Learn English with Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck delivers a keynote at Turning Point USA in response to the recent shooting of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, who was a beloved husband, father, and husband-in-lawyer to Erica Kirk.
00:00:06.000It's obviously a massive honor to be here at Turning Point USA.
00:00:11.000It's even more of an honor to follow Erica Kirk, a heroic figure and a true American patriot.
00:00:22.000I really believe that the best way to judge a goodness of a man is to see the goodness of his wife and his children.
00:00:29.000And on that measure, Charlie was unsurpassed.
00:00:32.000Erica and her children are in all of our hearts.
00:00:37.000And of course, this is an incredibly bittersweet moment.
00:00:40.000It's absolutely bitter because of the murder of our friend Charlie Kirk, an irreplaceable human being.
00:00:47.000I knew Charlie from the time he was 18 years old, and I watched him build himself into one of the most powerful exponents of conservatism in America, one of the most powerful coalition builders in American history.
00:00:59.000But it's also sweet to see the number of people who continue to remember Charlie each and every day and to carry on his mission.
00:01:08.000Well, today, I want to talk about the future of the country.
00:01:12.000And the future of this country, this amazing country, relies on the future of the conservative movement.
00:01:20.000It relies on what TPUSA defines as its core mission, freedom, free markets, and limited government.
00:01:27.000And most of all, most of all, the future of this country relies on truth.
00:01:40.000This country relies on truth because victory, true, real, lasting victory, cannot be achieved without truth.
00:01:50.000Victory without truth is victory for a lie, and that is no victory at all.
00:03:08.000An informational environment rife with both opportunity and chaos.
00:03:12.000Opportunity, because the legacy media gatekeepers are no longer in charge of what we see and what we hear.
00:03:17.000And chaos, because an anarchic informational environment means we actually have to be smart in how we assess the information and arguments that we hear.
00:03:28.000Well, because today the conservative movement is in serious danger.
00:03:33.000It is in danger, not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder.
00:03:40.000The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle, but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing enervation and grievance.
00:03:58.000These people are frauds and they are grifters and they do not deserve your time.
00:04:03.000And they are something worse than that.
00:04:05.000A danger to the only movement capable of stopping the left from wrecking the country wholesale.
00:04:10.000So today, I want to discuss five obligations that people who speak to you on matters of importance have to you.
00:04:18.000I want to speak to you about our duties.
00:04:43.000We should not say things like, they shot Charlie without specifying whom we mean by they.
00:04:49.000The person who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk, and whom all the evidence points at, all of it, is a gay, trans-loving furry.
00:05:05.000If we are going to target ideological movements, we should talk about the fact that the radical trans movement treats all those who oppose it as existential threats.
00:05:14.000Or if we're going to talk about the Democratic Party making room for the radical trans movement and echoing its inflammatory rhetoric, well, we should talk about that.
00:05:22.000Those are specific problems and they require specific responses.
00:05:26.000When people say they shot Charlie, however, they are instead trafficking in vagary that results in increased hatred without proposing any effective response.
00:05:35.000They are fostering despair and rage, and that makes things worse.
00:05:39.000We must also be honest about what people say and do, regardless of what that means coalitionally.
00:05:45.000It is the job of politicians to build coalitions.
00:05:48.000It's the job of those of us who try to shape public opinion to hold politicians to account and to hold them accountable to our values.
00:05:56.000We must not let fear of audience deter us from telling the truth.
00:06:01.000We must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth.
00:06:05.000So, for example, if Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk, casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here,
00:06:34.000who worked with Charlie every single day...
00:06:37.000To cast aspersions at Mikey McCoy and Andrew Colvin and Blake Neff and Tyler Boyer and, yes, at Erica Kirk.
00:06:43.000And to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie's murder?
00:06:48.000To spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie's murder or a cover-up in that murder?
00:06:59.000Then we, as people with a microphone, have a moral obligation to call that out by name.
00:07:16.000Kirk and TPUSA never, never should have put in the never, should have been put in the position to have to defend themselves against such specious and evil attacks, particularly in a time of mourning.
