00:00:41.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:35.000I'm in high school, and my friends think America is racist and awful.
00:01:38.000They're happy to have the time off for July 4th from their summer jobs and from their sports, but they tell me that America is an awful place and we need to turn it over or have a revolution.
00:01:49.000Can you please help me explain to my friends why the Declaration of Independence is so important and what exactly happened that day?
00:02:03.000Now, it took three days to actually finish the document.
00:02:05.000It's really July 2nd that we should be celebrating Independence Day, but they dated it July 4th for a reason.
00:02:12.000Now, we must understand the time and the circumstances before the Declaration was signed.
00:02:19.000That this was a bubbling up of many years of the British Empire that needed to pay off war debt, that needed to be able to finance their country to raise taxes.
00:02:31.000And their colonies in India were totally ravaged by, let's just say, imperialistic hubris, went back to Britain.
00:02:39.000They needed to try to finance to kind of basically bridge the revenue short gap.
00:02:44.000No one on the aisle wanted actually to pay taxes.
00:02:47.000They said, let's go tax those colonists.
00:02:49.000Now, remember, before the 1750s or 1760s came around, the first Europeans to come to America and the first Americans came right near 1620.
00:03:00.000Now, Nicole Hannah Jones makes a big deal out of this.
00:03:02.000We'll play some tape from Nicole Hannah Jones, the wannabe historian who does nothing but basically is a, let's say, historical arsonist to what is true and what is accurate in American history.
00:03:15.000Of course, there were the first colonies on the eastern seaboard, Jamestown being one of them.
00:03:19.000Then, of course, the Mayflower got blown off course.
00:03:22.000That is the creation of the Mayflower Compact, which then, of course, created the first experiment in self-government in the New World.
00:03:30.000For over 150 years, Americans, those being in America, had an opportunity to wrestle with and figure out what does it mean to have liberty?
00:03:40.000What kind of government should we set up?
00:03:45.000In the 1750s and the 1760s, there was a massive awakening and revival happening in America.
00:03:51.000It was led by Jonathan Mayhew, George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
00:03:58.000In fact, we have that sermon right here in our studio right there, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards.
00:04:04.000And then finally, in the 1770s, with the abuse of the British monarchy and the soil that was properly tilled by the teachings of the Bible, the American people were ready for a separation.
00:04:17.000Coming into 1776, there was the Stamp Act, there was the Quarters Act, there were all sorts of different types of act, according to Soldiers Act, whatever they called it.
00:04:26.000All of this bubbled up into a moment, and there was the publishing of Thomas Paine's famous booklet, Common Sense, which was widely distributed amongst the Eastern seaboard.
00:04:37.000And so the July of 1776 came and it was written in an urgent time and matter.
00:04:43.000So there was kind of a committee that put together the Declaration of Independence.
00:04:47.000It wasn't just Thomas Jefferson, although he was the main author.
00:04:50.000Benjamin Franklin contributed amongst many others.
00:04:53.000But Thomas Jefferson really had the gift of the pen.
00:04:58.000Thomas Jefferson was one of the youngest founders.
00:05:01.000Now, so Thomas Jefferson writes this, the unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America, when in the course of human events, let's stop there.
00:05:10.000That means that this applies to all time, all people.
00:05:39.000The promise that is eternal creation and the supreme being of the world.
00:05:47.000Thomas Jefferson continues by saying, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them.
00:07:17.000That right there is a little bit of a harbinger.
00:07:19.000It is a canary in the coal mine for the separation of powers that come in the Constitution.
00:07:25.000It's a little bit of a foreshadowing of how they're starting to think about power.
00:07:31.000You see, the Declaration wrestles with this idea of power all throughout.
00:07:34.000They say it explicitly, but only to a trained eye do they basically say to King George, you no longer have a moral right to use power against us.
00:07:43.000You see, the Declaration of Independence being the great step forward for humanity is a mass inversion event.
00:07:50.000How people view government differently.
00:07:52.000Government, of course, being the consolidated power of people, hopefully voluntarily, so that they give up the sovereign, give up their sovereignty to government, but they'll still being the sovereign, giving up their power to government, I should say.
00:08:05.000Thomas Jefferson continues by saying, to which the laws of nature and nature's God.
00:08:15.000Basically, what it's saying, what Thomas Jefferson is saying, is that there's laws of the universe.
