00:01:04.000You will never, you know, I don't like pithy little nonsense statements and stuff like that.
00:01:09.000But someone said to me a long time ago, it wasn't like some philosopher, just some guy meant, you know, if you were happy all the time, you wouldn't understand what happiness is.
00:01:17.000Like it would just be this kind of regular way.
00:01:22.000So this morning, I put a picture of my locals accountant, me, you know, I know I have this speech today, and I got a dinner tonight with a local politician about some stuff that, you know, it's Sunday, like I should have this day off, but I'm here with you.
00:01:36.000And so this morning I said to Paula, like, it's 95 degrees in Florida.
00:01:40.000I said, let's go downstairs, do a full body workout.
00:01:43.000By the way, my garage with no AC, so it's about 80 in the garage.
00:01:47.000And then I said, I'm going to jump in 190-degree sauna afterwards for about 10 minutes before this speech.
00:01:52.000And so I put a picture up on locals, and I'm like, you want to see what pain looks like?
00:01:55.000I said, if you don't go through this suffering and this suck all the time, you're never going to learn to adore the moments of joy and success.
00:02:02.000You have that this trigger bullshit stuff is just crazy.
00:02:06.000You can listen to that at length, members.charliekirk.com.
00:02:10.000Enjoy this conversation with Aaron Jin.
00:02:40.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:02:46.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:16.000Yeah, so I've been writing the series devoted to what I find like an epidemic.
00:03:22.000Of course, last time I was on the show, we talked about another epidemic, the Fauci apocalypse, right?
00:03:27.000When I came into town during the lockdowns and talked about COVID.
00:03:30.000And so I've been writing a lot about masculinity biblical friendship, particularly around this idea of like nice guy Christians, which is sort of plaguing a lot of big Eva evangelism, which I think really came to head during the Trump era and even today, sort of as we think about like what comes next for the party.
00:03:50.000And so nice guy Christians, or you could say nice guy in general, is there was a seminal book written a couple decades ago by Dr. Glubber, who is a psychiatrist who identified something in America where that men were particularly behaving in ways that were quite manipulative and immoral, aka trying to be nice.
00:04:09.000And a part of that is basically never saying what you want, never being direct, manipulating people by being nice and kind to them so they do something that like for you, right?
00:04:19.000So these like covert contracts, things like that, driven by toxic shame.
00:04:23.000And a lot of the problems I think that America is facing from fatherlessness to like issues in politics and even the stuff that you talked about about plaguing the church in America about not understanding what Trump was or is, depending if he gets re-elected or what we need to do as a country to defeat China and things like that.
00:04:41.000I think it's all connected to this around the idea of how men view themselves.
00:04:45.000And particularly around being nice, which is very different than being kind, is the indirectness of a lot of men.
00:04:54.000And that goes everything from how they work and how they choose relationships and how they have friends and how they don't have friends, how they treat their children.
00:05:02.000And so I think this is why maybe you and I have experienced a lot, both in our friend group and then working in politics, me on the edge is more of you involved about why we can talk to somebody who's like theologically and morally aligned with us.
00:05:16.000But then when it actually comes to doing something, acting, they don't follow through.
00:05:24.000We've had a pastor on once, and I won't say the name, kind of a cool guy pastor who was speaking out against some of the woke stuff, really nice person, and he invited me to his church.
00:05:34.000So I texted him, like, hey, I'm going to be in talent.
00:06:17.000Yeah, basically the original meaning was ignorant.
00:06:21.000But nice has also had multiple versions of like everything from like you're basically more or less a bad guy to being great, to being evil, to being manipulative, right?
00:06:34.000Over the course of the word nice, basically it has a ton of meanings, similar to the word, like when you mean nice guy.
00:08:24.000Like, if you read any of the letters, no, he's pretty harsh.
00:08:27.000Yes, because the world is sinful and the world has fallen.
00:08:30.000And so I think the men in America are really suffering from this contagion, this view of themselves that they're supposed to behave in ways that are not biblical and not oriented to Christ.
00:08:43.000And that's what creates these passive men that don't lead their families, that don't stand up for themselves.
00:09:32.000So how did a secular word that's non-biblical infuse it as almost the ultimate commandment?
00:09:39.000It's not, you shall have no other gods before me, shall not covet, shall not steal on your mother and father, remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
00:09:44.000But now like the ultimate commandment is, thou shall be nice against evil.
00:09:49.000Yeah, I think it's a combination of post-1950s, sort of the insert of the sexual revolution, more or less Marxism, that was trying to attack the foundations of what to make America what it is, which has basically constantly been kind of rabble-rousers, frontiersmen, like push the boundaries.
00:10:26.000So there's this kind of spirit of America that is remarkably masculine that does not exist in many of the other cultures.
00:10:34.000And so for, you could say for the enemy, which would be Satan, or for other enemies, which would be a more secular human, like China to Marxism, to attack America to the point where it's neutered, right?
00:10:46.000Because most countries know they can't ever really kinetically defeat us.
00:10:50.000The only way they can defeat us is through culture, right?
00:10:53.000And so they had to go after the source, which is the church and men that actually make America what it is.
00:10:59.000And so I think this Christian, a nice guy, Christians, and the reason why I put it before a Christian is like it overtakes Christ, right?
00:13:00.000I think you're onto something pretty deep here.
00:13:02.000Yeah, so because I don't think it's to over-respond into, let's say, some of the pastors you probably have on that are like rude and mean, right?
00:13:11.000Who don't position themselves as speaking the truth towards redemption and reconciliation.
00:13:17.000Because that's the real difference between our faith and the other faiths: is that the point of the cross is that we are in a position to help restore the world.
00:13:40.000But the origination of desire, and that's what I think was one of the failures of many nice guys, is that a lot of the desires they feel are wrong.
00:13:46.000But that's not how ever in the Hebrew Bible or in the Greek New Testament, like sin is ever presented.
00:13:52.000The desires that God gives you is good.
00:14:07.000And it's like, well, that's actually where all the sin is.
00:14:10.000And I think what they're doing is they're misreading a lot of the Old Testament scripture on heart and what God is going to do with the heart in terms of the new covenant, right?
00:14:39.000It's got to root that out of your heart rather than saying, oh, actually, no, your desire for winning, your desire for victory, your desire for being proud of yourself should go somewhere.
00:14:51.000But instead, it teaches them like, no, that's bad.
00:14:55.000And maybe this relates to sort of our sort of reformed, and I'm mostly reformed, like orientation about how we view people, et cetera, et cetera.
00:15:02.000But a lot of nice guys are living in this really deep shame, which is really sad because you talk to them and you hear how they talk about themselves.
00:15:11.000If any friend ever talked to them that way, they wouldn't be friends with that person.
00:15:14.000But yet they live with that person in their brain.
00:15:18.000And then when it comes to expression of the faith to the world, if you talk to non-believers, I think the one reason why Peterson to Rogan to Sigma males and all this stuff is happening is because men know what's being presented by Big Eva American evangelicalism is not real or true or good.
00:15:38.000So they go to these other men who are like, yeah, I should want to go eat steak and shoot guns and be around my dude friends and smoke cigars or talk about whatever and not feel ashamed.
00:15:48.000Wokeness to me is this, like, we could say like Christianity without Jesus that is deeply unmasculine, that is like constantly hunting down, pursuing people out of heart issues, sin hunting and attacking people.
00:16:02.000And then there's not a man to be there saying like, wait a minute.
00:16:06.000Actually, you should just kind of say what you want.
00:16:09.000Like, like, it doesn't mean that necessarily it's true or good, but we can debate it, right?
00:16:14.000But this lack of masculine culture, nice guys, et cetera, I think is one reason why we have white pole culture and all this like nonsense is because we're feeding this beast.
00:16:26.000So I think American evangelicalism has taught men to think less of themselves, oriented to shame, have no friends, don't pursue actually who Christ is actually in the Bible, and instead has created this neuterized thing that is that Paul really deeply ashamed of.
00:16:44.000It's like, you know, Rick Warren and Levi Lusko and all these people who really don't like me.
00:16:50.000And I got in a text argument with Rick Warren, who's, you know, become a hyper-feminine type figure, right?
00:18:20.000And bad theology leads to, as you say, this incredibly heavy guilt on a lot of largely white men who then become metro-sexual versions of their former selves.
00:18:33.000Yeah, rather than believing that Christ is victor, right?
00:18:35.000That Christ doesn't ever say these things that big Eva, Warren, or whoever says.
00:18:41.000You know what Christ says when he sees you?
00:18:43.000And these are all present tense Greek words.
00:18:55.000Because how you exist today, as presented by Paul in Ephesians and Galatians, a bunch of the places, like as you exist today, because you are saved and you live in eternity is how you are today.
00:19:20.000Meaning that we must be nice to the world or else people will not accept Christianity.
00:19:24.000One, that that's an incredible diminutive view of the gospel.
00:19:27.000So, and of sin and of Christ's work on the cross, that somehow it's dependent on you in being nice to send the message.
00:19:36.000I mean, I think Paul really condemns that in Galatians as an example of that.
00:19:41.000But the other thing is that you should put never anything, both in the sense of theology, like as in one area that I do condemn, let's say, the more masculine side of the church is they put these things in front of the gospel to prevent people from coming to faith as in different behavioral things and stuff like that.
00:19:58.000There's nothing that prevents you from being saved.
00:20:00.000And so you should not put these requirements on people outside of accepting the fact that Jesus died for your sins and gave you the Holy Spirit and He rose again from the dead and he will return the Nicene Creed.
00:20:10.000Nothing else should come between that.
00:20:12.000But in terms of being nice, to me, that's putting a list on it, as if you can somehow influence what God is going to do.
00:20:19.000People are elected and it's God's choice.
00:20:22.000He uses you, right, and uses your words to propel the gospel forward and your talents and your skills.
00:20:28.000But artificially putting yourself in some sort of like weird cultural mix of things, a milieu of like, you know, manipulative behavior, lying, et cetera, all these elements of being nice is a gross, grotesque belief that you can somehow do something in terms of the gospel message.
00:20:45.000So the way I would approach him is literally go read the first part of Galatians, which most people don't know.
00:20:51.000So when he's calling the super apostles, all these things, he's mocking this church, right?
00:20:56.000So, and probably that pastor may have a diminutive view of Paul, which is kind of, you know, which is very common among these feminized pastors.
00:21:04.000But it's very hard to argue if the person accepts Paul that he was not nice.
00:21:09.000And the other one would be like, you can go to Christ and you can see how he talked to Samaritans, see how he talked to Pharisees.
00:21:14.000He was not, he did not hide what he thought.
00:21:18.000Because if your goal is redemption, which is the goal of every person sharing the gospel, you cannot reconcile on a lie.
00:21:24.000You have to reconcile on the reality of who Christ is, what he said, what he's going to do.
00:21:29.000Have we seen the American church ever be so captured by a secular idea as we have now?
00:21:35.000I mean, yeah, I mean, it's really hard to, I mean, I don't want to be, because technically I am a post-millennial.
00:22:07.000Outside of very grotesque things that the church accepted for a while, like I would say, you know, indigent servitude, slavery, et cetera, which was prevalent in a lot of parts of the church for hundreds of years.
00:22:20.000It's hard to see something as terrible as what the church is suffering from right now.
00:22:27.000And that is an extension really of an, that's what Americans don't understand.
00:22:31.000So much of what we're dealing with within the American church is like in America.
00:22:34.000If you go to another country, and like one of my most memorable moments is going with some of our friends to Palestine.
00:22:42.000And I talked to my tour guide there in Bethlehem.
00:23:10.000And he joked that it's like the things you thought would separate churches in America, you realize how dumb it is once you're down to a couple churches.
00:23:20.000And I asked him what Jesus, yeah, I asked him who Jesus was.
00:23:24.000He repeated the beautiful Nicene Creed to me.
00:23:26.000And I've never met this before, right?
00:23:27.000And he speaks to Reading English, but he grew up there.
00:23:30.000And we were standing next to the wall, obviously, that surrounds Bethlehem.
00:25:56.000So where it says, God did, he did, God did, he did, right?
00:25:59.000And so what I tried to do with theology, like theological frameworks, because like Tulip is a, I believe was written by an Arminius, who actually wasn't written by Calvin.
00:26:10.000And again, I would choose to go to a Reformed church over an Armenian church, like 100%.
00:26:15.000But the irresistible side is that I try to submit the Bible to theological frameworks, not the theological frameworks into the Bible.
00:26:24.000So do you believe that we have some agency or will?
00:27:11.000If you're not actually accepting Jesus, you're just kind of just, you're just a robot, right?
00:27:15.000No, So there's confliction there between like, do you have a choice, for example, to, I'll use this as a framework, to speed or not, right?
00:28:14.000No, it is loving because if you believe in the first orientation to total depravity that you can't ever get to him anyways, then it is loving, right?
00:28:21.000Well, I think we're totally depraved and only Christ can bring us out of it.