00:07:33.000And the people who refuse to condemn Candace's truly vicious attacks, and some of them are speaking here, are guilty of cowardice.
00:07:48.000The fact that they have said nothing while Candace has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years is just as cowardly.
00:08:01.000Second, because we owe you the truth, we owe you the duty to speak out of principle, not personal feeling.
00:08:08.000It should not matter whether we despise someone or whether we love someone.
00:08:13.000The question is what they say and what they do, and whether those things are morally decent or not.
00:08:19.000On a political level, do they foster freedom, justice, and prosperity?
00:08:23.000On a personal level, do they treat others as they would wish to be treated?
00:08:27.000Personal feeling is not a substitute for moral judgment.
00:08:31.000To take again the Candace Owens situation as an example, friendship with public figures who say or do evil things is not an excuse for silence on the matter.
00:08:41.000Politics is not the sisterhood of the traveling pants.
00:08:49.000And if you are willing to sacrifice basic truth and simple principle in favor of emotional solidarity, you have betrayed your fundamental duty to the American people.
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00:11:06.000First off, I should break the omerite here and just be a little bit clear.
00:11:09.000The notion that people in our industry are close friends, like we all take holiday breaks with each other and go to each other's kids' graduations and stuff, is generally untrue.
00:11:17.000Some people do that, most of us don't.
00:11:19.000We see each other at conferences and we talk on the phone and all the rest.
00:11:24.000But even if it were true that other public figures were our best friends, our very best friends, that does not relieve us of our duty to speak out of principle and not to cover up evil or shy away from addressing it out of friendship.
00:11:43.000So no, Tucker Carlson, it is not an excuse to go silent on Candace's targeting of TPUSA.
00:11:56.000Or to mirror her bull lines of questioning because you love Candace personally.
00:12:00.000The same holds true of Megan Kelly, a person I consider a friend, characterizing Candace as a young mother and thus shying away from condemning her actions or fibing about them.
00:12:18.000And when Megan said this week, quote, my goal and my job here is to try to understand, yes, where Candace is coming from on this, and says she sees no purpose in inserting herself, quote, into this on one side, that is a moral and logical absurdity.
00:12:32.000There is only one moral side here, Erica Kirk's side.
00:12:44.000You know, the side of the widow with two children whose husband was shot live on camera in front of all of us.
00:12:51.000Friendship with the person accusing TPUSA of a cover-up of Charlie's murder is no excuse for cowardice.
00:13:03.000Third, and relatedly, we have a duty to take responsibility for what we say and do.
00:13:08.000If we hire awful people, we're responsible for that.
00:13:11.000I have some experience there, as you might suspect.
00:13:16.000That means that if we offer a guest for your viewing, we owe it to you to ask the kinds of questions that actually get at the truth.
00:13:22.000If we agree with a guest, that's fine, but we should own it.
00:13:26.000So, for example, if you host a Hitler-apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes, you know the Nick Fuentes who said that the Vice President of the United States is a, quote, fat gay race traitor married to a jeet.
00:13:47.000The person who said that Charlie Kirk was a, quote, retarded idiot.
00:13:51.000The person who said, and pardon my language here, it's his quote, that he, quote, took Turning Point USA and f ⁇ ed it, and that's why it's filled with gripers.
00:13:59.000If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.
00:14:13.000There is a reason that Charlie Kirk despised Nick Fuentes, and indeed even chided Dinesh D'Souza for debating him.
00:14:20.000He knew that Nick Fuentes is an evil troll and that building him up is an act of moral imbecility.
00:14:25.000And that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did.
00:14:29.000And he ought to take responsibility for that, just as he ought to take responsibility for glazing pornographer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate or for mainstreaming fake historian and pseudo-Nazi apologist Daryl Cooper as America's best and most honest popular historian.
00:14:44.000Hosts are, indeed, responsible for the guests they choose and the questions they ask those guests.
