00:00:52.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:59.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:57.000See, this is why you're a New York Times bestseller.
00:02:00.000Well, actually, now you don't know this, but the book that is launching today, which is called Fish Out of Water, a Search for the Meaning of Life, in here, I talk about meeting Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld with Seinfeld.
00:02:15.000It's in the book, and it's true, and it's insane.
00:02:19.000But yes, you and I are talking about Seinfeld.
00:02:21.000People maybe didn't get those references, but right over there.
00:02:25.000Yeah, I thought I was going to be a writer for Seinfeld, but maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves.
00:02:48.000He doesn't know how to tell a funny story.
00:02:50.000No, this is called, it's called Fish Out of Water, A Search for the Meaning of Life, because it tells the story of my early years.
00:03:01.000I was really not, it's not like I was like looking for the meaning of life, really.
00:03:07.000I was like many people kind of drifting along, not sure what to think or who to take seriously.
00:03:13.000I didn't want to be a religious fanatic.
00:03:14.000And so avoiding people who were very religious.
00:03:18.000And at the same time, after graduating from Yale, I floundered and went through a lot of real pain where I kind of thought, what am I doing with life?
00:03:27.000And I was really in a place where God kind of had me cornered.
00:03:32.000And so the end of the book, it's only the end of the book.
00:03:36.000There's this epiphany where I, you know, you don't really know what's happening sometimes in life, but God is there and he wants us to know him personally.
00:03:48.000And so looking back now and telling the story, it's just, it's kind of amazing to me, but it's not the kind of thing you could see while it was happening.
00:03:56.000So I wrote the book from the point of view of myself at the time.
00:03:59.000It's not like I look back and I comment.
00:04:02.000I just tell it, you know, from the point of view of the person there.
00:04:36.000And I think that the story of my search for the meaning of life, it is like that.
00:04:43.000And the ending of it, which, because it's not really a religious book, it's not a spiritual memoir.
00:04:49.000It's a memoir, which I think of as a literary memoir.
00:04:52.000There are notes of, you know, God and stuff through it, but just kind of like the way there are for anybody in life.
00:04:58.000You meet people that are, but it's not until the end that God essentially takes the different strands of my life and weaves together something and blows my mind.
00:05:11.000I mean, it literally changed me overnight.
00:05:14.000It was like, you know, a miraculous reveal that you're just speechless and you don't know what to do.
00:05:22.000It was just God revealed himself to me in a way that was so personal.
00:05:26.000I said, I do have to tell this story because people need to know God wants to reach us, but he's not a religious God.
00:05:34.000And so it's never what you think it is.
00:05:37.000It's never, you know, so I've become very serious about faith, but it's really being serious about reality because it's not like some version of reality or this is my philosophy.
00:06:01.000And in the course of that, I discovered some other stuff.
00:06:05.000So it's kind of, you know, I want it to be something that everyone, people who are not on the same page as we are politically or theologically, I wrote this book for them, to be perfectly blunt.
00:06:15.000This is the kind of book you can give to somebody with whom you disagree on a lot of stuff.
00:06:18.000And I think that because of the humor and the weird stuff and that, you know, I think people will track and will enjoy it just as a read.
00:07:03.000It only goes up to around my 25th birthday, which was when I had this, you know, insane dream that totally, totally, totally blew my mind and changed my world forever.
00:07:14.000I mean, you can't make that stuff up, you know, like there's no way you can make that up.
00:07:30.000They met in an English class in New York City.
00:07:32.000And so trying to figure out who you are when your dad is Greek and your mother's German, you don't really fit in anywhere, which is why I say fish out of water.
00:07:41.000There's a lot of funny Greek stuff in there.
00:07:44.000But, you know, I never quite fit in because we didn't speak Greek at home.
00:07:47.000My mother wasn't cooking Greek meals every night.
00:07:50.000And then when I got around the American kids, you know, in Connecticut, and I never quite fit in because my parents are European immigrants and, you know, we had this kind of European thing going on.
00:07:59.000And then when I went to Yale, I was kind of a working class kid.
00:08:02.000And so that was kind of a theme for me.
00:08:07.000And in the course of finding our identities, sort of whether you're witting or unwitting in the process, you're really trying to find out who you are ultimately, which is a way of finding God, so to speak.
00:09:22.000And I look back on it now and I think, Eric, you idiot, what like, why didn't you, if you read the story, you'll see, but it's, it's the naivete that I had back then, I wasn't, you know, as sophisticated as Charlie Kirk at that age.
00:09:48.000So looking back at some of the lessons that are derived from this book without spoiling the book, we have a lot of young people that listen to this.
00:09:56.000What if you could go back and tell your 20-something, 20-year-old something something, your 20-year-old self-something, I guess is the way to word it.