00:08:20.000We, as being the speaking beings, are entitled because we know that the universe has certain rules and we know there's a God that put those rules in place and therefore we're entitled to, quote, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
00:09:32.000And therefore, when you are a speaking being, as Thomas Jefferson would write, above the beast and below the divine, that's a human being.
00:09:41.000Above the beast and below the divine, that you have rights.
00:09:46.000What Thomas Jefferson is doing is he's taking John Locke's treatise on natural rights and his social contract theory, and he's putting it into practice and saying, all men are created equal as being the same sort of thing.
00:09:59.000Therefore, you cannot rob them of stuff.
00:10:39.000The government does not run the people.
00:10:42.000So it starts with this universal claim and it continues by saying that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
00:11:05.000Prudence indeed, love that word, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.
00:11:33.000It was about the abuse of people and continuing to abuse them without the consent of the governed.
00:11:41.000And accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
00:11:53.000But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object in vices, a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.
00:12:12.000Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which constraints them to alter their former systems of government.
00:12:21.000The history of the present King Britain, the King of Britain, is a history of repeated injustices and usurpations, all having in direct order the establishment of absolute tyranny over these states.
00:12:34.000To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, and then it gets very particular.
00:12:41.000So it starts universal, and it gets particular.
00:12:45.000And it wrestles throughout the entire document of this idea of the citizen versus the serf and the subject and the slave.
00:12:52.000You said, you see, they were not citizens at the time.
00:13:23.000And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, I never want to hear from another atheist secularist that America was not a Christian nation.
00:13:34.000They said here, and support for this declaration with a firm reliance on protection of divine providence, said differently in more kind of modern American English, and for support of this declaration with firm reliance on Almighty God and trusting in his will, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.
00:14:03.000They said, we're willing to die for this.
00:14:05.000That's how important self-government is.
00:14:07.000We're so willing to form something new.
00:14:11.000All 56 of us are willing to be hunted down and murdered.
00:14:17.000When you read the Declaration, you realize that it's a simple and it's a beautiful document, and it could be easily understood and retained.
00:14:23.000Everyone should read it every single Independence Day weekend.
00:14:27.000And I had someone email us, well, Charlie, where do I find it?
00:14:33.000If you have email, you probably have it.
00:14:36.000And remember, the military was looking for these 56 signers of the Declaration in a port city.
00:14:43.000What's so interesting, too, is that the opening of the Declaration demotes the signers.
00:14:48.000And it begins so abstractly and universally, and then it gets so narrow.
00:14:54.000But it's very clear that throughout the document that they viewed this as an act of obedience to the eternal.
00:15:02.000That they saw this as an act of faith to God.
00:15:08.000They tried petitions to try to get Britain to get off their back, but they said, we will not be able to exist in the form of government that we know is moral and that is good, that is true, that is biblically based if we do not write this separation.
00:15:47.000The fact there was a time and a place and a manner and a decision could never happen again.
00:15:53.000I want to tell you about one of our new partners here, very important.
00:15:56.000Just when you thought the government would stop trying to take over more of our health care, there's a new very sneaky bill right now that's working its way.
00:16:03.000This is a fact-acting action item right now.
00:16:06.000Senator Bernie Sanders is leading it, total communist, socialist.
00:16:09.000I'm urgently asking you to support the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste to stop the Senate from passing the Sanders Bill, S1339.
00:16:21.000It would raise the price of prescription drugs by making it harder for pharmacy benefit managers to continue to save an average of $1,000 per year for 275 million Americans just like you.
00:16:33.000Bernie, Marxist, communist, bad guy, his bill is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
00:16:38.000He says it will lower prescription drug prices, but we know Bernie Sanders.
00:17:15.000If you are on prescription drugs, if you are a senior and you have kind of Medicare components to it, this could be a massive change, make things more expensive, you know, disrupt co-pays.
00:17:26.000There's all sorts of stuff, okay, that could happen.
00:18:06.000A couple years ago, I would kind of just trip over my words whenever the issue of founding fathers and slavery came up.
00:18:13.000And I probably had a response that some of you give, like, oh, yeah, but we abolished it, and that was then, and now this is then, and this is now.
00:18:19.000That's not even a proper answer because it's not true.
00:18:24.000The founders all knew what they were doing was wrong.
