00:01:05.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:11.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:26.000We are really honored to have you back.
00:01:28.000And you might not have seen when I had folks raise their hand, but I think a larger portion of the folks that are here tonight were not here when you were here two years ago.
00:01:41.000But I want to say to you something publicly that I shared just briefly.
00:01:46.000And that is it was about two years ago in a very peculiar time in my life where I was introduced to you, your podcast, to a much broader audience because of the kinds of people that you interact with.
00:02:01.000I was introduced to all kinds of ideas that hadn't fully sort of formulated in my mind, but now I understand the wellspring of where those ideas come from.
00:02:10.000So your own, and I would call what you do a ministry.
00:02:14.000Whenever you're out dispensing truth that combats lies, I think that's a ministry.
00:02:19.000So I know that Turning Point USA is this incredibly, you know, this incredible growing organization where you're taking conservative ideas that you and I both know have their origin in biblical ideas.
00:02:33.000And you're passing these on to another generation.
00:02:36.000And for that, we're all incredibly grateful.
00:02:39.000But personally, you just may not have much of an idea of how much you have really impacted me, impacted me and this fellowship.
00:02:47.000We've been introduced to some top-notch thinking men because of your influence and because of your courage and your boldness.
00:02:55.000So I just want to say thank you publicly and keep doing what you're doing.
00:03:32.000And then 2012 rolled around and I thought, well, after four years of that, like, folks, it would be good if you voted with your Bibles open.
00:03:39.000And then that went the way that it went.
00:03:41.000Then we got to 2016 and I thought to myself, some of the men that I were listening, that I was listening to at the time, one said, the 2016 election is the most consequential election the world had ever seen.
00:03:53.000And I thought, not our country, but the world.
00:04:13.000So we get to 2020, and I'm thinking we've got to get, we've got to try, as a pastor who's called not simply to lead people to faith, but to lead them to maturity, right?
00:06:27.000I believe in the ministry, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
00:06:32.000And it's the most important thing in my life.
00:06:34.000And so everything we're going to talk about tonight goes through that prism, goes through that lens.
00:06:39.000And I believe that if you have not given your life to Christ, I'd highly encourage you to do that.
00:06:42.000We could talk about that later throughout this conversation.
00:06:45.000So I think back to when we were here in September, October 2020.
00:06:49.000And I think, boy, I'd give anything to go back to that period of time, right?
00:06:53.000And what's so funny is if you go back and re-listen to our time together, I was saying, boy, I'd do anything to go back six months ago.
00:07:00.000And it really is kind of this example of we really have no limit to how far we can destroy this beautiful country that we've been in, that we live in.
00:07:13.000I could go on endlessly about our porous open border, about the oligarchy running our public discourse, about inflation, about the ever-deteriorating rule of law in our country, the lawlessness from the people who are supposed to make laws themselves.
00:07:26.000So I could go through all those things, happy to explore that.
00:07:29.000But look, I'll take more of a kind of optimistic turn of what I think is happening because we could dwell on the problems all night and you could all add to them.
00:07:37.000In fact, we'll have some question and answer, you know, CRT, you know, not being able to define what a woman is, like all this sort of stuff, right?
00:07:45.000But I'm starting to see a consolidation, though, and a very promising consolidation of forces that otherwise would not be working together for righteous biblical causes.
00:07:57.000One, for example, is just the right to speak, which is obviously fundamental.
00:08:01.000We as Christians believe we are the speaking beings.
00:08:04.000So we believe we're made in God's image.
00:08:08.000And so in the two, the one creation story told two different ways in Genesis and John, it says the same thing, that God spoke into existence.
00:08:27.000And if we're unable to speak in our society, in our civilization, I believe it makes us less human and easier to control.
00:08:33.000And there's been an a lot of assault, both through corporations, through governments, through cultural pressures to shut us up.
00:08:39.000Whether or not we are Christians, constitutionalists, patriots, whatever you might want to call us, there's been a concerted campaign to make it harder to be able to express our ideas.
00:08:48.000So we're starting to see this unprecedented alliance, and I call it the winning team, the A team, team reality, whatever you want to call it, of people that have different political views, religious beliefs, but they're all contesting for moral righteousness, whether they know it or not.
00:09:03.000And they're all opposing what I would consider to be demonic and satanic forces.
00:09:06.000So here's kind of the, you kind of, you take a step back and it's necessary to do this.
00:09:11.000Things are so bad and they're trending in the wrong direction so quickly.
00:09:14.000People that otherwise would not be kind of together are starting to happen.
00:09:17.000So you have the most popular podcaster ever, Joe Rogan, alongside the world's richest man, Elon Musk, alongside the number one cable television show ever, Tucker Carlson, alongside Bill Maher, who's like a smug, arrogant atheist comedian, all saying the same thing, that if we do not reject, repudiate this woke, secular, nonsensical, anti-reality agenda, it really does, none of the disagreements will matter because we're all going to live in kind of this technocratic dystopian nightmare.
00:09:45.000And I look at that and I say, that is very similar in a lot of different ways.
00:09:49.000You could use the analogy of King Cyrus, who was not a Christian, but did righteous things for the people of God, where we're starting to see this movement, and it's a material movement, it's philosophical, it's economic, where finally I think there is some massive pushback to what we have felt to be outnumbered for the last 10 or 15, 20 years.
00:10:11.000The first step is identifying what is the clear and present danger, which is what you've asked.
00:10:15.000So in kind of the hierarchy of what concerns me the most, obviously inflation, obviously gas prices, all that stuff, open borders is a immediate concern.
00:10:25.000But I'm a little bit more worried about kind of like the civilizational turning issues, which is, and we use this colloquially like just the term woke, but it really is the biggest threat to our existence.
00:10:35.000Like if we don't get this right, and if we do not completely kick out this idea that we should have black only dormitories and that men can become pregnant and like all these things, which is now a predominant view in elite society, then it really doesn't, inflation and gas prices will kind of be a secondary thing.
00:10:53.000So, you know, we as believers, we live on team reality.
00:11:21.000We should be like, wait a second, if you can't answer that question, then the more complex, more important things from that point forward, you won't even be able to decide from that perspective.
00:11:30.000Here's where Christians in the church need to rise up.
