The Charlie Kirk Show - January 29, 2026


Charlie's Vision: America As a Christian Nation


Episode Stats


Length

39 minutes

Words per minute

182.20439

Word count

7,191

Sentence count

589

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

15

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, host Charlie Kirk sits down with John Daniel Davidson to discuss the immigration situation in Minneapolis, and how the Trump administration is responding to the growing protests in the streets of the city.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.
00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.
00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.
00:00:14.000 If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable.
00:00:19.000 But if the most important thing is doing good, you'll end up purposeful.
00:00:24.000 College is a scam, everybody.
00:00:26.000 You got to stop sending your kids to college.
00:00:27.000 You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible.
00:00:31.000 Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter.
00:00:33.000 Go start a Turning Point USA high school chapter.
00:00:35.000 Go find out how your church can get involved.
00:00:37.000 Sign up and become an activist.
00:00:39.000 I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.
00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.
00:00:43.000 And I encourage you to do the same.
00:00:45.000 Here I am.
00:00:46.000 Lord, use me.
00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:49.000 Here we go.
00:00:56.000 The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000 All right, welcome.
00:01:10.000 Hour two of the Charlie Kirk Show is underway.
00:01:12.000 We are joined by one of my favorite thinkers, writers, journalists.
00:01:17.000 That is John Daniel Davidson, who's been on the show a number of times.
00:01:20.000 John Daniel Davidson, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:23.000 It's good to see you.
00:01:24.000 Hey, thanks for having me.
00:01:25.000 So you and I were chatting because, you know, we're reacting to what's going on in Minneapolis.
00:01:32.000 And I think you share my perspective here that this is not the time where the administration can blink.
00:01:38.000 This is not a time where we can bend the knee or back down.
00:01:41.000 Please explain why you feel that way and what you're seeing.
00:01:45.000 One of the main things I think that we're all seeing is this narrative shift.
00:01:49.000 And we're seeing the Trump administration and the president respond to a narrative frame that's really being set by the Democrats and by the left and by the leaders in Minneapolis.
00:02:00.000 In some cases, leaders of what looks to be sort of an organized insurrection, anarcho-tyranny.
00:02:08.000 And instead of imposing the narrative that is the administration's policy that Trump was elected on to enforce our immigration laws, to effectuate mass deportations of the millions of people that were let in during the Biden administration, you now have the president having to respond to these oftentimes disingenuous or distorted questions from the press.
00:02:33.000 He's accepting the frame that there's been, you know, errors made in the enforcement of immigration law, that somehow these agitators and rioters in Minneapolis are legitimate, that their tactics in disrupting law enforcement are legitimate.
00:02:50.000 And we're seeing him respond even in terms of personnel and some policy statements as well.
00:02:57.000 I think it may be too soon to say, you know, that there's actually been a change in what those ICE agents are doing on the ground, but certainly from the perceptive point of the media and of us who are watching it from afar and online, it appears to be that Trump has blinked and that he is retreating, at least rhetorically.
00:03:15.000 And I find that very disturbing.
00:03:17.000 He seemed like he might be, but also then he's very animated this morning.
00:03:21.000 He seems annoyed with Mayor Jacob Fry.
00:03:24.000 So I don't know.
00:03:26.000 We've been around the block a few times with Trump.
00:03:28.000 He's definitely, he's had a lot of showdowns about things.
00:03:32.000 We've had policies he's pursued, policies he's backed down on, policies he's then reignited after that.
00:03:37.000 There's always this give and take with President Trump.
00:03:40.000 We saw that with the Greenland thing where he seems all in on something and then it might have been a negotiation tactic.
00:03:46.000 So how do you unpack maybe what the president's strategic thinking might be, John?
00:03:51.000 I don't know.
00:03:53.000 Honestly, I think Trump is a creature of instinct and of intuition.
00:03:59.000 I don't think he is a deep policy thinker.
00:04:04.000 I don't think that he is super disciplined in how he approaches things.
00:04:08.000 I think part of his genius is that he does operate on instinct and he does operate on intuition.
00:04:13.000 And he has great intuition and great instincts, even at the level of like genius instincts when it comes to U.S. politics and leadership.
00:04:23.000 But on something like this, this immigration issue and the issue of deportations, this isn't one issue alongside a bunch of other issues like Greenland or Venezuela or tariffs or something.
00:04:35.000 This is the issue.
00:04:36.000 This is the thing that got him elected the first time.
00:04:39.000 This is the thing that got him re-elected the second time.
00:04:42.000 This is what the American people voted for.
00:04:44.000 And what, you know, polls show they still say they favor in overwhelming numbers mass deportations for all illegal immigrants.
00:04:53.000 That's what he was elected to do.
00:04:54.000 If he does nothing else, that's what he needs to do.
00:04:58.000 And I don't think you see that kind of urgency, the administration.
00:05:02.000 And some of this comes down, I think, to the way administrations work.
00:05:07.000 And it plays into some of Trump's weaknesses, which can be a lack of discipline, a lack of focus.
00:05:13.000 One of the reasons, for example, that we saw the raid on Venezuela and the capture of Maduro is not necessarily, I don't think, and this is just a side example of what I'm talking about in terms of the dynamic.