00:14:58.000Fourth, because we have a duty to truth, we also have a duty to provide you with evidence of the claims that we make.
00:15:05.000Emotive accusations, conspiracy theories, and just asking questions, that's lazy and stupid and misleading.
00:15:13.000None of them are a substitute for truth.
00:15:15.000None of them are a substitute for evidence.
00:15:18.000So when Candace Owen says, I don't know, no, but I know, that is retarded.
00:15:24.000and we are all more retarded for having heard it.
00:15:36.000When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country, he's not actually making an argument based in evidence.
00:15:44.000He's simply maligning people that he disagrees with, which is indeed par for the course from a man who was once a PR flag for Jeffrey Epstein.
00:15:58.000Our duty to provide you evidence means we actually have to do much more than just ask questions.
00:16:03.000Just asking questions is something my five-year-old does, and it's really cute when it comes from my five-year-old.
00:16:08.000But when grown men and women spend their days just asking questions, without, you know, seeking answers, they are lying to you.
00:16:16.000In fact, they're doing something even worse.
00:16:18.000They are seeding distrust in the world around you, and they are enervating you in the process.
00:16:24.000So, for example, if many speakers, including Tucker Carlson and others, get on stage here at TPUSA and claim, without proper evidence, that Jeffrey Epstein was running a Mossad rape ring being covered up by the Trump administration, they are not actually uncovering a conspiracy or effectuating a solution.
00:16:41.000They are claiming a special provenance to information they won't let you see, which builds their power and leaves you with none.
00:16:48.000They are also implicating in their speculation actual human beings, good human beings like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi, and yes, the President of the United States, even if they're too cowardly to say President Trump's name.
00:17:02.000And that means you won't trust those good people in the future.
00:17:13.000They'll pretend they're outside the system.
00:17:16.000And they don't have access to actual information.
00:17:18.000You know, they're just asking questions.
00:17:20.000But many of these same people have direct pipelines to informational sources.
00:17:24.000So, for example, if Tucker wants answers to his questions about, say, Jeffrey Epstein, he could call the Vice President of the United States.
00:17:57.000We know that Anthony Fauci worked to shut down alternative solutions from people like Jay Bhattacharya.
00:18:03.000But when people posit a conspiracy and then provide you no evidence, they are doing you a fundamental disservice, and they are making you stupider in the process.
00:18:18.000Finally, because it is our job to make the lives of our audience better, that's really our job, is to give you more information to make your lives better.
00:18:30.000That's why we have to talk about our problems in order to find the solutions.
00:18:33.000That's what politics was supposed to be about after all, finding solutions to our common problems.
00:18:38.000If we speak endlessly about the problems we face, without ever positing a solution other than wrecking the system or centralizing power in a cult-like figure, we are not finding solutions.
00:19:27.000Because here is the most fundamental truth of all in the United States.
00:19:30.000For all of its problems, many of which, a huge number of which are real and serious, the United States is still the greatest country in the history of planet Earth.
00:19:48.000We have the greatest constitution ever devised by man.
00:19:52.000We have the greatest founding philosophy ever put to paper in the Declaration of Independence.
00:19:57.000In this country, you can make of yourself what you will.
00:20:00.000And if there are true obstacles standing in your way, we can all work together to remove them.
00:20:05.000That, by the way, is the essence of conservatism, that we live in a world created by God with a logic and a rationale, that we as human beings were created in God's image, as it says in the book of Genesis, with creative capacity and the power to choose.
00:20:18.000And that in a free country of limited government and defined powers, with property rights and equality under law, our destiny is in our hands and that we all have a duty to make the most of that historic opportunity.
00:20:32.000Anyone, anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is lying to you and they are making your life worse in the process.
00:20:40.000Now that lie may feel good in the moment.
00:20:44.000It may excuse us from taking the corrective action we can take on a personal level to fix our lives.
00:20:50.000It might give us someone else to blame for our own failures.
00:20:53.000But in the end, the lie kills not just your future, but the country that we've been given.
00:21:00.000So, for those of us who talk for a living, that's our job.
00:21:04.000To discuss America's problems with truth and with evidence.
00:21:07.000To provide possible solutions, and to encourage Americans to succeed and make great decisions.
00:21:14.000We who speak to people on a regular basis, who have a microphone and an audience, we have duties to you.
00:22:35.000Thankfully, there's no organization better positioned to educate young people about the true history of this country than Prager U. For years, young Americans have been fed a steady diet of misinformation, taught to believe this country is racist, sexist, and bigoted.
00:22:49.000They tell the whole story, the good and the bad, but always with accuracy and appreciation for the patriots who sacrificed everything to create the greatest country in human history.
00:22:57.000Through powerful storytelling, engaging videos, and family-friendly resources, PragerU is reaching the next generation.
00:23:03.000Millions of young people are finally hearing a message that inspires pride, not shame.
00:23:07.000And here's something you need to know.
00:23:08.000While plenty of nonprofits line up for government money, PragerU refused it, even when partnering with the White House.
00:23:14.000They will not let the government fund their message.
00:23:15.000That's why they rely on patriotic Americans like you.
00:24:08.000You know, when you engage in a conversation, I've said this to a lot of people, when you engage in a conversation, it's very important to sort of determine the end of the conversation.
00:24:15.000If it's going to be impossible to tell somebody the truth in a productive way, you probably shouldn't engage in that kind of conversation.
00:24:20.000And you should make that judgment ahead of time.
00:24:22.000But truth always has to take precedence over politeness if the two come into conflict, particularly if you're talking publicly, as we all do for a living.
00:24:31.000I'm not talking about you're talking to your kid and they bring you a macaroni painting and they're like, is it good or not?
00:24:42.000But when we're talking about politics and policy, obviously the truth has to come first because if we can't agree on fundamental facts, there's no possibility for solutions.
00:25:00.000You cited during your speech truth as the most important tenet of American conservatism.
00:25:06.000Why, therefore, did you call irrelevant the Israeli attack in 1967 on the USS Liberty, which left dozens of American servicemen dead and hundreds wounded?
00:25:22.000So what I actually said is that if we're looking at modern Israeli-American relations, looking at an attack that happened mistakenly by multiple Navy reports, multiple Israeli reports, and all available evidence, and using that attack in order to undermine today's relations between Israel and America, that's irrelevant.
00:25:40.000As irrelevant as it would be to cite a piece of evidence from World War II or from 1776 to define America's relations with, for example, Great Britain or Germany today.
00:25:48.000That does not mean that the attack wasn't horrible for the Americans involved, that it wasn't bloody and terrible.
00:25:53.000The Israeli government paid reparations to the people who were killed.
00:25:57.000If you look at the actual military record of what happened on the USS Liberty, it was clearly a mistaken and tragic attack.
00:26:03.000The people who frequently cite the USS Liberty, however, are not talking about the specifics of the USS Liberty.
00:26:08.000I suspect that the vast majority of people who bring this up are doing so in order to suggest that Israel deliberately attacked an American ship because Israel deliberately wants to harm America.
00:26:18.000It's connected generally with a larger point.
00:26:23.000If the truth matters, then the Israeli government must be held accountable for that attack.
00:26:30.000The American flag was flying on that ship.
00:26:34.000You do not mistake an American ship for a foreign one when our flag is flying.
00:26:40.000So, and we can spend the rest of the time talking about the specifics of the U.S. Liberty attack, or you can actually go look at the naval investigations that were done, multiple naval investigations that were done.
00:26:50.000The reality is that people were flying mirage planes for the Israeli military at the time.
00:26:54.000The USS Liberty was sailing in an area where it had essentially gone off-grid.
00:26:58.000The Israeli military mistook it for an Egyptian ship.
00:27:01.000They thought it was shelling al-Arish, which happened not to be true.
00:27:04.000In the initial attack, the American flag was knocked down, and then the attack went on for about 90 minutes.
00:27:08.000And then, as soon, you can hear this, by the way, on the tapes of the Israeli pilots talking to each other.
00:27:12.000As soon as they realize that it's an American ship, they call off the attack.
00:27:15.000They speed a ship to try and help the USS Liberty.
00:27:17.000There have been multiple unfortunate friendly fire incidents between Allied forces, including, for example, in the Gulf War, where U.S. forces were responsible for killing about nine British troops during the Gulf War.
00:27:26.000It's an unfortunate reality of war, but you're not answering my question, which is what is your broader agenda in asking the question?
00:27:34.000Because I suspect that your question is not limited to your specific ire over an incident that happened in 1967.
00:27:45.000I think we should question any foreign country's relationship with our government.
00:27:50.000That's totally fine, but I'm just wondering why you...
00:27:54.000Again, I'm perfectly fine with questioning any country's relationship with the United States.
00:27:59.000But, again, I'm wondering what your motivation is in bringing up a six-decade-old attack as though it is the number one issue in assessing the relationship between Israel and the United States today.
00:28:10.000Well, many problems persist to this day, but it's interesting that you say six-decade-old incident when there are many people in this audience who are alive for that attack as if this is irrelevant.
00:28:23.000No, it's just not particularly relevant to assessing the relationship between the United States and Israel today in the same way that in 1967, there are a wide variety of countries with which the United States had different relations.
00:28:36.000Okay, it's clearly not going to actually answer the question, so I'm happy to move to this one.
00:28:47.000Unfortunately, this will be the last question.
00:28:51.000Hi, my name is Natasha, and I'm a TPUSA chapter member at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
00:29:04.000So my question is, just with the divide in the conservative movement right now, what is your suggestion as to how young people can kind of come together and bridge that divide and just, you know, bring unity right now?
00:29:17.000So again, I think that unity has to be reliant on first principles.
00:29:21.000No one would ask conservatives to unite with radical trans activists because that would be silly.
00:29:26.000And so we first have to decide what are the principles that we hold in common and then actually determine who are our allies in that particular fight.
00:29:33.000Now, again, the coalition may shift depending on the issue.
00:29:36.000That's kind of a normal thing in politics.
00:29:38.000Sometimes you're going to have different allies than you have with regard to other issues.
00:29:42.000But when it comes to how young people ought to decide what they believe, that's the thing I most care about.
00:29:46.000Because if I'm talking about the long-term friends of America, not merely the coalitions of the moment, which break and reform and reform and break constantly.
00:29:54.000George W. Bush's coalition was obviously not Donald Trump's coalition, and Donald Trump's coalition is not going to be JD Vance's coalition.
00:30:00.000Meaning every politician has their own coalition.
00:30:02.000That's the nature of electoral politics.
00:30:04.000What I'm more concerned about is the trajectory of how people think and what people think.
00:30:09.000And so before determining how to unify with others, you should first decide what are the things that are important to you, what are your fundamental values, and then you should find people who agree with those fundamental values because the problem is if you don't, then when push comes to shove, things come apart pretty quickly.
00:31:03.000Charlie was your age when he started doing this.
00:31:06.000Again, I referenced earlier that I met Charlie when he was 18 years old.
00:31:08.000It was actually at David Horwood's Freedom Center conference, and Charlie was going around trying to meet donors.
00:31:13.000And I saw this really nerdy, tall, gangly kid walking around trying to meet people, and I started introducing Charlie to a few of his sort of original donors.
00:31:21.000And by the way, in the first conversation with Charlie, I've said this before, but it's true.
00:31:25.000Charlie walked away and I turned to my friend Jeremy Boring.
00:31:27.000I said, that dude's gonna be the head of the RNC one day.
00:31:29.000Because Charlie was just that much of a go-getter and it turns out that he was a lot bigger than that.
00:31:33.000I think that everyone has the potential to do that.
00:31:35.000Not everybody has the same exact skill set, and you have to find the skill set that best suits you.
00:31:53.000So again, if Charlie can do that, a raw kid, out of high school, no college degree, and build the most powerful conservative organization in America, then you can do it too, because that's what America is all about.