00:11:33.000And I think we're starting to see that, especially at this church, is that we have the truth.
00:11:38.000And that includes truth from God created man and woman to, you know, the truth of, you know, Jesus Christ and what he did for us.
00:11:45.000And yet so many Christians are dividing this, not you.
00:11:48.000And they say, oh, okay, what's happening politically is different than what's happening religiously and spiritually.
00:11:52.000And that is such, that's a sloppy and dare I say, satanic view of news.
00:12:18.000And in Jeremiah 29, 7, it says that you need to demand the welfare of the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.
00:12:25.000So are you caring about the nation that you are in?
00:12:28.000Your county, your city, your state, your country?
00:12:31.000And that, and the question is, all of you are, but a lot of churches and pastors like, I don't do that.
00:13:16.000And this is what always bothers me about some of these non-political pastors.
00:13:19.000I don't want to call them non-political, but they're just silent.
00:13:21.000I mean, persecution is all throughout the Bible.
00:13:24.000And yes, persecution is guaranteed for those of us that spread the gospel, of course.
00:13:28.000But we learned in the book of Acts that you don't, when persecution comes your way, you should not act indifferently towards it, right?
00:13:37.000You should actually try to create communities or structures or governments where religious freedom is able to be spread, especially you saw in Acts 5 that we're going to obey God and not man.
00:13:47.000And so what I think has happened, though, is why the church has remained quiet, unfortunately, for the continuance since you and I were here this, you know, this last time, is that some are afraid because of some of the backlash.
00:13:57.000Some are uncertain about how to talk about some of these things.
00:14:01.000But I'll kind of close on this and we can kind of riff back and forth on that question, which is despite all of that, there is some, I believe the spirit is moving with such high velocity right now and that people are rising up and the citizen, the regular everyday person, the plumber, the engineer, the mechanic, the police officer, the veteran, the mom that's showing up at school board meetings.
00:14:22.000Finally, ownership of the country is being demanded back.
00:14:26.000It's like, I actually want to be in charge of what happens in our nation and I'm not going to put up with some unelected health bureaucrat continually telling me what I can and cannot do.
00:14:36.000I'm not going to put up with that anymore.
00:15:25.000If the church does nothing, the civilization falls apart.
00:15:28.000And one of the greatest gifts to mankind, the United States of America, will be in the history book as something that used to exist.
00:15:34.000If the church rises up and starts to get engaged, get involved like it is here in this church, local level, state level, proclaiming truth and righteousness, America, I think our best days are still ahead.
00:15:45.000And even if you don't believe that, even if you're like, hey, Charlie, I think Jesus is coming next Thursday.
00:15:50.000It's the end times, then you're still biblically commanded to occupy till he comes, to be salt and light and to contest at every corner, regardless of the headwinds against you.
00:16:03.000So when you talk about the sort of this woke ideology that is the great threat that we've got to push back on, we have been talking about it.
00:16:14.000We talked about the fact that, you know, in the beginning, as we taught through John chapter one, in the beginning, it was the word, the word was with God.
00:16:47.000And so maybe just, could you maybe, when you maybe unpack a few of the buzzwords that you find in corporations, that you find everywhere in the community, so that people can understand, like, oh, that's actually tied to this thing that we must defeat.
00:17:07.000I'm so glad you asked that because I sometimes go so fast.
00:17:23.000He was an anti-police guy, and he had a shirt called woke.
00:17:26.000And then there was a thing on Twitter in 2016, 17, and 18, basically being called get woke.
00:17:32.000And it was a short-term phrase to say that you have to awaken to all the injustice, all the racism, and all the suffering, and therefore you are woke.
00:18:19.000In fact, you probably know some pastors that are telling you to stop reading the Old Testament and that, you know, maybe it's not what it says it is.
00:18:27.000In the heart of deconstructionism is it's not analytical.
00:18:34.000It's trying to take apart what is the truth of what is being said and trying to poke holes and trying to say what you think is true is actually not true.
00:18:44.000Now, this is a very dangerous game to play, especially with young people because they don't really know much as it is, right?
00:18:49.000So if you're trying to teach deconstructionism to a fifth grader, there's really not much to deconstruct.
00:18:54.000In reality, you're just creating endless doubt about any sort of thing they might believe in.
00:18:59.000Now, deconstructionism can be helpful in elevated legal circles or for pastors that are trying to get, you know, get through seminary to really challenge to see if they really believe what they believe.
00:19:11.000But deconstructionism is a tool of the enemy.
00:19:14.000It's questions of persecution and mockery and things that we're not always expected or not always able to answer at face value.
00:19:21.000I'll give you a great example, which is it's the nagging voice in your ear.
00:19:29.000That's deconstructionism at its core, right?
00:19:31.000The constant nagging, never satisfied questioning of trying to debase what you know is true.
00:19:38.000Now, if you actually go back to what words mean, which is, I'm so glad you mentioned it, Satan, satan, in Hebrew, literally means prosecutor, right?
00:19:46.000It means someone who taunts, someone who is trying to attack you.
00:19:49.000So that idea of deconstructionism is literally in the Hebrew term of Satan.
00:20:09.000Basically, it came with a guy by the name of Jacques Derrida into America, French guy, who was, and also a group of others, Michelle Foucault and I'm trying to think who else.
00:20:22.000Herbert Marcuse was the German guy who brought it over.
00:20:26.000And it's a belief that what we are now in the modern age, but we need to now go into the postmodern age, right?
00:20:33.000So if you look prior to Enlightenment, they would say that would be antiquity, and then there's modernity, and then there's postmodernity.
00:20:41.000And they would get as fundamental to say that men and women are, there's no differences between the two of them, that good and evil is merely an opinion, very outright.
00:20:51.000Now, you might say, who could believe something as nonsensical as this?
00:21:04.000It is neo-Marxist at its core, and it's a philosophical, it's a philosophical movement underneath all of it.
00:21:10.000Then finally, critical race theory, which is to believe that racism is everywhere.
00:21:13.000It's normative, that you're all racist without even realizing it, that the only way to get rid of racism is to now be in order to get rid of discrimination that used to happen, you need discrimination today.
00:21:25.000And so the term woke is kind of a catch-all term of all these things.
