00:00:00.000Hey, everybody, Tanner Charlie Kirk show an entire hour with Dr. Taylor Marshall, who is a very well-respected Catholic author and theologian.
00:00:08.000He's running for the presidency, which is important, but more importantly, he's just a deeply thoughtful person, someone I have a lot of respect for.
00:00:14.000As many of you know, I am not Catholic, but some of my closest friends in the world are Catholic, and I think it's time for Catholics and Protestants and evangelicals to work together on things that we can agree on.
00:00:25.000I think there's a lot of beauty in the Catholic tradition, and Dr. Marshall's a special person, and he's going to be coming on the show a lot more.
00:01:23.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:58.000We're definitely going to include him in future events.
00:02:00.000One of the most articulate and deepest thinkers when it comes to Catholicism and America and the natural law, Dr. Taylor Marshall, joins us for the full hour.
00:02:10.000Dr. Marshall, thanks so much for joining.
00:02:15.000So you're running for president, which is the big news, but we will get to that.
00:02:18.000First, take a little time to introduce yourself, what you have studied, the work you do, and the books you have published.
00:02:27.000I'm the author of, I think it's 11 books now.
00:02:30.000My wife and I, we have eight children, and I operate the new St. Thomas Institute.
00:02:37.000So we do online courses in philosophy, theology, Old Testament, New Testament, early church, all kinds of great topics.
00:02:45.000That we have over 3,000 students all over the world.
00:02:48.000And so my background is education and equipping people to think philosophically.
00:02:56.000We do courses on logic, how to think properly.
00:02:59.000And of course, the passion of my life is our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, the King.
00:03:06.000And one of the things that I've experienced working in politics and being involved is we have this idea that some people have this idea that the public square, the place where we debate and do public discourse and politics, is somehow, it could somehow be a neutral vacuum where we could all come and use pure reason and come to just rational agreement on policies.
00:03:28.000And I think people nowadays have realized that's just not the case.
00:03:33.000And maybe the idea of Christians being Christians in the public space and being vocal about it, maybe that is what we need to return to.
00:03:43.000It's certainly something we had for centuries and we got off track.
00:03:46.000And I think if you look now what's going on about to happen in June and all the things that are happening in our country, we're losing the war because in a way, we're giving the battleground to secularism and to humanity.
00:04:03.000So a group gets to pretend like they're oppressed while they get a whole month dedicated to them.
00:04:09.000A group gets to pretend as if they're marginalized while they basically get an excuse from the mainstream media and public health authorities to engage in the most degenerate behavior.
00:04:22.000The philosophy, how is it that we have been hoodwinked to basically believe a group that has everything basically given to them also simultaneously gets to play a month-long victim card?
00:04:50.000But just for people that don't know, the Overton window is the window, the portal of ideas that are socially and politically acceptable to talk about.
00:05:00.000So, Charlie, if we went back in like the 1990s and we said, hey, what do you think about gay marriage to all the Democratic candidates?
00:05:05.000They'd be like, oh, no, that's unthinkable.
00:05:17.000So I think the best analogy is you have two teams on a tug of war.
00:05:22.000They're on each end of the rope and they're pulling.
00:05:24.000And people are like, I'm going to go pull on that end or I'm going to go pull for the Republicans or Democrats.
00:05:29.000And the idea of the Overton window is there are certain people who are the philosophers, the clergy, the religious leaders who go to the middle of the rope and they grab that rope and they begin to pull it sideways laterally so that the debate between the Republicans and the Democrats, they're pulling always, but the debate and where that tug of war is happening gets pulled to the left or to the right by these, we call them today, influencers.
00:06:01.000And so what's happened is, is the Overton window is shifted so that even in conservative Republican circles, they're agreeing and assenting to policies and philosophies that not even Democrats would have accepted in the 1990s.
00:06:17.000And so what I'm trying to do in preparing to run for president is what my hope is, is to shift the Overton window.
