On this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, we are joined by First Liberty Institute President and CEO, Kelly Shackelford, to discuss the tragic loss of Charlie Kirk and the impact it has had on the country.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000All right, everybody, welcome to this special long-form interview with Kelly Shackelford, who's the president and CEO of First Liberty Institute.
00:01:20.000Kelly, you were a really close friend of Charlie's.
00:01:24.000You've been on this show many times, and it's an honor to have you in the studio because oftentimes we'd have you and it would be breaking news about something that was going on with the Supreme Court or some case that you were working that our audience needed to know about.
00:01:39.000You're here on campus at Turning Point USA.
00:01:41.000You're visiting and you're supporting the mission that the organization that Charlie built and this legacy that we're all trying to move forward.
00:02:49.000And you are in a very small group of people that Charlie would look to for legal advice and especially understanding the Supreme Court religious liberty.
00:03:00.000And, you know, you have a long history with this show.
00:03:54.000Our campus programming is growing like leaps and bounds.
00:03:57.000So there's a lot of good things happening.
00:03:59.000And you said something when we were meeting before this that it really took me by surprise and it caught my attention, and that is that you make the statement that there is more religious liberty in this country than at any other time in our nation's history.
00:04:42.000They didn't take three, two, they didn't take three.
00:04:45.000We won four religious liberty cases in 13 months.
00:04:50.000And three of these were, I would call, landmark, like shifting 50 years of case law.
00:04:56.000And so the Carson case, which was out of Maine, where they said, and Charlie, we talked about these, by the way, at the time, but you just don't put all this together.
00:05:06.000For 130 years, they've said, parents, you get to pick whatever school you want, public or private, because most of their school districts don't have public schools.
00:05:14.000Just take your voucher money and go, right?
00:05:16.000And then they decided to make one change, but you can't pick in religious schools.
00:05:28.000It's like 20-something years ago that, oh, this would violate separation of church and state if you treat the Christian people the same as you do.
00:06:11.000Victory number two was a case on religious freedom in the workplace.
00:06:16.000And there, what happened is we had a client who was came off the mission field and wanted to work somewhere where he didn't have to work on the Sabbath.
00:06:56.000We did something a little different than we would normally do there.
00:06:59.000We said to the court, this decision from 47 years ago was a lie then, and it's a lie now.
00:07:05.000You know that this is not what these words mean.
00:07:08.000The court ruled 9-0 in our favor and restored that standard of religious freedom.
00:07:13.000I mean, you have other cases here that I want to get to because you have been, I mean, you are the preeminent group working on religious liberty.
00:07:22.000And beyond that, you're just a legal scholar, an expert on this stuff, and we will continue to consult you as these cases come up.
00:07:28.000But I want to dive in a little deeper because you mentioned the separation of church and state.
00:07:33.000And this is, of course, taken from the 1802 letter, Danbury Baptist Association from Thomas Jefferson, where he said a wall of separation between church and state to express his belief that government should not interfere with religious freedom.
00:07:46.000Now, let's go back to what he was probably really saying.
00:07:50.000In 1802, America was 100% Christian, essentially, right?
00:07:57.000So our founders were often concerned with we don't want, you know, the Presbyterians or the Anglicans or whatever taking control of becoming the state religion.
00:08:13.000This is not in the Declaration of Independence.
00:08:16.000And yet we have turned it into this almost mythology of America that there is a separation of church and state.
00:08:24.000Now, in practice, obviously we know that that's impractical.
00:08:27.000It's not possible because all legislation, all policy is an extension of morality.
00:08:34.000It's a codification of a moral precept, which comes, of course, oftentimes.
00:08:40.000Sometimes it comes from academia, but oftentimes, and historically, it comes from our faith, our Christian beliefs in this country.
00:08:48.000So maybe just explain why this has become so insidious, this idea of separation in church and state, and what is true and what is not legally.
00:08:56.000Yeah, well, number one, it's not in the Constitution, right?
00:08:59.000I mean, what does the Constitution say?
00:09:01.000The Constitution, this is the First Amendment, the first two clauses, said that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
00:09:10.000The founders did not want us to establish a national church.
00:09:48.000But they start allowing lawsuits if you're offended by religion.
