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.
00:00:56.000The 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.
00:01:25.000So you and I were chatting because, you know, we're reacting to what's going on in Minneapolis.
00:01:32.000And I think you share my perspective here that this is not the time where the administration can blink.
00:01:38.000This is not a time where we can bend the knee or back down.
00:01:41.000Please explain why you feel that way and what you're seeing.
00:01:45.000One of the main things I think that we're all seeing is this narrative shift.
00:01:49.000And 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.
00:02:00.000In some cases, leaders of what looks to be sort of an organized insurrection, anarcho-tyranny.
00:02:08.000And 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.
00:02:33.000He'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.
00:02:50.000And we're seeing him respond even in terms of personnel and some policy statements as well.
00:02:57.000I 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.
00:03:53.000Honestly, I think Trump is a creature of instinct and of intuition.
00:03:59.000I don't think he is a deep policy thinker.
00:04:04.000I don't think that he is super disciplined in how he approaches things.
00:04:08.000I think part of his genius is that he does operate on instinct and he does operate on intuition.
00:04:13.000And he has great intuition and great instincts, even at the level of like genius instincts when it comes to U.S. politics and leadership.
00:04:23.000But 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.
00:04:54.000If he does nothing else, that's what he needs to do.
00:04:58.000And I don't think you see that kind of urgency, the administration.
00:05:02.000And some of this comes down, I think, to the way administrations work.
00:05:07.000And it plays into some of Trump's weaknesses, which can be a lack of discipline, a lack of focus.
00:05:13.000One 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.
00:05:26.000I 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.
00:05:37.000And 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.
00:05:53.000But on immigration, this is the one thing that he does need laser-like focus on.
00:05:58.000He needs everybody in his administration to be on board.
00:06:00.000There can't be any room for compromising with a radical insurgent left that is essentially imposing a nullification of federal immigration law in Minnesota.
00:06:11.000And I guarantee you, I think we're already starting to see this.
00:06:15.000This is going to spread to other cities and other states.
00:06:18.000And it may become quite bad as the weather warms up in some parts of the country.
00:06:23.000And 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.
00:06:30.000We're already seeing it spread, by the way, John.
00:06:33.000The 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.
00:07:08.000Trump regime is increasing illegal DHS raids.
00:07:11.000That's what he calls them against protesters.
00:07:13.000That's what he calls them in Minnesota.
00:07:15.000Bovino firing was a PR stunt to head fake de-escalation.
00:07:19.000So I just, I want us, while I agree with you, John, of all the issues, we need to be laser focused on immigration.
00:07:26.000The 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.
00:07:41.00080% of the population growth in the United States over the last decade has come from immigration, not births, 20%, right?
00:07:49.000And 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.
00:08:47.000And 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.
00:08:57.000There needs to be the DOJ on the ground arresting these people.
00:09:01.000Explain 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.
00:09:12.000It's actually what's having all these downstream effects that are positive.
00:09:16.000So I've spent many years reporting from the border, both sides of the border.
00:09:21.000I 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?
00:09:34.000And that was the first indication to me that, like, well, there's something going on at the border we don't understand.
00:09:39.000What 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.
00:09:48.000And then under Biden, you know, we had 10 million people at least.
00:09:52.000Those are just the ones we know about come into the country illegally during Biden's four years in office.
00:09:58.000So 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.
00:10:08.000Like Biden could have shut the flow of illegal immigration off in five minutes, anytime he wanted to.
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00:11:23.000So, 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.
00:11:42.000Brian 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.
00:11:51.000And I replied, immigration reform is code for treason, telling him that his success at securing the borders is being overshadowed by the interior enforcement.
00:12:02.000They 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.
00:12:17.000Mandate federal agents only take actions for which they are thoroughly trained and urge local law enforcement to cooperate on public safety threats.
00:12:26.000Five, require all federal law enforcement involved in shootings must be subject to a thorough independent investigation.
00:12:32.000You reacted to this very strongly and you were making that point.
00:12:50.000And 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.
