The Charlie Kirk Show - When We Removed God from School with Pete Hegseth LIVE at Dream City Church

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:02.000 No advertisers, just my conversation with Pete Hegseth brought to you by TurningpointUSA, tpusa.com.

00:00:08.000 It's a Sunday episode where we talk about Marxism, the education system, and more brought to you by our friends at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

00:00:15.000 That should be your church home if you live in Arizona.

00:00:17.000 Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:19.000 Have you voted?

00:00:20.000 Do you have a plan to get 10 people out to the polls?

00:00:22.000 10 people.

00:00:23.000 Write them down right now.

00:00:24.000 That is your call to action.

00:00:26.000 10 people.

00:00:27.000 Email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:30.000 That is freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:34.000 Subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.

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00:00:38.000 Get involved with TurningPointAction, TPAction.com.

00:00:41.000 You need your friends to get out to vote.

00:00:43.000 Own your circle.

00:00:44.000 If every person listening to this owned their circle, we will have a red wave that will overwhelm the system.

00:00:49.000 It's within striking distance.

00:00:50.000 We can do it.

00:00:51.000 Do we want it?

00:00:52.000 That's the question in front of us.

00:00:54.000 Buckle up.

00:00:55.000 Here we go.

00:00:56.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:58.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:01:00.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:03.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:07.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:08.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:09.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:01:10.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:01:17.000 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.

00:01:26.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:31.000 Thank you.

00:01:32.000 So all of you should have these on your seats.

00:01:34.000 It's going to be the most amazing thing December 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th at the Phoenix Convention Center.

00:01:40.000 That video did not do it justice at all.

00:01:42.000 We have Tucker Carlson, we have Candace Owens, we have Kaylee McEnany, we have Pete Hegseth, because you're not going to hear enough of him, as well as Greg Gutfeld.

00:01:52.000 We'll have the biggest speakers in the movement.

00:01:54.000 And we'll see if there's some other big guests, and you can guess who they might be.

00:01:58.000 If you live in Arizona and you're here tonight, I want to highly encourage you guys to get a discount with this here tonight of the QR code amfest.com.

00:02:06.000 It's four days.

00:02:07.000 It's the biggest event in the entire movement here in Arizona.

00:02:10.000 And we'd love to have all of you come and attend.

00:02:12.000 And so there's also the QR code there.

00:02:14.000 So it's a special discount for all of you guys here as part of our Freedom Night family.

00:02:20.000 So if you have any questions about that, we have booths outside.

00:02:23.000 And especially bring your son, your daughter, your grandkid.

00:02:28.000 We're anticipating well over 10 to 12,000 people there this year, which is just amazing.

00:02:33.000 And so get your tickets early.

00:02:35.000 It's going to be extraordinary.

00:02:36.000 You guys can follow this, and we want to have the biggest presence that we can have in Arizona.

00:02:42.000 So who's ready to go vote?

00:02:49.000 Good.

00:02:50.000 Who actually is planning to vote on election day?

00:02:52.000 Raise your hand.

00:02:52.000 It's a lot of people.

00:02:53.000 Good for you.

00:02:54.000 Look, I'm not going to tell you how to vote tonight.

00:02:56.000 That's not what tonight is about, but I'm going to tell you that you are biblically commanded to care about your nation and to vote.

00:03:03.000 And we need every single person here tonight to make a commitment to not just go and vote, but to get two, three, four, five, ten other people out to vote on Tuesday, whatever your leanings are.

00:03:16.000 I have a suspicion I know where your leanings are tonight.

00:03:18.000 But there is a misconception.

00:03:21.000 There is a lie out there that somehow Christians shouldn't care.

00:03:26.000 That for some reason, Christians should just kind of, oh, I don't care who's in charge and I don't care who's making decisions.

00:03:32.000 As we say frequently here tonight at Freedom Night, Jeremiah 29, 7, demand the welfare of the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.

00:03:42.000 And I just want to encourage all of you to rise up like never before.

00:03:46.000 It's right in front of you.

00:03:48.000 It's very, very important.

00:03:49.000 I know personally, I'm not trusting just putting my ballot in the mail.

00:03:54.000 So I actually want to go in person and make sure that happens.

00:03:58.000 And it really is just a couple hours away, everybody.

00:04:02.000 It's incredibly important.

00:04:04.000 So, a couple other kinds of thoughts on that.

00:04:06.000 I know we're going to have some question and answer here tonight, but I just want to let all of you know.

00:04:10.000 I travel the country, as you know, I visit college campuses, so you don't have to.

00:04:14.000 There's something happening in this country that the media is not picking up on, but I think that in a couple days you're going to see it materialize in a very significant and serious way.

00:04:26.000 But here's what has to happen: regardless of your own political leanings or your own kind of wishes coming this Tuesday, the most important thing is this: that in the next five or six days, you have to understand that it's not enough to be a spectator.

00:04:42.000 It has to be, you have to be a participant.

00:04:44.000 And by the way, this is a nonpartisan thing to say.

00:04:47.000 If you are not yet signed up to be an election judge, I highly recommend you look into that so that we have fair and free elections coming this Tuesday.

00:04:55.000 There are a lot of open election judge positions still.

00:04:58.000 Maricopa, I think, has all of them filled except for a couple areas.

00:05:02.000 If you don't know what an election judge is, it's just an election observer, someone that's making sure the process unfolds.

00:05:07.000 And I hate to break it to you.

00:05:09.000 It's probably going to take a couple days to find out whoever wins whatever race here in Tuesday.

00:05:13.000 And so, look, regardless of all the different political leanings here, here's what we can say: is that it is your biblical commandment to vote and then vote biblically.

00:05:23.000 Vote for the person that is most in alignment with your values and your worldview and get other people to do the same.

00:05:29.000 Do not wake up the next day and wish you would have cast a ballot and said, Oh, well, I don't like that person.

00:05:35.000 I don't like that.

00:05:36.000 I don't like those decisions.

00:05:37.000 You have a great opportunity to do that.

00:05:39.000 And so, tonight, we have an amazing opportunity to dive deep into one of the issues that so many of you people care about, that so many of us care about.

00:05:45.000 And by the way, our guest visited and saw firsthand Dream City Christian at Turning Point Academy.

00:05:51.000 And I got to tell you, Pete was blown away, and I was blown away.

00:05:55.000 And by the way, how awesome was that performance that we just saw?

00:05:59.000 That was really special.

00:06:00.000 I got to tell you.

00:06:01.000 That was really amazing.

00:06:04.000 And really, the battle that goes beyond politics, the battle that is shaping our country, is the battle happening in the classroom.

00:06:13.000 What is happening in high school classrooms, elementary classrooms, what's happening in our schools, what's happening in our colleges, is the most important war.

00:06:22.000 You could call it a culture war that's unfolding.

00:06:24.000 I know so many of you have really seen in the last couple years new energy and new commitment around these ideas, where all of a sudden you see pornography in our local school boards, in our local school districts, in our textbooks.

00:06:38.000 You see these radical ideas start to pop up in ways you never would have imagined.

00:06:42.000 And there is a parents movement, by the way, in this country that is strong and is getting bigger by the day in a very significant way.

00:06:52.000 But I was really moved by this book, Battle for the American Mind, by Pete Hegseth.

00:06:57.000 And you know, I read a lot of books, and I have to say, about 50% of the books I read, I just stop because it's just kind of the usual popcorn.

00:07:05.000 You know what I mean?

00:07:05.000 It's the same thing.

00:07:07.000 And, you know, Pete sent a copy of this to me, and he heavily promoted it on Fox and did a great job of it.

00:07:13.000 And I started reading it, and I started to say out loud, that's a good point.

00:07:18.000 I didn't know that.

00:07:20.000 So Erica walks in from the other room.

00:07:21.000 She said, What are you reading?

00:07:23.000 And I said, This is Pete's new book.

00:07:24.000 This is really well researched.

00:07:26.000 And by the way, this is kind of the topic that I know a lot about.

00:07:31.000 You know, it's kind of we're in 10 years of this, going to college campuses, a lot dealing with homeschooling.

00:07:36.000 And I learned a lot when I started to realize how deep the progressives were into our educational system, how serious this threat actually is, and then what the solution actually is.

00:07:46.000 So I have to give this plug every single time.

00:07:49.000 If you have a young person in your life and you're kind of school shopping, send them the Dream City Christian at Turning Point Academy because that's part of the solution that we're going to talk about tonight.

00:07:59.000 But honestly, we're very focused on the election.

00:08:03.000 Great.

00:08:04.000 But the people that are actually going to control the country or not control the country, it's actually more important what's happening in the classroom than even the ballot box right now.

00:08:13.000 It's actually a lot more important of what values are you passing down?

00:08:17.000 How do you view the world?

00:08:18.000 Do you believe there is a God?

00:08:20.000 Do you believe America's a good country?

00:08:22.000 That's the most important thing in front of us.