00:21:29.000Now, the way that I am framing it, though, is that we have two teams.
00:21:33.000I don't like binary choices, but guess what?
00:22:08.000Yet the regime in Washington, D.C. is like, there's another $6 trillion and things will get better.
00:22:13.000That's not living on team reality, right?
00:22:15.000In fact, we admit, we have the humility that we are tied to the pesky shackles of reality, those little pesky shackles that are always keeping us down.
00:22:23.000Like, actually, yes, we do believe that the laws of gravity are going to prevent us from flying, right?
00:22:29.000We do believe in certain natural laws.
00:22:32.000And so with an examination of the founding fathers, which is just so amazing, and they don't teach this in our schools at all.
00:22:38.000And when they teach it, they don't teach it well at all, which is the founding fathers versus the French Revolution.
00:22:43.000In the Declaration, they said we are bound to the laws of nature and nature is God, that there's limitations to what we can do.
00:22:50.000So there's certainly going to be limitations to the type of government we try to create.
00:22:54.000The current kind of apparatus, because they've all been educated at these hyper-elite institutions, they believe that there's no limit to them as long as you keep on giving them power, right?
00:23:07.000That we can re-engineer human beings themselves, which goes to a more fundamental question about what the church should engage in on this topic and this issue, which is what is the raw material that you're dealing with, right?
00:23:20.000So when you're dealing with human beings, then you should know from the outset you're dealing with rather flawed raw material.
00:23:28.000The Bible tells us that rather bluntly.
00:23:30.000This is not something that's debated in Christian circles.
00:23:44.000And yet, for whatever reason, so many churches remain silent on one of the most important issues, which is, do you believe human beings are naturally good or naturally bad?
00:23:53.000This is what is defining almost all of our political decisions, by the way.
00:23:56.000If you believe human beings are naturally good, which is an insane thing to believe, then you have to explain all the suffering.
00:24:31.000Now, this is a really important distinction because when you have an entire political movement that is all about blaming the external and not about the refinement of who you actually are as a person, the consequences that follow are rather dramatic and extreme.
00:24:46.000And that's something where I think some pastors could easily give that sermon and they just refuse to.
00:25:18.000Like, why is it that United Airlines says that the pilots they're going to be hiring, 50% of them, are going to be black pilots and they're going to elevate skin color above whether or not they're a good pilot.
00:25:43.000Like that's probably not going to end well.
00:25:44.000Like when you go in for heart surgery, I guarantee you you're not asking, you know, whether or not your doctor satisfied the diversity, equity, inclusion guidelines of, you know, the local BLM chapter.
00:25:56.000That's probably not going to be a priority for you.
00:25:59.000And when you elevate diversity over competency, you can start to see when these things start to fall apart.
00:26:05.000You're like, yeah, that's probably not smart.
00:26:07.000And I believe anyone can succeed at any position, obviously.
00:26:11.000But when you mandate it, you're like, that's probably not going to be sustainable.
00:26:15.000And by the way, this is bad in the clouds, like bad in the abstract.
00:26:20.000But then let's talk about how it's bad in the streets, okay?
00:26:23.000So the movement that I opposed from day one, which is BLM, you know, post all the Floyd stuff in the summer of 2020, what do they have to show for?
00:26:32.000Well, before BLM, about 5,500 blacks were getting killed in the streets across America.
00:26:38.000Post-BLM, 7,800 blacks are now being killed every single year in the streets.
00:28:45.000I'm like, wow, the tolerance crowd is like really willing to use force if you say something that might be out of alignment with their hyper-specific, super radical, like dark worldview.
00:29:12.000Like who would possibly want to be against anti-racism, right?
00:29:15.000I mean, anyone who would oppose that, you just probably are an awful person.
00:29:20.000And so I think we're actually getting a lot better at branding on our side, right?
00:29:23.000When we're talking about like parents' rights and all this sort of stuff, I think we're getting a lot better at that.
00:29:27.000But when you go a level deeper, these nice bumper sticker sound bites, these things that they use, have incredibly malevolent intent and purposes, right?
00:29:36.000And so like this one that they're using now in Florida, where they're like, we want to protect transgender children.
00:29:42.000It's like, okay, no, you don't, first of all, okay.
00:30:21.000But it goes showing, though, that the major places of power in America, they've all been captured by this virus.
00:30:29.000The cancer, the tumor has metastasized.
00:30:32.000Disney, Goldman Sachs, every major college and university, the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Harvard, the New York Times, CNN.
00:30:41.000But here's, and if you go a level deeper, and we cover this on our podcast, is that again, when we believe in those pesky shackles of reality, right?
00:30:49.000We believe what goes up must come down.
00:30:51.000We believe in the second law of thermodynamics, which is the inevitable law of decay.
00:30:55.000And so what ends up happening when you go woke?
00:30:58.000Yeah, like CNN Plus has been around for like 21 days and now they're, they just scrapped the entire thing.
00:31:06.000And, you know, Netflix comes out and Netflix literally two weeks ago, they came out with a new special saying that he's expecting the pregnant man.
00:31:14.000Netflix's stock is down 38% of trade in the last 24 hours.
00:31:19.000And so there is this check and balance, right?
00:31:25.000They're going to get $200 million of their special tax loopholes rescinded in Florida.
00:31:29.000A lot of people are no longer using Disney Plus.
00:31:32.000And so what I'm saying, though, is that the virus that they've implemented in these institutions is actually wildly unpopular with you, with normal people.
00:31:42.000And I think there's going to be this incredibly unexpected check and balance against this almost invasion of what we know to be good, true, and beautiful in our country.
00:31:55.000Something that we're, maybe just take a brief moment on this because you spend so much time on college campuses and you're dealing with, you spoke at length last time about Yes, exactly, which was fantastic.
00:32:08.000I meant it was eye-opening for a lot of people.
00:32:11.000But one of the things that we're dealing with here in our community is, so let's, let's, when you say that the way you speak about woke ideology is very different than those who don't want to be called woke, but are speak about these things.
00:32:26.000So can you provide a practical, is there any practical angle?
00:32:35.000So we've heard here recently, even in some of our own schools here, that we're going to talk about critical race theory as the Southern Baptist Conventions decided to sort of keep it.