00:05:26.000 I don't think that the Maduro raid was number one priority on Trump's list, but it was on enough people's agendas inside the administration that the thing got done.
00:05:37.000 And so that's the kind of push and pull that you're going to see in any administration, but I think especially in this Trump administration when his focus isn't always laser-like and he can get distracted and follow his intuition and his instincts, which is a blessing and a curse.
00:05:53.000 But on immigration, this is the one thing that he does need laser-like focus on.
00:05:58.000 He needs everybody in his administration to be on board.
00:06:00.000 There can't be any room for compromising with a radical insurgent left that is essentially imposing a nullification of federal immigration law in Minnesota.
00:06:11.000 And I guarantee you, I think we're already starting to see this.
00:06:15.000 This is going to spread to other cities and other states.
00:06:18.000 And it may become quite bad as the weather warms up in some parts of the country.
00:06:23.000 And that's been my basic operating premise here: you've got to squash it now in the winter in Minneapolis because spring and summer, it's going to spread.
00:06:23.000 Yeah.
00:06:30.000 We're already seeing it spread, by the way, John.
00:06:33.000 The signal chats, right, that we've now discovered were an organizing point focus for a lot of these activists have now been, they're being used in Portland.
00:06:44.000 They're being used in Los Angeles.
00:06:45.000 So this is going to spread.
00:06:47.000 Somebody is training people how to do this, how to organize them.
00:06:50.000 And there's a lot of data behind it.
00:06:52.000 A lot of it's automated.
00:06:53.000 A lot of it's being linked directly to Airtable.
00:06:55.000 So that's a sort of a database app that you can use, pretty user-friendly.
00:07:00.000 But I do just want to make one point here.
00:07:02.000 And we had this graphic up just a second ago.
00:07:04.000 This is Kyle Kalinsky was absolutely freaking out yesterday.
00:07:07.000 He said, major breaking.
00:07:08.000 Trump regime is increasing illegal DHS raids.
00:07:11.000 That's what he calls them against protesters.
00:07:13.000 That's what he calls them in Minnesota.
00:07:15.000 Bovino firing was a PR stunt to head fake de-escalation.
00:07:19.000 So I just, I want us, while I agree with you, John, of all the issues, we need to be laser focused on immigration.
00:07:26.000 The president needs to be laser focused on it because I think viscerally this is the most winning issue in this administration because people don't like to go to Costco or the DMV or the hospital and feel like they're living in a third world country.
00:07:39.000 And that's what it's become.
00:07:41.000 80% of the population growth in the United States over the last decade has come from immigration, not births, 20%, right?
00:07:49.000 And by the way, historically, even when we had a lot of immigration in the 90s, early 2000s, it was 60% of growth was Native-born American growth.
00:07:58.000 Now that is 80% immigration.
00:08:00.000 This has become untenable.
00:08:02.000 And I want to just also encourage everybody.
00:08:05.000 There was a big story in the New York Times yesterday that showed we are on pace for this next upcoming year that ends.
00:08:11.000 I guess it's, you know, they do it on a halfway mark.
00:08:15.000 So it'll end in July of 2026 for only 321,000 new people in the country.
00:08:21.000 That's down from 2.5 million in 2024 under Biden.
00:08:26.000 So like the ship is moving in the right direction.
00:08:29.000 We got to correct course when we need to.
00:08:33.000 And the left is freaking out.
00:08:34.000 So I just want to just keep a center place here.
00:08:37.000 And sometimes Trump is prone to head fakes.
00:08:39.000 Sometimes Trump is prone to operating on instinct, but things are moving in the right direction.
00:08:45.000 But I completely agree with you.
00:08:47.000 And John, why I wanted to talk to you about this, because I think the message that is sent to these insurgents needs to be firm and there needs to be prosecutions.
00:08:57.000 There needs to be the DOJ on the ground arresting these people.
00:09:01.000 Explain that piece of it because you have made a good point on your Twitter feed, on your X feed, that the interior enforcement of immigration is actually what's saving the border.
00:09:12.000 It's actually what's having all these downstream effects that are positive.
00:09:15.000 Yeah, that's right.
00:09:16.000 So I've spent many years reporting from the border, both sides of the border.
00:09:21.000 I started following this back in 2014 when the unaccompanied minors started showing up during the second Obama term, and nobody understood kind of what, you know, why are these unaccompanied children showing up?
00:09:34.000 And that was the first indication to me that, like, well, there's something going on at the border we don't understand.
00:09:39.000 What I came to realize, which a lot of people understand now, is that it was the industrialization of illegal immigration by the cartels that created a huge black market.
00:09:48.000 And then under Biden, you know, we had 10 million people at least.
00:09:52.000 Those are just the ones we know about come into the country illegally during Biden's four years in office.
00:09:58.000 So when I say that where the real effects of deportation come is interior enforcement, what I mean is you can shut the border down at any time.
00:10:08.000 Like Biden could have shut the flow of illegal immigration off in five minutes, anytime he wanted to.
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00:11:23.000 So, John, I want to keep talking about why interior enforcement is so important, but you were reacting to a report from Bill Melusian who said the bipartisan co-chairs of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which sounds like goodness, what a cringe name.
00:11:40.000 The Problem Solver Caucus.
00:11:42.000 Brian Fitz from Pennsylvania and Rom Tom Souzi from New York, Democrat from New York, have penned a letter to President Trump in which they urge him to take up immigration reform.
