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00:00:43.000This episode is a conversation I had with my pastor, Pastor Rob McCoy, and Pastor John Randall from Calvary Chapel, San Juan, Capistrano, or is it Capistrano?
00:01:34.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:42.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:54.000So I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, was saved right around when I was in fifth or sixth grade.
00:03:01.000I said the words, but I didn't really quite understand what it meant.
00:03:04.000But saying the words actually wasn't meaningless because that was kind of a very specific pivot point in my life.
00:03:10.000And then as I grew older, the words started to mean a lot more when you start to realize the suffering that you kind of have to endure, the difficulty you have to go through in life.
00:03:18.000And the harder you try, the more you're actually going to slip up and fall in what grace actually means.
00:03:23.000And so, you know, I speak on college campuses quite often, really haven't the last nine months for obvious reasons.
00:03:30.000And I get asked about all sorts of different things.
00:03:32.000Obviously, we lead with the political side and the philosophical side, but people ask me all the time about kind of religion and why I believe what I believe.
00:03:42.000And, you know, what is exactly what Christians just like, Christianity is just like every other religion is what I get from a lot of people.
00:03:48.000And I'm sure there's some people here tonight or might be watching on the live stream or outside that might not yet be saved.
00:03:53.000And so it's just, there's a real simple way that I'm able to distill the gospel.
00:08:03.000She knows, you know, kind of this partnership that we're forming is going to be one that is going to obviously be under a lot of attacks from the enemy, right?
00:09:30.000So we actually, one of our people at Turning Point USA, Tyler, originally wanted to hire Erica to come work for us at Turning Point USA, which started as a job interview.
00:09:45.000I was like, yeah, that dog's not going to hunt here.
00:09:48.000So let's get on to like other business here.
00:09:54.000And so I was very direct at the end of the conversation.
00:09:59.000And I was like, look, I'm not going to hire you, but I'd like to date you.
00:10:05.000No, by the way, I tell young men all the time, be this direct because women now, they're not used to it now because everyone's playing games.
00:10:12.000They're doing all this weird social media stuff.
00:11:16.000We sold almost 100,000 copies and it was awesome, beyond anything I could have imagined.
00:11:21.000And really what bothered me is that the way that Trump's supporters and President Trump was being described at the time was as if there's no philosophical basis for anything he's doing.
00:11:31.000It's just all just people that are following him that are less than desirable and he has no idea what he's doing.
00:12:51.000Well, first of all, it's a movement that wants to give a voice to people that shower before work and after work.
00:12:57.000It wants to give a voice to people that didn't necessarily go to Ivy League schools, to police officers, to firefighters, to military veterans, to carpenters, to welders, to entrepreneurs, to people that might have quote unquote been in flyover country, that were always kind of the pawns of the political elite in both parties.
00:13:17.000It's a party that, quite honestly, is a little bit sick and tired of these endless wars while we can't even take care of our own affairs here at home, or we're playing war games in the Middle East without any sort of desire, any sort of specific outcome being able to detail.
00:13:29.000It's a party that understands that without a vibrant manufacturing base, you actually don't have a country.
00:13:35.000It's a party that actually wants immigration policy to benefit the American people and American citizens, not some weird esoteric bumper sticker from some person in Malibu that has the comfort and the ability to say that we should just open up our country to every single person always, regardless.
00:13:51.000Why they live behind the house of games?
00:13:53.000And so, but more than anything else, it's a movement and a party now that the president will be exiting office.
00:14:00.000Hopefully, that will be able to keep and moving forward is that listens to the people and listens to their concerns and their anxieties.
00:14:06.000And one of the reasons why President Trump was able to get elected in the first place is that you had multiple decades of people that had valid concerns that were completely and totally ignored and silenced.
00:14:18.000Like, shut up person in Ohio, it doesn't matter your factory is closed.
00:14:22.000Like, shut up person in Maine, it doesn't matter your kid is overdosing on meth.
00:14:26.000You know, shut up person in El Paso, Texas, doesn't matter if the border remains wide open and children are getting sex trafficked across the border.
00:14:33.000All that matters is corporate tax cuts.
00:14:35.000And President Trump, in his very unique style, came onto the political scene and really highlighted three big issues that the Republican Party never wanted to talk about, which is immigration, trade, and corporate skepticism.
00:14:50.000And those three things I think are very, very healthy, especially right now.
00:14:54.000And so that's really what the book is about.
00:14:57.000And it's more important than ever because this, the kind of the argument over the Republican Party is already beginning.
00:15:03.000Like, what kind of party are we going to be?
00:15:05.000I want to be a party where President Donald Trump gets called all these awful things.
00:15:23.000And so he was the first candidate as a Republican since Reagan to win these traditionally Democrat areas where people predominantly worked with their hands, where people were in the manufacturing, the trades.
00:15:42.000And so that's something that I think is really, really important.
00:15:45.000And also, I want to say this as well: President Donald Trump was the most pro-life president in American history, and he deserves a lot of credit for that.
00:15:53.000And I have a whole part in my book about this where, albeit at times, it can be very confusing for certain people that haven't really understood it and studied it in the Christian world saying, how could a three-times married, twice-divorced guy who used to donate to planned parent to be so pro-life?
00:16:11.000It's like, well, maybe God was working really significantly in his life where he was courageously pro-life.
00:16:18.000First president ever speak at the March for Life.
00:16:19.000And so the kind of party in the movement I want to be in is a party that is unapologetically pro-life, that believes the church is essential, that wants to protect the dignity of the American worker, that wants to end these senseless foreign wars, that actually wants to challenge big tech with their crackdown on free speech in this country.
00:16:38.000That's the type of party that we want.
00:16:43.000We'll come back to more of that in a minute, but I'd like to, for a moment, kind of discuss, if we may, gentlemen, the subject of the pandemic.
00:16:51.000And I just want to talk a little bit about that.
00:16:52.000Of course, we've had people, maybe you have, people who have been hospitalized.
00:16:56.000We've had people who have lost loved ones who either died from COVID or died with it.