00:33:01.000I always, I laugh because we experience all this stuff, right?
00:33:04.000And some parents say, well, or school board members that are woke, they'll say, look, we need to expose kids to CRT and we need to get them exposed to us.
00:33:14.000So like, do you think doctors should like go through a course in bloodletting?
00:33:18.000Like, do you think that, you know, if we're going to try to, like, if we're going to try to create astronauts, should we like introduce them to the flat earth theory as well?
00:33:34.000You don't, you don't teach things that are not true to people you care about, especially precious young people that are going to be the inheritors of this nation.
00:33:42.000And so, look, there are some big tells.
00:33:44.000There's like 10 questions you can ask.
00:33:46.000I could spot a woke person very easily, right?
00:35:07.000Number two, a more kind of blunt one is, do you care more about things you can see or things you can't see?
00:35:15.000And we as Christians believe more in things you can't see with your eyes.
00:35:18.000We care more about your soul and your spirit.
00:35:20.000Now, you can see them over a period of time through actions and through word choice and all of that, but do you believe you should be able to judge someone within 10 seconds of meeting them?
00:35:38.000If you want to go into a caste system where they're like, hey, you're that color, therefore you're that person, and that's what you mean to me.
00:35:43.000That's a completely different system of government.
00:35:45.000It's anti-biblical and it's anti-West.
00:35:47.000So those are two good framings, right?
00:35:48.000Do you believe in things you can change versus you can't change, visible versus invisible, right?
00:35:53.000And are we creating an educational culture that values the things that could be changed and the invisible versus things that can't be changed versus the visible?
00:36:02.000Most school districts are elevating the opposite, which is creating a bunch of super depressed, like kind of quasi-racist kids.
00:36:11.000And now I'd be surprised, but it's like, if you're just thinking about skin color all the time, you're going to create more racism.
00:36:17.000It just, and by, it's going to be anti-white racism or any sort of other type of racism that might spring from it.
00:36:22.000But there's other kind of questions you can ask of the woke.
00:36:25.000And this is another one, which is like, do you believe an absolute truth?
00:36:29.000And if they say no, then you should respond like, do you believe that absolutely, right?
00:36:33.000So, which is like the great inherent contradiction of the deconstructionists, right?
00:36:38.000I don't know what I believe or what I am.
00:36:39.000Like, maybe you should get that figured out before you run for school board, probably, right?
00:36:43.000Like that, probably be able to, you know, tell me if North is actually North before you're telling our kids whether or not, you know, what they should believe and how they should believe it.
00:36:53.000But yeah, look, here, and we, I'm happy to go through this.
00:36:55.000I'm happy to, you know, reference some other guides of like how to spite, how to spot a wokey from at least 100 yards away, right?
00:37:03.000And by the way, wokeys are, they're opportunities, right?
00:37:08.000People are not obstacles, they're opportunities, right?
00:37:14.000But also, there's a difference between them as a person and which we should totally look at that as like, wow, I want to help you and all that.
00:37:24.000And so it's one thing if you just kind of like a woke person showing up to church, asking questions, all that awesome opportunity.
00:37:29.000It's another thing where that wokey is like, I'm now going to be mayor and you're going to live under my like, no, okay, now you've crossed the line.
00:37:35.000Now you're allowing your like perverse, satanic, demonic ideas to now be applied to everybody else.
00:37:40.000That's where I'm going to draw the line.
00:37:43.000Opportunity, then it's like, okay, now you're going to all of a sudden make me live under this sort of like weird quasi-tyranny where you're going to, I don't know how bad it is in Chattanooga.
00:37:52.000You could tell me with some of this stuff.
00:37:54.000I know that in other states and cities across the country, it's gotten totally out of control, whether it be black-only schools now in Portland, right, defunded the police, like all this stuff that's just so crazy.
00:38:04.000So yeah, I think that's some important nuance to pack into it.
00:38:08.000But look, this is the fight of this generation.
00:39:14.000Well, there's this wonderful verse in Psalms, I believe, where it says, if you love God, you must hate evil, which is like my verse to justify everything I do every single day.
00:39:53.000And so, look, the Bible tells us a couple of things.
00:39:56.000And we have to be willing to tell us, we have to be willing to pay a price for the journey that we're on against these sort of ideas and against this ideology.
00:40:08.000There is kind of this fairy tale that's told a lot of Christians that we're somehow going to win this battle and you're going to be able to keep everything the way it is.
00:40:16.000No, you're going to have to lose something.
00:40:18.000Lose friendships, lose relationships, lose business contracts, lose social credibility.
00:40:23.000Now, you'll get all of that back and then some, because the Lord will bless courage, but it's very, very necessary.
00:40:30.000And then there's other things we have to do to defeat this.
00:40:32.000We're already seeing this with Elon Musk and we're seeing this Rogan and all of the Elon has it right.
00:40:37.000Elon is, look, I'm going to just buy the most important marketplace for ideas, and that's how I'm going to defeat this mind virus.
00:40:45.000And look, I got a lot of problems with Elon.
00:41:06.000And then it's going to take a willing citizenry and population to be, to kick these ideas out of public discourse and differentiate the person from the idea and have zero tolerance whatsoever for the idea.
00:41:21.000And that's where that idea of tolerance, I really bother.
00:41:24.000People say, Charlie, where's your tolerance?
00:41:26.000And I always ask, like, should some ideas be tolerated?
00:41:30.000And they say, oh, all ideas should be tolerated.
00:42:04.000We have to be willing to win and we have to be willing to get into the arena and dust ourselves up a little bit.
00:42:09.000And this is something where Christians think like, well, look, you know, I don't want to get into the combat of all of this.
00:42:15.000And look, it might not be for you, but I can say comfortably, I have not, I've many times I've said things I regret and I've definitely sinned in some of my commentary about, you know, some of our American political leaders.
00:42:28.000But I could say that in my conscious, deliberate actions, I have not done anything in this battle that I would consider to be unethical or what these other people do.
00:42:38.000My biggest problem is like basically insulting people that are destroying my country.
00:42:52.000In fact, I believe that God will bless our victory if we just do the one thing that is necessary, be courageous and be willing to lose something, right?
