The Charlie Kirk Show - Unpacking the Maniacal Witch Hunt Against Donald Trump with Attorney David Engelhardt

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00:00:26.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:27.000 Today in the Charlie Kirk show, we go through in great detail the Trump indictment, rising crime in New York City, and also we briefly touch on the American founding and independence.

00:00:36.000 You guys can listen to more of that on Monday when we drop our Ask Me Anything episode.

00:00:40.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:43.000 And if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:46.000 That's charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:49.000 And if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA and join us in Tampa, Florida, go to tpusa.com slash SAS, tpusa.com slash SAS.

00:00:59.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:00.000 Here we go.

00:01:02.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:03.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:01:06.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:09.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:12.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:13.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:14.000 His 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.

00:01:23.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:31.000 That's why we are here.

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00:02:11.000 We're going to get into some breaking news here with the indictment against the Trump organization.

00:02:16.000 And one of the most stunning and alarming indictments that I have ever seen.

00:02:21.000 As we celebrate independence, we need to ask ourselves the question, are we currently living under some form of totalitarian, authoritarian tyranny?

00:02:31.000 And when you read this indictment and how the opposition is willing to use criminal power to go after people that they don't like their politics, it just begs the question, how do the truths of the Declaration ring true to what we're living through right now?

00:02:49.000 And then later in the hour, we're going to be joined by Pastor David Engelhart, again, from New York City, who's also a lawyer and attorney to go through the indictment.

00:02:57.000 And then I'm going to go through in great detail kind of what is the, what does the Declaration stand for?

00:03:04.000 And also what happened on July 3rd, July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.

00:03:09.000 We don't talk about that.

00:03:11.000 But maybe you didn't know, but July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd were the three days of the Gettysburg battle.

00:03:16.000 You see, Abraham Lincoln didn't give the Gettysburg address until I think November 19th.

00:03:20.000 We didn't get a fact check on that, 1863, almost four and a half months later.

00:03:24.000 But Abraham Lincoln, when he talked about America's founding, he was pointing directly to the same time that the Battle of Gettysburg occurred.

00:03:34.000 But first, let's get into the indictment here.

00:03:36.000 David, say hello.

00:03:37.000 Hello.

00:03:38.000 Good to be here, Charlie.

00:03:38.000 And David, did you get a chance to read through the indictment of the Trump organization and Alan Weiselberg?

00:03:45.000 Yep, all 15 counts of the indictment I had the great pleasure of reviewing.

00:03:50.000 So you're a lawyer.

00:03:52.000 What's your initial reaction?

00:03:54.000 And you're a resident of New York.

00:03:55.000 You pay taxes in New York?

00:03:57.000 Yeah, I would say my initial reaction is witch hunt.

00:04:00.000 And I mean that in the context of, if you remember last year, the DA, the Cyvance, and Letitia James, they were saying that they were going to find this was the wording they used.

00:04:13.000 They were going to find fraud as related to bank applications.

00:04:16.000 Remember that they were inflating the amount of money the operations.

00:04:20.000 And then insurance companies that they were defrauding.

00:04:20.000 Right.

00:04:23.000 And these were the big, like major corporations.

00:04:27.000 This is a scheme, a conspiracy across the whole board.

00:04:31.000 And what they found is a single guy that didn't pay taxes on benefits received.

00:04:37.000 There is no benefit.

00:04:38.000 If you read the indictment, there's zero benefit to the Trump Corporation.

00:04:42.000 Now, the Trump Corporation is named, but if you actually think through it, they're not saving any tax money.

00:04:49.000 I mean, they're paying for whatever these tertiary benefits to the employee, but they're not saving money by paying for these benefits.

00:04:57.000 They would either have to pay salary plus payroll tax, or they would pay the exact same amount on the apartment.

00:05:04.000 There's no incentive for the Trump organization to shoot themselves in the foot.

00:05:10.000 This indictment should be a fire alarm for all of us.

00:05:13.000 We knew what they were willing to do.

00:05:16.000 And regardless of your politics listening to this, you might love Trump, you might not like Trump.

00:05:19.000 It's completely irrelevant.

00:05:20.000 Instead, as we are here in New York City looking at the beautiful streets here, hey, I see somebody without a mask on.

00:05:26.000 Very rare.