00:18:30.000It makes them sinners, as the great Dr. Larry Arn would say.
00:18:34.000Nine out of 13 of colonies had already abolished slavery by the time the Constitution was ratified.
00:18:38.000The first anti-slavery convention was hosted in Philadelphia in 1775 by Benjamin Franklin.
00:18:45.000Thomas Jefferson admonished King George for bringing the sin of slavery into America in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence.
00:18:55.000The Northwest Ordinance, Article 6, said that no slaves should be in the new territories.
00:19:01.000But Nicole Hannah Jones insists that America's true founding was not in 1776, but 1619.
00:19:21.0001619, in August of 1619, is when the first group of 20 to 30 Africans were sold into the Virginia colony.
00:19:30.000And what the project is basically arguing is that that is actually as foundational to the American story as the year 1776, because nothing would be left untouched by that decision to engage in the institution of slavery.
00:19:42.000And so Nicole Hannah Jones argues that because slavery came to America, somehow that's the founding of America, as if we invented slavery.
00:21:17.000And by the time the founding fathers had died, specifically Adams and Jefferson, and I believe to be the same day, July 4th, 40 or 50 years later, was it 40 years later?
00:21:30.00050 years later, I think it was 1826, to the day that they passed away is really creepy, really weird, by the way.
00:21:38.000On July 4th, slaves and slavery was on its way out.
00:23:11.000Nicole Hannah Jones continues with her gibberish Play Cut 154.
00:23:15.000Our true founding was actually not 1776.
00:23:18.000Our true founding was when we decided to engage in slavery because we know as Thomas Jefferson was writing the declaration that we would issue to the world on July 4th, he owned 130 people.
00:23:28.000And black Americans, enslaved people were not included in those founding documents or were not intended to enjoy the freedoms of the Constitution.
00:23:35.000And we would argue that if you look across American life right now, almost nothing has been left untouched by that legacy.
00:24:04.000So just take an online course with Hillsdale College, any one of them, and then we can talk.
00:24:09.000Prove that you're willing to do the work.
00:24:11.000And that actually proves, that actually builds out the point I meant to complete, which is, I was always a little clumsy and intimidated by this question.
00:24:17.000I'll be very honest, about founding fathers owning slavery because I wasn't educated properly in government schools in the suburbs of Chicago.
00:24:24.000But boy, as soon as I realized the true history of it and it was total reframing that we're all born into a world we didn't create, how the founders already fought to abolish slavery, the history of the abolition movement.
00:24:36.000And what's amazing is we've had plenty of debate nights here, and we're actually going to host a, we're going to post a podcast with Debate Night in the upcoming days, is how unprepared the other side is to talk about this.
00:25:14.000We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
00:25:18.000Do you not find that to be compelling?
00:25:20.000How about Vermont that abolished slavery in 1777, right after the signing of the Declaration of Independence?
00:25:27.000Or all the colonies where black people were free and were able to own property and were able to vote.
00:25:33.000Now, they always point to the Three-Fifths Clause.
00:25:38.000The Three-Fifths Clause was actually an anti-slavery measure put into the Constitution as a way to prevent slave states from having overcounted population, not for rights to vote, but for representation purposes to be able to make slavery permanent.
00:25:53.000It was a backdoor way to actually abolish slavery.
00:25:57.000Thomas Jefferson's anti-slavery passage that was originally in the Declaration of Independence is this.
00:26:05.000He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distance people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation tither.
00:26:25.000This piratical, meaning pirates, warfare of infidel powers is the warfare of a Christian king of Great Britain.
00:26:36.000Determined to keep an open market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this excrable commerce.
00:26:48.000And that this assemblage of whores might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he obtruded them.
00:27:03.000This paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
00:27:12.000Blaming King George for bringing slavery to the colonies.
00:27:16.000But Nicole Hannah Jones would never tell you that.
00:27:20.000Nicole Hannah Jones would never tell you about how slavery was actually ended by the Americans.
00:27:35.000Freedom at CharlieKirk.com, this one here.
00:27:37.000Charlie, were the founding fathers Christian?
00:27:40.000My friends say otherwise, Neil from Youngstown.
00:27:42.000Yes, of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, the great majority, perhaps all, identified themselves as Christian, and all but one were Protestants.
