Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Okay, Jeff Childers, welcome back to Code Red. We're trying this. We're going to jump on. We had such a great response from Coffee and Covid episode. And we talked through your work and your substack that you release every single day. And went through the roof. Our numbers went through the roof. And so we had talked about doing something on a regular basis and just tackling some of the key things that are happening and what maybe people are responding to on your platform today.
Any plan that we might have has been just overtaken and overshadowed with the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
And so how did you find out about what happened?
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's funny. The Charlie Kirk assassination is going to be, I think, seen as one of those defining moments, you know, that you always remember when you heard about it.
And I was actually in the shower and Michelle came in and she had a look on her face and, you know, that look. And I just. My blood went cold.
I thought maybe somebody in the family had died or was in the hospital or something. And she said, they shot Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Wow. And that's the way I think a lot of people processed it is it was somebody in the family. And it was a conversation that he was having that any one of us could have been having.
Sitting over coffee, I said, on Wednesday night, I looked out over our congregation, and this has been difficult for a lot of our people to process.
I was getting texts from men who said, pastor, I'm struggling with this one from ladies saying, would you reach out to my husband?
And I think the reason is the conversation that Charlie was having in that very moment could have been any one of us having the same conversation.
And he was taking a position on an issue, and he was shot dead in cold blood for it.
And so immediately, I think I was actually on X as it happened. And so the first tweet came through and then just everything, it dominated the news flow. I jumped over onto kind of a dual screen. I'm always curious when news breaks, if who's going to cover it first on the big outlets. And so I was watching Fox and CNN to see who got to it first. CNN actually beat Fox to it, and they got to the reporting first. They had somebody live reporting on it.
And, you know, all of the theories, the guy in the white cap with the signs, all of that came out. It turned out to be a really close friend of Charlie's.
And but, you know, as the day went forward, we're going toward. At 6pm we have a service, a prayer meeting and groups meeting all over our campus.
And I received. One of our guys texted me and said, would you come up and speak to our group at 5:30 and maybe ease their mind a little bit about what's happened?
And so quickly I'm trying to get my thoughts together.
Charlie Kirk, you know, you and I have kids relatively the same age.
And what he has done in that generation in particular, I can't compare him to anybody else. I mean, on college campuses, the most liberal powerhouse in the nation, to walk into those institutions and tell truth.
It's just been absolutely incredible to watch the rise of Charlie Kirk.
And it was a young man, 31 years of age when he was killed, and our kids, I could point to him as someone that my son could kind of look up to and see as a good example.
Thinking about, I don't know, what were you doing when you were 31? I was probably pastoring maybe my second church by then. Do you remember where you were when you were 31?
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Oh, I was working seven days a week on my third business.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: Building a business.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Charlie was leading an $80 million organization annually.
I know how hard it is to get people to give anything.
$80 million a year, literally. As we were gathering, the pizza for the constitutional class that our church offers was provided by Turning Point usa.
I run into those guys everywhere I go. It is a massive, powerful movement.
And just to think, you know, this is a guy at 18 who had a vision for this, who pursued it long obedience in the same direction and built something that probably when it's all said and done, it may have tipped the balance for Trump.
What do you think?
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Undoubtedly. I mean, the Democrats have been saying for since before the election that they need a Charlie Kirk.
So they recognized it.
You saw the numbers for Trump. One of the biggest cohorts that changed their political affiliation was young men.
That age group swung for the first time in our lifetimes Republican.
And I would give Charlie Kirk 99% of the credit for that.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: What do you think it was about his message and his approach?
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Well, let's not leave off the table that Charlie Kirk was an unapologetic Christian.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: I mean, if you watch his video clips, which are so popular, which are these little debates that he has with, you know, any college kid that wants to come up and take the opposite side in an argument, Charlie would patiently and gracefully engage with them.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Never got angry.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Oh, he treated them with adult respect every time. And he, you know, spoke directly to them, listened to their points of view and told them why he disagreed.
And, you know, Charlie captured a kind of mental territory that you and I can't because we're old fuddy duddies and we don't know what it's like for kids nowadays. You know, they grow up with Instagram and TikTok and all that stuff, and we. We can barely open TikTok. Right.
But Charlie Kirk was right in their zone.
And so he spoke to them on a level that I don't think we always appreciate because we watch the debates and we think, well, yeah, I would have made that point too, but not in the way that Charlie did. And his personality was just so open and welcoming that he could connect with virtually anybody.
I don't know that we're ever going to see another Charlie Kirk. I think he's one of those unique people in history that, you know, and I hate to say he's irreplaceable because ultimately nobody's really irreplaceable, but. But I don't think we're going to see another Charlie Kirk.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: Well, we had the same conversation when Billy Graham passed or when. When he really got to where he couldn't do the mass crusades anymore.
And the hope was that we would see thousands of Billy Grahams and maybe we have on a smaller scale. You know, I think in some ways, Kirk was an iteration of that.
He was an evangelist as much as he was a conservative thinker.
And there's no.
Only heaven knows how many people were led to Christ under his influence. You know, we're looking at a time now.
I wake up every day and I'm shocked to hear men that I never really believed would turn toward Christ, whether it's a Joe Rogan or whoever it might be, a Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand. I mean, you look at these guys and really and truly, it's almost like if I get really, really honest, I would have to say I really didn't think the gospel was for them.
Like the big shots, the guys who have all the money. I thought really it's for guys who are trying to figure things out and to see somebody like Charlie who's not me. Charlie's brilliant, don't get me wrong, but he's kind of your nerdy white guy walking into a college campus, kind of picking a fight with a dragon, in a way, and seeing him just verbally spar with those guys and do such a great job. And then over time, that mountain began to crumble to where people in every echelon of life are looking to Christ now and making movement that way.
And I think one of the documents that you sent talked about a revival that's taking place among young people that seems to be real from everything that we can see.
And you know, every time I talk to somebody on a campus ministry or college campus, I'll ask, you know, we're hearing of these mass baptisms. I said, I'm trying to think which team it was that stood up. They introduced the new football team and they stood up and all these guys, big burly guys were saying, you know, Jesus Christ is what it's all about. He's everything.
And these. And they had a mass baptism by the football team of this Division 1 school.
And seeing that kind of thing take place, that's going to trickle into society eventually.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: And let me just point out, 10 years ago, football coaches were getting fired for having prayers.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: So that's how far we've come that quickly.
And we live day to day and we live in this media environment where breaking news like what we're doing right now, we had this plan of what we were going to talk about, but it all got washed, washed out by the last news cycle.
And something else is coming in a couple days that's going to capture everybody's attention.
So I think we get distracted and we don't always see the progress and we don't see these amazing tectonic changes that are happening in our society because we're just in the forest.
And that I think is a terrific example. And I wonder, I'll make two points about it. First, I wonder how much Charlie Kirk in particular is the cause of that revival among young people.
I don't think we can overlook this coincidence that that's the audience he was talking to and those are the ones that are responding the most forcefully.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: And that was the audience that took his life.
From what we can tell, 22 year old Tyler Robinson, a young man fresh out of college, from what we can tell at 22, if he was a college student.
It seems, from what I've understood, high powered bolt action rifle was recovered. Not an assault rifle, not an assault rifle.
It was an older weapon and one shot. There were three unspent shell casings that had transgender and anti fascist slogans written on them. Have you heard that?
[00:12:03] Speaker B: I have heard that. The Wall Street Journal reported that first, I think.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: And so I'm looking at this kid and just trying to imagine what the world has come to, to where these two guys who in their, in their, in their selves, they don't seem like they come from that different of a background. You know, you've got two guys roughly the same stature, same skin tone that can see the world differently enough that one would kill the other for what he believes.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: So since this whole thing started, what I've been looking at now until this morning, we didn't have the identity of the shooter. So what I focused on in terms of processing it and writing about it was the response by progressives to what happened. And I don't think, you know, by this point nobody is unaware that there are a lot of rank and file progressives who celebrated the killing.
And I think you've got some, some examples there. So these are just some, some examples from Blue sky where the basically random users are exhilarated, if anything, about Charlie Kirk's assassination. And now they're calling or trying to nominate who to go for next.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: I really, if somebody told me that, I would assume they're over overstating it. I watched the live feed on X as this was happening. I wanted to get the quickest news I could. And I'm watching the live feed. And this is a good representation of the live feed. Yeah, if you just put in Charlie Kirk in the search, people that were responding to Charlie Kirk. This is the kind of thing I would say three to one that I was seeing come through the feed. And this is the live feed for our audience who doesn't know that's not filtered. So you're not seeing just the things that will stir you up and that you want to see. This is what's happening as it's happening.
And the latest post, I'm assuming there's a percentage of our culture that is absolutely insane that would do something like that or say something like that.
It blows me away that it's as large as it is right.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: You struggle to comprehend how this could have happened and why we didn't notice it.
And so I'm going to offer you a solution, a simple, straightforward answer to that conundrum.
And the scripture that has been echoing in my mind for the last several days is one that you know well.
And it goes for we battle not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers in the high places.
And so you could shorten that or summarize that as it's a battle of ideas, not between people, but between thoughts and where those thoughts come from. We could have a theological discussion about that. But I'm going to offer you a secular solution and that is that there is a slogan that you have heard, I'm sure over and over again that the progressives use, especially academics and experts on the left. And that slogan is speech is violence.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Look at this, look at this quote. This is a local.
This gentleman worked for the Jacksonville city government, Jacksonville, Florida, just down the road from us.