00:09:52.000So if you wonder why nativity scenes were taken down across the country and menorah is at Hanukkah and Ten Commandments were rolled into the closet and all that, it's not because any of that is in the Constitution.
00:10:27.000And so we've been trying to get rid of it because we knew it really created a government that's hostile to religion, which is not what the founders wanted.
00:10:36.000They don't want the government to put their thumb on the scale in favor of one religion over another and never coercion by government.
00:10:43.000But the idea that the government can't be pro-religion in general is ridiculous.
00:10:48.000I mean, it would strike down the free exercise clause.
00:11:03.000He made a promise to God that after every game, the first thing he would do, everybody's in center field.
00:11:08.000They're making reservations for dinner after the game.
00:11:11.000The first thing he would do is go to a knee and for 15 seconds, thank God for the privilege of coaching those young men.
00:11:18.000And he did it for seven years until the school came to him and said, if you do that again, we're going to fire you.
00:11:24.000And, you know, he's like, what did I fight for if I'm not going to stand up?
00:11:28.000And what kind of example am I to these boys if I run as soon as somebody shoots at me?
00:11:33.000And so he went to a knee and they fired him.
00:11:36.000And unfortunately for him and for us, he lives outside of Seattle, so not exactly sympathetic courts.
00:11:43.000And for seven and a half years, he lost.
00:11:46.000But we finally made it to the Supreme Court and they ruled in our favor.
00:11:49.000This was the first time, by the way, Andrew, that there had ever been a case at the Supreme Court on the rights of teachers or coaches with regard to their faith.
00:12:18.000And as of three years ago, because of the success that you guys had at First Liberty Institute, what is now the precedent that has been set?
00:12:27.000The precedent, the new test is if there's a religious activity and it's occurring around or in government, if it's a part of our history, if it's consistent with our history and our traditions as a country, it's presumptively constitutional.
00:12:44.000Thanksgiving holds so many memories, and I'm sure it's the same for you.
00:12:49.000Right now, there's a girl finding out she's pregnant.
00:12:52.000In the next couple of weeks, she's going to make a decision.
00:12:54.000And whatever decision she makes will become her memory of this Thanksgiving for the rest of her life.
00:13:00.000What will she be thankful for a year from now?
00:14:05.000And, you know, you saw that debate clip between him and Andrew Cuomo, where he essentially guilted him and shamed him, saying that you don't know the mosques that you've visited.
00:14:17.000And so it shocked the nation outside at least New York City because it's like, oh, all of a sudden, in order to be a mayoral candidate at a big city in America, now you have to go service this new population.
00:14:30.000Historically, there is no doubt, there is no argument that historically America has been a Christian nation, whether that be Baptists or Quakers or Anglicans or Catholics or, and you could make the case for the, there's been a Jewish presence in the country for a historical president.
00:14:47.000So at what point, because the pushback would be like, okay, so we have more religious freedom now than we've ever had.
00:14:53.000Obviously, as a Christian, I want to be able to express my religious freedom.
00:14:58.000But what is good for the goose is then good for the gander.
00:15:01.000And now we have a rising population of Islam, of Muslims in this country.
00:15:07.000And so what rights do they now have if it now has to fit within this other precedent of historical consistency?
00:15:15.000Well, you know, first, people will ask a lot of times because we have synagogue cases across the country just wanting to be synagogues and they're being persecuted.
00:15:23.000It's ridiculous that this is happening in the United States.
00:15:26.000And they'll say, well, what about religious freedom for Muslims?
00:15:48.000They were trying to build that community out in Texas.
00:15:50.000It was easily taken care of by law in Texas.
00:15:53.000In fact, what they were doing in excluding others and doing that type of an effort probably violates securities laws.
00:16:00.000And the attorney general is now beginning to do a securities lawsuit against them for what they were trying to do.
00:16:07.000So I say, and it reminds me a little bit, gosh, I don't know how many, maybe 30 years ago, 25 years ago, when Bible clubs and schools became a thing and people tried to stop it.
00:16:20.000It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
00:16:24.000And there was a great victory for religious freedom in that, yeah, you can't allow clubs at school and then exclude the Christian club or the Bible club.