00:06:24.000I want to grab the middle of that rope and the tug of war and say, hey, hey, let's pull over here and let's discuss some of these issues that are dear to Christians, which is a major base, way bigger than the base of LGBT.
00:06:40.000And so the LGBT gets support from the media, from the corporations.
00:06:47.000And I mean, we call them, you know, the alphabet mafia because they have a totalitarian almost component to it.
00:06:56.000I think the T in LGBT stands more for tyranny than it does for trans.
00:07:02.000I mean, Matt Walsh, who's one of the clearest thinkers on this, has kind of this sequence, which I'm sure you've said, maybe you came up with it.
00:07:09.000And he said, I don't know where it came from, but to just give attribution to Walsh, because he first said it is first they make you tolerate it, and then they make you accept it, then they make you celebrate it, then they make you participate.
00:07:20.000I think that's the smartest way to summarize it.
00:07:23.000And so going into June, you're going to be judged if you don't have the flag, if you're not marching in the parade when it was first masquerading as first saying you must tolerate this.
00:07:36.000So how did tolerance become mandatory participation?
00:07:49.000And I think a lot of conservatives think, okay, well, we just need to go ahead and legislate morality, which, of course, legislation always has to do with morality.
00:07:58.000But you first have to influence the discussion.
00:08:01.000And I think that's one reason why a guy like Charlie Kirk is getting shadow banned on Twitter because you're one of those people, and there's many others as well, who are talking about these issues, and you're shifting the Overton window in a certain direction that they don't like.
00:08:20.000And I want to challenge the audience to think: what if we, what if everyone who believed that matrimony is between one man and one woman until death do us part, and everyone that believed that when human conception happens, that's a human person.
00:08:35.000What if we all united on that and we started asking for public federal recognition, which is exactly what they've done in the alphabet soup?
00:09:37.000But do we actually demand recognition?
00:09:41.000I mean, the LGBT have been able to plant their flag, literally their flag, at all the federal monuments, state monuments, even at all the embassies around the entire world.
00:09:54.000The British Empire wasn't even successful.
00:09:56.000The British Empire was not even this successful in their heyday of colonization.
00:10:00.000It's the most successful colonization project in world history.
00:10:04.000And yet they still get to tell us they're the victim.
00:10:07.000They've conquered every square inch of elite infrastructure and they tell us that they're oppressed.
00:11:42.000And that's really just amplified Marxism.
00:11:45.000It also creates incentives for people to find victimhood labels that they otherwise would not even think about or identify and then create ones out of thin air.
00:11:55.000Because you can immediately become important if you say you're actually a man when you're a woman.
00:12:00.000You could become richer in the currency of the pedigree of the elite.
00:12:07.000So, Dr. Marshall, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that every society has a central piety that you are not allowed to make light of.
00:12:15.000And with that, you could tell a lot about society.
00:12:18.000You can do the piss Christ, if I remember correctly, from a couple decades ago, where you could have the cross in a bucket of urine.
00:12:30.000You can even do the most grotesque and profane things to any sort of the word of God, to scripture, to the Eucharist.
00:12:38.000However, if you were to make fun of or make light of the alphabet mafia, then they'll come after you hard.
00:12:48.000Walk us through what went wrong the last couple decades.
00:12:50.000Were Christians too passive, too tolerant, sat on the sidelines too much?
00:12:54.000How do we get to a state of affairs where a radical group that was once on the fringes now basically has taken over and colonized all of Western society?
00:13:05.000Well, I like that you use the example of what they called, God forgive us, the piss Christ.
00:13:11.000Because if we all know, if that had been a Quran, an image of Muhammad, we know how the Islamic community would have responded.
00:13:23.000And we as Christians, see, I think the idea is we Christians believe that there's this idea of separation of church and state where, okay, I, Taylor Marshall, am a baptized disciple of Jesus Christ.
00:13:51.000It is completely contrary to everything Jesus Christ taught in the four canonical gospels, right?
00:13:57.000That I would somehow be living in these two worlds and that I would be taking off the church clothes and putting on the state clothes and moving back and forth.
00:14:05.000And that whenever I'm with anybody in public, anything that has to do with economics or politics, I always take off my church clothes and I put on my civic duty clothes and I keep my mouth shut.
00:14:20.000Somehow Christians bought into that lie and we have lost the culture war steadily for decades because we have taken that perspective.
00:14:29.000The proper approach, and that's what I'm trying to advocate in running for president, is it is okay to say Christ is king.
00:14:38.000It is okay to say marriage is between one man and one woman.
00:14:47.000I know a lot of people feel like, well, man, I don't know.
00:14:50.000I feel uncomfortable quoting the Bible.
00:14:51.000Everyone else out there is quoting their authorities on sexual deviancy, degeneracy.
00:14:57.000They're quoting their authorities, their scientists, their all of them.
00:15:04.000And then, but we, if we want to cite Jesus Christ, who we believe rose from the dead, and he's the second person of Trinity, we have to feel embarrassed about that.
00:15:43.000And would what percent of Christians in America or anywhere in the world in 2023 would do what Paul did?
00:15:51.000Is it because we're embarrassed or is it because we've imbibed upon a political philosophy that's ultimately there so that we lose every time?
00:16:04.000And it's time for people to wake up and realize if I agree to those terms, I lose the battle every time.
00:16:53.000My closest friends in the world are Catholics, and my wife, raised Catholic.
00:16:56.000I think there needs to be a harmony between Protestants and Catholics on this.
00:17:00.000I love your thoughts on that after the break.
00:17:02.000I'm not sure if you agree or disagree on that, but I think we need to have partnerships of people that believe Christ is king to fight against this evil and fight for truth and goodness.
00:17:12.000And because we're in a period of time right now where the decent in America, I still think, outnumber the indecent, to use Viktor Frankl's framing.
00:17:21.000But the indecent are blitzkrieging with a non blitzkrieging non-stop avalanche of tyranny, of degeneracy.
00:17:36.000Look, are you concerned about the American K-12 education system?
00:17:40.000Are you worried about what your children and your grandchildren are learning or honestly not learning in school?
00:17:45.000If you answer yes, my friends at Hillsdale College have a free resource for you.
00:17:48.000Hillsdale College understands the importance of education to the future of our country.
00:17:52.000They're now offering 10 free print copies of their recent issue of In Primus.
00:17:58.000It's titled Education as a Battleground, written by Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arne.
00:18:04.000The special issue provides a factual account of the issues in the ongoing battle over education, explaining why parents and teachers, not unelected bureaucrats or activists, should guide what our children are learning.
00:18:18.000With Hillsdale College, you can make a difference in your community by distributing these copies of In Primus at your church, local business, or even in your doctor's office.
00:18:26.000Do not miss this opportunity to arm yourself with the facts.
00:18:30.000Claim your 10 free copies of Education as a Battleground by visiting charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:19:46.000And when you look at what's going on with the Alphabet Soup group, they are attacking that full on.
00:19:53.000And one of the things that I want to propose, and I really want to shift the Overton window and get conservatives talking about every single week on radio shows, is doing something like implementing Victor Orban's family policies in Hungary.
00:20:08.000I think we conservatives have sort of, oh, that's really cool what they're doing in Hungary.
00:20:14.000No, we should be, Charlie, I literally think we should copy, paste, take Hungary's child policies, copy, paste, insert into America.
00:20:23.000And if we conservatives can say, look at what they're doing there, look at the success they're having, look how important it is for their culture, for their politics, we should promote the same ideals with the same incentives for our American people.
00:20:41.000That's a very simple comparison or a simple tool, but why can't we make moral alliances with places like Poland or Hungary?
00:20:52.000Not just political alliances, moral alliances.
00:20:55.000And part of it, because we are under this current occupation of secularism, they don't believe children are a moral good.
00:21:04.000They don't believe that being fruitful and multiplying is necessary.
00:21:10.000They're saying that in modernity, you can find fulfillment by just being this androgynous consumer, by staring at your screen, by living out your best life.
00:21:22.000Describe the dominant philosophy of the West that elevates the quote-unquote privileges or rights.
00:21:30.000I hate that word rights, but there's a better word for it, over duties and obligations.
00:21:34.000Shouldn't our laws point towards duties and obligations more than pleasure or licentiousness?
00:21:42.000I mean, if you go back to Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics, you know, the whole idea of rights doesn't make any sense without the other side of the coin, which is duties, right?
00:21:56.000So if I have the right to be a parent, I have duties to my children.
00:22:44.000And they're only there for a function.
00:22:48.000Whereas if you're a Christian, if you read the book of Genesis, if you read what our Lord Jesus Christ says, let the little ones come to me, or you must become like unto a little one in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.
00:23:00.000Our Lord Christ has all of these wonderful admonitions and teachings about the beauty of children and a family life.
00:23:10.000It's one thing I think you were saying it at Amfest last year, and Tucker Carlson at Amfest really hit it home and he's been saying it.
00:23:32.000They're not part of communist capital.
00:23:35.000They're persons and they're made in the image of likeness of God.
00:23:38.000And my wife and I are blessed with eight children.
00:23:40.000And, you know, we have, as you do, we have this experience of the beauty of infancy, toddlers.
00:23:47.000You know, we have a lot of teenagers and we sit down in the evenings and they read a book or they ask me about politics or, you know, two of them are at college.
00:23:56.000So they hear things and they bounce things off of me.
00:23:58.000And just, I can't express, I really can't express the profound joy of having friendship with your children and seeing them growing.
00:25:03.000Is there any form of knowledge that you're able to glean on, that you're able to grasp, that you're able to articulate outside of academic literature?
00:25:12.000And they said, well, there's nothing else except peer-reviewed studies or stats or data.
00:25:17.000I said, oh boy, you got a lot of work to do before you call yourself a conservative.
00:25:23.000Studies are fine, but if studies, studies don't have to point to something, they could point to something really cruel.
00:25:29.000A study without morality, without quite understanding of what is the human being, the ordering of the soul, you got a tough situation there.
00:25:36.000Do you have a thought on that, by the way, Dr. Marshall?
00:25:38.000Just before I play Piece of Technology, I do.
00:25:40.000I mean, it makes me think of Plato when he talks about the cave.
00:25:44.000I think everyone who took Philosophy 101 in college learned about Plato.
00:25:48.000I'm surprised how many do not know what it is, but yes, that's right.
00:25:51.000Well, for those that don't know, Plato or Socrates, Plato speaking through Socrates, talks about these people who are down in a cave and they're chained to their seats.
00:26:01.000And in front of them, there's a light and they're sort of puppet masters behind the people and they're projecting silhouettes onto the wall.
00:26:08.000And the people down in the cave are watching these silhouettes.
00:26:11.000I mean, it's remarkable how much Plato anticipated a movie theater because it sounds just like a movie theater.
00:26:17.000And this is hundreds of years before Christ.
00:26:20.000And they're sitting there and they believe that this is reality.
00:26:23.000These silhouettes on the wall from puppets behind them is reality.
00:26:28.000And at some point, someone breaks out of their chair, goes up onto the surface of the earth and sees the sun and the birds and the trees and the flowers and the bees and the foxes and the horses and all this beautiful stuff.
00:26:57.000And I think in our society, more than any other generation in the history of humankind, our society with our little iPhones and our movie theaters and our streaming Netflix and our video games and our 24-7 streaming porn, people are getting sexual experiences, human, so-called human experiences, economic experiences, all this experience, but it's all virtual.
00:27:37.000And when we're talking about family and the legacy of family, or even this, Charlie, how about this?
00:27:44.000Gathering with a group of people on Sunday to worship God, not just streaming it on TV, you're with a bunch of people.
00:27:52.000Those experiences, the next generation is lacking in.
00:27:56.000And it's this technological gap that's opening, not opening, placing them into Plato's cave.
00:28:02.000So we need, like you said at Amfest and Tucker Carlson and a bunch of other people said it as well.
00:28:09.000Get outside, touch grass, go ask a girl out, marry her, have some children, live life, have a barbecue with your kids, swim in the pool, throw them around, live life.
00:28:23.000This is why God created us, not to be sitting around looking at this phone or watching the latest degeneracy that's being pushed on us by minority groups.
00:28:36.000The consensus right now amongst most Christians is we shouldn't engage with this at all.
00:28:42.000I'm going to play a piece of tape here.
00:28:44.000And by the way, the Latin word for education means to lead forth.
00:30:02.000My children do not belong to the United States of America.
00:30:07.000They belong to me until they reach the age of majority, and then they're their own.
00:30:12.000But this idea, this is exactly what they want, and it goes right into the alphabet soup, as we know, because now it went from bake my cake to I want to assign the gender of your child at my school.
00:30:37.000So we as Christians, like, we don't want to be in politics.
00:30:41.000We don't want to put our morality on other people.
00:30:43.000We're going to go into our prayer closet and we're going to pray there and we're going to go to church on Sunday and then everything is shut off.
00:30:52.000If that is our position, then they are going to do everything they can to take our children, corrupt our children through media, pornography, all kinds of odd things are now inserting into Disney movies and video games and all these things.
00:31:09.000Because look, you and I both know, Charlie, the L, the B, all this stuff, it's sterile.
00:32:04.000God gave me parental influence and education over my child.
00:32:10.000As soon as you say that and they disagree with you on something like transgenderism, they are going to actually use weapons to take away your child.
00:32:18.000Now, these people are sneaky, so you're going to have to help me message this.
00:32:22.000I think I have a good answer to it, but they're starting to sneakily now use parents' rights arguments to argue against bans on chemical castration.
00:32:56.000So once again, we have to define the political space, right?
00:33:02.000So if it's just neutral, like there are no rules, there is no philosophy, there is no theology, there's nothing in the political space guiding, we have no answer.
00:33:14.000But we can say, if we move forward, if we move the Overton window, we can say, no, we are a Christian society.
00:33:21.000And for hundreds of years, millennia, we have defined human sex, male, female.
00:33:45.000That's the same thing when it comes to male, female, marriage, et cetera.
00:33:51.000For some reason, they just want to attack these vocabulary words to knock us off our feet when we can just insist, no, these are the definitions.
00:34:03.000But we have to fight for a Christian society.
00:34:05.000See, like if we keep on going, this is a neutral playground.
00:34:09.000We're just going to lose because they're going to do that flip that you just explained.
00:34:13.000And so that's why I'm arguing we must, as Christians, hold ourselves forth as Christians, evangelize the culture, and then have Christian expectations for morality, commerce, politics.
00:34:44.000I think for centuries, the enemies of Christianity, think of Nero, Domitian, Napoleon, they were attacking the church from the outside.
00:34:54.000They were making martyrs who become heroes of the Christians.
00:34:57.000So I think what happened in the 1800s is the sinister forces said, no, let's infiltrate into the church, into Christian seminaries, monasteries, institutions, universities, and let's begin to pour in the spirit of humanism, secularism, relativism.
00:35:17.000And I think that's where we are today.
00:35:19.000I think that's why we're being defeated.
00:35:21.000We've been injured from the inside, like a virus or a parasite.
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00:38:22.000So Dr. Marshall, one of the reasons you're running for the presidency based on your own description is to move the Overton window.
00:38:28.000What issues in particular do you think are the most movable and the most urgent for us to address?
00:38:35.000I think the most movable and the most urgent, and I think we still do have a majority.
00:38:40.000People debate it based on polls, is what is the definition of matrimony?
00:38:47.000One man, one woman, until death do his part.
00:38:50.000I still think there's hope for that discussion in America.
00:38:54.000And the reason I say that one first is because I feel in conservative circles, many candidates and many discussions, they've already moved away from that and considered it lost.
00:39:38.000Or is it one where you say, hey, look, Anthony Kennedy and his weird Supreme Court case overturning states actually independently voted that marriage was one man, one woman, and they undemocratically basically bulldozed their laws.
00:39:55.000I think it's one of the fundamental truths that humans know to be true based on natural law, but also based on scripture.
00:40:06.000I mean, God gave, he made humans in two sexes, male and female, and they have certain anatomical parts that I don't have to explain to everybody here that work to make a baby.
00:40:18.000And it's just rational that those two people who make a baby would be bound together in order to protect, educate, and raise that new human.
00:40:42.000And I think we have the most success there at the Overton window.
00:40:45.000Because if you can, if for thousands of years, matrimony has meant this, what I just described, and you say, well, no, the state can come in and redefine marriage.
00:41:12.000So I think, like you were just saying, you know, a lot of people in the concerted movement are like, well, you know, they need hospital rights and it's not that big of an issue, whatever.
00:41:21.000But as we have gone down the trail of tears for 10 years, we've realized the connection in the dots.
00:41:29.000And if the state can redefine marriage, the state can redefine male and female.
00:41:34.000And then you start getting into scary things about what the state can redefine.
00:41:38.000What other issues do you think we should focus on that you think are urgent and winnable in moving the Overton window?
00:41:45.000Well, the marriage one is, of course, I think, fundamental.
00:41:48.000I think that's a really important one.
00:42:43.000And if you look at the like the LGBT community, they take wins and momentum and then they just keep snowballing them and going and going and going.
00:42:51.000And I kind of feel like maybe we're not doing that right now.
00:42:55.000Like we're not keeping the momentum and the trajectory and the wins visible in front of people and reminding them and using that to gain more support, more fundraising, more political action, more education.
00:43:08.000So I think that's another main issue is the sanctity of life and then continuing the United States discussion, federal state discussion on sanctity of life.
00:43:20.000So, I think those two right there, I mean, if we could unite on those two issues, definition of matrimony, definition of human person and sanctity of life, Charlie, we could win on all this.
00:43:39.000I'm going to first say one thing that I think Catholics do really well, that I think Protestants need to do better.
00:43:45.000And I want you to tell me one thing Protestants do well, you think Catholics could do better.
00:43:49.000I think that Protestants need to think longer-term horizon, build more schools, and try to get more people like Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas educated into the highest places of society.
00:44:00.000Catholics have done this so well, building amazing educational institutions.
00:44:05.000And look at the cultural impact and footprint they've been able to do.
00:45:09.000So you're going to run this presidential candidate on the two issues that every Republican consultant tells you not to talk about, right?
00:45:16.000Can't talk about life, can't talk about marriage, but look, you're here to speak truth and try to build a movement.
00:45:22.000My hope for you is you're able to get to some oppositional media and actually be able to joust and speak about these things and maybe talk to young people.
00:45:30.000One minute remaining, Dr. Taylor Marshall.
00:45:33.000Well, yeah, I've got those two points, and I'm working with consultants and lawyers and clergy and crafting out a 12-point plan, which I hope to release on July 4th, the 4th of July, Independence Day.
00:45:46.000And these are talking points that I hope to move the Oberton window and to get hopefully discussed on the debate stages, especially with the GOP, with the Republicans.
00:45:56.000I'd like for a lot of Republican candidates in local races and also all the way up at the top at the presidential race to revisit and continue this momentum on these issues.
00:46:07.000So I will be releasing the whole thing, God willing, on Independence Day, 4th of July.
00:46:14.000And in the meantime, if you want to get information and get on the email list and learn about some of these points that we're developing, you can go to my website, taylormarshall.com.
00:46:22.000And at the very top, you can share your email address.
00:46:26.000And we're not going to sell it or share it with anyone.
00:46:28.000We just want to be in touch with you as we prepare to make this big announcement on the 4th of July.