Charlie's Global Fight for Free Speech with Dr. James Orr

Everybody, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

This is Andrew Colvet, executive producer of this show, and that empty chair reminds us of Charlie's legacy, his memory, and the fact that political violence took his life, an assassination did.

And this morning we awoke to more news of political violence targeted at ICE in Texas.

And to start off the show, and we had a whole show planned, but I thought it was important that we do this.

Simply, it hits very close to home for this team, I can tell you.

And so I wanted to have Border Czar Tom Homan kick off the top of the show with us.

So,

Border Czar Homan, thank you for joining us.

What can you tell us about what happened in Texas?

Well, this morning, a long gunman was targeting an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas.

It's where aliens are processed, either for removal or transfer to a facility.

And again, it's the third shooting that's occurred in Texas against immigration officials.

And we had a shooter show up at a board patrol facility and open fire trying to kill board patrol agents.

He was killed by agents.

Then had a group of people show up with weapons at an ICE detention facility in El Varado, Texas, and try to kill ICE agents.

And they did shoot one officer, a local police officer, who's also responding to the scene.

And now we have this today where a lone gunman stood at perch and opened up on

ICE during a transportation transfer.

We know we have at least two dead and

officers are uninjured.

And it later was announced by Cash Patel that one of the bullets had an anti-ICE slogan on the bullet.

So this was clearly a targeted attack against ICE.

Well,

Bordersar,

I just know that Charlie, this is his show.

He was such a supporter of yours and was worried for our brave men and women in law enforcement that were doing what the voters had voted for.

very, very clearly to remove illegal aliens from this country.

And we've seen these stats

that the targetings are on the increase, that assaults against ICE officers, are we still seeing a ramp up?

I mean, this instance is awful.

Thank God no law enforcement were harmed or injured, but our prayers are with the families of the detainees that have lost their lives.

But are we seeing this continue to ramp up across the country?

Are we still seeing it go up?

Are we seeing any calming down of the violence and the attacks against ICE officers?

First of all, you're right.

I had many discussions with Charlie, and he always ended the discussion to be safe and

that ICE officers should be safe because the rhetoric has continued to increase.

Assaults on ICE officers are up over 1,000%.

And know the rhetoric hasn't stopped.

And I said months ago, months ago, that if the hateful rhetoric didn't decrease, it's going to end in bloodshed.

Someone's going to die.

And of course, I was called a fearmonger.

The left says I was making irresponsible comments.

Unfortunately, I was right.

And just this past weekend, we saw protests turn criminal in Chicago and in Boston.

I mean, in Chicago, the ice facility is under attack.

In Portland, Oregon, the ice facility there has been under attack for months.

So, you know, no, it hasn't not slowed down.

Either has the hateful rhetoric.

from some up on Hill, some are congressional representatives and

other people who are in a position where

that small fraction, I would say on the left,

not everybody on the left is a bad person.

Most of them aren't, but there's that fraction that listens to this rhetoric and they feel empowered to take action against ICE.

If you've got a member of Congress comparing ICE to the secret police, which is a direct affiliation with the Nazis, or calling straight out Nazis to terrorists, or Governor Newsom just recently said the secret police.

I mean, he just passed legislation about secret police.

I mean, bottom line is that rhetoric is causing some of this violence.

And

I've been calling for people to stop the hateful rhetoric because

more are going to be hurt.

As a matter of fact, when we talked about the person that was shot at the Al Bravo City and we talked about

the gunman that was killed at a border patrol facility, I said at that time, there's going to be more if the rhetoric doesn't stop.

I've seen this game before.

I've seen this story before, and I just hate to see it right now.

I hope, you know, between what happened to ICE officers across the country, what happened to Charlie, and what's happened today,

I mean,

at what point do people just

stop the hate?

You can disagree with ICE does, but taking those toward actions,

it's just, it's unbelievable.

There's no excuse for it.

I want to show you a graphic.

I'm going to put up a graphic.

It's basically who, which groups justify violence based on age and political affiliation.

If you could put up 141,

this is the question, is it ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals?

And this is the percentage responding yes.

And you can see there,

Tom, at 18 to 39-year-old liberal progressives, that's 30%

believe that sometimes violence is justified to achieve a political goal.

And I believe

that matches with what happened to Charlie.

I don't know

the age of this particular shooter in Texas, but we are seeing an alarming rise.

And by the way, it's worth noting, conservatives, 18 to 39, are the most peaceful node on there besides moderates over 60.

So we're doing our part on the right to quell the violence, to quell the rhetoric,

to say, lean into Jesus, do not give in to hate, forgive your enemies.

We have to find a solution here.

And yet that one node, you can see it.

It sticks out like a sore thumb there, Tom.

18 to 39, 30% of them believe violence can be justified.

Your thoughts.

Well, it's not the country I grew up in.

I mean, you never heard of this.

When I went to college, you never heard of kind of this.

It's justification for violence ever.

I really think that many of the colleges have failed us.

And also think that the negative publicity being being pushed by 90% of the media 90 of the media constantly attack this administration and the work we're doing and i've said it before i think there's groups out there that hate president trump more than they love their communities or more than they you know have any common sense it's there's no reason for i mean it's just it's out of control and you're right The last four years under the Biden administration, everybody was angry about the border.

Everybody was angry about the number of Americans dying from fentanyl,

the vast increase in sex trafficking, the cartels having placement in this country, killing millions of Americans with poison.

You didn't see that counter protest that turned criminal.

So

it's mainly on one side.

And again, I'm hoping today, on top of everything that's happened in the last few months,

just let's stop the hate.

Let's have a meaningful debate, which Charlie was all supportive.

Let's have a debate about the issues.

Let's get back to talking rather than putting putting bullets in a firearm.

Tom, I want to make this personal.

About one minute remaining.

I know that this kind of rhetoric has directly impacted your life and your family.

Whatever details you can share, I want the audience to know what the real impact is for real people like yourself.

One minute.

I have a 24-7 security detail because of threats against me.

I don't live with my family

because

I don't want them around danger as much as I can.

So, you know,

it's tough, but I'm not going away.

I'm not shutting up.

I'm going to continue fighting to make this country great again.

President Trump made a promise to the American people.

He brought me to help them in that promise to make America safe again.

And we're going to continue working to remove the worst of the worst, illegal animals from this country to make our community safer.

Hard stop.

Well, God bless you, sir.

Thank you for joining the show.

I thought it was important to lead with that.

And on behalf of a grateful nation, Tom, thank you for your service.

Thank you for your courage.

Thank you for your voice.

And thank you for the results because this is what the American people voted for.

And we will not be deterred.

The truth will be the truth, and we cannot be cowed by these vigilantes.

And we got to do something about it, but we will not be cowed.

Tom Holman, thank you so much.

Borders are for the Trump administration.

Thank you, sir.

I am joined by Blake Neff,

one of the producers,

as well as the great Dr.

James Orr.

Honored to have you, Doctor, on the show.

I'm s candidly, of all the conversations I've had, and I've had we've had some amazing guests and some amazing conversations over the last

couple of weeks, this is probably the one I'm most excited about because of the way that you and I got to meet.

Charlie was there.

You met Charlie on his when he went to Cambridge and Oxford, Oxbridge, as you guys, I guess, call the the grouping.

But we then spent a weekend together in Aspen,

and we shared some just truly amazing moments.

And you also sat down with Charlie for an interview, which will now sort of,

in a haunting way, but in a beautiful way, because I know how much Charlie loved you,

your

interview with Charlie.

on that Aspen trip was actually the last

episode that went on the Charlie Kirk Show broadcast before he was assassinated.

So

it's a weird thing, I'm sure, for me to

hear that from me.

It's weird for me to say it out loud, but it's true.

And I just knew Charlie so well

that,

again, it's sort of fitting because you were like this academic, ideological, spiritual,

just shining light for Charlie, so much so that I was jealous when we got back from Aspen.

Charlie looked at you and he was like, Can you hang out with me on Sunday and just like be my professor for a day?

And as far as I know, you guys hung out on Sunday and you talked about the classics and about the canon of Western civilization.

And I love that because I know that that was basically the happiest you would ever see Charlie Kirk.

So thank you so much for giving him that day so close to the end and for just being somebody that he deeply deeply loved and appreciated.