00:17:03.000And so many have been affected by this.
00:17:06.000And I'm just curious what your perspective is, Charlie, on this pandemic, obviously, how it's affected our country and why this has become so polarizing, so political in the days that we've been living the last eight, nine months.
00:17:23.000I also want Rob to comment on this because he's been keeping his church open and has dealt with a lot of this.
00:17:29.000Look, it's a real virus with real life consequences.
00:17:34.000And I don't think anyone should say it's not real or anything.
00:17:37.000However, let's talk about the facts of what we're dealing with, who's actually at risk, and what is the cost of any measure to try to mitigate that risk, which is what a mature society and a civilization should be doing.
00:17:49.000Where as soon as after two weeks to slow the spread, which we're still doing, I guess, right?
00:17:52.000We're still in this two weeks to slow the spread nonsense, where we should have asked ourselves the question: okay, now we know how it works and operates.
00:17:59.000How much individual liberty and multi-decades of economic progress are we willing to throw away?
00:18:05.000And what can we actually prove the lives we're going to be saved through the lockdowns?
00:18:11.000And a mature society would have weighed those costs and benefits and would have said very simply and clearly that if you're over the age of 65, you should take this unbelievably seriously.
00:18:59.000We tried to kill a mouse with a Tomahawk missile.
00:19:02.000And the cost to our society Because of the lockdowns, not just the virus, will take decades, if ever, to be able to untangle from suicide, mental health, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, job displacement, business closures, all of it.
00:19:18.000And not to mention the cost that it did on just the psychological, sociological, and even spiritual health of so many people.
00:19:27.000And so, one of the reasons why it became so divided, unnecessarily, is because you saw a lot of governors, like the governor you have in this state, that quite honestly awful that never followed the science.
00:19:43.000He followed the scientists that he liked.
00:19:45.000And Rob was fighting up against it so much.
00:19:49.000Yeah, Rob, I'd like to ask that because that's a very good question that segues into something I was wondering.
00:19:54.000As you look at the different governors, as you pointed out, our governor and all that he's done, or I should say hasn't done.
00:20:00.000I don't know what he's doing, but you would assume that those who ran for office and got in genuinely cared and were concerned about their citizens.
00:22:07.000And in the history of the United States, a 12-month period, the largest number of opioid deaths in our nation's history.
00:22:18.000And then we get this from them that we don't love our neighbor.
00:22:22.000And the judge, when I had to sit before him when we violated the restraining order, he said, you need to look at the second greatest commandment: love your neighbor as you love yourself.
00:23:01.000And I'm not dismissing the 412 tragic deaths.
00:23:05.000But what I am focusing on towards my neighbors is the fact that we have devastated Californians with this tyrannical stupidity that is unacceptable.
00:23:19.000You know, Charlie, we were talking about how up in San Jose we were dialoguing about what's going on up there at Calvary San Jose and what they're experiencing.
00:23:26.000Yeah, and I just want to add on to Rob's point.
00:23:29.000That's 412 deaths under a lockdown, right?
00:23:32.000And so the virus still spread in the midst of a lockdown.
00:23:36.000And so what the public health officials never were able to clearly communicate, because they've never been grilled correctly, because you have a one-party rule in this state, is what does success look like?
00:23:46.000Give us exactly what you believe a lockdown will achieve.
00:23:51.000And then also tell us the costs: suicide, overdose, addiction, alcoholism, abuse, weigh them against each other, and then we'll have a better informed decision.
00:23:59.000Instead, it's we must lock down at all costs.
00:24:02.000And just so we in America are so unbelievably blessed, we will get out of this because of our incredible amount of ingenuity, entrepreneurship, wealth, and all this.
00:24:13.000Just so everyone knows, hundreds of millions of people across the world have re-entered absolute dire poverty and starvation and famine because we shut down, not because they shut down.
00:24:24.000All the supply chains got screwed up, all of it.
00:24:26.000And they were dependent on the Western world being open.
00:24:30.000You want to look after the least of these?
00:24:32.000Go explain that to people in Honduras and Nicaragua and El Salvador and all across Africa that are now going back into 1940s-style poverty that took decades to break them out of because you shut off the Western supply chain.
00:24:48.000I can't think of anything more immoral than that.
00:24:50.000You know, I question on this too, because obviously, for some of you believers attend church and so forth, you know, Rob, this comes up, and maybe Charlie can weigh on this too.
00:24:57.000You know, you heard a lot about the Romans 13.
00:24:59.000Hey, you guys are, and so the church being attacked by the church, which I found difficult.
00:25:04.000I thought we were on the same team, but we couldn't disagree agreeably.
00:25:07.000But that came up, and you're not loving your neighbor, and also you are violating Romans 13.
00:25:13.000You want to put that in context for us so we understand, you guys, exactly what that means.
00:25:28.000And I'm in full agreement with that understanding of it.
00:25:31.000And I agree with my brothers who bring it up.
00:25:33.000And I say to them, we're in agreement.
00:25:38.000The only problem is you're ignorant of the government in which you live and you don't know who the authority is in Romans 13 because the first three words of the preamble of the Constitution defines that authority as we the people.
00:25:58.000And in this form of government, which is unlike any in this 6,000 years of recorded history, where it's bottom up and the authority is given to the people, and those who govern govern by our consent.
00:26:12.000And it says in our birth certificate that if they violate that, it's our right and our duty to push back.
00:26:18.000And they're constrained by the seven articles of the U.S. Constitution that they swore to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
00:26:24.000So when the governor says to me that the church isn't essential, he's in violation of the First Amendment.
00:27:00.000You know, Charlie, I want to ask you this question.
00:27:02.000Um, why do you suppose that people say, and I get this from time to time, even having, you know, you hear tonight, there's those out there that say, hey, Christians shouldn't talk about politics, and especially pastors should never have an opinion or be involved.
00:27:19.000Don't you know the separation in the church and state?
00:28:10.000So, they can't even defend their own faulty premise.
00:28:13.000The second is this: it takes, it is hard to be, it's hard to be a Bible-believing Christian and actually believe that statement.