00:16:31.000And people would come to me and they would say, if we allow these Bible clubs, they're going to allow Satan clubs.
00:16:37.000They have to allow them too, you know, because of religious freedom.
00:16:40.000And I would say, you know, our kids say they'd love to know who they are.
00:16:48.000And, you know, 10 years later, there were 33,000 Bible clubs in public schools.
00:16:54.000And there really weren't much of the others.
00:16:56.000Now, I know the Muslim community is more organized, but I really think the truth always wins over the darkness.
00:17:03.000So if somebody's trying to do something and change our country, I mean, there's not a Muslim country in the world that you can find that really has religious freedom.
00:17:11.000The reason we have religious freedom in this country, even for people who disagree with Christians, is because of the JAO Christian belief that a relationship between you and God is between you and God, and the government has no right to come in between that.
00:17:36.000The more that we import people that happen to be Muslim, the more that they're going to exercise politically their political rights, and they're going to try and leverage that.
00:17:45.000You saw that with Zora Amdani and Andrew Cuomo.
00:17:48.000The more that they're going to try and form communities where they get to express a cultural norm that we would not consider traditionally American.
00:17:57.000So that's kind of the basis of my question.
00:18:00.000So you're saying that it has to be consistent with a historic norm, right?
00:18:52.000Oftentimes when we take readings, Council President, it's the ambient noise that's even louder than the call to prayer, to be honest with you.
00:18:57.000The truck will go by hit a pot wall, and it's much louder than the call to prayer.
00:19:00.000The two or three evaluations that we have had in the last couple years have been met with compliance as soon as we've talked to the religious institutions.
00:19:08.000It's no different than church bells that you might hear on Sunday.
00:19:11.000So you got that, and then you've got this guy, Mehdi Hassan, who actually comes by way of the UK.
00:19:17.000He was an MSNBC anchor, and now he's just basically a troublemaker and a provocateur.
00:19:23.000I think that if you can play church bells, you can pray the call to prayer.
00:19:26.000We are as American as anyone else, and don't take any BS from any.
00:19:29.000Okay, so this is going to be their argument now as the population of Muslims increases in the country while we continue to issue 1.2 million green cards every year.
00:19:38.000And a lot of those are coming from Muslim countries.
00:19:40.000And now, even increasingly, if we get people immigrating from Europe, they might be Muslims.
00:19:45.000So the point is, They're going to assert their religious freedoms because this is a country historically that has exercised a broad view of what religious freedom is.
00:19:56.000But you're saying there's a historical precedent.
00:19:59.000So, I'm just, again, I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here, which is a terrible expression, by the way, to use in a religious freedom discussion.
00:20:07.000But so, if they come in and they start saying, well, you know, it's no different than church bells, and you come in and you say, well, it has to be consistent with historic precedent.
00:20:16.000Is there a sense of what you would look at it and say, well, because this nation is historically Christian or Catholic, that would you would have broader freedoms in those respects to exercise certain religious freedoms than you would if they want to start doing Sharia law or if they want to start doing genital mutilation, if they want to start doing just Muslim call to prayer?
00:20:36.000Yeah, I think it wouldn't be based upon the religion, it would be based on the practice.
00:20:44.000So, in other words, if a Christian can pray, you know, somebody could say, Well, the history was most of the prayers are Christians, so the Jews can't pray.
00:20:54.000The whole idea was they were praying, right?
00:20:58.000And I think the situation here with calls to prayer, that's a noise issue, right?
00:21:05.000I mean, if the idea was that, well, we don't want them to be able to send an email to their friends and tell them to come to prayer, well, we'll allow the Christians to do it, but not the Muslims.
00:21:19.000And if the noise is really violating and disturbing people, they need to control it with noise.
00:21:25.000Now, the things that people are really concerned about, like creating Sharia law and things like this, those would never be allowed or consistent with our constitution in this country.
00:21:35.000So those things would take away freedoms.
00:21:38.000And those things, so you always have to ask yourself, what is the religious practice that they're asking for?
00:21:46.000And is it consistent with our history and tradition if the government is involved?
00:21:51.000If not, is it just something that is, you know, we would want to protect for all faiths?
