00:01:01.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:14.000We are traveling and crisscrossing the country.
00:02:18.000We are back at it, but we wanted to make sure we gave you an episode this Monday morning, an Ask Me Anything episode where I take your questions that you have emailed me, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:02:30.000So I want to first get to the impeachment vote that has happened over the weekend, and we are covering it probably first more than any other show.
00:02:40.000President Trump has been acquitted by the United States Senate with a 57 to 43 final vote.
00:02:49.000Senator Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania, a Republican, voted guilty.
00:03:08.000And Richard Burr, who is a Republican, also voted guilty.
00:03:12.000So that is, it looks like eight or nine Republicans that decided to go out of their way and to say that President Trump did indeed commit an act of insurrection on January the 6th at the speech that he gave at the ellipse.
00:03:25.000Now, this is stunning, to be perfectly honest, that this many Republicans are now making the decision that President Trump and his legacy is one that is worthy of criminal conviction.
00:03:44.000I think that David Schoen and the President Trump's defense team did quite well.
00:03:49.000President Trump has been acquitted, despite what the activist media might tell you.
00:03:54.000The headlines are already being published.
00:04:01.000The defectors from the Republican Party were, again, Richard Burr, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sass, and Pat Toomey.
00:04:11.000That is, seven Republicans, I correct myself, seven Republicans that voted to not just impeach, but to convict private citizen former President Trump.
00:04:21.000And I'm sure there will be a lot of interviews in the coming days and a lot of glowing press articles about Bill Cassidy and Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney and Ben Sass and Pat Toomey, some of whom are retiring and others seem to be completely immune to any sort of check and balance from the voters.
00:04:37.000What's amazing, though, is that these Republicans did not realize that the basis for this impeachment first and foremost was unconstitutional.
00:04:47.000The prosecution tampered with evidence, changing tweets, misinterpreting intent of evidence such as Calvary versus Calvary.
00:04:58.000The Republican Party is now going to go through a very consequential moment.
00:05:06.000A moment that will determine not just the future of the conservative movement, but with it, the future of the country.
00:05:14.000So it's a good thing that President Trump was acquitted.
00:05:17.000You might think that President Trump acted irresponsibly.
00:05:28.000I've made that point here on this podcast.
00:05:29.000I think that is something that he should not have done.
00:05:32.000But to then say that he committed a crime of inciting an insurrection is one of the most reckless and irresponsible legal theories and legal charges we have ever seen in the history of our country, let alone the United States Congress.
00:05:49.000So where does this leave the Republican Party?
00:05:56.000You might say, I wish he would have gotten convicted.
00:05:58.000This only leaves him with a stronger base, more emboldened, acquitted, and no more constitutional measures that can be used against him.
00:06:11.000The highest threshold given to the United States Congress is impeachment.
00:06:15.000It's never been used before against a private citizen.
00:06:18.000They held this trial without the presence of John Roberts, even there.
00:06:23.000It was Democrat Senator Pat Leahy, who, interestingly enough, as the judge also voted in the trial for guilty as part of the jury, probably the first time in American history that we have had a proceeding ever where the judge is both a subject, a witness, and also a juror.
00:06:56.000President Trump's defense team did a very good job.
00:07:00.000They did a great job of challenging the prosecution, the House managers.
00:07:03.000They did a very good job of pushing back against the phony, baseless narrative that President Trump was somehow guilty of incitement.
00:07:11.000They mentioned the violations of the Sixth Amendment, the confrontation clause, about how President Trump's defense team was not even allowed to see all the evidence put before them.
00:07:21.000In fact, let's play just a little clip here of David Schoen and President Trump's defense team challenging the claims made by the prosecution, the House impeachment managers.
00:07:33.000Our Constitution and any basic sense of fairness require that every legal process with significant consequences for a person's life, including impeachment, requires due process under the law, which includes fact-finding and the establishment of a legitimate evidentiary record with an appropriate foundation.
00:07:57.000Even last year's impeachment followed committee hearings and months of examination and investigation by the House.
00:08:04.000Here, President Trump and his counsel were given no opportunity to review evidence or question its propriety.
00:08:13.000The rush to judgment for a snap impeachment in this case was just one example of the denial of due process.
00:08:22.000Another, perhaps even more vitally significant example was the denial of any opportunity ever to test the integrity of the evidence offered against Donald J. Trump in a proceeding seeking to bar him from ever holding public office again and that seeks to disenfranchise some 75 million voters, American voters.
00:08:48.000On Wednesday this week, countless news outlets repeated the Democrat talking point about the power of never-before-seen footage.
00:09:02.000Why was this footage never seen before?
00:09:05.000Shouldn't the subject of an impeachment trial, this impeachment trial, President Trump, have the right to see the so-called new evidence against him?
00:09:13.000More importantly, the riot and the attack on this very building was a major event that shocked and impacted all Americans.
00:09:22.000Shouldn't the American people have seen this footage as soon as it was available?
00:09:27.000For what possible reason did the House managers withhold it from the American people and President Trump's lawyers?
00:10:07.000Now, in order to convict a president, you need 66 votes.
00:10:10.000So I know some of you are thinking, well, Charlie, he lost.
00:10:13.000Well, he didn't get a majority of votes.
00:10:17.000A majority of senators thought he should be convicted, but the constitutional threshold requires 66 votes, two-thirds of the chamber in order to convict.
00:10:29.000And so a very important question is what does Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sass, Pat Toomey, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, and Richard Burr, these Republican senators, what do they think the Republican Party should become?
00:10:43.000Where do they think of the tens of millions of new voters that have now been brought into the ranks thanks to President Trump, the people that have now put them back into office?
00:10:53.000And make no mistake, Pat Toomey is only a United States senator thanks to Donald Trump.
00:10:59.000Pat Toomey was down in all the polls in 2016.
00:11:02.000Pat Toomey's retiring in 2022, which will be a very contentious Senate race.
00:11:07.000Pat Toomey was failing in his 2016 race until Donald Trump brought him across the finish line alongside of him.
00:11:15.000Donald Trump bringing in hundreds of thousands of new voters across central Pennsylvania, people that were traditional Democrats, and Pat Toomey was the beneficiary of that.
00:11:24.000But now he thanks him by saying, I want to convict you as being guilty of inciting an insurrection.
00:12:00.000We will fight to repeal abortion is one of the most overused words in politics.
00:12:06.000If that is now the threshold to criminalize a political opponent, then the First Amendment is dead.
00:12:14.000And that's what really was on trial here: whether or not the First Amendment still exists.
00:12:19.000Some of these senators, I'm sure, are just voting because they were moved by some of the emotional footage.
00:12:24.000That is not the way our justice system is supposed to work.
00:12:27.000Unfortunately, far too often, it does work that way.
00:12:29.000If you're able to have an emotional plea to a jury, sometimes the jury will go alongside you.
00:12:33.000However, it's supposed to be based in reason, logic, facts, data, evidence.
00:12:43.000Some of the video footage that was shown was an incredibly emotional narrative, but it doesn't connect to President Trump, former President Trump.
00:12:52.000Former President Trump says you should go to the Capitol peacefully and patriotically.
00:12:58.000The threshold of incitement based on all prior case law shows that you must be specific about imminent danger.
00:13:06.000The timeline showed very clearly that the barricades were being broken while President Trump was taking the stage or before he even took the stage at 1249 Eastern.
00:13:16.000The people who broke into the Capitol, the people who assaulted police officers, the people that stole congressional documents or laptops, they will be held criminally accountable.
00:13:31.000But to then expand the threshold that anyone who makes a remark at a speech before acts of criminality occur would basically say, we want to put the First Amendment through the shredder.
00:13:45.000And that's what's so disappointing about Richard Burr and Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy and Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney and Ben Sass and Pat Toomey.
00:13:57.000This is not about a vote of whether or not you like Donald Trump.
00:14:00.000You see, these senators allowed their own personal bias to impact themselves as jurors.
00:14:07.000They will be paraded around by the New York Times, the New Yorkers, CNN, as the brave Republicans who stood up to the Trumpified Republican Party.