00:43:37.000Because if we see our school's going to teach our kids critical race theory, they're going to expose our kids to gender ideologies and we tolerate it, not willing to do the one thing that you just said we've got to do, call out the truth and then be willing to pay the price for it.
00:43:58.000Speak to me real quick about courage, where it would come from, and what the last two years dealing with this COVID crisis has taught us about where the current sort of courage meter in our country really is.
00:44:15.000So yeah, so I think weakness is a far bigger threat than wokeness because if we weren't weak as a society, I don't think the woke would be nearly as powerful as they are.
00:44:45.000If you're not willing to actually fight for what you believe in, then it's completely irrelevant what you believe in, right?
00:44:51.000Is that if you're not willing to do something, if you're not willing to pay the price, and you look at it like that the New Testament tells us that to be true, right?
00:44:58.000Paul was incredibly courageous, like unbelievably courageous to the point where they stoned him to death, right?
00:45:04.000I mean, the early disciples were courageous enough to push back against multiple government institutions to spread the gospel.
00:45:10.000And everywhere they went, they faced persecution.
00:47:04.000Again, another patent quote who I just happen to love, lead, follower, get out of the way, right?
00:47:09.000And if you know anything about Patton, you could see him saying that like every single day.
00:47:13.000And so that's kind of one characteristic in that whole sense.
00:47:18.000But kind of a final thought on courage that I think is really important that I want to touch on is without courage, what exactly would happen next?
00:49:40.000For those of you that own businesses and you're like, I'm not going to do business, you know, unless people know my values, all that stuff takes courage.
00:49:46.000I'm seeing that happen at record rates.
00:50:53.000When God delivered his chosen people out of Egypt into the wilderness and they needed and wanted for nothing, and he blew quail off course and manna from heaven, it took them like 20 minutes before they start complaining again.
00:51:06.000And they're like, who's this Moses guy?
00:51:26.000But I do believe that once you have kind of a little bit of a dosage of this kind of petty totalitarianism, that's where you're going to start to see more and more people demand freedom and demand liberty and demand kind of a release from this kind of authoritarianism that we're living through.
00:51:43.000So look, courage is the most important thing.
00:52:47.000So when you take a look at what we've dealt with in the last two years, can you sort of draw a thread?
00:52:55.000I mean, has this been a season where it's just like a perfect storm and this hit Or to you, do you see any sort of, I wouldn't call it a divine thread, maybe a darker thread that's actually running through it all?
00:53:14.000What are we really facing sort of on the high, you know, meta idea of what's connected and what's behind what's connected?
00:53:23.000I mean, you've got COVID, you've got this January 6th issue, you've got all some of the things that you mentioned earlier on.
00:53:49.000And the most courageous generation, the greatest generation, gave us peace and prosperity.
00:53:53.000And peace and prosperity post-60s and 70s, things were really good in America.
00:53:58.000I mean, we had problems, but then we had the sexual revolution.
00:54:01.000We had economic catastrophe eventually in the 70s.
00:54:05.000But generally, there was kind of this long overarching theme of kind of this soul searching of what does it mean to be an American.
00:54:12.000Now, in the 80s and 90s, we got in kind of the sugar high that it meant to be kind of an American to kind of like ship all of our jobs overseas and we got a bunch of plastic in return, which was an awful deal, obviously.
00:54:26.000And 90s happened, early 2000s, financial crisis, 9-11, war on terror, and this kind of hypersecurity state that was deployed, you know, domestically.
00:54:35.000But the through line from all of this was kind of this, not, it kind of happened, as Ernest Hemingway would say, it happened gradually than suddenly, where all this kind of culminated all these different forces in a short period of time in like this combustible engine when we decided to lock down our country.
00:54:53.000And boy, you know, there will be, there will be an unlimited amount of literature written about, you know, the Chinese Fauci coronavirus and kind of our reaction to it, which was the worst mistake ever made, I think, in American history.
00:55:16.000The through line from post-World War II to now, albeit there were some ups and downs and some resurgence and some declines, is that we want the, so in the 1950s, the many ruled the few, okay?
00:55:31.000Ever since the 1950s, there's been a campaign to change that, to get the few to rule the many.
00:55:37.000And what happened in COVID is finally the dream of those people was given was by definition, you have to give up all your power because there's an invisible virus that might kill you.
00:55:47.000So the few people have to go rule the many and give them these emergency powers.
00:55:51.000I mean, you saw all the other kind of social ills come front and center.
00:55:56.000And so the most depressed generation, alcohol-addicted generation, drug-addicted generation, the most, the saddest generation, most depressed generation, all kind of happened at this high velocity.
00:56:06.000And so what was shocking to me in the through line of all of this, it's all about trying to make you individually less free.
00:56:13.000It's trying to make your society crumble and weaken from within.
00:56:17.000And there are global forces behind this.
00:56:19.000Again, I won't spend too much time on this, but make no mistake, like the Great Reset World Economic Forum that is putting pressure on this country, COVID, they wrote the book, The Great Reset in the Midst of COVID.
00:56:33.000Now, I'm not saying that the World Economic Forum deployed the virus, okay?
00:56:38.000Although there is some evidence that there was some funny business.
00:56:55.000America, because of our structure, our system of government, who we are as a people, our history, and our culture, is that we were the first benevolent superpower ever to exist.
00:57:05.000Never happened before and will never happen since.
00:57:08.000A country with as much power as we have, as much wealth, as much prestige, actually goes around trying to do its best to do good around the world.
00:57:15.000We have a, okay, pretty bad track record the last 30, 40 years, but still, it's this, what, beacon of light.
00:57:39.000I'm talking metaphorically, of course.
00:57:41.000And so it's been a campaign, a multi-decade campaign from within our institutions and externally around the world to destroy the United States of America as we know it.
00:57:51.000So there's two big ways they're trying to do it right now.
00:57:53.000The most easy way is to destroy our currency.
00:57:55.000Obviously, they're trying to deteriorate the purchasing power of the dollar and keep our borders completely and wide open.
00:58:02.000They want you to be disempowered, disempowered through food shortages, disempowered through how you actually treat the Chinese coronavirus, disempowered by how you send your kids to school, disempowered by whether or not we can control your breathing and putting a mask on your face, right?