00:28:23.000Esther, Mordecai, Daniel, Jeremiah, Joseph, as just that list is just the beginning of people that went after to influence secular government for God's purpose, all throughout the Old Testament.
00:28:37.000It is a story repeating of people trying to be the counselor to the king to influence secular government for God's purpose.
00:28:43.000And those people are viewed as heroes in the biblical narrative time and time again.
00:28:49.000Not to mention, one of the most famous verses that I think is sometimes misunderstood from a scriptural standpoint is when Jesus Christ goes up to Caesarea Philippi and he says, On this rock, build mine.
00:29:10.000However, Tyndale, when he was translating the Bible, which ended up getting him killed, actually, it was hung and then burned.
00:29:17.000Yep, for just translating the Bible, late 1500s, early 1600s.
00:29:22.000It's actually led to the King James Version of the Bible, 1613, 1617, right around there.
00:29:27.000He was translating the Bible, which was an act of rebellion against the Catholic hierarchy at the time, where he said, I'm going to go back to the Koine Greek, and I'm going to translate it to English, and I'm going to not translate it from Latin to English.
00:29:41.000Understand, he was going back to the original texts, right?
00:29:44.000Which, because he wanted to skip the middle step.
00:29:47.000And this was a big no-no, especially at this verse.
00:29:51.000This verse was the breaking point, right?
00:29:53.000Because if all of a sudden this verse said something other than hierarchical structure located in Rome with a papal authority, that all of a sudden a lot of that whole governmental structure gets questioned.
00:30:08.000So this was a no-fly zone for the rulers of the time, but he did it anyway.
00:30:12.000And English was the language of the peasants.
00:30:15.000English came from Old English, which was kind of a kind of a weird mixture of Germanic tradition and kind of Highlander kind of tribal speak.
00:30:26.000And English went to Old English to English, but English was not a sophisticated language.
00:30:31.000In the 1500s, 1600s, it was spoken by our people, right?
00:30:34.000It was a bunch of Scots up in and so Tyndale went to translate.
00:30:40.000So, anyway, he goes to the original text, and Jesus Christ said, On this rock, build my ecclesia.
00:30:59.000An ecclesia is what you're doing tonight.
00:31:01.000An ecclesia was an actual thing that took place in ancient Greece, which was basically a local government meeting when people met and fasted beforehand about local events, local affairs, how to improve their community with two desired objectives.
00:31:19.000And it's the Greek word for isonomia and eleutheria, which means freedom and equality.
00:31:25.000I wonder what country has those two things built into the charter documents.
00:31:30.000So Jesus, as written very clearly, didn't use the term synagogue, didn't use any sort of secular terms.
00:31:38.000He used the secular term ecclesia, which I believe and Rob believes that just goes to show that Jesus wanted comprehensive Christianity, not compartmentalized Christianity.
00:31:51.000And so here's the other question I have, and I push back against pastors that say this, and I mean this as lovingly as I can.
00:31:56.000They're so unbelievably wrong about this.
00:31:59.000And I will talk to any of them about it because I want them to, okay, so tell me what else we're not supposed to be involved in as Christians.
00:32:06.000So are we not supposed to be involved in sports?
00:32:40.000And I said, I'll do whatever you want, but the reality is I'm his driver and I'm your biggest fan, so whatever.
00:32:46.000And as Charlie and I are sitting in the front row and we see that you put up Sanctity of Life Sunday, I want to say something about your pastor.
00:32:53.000He's one of the few pastors in the country that understand that the greatest moral tragedy in this nation is the obliteration of a million babies a year.
00:33:02.000And he's standing in defiance to tyranny and death, and he's doing it bravely.
00:33:07.000And he's up here trying to articulate to the rest of the Christian community what is necessary.
00:34:31.000And again, this is not to offend our brothers, but what do you say to pastors who are not opening their doors?
00:34:36.000And I want to tell you what I've observed just from my take.
00:34:38.000You know, I think of the words of Jesus when it says he saw the sheep were sorry, this always gets me when I talk about this, but weary and scattered.
00:34:47.000And we see people coming, you know, people who have shut their doors until people come in and they show up at a service and they just break.
00:34:54.000They break because they say, my pastor won't open the door.
00:35:34.000Now I'm just saddened and I'm disappointed.
00:35:37.000And that's why heroes need to be lifted up like these two men.
00:35:40.000But I'll tell you, here's why it's a realization that is a very important one for everyone here, which is that the natural state, the temptation from the enemy is to resort and retreat to fear, not towards liberty.
00:35:58.000And actually, our default condition being naturally sinful because of original sin, we're always going to screw it up, is actually to resort towards what is easy, what is safe, and what can be not necessarily rooted in what takes responsibility or liberty.
00:36:13.000And so for pastors that are still closed, as lovingly as I can, you know, articulate this, it's, do you trust your congregation or no?
00:36:45.000You're not opening your church to become a super spreader.
00:36:47.000So you won't be judged for opening your church for that.
00:36:50.000Instead, you're going to open up your church for people to find Christ, have the ecclesia, and be able to gather.
00:36:56.000And so, and here, here's the way it works at Rob's Church and Greg Farrington's church up in Sacramento and Jack Hibbs' church, which is, and you guys know this tonight.
00:37:43.000They should close their church permanently.
00:37:45.000Because now that we are almost 10 months into this thing, that they can't be open in any form or fashion, whether they need to have different spacing agreements or whatever it might be, then the message that that tells me is that they are resorting to total fear and they actually don't trust their congregation to know that there is something going on to make informed choices leading up to it.
00:38:08.000I'll tell you that, you know, we hosted probably the largest event of the entire calendar year in 2020 in Palm Beach, our Student Action Summit.
00:38:20.000And we had thousands and thousands of young people.
00:38:23.000And it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life.
00:38:26.000And it wasn't hard for the reason you might think fighting city council, restriction, like everything you could imagine, right?
00:38:32.000And it was, you have the whole national media coming on to you and all this stuff.
00:38:37.000But I was really glad we did it because there were fellowships and relationships made for a lifetime and people that had breakthroughs and all these amazing things.
00:38:48.000But then the reason we did it more than anything else, and the first thing I said at the opening night was that if you are afraid of getting the virus and getting the virus and dying from it, you should leave.
00:39:01.000Like, this is a place of people that are making the conscious decision that they know the cost and they are willing to go through that anyway.
00:39:09.000That's what matures, that's what a mature society does.
00:39:12.000And so, um, I really encourage every pastor to fully open the doors.
00:39:15.000We said it in May, we said it in July, we said it in September, and now we're saying it in January.
00:39:54.000And I sat here at this pulpit, and I remember there was, it was, and I thought, oh, Lord, you know, and what was amazing to me, and I've been preaching to our church: listen, the only way that we're going to come through this is by going through it.
00:40:05.000We've got to come through this, we've got to go through it.
00:42:49.000And sometimes when you're down and things are going terribly, it's actually really useful just to kind of take an inventory for a damage report.
00:42:56.000And so I think that's what we should do for a minute here.
00:42:58.000And so let's go back to the election, right?
00:43:01.000I think that there were three factors that mainly played in, which is the mail-in ballot nonsense, the signature verification issue where ballots were going all over the place.
00:43:26.000So if you guys want to go deeper into that, I'm actually not kidding because I'm actually not in the business of getting people's YouTube channels taken off.
00:43:34.000So if you guys want to really go deep into that, you guys can go into all my podcasts.
00:43:38.000I did literally 50 hours of research on this, as you guys might know.
00:43:41.000And I could talk about this at length.
00:43:43.000But if I talk about it right now, then we're all going to get digitally assassinated.
00:43:48.000So, no, no, no, but I'm going to assume it's.
00:43:52.000So, but there's a way, I'm going to frame this in a way that we can still talk about it, right?
00:43:56.000And so there's a couple other things I think that really went wrong, which is the first is we completely, as Republicans, conservatives, ignored, and not necessarily all of you, but our leaders did, the social media tech issue for far too long.
00:44:13.000I mean, this, they, they, they, you want to talk about interference in the election?
00:44:18.000I mean, this was the greatest act of private corporate election interference in the history of our country.
00:44:23.000And so let's just take a super easy example that everyone agrees with, which was grotesque, yet no one got held accountable for this, which is incredibly, you know, the coke head, Hunter Biden, left the left a laptop.
00:44:38.000Like, I mean, I don't, I mean, I'm sure he's a nice guy, but like, you know, and he left, he left a laptop at, you know, in some repair shop, and Rudy Giuliani stumbles upon this, you know, laptop, and Mr. Costello, his lawyer, gets it.
00:44:54.000And all of a sudden, you have the laptop of the, you know, the guy who's running for the Democrat Party's son, you're not allowed to talk about any of it, right?
00:45:00.000So you talked about it in the month of October, you got kicked off of Twitter, you got kicked off of all that sort of stuff, right?
00:45:06.000And out of nowhere, we all of a sudden saw this new kind of political reality set in where you weren't allowed to criticize the power structure.
00:45:17.000And social media played a massive role in all of this.
00:45:20.000And now we've seen that this is their big kind of, this is their blue terror, if you will, where they're going through and they're just taking out accounts.
00:45:27.000The president doesn't have access to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, like he was going to use that.
00:45:33.000Spotify, like, I mean, just like, really, that was something that needed to get done.
00:45:55.000I think that the other aspect is this, though, going back to the election, which is that the president could have had a better first debate performance.
00:46:05.000I think that there was a lot of momentum building and he got the virus.
00:46:10.000And then the first debate, he might have had the virus or not, but I do not think that was his best performance.
00:46:16.000And I say this was a friend to someone of his, but just looking at it analytically, I think that that set some things back.
00:46:23.000But more than anything else, the question is, how are we going to conduct elections from this point forward?
00:46:31.000And here's something to actually kind of work a little bit of optimism, if you will.
00:46:35.000Does anyone here think the election in Florida was stolen?
00:47:30.000And especially in Georgia and Arizona in particular.
00:47:33.000It is inexcusable that those states are still doing these backwards practices with not intent signature verification, voter registration nonsense and all that sort of stuff.
00:47:43.000So that's something that we really, really have to focus on.
00:47:46.000And then there's the Georgia runoff, which was a little bit in some ways different.
00:47:52.000Definitely shenanigans and tomfoolery happening around all of that.
00:47:56.000But there were just some parts of Georgia where people didn't show up, where just people did not show up on election day because they were either told not to vote, they were uninspired by the candidates, but the Democrats showed up in massive numbers.
00:48:08.000And also the churches were completely on the other side in Georgia, where you had Lecrae, I don't know if you know who that is or not, a Christian rapper who was doing events with Raphael Warnock, who is outwardly advocating for pro-abortion Raphael Warnock, Lecrae, the Christian rapper.
00:48:30.000And so it really makes you pause and say, you know, how exactly did that come together?
00:48:34.000And here's kind of the biggest lesson for all of us from some of this, as kind of tightly as I can put it, that persuasion matters a lot.
00:48:43.000The amount of money you spend, all that stuff matters.
00:48:45.000But now really, we have to get into how elections themselves are conducted, which is something that has always disinterested us, right?
00:48:52.000We're like, well, it doesn't really matter, but you send in your ballot or whatever.
00:48:54.000Like, no, now it's the practice of how you vote is going to be more important than either can you get your message out.
00:49:01.000But then we can't even do that because of social media.
00:49:03.000And so that's one of the biggest lessons and the takeaways here that unfortunately I think that resulted in Democrats having unified government.
00:49:16.000But at the same time, there's an incongruency here where Republicans were supposed to lose 20 seats in the House, and yet we gained 17 seats in the House, and they only have a seven-seat majority.
00:49:29.000We were supposed to lose state legislatures, and we flipped three state legislatures in one governor mansion.
00:49:34.000And so we were supposed to get our clocks cleaned, and Michelle Steele and Young Kim won and Mike Garcia won.
00:49:39.000And so it feels like we got our, you know, completely run over, but we have a lot of victories.
00:49:48.000And there were some counties that need forensic examinations.
00:49:53.000I mean, real examinations and hopefully some form of a criminal investigation, but I don't know if that's ever going to happen at this point, to be honest with you guys, that will go into exactly what happened in these five counties in these four states that suddenly and dramatically changed the trajectory of all these votes.
00:50:10.000To give you an idea of how just perplexing a lot of this is, Joe Biden will be the first president since 1907 to be winning the White House while losing 10 or more House seats for since 1907.
00:50:22.000Usually those are really tied together.
00:50:25.000And so Trump won, I think it's 28 of 29 bellwether counties across the country, the ones that usually dictate the rest of the race around the country.
00:50:34.000You win Florida by four points, you win Ohio by eight and a half points, and then you win Iowa by seven points.
00:50:40.000And so the question is, is who's actually verifying the ballots?
00:51:18.000Yeah, I mean, I'll talk more about the courts because I don't really know with the DOJ stuff.
00:51:23.000And so with the courts, though, they are inherently apolitical and they don't like the idea of overturning an election.
00:51:32.000And that's the way it was framed to them, despite the fact that there were so many outstanding questions and so many things that warranted cross-examination.
00:51:41.000What we consider to be evidence, the court doesn't.
00:51:44.000And they say to themselves, okay, these affidavits mean nothing, which I think is ridiculous.
00:51:50.000And they basically say, where is the forensic evidence?
00:51:54.000Well, we're never given access to that, right?
00:51:56.000So you keep running up against these different obstacles.
00:51:59.000And then in Georgia, you have a Secretary of State, Rothensperger, who says this election was perfect.
00:52:26.000And so the courts, they don't want to get involved in this.
00:52:30.000The Supreme Court, though, I think that a disservice to this country to not at least hear that case, in my opinion, to and let's just put all this other stuff aside.
00:52:41.000Let's just get to a very constitutional argument, if you will, just a strictly constitutional one.
00:52:46.000What Georgia did to change election law without the consent of the state legislature is unconstitutional.
00:53:21.000You had out-of-court settlements with Rothensperger, with Stacey Abrams, settling the way that this was done.
00:53:29.000In Pennsylvania, you had the same sort of thing.
00:53:31.000In Pennsylvania, it says very clearly in the Pennsylvania state constitution that mail-in balloting must only be used under extenuating circumstances.
00:53:40.000The state legislature just ignored it.
00:53:42.000They were like, oh, we're going to do universal mail-in balloting under emergency provisions under the pandemic.
00:53:48.000Of course, you can go in a BLM protest.
00:53:49.000You can go to Home Depot, Lowe's, Abortion Clinic, Canada.
00:53:52.000You're like really going to be a threat and menace to society.
00:53:55.000And so they saw that as an opportunity to have universal mail-in balloting.
00:54:00.000And so to give you an idea of just the scale of what we're dealing with here, Georgia used to have about 250,000 mail-in ballots every single year.
00:54:14.000So just think about any of you that run businesses.
00:54:16.000I want you to think about it just from a church standpoint, right?
00:54:18.000So that's a scale up of a six times multiple.
00:54:22.000So I want you to imagine if you have your normal attendance every Sunday, and then the next Sunday, unexpectedly, six times the amount of people show up and they all want seats.
00:54:31.000And you just need to discover the infrastructure to do that.
00:54:34.000That's what happened in Georgia, right?
00:54:36.000It's like they did not have the practices and the methods to be able to do this.
00:54:41.000Now, here's why Florida is such a great example: is that Florida did mail-in balloting the correct way for 10 years.
00:55:24.000And so you have a six-time scale up of mail-in balloting.
00:55:28.000And couple that with the apathetic churches, the motivated, you know, black base, and all that sort of, all those things have just combined into a worst possible storm for that.
00:55:40.000And so I just, I guess my biggest kind of piece of advice to all of you, though, is don't translate this frustration to cynicism, is that we have to now translate it into action, to real reform, because there are states that do this right.
00:55:58.000But even in this state where you guys do things however you do them, Mike Garcia still won despite all of that.
00:56:06.000I mean, Young Kim still won, and Michelle Steele, you don't think that they wanted those seats?
00:56:10.000You don't think that they wanted to do everything they possibly could?
00:56:13.000And that goes to show that you can, and part of the reason was after 18, there was such outrage and such a spotlight in Orange County, especially with Young Kim.
00:56:22.000Maybe some people are a little more gun-shy, right?
00:56:24.000Maybe some people are a little more skittish.
00:56:26.000And so that's why the focus matters a lot.
00:56:28.000But my personal, the one that I'm really most upset about is the Georgia ones.
00:56:33.000The Georgia, Arizona, we're going to figure out.
00:56:39.000Because not only did they screw up the presidency, but then the Georgia runoff, and their tone and their hostility, those Brian Kemp and Rothensperger, the way that they handled themselves, in my personal opinion, through the month of December, was outrageous.
00:56:53.000Where they called any of us that had questions to be just like awful human beings.
00:56:57.000And I just, I think that they had a month to all of a sudden say, you know what?
00:57:02.000Maybe we weren't prepared for a six-time increase of mail-in balloting.
00:57:19.000Georgia, which used to be a deep red state, has two Democrat senators and they sent their electors to Biden.
00:57:25.000Charlie, in light of what's happening with the recent elections and now seeing the differences, can you explain to us what it means in Congress in light of the House and Senate and how that affects conservatives and what we believe and all of that?
00:57:40.000Can you explain that and why it was such a give us some assessment on that?
00:57:45.000So I'm going to give you guys some hope because I think we all need some hope, right?
00:57:51.000And it's a biblical principle, Genesis 11, which is that which is built without the blessing of God will crumble and will get scattered and confused.
00:58:38.000And it is their default, their default position is absolute corrosion, parasitic intrusion of things at work.
00:58:46.000And so look at California, you look at New York, you look at Illinois, and they don't build, they, by definition, destroy everything they touch.
00:58:55.000And so they are going to screw this up.
00:58:57.000And it's going to take probably 200 days for them to do it, maybe less.
00:59:01.000Here's the second thing of hope that I'm going to give you.
00:59:57.000All of a sudden, the people are going to quickly, and I mean quickly, they're going to all of a sudden say, we want Republicans back in charge quickly.
01:00:12.000And because of the, here's the amazing brilliance of the founding fathers, is you actually can't take over this country in less than six years.
01:00:22.000You have to win every federal election on the House, state, and presidential level for six years straight with your agenda reinforced to get something very big and bold done.
01:00:34.000Even the Civil Rights Act took nine to 10 years to get done with broad-based consensus.
01:00:39.000The founding fathers intentionally put in these provisions and these safeguards to slow down the process, everybody.
01:00:46.000As Scalia said, fall in love with the gridlock, right?
01:00:50.000Like, just because we get mad sometimes when we can't get our agenda through, but then we have to remind ourselves if we ever in the minority, we're going to love the fact that there's the ability to sue the Supreme Court, states' rights, constitutional republic, 50-50 tie, right?
01:01:03.000All of a sudden, now we're going to kind of geek out at all these different trapdoors and these provisions.
01:01:08.000And thank you, God, for giving us the brilliance of the founding fathers to do that.
01:01:12.000So here's the point is that the people, the citizenry is going to basically say, hey, we want, at some point, we want Republicans back in charge.
01:01:25.000And it's going to happen quicker than you can imagine.
01:01:31.000Either we're going to be a conservative Christian Republican kind of movement community that will have given up in January of 2021 and will have no candidates, no infrastructure.
01:01:53.000Like, do you guys have vibrant schools and churches and business?
01:01:56.000Like, if we disconnect, or we can start building now with the faithful expectation that the people are going to come running back to truth very, very quickly under the current power structure.
01:02:19.000They want to break your will at all costs.
01:02:22.000And so as long as we keep that resolve, that grit, that will, that perseverance, and we build new at this moment, we strengthen our commitment to this.
01:02:32.000I'm telling you right now, thanks to the beauty of our system and we fix some things on the elections, I really believe that our brightest days are happening.
01:02:38.000You also pointed out that the folks that are on the tip of the spear, we need to build community and stick together.
01:02:43.000You know, you and I, though we met in passing, I am now your best friend.
01:03:03.000I want to say too, because this is kind of segues, and I think, Rob, as a pastor, you can answer this also, but because this is a question that I have a lot of times from where I sit and from what I do on a regular basis, and of course, Rob and you interact.
01:03:16.000And how do we live as Christians with a new administration that brings in things that we are opposed to?
01:03:27.000And, you know, it just seems in one sense like there's not a lot we can do about it.
01:03:32.000But how do we live as Christians in the midst of an ungodly world and with an administration coming in pushing things that we are completely opposed to?
01:03:42.000How do we respond in a way that honors God and maintains the witness?
01:03:47.000Because the natural tendency sometimes is, you know, you want to respond with anger and you want to overcome evil with evil.
01:03:55.000But the Bible says overcome evil with good.
01:03:57.000So help us understand the good that we can overcome the evil with.
01:04:33.000Because when Lincoln looked down in the second inaugural address, and I covered this earlier, where he looks out and you have a nation that's embroiled in war.
01:04:44.000Today, that'd be 6.5 million people in a civil war.
01:04:48.000And in 1860, we had, what, 4 million slaves?
01:04:51.000And that vile institution that called someone less than human based on the content of melanin was done away with.
01:05:01.000And the price paid was 2% of our nation's population.
01:05:05.000Every family suffered a death of someone.
01:05:08.000And you think God's going to sit idly by while we abort a million babies a year, 320,000 of which are black children, 4.5% of our population, black American female childbearing is responsible for almost 35% of the abortion.
01:05:23.000It's a Holocaust of the black community.
01:05:25.000And the church is going to put a black tile up.
01:05:30.000And at our church, while we're doing this, we've got Seth Gruber speaking on life.
01:05:34.000So we need to re-engage what is important to God because as Lincoln said in the second inaugural address, they pray to the same God, read the same Bible, expecting different outcomes.
01:05:44.000It's God's will we're looking for here, just like Joshua said to the commander of the Lord's army.
01:07:03.000Can you name for me your five city council members and your five school board members that you pray for by name and the issues they're dealing with in your community that would allow your citizenry here to live quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness and reverence?
01:09:04.000I also want to mention, and I want to just say to you, something that's kept me solid through this season and like many of you is understanding and having and filtering everything that we see through a biblical worldview.
01:09:22.000I say this to our congregation on a regular basis.
01:09:25.000Listen, if you don't filter, if you don't spend time in the word of God daily, you can go to every meeting you want, but listen, that's what's going to make the difference.
01:09:35.000God's people, and I believe, and I was sharing with Rob and Charlie earlier, that I believe that God's doing a real sifting in the church through this process.
01:09:41.000Through the pandemic, there has been a sifting through the political, it's been a sifting.
01:09:45.000People are going to have to come back to foundation.
01:09:47.000And depending on what you're building on, will determine whether or not you stand or crumble.
01:09:52.000And I think we're seeing people crumble because their foundation is faulty.
01:10:48.000And I'm seeing within the church, you either see people swing one way, this way, and they're not doing anything, or you see people swing this way and they got, you know, God-golden guns and barracks and they're hiding out and they're ready to charge this and do that.
01:11:01.000And they're getting into all these conspiracies and sending them to us.
01:11:08.000No, I'm going to, can I just for a second, Charlie, you, you who know all the conspiracies and you know, about these things, and we dialogued a little bit.
01:11:15.000Can you just clear the, what are the most popular conspiracies right now that you can just help people understand?
01:11:24.000Let me say this, though, with, and I mean this with, you know, with love and with understanding that if you are currently going through these and believing in them, it's really actually not totally your fault.
01:11:36.000It's a symptom of the media that has misled you, a symptom of our institutions that have deceived you, of our leaders that have lied to you.
01:11:44.000And you go and resort to anything you possibly can that might make some sense, that might have some crafting of a different narrative because you know what you're seeing on CNN is not true.
01:11:56.000However, just because something that is not on CNN is not true doesn't mean the message board is true.
01:12:02.000And so, look, and I think that some of these things have real life consequences.
01:12:07.000And I'm going to be speaking out a lot more forcibly about this.
01:12:12.000But I'm going to, you know, do a little bit of it now, which is that, look, it says in James 1:5, ask for wisdom, and God will give generously.
01:12:22.000It's one of the few things that God guarantees he will give generously.
01:12:26.000So before you read a news story that sounds too good to be true, just ask for wisdom before you read it.
01:13:04.000I got in a debate with somebody and they're like, you don't know what you're talking about.
01:13:07.000Look, I'm like, look, I don't like the whole argument from authority thing, but like, maybe you know something I don't know, but the president's not in Texas right now.
01:13:14.000Like, I don't know how else to put it.
01:13:16.000That he's the president's going to declare martial law.
01:13:22.000And it's designed to make you believe something that's not true.
01:13:26.000And so, and there's, there's, we need to all of a sudden, now that we're in this kind of damage report phase, say, like, maybe there's people that are writing these things to make you believe something so you're not active.
01:13:40.000Because you know what the underlying promise of all those stories are?
01:13:44.000I'm not going to have to do anything because Trump's going to serve four more years and save us.
01:13:49.000Those message boards have created a political messianic figure out of Trump, where all of a sudden it's like, I don't have to do anything.
01:13:56.000He's going to swoop in and our country is going to be saved.
01:13:58.000Like, actually, I love our listeners and I get these emails and I get all this stuff.
01:14:23.000Like a great example of this, the stuff that used to be on the message boards was the Epstein thing.
01:14:27.000Like the Epstein thing used to be kind of like an underground thing that no one talked about, but everyone thought to be true, and all of a sudden ended up being a real thing that everyone thinks that everyone knew at all times.
01:14:35.000That used to be something called the conspiracy theory.
01:14:37.000So I'm not discounting that everything that might be entertained.
01:14:41.000But if all of a sudden the guiding premise of it is I want this to be true more than I know it's true, then you got a problem, right?
01:14:53.000And that's where all of a sudden your earthly will is blurring with what actually might be happening.
01:15:00.000And so this is something that is very serious because a lot of people were told not to vote in Georgia based on a lot of these communications.
01:15:08.000A lot of people were told, and they believed it.
01:15:14.000I think there's plenty of agreement or disagreement here.
01:15:17.000But also, we have to understand that we as Christians, we have to be very careful with the types of news and information that we process and we spread.
01:15:28.000And so I go through exhaustive amounts of hours talking to real life sources before I say anything on my podcast.
01:15:37.000And people say, well, who are your sources?
01:15:39.000Like the actual people you're talking about.
01:15:43.000Like, I don't know how else, like, I mean, you know, like, I don't know how else to put it.
01:15:48.000Like, and I'm not saying that maybe I'm being misled and maybe there's this whole plan and like four-dimensional underwater chest.
01:15:54.000And we're all like, all right, okay, Tom Clancy, slow down, right?
01:15:58.000Like, but there's also a point to this, though, where be caught.
01:16:03.000And again, a lot of this is not your fault of that, right?
01:16:06.000I just want to make that very clear because you've been misled.
01:16:10.000And when you've been misled by so many institutions, the LA Times, CNN, you want to go grab onto something else, right?
01:16:16.000You're like, they're lying, then the inverse must be true.
01:16:19.000It's like, no, actually, the inverse might also be untrue.
01:16:21.000There might be something else that, you know, you know what I'm saying with that.
01:16:24.000And so I think that we really have to get, as a conservative movement, we got to fix this problem in like the first 30 days because it's a real, real issue.
01:16:35.000And I see it because, you know, I have a really interesting window into this because I think we have one of the more accessible podcasts and YouTube live streams out there where we take in hundreds of thousands of emails, right?
01:16:46.000And I see what people are thinking and seeing.
01:16:49.000And I can tell you, this is not a small thing.
01:16:50.000These are millions and millions of people that are, if you scale it, that have told me, Charlie, don't you know Mike Pence is in Guantamano Bay right now about to be shot for treason?
01:17:01.000And I'm like, what on what are you reading?
01:17:03.000Like, no, I mean, this is like not, I got hundreds of emails like once about this thing.
01:17:09.000And then I talked against it and they said I'm a liar and all this.
01:17:11.000Anyway, the point is that that needs to be confronted, right?
01:17:15.000And it also goes to show that there's a gaping hole in news in this country.
01:18:34.000And I also, we're getting close to wrapping up here in a few minutes, but I also would like to say, in addition to what these gentlemen have said, listen, if it causes you to fear, the Bible says that perfect love casts out fear.
01:21:02.000We're the authors of No Fault Divorce, Transgender Bathroom Bills, and we've aborted more children in the state of California, the entire population of Canada.
01:21:44.000Someone came up with a question and they said, you know, well, here we go.
01:21:48.000There's a pastor who shall remain anonymous, organizing a class on racial reconciliation.
01:21:57.000Of course, hey, listen, I get it in light of everything that's happening, and they're actually embracing parts of the CRT, which you're familiar with.
01:22:22.000I want to get some of these questions answered because that's my whatever you cut me off whenever.
01:22:27.000So, yeah, look, this is a super important thing, and this is more cultural, and we have to hit this head on, which is there's a different type of virus that's spreading across this country, and it's the virus of critical race theory.
01:22:39.000And critical race theory is an existential threat to our country.
01:22:42.000Critical race theory comes from the critical theory written by a guy by the name of Herbert Marcuse from the Frankfurt School.
01:22:48.000He was a communist dissident that was in Germany, came here as an expat, and started basically this new way of thinking that there is no absolute truth.
01:23:01.000It's this idea that all we are is just a mixture of molecules, and we're going to have to find our own meaning through power struggles.
01:23:09.000And all there is in life is the struggle of the oppressed and the oppressor, someone in charge, and someone being oppressed.
01:23:16.000That's basically the way they view the world.
01:23:18.000So, while we view the world through everyone made in the image of God, individual rights necessary for protection, everyone has the capacity to improve your own life, make better decisions, climb up in life.
01:23:28.000They look at life as you're actually always going to be in prison based solely and simply on the class that you've been born into, what you look like, and whether or not you're a man or a woman, which is weird because I thought they didn't believe in that.
01:23:52.000And there's a couple beliefs in the critical race theory, and this is now in churches across the country.
01:23:57.000This is now in almost every school teaches this now, by the way, every university, every high school.
01:24:02.000And it is actually, it's not just inconsistent with the Bible, it's diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Bible.
01:24:09.000Okay, there's a couple things that critical race theory teaches.
01:24:12.000First and foremost, that there is no such thing as individuals, that you're not actually made in the image of God, you're actually part of a collective.
01:24:21.000So, we're all part of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant collective, and us, us three, regardless of our decisions, regardless of any agency, we're always going to be in a position of privilege and power, regardless of anything we do.
01:24:35.000That's one of the things, and us three, as white Christian Anglo-Saxon men are given this special mantle because of that.
01:24:42.000Now, that's an inherently racist belief, right?
01:24:45.000To believe that all of a sudden your skin color matters, that gives you some form or fashion of built-in privilege.
01:24:52.000Okay, so also it's totalitarian in nature.
01:24:56.000It's not a matter of what you do, it's what you don't do, and you're judged based on that.
01:25:00.000Here's a great example of this, right?
01:25:02.000And it's super relevant for a lot of the young people in this room.
01:25:05.000It's not enough that you, during the entire kind of BLM thing, if you did nothing and didn't post, you're still called a racist because you didn't post the black square, right?
01:25:16.000So, it's not enough that you post like a white square, okay?
01:25:21.000They would lose it if you did that, right?
01:25:22.000And I wouldn't, by the way, I'm not recommending it.
01:25:24.000I'm saying that would be the opposite.
01:25:26.000I'm just saying that, like, it's this you didn't do anything, all of a sudden you're called an awful person because you did nothing.
01:25:31.000And it's like you must submit to us at all costs.
01:25:59.000And so, the fourth part of it is they don't believe in any form of dialogue.
01:26:04.000They think speech and the expression and the exchange of ideas are actually just reinforcing pre-existing white Anglo-Saxon heteronormal logocentric power dynamics.
01:26:16.000If you don't know what those are, good.
01:26:17.000You haven't been to college recently, right?
01:26:19.000It's just a bunch of nonsense that your children are learning for a lot of money going into debt to study things that don't matter to find jobs that don't exist.
01:26:26.000But so, but so then, no, but then the last part is this.
01:26:34.000And I could do a whole thing on college later if you guys want, but the last thing is this, which is that they don't believe in the scientific method and they don't believe in mathematics, right?
01:26:43.000So they believe that everything, Newtonian physics to the laws of thermodynamics to, you know, the laws of trigonometry, all that stuff, those are actually just aberrations built by white men for white men to reinforce white men's power structures.
01:26:57.000If you think this is insane, you're right.
01:26:59.000Every single college, every high school, and most churches are now teaching this stuff.
01:27:03.000And to give some grace to some pastors, though, they don't actually understand it.
01:27:08.000I actually, I'm giving some grace to a lot of these pastors that I think they're trying to do the right thing and they're actually doing the exact opposite thing.
01:27:14.000And so I encourage all of you, I've done a lot of podcasts.
01:27:19.000I have the critical race theory expert who's actually a liberal atheist who's speaking out against this.
01:27:56.000But the question is: you know, some people are asking, you know, Charlie, if Joe Biden is to issue a national lockdown, what do we do if Biden introduces a nationwide lockdown?
01:29:04.000They were far-right-wing people that call themselves Trump supporters that I would never associate with.
01:29:08.000And then there were legitimate Trump supporters that were there that seemed to have gotten caught up and, in their own words, made the worst mistake of their life, right?
01:29:15.000So that's all kind of being looped together.
01:29:36.000I actually think it takes more courage and more strength not to go act like a barbarian than to, okay?
01:29:42.000To actually be sophisticated and strategic and, you know, ever-loving and trying to pursue dialogue and all that.
01:29:47.000But there's also a thing that we as Christians really have perfected over the centuries, which is civil disobedience, which is completely different than civil discord.
01:29:55.000And I want to be very clear about this.
01:29:57.000Civil disobedience, if done for a moral purpose and done prayerfully and done with around the physical assembly of other believers and elders in a church structure, can be moral, which is what you guys are actually doing right now.
01:30:12.000So let me tell you what civil disobedience is.
01:30:52.000And the third thing is this, which is really, really important, which you must be willing to go through the entire process is you just can't cop out as soon as you go down that.
01:31:03.000And so I want you to just do a mad, like, so let's say he does a national lockdown.
01:31:07.000Let's just, which is unconstitutional in nature, right?
01:31:10.000I will be leading the charge for civil disobedience.
01:35:05.000what do you threaten me with heaven we're good to go we are free we are free We're free.
01:35:19.000Well, there are so many more things that could be spoken of tonight.
01:35:23.000And my goal really and my intention from the outset was to have these two gentlemen here with us tonight to be able to be equipped to understand what is the role of the church in all of this.
01:35:36.000And I realized several things tonight.
01:35:39.000One, I really should have paid more attention in history class.
01:37:36.000And if you're not saved, if you don't know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, if you don't know that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and then rose again on the third day, he is the way, the truth, and the life.
01:37:47.000And nobody gets to heaven through him.
01:38:19.000And I want to pray for this man and his future bride and what God's calling them to, and that God would expand the borders, brother, that he would just expand the borders and it would go above and beyond what you had even, you know, the Bible says that God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we could ask or think.
01:38:35.000And he's doing it and God's using you.