The Charlie Kirk Show - Charlie’s Lifelong Education + No Stupid Questions With Gen Z

00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.

00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.

00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.

00:00:14.000 If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable.

00:00:19.000 But if the most important thing is doing good, you'll end up purposeful.

00:00:24.000 College is a scam, everybody.

00:00:26.000 You got to stop sending your kids to college.

00:00:27.000 You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible.

00:00:31.000 Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter.

00:00:33.000 Go start a Turning Point USA high school chapter.

00:00:35.000 Go find out how your church can get involved.

00:00:37.000 Sign up and become an activist.

00:00:39.000 I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.

00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.

00:00:43.000 And I encourage you to do the same.

00:00:45.000 Here I am.

00:00:46.000 Lord, use me.

00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:49.000 Here we go.

00:00:56.000 The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.

00:01:09.000 Welcome back for hour two of the Charlie Kirk show.

00:01:12.000 So the top talent of this operation is off at Ole Miss.

00:01:15.000 We've got Erica out there, but we've got our talented team of Zoomers here and also me.

00:01:21.000 And so we wanted to bring back a segment that was a lot of fun last summer, and I think a lot of people liked it.

00:01:26.000 Last summer, we had the conflict, you know, the temporary war with Iran.

00:01:30.000 And so we sort of did a segment where we had one of our Gen Z members, Daisy, ask me questions about Iran.

00:01:35.000 And we wanted to bring that back.

00:01:37.000 I think it would be fun.

00:01:38.000 We just talked about the need to outreach to Gen Z. Well, we have Gen Z right in this office.

00:01:42.000 And I am a sage elder millennial with the bald head of an even older person.

00:01:48.000 And we're going to do it.

00:01:49.000 We're going to do a Q ⁇ A. And if you are in Gen Z and watching, you should also send in questions to Freedom at Charlie Kirk that you would like them to ask.

00:01:55.000 And we can do those in the second segment.

00:01:57.000 Yes, I told Blake I always love doing this segment because I don't have to prepare because these are actual questions that I have about actual things that I don't understand.

00:02:06.000 Alrighty.

00:02:07.000 Well, what's question number one?

00:02:09.000 So when we did the segment about Iran, I had questions because I didn't understand what's happening, but I still knew that there's always been some sort of conflict we've had in the Middle East.

00:02:20.000 This conflict with Venezuela seems to be coming out of nowhere, at least from my perspective.

00:02:25.000 I don't really remember hearing much about Venezuela being in the news.

00:02:28.000 I don't remember hearing much about us being in conflict with Venezuela.

00:02:31.000 So I don't know if, are they at war and with who?

00:02:37.000 That's a good question.

00:02:38.000 That's a good opening question.

00:02:39.000 Are they at war?

00:02:39.000 Right now, they are not.

00:02:42.000 There are signs we are moving in that direction that the administration says it's not for that purpose, but just for context, we've sent a carrier group to the Caribbean.

00:02:52.000 I believe it's the Gerald Ford.

00:02:54.000 So a carrier group is a big aircraft carrier.

00:02:57.000 And not just that, but all the ships that go with it.

00:03:00.000 So it's basically like sending a miniature entire U.S. military to a region.

00:03:06.000 We don't normally have a lot of security concerns going on in the Caribbean.

00:03:10.000 So what could they be there for?

00:03:12.000 Well, it would be Venezuela.

00:03:14.000 Now, you're probably wondering, as you were saying, what is the deal with Venezuela?

00:03:21.000 It actually has been a source of tension with the U.S. for some time, not as dramatic as anything going on in the Middle East.

00:03:28.000 With Iran, we're worried about them getting a nuclear weapon. 0.97

00:03:31.000 We're worried about them supporting militants fighting us in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, and so on.

00:03:39.000 This is more dialed back, but it's in our own backyard.

00:03:42.000 So have you ever heard of Hugo Chavez?

00:03:45.000 Yes, but I would associate that with like a drug lord.

00:03:50.000 I don't know if that's true.

00:03:51.000 Okay.

00:03:52.000 So that's where my head is.

00:03:53.000 Hugo Chavez.

00:03:54.000 Hugo Chavez was a guy.

00:03:55.000 He was a sort of presidential dictator of Venezuela.

00:03:59.000 I say presidential because he did win an election, but he was very authoritarian.

00:04:03.000 And then he sort of converted to being a strongman.

00:04:06.000 In a lot of ways, he actually, he was a colorful figure.

00:04:11.000 He had a radio show and he'd just ramble for three to four hours at a time, which is a funny thing for a president to do.

00:04:17.000 But he was this like left-wing Marxist.

00:04:19.000 So he did a lot of very bad stuff to the Venezuelan economy.

00:04:24.000 Venezuela has more oil than any other country on earth.

00:04:27.000 They have more oil than America, more than Russia, more than Saudi Arabia, more than any of them. 0.94

00:04:33.000 And yet, Venezuela is one of the poorest countries in the world because communism and Marxism are that dumb and he messed up the economy that bad that they can't properly produce oil. 0.96

00:04:44.000 They can't properly run their economy. 0.96

00:04:47.000 And as a result, a lot of people have left Venezuela.

00:04:50.000 A ton of Venezuelans, especially their middle class, fled, a lot of them to the U.S. So it's kind of like an updated version of the Cuba issue.