00:14:15.000It has nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with process, everything to do about the rights of the accused, the Sixth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the right to representation, the right to not have your evidence tampered with like the House managers did.
00:14:30.000And what I find to be increasingly concerning is how these Republicans believe that they can build a long-term, broad-based coalition and a party based on the Chamber of Commerce policies and acting as if the last four years did not exist.
00:14:50.000And so the final vote has come through, 57 to 43, with Murkowski, Romney, Sass, Toomey, Cassidy, Collins, and Burr voting to convict.
00:15:02.000But as we mentioned, it takes 66 votes in the United States Senate, and President Donald Trump is acquitted again.
00:15:12.000In our fast-paced world, it's tough to make reading a priority.
00:15:17.000Use what I use to digest big ideas quickly at thinker.org/slash Charlie, T-H-I-N-K-R.org.
00:15:24.000They summarize the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.
00:15:31.000Read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, to the recent bestsellers like Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.
00:15:41.000When I'm going for walks or when I'm riding on the bike, I always pop open thinker.org, T-H-I-N-K-R.org, and I just try to learn something new every day.
00:15:50.000That's something we talk about here a lot on this Charlie Kirk show.
00:16:17.000If I select your question, then you win a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine, the twice-acquitted president.
00:16:23.000Hey, Charlie, thanks for everything you do.
00:16:25.000I have a seven-year-old in public school in a center-left-leaning district.
00:16:28.000So far, they haven't done anything too crazy.
00:16:30.000They've been doing in-person learning most of the year.
00:16:33.000And although the superintendent loves to send out emails about, quote, anti-racism, I don't think they've introduced CRT to the curriculum yet.
00:16:40.000My husband and I both work, so homeschooling would be a challenge.
00:16:43.000And private school would be a significant financial burden, especially when my son starts kindergarten in two years.
00:16:48.000If our district was renaming schools or pulling down statues, I pulled my kids out in a heartbeat.
00:16:53.000But right now, the decision is not so clear.
00:16:55.000I know you're a proponent of homeschooling, but I've heard you encourage parents to get involved with the school board.
00:17:02.000If faced with the choice, do you think it's better to stay in the fight and try to influence the direction of the district or look for alternative options?
00:17:16.000I believe that if a parent is able to do it and you're able to be in a financial position to do it, you should homeschool your children.
00:17:22.000I have said if the conservative movement and the Christian movement is serious about pushing back against many of these influences that we complain about and that we have spotted and identified as being corrosive to our republic, then we have to double the homeschooling population in the next couple of years.
00:18:01.000There are many organizations through Hillsdale College and many other entities that make education from home something that is not just easier, but it's more effective than ever before.
00:18:14.000So to answer your question, I think that every single person that is homeschooling their kids should also get involved in the local school board.
00:18:21.000You're still paying local tax dollars.
00:18:23.000You should still be engaged and get involved, run for school board positions, push back against critical race theory anytime it is taught, and understand that what is happening in our public school system, you might say, oh, it doesn't impact my kid because my kid is not there.
00:18:44.000Whatever your local school district is teaching is what the kids will soon be believing, and they'll be acting on it.
00:18:52.000So it is imperative more than ever before that every single person listening to this podcast gets engaged and gets involved, focuses on school board races, shows up to school board meetings, asks the correct questions at these meetings, pushes back against the teaching of critical race theory, argues that there must be patriotic education similar to the 1776 Commission, not the 1619 project.
00:19:19.000Understanding that America is the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world.
00:19:24.000You see, the way that it is taught in public school is that America is not that great.
00:19:30.000And if we were in charge, we'd be able to build something even better.
00:19:33.000When in reality, every day I walk outside my door and when I go into do our podcast on our radio show every day, it is amazing to me that there is not bedlam in the streets.
00:19:47.000The fact we have it as good as we have it here with free speech rights and rights to private property and entrepreneurship and a vibrant and flourishing American middle class is remarkable.
00:19:59.000And the question we should be asking our young people is why?
00:20:04.000And even more importantly, what is a country?
00:20:06.000Is a country just a bunch of ideas multiculturally mixed together?
00:20:31.000And if we fail as Americans to communicate what a country actually is and why this country is so different than any other country that's ever existed in the history of the world, then it will cease to exist.
00:20:43.000You see, in the Declaration of Independence, where God is mentioned four different times, we must look at that document as a legal brief.
00:20:50.000It was submitted to the King of England as almost a very professional complaint, specific complaint against tyrannical rule.
00:21:02.000You have to understand when the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, they signed it in what city?
00:21:57.000And that document is so brilliant, written by Thomas Jefferson.
00:22:01.000In fact, the original draft of the Declaration is also worth noting because Thomas Jefferson blamed King George for bringing slaves to the United States and actually was an anti-slavery document.
00:22:11.000They won't teach your kids that in school.
00:22:14.000But the document is brilliant because it acknowledges the laws of nature and nature's God.
00:22:18.000And I quote, it's a document based on a vertical order of being.
00:22:26.000That our rights come from God, that our existence is granted by a creator.
00:22:31.000It also understands that you will live under some form of laws inevitably.
00:22:35.000And we want those form of laws to recognize natural rights.
00:22:40.000The Declaration and the reason why Western civilization basically was created after America is because it was written universally.
00:22:50.000When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them.
00:23:03.000A decent respect to the opinions of, and it goes on.
00:23:06.000What's so amazing is that it's a universal sentence.
00:23:08.000This has been applied to freedom fighters all across the world.
00:23:11.000This document has inspired people outside of the United States Constitution.
00:23:16.000Now, the groundwork before the Declaration was written was done by the Black Robe Regiment.
00:23:25.000It continued by saying, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
00:23:38.000If you don't know John Locke, you cannot understand the American founding.
00:23:42.000Thomas Jefferson basically copy-pasted John Locke into the Declaration.
00:23:47.000John Locke, the great Scottish Enlightenment thinker, wrote extensively on tolerance, was one of the three social contract theorists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke.
00:23:56.000Important to know all three of them and what they believe.
00:23:58.000We've gone into depth in Rousseau, into depth in Hobbes.
00:24:02.000I'm going to do a little bit more in the coming episodes.
00:24:05.000That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, meaning all people, not just the patriarchy, but all people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
00:24:20.000You understand the magic, the melody, the harmony that is within this document.
00:24:27.000Our children are being deprived of understanding the beauty of the language here.
00:24:34.000Let me read this again: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among all people, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.
00:24:51.000That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is then the right of the people to alter or abolish and institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect safety and happiness.
00:25:16.000You've ignored the small little quarrels and conflicts that we've gotten into.
00:25:20.000Remember, Lexington and Concord came before the signing of the Declaration.
00:25:25.000Lexington and Concord is famously described as the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
00:25:31.000That Lexington Concord was called the shot heard around the world.
00:25:35.000And so there was kind of a little moment where maybe the founding fathers would back off.
00:25:39.000The King of England was stunned when he read this, but he wasn't surprised to see the trajectory because it was reaching a boiling point.
00:25:46.000But what led the founding fathers to do this?
00:25:49.000What led the founding fathers to want to take that great leap forward?
00:25:54.000Well, of the 56 men who signed the Declaration, a great majority, in fact, some historians would argue all identified themselves as Christian, and all but one were Protestants.
00:26:04.000Four were either present or former ministers.
00:26:08.000And a number of the signers were sons of clergy.
00:26:10.000And at least half of them had studied divinity at various universities.
00:26:14.000And the denominations run as follows: 32 designers, over half were Episcopalians, 13 were Congregationalists, 12 were Presbyterians, and two were Quakers, two Unitarians, and one Roman Catholic.
00:26:32.000So I kind of went on a little bit of a sidebar there as far as the specifics of the founding.
00:26:37.000But to answer your question, Alexis, if what I just went through is not being taught to your kids, if you have a kid in college that can't recite what I just said in some form or fashion, they have been given a grave disservice.
00:26:55.000And it's never too late to course correct.
00:28:45.000I did a podcast about this boy almost a year and a half ago, back in June of 2019.
00:28:51.000I did an entire podcast on just Iran and the mistakes that America made towards Masogdeh and working with the British equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency, overthrowing a democratically elected leader, reinstituting the Shah, and then complete bedlam happened after the Islamic Revolution.