01:00:04.000And the question is, what do we do about it?
01:00:06.000I think all of you have made that decision there.
01:00:08.000But here's the cool thing, and I see it happening, is that the demonic forces that have had such a monopoly, they're all of a sudden, they're being spooked all around.
01:01:13.000I'm actually being derelict in my duty.
01:01:16.000I've exchanged the American flag for the gospel.
01:01:20.000But you look on and you think, I look on and think, if this is what it is that we're facing, as you've just articulated, if it is darkness, and the only people on the planet that can really do anything or have to band together to do something about it are those that are filled with the light that's greater than the darkness, which is God's people.
01:01:41.000Talk a little bit about what you're experiencing as you are.
01:01:43.000You're starting to see a bit of an awakening within the church and within church leaders.
01:01:50.000So talk a little about some of the brighter things that you're seeing.
01:01:53.000You talked about the fact that there's a coalition of sort of strange allies.
01:02:32.000Like you have a bunch of people celebrating that mask mandates are repealed.
01:02:36.000What a great opportunity for some mega church pastor to come in and say, let me tell you what true freedom actually is, right?
01:02:43.000Let me show you what now that you're celebrating being liberated from bondage.
01:02:47.000And they're like, oh, no, we don't do that at this church.
01:02:49.000Like, oh, okay, but you were super quick to lecture me that we have to go to BLM marches because what a great evangelistic opportunity it is.
01:03:32.000And then you'll see hundreds of kids give their life to the Lord that have never heard a sermon in their life, like weird youth pastor that tells me that we're not doing our job.
01:03:40.000Like, actually, no, you know what salt and light have in common?
01:03:43.000They change the environments that they go into.
01:03:46.000That's what salt and light have in common.
01:03:48.000And yet I have to be lectured by, you know, the same sort of people.
01:03:51.000They send me these emails like, Charlie, you're not a real Christian.
01:03:57.000Because you want to know what I did last week?
01:03:59.000I went to Colorado University Boulder, UC Berkeley, and Cal State Fullerton in a span of 72 hours, said the exact same stuff I'm saying here, sat at a table on UC Berkeley for two hours, having to like literally tell them during Holy Week that there is a God who loves them.
01:04:16.000You want to talk about like going into the lion's den?
01:04:19.000I'll put that up with like a missionary trip to Haiti.
01:05:49.000Oh, yeah, in Milwaukee last night with Candace Owens.
01:05:52.000And we had so many people, the great Candace Owens.
01:05:56.000And we had so many people wanting to come in.
01:05:58.000And the polling shows this, by the way.
01:06:00.000The polling shows that most young people are dissatisfied with the regime, 21% approval rating of Joe Biden, but it's deeper than just the politics, right?
01:06:07.000That's just kind of their, you know, their complaint against what's happening.
01:06:14.000But there's something else that I think that, again, the church misses this completely and wildly.
01:06:19.000You know, they're like, well, we're going to do the exact same thing we did in 1980s, the Jesus loves you movement, right?
01:06:24.000And they're the first ones to lecture me about how you have to kind of adjust to the times, obviously by their incredibly skinny genes and all that weird stuff that they do.
01:06:35.000But then they're the ones that don't actually ever think to themselves, huh?
01:07:06.000And so, yeah, look, the opportunity is multifaceted, right?
01:07:11.000There's a political opportunity, and the most important, obviously, there's a spiritual opportunity, but it's the Galatians 3 model, right?
01:07:17.000Where it's the law is a school teacher to Christ.
01:07:20.000And so for a lost generation, they just want something to make sense before they're willing to kind of take that leap of faith.
01:07:26.000And you have to understand, if you send a kid to college, not all college, most colleges, they will beat them down.
01:07:31.000They will deconstruct them so much that they will challenge their very existence.
01:07:37.000Come with me to a campus and sit with a couple hours and you'll see it for yourself.
01:07:41.000In fact, you can see the footage that we post, hundreds of hours of footage that we post on our social media where people will say, I don't even know if I'm actually alive.
01:07:49.000I mean, it is so deconstructionist, it will create misery.
01:07:53.000And so if you can even just get them to have a little bit of a buildup of what is reality, then finally you could point them to ultimate salvation, which is a God that loves them and sent his son to die for them.
01:08:04.000And so there's this great opportunity.
01:08:05.000There is this awakening and there is a spiritual awakening to all of this.
01:08:13.000We have to look at this in our, at this moment, say, wow, what a tough couple of years, unnecessarily tough, right?
01:08:19.000You take a pause, say, hmm, what a great opportunity.
01:08:23.000What other time would you rather live in with a generation, young generation that's so lost, so depressed, so miserable?
01:08:30.000It is the most suicidal generation in history, most depressed, saddest, blah, Like that, if you look at just like a market opportunity, the church should be like, all right, Marshall Plan, all the resources we can.
01:08:43.000Instead, it's kind of the same old kind of stuff that obviously doesn't work.
01:08:47.000So, but then just from a general standpoint, this is what really gives me hope is that citizens of all ages are now asking not like, hey, what are you going to do for me?
01:09:46.000I'm going to learn about what's happening around me, right?
01:09:49.000I'm going to contest for righteousness.
01:09:50.000And I know that this is going to be a long-term project.
01:09:53.000And that is the kind of takeaway, isn't it?
01:09:56.000Which is the news that you might not want to hear, but for the grandparents out there, you might not see this whole thing get back to where you want to see it.
01:10:05.000And that might not be what you came to hear tonight.
01:10:08.000But not seeing God's chosen people come to the promised land happened to one of our most favorite figures in the Bible.
01:10:17.000But you just look at your grandkids and say, are you worth it?
01:10:20.000Because I want them to go live in a free country, right?
01:10:38.000That is the unintended benefit from COVID, is this great awakening.
01:10:43.000Is where finally people are like, wow, I didn't realize how far gone my country actually was.
01:10:48.000Wow, I didn't realize they were teaching this in our schools.
01:10:50.000And then having the memory not to forget and the action to do something.
01:10:53.000But don't get me wrong, there will be successful battles along the way, but it might take 5, 10, 15 years, and we sometimes have to work backwards.
01:11:28.000They've thought to plant trees that they know will never be able to see it all go through.
