00:01:04.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:03:42.000You know, we wake up every morning just so thankful that we get to pour into something where we see ourselves moving the dial even slightly towards something that is good.
00:03:53.000And so We are just so blessed to be here today to be able to unpack some of these ideas, kind of give an update of what's going on, talking about why church is essential.
00:04:04.000By the way, it's amazing to see all of you gathering in person here today.
00:04:10.000So, Charlie, you know, people say, well, you know, the church should disengage from politics.
00:04:17.000And yet when I came from Australia to America, I found that the entire political system in America was birthed out of faith.
00:05:32.000It was all voting age individuals that would come together unified around two principles, a Greek word called ella eutheria and isonomia, freedom and equality.
00:05:44.000So Jesus said, on this rock, build my ecclesia.
00:05:48.000He said, on this rock, build my gathering of active, engaged, involved, aware people that are not walled off, that are not compartmentalized, instead, that have a comprehensive Christianity.
00:06:00.000It's so interesting because when Jesus said that, he went up to the mouth of the Jordan River and all the pagan religions were screaming their heads off as he said this.
00:06:07.000And he said, all of those will perish, but on this rock, build my ecclesia.
00:06:11.000And he used that term, I think, intentionally because Jesus never wanted the church, in my opinion, in any sort of theological deep dive when you go into the Greek words that were used to be walled off.
00:06:22.000He never wanted the church to be something that's like, we have the truth, you don't.
00:06:25.000We're not going to go contest in this sphere of influence.
00:06:28.000And so now here we are in a country that was founded on the two words of ellautheria and isonomia, freedom and equality.
00:07:49.000But as the church grew, did California become a better place to raise a family for middle-class incomes?
00:07:55.000California has aborted more babies than the entire population of Canada.
00:07:59.000California is the author of No Fault Divorce, Transgender Bathrooms, the most graphic and awful anti-Christian, anti-biblical sexual education curriculum you could possibly imagine, most homeless, hardest to start a business, most unequal.
00:08:12.000You guys all know it, gas tax, highest income tax you could possibly imagine.
00:08:15.000So as the church was being built, the left was doing ecclesia.
00:08:18.000While the church was gathering and going towards conversions, not disciples, the culture around us was tearing around.
00:08:40.000Number two is that people are afraid to contest on issues that might make them lose friends, might make them lose social status, or that they might not be that well versed on.
00:08:52.000And so what happens is you have a state right now where in the midst of a pandemic, tens of thousands of businesses that are going under, schools that are closed, you've lost more people to suicide under the age of 30 in this state to the virus.
00:09:07.000His priority is to pander to the pedophile lobby to pass SB 145 signed into law that now if you're a pedophile in the state of California, if a judge gives you the authority to do so, and there's plenty of activist judges in this state, you do not have to register in the sex registry.
00:09:23.000So while the world is burning, BLM is marching through the streets, pastors are going to prison, Gavin Newsom says, I know I want to go give a gift to the long-desired pedophile lobby in this state.
00:09:36.000That is what happens when the church doesn't engage.
00:09:38.000The church saw a renaissance the last 30 years in this state, but the state declined.
00:09:44.000And so only half of church-going Californians that are evangelicals are registered to vote.
00:09:49.000Only half of those vote in presidential years.
00:09:52.000Most people that go to the church and raise their hand and say, Jesus Christ is Lord, they don't contest at all in the political system.
00:09:58.000And I believe that we are going to be called to account in every sphere of influence, from civic, governmental, and everything that we do.
00:11:02.000The entire idea that children are on the southern border intentionally being put in cages.
00:11:07.000First of all, that policy, if at all it existed, which has been sunsetted, was from the prior administration.
00:11:11.000Any of the photographs, any of the videos happened under the Obama administration.
00:11:15.000And so if you were silent during the Obama administration, you're tweeting about kids in cages all of a sudden because you don't like the current president of the president, then you're kind of a hypocrite, to be perfectly honest with you.
00:11:25.000And the second thing is this, which is, and so I find that entire line of reasoning, I hear it all the time.
00:11:30.000And I just, it is so incredibly pathologically untrue that Donald Trump is like ordering young children to be put into cages.
00:13:02.000He drafted Herschel Walker, who he let babysit his kids.
00:13:05.000Herschel Walker, who won the Heisman Trophy, one of the greatest college athletes of all time, says that Donald Trump is one of the most decent, amazing human beings ever.
00:13:13.000So someone doesn't magically all of a sudden get the wickedness in their heart because they go down the escalator.
00:13:19.000What it is, is a cheap, baseless attack to try to silence discussion.
00:13:25.000And quite honestly, let's just look at the policy portfolio.
00:13:28.000If this guy harbored those sort of resentments in his heart, why did he give record funding to historical black colleges and universities?
00:13:35.000Why did he go out of his way to sign prison reform, the First Step Act, which all of us as Christians should say, you know what, people do deserve a second chance at life.