00:08:24.000 And Pete did an amazing job researching this book.

00:08:27.000 It was a bestseller all across the board.

00:08:30.000 And I look forward to exploring it, not just talking about the problem, but also the solution.

00:08:35.000 Because we in Arizona, we need to be on the front edge of, we already have great school choice legislation, thankfully, but starting new micro schools, hybrid schools, supporting Dream City Christian at Turning Point Academy, sending your kids there, and understanding the threats that every single kid in government schools right now in the state of Arizona is likely being propagandized by this progressive venom.

00:08:56.000 And we have a duty as Christians to care about that and go about solving it.

00:09:01.000 So join me in welcoming Fox and Friends host, Pete Hegseth, to the stage.

00:09:08.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:09:10.000 Pete, great to see you, man.

00:09:11.000 Thank you.

00:09:12.000 And I know you'll be at America Fest.

00:09:15.000 Yes.

00:09:15.000 And it's going to be a lot of fun.

00:09:17.000 You were there last year and been to our other events.

00:09:17.000 You've been there.

00:09:19.000 Pete, tell us about the book, Battle for the American Mind.

00:09:22.000 I will.

00:09:23.000 First of all, I'm so encouraged by all of you.

00:09:27.000 Thank you for spending your Wednesday night with me.

00:09:30.000 There's so many things you could be doing.

00:09:32.000 I'm encouraged by what this church is doing, not just in reaching people for Christ, but engaging boldly in the culture, which is exactly what we need churches to do.

00:09:41.000 And then a partnership with a school.

00:09:44.000 The reason we were at Dream City Christian is because at Fox Nation, I host a series called The Miss Education of America, which is a five-part series.

00:09:53.000 We're doing season two.

00:09:55.000 Season two is about gender studies and the sexualization of our kids, as well as the grip that our teachers' unions have on the government schools in our country.

00:10:05.000 But then we realized we've been doing a lot of problem identification.

00:10:08.000 Let's talk about the solution.

00:10:09.000 We want to highlight schools like Dream City and the partnership with churches, which used to be the standard.

00:10:17.000 And many churches abandoned that mission and in the void came progressives with a whole different prerogative.

00:10:25.000 So that's the baseline of Battle for the American Mind.

00:10:28.000 And the first chapter is called the 16,000 Hour War.

00:10:33.000 Because there are 16,000 hours your kids spend in school between kindergarten and their senior year, the most precious years of their life.

00:10:42.000 And the story of the progressive takeover of K through 12 education, because that's what it is.

00:10:48.000 When you read the book, the first step to recovery is understanding the depth of your problem, right?

00:10:53.000 You have to understand the firm and complete grip the progressives and modern leftists have on education today, almost across the board.

00:11:02.000 It doesn't matter what zip code you're in.

00:11:06.000 The first key is understanding not what they put into the school, not the indoctrination, because there's plenty of that.

00:11:11.000 You can see it on Fox or pretty much only Fox these days.

00:11:17.000 It's what they removed.

00:11:18.000 The secret of the story is not what they put in.

00:11:20.000 The secret of the story is what they removed.

00:11:23.000 It was very, very intentional.

00:11:26.000 It was a plot.

00:11:27.000 They talked about it openly.

00:11:29.000 We had to rediscover it.

00:11:31.000 And I think you know the answer.

00:11:33.000 The first thing they knew they had to remove from the classroom was God.

00:11:37.000 And they targeted it because our country assumed that would always be part of the classroom.

00:11:44.000 You go back 120 years, there was a cross and a Bible in every single school in America.

00:11:51.000 Public schools, a cross and a Bible.

00:11:55.000 It was part of the way our kids were raised and educated.

00:11:58.000 And then progressives, and this is different than the progressives we see today, Charlie.

00:12:02.000 This was a whole movement run by socialists and atheists.

00:12:06.000 When you meet the characters in this book, almost to a man and to a woman, they are socialists, atheists, and later on Marxists, who loathed the Judeo-Christian Valley's values of our republic and sought their destruction.

00:12:22.000 And they realized that the classroom was the place to do it.

00:12:27.000 And a word we talk about, you'll be introduced to early in the book, is an ancient Greek word called paideia.

00:12:34.000 There's no direct translation for it in English.

00:12:36.000 And I got to give a lot of credit to my co-author on the book, David Goodwin, as well.

00:12:40.000 He runs the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

00:12:43.000 So while we'll talk about the problem, I'm actually more optimistic about education in America today than I've ever been, and I'll tell you why.

00:12:49.000 But this word paideia, which probably none of us grew up learning because we didn't learn Latin and Greek like they used to to understand and engage with ancient texts and biblical wisdom, paideia is how we educate our youngest.

00:13:03.000 It's the enculturation, it's the vision of the good life that we imprint on the souls of our youngest kids.

00:13:10.000 And what progressives realize is if you can capture kids effectively before the age of 13 and change their paideia, their view of the world, then everything else down the pipeline is much, much easier.

00:13:24.000 That's why they don't want to.

00:13:25.000 College is a scam, as Charlie wrote about.

00:13:28.000 It is, but they were never set to end there.

00:13:32.000 That was where they started.

00:13:34.000 Their goal has always been not to stop at colleges and universities, but burrow into our high schools, middle schools, and now you see evident before our eyes are elementary schools.

00:13:46.000 Because if you teach kids there is no such thing as biological sex, that it's just a fluid spectrum of gender, or you teach kids that because of their skin color, they must be inherently oppressor or oppressed, a victim or an oppressor.

00:14:02.000 If this is a teacher with authority in front of a fourth grader, and that fourth grader comes home believing what that teacher is teaching and reinforced by all the curriculum and pedagogy that goes with it, you've now changed the entire way in which they view the world, which means introducing them to biblical truth later on becomes that much more difficult.

00:14:24.000 That's what the progressives targeted, and the story over 100 years has been hidden and we tried to expose it.

00:14:29.000 Yeah, and I think people are just waking up to this.

00:14:30.000 So this has been 100 years in the making, is what you talk about in the book.

00:14:34.000 How were the founding fathers educated?

00:14:37.000 So don't you think every single kid in America today deserves the type of education that brought the brilliance of 1776?

00:14:47.000 And it wasn't complicated.

00:14:49.000 This was a 2,000-year lineage of Western civilization, of Judeo-Christian values, the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem, of faith and reason, that was the great books that was biblical wisdom, that was Latin, it was Greek, it was theology, it was philosophy, it was actual history.

00:15:09.000 It was those ingredients that they grappled with, that they debated about, that brought about that brilliance of the greatest human experiment we've ever seen on the planet.

00:15:22.000 It was not an accident.

00:15:24.000 Churches had a great deal to do with it.

00:15:26.000 Who were many of the leaders of our revolution?

00:15:28.000 Ministers and reverends.

00:15:31.000 Who is the top?

00:15:33.000 I don't know.

00:15:33.000 I'm not trying to get into a tangent here.

00:15:35.000 Do you know who the top, what would be reverend, I guess, at Harvard University is today?

00:15:43.000 He's an atheist.

00:15:44.000 It's true.

00:15:46.000 He's an atheist.

00:15:48.000 We're so far gone from what our founders actually engaged with that they would not recognize it at all today.

00:15:54.000 It was a classical Christian education.

00:15:58.000 It was the way, and none of it was, it wasn't perfect, but they understood that teaching people to think critically created free-thinking people who couldn't be captured by demagoguery.

00:16:12.000 And when you can think critically and think freely, whether you're a mason or a blacksmith or a farmer, do you think people in the 1780s or 90s had more use for a classical education than we do today?

00:16:24.000 Absolutely not.

00:16:25.000 It was a baseline.

00:16:27.000 And what progressives understood is, no, we want to take thinkers and turn them into workers.

00:16:33.000 And through creating thinkers and turning them into workers, the first thing we need to remove is all of that high-falutin thinking stuff and turn it into vocational training.

00:16:43.000 And God was the first thing they removed in that process.

00:16:46.000 And so in the late 1800s, here's the Industrial Revolution.

00:16:49.000 And you have a lot of thinkers start to introduce this idea that because of technology, everything the founding fathers wrote can be disregarded.

00:16:57.000 Now, this is a very simple way to describe it.

00:17:00.000 Oh, we have Twitter and airplanes.

00:17:02.000 We don't need the Declaration or the Constitution anymore.

00:17:04.000 Now, by the way, a lot of people on college campuses believe that.

00:17:07.000 We've progressed so far.

00:17:09.000 Therefore, we don't need that old stuff.

00:17:11.000 Woodrow Wilson said this, by the way.

00:17:13.000 Woodrow Wilson was the first American president.

00:17:15.000 He was a progressive.

00:17:16.000 He was a friend with all these people.

00:17:18.000 He was a college president at Princeton University, governor of New Jersey, became president in 1912.

00:17:24.000 And he argued that basically the founding fathers, they got, they were fine at the time, but they don't know how advanced we are.