00:11:51.000 And I replied, immigration reform is code for treason, telling him that his success at securing the borders is being overshadowed by the interior enforcement.
00:12:01.000 And so what do they want?
00:12:02.000 They want to codify Trump's executive order to have the border secured, fix the broken asylum system, provide legal protection to millions of immigrants, whatever that means, because that means probably amnesty, that means path to citizenship, whatever you want to insert there.
00:12:17.000 Mandate federal agents only take actions for which they are thoroughly trained and urge local law enforcement to cooperate on public safety threats.
00:12:26.000 Five, require all federal law enforcement involved in shootings must be subject to a thorough independent investigation.
00:12:32.000 You reacted to this very strongly and you were making that point.
00:12:36.000 So please continue.
00:12:38.000 Yeah, I believe the point that I made was that we're done debating these things.
00:12:42.000 This is not, you know, this is something out of the past.
00:12:45.000 This is sort of the gang of eight.
00:12:47.000 This is amnesty.
00:12:49.000 We've had these debates.
00:12:50.000 And what we got for having these debates was at least 10 million illegal immigrants flooding over the border during the Biden administration in the greatest movement of human beings probably in the 21st century anywhere in the world.
00:13:04.000 A global phenomenon that has completely changed the United States to your point earlier about population growth.
00:13:10.000 That's where that comes from, is from Biden's border surge.
00:13:14.000 When I was saying before about controlling the border, the way you control the border, it's easy to do.
00:13:21.000 The operational capacity is there through CBP and Border Patrol.
00:13:25.000 They're very sophisticated, very highly trained personnel there.
00:13:28.000 You control it by letting them do their job and enforce the border, which they can do, detaining everybody who the Border Patrol picks up who's crossed into the country illegally, which the Biden administration did not do.
00:13:40.000 And then imposing deterrent policies so that the people who are in northern Mexico or in Central America or who are back home in their country of origin, who are thinking about paying $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 to a smuggling organization connected to a cartel will not actually take out the loan and pay that money and head north because they know there's no chance that they'll be allowed to stay.
00:14:02.000 All it takes.
00:14:03.000 I don't know if you guys remember the 15,000 Haitians that were under the bridge during the Biden administration in Delhi.
00:14:10.000 Oh, I remember Texas.
00:14:11.000 I remember.
00:14:12.000 Okay, do you know what happened there?
00:14:14.000 They went in because the Biden administration realized all this press is showing up with drones and all these images of these horrible conditions under this bridge.
00:14:22.000 And they said, all right, we have to, we got to wrap that up.
00:14:25.000 We got to get those people out of there.
00:14:27.000 They went in and they took a couple hundred people out of 15,000 and deported them back to Haiti.
00:14:33.000 About 8,000 to 9,000 of those people immediately went back across the river to Mexico.
00:14:38.000 They self-deported because they did not want to be sent back to Haiti.
00:14:41.000 So in other words, it's deterrent policies that secure the border.
00:14:45.000 And that can be done at any time.
00:14:47.000 But what do you do about the 10 million people that already got into the country?
00:14:51.000 You have to send ICE out into the interior of the United States and find those people and arrest them.
00:14:56.000 And it's a lot easier to do that.
00:14:58.000 And you can do it without any protests or any accidental shootings or tragic events if the local police will honor ICE detainer requests as they do through most of the country, everywhere except these sanctuary districts.
00:15:11.000 And so I think we have to like, we've allowed ourselves, and I think to go back to where we started, the Trump administration has allowed itself to kind of tumble down this leftist rabbit hole of adjudicating these fake things, right?
00:15:24.000 When what we're actually talking about is enforcing the immigration laws that we have on the books.
00:15:30.000 The ICE agents are not breaking the law.
00:15:32.000 They are not warrantless, doing warrantless arrests or kidnapping.
00:15:36.000 And anyone in the mainstream corporate media who says that should be called out for it.
00:15:40.000 They're just lying.
00:15:41.000 They're acting under their lawful authority under Article 2, not Article 3, right?
00:15:46.000 So they don't have judicial warrants, which is a whole nother thing we can talk about.
00:15:50.000 But all immigration enforcement is under the executive branch.
00:15:53.000 Immigration judges are administrative judges. 0.91
00:15:56.000 And the warrants that ICE agents have for illegal aliens are administrative warrants.
00:16:00.000 That's why they can't go into private homes and they wait sometimes outside places of business or public places to make their arrests.
00:16:07.000 But we just got to get back to reality on this because we've gone, the administration has allowed the conversation and the narrative to go so far afield.
00:16:16.000 I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
00:16:18.000 No, I completely agree with that.
00:16:19.000 Go ahead.
00:16:20.000 Well, it just occurs to me.
00:16:21.000 So people are freaking a lot of people who should know better are letting themselves have panic attacks because they can't handle an ugly image.
00:16:29.000 They're easily tricked by, oh, they used a five-year-old this bait.
00:16:33.000 And I feel like the low-hanging fruit of it disincentivizes coming here.
00:16:38.000 It encourages people to self-deport and it doesn't create as many bad images is if the administration put more pressure on something we know is illegal, which is businesses knowingly employing illegal immigrants.
