00:01:48.000Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:01:51.000If you want to get involved at Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.
00:01:56.000We play offense with a sense of urgency to win the American Culture War at tpusa.com.
00:02:01.000In fact, I had somebody come up to me yesterday and she said, Charlie, I want to get involved with Turning Point USA because you guys are saving the country.
00:02:09.000And we have the Charlie Kirk show, Turning Point USA, two different things, but working in harmony to save Western civilization.
00:02:15.000Vodie Bockam, Eric Metaxas, and more, buckle up.
00:02:42.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:23.000It's based on the idea of equity, not equality, but equity, equal outcomes.
00:03:29.000So social justice is about distributing resources within a given community, culture, whatever, so that the various groups within that culture don't have disparate outcomes.
00:03:44.000Biblical justice, on the other hand, is about applying the righteous standard of God equally to all people in all circumstances.
00:03:58.000They use a lot of the same terms, those who promote social justice, and yet there are distinct differences.
00:04:04.000Charlie, when did you first see these issues cropping up on campuses among younger folks or whoever in the culture and start to realize we need to make some distinctions here?
00:04:16.000Yeah, thank you, and honor to be here, and thank you to Salem.
00:04:18.000We've had a fun couple months working together, and we're going to have a lot more.
00:04:22.000So, Phil and Dave and the whole Salem team, it's been great.
00:04:25.000I also want to say, Vodi, you're our secret weapon, man.
00:04:28.000I'm telling you, we need you in front of millions and millions and more people.
00:04:31.000We're going to make sure that happens.
00:04:38.000Super quick, I started, as soon as I got involved with the campuses, I realized this idea of social justice is the religion of most of secular America.
00:04:47.000And the most succinct way I think I can describe it is social justice is always changing, and biblical justice never changes.
00:04:56.000And it's one of the world and one of the word.
00:05:01.000And social justice will always lead you to an arc and a bend of totalitarianism because there is no root, there is no anchor, there is no unchanging truth that guides you.
00:05:14.000Therefore, it's completely and totally relativistic based on the communicators, passions, the needs, wants, and desires of the audience, or even worse, how treacherous or deceitful the people that are using whatever power they have to try to enforce that social justice.
00:05:31.000This is a tricky subject for a lot of Christians, and it's very front and center in the church because they use our desire and our heart and our yearning to help the less fortunate as a way to try and overtake power structures to then actually deconstruct the sort of civilization that we know.
00:05:49.000And they're using it through kind of the most vulnerable way imaginable, which is Americans' inability to understand or communicate about race.
00:06:00.000And this is where Vodi comes in in such a helpful way.
00:06:03.000We've all talked about this, and they use the most effective tool imaginable, which is they call you a racist and they think you're going to shut up.
00:06:09.000And so, I'll stop there, but that's kind of where I started encountering.
00:06:13.000That's very important that we'll come back to that theme of how the card that is really dropped on the table is that of racist, if you even dare oppose critical race theory, wokeness, intersectionality.
00:06:23.000Eric, how did you start to see these issues, these subjects, crop up?
00:06:28.000When did this first catch your attention?
00:06:31.000Well, probably when I was an undergraduate at Yale in the early 1980s.
00:06:38.000Oh, I know I look young, but I was there.
00:06:40.000And the fact is that I grew up in a working-class home in Danbury, Connecticut.
00:06:46.000My mom and dad are European immigrants.
00:06:49.000My mom came from Germany, which became East Germany.
00:06:53.000So she was under Stalinist communism and was so grieved by it that she escaped East Germany at age 17.
00:07:04.000My father was in Greece when the communists tried to take over that country following World War II.
00:07:09.000So my parents, without even trying very hard, raised me to hate communism and understand it is evil.
00:07:18.000So when I got to Yale, I was astonished suddenly to be around the cultural elites who were basically anti-American, anti-Christian.
00:07:31.000And it's when I first began smelling this stuff.
00:07:33.000But I was too young and naive to really understand how bad it was.
00:07:40.000And in my book, which was flashed on the screen, published by Salem Books, because they'll publish anything.
00:07:48.000I have to say that's only half a joke because a lot of other people won't publish some good stuff.
00:07:56.000And that redounds to the benefit of Salem.
00:09:53.000I started really talking about these things, I guess, in 2004, 2005.
00:10:00.000I became aware really of the influence of Gramscian Marxism and the Frankfurt School.
00:10:08.000And, you know, during that time, 04, 05, 06, you know, people kind of looked at you and crossed their eyes when you mentioned these kinds of things.
00:10:18.000But then in 2008, during the election, when Obama's penchant toward Marxism, you know, became public, people started to pay a little more attention by then.
00:10:34.000And now, this is just more of a progression of the influence of those same ideologies, but just with different manifestations.
00:10:43.000And I would also say that, you know, this oppressor-oppressed paradigm, it's not just about black and white.
00:10:50.000In America, it's about black and white.
00:10:52.000But having lived as an expat for the last six years overseas, when you look at this globally, whereas in America, the oppressor is white people, white males, also white male Christians, but globally, the oppressor is America.
00:11:10.000And so internationally, people, you know, here you say to a white person, you need to check your privilege globally.
00:11:18.000And internationally, people say to America, you need to check your privilege.
00:11:22.000And what's going on at the border has a lot to do with that as well, because this is about these people who need to check their privilege, America, lowering their borders so that we can redistribute among people who haven't had the privilege to be here.
00:12:34.000That's a really important argument when you try to design a political system.
00:12:37.000When you try to design a political system and you understand that human beings are naturally likely to sin, then you're going to create a system that hopefully doesn't allow them to collectivize that sin and then destroy the kind of vocal minority, which is what the Founding Fathers did.
00:12:51.000They think that any problem in the world is because of the system, not because of human beings.
00:13:08.000Number two are the folks that, quite honestly, are nihilists.
00:13:12.000This is Nietzsche in its fullest possible and brightest colors.
00:13:16.000They are driven not by an end result, but instead by the passion and the enjoyment of watching systems burn down to the ground.
00:13:23.000This is something that is more prevalent than you might ever possibly imagine, especially amongst young people that are 18, 19, and 20 years old that have been taught that there is no beauty, there is no truth, there is no goodness, there is no wonder.
00:13:35.000So all there is is you that can possibly try to bring down the world down around you.
00:13:39.000This is best personified in a 15-second clip in one of the Batman movies where the Joker says some people just want to watch the world burn.
00:13:48.000That is a portion of the activist base.
00:13:50.000The third part is honestly the most scary, and this is where this is heading, which is the bend towards totalitarianism.
00:13:56.000What happens when you have these massive movements is eventually they're going to splinter, they're going to fight, there will be chaos, there'll be disorder, and then a sociopathic narcissist is going to be able to charm them to give all of that collective power to one person or a small group of people, and then we're going to live under that form of totalitarianism or tyranny.
00:14:13.000This almost always leads to a smaller and smaller group of people controlling more, where the people that thought they were actually going to have the power end up not having the power.
00:14:21.000And so I think it's somewhat useful to talk about those three different things, but they won't even be able to agree that amongst themselves.
00:14:29.000What they can agree, though, is what currently generally exists is a cancer and a poison.
00:14:35.000And what they want to do is they want to put forward a chemotherapy type of shock and awe blitzkrieg on the American Republic and on Christianity.
00:16:54.000Apart from God's grace, that's what we do.
00:16:56.000And so it's only because God has inserted himself into history that we have the ability at times to do other things.
00:17:04.000And the United States of America is the time when in the history of the universe, human beings were able to take a biblical worldview and say, oh, yes, we are fallen.
00:17:15.000So we need as many checks and balances as we can.
00:17:17.000We don't want power to be centralized at all.
00:17:21.000And then they said, and yet, because we believe that with God we are capable of great things, we will have this free market of ideas, economic free market.
00:17:33.000And if we can keep it, if we can keep the republic, that will flourish.
00:17:39.000But apart from God, it won't flourish.
00:17:40.000So what we're seeing, of course, is just another version of the anti-God philosophy.
00:17:46.000But if you look back in my Bonhoeffer book, at one point, I talk about a place called Bielefeld, which was really a ministry place where people were ministering to handicapped people and schizophrenics and all kinds of people that the Nazis would say should be terminated.
00:18:05.000And at the end of the day, you get those two views.
00:18:08.000One says it's Nietzsche, it is satanic.
00:18:12.000It says that if you can't produce, if you can't do what we need you to do, you're worthless.
00:18:27.000And obviously, to the extent that people can sell that, they will sell it.
00:18:33.000And there are times in culture when the Christian faith is strong or when there are other forces that are partaking of the good, the true, and the beautiful, that they're strong.
00:18:44.000And you're not able to get away with that.
00:18:45.000So in America, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you could only say so much.
00:18:49.000But as those forces wane, these forces come out of the closet.
00:18:54.000And just as Hitler was able to say things in 39 and 40 that he wouldn't dare say in 34, you're seeing people say increasingly absurd things.
00:19:03.000And so when you talk about what is the goal, I think it is really clear that some people, yeah, they're stupid enough to think you could build a utopia.
00:19:40.000And so we do need to understand it really boils down to two views.
00:19:45.000There's the kingdom of God and there's this stuff.
00:19:48.000And I think we need to understand that the people who are foolish enough or lost enough to be going along with that, you know, they're destroying themselves.
00:20:00.000And so I think it's really tempting to think of them as enemies.
00:20:04.000The enemy is the enemy, because this really is a satanic project.
00:20:08.000And we have to be very clear that the two views have increasingly have become clear.
00:20:18.000It strikes me in the context of Christianity, the church, that especially among my generation and younger, the phrase neither left nor right has become very popular when it comes to third way.
00:20:34.000It's become very popular in evangelical circles to describe basically our political philosophy.
00:20:40.000We're about Jesus, as indeed all three of us are.
00:22:14.000And one of the ways that you get around that is to not believe anything, to not stand for anything, just to say, I'm not that and I'm not that, right?
00:22:25.000Because if I'm one of those things, then I'll have to suffer the slings and arrows that come from the other side.
00:22:35.000I don't want to be about confrontation, which is one of the reasons that we hate masculinity.
00:22:42.000There is a war on masculinity right now.
00:22:46.000And all of it boils down to this same issue of thou shalt be nice.
00:22:52.000And we don't think masculinity is nice.
00:22:57.000Yeah, the third way, in the Christian circles, it's really puzzling to me.
00:23:03.000So obviously I spend most of my time in the political world as a Christian, and I'm starting to do more and more things in the Christian world, spoke at over 70 churches in the last year.
00:23:12.000I'm really shocked at how many young Christians, how weak they are.
00:23:17.000And just they have very little direction or purpose.
00:23:21.000They don't want to have any sort of confrontational conversations.
00:23:24.000It says in Isaiah 1, let us reason together.
00:23:27.000But if you go back to the ancient Hebrew, it's let us debate together.
00:23:49.000Yeah, you'll get me back, I know, I guess.
00:23:54.000And so look, Christ was a hundred percent grace and a hundred percent truth, and if, all of a sudden, we're not going to be clear about what the scriptures tell us and how to govern ourselves and how to live, then it really gets back to the true problem, which is watered down theology, And that is really what's going on here.
00:24:13.000And I've had the opportunity to dig into this a fair amount.
00:24:19.000But when it comes down to a lot of these Christians, if you really get down to it, all of a sudden they'll say, oh, yeah, it's an allegory.
00:25:03.000And if we're having a political discussion and they say they want the third way, then they're picking and choosing from the Bible like a buffet line that makes them feel good, that actually doesn't say true things about our faith and about what we're supposed to do as Christians.
00:25:19.000Part of the reason that this is happening is because this is always, it goes down to bad theology, right?
00:25:28.000Mega church pastors or whoever out there over focused on evangelism.
00:25:36.000Now, it's bad to under focus on evangelism, but if you act as though getting people saved is the only thing we're here on earth to do, you're an idiot.
00:25:45.000The fact of the matter is that if you over focus on evangelism, what happens is you make people think, I cannot say anything ever unless it might help lead somebody to faith.
00:25:55.000And if I say anything controversial or that they might disagree with, that's bad for the witness.
00:26:02.000And I was hamstrung in that position for years myself.
00:26:06.000I just thought, I've got to be careful.
00:26:08.000I don't want to be political because it's all about, you know, getting them safe, getting them safe, getting them safe.
00:26:12.000Well, at the end of the day, you have to trust truth.
00:26:15.000And you have to trust that if I speak the truth, I am speaking God.
00:26:20.000And I think we all have to understand, we've all seen idiots who drive people away from Jesus.
00:26:51.000The guy who's so nice, who he's afraid to talk about truth.
00:26:56.000And in America, this is a particularly American issue.
00:27:00.000Bonhoeffer, when he came to America in 1930, was kind of scandalized how everybody at Union Theological Seminary, which was woke 90 years ago, that everybody wanted to get along and get along.
00:27:13.000And he was like, well, what about truth?
00:27:14.000Because the Germans, you know, they don't have a problem with that.
00:27:19.000So every culture is uniquely blessed by God, but every culture has unique issues and possibilities of going wrong.
00:27:29.000And our problem, Anerica, is this wanting to be nice.
00:27:32.000And so when you wrap that together with this desire to get everybody saved, you tell people, don't get into politics, don't get into this, don't get into that.
00:28:16.000You would say, if you're any kind of a Christian, you better talk about that.
00:28:21.000You better, if you're a Jew in a boxcar going to Treblinka, you're thinking, I hope there's some Christians out there who'll be combative and speak out against the Nazi worldview.
00:28:30.000But there were Germans, Christians in Germany saying it's only about evangelism.
00:28:38.000We don't want to bring up that divisive stuff.
00:28:40.000Romans 13, Hitler is appointed by God.
00:28:43.000Even if he's doing bad stuff, we can't speak against it.
00:28:46.000There's just a concatenation of confusing ideas all building up into wherever you are in a given culture.
00:28:55.000But we have had plenty of warnings before.
00:28:57.000We've seen it before when Christians say, I don't want to be divisive.
00:29:01.000And I'm going to tell you, a lot of good German Christians said that.
00:29:04.000And they said, if we talk about this, we talk about that, it'll dampen our witness.
00:29:09.000Well, my attitude is your witness can go to hell and your fake evangelism to a fake gospel can go to hell.
00:29:15.000If you are not willing to stick up for the unborn or truth or whatever it is, your Christianity is worthless to the people you claim to want to lead, and you're the blind leading the blind.
00:29:27.000And the church needs to understand it's not a choice between do I want to lead people to Jesus or do I want to talk about truth.
00:29:33.000If you don't understand those two things are one, you know, you're already lost.
00:29:42.000And, you know, I would just say to bring these things together, this is about a poor theology because you have a problem with divisiveness if you believe that unity depends on us, if you believe that we have to do the work of reconciling us to one another.
00:30:04.000And so one of the things is we're not holding those two halves of Ephesians 2 together.
00:30:09.000That first half where Christ, through his death on the cross, right, reconciles us with God, reconciles lost, dead sinners to God.
00:30:18.000But in the second half, he reconciles lost, dead sinners to one another.
00:30:24.000The cross reconciles us vertically, vertically, and horizontally.
00:30:28.000And what many Christians believe is, sure, the cross may reconcile us to God, but it is insufficient to reconcile us to one another.
00:30:36.000So we have to make sure that we don't mess that up.
00:30:39.000When the fact of the matter is, you can't, if you believe you can mess up what Christ accomplished on the cross, then you don't believe Christ accomplished it on the cross.
00:30:53.000And that's one of the main differences between biblical justice and social justice.
00:30:57.000You look to the justice of the cross to find divine justice and divine mercy flowing out of that.
00:31:08.000There's no love, really, in social justice.
00:31:11.000I want to switch tracks, though, here.
00:31:12.000In your book, Fault Lines, my book, Christianity Awokeness, we both talk about intersectionality, which is the idea basically that the interests of...
00:31:21.000Is it, by the way, is there a new rule now that the two of us can't be in the same place at the same time after this?
00:31:56.000Foreigners by the native-born non-Christians by Christians.
00:31:59.000It's very important for people to understand that in the world of critical social justice, it's not just the white person that's the problem or the white male that's the problem.
00:32:09.000It's the white male, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, native-born.
00:32:13.000And if you keep going down the list, you get to Christian.
00:32:17.000And if you read the literature, the critical social justice literature, ultimately you realize that Christianity is seen as an oppressive, hegemonic power.
00:32:30.000So one of those intersections where people pile up their oppression is if they are not Christian or if they are not orthodox in their Christianity as well.
00:33:01.000Even in the Southern Baptist Convention now, this isn't exactly the same thing.
00:33:06.000But we've heard two consecutive presidents of the SBC, J.D. Greer and Ed Lytton, say basically that scripture whispers about sexual sin, which I think is tied into this whole embrace and softening around this issue.
00:33:22.000I'd love to hear you respond to the claim, scripture whispers about sexual sin.
00:33:34.000But secondly, even if it was true, we need to think about it like I used to think about my mama.
00:33:40.000I could be out playing with my friends in the street, and if I thought I heard my mama whisper my name, I'd go home just to make sure, right?
00:33:55.000So even if it was true that God whispers about that, listen to the whisper.
00:34:20.000Eric and Charlie, I want to switch tracks to our children, the children.
00:34:26.000They're being taught in public schools and colleges and universities basically to hate America because, as Vodhi talked about just a minute ago, America is a white supremacist, heteronormative, capitalist public order that is infested with sin, right?
00:34:44.000So what we saw with Antifa and BLM last summer, I don't think it was just being locked down in a terrible way.
00:34:51.000I think it was also lots of people thinking they were doing something righteous in destroying this public order.
00:34:59.000How should we think about our children and how they're being educated today to basically despise authority, the public order that God has made, and America itself?
00:35:12.000Yeah, this is sort of the sweet spot of what we do every day at Turning Point.
00:35:17.000And so to be as blunt as possible, if we don't radically change the way we do higher education in our country, we will not have a nation in 15 years.
00:35:54.000So yeah, we have an entire industry designed towards trying to capture high school seniors, putting them through a debt cycle to borrow money that they don't have, obviously, because they're borrowing money, to study things that don't matter, to find jobs that don't exist, to colleges that would otherwise go under and be financially bankrupt if it wasn't for the subsidy of the federal government.
00:36:18.000Most of what they're studying, they don't even find jobs in those majors when they graduate.
00:36:22.000By getting them in these environments that is basically the new Sodom and Gomorrah, where sexual degeneracy is platformed and glamorized, where dorm rooms of male and females are next to each other, where bad ideas are incubated and given a platform.
00:36:37.000They are then exposed to evangelistic nihilism, anti-American thought, and we're supposed to believe this is some sort of rite of passage.
00:36:45.000It's mostly and mainly, and then I'm going to offend most of the people in the room, it's mostly and mainly parents' fault because they have this idea that their kid needs to go to college because they don't want to tell their friends that their child's become a plumber and they don't want their kid to become a carpenter or work construction because that would be the worst thing, right?
00:37:02.000They'd rather have their kid become a nihilistic, screwed up Marxist than actually have to go work HVAC for a living, right?
00:37:12.000And so because of that, we have this cycle of mainly tied together of this public pressure, this idea that you have to go to college to succeed.
00:37:21.000And then let's talk about some of the numbers really quickly.
00:37:24.00059% of kids that go to college graduate.
00:37:26.00041% of the kids that go to college drop out.
00:37:28.00041% of the kids that go to college drop out.
00:37:32.000They exit with debt, a damaged self-esteem and confidence, very little to no direction, and they make perfect revolutionaries for the future because they're in this kind of financial purgatory.
00:37:43.000Then the ones that do graduate, we send them to inner cities to go rent, not own.
00:37:48.000When you don't own anything, you're far less likely to want to conserve anything.
00:37:52.000And then we tell them, whatever you do, don't get married.
00:37:55.000Go become a cog in the corporate machine.
00:37:57.000And then they become early 30-something people earning $120,000 a year, not accumulating really any of that capital, by the way, because they're spending it, spending it, spending it on short-term gratification or rental expenses.
00:38:09.000And we wonder why all of a sudden they want to uproot the entire system.
00:38:13.000They have nothing they want to conserve.
00:38:55.000And I see their critical race theory manuals.
00:38:57.000I see what the pastors of tomorrow are being taught.
00:39:00.000So I'm trying to radically and sometimes provocatively tell the body of Christ we have to rethink the way that we pass down our values to the next generation.
00:39:09.000You don't need a certificate to succeed in America.
00:39:12.000You don't need to say that you went to some college to be a good person.
00:39:14.000I care about whether you're saved, whether you have character, and whether you want to do something in your life, not if you went to Harvard and if you want to do something like that.
00:40:03.000And explain to me where you get the right even to say such a foul, untrue thing.
00:40:09.000There are many reasons for this, but I didn't really understand this fully until I wrote a book called If You Can Keep It, The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty.
00:40:19.000And in it, I was forced myself to really see what I had kind of been missing over the decades.
00:40:27.000And so, you know, I got the best miseducation you could get.
00:40:34.000I went to Yale University, which is exactly where you would go to learn how the global anti-American elites think.
00:40:48.000But it still took me a long time to get comfortable with what I now know to be true and to understand how dramatically over at least 50 years.
00:41:00.000I mean, the 60s was the watershed moment when all of these evil ideas kind of bubbled into the public realm.
00:41:07.000And, you know, this is trickle-down evil, right?
00:41:10.000This is cultural trickle-down theory where you see these ideas, you know, they're brought in by Marcuse and Gramsci, and there's certain people talking about them in faculty lounges and stuff and dairy-da, right?
00:41:22.000And then they trickle down, trickle-down, trickle-down.
00:41:24.000So when I bumped in all this stuff in the 80s at Yale, this was not yet out in the public, but I've watched it come out into the public so that now people are even using terms.
00:41:34.000I mean, one thing for me that I noticed is when people use terms like hegemony or intersectionality or any of the, I just feel like saying, hey, shut up, like speak English.
00:41:46.000Because all those words are sophistry.
00:41:50.000They're designed to skew your thinking a little bit, to knock you off balance.
00:41:54.000So like now I got to talk about critical race theory or systematic and be like, those are called weasel words.
00:41:59.000You know what weasel words are, right?
00:43:01.000If you do not have the guts, if you do not have the ability to say that is wrong, and we will crush you if you try to disturb private property, try to do anything like that.
00:43:11.000But the leaders have imbibed these false views going back to the 60s where people said, don't trust anybody over 30.
00:43:32.000But in the 60s, you have a situation where these leaders of Columbia University, these different places, did not have the ability to stand up to the students and let these arrogant thugs.
00:43:45.000You know, these are cultural Marxists.
00:43:48.000These are cultural revolutionaries under Mao.
00:44:07.000And the fact of the matter is, we have allowed this to happen and these anti-American ideas to come in.
00:44:13.000And it's why today we have an entire population that is not conversant in the basics of what is self-government and liberty and why is it beautiful and good and doesn't need to be perfect.
00:44:26.000It's just way better than anything else.
00:44:29.000So I tried to answer the question and I failed.
00:45:02.000And then we want to say a quick thank you to Tim Peterson, who's the president of Salem Books.
00:45:07.000If we could have a hand for Tim Peterson, he has acquired a number of us up here and is really leading the counterrevolution in a lot of ways because books do that in a free society.
00:45:22.000So we're very thankful, many of us, for Tim.
00:45:26.000We have literally one minute, but I want each of you to give us 15 seconds on the antidote for what ails us.
00:45:35.000And we'll start with Eric and finish with voting.
00:45:38.000Speaking of Salem Books, I have a book coming out in October called Is Atheism Dead?
00:45:45.000And I've never been as excited about a book.
00:45:47.000And it is the answer to this question because the cover of the book essentially is a snake, you know, eating itself, biting its own tail, right?
00:46:12.000And we just need to, in every way we can, with moral fiber and courage, continue to live out the truth and speak the truth and trust the Lord and be led by the Holy Spirit because there are a hundred answers to this.
00:46:28.000But I know that you cannot go wrong speaking the truth and trusting the Lord to use you as you do and having the confidence that you cannot fail.