00:17:30.000 Now, that right there is a non-biblical view of humanity because we believe just because times progress, human beings don't.

00:17:39.000 We believe human beings' brokenness is a standard that does not change.

00:17:44.000 In fact, we believe technology only makes it easier for us to screw up.

00:17:48.000 We believe technology only makes it easier for us to be awful and to be murderous and to be greedy.

00:17:54.000 In fact, it's the human being that you should focus on trying to create good people.

00:17:58.000 So the founding fathers created the Constitution.

00:18:00.000 It wasn't written for the times.

00:18:01.000 It was written to stand the test of time, right?

00:18:03.000 Because it is a document that mulls and dwells over eternal truths, not just things that are temporary.

00:18:09.000 So enter all these thinkers in the late 1800s where they see the steam engine.

00:18:14.000 They see all of this advancement.

00:18:16.000 And with it, Darwin's theory of evolution, all these other kind of more, let's say, provocative thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hegel, that are really kind of pushing ancient knowledge by the wayside.

00:18:30.000 And then they say, hey, we have to change the way we educate.

00:18:34.000 And the way they did it is what, Pete?

00:18:36.000 They basically said, enough of this Socratic way of learning, enough of this traditional way of having the church or the parent.

00:18:43.000 We need to what?

00:18:44.000 Have structured school, very specific times.

00:18:47.000 Everyone's sitting and looking at the teacher in rows.

00:18:50.000 By the way, the way that most kids in government schools sit in the classroom is something that's only 100 years old.

00:18:56.000 And by the way, Dream City Christian at Turning Point Academy, when we went into the classroom there, they weren't sitting that way.

00:19:01.000 They were also collaboratively in their own little working groups.

00:19:04.000 Just the way that you sit in a class, single file, is awful.

00:19:08.000 There is no evidence actually kids learn that way well.

00:19:11.000 In fact, there's evidence that they actually learn terribly that way.

00:19:14.000 But if you're trying to create worker bees in a factory, that's a good way.

00:19:17.000 Elaborate on all that, Pete.

00:19:18.000 Absolutely right.

00:19:19.000 Progressives had social control on the mind.

00:19:21.000 And Charlie, you're exactly right.

00:19:23.000 It all comes back to the garden.

00:19:24.000 It all comes back to the original sin.

00:19:25.000 It all comes back to whether or not you believe men and women are perfectible.

00:19:29.000 That's right.

00:19:29.000 So, progressives rejected the idea of original sin, that we are all sinners in need of God's grace, and said through education and social control, we can create generations of future reliable voters who will perpetuate our utopian schemes.

00:19:45.000 See, they didn't know exactly where it would lead.

00:19:47.000 It wasn't a conspiracy, but they knew exactly where it wouldn't lead.

00:19:51.000 It wouldn't lead toward Judeo-Christian values and biblical wisdom.

00:19:55.000 They knew that.

00:19:56.000 That's where we'll get into critical theory if we want to, and the whole idea of where that's a whole nother topic.

00:20:02.000 But I got a progressive education, and so did you, almost to a man and to a woman.

00:20:09.000 And I went to a public school in the 1990s in conservative suburban Minnesota.

00:20:16.000 My parents were Christians.

00:20:17.000 My dad was an educator.

00:20:18.000 My mom was a stay-at-home mom.

00:20:20.000 We went to a wonderful church that reminds me a lot of this church.

00:20:23.000 And I went to church on Sunday, and we went to Iwana and Wednesday night church on Wednesday nights.

00:20:31.000 And I had a wonderful upbringing.

00:20:34.000 But everything about the confines of my classroom was created by progressives 100 years ago.

00:20:39.000 You mentioned the Rose.

00:20:41.000 You mentioned that approach.

00:20:43.000 The bell ringing, God being removed, of course, lunch breaks.

00:20:48.000 Lunch breaks, different subjects, social studies.

00:20:51.000 The idea we're not going to study civics, history, philosophy, theology.

00:20:56.000 We're going to create psychology and social studies and split it all up as if we can dissect human nature and through a scientific method, which they've invented, create more perfectible human beings by controlling how they think and what they think.

00:21:13.000 All created by progressives.

00:21:15.000 So almost every subject and frame.

00:21:17.000 Did you take social studies?

00:21:19.000 I took social studies.

00:21:20.000 The progressives made it up.

00:21:24.000 It's a made-up conglomerate of subjects meant to silo the way that we think, as opposed to basing all of wisdom in God's wisdom, in his word.

00:21:34.000 And it all makes sense looking at it through that lens.

00:21:37.000 You see, John Dewey, who's the father of modern progressive education, founded a school in Gary, Indiana called the Gary Plant.

00:21:43.000 And they knew the parents there would revolt in the early 20th century if they took God out.

00:21:47.000 So they decided, we'll just have a pullout period.

00:21:50.000 So the kids can still get religious instruction.

00:21:52.000 They just have to leave the campus.

00:21:54.000 And then when they come back, we'll continue with the secular education.

00:21:57.000 Well, they debated this in the New Republic, the progressive magazine of the time.

00:22:01.000 Then they moved the school in another variation to New York City, where they continued it and got more aggressive about how to remove God.

00:22:08.000 John Dewey then eventually lands at Columbia University.

00:22:12.000 The story goes on and on, and the way in which they burrowed into the institutions to change the way in which we learn.

00:22:19.000 Here's one lesson they took in particular.

00:22:21.000 Frances Willard, probably never heard her name, and I hadn't before this project either.

00:22:25.000 She was a suffragette, but also fought for prohibition in the 1870s, 1890s, a socialist.

00:22:32.000 She realized that if you put curriculum in third-grade classrooms across America, and this was her mission, anti-alcohol curriculum, she thought, let's see what happens.

00:22:42.000 What happened 40 years later?

00:22:44.000 The 18th Amendment, a constitutional amendment banning the sale and consumption of alcohol across America.

00:22:50.000 It succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

00:22:54.000 And the progressives studied this movement and said, if we can control second, third, and fourth grade curriculum, imagine the political effect we can have in the future.

00:23:04.000 Imagine right now where they're teaching environmentalism and climate change alarmism and racial justice.

00:23:11.000 What does that look like politically 30 years from now?

00:23:15.000 That is the horizon.

00:23:15.000 Right?

00:23:17.000 And yes, what is happening five days from now in Arizona, you better believe it's important, right?

00:23:22.000 But what about what's going to happen 10 years and 15 and 20 and 25 years and 30 years?

00:23:28.000 That battle in the classroom is the most consequential.

00:23:31.000 Pete, do you have a thought on that?

00:23:33.000 It's unchartered territory, actually.

00:23:35.000 This gives me hope.

00:23:36.000 What Turning Point is doing, giving me hope.

00:23:39.000 What homeschoolers in classical Christian schools across America are doing, give me hope.

00:23:43.000 So none of this is irreversible.

00:23:45.000 But if you look at the trajectory, we had a Western Christian Paideia for about 40 years from the 1920s to the 1960s.

00:23:54.000 And then we had a effectively American progressive paideia.

00:23:57.000 And I'll explain that for a second from the 60s to the early 2000s.

00:24:01.000 We are living in basically a culturally Marxist Paideia at this point.

00:24:05.000 That's right.

00:24:06.000 When you look at the stranglehold that they have on K through 12, from the unions to the teachers' colleges to the accreditors to the testing to the state standards to the federal standards to the funding, it is all a certain set of prerogatives, none of which reflect the values of this church or of your family.

00:24:25.000 And that's intentional.

00:24:26.000 And one more thing.

00:24:27.000 When I say American progressive paideia, what did they replace the Bible and the cross with?

00:24:36.000 They replaced it with a flag and a pledge.

00:24:38.000 The early progressives replaced God with allegiance to the state.

00:24:43.000 Now, I love the Pledge of Allegiance, and I revere our flag, fought for it.

00:24:50.000 But the progressives saw it as a gradual step.

00:24:54.000 What do they care today about the pledge and the flag?

00:24:57.000 They're happy to get rid of it now.

00:24:59.000 It was always a step for social control and allegiance to the state.

00:25:03.000 The original Pledge of Allegiance in America, written by Francis Bellamy in the 1890s, he's a socialist, and it did not include under God.

00:25:13.000 So the original Pledge of Allegiance did not include under God.

00:25:16.000 Eisenhower added that in the 1950s when we were fighting the godless communists.

00:25:20.000 They wanted, instead of kids reading Bibles and reciting prayers, they wanted kids saying a secular pledge and uniting around a flag.

00:25:27.000 Because that's a lot easier, a lot more malleable than biblical wisdom and biblical truth, which does not change.

00:25:35.000 And then they removed prayer in schools in one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history.

00:25:40.000 And by the way, the prayer that was in schools was a theistic prayer.

00:25:44.000 It was not Christian.

00:25:45.000 It basically said, to the God of above, we thank you for today, and we pray for my classmates and my country.

00:25:53.000 It was very simple.

