The Charlie Kirk Show - Charlie vs. The University of Cambridge

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.

00:00:04.000 This is my conversation at Cambridge University.

00:00:07.000 I thought I did pretty well, to be perfectly honest.

00:00:10.000 It was an incredibly difficult environment.

00:00:12.000 I walk in, no applause, just stares and glares from the Cambridge intelligentsia.

00:00:19.000 400 people against me and a professor.

00:00:22.000 I talk to the president of Cambridge, who didn't even do the niceties, just went straight into trying to brutalize me publicly.

00:00:29.000 I kept my calm.

00:00:29.000 I kept my cool.

00:00:30.000 I felt pretty good about the points I made.

00:00:32.000 There are some points I probably could have made better. 0.83

00:00:34.000 But understand, it was literally kind of like a Moscow show trial where you're standing there for an hour and a half and they're throwing a debater after debater and they're applauding at the dumbest stuff.

00:00:46.000 So I just have to warn you before you listen to this podcast, this one – I mean, it was so overwhelming against me.

00:01:00.000 That's why I kind of love it, because we need to be unafraid to go into those environments.

00:01:04.000 We need to be unafraid to go into the lines then.

00:01:06.000 We need to be unafraid to go into the place where we're not always going to be applauded.

00:01:10.000 We're not always going to be celebrated.

00:01:11.000 We're not always going to be welcomed with open arms.

00:01:14.000 No, that's not what free speech is all about, is sometimes going into the greatest place of opposition.

00:01:20.000 And so I was thankful to do it.

00:01:22.000 There's a lot of insults that they throw at me.

00:01:25.000 There's a lot of, let's say, clever little remarks.

00:01:28.000 It was far from a debate.

00:01:30.000 It was more just kind of like a verbal melee.

00:01:33.000 And I think you will agree, and I would love your thoughts, freedomatcharliekirk.com, that the students of Cambridge, they could have done a lot better.

00:01:40.000 They could have been far more sophisticated, more polite, but they decided to take the gloves off and we got into the arena.

00:01:48.000 And of course, when I made a good point, it was met with silence.

00:01:51.000 And when they made a mediocre point, it was met with roaring applause as if they split the atom.

00:01:56.000 Hilariously, they actually split the atom at Cambridge.

00:01:59.000 Make sure you guys subscribe to our podcast and enjoy this lively, controversial, viral fight at Cambridge University.

00:02:09.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:02:10.000 Here we go.

00:02:11.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:02:13.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:02:15.000 I want you to know we are lucky.

00:02:17.000 To have Charlie Kirk.

00:02:18.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:02:21.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:02:23.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:02:24.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:02:32.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:02:41.000 That's why we are here.

00:02:44.000 Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.

00:02:54.000 Learn how you can protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.

00:03:01.000 That is noblegoldinvestments.com.

00:03:03.000 It's where I buy all of my gold.

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00:03:07.000 Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining us tonight.

00:03:13.000 Our speaker tonight is Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative commentator.

00:03:18.000 He's founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, which has a presence on over 3,000 high school and college campuses.

00:03:25.000 It is the largest and fastest growing youth activist organization in USA, and he's written four books.

00:03:32.000 Thank you for joining us today.

00:03:33.000 Thank you.

00:03:34.000 Great to be here.

00:03:35.000 Brilliant.

00:03:36.000 So I'll start with some questions from me, and then we're going to move to the questions from the audience, from the people who've submitted them, and you'll be asking them at the dispatch box.

00:03:43.000 My first question is about Turning Point USA's Professor Watchlist.

00:03:48.000 Its mission is described as exposing college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom, with examples including feminism, abortion, and socialism.

00:04:00.000 How would you respond to critics, such as PEN America?

00:04:07.000 Well, we're getting right into it, aren't we?

00:04:15.000 Thank you.

00:04:15.000 So yeah, just by background, Turning Point USA has now grown to be the largest campus conservative organization in the country.

00:04:23.000 I come from a view that conservatism is widely underrepresented in American campuses, and by conservatism.

00:04:30.000 I literally mean the defense of Western values, free markets, rule of law, individual initiatives, entrepreneurship, the Constitution, so on and so forth.

00:04:39.000 And an American college campus is in particular, and I don't know, I'm guessing that this campus is...

00:04:47.000 We'll see what happens when we have dialogue.

00:04:48.000 But I do know that there are some great professors that do teach the Western canon, which is far too missing from American universities.

00:04:55.000 Is that American college campuses have become a place where they strive to have everyone look different but think the same.

00:05:03.000 And in America, university and college tuition is through the roof.

00:05:08.000 And students and parents have a moral obligation to know who is teaching their kids.

00:05:13.000 And for these professors that have such a major objection for being on our professor watch list, if they don't say obscene things, then they will not end up on our watch list.

00:05:22.000 I'm talking about professors that were I'm sorry.

00:05:26.000 If you're excited about what happened on October 7th, then you deserve to be on a professor watch list, and people should know all about you.

00:05:32.000 And if people want to fire you as a consequence of that, or if people don't want to go to that school as a consequence of that, then so be it.

00:05:38.000 And so what was the criticism exactly?

00:05:40.000 It was...

00:05:47.000 Sorry, thank you.

00:05:48.000 If the publicizing of certain ideas is intimidation, then I think that's just laughable.

00:05:52.000 It is using our own free speech to expose professors who we believe are making America a worse country.

00:05:58.000 And in fact, I believe in America, higher education has largely posed a threat to Western values.

00:06:04.000 And I think we need more students and more parents to realize the moral rot that universities have become in the Western world.

00:06:11.000 So, Turning Point Accountomy mentions the importance of promoting intellectual growth.

00:06:17.000 How would you respond to critics that such an education system stifles intellectual growth through establishing a fixed set of values, for example, regarding God, life beginning at conception, and two genders, rather than promoting intellectual diversity?

00:06:31.000 Sure, I mean, at some point, you're going to have to get to a truth claim.

00:06:34.000 So, even to say that you want intellectual diversity means that you think intellectual diversity matters, but by what standard?

00:06:40.000 So you have to actually, at some point, say that something is good.

00:06:43.000 So if someone says, well, the criticism that you're going to tell a kid that something is good is something else, you should have intellectual diversity.

00:06:49.000 Okay, why?

00:06:50.000 By what standard?

00:06:51.000 By what book?

00:06:52.000 By what scholar?

00:06:52.000 By what author?

00:06:53.000 By what worldview?

00:06:54.000 We believe, as an organization, that the West is the best for many reasons.

00:07:01.000 In particular, my own personal views.

00:07:02.000 I'm a Christian.

00:07:03.000 I'm not ashamed of it.

00:07:04.000 And Christianity brought to the world things that we all take for granted.

00:07:08.000 Tom Holland, who actually was educated here and is one of the great classicists and taught himself ancient Greek, he wrote in his book Dominion that even if you hate Christianity, your critique of Christianity is actually using Christianity itself.

00:07:21.000 And so this idea of intellectual diversity, I totally support that.

00:07:25.000 And I think that students should read different books and should read different authors.

00:07:29.000 At some point though, the purpose of education is not to have an endless buffet line for students to sample every bad idea in the world.

00:07:37.000 It's to point them to the good, the true, and the beautiful.

00:07:39.000 And I think we've lost what the purpose of education is.

00:07:44.000 To lead forth out of the cave was the original analogy.

00:07:46.000 And so at Turning Point Academy, we take the biblical idea to train a child up in the ways in which they will go, and we make no apologies for instituting a belief that...

00:07:58.000 The defense of universal human equality is a good for all humanity, amongst many other things that you articulated.

00:08:05.000 So, how would you reconcile the importance of freedom, which is listed as Turning Point USA's mission on your website, with the restrictions on bodily autonomy, which you support, including abortion, trans-affirming health care, and birth control?

00:08:19.000 And how would you respond to criticism of your limited view of freedom?

00:08:22.000 Sure.

00:08:22.000 So first of all, birth control, I don't have that strong of views of.

00:08:26.000 So I mean, except the fact that I've criticized how actually young people that take young women that take hormonal birth control might have side effects that are not always disclosed to them.

00:08:34.000 As far as abortion and trans affirming care, I'll get into that in a second.

00:08:40.000 But I find it laughable, not from you, of course, but some of the people that are always very critical of.

00:08:44.000 Charlie, why don't you just believe in bodily autonomy?

00:08:46.000 I'm sorry, didn't you just mandate a vaccine for the last couple years?

00:08:48.000 I couldn't visit your country for two years because I didn't take a vaccine.

00:08:51.000 So it's my body, my choice, unless it's...

00:08:59.000 That was neither safe nor effective, and we all must be very honest about the fact that the public health experts of both of our countries never apologized for the fact that they made you take a vaccine that, by the way, has a lot of side effects for a lot of people in this room, and no one wants to say that.

00:09:12.000 As a side note, though, all the bodily autonomy people, and you guys can laugh all you want.

00:09:17.000 It's fine.

00:09:19.000 All the bodily autonomy people suddenly got really silent when we decided to say, we're going to control your body and control the movement of what you can do.

00:09:26.000 You can't go to the pub.

00:09:28.000 You can't go to the local gathering of friends.

00:09:30.000 You can't go to university.

00:09:31.000 You can't even go into the UK if you don't have a card.

00:09:33.000 So that's a fun contradiction for me.

00:09:35.000 At the same time, there's a difference between freedom or liberty and license.

00:09:39.000 Liberty is the pursuit of things that allow human beings to flourish at its highest possible potential.

00:09:44.000 License is not those things.

00:09:45.000 So on the first thing, you do not have an ability, and I'm sure there will be a question about this, under any agreed-upon Western morality, which is derived from a Christian construct, to murder another human being.

00:09:56.000 You do not have that freedom.

00:09:58.000 And so we believe, obviously, because we believe in very basic biology and science, that life begins at conception, and therefore that life deserves universal human rights as applied equally under our laws.

00:10:11.000 As far as trans-affirming care, as far as if you want to do something over the age of 18, knock yourself out.

00:10:17.000 you guys actually have been better than our country on this.

00:10:20.000 You have the Cass Report that our country has lost its mind, where the Cass Report itself And so we all can agree that students or young people that are not yet of age or mature age of 18, of course we limit certain freedoms or liberties for 15-year-olds.

00:10:45.000 In my country, they can't own guns until they're 18. In my country, they can't even drink until they're 21. In my country, they can't vote until they're 18 in America.

00:10:54.000 And so until someone is of age, you're going to limit that.

00:10:57.000 And so I believe that we should all agree that.

00:11:13.000 So you spoke about vaccines and the COVID-19 vaccine.

00:11:17.000 How would you respond to accusations about you misusing your platform and purporting misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, including speaking against the COVID vaccine and speculating about deaths caused by it and being briefly banned from Twitter for claiming that hydroxychloroquine was 100% effective in treating the virus?

00:11:38.000 Well, I'm back on Twitter now, thankfully.

00:11:39.000 New ownership.

00:11:43.000 I appreciate the question.

00:11:45.000 Has anyone asked our public health leaders that question?

00:11:48.000 Will they apologize for everything they got wrong?

00:11:51.000 The lockdowns were completely unnecessary.

00:11:53.000 They should never have happened.

00:11:54.000 And the young people of the West lost proms, graduation, whatever equivalent you have here in the UK, for no good reason whatsoever.

00:12:01.000 And you guys can laugh all you want.

00:12:04.000 But let's look at the data.

00:12:05.000 Suicide rates of young people in the West went up after COVID.

00:12:08.000 There's speech delays.

00:12:09.000 There's a misery problem.

00:12:10.000 And we locked down the generation of people that needed to be locked down the least that have now bared the consequences the most on top of a hyperinflation crisis, which caused a housing crisis, which has caused a sovereign death crisis.

00:12:23.000 All for what?

00:12:24.000 Because we were worried that something that materially was never a greater threat than the seasonal flu to these people in this room was never a greater threat than the seasonal flu.

00:12:34.000 That is a fact of science, because we have to trust the science.

00:12:38.000 And again, we can go back and forth, but this is the more important thing.

00:12:41.000 It was never about trusting the science.

00:12:43.000 It was about trusting the scientists.

00:12:45.000 That confirmed this view.

00:12:47.000 There is something called the Barrington Declaration.

00:12:48.000 If you don't know what this is, all of you have a moral obligation to know what it is.

00:12:52.000 The Barrington Declaration was thousands of scientists from around the world that said these lockdowns are doing more harm than good.

00:12:58.000 And the one thing that we never talked about through all of this, that now the pharma companies magically discovered after they were able to proliferate a vaccine, is early interventions.

00:13:06.000 Is the fact that if you catch COVID early, what is your vitamin D level?

00:13:10.000 Let's have a serious conversation about whether or not you're chronically overweight.

00:13:13.000 In my country, we are a fat country.

00:13:17.000 Why don't we also say to the American people, and be honest, if you are 50 pounds overweight, you have a much higher likelihood of dying of COVID.

00:13:23.000 That would be considered to be politically insensitive in America.

00:13:26.000 So how do I respond to critics?

00:13:28.000 Honestly, I'm proud of the work that we did during COVID.

00:13:30.000 I opposed the lockdowns from the beginning.

00:13:32.000 We talked about early interventions.

00:13:34.000 We platformed people that were right all along.

00:13:36.000 And meanwhile, the people that got the most important public policy questions of our time wrong have never felt any sort of criticism.

00:13:43.000 They've never actually faced justice.

00:13:45.000 And I think we, the people of the West, deserve an apology from our leaders for all the suffering that they inflicted on the young people of both our countries.

00:13:52.000 So you've described recently how it used to be 10 vaccines.

00:13:57.000 Now it's 72 shots for our babies.

00:13:59.000 Something's not right and our kids are sicker than ever.

00:14:01.000 How would you respond to criticism that your rhetoric regarding vaccinations is dangerous and irresponsible when considering a global rise in vaccine distrust and deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases, including measles and meningitis?

00:14:16.000 Well, first of all...

00:14:21.000 I'm not preventing that.

00:14:22.000 I think, though, that a robust conversation needs to happen that inoculations have risen across America.

00:14:27.000 I'll just talk about America.

00:14:28.000 I know this for certain.

00:14:30.000 Inoculation and vaccine rates have risen, and chronic diseases are higher than ever, and there is a perplexing rise in a lot of the secondary and third-tier issues.

00:14:40.000 Of course I'm pro-vaccine.

00:14:42.000 If you want to get vaccines, we should do it prudently.

00:14:44.000 We should do it appropriately.

00:14:45.000 We should do it smartly.

00:14:46.000 But in the same way, we should also simultaneously respect medical freedom and religious conscience.

00:14:51.000 The criticism is this.

00:14:53.000 I'm not a scientist and I don't play one on TV, but also I use human reason and one would say common sense to also ask the very simple question.

00:15:01.000 The public health authorities got almost every question of COVID wrong.

00:15:06.000 Why should we continue to delegate trust to them?

00:15:09.000 Trust is earned.

00:15:10.000 It is not given.

00:15:11.000 And so, yeah, look, I'm sure someone's going to ask a question or two about that.

00:15:15.000 That's fine.

00:15:15.000 I'm by no means a quote-unquote expert on all that.

00:15:19.000 But let me also question this.

00:15:20.000 The experts, they have to now, number one, you have to apologize when you get something really wrong.

00:15:25.000 And I think you have to get back into the public square and prove to us why we should trust you.

00:15:31.000 When, for example, in my country, I'm not sure if it was for you guys, we had this thing of six feet to slow the spread.

00:15:37.000 Anthony Fauci just made it up.

00:15:38.000 The data shows that he just arbitrarily made it up.

00:15:40.000 There is not a single public health reason why we had six feet to slow the spread.

00:15:44.000 Locking down schools.

00:15:45.000 Actually, what made COVID worse and delayed the inevitable spread.

00:15:48.000 The only country in Europe that I think was a model was Sweden.

00:15:51.000 They kept schools open.

00:15:52.000 They kept restaurants open.

00:15:53.000 They leaned into herd immunity.

00:15:55.000 And generally, their statistics were way better than some of the other countries that were correlated to it.

00:16:00.000 Everyone has the agency to do what they want to see fit, and yes, I do think that there is something troubling when the childhood vaccination schedule goes from 10 shots to 72 shots, some of which are things, for example, hepatitis B. Upon birth in America, I don't know how it is in the UK, within seconds, they will inoculate a child against hepatitis B. Number one, hepatitis B vaccine expired by the age of 13, and there's only two ways to get hepatitis B: through sexual intercourse, or through intravenous drugs, or some other correlated way.

00:16:28.000 So unless it is a son or a daughter of an active drug user or a drugman, And so those of us that even ask the question, why are we using a hepatitis B vaccine when we can maybe wait until they're 12 or 13 and when they're sexually active?

00:16:48.000 No, you must do it and you must just trust the science.

00:16:51.000 Okay, well, that's not good enough for us.

00:16:55.000 So, Turning Point USA acquired students for Trump in 2019 and worked on targeting students on college campuses, especially ahead of the 2020 election.

00:17:05.000 However, despite an increase in youth turnout in 2020, Trump's support was worse with young people in several battleground states than 2016.

00:17:14.000 How would you respond to critics who claim that this failure was partly due to Trump outsourcing youth outreach to Turning Point USA?

00:17:21.000 How did he do this last election?

00:17:24.000 Well, I mean, his support was better in youth, but it was still lower amongst youth than the Democrat support was.

00:17:30.000 We won the youth vote in the state of Michigan.

00:17:32.000 And we ran, basically, an entire youth operation in 2024.

00:17:35.000 In fact, anyone can look on ChatGPT, Grok, or Google.

00:17:38.000 I mean, whatever you want.

00:17:41.000 We crushed the youth vote.

00:17:42.000 Even Democrats acknowledge it.

00:17:43.000 There's story after story after story.

00:17:45.000 Why are young people moving so far to the right? 0.75

00:17:47.000 And so, will you give me credit for that?

00:17:51.000 I mean, why do you think that, like, In several key states, even in 2024, amongst young people.

00:17:57.000 We did anywhere between 10 to 25 points better in the key battleground states.

00:18:00.000 This is not just conjecture.

00:18:01.000 It is material fact.

00:18:03.000 Both young men and young women moved to the right dramatically.

00:18:06.000 In America, young people are Donald Trump's most loyal cohort, not even baby boomers.

00:18:11.000 According to the Yale Youth Poll and the Harvard Youth Poll, Donald Trump has actually made the most gains amongst younger voters.

00:18:17.000 And I guess maybe something we did had something to do with that?

00:18:22.000 And what do you see as the future of conservatism amongst young people?

00:18:26.000 I think it's going to be the dominant, God willing, dominant worldview amongst young people in America.

00:18:31.000 And it's ascendant.

00:18:32.000 Again, what we are seeing in states, and I don't know if it's the case here in the UK, young men in particular are on pace to be the most conservative generation in history.

00:18:41.000 And it's an exciting trend, and we're leaning into it.

00:18:43.000 We see this in the macro trends.

00:18:45.000 We also see this in micro.

00:18:47.000 Young women are following suit.

00:18:49.000 There's kind of two Gen Zs.

00:18:51.000 There's Gen Z that was basically out of college or near end of college at COVID, and then there was Gen Z that was in high school.

00:18:57.000 What would the equivalent term be in high school?

00:18:59.000 Whatever you call it.

00:19:01.000 Yeah, okay.

00:19:03.000 And they had their lives obliterated.

00:19:05.000 Those are the most formative times of their life, 15, 16, 17, 18. They were forced to wear masks.

00:19:09.000 They had to do school through Zoom.

00:19:11.000 They saw friends, many of whom that took their life or suicide rates went up exponentially.

00:19:16.000 And also, on top of that, we had this insane race stuff in America during 2020, otherwise known as Floydapalooza, where we decided to burn our country because a guy drug overdosed on the streets of Minneapolis. 0.58

00:19:28.000 That's true.

00:19:29.000 He did drug overdose.

00:19:30.000 It's not just my opinion.

00:19:31.000 Just read the medical examiner report.

00:19:33.000 The Hennepin County Medical Examiner Report.

00:19:36.000 So then all of a sudden we decided to commit cultural suicide and throw statues.

00:19:40.000 By the way, in London they threw a statue into the river or something because we're systemically racist.

00:19:45.000 I'm sorry, our two countries are the two least racist countries ever to exist in the history of the world?

00:19:51.000 And you guys should also be thanking the Lord that you have someone like William Wilberforce to look up to, and you should be building statues to Wilberforce, not taking down statues of your history, because it's thanks to Western values that we abolish slavery, and the world is a profoundly better place because of that worldview, and we as conservatives are unafraid to tell that story and that truth.

00:20:11.000 So you've condemned the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a huge mistake.

00:20:15.000 Correct.

00:20:16.000 Why do you believe it was a mistake to pass anti-discrimination legislation?

00:20:20.000 And what do you think would be a better policy for being treated fairly and equally, which you see as an American principle?

00:20:27.000 Nothing against the intent, but it was too broadly written and it played into something called disparate impact.

00:20:32.000 Disparate impact was woven within the Civil Rights Act, and disparate impact basically says if two racial groups have different outcomes, the answer must be racism.

00:20:41.000 It does not allow any legal nuance.

00:20:43.000 So there are four components to, quote unquote, the anti-racist regime of America.

00:20:46.000 I don't pretend to know what goes on in this country.

00:20:48.000 I could just talk about America.

00:20:49.000 I'm sure that's fine.

00:20:50.000 And it's four components.

00:20:51.000 Affirmative action, critical race theory, DEI, and disparate impact.

00:20:55.000 Those are kind of the four components.

00:20:56.000 All of them have their subsection.

00:20:58.000 The Civil Rights Act led the way to affirmative action, which is weaponized, quote unquote, reverse racism against Asian and white people.

00:21:05.000 And the Civil Rights Act also blazed the trail for disparate impact as a legal theory.

00:21:10.000 I'm saying that if black Americans are doing worse in a group, it might not be because of marital differences or cultural differences or single motherhood issues.

00:21:17.000 It must be racism.

00:21:19.000 And so because of that, the Civil Rights Act was too broadly written.

00:21:22.000 It's now being applied in my country as a way to get rid of voter integrity, to get rid of election integrity, to get rid of voter ID.

00:21:29.000 The Civil Rights Act is also now being applied to put men in female locker rooms. 0.86

00:21:32.000 So the intent, it should have been a single-page or a two-page bill to say that you cannot discriminate against based on the color of somebody's skin, period, end of story.

00:21:40.000 Instead, we get a multiple hundred-page bill with lots of chapters and lots of lesser-known amendments that created basically a permanent anti-racist bureaucracy within our federal government to go find racism where it doesn't exist and create it in new places where it otherwise did not exist.

00:21:55.000 So you've described Martin Luther King Jr. as awful, not a good person, even though many conservative commentators have spoken in support of what he says, including his quote, where they will be judged about his children, where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

00:22:12.000 I liked that statement.

00:22:13.000 He was right there.

00:22:14.000 So does his speech and his general ethos not then agree with your views?

00:22:18.000 No, I've complimented him as well, but I mean, first of all, he was a personally morally flawed man.

00:22:22.000 And to be fair, a lot of people I sometimes look up to are morally flawed.

00:22:25.000 But also, I mean, we're all morally flawed.

00:22:28.000 We're all sinners, I would hope.

00:22:29.000 Oh, actually, many of you probably don't believe in God, so never mind.

00:22:31.000 So the...

00:22:37.000 I don't want to go too deep into this.

00:22:39.000 and maybe it's very interesting to UK students about MLK, but there is a mythology around MLK that does not warrant the reverence that he gets treated with in America.

00:22:49.000 Should he be mentioned amongst lots of people in the 20th century that was complicated and at the end of his life advocated for a more communistic view and then actually got away from race blindness and actually got towards race obsession?

00:23:00.000 He did some great things.

00:23:01.000 He did some things that were not so great.

00:23:03.000 In America, though, you must understand, he is looked to as the new founding father.

00:23:07.000 The main contention that I have with the Civil Rights Act and the Civil Rights Movement and how it ended, not how it started, is that we refounded the country fundamentally.

00:23:14.000 We cast aside our founding roots and our founding documents of the U.S. Constitution, and we decided to basically usher in the Civil Rights Act as a new anti-racist dogma creed.

00:23:25.000 And I find something fundamentally wrong with that.

00:23:27.000 Our birth certificate as Americans is the declaration and the law of the land is tied with the U.S. Constitution.

00:23:33.000 It was not the Civil Rights Act.

00:23:35.000 With all of that to say, we have a national holiday to MLK.

00:23:39.000 We got rid of a national holiday for our first president and our founding father, George Washington.

00:23:44.000 We used to call it Washington's birthday.

00:23:46.000 Now we call it President's Day in our country.

00:23:49.000 So that's just maybe some context to answer that question.

00:23:51.000 Why Refi is an amazing debt resettlement company.

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00:25:00.000 So you tweeted ahead of the January 6th Capitol attack that Turning Point USA and Students for Trump were sending more than 80 buses of Patriots to D.C. to fight for this president, although it ended up being seven.

00:25:13.000 Do you see your claims, including that the election was stolen, as contributing to January 6th?

00:25:20.000 It's somewhat of an irrelevant question, but no, of course not.

00:25:24.000 In fact, our students were the ones that Didn't even go to the Capitol and peacefully went home.

00:25:28.000 But, I mean, how deep into January 6th do you want to get?

00:25:31.000 It wasn't an insurrection by any means whatsoever.

00:25:34.000 There were some people that acted totally improperly, and they should not assault police officers or break windows.

00:25:39.000 But there were also a lot of people that walked into the Capitol building and the doors were open for them and they walked between the cued lines that were there and said a prayer.

00:25:47.000 And these are the people that walk around with pocket constitutions, and they were smeared in the largest witch hunt and manhunt, I should say, the largest manhunt in American law enforcement history that resulted in 1,300 arrests of nonviolent offenders that walked into the people's house in the United States Capitol building, while violent crime rose in almost every major city in the country.

00:26:06.000 And so, I don't know how much.

00:26:11.000 You've compared same-sex sexual behaviour to drug and alcohol use and described it as an error and said you don't agree with the lifestyle.

00:26:19.000 How would you justify these comments whilst also speaking about welcoming gay people into the Conservative movement?

00:26:25.000 Well, first, we all have flaws.

00:26:26.000 That's number one.

00:26:27.000 But number two, how do I justify it?

00:26:30.000 It doesn't matter what Charlie Kirk believes.

00:26:32.000 That's a view derived from Scripture.

00:26:35.000 The Bible talks very clearly about God's natural order.

00:26:39.000 We see this reflected in the natural law.

00:26:40.000 Some of my closest friends and closest people that work with me alongside at Turing Point USA participate in a same-sex lifestyle, and that's their own prerogative. 0.99

00:26:49.000 But if you ask me what I believe and why I believe it, it's derived straight from Scripture.

00:26:53.000 And you've spoken of marriage as between one man and one woman, even whilst polls have consistently shown most Americans as in support of same-sex marriage.

00:27:02.000 How would you respond to critics regarding your position on this?

00:27:05.000 I don't derive my morality from up-or-down vote.

00:27:09.000 How would you respond to criticism that far-right-wing discourse, particularly online, is inflamed by organizations such as Turning Point USA and your rhetoric, even as you condemn attendance of neo-Nazis at your events?

00:27:23.000 I don't even know how to respond to that.

00:27:26.000 I mean, how do I respond to critics that I'm inflaming tensions?

00:27:30.000 If the truth inflames you, you have a problem.

00:27:33.000 It's not my problem.

00:27:37.000 What do you see as the role of an institution such as Turning Point USA in shaping national discourse?

00:27:43.000 And what do you think is next for the organization in terms of what you discuss?

00:27:46.000 Yeah, I mean, look, we're very known for hopefully what we'll see here, which is respectful dialogue.

00:27:51.000 We have an open mic on campuses.

00:27:53.000 I did over 100 hours of campus debates this semester, seen billions of times around the world.

00:27:59.000 Yeah, look, as far as conservatism, we plan to win.

00:28:03.000 And for the three conservatives that are here tonight, I hope you guys get your mojo back.

00:28:09.000 This was once a great country.

00:28:11.000 I want to see it great again.

00:28:12.000 You guys are a husk of your former self.

00:28:14.000 You guys, you can laugh and sneer all you want, but the country that split the atom and invented the steam engine and eradicated slavery and brought common law to the world can do a lot better than this.

00:28:25.000 And you are...

00:28:30.000 And for whatever I can do, I hope that this country finds a leader or a group of leaders.

00:28:36.000 I'm not here to give you political advice.

00:28:37.000 I hate when foreigners do that to Americans, you guys, whatever you want. 1.00

00:28:39.000 But I do have a wish that the world feels like it's missing something.

00:28:43.000 It feels like it's missing something when Great Britain or England or whatever politically correct thing I have to say, because I guess England, I can't fly an English flag now, whatever nonsense that is.

00:28:54.000 Be proud of your heritage.

00:28:55.000 You've done good for the world.

00:28:57.000 Stop apologizing.

00:28:58.000 Get your energy.

00:28:59.000 Get your vitality.

00:29:00.000 Get what made England and made Great Britain such a phenomenal place.

00:29:06.000 I hope you get that back, and I hope that you reject the swan song of multiculturalism and get back to the fundamental truism that a strong Britain means a strong world, and therefore a strong West, and we can stand up for what is good, true, and beautiful.

00:29:22.000 Would you agree with commentators that your politics have become more conservative in recent years and what's caused this shift?

00:29:29.000 Yes.

00:29:30.000 Partially, honestly, getting married and having children, something that I hope all of you do.

00:29:35.000 Getting married and having children is an objective good thing for yourself and for society and for, of course, your children.

00:29:41.000 The fact that we're having less children in the West is a very alarming trend.

00:29:46.000 And as I got married and I started to have a couple kids, I started to realize this is what I'm fighting for.

00:29:52.000 And I understand the threats against their well-being and their livelihood.

00:29:56.000 And then also I got more serious about my faith.

00:29:58.000 So you've spoken today against affirmative action in educational institutions.

00:30:03.000 How would you propose making excellence in education more equitable for students from disadvantaged backgrounds?

00:30:10.000 IQ tests.

00:30:12.000 And do you see equal treatment as possible without considering it?

00:30:16.000 Just so we're clear, IQ tests don't have anything to do with background.

00:30:19.000 I mean, meaning like, okay, if you have somewhat of an equal nutritional capacity, it doesn't matter how much you study or you get an IQ, maybe you can get an IQ tutor and boost it by a couple points, but we should bring back IQ tests in the West. 0.56

00:30:30.000 Please continue.

00:30:31.000 I was just going to say, do you see it as possible without considering any external factors for students when applying for higher education, such as economic background?

00:30:38.000 Well, external factors can be factored in, but affirmative action isn't that.

00:30:42.000 at least in America, I don't know how it works here.

00:30:43.000 Affirmative action in America is...

00:30:55.000 Great.

00:30:55.000 We're going to move now to...

00:30:57.000 Am I going to stand here?

00:30:58.000 Yeah.

00:30:58.000 of the discussion.

00:30:59.000 Thank you.

00:30:59.000 Yeah, the one.

00:31:19.000 Okay, thank you.

00:31:27.000 Can we settle down, please?

00:31:29.000 We're going to move on to our questions.

00:31:30.000 Our first question is from Zenocha Zubair from Sydney, Sussex.

00:31:35.000 Come up and ask a question.

00:31:38.000 APPLAUSE APPLAUSE I have quite a simple question for you.

00:31:51.000 Now I know you've debated Dean Withers on Jubilee before.

00:31:54.000 I was wondering why you now refuse to engage with further debate with him.

00:31:58.000 Wait, hold on.

00:31:59.000 First of all, he's coming on my show this summer.

00:32:01.000 And let me get this straight.

00:32:02.000 I flew 5,000 miles across the world to have you ask why I'm not going to debate a left-wing YouTuber.

00:32:07.000 Well, I mean, he continuously tries to get your attention at your campus.

00:32:12.000 I've debated him twice in the last calendar year.

00:32:15.000 He's coming on my show this summer.

00:32:17.000 Let me be clear.

00:32:17.000 I came to Cambridge to have you ask me that.

00:32:22.000 I mean, you talk about freedom.

00:32:24.000 I'm just using my freedom of speech to ask you a simple question.

00:32:26.000 You seem to be dodging it for some reason.

00:32:29.000 I've debated him twice in the last year, and he's coming on this summer for a long-form discussion.

00:32:34.000 But is this what I can expect?

00:32:37.000 Yeah, he's making videos about you avoiding him on your campus debates.

00:32:41.000 Right, so let me tell you how this works.

00:32:43.000 I do a campus event, like at Texas A&M University.

00:32:46.000 I rent it out.

00:32:47.000 I'm there for three hours.

00:32:49.000 He shows up demanding to come up to the mic immediately, cutting in line of other students.

00:32:53.000 It's not Joe Biden's America anymore where you can just cut in line and get whatever you want.

00:32:57.000 So therefore, I say, excuse me, Dean, we'll talk at another time.

00:33:02.000 He makes this YouTube video as if I'm scared to debate him, even though I debated him twice in the last year.

00:33:07.000 Does that sufficiently answer your question?

00:33:09.000 Yes, it does.

00:33:10.000 Thank you very much.

00:33:11.000 Thank you.

00:33:12.000 Our next question.

00:33:19.000 is from James Loveridge from Anglo-Ruston University.

00:33:22.000 Thank you.

00:33:30.000 So, firstly, thank you for coming here, Charlie.

00:33:33.000 It's nice to meet you.

00:33:33.000 So, my question is, I am a Conservative and I did back Trump in 2024, but I'm troubled that the GOP refuses to hold him accountable for his personal and legal failings.

00:33:46.000 And how can we claim to stand for moral values and the Constitution while excusing behaviour that we condemn from the left?

00:33:53.000 Isn't it the hypocrisy undermining our credibility, especially with the next generation?

00:33:58.000 What specifically do you have issue with?

00:34:01.000 Countless things he's done.

00:34:03.000 The what?

00:34:04.000 Stormy Daniels.

00:34:07.000 You know, the bus interview that he put down to Locker Room Talk.

00:34:13.000 You know, his multiple legal values, filings.

00:34:19.000 And what would you like to see them do?

00:34:20.000 And you voted for this man.

00:34:23.000 No, I can't vote for him.

00:34:24.000 Whatever, you said you voted or whatever, I don't know.

00:34:26.000 Plenty of Americans, I don't know, you said you supported him, so...

00:34:30.000 Is that correct?

00:34:32.000 You supported him, okay.

00:34:33.000 No, I'm not saying that.

00:34:34.000 I supported him on some of his policies and him, but...

00:34:47.000 I mean, I critique him.

00:34:49.000 He's a friend of mine.

00:34:50.000 I critique him.

00:34:50.000 I don't think Canada should be the 51st state.

00:34:52.000 We have enough liberals in America.

00:34:57.000 Okay, thank you.

00:34:58.000 Thank you.

00:34:59.000 cheers.

00:35:06.000 Next question is from Kai Bevan at Trinity Hall.

00:35:17.000 So thank you for coming, Charlie.

00:35:19.000 My question to you, I mean, I'm a medical student, and I'm going to throw out the big A word.

00:35:23.000 I know you get asked about it a lot, but I want to hear from you what your opinion is on abortion.

00:35:30.000 Life begins at conception.

00:35:32.000 But about abortion specifically.

00:35:34.000 Why do you think abortion is wrong specifically?

00:35:36.000 Well, you agree murder is wrong?

00:35:38.000 I agree.

00:35:39.000 Okay, so this is where we get to the question, right?

00:35:41.000 Because what is it about murder you say is wrong?

00:35:44.000 Like, why is murder wrong?

00:35:46.000 Well, because it's a human being.

00:35:47.000 Not just because it has consciousness or because it's of a certain age.

00:35:49.000 Because it's a human.

00:35:50.000 And what is it that gives human being this moral worth?

00:35:53.000 Not its consciousness, necessarily.

00:35:55.000 I didn't say it's consciousness.

00:35:56.000 I know.

00:35:56.000 I can imagine it's because it is a human being because it has a soul.

00:36:01.000 And what is this soul?

00:36:02.000 Where does this come from?

00:36:04.000 Exactly.

00:36:04.000 I mean, again, the Greeks postulated that it is the entirety of your being.

00:36:08.000 You guys can laugh.

00:36:09.000 I mean, it's true.

00:36:10.000 I mean, every civilization has had a different belief, but agreed upon ethical monotheism, which is the creed of the West and what the birth certificate of my country articulates, that every human being is more than just matter, it's more than just a clump of cells, but it also has an invisible element to you that will live beyond you.

00:36:24.000 Fine.

00:36:29.000 Ethical monotheism, which is the creed of the West.

00:36:32.000 And again, the Declaration of Independence mentions God four times.

00:36:35.000 The founders were explicitly believed, not in a secular morality, but a divinely given one, of at least this idea that there is a God and you are not him.

00:36:45.000 And let me ask you, what is the first stage of human development?

00:36:49.000 This is the thing, right?

00:36:50.000 We can take it from the sperm being generated in the father and the oocyte being generated in the mother, right?

00:36:56.000 They fuse at conception.

00:36:58.000 The only thing that happens at conception is these two cells fused.

00:37:01.000 No, DNA is created.

00:37:02.000 DNA is not created.

00:37:04.000 No, that's not true.

00:37:05.000 The DNA coding at the zygote.

00:37:07.000 Hold on, time out.

00:37:09.000 Does a zygote have a unique marker?

00:37:11.000 Does a zygote have a unique marker?

00:37:14.000 You have to let me speak.

00:37:15.000 Answer it, yes or no.

00:37:16.000 Does a zygote have a unique marker?

00:37:17.000 Define a unique marker.

00:37:19.000 Meaning, can you differentiate the DNA coding between the mother and the zygote if you examine it under a deoxyribonucleic acid analysis?

00:37:27.000 Can you?

00:37:27.000 Only purely because the addition comes from the father.

00:37:30.000 Oh, so it is something different.

00:37:32.000 Charlie, Charlie, DNA is not created.

00:37:35.000 DNA is not created.

00:37:36.000 The father has his own genome, the mother has her own genome. 0.93

00:37:39.000 They fuse.

00:37:40.000 This is why you have the same characteristics, similar ones to your mother, similar ones to your father.

00:37:44.000 That's why you have similar characteristics to your siblings.

00:37:46.000 DNA is not created, right?

00:37:48.000 So when you ask me, where does a human being come from?

00:37:50.000 I can say to you, it starts at conception, but all conception is these two cells joining, right?

00:37:55.000 These two cells were created, the mother cells were created long before, they were created when she was a fetus.

00:38:01.000 So there's none of this DNA being produced, right?

00:38:04.000 So we can't establish The only thing that happens at conception is these two cells fuse.

00:38:09.000 Now this idea that that means that for some reason suddenly that moral worth comes in, but it wasn't there before when you had these two cells who had half the DNA, but suddenly there's a Something magical happens at that point.

00:38:21.000 It's not magical, Charlie.

00:38:22.000 We know about this.

00:38:23.000 Well, hold on.

00:38:24.000 Hold on.

00:38:24.000 Charlie, Charlie.

00:38:25.000 Time out.

00:38:26.000 Hold on.

00:38:29.000 I promise you, I'm not trying to score points.

00:38:33.000 I'm not trying to score points on you.

00:38:35.000 We call it the miracle of life for a reason.

00:38:37.000 We've not been able to yet replicate human life development outside of the womb.

00:38:40.000 We call it the miracle of life because, yes, it's something beautiful.

00:38:43.000 The ability to form a new human.

00:38:45.000 It's magical.

00:38:45.000 You say magical.

00:38:47.000 Oh, it's beautiful.

00:38:48.000 It's an incredible thing that happens, of course.

00:38:50.000 But it's not incredible in the sense we don't know what's going on.

00:38:53.000 There's no new DNA coming out of nowhere.

00:38:55.000 Hold on, but time out.

00:38:57.000 Isn't there a separate DNA, though, than the mother? 0.99

00:39:00.000 Yes, from the father.

00:39:01.000 Okay, yes, but it's not the father's DNA either.

00:39:04.000 A new coding is created.

00:39:06.000 You are a blend of the two.

00:39:09.000 So when did your life begin?

00:39:11.000 When did your life begin?

00:39:13.000 I mean, again, this comes from what you define as where life starts.

00:39:16.000 You can say life starts at conception, but I'm telling you, I believe that's just an arbitrary point, right?

00:39:21.000 That's just the moment these two cells fuse.

00:39:23.000 Now, you say about this mother thing, so the way DNA is arranged in a cell is it's arranged in chromosomes.

00:39:29.000 Chromosomes are paired up, so you have one from the mother, one from the father, typically, in a healthy individual, right?

00:39:34.000 Now, you can take those maternal chromosomes out and you can find that this is who the person's mother is. 0.60

00:39:39.000 And you can do the same with the father.

00:39:41.000 Now, the reason you are different to your mother and father is because some of those chromosomes express genes that are different from each other.

00:39:47.000 And so those genes interact and that's what gives rise to you, right?

00:39:51.000 There's no space for any kind of moral framework to come into that until you consider that a human being is capable of consciousness and of suffering.

00:40:00.000 But unless you, if you take that out of the equation, these two DNA, you know, whatever they call molecules, right?

00:40:07.000 These two DNA molecules are fusing.

00:40:09.000 That does not suddenly flip a switch that attributes moral worth to that individual.

00:40:23.000 I'm just saying, I'm not trying to score points.

00:40:26.000 By what moral standard do you believe that?

00:40:29.000 I believe that if an individual is capable of suffering, then it's wrong.

00:40:33.000 Now, can I explain my opinion on abortion, just so you can understand?

00:40:36.000 I would agree, as many reasonable people would, that at nine months...

00:40:45.000 Unless you have some extreme circumstances.

00:40:47.000 But for an elective abortion seems a bit radical to me.

00:40:50.000 But it also seems radical to say that a woman who has just, you know, the cells have just fused, to deny her of an abortion also seems wrong to me.

00:40:57.000 Because that, you know, that zygote is not capable of suffering, as far as we know.

00:41:02.000 So you're, again, by what moral standard?

00:41:04.000 Is that just your opinion?

00:41:05.000 Where did you get that moral standard from?

00:41:07.000 Because suffering is a bad thing.

00:41:08.000 We all know suffering is a bad thing.

00:41:10.000 That's an objective fact, right?

00:41:11.000 Okay, so you do believe in objective morality.

00:41:14.000 I believe that suffering is an objectively negative feeling.

00:41:17.000 So if you can't feel it, is it okay?

00:41:20.000 What do you mean if you can't feel it?

00:41:21.000 If you can't feel the pain, is it okay to inflict the pain?

00:41:24.000 In the sense that if no one's suffering from it, if you have a scenario where nobody is suffering from something, then yes, of course.

00:41:29.000 There's no moral...

00:41:37.000 So let me just make sure I understand this correctly.

00:41:40.000 That if it doesn't affect their well-being, so dementia patients that don't know who they are or where they're from, can we execute dementia patients because they're confused about their well-being?

00:41:49.000 Can you imagine a scenario?

00:41:51.000 Or Alzheimer's patients.

00:41:52.000 Alzheimer's patients don't really know much about anything.

00:41:55.000 Can we schedule them for execution because they can't technically suffer?

00:41:58.000 Can I respond? 0.62

00:41:59.000 So can you imagine a scenario where we lived in a society where we killed people when they underwent dementia?

00:42:06.000 Suffer from dementia.

00:42:07.000 We're incapable of suffering. 1.00

00:42:08.000 And we killed them, right? 0.98

00:42:09.000 That would not, that does not... 0.98

00:42:15.000 of still suffering involved.

00:42:21.000 Imagine living your life thinking, I could get dementia and suddenly I'd be killed by my state.

00:42:26.000 Imagine a world where you slaughter a million babies every year in America.

00:42:28.000 Charlie!

00:42:29.000 Charlie, it's not slaughter.

00:42:31.000 That's the problem.

00:42:31.000 Hold on.

00:42:32.000 It's a forcible removal from the umbilical cord.

00:42:35.000 Of another human life.

00:42:37.000 Again, we have clarity but not agreement.

00:42:40.000 Biologically, you know that your entire coding began at conception.

00:42:44.000 Your coding.

00:42:44.000 No, no, that's what I'm denying.

00:42:46.000 I disagree with that.

00:42:47.000 When those two cells fused together, to use your terminology, that is where the process of human...

00:42:54.000 In the interest of time, can we bring this question to a close?

00:42:56.000 The process of human development objectively begins at that moment.

00:42:59.000 Therefore, those human beings are deserving of human rights.

00:43:03.000 Would we keep going or do you want to?

00:43:05.000 Can I finish?

00:43:06.000 Yeah, you can finish.

00:43:07.000 The process of development begins from the moment the sperm is being generated in the That's just a point you've taken.

00:43:18.000 It makes perfect sense because that is when your journey as a human being, when the sperm and egg were separate, you were not yet a fused human being.

00:43:25.000 You were not created uniquely in any image.

00:43:27.000 DNA existed.

00:43:28.000 Your DNA existed.

00:43:32.000 Your DNA did not exist.

00:43:33.000 It's like saying that we have a full car just because we have all the parts.

00:43:36.000 It was not yet put together until conception happens and the zygote was By the way, thank you guys for supporting it.

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00:45:40.000 The next question tonight is from Rudy Ellis-Jones from Emanuel College.

00:45:50.000 Hello, thank you for coming to today's talk.

00:45:52.000 So my question, as someone studying archaeology and biological anthropology, I've learned that moral codes and social norms have always been fluid, shaped by time, culture, power.

00:46:04.000 So many ancient and recent societies embraced same-sex relationships and even the idea of third genders well before Western conservatism even existed.

00:46:12.000 So when you claim that modern conservative values represent some kind of universal, objective moral truth, like you said on your chair over there, aren't you just defending a selective, historically recent ideology that erases most of human history and targets people who have always been part of it?

00:46:29.000 No, but can you point to me of a...

00:46:37.000 Can you point to me a great power that endorsed same-sex marriage?

00:46:40.000 Not cohabitation, but marriage.

00:46:42.000 Ancient Mesopotamia.

00:46:43.000 As marriage.

00:46:44.000 As marriage that existed.

00:46:47.000 Recognized by the state.

00:46:49.000 100%.

00:46:50.000 And how did that work out for them?

00:46:53.000 It worked out perfectly fine.

00:46:54.000 It was an accepted norm of society.

00:46:56.000 Okay, I still think it's wrong.

00:46:59.000 Okay, swiftly moving on.

00:47:00.000 So you said it was based on scripture and you believe that there are moral, objective, universal truths.

00:47:04.000 Yes, there are.

00:47:05.000 Murder is wrong today and murder was wrong 2,000 years ago.

00:47:08.000 Right, okay, that's not same-sex, but fair. 0.96

00:47:10.000 I see your point.

00:47:11.000 There are moral truths that are transcendent of time, place, and matter.

00:47:16.000 Okay, but so just to clarify, you believe that this is in the Bible, this is laid out in the Bible, that man shall not sleep with man, and so therefore it's also repeated throughout the New Testament as well.

00:47:24.000 In the book of Matthew, Jesus reaffirms the biblical standard for marriage.

00:47:27.000 Okay, so I'm going to make two very, very quick points.

00:47:29.000 So the first, so if we look at the Old Testament in isolation, just to start off with as an example.

00:47:34.000 So let's look at Exodus 35.2, which suggests that if you work on the Sabbath, you should be put to death.

00:47:40.000 If you look at Leviticus 11.7, It suggests that if you have pork, you should be put to death.

00:47:46.000 If you plant two crops side by side, you should be stoned by your entire village. 0.89

00:47:51.000 If you wear a suit, which you are wearing now, that contains two different fibres intertwined into the same jacket, you should be burned at the stake by your own mother.

00:47:59.000 Now, following that rationale, in Leviticus 18.22, and it states that man shall not sleep with man, why aren't we burning ourselves at the stake as well? 0.96

00:48:08.000 Why aren't we stoning ourselves to death?

00:48:18.000 Do you care to address my main contention that Christ affirmed biblical marriage in the book of Matthew?

00:48:23.000 And can you tell me the difference between the ceremonial, the moral, and the ritual law?

00:48:28.000 And then finally, also, tell me about Christianity, the difference between the new and the old covenant, or are you just going to cherry-pick certain verses of ancient Israel that do not apply to new Christianity?

00:48:36.000 Fair, fair.

00:48:37.000 So we'll look at two points then.

00:48:38.000 So firstly, if we look at the Old Testament, we can see the kind of inconsistencies there.

00:48:43.000 We've already touched upon that, right?

00:48:45.000 That makes sense.

00:48:45.000 Second, you mentioned the point of Jesus and Christ.

00:48:48.000 He never mentioned anything to homosexuality at all.

00:48:50.000 Well, hold on a second.

00:48:51.000 He affirmed biblical marriage as one man and one woman.

00:48:55.000 He said a man shall leave his mother's house. 1.00

00:48:57.000 Romans, right?

00:48:57.000 In the New Testament.

00:48:58.000 No, in Matthew.

00:48:58.000 That is not correct.

00:48:59.000 In the New Testament.

00:49:00.000 In the New Testament.

00:49:01.000 Well, Romans is also in the New Testament.

00:49:03.000 Secondly, in Romans 1, the Apostle Paul talks negatively about homosexuality.

00:49:08.000 Explicitly.

00:49:08.000 Also, homosexuality is repeated in the book of Titus and in the book of Jude as not being favorable as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

00:49:16.000 Not even talking about the Old Testament verses.

00:49:17.000 There are three types of the 613 Levitical laws.

00:49:20.000 And you, you know, of course, in your own way, cherry-pick some of them.

00:49:23.000 We do not live under the ceremonial.

00:49:25.000 We do not live under the ritual.

00:49:27.000 But we do live under the moral.

00:49:28.000 There's only ten of the moral that we as Christians believe we're bound to.

00:49:31.000 Some believe nine, which of course is the Decalogue.

00:49:33.000 And so none of those that you mentioned we as Christians believe that we live under.

00:49:37.000 However, we do look at what Christ articulated as the biblical standard of marriage.

00:49:42.000 And we can also look to church tradition for this as well.

00:49:44.000 And the church has had a tradition for well over 2,000 years.

00:49:47.000 Even myself as a Protestant acknowledges that tradition is marriage between one man and one woman.

00:49:51.000 Fair point.

00:49:52.000 But, okay, say we put aside the Old Testament for now.

00:49:55.000 We'll put that aside and the inconsistencies there, and we'll look purely at the New Testament following your rationale, okay?

00:49:59.000 Now, when you say that Christ lays specifically, and the New Testament states specifically that man shall not sleep with man, I'd like to point out a linguistic error on that point.

00:50:06.000 I did not say that.

00:50:07.000 I said the biblical marriage was affirmed, and then Romans 1 did talk negatively about the action of homosexuality.

00:50:13.000 But ultimately, that affirmation comes from eight lines in there that suggest that man shall not sleep with man.

00:50:18.000 Yes, of course, yes.

00:50:19.000 The Old Testament and New Testament It wasn't just enough to say that you shall, you know, man shall strike eye for eye.

00:50:30.000 It's that you shall turn the other cheek, that you shall love your enemy.

00:50:33.000 Christ's moral standard was much more even elevated than that of the Israelites and the Hebrews. 0.90

00:50:37.000 I'm going to ask you whose Bible, okay?

00:50:38.000 Now, your Bible that you use currently is written in the English language, right?

00:50:42.000 Yeah, the King James Version, yes, thanks to Tyndale.

00:50:42.000 Correct?

00:50:45.000 Yeah, well, exactly.

00:50:45.000 It's written in the English language, which in itself is only, say, 500 years old.

00:50:49.000 Now, but the Christianity in itself, say, is 2,000 years old or even older.

00:50:53.000 Yeah?

00:50:53.000 Correct?

00:50:54.000 Now, which means that the Bible was originally written not in English, but in ancient Greek.

00:50:57.000 Koinye Greek.

00:50:58.000 Huh?

00:50:59.000 Koinye Greek.

00:50:59.000 Yeah, correct.

00:51:00.000 Now, if we look at the Greek terminology.

00:51:02.000 And man.

00:51:03.000 Yes, and Jesus spoke Aramaic.

00:51:04.000 You could translate things.

00:51:05.000 You acknowledge that.

00:51:06.000 Well, we translate things, but translations are linguistically ambiguous.

00:51:09.000 As a former classicist, I know that language can't be translated directly.

00:51:13.000 So, for example, if we look at the translation of certain words into man, so I've got two words here.

00:51:18.000 so I've got malakoi which means essentially soft which isn't necessarily directly saying a gay man and then we've got asana koitai, which essentially means prostitutes.

00:51:29.000 Now, if we look at things linguistically, we can pick apart the Bible and say that actually, it wasn't saying man shall not sleep with man, it's saying man shall not sleep with prostitutes, which is an entirely different linguistics.

00:51:41.000 My contention is completely New Testament focused.

00:51:45.000 But you said man shall not speak another man.

00:51:47.000 So you're talking about Romans 1. Well, actually, in Romans 1, it was actually women sleeping with women. 0.78

00:51:52.000 So you got your verses wrong.

00:51:53.000 In Romans 1, Paul is prophesying about the end of the world.

00:51:56.000 And he's saying that in the end times, woman will like, with woman like, and man will, I think it might say man will like, man will like.

00:52:02.000 You have to get the verses specifically.

00:52:03.000 But it is agreed upon, and you can agree.

00:52:05.000 This is why tradition is important.

00:52:06.000 And I even say this as a Protestant, is that we believe that Scripture is very important.

00:52:10.000 but also look to tradition.

00:52:11.000 Church tradition has had an unbroken chain affirming matrimony, holy matrimony being one man, one woman, And so I'm not even sure your contention, your point.

00:52:24.000 Are you saying that the Bible doesn't affirm marriage as one man, one woman?

00:52:27.000 Are you saying church tradition doesn't affirm marriage as one man, one woman?

00:52:29.000 The Bible doesn't affirm.

00:52:30.000 That is completely nonsense.

00:52:33.000 It's a linguistic error.

00:52:35.000 But Christ our Lord, which is the standard, he affirms this idea that you will leave your father's home.

00:52:40.000 Going back to Genesis 12 and this idea of Abraham leaving his father's home, and you will cleave to your wife. 0.98

00:52:45.000 That it will be called one.

00:52:47.000 In fact, this idea of a new creation, which is something that is then used by the Apostle Paul to describe the church of Christ and the church being the bride of Christ with Jesus.

00:52:58.000 So I'm not even sure your contention.

00:52:59.000 But you're just avoiding my point.

00:53:01.000 I'm saying the Bible that we have today, I acknowledge that.

00:53:07.000 Well, hold on.

00:53:08.000 But what about specifically in Matthew or in the book of Romans?

00:53:11.000 But in order for you to be correct, you mean the church fathers translated it wrong when they were within like 50 years of this.

00:53:16.000 In order for your contention to be correct, you have to say that the early church fathers that wrote the early letters to the church, they were translating it wrong and the tradition they established was wrong.

00:53:26.000 So by then we can lean on tradition and scripture.

00:53:29.000 So when you get tradition plus scripture, you get something that is authentic, that is real, and that is...

00:53:37.000 We've gone back thousands of years to ancient Mesopotamia.

00:53:39.000 But understand, they all spoke Greek, they wrote Greek, and they spoke Aramaic.

00:53:44.000 So, for example, when they were writing the early Gospels, the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they were obviously writing in Greek.

00:53:52.000 They knew that language.

00:53:53.000 So in Matthew, when they were writing Greek, and then the early church fathers...

00:53:56.000 We have a 2,000 unbroken chain.

00:54:00.000 I think you would irrefutably say that it was the teachings of Christ for one man and one woman.

00:54:05.000 Because the church tradition has been unbroken for 2,000 years and they derived it from scripture of that original language.

00:54:10.000 You can't argue that.

00:54:11.000 That makes sense.

00:54:12.000 I mean, if we agree to disagree, then why don't we look at biology?

00:54:14.000 So you know better than the church fathers?

00:54:15.000 No, I'm not saying I know better than the church fathers.

00:54:17.000 What I'm saying is, linguistically, there is undeniably an error, regardless of what you say.

00:54:21.000 From our lens, maybe, but not from the people when they were making these traditions of the time.

00:54:25.000 I agree.

00:54:25.000 They may have got that right, but that may not have been their original meaning.

00:54:28.000 What we're saying is the meaning has been warped over time because societal and cultural context, such as the British Empire.

00:54:34.000 Can we start bringing this question to a close, please?

00:54:36.000 It can be, but that is why tradition matters, because the tradition, they understood the context.

00:54:40.000 Tradition is context-dependent.

00:54:42.000 Well, yes and no, because of course tradition is, but if the tradition lasts for 2,000 years, then we look back as to how did they get to that conclusion, how did they reach that verdict.

00:54:51.000 And if that verdict is in alignment with what we see in Scripture, it means that their verdict was correct in Scripture.

00:54:56.000 They never reached that verdict.

00:54:57.000 as I have historically pointed out.

00:54:59.000 All of the major church councils, Well, no, no.

00:55:03.000 I'm talking about like 300 and 400 and 500.

00:55:06.000 Which in the scale of 2,000 years is nothing.

00:55:09.000 No, but they set this unbroken chain.

00:55:11.000 We've had an unbroken chain in a course.

00:55:13.000 That says that marriage is one man and one woman. 0.99

00:55:15.000 The church has never wavered on this truth.

00:55:17.000 Noted by the British Empire under British form of Christianity.

00:55:20.000 I'm talking all the way back to like 200 or 300.

00:55:22.000 The idea of biblical Christianity goes back to the early, early times of the church when it was a scattered, persecuted church well before King Justinian and well before the Eastern Roman Empire.

00:55:32.000 Well before mass conversions. 0.61

00:55:33.000 When it was a persecuted church, the church believed in one man and one woman because they got it from the scripture itself.

00:55:38.000 Do you want to keep going?

00:55:39.000 Can we move on to the next question, please?

00:55:40.000 Thank you.

00:55:41.000 Our next question is from Damzit Wimela Sena from Lucy Cavendish College.

00:55:46.000 Thank you.

00:55:54.000 Hello, Charlie.

00:55:55.000 Thank you for being here.

00:55:57.000 Just before I start with my question, I wanted to address something you said earlier.

00:56:02.000 On sort of Western Christian values being the reason for the abolishment of slavery globally.

00:56:10.000 I'm not sure whether you know this.

00:56:12.000 I've seen you repeating this quite often.

00:56:14.000 I'm a practicing Buddhist and it was actually Buddhism, Buddhist emperors, Emperor Ashoka of India, who first abolished slavery globally.

00:56:24.000 So I would sort of ask you to sort of look at other You did it globally?

00:56:32.000 The Buddhists had that much span of influence?

00:56:34.000 Oh yeah, within India.

00:56:36.000 Okay, I'll look into it.

00:56:37.000 Thank you.

00:56:38.000 So first of all, my first question, or my only question is, you've advocated and applauded the reducing and removing of public funding for universities on the grounds they promote ideological biases.

00:56:53.000 Given that universities play a critical role in driving national innovation, research, and upward mobility, especially through federally funded grants, how do you reconcile this position with the broader societal value that higher education institutes offer?

00:57:10.000 Well, they can, but in Harvard's case, for example, who's getting their funding pulled, they have a $50 billion endowment.

00:57:16.000 Just so we are clear, in pounds, that would be like, what, $42 billion, $45 billion?

00:57:20.000 I mean, I'm trying to learn the conversion rate here.

00:57:23.000 I mean, it's an extraordinary amount of money.

00:57:24.000 They can either use their endowments to fund it, and if you have certain behavior and certain practices, then you should not get federal funding.

00:57:30.000 Harvard is in direct violation of the United States Supreme Court fair admissions case, which says you cannot discriminate people based on the color of their skin.

00:57:38.000 Go ahead.

00:57:39.000 But isn't the whole point of it?

00:57:40.000 You can't use endowments like that.

00:57:43.000 The point of an endowment is to manage a fund through perpetuity.

00:57:49.000 Cambridge has an endowment, and that endowment allows professorships to be funded, to allow for research into sciences.

00:57:57.000 That's the whole point of an endowment.

00:57:58.000 Hold on.

00:57:59.000 You just said it funds research into sciences.

00:58:01.000 That's what they should do with their monstrosity of an endowment.

00:58:04.000 Yeah, but the endowment is...

00:58:13.000 They have a $50 billion endowment.

00:58:15.000 Even like a podunk money manager in America can earn a 7-10% investment in the markets the last couple of years.

00:58:22.000 That's $5 billion of returns that that endowment could then reinvest in whatever they want.

00:58:28.000 Instead, Harvard has become a hedge fund with a radical school attached.

00:58:32.000 And I think that's very wrong for US taxpayers to continue to subsidize.

00:58:35.000 But it's not just Harvard.

00:58:37.000 You've called on colleges being a scam.

00:58:41.000 You've constantly attacked higher education institutes.

00:58:45.000 You've attacked liberal arts as a scam.

00:58:49.000 For example, like a lot of conservatives, Peter Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford.

00:58:56.000 Ronald Reagan studied sociology.

00:58:58.000 A lot of them did study liberal arts, and you keep undermining these august institutions, which have provided a lot for society.

00:59:07.000 Like society's backbones have been universities and higher learning institutes, and yet you keep attacking them.

00:59:16.000 Well, they used to be largely, but again, I don't want to speak too much about this country, but...

00:59:22.000 You know Peter Thiel, after he graduated Stanford, wrote an entire book criticizing college and then paying people not to go to college?

00:59:28.000 So Peter Thiel, who spoke at this very school, and you guys had a great conversation with him, do you know that he believes college is such a scam?

00:59:35.000 He would pay people $100,000 a year for 20 years straight not to go to college?

00:59:39.000 So not exactly a good argument in your favor.

00:59:41.000 Peter Thiel, who got a philosophy degree, made billions of dollars, and has now forked over tens of millions of dollars for people not to go to U.S. universities and colleges.

00:59:50.000 But it's not just Peter Thiel.

00:59:51.000 I know, but you mentioned him.

00:59:52.000 I didn't.

00:59:53.000 But to complete the point is that, yes.

00:59:57.000 Look, in America, there are far too many people going to college.

01:00:02.000 We need people to become welders, electricians, people that work with their hands.

01:00:06.000 There is a major trade deficit problem in the United States.

01:00:09.000 We have 11 million well-paying jobs that we cannot find enough labor for.

01:00:13.000 And instead, we have a lot of people going to university.

01:00:15.000 To go study North African lesbian poetry.

01:00:18.000 It might sound good, but it doesn't necessarily, A, either develop the content of the character or the development of the soul, and B, it does not necessarily also give you the skills necessary.

01:00:28.000 Some college is good for you.

01:00:29.000 I'm a big proponent of Hillsdale College.

01:00:32.000 Guys, can you please be quiet?

01:00:33.000 I believe Hillsdale College is America's greatest college, and I'm a big proponent of that.

01:00:37.000 But I would ask a question.

01:00:39.000 In your own words, what do you believe the purpose of college is?

01:00:42.000 It's critical engagement.

01:00:44.000 But coming back to your point on lesbian poetry or whatever.

01:00:49.000 North African lesbian poetry.

01:00:50.000 North African lesbian poetry.

01:00:52.000 So in the morning I actually had a lecture on development policy.

01:00:56.000 And one of the key authors on sort of development economics is Nussbaum, who talks about how liberal arts sort of engages you critically.

01:01:06.000 And one could argue, even North African lesbian poetry, I don't think that's a degree. 0.69

01:01:11.000 I think that's just a module within a degree.

01:01:17.000 Maybe.

01:01:18.000 Yeah.

01:01:20.000 That makes you engaged.

01:01:21.000 The fact you don't know shows how rotten to the core universities have become.

01:01:24.000 You're taking one example and telling conservatives and hoards of young people that college is a scam.

01:01:32.000 College isn't a scam.

01:01:33.000 I mean, I took my mom down to a pub just down the road where Watson and Crick announced DNA.

01:01:45.000 If college is a scam, then DNA wouldn't have been discovered.

01:01:48.000 Cancer research...

01:01:51.000 Yes, you're right.

01:01:52.000 At this specific university, you guys split the atom.

01:01:54.000 You had Sir Isaac Newton.

01:01:56.000 You had some of the greatest minds of the West.

01:01:58.000 I don't know about what's happening here, and I'm not going to criticize it.

01:02:00.000 But at most colleges in the West, they've gone away from places of inquiry and appreciation of what is good and what is beautiful and into this incessant oppression Olympics of trying to deconstruct the core canon that is our birth certificate.

01:02:14.000 I don't know if that's happening here.

01:02:16.000 That's not true, though.

01:02:17.000 In America, it is objectively true, okay?

01:02:20.000 It isn't true.

01:02:21.000 No, first of all, they removed Western civilization as a core course in Stanford in the 1990s.

01:02:25.000 They tried to bring it back with petitions and the university said, "No, teaching Western civilization is racist." I talked to some students earlier in the English department and they said, hey, I'm studying Shakespeare.

01:02:41.000 I said, that's refreshing because in a lot of US schools, they don't teach Shakespeare because he's called racist.

01:02:45.000 you'd be surprised at how wretched to the core some of these colleges have become in America.

01:02:49.000 If you look at the Global Innovation Index, They're number two on the Global Innovation Index.

01:02:59.000 China is somewhere near 13. There is a value in liberal arts, yet you're criticizing it.

01:03:14.000 Yes, and I'm going to keep on criticizing it.

01:03:15.000 Also, the vast majority of liberal arts graduates do not respect freedom of speech.

01:03:19.000 That is an empirical pull.

01:03:20.000 They increasingly do not have reverence or gratitude for the United States of America.

01:03:24.000 They don't care about the core values of the U.S. Constitution.

01:03:26.000 If you want to go to college, that's fine.

01:03:28.000 But in our country, The kids that do graduate, half of them end up getting jobs that do not require any sort of college degree.

01:03:36.000 There are all these made-up degrees.

01:03:37.000 In America, I know it's different than the experience you might be having here.

01:03:40.000 Your tutoring system here is objectively great.

01:03:42.000 I'm glad you guys have it.

01:03:44.000 The class sizes in America are 400 to 500 students, sometimes per introductory course.

01:03:49.000 To go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, study things that don't matter to find jobs that do not exist.

01:03:54.000 And so let me just make one final point, is that, of course, some people should be going to college, but generally in the United States of America, it has become a racket of debt, it has become a burden, and a place where we're actually not putting our best and brightest into the job field itself to be equipped for the jobs of the future.

01:04:09.000 Instead, we have a lot of baristas at Starbucks with philosophy degrees. 0.90

01:04:13.000 You also mentioned indoctrination.

01:04:15.000 As per the Oxford Dictionary's definition of indoctrination, it means that you take a belief and you can't

01:04:53.000 lack critical thought in deciding what is thought in schools.

01:04:57.000 Again, I'm not using Cambridge as the school that I think of, but in America, we have millions of people that go to these massive state schools that have humanities departments, that are not reading the great books, that do not have a tutoring system, that are unfortunately laced with the most anti-Western thought imaginable.

01:05:14.000 I don't really quite following what one thing has to do with the other, why 3,000 chapters has something to do with your indictment.

01:05:19.000 Maybe you can clarify, but I think we're out of time.

01:05:21.000 You can clarify, but then we'll be fine.

01:05:22.000 In general.

01:05:23.000 Colleges should be a place that lift you up to what is good, true, and beautiful.

01:05:27.000 To study the great things that have been, to develop your soul, and develop your character.

01:05:31.000 Character in Greek literally means like tattoo, etched within you.

01:05:36.000 Far too often, colleges create ungrateful, pessimistic, and nihilistic revolutionaries that want to tear down what was before and instead have no alternative to build the future, and the West is suffering because of it.

01:05:47.000 Thank you very much.

01:05:48.000 Thank you.

01:05:49.000 I disagree, but thank you very much.

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01:06:48.000 Finding their customers and expanding.

01:06:50.000 Learn more about TikTok's contribution to the U.S. economy Our next question is from Archie McIntosh at Jesus College.

01:07:12.000 applause applause applause applause It's good to meet you, Charlie.

01:07:22.000 I hope you can understand the first rule.

01:07:24.000 I'm a little nervous.

01:07:25.000 There's a very real chance I could wake up tomorrow, front page of YouTube. 0.98

01:07:28.000 Charlie Kirk owns Man Bun Idiot with facts and logic. 0.99

01:07:32.000 It destroys. 1.00

01:07:33.000 It destroys.

01:07:34.000 So my question is, I agree that stable monogamous relationships often produce the best outcomes for society, but if that structure really works for everyone, And why do so many marriages still end in divorce, even among people who generally try to make it work?

01:07:57.000 And just one final framing there.

01:07:59.000 If you believe in free markets because they are decentralized and they adapt to reality without top-down control, and given the individual ability to form healthy long-term pair bonds very significantly with factors like genetics and ecologically calibrated detachment styles, Why do you reject top-down control in economics, but not extend that same rejection to human behavior in terms of marriage?

01:08:21.000 Okay, so the first one, the second law of thermodynamics answers your question, is that it's the law of decay.

01:08:27.000 Societies tend to decay against the roots that created them.

01:08:31.000 For example, as a side note, here in this country, you guys invented the idea of free speech.

01:08:36.000 You brought it to the world.

01:08:37.000 You guys do not have free speech in this country anymore.

01:08:39.000 30 people a day are arrested in the UK for inflammatory social media posts.

01:08:44.000 Someone by the name of Lucy Connolly is currently facing prison time for a Facebook post that was critical of migrants.

01:08:52.000 It is normal, unfortunately, for civilizations to get away from how they once operated and how they once were.

01:08:58.000 Now, to your question, does that answer the first part of your question?

01:09:01.000 You were saying, why do they get away from monogamy?

01:09:03.000 I want to make sure I'm answering your question.

01:09:05.000 I would say I don't feel that that's a full answer.

01:09:07.000 Okay, so you're asking why do they get away from what works?

01:09:12.000 Is that correct?

01:09:14.000 Yes, yes.

01:09:15.000 Well, why do societies make this change once they become more prosperous?

01:09:18.000 Oh, yeah, okay.

01:09:19.000 I mean, because prosperity leads to degeneracy, for sure.

01:09:21.000 That would be the answer.

01:09:23.000 And so once you are prosperous, you tend to no longer have the moral guardrails or the limitations.

01:09:28.000 Let's just say you no longer have delayed gratification because you have instant gratification, because you have a surplus of goods, and then you have a decline of a transcendent moral order.

01:09:38.000 The second part of the question, can you remind me, please, what the second question was?

01:09:41.000 Yeah.

01:09:42.000 About markets?

01:09:43.000 Yeah.