00:13:04.000A global phenomenon that has completely changed the United States to your point earlier about population growth.
00:13:10.000That's where that comes from, is from Biden's border surge.
00:13:14.000When I was saying before about controlling the border, the way you control the border, it's easy to do.
00:13:21.000The operational capacity is there through CBP and Border Patrol.
00:13:25.000They're very sophisticated, very highly trained personnel there.
00:13:28.000You 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.
00:13:40.000And 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.
00:14:12.000Okay, do you know what happened there?
00:14:14.000They 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.
00:14:22.000And they said, all right, we have to, we got to wrap that up.
00:14:25.000We got to get those people out of there.
00:14:27.000They went in and they took a couple hundred people out of 15,000 and deported them back to Haiti.
00:14:33.000About 8,000 to 9,000 of those people immediately went back across the river to Mexico.
00:14:38.000They self-deported because they did not want to be sent back to Haiti.
00:14:41.000So in other words, it's deterrent policies that secure the border.
00:14:58.000And 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.
00:15:11.000And 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?
00:15:24.000When what we're actually talking about is enforcing the immigration laws that we have on the books.
00:15:30.000The ICE agents are not breaking the law.
00:15:32.000They are not warrantless, doing warrantless arrests or kidnapping.
00:15:36.000And anyone in the mainstream corporate media who says that should be called out for it.
00:15:41.000They're acting under their lawful authority under Article 2, not Article 3, right?
00:15:46.000So they don't have judicial warrants, which is a whole nother thing we can talk about.
00:15:50.000But all immigration enforcement is under the executive branch.
00:15:53.000Immigration judges are administrative judges.
00:15:56.000And the warrants that ICE agents have for illegal aliens are administrative warrants.
00:16:00.000That's why they can't go into private homes and they wait sometimes outside places of business or public places to make their arrests.
00:16:07.000But 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.
00:16:21.000So 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.
00:16:29.000They're easily tricked by, oh, they used a five-year-old this bait.
00:16:33.000And I feel like the low-hanging fruit of it disincentivizes coming here.
00:16:38.000It 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.
00:16:52.000And 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.
00:17:07.000And so they self-deport their illegal employees out of their companies and then those employees self-deport out of the country.
00:17:18.000The 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?
00:17:29.000And on the right, it was Republicans in sort of the commerce, Chamber of Commerce Republicans who wanted lower wages for their big business constituents.
00:17:38.000And so they kind of turned a blind eye and allowed cheap labor to flood into the country at the behest of those special interests.
00:17:46.000I think if you knowingly employ illegal immigrants, you shouldn't just get fined or get some slap on the wrist.
00:17:54.000And I totally agree that you don't have to get every business.
00:17:57.000You 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.
00:18:14.000You personally, owner of this business, are going to jail.
00:19:08.000And by the way, everybody who wants scalps from the previous administration, if you're not bringing up Alejandro Majorkis, you're missing the point.
00:20:27.000Seinfeld, the last few seasons basically stink.
00:20:33.000Now, 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.
00:20:42.000So when you watch like the first six, seven seasons, it's a certain show.
00:20:47.000And then it gets, you know, like when they do stuff like Kramer has the Merv Griffin set.
00:20:53.000It's like it's funny, but it's like cartoon funny.
00:20:56.000I know you weren't expecting to have this discussion with Christian.
00:20:58.000No, Charlie, listen, I don't disagree.
00:21:01.000I'm slightly younger than you guys, so we talk about this with The Simpsons.
00:21:04.000But 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.
00:21:21.000You are host of Socrates in the City, author of Bonhoeffer, Is Atheism Dead and Letter to the American Church.
00:21:28.000So I wanted to start this, Eric, because you are a man of God.
00:21:32.000And 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.
00:22:00.000Of Charlie explaining why America's Christian roots must be, are Christian and why we need to keep it that way.
00:22:09.000And then I just, we'll let the conversation go wherever it is.
00:22:12.000So please enjoy this longer clip, 345.
00:22:16.000Remember that we were a collection of states and colonies, and you need to read the state constitutions before anything else.
00:22:21.00013 out of 13 required a declaration of faith.
00:22:23.0009 out of 13 required you to be a Protestant, except Maryland, which was Catholic, which still required a declaration of faith.
00:22:29.000Every 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.
00:22:38.000Secondly, 55 out of 56 of the original signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing church attending Christians.
00:22:44.000So common law is inherited from Blackstone, who was Christian.
00:22:48.000Common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures.
00:22:50.000So 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.
00:23:05.000But 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.
00:23:12.000We 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.
00:23:39.000Jesus Christ, as it says in Revelation, that Jesus will judge the earth on his throne.
00:23:44.000So, in the declaration, they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer very specifically.
00:23:50.000Thirdly, 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.
00:24:02.000So, 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.
00:24:11.000Here's how you should set up your form of government.
00:24:14.000But finally, and most importantly, let's look at actually what the founders said.
00:24:18.000John Adams seamlessly said the Constitution was only written for a moral and religious people.
00:24:22.000It was wholly inadequate to the people of any other.
00:24:24.000The 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.
00:24:33.000One 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.
00:24:41.000So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population.
00:25:54.000There is no America, period, without Christian faith.
00:25:59.000All of the founders, and I'm really focused on the founders before the founders, right?
00:26:02.000I'm talking about Samuel Adams, John Adams in the 1760s.
00:26:07.000This is what I talk about in my book before I get to the actual war or the revolution, but they were radical Reformation Puritans.
00:26:18.000These 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.
00:26:32.000No king but Jesus, no king but the Lord.
00:28:29.000And 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.
00:28:36.000It's like, if you really understand that, you understand apart from God, that makes no sense.
00:28:46.000In other words, to love America, to understand what America is, it points you back.
00:28:52.000Every single one of the folks who gave us this country understood it is about Jesus.
00:28:58.000It'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?
00:29:47.000If 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.
00:30:01.000President Trump agrees with that term that in this supercentennial year, we need to go back.
00:30:07.000We need to understand that without that, America goes away.
00:30:11.000So, you know, nobody got this better than our friend Charlie.
00:30:15.000And just listening to that clip, I just get, I get joy from that, that he said all that.
00:30:19.000Yeah, no, I look forward to us discussing that book when it comes out.
00:30:23.000And one of Charlie's big causes was he just, he really flogged at that point.
00:30:27.000America is obviously a Christian country.
00:30:29.000And it obviously is, you almost have to feel like a moron.
00:30:33.000Like you said, once you notice it, it's like, okay, so we were settled by a bunch of Protestant religious zealots of various stripes.
00:30:47.000Half the Protestant denominations in the world probably come out of England in this time period.
00:30:51.000They're constantly coming to Luther Versions.
00:30:53.000They're the ones who translate the Bible into every language, send missionaries everywhere.
00:30:56.000They're constantly trying to convert the Indians in America.
00:30:59.000They're coming out of a very religiously infused revolution in the English Civil Wars.
00:31:04.000That's basically a religious infused revolt.
00:31:06.000They have the Glorious Revolution, which I'm a Catholic.
00:31:09.000I don't even like that, but that's totally a religious infused revolt.
00:31:12.000And 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.
00:31:38.000It'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.
00:32:08.000Ben 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.
00:32:17.000They both suggested Moses parting the Red Sea and the Israelites in the wilderness.
00:32:23.000And what, like, there's like that, that's it.
00:35:53.000It's already making fun of it, it's already making fun of it.
00:35:56.000I 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.
00:36:09.000And there was another ribbon for, I forget what, and you had to wear the ribbons.
00:36:12.000And, like the jerk that I was, I wore the ribbons.
00:36:15.000It's like, oh, you got, you got to wear the ribbons.
00:36:18.000This kind of virtue signaling has been going on for a long, long time.
00:36:22.000And of course, Seinfeld was mocking it.
00:36:25.000You know, there's so many episodes where they mock it, where they say the stuff that everybody's thinking.