00:05:27.000 Actually, two people as we watch people walk down the streets.

00:05:31.000 Oh, he's very rare.

00:05:32.000 This guy has two masks on.

00:05:34.000 As we watch the streets in New York, I feel as if we are living in enemy-occupied territory here in New York.

00:05:41.000 And I don't say that lightly.

00:05:43.000 It's almost as if the rule of law and the way that we go about treating our fellow countrymen is that if you live in New York City or the state of New York, they will use whatever political power they have to destroy your life.

00:05:56.000 So, what's happening right now reminds me of a man named Andre Vyshetsky.

00:06:02.000 Do you know who that is?

00:06:03.000 I don't. 0.63

00:06:03.000 He used to run the show trial operation for Joseph Stalin. 0.63

00:06:07.000 And show trials back in Stalin's Russia was a series of public prosecutions against political opponents.

00:06:17.000 And he had the most famous quote. 0.61

00:06:19.000 And his quote is something that is referenced in cocktail parties and in law classrooms across the country, which is, you show me the man, I'll show you the crime.

00:06:29.000 Right.

00:06:30.000 And if you show me a man like Donald Trump who has gone through two years of exhaustive investigations, criminal investigations that they said, we don't know what the crime is, but we're going to try to find it.

00:06:42.000 Letitia James campaigned on this.

00:06:44.000 And then they had to perp walk this man who is the CFO for the Trump organization.

00:06:49.000 And if you read this indictment, they act as if he is smuggling children into New York City.

00:06:56.000 They act as if he is running a gun-running operation, or if that he is trying to launder money from the third world, you say, Oh, wait, he didn't pay his taxes because of some sort of benefit that he received.

00:07:08.000 So, just so you guys understand, the main thrust of the argument is that he was given cars that he was not paying tax on.

00:07:14.000 Now, what I find interesting, though, is how do they know those were not company cars?

00:07:19.000 Right, exactly.

00:07:19.000 Exactly.

00:07:20.000 Also, if New York City was not his residence, who's to say that that was not imperative for him to be able to do his job as CFO of the Trump organization?

00:07:29.000 The point is, under certain accounting principles, some of these things very well could be argued as legitimate deductions.

00:07:36.000 Now, when you get to living expenses, it gets harder, obviously.

00:07:39.000 But the argument could be made that was not my residence.

00:07:42.000 You know, Mr. Trump wanted me in the city, and this was part of one of the benefit packages.

00:07:47.000 And if they weren't declaring it as income, that's on them.

00:07:50.000 That's not on me.

00:07:51.000 And then also, let's talk about remedies.

00:07:53.000 They are now using criminal prosecution for something that very well could be figured out in an afternoon in a boardroom where the state of New York and say, look, we see what you were doing here.

00:08:02.000 You have one side of the story.

00:08:03.000 We have one side of the story.

00:08:04.000 Pay us $400,000 and that's a settlement.

00:08:07.000 Have you ever seen, David, the criminal process used to try to remedy tax payment issues like this?

00:08:15.000 No, and I think it was one of the Trump organization lawyers, Ron Fisher, who said a fringe benefits tax case has never been applied this way.

00:08:24.000 And even the New York Times said it was either yesterday, the day before that, you could not imagine another corporation in New York City having files, charges filed this way.

00:08:35.000 The funny thing about his residence here versus his residence in Long Island is this is a normal New York City corporate officer situation.

00:08:43.000 There are specific rules.

00:08:44.000 In New York City, if you don't live here for 184 days of the years, you can say, I don't live in New York City.

00:08:51.000 There's a three-part rule.

00:08:52.000 Are you domiciled there?

00:08:53.000 Do you live there more than 183 days?

00:08:56.000 And is it your place of permanent residence?

00:08:58.000 Well, it sounds like Long Island has been Weiselberg's state, you know, permanent residence.

00:09:03.000 And if he's a smart finance guy, he knows that and he knows he needs to spend 183 days so he doesn't have to pay the taxes.

00:09:11.000 So, Charlie, like if you actually look at just the New York state tax liability that Weiselman has over the entire period of 15 years, it's 100 grand.

00:09:21.000 This is not one.

00:09:23.000 This is barely one salary of one of the 10 attorneys on the teams going after the Trump organization.

00:09:29.000 And, you know, they keep saying $1.7 million over and over and over in the indictments and make it sound like he stole.

00:09:36.000 But it's also over 12 years.

00:09:37.000 Right.

00:09:38.000 And you're running a multi-billion dollar business and you're talking about fringe benefits for the CEO.

00:09:43.000 And you know what's amazing as we're here in New York City, and I say this as a conservative, the people that crashed our economy and manipulate the financial banking laws all in Wall Street, none of them went to jail after 2008.

00:09:55.000 None of the people that were on the phone with the Treasury, on the phone with Goldman Sachs, on the phone with the FDIC, crafting together all of these very specific bailout packages that were playing games with people's deposits.

00:10:10.000 None of them went to jail.

00:10:11.000 None of them had exhaustive investigations from the New York Attorney General.

00:10:15.000 But instead, we now have to see Donald Trump's CFO get perp walked at the New York Attorney General's office while every one of the other legitimate financial criminals here in New York City, they're wealthier than ever before.

00:10:30.000 I was in the cab on the way home last night and the cab driver said to me, well, Donald Trump has killed 100,000, a minimum of 100,000 people.

00:10:39.000 So I'm glad the Trump organization.

00:10:41.000 People believe that. 0.91

00:10:41.000 The people in New York City are happy with these indictments because they think Trump is a mass murderer. 0.91

00:10:47.000 And I said, well, didn't he, wasn't he the guy that originally tried to stop travel from China?

00:10:52.000 And he said, no, that was just a show.

00:10:53.000 That was a play.

00:10:54.000 It's just a total joke.

00:10:55.000 There's such a cognitive dissonance in the people of New York that only listen to left-wing media that actually truly believe that the Wuhan, the Chinese virus was the fault of Donald Trump, who has not been more opposed to China than any other leader we've had in the last 10 years.

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00:12:35.000 We were just asking the question: what is the potential benefit to the Trump organization here that was being alleged in the indictment?

00:12:42.000 And I think that's the main question for any reasonable person that reads through the 25 pages of the indictment.

00:12:47.000 If you get away from the millions of dollars, blah, blah, blah.

00:12:49.000 There's a general rule, Charlie, in business law called the business judgment rule, which means a business will not intentionally harm itself or damage itself because it functions on the basis of profits for itself and the holders, owners of that corporation.

00:13:05.000 And so when you look at what the indictment tells us, it tells us that it's taking certain dollars and then it's giving them to Weiselman for fringe benefits.

00:13:14.000 And it's instead of giving it to Weiselman as payment, if it was just payment, they would have to pay, you know, a social security tax, Medicaid, Medicare, whatever that body of taxes is.

00:13:25.000 Instead, they're paying it for a car or an apartment or whatever.

00:13:29.000 And therefore, the Trump organization is guilty criminally because they paid in one manner and not the other manner.

00:13:37.000 But it's still a loss for the Trump organization, either way.

00:13:41.000 So, according to the business judgment rule, they would never do something to shoot themselves in the foot purposely.

00:13:46.000 It's insane.

00:13:47.000 And so, what this has basically opened up is this question of what laws do you choose to enforce and against whom to the state of New York?

00:13:54.000 Because if this is now the case, I guarantee you, in a city of 8 million people, you got at least 80 to 90,000 people that are cheating significantly on their taxes or not even filing returns altogether.

00:14:05.000 I mean, there are people with the IRS that go five, six, or seven years without filing a return.

00:14:09.000 The IRS comes and says, Stop doing this, pay a big penalty.

00:14:13.000 And that's usually the path forward.

00:14:15.000 Instead, they are using an abuse of the fraud statute, unlike anything we have ever seen before.

00:14:20.000 This sets a precedent that if we don't like your politics, we are now able to open up endless investigations into you, make you spend millions of dollars in legal fees.

00:14:30.000 Meanwhile, Peter Strzzok walks free, Lisa Page walks free, James Colmy walks free, Hunter Biden walks free.

00:14:38.000 How about Hunter Biden's taxes?

00:14:39.000 I would love to see his taxes.

00:14:41.000 I'd love to see a deep dive by the AG of New York City into Biden's Hunter Biden.

00:14:45.000 Do you think Hunter Biden ever got a fringe benefit?

00:14:47.000 Do you think he ever spent a couple weekends or a couple months in somebody else's apartment, maybe in New York City?

00:14:53.000 That very well could have been taxable income when he was living here.

00:14:56.000 Do you think that Hunter Biden ever, do you think he perfectly filled out his taxes?

00:15:01.000 Actually, no, he's under federal investigation for tax fraud, but we all know how that's going to end.

00:15:05.000 Hunter Biden will never be indicted.

00:15:07.000 He will never go to jail because the way it works in our country is that if you're a Democrat, you get complete and total immunity.

00:15:14.000 It's called progressive immunity, not herd immunity, progressive immunity.

00:15:19.000 If you're a conservative, though, you are guilty until proven innocent.

00:15:23.000 And when I saw Alan, is it Weiselberg or Weisselberg? 0.54

00:15:27.000 Yeah, walking as like a perp walk with his hands behind his back as if he is some sort of first-rate mob boss criminal.

00:15:36.000 Right.

00:15:36.000 And then he had to walk through and everyone was photographing him through this walk of shame.

00:15:40.000 I thought to myself, New York City and New York State, you are going to pay a price for this.

00:15:45.000 Man, I'm not, this is not like there's some sort of retribution.

00:15:48.000 The attention you are putting on this while New York City becomes Gotham City, that will manifest itself in something very significant.

00:15:58.000 Yeah.

00:15:59.000 And unfortunately, for most voters, they're still voting in droves for Democrats.

00:16:03.000 I mean, you have Adams, who hopefully will get elected as a former police officer.

00:16:10.000 And if that happens, maybe they'll bring more police back into the city and back into the subways because the crime rate, as we spoke about yesterday, has dramatically increased in New York City because we have an administration right now that's not focusing on the most important things.

00:16:25.000 What are the most important things?

00:16:27.000 That's one of the most important things.

00:16:27.000 Safety.

00:16:29.000 New YorkPost.com.

00:16:30.000 Did you know that 70% of the shootings in New York City in 2020 are unsolved?

00:16:36.000 Wow.

00:16:38.000 70%.

00:16:39.000 So 70% of any time there's been a firearm discharge in New York City.

00:16:43.000 We don't know who did that.

00:16:44.000 But all of a sudden, we now, the focus of the law enforcement arm of the city of New York is not about solving the 70% of unknown shooters and murderers.

00:16:56.000 No, it's about whether or not Weisselberg was in an apartment that he didn't perfectly pay for.

00:17:05.000 And instead of sending a letter saying, can you guys just solve this?

00:17:08.000 We know what you were doing here.

00:17:09.000 Or maybe there was a legitimate business purpose.

00:17:11.000 Instead, it's, no, we are going to make you suffer.

00:17:15.000 And even if you are a Democrat listening to this right now in the car, this should terrify you.

00:17:21.000 It's just a matter of time until Republicans respond in kind.

00:17:24.000 And that is not a good thing for our country, but it's a necessary thing.

00:17:27.000 Somewhere in some state across the country, you're going to see some attorney general that's going to say, you know what?

00:17:32.000 You guys just crossed the Rubicon.

00:17:34.000 We are going to start investigating every single Democrat nonprofit.

00:17:37.000 And by the way, it's long past time we start doing that.

00:17:39.000 That's right.

00:17:40.000 But all of a sudden, if you're a Democrat chuckling at this and you think that there's not going to be, you know, an equal and opposite reaction, you're naive.

00:17:49.000 Did you get hit with a big tax bill you weren't expecting?

00:17:52.000 With rates still being very low and home equity being high, it's the perfect time to refinance and get some cash out of your home.

00:17:58.000 If you have to take out a loan, don't go to the big banks where you know they don't share your values.

00:18:03.000 And at any time, they might kick out conservatives from using their banks.

00:18:07.000 Remember Tucker Carlson revealing that Bank of America probably unconstitutionally and maybe outside of the law, who knows, handed over depositing information, credit card transactions to the federal government to try to target conservatives.

00:18:20.000 That's right.

00:18:21.000 The big banks are siding against us.

00:18:24.000 So if you are going to try to borrow some money and you don't know what to do, then talk to a human being.

00:18:28.000 Talk to my friends, Andrew and Todd.

00:18:30.000 It's Andrew Del Rey and Todd Avakian at AndrewandTodd.com.

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00:18:39.000 Just go to andrewandtodd.com and take a 30 seconds to answer a couple questions.

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00:18:45.000 Andrew and Todd are not brokers.

00:18:47.000 They're bankers and human beings.

00:18:48.000 It's not like talking to an automaton and you have to borrow money and give money to BLM.

00:18:54.000 Instead, Andrew and Todd are real people.

00:18:56.000 They'll joke with you.

00:18:57.000 They'll pray with you.

00:18:58.000 They'll sympathize with you.

00:18:59.000 They'll give you honest advice.

00:19:00.000 They're good people, especially when you make one of the most important decisions in your life.

00:19:05.000 Don't go to one of the woke Wall Street banks where they just, all their money goes to the destruction of America.

00:19:10.000 Go look at the contributions.

00:19:12.000 Do you know that one of the big banks says they will not give money to Republicans anymore?

00:19:15.000 Then why take out loans with them?

00:19:17.000 The answer is because you probably didn't know that there was a competitor.

00:19:19.000 You didn't know that there were a couple Christian guys in California that want to do right by you.

00:19:24.000 I know they've done a great job with producer Andrew.

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00:19:35.000 And by the way, you might be working through a loan with a big bank and you might be up to your neck in paperwork.

00:19:39.000 It's not too late to pull the cord and transfer that over to someone who loves the Lord and loves the country.

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00:19:46.000 Look, we're partnering with them.

00:19:47.000 You're going to hear me talk about them a lot on this program.

00:19:50.000 Let me just end with this: with Andrew and Todd: is that a lot of you say, Charlie, I want to buy cot.

00:19:55.000 I want to stop supporting companies that don't share my values.

00:19:58.000 Well, then why would you borrow maybe even six figures, maybe seven figures with a bank that hates you?

00:20:05.000 Answer, you shouldn't.

00:20:06.000 AndrewandTodd.com, 888, 888, 1172.

00:20:09.000 Tell them Charlie Kirk sent you.

00:20:11.000 You'll be met with a smile, a warm greeting, and a real human being.

00:20:15.000 AndrewandTodd.com.

00:20:18.000 Really quick before we get into July 4th, Independence Day weekend.

00:20:22.000 Do you know there's over 155, according to NBC News New York, 155,000 untested rape kits in New York City?

00:20:30.000 But at least we got Weisselberg, at least we knew Weisselberg used a company car.

00:20:35.000 Do you know that shootings are up 64%?

00:20:37.000 Is that right, David?

00:20:37.000 That's right, 64%.

00:20:38.000 The New York Post said yesterday, 64%.

00:20:41.000 But at least we know that Weiselberg used a company car.

00:20:43.000 Do you know that there were 12 shootings overnight in New York City?

00:20:47.000 But at least we know Weiselberg used a company car.

00:20:50.000 That's right.

00:20:51.000 You see, the priority of the ruling class is not the well-being of black children in Brooklyn or Harlem that are shot on the way to school.

00:21:02.000 No, it's whether or not they punish people that threaten their political power.

00:21:07.000 This is what we're seeing now in New York City.

00:21:09.000 We're going to keep on monitoring this story, but at least we know everybody.

00:21:12.000 We don't know who the rapists are.

00:21:14.000 We don't know who the 70% of all shootings in New York go unsolved.

00:21:19.000 But at least we know that Weiselberg used a company car.

00:21:22.000 So this weekend, we celebrate one of the most important days in human history.

00:21:28.000 And I want to explore this with you, David.

00:21:30.000 It's very important.

00:21:31.000 And it's now a day that is under major accusations from the intelligentsia, the enlightened, the postmodern folks in our country, which is the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776.

00:21:47.000 So I want to read from it.

00:21:49.000 And it's very important that we understand that this was not just a document for the time.

00:21:55.000 It was a document for all time.

00:21:58.000 It starts with: when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them.

00:22:17.000 A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation.

00:22:23.000 Let's stop right there.

00:22:24.000 When in the course of human events, what does that mean?

00:22:27.000 It means this is a universal principle.

00:22:29.000 It means that when Thomas Jefferson was writing this, he wasn't saying that, oh, this is just for 1776.

00:22:35.000 No, he said, this is a moral right for all human beings.

00:22:39.000 Professor Harry Jaffa, who was the professor for Dr. Larry Arn from Hillsdale, he argued that the Declaration of Independence was the second most profound moment in this idea of self-governance from Moses coming down from Mount Sinai.

00:22:56.000 Because this was not just a political document.

00:22:59.000 This is a document that talked about who are we as human beings and how should we be governed.

00:23:05.000 In fact, Thomas Jefferson made the argument that government exists simply and solely to protect you as God made you and there are certain laws that you are able to operate in.

00:23:20.000 I want to say this again.

00:23:22.000 The laws of nature and of nature's God.

00:23:25.000 David, what does that mean?

00:23:27.000 Yeah, so the laws of nature and nature's God is, I mean, first, God is creator of all things.

00:23:32.000 And second of all, that he creates us in an environment which allows freedom, allows what we call the pursuit of happiness, not the pursuit of narcissism or self-indulgence, but for me to be able to pursue my dreams and goals in life without being taken by a tyrannical government, without being treated in an unequal way.

00:23:52.000 And that's the second clause of the Declaration, right?

00:23:55.000 That this is the number one thing we hold to be self-evident, that we're created equal.

00:24:00.000 You can't, because of a political bent, treat this party significantly different than you treat this other party.

00:24:07.000 And that was happening and it's happening again in our current political climate.

00:24:11.000 What makes America so beautiful is first, this idea of liberty bounded by basic laws.

00:24:18.000 We hold these truths to be self-evident.

00:24:21.000 So this idea of self-evident truth is a Lockean idea.

00:24:25.000 John Locke, who is heavily influenced by Aquinas and Augustine and by Aristotle, there are three social contract theorists that all happened around the same time.

00:24:35.000 They all lived in the same time, basically.

00:24:37.000 They were contemporaries, to use the philosophical term.

00:24:41.000 And that would be John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Hobbes.

00:24:46.000 Thomas Hobbes believed that human nature, that we were nasty and we were brutish and short to one another.

00:24:52.000 And therefore, we need a dictator type like tyrant to govern ourselves.

00:24:57.000 Hobbes was right about human nature.

00:24:59.000 He was wrong about the prescription for that human nature.

00:25:02.000 Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a French philosopher.

00:25:06.000 He heavily influenced Karl Marx and this idea of the romantic writer and romantic literature.

00:25:13.000 Rousseau valued the primitive over the civilized.

00:25:17.000 He valued the infant over the adult.

00:25:21.000 He prioritized the adulterer over the loyal spouse.

00:25:25.000 Confessions, written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was actually the second best-selling book in the 1800s in France.

00:25:33.000 His idea of a social contract was that his most famous quote was not that all men are created equal and that they're endowed by their creator.

00:25:41.000 Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, no, no, no, no.

00:25:43.000 All men are born free and they live the rest of their lives in chains.

00:25:48.000 Basically, he was saying that private property and commercial society, that is actually keeping people handcuffed.

00:25:56.000 So there's this tension point between John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where John Locke said, who are you in the state of nature?

00:26:04.000 What do you got?

00:26:07.000 You have consciousness?

00:26:09.000 Do you have thought?

00:26:11.000 Do you have the ability to own property?

00:26:14.000 That is worthy of protection.

00:26:15.000 So anything that is built was built by those things.

00:26:19.000 It was built by your ability to reason.

00:26:21.000 And then it says in the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson all but just copied John Locke with this, that we're endowed by their creator.

00:26:30.000 So creator, by the way, has a capital C in the Declaration.

00:26:34.000 God is mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence.

00:26:37.000 We'll get into that in a second.

00:26:38.000 With certain unalienable rights.

00:26:40.000 What does that mean, David?

00:26:41.000 Yeah, unalienable rights are rights that you can't have taken away from you.

00:26:45.000 They can't be separated from you.

00:26:47.000 This is part of Locke in the second treatise on government.

00:26:51.000 He says property itself is something that you invest your life into.

00:26:56.000 So when someone steals something from you, they're not just stealing your hat or your shoes or your car.

00:27:01.000 They're stealing a piece of your life because you've invested your years to have that and your life exists inside that property.

00:27:09.000 And that can't be taken away from you without appropriate process of law.

00:27:14.000 Then it says life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

00:27:17.000 Now, the original draft said property, which was part of John Locke's original thesis.

00:27:24.000 Now, I want to stop really quick because there is this idea that our true birthday was 1619.

00:27:31.000 It's being put forward by the charlatan and the dishonest, let's just say, quasi-intellectual Nicole Hannah Jones, who has just been granted tenure at University of North Carolina and she wrote the 1619 project, amongst other things, despite intentionally misinterpreting the documents, the founders.

00:27:49.000 So her whole argument is that the American founding was actually about defending slavery and racism.

00:27:55.000 Nicole Hannah Jones, I will write you a personal check of $10,000.

00:28:00.000 And I know you're a grifter, so you love money.

00:28:02.000 If you can find me one original source document of any signer, of any founding father that ever wrote robustly about connecting the American founding to slavery, I will write you a personal check.

00:28:14.000 You can't find it because you made it up.

00:28:16.000 You did not use original source documents.

00:28:18.000 You did not use quotes that are attributed to the founders.

00:28:20.000 In fact, if you look in the private journals and musings of every single founding father, Thomas Jefferson included, they abhorred slavery.

00:28:26.000 They did not say, are we going to get rid of slavery?

00:28:29.000 They asked, how are we going to get rid of slavery?

00:28:31.000 And I'll prove it to you. 0.92

00:28:32.000 Vermont abolished slavery in 1777.

00:28:35.000 Nine out of 13 of the original colonies by the Constitutional Convention by 1787 had already abolished slavery.

00:28:42.000 The Declaration was a universal call of what a human being is in relationship with that government.

00:28:47.000 It wasn't until the Democrat Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, 7-2, the two dissenters were Republicans, did they say the Declaration doesn't apply to black people.

00:28:57.000 The Dred Scott decision was one of the most immoral and evil legal decisions ever made in the history of the world.

00:29:03.000 But this is a really important thing that when we look at the Declaration, we look at our founding, this was a call for all of humanity.

00:29:10.000 So it gets to the question of what is a human being, which is something the other side cannot answer.

00:29:15.000 The other side says, well, a human being is what I choose it to be.

00:29:18.000 We believe a human being is the speaking being, as Aristotle would say.

00:29:22.000 Nature is the norm, that we are the reasoned beings.

00:29:26.000 That makes us different than dogs and dolphins.

00:29:28.000 The Constitution does not apply to butterflies.

00:29:31.000 It is a human document, and it says it right here.

00:29:34.000 It says that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, not among elk, not among moose, not among dolphins, but among men deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.

00:29:46.000 That idea of consent to the governed comes down to one word, permission, that the government needs our permission to use force.

00:29:54.000 You see, what Thomas Jefferson was doing here, he was a big thinker, is he was completely inverting human beings' relationship with government in real time.

00:30:03.000 He said, you know what, King George, you're actually at the bottom of the hierarchy.

00:30:07.000 The top of the hierarchy is the creator.

00:30:09.000 And then those rights are transcendently passed down to the equality of all human beings.

00:30:14.000 Then government springs out beyond that.

00:30:17.000 You see, this idea of the divine right of kings, which obviously King George believed in, was the opposite, was that there was a hierarchy of the human being above one another where Thomas Jefferson said, no, we're all equal with rights under our creator.

00:30:30.000 And therefore, King George, if you're in that position of authority, we have to give you that permission.

00:30:35.000 We have to have some sort of system to either vote for you or to collaborate or to cooperate.

00:30:41.000 You're not just there through blood right.

00:30:43.000 What Thomas Jefferson was doing here in the Declaration of Independence was the most articulate and effective indictment of the blood right to ancestral rule.

00:30:53.000 That's a leap forward, the likes of which is just so mind-blowing because it was an act of courage and one that was filled with clarity of wisdom that I argue was actually transcendent.

00:31:05.000 And Thomas Jefferson was tasked with this project by the fellow signers, 56 of them, where they said, hey, Thomas Jefferson, TJ, can you put all these ideas into one?

00:31:19.000 But there's something that people miss, which is this was just merely an extension of the demand of the people that was laid by the preachers of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield and many others.

00:31:31.000 And there was a committee that was formed.

00:31:33.000 The chairman of that committee was Benjamin Franklin.

00:31:36.000 And they said, hey, young Thomas Jefferson, take a stab at this.

00:31:39.000 Dr. Larry Arn from Hillsdale, he famously has said, you could only really become a master of three things.

00:31:44.000 You can know a lot of things.

00:31:45.000 You can only become a master of three things.

00:31:47.000 For him, it was Aristotle, Lincoln, and Churchill.

00:31:50.000 My goal in life is to become a master around the time of the American founding.

00:31:54.000 That's one of my goals in life.

00:31:56.000 I think I found my passion with that of what did Hamilton believe?

00:31:59.000 What did Madison believe?

00:32:00.000 What did George Mason believe?

00:32:01.000 And it's just so important and it's being so intentionally misrepresented because almost all of these conversations of the destruction of our country go back to a misunderstanding of the philosophical roots and the ambitions and the dreams of the founding fathers.

00:32:15.000 So I want to go back to this, David, really quick.

00:32:17.000 Can you walk through what was the landscape like of the church and activist pastors right before the Declaration of Independence?

00:32:28.000 Was there a citizenry that was demanding this great leap forward to self-governance?

00:32:33.000 Yeah, you mentioned in the previous segment, Charlie, the shift between the divine right of kings, subjugating law, reinterpreting law, living under the tyranny of ever-changing laws, and this famous pamphlet called Lex Rex that came out and started shifting the ideological landscape through pastors.

00:32:54.000 And Lex Rex meant that Lex, that's the Latin word for law, and Rex is the Latin word for king.

00:33:01.000 So Lex was above Rex.

00:33:03.000 So it wasn't that the king was above the law, that he could interpret it any way he wanted, but actually that the law was above the king and the king was subject to law.

00:33:13.000 In that pamphlet, it's John Knox, I believe, is one of the ideological kind of seed bearers of that movement.

00:33:22.000 He was saying that the kings of the Old Testament always ended up doing corrupt things.

00:33:27.000 That's why the law has to be fixed and permanent because it doesn't change and apply differently to different groups of people.

00:33:36.000 And we just talked about the Declaration of Independence.

00:33:39.000 One of the axioms is equality under the law.

00:33:43.000 And this is something in the Summa that Thomas Aquinas said.

00:33:46.000 He said, Summa Theologica.

00:33:48.000 That's right.

00:33:48.000 He said, when there are a thousand laws, when there are innumerable laws, it creates the opportunity for tyranny because you never know what law you're breaking.

00:33:57.000 And the tyrannical can apply whatever law, just like you said, the fascist dictators boy said, you show me the man, I'll show you the crime.

00:34:06.000 Well, that works in an environment where there's a million laws and you don't even know if you're breaking those laws.

00:34:11.000 Andrei Vyshevsky, Mark Cicero famously said, the more laws, the less justice.

00:34:17.000 James Madison famously said, if the laws become too voluminous and too counted and too plenty, justice will disappear.

00:34:24.000 I'm paraphrasing, but that's basically what James Madison said.

00:34:27.000 James Madison, the author and the father of the American Constitution.

00:34:30.000 And then finally, as you say, Andrei Vyshevsky, show me the man, I'll show you the crime.

00:34:35.000 You pass a bunch of laws professionally.

00:34:37.000 It then all comes down to who's enforcing it, who's in charge.

00:34:41.000 And if you get a carve-out, that means you're a friend or an ally of the party.

00:34:45.000 But if you're a dissident against the party, like Donald Trump, they will crush you.

00:34:50.000 And on this July 4th weekend, I hope all of you take time to go reread the Declaration of Independence and then listen to our podcasts and think deeply: are we near a precipice where we have to redeclare our moral right to self-govern?

00:35:05.000 And those are very weighted words.

00:35:07.000 I'm not calling for anything violent, obviously.

00:35:09.000 I'm saying, but do we have to redeclare this idea that we have a moral right to be able to charter our course and to be able to build a partnership with our leaders?

00:35:20.000 It feels awfully antagonistic.

00:35:22.000 Where if you don't hold the party line, they will crush you the same way King George did to the American Founders.

00:35:29.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:30.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:32.000 And if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:35:36.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:38.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 03, 2021

Unpacking the Maniacal Witch Hunt Against Donald Trump with Attorney David Engelhardt

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