00:10:05.000Or there's a lot of young people, and we get this, Eric, a lot.
00:10:08.000We get thousands of emails a week of students and young people that are honestly searching direction.
00:10:14.000The academy has become a place absent of beauty or truth.
00:10:17.000It has become an anger-filled rage postmodern just circus.
00:12:05.000I actually wrote a poem about it, but I didn't put the poem in the book.
00:12:07.000The poem is on my website, but it's totally true and I but I confronted this at YALE that this I did.
00:12:14.000I shouldn't say I confronted it, I bumped into it.
00:12:17.000It confronted me, this Postmodern you know, post meaning world and coming from a working class family where my parents taught me and this is a big part of the book they taught me to hate communism.
00:12:50.000And we're the good guys because we, even in the most basic way, believe in god, believe in freedom, believe in the sanctity of the individual and I I got that from my mom and dad, just from who they were.
00:13:00.000So suddenly i'm at YALE bumping into people that they don't, they don't get, that they don't believe in good or evil, you know, they just don't know.
00:13:07.000And that's when I got really puzzled and really like I wasn't just, I wasn't sure where to go, where to turn, and there's a couple of there's just some good stuff in here about what happened to me at YALE.
00:13:20.000But then I graduated, just lost, like thinking I, you know, and what's interesting, and a lot of people who listen to you and know you, they won't have this problem.
00:13:30.000But my problem was I bought into the demonization of conservatives and evangelical, serious Christians.
00:13:40.000In other words, I was one of those people on the campus who I was not active in persecuting them, but I I didn't say anything.
00:13:49.000I kind of went along with the crowd that says conservatives are like fascist jerks and uh, Christians are insane and they're you know.
00:13:58.000I went along with that basically and by not saying anything.
00:14:02.000And I graduated and suddenly I didn't know where I was and I had been trained to look down my nose at conservatives, to look down my nose at patriots and definitely to look down my nose at people who took the Bible seriously and when I think how that hurt me.
00:14:20.000I bought the lie, and many people today have bought the lie that anybody who takes the Bible really seriously must be half nuts.
00:14:27.000Anybody who, you know, believes in god and country, they must be nuts.
00:14:31.000I bought that lie and so I bring that perspective in a way.
00:14:34.000I'll tell you I wrote this book for people who don't agree with me, as you know.
00:14:38.000I'm hoping people who do agree with me will buy the book and give it to those people and say, just see what you think of this, because this is not uh, an apology for the conservative worldview or for faith, it's just a story.
00:14:50.000And just see if you track with it, see what happens, because it's just my story and I I really do feel, speaking to young people today, if you understand That being a conservative is not just the right worldview, but it's going to help you and other people.
00:15:08.000How can you not care about these things?
00:15:10.000How can you say, oh, I don't want to bring that up because somebody might look at me funny?
00:15:13.000And that goes double for the Christian faith.
00:15:18.000The only reason conservatism even makes sense is because of God.
00:15:21.000So you can blow off God, but you're being intellectually dishonest.
00:15:24.000The God of the Bible is the one who determines reality, and conservatism is a response to reality, whereas the utopianist leftist view is not a response to reality.
00:15:35.000It's kicking against the goads of reality.
00:15:37.000And I guess finally, you know, I would say that today, the one thing we have today, which we did not have when I was a young man, is today we have people who talk about being Christians who are woke, foolish young people.
00:15:51.000They are very confused about what the Bible says about things.
00:15:56.000And they have a kind of angry, leftist, puritanical streak.
00:16:04.000And that, you know, that kind of feeds the mobs of the French Revolution and any utopian, anything that puts something in place of God as a religion.
00:16:11.000And there are a lot of people who call themselves Christians who don't understand what Christianity has been historically, who don't love America, who don't.
00:16:34.000A lot of them, you know, maybe not yet, but they will be.
00:16:37.000So we have lots of people that listen to us that admit they're kind of drifting.
00:16:41.000Our program, I think, does some good for them, but they have gone through such incredible indoctrination for years that they almost are conditioned not to believe that God is real, that the creator, a creator wants to, our creator wants to come in a relationship with them.
00:17:00.000What do you think young people can do to kind of jolt themselves back into a sense of direction?
00:17:06.000I think that you cannot have direction without meaning.
00:17:54.000It's really easy to drift along with the American zeitgeist that says, you know, everything's cool and it's not.
00:18:02.000And so when you say, how can you shake people?
00:18:05.000I think ultimately God has to do that.
00:18:09.000But I would say I was not exposed to anybody who was, you know, reputable or intellectually impressive, who was serious about his or her faith.
00:18:26.000I had the, I bought into this lie that it's only like these jugheads who, you know, they're not that bright and they're not that philosophically astute and they bought into this stuff.
