On Hacker News and Charlie Kirk

  Thank you, everybody. Please take a seat. Thank you. What a great turnout tonight—welcome to the fall, everybody.

  This is excellent. We have a very special guest tonight, so I’m not going to spend too much time introducing. But first, I just want to say it is so encouraging and heartwarming to see this event grow and grow and grow. We’ve taken this all across the country. We’ve done this in Virginia, we’ve done Freedom Night in America in Albuquerque. We now have an amazing community of local pastors that we meet with before these events, where we are growing the movement to talk about the church taking a stand for biblical values, taking a stand against tyranny.

  I have a couple of verses I want to share, but I’m going to just get right to the thing that’s on my heart. And I think we can all agree—and Luke, I hope I’m not talking out of turn—if they try to lock us down again, we are not going to comply with the government. We’re not going to do the masks, we’re not going to shut down the churches, we are not going to comply. Period.

  Okay, I got that off my chest. Am I good to say that, Luke? Say it again: Dream City Church will not comply. If they try to shut down this church—right. And if this is not your church home, then this probably should become your church home, because how many churches in the valley would say that boldly and clearly? I love the Barnetts. You guys are led so well here.

  So there’s this movement. I’ve been doing this for 11 years, speaking on college campuses. I’ve given over 2,000 speeches in the last 11 years—literally in every corner of the country. About five or six years ago, you started to see this movement that at first seemed on the fringe. It wasn’t anything necessarily new. 

  Many of you remember growing up, this idea of men cross-dressing—I used to call it transvestite. It was kind of on the fringes; it wasn’t really something we talked about a lot. But as Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, things happen gradually and then suddenly. It’s like we woke up in a different country.

  One of the themes that we talk about here a lot is that you are living through a cultural revolution—the same that Mao did in China—where they’re trying to actually re-found the country. They look at themselves as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Jay, and George Washington. They’re trying to re-found the country into something new, something weird, something not ordinary, something different. And it’s hard to always notice that when you’re living through it, right? Sometimes you don’t notice it because it’s so confusing. I’m sure some of you sometimes look at your TV and say: what country am I living in?

 Not— I mean, 600 years in federal prison for a former president—all of that. But the one issue I think that is so against our senses, so against the natural law, and dare I say, a throbbing middle finger to God, is the transgender thing happening in America right now. [Applause]

  Some of you—and I was guilty of this for years—I used to believe in this “live and let live” thing. I had strong beliefs of what God’s design was, but I said, hey, if it’s not bothering me, then I’m not going to talk much about it. And I’m sure some of you probably said something similar. But it was never about that. It was not about “live and let live.” It was: live and let us rule.

  What first went from, “Well, we have to tolerate, okay.” Then, “You must accept, okay.” Then, “You must celebrate” I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that. And then, “You must participate.” And if you can’t participate, your kids must participate.

  This used to be just kind of on the fringes. And those of us that do this for a living, we started to speak out more and more—especially three or four years ago. But I was told by the people in charge: “Oh, this is not—it’s just a little thing here, a little thing there.” And then, next thing you know, a story that shocked the world—those of us that pay attention—was all of a sudden when we saw a biological man win an NCAA championship in female athletics and swimming.

  The people that told us this was on the fringes, this was isolated—you see an institution destroyed in front of our very eyes. The very same people, by the way, that always are lecturing us about the “war on women,” #MeToo, were perfectly fine with a deranged, neurotic man becoming an NCAA champion.

  But it didn’t stop there. We started to see this in schools and curriculum, pronoun usage. And I do not exaggerate to say this is now the new state-run religion of the United States federal government. Where they have two LGBTQ “alphabet mafia” flags at the White House. Where they have trans people taking off their clothes—not an exaggeration—on the White House lawn. Where the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, comes out and says that biological men can give birth and lactate if they take the right drugs. In fact, the Biden regime says they’re “birthing people,” they are not women.

  In fact, if you ever want to just see somebody short-circuit, we have to thank the legendary Matt Walsh—who I will get here one night, I will get that done, we will. I will. And I’m not one to cheaply give out comments, but he’s done hero’s work. He’s really special. Where he just asked the simple question that just breaks the matrix of the trans lobby: “What is a woman?”

  Well, tonight we have a woman speaking to us. And it’s actually the first woman ever at Freedom Night in America. That’s not intentional—it just so happened this way. This young lady had a national championship robbed from her. She’s been lied about. She has been held hostage by left-wing activists at Turning Point USA campus events. And she’s now one of the most important cultural warriors and figures on the landscape right now, arguing for really simple stuff—stuff that people would have rolled their eyes at ten years ago and said, “Okay, why are you saying this, it’s normal.” Now, it’s considered radical.

  We are in a church, and so it’s important to remember Deuteronomy 22:5: A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God. You hear that, William Thomas? You’re an abomination to God.

  So, God created in His own image—in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. Distinctions keep us free. Men and women are not the same, and that’s a beautiful thing. Tonight, we have one of the most powerful young women in America, fighting the transgender mafia.

  Join me in welcoming Riley Gaines, everybody.