00:21:57.000Because that's really what the religious freedoms is about.
00:22:00.000Yeah, I mean, in this Muslim call to prayer, when they start congregating in certain municipalities like they have in Dearborn, that's going to be an increasing issue because that's something that they demand.
00:22:09.000They demand these five times a day prayers.
00:22:11.000They all have to point towards Mecca and they get on their prayer mats.
00:22:14.000And it's, you know, and I think at some level, for a lot of us, you know, it's just simply offensive because, A, we believe that, you know, and you don't have to chime in here.
00:22:27.000But it's offensive because, you know, we love our culture.
00:22:31.000We love the American Christian heritage that we have, that we inherited from England and from, you know, the Magna Carta and, you know, all the way back, the Black Road Regimen, the revivals that gave birth to American liberty.
00:22:49.000And so we don't want to hear Muslim calls to prayer in our neighborhoods.
00:22:53.000I don't want my kids to have to go to school and be taught how to be respectful to this other culture that I didn't have to grow up with, but all of a sudden they decided to move here.
00:23:02.000And when you also think about the fact that they have 50 Muslim-majority, 50-plus Muslim-majority nations on planet Earth that they could move to, why are you insisting on moving to the West that is Christian?
00:23:12.000Even if we're not, you know, everybody's going to church on Sunday, this is, in our turns of phrases, our rules, our norms, our customs, the holidays that we celebrate.
00:23:26.000We do not want to have to listen to the call of prayer.
00:23:30.000And I understand you have a different challenge as a lawyer to sort of interpret the laws and the statutes on the books.
00:23:35.000But what are the statutes on the books or what is lacking that would help protect and insulate our culture from, I would say an increasingly hostile force that wants to assert cultural dominance on Americans and the West.
00:23:50.000Yeah, I think the idea of what you can do about different religions that would come in and really aren't religions.
00:24:05.000Any religion that comes into the United States, it doesn't want to simulate.
00:24:09.000That's the whole purpose of the United States is assimilation.
00:24:12.000It's the melting pot, not creating a new government from some other source.
00:24:19.000And so I think the issue there is not the religious freedom side.
00:24:24.000the immigration and who we're allowing in and making sure that we are the united states that we we have a certain history and tradition and approach and we love diversity if they're coming here for the ideals of america freedom um but i will say i will say we don't have we don't have a problem with ethnic diversity necessarily right We have a problem with cultural diversity.
00:24:44.000Now, it's not to say that I don't love my Italian grandmother's cannolis.
00:24:49.000Obviously, there's certain things, but if you expect to come here into this country and you expect to then matriculate your son or daughter into my kids' school, and now we have to make a carve-out for Muslim prayer five times a day that impacts my child's learning experience,
00:25:05.000or they have to now be educated on how to be incorporated into that experience, much like we've seen candidly with the secular cult of LGBTQ plus whatever, as Charlie always called the alphabet mafia.
00:25:31.000But this is an insidious cultural coercive force that, you know, we have to, yes, the immigration is key, and I totally agree with that.
00:25:41.000We've been hitting that hard for a long time on this show.
00:25:44.000You know, we're doing 1.2 million green cards a year, and we don't vet for American values.
00:25:49.000We don't vet for anything like that because we're a bunch of suckers and we get taken advantage of.
00:25:53.000And my argument is like, can we, at least as a first step, go back to pre-1990 Immigration Act with George H.W. Bush, which took it from 500,000 green cards a year to 1.2 million?
00:26:02.000We do not need the state of Montana every year in this country or the state of Arkansas every three years in this country with legal immigrants, especially as AI is coming.
00:26:11.000I mean, we're already seeing Amazon has just announced they're going to probably cut about 600,000 jobs and replace them with robots over the next couple of years.
00:26:28.000Yes, let's deal with the immigration thing first, but we already have a problem that's here, or at least a potential conflicts of interest that are here.
00:26:37.000And you see that with the Mehdi Hassan clip.
00:26:39.000So I'm just trying to drill down on this piece of do we have more because we have more precedent historically?
00:26:47.000Do we have more rights to this than there's going to be more practices that are more consistent with the Judeo-Christian heritage or the founding that are going to be laid in that are not going to, that wouldn't be part of history tradition from other religions.