00:04:58.000 Castro took over Cuba, a ton of Cubans moved to Florida, and we have these kind of conservative Cubans who always have, you know, are interested in the Cuban regime.

00:05:08.000 Now we also have a lot of Venezuelans, and there also a lot of them live in Florida.

00:05:12.000 And so a lot of those want to see, frankly, they want to see regime change in Venezuela.

00:05:17.000 They want to see the government switch to someone else.

00:05:20.000 And it's just been this nagging soar in U.S. foreign policy, mostly because it's a country in our own backyard.

00:05:25.000 They're very close by.

00:05:27.000 A lot of illegal immigrants have come from there.

00:05:29.000 A lot of criminals have come from there.

00:05:30.000 And now, and this is very important, what the Trump administration says is they claim a lot of drugs are coming from Venezuela as well.

00:05:36.000 Okay, so it does have something to do with drugs.

00:05:39.000 Yes.

00:05:39.000 Okay.

00:05:40.000 So my next question is: there are other countries that I know of, like Somalia or elsewhere, where we've just had a military presence.

00:05:48.000 We just have people there, whether or not we're at war with them.

00:05:51.000 Is this different than that?

00:05:53.000 Yeah, it's definitely different.

00:05:55.000 The most important thing, of course, is this doesn't have anything to do with, you know, it doesn't have anything to do with containing like China or Russia.

00:06:01.000 It doesn't have anything to do with fighting Islamic extremism.

00:06:06.000 I shouldn't say it has nothing to do with China because Venezuela has aligned with these countries that are hostile to us mostly because they just don't like us.

00:06:14.000 They're like, we're going to join the other team of countries that don't like America.

00:06:18.000 But the biggest factor with it is primarily just that they're a pretty radically left-wing anti-American government that is only a few hundred miles away from the U.S. And they have persistently been problematic.

00:06:34.000 They've had some fraudulent elections.

00:06:36.000 So they still tend to have elections, but they're highly disputed results.

00:06:40.000 And so I believe in 2024, most recently, they had a pretty rigged election where the opposition wasn't allowed to seriously compete.

00:06:48.000 The announced numbers were not considered very credible.

00:06:51.000 And the dissident wing of Venezuelan politics has been very pro-Trump as a result.

00:06:58.000 You may have heard the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump wanted to win.

00:07:01.000 It instead went to a Venezuelan political dissident who in turn dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize win to Donald Trump.

00:07:09.000 So who is currently in charge of Venezuela?

00:07:11.000 The current head.

00:07:12.000 So the Hugo Chavez guy I mentioned, he died. 0.63

00:07:14.000 He was a quite fat man.

00:07:16.000 And so he died rather abruptly about 15 years ago.

00:07:20.000 And then since then, Nicolas Maduro has ruled Venezuela.

00:07:24.000 15 years.

00:07:25.000 About that.

00:07:25.000 I might be off on the year he died, but he's about that long, yeah.

00:07:28.000 At least a decade.

00:07:29.000 How did he come to power?

00:07:31.000 Do you think they kind of vote, but not really?

00:07:33.000 He was just the, I think he was the vice president or otherwise immediate successor when Chavez died.

00:07:38.000 And then he has won elections since that took place.

00:07:42.000 So does he have problems with the United States?

00:07:45.000 Yes.

00:07:46.000 So he says he doesn't.

00:07:47.000 We had a very funny clip the other day where he's saying, no war, war bad.

00:07:51.000 He says he doesn't want conflict with us, but he is still a guy who has clung to power through illegitimate elections, who is running this incredibly bad regime.

00:08:04.000 They're not as bad as ISIS. 0.99

00:08:06.000 They're not mass murdering thousands of people, but they've definitely been authoritarian with dissidents in their country.

00:08:12.000 They have had rigged elections, and they've totally ruined their country.

00:08:15.000 That's the saddest thing is Venezuela should be, has essentially free money buried underneath it in the form of oil, and yet they remain a poor country because that is how bad left-wing economics is.

00:08:26.000 And there's been this tension.

00:08:27.000 There was tension in the first Trump administration.

00:08:29.000 There are people who just want to overthrow that government.

00:08:31.000 Lindsey Graham has wanted to do it.

00:08:33.000 The Trump administration has not said it wants to do it, but like I said, now we're seeing there's a carrier in the Caribbean.

00:08:40.000 We have a ship that's in Trinidad.

00:08:41.000 That's another country that's right next to Venezuela.

00:08:44.000 And we're also bombing drug boats that we say are coming from Venezuela.

00:08:48.000 And so it's unclear where this could go from here, but there's clearly signs of escalating tensions with the country.

00:08:54.000 Escalating with us or have they retaliated yet? 0.97

00:08:58.000 I think they'd be very dumb to retaliate to us. 0.96

00:08:59.000 I think this would be like a three-year-old trying to retaliate against Mike Tyson. 0.99

00:09:06.000 Okay.

00:09:06.000 Gen Z knows who Mike Tyson is.

00:09:08.000 Yes.

00:09:08.000 Okay.

00:09:09.000 Don't worry.

00:09:10.000 So, okay, Danny, let me know what you think about this.

00:09:10.000 Don't worry.

00:09:14.000 Because in my friend group circles, we're not really discussing Venezuela, which is different because when October 7th, Israel Hamas, like that has been a huge topic of conversation, as well as Iran, huge topic of conversation just amongst very apolitical people.

00:09:31.000 Are your friends discussing or worried about Venezuela at all?

00:09:35.000 No, not really.

00:09:36.000 The only thing that we had talked about with Venezuela ever is bombing the drugs coming in from Venezuela on the boats, as we've seen in those videos that Trump has posted on social media.

00:09:46.000 That's really all that I've ever talked about with my friend group about.

00:09:50.000 Do they support that?

00:09:51.000 Do they think it's cool to blow up the drug users?

00:09:54.000 Yeah, they love that.

00:09:55.000 Yeah.

00:09:56.000 So my thought has long been I worry about it just because if you bomb the wrong boat once of innocent people, that's atrocious and that's very bad.

00:10:05.000 But if they have the ability to be very highly certain on this, I have no problem blowing up drug dealers. 0.77

00:10:10.000 Yeah, I'm all for blowing up drug dealers that are trying to kill thousands of people.

00:10:14.000 As we have established, I have a highly unmillennial view towards capital punishment generally.

00:10:20.000 So I should not be taken as a representative elder on that front.

00:10:23.000 But I can kind of, to reframe this, it's sounding more similar to like any sort of conflict we've had with Mexico.

00:10:31.000 Similar to that, similar to that.

00:10:32.000 But we're not going to try to regime change Mexico.

00:10:34.000 Right.

00:10:36.000 Look, I know there are a lot of choices when it comes to who you choose for your cell phone service.

00:10:41.000 There are new ones popping up all the time.

00:10:43.000 But the truth is, there's only one that boldly stands in the gap for every American that believes that freedom is worth fighting for.

00:10:50.000 And that is Patriot Mobile.

00:10:51.000 For more than 12 years, Patriot Mobile has been on the front lines fighting for our God-given rights of freedom while also providing exceptional nationwide cell phone service with access to all three of the main networks.

00:11:02.000 Don't just take my word for it.

00:11:04.000 Ask the hundreds of thousands of Americans who've made the switch and are now supporting causes they believe in simply by switching to Patriot Mobile.

00:11:11.000 It's easier than it's ever been.

00:11:12.000 Activate in minutes from the comfort of your own home.

00:11:14.000 Keep your number, keep your phone, or upgrade.

00:11:16.000 Patriot Mobile's all-U.S.-based support team is standing by to take care of you.

00:11:21.000 Charlie and Glenn over at Patriot Mobile.

00:11:23.000 Dear, dear friends.

00:11:24.000 So I'll give the last word to Charlie.

00:11:26.000 Call 972Patriot today or go to patriotmobile.com slash Charlie.

00:11:30.000 Use promo code Charlie for a free month of service.

00:11:33.000 That's patriotmobile.com slash Charlie or call 972 Patriot and make the switch today.

00:11:40.000 Tell them about the text messages you see.

00:11:42.000 I'm getting text messages from my friends that are watching right now, and they're all saying how much they support blowing up all the drug dealers.

00:11:49.000 They want us to go further and start blowing up the cartels in Mexico, which I would also support, but as Blake was saying, we'd need to have some intelligence.

00:11:57.000 It's not good if you blow up innocent people.

00:11:59.000 It is very good if you blow up evil, the guilty, though.

00:12:01.000 We would have to do a whole other no-dumb segments, no-dumb question segments on that then, if we, if we're considering it.

00:12:06.000 Does Gen Z know what Mexico is? 0.98

00:12:08.000 Have they heard of it?

00:12:08.000 Yeah, I know more about Mexico, that situation, than I do about Venezuela, but I still have questions.

00:12:12.000 Really?

00:12:13.000 Name 50 Mexican cities.

00:12:16.000 Cabo, Cancun.

00:12:19.000 All right, but I'm not the one who's asking questions.

00:12:21.000 You're the one who's asking questions.

00:12:22.000 Something else I don't know is why everyone on my Instagram and TikTok is freaking out about the East Wing construction.

00:12:28.000 Okay.

00:12:29.000 I, because I run in a very conservative bubble, I have seen all of Caroline Levitts, everything we've talked about that Trump is building this beautiful ballroom that can't wait to see.

00:12:43.000 But why, I mean, there have been arguments that this is unconstitutional.

00:12:48.000 There have been arguments that he's not allowed to do this, that this is desecrating American property.

00:12:53.000 Why are people so upset and what is happening?

00:12:55.000 This might be that you're a younger person, Daisy, but those of us who are older, we know that the East Wing is the heart of America.

00:13:02.000 It is the heart of America.

00:13:03.000 That's what it seems like.

00:13:05.000 There is no building that is more important than the East Wing of the White House.

00:13:10.000 No, I'm just kidding.

00:13:11.000 I could tell you the boring answer.

00:13:14.000 So the White House is the house the president lives in.

00:13:17.000 I believe the technical term is the executive mansion.

00:13:19.000 White House is only a nickname.

00:13:21.000 And as America got bigger and the president's staff got larger, the White House was not really big enough to house everything that you needed to do with the White House.

00:13:30.000 So they added wings to it, hence why they're called East and West Wing.