Well Andrew thank you it's just so good to be with you despite the circumstances and gosh what a what a surreal few days it's been what an extraordinary achievement you guys pulled off I was so thrilled to have been able to make it to the stadium on Sunday for that that extraordinary day and just so many thoughts going through my mind but you know I've been teaching undergraduates graduate students at Oxford and Cambridge on and off for fifteen sixteen years And I can say, you know, hand on heart, I have never come across a young person with that thirst for knowledge, that thirst for intellectual formation, spiritual wisdom.

You know, I spent weeks trying to trying to get him to call me James, but it was always

Dr.

Orr.

It's always this sort of extraordinary respect and humility that he had.

And you're right, that last afternoon, just before I was getting off to the airport,

I think that morning a car was supposed to pick me up to take me to his apartment.

And

Mikey, Charlie's chief of staff, rang me and said, I've cancelled the car.

I said,

how am I going to get to Charlie's apartment?

He said, no, no, no.

He wants to come and pick you up from the hotel so that he can have more time with you.

And

we had...

We had a day together.

We had a wonderful morning and went into his apartment and, yeah, two, three hours of just philosophy just grilling me on it with that big, big whiteboard.

He wanted me to, you know, map out moral philosophy.

Help me.

He was just prepping, prepping, prepping.

What if I get this question?

What if I get that question?

It was just extraordinary.

And absorbing it all, taking notes,

grilling me.

Yes, I understand that point, but how do I make it accessible?

And there was always this sense of this, the audience that he wanted to reach and

not be in conflict with,

not to sort of

dunk on them at all,

to but to inform them, to educate them,

to enlighten them.

Just extraordinary.

And then got back to London, I'm getting texts from him, Bible verses from him, and then a text on, oh, that that lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre you mentioned on existentialism in 1946.

Can you send me a copy?

And can you explain to me that point?

So okay, let's do it.

And did that.

And then on the first, my last text from him was on the 1st of September saying, can you send me a lecture on natural law?

And

God help me, I never got back to him.

It was,

yeah,

it was,

it was a busy week and I thought I've got to sit down and do this properly.

And then, you know, by the time things had calmed down,

it had happened.

And,

yeah,

I'd never met anyone like him.

And, you know, you meet people, you know that there's just...

You're going to be friends for years and years and years.

And you're going to learn so much from each other.

And

we had great plans.

He was so excited about britain he loved it so much was staring now this this photo of winston churchill and was so excited about what was happening on the right in in britain and wanted to know exactly what all the kind of all the polling dynamics were and how he could help extraordinary you were a a really important bridge for him and he was an anglophile begrudgingly but he he genuinely was i don't think that

many brits maybe appreciated that because he came into England and really lit up the leadership, lit up the current zeitgeist in the country.

But it has become clear to me

that Charlie, and I've said this a bunch of times, I'm just going to say it again for the sake of this conversation, that Charlie was a modern prophet.

And he was going around campuses, this country,

calling our leaders to repent, calling our citizens to repent, to remember themselves.

And he went straight into the belly of the beast in Oxbridge and

called on

Brits to remember themselves.

Stand up, man.

Put your shoulders back.

Remember who you are.

You're a great people.

Like, wake up.

And

just like they do with prophets, not only is Charlie dead, but in England, they rejected him.

Tell me about your perspective on that.

Well,

I think it was Jordan Peterson who first connected us

about a year ago, I think.

And so Charlie had been on my radar for a while.

We had a lot of mutual friends, but he was very excited about his trip to England and started peppering me with texts and requests like, what will the audience be like?

What are the kinds of questions that I should be thinking about?

What are the topics?

You know, he was just prepping, prepping, prepping.

And

so he came to Cambridge.

I went to the Cambridge Union to just give him some moral support with my son and half a dozen students.

And we were the only ones supporting him.

I mean, my goodness, it was...

Well, and and Blake.

And Blake, you were there, of course.

And the team.

You and the team were there.

And

it was impressive.

I mean,

he was competitive.

He was quick.

He was,

I don't think anyone, any of those students, and they were bright students.

I was quite, you know, in a funny way, proud of those students.

I mean, they were, you know,

off the cliff progressive on a whole load of on all the issues.

But I thought they stood their ground well.

And

then we went for this meal afterwards.

And just again, two, three hours of just talking and talking stats.

And I got a call from one of

this big media platform, GB News, just desperate to get half an hour of Charlie's time, but it was down in London.

It was just awkward to get to.

I said, look, I know this is difficult, but if you could just, you know, would you consider this?

And he said, absolutely, no problem.

And you managed to fit it into that very tight schedule.

That was with Ben.

Yes, that's right with Ben.

That clip went viral.

It was a good thing he fitted it.

It's great.

He did it.

And it was much appreciated.

And

so, you know, I think it was

great.

I mean, I sat in that debating chamber and thought, this is a proper debate.

You know, this is what this place was designed for.

And this is really puncturing the group think in a way that is pretty rare these days on elite campuses on both sides of the Atlantic.

And it was, we were fortunate to have him.

Images.

And then we've got some images there.

Yeah, there we go.

Yeah, the bouncy bridge.

The bouncy bridge.

Oh, bless him.

Yeah,

that was...

Charlie found that so funny.

Because he looks like a Harry Potter figure, like characters us.

That's it.

He was, yeah,

quick on his feet, just jumping up and down.

And yeah, amazing.

I remember that so well.

And

it was just great to see.

And as I said, it punctured the groupthink.

And I've said this before, the trouble with groupthink is that wrong think becomes evil think.

You know, when there's just this tiny minority opinion, then

it just becomes subversive.

It becomes something that is threatening.

And

so easy to demonize.

And what we saw on both those debates was

Charlie's ability to put across cases and positions in a winsome, civil, respectful way.

And

I think the assassination has just triggered off a whole lot of very interesting debates on the free speech side of things, of course, and Charlie's a great free speech warrior.

We've been fighting a lot on free speech battles on university campuses and

but you know if this is if this is how it ends if one side is so quick to resort in the end to lawfare or warfare or violence what do we do where does that leave liberalism where does where does that leave before we move on I don't you know we've seen the reaction around the world but those Cambridge students who came out to support Charlie last May how have they reacted to this?

Well they've I tell you they've been in they've been in pieces.

It's been very upsetting for them.

And my son in particular, who just worshiped Charlie, and Charlie recorded a little video for him actually when I was here at the offices a month ago.

It's been very hard.

And even those who didn't know him at all, I mean, we gathered the two days after it happened, Friday, it was the Friday evening outside Downing Street, a pretty spontaneous vigil, thousands and thousands of people around the cenotaph and Whitehall, just so moving, just this very kind of very unusual to see that in London.

There was a sense sense of a great, great kind of peace and love.

And you welcomed Charlie to the UK.

You helped with get these debates set up for Charlie, which would be one of his last big trips.

And it's hard to think about that.

He loved that trip.

He loved meeting you.

You were so dear to him.

And I know that you guys had great plans to to keep learning from each other.

And you are yourself

becoming sort of known politically in the UK.

And I know that

you enter into that with fear and trembling and

a great weight on your shoulders.

And we can get into that a little bit later.

But I love what we're talking about.

You were witnessing the immediate aftermath of the assassination, and there was huge vigils throughout the UK.

And I said something that before, that prophets are rejected.

That is sort of the model.

And he was a prophet taking the truth around the world, even to to the UK.

But there was a remnant that heard what he said.

And then you had Tommy Robinson lead this huge march.

Elon Musk called in.

They talked about Charlie.

I saw so many people with Charlie's picture, and they were chanting, Charlie, Charlie.

It was really beautiful for me to see this outpouring of love for Charlie even across the pond.

What was that like?

Take us into that moment.

Yes, well, I didn't go on that march, but I know that over the summer there was a lot of anxiety in the press, within the establishment,

about it.

And I remember talking to Charlie about it last month, and,

you know, there were just sort of

premonitions, people thinking that this is going to end violently.

It was demonized.

And I think...

You know, one silver lining you might say is that I think the march, from what I can tell, was broadly peaceful.

I mean, I think there were about 100,000 people marching through the streets, and I think there were something like 25 arrests, which I think, you know,

you compare it to similar kinds of events, it's not out of the ordinary at all.

And it was, from what I could tell from just looking at the footage, it was peaceful.

And I'm sure that that sense of it being a vigil for Charlie, it being a sort of witness to Charlie, as you say, his face was all over, you know, posters everywhere of him.

And

I think that would have had a calming effect on the march and and I think you know there was there was a great atmosphere as from what I could tell

you know it was broadly demonized in the mainstream media afterwards as far as I could tell but I but I think it went off a lot better than many people were worrying about over the summer yeah well and I to the point about violence and I know that the there's an establishment press that is even more entrenched in the UK than there is in the US And they still have more power to sort of set narratives and things.

And so that's certainly something that needs to be addressed in the UK.

But the point is, you had all these people that have a lot of reason to be upset about things, but they are largely peaceful.

And that's the actual truth.

The actual truth is that it was sort of beautiful and

really respectful.

And we got a note yesterday.

I can't divulge who this is from, but this note was passed along.

It said, just got off the phone with a friend, won't say the name, who is SWAT and was tasked with working the memorial for Charlie here in Glendale, Arizona.

He said they were all briefed to 100% expect something major to happen.

And the whole event came and went without one arrest between Peoria, Mesa, Glendale, and Phoenix PD all assisting.

A complete anomaly for an event even 10%

this size.

Even the Super Bowl would have someone get drunk and like punch a guy.

Yeah.

They didn't have one arrest.

And the power of prayer, you know, I keep saying this over and over again.

The first time in my life that I've, I can feel the prayers of strangers just sustaining this whole team through Turning Point, Turning Point Action, the Charlie Kirk Show.

You can feel it, and you could feel the prayers inside the memorial.

And you were there.

You actually made it back, which is a whole other saga, which is incredible.

And I think such an honor, Charlie would have been just so honored to know what you went through in order to get planes, trades, and automobiles for you in that trip.

But

I do want to stay on the UK.

Do you think, you know, a lot of people are talking about this as a revival moment in the US.

A lot of people are talking about this is the turning point.

This is a politically galvanizing moment.

Do you feel like this is having at least some sort of the same effect in the UK?

It's had extraordinary reverberations all across Europe, I think, and

definitely in Britain.

I'm having conversations with people

about faith, about family, about

freedom, about loving your country,

that I simply

was just very, very difficult to have before.

And he's unleashed something extraordinary.

A lot of people didn't really know who Charlie was, I think,

in Britain.

It was only

when the news broke, people started

the framing, I think even on the BBC, the BBC to start with at least was saying his far-right character.

Some of the press were just

were demonising him.

But very quickly that shifted, and it was just obvious.

You couldn't mistake it.

He was an extraordinary husband, loving father, civil, respectful in his engagement with young people.

And that came across very, very quickly.

And so

it's been remarkable, the kind of conversations that have opened up.

And I think his legacy is going to be a remarkable one.

I think

we're having these big debates in Britain at the moment around exactly these kinds of issues and

all of those sort of

those great sort of four cornerstones, I think, of the faith, family, flag and freedom that we're just celebrating that extraordinary way in the stadium on Sunday.

And it's very difficult still in Britain to have conversations around those.

But something's shifted and I'm sure that Charlie's legacy will be to catalyse that

and to put those issues back on the table and and they're going to be right you know front and center of the British political landscape over the next five years.

I just want to make sure you're getting it because you and James you and James, you were in England with James, so I just want to make sure I'm giving Blake his views on what's happening over there.

Of course, of course.

You know, before we move on too far from the debate, I know this is I followed this, you've definitely followed it, but I don't know that a lot of people in the U.S.

know about this, that one of the Oxford Union people that Charlie met when he debated there, he posted something about Charlie's death that was that was pretty bad, and there's been a backlash to that.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, I think it's the incoming president of the Oxford Union, do we have that?

Who debated

Charlie back in May,

I think, said something, I can't remember the words.

He said, yes,

he, so, president-elect George Abergne, who there is an image of them debating.

I'll get that loaded to our team so they can put this up.

Get that ASAP guys.

So he posted, he debated Charlie.

He was one of the people who debated him.

He was actually dead.

And he appeared to sell.

He shared multiple celebratory remarks about the shooting on WhatsApp, according to the Oxford student.

One message said, Charlie Kirk got shot.

Let's effing go.

And the other said, scoreboard FN.

I don't know what that means.

I think Ryan would probably be able to tell me what that means.

But

scoreboard, it means like basically put a point on the board because we took one down

and you can probably tell us more about what happens to the other.

Has he been punished for this?

So there was a big debate

kind of blew up afterwards.

To be honest, I was so upset at the time, I was tuning out of the negative reactions and I was trying not to dwell on it too much.

But I was getting a lot of texts from people who are signing

a letter of, effectively a letter of no confidence.

And I think the threshold is, I think it's something like 150.

So if you were an officer of the Oxford Union in in the past,

you could force a resignation.

I think they've hit about 70 signatures.

And

we are.

I mean, it's a very damning.

Yeah.

I mean,

I think

it's touched a nerve because

the worry is...

Is this legitimate speech?

Should he be expelled for this?

Should he be restricted?

Okay, but hold on.

This is one of these stupid academic cul-de-sacs that people that are educated but beyond their intelligence get themselves into.

And this is like, I'm sorry, Charlie Kirk was murdered, assassinated.

Do you think it's okay that Martin Luther King or JFK or Lincoln or whoever was assassinated?

Do we think that this is okay?

Do we think political violence...

Okay, listen, I understand if some fringe character on some Discord chat thinks that it's gleeful.

But that person does not represent Cambridge or Oxford.

That is supposed to be a premier institution.

I'm calling, I hope this gets clipped.

I am calling on you sane left-wing students that are still

advocates for civilization to sign that petition, that letter, whatever it is.

Get it to 150.

That is not okay.

Even if you disagree with Charlie, Charlie was a fundamentally good and decent, loving husband and father who believed in the building blocks of Western civilization.

he did not deserve this.

And for somebody to represent your school that would celebrate his death is shocking that you cannot get 150 people to put their name to disciplining or at least or whatever.

I don't even know what this, but the fact that that can go unchecked is abyss.

Abysmal.

It is such an indictment of the moral character and the lack of moral clarity that exists at

the UK's elite institutions.

I just have to say that.

Get it over 150.

Absolutely right.

You know, language like that, it lays down the enabling conditions

for violence.

It dehumanizes conservatives, that if you are a conservative, you're less than human, you don't deserve to live.

And by the way,

if somebody kills you, you had it coming.

Yeah.

To be clear, the unanimous reaction on left and right in Britain was one of condemnation and anger.

Good.

And so just...

It's apparently not unanimous.

But yeah, why are there not 150 signatures?

When somebody actually has to put their name to it, they get weak in the knees.

Yeah.

What is there to be weak in the knees about political assassinations?

No, I couldn't agree more.

I mean, two days later, I remember we were

having lunch with Nigel and Nigel Farage and people,

this group walked out and screamed fascist at us.

And I just thought to myself, you know, and he gets that all the time, of course, but I just thought to myself, just, you know, Charlie's blood had barely run cold and still they would have known exactly what had happened.

They would have known the kind of rhetoric and the demonizing that can lay down, as it were, the conditions for

violence on the left.

And I just, you know,

I don't see how we come out of this.

You know, I don't see what solutions

liberalism has.

You know, I want to, I didn't mention this, but it's worth mentioning that that go up and go ahead and put up 141 again.

You can do it

on the screen.

And this is this poll about political political violence being justified, 141.

And

you look at the date that this was conducted,

September 12th through September 15th.

Charlie was murdered on the 10th.

This is a poll conducted after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

And 30%

of young liberals still believe that.

That is

that should be a

sobering stat for anybody.

Time is flying with you, by the way, Dr.

James Orr.

It's truly amazing.

We have actually Charlie's debate with the, it's coming.

I don't know that we have it yet, with the new incoming

president, yes.

So we'll play that before this segment ends.

But, I mean,

give us, I don't know,

you're...

Just sum it all up.

Charlie, England, the U.K., free speech, wherever you want to take this, because we have actually, we were just discussing in the break all these other things we're going to get to.

But I think we need to put a capstone on this hour.

I once made the mistake of asking Charlie what part of the motherland

he was from, his family was from.

He said, My surname's Kirk.

Where do you think I'm from?

I said, yeah, okay, right.

He's proud of his Scottish heritage.

He loved Britain and he had this sort of, you know, I think sometimes

in our country

we get a sense a note of

almost kind of a smug contempt from from Americas to to what's going on over here, but but it's just not true.

And I think and Charlie uh sort of personified that.

He he Charlie was somebody who he loved the country, he was he was sort of heartbroken at w at what he saw was happening to it, the fact that it was just losing, you know, that it was no longer the cradle of those founding values that he believed made America great, that that gave America its DNA.

And you know, he was so passionate about about us and and not just you know, not just recently.

I mean, I can't remember when he set up Turning Point UK.

I think it must have been 2017, 2018.

I don't know if he's did that in any other country.

I mean, he had just a

fierce desire to

kind of connect that sort of Anglo-American axis.

And

I think it's been pretty successful, TP UK.

They're the ones who organized that vigil outside Downing Street.

So he had a good social media following.

Absolutely right.

And so it's something we talked about it a lot, actually, last month and

how to help ramp it up and how to kind of develop this sort of

youth movement on the right in Britain.

And so he was passionate about it, and I think felt the right's in a little bit of chaos at the moment in some ways.

I think it's kind of fruitful chaos.

We talked a lot about it.

There's all sorts of emerging movements.

There's a lot of vitality now, I think, on the right, a lot of philosophical energy, a lot of political energy, and you're seeing that now

reflected in the polling.

Do you think that reform, do you think Nigel Farage is the likely next Prime Minister if things hold?

Yes, I do.

I think he is set to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, whenever the election is going to be held.

I think the latest it could be held is August 2029.

That's a

long time.

That's a long way.

That's an eternity.

Was it Adam Smith who said there's a lot of ruin in a nation?

Well, I just don't know how much ruin there is left in ours with the current government, certainly.

But yes, I think if you were the betting markets and the polling would would suggest that that that Nigel is set to Kier's very unpopular extremely unpopular yes ab absolutely I think he's just this week his approval rating sank to uh below what I think Boris Johnson had at his very you know at at the Nadir at the Nader

exactly and and um so it's it sounds better there's there's there's a lot you know there's a lot of manoeuvrings now on the left which is now fragmenting into the kind of the Rainbow Caucus the Crescent Caucus the the star the old school socialists, and

it may be that he gets

almost very likely that Stalma gets unseated.

I mean we're good at ditching prime ministers.

Yeah, I was gonna say, what triggers it?

Well, so we're a parliamentary democracy, so what that means is you've got you know the party that can command a majority and command the confidence of the House of Commons is the government.

And now Stalma's got a majority in the I think 154

and so turkeys don't vote for Christmas even if the Turkeys really really hate each other and and so it's

very likely that the government will survive in some form

till the end of the electoral cycle.

But I suspect Starm is not going to be that long in Downing Street.

One could hope.

So Nigel's well positioned.

By the way, we were going to play Sweat Pants, Bro, but I actually like this better.

Let's play the clip from the UK of Charlie paying you quite the compliment, Blake.

162.

Blake is like the smartest person I know.

We're all honey prepared to like.

That was.

Sorry, I just had to do that for you.

You know,

Charlie was very impressed by Blake's intellect and by your memory.

And that was you traveling with your travel buddy.

You guys were international travel buddies at the end.

I mean, it really...

It really was something.

I picked up on that reverence for Blake over our dinner in Cambridge.

And whenever there was this kind of difficult moment, a difficult discussion, or we needed some facts, Charlie would turn to his left, say, blank,

and he'd always have the answer.

Well, it's true.

You do have a weird, weirdly photographic memory for history.

Maybe it's not photographic, whatever it is.

You have a great recall.

You have a great recall.

Our good friends at Angel Studios, I love Angel Studios, amazing new film this holy week.

Phenomenal.

As I think about Charlie's life and how much of a support he was of Angel, it's hard not to feel so grateful for what he did.

He supported us in our darkest days and in our brightest hours as a company.

Jeff and I and Charlie were doing lunch together.

And we asked him, he said, are you at all worried about one of these college campuses?

And he just said, with so much peace in his eyes and so much peace in his heart, if that's how God takes me, then that's how I'm supposed to go.

And I feel like that was a clear message that Charlie's life is a testimony.

to Jesus Christ, his Lord and Savior.

And his relationship with him was the most important thing that he would want want the world to remember about his legacy.

Man, are we grateful to have gotten to be a little connection in the multitude of connections that he made throughout his life because it was so impactful to us.

Thank you, Charlie.

Love you.

We miss you.

We're going to continue to drive forward the good news.

This is Andrew Colvett, your executive producer.

I am joined by the great British patriot Dr.

James Orr,

who it was interesting, actually, when we hung out in Aspen, there had just been this piece that came out about you calling you the mentor of J.D.

Vance.

And you are friends with J.D.

We are friends with JD.

He actually hosted this show the Monday after September 10th.

And it was a great honor, great tribute.

But you took umbrage with that, didn't you?

That framing of things.

Because J.D.

hung out, he went on vacation or something in the Cotswolds.

Yeah, I've known him for a few years.

He had a trip to England over August.

It was supposed to be a family holiday, but it worked the whole time.

It turned into a media circus and he had to cut it short.

He did some golf

up in Scotland, I think.

Yeah, I took umbrage at the description.

This idea that I'm somehow mentor to the Vice President of the United States is not true at all.

I've learnt a great deal more from him than he's ever learnt from me.

But the last time I saw him in Washington must have been just a few days before it happened i think it was about a week before it happened and i just said i look i was out in arizona and uh spent some time with charlie and his team and it's my goodness you know you're in you're in good shape for 2028 that that that machine is going to be uh is is roaring and with energy and enthusiasm we hope he dives in i mean every indication would you would think a vice president would be primed for that but he's very coy about it you know he's being very respectful and of course we appreciate that it's it's it's still the era of Trump and we're into that too.

But yeah, tell us about your relationship with him.

I think that's interesting.

Well we met, gosh, I think, yeah, a few years ago, I think summer of 2019, I think it was, through mutual friends.

And yeah, we hit it off.

He was a private citizen at the time.

I'd read Hill Billy Elegies when it came out, I think, in 2016.

A Texan friend of mine, I think it was the end of October 2016,

pressed a copy into my hands and said, Trump is going to win and this is why.

You need to read this.

And I read it, loved it.

So he was on my radar early on and then had the chance to meet him in 2019.

We hit it off.

We talked a lot, not actually very much about politics at all, although he did a lot of philosophy,

talked about faith, talked about theology.

And I thought, gosh, this guy's promising.

He could be a congressman one day.

Congressman?

Looks like he's got a bright future.

Yeah, everybody, by the way, you know, I usually don't share numbers, but him hosting Charlie's show,

and I hope people understand

there's a difference between a million views on YouTube and a different and a million downloads of a podcast I've never seen a podcast

let's just say it's true it's our most downloaded podcast it's the most downloaded podcast episode and I will just say that ever of all time

and JD did such a magnificent job and I was thinking about that this morning what he said on his episode when he hosted he said yes we want unity but first we have to have truth

I think that is really relevant to something that's happening in our own news cycle right now.

And the truth is, and I think we're going to discuss both this hour about this, both sidesism.

It's a lie.

But also, Jimmy Kimmel

said that,

you know, he essentially inferred, stated, I think very clearly, that the shooter

came from MAGA.

And that really upset me.

And I'll explain why.

Because if you can lie about something so fundamental where this, you know, this individual had a trans boyfriend or whatever, however you're supposed to say it, I think that's probably the right way to say it.

That he was into all this weird stuff.

He was writing all of these notes on these bullet casings and things like that.

And his own parents were worried about his radicalism.

And then to go on the air and say, no, actually, it was from MAGA.

MAGA killed him.

What that means to me is that you can lie with impunity, that there is a machinery in place that will defend you.

Your life is not important.

I am free to desecrate your memory

because

conservatives bad.

And you had it coming.

And more should, you know, it's basically a license to say we're going to support you guys if you guys go do this stuff out

in the real world.

And that's not okay.

And so we have clips.

Blake, I don't know which clip it is.

The Jimmy Kimmel in response to the backlash they receive.

Yeah.

We can just play one of these.

I mean, it doesn't matter.

132.

I don't think what I have to say is going to make much of a difference.

If you like me, you like me.

If you don't, you don't.

I have no illusions about changing anyone's mind.

But I do want to make something clear because it's important to me as a human.

And that is you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.

I don't think there's anything funny about it.

I posted a message on Instagram on the day he was killed sending love to his family and asking for compassion, and I meant it.

I still do.

Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what it was obviously a deeply disturbed individual.

That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make.

But I understand that to some, that felt either ill-timed or unclear, or maybe both.

And for those who think I did

point a finger, I get why you're upset.

If the situation was reversed, there's a good chance I'd have felt the same way.

So what I'm lacking there is a, I'm sorry.

I lied.

I misrepresented the nature of who the shooter was.

I'm sorry.

I will do better.

My sincerest apologies to Erica Kirk and to the Kirk family.

And James, you're a Christian.

Explain the difference between what he did, sort of parsing words, never kind of owning it.

It was sort of, I'm sorry if you were offended.

Explain what

Christian contrition looks like, what it looks like in scripture, historically, what it means, and what that was lacking.

Yeah, I mean, look,

I could hear some contrition

in his voice, as he was clearly emotional, whether the emotions has been driven by what had happened to him, you know, the fact that his career looked like it was on the precipice.

I don't know.

I mean, I think, you know, true contrition expresses itself in actions.

And,

you know, I detected a sort of a hint of a politician's apology there.

I'm just deeply, deeply sorry that that offence has been caused.

But, you know, repentance, you know, the Greek, the New Testament is metanoia, which means a complete transformation of one's mind, of one's intellect, one's understanding, one's heart.

And,

you know, the Latin translation I think is pinitamini, which is kind of not just repentance, but do penance.

And there's a lot of debate about that in the Reformation,

about, you know, his sort of repentance is something not just of the heart, but you've got to do it.

You've got to do stuff that shows the this kind of the outward working, the outward expression of inner contrition

within one's heart.

And

I don't know.

Look, I don't have a window into men's souls.

I don't have a window into Jimmy Kimmel's soul.

I just hope that this this this incident, this whole sorry saga

has made the left, has made the kind of American liberals think a lot harder about the language that they're using.

And

just being aware that, you know, spinning the kind of conspiracy theories that are completely fact-free, as seems to be the case with this extraordinary charge that the killer was motivated by

was part of the MAGA movement, just simply absurd, not a shred of evidence for it.

I just hope that this will give them pause for thought and that it'll just slow things down.

And

yeah, I mean, we just, there cannot be civil discourse if it's, you know, if one side is constantly paying the consequences for

indiscreet speech or violent rhetoric, and the other side effectively gets a free pass.

And

that seems to be what's happening not just in America, but all across the landscape of Western culture, Western politics.

And I mean,

you have kind of a contrarian take here because you think we should just sort of move on from this topic.

I want more.

Well, so

what's frustrated me about it is they went and

due to sort of how it unfolded,

we allowed it to become that like Jimmy Kimmel was this free speech martyr against, like, you know, because we had Brendan Carr at the FCC.

He stepped out and he basically said, You better take him off the air, or we're going to like investigate ABC and Disney, and they're going to have to answer for all these things.

And you took what it should have been, which is Jimmy Kimmel said something disgusting.

And there really was this big organic anger against them.

And that got tamped down, and it turned into, oh, this guy in the Trump administration is silencing Jimmy Kimmel, who is also lame and not funny.

And

it took something that was good and it changed it.

And it also colored, and unfortunately, what we also saw, which was the very organic anger against all the other people who said disgusting things.

Yeah.

Keep going with that, though, Blake.

And I mean, I know there was, I will say, one of the things that I noticed, and you saw this with the Pam Bondi,

I think it was a misspeak on Pam Bondi's behalf because she kind of clarified her point after.

She was talking about incitement.

She meant to get to incitement.

She said hate speech, but

I would just say there was a lot of voices that on the right that said, we don't agree with the way she said that.

Yeah, but that's not that's not our

Charlie's POV.

We've had to endure, now we've had to endure all this stupid, nasty, fake stuff on the left.

We're like, oh,

the right doesn't care about free speech at all.

They want to crack down.

No, the backlash to Bondi saying the hate speech thing was immediate.

It was basically unanimous.

It was dial this back right now.

And she did, thankfully.

But it is a similar, it was a similar issue here where i think there is a huge amount of genuine backlash to what kimmel did i think he probably would have gotten suspended in fact we got reporting from the wall street journal and others that suggested he was going to be suspended at minimum uh even without what carr said and i i think it put the wrong color on it that there was that kind of overt threat and then the way he was if you go to car's twitter account he's like posting all these memes and just like bragging about what he did And

I understand the impulse.

It is a way there is an element where the Trump movement made the movement more assertive, more, you know, more bragging.

And we've seen it with like the ice stuff where they're like, we're deporting people.

And here's a meme of this person who is also a

child predator getting deported and it's great.

And people have liked that.

But...

You do have to be careful because we do want to make sure that this is about that, you know, Charlie, who is a martyr for free speech, a martyr for Christianity, and we don't want that to turn into Charlie

is ever considered some sort of justification for an anti-speech.

Charlie would reject that, by the way.

Completely.

He was basically a free speech absolutist.

I mean, I think I say basically because

I'm just hedging in my mind maybe some sort of incitement he would draw a line at.

But he believed in ugly speech.

He believed in vile speech.

He believed in the freedom to say evil things.

I mean, that does cross the line into incitement, which is illegal when you're calling for violence for somebody.

But I mean, I struggle with asking the question: you know, when we think about some of these ugly reactions, people celebrating, you think about the Oxford kid,

sweatpants, bro.

You know, where you're celebrating the murder of somebody, is that not incitement in a certain way?

I think the spirit is certainly the same.

Legally, the barrier

is different.

So one of the things that makes American free speech so exceptional even compared to other western nations is we have uh kind of the brandenburg standard for speech it's a supreme court case and it's basically like it is in fact only incitement if you are directly calling for some criminal act and like in a specific way so if someone were to say someone should go to the Utah Valley event and shoot Charlie Kirk, that is incitement.

But even saying someone should shoot Charlie Kirk isn't by itself.

And,

you know,

that enables a lot of ugly speech.

As Charlie himself said, I think he has a tweet where he says, like, there is ugly speech.

There is deranged speech, but there is not hate speech.

And the thing with incitement, what's good about that strict standard is that gives us

so, it means that an authoritarian government like the Biden administration has so little grounds to come out and say, And the left loves to do this, where, oh, this thing you said, you know, that was actually inciting hate against migrants.

That was inciting hate against trans people.

That was inciting hate against minorities just because you say, oh, I don't want more immigration.

And certainly Dr.

Orr can tell us all about how that's been abused in the UK.

That's where we're going next.

Which

they'll claim that's a free speech country, but it's clearly not.

But

this is the distinction, and I think it's really important for us to remain morally very clear on this.

What I was trying to say was that celebrating the vicious murder of our friend is vile, it's ugly, it's nasty.

100%.

And

it is from the same same demonic spirit that I think somebody would, you know, this incitement legal.

So I'm talking, there's two distinctions.

There's almost like the demonic spirit that I would call it versus the legal standard.

And I'm not conflating the two.

I'm saying, so, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to celebrate that, certainly maybe you didn't break a law, but you are participating in the same demonism.

And I would just say I have not fully internalized that

other than to say that may you live a life so remarkable, so courageous, and so true that the demons celebrate when you die, and may your enemies, your enemies celebrate, because that means you have done something.

You have been so extraordinary that you live rent-free in their heads, and

they don't know anything else to do other than to say, you know, thank goodness that extraordinarily effective person is off the board.

But, you know,

in Soren Kierkegaard's words, that's really just the beginning when a martyr dies.

And so, Dr.

Orr, Charlie was a free speech absolutist, and one of the themes of his trip to the UK was about this issue of free speech.

We've heard that in the UK, 30 arrests are made a day for people criticizing immigration, basically.

Just this sea of humanity.

And, you know, we have a ton of immigration into this country, which is one of, you know, my pet projects is to limit that.