00:27:13.000That's what the whole issue with Coach Kennedy's case and this idea of you're not doing the lemon approach where, oh, you're on government grounds.
00:27:25.000Well, gosh, you can't do any of this religious stuff.
00:27:28.000They said, no, no, as long as it's part of our tradition.
00:27:32.000We're about to argue a case at the Supreme Court in less than two months over whether you have a right to share your faith in a public park.
00:27:40.000So you begin to wonder sometimes we begin to lose who we are as a country, but I feel good and I'm very hopeful we'll win that case.
00:28:28.000So that's one of the beautiful things about the Coach Kennedy case is all these things that we haven't been allowed to do that's created almost a naked public square, right?
00:28:37.000We should be, I mean, I love the fact that we can have a nativity scene at Christmas on the government lawn.
00:29:08.000It's every person is valuable in the eyes of God.
00:29:11.000You know, all those principles start to flood back into our country.
00:29:15.000But when we remove those from the public arena, we began to lose those.
00:29:19.000When you push the Ten Commandments in the closet and you do all these things, which is why I love, if you've seen a number of states are now passing laws, they're putting up Ten Commandments posters in their schools and they're teaching about these things as part of our history and traditions and the beginning of our laws and our thoughts in our country.
00:29:37.000That'll really change us, I think, long term.
00:29:40.000And I would much rather have that approach that allows for more freedom, even if there's some things that maybe people don't like.
00:29:48.000As long as they're not infringing other people's freedoms, they're welcome to go.
00:29:53.000What if you could make the argument that the Muslim call to prayer five times a day is infringing on my freedom not to have to hear it?
00:30:00.000Although they would say the same thing about church bells, which is objectively a beautiful thing to hear.
00:30:05.000I mean, you know, I mean, I would argue that even Muslims would think, you know, oh, that's a nice sounding tone.
00:30:13.000I think they'll have to have neutral on that.
00:30:15.000I think they'll have to have a neutral law, whatever it is, right?
00:30:17.000If it's a noise level, if it's the number of times a day, something, I mean, people, there is a right somewhat, I mean, you would want to make that a right in your community to not be disrupted by sounds all day, right?
00:30:29.000I mean, it would be miserable if you were right next to one of these places and you couldn't do your business.
00:32:15.000Tell us about that because you are directly involved in that.
00:32:18.000It's the first time it's ever been done in the United States.
00:32:21.000Commissions generally report to an agency or department or something, and I think they send a report and it disappears in the back of some room.
00:33:31.000She's a wonderful woman, 33 years teaching.
00:33:34.000And if you could see the pictures, you know, if you see it online, they've got a desk and they've got a little wall behind them that's their personal wall.
00:36:13.000This is the hostility that goes on to teachers, to kids, to parents around the country that we have to fight every day all over the country.
00:36:22.000Yeah, I mean, and then there's this, I mean, she's just such a sweetheart.
00:36:25.000I hope, I mean, it sounds like you guys already should have dealt with this with the Lemon case where you got that reverse with Coach Kennedy.
00:36:31.000All of this should take care of it, but we're fighting.
00:36:34.000We have one of the biggest law firms in the world joined us against this school district, but they're refusing to back down.
00:37:11.000Talking about, you know, I failed you, Papa Guy.
00:37:14.000I mean, oh, that's gut-wrenching to just hear you even say that because you know that her faith was so sincere that she knew not to hide her faith or let them persecute her.
00:37:32.000These are the people that you do want leading our children, not the ones that are doing hand signs to their neck in Nathan Hale Elementary, Lucy Martinez, that still hasn't been fired as of this recording, at least.
00:37:43.000And so we're hoping that that happens.
00:37:45.000And by the way, you know, some people are like, oh, well, you know, they're upset that we're saying, hey, if you celebrated Charlie Kirk's murder, that you should not be employed to teach our school at our schools, whether that be K-8 or it be a university like Illinois State, where there was a teacher's assistant who tried to flip over one of the tables of our kids that were tabling out in the square.
00:38:06.000And that teaching assistant has been fired by Illinois State University.
00:39:03.000I mean, we, you know, that should be automatic.
00:39:07.000Especially somebody as good and wonderful and as decent.
00:39:10.000I understand people have different algorithms and they get fed all of this stuff, which is why we've made it a point on the show to just debunk these out-of-context clips or the divorce from the argument that preceded it for 15 minutes.
00:39:23.000And they take one little snippet and these people go around saying Charlie was a bigot or misogynist or something.
00:40:35.000And they go through maybe a couple years together.
00:40:37.000Maybe this was just a one-off at this school, but yeah, my daughter has this where she was three or four years older, and they kind of have a big buddy.
00:40:45.000And so this kid was a fifth grade, 11, right?
00:40:49.000He's going to be a big buddy to a kindergartner.
00:40:51.000And his job was to kind of shepherd him through the process, be a mentor, big friend, big brother.
00:40:56.000And he gets asked to read a book about LGBT whatever.
00:41:02.000And I think asking him to ask this little kindergartner to question their gender and to take out a paper and draw on it to show what gender they are.
00:41:12.000So this, you know, little Shay is just a heart of gold.
00:41:16.000And he said, I can't do that to my kindergarten buddy.
00:41:20.000And he and another child there both went home to their parents and told them.
00:41:24.000And the parents went to the school and said, you know, you need to be notifying the parents if you're doing something like this.
00:41:30.000And number two, we need an exemption for our child because this would violate their faith.
00:41:35.000The school answered, you have no right to be notified.
00:41:44.000Well, you religious people are backwards and we have to show you how you should believe about transgenderism and all these things.
00:41:51.000So now we end up going to federal court and we did win that it is a violation of the Constitution to not notify parents about something like this.
00:42:00.000And you do have to provide a religious exemption.
00:42:02.000The school, by the way, because these kids stood up, I mean, these are 11-year-olds, had a pink out the hate day to have them bullied.
00:43:08.000When I was in fifth grade, my school forced me to teach my kindergarten buddy about changing his gender using a book called My Shadow is Pink.
00:43:16.000The book said you can choose your gender based on feelings instead of how God made us.
00:43:21.000I knew this was not right, but I was afraid of getting in trouble.
00:43:25.000After my family spoke up, the school treated us badly, and kids started bullying me and my brother because of our faith.
00:43:31.000And the school did nothing to stop it.
00:43:33.000It hurt a lot, but I kept trusting God.
00:43:36.000I believe kids like me should be able to live on faith at school without being forced to go against what we believe.
00:43:43.000I hope no other family has to go through what mine did.
00:44:09.000And the testimony of he and his mom, which came after the president left, where they sat, it was about five minutes, was one of the most touching things you've ever seen, too, because his mom started breaking down at times.
00:44:42.000And that we're going to come up with specific things that can be done to.
00:44:45.000Can you, I mean, I don't want to put the cart before the horse here.
00:44:48.000I know that you have a July 4th, 2026 deadline to get these recommendations to the president.
00:44:53.000But just explore in general, what are some of the things, what are the levers that the president can pull, and how do we make some of this stuff permanent?
00:45:02.000Well, number one, there are obvious things he can do immediately.
00:45:06.000So, for instance, we've had Department of Education guidelines for years on religious freedom in the schools to try to help schools because there's a lot of confusion.
00:45:15.000Obviously, it'll have some of the more recent good victories, like the Coach Kennedy case, as well as the Mahmood decision that came this summer on the rights of parents over their kids in the schools.
00:45:32.000And this is one of those unique things.
00:45:34.000You had Jewish parents, Muslim parents, Christian parents all together.
00:45:39.000Well, there is some common ground with the Muslim community when it comes to parental notifications and not wanting their kids to get trans.
00:45:47.000I mean, so there are areas where we can cooperate.
00:46:07.000But the point is, all this is going to be, and I think in this new Department of Education guidelines that will be released.
00:46:13.000Well, my proposal, if I can get the rest of the commissioners on the commission to agree, and I think they seemed agreeable, is I think every school district who receives federal money, which is every school district, should have to certify that they've used these guidelines and they've trained all of their administrators, all of their teachers, so that they understand the religious freedoms or parental rights that the people in their district have.
00:46:40.000If they don't and they refuse, pull the funding.
