00:00:09.000Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, I sit down with two dear friends of mine, Ryan Helfenbein at the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty and David Harris Jr., who is cross-posting this episode.
00:00:17.000So God bless him for everything he does for our country.
00:00:20.000It's a great conversation about the Chinese coronavirus and so much more.
00:00:23.000We talk about faith and liberty and also Liberty University.
00:01:02.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:53.000One of the things we say over at the Falkirk Center, this is the place where Christ is king, church is essential, and freedom, Charlie, which we know we all agree on this.
00:02:01.000Everybody who's listening, freedom is everything.
00:02:07.000I just, you know, the last 60 days have been nuts.
00:02:11.000I kind of, you know, it's, I'm looking at this as an opportunity to recap, you know, to actually like, what have we learned over the past 60 days?
00:02:30.000We've seen churches that have been closed.
00:02:32.000We're even seeing the effects of it even now with masks being worn everywhere.
00:02:38.000But I want to get your thoughts, your reflection.
00:02:41.000Yeah, I don't think that I don't think it's over yet because now they're trying to re-lock down the country.
00:02:47.000However, the lesson should already be very clear, which is that the lockdowns did way more damage than I think it was ever originally estimated.
00:02:56.000I mean, I have to say, all three of us were part of the community that thought that we were going way too far, too early.
00:03:03.000And I remember exchanging messages with you guys a couple weeks out from Easter.
00:03:09.000And that wasn't the whole consensus in the conservative movement at the time.
00:03:13.000Some people are like, no, let's just wait it out.
00:03:15.000And I think it's pretty well accepted that it was an outrageous abuse of power against Christendom, against the kingdom, and against patriotic Americans.
00:03:26.000So the biggest lesson for me is one that I take into the news cycle into my life every single day, which is to be an independent thinker, be highly skeptical, and yoke yourself in reason, not in outrage or in rage in general.
00:03:43.000And I actually am inherently distrustful of the expert community because there's actually a very low price to be wrong, very low cost to be wrong, and a very little reward to be correct.
00:04:56.000You still have the freedom to do that.
00:04:57.000You should have the freedom to do that.
00:04:58.000So for COVID-19 for me, I actually had a friend of mine that is a billionaire that's very well connected that brought me information from the very beginning saying that this virus was man-made.
00:05:09.000This virus was not released by accident.
00:05:11.000This virus is part SARS, part MERS, and also part HIV.
00:05:16.000And this virus has the potential to be worse than the Spanish flu.
00:05:21.000And he was sharing this with me like within a couple of weeks of this thing breaking.
00:05:24.000He was giving me other supporting data.
00:05:26.000I had him on my show a couple of times to talk about it.
00:05:29.000And he was very much a proponent for locking things down, shutting things down.
00:05:34.000He thought the stock market was going to hit 10,000.
00:05:38.000He was literally waiting for the absolute disaster.
00:05:42.000So there's two sides that could be accurate here.
00:05:46.000One, now that we've seen that it actually was not that disastrous, is it because the president made the early decisions that he did to shut down travel from China in January when he took so much heat over it, January 21st, I believe.
00:05:59.000Nobody, he said that he was in a discussion with 20 plus advisors and nobody agreed with him to shut travel down from China, yet he did anyway.
00:06:09.000I believe that that was huge in thwarting the invasion of this thing from people that were carrying it.
00:06:15.000And it could have been 10 or 100 times worse had he not done that.
00:06:21.000The other side of the other side is that it's no worse than the flu because now that's what we're seeing.
00:06:26.000Now we're seeing, I interviewed Dr. Dan out of Kern County that owns and operates eight medical clinics that said he began to do his own testing.
00:06:35.000And in that testing he did, it came out to 0.2% of the people basically were the, was the mortality rate and that so many more people than had been reported actually had COVID-19 and had gotten better from it.
00:06:54.000So, you know, it's like you take both of these things into consideration.
00:06:57.000It could have been, I believe it absolutely would have been a lot greater, had a lot greater disaster had the president not taken action, banned travel from China, banned travel from Europe, did what he did what he did.
00:07:09.000But at the same time, and I don't believe it was released by accident, but at the same time, we also now see how the overreach was implemented by so many Democrat politicians, governors, mayors that basically just threw the Constitution out the window, seemed to target churches.
00:07:28.000And my hope is that well-meaning Americans, believers, Democrats, obviously, and Republicans as well, will realize how far some of these politicians are willing to go if they're given the opportunity to take that much power.
00:07:49.000So the virus, we have some pretty good data that if you have comorbidities, if you're above the age of 60 and you're overweight, this is something you should be concerned about.
00:08:00.000However, if you are those things, if you're over 60 overweight and you have comorbidities, you should be concerned every single flu season.
00:09:25.000But to the extent where you're going to shut down all of society and you act as if that is an appropriate reaction, I mean, we better be seeing 20% mortality rates if we're doing that.
00:11:09.000George Floyd, that was horrendous, what happened to him.
00:11:13.000But then you saw protest that protest lasted five minutes, and then it immediately went to the complete disintegration of societal justice, law and order, rioting, stores being looted, Molotov cocktails, you name it, the whole thing.
00:11:34.000And then we had the issue of, you know, Black Lives Matter, the organization coming forth and springing upon this opportunity.
00:12:00.000Well, I don't think, I mean, I think we have to acknowledge and admit and understand that there was systemic racism in our country up to a certain point.
00:12:09.000But all of that began to go away once we had liberation, once we had the Civil Rights Act, once we began to champion black lives as actually mattering in the 60s, then there were changes that were made.
00:12:26.000There were changes for women that were made.
00:12:27.000There were changes for black Americans that were made.
00:12:29.000And we as a society, we had the opportunity to then make sure that we supported the individuals that actually supported what we believe matters the most, which is equality.