00:18:37.000I hadn't encountered, you know, C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton or whoever.
00:18:43.000There's a million books by a million people.
00:19:36.000So when I started bumping into them, I thought, how is it possible that I've gone through most of my life?
00:19:41.000I never heard of, you know, again, C.S. Lewis is usually the easiest one, but there are a host of books and things that I read.
00:19:50.000And I like to have a lot of these people on my radio program today to introduce people, but they're these amazing scientists, these amazing thinkers, historians, and on and on.
00:21:08.000The love and goodness of God is unbelievable.
00:21:11.000And I think that dealing with evil, understanding that there are dark forces, and I don't just mean socialism, although, of course, it's at the root of all that stuff.
00:21:21.000The dark forces are at the root of all bad political ideas, but the dark forces themselves, the satanic evil, we don't talk about that.
00:21:29.000And I want to say to people, that is real.
00:21:33.000And that was part of my story is bumping into actual evil.
00:21:37.000I made the mistake of watching The Exorcist when I was like 17 years old.
00:21:41.000And it was so horrifying that briefly I turned toward God, but then there was no follow-up and I kind of drifted away.
00:21:49.000But if you see real evil, you'll understand I want God.
00:21:57.000And by the way, if you don't take it seriously, you know, to guilt trip people, there are millions of people around the world that are depending on us in America to live out the truth.
00:22:08.000And if you kind of take a pass on that, you know, you're, you don't care about those people.
00:22:12.000If you care about people around the world who don't have any kind of liberty or even possibility of thriving, then, you know, where are you coming from?
00:22:22.000And I think growing up is part of that, realizing that I've got to choose in this battle.
00:22:30.000And as I say, in some ways, my parents helped me to see that.
00:22:32.000They laid a foundation, but I almost really missed it because as I say, I went to Yale and I just got in with a crowd that didn't even give it the time of day briefly.
00:22:44.000So I want to focus on something you mentioned that is a big focus of mine lately.
00:22:50.000And I come from the political world as a Christian looking into the Christian world, whereas most people are in the Christian world looking into the political world.
00:23:43.000No other church around him is supporting him.
00:23:46.000And very few churches in the country are even aware that a pastor is fighting the government for the ecclesia.
00:23:52.000And so I'm just looking around and I see, for example, in just the Houston general area, billions of dollars in buildings, hundreds of millions in dollars for Christian Incorporated.
00:24:03.000Yet here is Mike McClure in San Jose, which is just basically the same as doing a mission trip overseas, considering the Christian to citizen ratio in San Jose is probably lower than most totalitarian dictatorships.
00:24:16.000And yet most people are not supporting him or even aware of it.
00:24:20.000In conservative world, Eric, when an example, one of our turning point USA kids gets in a controversy on campus.
00:24:26.000That person's on Tucker Carlson the next night or Sean Hannity show doing a full media circuit.
00:25:16.000And to really be courageous when other people aren't being courageous, it costs us something.
00:25:21.000And I learned that in the last whatever number of months standing up for Trump and this election fraud, which I saw, I just thought, how come everybody in America is not screaming?
00:26:58.000A lot of these megachurches and places that have been shy about this, you know, you want to kind of ask them, what gospel is it that you're preaching?
00:27:07.000Like what problem are you feeding your people?
00:27:10.000When evil comes, when government comes and wants to find you and do these things, what fake God are you going to turn to?
00:27:20.000What happy, clappy God are you going to do?
00:27:32.000But I never dreamt until the last four years, roughly, that I would see so many so-called Christians not understand that we're in a battle.
00:28:38.000The people that are in the middle use that as an excuse, never use that as an accusation against churches that go woke or liberal.
00:28:45.000For example, many of these mega churches say they're only, a lot of the megachurches say, well, we're not a political church, but they have problems with really churches becoming conservative, not churches becoming liberal.
00:28:57.000I have recently got into a, I guess you could call it a Twitter feud, and it never meant to be anything personal against the rapper Lecrae, who allegedly people like his music.
00:29:14.000And so he responded to me and just based, and I don't want to mischaracterize it, but I basically said, how does no one see how this is not racist and white supremacist for a white guy to say a black guy shouldn't be allowed to perform at church?
00:29:27.000And of course, nothing that I said was racially motivated or charged.
00:29:30.000I just don't think he should be able to perform at church because he endorsed the murder of children, right?
00:29:47.000K-Love got a lot of calls from people because they said, oh, no, Lecrae is not part of our network.
00:29:52.000They literally have a webpage on Lecrae on K-Love.com.
00:29:55.000So that goes to show how corrupt they have become.
00:29:58.000Anyway, so you have a lot of things going on here.
00:30:02.000First of all, I think, I mean, I have met Lecrae a number of times.
00:30:08.000I think, you know what it is, Charlie?