00:25:54.000 And I truly believe as soon as we removed prayer from schools, that was one of the worst decisions that has happened in modern America.

00:26:00.000 I really believe that in more ways than one.

00:26:03.000 And so, Pete, something I want to talk about, though, is so we kind of lived through the aftermath and the after effects of this.

00:26:11.000 And people are catching up at a rapid pace.

00:26:14.000 More people are interested and send us emails on our podcast asking about critical race theory, critical theory, postmodernism.

00:26:22.000 And it comes down to all those are kind of the after effects of losing the education war or not engaging in it enough.

00:26:29.000 But I actually think we're catching up rather significantly and in a very promising way.

00:26:35.000 I mean, I just look around the audience here.

00:26:37.000 I see people that I know are challenging the Scottsdale Unified School Board in amazing ways.

00:26:42.000 I see people running for a school board.

00:26:44.000 I see moms here that are in the front.

00:26:45.000 I'm not going to say any names, but I see some people that are doing some really significant things.

00:26:49.000 I mean, just from all the local projects we have going here.

00:26:52.000 So we're starting to see a catch-up period.

00:26:54.000 American homeschooling has doubled over the last year and a half.

00:26:57.000 We're seeing an incredible demand in this way.

00:27:00.000 And so, but, Pete, you mentioned something interesting, which is you said, well, it's not a conspiracy.

00:27:05.000 However, there was a collective agreement that they wanted to have a less free, non-constitutional country because of their takeover of education.

00:27:05.000 I agree.

00:27:16.000 Is that fair to say?

00:27:17.000 And they did it all under the guise of democracy.

00:27:17.000 Absolutely.

00:27:20.000 Yes.

00:27:21.000 My least favorite word, by the way.

00:27:23.000 My reporters love it when I say this, when I say democracy is a bad idea.

00:27:28.000 And I, by the way, we don't have a democracy.

00:27:28.000 It is.

00:27:30.000 We live in a constitutional republic.

00:27:32.000 We've never had a democracy, okay?

00:27:34.000 And people go nuts when I say that.

00:27:36.000 Let me just expand.

00:27:37.000 And you could comment on it.

00:27:38.000 Our founders dismissed democracy.

00:27:40.000 They wrote against it.

00:27:42.000 As mob rule and as the tyranny of the cities against the farms, against the agrarian, a constitutional republic has consent to the government, independent judiciary, separation of powers, checks and balances.

00:27:54.000 A democracy is like Brazil.

00:27:55.000 If you get one more vote than the other person, you can do whatever you want.

00:27:59.000 That's a very bad way to run a country.

00:28:01.000 Sorry, Pete, I had to rant against democracy.

00:28:03.000 You're exactly right.

00:28:04.000 The reason I said I'm so optimistic is because of all the things you said.

00:28:07.000 We called it the COVID-16-19 moment, what happened a couple of years ago in the book, when all of us were at home, kids and grandkids, through a Zoom screen and you were aghast at what you were seeing.

00:28:19.000 And that was right when the 1619 project came out and they said 1776 is racist and the real founding date is 1619.

00:28:27.000 And oh, by the way, pick your gender pronoun.

00:28:29.000 Parents revolted, but a lot of them looked around and said, How did this happen?

00:28:35.000 And they looked for alternatives.

00:28:36.000 And we are in a renaissance of education in America today.

00:28:40.000 Let me say something very clearly and honestly with all of you.

00:28:44.000 We're all friends now.

00:28:46.000 If you can today get your kids out of government school right now.

00:28:57.000 And Pete, that's a big lift for some parents, though.

00:29:00.000 And by the way, he's not saying it in a scolding way.

00:29:02.000 He's just encouraging elaborate.

00:29:03.000 I'm saying this as someone who went to public school, whose parents, my dad was a public school teacher and had kids in public school at one point.

00:29:10.000 I'm not an anti-public school person.

00:29:13.000 I'm a pro-education, real education for kids.

00:29:21.000 The teachers' unions, take them for example.

00:29:22.000 By the way, they used to be Christian conservative teachers' associations that would pass out biblical tracts before they were taken over by radical unions in the 40s and 50s and 60s and turned into effectively a political entity for the Democrat Party.

00:29:38.000 They created the Department of Education after they elected Jimmy Carter.

00:29:43.000 So the federal Department of Education, which has been growing in size and scope, is now controlled by teachers' unions who have only one political persuasion and are controlled by the radical left, who control who becomes a teacher and what goes into your classroom and what they're allowed to teach.

00:29:57.000 So as there, there are wonderful, God-fearing, Christian, patriot, public school teachers in this audience, I'm sure.

00:30:05.000 And I salute you for what you do every day.

00:30:09.000 And I salute the parents that are at school board meetings fighting.

00:30:13.000 And there's several in this audience that are fighting like none other.

00:30:16.000 And I love it.

00:30:17.000 I love it, love it, love it.

00:30:19.000 But my mom did the same thing in the 1990s: a new self-esteem curriculum called a values-free curriculum.

00:30:25.000 I'm sure benign by today's standards.

00:30:25.000 Worst.

00:30:28.000 And what happened?

00:30:29.000 She pulled me out, got a few parents riled up.

00:30:32.000 And what changed in Forest Lake Independent School District?

00:30:35.000 Nothing.

00:30:37.000 So, and I write about it in the book as well.

00:30:40.000 I feel like protesting at school boards today, for the most part, is like charging a fortified machine gun nest with a Nerf gun.

00:30:49.000 I salute your efforts, but you're probably going to die because it only fortifies their position and their belief in their own power and strength and lack of accountability in that position.

00:31:01.000 So I recognize there are a lot of people that can't leave their current educational situation.

00:31:08.000 And in that case, fight.

00:31:11.000 Fight with all your might for your kids and give them every single opportunity in your home to, but you're going to, that's going to be a full-time job unwinding the indoctrination that they're facing at school.

00:31:23.000 I know my 12-year-old, my 12-year-old is not capable of being salt and light right now.

00:31:32.000 My six-year-old still thinks he has a legitimate shot at being Batman.

00:31:32.000 Not yet.

00:31:38.000 Okay?

00:31:40.000 They're not ready to take on the culture wars.

00:31:42.000 I want to fortify them before I ask them and prepare them to be salt and light in the world.

00:31:49.000 So if you, what we argue for in the book is a radical reorientation of your life around the education of your kids.

00:31:56.000 I know what you want to do at home as parents and grandparents.

00:32:00.000 I know what you want to do at church by introducing your kids and grandkids to our Lord and Savior.

00:32:06.000 But then are you outsourcing eight hours a day and 40 hours a week and 16,000 hours over the course of their life to someone else who's teaching them things that are completely against?

00:32:17.000 That's what we've awoken up to.

00:32:20.000 And if you need to take a second job or drive 20 minutes further or give up a vacation or take out a second mortgage or refinance, maybe not right now.

00:32:35.000 Find what you can do because preparing them now, this is the moment you can prepare them.

00:32:41.000 And that legacy is, because I love my parents, but what I know I had was a secular core with a Christian veneer.

00:32:48.000 And I didn't even know it.

00:32:49.000 And I wasn't prepared for the world I was entering into.

00:32:52.000 And I can't imagine what kids confront today.

00:32:55.000 And when I come across a kid who's classically educated, it is a night and day difference between a kid that is progressively educated versus classically educated.

00:33:04.000 They dwell on the topics of what is a human being?

00:33:07.000 What is the soul?

00:33:08.000 Is there a God?

00:33:09.000 What is beautiful?

00:33:10.000 What is worthy of wonder?

00:33:11.000 What is good?

00:33:12.000 What is true?

00:33:13.000 Most kids that are progressively educated, even the kids that are conservative, they haven't thought deeply about any of that.

00:33:18.000 It's just about survival and kind of fighting back against all this nonsense.

00:33:22.000 And as you all know, without a vision that people perish, as it says in Proverbs, what is the vision?

00:33:27.000 Well, in the year 2045, if we keep up this momentum, if this trajectory continues, the front page of the New York Times will say, sudden right shift in America attributable to parents' movement post-COVID where homeschooling doubled.

00:33:41.000 That's the vision in 25 years from now.

00:33:43.000 Yes.

00:33:44.000 It's where they're all of a sudden going to say, this country isn't as liberal as we thought it would be.

00:33:48.000 All the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, it can happen, but it takes many years and decades of work.

00:33:56.000 So, Pete, I want to also ask you about, I want you to describe more about classical education and kind of the promise of that, especially for people that want to dive into it and just how successful it really has been and can continue to be.

00:34:11.000 We dedicated the book to families who resurrected classical Christian education about 40 years ago.

00:34:16.000 I think the darkest moment of education in America was the 1970s.

00:34:21.000 Homeschooling was under assault.

00:34:22.000 They were trying to make it illegal in many states.

00:34:25.000 They'd already gone after parochial school in multiple states.

00:34:28.000 And there were zero classical Christian schools in America.

00:34:31.000 Maybe there were people homeschooling and teaching it, but brick and mortars, there were zero.

00:34:35.000 And when you talk to people that refounded that movement, it's like archaeology.

00:34:40.000 Because all of us got a progressive education.

00:34:44.000 Almost all of us.

00:34:45.000 And so relearning how to learn requires archaeology to rediscover how we used to teach kids how to think freely, how to engage with original sources and original texts, how to interweave biblical truth into all subjects.

00:35:01.000 So you discover wonder and you discover beauty and you search for truth and you ask the big questions.

00:35:08.000 What is my relationship to God?

00:35:10.000 Where do my rights actually come from?

00:35:12.000 Government or God?

00:35:14.000 How do I engage with my founding documents?

00:35:17.000 The big question.

00:35:18.000 And by the way, the criticism I get all the time is that you're whitewashing history.

00:35:22.000 You're putting your kids in a bubble.

00:35:23.000 Walk into a classical Christian school or a classic school, the last thing you will see is a bubble.

00:35:29.000 In fact, we went into one to film, and they were dealing with, they were talking about modern feminism and the argument of modern feminism.

00:35:36.000 And it was a very robust debate, all based on biblical wisdom and historical texts about human nature.

00:35:43.000 It was fascinating to watch men and women, 16, 17-year-olds, engaging constructively in this conversation, preparing them for the conversations in the future.

00:35:52.000 So when you walk into a classical school, the first thing you will say is, Can I please go back to school?

00:36:00.000 Because you will realize what you did not, you were never engaged with, and therefore never taught.

00:36:07.000 I see that with my 11, 12, 12-year-olds right now, what they're engaging with.

00:36:11.000 And I went to a couple of terrible Ivy League schools where I never engaged with any of those topics because all those big falutin types had already gotten rid of all of that before I got there.

00:36:22.000 So I didn't even know what I was missing.

00:36:24.000 By the way, you can go to classicalchristian.org.

00:36:26.000 I bet you'll find more schools than you're even aware of in the Phoenix area and throughout Arizona.

00:36:31.000 Classical Conversations is a homeschool hybrid model.

00:36:35.000 They're amazing.

00:36:37.000 There's hundreds, over 100,000, tens of thousands of students who do hybrid homeschooling through classical conversations where you do a couple of days at home and a couple of days with other families.

00:36:46.000 So there's a lot of support and a lot of encouragement.

00:36:49.000 That's been growing like gangbusters.

00:36:51.000 So the movement is getting rid of a lot of the excuses that we've all had, and especially in Arizona, where in more cases than not, the dollars will follow.

00:37:02.000 The tax incentives here are amazing.

00:37:04.000 It's the best in the country, by the way.

00:37:05.000 And so the excuse financially is you really don't have much of an excuse if you live in Arizona, I'll be honest.

00:37:11.000 Now, the only excuse you might have is waiting lists.

00:37:14.000 Great Hearts has a huge waiting list.

00:37:17.000 They're thinking of building a Hillsdale-Barney charter here, and Hillsdale has one that's still in motion.

00:37:22.000 I know a lot of parents are trying to do that.

00:37:24.000 And so, obviously, Dream City Christian, Turning Point Academy, this is growing like crazy.

00:37:28.000 And so, but more is more.

00:37:29.000 That's the thing.

00:37:30.000 Where someone says, Oh, Charlie, are you competing?

00:37:31.000 I said, No.

00:37:32.000 I said, My competition isn't Hillsdale or Great Hearts.

00:37:35.000 My competition is Scottsdale Unified School District.

00:37:38.000 That's my competition.

00:37:39.000 Are you kidding me?

00:37:40.000 Or Chandler Unified School District, where they're doing critical race theory and they're saying that men can become pregnant and they have pornography in the schools in the West Valley, which is all over Arizona, by the way.

00:37:49.000 All over.

00:37:50.000 And that has to be a huge priority of the next legislative session, by the way.

00:37:53.000 Let's get rid of this venom in our schools.

00:37:55.000 And so, Pete, I'm going to get to some questions here, but I want to close with what is the call for Christians in particular?

00:38:01.000 Because, you know, you speak a lot of different places and you talk about classical education and secular education and the downsides of it.

00:38:08.000 But for Christians that are here, us being in a church, it really should be a no-brainer in some ways, right?

00:38:14.000 This is a call for the church to open up their resources, their facilities.

00:38:18.000 This is the rallying cry of the American church, right?

00:38:21.000 It is.

00:38:22.000 This movement starts and survives and only thrives if churches lead it.

00:38:33.000 Almost every church I've ever gone to, and I've moved a lot, so I've been to many, almost completely ignores the topic of education.

00:38:41.000 Won't even talk about it because it's really tough to talk about.

00:38:44.000 What do you want to do?

00:38:45.000 Offend 80% of your parishioners, almost all of which go to public school and tell them what they're giving their kids is not good enough?

00:38:54.000 That's not what I'm telling you.

00:38:56.000 I'm not imputing your motives or your intentions or your love for your kids.

00:39:02.000 Most of us, until about two years ago or three years ago, when we started doing our research or five years ago, had no idea that the Marxists had embedded critical theory in New York City and Columbia University in the 1930s and 40s, and it made its way throughout our teachers' colleges across the country.

00:39:20.000 And then fast forward 50 years, up pops critical race theory.

00:39:24.000 And we're all saying, what is this?

00:39:26.000 And the progressives have been talking about it for 60 years.

00:39:28.000 And it's been in our teachers' colleges for 40.

00:39:30.000 And Howard Zinn has written the most powerful textbook, most best-selling textbook in the last 40 years in American history.

00:39:38.000 And it's American history written from the Soviet perspective.

00:39:42.000 Your kids likely got most of their history either directly from a people's history of the United States or embedded into their textbooks written by Howard Zinn, an avowed anti-American Marxist.

00:39:54.000 Millions of kids right now are getting that education in there.

00:39:57.000 Right now, in public schools in Tennessee, where I'm from.

00:40:00.000 And here in Arizona, in North Dakota, Minnesota, Oregon to Massachusetts, and every other red state in between.

00:40:00.000 Here in Arizona.

00:40:08.000 Because the education department and teachers' unions have centralized control of what's acceptable into textbooks and into curriculum.

00:40:16.000 So we're all in the same place.

00:40:19.000 We're all learning this in real time.

00:40:21.000 And that's why I say radical reorientation, but that's not just on parents.

00:40:25.000 That is on Christian leaders and pastors to do what Dream City is doing, which is speak boldly and truthfully to all Christian families.

00:40:36.000 And this is what's so great about Dream City.

00:40:38.000 And by the way, we can start lining up for questions too, please, guys.

00:40:41.000 One of the things I love is the pastor needs to at least educate their church about the problem and to explain it, right?

00:40:50.000 I mean, churches, they have all sorts of different ministries, homeless ministries, drug recovery ministries, men's ministries.

00:40:56.000 Why don't they have one dedicated to education, right?

00:40:59.000 I mean, and that's what Dream City has done, whether through the school or through assistance.

00:41:04.000 This is the pressing civilizational defining issue right now in more ways than one.

00:41:10.000 Quick thought, Pete, and then we'll get to some questions.

00:41:11.000 Quick thought.

00:41:12.000 I can't remember which socialist atheist said this in the book, but you help me out.

00:41:19.000 This is a direct quote.

00:41:21.000 What hope do the theists have with their church on Sunday and Wednesday night up against 40 hours a week of secular education?

00:41:31.000 They don't have a chance.

00:41:34.000 It's not enough to try to undo it at the dinner table or have a few discussions or take them to church and take them to Sunday.

00:41:42.000 By the way, you know where Sunday school came from?

00:41:44.000 It came because churches abdicated Monday through Friday school, outsourced it to government schools and decided we're just going to do school on Sunday.

00:41:54.000 That's not the way it used to be, and we need to return to that.

00:41:58.000 It is said that the Constitution was written solely for a moral and religious people.

00:42:02.000 It is wholly inadequate for the people of any other.

00:42:05.000 If you want this republic to continue, not a democracy, our republic to continue, you must have a moral and religious people, or at the very least, moral and virtuous.

00:42:15.000 That is not going to happen in secular progressive education through the government schools.

00:42:19.000 Okay, we'll get a question here.

00:42:22.000 Let's try to have the questions focused on education if we can.

00:42:24.000 Yeah.

00:42:25.000 Thank you so much.

00:42:26.000 I have spent my adult lifetime as a dedicated university professor.

00:42:29.000 I won't mention the university.

00:42:32.000 But this month I will finally step away from my job, not in small part, because of woke culture.

00:42:37.000 Wow.

00:42:38.000 God bless you.

00:42:39.000 Wow.

00:42:43.000 As life and God would have it, I have been invited to help out at a small charter school with values that align with mine.

00:42:50.000 My question is: what advice would you give me to help keep politics out and keep values in?

00:42:57.000 Yeah, that's a great question.

00:42:59.000 I'm not totally in agreement to keep politics out because, I mean, Aristotle wrote about politics.

00:43:04.000 I hear what you're saying, though.

00:43:05.000 Don't make it political.

00:43:06.000 But the idea of talking about political systems and structures, I think, is great.

00:43:10.000 But it shouldn't be partisan.

00:43:12.000 I think that's what you're getting at, right?

00:43:14.000 And it should be value-driven and around philosophy.

00:43:16.000 First, I just want to commend you because we need more people to get into.

00:43:22.000 I actually think, I don't know where you're a professor, I don't know any of that, but I actually think you're going to make a bigger impact with high school kids and middle school kids than even with college kids.

00:43:32.000 I'll be honest, that your talent is going to be, you know, really, really needed.

00:43:36.000 Look, my advice is this: use the Socratic method.

00:43:38.000 It's worked.

00:43:39.000 The classical form of education is not about the self-esteem movement, which I could do a whole speech on the self-esteem movement.

00:43:47.000 I got to do a tangent on that in a second.

00:43:48.000 It's just total nonsense.

00:43:50.000 These government schools do so much damage to these kids.

00:43:52.000 You wonder why they're killing themselves.

00:43:54.000 It's because of the self-esteem movement, partially.

00:43:56.000 I'll tell you why in a second.

00:43:57.000 But it's also about challenging them that the work is worth it to be able to understand what is beautiful, good, and true.

00:44:05.000 And so, what college does, or secular education does, is they try to make you think like a factory worker.

00:44:11.000 What classical education does, properly understood, or the charter school, hopefully, you're going to, is that, no, you're a human being with a soul, and you must try to develop your reason and those skills to be able to understand the things that are eternal, not temporal.

00:44:25.000 That's what a proper teacher does, not just says, hey, here's a bunch of skills.

00:44:29.000 And that's fine.

00:44:30.000 There's a place for that.

00:44:31.000 But honestly, you could always add skills on.

00:44:36.000 But it's very hard when someone has no basis whatsoever to then be able to convince them that there is something that is true.

00:44:43.000 I'll give you an example.

00:44:44.000 I was just at the University of Texas, Austin.

00:44:46.000 These kids are incredibly high IQ test scores.

00:44:49.000 The least wise group of people I've ever been around.

00:44:52.000 Why?

00:44:53.000 The Bible tells us: wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord.

00:44:57.000 These universities have no God, so there's no wisdom.

00:45:01.000 Of course, that they're saying things.

00:45:02.000 They say men can become pregnant.

00:45:04.000 There's unlimited genders.

00:45:05.000 They say all this nonsense.

00:45:06.000 That's where you have to start.

00:45:07.000 Pete, your thoughts.

00:45:09.000 You're so right.

00:45:09.000 Even what we call our schools, they used to be called grammar, logic, and rhetoric schools.

00:45:15.000 It was replaced by elementary, and that was all, it was all part of remaking.

00:45:20.000 I would just salute you for your courage.

00:45:22.000 Most people can't stop a career track and say, I'm not, I don't support what's being done in my name in part, and I'm going to go make a change.

00:45:32.000 Speak as boldly as you can about that to as many people as you can who are former colleagues or others and motivate them to recognize that that same sort of choice is possible.

00:45:43.000 The kind of value you're going to add to those young kids' life is immense.

00:45:46.000 And I appreciate you.

00:45:50.000 We'll go over here.

00:45:53.000 God bless both of you.

00:45:55.000 My granddaughter is 10, and she's in the Oak Creek Cottonwood School District.

00:46:01.000 And her teacher identifies as MX.

00:46:05.000 So, and she signs her papers as her and she, and she is allowed to watch, they're made to watch in her class 15 minutes a day of CNN 10.

00:46:20.000 So my radar went up when she asked me what CNN was, if it was good.

00:46:25.000 And I said, well, how do you know?

00:46:26.000 She says, well, I don't know, but it just doesn't seem right.

00:46:31.000 I said, so what do you do when you have to write a report for 15 minutes of this watching CNN 10?

00:46:38.000 She says, well, I don't really pay attention because I asked my teacher if I had to write.

00:46:45.000 And she said, yes, I did.

00:46:46.000 So I just copy my friends.

00:46:48.000 But I watch Newsmax all the time at dad's house.

00:46:54.000 So I get a lot, but I just don't think it's right to be watching CNN.

00:46:59.000 So now somebody's doing the right thing, right?

00:47:02.000 Because her radar went up.

00:47:04.000 But what can I do other?

00:47:08.000 Because it's not, I don't want to sound like a chicken, but what can I do to change things in her school without switching schools?

00:47:17.000 Because that doesn't seem to be an option right now.

00:47:21.000 A very difficult dilemma.

00:47:23.000 I will shoot straight with you.

00:47:25.000 I don't think there's a lot if you walk in to talk to the principal or the superintendent or the teacher that you're going to get.

00:47:31.000 Here's what you're going to get: right here: shutdown mode.

00:47:37.000 Default to talking points.

00:47:40.000 Anything you would say that's outside the perimeters of the box will be deemed as discriminatory or not diverse enough and not tolerant enough.

00:47:49.000 That is what those are the words they use to try to put you in a box.

00:47:53.000 Now, you as a grandmother, parents, obviously, are going to do everything you can on the outside.

00:48:00.000 But think about that.

00:48:01.000 10 years old, why are we watching CNN, MX?

00:48:03.000 I don't even know what that means.

00:48:04.000 They certainly don't, but it becomes the water in which they swim.

00:48:09.000 It becomes the environment that is the default norm.

00:48:12.000 You can't write a paper without giving in to the orthodoxy of whatever the teacher and the environment has created.

00:48:20.000 So they may become conservative later on, but that's after speaking the language of progressives for eight more years until they graduate, which that's a recipe for getting some survivors because you're politically attuned.

00:48:34.000 But most parents and grandparents probably aren't as engaged, which means those kids are not surviving.

00:48:40.000 So you're going to fight with all you have because you love that child.

00:48:44.000 If you can get them out, I would get them out.

00:48:46.000 I know that may not be an option, and I understand that.

00:48:49.000 So it's going to mean you're going to have to be all over everything because I don't, I'm not saying you shouldn't engage.

00:48:54.000 You should with teachers, make sure they know you're paying attention.

00:48:58.000 Absolutely ask questions.

00:48:59.000 But the likelihood that you're going to get some sort of an affirmative response is pretty low.

00:49:05.000 Yeah, I mean, and with the new Arizona bill, it's actually probably more financially attainable than I think people realize to take your kid out of public school right now.

00:49:14.000 It's a pretty, if you guys are not educated on this bill that was just signed, it's now law.

00:49:19.000 It's not perfect, but I mean, you're within almost a dollar-for-dollar match at some schools to have the money follow the kid to private and charter schools.

00:49:27.000 It's really amazing.

00:49:28.000 So thank you.

00:49:29.000 We got to get to the next question.

00:49:31.000 Thank you.

00:49:33.000 Hi, guys.

00:49:33.000 My name is Clissa, and I attend GCU as a dual enrollment student.

00:49:36.000 I'm in Christian Worldview class, and my professor is clearly left-leaning.

00:49:41.000 He said things like, Jesus wants us to judge as Christians.

00:49:44.000 I also did a paper on the pro-life side of abortion, of which he failed me on.

00:49:49.000 I was wondering how you think I should handle it and what I can do to combat his and other professors' biased behavior moving forward.

00:49:56.000 What school is that at?

00:49:57.000 Sorry.

00:49:58.000 GCU.

00:49:59.000 At Grand Canyon.

00:50:00.000 Yeah.

00:50:02.000 Yeah.

00:50:03.000 Remember when I went after Grand Canyon a couple months ago and everyone attacked me?

00:50:08.000 Not that you guys didn't, but I got so much hate mail from people.

00:50:11.000 Can you just repeat?

00:50:12.000 I had a difficulty hearing you.

00:50:14.000 Did you say one of them is you failed, you got failed on our paper because it was pro-life?

00:50:18.000 Yeah.

00:50:19.000 And what was the other one?

00:50:21.000 He said that Jesus wants us to judge as Christians.

00:50:25.000 Okay.

00:50:26.000 She just wants us to judge?

00:50:28.000 Jesus, yeah.

00:50:32.000 That's theologically interesting.

00:50:35.000 I don't know.

00:50:36.000 I have to bring it up with management about that.

00:50:40.000 Is GCU a Christian university?

00:50:43.000 Allegedly.

00:50:44.000 Oh, okay.

00:50:46.000 I'm sorry.

00:50:47.000 I'm not.

00:50:47.000 I've heard of it.

00:50:48.000 I have to be fair.

00:50:49.000 We had an amazing event there.

00:50:50.000 Our chapter did a great job, and they did treat us well from the administration.

00:50:54.000 I have to be fair.

00:50:56.000 But what's happening is in the classroom, what you're just telling me is a horror show.

00:51:00.000 You know what?

00:51:02.000 It's just like, I'll use a military analogy.

00:51:06.000 The military academies used to be almost all be run by former officers of the Army or Navy.

00:51:12.000 As more and more of the faculty became civilian teachers, all the junk that came out of teachers' colleges and out of other universities has made its way into military academies.

00:51:23.000 I think a lot of the same thing has happened at a lot of Christian universities, which were dedicated to biblical wisdom until they bought into the educational system that creates the same teachers that go to secular colleges.

00:51:35.000 And then they bring those very same ideas into those universities, which slowly over time, if they're not intentional about their culture, you lose Christian universities.

00:51:45.000 We see it all the time.

00:51:46.000 Just stand up and be bold.

00:51:47.000 Find other Christians, turning point chapter.

00:51:51.000 I tell you, when I go to America Fest and Student Action Summit.

00:51:54.000 And we have some of our GCU kids somewhere.

00:51:56.000 I bet there we go.

00:51:58.000 They're back there.

00:52:00.000 It almost feels like, at first, at least, Charlie, it almost felt like a giant student therapy session because it was students looking around saying there are other people like me.

00:52:11.000 And there is strength in numbers.

00:52:14.000 And keep standing up.

00:52:15.000 I just want to encourage you.

00:52:17.000 It takes courage to say, I'm going to say something I know that will make me be graded down or differently.

00:52:22.000 You just got to decide at that point.

00:52:24.000 And then I would not be shy about appealing that up the hierarchy at GCU.

00:52:29.000 I wouldn't be shy because here's what I'll say.

00:52:34.000 A lot of very generous, good people give a lot of money to GCU because they present themselves as a conservative Christian school.

00:52:45.000 So I don't think they would love to hear that.

00:52:48.000 And I think you actually might get that remedied pretty quick.

00:52:58.000 First of all, I want to thank both of you for being a voice for us in the media.

00:53:02.000 Thank you.

00:53:03.000 You know, all this will be for nothing if we don't stop them from robbing our election.

00:53:08.000 How are we going to do that?

00:53:09.000 Keep them from robbing our election.

00:53:12.000 Love the energy.

00:53:13.000 I want to say focus on education.

00:53:15.000 Let me just, but I'll talk personally for a second about this.

00:53:17.000 Is that okay?

00:53:18.000 Sure.

00:53:19.000 And I agree with you, by the way, completely.

00:53:21.000 And I just want to give a fair warning.

00:53:23.000 This is Charlie Kirk speaking personally, not on behalf of Turning Point USA.

00:53:27.000 You could laugh all you want, but I have people that watch everything I say.

00:53:31.000 Are we good on the disclaimer, Pete?

00:53:32.000 Okay, Charlie Kirk personally.

00:53:34.000 Okay, a lot of you are planning to vote on Election Day.

00:53:37.000 I think that's great, but just be prepared for massive traffic jams, paper shortages, ink shortages, pipe bursts.

00:53:45.000 Okay.

00:53:46.000 I am very encouraged, though, to just let you know that people are not just putting their ballot in the mail.

00:53:53.000 If you vote in person on Election Day, that is the least amount of people that touch your ballot, and it will be counted second, which is better than ninth in the way that we do our Honduran election system here in Arizona, where it's we first count the mail-in ballots, and then we count the in-person, no, in person early, and then the same-day election, and then the people that then drop off their ballot that was mailed to them.

00:54:17.000 It's so silly.

00:54:17.000 It's an insult to all of our intelligence.

00:54:19.000 We got to fix this, everybody.

00:54:21.000 I am so tired of this, by the way.

00:54:22.000 It is awful.

00:54:24.000 It's a disgrace.

00:54:25.000 But to answer your question, let me.

00:54:29.000 Yes, we do.

00:54:30.000 We have every one of those people, but I want to just say this.

00:54:33.000 I'm so encouraged because all of us that are going to show up on Election Day are showing through our own action.

00:54:41.000 We are going to do something differently to try to have a different result.

00:54:45.000 And I think that's a great thing exhibited by all of us that are going to overwhelm the polls coming this Tuesday.

00:54:53.000 A man.

00:54:55.000 Hi.

00:54:57.000 Yeah.

00:54:58.000 I just want to ask, in school, some people, they just don't want to flat out know about the Bible.

00:55:06.000 I try and tell them and they just say no and walk away.

00:55:10.000 What can I do to try and help and try and make it better?

00:55:19.000 Well, you've already got a bold spirit, and I love that.

00:55:29.000 Keep learning.

00:55:30.000 That's a great answer.

00:55:31.000 Keep learning, keep educating, keep praying, keep focused on what you know to be good and right and true.

00:55:39.000 And trust that that amazing institution that you go to will be reinforcing what you're saying.

00:55:46.000 And whether they want to engage with God in the Bible or not, they're going to meet him somewhere in class.

00:55:52.000 And I just, I wish my kid would ask that question.

00:55:58.000 That's all I can think.

00:55:59.000 And look, don't take it too personally.

00:56:02.000 Most kids, they only care about sports and whatever.

00:56:04.000 That's okay.

00:56:05.000 Keep pushing, be salt and light.

00:56:07.000 Change the environment that you're in.

00:56:09.000 It's totally normal.

00:56:10.000 God bless you, man.

00:56:11.000 Thank you.

00:56:13.000 I know that sweatshirt.

00:56:15.000 I got it at GCU and you came and spoke with us.

00:56:18.000 Yeah.

00:56:19.000 So I'm a senior also at GCU, and I'm going to be student teaching next year, hopefully at Dream City Christian, my favorite school.

00:56:30.000 And I want to know what are the top book titles that should be taught in every single classroom across America.

00:56:39.000 Wow, that's great.

00:56:41.000 So obviously the Bible, we're doing that, and it needs to be the center of education, right?

00:56:45.000 So I'm a big believer in classical education.

00:56:48.000 So one of my big pieces of feedback to Protestant circles is that we need to teach Thomas Aquinas, who is a Catholic thinker, but on Reformation.

00:56:59.000 So there really shouldn't be any reason not to teach him.

00:57:01.000 He is the best, most clearest author when it comes on proofs of God and getting a young person to believe in God reasonably and rationally.

00:57:11.000 If you want a young person at a young age to understand and grasp that there is a God in the universe, Thomas Aquinas wrote a great book.

00:57:17.000 It's hard to read, but you can get more digestible versions called the Summa Theologica.

00:57:23.000 It's terrific.

00:57:24.000 Once kids get older, this is why I love classical education.

00:57:27.000 I think Aristotle is a really important thing for people to wrestle with, for Plato as well.

00:57:32.000 But let's just kind of go to more modern, like post-1700s, okay?

00:57:35.000 I think every, I know that's a joke, by the way, is that every young kid should learn the Federalist Papers.

00:57:42.000 Every young kid should understand what Madison, Hamilton, and Jay really thought about when it came to the structure of our government.

00:57:50.000 And then kind of coming into more modern times, kind of 1900s, 1950s, 1960s, I really truly believe that the ultimate red pill, and I say that in a very positive way, is Thomas Sowell should be taught in every American classroom.

00:58:06.000 And I'm telling you, if you do not know who Thomas Sowell is, it will change your life.

00:58:11.000 They want to racialize everything.

00:58:13.000 His book, Discrimination and Disparities, is a life-changing book.

00:58:19.000 The whole thesis is very simple.

00:58:21.000 Just because there might be different outcomes between racial groups does not mean you can blame discrimination.

00:58:30.000 It is the most simple argument, and it shatters all of the lies of the progressive left.

00:58:35.000 And finally, kind of a passion of mine: kids need to be taught proper economics.

00:58:40.000 Milton Friedman, Adam Smith.

00:58:43.000 So those are things that are personal passion projects of mine.

00:58:45.000 Pete?

00:58:46.000 I can't rattle off books like that.

00:58:50.000 But I'll tell you, I remember when I read Bill Bennett, former education secretary, what's it called?

00:58:59.000 The Last Best Hope, Volume 1.

00:59:01.000 And there's multiple good books he's written, but he wrote a two-volume series on the history of America.

00:59:07.000 And he wrote it in effect to, in part, to rebut Howard Zinn and what he had written had become so prolific.

00:59:15.000 It's called The Last Best Hope, Volume 1 and Volume 2.

00:59:18.000 It's basically North American history through the United States.

00:59:21.000 And I just remember going through, even through high school, and looking at my textbooks and saying, Mom, Dad, why is Ronald Reagan always the bad guy?

00:59:29.000 No, I mean, it's just so subtle.

00:59:31.000 The progressives were these amazing, good people who are forward thinkers.

00:59:35.000 And the way they tinker on the margins.

00:59:38.000 So find Christian patriotic historians and elevate their side of the story and equip kids with that.

00:59:46.000 I mean, so there's a lot of great books out there.

00:59:48.000 I mean, you can go to classicalchristian.org.

00:59:50.000 They have a full laundry list of all the types of resources.

00:59:54.000 But even on the more modern side, and the more original documents you can get.

00:59:58.000 That's exactly right.

00:59:59.000 So the Declaration of Independence, you could do a whole graduate semester on that if you want to, but even just breaking it down for kids, because we dumb down really great, imaginative, powerful stories into these readers.

01:00:14.000 Oh, it's terrible.

01:00:14.000 It's really boring for kids.

01:00:16.000 So the more you can, original fables and great children's literature that Disney's dumbed down and everyone else is dumbed down, make that come alive.

01:00:26.000 The more original, I think, the better.

01:00:27.000 And I'll add anything by C.S. Lewis.

01:00:29.000 I think he was the most important author of the 20th century, and every Christian should be.

01:00:33.000 And by the way, not just his Christian apologetic stuff, that hideous strength and abolition of man.

01:00:39.000 And this is a more education, this is a higher level.

01:00:42.000 But if you want to get a high schooler to understand the tragedy of totalitarianism, have them read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and obviously 1984 by George Orwell.

01:00:52.000 George Orwell, just transparency, has a rather graphic sex scene.

01:00:56.000 So if you have a kid read it, maybe just monitor that.

01:00:59.000 I just never want to recommend it is R-rated.

01:01:01.000 Besides that, though, it is an unbelievable work.

01:01:04.000 It is one of the most prophetic, articulate, and important pieces of literature ever, let alone in the last 100 years.

01:01:12.000 We are living through basically every prediction of George Orwell from the manipulation of speech to surveillance to the elimination of history and all of that.

01:01:20.000 Sorry, that was a very long two-parted answer.

01:01:22.000 God bless you.

01:01:23.000 We need more teachers.

01:01:24.000 God bless you.

01:01:25.000 We need more teachers.

01:01:26.000 So important.

01:01:27.000 All right.

01:01:27.000 We'll do two more questions here and here.

01:01:29.000 Sorry for everyone in line.

01:01:30.000 Peter Hegseth, Charlie Kirk, thank you, good and faithful servants for sharing your gifts.

01:01:37.000 Thank you.

01:01:39.000 I have a couple quick sound bites leading to a question.

01:01:42.000 I was educated K through 12 in Catholic school in Los Angeles, California.

01:01:47.000 Peter, I guarantee to you that I didn't get the negative education that you talked about.

01:01:53.000 Maybe some, and that maelstrom of organized history and teaching.

01:02:01.000 In my school, Ten Commandments in the hallways, in the classrooms, U.S. Constitution, U.S. flag, each classroom for eight, K through 12.

01:02:14.000 Fortunate for me.

01:02:17.000 A county in North Carolina, I better be careful to not name the county.

01:02:21.000 I had a construction consulting assignment post-Hurricane Florence.

01:02:24.000 23 campuses.

01:02:25.000 That is the question.

01:02:26.000 We're over time.

01:02:27.000 So please.

01:02:28.000 23 campuses.

01:02:29.000 U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Our Father.

01:02:33.000 My question is: combating a school board.

01:02:39.000 What is something that can be said as a parent, a taxpaying parent in the neighborhood, in the community, that can shake these people to their core, other than saying, get behind these Satan.

01:02:53.000 Yeah, so I'll just say you need to FOIA them.

01:02:56.000 It's Freedom of Information Act, and then overwhelm them at the meetings, right?

01:03:00.000 And so it doesn't do everything.

01:03:02.000 Again, I agree with Pete.

01:03:03.000 You got to get your kids out of government schools, I'll be honest.

01:03:06.000 If you can, get them out of government schools, but it's not realistic for everybody.

01:03:09.000 And I don't want to say you're making a mistake to keep them in, but the ideal is to get them out.

01:03:14.000 But FOIA requests, FOIA them to death, try to find out all the emails, all their backroom deals.

01:03:20.000 And then, look, I'll be honest, you just got to keep showing up to the school boards.

01:03:23.000 Pete, really quick, and then we'll get to the last question.

01:03:25.000 Yeah, I mean, part of the reason you're here is because you engaged with those ideas.

01:03:31.000 K-12 education has kicked God out for the last 70 years.

01:03:36.000 A couple of complaints to the school board.

01:03:39.000 I mean, they're just going to look at you and say, wall of separation.

01:03:41.000 That's what they do.

01:03:42.000 They look at you and say, I've got stacks of emails from administrators saying wall of separation, which they'll say it's in the Constitution.

01:03:49.000 No, it's.

01:03:49.000 Of course, it isn't.

01:03:52.000 It's not in the Constitution.

01:03:53.000 They believe it is.

01:03:54.000 It's part of their dogma.

01:03:56.000 Their mythology.

01:03:57.000 It's their mythology.

01:03:58.000 And so there's not a whole lot you can say to a modern school board about God.

01:04:03.000 Last question.

01:04:04.000 By the way, this is the last question of the year at Freedom Night because we aren't doing a December one because we have America Fest instead.

01:04:13.000 And of course, Dream City does their Christmas pageant.

01:04:15.000 So again, everyone register for America Fest.

01:04:18.000 No pressure.

01:04:19.000 Last one of the year.

01:04:23.000 Hello, my name is Rebecca Jensen, and I'm in seventh grade.

01:04:26.000 I homeschool with Classical Conversations.

01:04:28.000 I know you.

01:04:28.000 Hey, how are you?

01:04:29.000 Classical is awesome.

01:04:31.000 Yes.

01:04:32.000 I was wondering how I can get involved at TPUSA.

01:04:35.000 That's the best question of the whole year.

01:04:37.000 I got to say that.

01:04:38.000 I planted that question.

01:04:39.000 Rigged.

01:04:41.000 So we got to start a classical conversations chapter.

01:04:44.000 Our team would be involved.

01:04:45.000 And by the way, I've spoken twice in the last year at classical conversations, and I got to tell you, these kids are wicked smart.

01:04:53.000 Just the difference between a classically educated kid from how polite they are to how they communicate to someone who's in the government schools.

01:05:00.000 It's just like night and day difference.

01:05:02.000 And so, but you got to come to America Fest.

01:05:05.000 You got to get other friends involved to start a Turning Point USA chapter.

01:05:08.000 And Pete.

01:05:09.000 One more commercial for classical conversations.

01:05:11.000 A lot of people knock homeschooling and say, okay, it's not like the perception was 20, 30 years ago.

01:05:20.000 We're talking sports teams.

01:05:22.000 We're talking proms.

01:05:23.000 We're talking a lot of the nostalgia that you have of what high school was, because of the power of the growth that it's had and the way that they work together with other homeschool families, you are not alone.

01:05:35.000 Your kid is not alone.

01:05:37.000 And they become part of a group of fellow Christians and classically trained young people who have a full-on high school experience.

01:05:44.000 We're going to follow up and get a turning point chapter started immediately.

01:05:47.000 God bless you, okay?

01:05:49.000 So that's a perfect note to end on.

01:05:52.000 What a year for Freedom Night, guys, right?

01:05:55.000 I mean, all the programming we had, right?

01:05:58.000 Massive community impact.

01:06:00.000 We had Victor Marks this year.

01:06:02.000 We had Bill Federer this year.

01:06:03.000 We had Sean Foyt this year.

01:06:05.000 We had amazing people, and you guys made it possible.

01:06:07.000 You showed up.

01:06:08.000 You supported us.

01:06:09.000 You prayed for us.

01:06:11.000 And we're going to continue it into the next year as obviously we have a very busy month and a half going.

01:06:15.000 So let me just thank Dream City for having this amazing year.

01:06:18.000 And in 2023, we're going to be back on Wednesday with amazing people.

01:06:22.000 We got Dennis Prager coming.

01:06:24.000 We got amazing people coming in the new year.

01:06:26.000 But let me just close with this, guys.

01:06:28.000 Of course, register for America Fest, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Kayleigh McNany, Greg Gutfeld, and more to come.

01:06:33.000 Make sure you vote on Tuesday.

01:06:35.000 But guess what?

01:06:36.000 After that, the war is not over.

01:06:39.000 We got to keep pushing forward.

01:06:40.000 Stay involved with Turning Point USA.

01:06:42.000 Stay involved in the local community.

01:06:44.000 Stay involved in the education of your kids.

01:06:46.000 And Pete, you did an amazing job with this book, truly.

01:06:49.000 And Pete, thank you for being with us.

01:06:50.000 Thank you guys very much.

01:06:51.000 Thank you, Charlie.

01:06:51.000 God bless you guys and see you at America Fest.

01:06:53.000 God bless you.

01:06:54.000 Thank you, brother.

01:06:57.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

01:06:59.000 Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:07:02.000 Thank you so much for listening.

01:07:03.000 God bless.

01:07:07.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - November 06, 2022

When We Removed God from School with Pete Hegseth LIVE at Dream City Church

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