00:13:45.000And it's President Donald Trump who, not Barack Obama, not Kamala Harris, who championed that through the U.S. Congress and got it signed into law, which has now allowed over 1,000 mostly black inmates successful reentry back into society when they had very, very harsh prison sentences.
00:14:05.000And these are people, by the way, that had become pastors of prison ministries.
00:14:08.000I mean, they had an incredible track record, but they were not allowed out because of prior crime bills that were written.
00:14:15.000And President Trump said, this doesn't make any sense.
00:14:17.000How about opportunity zones, which has brought billions and billions of dollars to the black community across the country?
00:14:24.000And then you just look through the, and the other picture is this, which is that I really find it to be disappointing.
00:14:33.000In fact, maddening and really dangerous when we use a term that has so much weight as racist and we just throw it around like a frisbee.
00:14:42.000Because here's the problem, is that there are people in this country that are racist.
00:14:46.000But I always say that we have a supply and demand problem with racists in our country.
00:14:50.000There's an incredible demand by the mainstream media to try to find racists.
00:14:56.000The problem is there's just not that many of them.
00:15:11.000When there is a fake hate crime industry out there of which there's hoaxes, maybe we're actually a lot more decent than we give ourselves credit for.
00:15:18.000And I'm not saying there's not people that harbor that resentment.
00:15:42.000If they were everywhere, we would have to have that kind of like that kind of tension.
00:15:46.000The second part about is this, which is, I'm a big believer that speech and dialogue is really what prevents us from tearing each other apart.
00:15:56.000Christ was the ultimate, the ultimate communicator.
00:16:00.000He engaged in difficult dialectics intentionally.
00:16:05.000And Aristotle said that we are the speaking beings.
00:16:08.000Like we as human beings, we need to be able to talk to get things off our chest, to get our deep thoughts articulated, and we can then wrestle with these ideas.
00:16:17.000And from a utilitarian standpoint, as soon as you stop talking, that bridge from silence to all of a sudden tearing each other apart happens like that.
00:16:26.000There's only two ways to govern human beings.
00:17:30.000They think we're actually really bad people.
00:17:33.000And as soon as you think the other side is bad, that gives you justification to all of a sudden have a moral license to do things you otherwise would not do if you just thought they were incorrect on policy.
00:17:47.000You know, a lot of the videos that I've seen and one of the things that really highlighted you as a Joshua to our generation is your courage.
00:17:59.000And I love how you've gone into the schools.
00:18:01.000Now, one of the saddest things is I know that Harvard, Veritas Truth, used to be the bastion of being a theological seminary to train people up with a biblical worldview.
00:18:12.000And I think, again, while we were building the church walls, they were doing ecclesia going into our colleges.
00:18:20.000Talk a little bit about what you're so passionate about, because it's literally every time I see it, you're in the lion's den.
00:19:01.000And look, I'm a very outspoken critic.
00:19:04.000And I think a little bit, I push the boundaries on this topic intentionally because I think that we as human beings want, we need our presuppositions challenged.
00:19:13.000I think as soon as you don't challenge any sort of preconceptions you have, then all of a sudden you get into dogma and that's a bad thing.
00:19:19.000And that's why we as Christians should be unafraid to contest about the gospel or about the authenticity of the Bible.
00:19:25.000Because the more that I believe we dig into the archaeological and the historical backing of the Bible, the more your faith will be strengthened.
00:19:41.000And so because it's completely built on lies.
00:19:45.000I mean, I'm just going to be very honest with you guys.
00:19:47.000And the entire way we do higher education in this country, when you look at it, I'm about to tell you some numbers and I'm going to make an argument.
00:19:54.000We have been doing this so incorrectly for so long, it's time for us to completely rethink how we educate our children post-high school.
00:20:01.000Only 59% of kids that go to college graduate.
00:22:19.000Let's go complain nihilistically for the next four years.
00:22:24.000And they don't learn about Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Classics, Augustine Aquinas, Burke, Hume, the incredible amount of literature that built our country and our civilization, Shakespeare or any of that.
00:22:36.000Instead, it's grievance-based literature about everything that is wrong about the world around you.
00:22:41.000And it creates really unhappy, foolish people.
00:22:45.000And so you're paying an exorbitant amount of money for kids not to pursue truth.
00:22:49.000And even worse than that, if anyone dare disagree or contribute one piece of information that might be contrary, the dogma says, you're a heretic.
00:22:59.000I need my trigger warning, safe space, throw them off campus.
00:23:04.000And so college should be about the pursuit of goodness, the pursuit of truth, like almost tempting and challenging that young freshman to go on that journey.
00:23:14.000So by the time they graduate, that certificate means that I'm a little bit closer to be able to articulate what is good in the world and if there is some form of truth, right?
00:23:24.000That is what classical education is supposed to be.
00:23:27.000Instead, we now create young people to become experts at complaining.
00:23:34.000And like we have created a professional complaining class where instead of becoming stronger to be able to endure the inevitable and suffering of the world, right?
00:23:44.000How are you able to create a more, let's say, a better capacity of a metaphorical muscle system to endure the suffering that will come on your shoulders that all of you know that is inevitable, right?
00:23:58.000The pain, the unexpected, the divorce.
00:24:09.000Instead, we say, we're going to train you to be able to complain, to try to remove the suffering from the world, to try to say, we're going to turn you into an activist so that you can then go scream louder and mobilize into the streets so that you can eventually get the suffering around us.
00:24:24.000We as Christians should find huge problems with this because we know we live in a broken world, that we're depraved by nature, and the only salvation is Jesus Christ.
00:24:34.000And so if the entire ideological kind of direction of the academy is like, we're going to create a small set of people to go then mobilize in the streets, we say, time out, what are we doing here?
00:24:46.000And then, so, and then even beyond that, let's go a level deeper.
00:24:50.000If you send your kid to college, you're going to play Russian roulette with their values.
00:24:54.000They might go to college and they're going to come back somebody that you do not recognize.
00:25:01.000In our fast-paced world, it's time to make reading a priority.
00:25:06.000You guys have heard me talk about it, thinker.org slash Charlie, T-H-I-N-K-R, has solved that problem by summarizing the key ideas from new and noteworthy fiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.
00:25:17.000Reader listened to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes, including old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
00:25:23.000If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons at what?
00:27:08.000And again, it's an intentionally provocative narrative.
00:27:10.000I don't mean to, I really do not mean offense, but I say that because it resonates on a very deep level that when you send your kid off to college, all of a sudden they might become somebody completely different.
00:27:19.000And so I think we have to completely rethink the way that we do higher education.
00:27:23.000And I'll tell you this, that we need way more people to go to become plumbers, electricians, HVAC, carpenters, entrepreneurs, you know, take risks in the marketplace, police officers, firefighters, go into the military, all these sorts of things.
00:28:06.000And the problem with critical race theory is that, and this is what's permeating our colleges today, is that critical race theory basically gets me to look out and America is bad, society is bad, and therefore I need to become an activist against these things that are kind of almost ethereal out there, as opposed to up for the longest time, education was about me working on my character,
00:28:36.000realizing that the way to change the world out there has to begin with me.
00:28:41.000And so we have people screaming for equality.
00:28:44.000Yesterday, I was watching a video of a beautiful black man in San Francisco marching for conservative values.
00:28:52.000Black man got beat up by white NT for BLM activists, where they knocked one of his teeth out and his mouth is all bloodied.
00:29:00.000And I'm like, you do realize you guys are meant to be Black Lives Matter and you just white people just beat up a black guy because that's the problem.
00:29:08.000Because when I think that the problem is out there, I can get hate out there and it doesn't begin with me.
00:29:16.000So as we're coming into all of this, and just we've got a few minutes left in this, tell us what are some of the biggest issues that you see that are at stake in this election?
00:29:26.000Why do we need to go beyond just, hey, go out and vote your values?
00:29:49.000You have a personal, amazing story that I heard last night about the incredible difference of what politics can do to humanity and the moral call we should have between East and West Germany, where you can go to church or you can go to a gulag.
00:30:10.000And in kind of in a way that I don't think was intentional, I think a lot of middle-class Americans kind of took a deep breath and kind of was like, now I could take the next decade off.
00:30:47.000And I don't think we've ever articulated the 90s as a post-war phase the way we should.
00:30:51.000We talk about the 50s as a post-war phase, right?
00:30:53.000But the 90s was also kind of a post-war phase.
00:30:56.000And what we didn't realize and what we kind of just took our eye off the ball is that the Marxists, they didn't all disappear as soon as that physical wall fell, everybody.
00:31:06.000I mean, Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis, they got to work and they re-infiltrated a lot of these institutions.
00:31:34.000And so, and in some ways, in a very unusual way, that he's probably the only one that could have probably ever had the capacity to endure what they threw through.
00:31:45.000But the kind of moral pietism that people throw at Donald Trump is exhausting to me because, like, I'm such a better person than Donald Trump.
00:31:52.000How could you possibly vote for somebody like that?
00:31:55.000And man, I come from a church background where we're all sinners in need of Jesus Christ, right?
00:32:45.000This guy literally made millions of dollars through his son by China.
00:32:49.000This guy is unafraid to be prayed over by evangelical pastors and has a vice president who has introduced more pastors into the White House than any other president in the modern era.
00:34:37.000And so I know we're over time, but I'll close with this, which is that the government that you have is just like looking in a mirror.
00:34:48.000It's a reflection of the citizenry, right?
00:34:50.000And so politicians are just reading the script that we gave them.
00:34:54.000And so when you don't show up, you don't get active and you don't vote and you don't do these things, they're just going to reflect back on it.
00:35:00.000And this is a hard thing to say, but yeah, the pedophiles and their lobby, they worked harder than Christians did in the state the last 20 years.
00:35:23.000And I hate to be that graphic, but that's a real thing that's happened just in this state, where pastors are being arrested, but Planned Parenthoods are being opened.
00:35:30.000And so Benjamin Franklin said it's a republic if you can keep it.
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00:36:21.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:36:22.000If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com, email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, and please consider supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash