00:01:05.000Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:01:08.000Get involved with Turning Point USA Today.
00:01:10.000Turning Point USA, we are fighting hard to win the American Culture War at tpusa.com, starting high school and college chapters all across the country.
00:01:52.000His 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.
00:02:00.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:15.000Charlie is the founder and CEO of Turning Point USA.
00:02:19.000It's the largest and most influential conservative youth activist organization in the country, starting with nothing but enthusiasm, energy, and purpose in 2012.
00:02:33.000And in just nine years, he has built Turning Point USA to be a powerhouse of conservatism with now more than 2,000 chapters on college and high school campuses around the country and 250,000, a quarter of a million members.
00:03:33.000So I'm super thrilled we're able to do this conversation so that people can learn from you.
00:03:37.000Yeah, I wrote that essay when I was a senior in high school, and I came across an AP, which means advanced placement textbook, economics textbook, that was called Paul Krugman's Economics for the AP.
00:03:52.000And Paul Krugman is an economist for the New York Times, who's been wrong about basically everything for the last 30 years.
00:03:59.000And I opened it up and it was one chapter after the other of why private property needs to be put into question, why collectivization of property is actually more efficient, more of kind of the Cass-Sunstein model of organizing society.
00:04:18.000And there was one chapter in particular that was wrong.
00:04:21.000It was wrong in its interpretation of history and wrong in what it was trying to teach the readers.
00:04:27.000And it was teaching students that the 1980s was not a period of economic growth.
00:04:32.000It was a period when the middle class suffered and that poor people got poorer.
00:04:37.000And Dr. Bob, you know, you're entitled to your own opinion.
00:04:40.000You're not entitled to your own facts.
00:04:42.000You know, the 1980s, that thanks to Ronald Reagan and tax cuts and deregulation, that the economy soared.
00:04:48.000And so I challenged this to my teacher and kind of wrote it up.
00:04:52.000And this was when Andrew Breitbart was still alive, right before he died, like a month before he died.
00:04:57.000Breitbart.com took that essay and was the first essay I ever wrote.
00:05:02.000I was, I just sent to them as a tip and they said, why don't you try to write this?
00:05:17.000Because the enemies that I made because of that.
00:05:19.000My teacher, administrator, and principal, superintendent, head of instruction, they hated the fact that I would go and expose the fact that they are teaching this garbage in these classrooms.
00:05:30.000And so from there, I kind of got the itch, you could say, to try to do something to save this country.
00:05:38.000And that led that article in Breitbart, led to an interview on Fox News.
00:05:54.000And my teachers were saying, did I see you on television this morning?
00:05:58.000And that was the beginning stages of kind of what became Turning Point USA.
00:06:04.000And I got to thinking kind of the entrepreneur in me kicked in.
00:06:08.000I said, there must be millions of other young people experiencing exactly what I saw in that textbook.
00:06:15.000And that was just one isolated incident of Dr. Bob of teachers that would go out of their way towards framing Marxism in a positive way and kind of the beginning stages of what was wokeism all the way back in 2012.
00:06:29.000And that led you to becoming an activist.
00:06:34.000Now, I know you did try to get into the Air Force Academy.
00:06:48.000Nevertheless, when my children were graduating high school, I suggested to them that they not go to college because college for most people is a waste of time.
00:06:59.000It's a waste of four years and it's a waste of money.
00:07:03.000Now, of course, college is necessary for certain specialties.
00:07:06.000If you're going to be a doctor, a lawyer, many things, an architect, you have to learn.
00:07:11.000But colleges are, in many cases, a fraud.
00:07:57.000So I would just be getting out right now.
00:07:59.000And who knows, maybe I would be in some Afghanistan debacle after that whole humiliation.
00:08:04.000It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
00:08:06.000And that's my lesson to young people: my whole life was about going to West Point.
00:08:09.000I was an Eagle Scout football basketball captain, good grades, you know, member of the community, got every letter of recommendation you could imagine, got my congressional nomination.
00:08:18.000But when it came for appointment to the academy, I didn't get in.
00:09:15.000I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, the Wheeling, Arlington Heights area.
00:09:19.000And where I came from, the kids that were addicted to drugs were treated much better than the kids that didn't go to college in the sense that if you didn't go to college, there was kind of like a social stigma to you.
00:09:33.000And so my parents decided like, hey, they were going to do the difficult thing, which was they were going to tell their neighbors that, you know, Charlie's actually not going to college this year.
00:09:48.000And, you know, from the beginning, Dr. Bob, there were so many people that were negative and naysayers, but there were a couple people.
00:09:55.000There were a couple of neighbors that stepped up and supported us early on that were conservative, not in, you know, massive numbers, but definitely helped us get going.
00:10:03.000But large in part, you pinpointed it perfectly.
00:10:06.000One of the reasons why students go to college is because of parental social pressure.
00:10:11.000I'm going to, turns out my kids, despite the fact that I advise them not to go to college, they felt the social pressure to go to college and they did.
00:10:26.000When I started my company, Cognix, back in 1981, a number of people, I tried to recruit smart engineers and I found this fellow who turns out to be brilliant.
00:10:37.000And I rarely, I was teaching at MIT, got my PhD at MIT.
00:10:41.000So I know what brilliance is, and I rarely use that.
00:13:09.000So it takes very special people, a very special person, because we offered jobs to another fellow, and he'd be a millionaire today based on stock options we give.
00:13:18.000And he said at the end of the summer, he said, well, it was great working here, but I'm going to go in the Peace Corps.
00:13:24.000So the, you know, opportunity knocks, you got to answer the door.
00:14:09.000But here it quotes the New York Times as saying this.
00:14:13.000By mixing and matching and twisting facts, Mr. Kirk has come to exemplify a new breed of political agitator that has flourished since the 2016 election of President Trump by walking the line between mainstream conservative opinion and outright disinformation.
00:14:33.000Now, when they use the term agitator, I think they meant it in the negative.
00:14:39.000Because what an agitator does is questions what is happening and if it's wrong, tries to make it right, agitating for change.
00:14:48.000You are an agitator and I'm using that in the most positive sense.
00:14:52.000And I consider the New York Times taking time to write that piece, which was on 1A of the New York Times when they published that above the fold as a compliment.
00:15:00.000They don't go after just any sort of schlep on the side of the street.
00:15:04.000No, they're going to go after people that are doing something hopefully very significant.
00:15:08.000And you notice when you read that, they don't give any sort of evidence.
00:16:02.000And it keeps the organization alive in perpetuity.
00:16:05.000As you said, 250,000 active members, well over 200 full-time people on staff and growing, which is extraordinary.
00:16:15.000And so we're in great shape and we're doing very well.
00:16:18.000We also have Turning Point Action, which has been around for a couple of years, 501c4, social welfare organization that's also allowed to do politics and also able to help in political campaigns.
00:16:32.000So we've been involved in the recall newsom type effort.
00:16:36.000And I know this will probably be airing after all of that, but that's something that we were involved in.
00:16:41.000We've also been very involved or we're very involved in a lot of the state legislative races across the country, which are very important in Arizona and Pennsylvania and Georgia, involved in school board races from our 501c4.
00:16:53.000And then, of course, involved in congressional and senatorial races as well.
00:16:58.000We also started Turning Point Academy, which is a project of Turning Point USA, which is to try to advance pro-American curriculum in high schools across the country.
00:17:09.000And yeah, that's just some of our new projects that we have coming.
00:17:12.000But we really have this beautiful combination of our 501c3, Turning Point USA, not political at all, educational and cultural in its mission, and then Turning Point Action, which of course allows us to do politics.
00:17:24.000And Turning Point Faith is a new program that we just launched, which is really exciting, which is try to build a coalition of liberty for liberty of people of all different faith backgrounds.
00:17:36.000Because, you know, Dr. Bob, if we're serious about what is the last entity that hasn't been totally corrupted by the left, right?
00:17:48.000The American churches, they're ready to rock.
00:17:51.000And you know this, especially when it comes to both of our love of Israel.
00:17:55.000It is the American evangelicals that support Israel, that defend Israel.
00:18:00.000And so Turning Point Faith, we have 32 full-time people that have been hired in this division of this organization to try and find pastors and find churches and give them the support they need and the resources they need and the training they need to speak out on these critical issues.
00:18:13.000That is fantastic because people still look to their pastors for guidance.
00:18:38.000Not that the spouses are unimportant, but someone will trust a religious official and their boss, even above their spouse, when it comes to these very intimate decisions.
00:18:51.000Of course, it's a very big deal these days.
00:18:54.000We're going to be talking more about that critical race theory.