00:13:34.000 Now, contrary to what you think, I think a lot of people in their heads, they think the East Wing of the White House means like the eastern half of the White House.

00:13:41.000 And there were photos going by viral when they were knocking it down.

00:13:44.000 And I think people thought they'd literally clawed off the side of the White House.

00:13:48.000 They have not done that.

00:13:49.000 Though I will note they've done it in the past.

00:13:51.000 We once did a total renovation of the White House, gutted the entire interior, replaced the whole thing.

00:13:55.000 When was that?

00:13:56.000 In the 40s.

00:13:57.000 Okay.

00:13:57.000 Truman didn't live in the White House for about two years because of how extensive it was.

00:14:01.000 But they added these new wings.

00:14:02.000 So the West Wing, you've all heard of.

00:14:04.000 That's where the Rose Garden is outside the West Wing.

00:14:08.000 It's beautiful.

00:14:09.000 I've never even heard of the East Wing.

00:14:11.000 It's actually a quite cramped building if you were ever inside it.

00:14:14.000 It's like a lot of people in there.

00:14:15.000 The hallways are very narrow.

00:14:16.000 But that's where the Oval Office is.

00:14:18.000 That's where some of the other, you know, the Roosevelt room is.

00:14:21.000 There's some famous buildings there.

00:14:22.000 The East Wing is a sort of events venue building that they have, but it's not very large.

00:14:28.000 I want to say about 200 people can be in it, which this is the United States of America.

00:14:34.000 We have slightly larger events that need more people.

00:14:36.000 You can't exactly hold a turning point event in the East Wing.

00:14:39.000 So Trump wanted to expand it.

00:14:40.000 It's been known we need to expand it for a long time.

00:14:43.000 And he announced plans to expand it many months ago.

00:14:47.000 And he said that it would include, you know, expanding it, and it would include replacing the current East Wing building.

00:14:53.000 No one has actually strongly cared about the East Wing.

00:14:55.000 Nobody could tell you what a famous room in the East Wing is.

00:14:59.000 Probably if you showed people a photo of it, they would not be able to ID it just by design.

00:15:05.000 No, I don't think I could.

00:15:06.000 I don't think I could.

00:15:07.000 I've been to the White House.

00:15:08.000 I don't think I could tell you, oh, yeah, that's definitely this room at the East Wing.

00:15:12.000 Yeah, precisely.

00:15:13.000 And so the real answer is people are freaking out because Trump went and just did a thing.

00:15:17.000 And you used to be able to do this in the past.

00:15:20.000 People could just go do things.

00:15:21.000 The president could try to build something or try to enact a policy.

00:15:27.000 But what they want, they want total paralysis in America.

00:15:31.000 There have been complaints where they've said, how is he able to do this without the approval of historians?

00:15:36.000 So, you know, you have to go find historians.

00:15:39.000 I'm sure we could find some historians that would be a good idea.

00:15:41.000 You need to ask all the historians for their permission before you knock over any building.

00:15:46.000 And that's what they're angry about.

00:15:47.000 Trump actually just said, we need a bigger building at the White House.

00:15:50.000 I am the president.

00:15:51.000 I control the White House.

00:15:52.000 And so I'm going to knock this over and build a bigger ballroom.

00:15:57.000 And it's probably going to be very Trumpian in appearance.

00:15:59.000 He likes his gold leaf.

00:16:01.000 But it's going to be able to house 600 people.

00:16:04.000 And the problem he's solving is up to this point, if we wanted to do a state dinner at the White House with a lot of people at it, you had to put up tents on the White House lawn.

00:16:13.000 You had to put up port-a-potties. 0.88

00:16:15.000 Do you want the Prime Minister of Japan to go into a port-a-potty?

00:16:18.000 Do you want Vladimir?

00:16:19.000 Okay, Vladimir Putin and a port-a-potty is kind of funny to envision.

00:16:21.000 But it's not befitting of a nation of our caliber.

00:16:25.000 And so that's why Trump did it.

00:16:26.000 And people are freaking out because they freak out about everything.

00:16:28.000 So there are no actual legal issues or ramifications for this.

00:16:32.000 Well, they'll probably find some district court judge who's going to say that it was illegal, but they find district court judges who say everything's illegal.

00:16:37.000 Right.

00:16:38.000 Yeah, same question as before, Danny.

00:16:41.000 Are other people freaking out about this as much as I'm seeing, or is it just a few text messages like the East Wing?

00:16:48.000 I'm torn up.

00:16:49.000 They're just as upset about the drugs.

00:16:51.000 No, not at all.

00:16:52.000 I don't think they really care at all.

00:16:54.000 But I would like to know what Blake, if you were president, what would you do with the East Wing?

00:17:00.000 Let's get in the mind of Blake real quick.

00:17:02.000 Oh, dear.

00:17:03.000 That's a lot that I put on my body.

00:17:04.000 I want to make your vision.

00:17:06.000 That is my vision a reality.

00:17:09.000 I don't know.

00:17:10.000 That's really hard.

00:17:13.000 I don't even know if we're making it bigger than that.

00:17:15.000 I would probably want to see it.

00:17:16.000 I would build a bigger ballroom.

00:17:18.000 I would name it after Charlie.

00:17:19.000 I would probably not have old life.

00:17:20.000 I'm very German.

00:17:21.000 I don't like the fancy stuff.

00:17:22.000 I would have it be very humble looking and just have a lot of portraits of American presidents and like great Americans around.

00:17:28.000 That would be my aesthetic thing in the Charles Kirk National Ballroom, which we should build.

00:17:33.000 I think that's a great name, personally.

00:17:35.000 I have no issues with that.

00:17:36.000 That's great.

00:17:39.000 Many of us are hopeful about the direction the country is headed.

00:17:42.000 But after years of abuse and mismanagement, things could fall apart at any moment.

00:17:46.000 That's why I and Americans from all walks of life have taken action to prepare for what's coming next.

00:17:52.000 And that starts with having an emergency food supply.

00:17:55.000 Storing food in your home is the right thing to do because we're living in crazy times, which explains why so many people are preparing.

00:18:03.000 Right now, you can get ready too with a three-month emergency food kit from MyPatriot Supply.

00:18:08.000 It comes with delicious foods like creamy stroganoff, honey wheat bread, and mushroom rice pilaf.

00:18:13.000 The entire kit offers over 2,000 calories a day.

00:18:16.000 This food kit lasts up to 25 years.

00:18:19.000 Who knows what our country will look like then?

00:18:21.000 But when that day comes, you'll be ready.

00:18:23.000 Now, hear from Charlie in his own words.

00:18:25.000 Just go to mypatriotsupply.com/slash K-I-R-K and join millions of Americans who are preparing today at mypatriotsupply.com/slash Kirk. 0.81

00:18:33.000 That is mypatriotsupply.com/slash Kirk.

00:18:38.000 So without further ado, I am so honored to have the one and only Dr. Larry Arn, president of Hillsdale College, in the studio.

00:18:47.000 Here we are.

00:18:49.000 It's a pleasure, sir, because of so many reasons, but namely because of how much Charlie loved and adored and respected you, both in your role at the college, but just as a personal friend of his.

00:19:01.000 And I know that that was a bond you both shared, and you loved each other and you supported each other.

00:19:05.000 And so it's an honor to have you here.

00:19:08.000 The floor is yours.

00:19:10.000 Reflect on whatever you want to reflect on.

00:19:13.000 Well, Charlie is the best student I ever saw who didn't go to Hillsdale College, except he did.

00:19:20.000 He was such a high-minded, generous, powerful, capable young man with amazing self-restraint and self-discipline.

00:19:29.000 I never met a better person.

00:19:31.000 And I did fall in love with him.

00:19:35.000 In the beginning, I thought he was just a 19-year-old show pony.

00:19:41.000 And I asked him a lot of hard questions, and he didn't know the answer.

00:19:45.000 He's 19.

00:19:46.000 And he just immediately was determined to learn the answer.

00:19:52.000 And so I knew him for the rest of his life, 13 years, and he grew on me to a great friendship.

00:20:01.000 I adored him.

00:20:02.000 I think what he's built here is a wonderful thing.

00:20:07.000 I never really talked about, you know, Charlie, I run a big old business, and Charlie runs a big business, and he built it.

00:20:15.000 I never talked to him about that very much.

00:20:17.000 I came here and went around and talked to the staff one day.

00:20:21.000 At the end of it, I said, Charlie, you really know what you're doing, don't you?

00:20:25.000 So this place is very vibrant, and Erica is heroic, and you guys are practiced and principled and good at your jobs.

00:20:34.000 Turning point is growing, I understand.

00:20:36.000 I'm not surprised by that, and I'm confident that will continue.

00:20:40.000 Well, thank you for saying that.

00:20:41.000 And I will say that, and Blake can attest, one of the speeches from the memorial that has been most oft quoted to me or referenced as this moment, of the powerful moment that helped encapsulate the memorial at State Farm Stadium was your speech.

00:21:00.000 You had four minutes.

00:21:03.000 We all got rushed through there because there was a whole, I mean, we had a whole program and it was executed with precision.

00:21:10.000 But your speech, this clip, just listening to it back, is one of the most poignant, I don't know how many words.

00:21:16.000 It's got to be like 25 words, 30 words.

00:21:19.000 And I've had more people tell me about this.

00:21:22.000 And so I'm going to play it here and get your reaction and maybe your reflection, rather, on what you said.

00:21:28.000 Play cut 193.

00:21:30.000 You know, a good thing is a thing that has being.

00:21:35.000 An assassin is not a thing that has being.

00:21:40.000 The assassin must give up his humanity to destroy something that has being.

00:21:46.000 Charlie lives on. 0.94

00:21:49.000 The assassin will die.

00:21:55.000 It's a powerful moment, Dr. Arn.

00:21:57.000 Yeah.

00:21:58.000 Well, that's one of the first conversations I had with Charlie.

00:22:04.000 What is a good thing?

00:22:05.000 What is good?

00:22:06.000 What does it mean for a thing to be good?

00:22:11.000 Charlie got into, you know, that's the fundamental question in philosophy, by the way.

00:22:16.000 That's what Socrates is always asking.

00:22:19.000 And Charlie wanted to know the answer to that.

00:22:22.000 And he, Erica gave, you know, it's probably the best speech at the memorial.

00:22:29.000 Very powerful woman.

00:22:31.000 So deeply aggrieved.

00:22:35.000 She read from his journals.

00:22:38.000 Two, I think maybe three, but two for sure of the stories were class notes on Aristotle class.

00:22:47.000 She told me my name was at the top of the pages because I know something about Aristotle and got him reading it.

00:22:54.000 And see, that's, I think what you have to do, I mean, this is what Turning Point has to do.

00:23:02.000 You can only save America by making it good again.

00:23:09.000 And young people can only contribute to America if they live well. 1.00

00:23:14.000 And to live well is to learn and know and practice the moral and the intellectual virtues.

00:23:21.000 And Charlie was a model of that.

00:23:24.000 He became a very knowledgeable young man, and he had these enormous gifts.

00:23:29.000 He was a very powerful guy, very charming, very fun.

00:23:35.000 To be around Charlie, every time I was around him a lot, every time I was around him, it was a giggle.

00:23:40.000 And also serious, right?

00:23:44.000 Well, we have to live like that to be a free people.

00:23:49.000 And, you know, so many young people are lost today because they go off to college and they tell them nothing is good or true objectively.

00:24:00.000 Which, by the way, is a statement about the truth, isn't it?

00:24:07.000 The right response to that is, is that true?

00:24:13.000 And Charlie got into that, and he led millions of young people toward a better path.

00:24:21.000 I just think that whole discussion, what is it to be good?

00:24:26.000 What is it?

00:24:27.000 What are we ultimately aimed at?

00:24:29.000 It's sort of the bigger picture thing.

00:24:31.000 Charlie wrote a book called The College Scam.

00:24:33.000 He routinely said college was a scam.

00:24:36.000 But then we did these ads for Hillsdale.

00:24:38.000 He would have him on.

00:24:39.000 He always spoke well of Hillsdale as the best college in America.

00:24:41.000 And it's because you're probably one of the only college heads in America who could give an answer to that about why a university, why a college education would matter, why, you know, what the goal of it should be beyond just sending a bunch of money to a college bureaucrat or getting some credential.

00:25:00.000 And it's the ability to actually answer that question.

00:25:03.000 Why are you bothering to learn any of these things in the first place?

00:25:06.000 Why does it actually matter that you read these books or understand these things?

00:25:10.000 And that's, you know, I think I imagine that's why we're going to continue touting Hillsdale going forward is because there aren't many schools that do that.

00:25:18.000 And our goal still remains to make more schools like that.

00:25:21.000 And that's what Charlie would care about.

00:25:23.000 He didn't just want to burn down higher education because it, you know, caused him a tiff.

00:25:28.000 He wanted it to be something more worthy of the people who attended.

00:25:31.000 This is a really good point that you're making because often Charlie would be accused of being anti-intellectual or anti-education.

00:25:40.000 Charlie was the most pro-education person I have ever met.

00:25:44.000 He was the most pro-intellectual person I have ever met.

00:25:48.000 And he loved being connected to you, Dr. Arne.

00:25:52.000 He loved being connected to Hillsdale because he believed that you were doing it the right way.

00:26:00.000 Well, he, you know, he called me once before he published that book and said, I'm going to publish a book telling kids not to go to college, but I'm exempting Hillsdale.

00:26:12.000 And I said, thank you very much.

00:26:14.000 He was giving me a warning.

00:26:15.000 And I said, thank you very much.

00:26:18.000 And he said, do you think it's right I should publish that book?

00:26:21.000 And I said, yeah, I said, you know, there are some marvelous teachers scattered here and there.

00:26:32.000 If you go to, if you encounter one of them, college will be a golden experience.

00:26:40.000 But otherwise, it's not institutionalized that it's a golden experience in very many places anymore.

00:26:48.000 So that's what Charlie is saying.

00:26:50.000 And Charlie, you know, Charlie was a student in our online courses, an assiduous student.

00:26:57.000 He took a lot of them, took nearly all of them, I think.

00:27:01.000 And people are always asking me which one.

00:27:03.000 So we're not at the college, we're not using Charlie's name except to praise him because there's a flurry of that right now.

00:27:15.000 Probably, you know, people have been giving us money for scholarships for Turning for in honor of Charlie.

00:27:22.000 And if Erica wants me to, I'm going to turn those into scholarships for kids recommended by Turning Point.

00:27:31.000 Wonderful.

00:27:33.000 And she probably will.

00:27:34.000 I told her today.

00:27:35.000 But I, you know, mostly the most important thing, you know, from my point of view, Charlie was a student who succeeded in making himself knowledgeable of the best things to know and living in light of them.

00:27:53.000 And he was an encouragement to why young, especially young men who are lost these days, right?

00:28:03.000 They just flock to him.

00:28:06.000 At Hillsdale College, the night of his assassination, it wasn't organized.

00:28:12.000 Our chapel, which holds 1,500, was full for five hours in a prayer vigil.

00:28:21.000 And I brought Erica a box, big box of letters that Hillsdale students wrote to her.

00:28:29.000 We didn't ask them to do that.

00:28:31.000 They got up a letter-writing campaign.

00:28:34.000 You know, we have a, I don't know if Erica showed you, but we have a whole basic warehouse filled with these beautiful presents and letters that have come in from all over the country and people have dropped them off.

00:28:48.000 And the outpouring of love and support.

00:28:51.000 I mean, we make much of some of the negativity, some of the really vile behavior that we've seen because it deserves to be taboo.

00:29:01.000 It deserves to be shamed.

00:29:04.000 But I will never, ever forget how much people have prayed for us, how much people have poured out their love for Charlie through us.

00:29:16.000 And it is, I will tell you, it's truly life-changing.

00:29:19.000 So it's beautiful to hear that.

00:29:22.000 This is the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:29:24.000 We are all about saving babies with pre-born.

00:29:28.000 There are 24,836 kindergartners starting school this month who would not be alive if it hadn't been for what Pre-Born did in 2019.

00:29:40.000 That's how many babies were saved that year because of gifts of ultrasounds from people just like you in this audience.

00:29:47.000 When a woman considering abortion sees her baby on that ultrasound and hears that baby's heartbeat, it doubles.

00:29:54.000 Let me repeat.

00:29:55.000 It doubles the chance that she will choose life.

00:29:58.000 $140 gives five mothers a free ultrasound and saves babies.

00:30:03.000 $280 can save 10 babies, and just $28 a month can save a baby a month for less than $1 a day.

00:30:12.000 A $15,000 gift will provide an ultrasound machine that will save babies' lives for years and years to come.

00:30:18.000 Charlie and Erica love Pre-Born.

00:30:21.000 Charlie loved it so much.

00:30:22.000 He believed in it so much.

00:30:23.000 He was a donor.

00:30:24.000 Whether you want to save one baby or five or hundreds, it's just a phone call or a click away.

00:30:28.000 Join me now, saving babies.

00:30:30.000 Call 833-850-2229 or click on the Pre-Born banner at CharlieKirk.com today.

00:30:38.000 I wanted to play this clip really quick for you, for the audience to see you and Charlie interact a little bit together.

00:30:44.000 Let's go ahead and play.

00:30:46.000 I believe we have this clip.

00:30:48.000 Let's just play 197.

00:30:50.000 Hillsdale is the cutting edge, and I mean it.

00:30:52.000 It is America's greatest college.

00:30:54.000 What are you seeing with the new students coming into Hillsdale?

00:30:58.000 It's an overwhelmingly Christian college, almost everybody.

00:31:03.000 We've never in 182 years required a faith statement to attend the college.

00:31:08.000 Our official doctrine is mere Christianity.

00:31:10.000 That is to say, we got our Catholics and we got our Protestants and we got our Orthodox and we got every kind of Protestant.

00:31:17.000 And we talk about that.

00:31:18.000 I like to say we have the arguments of the Reformation going on all the time here, not the wars of the Reformation.

00:31:26.000 There is a prayer service on every floor and wing of every dormitory every day.

00:31:33.000 Well, there you go.

00:31:34.000 There's a little piece, a little taste.

00:31:36.000 I mean, you guys had these conversations.

00:31:37.000 I mean, you had so many of these conversations.

00:31:39.000 We could have picked any number of clips, but I just think it's powerful to see you and Charlie just interacting.

00:31:45.000 It just, this is a cat, like the comfort, the casualness of it, the ability you guys had to riff off one another was you were singing from the same hymnal.

00:31:53.000 I did.

00:31:55.000 The last time I was on his show, when did that happen?

00:31:59.000 I can't remember.

00:32:00.000 He gave a speech for us here in Phoenix.

00:32:03.000 And I will tell you what I thought about that speech.

00:32:05.000 We had a big crowd.

00:32:06.000 We had 900 people there, I think.

00:32:09.000 And I sat there and watched him give the speech, and I said, boy.

00:32:14.000 And see, Charlie's always a boy to me.

00:32:16.000 Right?

00:32:20.000 That boy has learned a lot.

00:32:23.000 It was masterful.

00:32:25.000 And it was the crisis.

00:32:27.000 You know, the crisis in America is a crisis of principle and thought, which has given rise to a distortion in our institutions in America.

00:32:37.000 The Constitution's not working right, right?

00:32:40.000 Charlie, you know, to the extent that he helped get Donald Trump elected, and that is some considerable extent, it's fundamentally important that now it's been shown that you can dismiss a civil servant.

00:32:54.000 And that's, you know, who would have thought it, you know?

00:32:57.000 Well, Charlie had to do with that, right?

00:32:59.000 But he understood the arguments behind that.

00:33:03.000 He, he, you know, I mean, first of all, politics, you know, politics is like a bad word, right?

00:33:09.000 Politics is the method by which a free people govern themselves.

00:33:14.000 And they have to be in control of it.

00:33:17.000 And so we've built this state that is not responsive.

00:33:24.000 You know, in the scholarship on the administrative state, there's an argument how many rulemaking how many rulemaking bodies in America there are.

00:33:36.000 Not how many rules.

00:33:37.000 How many bodies are making them? 0.96

00:33:39.000 Hard to tell.

00:33:40.000 It's a great question.

00:33:41.000 I had this great conversation with Alex Marlowe, who was in the studio with us for two shows.

00:33:49.000 And he was just telling me about some of what he experienced with when Andrew Breitbart died.

00:33:55.000 And a lot of people said that Breitbart was going to be no more.

00:33:59.000 And then he said he experienced another wave of that with Steve Bannon when he left Breitbart and that Breitbart's going to be no more.

00:34:08.000 And he was saying, he's like, listen, part of Andrew's legacy was us carrying it on.

00:34:12.000 Part of the institution that Andrew built at Breitbart was what he trained people like Alex Marlowe to do and to carry on.

00:34:20.000 And to this day, Breitbart is two, three, four times bigger than it was when Andrew was alive.

00:34:26.000 And obviously, we've gotten this, you know, we are, there is no replacing Charlie.

00:34:30.000 That's not what I'm saying.

00:34:31.000 But Charlie would want us to get every ounce of enthusiasm and love that has been poured out after his death and make use of it and turn it to good.

00:34:41.000 And I think it's a holy duty.

00:34:43.000 It's a sacred honor that we have to continue his work.

00:34:46.000 Yeah, you will, too.

00:34:48.000 I mean, first of all, no America without George Washington.

00:34:54.000 And it continued after he died, in part because of his work.

00:34:58.000 What is an institution?

00:35:00.000 It's a set of principles and people serving them in some organized way.

00:35:07.000 Charlie built that, right?

00:35:10.000 And that, and if all he wanted to do was, you know, there are people who make money just going around giving speeches on college campuses.

00:35:18.000 And they might have, you know, an assistant or an agent, right?

00:35:23.000 Charlie built this whacking big old thing.

00:35:26.000 It's all over the place.

00:35:27.000 And that meant before he died, Turning Point was not only Charlie.

00:35:34.000 So what you've lost is your founder.

00:35:36.000 But if you found it well, then it will continue.

00:35:39.000 And he did.

00:35:40.000 Well, you've done that as well at Hillsdale.

00:35:43.000 I mean, you did not found Hillsdale College.

00:35:46.000 I didn't.

00:35:46.000 No.

00:35:49.000 The only job I've ever had in a college is the one I have right now.

00:35:52.000 And, you know, I went to graduate school.

00:35:55.000 I got a fabulous.

00:35:57.000 I happened upon the right things to know.

00:36:01.000 And, of course, I was surrounded by people who hated those things.

00:36:05.000 So I was never ambitious to work in a college.

00:36:08.000 And because most of my friends are PhDs, and Charlie, who's kind of, should get a PhD, he's getting a BhD in May at Hillsdale College.

00:36:17.000 The point is, they always hold college presidents in contempt.

00:36:20.000 So of all the jobs in the world, that'd be the last one I wanted.

00:36:23.000 And then I discovered that our college was beautifully founded by people who became friends of Abraham Lincoln.

00:36:29.000 And I love that stuff.

00:36:32.000 So in 50 years and 100 years, one prays and believes, people will be honored to work at Turning Point because it was so well begun.

00:36:45.000 And if a thing is well begun, by the way, how would you refound America to make it better than the American founding?

00:36:57.000 It is actually as perfect as a human thing can be in the modern world, right?

00:37:02.000 After the birth of Jesus.

00:37:03.000 Date the modern world from that because politics changes after Jesus is born because he's everyone's savior and he doesn't set up a government.

00:37:15.000 And so you have to have freedom of religion.

00:37:17.000 And you still have to have all the things that countries do now devoted to freedom.

00:37:22.000 The name on the t-shirt, the day Charlie was shot.

00:37:26.000 You see?

00:37:27.000 So we, our founders, solved that problem.

00:37:32.000 And there's no progress possible beyond that.

00:37:35.000 We can only remember it and revive it when it flags.

00:37:39.000 And that's what, that's our work as Americans today.

00:37:43.000 Every American has two jobs, and one is to live an excellent life.

00:37:48.000 Charlie is a model of that.

00:37:50.000 And the other is to repair his country.

00:37:53.000 And Charlie was a model of that.

00:37:56.000 I think we should, you know, I think we could maybe end with another.

00:37:59.000 We have a video of Charlie, actually, what he said about Hillsdale. 0.98

00:38:02.000 Darn it. 0.98

00:38:03.000 Okay. 0.99

00:38:03.000 Well, I guess we didn't have that one in time. 0.99

00:38:07.000 Let me quote him.

00:38:07.000 Charlie said Hillsdale was great.

00:38:09.000 Yes.

00:38:09.000 Charlie said Hillsdale was great.

00:38:11.000 He said it was America's finest college.

00:38:12.000 More than time.

00:38:13.000 There's a tape.

00:38:14.000 We haven't used it because we don't.

00:38:17.000 But there's a tape of Charlie talking to a young, and he went all over the internet.

00:38:21.000 And he's talking to a young woman.

00:38:24.000 No, she's like 10 or 11, right?

00:38:26.000 And he said, if you're going to go to college, go to Hillsdale College or don't go.

00:38:31.000 Well, that is a good.

00:38:33.000 We endorse that message.

00:38:34.000 We endorse that message.

00:38:35.000 Dr. Larian, what a privilege.

00:38:38.000 Thank you for making time out of your busy schedule to join us here and to come visit us all.

00:38:43.000 Thank you guys for carrying on.

00:38:45.000 Noble work.

00:38:46.000 Thank you, sir.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 30, 2025

Charlie’s Lifelong Education + No Stupid Questions With Gen Z

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript