Frank Treppert and Alex Marlowe join me to discuss Bill Maher, Bernie Sanders and AOC, and more! Recorded in Los Angeles, CA! (Live from the Bitcoin Show Studio)
00:00:38.000When you subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast page, you get notifications of new episodes, so make sure you do that Charlie Kirk Show podcast page.
00:00:46.000Email me, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:01:05.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:11.000We 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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00:02:33.000If I interviewed you, my first question was going to be, did you get a contact high?
00:02:37.000It's one of these things out here in California that is, it's a real thing, because I've never smoked weed also, so I don't, I think you now have officially had a half a time, so I think one half of a time, I think you can say, if anyone asks.
00:03:04.000So in general, I'm in the camp that Mars stick, he's got a couple of sticks, but one of them is he's saying all the stuff that folks like you and me and Steve and all Donald Trump were saying eight, 10 years ago.
00:03:17.000And people are talking about him like he's a genius for saying them.
00:03:20.000And I do find that a little irritating and frustrating, but he does have one other stick that I love, which is he literally is the only person who's talking to all.
00:03:30.000I know you would talk to them, Charlie.
00:03:32.000I know I would talk to them on my show.
00:03:34.000But they don't tend to show up for whatever reason.
00:03:37.000He's figured out a way to get all these people to show up and talk to him of all these different viewpoints.
00:03:41.000And it is a terrific product that he puts out because of that.
00:03:45.000And it's not that he's so amazing, even though he's, of course, got some skills.
00:03:48.000But his ability to bring people in is a skill in and of itself.
00:03:52.000And you've absolutely got to hand it to him for that.
00:03:55.000And it makes it so that you're able to get deeper on conversations and talk.
00:03:58.000That you're just not going to be able to do in a two-minute soundbite or people talking past each other on social media.
00:04:04.000So I'm glad you're doing it, and I'm glad that this could hopefully open up some doors for some people.
00:04:10.000Yeah, and we have later in the hour Frank Turek to dive deeper into the apologetics Christian side of the discussion, which a lot of our discussion was centered around Christianity.
00:04:20.000Let's just play one piece of tape here, and then I want to get into some of the news of the day.
00:04:24.000Because we did talk a lot about Garcia.
00:04:26.000That was a big portion of my conversation with Bill Maher.
00:06:02.000Because I always feel like I ask this because my friend Robert Dobby writes for us sometimes, who I'm sure you're aware of, who's an actor from a lot of things, Die Hard, among other things.
00:06:11.000He used to hang out with a lot of the Rat Pack guys.
00:06:13.000I always asked him, were they always just getting completely loaded or was that part of an image?
00:06:52.000All in for MS-13, meaning the Democrats.
00:06:54.000They're going down there with the, having margaritas with MS-13 members.
00:06:59.000It's this case where he's got all these people in the car with him and no one's got any luggage and he's clearly involved in human smuggling that appears to be adding to his resume.
00:07:11.000It makes you feel as though that how could the Democrats possibly get the upper hand on this?
00:07:15.000But that's not really the game they're playing.
00:07:17.000The game they're playing is they're trying to trip up Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and the people who are setting I know they
00:07:51.000We've got to be pretty vigilant here because if Trump makes one false move here, they're trying to come up with a strategy that leads to his, if not outright removal, at least waste all his time.
00:08:18.000That'll satisfy the courts and this issue will largely be put to rest.
00:08:21.000It keeps on living because of the numerous court interventions.
00:08:26.000Yeah, it's a great question because I'm generally a don't-give-an-inch guy, but I do feel like I would kind of love to see them bring him back and then just deport him again because they would and they could.
00:08:37.000Miller said as much, and he could be deported for any reason.
00:10:03.000Please. Yeah, I just feel like this is one where, in the short term, we've got to emphasize the Democrats are cornered here defending all of MS-13, and they're, of course, defending illegal alien gang members over American citizens.
00:10:16.000Trump continuing to have the angel bombs out there, make them surrogates in this regard, I think is really important, and it's a great move.
00:10:22.000But just know that the main goal, they're not dumb.
00:10:25.000They're foolish sometimes, but they're not dumb on the left.
00:10:28.000And they're trying to get Trump administration to violate some sort of directive from a court that could lead towards political momentum, towards impeachment.
00:10:36.000And so just keep that in mind that they're not doing this without a endgame in mind.
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00:12:37.000David Hogg, who I know you know, a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, he's going to be joining us on the roundtable.
00:12:44.000And he is pursuing this effort to unseat some Democrats in safe seats through primary challenges.
00:12:51.000I look forward to standing behind every single Democratic incumbent, from the most progressive to the most centrist, and all points in between.
00:13:50.000I mean, if you had told me that after the 2012 autopsy that we'd have Donald Trump in four years and then Donald Trump again four years after that, or eight years after that, I mean, you wouldn't believe.
00:14:47.000Now, I understand that area, that part of the world doesn't get a lot of attention.
00:14:51.000It's kind of like what happens when we go to California, when you're so in the ideological minority, you tend to draw out anyone that's like-minded because there really is nothing of the sort.
00:15:23.000He wouldn't even support the Democrats that he got along with when Trump put them up for confirmation, which is another genius move by Trump.
00:15:30.000Not only did he pick the best people for his cabinet, but he picked Democrats specifically to expose the senators who act like they're anti-establishment, but they're pure establishment.
00:15:40.000He's a rich guy, and then he acts like he's a socialist.
00:15:42.000But there is an astroturf here, which might comfort the audience a little bit, which is a lot of them are trying to piggyback off of musical acts.
00:15:52.000And then they'll tack on an AOC or Bernie Sanders speech.
00:15:54.000So I don't really buy the 12,000 number.
00:15:57.000But that said, we should go to the woodshed and act as though they're building a robust grassroots resistance that isn't just Soros-funded stuff like a lot of the Tesla stuff.
00:16:06.000And a lot of our reporting, this group Indivisible that's very networked or the new Arabella advisors where they're just funding everything.
00:16:14.000We got to act like they're going to get organized and they're going to come back and they're going to mount a comeback.
00:17:54.000Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:17:57.000As you know, I joined the Bill Maher program last week and it aired yesterday and our full annotated version will be out tomorrow.
00:18:08.000And my very good friend Frank Turek took a lot of time, about two hours, probably three hours out of his schedule, to watch the entire thing and give his feedback on things that we could add on top of it on how we can best defend our faith.
00:18:21.000Frank, great to see you, and thank you for taking the time, and happy belated Easter.
00:18:25.000Yeah, Charlie, you took the right approach with Bill.
00:18:28.000You could have said a lot more, but as you say, when you're on a podcast, somebody else's podcast, You want to give him the benefit of the doubt.
00:18:36.000You want to get a few points in, but you don't want to make it a monologue as to why the guy's wrong.
00:18:52.000I'm going to take something that is so anti-intellectual, even though I can argue like an intellectual.
00:18:58.000However, but you have to acknowledge even the greatest minds of history have been...
00:19:03.000Mesmerized by the scriptures, Isaac Newton, Thomas Aquinas.
00:19:06.000Well, Isaac Newton wrote more about biblical prophecy than even physics.
00:19:10.000And so there's something about the scriptures that are intellectual, that does push your limits.
00:19:16.000And that's what I think is so beautiful about our faith, is it can be accessible to everyone, but also infinitely nourishing in exploration.
00:19:24.000Frank, are the scriptures anti-intellectual?
00:19:28.000In fact, the Bible continually tells us to give reasons for what we believe.
00:19:32.000And of course, even Yahweh in the Old Testament says, come let us reason together.
00:19:38.000You know, Charlie, one of the things that atheists cannot answer, cannot actually give a cause for, is reason itself.
00:19:45.000I mean, if we're just molecules in motion, if we're just molecular machines, if we're nothing but moist robots, which is the...
00:19:53.000Common view of most materialists today, most atheists today, then they shouldn't even believe anything they think because every thought they have is the result of the laws of physics.
00:20:03.000They're not really thinking, they're reacting.
00:20:06.000And C.S. Lewis pointed this out brilliantly in so many of his works that if materialism's true, there's no way to even justify thinking.
00:20:18.000And if you can't justify thinking, you can't call a Christian anti-intellectual because you haven't...
00:20:27.000And so, Frank, one of the contentions that Bill Maher made is that, listen, Christianity, it's just a counterfeit of all these other Middle Eastern religions.
00:20:36.000Osiris and all this, virgin birth and raised from the dead.
00:20:40.000This is a story that is appropriated, and Christianity just copied other religions in the Middle East.
00:21:54.000And, of course, you're going to say, well, Frank, of course, that was the Titanic.
00:21:56.000Well, actually, it was actually a novel from, I think, 1898 called The Futility, and it predated the Titanic just by chance.
00:22:09.000Nobody would say, well, the Titanic story then must be copied from this novel called Futility.
00:22:15.000It just happened to be that there were parallels.
00:22:18.000So parallels don't necessarily prove that one is copying from another anyway.
00:22:23.000For example, a lot of the religions that overlap with Christianity, the overlap lines up with Christianity's rise, so they're just copying it.
00:22:30.000Like in Norse mythology, for example, there's a god, Balder, who dies and comes back and creates a paradise after an apocalypse.
00:22:37.000But almost certainly, this part of the myth was influenced by the spread of Christianity and was written down only in the Middle Ages.
00:22:44.000Another thing that Bill Maher mentioned in the discussion, and I didn't even know how to process this.
00:22:51.000I knew that this school of thought existed, but I thought it was only on Reddit or Discord channels, not in agreed-upon high scholarly thinking.
00:23:02.000Did Jesus Christ actually exist, Frank Turek?
00:23:07.000If there is one or two scholars out of many thousands, Charlie, in academia today who study this kind of material, and I'm not talking about...
00:25:53.000Probably one of the most attested to facts from ancient history is the crucifixion of Jesus.
00:25:58.000Of course, he doesn't believe in the resurrection, but there's virtually no scholars out there who say Jesus never rose from the dead, or I should say never existed, which is why when Bill tried to say that, it's completely off the road.
00:26:09.000The other one, which I didn't quite grasp, and I did find that there was a school of thought out there that exists, but very fringe, that Paul was talking about a spiritual Jesus.
00:26:23.000Where does this come from, and is there any merit to the argument that Paul was somehow not connected, or he thought Jesus was just a spiritual celestial being?
00:26:40.000No, because Paul makes it very clear that he's talking about a resurrected body, a body that comes out of the tomb.
00:26:47.000It would have been easy to say Jesus resurrected spiritually, then you wouldn't have to, you know, his body could still be in the tomb, and you could still say, oh, he resurrected spiritually.
00:26:58.000Jesus' tomb was empty, and it would have been easy to squash Christianity if it wasn't empty, because both the Romans and the Jews who didn't want Christianity to succeed would have gone.
00:27:09.000Gone to the right tomb and taken out his body.
00:27:11.000They didn't do it because his body wasn't in there.
00:27:15.000So no, this was a physical resurrection.
00:27:18.000And that's what made it so crazy to the Greeks because they didn't think anyone would want to have their body raised.
00:27:26.000They wanted to be liberated from the body.
00:28:16.000We have a YouTube channel, Crossexamine, two words, at YouTube.
00:28:20.000And we also have a podcast called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.
00:28:23.000So we're going to college campuses, high schools, churches, presenting the evidence that Christianity is true and taking a lot of questions.
00:28:29.000We have over 2,500 videos on our YouTube channel.
00:28:33.000Most of them are Q&A videos from the college campus.
00:28:35.000The world is waking up to the power of gold.
00:28:40.000National banks are scrambling to secure it.
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00:29:45.000I don't know if you caught this in part of the interview, where he said, well, the Holy Spirit's a concept that came hundreds of years later.
00:29:50.000I actually think I did a pretty good job of interjecting and correcting the record.
00:29:56.000The Spirit is actually mentioned all the way back into the Old Testament, but primarily we see that in the baptism of Christ our Lord, where it was Jesus Christ, the Spirit came upon him, and God the Father said, this is my Son in whom I am pleased.
00:30:11.000Truth to what you said, not what he said.
00:30:13.000In fact, it's all over the New Testament, and as you mentioned, even the Old Testament.
00:30:17.000I mean, the Holy Spirit comes upon the believers at Pentecost, which as one of the most accurate, I mean, I think all the books are accurate, but one of the most verifiable books in the New Testament is the Book of Acts, Charlie.
00:30:30.000And in our book, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.
00:30:42.000By an archaeologist by the name of Sir William Ramsey, who initially was skeptical of Luke 100 years ago.
00:30:48.000Then he spent 20 years studying Luke, and he said Luke is an historian of first rank.
00:30:53.000And if you go through the Book of Acts, there are 84 historically eyewitness confirmable details that only an eyewitness or somebody that knew an eyewitness would know.
00:31:02.000Just in the Book of Acts, Charlie, we list them all, and I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.
00:31:06.000So the Holy Spirit is all over the documents.
00:31:10.000And as you pointed out in your rebuttal video, response video that you released earlier today, or maybe it was yesterday, with Bill Maher, even the, I mean, the data, the documents is important, but what's more important are the sources for the documents,
00:31:29.000If you were to write a book or I were to write a book about 9-11 right now, which is about 23 years ago, it's more important that I'm interviewing people who saw it.
00:31:39.000That's more important than the date I'm writing it down right now in 2025.
00:31:43.000And that's what goes on with the New Testament.
00:31:48.000The dates of these books are written during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses by eyewitnesses or people that knew eyewitnesses because they proved it by putting data in the text that only an eyewitness would know.
00:32:00.000But they're actually interviewing people if they weren't eyewitnesses themselves like Luke wasn't.
00:32:05.000They were interviewing people that were there and they're still alive when they're writing it.
00:32:53.000I wanted to develop a relationship with Bill.
00:32:56.000It was tempting to kind of go all in and go heavy apologetics and a little finger wagging.
00:33:03.000Just speak as someone who does this for a living and closing here, about a minute and a half remaining, the different approaches that we as believers should bring to unusual circumstances to point towards Jesus.
00:33:14.000Well, I think both you and I try and take the approach where we don't want to try and own people.
00:33:19.000We want to gently correct them and ask them a lot of questions because we want them walking away going, I want to know more.
00:33:26.000We don't want them walking away from an interaction with us.
00:33:37.000Look, Charlie, as you know, when somebody asks you a question, you're not just answering a question, you're answering a person.
00:33:45.000And so you want to provide an opening for the next conversation.
00:33:50.000And what I try and ask people is, if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?
00:33:55.000And Charlie, I've had atheists stand at their microphone in front of hundreds of people on college campuses and say no, because they don't want it to be true.
00:34:03.000So I think that clears the deck of all the objections they could have.