And look at what he said. When you spew hate, it's what you get back. He's referring to Charlie Kirk.
You've heard Charlie Kirk.
That is the, the farthest thing from hate of anybody I've ever heard. Like you said, people would come up dressed in the most obscene outfits in order to get a response.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Satanists, you name it.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: Did you see the clip where a Satanist came up and started calling on Satan in the middle of his deal and he just kind of laughed and brushed him off?
It was not hate at all. But that is how you're right, it's how it's interpreted.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: So look at that quote that you've got there. Mr. Thomas used the word spew. What is the synonym for that word as he's used it there, like vomit or spit. What about just said. Yeah, so all he's talking about there is speech. Right, Right. And so, and I don't know, I mean, I can't tell. I don't want to make assumptions. If his biopic is recent, then he's probably in his early 30s too.
But they went through college listening to professors tell them about microaggressions and triggers.
And here's the thing, if speech is violence, it's the equivalent, then you have a right of self defense.
And under the legal system that goes back under common law and probably back to the code of Hammurabi or something, you have a right to use lethal force in self defense legally.
And so that's what they're teaching the kids is that when somebody says something that's the equivalent of physical violence. And then the natural logical result of that is you're entitled to defend yourself and you can do it preemptively so that you don't have to hear.
So you see somebody coming at you about to commit violence, you can respond with lethal force.
So if they're about to say something that is violence, then you can preemptively use force.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Has that been tried? Has it ever been used as a, in a case study or.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: Well, you can search the academic literature and find you're absolutely right on it. Paper after paper. That's what they're teaching the kids.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Yeah, you're absolutely right that that's what's being taught.
And I'm wondering if a kid, I'm hoping my son, if he heard that, would stop and go okay, what case has been won with that argument? But you're right, that is what they're selling. And my daughter, when she was in uf, there was a situation where.
And I'm going to use a, you know, make up a metaphor for it, but it was like they were telling her, the earth is a square. This is something that everybody in their right mind knows was inaccurate. And it was something about gender studies or something, but it was the earth is a square.
And so she said, dad, they're testing me on this information that suggests that the earth is a square.
How do I answer this on a exam? And I said, well, Carly, what you do is you say, the professor says the earth isn't square.
So she followed my advice. They marked it wrong, and they said, that's not the answer. The answer is the earth is a square.
And so she said, let me get this clear.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: Bad advice.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Let me get this clear. I can't just put down that this is what you taught me. I'm not allowed to disagree with it.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: She has to believe it.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: You have to believe it. You have to put it down on this paper if you want to remain in this class.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: And so there's where we come to what I've been describing as a fundamental and incompatible conflict, a civilizational conflict that we're having.
And I've used the analogy of the Civil War.
So in the Civil War, the country was divided over an issue. And, you know, I know there's a lot of theories about the Civil War, and people don't agree on all the causes, but the mainstream understanding of the Civil War, and I think it's supported by contemporary sources, but anyway, is that the dispute was over whether people can be property or there's something inherently about personhood, creation in God's image, that precludes that person ever being considered property.
And those two ideas are so radically different that there's no middle ground.
You can't say, well, all right, let's compromise. And we'll say that people can partly be property or they can be property under some circumstances, but not always.
And that's what happened between the 1830s and the 1860s in this country as we tried to compromise. And so you remember, it's even named for it the Missouri Compromise and the Mason Dixon Line. And so we created this unstable peace between those two diametric positions. But all that did was coil the problem up like a spring until it reached that final condensed point where you couldn't compress it anymore. And it shattered, right?
And so we've approached that point, and we may be at that point, Charlie Kirk's death was not just the death of a man. It was the death of an idea that reasoned debate could resolve these issues.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Do you think we're heading toward a second civil war?
[00:21:44] Speaker B: I do. I don't know what the Civil War is going to look like.
I don't know if it's going to. You know, people are going to join militias and take up arms and call for volunteers and things like that, like in the 1860s. I sort of doubt it. But there has to be some kind of a national divorce or one side has got to win so decisively and conclusively that it resolves the issue.
This. You and I talk about this like it's weird. We, you know, we say, well, you know, for you and me, speech is not violence. I mean, that's what a ridiculous idea. The founders clearly believe that you should tolerate some bad speech to prevent an even worse outcome, which is coerced speech. Right. I mean, that's the First Amendment. The first one.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: Well, and that was actually the argument about a different amendment that Kirk was making. Right. When he was shot was that if you're going to have freedoms, that there are going to be some abuses of that freedom.
And that's when they killed him, actually.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that notion seems so bizarre to us. Obviously, it is not bizarre to all those people that you just put up on the screen, but it is also not bizarre to most of the world.
So you're a professional in theology. Let me ask you, in Muslim countries, in Islamic traditions, how is speech considered?