00:27:50.000I think Charles Carroll was the only Catholic that signed the Declaration of Independence from Maryland, otherwise known as Maryland, Maryland.
00:27:58.000Four were either present or former ministers, and a number of the signers were sons of clergy.
00:28:03.000At least half of them had studied divinity at their various universities.
00:28:07.000The denomination breakdowns run as follows: 32 of the signers were over half Episcopalians or Anglicans, the old state of the Church of England.
00:28:13.00013 were Congregationalists, 12 were Presbyterians, and there were two Quakers, two Unitarians, and one Roman Catholic.
00:28:20.000Which was, of course, Charles Carroll from Annapolis, Maryland, Annapolis, Maryland.
00:28:26.000Charlie, do you call it Independence Day or 4th of July?
00:28:34.000I say them interchangeably, to be honest.
00:28:36.000I try to reject 4th of July because it just sounds just kind of so, it's like a throwaway line.
00:28:41.000Like the 4th of July, I think Independence Day, but I think good people say 4th of July and mean really well, good patriotic people.
00:28:48.000We're going to finish this one with the question of: should Christians care about their country?
00:28:52.000That's something we get a lot of, where people say, Charlie, you're engaging in Christian nationalism.
00:28:57.000We have a question from Peter about this saying, Charlie, how do you reconcile wanting what's best for America while also wanting what's best for the gospel?
00:29:07.000What if I told you they actually can be linked together?
00:29:10.000Jeremiah 29:7 says, Demand the welfare of the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.
00:29:36.000I would encourage Adam Kinzinger to reopen the Bible because actually, Adam Kinzinger obviously doesn't know Koigne Greek.
00:29:44.000I don't know what Adam Kinzinger does know.
00:29:46.000But go back to the Koigne Greek that Tyndale actually originally translated, which actually got Tyndale killed, which is when Jesus was at the mouth of the Jordan River at the Caesarea Philippi, Jesus said to his disciples, he went through a dialogue: who do men say that I am?
00:30:01.000Some say that you're Elijah, some say you're John the Baptist, and finally goes on to say, On this rock, build my church, not the right word, actually is the word ecclesia or ecclesia, which is the Greek word for public assembly, meeting place.
00:30:16.000So basically, Jesus said, on this rock, build my community activist organization center that will influence everything that's happening else around you.
00:30:25.000Now, Jesus did not use the word synaguge, he didn't use temple.
00:30:28.000He very well could have used any other word imaginable.
00:30:30.000But he used a secular political term that was widely used throughout Greece, which, by the way, that Greeks, all throughout the polis, the politics, would have ecclesias everywhere, and the two words would be plastered all over the ecclesia, eleutheria and isonomia, which were the two words for freedom and equality.
00:30:48.000I wonder what country had those two words as their founding ideas and documents.
00:30:52.000You see, to push back against what Adam Kinzinger would say, Jesus did not want compartmentalized Christianity.
00:31:11.000So if Adam Kinzinger believes Christians have no place in government, then he believes that he should take out a piece of scissors and take out Esther, Mordecai, Nehemiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, and every other, and Joseph, and every other Old Testament figure that tried to influence secular government for God's chosen purpose.
00:31:27.000The idea of being counselor of the king is not just biblical, but it's a mandate.
00:31:31.000Demand the welfare of the nation that you are in because your nation is tied to your nation's welfare.
00:31:35.000If your pastor, if your church refuses to talk about this, you need to find another pastor or church or challenge them biblically and do so in private.
00:31:42.000If your pastor or church do not celebrate Roe versus Wade being overturned, you need to find another pastor or church or confront them biblically or privately.
00:32:42.000If you pursue virtue, life can be very nasty if you pursue things that are sinful, which basically the word sin means off target from how God wants you to live.
00:32:52.000But how to celebrate Independence Day?
00:32:54.000We should be thankful for what we have, thankful for the nation we live in, and then we have to be motivated towards action, not sitting around on our hands and hoping things get better.
00:33:03.000But what are you doing to pray for your school board members or maybe run for a school board?
00:33:08.000What are you doing to make a meaningful difference in your community?
00:33:16.000The proper way to honor our founding fathers this Independence Day is to read the Declaration of Independence and channel the spirit of self-government and do something constructive and positive, peaceful to make America a better place to live.
00:33:30.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.