00:30:10.000And this is where we have to have grace.
00:30:11.000There are a lot of people that are, they're straight up misled.
00:30:15.000In other words, I think that this is kind of the problem is that the left is so vicious and belligerent that if you hesitate, they are, you know, you're dead.
00:30:32.000And so the pressure being put on people like Lecrae, I'm not at all surprised in some ways that he would be confused about this or whatever.
00:30:43.000I think he's a really good guy living, but we're living in really tough times and the pressure on somebody like that is horrifying.
00:30:51.000He went and did a campaign event for Raphael Warnock.
00:30:55.000Well, no, look, obviously, you know where I stand on that, but I'm still saying that it's kind of no wonder because I really think that there's so many people that they really know not what they do.
00:31:10.000They don't understand that this is about killing the unborn.
00:31:16.000They don't understand who somebody like a Warnock really is or whatever.
00:31:19.000Or everybody around them is telling them, no, no, no, he's cool.
00:31:43.000But if you tick off these other people, you're also going to pay a price.
00:31:46.000That to me is the issue is that we typically don't make people pay a price, which is why I've been so outspoken and enraged about the Mike Lindell thing.
00:31:54.000All of the stores that have said we're going to throw him out, Kohl's, HEB stores, Wayfair stores, and Bed Bath and Beyond, no one should ever spend a penny in those stores ever again.
00:32:10.000They should understand that if you want to play this game, you are anti-American.
00:33:18.000And yet they do whatever they want to do with no recourse at all whatsoever.
00:33:26.000Are you guys sick of all the cancel culture?
00:33:28.000Stand with one of the fighters, Mike Lindell, right now.
00:33:32.000I want to talk to you about how MyPillow has changed so many people's lives.
00:33:35.000I know people that use My Pillow, made in America, by the way, and they say they're sleeping better, they're a better person, and it's just a game changer.
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00:33:55.000Not only are you getting the lowest price ever, $29.98 for a queen-size premium, but Mike is extending a 60-day money-back guarantee to March 1st, 2021.
00:34:04.000So right now, support the good guys, support the people that are trying to cancel.
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00:34:34.000But Eric, I guess what I am confused about, which is what inspired the whole thing, is that just how indifferent Christians are to the downfall of the country, maybe I'm being too harsh on them.
00:34:46.000Maybe I should just judge them as normal people.
00:34:49.000But your Bonhoeffer book is very instructive.
00:34:52.000And it goes to show that maybe there isn't a difference to how Christians should act.
00:34:57.000Well, I really think the issue, Charlie, is that we got to know we're no different than the Germans in 30s Germany.
00:35:05.000If you think we're better than them inherently, you're a racist, right?
00:35:12.000So what happened in Germany, anybody who thinks like, well, I wouldn't have been one of those people or I wouldn't have shouted crucify him, of course you would.
00:35:19.000If you don't get that, you obviously aren't any kind of a real Christian because the first thing you'll understand is you are one of those people.
00:35:26.000And it's only by the grace of God that you wouldn't be.
00:35:56.000You need to understand that is idiocy.
00:35:58.000There's no such thing as only preaching the gospel.
00:36:02.000The gospel inevitably bumps into politics.
00:36:05.000If people are being tortured for their faith, if people are being enslaved, if people are being sent in boxcars to death camps and you say, well, I can't get involved in that because that's political.
00:36:16.000You have no faith and the gospel you believe in is fake.
00:36:21.000This is real justice issues to say when I see something wrong, somebody getting beat up in the street, if I don't do something, you know, the Good Samaritan, this is like the most basic parable.
00:36:38.000So if you don't do that, when your country is going to hell, you've got bad theology on what I just said because you think like politics is separate from your faith.
00:37:04.000You are hurting that kid because you have either elected somebody who's going to enact policies that are going to harm that community, or you didn't vote at all and allowed that person to get elected.
00:37:19.000And if you care about people around the world, you have to care about America being free and strong.
00:37:24.000We noticed that China, the second Joe Biden got in office, they understand, well, now we're going to have some fun because we don't have Trump to deal with.
00:37:35.000So we're going to persecute our Uyghur Muslims even more.
00:38:34.000You're just cool with everything burning down because everything will be fine for you.
00:38:38.000That is selfish, it's fundamentally unbiblical, and that terrible theology has crept into the church.
00:38:45.000And anytime I get a chance to talk about it, I'm uh I'm grateful.
00:38:48.000So, thank you for letting me bring that up because it's people honestly, Charlie, they don't realize, they just don't realize what's uh what's happening.
00:38:57.000And I, I think, I, I, I don't know if I said it earlier today, but you know, the memoir that came out today, Fish Out of Water, when I talk about my parents growing up, they just told me these stories of growing up in Europe where there was evil, there was communism.