01:09:44.000 Oh, yeah.

01:09:44.000 Okay, well, for example, I believe in intervention in markets if there is something that is improper morally.

01:09:50.000 So, for example, I do not believe that you should be able to scam your neighbor or have misleading advertising because I believe in a transcendent moral standard, and the same goes for my personal views on marriage.

01:09:59.000 Okay, so I think we largely agree on the foundation.

01:10:02.000 I'd like to propose something that you might like to think about.

01:10:04.000 So firstly, I absolutely acknowledge...

01:10:13.000 Again, there's strong data showing the independence of socioeconomic factors.

01:10:17.000 Broken homes are some of the strongest predictors of poor life outcomes.

01:10:21.000 We totally agree.

01:10:22.000 And even, I'm not sure if many people here are aware of this, but if you track as countries become more socially egalitarian, somewhat surprisingly, rates of female depression and anxiety also spike disproportionately.

01:10:35.000 I think one of the problems here is that when you try and impose more absolutism, inevitably, again, due to variance in attachment issues, due to industrialized culture, absent parents, screens, raising kids, around 50% of adults in the West develop attachment disorders, which make it very difficult to maintain long-term pair bonds.

01:10:57.000 And then additionally, you have things like variation of ketocin receptors, density and shape, also invasive pressin.

01:11:03.000 There are going to be, even if there's 5% of people who feel that these rules really do not fit them, they will push back.

01:11:10.000 And this will create ideologies that then grow into more wider appealing ideologies, which then leads to the change.

01:11:17.000 I think this is what happened in the sexual revolution.

01:11:18.000 It started with a push for female autonomy. 1.00

01:11:20.000 And then it was almost morphed into a really exaggerated expression of pushing for maximizing individual freedom.

01:11:27.000 And I think that when you try and impose moral absolutism this way, And I think if you were to, as someone with a platform, instead say, hey, monogamy is great, it works best for most people, but I also understand there are some people it doesn't work so well for.

01:11:42.000 More people would hear the message that you want to push.

01:11:45.000 Okay, thank you for that.

01:11:47.000 I've actually never gotten that question before.

01:11:48.000 It's very thoughtful.

01:11:49.000 Would you say you're against moral absolutism then?

01:11:53.000 Yes, yes I would.

01:11:54.000 Are you against that absolutely?

01:11:57.000 No, I'm very open to having my mind changed.

01:12:00.000 So it's not an absolute thing?

01:12:02.000 Well, I'm against moral absolutism.

01:12:04.000 Are you against moral absolutism?

01:12:06.000 Absolutely.

01:12:07.000 No.

01:12:08.000 Okay, so then you're consistent.

01:12:09.000 So it's all just kind of, it's preference, not...

01:12:15.000 And you could just basically do whatever you prefer.

01:12:16.000 There is no transcendent moral order.

01:12:19.000 Well, I think what you're doing there is slightly unfairly putting me into a loop, because I'm very open to having my mind changed.

01:12:24.000 What I'm saying, though, is that by definitionally, and this is something that will keep on coming back, you must choose what moral standard we live by.

01:12:31.000 I'm very clear as to what moral standard.

01:12:34.000 The lie of the West, of modernity, the last 30 years, is that we're going to have you live and let live, and there will be no moral standard.

01:12:40.000 That itself is a moral standard, and it's a really bad one.

01:12:43.000 And to your point, that yes, it creates more suffering, it creates more despair.

01:12:47.000 No, I disagree with what you say, and I respect the heart of which you're saying it.

01:12:51.000 I will say that I have a moral obligation not to accommodate when people fall short, but instead try to lift them up towards the standard that is true and that I know that works.

01:13:00.000 So where I'd push this is that I'd ask you, you describe people falling short when they fail to engage in long-term monogamy.

01:13:06.000 What do you think causes that?

01:13:08.000 Why do you think some people struggle?

01:13:09.000 Many reasons.

01:13:10.000 Economic is one of them, but the biggest is the death of religion and the death of Christianity in the West. 0.98

01:13:16.000 As America, I'll just talk about America.

01:13:18.000 The UK is unfortunately far less churched than America.

01:13:20.000 But as America has become less churched, so many of these social ills rise.

01:13:26.000 So one thing I would say, I study the evolution of behavior, in particular sexual romantic behavior.

01:13:31.000 If you track all the different hunter-gatherer cultures that we can study, and we track how agriculture shapes things, you see that ecological conditions really reliably predict the prevalence of monogamy, certain marriage systems.

01:13:42.000 And what I think is what we refer to as attachment issues.

01:13:45.000 They seem to be an ecological calibration to an environment.

01:13:48.000 In environments that are more unstable, it's less optimal for an individual to grow up with a tendency to rely on long-term pair bonds.

01:13:54.000 And I think there's a mismatch with the modern world, again, coming back to industrialization.

01:13:58.000 There are so many people who raise kids as absent parents.

01:14:02.000 Daycare is massively linked to attachment issues.

01:14:04.000 This then causes people to struggle to bond long-term.

01:14:08.000 And then again, coming back to the genetic part.

01:14:09.000 There's, again, real research showing that especially vasopressin mutations and oxytocin mutations, some people really just do not have the proclivity for this.

01:14:19.000 What brings stability?

01:14:21.000 Because you say stability is a good thing.

01:14:23.000 And what would bring stability?

01:14:24.000 So, first of all, I would say we had what you might consider stability in the previous century, and then it became unstable.

01:14:33.000 Why?

01:14:34.000 I'm saying because moral, absolute, simple was imposed.

01:14:39.000 Moral absolutism was lost.

01:14:41.000 You see, modernity rose.

01:14:43.000 We started to teach our kids moral relativism, and we got rid of moral absolutes.

01:14:46.000 So it's the opposite.

01:14:47.000 So why was it lost?

01:14:48.000 Was it lost because people stopped pushing from top down?

01:14:50.000 Why was it lost?

01:14:52.000 That's a question for far smarter minds.

01:14:54.000 I can only tell you that it was.

01:14:55.000 In America, it's honestly one of the worst decisions, just worst ideas ever, which is modern feminism, largely from Betty Friedan's feminist critique, feminist mystique, I'm sorry, feminist mystique, And it has led to the women of the West being the most miserable, most depressed, most suicidal, most prescription drug-addicted cohort on the planet. 0.92

01:15:22.000 And I think we need to appropriately challenge feminism and tell young women that it's okay, in fact it's courageous, to get married and have children again.

01:15:30.000 I think it would solve a lot of our problems.

01:15:31.000 Well, I've been told to, very brilliant.

01:15:35.000 Thank you.

01:15:43.000 Next question is from Tilly Middlehurst at Fitzwilliam College.

01:15:49.000 Oh, I'm a feminist. 1.00

01:15:57.000 My question is about the role of women, though. 0.99

01:15:59.000 What should women's role in public and private life look like, and what are the material benefits of that? 1.00

01:16:04.000 Well, thank you for that.

01:16:06.000 Can I take it?

01:16:07.000 I don't even want to take this detour, but can we both agree on what a woman is?

01:16:10.000 Yes.

01:16:11.000 An adult human female is a biological state of being that is also socially experienced. 0.91

01:16:15.000 Can I please elucidate just one example of that social experience?

01:16:18.000 Yeah, I was going to answer your question, but sure, go ahead.

01:16:20.000 Yeah, okay, okay.

01:16:21.000 So let's say you're a member of a tribe, and in that tribe you have the biological female anatomy, and in order to become a woman in that tribe you have to also get a tattoo.

01:16:30.000 That's a social experience that's mapped onto biological reality.

01:16:33.000 So can a woman have a prostate? 1.00

01:16:35.000 Can a woman have a prostate? 1.00

01:16:36.000 Biologically speaking, a woman is an adult human female that has a biological reality, but it's also a social experience, right?

01:16:44.000 It's super easy. 0.53

01:16:45.000 Can a woman have a prostate? 1.00

01:16:47.000 As per my definition of a woman, I would say that people who have a prostate are biologically male, but they can sometimes be socially treated as women.

01:16:55.000 Okay, got it.

01:16:56.000 So women can have prostates, got it. 1.00

01:16:58.000 Okay, so you're a feminist that actually isn't just fighting for women, you're also fighting for men. 1.00

01:17:05.000 So, yes, yeah.

01:17:06.000 Men also experience harms from patriarchy, but I argue...

01:17:11.000 Yeah, sure, go ahead.

01:17:12.000 So men also experience harms from patriarchal domination, but I would argue that those harms come from that system of domination itself.

01:17:18.000 In the same way, for example, this isn't a threat, but if I reached across and punched you in the face, then my hand might hurt.

01:17:23.000 Right, so are we understanding that there are patterns of power?

01:17:26.000 So I would also fight for the rights of men as a feminist, just as I would fight for the rights of women.

01:17:31.000 Sure.

01:17:32.000 Do you think women are happier than they were 40 years ago?

01:17:38.000 I think that women report more stress and dissatisfaction today, not because they have more rights or because of feminism, but because they're under dual pressure to both excel professionally and also because of the domestic labour in homes that is structured around outdated expectations.

01:17:53.000 So for example, studies like the OECD's Better Life Index show that women's life expectancy, education levels, professional achievements have risen in countries with higher gender inequality.

01:18:02.000 So I would argue that what you're calling unhappiness is actually Yeah.

01:18:18.000 That's really rich.

01:18:21.000 I didn't know women not to complain 50 years ago. 1.00

01:18:23.000 That's funny.

01:18:24.000 So, hold on a second.

01:18:26.000 Why are suicide rates going up more for women? 1.00

01:18:30.000 Materially, women are killing themselves more. 1.00

01:18:32.000 Why is that?

01:18:33.000 I think that even if both men and women have become unhappier, men's suicide rates have risen as well, and that's also been exponential.

01:18:40.000 Can you at least concede that feminism offers only one potential explanation? 1.00

01:18:43.000 There could be also other explanations.

01:18:44.000 Of course, obviously, but feminism is the glaring thing in front of us where we have fertility rates down, we have marriage rates down, we have unhappiness up, and we did something in the 1960s out of the universities of Bredi Friedan and Gloria Steinem and all these feminists that basically said, You're trapped in a home, go get a job, freeze your eggs, take birth control, and all of a sudden women are way unhappier than they were 40 years ago. 1.00

01:19:06.000 And I just have to ask the question, why is that?

01:19:09.000 Is it working?

01:19:09.000 And maybe there are biological differences between men and women that we should respect and that deep down a lot of women want to get married and have children.

01:19:16.000 In fact, we should applaud it and we should support it and we should say, it means nothing if you're going to be a CEO of some shoe company or be some banker in London.

01:19:24.000 What matters?

01:19:25.000 If you raise children and you have something to pass down long after you're gone.

01:19:28.000 I think I would bring two points to that.

01:19:30.000 The first one is just really simple.

01:19:31.000 I would argue something else.

01:19:36.000 I would say that it's an economic policy that has very little to do with the social acceptance of alternative lifestyles.

01:19:40.000 I would say that we can recognise that income inequality across a vast swathe of Western countries has increased which causes all kinds of socialills, a lack of social cohesion, housing price growth doesn't correspond with wage growth, monopolies increasingly become kind of emboldened to interfere with politics and monopolies don't prioritise social health either.

01:19:57.000 I think that those offer more compelling reasons for a decline in happiness than an increase in freedoms.

01:20:01.000 On an intuitive basis, generally speaking, people want more freedom, not less.

01:20:05.000 Okay, so if that's true, do you agree that the happiest women in the West are married with kids?

01:20:10.000 I would have to look into it, but I think there are certain...

01:20:14.000 The women with kids are not the ones tearing down statues, right? 1.00

01:20:17.000 They're the ones that actually have obligations.

01:20:19.000 Does tearing down statues correspond to some kind of smiles per capita data set that I wasn't aware of?

01:20:23.000 Again, it's like, it's a little bit of a one-liner.

01:20:26.000 But the happy and the grateful.

01:20:28.000 Okay.

01:20:35.000 But as a side note, you would agree objectively, study after study, survey after survey, that the women of the West that are married and have children, especially a lot of children, are far happier than even the ones that earn more money correlated at the same age.

01:20:46.000 So I also don't think that happiness is a very good metric, and neither do you, because you think gay people shouldn't just pursue happiness by being gay.

01:20:52.000 They have other moralistic considerations to be making.

01:20:54.000 So I don't think smiles per capita is a particularly convincing way to measure whether or not we should encourage women to be autonomous.

01:21:00.000 I think we should maximize agency within a fair system that has reasonable parameters because it's expedient, it's good for the economy, it's logical, it's the moral thing, because if we can't prove the material harms, we shouldn't discourage it.

01:21:10.000 And also self-reported studies is a really flawed way to do psychology.

01:21:13.000 It's the week before my university exams right now, and I'm standing here explaining the basic methodology behind survey collection in sociology, which you don't even think is a real subject, to Charlie Kirk.

01:21:23.000 If I took one of those surveys right now, I'd check extremely miserable.

01:21:30.000 No, I'm kind of making a joke.

01:21:35.000 I mean, like, that's an important point, though, is that the women in the West have it the best in the world, and yet they're way unhappier than women of Sub-Saharan Africa. 1.00

01:21:43.000 There's something fundamentally wrong here.

01:21:45.000 Because the women of Sub-Saharan Africa have something that a lot of women in the West do not have. 0.68

01:21:48.000 The women in the West have cats, and they have good jobs. 1.00

01:21:51.000 And the women of Sub-Saharan Africa, they have a belief in the divine, and they have kids.

01:21:55.000 And maybe there's a biological undercurrent that is keeping a lot of women from realizing their full potential. 1.00

01:22:02.000 And so without reading your phone and just like, you know, connecting.

01:22:07.000 Well, it's fine.

01:22:08.000 Sure, then you can answer without it.

01:22:09.000 Fair enough.

01:22:10.000 Would you agree that it's a good thing that more women get married and have children in the West?

01:22:14.000 I would ask you, would you say that a sub-Saharan African woman who's experienced female genital mutilation and checks extremely happy in a survey, and I also would check extremely happy in a survey, who do you think would be objectively more happy, even if they both check the same answer?

01:22:27.000 Again, so if you want to talk about how Islam mistreats women, we could talk all day long. 1.00

01:22:30.000 I'm all for that.

01:22:32.000 Me too.

01:22:33.000 So we agree.

01:22:33.000 Okay, good.

01:22:33.000 Absolutely.

01:22:34.000 We agree on many, many things. 0.98

01:22:35.000 That we should shut off Muslim immigration to the UK, right? 1.00

01:22:37.000 We totally agree. 0.89

01:22:38.000 I think that all religious fundamentalism is bad, and if you take that logic, we should also not allow evangelical Christians in the UK either. 1.00

01:22:43.000 Hold on.

01:22:43.000 Hold on a second.

01:22:44.000 Hold on.

01:22:45.000 Hold on.

01:22:45.000 That's funny.

01:22:47.000 Can you show me a single...

01:22:49.000 Show me what would your example...

01:22:56.000 America.

01:22:57.000 Yes.

01:22:57.000 Oh, really?

01:22:58.000 We had a female woman vice president. 1.00

01:23:01.000 We had a female vice president, a female speaker of the house. 1.00

01:23:04.000 Women earn more than men in America. 0.88

01:23:06.000 In Rwanda, female representation in government supersedes the UK by quite a lot. 0.99

01:23:11.000 Do women get treated better in Rwanda?

01:23:14.000 I might be super off of this.

01:23:16.000 Like, is Rwanda Islamic? 0.96

01:23:17.000 Like, I'm not totally sure.

01:23:18.000 I don't think it is.

01:23:19.000 Like, is it?

01:23:20.000 Like, I don't know, actually.

01:23:22.000 It's not.

01:23:23.000 So, again, we're just talking about Islam.

01:23:24.000 It's a little bit of a side note.

01:23:25.000 But you must be morally clear, because you brought up female gender mutilation, which is a teaching of the Islamic faith.

01:23:31.000 But as a side note, again, this is very important, which is I'm not here to require you to do anything or not. 0.98

01:23:39.000 I'm making a simple observation, which is The women of the West are miserable. 1.00

01:23:46.000 And they're miserable for a reason. 0.97

01:23:47.000 Because we've told them to suppress how they are made by God and pursue something else and get a bunch of trinkets and get a bunch of promotions and they end up at 38 years old with a big flat in London and they're miserable.

01:24:00.000 And we should tell them to stop freezing their eggs and start finding their partner earlier and have lots of babies. 1.00

01:24:05.000 Yeah, okay.

01:24:06.000 I think I'd bring two just final points to this.

01:24:07.000 First one is just really intuitive, right?

01:24:09.000 Which is that if you actually care about women's happiness, then the solution is to structurally support them. 0.63

01:24:13.000 That means universal childcare, shared legally enforceable parental leave.

01:24:16.000 And in Nordic countries where women have high workforce participation and also some state support, they report higher life satisfaction than in more conservative countries, including America.

01:24:24.000 So if your metric is happiness...

01:24:26.000 You just told me they're BS. 0.96

01:24:27.000 So are satisfaction surveys bullshit or not? 1.00

01:24:29.000 Because you told me they're bullshit. 0.99

01:24:30.000 Do you acknowledge satisfaction surveys or not? 1.00

01:24:32.000 You just told me that they're BS.

01:24:33.000 Do you think we can use that as data?

01:24:35.000 I don't think that it's the only sole data set.

01:24:39.000 You told me they're so flawed and you self-report.

01:24:42.000 Okay, by the macro self-satisfaction data.

01:24:45.000 I am correct.

01:24:46.000 And you are right.

01:24:46.000 When you have paid family leave, you are happier.

01:24:48.000 I'm actually a proponent of that.

01:24:50.000 At Turning Point USA, we pay for six months when somebody has a child.

01:24:52.000 I think there's a lot of agreement we can have on that.

01:24:54.000 We need to encourage having more children.

01:24:56.000 I think the Hungarian child policy is phenomenal.

01:24:58.000 We should look at that.

01:24:59.000 Because the greatest thing that is plaguing the West is we're not having enough kids.

01:25:02.000 And it's not just bad because we won't have a future.

01:25:05.000 It's also bad because the present is awfully miserable for too many women as well. 0.98

01:25:08.000 Okay, in which case I think we get...

01:25:12.000 Okay, I think just one final thing, which is in which case we get to a really interesting argument about what parts of womanhood can be demarcated to the social and what kinds of womanhood can be demarcated to the biological.

01:25:21.000 So, for example, my anatomy is demarcated to the biological, but the fact that I might potentially be a better nurturer than a man, I would demarcate that to the social, you might demarcate that to the biological, in which case we have differing moral scales of value.

01:25:30.000 I would ask why we should necessarily prioritize your moral scale of value, which prioritizes things like the birth rate, when in actual fact there are various other moral scales of value.

01:25:39.000 And if you yourself are a free market American, why is it the case that you would not, like the previous speaker noted, extend personal freedoms towards all spheres, including a private sphere?

01:25:48.000 I believe in absolute truth claims.

01:25:49.000 And it's absolutely wrong and bad when a society stops having kids to replace their own population. 0.95

01:25:53.000 And then you have to import the third world and you become the third world. 0.99

01:26:01.000 You know one of the biggest lies being sold to American people right now is that you're in control of your money, especially when it comes to crypto.

01:26:07.000 But the truth, most of these so-called crypto platforms are just banks in disguise, fully capable of freezing your assets the moment some bureaucrat makes a phone call.

01:26:16.000 That is not what Bitcoin was built for.

01:26:18.000 That's why I use Bitcoin.com.

01:26:20.000 I just did a major transaction on it.

01:26:22.000 They offer a self-custodial wallet, which means you hold the keys.

01:26:26.000 You control your assets.

01:26:28.000 No one can touch your crypto.

01:26:29.000 Not the IRS or not a rogue bank.

01:26:32.000 Not some three-letter agency that thinks it knows better than you do.

01:26:35.000 This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin, peer-to-peer money, free from centralized control, free from surveillance, and free from arbitrary seizure.

01:26:44.000 So if you're serious about financial sovereignty, go to Bitcoin.com, set up your wallet, take back control, because if you don't hold the keys, you don't own your money.

01:26:52.000 Bitcoin.com.

01:26:53.000 Freedom starts here.

01:26:57.000 Thank you.

01:26:58.000 And the final question that we've got time for today is from Sammy MacDonald from St. John's College.

01:27:03.000 Thank you.

01:27:12.000 Good evening, Mr. Kirk.

01:27:13.000 You've obviously devoted a lot of your life to electing, keeping in power Donald Trump.

01:27:18.000 And you did so partly because you said Trump would put Americans first and take them out of foreign conflicts.

01:27:23.000 Shall we see how that is going at the moment?

01:27:26.000 Currently, Trump has just accepted a $400 million debt from Qatar, which we're assured is perfectly above board.

01:27:32.000 Billions in arms are going to Saudi Arabia, which they're using to bomb and starve Yemeni children. 1.00

01:27:37.000 Not sure how that's in the interest of the United States.

01:27:39.000 but it might be in the interest of the $5.5 billion deal his failed sons are receiving.

01:27:44.000 At the same time, this great president of peace has greenlit mass killings, not just in Yemen, but in Gaza, where he greenlit an invasion called Operation Gideon's Chisholm.

01:27:59.000 Haven't you and your ilk sold America out?

01:28:02.000 applause applause applause applause applause applause Well, I'm glad you have great intellectual substance and can answer.

01:28:18.000 Because it's all the culture wars for you, isn't it?

01:28:20.000 The second someone actually tells you what you're doing, Pound on the table, you're all over the place.

01:28:29.000 No.

01:28:30.000 Do you want me to go piece by piece?

01:28:31.000 or would you like me to talk slower?

01:28:34.000 Number one, Donald Trump is convening a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

01:28:39.000 It's going well.

01:28:40.000 Can you not interrupt me?

01:28:41.000 I allowed you to talk uninterrupted.

01:28:42.000 You're famous for not interrupting.

01:28:45.000 Yeah, I haven't interrupted a single person here today.

01:28:48.000 Can I speak uninterrupted, actually?

01:28:50.000 He is convening a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

01:28:53.000 I believe we will see an end to that war.

01:28:55.000 Number two, he's actually talking to Iran and discouraging Israel to strike the interior of Iran and has stopped many other international countries to do the same.

01:29:04.000 Number three, can you give him credit for ending the Indian-Pakistan war?

01:29:09.000 Both of them said he didn't do that.

01:29:11.000 Well, hold on a sec.

01:29:11.000 Let's go back.

01:29:13.000 No, no, no.

01:29:13.000 Russia-Ukraine.

01:29:14.000 Can I speak now?

01:29:16.000 Yes, but the Indian-Pakistan thing, you've got to go deeper than that.

01:29:19.000 Let's go in order.

01:29:21.000 Is a peace summit where the main person in question, Russia, doesn't show up, is that a success, Mr Kirk?

01:29:28.000 I'm not even sure.

01:29:30.000 Well, again, these are ongoing negotiations, and it's a lot better than when your Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, went alongside our Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, to Istanbul and unnecessarily blew up a potential Russian peace deal, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians, one of the great unnecessary wars of the modern era.

01:29:50.000 Donald Trump believes in conversation and police through strength.

01:29:53.000 He has been president for well over 120 to 130 days, and he has already ended a war between two nuclear conflicts of India-Pakistan.

01:30:01.000 He has secured our own U.S. southern border while we were being invaded by foreign powers.

01:30:05.000 And thirdly, he is brokering a potential settlement with Iran that will prevent a major escalation in the Middle East.

01:30:12.000 And finally, it is very difficult, but I believe they'll get it done, that we'll finally see an end to the Russian-Ukrainian war.

01:30:22.000 But do you really think leverage, negotiations work if you cut off all your leverage and scream at one party in the Oval Office?

01:30:29.000 Don't you think that has just emboldened Russia?

01:30:31.000 Because look at the approach.

01:30:32.000 Putin thinks so much of your glorious president, he can't even be asked to show up. 1.00

01:30:36.000 You have elected, or help elect, somebody who is at best an idiot and at worst is deeply corrupt. 1.00

01:30:42.000 Okay, again, so Trump and Putin had a two-hour phone call today. 1.00

01:30:45.000 You'll acknowledge that's a good thing.

01:30:46.000 The pursuit of peace can sometimes be a winding road, and it's a lot better than sending hundreds of billions of dollars further into the killing fields of eastern Ukraine, something that tragically, both the UK government and the US government, has been unnecessarily supporting for a couple of years.

01:31:02.000 President Trump wants to see a brokerage, an ending of this settlement.

01:31:05.000 I pray we can get it.

01:31:06.000 It's very complicated because of the mess that Joe Biden left, which was an active kinetic war with a nuclear power sending American-made missiles into the interior of Russia.

01:31:15.000 So President Trump has already ended a At this point we are merely speculating, which I think we should not spend our time doing that, because eventually one of us will be right.

01:31:27.000 I believe we'll be right, and I believe we'll see an end to this war.

01:31:30.000 Can we just talk about 100 billions worth of weapons?

01:31:32.000 Because you dodged my question on what was going on in the Middle East, where Trump has just signed enormous arms contracts with Saudi Arabia and with Qatar.

01:31:40.000 And I noticed you ignored the fact that this might have had anything to do with the blatant corruption going on through the Trump coin and going on through giving the very competent sons of Donald Trump.

01:31:52.000 Billions of investment from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

01:31:55.000 This is something that is directly embroiling Americans into conflict but is importantly killing many innocent people.

01:32:01.000 Those nations have been known to terrorise innocent civilian populations.

01:32:04.000 So if you're coming to me and you're objecting to America selling weaponry, why are you defending shilling for the Saudis? 0.83

01:32:10.000 Well, hold on.

01:32:11.000 One is sending weaponry.

01:32:12.000 One is purchasing.

01:32:13.000 Secondly, you do know that the biggest purchase that was announced was commercial airliners, 737, $100 billion.

01:32:19.000 We've heard of Qatar Airways.

01:32:20.000 They purchased $100 billion of commercial airways.

01:32:23.000 You are right.

01:32:23.000 There were some weapons contracts.

01:32:25.000 But I guess the question is, would you rather have Saudi Arabia buy weapons from America or China?

01:32:29.000 I'd rather they not have American weaponry at cut price rates.

01:32:32.000 Let's talk about Qatar for a second.

01:32:34.000 You mentioned Qatar.

01:32:36.000 You've been talking a lot about Hamas and the evils of Hamas.

01:32:40.000 Can I ask you, who's the main funder of Hamas?

01:32:42.000 Well, the palace state?

01:32:45.000 Well, the West actually funds Hamas.

01:32:47.000 Which state?

01:32:47.000 Well, Iran funds Where are the Hamas leaders?

01:32:50.000 And also Qatar funds Hamas.

01:32:52.000 It is a combination of international relief organizations.

01:32:55.000 Is this a state we should have a 400 million jet with the President of the United States on it?

01:32:58.000 Well, hold on.

01:32:58.000 First of all, it was not given to him personally.

01:33:00.000 I understand the optics of it.

01:33:02.000 But it was not given to him personally.

01:33:03.000 It was given to the U.S. government.

01:33:04.000 And under that standard, no U.S. government should ever receive any gifts from any foreign countries whatsoever.

01:33:10.000 It's not given to him personally.

01:33:13.000 Why is he trying to transfer it to his personal library?

01:33:16.000 He is.

01:33:17.000 We're lying.

01:33:19.000 This is way too in the weeds.

01:33:20.000 If you want to keep on going, we can.

01:33:22.000 It's a fundamental moral principle.

01:33:24.000 Under that fundamental moral principle, can you acknowledge, though, that President Trump is getting more done in a less period of time than any president we've seen, while our prior president did not even know what year he got elected?

01:33:37.000 You understand the contrast here?

01:33:38.000 What about autism again?

01:33:39.000 I'm not a defender of Biden.

01:33:40.000 No, I'm not saying President Trump is far better than the predecessor.

01:33:43.000 You're going to have to defend the person you spent millions to write.

01:33:45.000 I will defend every day of someone who ends an invasion, who brings down the price of oil, who is revitalizing the American economy, who is brokering peace, who stopped the potential nuclear war, who is bringing Iran to the table and bringing Russia to the table, someone who does not want armed conflicts with the greatest powers of our time.

01:34:02.000 I will defend that endlessly.

01:34:05.000 You are living in a fantasy world.

01:34:11.000 Let's check on how Trump is doing in terms of diplomacy.

01:34:14.000 Look, with the war in the Middle East, do you think it was a defensible decision to tell the Israelis you wanted Trump-Gaza to agree for Israel to invade the Gaza Strip and to continue to murder thousands of innocent children and civilians in a pointless war?

01:34:30.000 Is that in America's interest?

01:34:31.000 Is that in humanity's interest?

01:34:31.000 Well, first of all, you should know something about Trump.

01:34:33.000 If you haven't realized with Trump over the last 10 years, he is quite the social media user and uses hyperbolic language at times.

01:34:42.000 But let me ask you, in the conflict of Israel versus Hamas, who's the good guy? 0.99

01:34:45.000 I believe both Hamas and the Israeli government are evil, but I think also that there is no justification for the murder and mutilation of thousands of innocent people and children.

01:35:01.000 There's no justification, Mr. Kerr, for invading hospitals, for bombing innocent populations, and dragging out a war which is damaging Israel and the West.

01:35:11.000 You've made that point, but it's not a point, it's a moral truth, isn't it?

01:35:14.000 It was also a moral truth that the war started because 1,300 Jews were killed and 200 were taken hostage.

01:35:19.000 And when you declare war on Israel, expect a firestorm in reaction.

01:35:24.000 Let me finish.

01:35:25.000 I let you talk.

01:35:34.000 On Shabbat, Hamas invaded Israel, deciding to go recklessly to music concerts.

01:35:40.000 To homes, to kibbutzes, and taking 200-plus hostages.

01:35:44.000 They knew what they were doing.

01:35:45.000 In one of the most cloistered urban environments on the planet, 2 million people live in a place where it's impossible to wage war.

01:35:52.000 Impossible.

01:35:52.000 Where they wear civilian clothing, they violate every tenant of the Geneva Convention, and the IDF, when they do something right, they get no credit.

01:35:59.000 When they do life-saving surgeries of a Gazan child, they get no credit.

01:36:02.000 When they drive leaflets, drop leaflets, they get no credit.

01:36:04.000 But when they happen to bomb a place where they are operating their military from, which we now know from third time, I'm sorry, the country where they were living in relative peace on October 6th.

01:36:19.000 That all of a sudden we had a war, and Hamas started the war. 0.89

01:36:22.000 And I don't see people that were really upset about the two million Germans that were killed in World War II, civilians.

01:36:27.000 A tragic truth of war is that civilians die.

01:36:30.000 I don't like it, and you don't like it.

01:36:31.000 And they brought it upon themselves.

01:36:33.000 The only operation at NTG to blame is the leadership of Hamas, not the Israeli government, for fighting this defensive war after they were invaded.

01:36:43.000 I am no defender of the terrible pogrom that was launched against Jews on that day.

01:36:49.000 But the justification for the death of innocents cannot be an infinite cycle of bloodlust.

01:36:54.000 It cannot be killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians with a war with no end in sight.

01:37:00.000 People who are not complicit in those atrocities.

01:37:02.000 It cannot be bombing hospitals which children use.

01:37:05.000 It cannot be bombing hospitals in which cancer patients are dying and starving in there.

01:37:10.000 The deaths that have been inflicted, nobody knows the true toll, but somewhere between 50 and 100,000 people lie dead under the rubble.

01:37:19.000 What is left for Gaza except for to continue to suffer under Hamas?

01:37:22.000 Because it turns out Netanyahu's political strategy has not worked.

01:37:26.000 it has entrenched her mass within the territories. 0.99

01:37:29.000 To be a Christian, I would have thought Mr. Kirk, would never have involved suggesting that the price for an atrocity must be an infinite cycle of bloodlust, that innocent people and the young population must be killed to avenge some kind of providential No one likes what's happening in Gaza.

01:37:50.000 No one with a heart or a soul or a mind likes when kids die.

01:37:54.000 but you must understand who started the conflict so that you could end it correctly.

01:37:57.000 And until Hamas brokers an unconditional surrender, They could release the hostages and drop their weapons and their lives would be spared. 0.53

01:38:06.000 Instead, they are using children of Gaza as cannon fodder, financed by the Iranian mullahs and dragging the entire world into this conflict. 0.98

01:38:14.000 So, I don't even know what we're debating at this point other than I believe that Israel, I believe the facts, Israel was unconditionally attacked on October 7th. 0.94

01:38:23.000 They're responding in kind.

01:38:24.000 And I would just ask you a very simple moral question.

01:38:26.000 How should Israel have responded?

01:38:29.000 Not with the blanket carpet bombing of the city, not with bombing hospitals.

01:38:33.000 Of course, some kind of military operation might have been necessary, but not murder on this scale.

01:38:39.000 There is no justification for what is happening with the enormous death toll that is being produced.

01:38:44.000 I really cannot see how you come here and you have the gall to lecture us on Christian morality and then sit here and justify the murder of thousands of civilians. 0.57

01:38:53.000 Is it working?

01:38:54.000 I've never said that.

01:38:56.000 You just did.

01:38:57.000 This is your whole thing.

01:38:58.000 In war, these are called casualties of a war.

01:39:02.000 We're going to stop bringing this to the house.

01:39:03.000 Again, I'm not going to justify every military maneuver of a 100,000-person army.

01:39:10.000 Instead, what I will do is I'll be clear that there is a good guy and there is a bad guy.

01:39:14.000 I honestly Well, hold on.

01:39:21.000 It's interesting you say that because a child I will be glad that I will not have been somebody who has defended the genocide of the Palestinian people.

01:39:38.000 And I think you will have to reckon one day that you have reckoned with...

01:39:42.000 I want to close on this.

01:39:43.000 So can you tell me what African country is currently ongoing in civil war?

01:39:47.000 Believe it or not, I know about Sudan.

01:39:49.000 Okay, good. 1.00

01:39:49.000 Because I'm an idiot. 1.00

01:39:50.000 How about what Southeastern Asian country has an ethnic cleansing going on right now? 1.00

01:39:54.000 I know.

01:39:55.000 Good.

01:39:55.000 And you have strong opinions on both sides?

01:39:58.000 Unlike you, I take an effort to be informed about foreign policy and to come to conclusions.

01:40:05.000 You are a culture warrior.

01:40:06.000 I believe when everything is done, Mr. Kirk, people will see you and the people you've supported as corrupt, as selling the country out to the lowest bidder, and of doing irreparable damage to a country I'm sure we all deep down love.

01:40:20.000 The difference is when...

01:40:22.000 ...

01:40:54.000 Next question.

01:40:57.000 Thank you.

01:40:58.000 That's all we've got time for today.

01:41:00.000 Mr. Kirk has another engagement, so we're going to walk out of the chamber.

01:41:04.000 Questions with the students or no?

01:41:06.000 I'm fine with what you want.

01:41:07.000 No, I think this is all we've got time for today.

01:41:14.000 You guys are easy.

01:41:23.000 A couple more.

01:41:24.000 Does anyone have any questions?

01:41:25.000 Who's the best?

01:41:33.000 Over there.

01:41:34.000 Thank you.

01:41:52.000 Marvellous.

01:41:54.000 Thank you.

01:41:55.000 A very, very short question.

01:41:58.000 Israel versus Hamas. 0.83

01:42:00.000 Good guy versus bad guy.

01:42:03.000 Russia versus Ukraine.

01:42:05.000 Who's the good guy and who's the bad guy?

01:42:07.000 Both are bad, one is worse.

01:42:10.000 Which way around?

01:42:11.000 Russia is worse than Ukraine. 0.99

01:42:12.000 Okay, so why haven't we pursued that?

01:42:16.000 What do you mean?

01:42:17.000 Well, it seems to me that in the whole of the current US proposition, That Ukraine is being the bad guy. 0.94

01:42:28.000 In what way?

01:42:28.000 We funded Ukraine upwards to $200 billion.

01:42:32.000 Absolutely.

01:42:33.000 We just signed a mineral deal with Ukraine, not Russia.

01:42:37.000 You are expecting Ukraine to give up 20% of its territory to someone who invaded it?

01:42:42.000 Well, is Crimea part of Russia or Ukraine?

01:42:45.000 Ukraine.

01:42:46.000 That's where we don't agree.

01:42:48.000 Well, I'm afraid that's part of international treaty.

01:42:50.000 That's not up for grabs.

01:42:51.000 Well, it's interesting.

01:42:52.000 I mean, thanks for coming.

01:42:53.000 I mean...

01:42:55.000 APPLAUSE APPLAUSE APPLAUSE APPLAUSE Even Zelensky has said he's willing to give up Ukraine.

01:43:05.000 No, no, no.

01:43:06.000 America signed the agreement that gave Ukraine Crimea.

01:43:12.000 Right.

01:43:13.000 When the Soviet Union ended.

01:43:16.000 Right.

01:43:16.000 It was done.

01:43:17.000 First of all, it never should have been done.

01:43:19.000 It was largely ceremonial.

01:43:20.000 However, it was annexed under Obama.

01:43:23.000 Yes, and it was a mistake, and it should be given back to Russia as a sign of good gesture to end this conflict.

01:43:30.000 Who's currently controlling Crimea?

01:43:31.000 Where was the Russian Navy headquartered in World War II?

01:43:33.000 Where was the end of World War II sign?

01:43:36.000 This is very important.

01:43:37.000 I'm not doubting that, I'm just saying that if we're being logical on what has happened...

01:43:46.000 And I don't understand it.

01:43:48.000 Because actually, why is Ukraine the bad guy? 0.92

01:43:51.000 No, I said they're bad, they're not the bad guy.

01:43:53.000 Yeah, well you said they were both bad, but one was more bad than the other.

01:43:56.000 Correct, yes.

01:43:57.000 So why is Ukraine bad? 0.78

01:43:59.000 Well, there's a lot wrong with Ukraine. 0.87

01:44:01.000 First of all, they're not a democracy.

01:44:03.000 Zelensky refuses to hold an election.

01:44:05.000 Well, no, he can't hold an election.

01:44:06.000 Wait, did Churchill hold an election during the war?

01:44:08.000 Because under his constitutional law, That's not true.

01:44:11.000 He can call an election.

01:44:12.000 He can call a snap election.

01:44:13.000 He's full dictator of the country.

01:44:14.000 No.

01:44:15.000 Because he knows that the people of Ukraine would kick him out immediately because he's deeply unpopular.

01:44:19.000 In fact, if he wanted to show a statement to the world, he would call an election and win by 80% and say, see, I'm super popular.

01:44:25.000 So that's number one.

01:44:26.000 I have a problem with that.

01:44:27.000 I have a problem with a person being propped up as a government we're sending $200 billion to that refuses even to face his voters.

01:44:34.000 Okay, I can't agree with you factually on that at all.

01:44:38.000 Constitutionally, Ukraine is not able to hold an election because it's under military law at the moment, and that's just a matter of fact.

01:44:45.000 Again, he can, as a prime minister or president, he can do whatever he wants.

01:44:51.000 He can't.

01:44:52.000 He can't sign an executive order and change their constitution.

01:44:56.000 Neither can the American president either, so hopefully there's a bit on that.

01:45:00.000 He could even do a ceremonial election to see where he actually stands with the people.

01:45:05.000 I think we call those opinion polls.

01:45:07.000 Yes, and they're very negative.

01:45:09.000 But you would agree that a person that holds on to power without the election of the sovereign is pretty questionable?

01:45:16.000 No, not in those circumstances.

01:45:19.000 Okay, then we disagree.

01:45:20.000 Okay, that's fine.

01:45:21.000 But give me another reason why you're Do you not know where a lot of this money is going?

01:45:30.000 I don't disagree that there is a problem with corruption, but the most corrupt country in Europe, are you sure about that?

01:45:37.000 I'd have to think, I'd have to double or triple think about that, but they're very corrupt.

01:45:42.000 Okay, so that's a little bit doubtful.

01:45:44.000 It's not absolute.

01:45:45.000 There's plenty of corruption around.

01:45:47.000 I mean, you know, let's face it, we are talking about comparison with some of the states you're doing business with in the Gulf.

01:45:54.000 Of course, but we're not giving them money, they're giving us money.

01:45:57.000 That's the difference, right?

01:45:58.000 Saudi Arabia's Well, hold on a second. 0.95

01:46:00.000 It's morally acceptable to take money from corruption.

01:46:03.000 Well, hold on.

01:46:03.000 First of all, as far as morally acceptable, you do what's best in the benefit of your country.

01:46:10.000 And so, for example, we were allied with Russia during the Second World War, and I'm glad we were.

01:46:16.000 And I would ask you, how much money is too much money to send to Ukraine?

01:46:20.000 We're at 200 billion right now.

01:46:22.000 I don't think you have to send any more money to Ukraine.

01:46:25.000 We agree.

01:46:25.000 I think you have to agree to support them as a free country and perhaps sell them weapons.

01:46:30.000 Aren't you very happy to sell weapons to less free countries?

01:46:33.000 And I think Europe will pick up the slack, as we ought to.

01:46:36.000 And I don't disagree with some of the comments about Europe not looking after its own security.

01:46:41.000 I just don't get this approach, which was supposedly to end the war quickly, which now seems to be elongating it.

01:46:51.000 And in doing so, throwing up a smokescreen of very variable facts, if they are facts at all, about how things occurred, which actually isn't helping things.

01:47:03.000 And if people can't see that Putin is stalling, I'm just...

01:47:09.000 I think he might be stalling.

01:47:11.000 And therefore, and I think even your president has acknowledged the fact that he thinks he might be stalling.

01:47:15.000 That's correct.

01:47:15.000 So we don't have a disagreement there.

01:47:16.000 No, we don't.

01:47:17.000 We just have a disagreement about the efficacy of tactics.

01:47:20.000 And we don't know.

01:47:21.000 And I'm willing to say we could be wrong.

01:47:23.000 Of course you could be wrong in life.

01:47:25.000 We could all be wrong.

01:47:27.000 But actually bringing that war to an end consistently actually isn't going very well.

01:47:35.000 And I would just suggest to you that whatever tactics have been used are perhaps not the best.

01:47:40.000 And they are certainly inconsistent with what's going on in the Middle East.

01:47:44.000 And how America has been treating parties in the Middle East.

01:47:47.000 But I've had enough of your time.

01:47:50.000 That's a fair contention.

01:47:51.000 Thank you very much.

01:47:52.000 Thank you, everybody.

01:47:58.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

01:48:02.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:48:04.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - May 29, 2025

Charlie vs. The University of Cambridge

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