00:46:44.000I mean, why should we ever give funding to a school district that is violating the United States Constitution?
00:46:50.000And so if they are, and we gave, you saw examples like Coach Kennedy and others, who even after they won their lawsuit, the persecution continued.
00:47:00.000They still were trying to violate the constituents.
00:47:03.000At that point, to me, they're doing it intentionally, and they should have all their money yanked away.
00:48:54.000So I want to end this conversation on kind of a question of judicial history.
00:49:04.000Because one of the things we were talking about is that the courts really went wayward during the 50s, 60s, 70s.
00:49:11.000And, you know, now the liberals are freaking out because there's a 6-3 majority of Republican appointees.
00:49:18.000We lose Amy Comey Barrett sometimes, and if Kavanaugh goes wayward, Justice Roberts goes wayward.
00:49:24.000So it's a little tenuous, but we've got over your shoulder there, we've got Justice Clarence Thomas, a picture of him on the wall, and we've got Alito.
00:49:33.000You know, Gorsuch has been pretty good.
00:49:36.000So the question is, just walk us through, I mean, you know, the 20th century is a long time, but if you had to kind of put it into epics or eras of liberal courts, conservative courts, there really does appear to be something that got in the water after World War II.
00:49:53.000And maybe it took a little while to kind of metastasize, but it was in the 50s, 60s, 70s, we really got a lot of these terrible rulings, whether it's abortion or religious liberty.
00:50:05.000Just explain, give us a 30,000-foot view.
00:50:08.000Well, really, what we're talking about is the 60s, right?
00:50:12.000I mean, think of the hippies, the whole, you know, sexual revolution, all the stuff that really went against all the Judeo-Christian values that the country had.
00:50:26.000And that, you know, what I always tell people, they go, how can these judges issue these opinions?
00:50:31.000Like, they'll say, well, that's not what the statute says.
00:50:34.000And I would tell them, how many pastors are not doing what the scripture says?
00:50:38.000How many of them are reinterpreting what it says?
00:50:41.000So why wouldn't you think the judges would do the same thing?
00:50:44.000If they're getting loose with the truth, they're getting loose with the truth.
00:51:09.000And so you had a lot of these really bad decisions, including on religious freedom, on all the kind of values that the country was built upon.
00:51:17.000It's just wild to me because, you know, I wasn't alive during the 60s.
00:51:20.000I don't know when you were born, but you think about a country that was so Christian, right?
00:51:24.000I mean, a lot of people don't know there was a religious revival that happened in the 50s.
00:51:27.000That's when Billy Graham's tent revivals really kicked off.
00:51:30.000The Catholics were surging in the 1950s.
00:51:33.000And yet somehow, upon that cultural backdrop, you had this emergence of one of the most virulently liberal Supreme Courts.
00:51:49.000And then what follows that is, this is the other thing, you talk about history, is you had a Democrat Party that was committed to picking people that would get to the results they wanted to get to, right?
00:52:01.000So they seem to never miss with their Supreme Court picks.
00:52:05.000Whereas the Republicans, they would put a Republican on and they would be good one time and bad the next, right?
00:52:12.000And the reason for that is the Republicans weren't picking based upon a real analysis of the life of this person.
00:52:23.000They would pick based upon, this is the way D.C. kind of works.
00:52:55.000What is their judicial philosophy that is actually lived out?
00:52:58.000Are they willing to restrain themselves and not take power?
00:53:02.000Are they willing to pay a price to do the right thing?
00:53:06.000Those are the kind of questions you've got to ask.
00:53:08.000And when you do, and what I would say is on the Republican side, everything shifted with the Harriet Myers nomination because it was another one of those.
00:53:44.000And so since then, it has all been about not what people say, but show me the proof.
00:53:51.000And that is what is so dangerous because D.C. doesn't operate that way.
00:53:56.000And so if you don't have a real pushback on these judges at this, especially Supreme Court, but even the Federal Court of Appeals, these are lifetime appointments.
00:54:05.000Then you're going to end up with pushing friends because that's how everything works there.
00:54:14.000And nobody's, I'm telling you, Andrew, last time under the first Trump, the first nominees for Supreme Court, we had these people pushing these people, and we would go to the White House and say, have you read this opinion?
