Faith and Family: Kirk Cameron’s Blueprint for Cultural Victory | 12.24.25

Speaker 1 Tu mereces fruits favorites for menos. Ja sell na Big Mac, McNuggets, or a sausage, egg and cheese, McCriddles, pidetuan to hocomo un meo, ya hora.
Oof, nava comodarto un gustaso por tam poco.

Speaker 1 Los extra value meals están de regreso.

Speaker 2 Gana por la mañana con el extra value meal, sausage, mc, muffin with egg, hash browns, yun cafe agiente pequeño por solos se dolares. Bara ba ba ba.
Preses y participación pueden varía.

Speaker 2 Los prees de la promosión pueden serminores que los de las comidas.

Speaker 3 Actor Kirk Cameron has become a formidable force in the culture, launching a children's book publishing company that's brought Christian values back to the industry while also exposing the double standards of woke public libraries.

Speaker 3 He's also recently launched a new podcast and a new season of his children's show Adventures with Iggy and Mr. Kirk.

Speaker 3 In this episode, we sit down in studio with Cameron to discuss his new projects and what he believes is key to winning the culture back back on faith and family.

Speaker 3 I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley. This is a special edition of Ponywire.

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Speaker 3 joining us now to discuss his many new projects and the battle for the culture is actor producer and host kirk cameron kirk first of all thank you so much for joining the show thank you great to be here it's so fun to have you in studio so i've been a big fan of yours for a long time thank you and we at daily wire we've been really interested in the projects you've had going particularly your children's projects you have the book series You have a new show of the second season coming out, Iggy and Mr.

Speaker 3 Kirk. Let's start there.
What got you into that? Why did you feel compelled to produce that show?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I think I started as a child actor in Hollywood. And so I was thinking, what am I going to do with my life? And when I discovered that, hey, I've got a career that's sort of launched.

Speaker 3 Now I'm trying to build a life for myself. But once you become a dad and now I'm a grandfather, I'm beginning to think legacy and I'm beginning to think of

Speaker 3 how can I help my children succeed and win. And one of the ways that I can do that is by playing the long game and investing in the moral, spiritual health of my children and my grandchildren.

Speaker 3 So when I think of the impact that Mr. Rogers had on generations of families, I think, who's our guy today? Who's going to do that?

Speaker 3 And with so many shows, good shows and good companies, and and I think of Disney and I think of Nickelodeon and I think of others,

Speaker 3 and they sort of like bend with the political winds or the moral

Speaker 3 winds. I think, who's going to stay true to that North Star set of values that leads to kids blessing and protection? And I'm like.

Speaker 3 If not me, then who? And I've got an opportunity. So I'm going to start writing children's books and making children's television shows and partnering with people who are committed to the cause.

Speaker 3 And that's really what inspired the books with Brave Books, the company, and the TV show called Adventures with Iggy and Mr. Kirk.
What has the response been to both of those, Brave Books and Iggy?

Speaker 3 Well, it depends on who you ask. So

Speaker 3 the drag queens don't like the books much. No.
And the libraries that support

Speaker 3 progressive agendas don't like me entering much.

Speaker 3 In fact, 50 of them denied me access to the public library after holding drag queen story hours because they said our values don't align.

Speaker 3 Now, if you read the book that I wanted to read to the kids, it's a little book about faith, hope, love,

Speaker 3 kindness, gentleness, and self-control. I'll get over my offense in a second and we can continue.
Yeah, and I thought, wait, I thought the rules were like diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Speaker 3 Why do you exclude me? Why not diversity of thought instead of this monoculture that the kids are getting?

Speaker 3 And when we went to the libraries, because they realized they were going to get into legal trouble if they didn't let me in, Thousands of parents and grandparents showed up and said, thank you.

Speaker 3 We don't want this other stuff, but we're being marginalized and silenced.

Speaker 3 We want to get behind you and we want to be part of the army of compassion that can restore first principles and a love for America and a love for God to our children.

Speaker 3 And the accusation here or the suggestion is that if you have a Christian worldview, it's inherently discriminatory. What's your counter to that?

Speaker 3 Well, every view is inherently discriminatory, particularly the DEI view,

Speaker 3 particularly the progressive inclusive view, as I experienced. So I've been run over by the tolerance bus several times.
If someone's coming at you with a sign that says,

Speaker 3 you know, love everybody, be careful. They might whack you over the head with it.
So

Speaker 3 What we need to do, I think, is just be honest about the fact that there's good and evil in the world. There are ideas that that lead to liberty and blessing, and then there's ideas that don't.

Speaker 3 I think it was Stalin who said something like, ideas are more powerful than guns. We don't let our people have guns.
Why then would we let them have ideas?

Speaker 3 So the truth is, we all want something that we believe is good. And that means by definition, we're discriminating against that which we think is harmful.
And that's what I'm doing.

Speaker 3 The only difference is what is the basis for your worldview? What is your value set rooted in? And mine would be rooted in the value set

Speaker 3 of Moses that's been around for thousands of years and produced the world's greatest civilizations and ethical moral codes. That would make sense, you would think, to a lot of people.
You'd think.

Speaker 3 And we've known that for a long time. It's just that, you know,

Speaker 3 every now and then we forget and we have to be reminded. So you said, look, you saw, and we covered this extensively when this was happening with you in these libraries.

Speaker 3 We saw the footage of the people lining up to get in. You've seen a lot of support for that.

Speaker 3 How has that operated in terms of behind the scenes or connections to other organizations and things? How does that play out in terms of getting the message out?

Speaker 3 I guess I could say that, you know, when somebody takes a stand, I think of Riley Gaines and I think of what happened with her and the competition.

Speaker 3 There are a lot of people who say, yes, finally, finally somebody who's speaking the truth in a tough spot and we want to get behind her.

Speaker 3 So I'm hoping that there are more actors, more creatives, more poets and storytellers and musicians and movie makers who get into that creative space, don't just abandon it to, well, it's been taken over by the dark side.

Speaker 3 No, no, no. There's things called great awakenings and revivals.
We can get back to a resurrection of first principles and do the right thing.

Speaker 3 One of the things that I was personally super encouraged by was that three years ago, we were being locked out of public libraries. And this last year,

Speaker 3 we were invited by the Library of Congress, the most prestigious public library in the nation, so that we could read these same books by the Trump administration.

Speaker 3 Super grateful, and I'm very thankful for the shift in the direction of the winds morally, politically, spiritually. Your show, so the children's show, Igam Mr.
Kirk. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Totally delightful. We, again,

Speaker 3 we've created bent key. So we're very interested in children's content.

Speaker 3 And there's a philosophy at the heart of the show, it seems like to me, that is, it's sort of like a learning through imperfection. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Mistakes, how children learn.

Speaker 3 What is the sort of driving philosophy of

Speaker 3 how you organize an episode? Yeah, great question. So

Speaker 3 I think that

Speaker 3 at the very base of every episode of Iggy and Mr. Kirk, which, by the way, is a story of Mr.

Speaker 3 Kirk who has adopted a five-year-old iguana and raising him in his backyard in a tree house with a whole cast of colorful animal friends, including a vulture named Culture.

Speaker 3 who is always deceiving Iggy, lying to him about who he is and why he's here and who loves him and truth and all of that.

Speaker 3 But he has access to a based supercomputer, a non-woke Siri chat GPT that's always telling him the truth. So he's learning lessons about identity and purpose and who he can trust.

Speaker 3 We want kids to be able to identify with Iggy as a five-year-old, six, seven-year-old and say,

Speaker 3 I struggle with that same thing. And this is what Iggy learned, or this is what Iggy

Speaker 3 did. First, he did the wrong thing.
Then he learned from Mr. Kirk, his dad or his mom, and he did the right thing.
And it turned out good. So

Speaker 3 we want to hold out out the moral code that we want children to work with, but we want the reality of the fact that nobody's perfect. We all make mistakes.
We're all working through it.

Speaker 3 We're wrestling with desires in our hearts and thoughts in our head that may be wrong or may be confusing us.

Speaker 3 And so we need to have reliable guides like a mom and dad, hopefully, that's the ideal, to guide you and other resources, even outside your family, sources of truth and good friends that can help you as a child.

Speaker 3 Because,

Speaker 3 you know, as whoever rocks the cradle rules the future, something like that, whoever gets to tell the kids the bedtime stories, whoever gives, sings them the lullabies at night, you're shaping the next generation's hearts and minds.

Speaker 3 And so it's super important.

Speaker 3 Was it important for you that a male, you, you happen to be a male, but a male was the key guide for Iggy?

Speaker 3 Well, I don't think that was a conscious thought.

Speaker 3 I mean, I had been writing books with Brave Books, and so I was naturally the guy that was going to be at the center of the TV show that we wanted to make. So

Speaker 3 I don't think that that was strategic on our part selfishly. I want to be the guy because, you know, I want to be in the show.
And it's what I want to do with my life. But I do think that

Speaker 3 strong, faithful, character-filled, compassionate male figures are lacking in the media and that it is very good to have them

Speaker 3 modeling those qualities for children. I want to turn to your podcast formats that are interesting to me.

Speaker 3 So you've about six months ago, as I understand it, you've launched a series of kind of different formats for different days of the week.

Speaker 3 oh i see what you're saying yeah your son is in it that's right you're

Speaker 3 the podcast space is we as we have found and you know it's a it's a crowded space it's a complicated space there's a lot of personalities there's a lot of bad in it there's a lot of good potential in it how why did you choose the formats and how is that going for it have you enjoyed uh this new season of your show well thank you for being intrigued with the format of of of our new show the kirk cameron show uh there really wasn't any genius wisdom behind it.

Speaker 3 We couldn't figure out what kind of formatted we wanted to do. So I thought, well,

Speaker 3 I want daily inspiration. Like, you know, I need help in a cup in the form of coffee every single morning, you know, or I don't get started.
One cup?

Speaker 3 I'm a two-cup. I'm a two-cup guy with half and half.

Speaker 3 But just in terms of like hope and courage when you're being depressed and discouraged by all the news that you see every day, how do I attack the day with joy in my heart?

Speaker 3 And I thought, let's do a morning inspirational session where I can help you to like root all your thoughts and truth and then inspire your faith and courage. So that's Mondays.

Speaker 3 And then on Wednesdays, we have a dangerous conversation between me and my son, who's 22.

Speaker 3 So we just brought up the other day, like how AI is affecting relationships and dudes are now marrying their chat bot.

Speaker 3 because she's just so much more understanding and encouraging than his last girlfriend. Right.

Speaker 3 And that's okay.

Speaker 3 To the nature of hell. Are we talking about divine wrath that results in annihilation or eternal conscious punishment? I mean, so we're diving into prickly topics.

Speaker 3 Gentle parenting. I mean, we could kind of go everywhere and people are really enjoying that.
So we didn't stop on Wednesdays.

Speaker 3 And then Friday, I personally don't have time to listen to the news all the time. So when someone gives me a weekly wrap-up of politics and pop culture, I'm like, thank you.

Speaker 3 So I I tried to do that through a biblical lens. And honestly, I'd love to pick just one, but people seem to enjoy all three.
So we keep doing all three.

Speaker 3 I think it's a good move. I think it's just for me as somebody that's a connoisseur by necessity of podcasts, I think it's a great idea.
And it's very enjoyable.

Speaker 3 The idea of

Speaker 3 you're clearly a man with a mission. And this is something that is a little prickly of a topic, but the podcast space

Speaker 3 is inhabited by a lot of people

Speaker 3 that have different motives for being in it. And one of the things I'm drawn to about just you in general is, again, you have a mission.
It's very overt. It's not about you in the end.

Speaker 3 It is about presenting a message and, like you've said repeatedly, trying to restore the country to a place of a more traditional views on things, a lot of that having to do with faith.

Speaker 3 Have you found it difficult in the podcast space to keep the message about the great, the greater message?

Speaker 3 You know, or is it, is, is there a temptation to, to make these shows, we've seen with a lot of different podcasts, more and more about the individual behind the mic rather than the larger message.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean? And you know where else that happens is in

Speaker 3 churches.

Speaker 3 So I'm a Christian.

Speaker 3 And so often you can find these personality-driven churches where you start to suspect, is this really all about getting people to fund their next building campaign and buy the pastor a new jet?

Speaker 3 Or is it really about the greater message? And

Speaker 3 I think that for me,

Speaker 3 of course,

Speaker 3 I recognize certain inherent truths. Never follow the political life advice of celebrities.
So that kind of means don't listen to me in terms of your final authority. That's always a bad mood.

Speaker 3 And I'm an actor from California. I mean, right? The land of fruits and nuts.
I mean, anything can go sideways coming out of California. We're a whole company from California.

Speaker 3 But I escaped and I now live here in Tennessee.

Speaker 3 There is the challenge for me, because I've never done this before, of balancing the logistics and things like sponsors and funding and viewership, all of that with... the creative aspect and just the

Speaker 3 what is the aspirational value is that the right word um the inspirational value

Speaker 3 and you've you've got to make both work and so um i try to have other people who take care of the logistics and the the finances and how all of that works to keep us on the air and then i do the deep dives into studying and thinking and praying and learning and uh

Speaker 3 talking with people that help me have a better understanding of the world. And then I try to communicate it as best I can.
As you do so well.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much for joining us and great, great luck with the new series and all your new projects. Thank you so much.
Yeah, honored to be here and thank you.

Speaker 3 That was actor Kirk Cameron and this has been a special edition of Morning Wire.

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