01:11:33.000And so we have to look at this intergenerationally, and we also have to stop lying to ourselves.
01:11:38.000Stop lying to ourselves that just one more election is going to fix the country.
01:11:42.000Stop lying to ourselves that, you know, Air Force One's going to swoop in and solve all of our problems.
01:11:47.000I'm already looking at kids, you know, that are 8, 9, and 10, 11 years old and being like, I have to try to raise them up as early as possible to try to fight for this stuff.
01:11:54.000And look, we're in this fight for as long as God keeps on giving us breath and life, right?
01:11:59.000But I also think that's kind of freeing, isn't it?
01:12:01.000It's kind of freeing to know you might not see this entire fight play out, right?
01:12:05.000It's kind of freeing in some sense because it's also like, maybe, maybe I'm going to do what I can do, and then I'm going to pass down the baton to the future generation and continue this in any way, shape, or form and leave the rest up to God.
01:12:19.000And so, look, I'm comforted by the fact that I'm seeing people of all different generations, all different ages, all different mindsets rise up in a powerful, meaningful, and significant way.
01:12:31.000And I could tell you, the other side, they are trembling.
01:12:34.000So if you're at Caesar's Palace and you're trying to make the odds, who's going to win in the next 20 years?
01:12:40.000Team reality and team liberty or team woke and team insanity?
01:12:44.000Our team has the truth, the Bible, the will of the Lord, Jesus Christ, and also on the earth, the world's richest man, the most popular podcaster, the most popular cable news channel, the pillow guy, and many others, right?
01:13:03.000They, they have Supreme Court nominees that can't tell you what a woman is.
01:13:10.000They have CNN Plus, which won't exist in like nine days because it's just done.
01:13:15.000I'm going to bet on team liberty and team reality.
01:13:18.000I'm telling you, the forces and the momentum is overwhelming, everybody.
01:14:29.000I just wanted to ask, as I've gotten more and more involved in politics and watching podcasts, I listen to like two or three podcasts a day, oftentimes.
01:14:38.000How do you keep your heart from getting hardened and like just being like wanting to be Jesus flipping over the tables, but like 24-7?
01:17:41.000If you're a parent that is growing disconnected from your child, are you having a Sabbath dinner with them with no devices on every Friday night?
01:18:46.000And so I highly, if you do it, try it for a month, try it for two months, and you'll find your relationship with God and your loved ones will dramatically improve.
01:18:53.000And that hardened heart that you are worried about, I think will soften very quickly.
01:19:43.000So you need to try to build a majority on your school board.
01:19:46.000If you win, which is easier said than done, then you have to, before you take office, because you're not yet a school board member, is that right?
01:19:55.000You have to make a decision that you are going to put what is right above what is likable, okay, or what is popular.
01:20:02.000And then you have to understand as a school board member, they will demagogue, they will delay, they will filibuster, they will do everything they possibly can.
01:20:11.000But you as a school board member have a lot of power.
01:20:15.000And creating an inside-out access between you as a school board member and an active parent group is what's been missing.
01:20:23.000So you have to be getting information and then leaking it to parents to get angry at the school board meetings and vice versa, right?
01:20:29.000Now, this is what, but think about it.
01:20:34.000And so you have to be like, so you have to use FOIA to your advantage, but you at Freedom of Information Act, but you as a school board member, you have so much power for curriculum and for budgets and for all these things.
01:20:46.000And so as a school board member, you should always ask for more than you actually think you're going to get.
01:20:52.000And then be a relentless advocate for parents.
01:21:17.000And so I just want to commend you and encourage you for what you're doing here.
01:21:21.000And finally, the last piece of advice I'll give you for when you actually get in to be a school board is don't just try to get rid of bad stuff.
01:21:29.000Try to put positive things in as well, which is try to institute pro-American curriculum.
01:21:54.000So I have a little bit of an evangelistic question for you, I think, because I spend a lot of time wondering what it takes for the lights to come on for some people.
01:22:04.000So I think we can all relate to that in terms of family members and friends, but I personally have a lot of colleagues that are millennial pastors, which are the worst.
01:22:16.000But in terms of just, you know, these are good people, but then you see them doing things like shaming John MacArthur for opening up this church during COVID.
01:22:26.000And then not only posting black squares, which early on you could understand, but then never standing up for abortion in the black communities and then never wanting to kind of distance themselves once they figured out what Black Lives Matter really is all about.
01:22:41.000And so I guess the question is, is what have you seen be effective to really help, or is there something that you seem to be effective to kind of turn the lights on for people?
01:22:51.000And then also too, within that, kind of a question within the question is, how much time do you spend rallying the base as opposed to winning the convert?
01:23:03.000Because you don't want to just, you do, but you don't want to just preach to the choir the whole time and rally the base.
01:23:08.000You want to be able to win people over to the truth.
01:23:11.000So what's the ratio there in terms of like how often you rally the base, how often you try to win the convert?
01:23:51.000And yet, so then, but then there's these Christian pastors that start to kind of come into my world with the kind of moral righteousness that comes with it, trying to tell me about like Rousseauian ideology or, you know, crime statistics in New York or critical race theory.
01:24:16.000Like leave the, you know, stay in your lane.
01:24:19.000And so when they kind of cross that Rubicon, I'm like, all right, tough guy, like, you want to go tell me that America's racist to the core?
01:24:27.000Like, that's not going to end well for you.
01:24:29.000Now, again, they don't talk to me because they know it won't end well for them.
01:26:25.000I have been more blessed in a reaction and more people agreeing.
01:26:29.000Because here's what I learned this the heart, not the hard way, but someone came up to me after the event at Berkeley and they said, I agreed with almost nothing you said, but the way you said it and the conviction and the passion, like you're great and I'm going to follow you.
01:26:59.000It's how Jesus got to the bottom of the, you know, got to the truth.
01:27:01.000So just keep on asking these questions of these youth pastors, millennial pastors and whomever.
01:27:07.000And then finally, I think there is a reckoning coming.
01:27:09.000I think there will be a series at some point of publicly recorded debates that have to happen between the wokeys and those of us that actually believe in the Bible.
01:27:58.000Hey, thank you for the courage that you have been speaking for the last couple of years.
