One important element of Christian culture and Christian heritage is the idea of loving your enemies. It goes all the way back to the Gospels, and there was a now famous moment at Charlie’s memorial where Erica, one of the leaders of the movement that he worked, that he built up, got up and talked about forgiveness and forgiving Charlie’s killer, forgiving your enemies, loving your enemies. And then the president of the United States, also a friend of Charlie’s, a man on whose behalf Charlie did so much work, got up and said, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, I hate them, I hate my enemies. And I feel like that duality is very obviously on display in conservative politics, where you have a conservatism and a populism that is informed by Christianity in a lot of ways, but at the same time, you got to fight your enemies. You can’t give them an inch. Would you agree — and you could disagree — that conservative politics, going forward through the end of Trump and after, could use a little more of the Erica Kirk spirit? And if you agree, how do you do that? Well, if you’re asking, do I endorse a little bit more Erica Kirk’s spirit, of course I do. Good, OK, I thought that would be an easy lift. So now, but what does that mean when you’re not just preaching the Gospel and talking about Jesus’ love, but when you are doing politics with your fellow citizens who you end up having really good reasons to, or feel like you have really good reasons to, treat as an enemy? Yeah, I mean, I would say, I think there’s a tendency in the modern media landscape, especially when you’re talking about legacy media — and immigration’s a good example of this — where they’ll major, they’ll turn the volume all the way up for what I call a sob story of somebody that’s in the country illegally getting deported, and they will turn the volume all the way down on the sob story, which is actually a real tragedy of a family that lost somebody to fentanyl or that was trafficked or that was hit by a drunk driver that shouldn’t have been in the country. My counter to that is that loving my neighbor and loving my community means that I want to — sometimes I’m going to be forced to do the hard thing on immigration, or I’m going to be forced to do the hard thing on law-and-order issues, because actually, that’s what love looks like. It’s basically saying, I love you enough that you’re — I’m not going to let you drink the toilet water, America.
