A Phone Call from Charlie Kirk

in a dark room as it were. There are no lights. This kind of sort of Socratic ignorance that we all have and we look for something that's fixed and immovable. And in Khan's philosophical mind, that meant immediate sense perception, science, things that you can touch as soon as you open your All right, everybody. Well, welcome back to the Files. I am um both honored and sad today to be bringing you this special on the person and work of Charlie Kirk. As uh many of you know, I ran I started the Files about a year ago. So, this is kind of our oneyear anniversary show. And um it was right before I started teaching for Turning Point USA.

And right after I started teaching, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, taken from us way too early. And um this is my attempt to honor his legacy, his person, his work. And so I'm really looking forward to bringing this episode to you. How am I structuring this? Well, I had a phone conversation with Charlie Kirk and I have been brainstorming and thinking through what I can remember about that conversation. And um that's what I'm bringing to you here is some recollections about that conversation. And at the end of that conversation, we had made plans to talk again later that night.

That never happened. Life got busy and talk a little bit about that. Then once I started teaching and leading for Turning Point, um he was supposed to visit the classroom that I was teaching in and uh that was going to happen in October and I started in early September uh with that leadership position and obviously that never happened either.

So this is my recollections regarding my conversation with Charlie Kirk particularly as it pertains to his interest in the philosophy of Emanuel Kant and then I'm going to look at some of his work through the years and show its contean connections and kind of reminisce about what I might have said to him what I would have said to him if we had that sitdown that he had hoped for and I had hoped for as well regarding the philosophy of Emanuel Khan. All right. Well, the context of this is the late fall of 2023. I'd already been doing itinerant work, uh, helping to craft some ideas for Turning Point and I was teaching at Trinity International University, but it was a college that was failing and we could do a whole podcast on why Trinity International University failed.

I hope to do something on that in the future. It is a case study in contemporary American academic life and universities which have have been falling uh away disappearing for a couple of years now and uh I think at least from Charlie's perspective and I think the one that I was increasingly embracing was that Trinity was waffling. It was waffling in how it applied the gospel to some of the big issues that culture was facing and the inability of evangelicals in general, but particularly at Trinity to rally around a response to the times made us irrelevant in some ways. And we were dying. It wasn't just that.

There were a variety of other factors that were involved for Trinity, but that was one of the factors. I'd given 25 years of my career to Trinity, to the ivory towers, and those ivory towers, at least for me and for lots of other people like me, were beginning to tumble down. That's when in the fall of 2023, I honestly I can't remember the exact month. Let's say November. I really don't know for sure. The phone rings and on the other side of the phone call was Charlie Kirk. It's the only in-depth conversation I ever had with Charlie Kirk, but I remember it well. And I'd like to give you a little bit of a synopsis of of of that phone call.

What strikes me now about it, the phone call, a full season into the Firestone Files, was just how much of the seeds of of many of my episodes I was able to convey to him in those 30 minutes that we uh that we talked together on the phone. Um, so in this podcast, I'm going to be telling you about how that went. uh some of our planning for follow-up conversations and then show you how it played out in Charlie's own words to university students and I'll reminisce along the way about how I would have framed this for him with my background in philosophy in general and in the philosophy of Emanuel Kant in particular.

I remember his first question to me. He said, "Uh, Dr. Firestone, how is it I was I was looking over your portfolio. You have more publications than the president of Harvard University. How is it that you end up on the doorsteps of Turning Point USA?" And um I uh I said I've been asking myself the same question, Charlie. Um but my answer really boiled down to um his witness. I had gotten to know him through a friend of mine, Huds Herzburg, for the last few years.

And when I first kind of bumped into Huts and started talking about the work of Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk, I was I didn't even know who Charlie Kirk was, even though if you've watched some of my other podcasts, he'd been to my house before. I I hadn't even realized that. Um and um and so, you know, it was a it was a progressive revelation about who this fellow was. And as I got to know him sort of vicariously through huts, I started to look at some of his work.

And what struck me about this guy, this is before the phone call, was that he was embodying much of what I would have hoped some of the graduates of Trinity International University would be embodying. He was defending the gospel in the public spaces, culture, the university, politics and doing so effectively. That is reaching a very important generation because that generation is increasingly being trained up and indoctrinated into foreign ideas at least foreign to good western thought and uh foreign to the Bible and foreign to our f founding documents. And so Charlie was really effective at reaching that precise group that I'd been working 25 years with.

You know, I was not an apologist. I was in the ivory towers. Charlie was um was not trained. He wasn't in the ivory towers. In fact, he he said, "Look, college is a scam the way it's currently. The value proposition is not working." So we talked a little bit about that together. And I guess I was ripe and ready to hear the message of Charlie Kirk at the time because my own university was failing. I was seeing in real time what he was talking about theoretically. I was living out practically.

And so um we had a chance to talk. Now when when he started asking me about my publication record particularly in the philosophy of Emanuel Khan that's not a conversation I'm unfamiliar with um I have been dealing in the evangelical world in particular Christian world u for quite some time trying to show evangelicals that Kant is not a foe of Christianity he's a friend of Christianity now not the kind of friend that comes alongside you in every detail of your worldview. No, he he's a friend in so far as he's a theist. He thinks that Christianity was on to the way philosophy ought to culminate its intellectual pursuits.

And um I've been working for 25 years in in the ivory towers of Khan studies to try to show that there's an affirmative reading of Kant that um was a lot more fruitful, a lot more friendly and a lot more empowering to Christians that we've been taught. Now, Charlie was a little bit of a skeptic on that and rightfully so because there are other elements or what you might call receptions um consequences of K's philosophy that are part of the problem in the universities today and in culture today.

And there is a sense in which God's responsible for that because he doesn't tell us what he truly believes. What he does is is he does what I call pure philosophy. And in doing pure philosophy, his philosophy becomes ultimately quite amanable to an interface with the Christian faith. That is not always the way he's been received. He has been um utilized especially by the uh 19th century philosophers what I call the left-wing Hegelians to create malicious philosophies. Encon's partially responsible for opening that door of possibility. He even recognized it in his own life.

Um in the in in in toward the end of his life there were some of these what German idealists who were like the fountain head of people like Foyerbach and Marx and Nichze. they were already coming out in the university uh utilizing Khan's philosophy saying we are the apex or the culmination or the continuation of the true Emanuel Khan and Khan was thoroughly upset with this development. In fact, one of his students was a guy named Gotlib Victa and he wrote an open letter to Gotlib Victa. Open open letter meaning it was written in public like published as an open letter to Fictus saying his philosophy and his inclination philosophical inclinations or continuations of Khan's philosophy are unrecognizable to him and they're non-critical.

And we're going to talk a little bit about why that's the case as we go along here. And so I've been spending the last 25 years trying to write that story that Kant would have rolled over in his grave if he would have seen the way in which philosophers of the 19th century particularly in Germany but not exclusively there took his philosophy created philosophical worldviews and when I teach on this material I typically point out well Schopenhau of course gives way to Nichze and Nietze uh is a contemporary of Karl Marx and and there's another philosopher in there called uh uh Ludwig Foyerbach. All of these um philosophers attribute themselves in one way or another to Emanuel Kant.

That is there sort of this is the ultimate outcome of Kant's philosophy. And I've been spending 25 years uh of my career saying that was a illegitimate use of Kant and Kant himself recognized it even before he died that uh these these sorts of trajectories are non-starters. Well, and I've been positing a different way of conceiving of the whole of Kant's philosophy and it in its fullness in its unfolding in its development. I'll be doing a series of podcasts around the holidays this year making that case and trying to teach people what an affirmative uh and an insightful and a useful Emanuel K actually looks like.

So that's coming uh later on this year. But for now, I'm just zeroing in on my conversation with Charlie Kirk. Um we talked about that uh you know this sort of a preliminary conversation about my publication record and he seemed to be satisfied with my motivations in this regard and I also had the chance to sort of shared the university experience that I had had. Uh I also was able to talk about the northshore of Chicago which by the way is where he and I are both from.

I spent 25 years teaching about five miles from his high school and I've had of a number of students who I've had that have come out of that area and have made a huge difference for what you might call conservative Christian theologically affirmative philosophical thought. And so um there we have some deep affinities there. I was able to share some of that with him. And then he sort of asked me about my interest in teaching for Turning Point USA. And uh I told him that um I thought we could consider a year 13 or a finishing school that was parallel to a college experience but really focused in on the things that are foundational to a you know American biblical citizen.

And he just ate that up immediately and he said, "Are you talking about the lysm?" And that really surprised me. And it surprised me because lysum is an a word from Aristotle. Aristotle posited a lysum that is a kind of university concept, but it wasn't for formal credentiing. Rather, it was outside of that. It was for formation of minds rather than any kind of credential. And Charlie seemed to really like love that idea, the lysm idea. He he he had thought of a more philosophically sophisticated word for it than I had. And that was I I think uh a place where we've immediately felt a kind of kindredness, a kindred spirit between us.

Um I think the other thing about the lysum concept that he had in his mind that we were kind of sharing together was that this had a rigorous intellectual component to it but it also had a translation to the public component to it. And so what good is your ivory tower learning if it doesn't permeate society? It doesn't permeate your culture. It doesn't make a difference to people's lives.

And that was the lysum as well because in the morning in the lysum they would do deep intellectual inquiry and then in the evenings they'd have public lectures and they would you know have parties and and and opportunities for people to dialogue about the ideas that were emerging from uh the studies that were going on earlier in the day. So that was another I think part of this thing that went into our our kind of common or kindred interest in this year 13 idea. Uh the other part of it was that it had a kind of political component to it. Anybody knows Aristotle's philosophy knows that he's a political scientist.

that is he studied all of the constitutions and all of the manifestations of government that he could get his hands on in the sort of uh mediterranean area the Aian Sea and so forth he would he would get all that material and he would sort of boil it down and so when we study Aristotle's philosophy oftent times we go to the political science because it is remarkably clear and contemporary in the typology that he works out in his in his writings on this matter.

And that's another area I think uh Charlie and I were both sort of interested in was how do how do we take the intellectual promise um of the all of these deep ivory tower ideas, translate them into culture and to make a difference in our politics. Of course, both of us are 21st century Americans, but we're both interested in how the great synthesis of the Bible and the western intellectual tradition established the civics that we have in uh America or that we should have in America today. uh those are the founding features of the university in the United States and yet they have been systematically downplayed in some cases eradicated or even negatively uh uh displayed and taught within our universities.

That is not only is it unacceptable, it's just not good philosophy. It's just not good thinking. We have a uh constitutional republic that's 250 years old. It's like broke. It's like Bob Beaman breaking the long jump record. Like that thing was like a record for 50 years. Well, this is 250 years. We just uh celebrated that this year.

Um Charlie didn't have a chance to uh to see those celebrations, but you know, he would have had a good time reminding us of the great biblical and western philosophical synthesis that made the founding documents possible. And so I've talked about that in other podcasts. Feel free to look at that. The 250th celebration, I talk about the Declaration of Independence and the uh Constitution, Bill of Rights, and so forth. All of that is um really thanks to Charlie's work because he he gave me the confidence to take my philosophical musings as it were and consolidate them into civics into things that matter to everyday life.

And by by God's grace, we have quite a gift here in this country, a constitutional republic, a a democracy that has lasted for so long and continues to be the best country in the world. And so, um, we we in that conversation were able to talk, uh, briefly about some of that. Now, when he pressed me a little bit regarding um you know, what are some of the philosophical you know uh I I I guess points of light or pegs in the wall or uh pillars that matter to me. Uh I I immediately pivoted to some things I had been seeing in his own work that I totally agreed with that that were sort of undergirling my own philosophical position.

So I mentioned to him about his concept of the Bible being the owner's manual. I told him that's exactly um that's exactly sort of parallel to a concept that that Emanuel Kaj used. and I talked with him about uh this essay Khan wrote called what is orientation in thinking and in that essay Khan focuses on the fact that we wake up in a dark room as it were there are no lights this kind of sort of Socratic ignorance that we all have and we look for something that's fixed and immovable and in Khan's philosophical mind that meant immediate sense perception science, things that you can touch as soon as you open your eyes.

The fact that I'm being appeared to by a desk, uh, some lights, a camera, those are things I know to be true because they they confront me immediately. It's got and and Khan says in that essay, once you have that point of orientation, you can map out the whole room. And for Kant that meant mapping out morality, aesthetics, religion. And he even went into political philosophy and history and archaeology and astronomy.

And he went into other areas. But he was only he talked about in this essay uh what is orientation or uh what does it mean to orient oneself in thinking about the need for this point of orientation. And I said, when I hear you talk about the Bible, Charlie, as an owner's manual, I see that as a fixed point, that is the revelation of God.

And it's, you know, and and as he defends the Bible in some of his public speak uh speaking, you know, to university students, he doesn't defend it as though it were some kind of uh golden tablet that was uh given to us and then disappears somewhere or a still small voice in some cave that is written down in kind of a a dictation format. Now, this is written by dozens and dozens of authors over thousands of years, and they're all telling a common story.

God is revealing his plan, his nature, his plan of salvation to the human race through the people of Israel, through the the prophets, through the apostles, through the writers, all of whom, you know, and when you look at the gospels, and we're going to see some of this when we when we turn to Charlie's own words a little later on, they are not prefabricated.

you know, sort of pristine documents. They are coming at us from perspectives of individuals in in whom God in and through God God is working. And so Charlie saw the Bible as an extraordinary gift to us today because it's made it through 2,000 years of critical review. It's been opened to public scrutiny for its entire existence. This, by the way, is very different than other holy books which are often times insulated, protected, and uh looked at as being untouchable. The Bible's very touchable. It's almost like you can touch Jesus's side and feel the area where the spear went in as he did with Thomas or his hands and feet.

The Bible's very much the same way. The word of God is accessible to us. We can read it. We can study it. We can look at the archaeology surrounding it. We can test its wisdom. And for Charlie, it was self-evidently true. It you just lived a better life if you lived biblically. And that was the sort of point of orientation. And so he really he he loved that sort of first strike that I had of connecting his thought, this owner's manual concept with this point of orientation concept that we find in Emanuel K. Another point that Charlie oftentimes made was that there's no neutral vantage point.

Everybody is standing somewhere and everybody has certain commitments that are guiding their outlook on life. He say this often times at the microphone when he's dealing with students. This goes way back virtually to the church fathers um that everybody is in a position one way or another of faith seeking understanding. Everybody is committed to some authority to some set of concepts to some person to some perspective and it's from that faith commitment that you get your understanding of the world at least in part. Now, of course, you have your own faculties.

You have your own journey in life that that that uh sort of informs your worldview, but just as importantly or perhaps more importantly is how you understand the meaningfulness uh of these experiences that you have through the eyes of faith. And faith-seeking understanding goes back to Aquinas, goes back to Amsel, really goes back to Augustine and the early church fathers. This is a biblical position.

You can't please God without faith, without trust in him. That's what he wants from us. He wants faith that yields formation, that yields growth, that that grows us into Christlikkeness. Charlie understood that there's no neutral vantage point. Everybody is coming to the microphone with a philosophical worldview of some kind. And Charlie was all over this no neutral vantage point. I had been I'd written essays on this. You can find these essays in the published literature on faith-seeking understanding about why no neutral vantage point doesn't make any sense. Um and uh we had an immediate affinity in that area and I I I had a chance to talk with him about that.

The other one uh another point that we had in common I was able to share this with him was that no one is a finished product. And what do I mean by that? Um, everybody either is learning or should be learning. In in in the in the uh academic worlds, in the Christian academic world, we talked about being a lifelong learner. Recognizing that your perspective is limited, your understanding is therefore u truncated and and and and and limited as well.

And uh we can we all need to start by recognizing our ignorance. Now this is something that Socrates made his calling card marching around Athens teaching or questioning the wise and teaching them indirectly through Socratic questioning that they don't know as much as they think they know. And I can't think of anybody better of all the apologists I've seen through the years than Charlie Kirk at taking young, you know, uh, university students and saying, "Let's break down this facade of knowledge that you think you have." And let's begin by recognizing that you are an unfinished product, that there are things you still need to learn.

And the great books, the Bible, many of them in the Western Intellectual Tradition, many of them gifted to us by our forefathers here in the United States, are worthy of your deep consideration and commitment and that's a starting point for a good university education. And so, you know, Jordan Peterson makes a lot out of this as well that uh that, you know, we are unfinished pro uh uh uh products and we need to um get our own house in order. He talks about before you start talking about other people's houses. And so whenever he encounters sort of dissension uh with uh young people or really anybody really he wants to know how how orderly is your house?

Why are you you know sort of licensed as it were to be critical of let's say the American government or the way in which um our laws work themselves out or um American policy in one thing or another. what makes you in authority and you can't even keep your own house in order. And so that was Jordan Peterson of course and I think Socrates and Peter but but Charlie took it, you know, one step one step further on than either one of those guys. He lived it. He went out there and talked with young people and in so doing he was able to show them that they don't know quite as much as they think they know.

And uh I think that was an ingenious piece of what Charlie did with his um with his public speaking. Now um so we talked about this notion of no one being a finished product. I think the last thing that I and it dawned on me. I was thinking about this conversation over the last several months thinking about how to best honor Charlie with this episode. And um there was a there was a episode that I talked about the human superpowers and those of you who've been watching the Firestone Files will know that the superpowers we have four superpowers. We have the ability to experience the world through the five senses.

I call that the empirical superpower, sense perception. We have the moral superpower. We have the aesthetic superpower. Then we have the religious superpower. And that language I actually first used to my recollection. I was trying to think if I ever used it in class before that conversation with Charlie, but I don't think that I did. I think in preparation for that phone call, I thought through this concept of the human superpowers and I had been quickened in my thinking about that because of Charlie Kirk's um his apologetics, his strategy when he's talking to young people because I remember one and I and I was able to relate this to him in that phone conversation where he talked about um beauty and aesthetics.

and how the beautiful testifies to this world being more meaningful pointing to God that there's something beyond just the immediate and I excuse me I mentioned in that phone call that um that I had the same insight with regards to one of my favorite composers uh uh Mozart his he's got this piece called in a kind of no music and um I was uh I said you can't listen to that without having an experience of transcendence that there's more to this world than meets the eye and it was at that point and I call this I call this a superpower our ability to see the beauty and purposiveness of the world and experience it as far as we know dogs and cats they don't care how beautiful a place is they're pragmatists of the highest order but not human beings. We do care and it does matter to our formation to our soul that we experience beauty that we have this ability to decompress to understand the world is more meaningful than the mundane. And uh Charlie understood that and he utilized it in his apologetics with college students.

And um I liken that in that phone conversation to realism. Charlie's a realist. And by that I mean he believes the world is real. He believes that morality is real, that the good is real. That aesthetics and beauty is something we can experience and is real and it matters. And the purposiveness that we feel whenever we experience something that's beautiful, that's real. And of course our experience of God is real. Now it may be varied. There are different tastes. There are different experiences of God. But all of these are uni basically universal. And they're human superpowers that make us fully articulated human beings. And they point to something that isn't just a, you know, a figment of our imaginations or something.

They point to the real. And so when I talked about those superpowers that we have, I remember Charlie saying, "Well, now you're speaking my language." And that was super cool because I felt like a kindredness was developing in that phone call as we shared our common intellectual interests and commitments and that was super cool. Well, it ended um that phone call ended with him um affirming with me. He said, "Chris, I'm sold.

I love this project. You know that this thing will stand or fall with your commitment to it." And I promised Charlie in that phone call, I said, "Charlie, I am committed to it. I have been committed my whole career to intelle to the intellectual life, the life of the mind, sharing that with college students and empowering them to be change agents for Christ in the world. That's been the mantra of my entire career. And he said, "Yeah, that's awesome." Because he said something like, "I don't micromanage. And I really need if this thing is going to succeed, I need somebody to be an intellectual driver who who will, his words were something like who will obsess over it day and night.

And I said, "Yeah, I totally agree with you." Anyway, um we ended with him saying, "Look, I've got to go." He he was heading to the hospital for some uh personal reasons at the time and he said, "Look, I want your phone number and I want to call you back tonight to discuss these things further." I said, "That's great because I would love to pick your brain about how to articulate and fully u uh uh develop this program we've been talking about." And so he said, "Sure, I'm going to call you back." Well, I understood he was dealing with some personal issues, and it didn't surprise me with a guy that busy that he didn't call me back that night. But we did ultimately put on the schedule a visit that he was supposed to make um a year later where we would have a chance to talk and he would visit the classroom that I was teaching in. And unfortunately that um that visit never um never came to pass.

So where do we go from here? Well, um, Charlie spent his life taking questions from students. Once, just once, uh, he asked his questions of me. And so, he probed me on this stuff. And I really laid a foundation that would give give me the opportunity to make my case at some later time. And as I mentioned here, we never had a chance to finish that. And that's what I plan to do right now is to finish the conversation that I've just articulated with you um and how I would have sort of laid this out for Charlie had I had the opportunity. Now this is not in a vacuum.

I have been doing podcasts now for an entire year and they all started in September around September 1st of um of uh 2025 and it was not long after that that Charlie was taken from us. And so they immediately pivoted from all of these podcasts that I had done in the summer of 2025 to four special episodes on the person and work of Charlie Kirk in honor of him because he was taken from us on September 10th of 2025. So, let me briefly recap what ground I've already covered on Charlie that I think it'll be helpful context as we begin to make our transition to his actual arguments and my contean sort of framing a response to those arguments.

Uh so on the night of September 10th, I was like many people around the country and indeed around the world distraught. I couldn't believe that Charlie Kirk had been taken from us. It was a deep personal loss because I was still looking forward to talking with him and helping him to leverage his immense intellectual giftedness, speaking giftedness to be even more effective. I mean, my goodness did this guy have promise. And to be honest, I was absolutely confident, I remain confident that he would have been our president here in the United States probably about 12 years from now. And um I was, you know, I was utterly confident that this fellow was worth investing time in and intellectual uh energy in.

And so when he was taken from us, I was totally I was totally uh beaten down in the in that particular podcast. I say that he was taken from us a few days ago. That's because I was going to publish it a few days later, but it was actually the very night of his assassination that I did that first podcast, a tribute to Charlie Kirk. And um I was griefstricken. I was able to uh I was able to share um a lot about Charlie that I had come to know and appreciate.

I recommend that you go back and watch it. It was actually the fourth episode that I published. So my entire podcast kind of shifted focus because of this event that um that we all experienced. Uh Charlie Kirk had been an answer to prayer and then he was taken from us. And uh I was just trying to reflect in that episode about how how tragic it was that someone so gifted who we'd been praying for, who I'd been praying for, um could be so gruesomely and terribly taken from us. And um he reminded me of the disciples in some ways these uneducated. No, he had a high school education.

He's a 21st century person. He was self-educated up to here. He had discipline to read books at a regular basis to train himself to put himself in the context of people who knew what they were talking about. So you know when I say untrained I mean I really mean uncredentialed. Uncredential. He didn't have the standard university credentials, but he had the training. He had the experience. He had the sort of interaction, but he's like the disciples that he he was being he was being trained by Christ. He was being trained by the conditions on the ground in in real time, the fishermen who Christ called uh to follow him.

and that the foolish things of this world would shame the uh the wise ones of this world. And uh reminded me of Socrates who went to the wise people of this world and showed that this guy who just answer questions really is the wisest of all of them, you know. And so, um, I reflected on that in that first September 10th episode, but then I felt like one episode wasn't enough. So, we ended up doing four total episodes on Charlie the entire month. I wasn't planning on that. I was teaching full-time and and leading full-time, and I in a sense, I didn't have time for it.

But you make time when something this important happens. And that's become an aspect of the Firestone Files that I've tried to embrace over this first year is that when there's world events or there's something that's going on that's worthy of our attention, then the Firestone Files will break for whatever it's doing and it will jump in and uh address those things. And that was certainly the Charlie Kirk event. So in the second uh episode I talked about s Charlie Kirk and Socrates and I really tried to make the case that Charlie Kirk was the contemporary Socrates that you might call the Christian Socrates.

You see, Socrates led with, you know, this alentious concept, this this asking questions, seeking to to get people to stake a thesis and to give a rationale for that thesis and then through a Q&A process show that it's not as strong as they think it is and that it still has a lot of refinement to work work itself out with. And so Charlie was just a genius at this. He had people come to the microphone and they would stake a claim and they'd give reasons. Sometimes they'd ask him questions. He'd make a case, but usually he would get them to sort of stake where a claim where they stand and and and ask their reasons for it.

He start probing around it and showing them, wow, that is self-referentially inconsistent or there's issues with what you think. Um, that's the Socratic side of Socrates. Now, he was a Christian Socrates because he came with a fervent and firm belief that Jesus Christ was the truth, was the way, was the life. And so, um, he was Socrates, you know, on steroids. He was Socrates with a position, with something to share, with a positive argument. And that made him an imposing figure because he could undo your position with questions and he could posit his own.

And from that vantage point things look a lot clearer and therefore he would be persuasive in public. And so we tried to talk about this this uh the method that Charlie Kirk used in light of Socrates. Now both of them have been charged by the wise ones with corrupting the youth. Charlie was going, you know, it's well known that Socrates was put on trial in the apology and one of the charges was corrupting the youth, making the worse appear the better cause using the Socratic method. Uh and uh and Charlie did very much the same thing. He went to the college students. He didn't go to any when he went to Cambridge, when he went to Oxford, he went to college students.

And if you ever watch any of the videos where he's in the UK, you get these pretentious college students who think they know all sorts of stuff. And here's this uneducated guy with no college degree who walks in, who does this, by the way, who walks into Oxford and Cambridge and takes questions, prefabricated, pre-articulated, uh, pre-defended questions that they're reading off of sheets of paper and he reacts to them in real time. That is absolutely extraordinary. Let me let me tell you, I've dealt I I was the head or the moderator of the Trinity debates for 20 years. Nobody does this. You always come in prepared. You always come in with an argument, a position to defend. The positions collide and then you have open rational discourse. And this is what a debate is. Charlie walks in to these college campuses. No notes.

students come up with their cell phones, with their ideas, with their arguments. And when he went to Oxford and Cambridge, you can tell in those videos, these students came with their knives and guns drawn, intellectually speaking. And Charlie just addressed them head on. I mean, as a philosopher who's done this for a long time, and I've worked with many apologists from William Lane Craig to Paul Copan to uh Gary Hobber Moss to to uh John Warwick Montgomery, all of these great apologists and they're all fabulous in their own way. Charlie was cut out of a cloth that was perhaps even one step greater. he would walk in unprepared and make a humongous difference.

That is not to downplay these other fellows. I mean, I greatly respect and admire these apologists who are able to make these academic arguments um and make them stick, but uh man, Charlie did it in real time with real people and uh it was an extraordinary thing to watch. That's Socrates. That's the Christian Socrates. And so I have an episode talking about uh Charlie Kirk and Socrates. Um the third episode was Charlie Kirk the apologist. And in that episode I interviewed Scott Polander of uh Turning Point USA.

and I had interviewed him 6 months earlier or something like that before my sort of formal position leading you know in teaching for Turning Point USA and well before Charlie's assassination but I had this stuff in the can uh from a class I had taught on Charlie Kirk the apologist and so I showed this interview with Scott Polander and um on on Charlie Kirk, the apologist.

And really the takeaways for those I'm going to be talking a little bit more about those in a moment, but the takeaways from those center on objective moral truth, which he has in common with a number of apologists in uh in currently working actually from Bill Craig and and Paul Copan, Ravi Zacharias was somebody who talked a lot about this. Um uh so objective moral values exist. Scripture is self attesting testimony that there's something about scripture that is just right. Sort of like primmaaccia, right? Like soon as you start reading and looking at it, you apply it to your lives, it is immediately evident to us that there's truth here that human beings need to know, need to embrace, need to embody.

and then uh the resurrection as a kind of historical hinge. Uh Gary Hobbermas has done a lot of work in this area, but he's not alone. William Lane Craig and others have the same thing. Charlie utilized all of these things. I would call Charlie's approach a cumulative case argument, but it wasn't just a pastiche or a collage of arguments. It had a logical structure to it. people can identify with moral objectivity because even the person who comes to the microphone who is enraged by one of Charlie's positions, they're enraged because they believe they're morally right and that morals are objective. If they don't believe that, why do they care?

Um, and so Charlie was a genius at at at bringing these apologetic arguments into the public sphere, public sector, and from that vantage point being able to uh to persuade minds and hearts towards the truths. And so, you know, he would utilize arguments from the apologist, but in a uniquely dialogical and um what you might say um popularizing way. He could he understood how questions and how the camera worked and how the microphone worked and he really used rhetoric to wrap it all up.

So, moral objectivity and uh scripture and um and and the resurrection and really arguments for the existence of God and all of these sorts of things that he would bring together with a rhetorical style that was convincing to all the onlookers. May not be convincing to the person who came to the microphone. They came resolute in their position. Sometimes it was, but more often than not as a third party observer, we're like, "Dang, I think he's right. He's got something in his position here that really matters that we need to consider um carefully." So, what I purport to do here is to kind of share with you those some of those arguments and look at them with a Kantean lens and discuss with you how I think Kant might have helped refine and inform Charlie's vision in such a way that it would even it would be effective beyond words.

The last u episode that I did was on the Charlie Kirk memorial. Now, those of you who remember the it was about a week after the assassination that uh that the that in Phoenix they had the Charlie Kirk Memorial. And of course, it was kind of like a uh a visual, a a how do I put it? A an event that I felt like I had to be there. the memorial. This is a moment in time where we had an emotional watershed on the person and work of Charlie Kirk.

Charlie had touched something in all of us that we knew was true that was vitally important if we're going to save Western civilization and stop the tide of the insanity that we had all just experienced through COVID and everything else that's been going on. If you're like me, you were like just blindsided by all the sort of philosophical mumbo jumbo and and and and the nonsense that has emerged since CO and it's infected. It's like a it's like a virus that's been infecting not just the physical body like CO did, but the mind and the heart of American citizens. And Charlie was just a genius at that.

This memorial was a watershed moment of people coming together in Phoenix, Arizona to remember Charlie Kirk who had helped us to remember um all of these truths in these vital positions that uh the university had long forgotten at this point and that he was doing his utmost to uh bring back into our, you know, our conversation and our and convictions here in the United States. So, that memorial was something I had to go to. I went there on my own dime. Um, and uh, a number of students that I had been teaching went there as well. You can watch all of that in the episode on the Charlie Kirk Memorial.

But I'll just remind you guys that there were 200,000 people outside, many of whom could not get in. and I kind of uh uh traverse and and talk about my journey of going from Fort Worth, Texas uh to Phoenix. I stayed with a the pastor um a fellow by the name of Tim Anderson who had um who had married my wife and I. He's retired or semi-retired down in Phoenix, Arizona. He was gracious enough to say I could stay at his house. And uh I did. And I went down there and uh made my journey with a few students, several students. Uh right to the memorial building and getting inside was uh no easy feat.

Uh we had to traverse the whole thing in a massive crowd and you can watch all of that in that video. But we finally made it inside and um several extraordinary observations you'll find in that video. and that was just how many people turned out. The excellence of Turning Point in putting together such a large and complex event on such short notice. I mean, that is just absolutely extraordinary what they're capable of doing. And um the the vibe there was spiritual, was deeply um a sense of holiness was over the place. songs were ringing. Charlie's image was everywhere in the memorial. And um I started out there in the uh in the blue section.

That's where we had seats on the floor, which was already extraordinary. And uh one of my students, Sam Reynolds, um and I made our way up into the uh to the uh uh red section and then into the white section where we were able to meet all sorts of extraordinary people. And uh you can again you can see that in that episode. That was a a great a great experience for us and really a sense of revival. And it's one that has still been spilling over the United States through the um you know Make Heaven Crowded tour that Turning Point Faith has been putting on and uh really it's reverberating throughout the world.

And so um you could see that with the the millions of people who hit the streets in celebration of Charlie's life uh after he was killed. That was just an extraordinary thing to watch. Charlie Kirk had lived an extraordinarily an extraordinary life and it was cut way too short and yet the reverberations of that short life will be with us for a very very long time. Um, I think the last thing I remember about that memorial was Erica Kirk coming out and uh, I knew in my heart what needed to happen.

I also in reflecting on my own life, I wasn't sure what I would do. Would I have the heart to forgive the killer of my spouse? I'm not sure I would. I don't know. I like to believe that I would. Um, have I been formed to such a degree where that would be possible for me? I'm not uh I'm not sure. But as I stood very close to the front the floor looking at the stage, Erica Kirk walked out and she did something well so extraordinary I can hardly even say it. she forgave the killer of her husband.

And uh I just uh I just stood amazed and I thank God that that kind of salt and light could come out of his people in the face of such a tragedy. And so thank you Erica for that. Anyway, we left and I came back and I taught and I ended up back here at Champion Christian College and starting the honors program here. And the whole honors program I had set up with those same points of orientation that Charlie Kirk and I had talked about on that phone call. You see, I'd already mentioned the Bible as being the owner's manual and the point of orientation for the soul. What I didn't mention was the Western intellectual tradition, the great books of the past, the Greco Roman books, the early Christian books, the Middle Ages, uh the great Christian synthesis. All of these works that we have been gifted through the ages are points of orientation for the mind.

And so if the Bible is a point of orientation for the soul, then the western intellectual tradition is the point of orientation. The working out of the great Christian intellectual synthesis is a point of orientation for the mind. And then the American founding documents, point of orientation for the body, and by that I mean the body politic, the way we live our lives together, the commitments that we have to one another as American citizens rooted in that great set of documents, these founding documents that make the American nation possible. And so I talked with him about this lysum concept, this lysum curriculum based upon these four these three points of light.

The Bible, the western intellectual tradition and the founding documents and these directly parallel the anthropology that we share as Christians. I think that we are a complex composite of a soul, a mind and a body. And by the way, this parallels Khan's understanding of the basics of the university that emerge out of um the ancient western intellectual tradition.

He oftentimes talked he had his this essay that he wrote toward the end of his life called the conflict of the faculties and he talked about theology medicine and law and that's a direct parallel to the soul the the mind in the body the Bible the western intellectual tradition and the founding documents the other thing that Christian philosophers in this period you know and and Kant especially talked about were the three most important things that we need to have in our worldview. An understanding of God, an understanding of the human being, and an understanding of the world. Again, these are direct directly corresponding to the church through the culture to to our politics. This tripartite understanding of soul, mind, and body works itself out in the work of Emanuel Khan. But it's also found in Charlie Kirk's apologetic strategy. His intellectual approach had three points of orientation. The Bible, the owner's manual, the thing you look at when all else is failing you.

the western intellectual tradition which is really a a complex working out of the philosophy and theology and synthesis and then of course the culmination in the body politic that we find in the US Constitution the Declaration of Independence and the surrounding documents that are so important to that these orient should orient the American university. they should give rise to everything else that flows from that. Now, I know if you go to major universities today, they'll have 200, 300 plus majors. If you're a smaller Christian school, you might only have two or 30 or something in the, you know, these private schools f focus in particular areas, but the big universities, they have just tons of majors.

But often times in the development of those various majors, these universities lose sight of the fact that they are founded on these three great pillars. The Bible, the western intellectual tradition, and the founding documents. These things should never be taken out of our educational system. And uh I think Charlie understood that and so he focused on it. And when I shared those three things with him, he he basically he I remember him saying, "I'm sold. I'm sold." I mean, how many times have you seen Charlie Kirk when he's at a microphone and somebody's giving an argument, does he say, "I'm sold." I mean, I took that to be a badge of honor. Um, and one that we were going to talk about further down the road, but we never did.

So, for the remainder of this podcast, I don't know if we're going to break these into two podcasts or not, but I'm just going to keep going. But for the remainder of this one, we're going to be looking at Charlie Kirk's actual arguments with this tripartite lens of the Bible, the Western intellectual tradition, and the civics of the founding documents. And um and look at that with a view to finishing the conversation. I was hoping to have with Charlie Kurt. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life.

If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions. And remember, the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.

Turn it around.