00:29:10.000However, with that being said, that does not excuse what Iran stands for and the terrorism that they fund.
00:29:17.000So, Barack Obama, in the most innocent way that I can portray his relationship with Iran, believes that Iran is the victim, that Iran actually wants to be Western, that Iran was always suffering because of the Central Intelligence Agency, and it's up to us to go fix it by lifting sanctions, giving them a bunch of money.
00:29:37.000That's a bunch of rubbish, just so we're clear.
00:29:39.000Barack Obama and John Kerry and Joe Biden and the whole group of foreign policy apparatchiks that ran the Obama White House foreign policy portfolio kowtowed to Iran for a variety of other reasons.
00:29:52.000Number one, it's a great way to stick it to Israel.
00:29:55.000Both Hezbollah and Hamas are funded heavily by Iran.
00:29:59.000Number two, Iran does a very good job of pandering to specific left-wing interests around the globe.
00:30:07.000Iran allies themselves with anything that stands against America.
00:30:12.000What does Elon Omar, AOC, and Iran have in common?
00:30:16.000They all think America is a terrible country.
00:30:19.000They're able to agree on a lot, despite the fact that Iran launches homosexuals off the roofs of buildings, despite the fact that Iran executes political dissidents, despite the fact that Iran has little to no respect of first freedoms or political freedom.
00:30:35.000And so, to answer your question, Obama always thought of himself, and I'm doing this in the most fair way imaginable.
00:30:41.000I think there's another narrative that I can get into, but it's more on speculation, still on some facts.
00:30:47.000I can touch on that a little bit, which is the most fair argument is that Obama saw America as the oppressor and Iran as the oppressed.
00:30:57.000He saw Israel as the oppressor in the region and Iran as the oppressed.
00:31:01.000And he saw himself through the Iran nuclear deal and some of the other nonsense that was negotiated internationally to try and even the scales.
00:31:51.000They had Islam, and they tolerated, even at times, Jewish sects under the Persian Empire.
00:31:57.000And so Persia, which is the ancestral roots of what is now called Iran, does not actually even have multi-hundred-year history, shared history of being under an Islamic theocratic dictatorship.
00:32:12.000Whereas the history of Saudi Arabia absolutely does.
00:32:15.000The house of Saud going back many, many hundreds of years.
00:32:46.000Sunnis and Shias have hated each other for quite some time.
00:32:49.000And Iran is the predominant Shia country on the planet.
00:32:54.000So what is the correct approach to Iran?
00:32:57.000Do not give them billions of dollars in sanction relief.
00:32:59.000Treat them what they are, which is a failed American experiment in foreign policy that eventually the people of Iran are going to have to rise up against the theocratic totalitarian maniacs that run Iran, take power back, and through their own reform, hopefully get back to the values that used to govern Persia, which was a much more decent society than what Iran has become.
00:33:22.000And by the way, Persians are some of the most entrepreneurial, enterprising, forward-thinking, and incredible business people you'll ever come across.
00:33:33.000There's a lot of potential in Iran, a lot.
00:33:35.000And the young people of Iran are not going to put up with the Ayatollah.
00:33:38.000They're not going to put up with Akhadi Mijad.
00:33:40.000They're not going to put up with all of this 14th century garbage that has dominated the society of Iran.
00:33:49.000The people are being oppressed, and they're not being oppressed by the West.
00:33:52.000They're being oppressed by the theocratic maniacs that run the Republic of Iran.
00:33:58.000To finish the question, Stan and Jacqueline, there is no email I know of to support President Trump, but you post on social media, you tell your friends to do the same.
00:34:07.000I'm just going to tell you, I think you're going to see President Trump very, very soon.
00:34:11.000I think you're going to see him do some media, maybe some public events.
00:34:16.000Everyone, thank you guys for emailing us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:34:19.000We are moving crisscrossing the country, but we want to make sure that you guys had your ask me anything episode today, and we made good on that promise.
00:34:27.000So if you guys want to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
00:34:31.000If you want to get involved at Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.