00:16:52.000 And I've often thought like the way you cut the Gordian knot is you make a really public example of one or two business owners who have very egregiously been hiring illegals and use that to put the fear of God in others.
00:17:07.000 And so they self-deport their illegal employees out of their companies and then those employees self-deport out of the country.
00:17:13.000 What do you think of that?
00:17:14.000 Great idea.
00:17:15.000 I've been talking about that for years.
00:17:17.000 This is the one thing.
00:17:18.000 The reason that we got mass illegal immigration is because on the Democrat side, they wanted it to increase their voter rolls, which they have been saying for decades, right?
00:17:27.000 That's not a conspiracy theory.
00:17:29.000 And on the right, it was Republicans in sort of the commerce, Chamber of Commerce Republicans who wanted lower wages for their big business constituents.
00:17:38.000 And so they kind of turned a blind eye and allowed cheap labor to flood into the country at the behest of those special interests.
00:17:46.000 I think if you knowingly employ illegal immigrants, you shouldn't just get fined or get some slap on the wrist.
00:17:53.000 You should go to jail.
00:17:54.000 And I totally agree that you don't have to get every business.
00:17:57.000 You just have to send a message to encourage the others, so to speak, and actually put real meat on the bone there and say, if you break our immigration laws and knowingly hire illegals, you're going to jail. 0.66
00:18:14.000 You personally, owner of this business, are going to jail.
00:18:18.000 And we don't talk about that enough.
00:18:19.000 And that's a huge part of the incentive, the pull factors for illegal immigrants to come here. 0.89
00:18:25.000 They won't come if they know they're going to get deported as soon as they get caught crossing the border.
00:18:30.000 And they also won't come if they know there's no jobs for them here.
00:18:33.000 Well, and they also won't come if they know they're not going to immediately be put on the dole, right?
00:18:37.000 Because that's another pull factor.
00:18:39.000 They come here, they were getting free debit cards filled with free cash, free flights into the interior, family reunification.
00:18:46.000 And by the way, they expedited everything on the CBP1 app.
00:18:50.000 So to your point earlier, they didn't like the bad PR.
00:18:53.000 So they're like, listen, you don't have to come flood the border.
00:18:56.000 That's bad optics.
00:18:57.000 You know, you got Bill Delusion down there with drones.
00:18:59.000 No, just get on the app.
00:19:00.000 We'll get you a flight from Mexico City.
00:19:02.000 You come up, go wherever you want, and then just get immediately on the dole.
00:19:05.000 That's what they're doing.
00:19:06.000 It's treason.
00:19:07.000 It was absolutely treason.
00:19:08.000 And by the way, everybody who wants scalps from the previous administration, if you're not bringing up Alejandro Majorkis, you're missing the point.
00:19:16.000 Oh, yeah.
00:19:17.000 So, John, John.
00:19:18.000 Yeah, that guy's a trader.
00:19:19.000 Yeah, we completely.
00:19:22.000 We're out of time here.
00:19:22.000 Thank you so much.
00:19:23.000 Very, very, the moral clarity is important.
00:19:25.000 Thank you.
00:19:26.000 Thanks, guys.
00:19:26.000 Thanks for having me.
00:19:30.000 I am very excited about our next guest who's been a longtime friend of mine personally.
00:19:35.000 And of course, to Charlie, and that is Eric Metaxas, great American, great patriot, great Christian man.
00:19:41.000 Eric, welcome back to the show, my friend.
00:19:44.000 I never left, Andrew.
00:19:46.000 Where have you been?
00:19:47.000 It's so good to see you.
00:19:49.000 I just get blessed in my bones.
00:19:51.000 Thanks for having me.
00:19:52.000 God bless you.
00:19:53.000 You know, I'm just sad that you didn't wear a pink shirt or something that I could have.
00:19:58.000 Just to throw back to Charlie, some golden boy quote.
00:20:01.000 We got to get Seinfeld.
00:20:02.000 Load up a good Seinfeld clip.
00:20:04.000 We have to do it in Charlie's honor.
00:20:05.000 I kid you not, Eric.
00:20:07.000 I have been the, so I fall asleep to Seinfeld every night in honor of Charlie.
00:20:12.000 I'm working my way through the entire 10 seasons.
00:20:17.000 Okay, now I'm going to have to interrupt you.
00:20:19.000 I got to tell you what Charlie and I had like an ongoing disagreement, and he eventually agreed with me.
00:20:25.000 Oh.
00:20:26.000 And here's what it is.
00:20:27.000 Seinfeld, the last few seasons basically stink.
00:20:33.000 Now, when I say basically, there's still great moments and stuff, but it's like they handed over to a bunch of younger writers who turned it into the cartoon version of Seinfeld.
00:20:42.000 So when you watch like the first six, seven seasons, it's a certain show.
00:20:47.000 And then it gets, you know, like when they do stuff like Kramer has the Merv Griffin set.
00:20:52.000 Yeah, that's funny.
00:20:53.000 It's like it's funny, but it's like cartoon funny.
00:20:56.000 I know you weren't expecting to have this discussion with Christian.
00:20:58.000 No, Charlie, listen, I don't disagree.
00:21:01.000 I'm slightly younger than you guys, so we talk about this with The Simpsons.
00:21:04.000 But the problem is, at least with Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld had the wisdom to refuse 4 million an episode or whatever they offered him to keep going.
00:21:12.000 And yeah, and they just ended it.
00:21:13.000 Whereas The Simpsons has been going for three times.
00:21:15.000 It's been a bad show for three times longer than it was ever a good show.
00:21:18.000 And it's still going.
00:21:19.000 Well, it's still going.
00:21:21.000 You are host of Socrates in the City, author of Bonhoeffer, Is Atheism Dead and Letter to the American Church.
00:21:28.000 So I wanted to start this, Eric, because you are a man of God.
00:21:32.000 And one of the core ethos, central themes of this show, and it will forever be this way, because this is a show that is dedicated to the legacy of Charlie Kirk and continuing the mission of Charlie Kirk, is to honor faith, is to lift up Jesus Christ and to do it boldly, proudly, loudly, and without apology.
00:21:54.000 And so I want to play a clip.
00:21:56.000 It's longer.
00:21:57.000 This is the Charlie Kirk show.
00:21:58.000 He deserves the time.
00:22:00.000 Of Charlie explaining why America's Christian roots must be, are Christian and why we need to keep it that way. 0.94
00:22:09.000 And then I just, we'll let the conversation go wherever it is.
00:22:12.000 So please enjoy this longer clip, 345.
00:22:16.000 Remember that we were a collection of states and colonies, and you need to read the state constitutions before anything else.
00:22:21.000 13 out of 13 required a declaration of faith.
00:22:23.000 9 out of 13 required you to be a Protestant, except Maryland, which was Catholic, which still required a declaration of faith.
00:22:29.000 Every single one of the original state constitutions, Pennsylvania included, they had, I profess Lord and Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in the original state constitutions.
00:22:38.000 Secondly, 55 out of 56 of the original signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing church attending Christians.
00:22:43.000 You asked about common law.
00:22:44.000 So common law is inherited from Blackstone, who was Christian.
00:22:48.000 Common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures.
00:22:50.000 So let's go to three principles of common law, due process and jury of your peers, wrapped into the ultimate biblical principle that you shall not favor justice if you are rich or poor, which is in Leviticus 19, right before the most famous part of Leviticus 19, which is that you should love your neighbor as yourself.
00:23:05.000 But before that is that in the administration of justice, you shall not favor the rich or the poor, which is the idea of blind justice.
00:23:12.000 We get that in the West, which is incorporated also in the New Testament ideal, neither slave nor Greek nor Jew, you're all one in Jesus Christ, which is we have the idea of human equality.
00:23:19.000 These are all biblical ideas.
00:23:20.000 They're not enlightenment ideas, which is they kind of get conflated at the time.
00:23:24.000 But more importantly than that, they say that God was only mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence.
00:23:29.000 Well, that's a big deal.
00:23:30.000 Okay.
00:23:30.000 Laws of nature and nature's God.
00:23:32.000 The last paragraph of the Declaration reads as a prayer.
00:23:35.000 It says we appeal to the supreme judge of the universe.
00:23:38.000 Who's the judge of the universe?
00:23:39.000 Jesus Christ, as it says in Revelation, that Jesus will judge the earth on his throne.
00:23:44.000 So, in the declaration, they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer very specifically.
00:23:50.000 Thirdly, as I said on stage yesterday, Deuteronomy was by far the most quoted book, religious or non-religious, in the time of the founding when they were putting together the Constitution, more than John Locke, more than Montesquieu, more than Blackstone.
00:24:02.000 So, the book of Deuteronomy, which talked about laws, customs, traditions, it was Moses' farewell address as he's about to say goodbye, say, hey, good luck in Canaan, guys.
00:24:11.000 Here's how you should set up your form of government.
00:24:14.000 But finally, and most importantly, let's look at actually what the founders said.
00:24:18.000 John Adams seamlessly said the Constitution was only written for a moral and religious people.
00:24:22.000 It was wholly inadequate to the people of any other. 0.62
00:24:24.000 The body politic of America was so Christian and was so Protestant that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord.
00:24:33.000 One of the reasons we're living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government and they're incompatible. 0.96
00:24:41.000 So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population. 1.00
00:24:45.000 Your reaction.
00:24:46.000 Listen, I could laugh.
00:24:48.000 I could fall down laughing with joy because the fact that Charlie, only Charlie, could rattle things off like boom boom like enough.
00:24:58.000 Like it's unbelievable.
00:25:00.000 It's so beautiful and it's so true.
00:25:04.000 I tell you, Andrew, you and I haven't talked much because I've been deep in the bowels of working on a book on the American Revolution.
00:25:11.000 I have never in my life understood what Charlie just was talking about in the way that I do now.
00:25:18.000 The book will come out in June.
00:25:20.000 It is outrageously inescapable, inescapable, utterly inescapable that this nation is a Christian nation. 1.00
00:25:30.000 Now, you have to define what that means.
00:25:31.000 It doesn't mean that the government tells people you have to go to church or the government, the government has to be agnostic. 0.83
00:25:38.000 The government has to sit back and we have freedom in America.
00:25:41.000 But the founders, as Charlie was just saying, there's no doubt.
00:25:46.000 And when you know the details, you'll be embarrassed that you didn't see this before.
00:25:50.000 You didn't learn this in school.
00:25:51.000 There is no doubt.
00:25:52.000 There is no America.
00:25:54.000 There is no America, period, without Christian faith. 0.61
00:25:59.000 All of the founders, and I'm really focused on the founders before the founders, right?
00:26:02.000 I'm talking about Samuel Adams, John Adams in the 1760s.
00:26:07.000 This is what I talk about in my book before I get to the actual war or the revolution, but they were radical Reformation Puritans.
00:26:18.000 These were people who were just, they saw the whole world through a biblical lens, and they knew that God's model is for us to do what the ancient Israelites did in Sinai, have a direct covenant with God.
00:26:32.000 No king but Jesus, no king but the Lord.
00:26:36.000 They all understood this.
00:26:38.000 They all understood this.
00:26:40.000 And when they created our government, that's what they were doing.
00:26:44.000 And it's just so amazing to me how we have lived at a time where this is news to most people.
00:26:53.000 Andrew Colvett here.
00:26:53.000 Hi, folks.
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00:27:45.000 Just go to yrefi.com and tell them your friend Andrew sent you.
00:27:51.000 But as I've been writing this book, I have been so astonished.
00:27:55.000 I cannot tell you.
00:27:56.000 The name of the book is Revolution.
00:27:58.000 And as I say, you can't even pre-order it yet.
00:28:00.000 But the reason it's called Revolution is because every other revolution is not a revolution.
00:28:05.000 It's a fake revolution.
00:28:07.000 Fake and gay. 1.00
00:28:09.000 The French Revolution is a demonic parody of a revolution.
00:28:14.000 It's like it becomes a bloodbath because they take God out.
00:28:18.000 The Bolshevik Revolution, all these things we call revolution.
00:28:20.000 They're not actual revolutions.
00:28:21.000 The one true revolution in the history of the world in terms of government is America.
00:28:27.000 And it's so beautiful.
00:28:29.000 And so I think I have to say that what's become clear to me is like a lot of people say, well, I'm conservative or I love America or whatever.
00:28:36.000 It's like, if you really understand that, you understand apart from God, that makes no sense.
00:28:42.000 You should be a liberal.
00:28:45.000 You should be aware.
00:28:46.000 In other words, to love America, to understand what America is, it points you back.
00:28:52.000 Every single one of the folks who gave us this country understood it is about Jesus.
00:28:58.000 It's about bringing biblical, you know, they basically said, well, if we wanted to form a government on biblical principles, what would that look like?
00:29:06.000 It would look like America. 0.90
00:29:07.000 That's what it is.
00:29:08.000 And that's what, and many of them said it explicitly.
00:29:11.000 Samuel Adams, I think, said it explicitly.
00:29:14.000 They looked at, you know, the authoritarian monarchies in the same way that they looked at the Roman Catholic Church at the time.
00:29:22.000 It's like top down.
00:29:23.000 It's going to tell you what to do.
00:29:25.000 You don't, you know, and the Reformation changed everything.
00:29:29.000 So suddenly every single person has the ability to have a direct relationship with God.
00:29:34.000 And they said that, you know, that's the way it should be.
00:29:37.000 Could we form a government that looks like that?
00:29:41.000 Would it be possible?
00:29:42.000 And as you just said, quoting John Adams, it's like, it is not possible unless the people get that.
00:29:47.000 It is not.
00:29:47.000 If the people aren't tuned into this, it's not going to work, which is why I hope in this 250th year of celebration, which we have called the supercentennial, in case anybody didn't get the memo, this is the supercentennial.
00:30:01.000 President Trump agrees with that term that in this supercentennial year, we need to go back.
00:30:07.000 We need to understand that without that, America goes away.
00:30:11.000 So, you know, nobody got this better than our friend Charlie.
00:30:15.000 And just listening to that clip, I just get, I get joy from that, that he said all that.
00:30:19.000 Yeah, no, I look forward to us discussing that book when it comes out.
00:30:23.000 And one of Charlie's big causes was he just, he really flogged at that point.
00:30:27.000 America is obviously a Christian country.
00:30:29.000 And it obviously is, you almost have to feel like a moron.
00:30:33.000 Like you said, once you notice it, it's like, okay, so we were settled by a bunch of Protestant religious zealots of various stripes.
00:30:41.000 Zealots.
00:30:42.000 Yeah.
00:30:42.000 They weren't just technically.
00:30:43.000 Coming from a nation of huge religious ferment.
00:30:46.000 Like, I think, what is it?
00:30:47.000 Half the Protestant denominations in the world probably come out of England in this time period.
00:30:51.000 They're constantly coming to Luther Versions.
00:30:53.000 They're the ones who translate the Bible into every language, send missionaries everywhere.
00:30:56.000 They're constantly trying to convert the Indians in America. 0.96
00:30:59.000 They're coming out of a very religiously infused revolution in the English Civil Wars.
00:31:04.000 That's basically a religious infused revolt.
00:31:06.000 They have the Glorious Revolution, which I'm a Catholic.
00:31:09.000 I don't even like that, but that's totally a religious infused revolt.
00:31:12.000 And that's where we get our entire concept of the Bill of Rights, the original Bill of Rights, is basically born out of the Glorious Revolution and its aftermath.
00:31:21.000 That's what's going on.
00:31:22.000 But immediately after the revolution, America is this Christian country. 0.89
00:31:26.000 And that's what drives abolitionism. 0.97
00:31:27.000 That's what infuses both sides of the Civil War.
00:31:30.000 And then they want to tell you, oh, and then during the period where the country was founded, oh, that was just a bunch of deists.
00:31:34.000 No one really cared.
00:31:35.000 Give me a break.
00:31:36.000 Oh, that's a that is something.
00:31:38.000 It's funny you say that because I, you know, when the book comes out, there's like nine things that I'm just champing at the bit to talk about.
00:31:44.000 The whole deist thing, complete baloney.
00:31:47.000 I never dreamt that I would discover that it's total baloney.
00:31:52.000 I mean, almost nobody is a deist.
00:31:55.000 Even the deists are not deists.
00:31:56.000 I mean, you read what Franklin says, you read what Jefferson says.
00:32:01.000 And these are the only two people that everybody points to, you know, like their deists.
00:32:05.000 They say radically Christian things.
00:32:08.000 Ben Franklin and Jefferson, when they were going to design the Great Seal, you know, we were going to design a great seal for the new nation.
00:32:17.000 They both suggested Moses parting the Red Sea and the Israelites in the wilderness.
00:32:23.000 And what, like, there's like that, that's it.
00:32:25.000 That's it.
00:32:26.000 Those are the two quote-unquote deists.
00:32:28.000 And they say so many things that deists don't talk like that.
00:32:32.000 Certainly Washington is not a deist.
00:32:33.000 It's like hilarious.
00:32:34.000 Well, and you're, you're, you're making a point that they were so steeped in the language of the Bible and the language of scripture.
00:32:41.000 It, it, it animated their turns of phrases, the way that they formed their thoughts.
00:32:45.000 It was so innate to them that they couldn't help themselves.
00:32:49.000 All right.
00:32:50.000 So, Eric, in honor of Charlie, I have to play, I have to play a Seinfeld club.
00:32:56.000 Here we go.
00:32:58.000 How about this?
00:32:58.000 This is the pitch for their show: 410.
00:33:02.000 You want to go with me to NBC?
00:33:03.000 Yeah, I think we really got something in.
00:33:05.000 What do we got?
00:33:06.000 One idea.
00:33:06.000 An idea.
00:33:07.000 An idea for the show.
00:33:09.000 I still don't know what the idea is.
00:33:11.000 It's about nothing.
00:33:13.000 Right.
00:33:13.000 Everybody's doing something.
00:33:15.000 We'll do nothing.
00:33:17.000 So we go into NBC.
00:33:18.000 We tell them we got an idea for a show about nothing.
00:33:20.000 Exactly.
00:33:21.000 They say, what's your show about?
00:33:22.000 I say nothing.
00:33:23.000 There you go.
00:33:25.000 I think you may have something here.
00:33:28.000 I got one more.
00:33:29.000 I just have to play it, Eric.
00:33:31.000 Tuesday has no.
00:33:33.000 Don't say it.
00:33:34.000 4-11.
00:33:36.000 What's today?
00:33:37.000 It's Thursday.
00:33:39.000 Really?
00:33:40.000 Feels like Tuesday.
00:33:43.000 Tuesday has no feel.
00:33:45.000 Monday has a feel.
00:33:47.000 Friday has a feel.
00:33:49.000 Sunday has a feel.
00:33:50.000 I feel Tuesday and Wednesday.
00:33:51.000 All right, shut up to both of you.
00:33:53.000 You're making me nervous.
00:33:54.000 He's right.
00:33:55.000 Tuesday doesn't have a feel.
00:33:56.000 Tuesday has no feel.
00:33:58.000 I was around for a Tuesday yesterday.
00:34:00.000 I didn't feel anything.
00:34:02.000 I don't know if I told you, Andrew.
00:34:04.000 I don't even know if I told Charlie.
00:34:06.000 I was friends with Larry David before Seinfeld.
00:34:11.000 He was nowhere in his career.
00:34:14.000 And everybody said, like, oh, this is a comedian's comedian.
00:34:17.000 And I went to watch him at a club here in the city in New York.
00:34:21.000 And we were friends.
00:34:23.000 And I went to a dinner party at his apartment and the real Kramer popped in. 0.87
00:34:29.000 Like, I was, it's so bizarre.
00:34:31.000 And I knew him through the woman that Elaine Bennis is based on.
00:34:35.000 So all those stories about Fat Camp and all that kind of stuff.
00:34:38.000 It's so crazy.
00:34:40.000 And then when I became born again and became politically conservative, he couldn't really handle it.
00:34:48.000 And so our friendship evaporated.
00:34:51.000 But it's such a bizarre thing to think that, you know, I knew him before Seinfeld was a thing.
00:34:58.000 It's just crazy to me.
00:34:59.000 I can't be that old, obviously.
00:35:01.000 Yeah.
00:35:01.000 I mean, you know what's interesting?
00:35:03.000 I think, you know, Larry David's off obviously a crazy person, very lib.
00:35:08.000 He's given the world a great show, but so did Jerry.
00:35:11.000 And Jerry Seinfeld is not crazy woke.
00:35:13.000 So we can take solace in that.
00:35:15.000 And actually, if you watch Seinfeld back, this is the 90s.
00:35:20.000 I mean, it started basically, I think season one was 1989 and it ended, you know, around 2000, 1999, something like that.
00:35:27.000 And it is not woke.
00:35:29.000 The show is very nut woke, and it sort of predicts so much of the weirdness that we're experiencing in our modern culture.
00:35:36.000 It predicts it, right?
00:35:37.000 Like, you got to wear a ribbon.
00:35:39.000 I think we play that's you know, it's a very good idea.
00:35:40.000 I don't know before the black square.
00:35:43.000 The takeaway is not that it predicts it, it's it's kind of a solace to it that it's actually always been there and it comes and goes.
00:35:50.000 Well, and I think it's accentuated by social media, yeah, certainly.
00:35:53.000 That's why I'm talking about it.
00:35:53.000 It's already making fun of it, it's already making fun of it.
00:35:56.000 I actually remember when I graduated from Yale in the 80s, you had to wear a ribbon at graduation that showed that you stood against apartheid in South Africa.
00:36:09.000 And there was another ribbon for, I forget what, and you had to wear the ribbons.
00:36:12.000 And, like the jerk that I was, I wore the ribbons.
00:36:15.000 It's like, oh, you got, you got to wear the ribbons.
00:36:18.000 This kind of virtue signaling has been going on for a long, long time.
00:36:22.000 And of course, Seinfeld was mocking it.
00:36:25.000 You know, there's so many episodes where they mock it, where they say the stuff that everybody's thinking.
00:36:30.000 So that's called comedy.
00:36:32.000 And what comedy is, is truth-telling.
00:36:34.000 I mean, the reason we find it funny is because like, yep, exactly.
00:36:38.000 So, yeah, I'd love to.
00:36:40.000 That's somebody I'd love to interview someday is Jerry Seinfeld.
00:36:44.000 I think I could have a fun conversation with him.
00:36:46.000 Well, we have his Duke commencement speech.
00:36:48.000 Our team, our crack team in the studio, is like pulling Seinfeld stuff a lot.
00:36:53.000 So here we go.
00:36:54.000 I'm just going to play one.
00:36:55.000 Let's go ahead and play 415.
00:36:58.000 Privilege is a word that has taken quite a beating lately.
00:37:02.000 Privilege today seems to be the worst thing you can have.
00:37:06.000 I would like to take a moment to defend it.
00:37:10.000 Again, a lot of you are thinking, I can't believe they invited this guy.
00:37:15.000 Too late.
00:37:16.000 I say, use your privilege.
00:37:20.000 I grew up a Jewish boy from New York.
00:37:22.000 That is a privilege if you want to be a comedian.
00:37:25.000 My point is, we're embarrassed about things we should be proud of and proud of things we should be embarrassed about.
00:37:32.000 Pretty smart.
00:37:34.000 Well, the joy is that he clearly, it's like Ricky Gervais, he doesn't care.
00:37:39.000 He's like, come at me.
00:37:41.000 Like, come at me.
00:37:41.000 I got tenure.
00:37:42.000 I got comedy entertainment tenure.
00:37:44.000 I'm Jerry Seinfeld.
00:37:45.000 I can say this stuff and I can shove it in your face.
00:37:48.000 And what are you going to do about it?
00:37:50.000 What are you going to do?
00:37:51.000 Well, yeah.
00:37:53.000 The team is telling me that these are all clips Charlie loved.
00:37:56.000 So we're going to just, this is all just an Ode to Charlie segment with you, Eric, because that's the right thing to do with you.
00:38:02.000 Let's go ahead and play the next one, 416.
00:38:05.000 You went to Duke.
00:38:06.000 That is an unbelievable privilege.
00:38:08.000 I now have an honorary doctorate of humane letters degree from Duke University.
00:38:13.000 And if I can figure out a way to use that, I will.
00:38:17.000 I haven't figured anything out yet.
00:38:20.000 I think it's pretty much as useful in real life as this outfit I'm wearing.
00:38:27.000 Unbelievable.
00:38:28.000 Eric, I got an honorary doctorate from Liberty and from Hillsdale.
00:38:34.000 Listen, Hillsdale's a partner on the show.
00:38:36.000 We've got some news that's coming up very soon.
00:38:38.000 We love Hillsdale.
00:38:39.000 We love Dr. Larian.
00:38:40.000 He was just in our studio.
00:38:42.000 And it was Charlie's favorite university, the Beacon of the North, America's greatest college.
00:38:48.000 So go to charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:38:51.000 I got an honorary degree from Hillsdale and an honorary degree from Liberty.
00:38:55.000 Are you ready for this, Andrew?
00:38:58.000 On the same weekend.
00:38:59.000 Yeah.
00:39:00.000 Yeah.
00:39:00.000 I left my house.
00:39:02.000 I got two honorary degrees from the greatest from Hillsdale and from Liberty, and I came home and I had them both.
00:39:07.000 It's like that was a pretty good weekend.
00:39:09.000 It's been tough every day.
00:39:11.000 Eric Metaxas, you are a national treasure.
00:39:13.000 I've missed you, my friend.
00:39:15.000 Let's have you on again soon.
00:39:16.000 There's so much to talk about, and the country needs Jesus, and we need comedy.
00:39:21.000 And you deliver both in spades.
00:39:23.000 And I appreciate you for that, my friend.
00:39:25.000 We'll talk to you again.
00:39:26.000 Thank you, guys.
00:39:27.000 Thank you both.