REPLAY ｜ My 2019 Interview with Charlie Kirk
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
195.07048
Summary
In this episode, my good friend Charlie Kirk joins me to talk about what it looks like to be a conservative in the 21st century and why it's so important to have a conservative upbringing. We talk about how important it is to be raised with conservative values, and how we relate to younger generations that don't really know what conservatism is or why they should buy into it.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey guys, what is up? Happy Friday. Today I am talking to my good friend Charlie Kirk of
00:00:06.440
Turning Point USA. He just got a new podcast that you guys should go subscribe to. He of course
00:00:11.740
travels the country all the time talking about conservative values and we are going to talk about
00:00:18.260
conservatism and what it looks like for us to be kind of on the front lines of that,
00:00:25.200
especially him and how we relate to these younger generations that seem to not really know what
00:00:30.280
conservatism is or why they should buy into it and why that work is really important. Now I am going
00:00:36.780
to bring in my friend, Charlie Kirk. Charlie, thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, of course. Thank
00:00:43.100
you. Big fan of the, your podcast. So thanks for having me. Yeah. Uh, okay. Tell everyone, well,
00:00:49.000
I'm sure most people listening right now know exactly who you are and what you do, but tell
00:00:53.440
everyone a little bit about your background, Turning Point, how you started this whole thing
00:00:58.580
that is now a massive movement. Well, thank you. I mean, I, um, I started Turning Point USA when I was
00:01:04.080
18 years old. Um, I had no connections, no money and no idea what I was doing, but I had this kind
00:01:11.220
of crazy idea that, uh, young people could be, uh, conservative and that we needed to do more,
00:01:16.240
um, that our generation didn't have to kind of fall in this radical leftist direction. Um,
00:01:22.680
the great irony is I never went to college and, um, to start a college movement, which
00:01:27.940
is kind of in the fun kind of twisted and, um, yeah, it's just grown now to 1400 high school
00:01:33.980
and college campuses. Yeah. We have amazing team, tons of spirit, lots of energy and, um,
00:01:40.300
just like really on, honestly, just really blessed and super thankful and lucky to have been able
00:01:45.620
to have the success we've been able to have. So you were 18 when you started it. How old are
00:01:49.500
you now? I'm 25 now, 25. So it's been about seven years. Could you have imagined that it would grow
00:01:57.220
this much in really this quickly relative to how long it typically takes these kinds of
00:02:02.680
organizations to grow? No, I didn't even know things could grow to be this big, meaning I was
00:02:08.980
just so, um, naive. I didn't not naive. It's not the wrong word. I was just, I didn't know. Yeah.
00:02:14.720
I wasn't worldly. I didn't know how organizations worked or budgets or staff or employees, but
00:02:20.020
what's so beautiful about our country and what I'm fighting for is a kid with a dream can still
00:02:25.920
succeed. And that's, that's a uniquely American concept. It really is that you have a vision and
00:02:33.520
you're going to make mistakes. You're going to have to take a risk, but large in part, if you,
00:02:38.980
if you have this good idea and you work really, really hard, you can show progress over a couple
00:02:43.820
of years. And that's a beautiful thing about our country that, you know, we're, you and I are both
00:02:49.060
working to preserve and protect because not every country has that kind of guarantee where a young
00:02:54.040
person can take a risk and then succeed. Yeah. Were you raised conservative? Mostly. Yeah. I mean,
00:03:00.780
I was raised center, right? I was raised with really conservative values, but they never use the word
00:03:05.820
conservative. And that's like a real, I think a lot of people have this kind of upbringing where
00:03:09.680
my dad would always just talk about how great of a country America is. My mom raised me as a
00:03:16.340
Christian, but they'd vote Republican. Don't get me wrong. But it was, wasn't, it wasn't part of their,
00:03:21.960
our conversation. It wasn't like now here's why you have to be a conservative. It was just Charlie,
00:03:26.380
you need to realize how great of a country we live in. Yeah. And those are all naturally
00:03:30.320
conservative things now. Now, of course my parents, like many other people, I think have become more
00:03:36.480
involved in politics as our country has become more in jeopardy, honestly. Yeah. Um, and they're
00:03:41.780
much more likely to say that they're conservatives today than they were 10 years ago. Um, but I think,
00:03:47.960
I think if even for any parents listening to this or, you know, new parents, like, you know,
00:03:52.300
to soon be parents like yourself, just teach the values, just teach the ideas, forget about the
00:03:57.620
political labels, talk about American exceptionalism and faith and reverence and all these things.
00:04:01.620
Yeah. And that will make such a bigger difference in someone's upbringing than just like, Oh,
00:04:08.080
this side is good. And this side is bad. Yeah. Because the fact of the matter is these are
00:04:12.660
conservative, almost partisan values nowadays. It used to be that patriotism and thinking of these
00:04:18.600
things like America first and America is the greatest country in the world. A lot of people thought
00:04:23.920
that on both sides of the aisle, but now it seems like that's almost strictly a conservative idea.
00:04:29.080
And I really have, yeah, I really have the same story. My parents never really talked about
00:04:34.840
being a Republican. I knew that they were, I knew that we liked George W. Bush. I knew after 9-11,
00:04:39.920
we really revered him and, and all of this stuff, but they were entrepreneurs. They came from nothing.
00:04:45.720
They always told me you can do anything that you want to do. Kind of like what your parents told you,
00:04:49.640
it sounds like. And that just always appealed to me. It never made sense that you would want
00:04:55.040
bureaucrats controlling your life or that you would want a limit or a cap on your success.
00:05:00.200
And I think that's what I want to communicate to young people is that is a huge part of what
00:05:06.120
conservatism is. And young people do like freedom and flexibility and independence. So why do you think
00:05:12.900
there has been among so many people around our age? I'm a little older than you. Why do you think
00:05:18.140
that they can't connect the values of freedom and independence and flexibility, the things that
00:05:23.040
they really like with conservatism? Well, I think, first of all, there's a massive misinformation
00:05:30.120
campaign against conservatives starting for, you know, in the education system and media.
00:05:35.140
But Allie, I'm going to kind of just say a lot of students, I think they want to change the world.
00:05:41.080
I think they want to do what's right. A lot of students, I think most students do, at least the
00:05:44.800
ones in politics. And the ones on the left, they've been told the best way that they can change the
00:05:49.380
world is by giving government all this power and giving government all this authority over
00:05:53.580
everyone and, you know, other people's lives. And first of all, that's just not true. But it's also
00:05:58.420
just not logical when you think about it. And it's also not correct in the sense that if you,
00:06:04.700
the best way to improve anything is to first improve yourself, is to act more ethically, act more
00:06:09.620
honestly, do the correct things. I fall short of this. Everyone does, right? We as Christians
00:06:14.100
believe you're always going to fall short of it. But you also believe you can be a better person
00:06:18.120
over time. And if you do that, you'll actually make the world a better place. But it's so easy,
00:06:24.160
Allie. It's so easy to sell utopianism to a generation that doesn't know any different,
00:06:30.260
but also wants to change the world. And so I'm careful not to do this whole like,
00:06:34.840
oh, our generation is so stupid type thing. I don't think that does and does any good. Yeah,
00:06:39.760
I think these students are misinformed. But that's different. I think a lot of students mean well,
00:06:44.820
I think they really think they're on the right side of history, when they're arguing for socialism,
00:06:50.060
or they found some like new idea. Well, it's not you didn't find anything. Yeah. Not any sort of,
00:06:55.760
you know, you didn't discover plutonium. Okay. And, and, but if I can connect with them, I say,
00:07:01.380
listen, do you want to make the world a better place? Believe it or not, I actually want to make
00:07:05.520
the world a better place too. So they, they attack my emotives immediately. Right. I'm a horrible
00:07:09.980
person. I want polluting. I want billionaires running around with machine guns. Yeah. Engaged
00:07:15.180
communities. And they only go to private schools. And you know, like all these like ridiculous
00:07:19.440
stereotypes, right? They only, they fly, they fly private jets to work, right? Whatever. Right. Some
00:07:24.260
crazy thing. Yeah. Listen, I actually, the first thing that's most important to me
00:07:28.900
is the matrix of maximizing human freedom while also ensuring that our natural rights are protected
00:07:36.900
while also having some sort of compromise that the least of these are taken care of in some form
00:07:42.340
of equitable, charitable way, whether that be charity, churches, government finance. So that's
00:07:47.820
the first thing, right? But I want to be able to help people without having to sacrifice human freedom.
00:07:53.060
Yeah. That's a really, that conversation is one that Republicans and Democrats used to be able to
00:07:57.720
have while both respecting the country. Yeah. Now I feel as if you can't have a conversation about
00:08:03.180
healthcare until it, unless it descends into, oh, this is a horrible country. Like with Bernie Sanders.
00:08:08.300
Yeah. How dare we not have this as a country or a horrible place? Well, hold on. You can have this
00:08:13.620
conversation logically and ethically without having to say that this whole place has been a mistake.
00:08:18.380
Have we made mistakes? Yes. Is America a mistake? No. And so anyway, Ellie, to put it long and short,
00:08:24.760
students, they're, they're the prime audience for utopian values because they want to believe in
00:08:31.100
them. They really do. And what, I mean, you're 19, you have very little responsibility. You want to
00:08:36.560
lean in. You want to say, yes, we can change the world. Yes. Start with yourself, but it's not that
00:08:43.420
simple. Yeah. And it's not necessarily the government's job to do that. I think that there
00:08:47.880
is, like you said, not just a desire to change the world and utopianism for themselves, but to give
00:08:53.520
millennials the benefit of the doubt. I mean, a lot of times we are, and younger generation,
00:08:58.200
I guess generation Z is in college now. We're often talked about as selfish, self-centered,
00:09:02.400
self-absorbed. And I do think that's true in a, in a large way. We've all been raised with personal
00:09:07.760
technology. Every price position that we have starts with the letter I. We are all kind of focused on
00:09:14.740
ourselves and how we present ourselves on the internet. But I also think that a characteristic
00:09:18.680
of young people is empathy, that they truly do care about people that are different than them.
00:09:23.360
They don't want people to be ostracized. They want people to be taken care of. And so
00:09:27.580
they hear these grand ideas from someone like Bernie Sanders. So like, you know, the very blanket
00:09:32.500
statement, well, I believe that everyone should have enough, everyone working 40 hours a week should
00:09:38.680
have enough dignity to live or to have enough to live on. You hear that and you're like, well,
00:09:44.120
I don't want to argue with that. Like, I don't want to say that someone who works at McDonald's
00:09:49.680
doesn't have enough dignity, but like you said, that's a bad faith argument. And so what I'm
00:09:54.940
hearing is that when you approach these students, you try to kind of go in and say, here's what we
00:10:00.000
agree on. Like, here's the baseline, whether you believe it or not. We both want people to be
00:10:05.340
taken care of in a way. We both want people to succeed in a way. We both want to make the world a
00:10:11.720
better place. But look, we just have different strategies to get there. So let's have a
00:10:15.660
conversation about what's better. Do you think that that has been effective or have you received
00:10:21.280
a bunch of pushback or both? Yeah. I mean, it's definitely become, it's becoming very effective
00:10:27.400
and I never attack students' motives or anything like that. I am critical of some Democrat leaders'
00:10:34.020
motives because I don't think they actually want people to get off of food stamps. That's different,
00:10:39.120
right? But when I talk to students, I'm like, listen, what, what, what, no matter if you're
00:10:43.680
a Republican or Democrat, Marxist or libertarian, you should think it's a good thing. In fact,
00:10:49.440
you should think it's a great thing that 5 million people are no longer on food stamps
00:10:53.860
and they're now getting jobs. That's a huge success. Like right now, let's just talk about
00:10:58.500
that success story of the Trump presidency. Because under Obama, there is nothing but food stamp
00:11:03.900
increase. It almost never went down. All of a sudden under Trump, 5 million people no longer have
00:11:08.120
to look to government. They can now provide for themselves and their family without government.
00:11:12.620
Amazing thing. Why do I talk about that? This is self-reliance. There's more dignity in that,
00:11:18.520
right? So we're talking about the dignity of work, right? Like Bernie Sanders. I want everyone to have
00:11:22.080
dignity. Well, of course I do. I mean, yes, of course I want dignity. Like, I mean, is the insinuation
00:11:28.360
I don't or something? It's like, are you trying to use it as like a wedge issue? It's kind of saying
00:11:32.720
like, I want everyone to live forever. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love that. I mean, you know what I'm
00:11:37.500
saying? So they use these things as if they position them as if the opposition doesn't want
00:11:41.880
dignity, right? Like, okay. But you know what my idea of dignity is, is maximizing the worker's
00:11:47.920
freedom, maximizing their capacity to get a raise, to keep all their money, to be able to provide for
00:11:54.140
their family. So that's dignity to me is the sovereignty of the individual. And it's hot. By the way,
00:12:00.660
this is, this, what's really interesting is you cannot have both liberty. You cannot have
00:12:07.640
both liberty and assuredness. You can't. So let's use this extreme example, right? And Bernie Sanders
00:12:13.860
loves talking about prisoners to vote. It's like one of the stupidest things. And I could break that
00:12:18.060
down to you if you want. It's so beyond, it's, and I could, it's so silly, but so in the most extreme
00:12:25.000
example, if you want to just be taken care of, isn't that's what prison is, right? You think about it
00:12:30.460
and a really extreme example, get three meals a day. You're, you have a house, you have a place to
00:12:36.020
sleep, you have a shower, but there's no freedom, right? There's really no freedom because people
00:12:41.000
want to get out, right? So that's the extreme example. I'm not saying that's what the left
00:12:44.940
wants. Media matters. If you're watching this, that's not what I'm saying. But I will say the
00:12:49.860
other extreme example is liberty. You can do whatever you want to do, however you want to do it. But what
00:12:53.920
does liberty take? It takes responsibility. Why do the people, why are people in prison? Because they
00:12:59.380
didn't take responsibility. They made a mistake, right? So, you know, Bernie and all these people
00:13:05.120
were the freedom people were all this. Well, you could say that, but you also have to tell the
00:13:10.160
audience, and this is, this is like being brutally true in politics and no one wants to be brutally
00:13:14.520
true in politics. I'm going to give you freedom. I'm going to give you liberty. But if you screw up,
00:13:19.140
you got to take, you got to take responsibility for yourself. Yeah. And everyone's going to kind of
00:13:23.580
clap like, wait a second, I have to do what? Yeah. I have to wake up earlier. Yeah. You see
00:13:29.460
what I'm saying? But here's the thing is, and this is why we as conservatives are always going to be
00:13:34.160
punching up Allie. Always. This is why talk radio is so successful. This is why your podcast works,
00:13:38.540
because it takes effort to explain conservative values. Yeah. They are natural. They are embedded,
00:13:45.200
but it takes maturity. It takes work because it's so much easier to sell everything with no
00:13:51.400
responsibility. Yeah. I, by the way, I wish my job was to go to college campuses and say free
00:13:56.740
education, student loan debt, climate change, renewal. My job would be so easy. I'd be done in
00:14:01.320
10 minutes. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And so anyway, I'm the long and short of it is this takes
00:14:06.820
explanation. It takes theory. It takes observation, takes maturity, but it also demonstrates we're on
00:14:13.560
the right side of history to use Ben Shapiro quote, who we love or to use the right side of the argument.
00:14:20.400
Yeah. And I don't think that's talked about. I don't know. Yeah. I always say that it's so much
00:14:25.680
easier to be a progressive millennial or a progressive Gen Z-er than it is to be a conservative
00:14:29.980
millennial. Not because like you said, the ideas are complicated. They are very natural and I think
00:14:34.720
embedded in the human spirit, but because they are being indoctrinated by every megaphone that's out
00:14:42.940
there, by their professors, by social media, by the mainstream media, by all of these outlets.
00:14:49.500
And so we are swimming upstream. We are like the voices in the wilderness saying, hang on just
00:14:54.560
one second. Hang on a second. I have something to say to that. And if anyone wants to listen to me,
00:14:59.660
great. But we have to kind of put our voices out there knowing that we're going to be criticized and
00:15:04.220
lambasted by the mainstream and hope that there are some people out there who are thinking, wait,
00:15:10.420
I'm listening to this progressive stuff too. And I'm not so sure that it's right.
00:15:15.180
Like I'm not, I'm not so sure that I'm on board with, you know, with abortion. I'm not so sure
00:15:20.780
that I'm on board with socialism. And so they start listening to people like you, like Candace,
00:15:24.660
like me, like Ben. And they say, okay, someone please make sense of this for me and give me
00:15:29.340
another alternative. And they hear it. And the hope is anyway, that they're like, oh, okay. Okay.
00:15:35.180
That makes more sense now. But you're right in that it is difficult because what you're presenting
00:15:41.440
to them is not a guarantee. You're presenting to them risk. And you know, it's, it's difficult.
00:15:47.100
It's just like selling any kind of investment. It's like, okay, there's a huge, there's a risk in
00:15:51.620
this. There's a big risk in this, but the reward is so much greater than collectivism. So much greater
00:15:58.360
and convincing someone of that without any kind of guarantee is difficult.
00:16:02.740
And so here's a couple of thought exercises. You're totally right, Ellie. It's difficult and
00:16:07.420
it takes effort and it takes a mature society. And so what I tell people is for any benefit that
00:16:12.900
you want to receive from the government, be ready to be ready to pay for the equivalent of it at any
00:16:18.320
time. Right. So, okay. I want free education. Okay. What does that cost? Uh, I don't know. It's
00:16:23.540
free. No, it's not. Whatever it is. $21,000 a year. Be ready to write that check because you might have
00:16:28.380
to. Well, no, that's not how it works. No, sure. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Don't try to make
00:16:32.720
other people pay for what you think is a good idea. By the way, most times you will end up paying for
00:16:36.840
it. That's actually, the data shows that is that the, the people that advocate for these free
00:16:41.380
handouts actually end up paying for it. Right. They actually end up, you know, they, they end up
00:16:46.400
having to carry that burden. And you said it, you said it best is there is risk in this, but there's
00:16:51.460
also fulfillment. And this is what really upsets me is that these students are like, well, I just want
00:16:56.700
to live a happy life and get taken care of. And they don't say it that, you know, flippantly some
00:17:01.760
do. Yeah. You know, like, well, hold on a second. You just, your idea of happiness is just getting a
00:17:06.960
bunch of stuff from the government. Yeah. Like I'm sure you had like dreams, right? I mean,
00:17:10.660
you must do want to do something in your life. You might want to start a business, start a family
00:17:14.960
travel. I say you maximize freedom to the greatest extent you can without encroaching on other people's
00:17:22.280
rights. Right. And still protecting the least of these in a very compromised, you know, in a, in a,
00:17:27.140
in a position that we can come to a consensus with, right. Through where it's a safety net,
00:17:31.200
not a hammock, right. Not anarchist people, whatever gets crazy idea, but maximizing freedom,
00:17:38.240
right. Then at that moment, you will have a more functioning, productive, healthy society.
00:17:45.800
And this is hard. It's just, it's just not easy because as soon as there's some sort of,
00:17:50.780
some form of just not dysfunction, but you have some form of irregularity, people immediately say,
00:17:57.840
oh, the government should fix that. Yeah. You know, government should do this. The government
00:18:01.180
should come in and have, you know, free education or bail out the banks. And it's so tempting to turn
00:18:06.960
to government to try to fix all these problems. When in reality, government is actually the root
00:18:10.880
cause of most of them. Um, and so look, this message that you and I are bringing to young people
00:18:16.380
is resonating. It's going to take more effort. And this is why the work we're doing at Turning
00:18:21.440
Point USA, you know, is so important. And you chairing our young women's leadership summit,
00:18:26.580
anyone listening to this should come to our young women's leadership summit in early June,
00:18:31.160
tpusa.com slash YWLS. And, um, I just started my new podcast, which is so much fun. I love it.
00:18:37.460
I love it. Yeah. Wait, tell everyone, tell everyone about your, about your podcast, where
00:18:40.720
they can find it, what it's called, all that, what you'll be doing, how long, how long it is,
00:18:45.180
all that. Yeah. It's going to be once a week. Um, kind of just like a culture war update from
00:18:49.940
the front lines. Every Wednesday, every Wednesday, every Wednesday, they go to Apple podcast and,
00:18:55.860
or iTunes, just type in a Charlie Kirk show, hit subscribe five-star rating. Um, if you want top
00:19:01.700
charts, it's, it's already, it's already soared in the charts, which is amazing. That tells you that
00:19:06.500
the first episode was awesome. Everyone needs to go listen to it. Yeah, we're, we're really happy.
00:19:11.380
Um, we're going to have a live show next week in Phoenix. If anyone's interested to come by,
00:19:15.040
um, kind of as a cool second episode. Um, and look, we're just, we're going to see if I'm good
00:19:21.040
at it and all that sort of stuff. I think I'm going to really enjoy it. I love long form.
00:19:24.780
Your podcast is amazing. It's a top hundred podcast in the world. Um, from the charts I've seen,
00:19:30.220
which is awesome. And I think our generation is looking for this kind of longer form or intellectual,
00:19:34.600
deeper defense of these ideas. Yeah. I think they're looking for nuance. And I think a lot
00:19:39.380
of people don't realize they might only see you in a, in a 30 second clip to where you were just
00:19:44.700
destroying a stupid argument from someone on the left, or they see you on Fox. You're everywhere
00:19:49.980
doing all of these things. But I think they maybe don't know how much work you put into this and how
00:19:57.020
long you've been studying this stuff, how much you really know about all this. There's a million
00:20:02.740
things that I could talk to you about socialism, Venezuela, all of that, but you'll just have to
00:20:07.440
come back and we'll have another conversation. But everyone who does, I'm sure everyone who
00:20:11.780
listens to this already follows you. You've got, I think a million followers on it on Twitter,
00:20:15.880
a million. Yep. That's freaking crazy. That's crazy. Well, thank you so much for taking the time
00:20:22.480
to join me. Um, everyone go to tpusa.com slash YWLS. Correct. Yes. If you are a female between
00:20:30.420
ages 18 and 27, that's right. Correct. And we will, we're going to work on some kind of,
00:20:35.860
I've gotten a lot of messages from young moms in their thirties saying, Hey, we want something for
00:20:40.940
us. And so we'll have to think about that. Thank you so much, Allie, for having me. This is great.
00:20:44.980
Thank you. I'll see you soon. I hope that you enjoyed that conversation with Charlie. There were
00:20:50.240
so many other things that I wanted to talk to him about. I mean, the guy, well, he just speaks well,
00:20:55.060
first of all, but he also knows a lot. He just knows a lot. He knows a lot of facts. He's been
00:21:00.500
doing a lot of reading on capitalism and socialism and American exceptionalism for a really long time.
00:21:05.560
So he's just a good resource on all of this. If you go on social media and you look at the clips
00:21:12.520
in which he is engaging with these students, it's really incredible how he's able to just kind of
00:21:16.500
recall these facts, uh, so quickly. But, um, I just really appreciate the work that he is doing for
00:21:23.340
conservatism and how long he's been in this fight at such a young age. It's really crazy.
00:21:28.060
I wanted to talk to him about Venezuela and socialism and everything that's going on there.
00:21:33.520
And I also wanted to bring up the assault on the dignity of work. That's a reason why we're having
00:21:39.420
such a hard time. I think reasoning with people like AOC and Bernie Sanders is because they don't
00:21:45.760
believe there is an inherent dignity in someone working. They think it is just as dignified for someone
00:21:51.200
to live on the, off the government and, you know, watercolor paint all day, even though no one is
00:21:57.160
buying their pieces. Like that's what they think is just as dignified as someone working hard and
00:22:02.660
providing for their family. And so when you don't have the same idea of the dignity of work, that
00:22:07.940
there is inherent dignity in work, then that that's difficult. And part of that is because, uh,
00:22:15.000
the left has become so secular, they have become so not everyone on the left, but in general,
00:22:20.520
the left has become secular. The left has, um, abandoned this idea of the centrality of God,
00:22:27.180
the centrality of, uh, morality of biblical morality. And the Bible is what tells us that one personal
00:22:34.580
property is a thing. The 10th commandment is do not covet. And also, uh, that work is good work existed
00:22:41.660
before the fall of man. It existed before sin. So work is inherently good. It is what, uh, part of
00:22:47.580
what the human spirit runs on is productivity. And so when there's an assault on that, there's an
00:22:53.880
assault on the individual, there's an assault on the dignity of human beings, um, as image bearers of
00:23:00.320
God and as God created us to be. Okay. That's all I have for today and all I have for this week.