00:54:27.000And we watched their hair light on fire.
00:54:29.000Nobody had bothered to read the opinions that they had even written.
00:54:43.000What is the proof of who they will be on the Supreme Court?
00:54:47.000I mean, I bet if they looked at your life, Andrew, and they're trying to figure out what kind of, they would have a lot of proof points of who you are, where you stand, whether you're willing to do the right thing versus these people that hide for 50 years and then they show up and we're supposed to think, well, they're going to be really good.
00:55:05.000Yeah, I mean, on that note, even when you said that, are they willing to pay a price for it?
00:55:09.000And, you know, I remember when I first started working with Charlie eight years ago, it was something I had to contend with because I was living in Los Angeles at the time.
00:55:18.000And, you know, I was like, well, listen, if I join up publicly with Charlie Kirk, there's going to be a price for that.
00:55:24.000And ultimately, I decided, yeah, let's do it.
00:55:26.000Like, I felt like the Lord was calling me to do it.
00:55:30.000And when you make those kind of decisions in your life, where there's no hiding behind anything, where you have to come out and pick a side, that tells you a lot about a person.
00:55:38.000It's hard to quantify, but it's a really important character proof point that you need to consider when you're picking these lifetime appointments.
00:55:46.000And, you know, you're also working on this at the appellate court level and some of these district court levels.
00:55:52.000So you guys have, I mean, I don't know what you can share, Kelly, but you guys have put together a war room of sorts to assess nominees at even the lower courts.
00:56:05.000We were tired of having to hope about nominees because, I mean, our job at First Liberty is protecting everybody's religious freedoms, right?
00:56:14.000And, well, if you don't have good judges, they're not going to be protected.
00:57:02.000We have a whole team, a large team of people.
00:57:06.000We also have very sophisticated AI experts in this area, all a part of the process to make sure that we know everything about everybody because it's too important to our freedoms.
00:57:17.000And we just provide those so that ultimately the ultimate decision maker, the president, has the information to make good choices.
00:57:25.000So that's our goal is, you know, in a way, I feel like my goal is, our goal as an organization, Eve, is to stand in front of the booth and say, my hand up saying nobody gets through who's not pro-religious freedom.
00:57:39.000And if we get run over by a train sometime, then we'll get run over by the train.
00:57:43.000But we're going to stand and do our job and make sure the information is provided so that people aren't surprised like we were for many years.
00:57:52.000And if you ever need any help getting people's attention with some of that information, please let me know because you're so right.
00:57:58.000The judiciary is so critically important, not only to religious liberties, but all of our liberties.
00:58:03.000And, you know, as the president has been the victim of this black robe tyranny, as we've seen, this is becoming more and more of an issue.
00:58:11.000Even after the Supreme Court sort of limited some of these national injunctions, they're finding workarounds by using class actions and all this kind of stuff.
00:58:19.000So please tell everybody how they can follow you, Kelly.
00:58:22.000Your guys' great work at First Liberty Institute.
00:58:25.000Well, I'd say one of the things is go to firstliberty.org, our website, and you'll see a little bit of the way down it says be an insider.
00:58:33.000And if they sign up, every Friday, we try to send out an email that lists the four or five biggest actions of the week on religious freedom.
00:58:43.000It might be some judges that went through.
00:58:45.000But we try to keep everybody up to date so they can really know what's happening because most of the stuff will not appear in the middle of the day.
00:58:52.000It's not headline news, but it affects your life.
00:58:54.000So firstliberty.org and then Be an Insider is a great way.
00:58:57.000Of course, we also have Twitter and Facebook and everything else that's out there that they can go and follow as well.
00:59:04.000But I just really think so much of what's happened recently, we've been trained for 50 years about these religious freedoms that we supposedly don't have.
00:59:12.000And because of these recent decisions, these wins, we flipped all that.
00:59:16.000And most people have no idea what they can do now.
00:59:19.000And so I just think people will get the information.
00:59:23.000They're going to find out that there's a lot more they can do than they think and that can change their community.
00:59:29.000And I hope they, you know, they even share that with other people because the more people that get emboldened, the more we'll take our country back to what it should be.