00:12:41.000So I don't believe today we have an issue with systemic racism.
00:12:45.000And every single person that tries to say that we do have an issue with systemic racism tries to use the unarmed black individuals that have been shot and killed by police.
00:13:02.000The individuals that are black that were unarmed, I think there was nine last year and like five or six of them were doing something violent or in the act of doing something violent.
00:13:11.000Or they were saying they had a weapon.
00:13:13.000Or they had a weapon or they reached for the officer's gun.
00:13:15.000So it's not like there's this boogeyman of the police that just embodies all of police that are out just looking down to looking to track down and hunt and shoot and kill black individuals.
00:13:26.000Nor is there a system in place where an individual cannot start a business, join a company, become an employee, have an idea.
00:13:49.000I had to do all of the necessary legalities as far as state, local, business, licenses, everything necessary to get the business up and operational, and then provide the capital to be able to provide everything necessary for individuals to be able to work for my company to create a living.
00:14:08.000And I want to make something very clear because when people, when I reject the premise of systemic racism, and David's absolutely right, there was a period of time where that existed.
00:14:17.000However, you look at the 1960s, admitting that there might be systemic injustice is not the same thing as saying systemic racism.
00:14:26.000And so again, this takes a mature mind of which the left is not capable of because they intentionally try to keep conversations so it requires nuance and thought.
00:14:35.000So for example, saying that the black community has been disadvantaged is 100% true post-1960s.
00:14:41.000Saying that it was only because of racism is patently untrue.
00:14:45.000So for example, the black community was impacted by the Great Society Act.
00:14:49.000So every community was actually, because single motherhood went up in the white community, just went up more dramatically in the black community than any other community.
00:14:57.000Now, so explain me this, is that post-Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, how is it?
00:15:02.000So if we account Jim Crow laws, segregation, and slavery, evil, evil, evil, which thank you, Christianity.
00:15:10.000It was definitionally systemic racism.
00:15:12.000So the definition of systemic racism legislatively and policy-wise, which is the only way we can really discuss it, is that I can do something with the color of my skin that a black person can't do, or vice versa.
00:15:23.000Now, if you want to get hyper technical, I think affirmative action is absolutely 100% against affirmative action.
00:15:44.000So, if you account slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, and everything that led up to it, a good point, a good fulcrum point, if you will, is okay, the day before the Civil Rights Act was passed.
00:15:58.000So that was, so actually, before that, you saw black wages increase the most it ever increased it from 1948 to 1960.
00:16:05.000Now, it wasn't the black community did something that was pretty remarkable is that they had a sense of resiliency from 48 to 60 where they were being discriminated against.
00:16:18.000However, black businesses were thriving.
00:16:21.000There was a sense of cooperation and community.
00:16:23.000A lot of that went away when the government came in and tore down their communities and had a vertical housing unit.
00:21:16.000David has strengths that I don't have.
00:21:18.000I have strengths that David doesn't have.
00:21:20.000If you try to equalize those through central planning, you are definitionally trying to normalize something that God may have gave someone more than someone else.
00:23:06.000This country has given me the ability to start businesses from an idea and not have to get that idea approved from the government, not have to get that idea sanctioned by the government, not have to say, here's the idea, government, will you want to do this for me?
00:23:22.000It's like I've had the freedom to be a business owner for over 20 years.
00:23:52.000I've had the ability to go to church, attend church, and not be chastised for that.
00:23:58.000It's like those are freedoms that we take for granted here in this country.
00:24:00.000If we haven't been to other countries or we haven't done our research and looked at history and looked at what other countries actually do, religious persecution is a big deal.
00:24:12.000I'm so thankful that I was given the opportunity to be born in this country, to grow in this country, to meet my wife here, to start a business here, and to live here.
00:24:57.000You know, there's an interesting, I had an interesting experience a couple years ago, I'll never forget, where I was with a bunch of smug Europeans who they were incredibly anti-American, philosophically and morally secular, and they were Germans and nothing wrong with that.
00:25:12.000They just happened to be anti-American Germans.
00:25:14.000And they were just bashing on America.
00:25:49.000And I think that's a very important question because it's not inconceivable that this can stop existing as we know it.
00:25:59.000I mean, the things we know to be true are disappearing so quickly.
00:26:04.000I mean, so look, I have a different story than David, but 26 years old, being able to interview the president of the United States and host him three times in one calendar year.
00:26:25.000I've gotten to interview him, not for not as long as you did on your amazing podcast that's about to drop, but I did get to ask him one question while he's sitting at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.
00:27:11.000But the goal that the founders set was a very aspirational one.
00:27:16.000In fact, it's even, we must admit, they didn't live up to their own goal upon writing those words.
00:27:22.000And I think that's a really important thing because they were actually trying to set something so forward-thinking that they were even held back by their own sin.
00:27:30.000Some of them owned slaves, some of them engaged in behavior that we would not consider to be permissible today.
00:27:35.000But those words, the preamble of the Constitution, actually are still as applicable today as they were then.
00:28:32.000And he loves what we've been founded on.
00:28:34.000We're founded on Judeo-Christian values.
00:28:36.000You know, the Creator is talked about in our Constitution.
00:28:40.000The way that our system of government is structured is based on God and the Trinity with different aspects of government.
00:28:48.000So here's one thing I think that's so important for people to understand, for everybody listening to understand, is that God, the Father, loves you.
00:28:56.000He sent his son to pay a ransom for you so that you could know true love and so that you could know the Father.
00:29:29.000We need to know why we believe what we believe because we are the church here in this country.
00:29:35.000And if America is spared, which I believe it will be, I'm just trying to encourage everybody, it will be because of the believers that are believing for God's will to be done in this country.
00:30:20.000Make sure you guys check out Turning PointUSA.
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