But we also have a country that's much larger, and it sort of can absorb the visceral feel or the visual feel of it can absorb it a little bit differently than the UK, which is, remind me, what are you, 60, 80 million?

I can't remember.

So if you have a couple million migrants come into the UK, I mean, it's instantly very visible.

It's very,

it impacts the daily life of a lot of Britons really quickly.

Tell us about the state of free speech in your country.

Did this 100,000 person march push back against that?

Was that a theme of it?

Explain.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Well, of course, to go back to your earlier conversation, we don't have anything like the sort of

jurisprudence that's built up around the First Amendment

over the last 100, 150 years.

But I think up until

the end of the last century, there was no sense that

there were free speech problems

in Britain.

It's really been the last 25 years, I think, intensifying in the last 10 to 15.

And I don't think there's any real doubt that it is connected to the rapid

demographic change at scale that we've witnessed in the last 25 years, but particularly in the last five to ten years.

And what happens there, I think, is that there's sort of a sense of a kind of high trust society, a moral community that is, you know, basically shares the same universe of norms and standards of

speech.

That kind of gets fragmented and

silos begin to open up and there's really just a dialogue of the deaf between

you know different blocks within different demographic blocks.

And so there that sort of that sense of being a you know in a shared enterprise is starting to kind of unravel.

And what happens there is that the state increasingly has to police these fragile boundaries between these different these different silos.

And that's what we've seen in the last 10 to 15 years.

We've seen it under a Labour government, the left-wing government.

We've seen it under the Conservative government.

The last Conservative government brought in something called an Orwellian phrase, non-crime hate incidents, where police can record your name, whether they accept that no crime has been committed, that you're exercising lawful free speech, but they make a note of it.

It goes on your record until recently, I think.

That was on your record forever.

So it's just this database.

The state, the Leviathan is just collecting this.

That's right.

The police, you know, they are policing tweets, not streets.

And

it is getting worse.

Can Nigel fix this as Prime Minister?

Well, I think one of the central focuses, one of the kind of guiding, one of the north stars of the reform sort of philosophy and policy agenda is without question free speech.

So there's a lot of debates, I think, internally as to what that's going to look like.

Isn't that just, I mean, isn't that just politics?

I want fewer immigrants in my country.

Yeah, so look, you're not going to get,

well, you may well get a knock on the door if you say that in the wrong way online.

I mean, it wouldn't, it wouldn't surprise me.

But yes, I think that there's, you know, there's this thing about this, this sort of dominant left-wing orthodoxy has become this sort of, you know, the, become

the moral universe.

Yeah, it's like a puritanical, like, yeah, a purity.

Exactly right.

So that any dissent, you know, as I said earlier, any wrong think is evil thing.

You know, it's something that

is, you know, you've got to demonize.

So it's this old point that we've made it many.

It's, you know, on the left, the idea is that you're not just wrong, you're morally wrong.

And on the right, you know,

maybe it's not always the case, but I think generally speaking, on the right, we do just think that the left are honestly and sincerely mistaken.

And we don't, there isn't the same rhetoric, widespread rhetoric of demonizing and

a kind of name-calling that, okay, maybe it's not direct causal incitement, maybe it doesn't meet the Brandenburg standard, but it's certainly, I think, shifting the conditions.

It's laying down the enabling conditions for violence.

If you call somebody public figure, Hitler, fascist often enough, then it shouldn't be surprising that crazy people

will do violence against them.

It's one of the most frustrating things where we've had the left has certainly pushed in the last couple weeks to try to argue, actually, like there's more right-wing violence than left.

And one, it's false, and we'll get into that in the rest of the show.

But I'm just, I'm looking at these tweets.

Matt Iglesias, that like fat guy from Vox,

he was like, people remind themselves of things he said a while ago.

I'll read this one quick and we can go back into it.

But he said, it was when Tucker Carlson got harassed at his home in like 2017 or 2018.

People were trying to like kick in his door, basically, and like terrorizing his house.

And he was saying, I'll read the full tweets later.

But he he was basically saying, this is a good thing.

Like you should do this to right-wing people.

And now he's going to come out and be like, oh, I oppose violence against the right.

Well, no, you just are trying to read the winds, Matt.

Dehumanization.

Otherization.

Yeah, I mean, it it it is this theme where and and this is why I keep harping on this Kimmel apology.

It is not contrition unless you take full accountability.

And I remember Tucker actually said this once to me, because you just brought up Tucker.

Tucker said that he was taught at a very early age that

your apology must be earnest and very, very contrite.

And he said he's practiced this discipline his whole life.

When he's sorry, he's like really sorry and he'll look you in your eyes and he'll say, I'm so, so sorry.

I'm so sorry for what I've done.

And there is something powerful that I think that unleashes in the human spirit.

And what that also does is

it confers the humanity of the person that you've wronged.

It says, you are worthy of me swallowing this and owning it and being humble to it because you are worth it.

And when you refuse to do that, you're essentially communicating, you're not worth it.

I don't believe in your inherent value.

And, you know,

so what?

I'm going to just move on because I can.

Yeah.

Yeah,

absolutely right.

And I think,

yeah, we have lost that sense of,

you know, moral sincerity, the importance of contrition, and apologies just so quickly just become, you know,

defensive statements.

You know.

I have a question for you.

It's a bit of a...

You handle it as you must.

You are treading.

I know you sort of have your hand in many pies right now.

So can the West be saved without Christianity?

Well, the West is built out of Christianity, not only Christianity, but Christianity is the life force that fuses the Hellenic and the Hebraic engine rooms of Western civilization.

And also harnesses the sort of power of Roman civilization.

And so, you know, to ask, can the West survive without Christianity is to say, well, you know,

the West just is.

That is its DNA.

And all of our moral reflexes,

even our atheism, even our moral indignation against the wrongs of institutional religion is driven by a Christian impulse.

The reason we know what bad is is because we've been told what good is, right?

And yes, there is sort of a natural law, I think, baked into all of us, right?

But we are, as a civilization, increasingly unable to get very obvious moral truths, a unanimity around them.

Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered and assassinated.

We didn't have unanimity that that was a bad thing.

And that is terrifying.

Men are not women.

That is a basic human truth.

Lived experience teaches us this.

We can't get unanimity on that.

Now, I think we're probably like 90-10 on that at this point.

But

can we remember the straight line, as Charlie would say, versus the crooked line without a moral judge over all of us, something that we all ascribe to, because that was what built the West.

You're talking about the engine room.

This is from which all of our values flow.

All of

our morals, our laws, our politics have historically all flowed from a center point that, and his name is Jesus.

And so, I'm like, Anglicans, you know, I don't, don't even get me started on Anglican.

I think you said in your quote, you're hanging on by your knuckles or something, by your fingernails.

You're still an Anglican man.

You're still a good Brit.

But

my hope is that this galvanizing moment, even in the UK and throughout Europe, is going to restore this sense of moral-centeredness.

And that's what Charlie would want.

And you saw that outpouring at the memorial.

It was almost like revival means that it's, yes, it's new converts, but it's also old.

converts or cultural Christians that are saying, I want to get more into this.

I want to embrace these ideas.

I hope we see that in the UK.

And there are signs.

There are signs.

I mean, I saw just about a month ago, I talked about it with Charlie, some data that suggested in Britain,

18 to 35-year-olds, you're seeing a tripling of belief in God over the last five years.

You're seeing massive spikes in Bible sales.

Now, it's

from a low base.

Yes,

and religious adherence and revival is notoriously difficult to capture.

But something I think is stirring.

Yes.

There was a tweet the other day where I think

it was Michael Tracy, who's done some stuff we like, but he was reacting to the rally where he's like, they're saying there's a spiritual revival, but how do you measure a spiritual revival?

Well, here's what I would say, is that

Christians are called to be salt and light.

We are the preservers of society.

We preserve the truth.

And I don't think we need to have

all of us, or the whole culture, buy-in, to preserve the food, the good, the nourishment for society.

So something to keep in mind.

And is your official professorial title?

They're always so long.

Yeah, so we've actually switched to the American system now.

We used to have nice old kind of Dickensian names like junior lecturer, senior lecturer, reader.

The reader was baffling.

If you were basically one-off from a professor, you were a reader.

Which

well, in the end, Oxford and then Cambridge decided that this was just too confusing.

Like a reader, when you're one-off, you know, just one-off a professor, it makes it sound like you just sit in the library and that's all you do.

So I'm an associate professor.

I'm not a professor, so I'm one-off,

one-off full professor.

And what is my title?

Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion.

And so Philosophy of Religion is my area, but

that covers a very

wide range of different topics.

There's a lot of moral philosophy, what we've been talking about just now, political philosophy, philosophical theology.

In fact,

one of the reasons I was always

coming over to Arizona was to record, to film a series for Peterson Academy, one on philosophy of religion, one on philosophy of mind,

consciousness, AI, the soul, and those kinds of questions.

And I'm doing the third one is an introduction to Aristotle from logic to life.

Wow.

So quick plug there.

And yeah, no, Chai was so hungry for all of that, wanted to know,

just wouldn't stop

asking me for things,

lecture notes.

And

I hope I sort of did him proud with my responses.

And you could just see how seriously he was taking the tour as it was coming up.

In fact, I think he said we were putting plans in place for me to go with him to the University of Missouri, I think, on the 20th of

one of these.

It was on the 29th of September.

And he said, you know, that's going to be the tough one.

You know,

that's where it's risky.

He said, that's the one that's going to be the most dangerous.

I said, well, I hope you got a lot of good security.

He said, yeah, it's all sorted.

Don't worry about it.

By the way, can I make a point of that just in defense of our security team?

People need to understand that they do not not have jurisdiction on the rooftops or the surrounding area.

Their only jurisdiction on a campus is Charlie's physical proximity.

And they were coordinating with local PD and campus PD to make sure all of those venues.

But ultimately, we don't have counter snipers.

We don't have the secret service.

Right.

Well, exactly.

But in many campus PDs do not have drone programs, which is a big problem.

I'm actually working on that because it's something they should all have.

It should be mandated by some sort of law.

And so, anyways, I just, in quick defense of the security, they're only allowed to protect his immediate vicinity.

They have to rely on PD to secure the larger perimeter.

So, anyways, that's one thing.

Anyways,

our team, I said salt and light, and they just like, they're like, here's Charlie talking about salt and light, so why not?

It's either 168 or 103.

Play the clip.

Jesus called us to be salt and light.

What do salt and light have in common?

They change the environments they come in contact with.

They don't conform.

They don't affirm.

They transform what they come in contact with.

My question for you: are you transforming the environment you come in contact with?

Your place of work.

Are you transforming your family?

Are you trying to lift people up?

Are you trying to reject evil?

It says in the Psalms, Psalm 97, 10.

What do you want to be caught doing upon Jesus' return?

Do not allow eschatology to be an excuse for you not to fight evil.

Do not allow the signs of the times for you to be paralyzed, static, to not not engage in the culture.

We must challenge people to be greater, to reach higher, to be biblical, to be Christ-like.

And I'm telling you, this generation cannot just be the most conservative generation, but the most Christian generation, as we continue to be salt and light in every single walk of our life.

Oh, amen.

Extraordinary.

I mean, just going, I find it difficult to look at old footage.

And, you know, I've tried to just screen it all out because it

makes me too emotional.

But

he had this extraordinary gift to talk about faith in a way that was just so accessible.

It just grounded everything he said,

all of the politics, all of the sort of neuralgic issues in this kind of non-negotiable

moral foundation.

And there was just such authenticity and sincerity there.

And it's something that the right

really needs to remember, that you've got to be anchored in clear moral foundations.

And I think, you know, without faith and without that sort of, you know, without that framing that Charlie was always so insistent on, it it unravels, it unravels.

And we get towards a sort of you know, Nietzschean nihilism or

actual racism.

And it's just amazing to just to be reminded of what he was like in full flight.

And I've never seen him using notes, never seen him reading from a speech, but just extraordinary fluency and extraordinary sort of, I think, just

raw rhetorical flair for someone that young.

The story of how Charlie was discovered is, I think, very telling.

And actually, something that Ben Shapiro, because he had come in on the Tuesday after it happened, and he said, you know, Charlie wasn't charismatic at the beginning.

And Ben said wonderful things about Charlie.

Please don't take this the wrong way.

But it's actually a bit of the opposite of that, is he was gifted from God.

without any training with this rhetorical flair.

And the story was that Bill Montgomery was at some sort of tea party rally, and Charlie was 18, and he was going to be one of the speakers because he had, I think, gains a little bit of local

notoriety

for organizing.

So they invited him to be one of the speakers.

18 years old, and the story that was conveyed to me is everybody's asleep.

Actually, Bill told me this story, actually, many years ago.

He said, everybody's kind of asleep and dazed and bored.

And then all of a sudden, Charlie took the stage.

And Bill said it it was like he looked at everybody in the audience.

All of a sudden, Charlie starts speaking, and everybody goes,

head up, ears perk up, because Charlie just had this way of his words would pierce,

like they would pierce your mind and your heart.

And I think this is, he was, his moral clarity was so strong that

he was sort of like a dividing line.

Like his words were a sword, and they were sharp and they would cut through and it would force you to pick a side.

He didn't leave you any ground to sort of remain in the mushy middle.

He would say things so, and he took a lot of flack for that.

He took a lot of heat, took a lot of slings and arrows because he was so morally clear, and he would say it with such force that you had to sort of

wake up and perk up out of your seat.

I actually forgot that Bill told me.

That was the first time I ever met Bill Montgomery, and may he rest in peace.

He died in 2020.

But, you know,

that was Charlie from the start.

It's easy to think, you know, obviously after 2016 on both sides of the Atlantic, you know, there was, you know, many, many more people are coming through.

And the sort of the new media emerged.

You know,

you know, started to see a lot of incredible conservative voices coming through.

But Charlie, at 18, this is, we're talking the Obama years.

This is the early 2010s when it was extremely costly and very rare for people of any age to be coming out.

That, you know, to have that kind of trenchant, clear moral horizon and that clarity it's just just remarkable and it must have been you know

contra mundum in 2012 and I can't you know I wasn't tracking American politics that closely back then but you know I would have thought within the GOP that would have been very unusual

and he was he I don't know what sustained I don't know what it is where he got it from you know God

it was straight from God I mean that God had a plan from Charlie's for his whole life but that 18 to 31 charisma like that's difficult to

so much into it.

And you saw it up close in those last trips, but his schedule was truly to manage that schedule that he kept, especially at our conferences.

It was booked from 6 a.m.

to the time he put his head down on the pillow.

It was truly remarkable how much he disciplined it took.

And I want to say, you talk about his fluency, and this is something that Blake and I talked about.

I actually had a line in my speech at his memoir, and I cut it just for time.

But this show was

how he got battle ready.

And everybody kind of reflects how Charlie leveled up over the years.

And I do think it was the show because every day he was forced to come on the show and defend his values or his political takes or how he was reflecting on the current news of the day.

And it just gave him repetitions, repetitions, repetitions.

And originally the show was a three-hour show.

So he was doing a three-hour show.

We didn't move to a two-hour show until January of this year, which was really wonderful for his schedule because he could get more done.

But

it did really make him battle ready.

And some of the arguments we'd have before the show, I mean,

that was really special moments.

Right, Blake?

Yeah.

It's just, I mean,

it was your line, the battle ready was your line.

So I was trying to give you credit for it.

It was a good line.

But let's talk about both sidesism.

Yes, let's do that.

Are both sides equally guilty of political violence?

So this is, we've seen this a ton in the past, well, since this happened.

So this came out.

It was obviously the most spectacular, the most damaging assassination in the U.S.

since RFK, probably,

50 years ago.

And actually almost 60 years ago now.

And so it's been,

and so people are like, well, this fits into, you know, and it came right after, you know, there was this apparently racially motivated stabbing on that bus in Charlotte.

And people are saying, okay, there's a lot of left-wing violence out there.

And so these experts trotted out with some charts charts that were in The Economist or in Cato or whatever, where they're like, actually, actually, left-wing violence isn't common.

It's right-wing violence that's way more common.

I even heard them mentioning J6.

JSX, they have DHS.

DHS was made that a huge priority under Biden.

They always like to make it a priority because

that's who works at a lot of DHS, who was doing a lot of that work at DHS or at the FBI.

Remember when they were investigating pro-life, like Catholic churches, because this was going to be this terrorist nexus.

And so finally, people are saying, you know what?

Let's actually look at the numbers.

What is the real deal with these numbers?

Because they're just getting pushed.

And so one of these studies that went really popular, it was literally just compiled by an Antifa person.

An Antifa person made a study of what was more common, left or right-wing.

And if you dig into the numbers, there is so much...

lying about it.

So I'm looking at this thread by Tim Carney, where he just looked at some of the numbers in

what they were using for this database.

So for example,

a suicidal suicidal young man made a hit list that included Trump on it.

He then later killed two strangers who were both white.

This was counted as right-wing political violence, according to an ADL study, because the shooter had a swastika on his gun.

There was a felon in New Hampshire, Jesse James Sullivan, in 2024.

He murdered his half-brother, who was white.

But they counted it as a right-wing political violence because he had joined a white prison gang while he was in prison.

By the way,

what happens in prison?

You have to find somebody that will protect you.

There's someone someone I found where someone sent anti-gay, like made a harassment call to George Santos and said that he had hurt the gay community with what he did.

And that was like right-wing, anti-government threats.

All right.

Well, keep going, Blake.

Yeah, this George Santos.

So this guy...

Calls him and makes a threat to him because George Santos made fools of the gay community.

So that must be gay activists left a threatening voicemail for George Santos and said he felt he had taken under anti-gay acts, and that was right-wing government-focused violence.

And then another one was a homeless man broke into a hotel and attacked someone and used a racial slur.

It was later put in a mental institution.

Oh, that's right-wing, racially motivated violence.

And so, this happens over and over.

And there's even a chart that was in,

I think this was in The Economist or somewhere, but it shows that over time and how they allegedly, there's all this right-wing violence that peaks in 2018, 2019, and then it goes down in 2020.

And that's how you always know all this stuff is BS.

Whenever they put out these studies, they don't count what was clearly the biggest outburst of politically motivated violence in our lifetimes, which is in 2020, George Floyd died.

We had gigantic riots in Minneapolis where they burned down a police station.

We had gigantic violence in,

sorry, one moment there.

We had gigantic violence in Minneapolis.

We had gigantic violence in D.C.

And that was literally.

They're counting this all as right-wing.

I think they're just not even counting it.

They're just like, oh, that's something else.

This is mostly, it's mostly peaceful protests.

Or they'll say, someone has to be convicted and life hack.

Don't convict people.

Which one?

This is the prosecution project?

So the prosecution project, this is one that was getting shared a lot.

That was supposedly tracking what violence occurs.

And what they'll often do, so for example, in this chart, they say resulting in a guilty verdict.

So if they have...

clearly hundreds or thousands of people going around smashing windows, doing graffiti everywhere, terrorizing the public, But, oh, nobody was convicted of this.

This is a great point.

This is a great point because nobody was convicted of anything.

As a matter of fact, the cities ended up settling with many of the

money.

Giving them money or

St.

Louis, a mob tear, like brays and terrorizes that family.

Was that the McCloskeys?

Yeah, the McCloskeys.

The McCloskeys.

The McCloskeys bring out empty guns to have these people not storm their house and attack them.

And I bet that's probably counted as nothing, or it's going to be counted as right-wing violence.

Sure.

You know, anti-anti-protester, anti-racial justice.

And it's just a total sham.

They besieged a courthouse in Portland for...

Oh, that was another one.

One of the data sets that was getting shared around.

It did not count a member of Antifa taking a gun, shooting a Trump supporter in the head in a murder.

And they didn't count that as left-wing political violence.

Probably because he wasn't convicted, because he was killed by the police before he actually.

Well, and this is why it's such a salient point you're making, is because

we saw in the aftermath of what happened to Charlie, we didn't riot, we didn't burn down buildings, we didn't.

It is inside.

We need to learn the talking points.

We did not loot businesses.

We prayed.

And like everyone knows this.

Nobody actually

was

prepping their stores or anything.

Nobody was doing excess preparations like, oh, we have to be ready.

You know, after Charlie Kirk.

No one was worried about the Charlie Kirk riots.

Nobody was even worried about that.

We might have worried about other violence happening, but nobody was worried, oh, all of those conservatives who like Charlie Kirk are going to go and burn down

Salt Lake City, burn down Phoenix.

No one was worried about that.

We do worry about that all the time with Antifa, with BLM, with causes that are on the left.

This is what the reality is.

And we are just

BS about this.

You can trade statistics and studies all you like, but the true character of a political movement comes out in moments of crisis and of tragedy.

And I'm sorry, but the contrast is as clear as day between what happened in May, the aftermath of the Floyd killing in May 2020,

and Charlie's death.

I mean,

what you were saying earlier, Andrew, just not a single arrest.

You know, 100,000 people in that stadium.

And I, you know, we were all there.

It was just so peaceful.

There was nothing.

There was almost 300,000 people in and around the stadium.

Right.

Yeah.

And so I think the floor is yours, my friend.

Like,

end this hour as you see fit.

And, I mean, maybe it's remembering Charlie.

Maybe it's what you hope to see come from this.

And

whatever it is, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Andrea.

The check's in the post later.

That's so good of you to say.

And

it's so strange to meet not just Charlie, but you and his team.

And just a few months ago.

And yet, you know, felt like just, you know,

lifelong friendships were emerging.

And we just had these great plans.

And

I learnt far more from Charlie than I think he learnt from me because, you know, I think I was joking earlier, I spent months trying to get him to call me James, but it was always Dr.

All, that incredible kind of

humility.

It's ironic that he's known to be sort of anti-college and all this stuff, but yet when he met a true scholar,

how much reverence he actually had.

And that came across, I thought, in Larry Arn's beautiful tribute to him in the stadium.

And I've never seen Larry

deeply kind of moved like that.

He's always very good at keeping it together, but it was just such an extraordinary testimony.

I think he mentioned at one point that

he said to Charlie, you've got to learn and it's going to take suffering.

It's a great bit of wisdom from Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Pathemata, Mathemata.

You have sufferings, learnings.

And that idea of Larry just instills that in

his cohorts at Hillsdale.

And then just Charlie goes off and does all 31 Hillsdale courses available, then you know comes back comes back for more and

just extraordinary and I think you know it's hard to hard you know hard to replace somebody with that that kind of package of powers and skills and abilities and aptitudes and you can't replace him no but but I felt on Sunday you know something had shifted and that although he could not be replaced there was there's something

something stirring

something that is something that is that is peaceful something that

is kind of recovering

the ancient vision for the West

of hope, of faith, of love,

the great trinity of theological virtues.

And

it was just extraordinary to witness that.

And there's a kind of envy.

I remember that last show we did that was aired as his last show.

We recorded it back in August.

And I think I opened it by saying, I don't normally like watching things I do, but I wanted to watch that because I wanted to be reminded of him and of our time together.

And I think I just started by saying, look, you know,

young people are always saying, we want to change the world.

And I tend to think that the world would be a much better place if fewer young people were trying to change it.

But in Charlie's case, I said, you know, you really are changing the world.

You are really

shifting things

in extraordinary ways.

And I think I said at one point,

we need to bottle some Kirk juice and

bring it back to the mother country.

But

I think there's going to be

a lot of kirk juice in Britain now.

It's been better than bottled.

It's been unleashed.

That's right.

That's right.

There's a torrent of it

all over the West now.

And what a role model he will be.

What an exemplar he will be

in death

to so many, many who'd never really come across him before.

It's true, as I said, in Britain, he's being discovered for the first time by millions of people.

And France, I've heard similar stories about France and Italy and even Spain.

Especially among the young.

I haven't lost count of the number of people saying, like, I've never heard of this guy, but

my children are talking about it.

My children are incredibly upset.

And

it's just

an extraordinary legacy.

I count it just such a high honor to have got to know him in the last few months of his life.

And

we must honor him in the months and years ahead, honor his legacy.

You and he shared a mission to save the West.

And

we must do that.

We must.

It's worth saving.

It's beautiful.

And that was his passion.

It's just been an honor to have you here, Dr.

Orr.

James, I don't know.

Well,

Dr.

Orr,

we'll see you tomorrow.

Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you, Blake.