The Charlie Kirk Show - November 26, 2025


Why Charlie Loved Thanksgiving


Episode Stats


Length

39 minutes

Words per minute

175.5311

Word count

6,913

Sentence count

550

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

25

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Bill Federer and Dr. Jerry Newcomb join Charlie and Andrew to talk about the importance of Thanksgiving and why it's one of the most important days of the year. Charlie talks about why Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday and why we should all be thankful for it.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.
00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.
00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.
00:00:14.000 If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable.
00:00:19.000 But if the most important thing is doing good, you'll end up purposeful.
00:00:24.000 College is a scam, everybody.
00:00:26.000 You got to stop sending your kids to college.
00:00:27.000 You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible.
00:00:31.000 Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter.
00:00:33.000 Go start a Turning Point USA high school chapter.
00:00:35.000 Go find out how your church can get involved.
00:00:37.000 Sign up and become an activist.
00:00:39.000 I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.
00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.
00:00:43.000 And I encourage you to do the same.
00:00:45.000 Here I am, Lord Museman.
00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:49.000 Here we go.
00:00:59.000 The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:12.000 All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:15.000 My name is Andrew Colvin, executive producer of this fine show, joined by Blake Neff.
00:01:18.000 And we have two guests this hour for the whole hour.
00:01:22.000 One of them is Charlie's dear, dear friend, and I haven't seen him for too long now, Bill Federer, author and speaker.
00:01:27.000 You can find him at AmericanMinute.com.
00:01:30.000 And Dr. Jerry Newcomb, executive director of Providence Forum.
00:01:34.000 You can find him at providenceforum.org.
00:01:37.000 Gentlemen, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:39.000 So good to have you both.
00:01:40.000 Hey, great to be with you.
00:01:42.000 Thank you so much for the opportunity.
00:01:45.000 It's wonderful.
00:01:46.000 Well, this is a so I wanted to do this.
00:01:48.000 I think we booked this like a month ago because I saw it coming down the pike here. 1.00
00:01:52.000 And I wanted to do this because Charlie's, I mean, it was like July 4th might have had it beat as far as Charlie's favorite holidays.
00:02:01.000 But it was July 4th.
00:02:02.000 He loved New Year's.
00:02:03.000 He loved Thanksgiving.
00:02:05.000 And he loved Thanksgiving because it is just such a uniquely American holiday.
00:02:10.000 It is, it's providential.
00:02:12.000 It tells the story of our people and of our heritage, of the spirit that is imbued in us as Americans.
00:02:19.000 And he liked it because it's giving thanks to God, which he always wanted us to do.
00:02:24.000 He always did, whenever anything good happened in his life.
00:02:27.000 Glory be to God.
00:02:28.000 Glory be to God.
00:02:29.000 Yeah, and you can actually see this in a tweet that he had just after we won the election.
00:02:37.000 He showed this up 208.
00:02:38.000 He posted this November 28th, 2024.
00:02:41.000 He said, Happy Thanksgiving from our family to yours.
00:02:44.000 We are thankful for the gift of salvation, our amazing children, and God's mercy on our great country this year.
00:02:49.000 Take a moment today to be grateful that we did it.
00:02:51.000 By God's grace alone, we took our country back.
00:02:54.000 Psalm 118, verse 1.
00:02:57.000 So, Bill, let's start with you.
00:03:01.000 In Charlie's honor, I am all about evangelizing the love of this holiday and the uniqueness to the American spirit it represents.
00:03:09.000 Tell us what makes Thanksgiving unique and so special.
00:03:14.000 Well, that America is an experiment of people ruling ourselves.
00:03:21.000 So, one of the things I did was go back and research every single century of recorded human history to try to find out what the most common form of government is.
00:03:30.000 And it's gangs and a gang leader with enough weapons we call a king or a pharaoh or a Caesar, Kaiser, Sultan Tsar.
00:03:36.000 And these kingdoms keep getting bigger because with the latest military advancement, kings can kill more people.
00:03:43.000 So, finally, the king of England had the biggest empire on planet Earth.
00:03:46.000 The sun never set on the British Empire.
00:03:47.000 He was a globalist.
00:03:48.000 He was a one-world government guy.
00:03:49.000 And America's founders broke away and flipped it and made the people the king.
00:03:53.000 It's a polarity change in the flow of power.
00:03:55.000 But we zoom in on the pilgrims.
00:03:58.000 Why?
00:03:58.000 Well, they were the ones that had the Mayflower Compact, this idea of people ruling themselves.
00:04:03.000 So at the time the pilgrims were founding America, you had Chinese emperors, Japanese emperors, Korean emperors, Indian Maharaja.
00:04:11.000 Raja means king, Maha means great, Russian czars, Mongolian Khans, African chieftains, kings of Spain, France, and the whole world's basically kings.
00:04:19.000 And here you have these little Christians starting their own community. 0.99
00:04:23.000 So one overlooked thing is they got their idea from ancient Israel that first 400 years out of Egypt before they got a king.
00:04:31.000 So around 1400 BC, you have the Israelites, millions of them come out of Egypt.