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Well, you're not allowed to say anything negative against the Prophet or what happens. Oh, you bet. Severe penalties. Severe. The most severe penalties.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: They'll kill you for it.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: Yeah. It could be a cartoon, it could be comedy. It could be anything. You don't talk about the Prophet in a negative sense.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: Or anything blasphemous. Right. And so you could make a perfectly innocuous comment, but if it's interpreted by the listener as blasphemous, what happens?
[00:23:41] Speaker A: They're deciding, and you're on the other side of the weapon at that point.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And they don't usually give you a long trial or anything like that. Right. I mean, the locals will take it into their own hands if the officials don't act fast enough.
And so. All right. But then we say, well, you know, that's just the Muslim world. And by the way, how many Muslims are there in the world?
[00:24:01] Speaker A: There's a lot growing.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: So that's a large portion of the world. But we say, well, we're in the Western tradition.
Well, how about in Europe?
The Europeans don't see it the same way as us. They'll lock you up for speech. Right. We've seen the stories, all of us, in the headlines over and over. Just recently, I think it was this week, there was a case that made the headlines. A German woman was jailed because she called her rapist a pig.
The rapist got a suspended sentence.
So to Europeans, that makes sense somehow.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Well, it began with opening the floodgates. And whether it is the ideas of Islam coming into the uk, flooding the west, something happened in our country where not only did ideologies come in, but people came in who saw the world totally different than the majority of people in the United States. If you go back, I don't know when it changed. I mean, you go back to the 80s, maybe the 90s, there was a certain sense of when we talked about God, we knew what we were talking about.
Even if you didn't believe in God, you were referring to the God they talk about down at the Baptist church or the Methodist church or whatever it might be that shifted somewhere and open borders with the liberals taking over our college systems.
And if you're going to turn that around, thankfully we have the gospel that can change hearts and change minds.
And Charlie was stepping into that territory, trying to do it.
But at some point you've also got to close the door and stop letting this into our country.
And that's where I think we have a short window to maybe get some of that corrected.
What are your thoughts on how wide do we keep the ideological door open?
[00:26:14] Speaker B: So, you know, you touched on a really important issue, which is how much can you dilute a culture by bringing in people who don't assimilate, but bring their own culture with them before you lose the original culture?
[00:26:28] Speaker A: We've got a Muslim who has very odd liberal Muslim ideology, a mixture of Islam and liberalism has a good chance of becoming mayor of New York City.
That's going to significantly change things.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: But the young man who assassinated Charlie Kirk wasn't a Muslim or an immigrant.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: And so where does that leave us? And what do we make of this anti constitutional movement of speech being violence? And so there's people who are celebrating this young man taking matters into his own hand. Just like in a Muslim community when somebody punishes blasphemy because the officials aren't doing anything about it. Right. And so there's all this cheering and clapping from the gallery, literally on tmz.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: Did you see the clip from tmz?
[00:27:27] Speaker B: They were that the people in the.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Audience, it was the people on the staff.
Literally as the news was coming out, we were all watching the clip about whether or not he was going to survive.
And as the news broke.
Let me see if I can bring this up.
As the news broke, they're watching it, they're trying to make sense of it.
And I want you to listen to this.
If this will play, if he's still on the loose, because they want to find him. So I would think that that's one of the main reasons they're holding this news conference.
So my guess is we're going to see an image of this guy possibly in the next 20 minutes. The news conference is scheduled for 3 o' clock in Utah time, which is 2 o'. Clock. This is Pacific.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: So you hear cheering in the background.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: Listen, Eastern.
Janet, go.
Go to the cheering.
They just found out Charlie Kirk died.
Trump just posted that Charlie Kirk is dead.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: Okay. Now how does that remain on the air after that?
How does TMZ have a platform unless the head of that organization cleans house?
If they see the world as that is a good thing, no matter who was on the other end of that bullet. If they see the world where somebody is assassinated for freedom of speech, how do we live in a world where that can persist?
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Well, they lied about it. Right. Didn't they come up with some kind of lame excuse?
[00:29:24] Speaker A: I haven't heard the lie. What was the excuse?
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Yeah. So TMZ claims that the staff was watching a different video about a car chase in the middle of the breaking Charlie Kirk story that captured the whole country.
That's what we're supposed to believe, and nobody believes it.
But the truth is that. That most or many of TMZ readers agree with that sentiment.
And so how do you compromise with that?
[00:29:54] Speaker A: Well, and the power of some of these media outlets, you take tmz, for example, they had video on the.
The suspect, the shooter, the guy that they have in custody right now. TMZ had video that the FBI didn't have from ring cameras.
So how do you get to that, whether it's hacking or whether it's boots on the ground.
How do you have an army that knows how to get that kind of footage that quickly and at the same time is working with the FBI and celebrating? It's just such a bizarre scenario.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: Right. So think back to the pandemic.
I write a blog called Coffee and Covid.
[00:30:41] Speaker A: You do? We ought to post about that.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: So I'm not done with the pandemic yet.
But think about the same reasoning, the same ideology, where people on the left believe that the government should make decisions about what experimental injections you should be forced to take.
They want to delegate that part of your freedom and liberty to bureaucrats.
Well, this is exactly the same thing. It's part and parcel with that same ideology.
They want to delegate your ability to think certain things, like whether the Earth is a cube.
They want the government to be in charge of what you think.
And so that's what I keep coming back to, is this fundamental disconnect between worldviews.
You know what a worldview is.
It's baked deeply into your personality and your way of looking and interpreting everything that happens in the world.
And they're not easy to change.
As far as I know, the gospel is one of the few things that can change somebody's worldview.
So if you've got two incompatible worldviews, what do you do?
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Leads to war a lot of times.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: And that's the Civil War problem. Right, right. We can't. We've tried to have a Missouri Compromise. We come up with hate speech laws and, you know, things where we're. We're sort of tweaking in the middle, trying to make everybody happy, you know. Well, you can't say this about the Holocaust or you, you know, if you, if you commit a crime and it has some racial speech attached to it, well, then, like, if there's a noose involved, then you get an enhanced punishment.
Right. And so all these sort of things, that's the Missouri Compromise, but that ended this week. That failed.
Right. So the, you know, it died in a tent in Utah.
It's like the shots that were fired against Fort Sumter would be another way to think about it, because we're going to have to reckon with this somehow.
And that, I think, is, I mean, people are experiencing a level of angst, I think you would agree, that is sort of incomparable to anything. I can remember the space shuttle disaster, President Trump getting shot.
You know, you search for something that affected people as much as Charlie Kirk's killing did, you can't really come up with anything.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: No, you're right. Yeah. And then you think about, in that analogy of the Civil War, the problem with the Civil War. I was bringing up Jefferson Davis final speech to Congress right before Mississippi had voted to secede from the Union.
Davis is giving his last speech, and in that he's arguing for why he thinks this is okay.
Now, let me clarify I'm a son of the South. I had two ancestors who fought and lived through the Civil War, and my family never owned a slave.
We were working alongside the slaves.
So with that said, Davis argued what you argued earlier, that the center of this issue is an African, a full human.
We can argue about other states rights issues, whatever it might be.
And is an African, a full human? And where would that lead? If we all agree that that's the case, if that man cannot be and that woman cannot be property, then where will that lead?
That was in his argument to Congress that motivated him to endorse and ultimately become the President of the Confederacy.
So the problem was that issue that Christians should be able to answer effectively and quickly, that these are humans, these are people, and they're image bearers of the Almighty.
It got convoluted with some arguments that we couldn't answer as quickly.
The issue of states rights, is it legal for a state to secede from the Union? Is that acceptable?
And that argument was tougher to answer because I would look at that argument and say, well, the states pre existed the Constitution, they pre existed the nation. We are a united system of states.
And so I would argue that we had the right to come, every right to come from the Union, as the United States did to come out of Great Britain. And so I understand that argument, and I can believe that argument.
And then, you know, you look at my ancestors as the north was coming down waging war, people like our family who had no slaves, they would ask, they would say, well, why are you fighting if you have no slaves? This is about slavery. And my ancestors would give answers like, because you're here.
You know, it made perfect sense. They didn't want the Union army there.
So how similar is what we're dealing with on an ideological level now to that time when from our framework, it's a very simple question, is it male or female?
This is not a difficult thing to answer.
For other people that's not as clear.
And how do we get to a point if we can't agree on what is male and female?
Or can that be changed if we can't agree on something, that there's no compromise, no, no, we can't get to a place, I can't foresee a time that even I'm going to feel okay calling a male a female or vice versa, knowingly.
And if there's that big of a gap, you know, this young man, if the young man that assassinated Kirk actually was deeply indoctrinated into that agenda, then so that he sees what Kirk is doing as the most evil thing in the world when it's just the same thing you.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: And I might say, yeah, he wasn't doing. Charlie Kirk wasn't a politician. He never passed a law about transgenderism.
He just said stuff, spoke his mind.
[00:37:30] Speaker A: Just like we would over coffee every morning.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: So you raised a bunch of interesting issues there.
The issue of secession I think is fascinating and relevant, but let's not overlook the fact that that was a secondary issue.
[00:37:48] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:37:48] Speaker B: Because what led to them wanting to secede was this issue of slavery. Now let me try to draw a line.
Slavery.
And let's give the pro slavery folks their best argument.
They argued that Africans were too primitive to take care of themselves.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: Well, and they argued from the founding, and that's what Jefferson argued, is that the founding fathers described him as 2/3 of a person.
And so Jefferson was arguing that if I'm wrong, so was Jefferson, so was George Washington, so was our founding Fathers. And so that any. And that's correct. They were wrong on those parts. That's when we changed the Constitution in that regard.
But that was the crux of his argument was they're not human.
[00:38:39] Speaker B: And their experience of Africans, by and large was of people who were without a civilization. They didn't know how to read, they were violent and they didn't have laws. And so looking at it through that lens, you can have some sympathy for some of them concluding, hey, we need to, you know, these people can't take care of themselves. So here's the structure we can put them in where they can be productive.
Right. So we give them jobs. Obviously they can't be landowners and they can't participate in not going to vote. They shouldn't be voting and things like that. So we'll take care of them. And the trade is that they work for us and then we own them.
And so that.
There's a philosophy there that if someone can't make good decisions for themselves, then somebody else can make the decisions for them. Right. That's the basic.
[00:39:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:39:33] Speaker B: So now you now move to the pandemic.
So some people like you and me are too stupid and uneducated and we don't understand science.
So the government needs to decide what medicine should be.
[00:39:45] Speaker A: What a great analogy. I've not never thought of it that way.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: It's the same philosophy.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And you're not really human at that point.
[00:39:53] Speaker B: No. You've lost your humanity and you've become part of a herd.
You've got a herd of cows and you can give Those cows, any shots you want because you own them their property. You got a herd of slaves and you can give your slaves shots because they don't know any better. You have to decide what shots they need to get. And so now that's how they look at us. We're part of a herd. It's the same philosophy from the slaving days.
And the Charlie Kirk situation is also exactly the same.
Some of us are too stupid to have our own thoughts.
We draw wrong conclusions, we think bad things. We don't understand that gender is fluid and that it's a whole spectrum.
[00:40:33] Speaker A: It's not.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: Yeah, we buy into that ancient religious theory that God created man and woman because we read it in a book and we don't understand science. And the science says that no, it's a subjective experience of reality, is what gender is.
So we need somebody to tell us what to think.
And just like when your slaves don't do what they're told, what happens? They get disciplined, they get put in the hole or given some lashes or whatever. And so what happens if you don't think the right things after they already explained to you that the Earth is a cube? Not your professor says the Earth is a cube. It is a cube. And if you don't say that, well, you need to be disciplined.
So nothing has changed since the Civil War, and that's why I keep coming back to it.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: So thinking about the analogy of comparing it to the Civil War, I'm almost always reading or rereading Shelby Foote's three volume series.
There's something about that that calms me and helps me to understand today's time. And it may be because of the similarities that you're describing, but as I was reading it, he talked about how General Sherman, prior to the war, had relatives on both sides of this thing and he was begging the south not to, not to secede and not to go to war with what at that time was the greatest power on planet Earth for making war.
And he argued that they just didn't have the manufacturing capability and all this. And the south believed they had these superior soldiers who grew up in the woods.
So he was arguing and he said if we don't tone down the rhetoric, he said Americans only have two tools change things and it's ballots or bullets.
And he said, we prefer ballots. But he said if you choose bullets, you will lose. And his theory was the south lost on the presidential election in the election of Lincoln, and as a result we chose bullets because we didn't win at Ballots.
And there's a lot of truth to that. There's a lot of truth to that.
But that division, we see some of that happening now between people of one household.
[00:42:57] Speaker B: Well, they called it the brothers war, right. Because two brothers from the same household could be split on the slavery issue, and one of them would go fight in the Union army and one of them would fight for the Confederates.
How can that happen when two people are raised in the same family with the same values and go to the same church and everything else and just track that right through to today?
I'm sure you've got family members that disagree fundamentally about some of these things.
[00:43:26] Speaker A: Totally. And we were always raised.
I had a grandmother who was an old school Kennedy Democrat.
And probably after Clinton, I got off board with the Democrats. And so I began to kind of see the world a little differently and vote differently.
[00:43:47] Speaker B: And.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: And so we would argue a little bit about it and we would joke around about it with each other, but at the end of the day, she was going to vote how she was going to vote, I was going to vote. And I think most of the people in my family now, that's still the way we see it.
Two different approaches to solve the same problem many times. But in our church, I can't tell you how many parents are just devastated because they've been disowned by their children who see the issue of COVID or gender or whatever, it might be differently than they did.
And that's awfully familiar when you read about the Civil War times.
[00:44:26] Speaker B: Right. And so I think, you know, we could have a whole nother podcast about how the Civil War never really ended.
The Democrats, if you think about it, and you know your Civil War history.
So the.
The Confederacy never surrendered.
Lee surrendered.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: Generals, individual armies surrendered.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: The armies did because they were forced to.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: The last one to surrender was a unit from Australia. Interestingly, that I did not know that.
[00:44:56] Speaker B: Sounds like a funny story. But the Confederacy was defeated, not surrendered.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: It was conquered.
[00:45:05] Speaker B: And so you have a conquered enemy inside the United States.
And what does history tell us about that situation? Is that a stable situation?
No, it's not stable.
So I would suggest to you that the Democrats, the same ones, that today we find ourselves on the other side of these issues.
It's the same issue whether the government can own you or not.
And we're having that fight today.
[00:45:36] Speaker A: Wow.
When the news broke, we both have friends and connections in different places. And so you get texts and theories and ideas and some you take seriously, some you don't.
One of the texts that I got that I took seriously because of who it came from, and I can't tell you where it came from on camera, but it came from a source that would know. And he said that there were assets of foreign governments inside the gathering. He wasn't suggesting that the foreign government was behind the shooting, but he was opening the door that that may be possible. And if that's the case, this would become much bigger than it otherwise would.
So my mind began to go to the place of, okay, if you are China or Russia or whoever it might be or an ally, why would you do this? Why Charlie Kirk?
And trying to kind of, I guess, play devil's advocate and understand where that would make sense.
If Kirk was the factor in Trump getting elected that we suggested earlier, and if the only hope before bullets is ballots, then the election of Trump gives us a window of time to correct some of these things.
And if the correction of these things could lead to a powerful future for this nation, it would make sense to put a bullet through Charlie Kirk at that point.
That's where my mind went. Mathematically, that's a scary thought that could lead to World War iii.
But also, if this is just a homegrown terrorist killer, anti fascist, pro trans kid, 22 years old, bought a gun, loaded up and got a good shot in because he hated what Charlie Kirk stood for, that's not World War Three.
That's potential civil war.
And I think that's scarier than World War 3 in my mind, and it's less prepared for.
[00:48:01] Speaker B: So there's a lot to unpack there as well.
My opinion is that there's no legitimate argument that foreign governments aren't involved to some extent.
And I'll explain why I say that.
In the 1950s or 60s, I think as a result of the Church Commission's investigation of the Central Intelligence agency, some early 50s procedures that the CIA used were declassified.
And remember, that was in the Cold War and we were fighting world Communism.
And so the CIA had developed a whole series of techniques that they called soft power, as opposed to hard power. Hard power is military. That's kinetic force. It's tanks and bombers and guns and everything. The problem with hard power is it's expensive.
It's expensive in human beings, it's expensive in material.
It takes a long time.
It can be risky, can create larger conflicts. Right.
So they developed a soft power technique as an alternative to creating what they call regime change in other countries. And so that was a euphemism for taking out the communist leader. And Replacing them with somebody who was friendly to the West.
And one of their main soft power techniques, which is described in the document, is going into a country where you want to change the regime, figuring out what the issues are that polarize the citizens the most, and then leaning into those issues and creating conflicts on the margins, false flags, somebody gets murdered or assassinated so that one side blames the other side and so on. It's classic. And the CIA did it over and over and over and over again.
Now, that was their 50s techniques, so you can imagine that the strategies that they're using today are much more advanced than that.
Now, where I'm not going is to blame the CIA for this, although we could have a conversation about the deep state and how they're opposed to Trump and all that.
[00:50:23] Speaker A: But that's what I'm afraid of.
[00:50:26] Speaker B: Well, I think that's a conversation that probably should be had, but.
[00:50:30] Speaker A: Well, you know, we're seeing in documents that are released now, whether it's Martin Luther King Jr. Whether it's Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, whoever it might be, you dig deep enough, Nixon, Watergate, the CIA is always involved. Yeah.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: You find their fingerprints all over it.
[00:50:48] Speaker A: They're always behind it. And, you know, Trump coming into office, there are some mechanisms. I met a guy last week who had a clearance because of the way things are set up that Trump doesn't have.
So you think when you walk into the Oval Office as President, you can see everything. No, you can't.
There are some things that are. You have to have a reason.
[00:51:11] Speaker B: You have to know what to ask for.
[00:51:12] Speaker A: That's true. That's true. And so there's always.
I've just heard and seen too much. I think we all have to absolutely close the door and say that is not a possibility, that that's going to come out eventually. I hope it's not. Yeah, I hope it's not.
[00:51:29] Speaker B: And so let's put that on the back burner. And I want to say I'm going to answer the question that you asked me about potential foreign interference, but for my friends in the CIA, I am not making that allegation at all.
So over the years, since the CIA started with its soft power, or you could call them color revolutions, that's another term that they use.
Well, guess what? Other countries noticed.
They're not stupid.
They saw what we were up to and they know that. For example, I think the modern version, by the way, is NGOs.
So USAID funds, all these NGOs that go into a country and then they do this color Revolution stuff. They do protests and all of that.
Social media, you name it.
[00:52:24] Speaker A: By the way, we get no funding from the government.
If they want to send me some money, that would be awesome. But so far, no funding.
[00:52:33] Speaker B: Well, the good news, Trump pulled the plug on usaid, so we're making some progress.
And maybe we should look at Scott Adams latest video clip where he talks about how the Charlie Kirk killing has changed his mind. It's got a couple of adult words in it, but you can look that up.
But what I was saying is that other countries noticed and other countries are also disadvantaged against the US because they don't have militaries capable of competing with our military. So hard power isn't even a choice for them.
But what's stopping them from using soft power techniques back against us? The same soft power techniques that our own Central Intelligence Agency invented during the Cold War. Right.
Of course they are doing that, certainly. And so the key technique in a soft power operation is to identify those irreconcilable issues that we've been talking about this whole time, where there is no possibility of compromise and then creating more tension, leaning in, standing on those nerves.
I'm 100% convinced that foreign governments are doing that. And, and it's our own fault. We started it.
Right. All that stuff needs to stop. But that's the world that we live in. So China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, you name it. Anybody who is responding to or has been the victim of our own soft power aggression over the years feels completely justified to do it to us mentally.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: I've not been able to do the math where it would make any sense that the accusation that the Mossad would be involved makes any sense at all to me, I think the theory would go that Kirk had platformed Tucker Carlson. Tucker had said some things that were not kind of your standard pro Israel ARG arguments, and as a result, Kirk was taken out.
[00:54:45] Speaker B: Well, I looked into it a little bit more. I'll give you the clip that I think people who have that theory are relying on.
There were a couple of them. So recently, maybe as recent as last week, Charlie Kirk was on with Ben Shapiro and then separately with Patrick Ben David, and he advanced a theory that the Israeli government intentionally failed to respond to the October 7th massacre for six hours.
[00:55:11] Speaker A: We talked about it with General Flynn.
[00:55:13] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that I think is the linchpin for people who theorize that Mossad was involved because of Charlie's influence.
[00:55:23] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:55:24] Speaker B: You know, and so if there were, if the Mossad was involved in delaying the response to October 7th. And the rationale for that, I guess, is that Netanyahu was very weak at that time. He was facing protest over the Supreme Court issues and solidify.
[00:55:44] Speaker A: And solidify his nation.
[00:55:46] Speaker B: Yes. And when October 7th happened, that's it. He was back in charge and solid.
So any threat to that would necessarily get Mossad's attention. Now, I don't have any opinion on that.
Frankly. I don't understand Israeli politics well enough to.
[00:56:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just like, it's complicated, but it's the parliamentary system. And so it's just a different animal. But I've always liked Netanyahu. I've always respected him as just a great leader.
We were there when October 7th happened, and I can testify that he was not a popular man in that country the day before October 7th.
Everything changed after that.
That's natural. That's human nature. We get behind our people.
But, yeah, we struggled with the fact that that is the most secure nation on the planet by any estimation. You don't walk through the Israeli airport without someone constantly watching you.
And we've been through those stop points and checkpoints and all of those things. We love Israel.
But how that could happen, how a foreign government could plan that attack and pull it off was a little bit mind blowing for us.
There's always more to the story. We've lived long enough and give it enough time, and there's typically more to the story. What you believe, day or two after it happened is usually not true.
So that's why we have conversations like this, and that's why it's important.
I think I saw where Ben Shapiro interestingly put out that he was going to take up the reins and start going to college campuses and holding events like Kirk did. I wish you talk about somebody coming to Christ. That would be a groundbreaking moment.
[00:57:41] Speaker B: No kidding.
[00:57:42] Speaker A: But if anybody could make the arguments for conservatism as well as Kirk did, Shapiro is certainly a good base for that.
We need a lot of those. We need a lot of people having these kind of conversations and hopefully doing it in the way that we can share with our kids and grandkids that they will listen to and digest it.
And hopefully we can recreate what Kirk was doing in front of thousands of people on the college campus.
We can have this happening on cell phones all over the world, because words are not weapons in that sense.
They're tools and their pathways to get us to a place to see the world as it actually is. And that's what I hope we can accomplish today.
So anything else you want to talk about before we wrap?
[00:58:32] Speaker B: Just that I would second your sort of aspirational words there.
The solution to this problem without hard power or soft power is democratic debate.
And that's what Charlie Kirk represented.
[00:58:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:58:51] Speaker B: You know, if we can get past the anger over that, then maybe we can. You know, maybe this would be a wake up call to our friends on the left that we could get back to a place where democratic debate was treasured and not feared.
[00:59:07] Speaker A: Amen. Amen. Thank you.
[00:59:09] Speaker B: You're welcome.
[00:59:11] Speaker A: All.
[00:59:31] Speaker B: Right.