01:28:04.000You mentioned earlier about, you know, how it's really painfully obvious the woke test.
01:28:10.000But I wonder after the last two years, we've seen kind of a culmination of all these painfully obvious woke topics.
01:28:18.000Are there some subtle things that you are seeing coming down?
01:28:22.000It seems like, oh, there can't be one more thing, but you turn on the news and there it is, another topic that just we never thought we would see.
01:28:30.000So there's some subtle ways that we can be proactively detecting so that they don't ultimately culminate and add to the woke test.
01:29:09.000And look at one that's unfolding all across the country, which is this idea of should you teach children this kind of radical gender ideology.
01:29:19.000And this is what's interesting is that we're going to lose that debate if we don't actually get to the root of the issue.
01:29:55.000It's just move to a younger demographic.
01:29:57.000So we will lose on that if we don't get our argument right earlier on in that.
01:30:02.000And then there's obviously the transgender part of it.
01:30:04.000Look, I could go on to a lot of different types of these issues that I think are kind of pressure cooker ones that are growing up throughout the system, but it will get worse.
01:30:14.000The depths of hell have not even been touched by this.
01:30:22.000And isn't it amazing how these groups that are always demanding liberation from oppression start in there and then they go immediately to trying to force evangelism of the most vulnerable, right?
01:30:33.000So it all started with like the plight of gay marriage.
01:31:49.000Do you have any knowledge or information on the Stew Peters documentary called Watch the Water with Dr. Brian Artis regarding Rendesivir?
01:32:00.000No, but I've had a couple people tell me about it.
01:32:02.000And I'm telling you, I am very passionate about the Rem Desivir topic because I know a lot of people that were damaged by the forcible use of Rem Desivir in the hospitals.
01:33:05.000I gave him my word that if he ran again, I would support him.
01:33:08.000I'm not a guy that does that and falters.
01:33:10.000You wouldn't want me to be that type of guy either, right?
01:33:12.000He's a person that when I had no following, no credibility, and kind of was just like this 21, 22-year-old, he saw something special in our movement and spoke at our events and invited me to the White House.
01:33:23.000And he really poured energy and time and resources into our movement.
01:33:31.000And I don't think that would be the right thing to do.
01:33:33.000And obviously you guys would make your own decisions in that regard.
01:33:36.000But I would say this, that if you win a presidency once and then the second time you run, it's the most interfered with election in history with ballots going everywhere and Zuckerberg with $400 million.
01:33:48.000I believe you have earned the right to run for the presidency again, especially after the mess that we're seeing all around us.
01:33:55.000And so that would be my own personal thing.
01:33:57.000Obviously, people have differences of opinions in that way, but I'm a loyal guy.
01:34:01.000And I'm going to hold the line for someone that was good to me.
01:35:28.000Like, it's really creepy and weird how much you care about teaching six-year-olds about gender transitioning.
01:35:33.000And this is something some people aren't comfortable with, but I am, which is in the arena of messaging, I'm going to take the gloves off and I'm not going to allow you to insult us and to batter us continually.
01:35:44.000Like, I'm going to call it for what it actually is, if that makes sense.
01:35:47.000And so, but look, it's difficult because we always kind of want, we want to play by this like book of rules that actually doesn't exist.
01:35:56.000And their book of rules is we want to destroy them.
01:36:25.000The people that support the million abortions a year and puberty blockers for 10-year-olds and the confusion of most fundamental gender issues, right?
01:36:33.000And porous open borders, I think that's immoral and that therefore means it's evil.
01:36:37.000And I'm not going to all of a sudden act as if we're in this like kind of long-form, equally standing Socratic debate about how we all want the same thing.
01:36:45.000It's like we actually want two completely different things.
01:36:49.000And we have to get better about messaging about it.
01:37:53.000These are certifiable mental conditions that people have where they think they're younger than they actually are.
01:37:58.000Should a 50-year-old who thinks that he's 50-year-old should be able to compete in a youth soccer league, you know, with eight-year-olds just because he feels that way.
01:38:07.000So at the core of transgenderism, and I'm not making light of it, we should have compassion.
01:38:26.000We've had successful treatments to show people that trauma might have induced that and that external forces might have had them confused about it.
01:38:34.000But the most important thing is who gets to determine your reality?
01:38:38.000Now, people, this is at the fundamental core of so many of these movements.
01:38:42.000Hey, well, you get to determine your own truth.
01:39:02.000We have to be anchored, again, to what we've talked about all evening, to reality, is that your wishes, your will, your demands, your feelings do not determine what you are.
01:39:13.000And they might have that own opinion, right?
01:39:17.000They might say, I am a man, even though they're a woman.
01:39:19.000They might say I'm a unicorn, even though they're a human.
01:39:22.000They could say whatever those sorts of things, okay?
01:39:24.000There are separate psychological mental treatment that I hope they come.
01:39:27.000And most importantly, spiritual treatment I hope that they end up getting, right?
01:39:31.000However, the more important question is this, which is, are you going to use political power now to force other people to succumb to your incredibly radical mental disease?
01:39:43.000Are you going to use political power to make me say a pronoun that I know is not true and like penalize me because I used the wrong pronoun?
01:39:49.000Are you going to now use political power to force someone with a mental condition to now be able to go into girls' locker rooms, even though that's not the biological gender that they were born with?
01:39:59.000Are you going to now use political power to say that children can get puberty blockers without even notifying their parents, which is happening in states all across the country?
01:40:08.000So that's an even, that's a more important issue, which is you can think whatever you want to think, right?
01:40:12.000Okay, whatever, but now do not use the force of the state.
01:40:37.000I'm a woman and we have to all of a sudden reconfigure all of women's sports as he wins the NCAA championship, disenfranchising biological women and act as if that is somehow normal and okay.
01:40:48.000What that is, is tolerance gone wrong.
01:40:51.000What that is, is platforming and entertaining mass psychosis from us when in reality, those people need individual treatment, individual compassion, individual help, not all of society pandering to their problem and acting as if it's okay.
01:41:18.000First, as you guys kind of continue on this journey, help Turning Point USA however you can.
01:41:25.000Turning Point USA is the most effective organization for all ages to be able to support citizens of all different backgrounds to be able to take a stand, young and old.