00:04:35.000 And for four centuries, no king.
00:04:37.000 It's a total anomaly in world history that we don't appreciate.
00:04:40.000 But when you study it, it worked because everybody's taught the law and everybody's personally accountable to God to follow it.
00:04:46.000 It worked for four centuries until the priests went woke.
00:04:50.000 The Levi priests.
00:04:51.000 They stopped teaching the law anymore.
00:04:53.000 And you got Eli, the high priest, his own sons are sleeping with women in the very tent where the Ark of the Covenant is in this line.
00:04:59.000 Every man does what's right in their own eyes.
00:05:00.000 Why?
00:05:00.000 Because the priest stopped teaching what was right in the Lord's eyes.
00:05:03.000 Turns into chaos.
00:05:04.000 They ask for a king and they get King Saul.
00:05:06.000 Why is this story important?
00:05:07.000 The kings of Europe looked to the Bible for their authority, but they looked to the King Saul and after.
00:05:12.000 And the Pilgrims and Puritans that founded New England looked to the pre-King Saul part of the Bible. 0.58
00:05:16.000 Both of them are looking to the Bible.
00:05:17.000 One's King Saul and after and the ones before.
00:05:20.000 So that's why they taught Hebrew at Yale and Harvard.
00:05:22.000 And so this little congregation, they were going to go to Jamestown, submit to the king's government.
00:05:27.000 They got blown off course, land on the shores of Massachusetts.
00:05:31.000 And the captain says, get off the boat.
00:05:33.000 And they go, well, who's going to be in charge?
00:05:34.000 There's no king-appointed person in our little group.
00:05:37.000 102 of us, nobody's been picked by the king.
00:05:39.000 They do something unique.
00:05:40.000 They take their little covenant church form of government and they make it their civil government.
00:05:44.000 It's called the Mayflower Compact.
00:05:46.000 We in you, presence of God, covenant ourselves together into a civil body politic.
00:05:50.000 That was the model.
00:05:51.000 And then in the next decade, you have what's called the Great Puritan Migration. 0.79
00:05:55.000 20,000 Puritans flood into New England, and you have pastors and churches founding cities.
00:06:00.000 So Pastor Roger Williams and the First Baptist Church founds the city of Providence, Rhode Island.
00:06:05.000 Reverend Thomas Hooker and the First Congregational Church founds the city of Hartford, Connecticut.
00:06:10.000 This is unique on planet Earth when the whole world's ruled by kings, and you got pastors and churches founding cities.
00:06:17.000 And anyway, so that's why we look to the pilgrims.
00:06:19.000 And the word federal is Latin for covenant.
00:06:24.000 We have a covenant form of government in America that can be traced back to these pilgrims.
00:06:30.000 I love that.
00:06:31.000 And Dr. Jerry Newcomb, you know, you run the Providence Forum, and your whole mission is to bring back Judeo-Christian values to the United States, make much of them.
00:06:42.000 And you have a place here.
00:06:44.000 You know, you say an article here on your website, America's First Thanksgiving.
00:06:49.000 You're talking about this First Thanksgiving that Bill just alluded to.
00:06:53.000 And you say that it's an annual reminder of our nation's Christians and roots and our godly heritage.
00:06:59.000 I do believe this nation is providentially founded.
00:07:02.000 When you look to the First Thanksgiving, you look to the story that's uniquely American.
00:07:06.000 What stands out to you that you want to call attention to for the 2025, our modern Americans?
00:07:14.000 Well, how much suffering the pilgrims endured just for the sake of the goal to be able to worship Jesus Christ and the purity of the conscience and be left alone.
00:07:25.000 When they started in England, it was a small little church.
00:07:29.000 The pilgrims were basically one particular congregation that managed to, when they began in a place in the Midlands in England, about 150 miles north of London, it was all secret.
00:07:42.000 It was illegal.
00:07:43.000 And so eventually they decided, hey, we could be tolerated at least in Holland.
00:07:48.000 So they were able to migrate that even there.
00:07:51.000 That wasn't an easy thing to do.
00:07:52.000 And then eventually, about 10 years later, they were able to come to the new world.
00:07:57.000 But through it all, they were suffering.
00:07:58.000 And in fact, in the book called A Plymouth Plantation, which their main leader, Governor William Bradford, wrote, he said at the very beginning, it is well known unto the godly how ever since the first breaking out of the light of the gospel in our honorable nation of England, Satan hath raised, maintained, and continued wars and oppositions against the saints.
00:08:21.000 And so they suffered one hindrance and persecution after another, but they went forward with their goal.
00:08:30.000 And when they finally got to the new world and they wrote the Mayflower Compact that Bill Federer was talking about, which was the first beginning of what would become the American constitutional process.
00:08:42.000 You know, 150 years later, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution would flow out of the same ideas of self-rule under God that were written down there right in the cabin of the Mayflower.
00:08:56.000 I mean, this is amazing stuff.
00:08:58.000 But they said we came, you know, for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.
00:09:04.000 And so when they finally were here, despite one hindrance and one setback after another, including the fact that half their number died that first winter, when the harvest came in 1621, they set aside time to give thanks to God in all circumstances.
00:09:24.000 And later on, when they would celebrate Thanksgiving, because they had gone through this period of starvation where the daily ration for each person would only be about five kernels of corn, they would sometimes take their Thanksgiving plate.
00:09:40.000 This is at later times of prosperity, and they would put five little kernels of corn on the plate to remind them of what they had endured during that time of starvation, where again, half their number died, but they gave thanks that he allowed them to flourish.
00:09:58.000 So Thanksgiving is such a great reminder of our Christian roots.
00:10:02.000 And a lot of people want to say, well, you know, okay, we can understand the settlers like the Pilgrims and the Puritans, they were Christians, but by the time you get to the Founding Fathers, they weren't.
00:10:10.000 They were, you know, basically unbelievers. 0.89
00:10:13.000 And that's just not true.
00:10:14.000 And anybody who takes Bill Federer's book, America's God and Country, and you look at these quotes from the Founding Fathers as well as the settlers, including, you know, George Washington and, you know, all the founding fathers, James Madison, you see the Christian faith played a very important thing.
00:10:33.000 Dr. Newcomb, we have a great clip from Charlie basically asserting the Christian roots of our founding.
00:10:38.000 And we'll might play that this hour.
00:10:39.000 We'll be right back.
00:10:40.000 More when we get back.
00:10:44.000 A new Hillsdale College miniseries on colonial America offers a fresh way to think about Thanksgiving.
00:10:51.000 Beyond the food and the political debates, it reminds us what we should be truly thankful for, our freedom, our prosperity, and our faith.
00:10:59.000 In a brand new six-part documentary series, Hillsdale College professors will teach you the religious, the political, cultural, and economic ideas that shaped a uniquely American culture during the colonial period.
00:11:10.000 This Hillsdale course will focus on the forging of the American character that made the revolution possible and why it's more important than ever to remember and reclaim that character today.
00:11:21.000 This Hillsdale College miniseries is completely free and it's easy to access.
00:11:26.000 Plus, Hillsdale offers more than 40 other free online courses.
00:11:29.000 Go right now to charlieforhillsdale.com to enroll.
00:11:32.000 There's no cost and it's easy to get started.
00:11:35.000 That's charlie4hillsdale.com to register.
00:11:38.000 C-H-A-R-L-I-E-F-O-R for Hillsdale dot com.
00:11:45.000 Blake, you have some.
00:11:47.000 Yeah, by the way, gentlemen, just in case you're not aware, Blake is our resident historian on set.
00:11:53.000 Whatever.
00:11:53.000 No, I've talked with Bill.
00:11:55.000 We've taught.
00:11:56.000 That would come on when Charlie would talk before a few times.
00:11:58.000 It was a lot of fun.
00:11:59.000 Don't underscore it.
00:12:00.000 Don't undercut undersell.
00:12:01.000 We were talking before the break about the founders and the myth the founders were all proto-modern atheists and such.
00:12:10.000 And so I was looking at some of the early Thanksgiving stuff.
00:12:14.000 So George Washington was proclaiming days of Thanksgiving in the middle of the Revolutionary War, notably after the Battle at Saratoga, which was the victory that really opened the way for America to actually win that conflict.
00:12:28.000 Multiple, and then we had proclamations of Thanksgiving by the Continental Congress or the Confederation Congress during that fun period where we didn't have the Constitution yet.
00:12:38.000 And then this one really stood out to me as remarkable.
00:12:41.000 Basically, the day after the House of Representatives voted to advance the First Amendment, the Freedom of Religion Amendment, the one that people used to argue there's a wall of separation between church and state in our government.
00:12:52.000 You know, they declared us a non-religious country.
00:12:54.000 The day after they do this, Congressman Elias Boudino, Boudinot, I have no idea how they're going to pronounce that from New Jersey.
00:13:03.000 He had this House and Senate jointly call for President Washington to declare a day of Thanksgiving for, quote, the many signal favors of Almighty God in his favor for our country.
00:13:17.000 Yeah, Bill, you know, this is a debate that goes back and forth.
00:13:22.000 And Charlie, I think, had the ultimate slapdown video. 0.69
00:13:26.000 I think we're just going to have to play it when we get it.
00:13:29.000 Bill, was America a Christian nation?
00:13:33.000 Do we have Christian roots or are we just a bunch of deists that believe in a distant God?
00:13:39.000 What is the truth?
00:13:41.000 Yeah, well, Europe was Catholic and then the Reformation started. 0.83
00:13:45.000 And then you had one denomination per country.
00:13:48.000 So Northern Germany and Sweden were Lutheran.
00:13:51.000 Switzerland was Calvinist.
00:13:53.000 Scotland was Presbyterian.
00:13:55.000 Holland was Dutch Reform. 0.51
00:13:56.000 Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Poland, stayed Catholic. 0.55
00:13:58.000 And if you did not believe the way your king did, you were persecuted and you fled.
00:14:02.000 And a lot of those people that fled spilled over and founded colonies in America.
00:14:06.000 So I read through every charter of every colony.
00:14:09.000 Every colony was started by a different Christian denomination.
00:14:12.000 Virginia was Anglican.
00:14:14.000 You had to take the oath of supremacy, acknowledging the king as the head of the Anglican church.
00:14:20.000 Massachusetts was Puritan.
00:14:23.000 Rhode Island was founded by Baptist.
00:14:25.000 New York was founded by Dutch Reform.
00:14:28.000 Delaware and New Jersey were originally Swedish Lutheran and then taken over by the Dutch and then taken over by the British.
00:14:33.000 Connecticut and New Hampshire were Congregationalist Christian colonies.
00:14:37.000 And Pennsylvania, Quaker. 0.99
00:14:39.000 And I mentioned Maryland was founded by Catholics, Lord Baltimore.
00:14:42.000 But the idea in America was they didn't get along.
00:14:45.000 They tar and feather each other.
00:14:47.000 But then they all had to work together against the king of England.
00:14:50.000 After the revolution, their attitude changed to: we may not always agree on religion, but you are willing to fight and die for my freedom.
00:14:58.000 I need to let you practice your faith.
00:15:02.000 And so religion began to expand, but on a state-by-state basis.
00:15:06.000 So in 1776, 98% of the country was Protestant, 3 million people, only 1% Catholic, like 30,000 Catholics in a country, 3 million.
00:15:15.000 They were only allowed in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York.
00:15:17.000 And then 1 tenth of a percent Jewish, only seven synagogues in the whole country.
00:15:21.000 And then I read through every state constitution.
00:15:23.000 And so nine of the original 13, you had to be a Protestant. 0.60
00:15:26.000 Three, you had to be a plain Christian. 0.79
00:15:28.000 And then there's an Irish potato family.
00:15:30.000 Millions of Irish Catholics come to America and they go from 1% to 20% in a decade.
00:15:34.000 And then states began to expand from requiring you to be Protestant to just Christian.
00:15:38.000 Then there's a persecution of Jews in Bavaria.
00:15:40.000 They come across and go from a tenth of a percent to 1%.
00:15:43.000 In 1851, Maryland changed its state constitution to say you could hold office if you were a Christian or a Jew.
00:15:50.000 And then after the Civil War, many states rewrote their constitutions to say all you had to do was believe in God.
00:15:55.000 But again, the First Amendment was simply to prevent the federal government from picking one Christian denomination and making it the national one, which again was what every country in Europe had done. 0.55
00:16:07.000 Wow.
00:16:08.000 That's thorough.
00:16:10.000 That is very thorough.
00:16:11.000 I wonder if Charlie.
00:16:12.000 So Charlie had this great exchange.
00:16:14.000 We're going to play it in the next segment.
00:16:16.000 But Bill, did you give him all of the, where did he get that from you, Bill?
00:16:21.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:16:22.000 We did an interview actually on that topic beforehand.
00:16:26.000 And then right after he recorded that, he texted it to me and he said, how did I do it?
00:16:32.000 Well, I think he did well because that clip was seen by tens of millions of people.
00:16:38.000 It really was an absolute masterclass.
00:16:41.000 Dr. Jerry Newcomb, when we play it for you, we'll get your review on how Charlie did.
00:16:46.000 But it's one of those clips that keeps coming back around again and again and again, especially after we lost Charlie, because I think it just was the exact type of moral clarity that the world so desperately needs.
00:16:59.000 And Charlie had a way of being patient, but forceful and firm and morally clear.
00:17:06.000 And I think it was a really powerful moment.
00:17:07.000 So we're going to play that.
00:17:09.000 We can open the next segment with it.
00:17:11.000 And Dr. Jerry Newcomb, we'll get your grade.
00:17:14.000 A through F. You're going to have to grade Charlie's take there.
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00:18:24.000 Okay, gentlemen, I apologize.
00:18:26.000 It's a longer clip, but Dr. Jerry Newcomb, I'm going to get your reaction to this on the other side.
00:18:31.000 I believe we have it, don't we?
00:18:33.000 We have it?
00:18:34.000 Yes.
00:18:34.000 Is it loaded?
00:18:35.000 I believe it's 214.
00:18:37.000 Let's try.
00:18:37.000 214.
00:18:39.000 Remember that we were a collection of states and colonies, and you need to read the state constitutions before anything else.
00:18:44.000 13 out of 13 required a declaration of faith.
00:18:46.000 9 out of 13 required you to be a Protestant, except Maryland, which was Catholic, which still required a declaration of faith.
00:18:52.000 Every single one of the original state constitutions, Pennsylvania included, they had, I profess Lord and Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in the original state constitutions.
00:19:01.000 Secondly, 55 out of 56 of the original signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing church attending Christians.
00:19:06.000 You asked about common law.
00:19:08.000 So common law is inherited from Blackstone, who was Christian.
00:19:11.000 A common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures.
00:19:13.000 So let's go to three principles of common law, due process, and jury of your peers, wrapped into the ultimate biblical principle that you shall not favor justice if you are rich or poor, which is in Leviticus 19, right before the most famous part of Leviticus 19, which is that you should love your neighbor as yourself.
00:19:29.000 But before that is that in the administration of justice, you shall not favor the rich or the poor, which is the idea of blind justice.
00:19:35.000 We get that in the West, which is incorporated also in the New Testament ideal.
00:19:38.000 Neither slave nor Greek nor Jew, you're all one in Jesus Christ, which is where the idea of human equality.
00:19:42.000 These are all biblical ideas.
00:19:43.000 They're not enlightenment ideas, which is they kind of get conflated at the time.
00:19:47.000 But more importantly than that, they say that God was only mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence.
00:19:52.000 Well, that's a big deal, okay?
00:19:54.000 Laws of nature and nature's God.
00:19:55.000 The last paragraph of the declaration reads as a prayer.
00:19:58.000 It says, we appeal to the supreme judge of the universe.
00:20:01.000 Who's the judge of the universe?
00:20:02.000 Jesus Christ, as it says in Revelation, that Jesus will judge the earth on his throne.
00:20:08.000 So in the Declaration, they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer very specifically.
00:20:13.000 Thirdly, as I said on the stage yesterday, Deuteronomy was by far the most quoted book, religious or non-religious, in the time of the founding when they were putting together Constitution, more than John Locke, more than Montesquieu, more than Blackstone.
00:20:26.000 So the book of Deuteronomy, which talked about laws, customs, traditions, it was Moses' farewell address as he's about to say goodbye, say, hey, good luck in Canaan, guys.
00:20:35.000 Here's how you should set up your form of government.
00:20:37.000 But finally, and most importantly, let's look at actually what the founders said.
00:20:41.000 John Adams seamlessly said the Constitution was only written for a moral, religious people.
00:20:46.000 It was wholly inadequate for the people of any other. 0.60
00:20:48.000 The body politic of America was so Christian and was so Protestant that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord.
00:20:56.000 One of the reasons we're living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they're incompatible. 0.95
00:21:04.000 So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population. 1.00
00:21:09.000 Boom.
00:21:09.000 Zing.
00:21:11.000 Great content.
00:21:12.000 Dr. Newcomb, your reaction.
00:21:18.000 Absolutely terrific.
00:21:20.000 And he's totally right.
00:21:21.000 We have this foundation of the nation that is based on biblical principles.
00:21:27.000 And that quote that he alluded to from John Adams, our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
00:21:34.000 It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
00:21:37.000 When George Washington was leaving the office, he gave us the farewell address.
00:21:41.000 And he said there, of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.
00:21:51.000 Well, modern Americans today are saying religion and morality have no place in the public arena.
00:21:57.000 What are you talking about?
00:21:58.000 It was religion and morality, specifically Christianity, that gave us the freedoms we enjoy.
00:22:04.000 And those freedoms cannot be maintained for long if we undercut that Christian foundation. 0.95
00:22:11.000 Now, the foundation is still there.
00:22:13.000 It's attacked.
00:22:15.000 And people will bring out all kinds of different ways to try and cut us off from that foundation.
00:22:20.000 But the foundation is still there.
00:22:22.000 In a different context, John Adams once said, facts are stubborn things.
00:22:28.000 This is why the history is so important.
00:22:30.000 This is why at providenceforum.org, for example, we do so much to try and create these videos and programs like you do too at Turning Point with Bill Federer in order to educate people about our Christian roots.
00:22:45.000 And, you know, the fact of the matter is, human beings are sinful.
00:22:51.000 And that is a very important doctrine that the founding fathers fully understood.
00:22:57.000 You read the Constitution and you see the separation of power.
00:23:01.000 They did not want to give too much power to too many people.
00:23:05.000 You read the Declaration of Independence and you see the consent of the governed.
00:23:10.000 And this is because we have our rights from God.
00:23:14.000 So the fact that human beings are made in the image of God, that's enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
00:23:20.000 And the fact that human beings are fallen and sinful, that's enshrined in the Constitution.
00:23:25.000 And these have governed us very, very well.
00:23:28.000 When you look at countries like the communist countries, for example, in the 20th century and 21st century, even you see how they begin with this atheistic foundation.
00:23:39.000 There is no God.
00:23:41.000 And when there is no God and the belief of that, then there are no rights.
00:23:46.000 So even some liberal type founders of America, for example, Thomas Jefferson, he wasn't as un-Christian as he sometimes made out to be.
00:23:55.000 He was not a lifelong skeptic.
00:23:57.000 In fact, the year after he wrote the Declaration of Independence, he helped found as a layman the Calvinistical Reformed Church of Charlottesville.
00:24:08.000 And he even wrote up the agreement for the subscription for this.
00:24:12.000 And they called an evangelical minister, the Reverend Charles Clay, for this church.
00:24:17.000 And they said, we're desirous of gospel knowledge.
00:24:20.000 But even Jefferson, later, when he has some doubts and so forth about some of the doctrines, he still said that, you know, our rights come from God.
00:24:29.000 And if we ever forget that, I tremble for my country because how can we maintain our freedoms if we ever lose sight of God?
00:24:39.000 And the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, many nations have been soaked in blood because they began with the premise that there is no God.
00:24:50.000 There's no higher authority than the state.
00:24:55.000 The state is God.
00:24:57.000 So good luck with that.
00:24:58.000 So Mao has slain his millions and tens of millions.
00:25:02.000 And Stalin, too.
00:25:02.000 And the bloodline really, it hits.
00:25:04.000 And we have to be on guard about that.
00:25:06.000 And speaking of that, I think it's worth remembering that, you know, we've talked about the first Thanksgiving.
00:25:11.000 We talked about the founding era Thanksgivings, but the annual, you know, Thanksgiving as we observe it was born in the middle of the American Civil War, proclaimed by Lincoln 1863.
00:25:23.000 That's not the end of the Civil War.
00:25:25.000 That's the peak of the war.
00:25:27.000 That's right.
00:25:28.000 Tens of thousands of people are dying every month.
00:25:31.000 This is just a few months after Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle in American history.
00:25:35.000 And that is when Lincoln issues his proclamation that we should have a national day of Thanksgiving.
00:25:41.000 And I think there's a lot of meaning in that.
00:25:44.000 Yeah, especially this year, given what we've been through.
00:25:47.000 Bill, on that note of what Blake's talking about, how did we get from Jamestown to 1863?
00:25:55.000 What was the American experience with Thanksgiving in between that time?
00:26:00.000 Right.
00:26:01.000 Well, now I do want to mention I have a book, and it's called The Treacherous World of the 16th Century and How the Pilgrims Escaped It. 0.97
00:26:07.000 So it gets the whole setting of what was going on in Europe.
00:26:11.000 What were the Muslims doing? 1.00
00:26:12.000 People forget that they were surrounding Vienna, Austria twice, and they had pirates capturing and they had whole Catholic orders in Europe called the Trinitarians and they would ransom back people for Muslim slavery. 0.88
00:26:24.000 And matter of fact, one of the pilgrim ships was captured by Muslim pirates.
00:26:28.000 In 1625, William Bradford said they saved up 800 pounds of beaver skins, sent it back to England, but it was captured in the English Channel by a Turkish man of war, carried off to solemn Morocco, and the crew was made slaves.
00:26:42.000 So even the pilgrims had to deal with that.
00:26:45.000 One other thing before we get off the pilgrims is they tried communism, right?
00:26:48.000 So they had no money.
00:26:49.000 They borrowed money from a London company that set up bylaws that said everything would be held in common.
00:26:55.000 Everything got by cooking, trucking, fishing shall go into ye common stock, and everyone's livelihood shall come out of ye common stock.
00:27:01.000 And William Bradford said they tried it and almost starved to death.
00:27:04.000 He says that the young man objected to doing twice as much work as the old guy, but got paid the same.
00:27:09.000 The women objected to having to wash other men's clothes. 1.00
00:27:12.000 And William Bradford said, after much discussion, it was decided that each man should plant corn for his own household.
00:27:18.000 This made all hands more industrious.
00:27:20.000 The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to plant corn. 1.00
00:27:24.000 Well, before they would allege weakness and to have forced them would have been great oppression.
00:27:27.000 So here the pilgrims tried everything owned in common and it didn't work.
00:27:33.000 One other thing that's overlooked is there were twice as many Indians at the first Thanksgiving than pilgrims.
00:27:38.000 There was like 90 Indians and only 52 pilgrims.
00:27:42.000 And get this only four adult women cooking for 142 people because all the rest of them had died in the winter. 0.99
00:27:50.000 And then one other quick thing is Squanto, who had been kidnapped by some unscrupulous people and taken and sold as a slave in Malaga, Spain.
00:27:59.000 He was purchased by some friars, given his freedom.
00:28:02.000 He hitchhikes his way back to England, works for the Newfoundland company that drop him off on the shores of America, only to find out that his entire tribe was wiped out in a plague.
00:28:12.000 And William Bradford says three years earlier, a French ship was shipwrecked there.
00:28:16.000 And evidently, one of the sailors that got ashore had an illness and wiped out the tribe.
00:28:20.000 But had Squanto not been kidnapped, he most likely would have been killed as well.
00:28:24.000 But here the pilgrims land and half of them die the first winter.
00:28:28.000 But the next spring out of the woods walks this Indian Squanto. 1.00
00:28:32.000 And you can just imagine the conversation.
00:28:34.000 Oh, you guys from England? 0.61
00:28:35.000 Yeah, I used to live there.
00:28:37.000 And then this place, I grew up here.
00:28:39.000 And so Squanto was their interpreter, showed them how to catch beaver and plant corn and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation, what William Bradford said.
00:28:48.000 And one last thing, when Squanto was dying, he says that a couple years later, they were exploring and they got caught in the freezing rain and Squanto fell ill of Indian fever, bleeding much in the nose.
00:28:59.000 And he begged Governor Bradford to pray for him that he might go to the Englishman's God in heaven.
00:29:06.000 All right.
00:29:07.000 So Squanto became a Christian. 0.83
00:29:09.000 I'm confident.
00:29:10.000 Anyway, so we looked at the Pilgrims because they had self-government, which inspired New England and then eventually turned into our Constitution.
00:29:22.000 Legacy Box has been a proud sponsor of this show since 2021.
00:29:27.000 And we here at the Charlie Kirk Show are grateful to continue supporting a community that values family and tradition.
00:29:33.000 You know how we talk about protecting what really matters.
00:29:36.000 That's not just finances or politics.
00:29:38.000 It's your family memories too.
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00:30:07.000 Honor the moments that matter.
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00:30:25.000 Got an email here from Kevin.
00:30:26.000 This is really good.
00:30:27.000 Blake, you want to read this one?
00:30:28.000 Oh, let me see.
00:30:30.000 Yes, I got it.
00:30:31.000 So he says, Charlie was right.
00:30:33.000 We should all strive to keep Thanksgiving going strong.
00:30:36.000 It's an American holiday.
00:30:37.000 It is a Christian holiday.
00:30:38.000 It's hard to make gratitude marketable, which is why other holidays get more attention for their commercial opportunities.
00:30:46.000 May God bless the Kirk family.
00:30:47.000 Thank you very much, Kevin.
00:30:48.000 Yeah, Kevin.
00:30:49.000 Well said, Kevin.
00:30:50.000 I love that.
00:30:51.000 It's so true. 0.84
00:30:51.000 I mean, the other holidays are. 0.84
00:30:54.000 They're dying for Thanksgiving to end so they can like slam the door and say, and now it's Christmas shopping season.
00:30:59.000 Go out for Black Springs.
00:31:00.000 This is what upsets me about celebrating Christmas after Halloween because you're just shortchanging.
00:31:07.000 The most American Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving is it is related to Christmas, but it is not Christmas.
00:31:12.000 It is a separate holiday.
00:31:14.000 Yes.
00:31:14.000 And we shouldn't just fold it in.
00:31:16.000 Yeah, I agree.
00:31:17.000 I completely agree.
00:31:18.000 Bill, connect the dots here.
00:31:20.000 We got to go kind of quick here between the first Thanksgiving and 1863 and that declaration by President Lincoln.
00:31:29.000 Right.
00:31:29.000 So they had an attitude.
00:31:30.000 When things were bad, you would have days of prayer.
00:31:34.000 And when things got real bad, they had days of fasting and prayer.
00:31:36.000 And when things turned around, they had days of Thanksgiving.
00:31:39.000 And they were on an as-needed basis.
00:31:42.000 And so, as Blake mentioned, you had days of fasting during the Revolutionary War and then days of Thanksgiving.
00:31:49.000 You had threatened war with France, and John Adams has two days of fasting and prayer, and then days of Thanksgiving when the British burned the White House.
00:31:59.000 James Madison had a day of fasting and prayer and then a day of Thanksgiving during a cholera epidemic in 1849 when 150,000 Americans died of cholera.
00:32:10.000 You had Zachary Taylor had a day of fasting.
00:32:14.000 And then Lincoln had two days of fasting and prayer during the Revolution.
00:32:18.000 And then he made, as Blake mentioned, the day of Thanksgiving an annual event.
00:32:22.000 But it was a relationship with God.
00:32:24.000 Now, from Lincoln till now, it's an annual event.
00:32:28.000 And matter of fact, it's the last Thursday in September, in November.
00:32:35.000 FDR wanted to move it one week earlier.
00:32:38.000 So there'd be an extra week of shopping before Christmas.
00:32:40.000 And that became a campaign issue that the Republicans are like, we're going to move Thanksgiving back to the original date.
00:32:48.000 But it's always been biblical.
00:32:50.000 It's always been thinking a monotheistic God.
00:32:52.000 So you're leaving out Buddhism and Hinduism.
00:32:55.000 And it's also that you have the freedom.
00:32:58.000 Like Jefferson had a day of Thanksgiving that the Continental Congress asked everybody to all the states to observe.
00:33:06.000 And he's governor of Virginia, so he has Virginia observe a day of Thanksgiving.
00:33:09.000 But it was voluntary.
00:33:10.000 So they didn't want to have to be forced, but they want it to be voluntary.
00:33:14.000 And so voluntary worship of God is clearly Christian.
00:33:17.000 It's not in Islam. 0.99
00:33:19.000 And so they're referring to a God of the Bible.
00:33:22.000 And of course, many of them have proclamations and scriptures in there as well.
00:33:26.000 That's great.
00:33:27.000 Really, really well said, Bill.
00:33:29.000 And I love what you were talking about, those presidents that were between Washington and Lincoln and how they had days of fasting and days of prayer and days of thanksgiving.
00:33:39.000 I mean, how amazing would that be if the president of the United States called on a day of fasting and prayer?
00:33:46.000 I mean, that would just be a complete paradigm shift from our current moment.
00:33:50.000 And I'm sure it would be incredibly controversial and all of that.
00:33:54.000 But we should.
00:33:54.000 We absolutely should because America is unique among the nations.
00:33:58.000 We are a providential nation that was founded on Christian belief in God.
00:34:03.000 And I think our origin story really demonstrates that.
00:34:07.000 I'm going to play this clip, one of Charlie's favorites, 194.
00:34:12.000 They knew that they were going to face hardship.
00:34:15.000 Hardship, like you and I don't know.
00:34:18.000 But paramount importance to them was living freely and worshiping God according to the dictates of their own consciences, their own beliefs.
00:34:32.000 That's what they were denied the freedom to do in England.
00:34:37.000 But because of the biblical precedent set forth in scripture, they never doubted, because of their faith in God, that their experiment would work.
00:34:48.000 They never doubted they would get to the new world.
00:34:50.000 They never doubted that once they got there, they would thrive.
00:34:54.000 During that first winter, remember they arrive in November.
00:34:58.000 During that first winter, half of them, including William Bradford's own wife, died.
00:35:04.000 Spring finally came.
00:35:07.000 They did meet the Indians, the Native Americans who were there, who did help them.
00:35:15.000 You know, Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives.
00:35:25.000 It wasn't that.
00:35:26.000 That happened, but Thanksgiving was a devout expression of gratitude, the pilgrims, to God For their survival and everything that was a part of it.
00:35:47.000 Dr. Jerry Newcomb, well, the Pilgrims were a small group of Christian who were basically Christians that were outcasts in their own society.
00:35:57.000 And all they wanted to do was worship Jesus and the purity of the conscience.
00:36:00.000 And as Dr. D. James Kennedy once noted, America began as a church relocation project in the sense that the Pilgrims were the ones he's talking about.
00:36:10.000 They went from this place north of London, about 150 miles, then they made it to Holland where they could at least be tolerated.
00:36:19.000 And then eventually they made it to the New World.
00:36:21.000 So in that sense, in the sense that the Pilgrims cast a long and positive shadow in what would become the United States of America, that's a fantastic observation.
00:36:31.000 They began that whole process of self-rule under God that we've talked about with the Mayflower Compact.
00:36:37.000 They had a form of socialism imposed on them by the people who made the loans so they could even have the voyage.
00:36:46.000 And they got rid of that and instead gave free enterprise.
00:36:50.000 And they flourished as they made God the center of their whole settlement.
00:36:56.000 And just one last observation.
00:36:57.000 In a film I made about this, about the Pilgrims, and Charlie, by the way, commended one of the films I made, you know, in this whole series called the Foundation of American Liberty series.
00:37:07.000 And Bill Federer is a major, major guest.
00:37:09.000 Anyway, so I interviewed the direct descendant of the de facto pastor of the Pilgrims.
00:37:17.000 His name was William Brewster.
00:37:19.000 And so I interviewed this descendant, and he said, Suppose one after things got real stable in Plymouth and they were starting to thrive and flourish, you know, under God.
00:37:33.000 Suppose one of their children said, Do I have to go to church?
00:37:37.000 He said, One of those parents could easily say to that child, What do you mean?
00:37:41.000 Do you have to go to church?
00:37:43.000 You have no idea how much we sacrifice so that you can go to church.
00:37:48.000 America was begun by people who wanted to worship Jesus and the purity of the conscience.
00:37:54.000 Then that freedom was extended to everybody else.
00:37:57.000 And now, at least in some quarters, they're trying to say, No, Christians are not allowed to have that kind of freedom.
00:38:03.000 That's crazy.
00:38:04.000 There's a reason we're called, even to this day, our national motto is, In God We Trust.
00:38:10.000 Yeah, well said.
00:38:11.000 And Bill, I just want to commend you as well.
00:38:14.000 Thank you both for coming.
00:38:16.000 You are a wealth of knowledge.
00:38:18.000 American Minute, I want to make sure I got it right here.
00:38:23.000 AmericanMinute.com.
00:38:25.000 I just so encourage everybody to sign up for your newsletter.
00:38:29.000 The work you do there is tremendous.
00:38:30.000 Dr. JerryNewcombe, ProvidenceForum.org.
00:38:33.000 I got it right.
00:38:35.000 Final 30 seconds to you, Bill.
00:38:37.000 How can people follow you and get involved with your history lessons?
00:38:43.000 Yeah, well, matter of fact, turningpointed.com.
00:38:47.000 If you go to resources and scroll down, you see how we got here.
00:38:50.000 And so I do a weekly video for Turning Point Ed.
00:38:53.000 Charlie had he and Rob McCoy and Mikey, we went to dinner together.
00:38:58.000 He's like, I want you to be a big part of this.
00:39:00.000 And so I write it.
00:39:02.000 It's about seven minutes long, and anybody can sign up for it.
00:39:04.000 It's particularly homeschoolers and Christian schools and classic schools.
00:39:08.000 But it's turningpointed.com.
00:39:09.000 Look at resources and how we got here.
00:39:11.000 I love that.
00:39:12.000 Thank you, Bill.
00:39:13.000 Bill Federer, author and speaker, AmericanMinute.com.
00:39:16.000 Dr. Jerry Newcomb, Executive Director of Providence Forum, ProvidenceForum.org.
00:39:21.000 Thank you, gentlemen, and happy Thanksgiving to you both.