00:18:57.000But even 10 years ago, when I was running the company, we had something every month called Ask the President, where people could come, have pizza.
00:19:06.000Usually about 100 of my employees would show up, probably for the pizza more than for asking the question.
00:19:12.000And we also took questions anonymously.
00:19:15.000And one of the questions from one of my employees was, Dr. Bob, when are we going to have more diversity?
00:19:23.000And, you know, I thought about it very quickly and came to the conclusion that we'll have more diversity when that's what my customers want.
00:21:14.000You want everybody to sign up for the mission of the company.
00:21:17.000Whether it be a company or a military operation or a sports team, this idea that discord or diversity is somehow going to be your defining characteristic or strength.
00:21:28.000It could be an element of who you are.
00:21:30.000I'm not saying anything, you know, that you should be outrageously hateful or any of that.
00:21:44.000And if you read letters from the president in annual reports, public companies file annual reports, there's always a letter from the president or the chairman.
00:21:51.000And you will find ever since, I think, five years ago, the first sentence is about diversity.
00:22:19.000Certainly we owe it to them to run a straightforward, ethical organization that doesn't discriminate unduly against any particular race or people or sex or whatever.
00:22:29.000But the first thing we got to serve is our customers and they want quality.
00:22:33.000And so if you have a room and you look around the room and you have 20 coders, you know, people that can code that are all Asian, you didn't pick them because they were Asian.
00:22:42.000You picked them because they were good at coding.
00:22:47.000And I just want to be very clear here because some people are going to try to cut up what I said is that if you look at how a business needs to be run, the obligation and the duty is not to some sort of esoteric bumper sticker, which is what the activists have done.
00:23:03.000Instead, it's about fulfilling the mandate to your shareholders or to your employees or to your customers, the most important thing, right?
00:23:11.000Which is what keeps the entire enterprise going.
00:23:14.000What's happened, though, is you have these social revolutionaries that have taken over the HR departments of these major funds.
00:23:19.000Let's take Goldman Sachs, for example, that have no idea how capital flows work.
00:23:24.000They are 100 years removed from the founding of that company.
00:23:28.000And they come in after they go to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, or Berkeley thinking like, well, yeah, it's just so easy to make money.
00:24:06.000How many skinny people are in football teams?
00:24:09.000Well, and this is why I believe the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement is against the American creed and against what makes America an exceptional nation.
00:24:19.000Because deep down, we love celebrating winning and success in America.
00:24:24.000We love the people that can go 100 jeopardy rounds, you know, straight.
00:24:29.000We love the Olympic athletes that could break the untouchable Olympic record.
00:24:34.000We love the celebration of impossibility.
00:24:38.000And that only happens when you prioritize competency, meritocracy, consciousness, reason, not kind of silly melanin contents in people's skin.
00:24:51.000And so, but sports is the great example here, Dr. Bob, because deep down, no one wants to see a bunch of five foot eight people play for the Los Angeles Lakers.
00:25:37.000Well, winning and giving prizes to people who win is not only useful for the person who won, it's useful and helpful to the people who can see that if you work hard, if you play hard, if you exercise, maybe you can do it.
00:26:05.000And you just said prizes in economics, we call this word incentives.
00:26:10.000Incentives is what drive human behavior, right?
00:26:12.000And so if you think you're going to get a $200, $500 ticket, you're not going to drive in the HOV lane by yourself because that's an incentive not to do that.
00:27:25.000The theory says that racism is a part of everyday life in America because racism is in the DNA of every white American, a white American, whether they know it or not.
00:29:16.000So we have gone a long way from measuring people, as Martin Luther King said, by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.
00:29:37.000We, Americans, America has to decide if we're going to go back to the America that we loved of freedom, free expression, and rights for everyone, right?
00:30:36.000It's a question of are we willing to fight for it?
00:30:38.000Are we willing to do something about it?
00:30:40.000Are the parents that are seeing what's happening to their kids willing to intercede and actually, you know, intervene, I should say, and stop this line of nonsense that's been happening?
00:30:50.000But, you know, Dr. Bob, I totally agree because I grew up in an America born in 93, right?
00:31:25.000It broke exactly when I turned 15 years old in 2008 when Barack Obama got elected.
00:31:31.000We have never had worse race relations in my time.
00:31:35.000You know, maybe in Jim Crow of the Civil War, they were worse, but never, they were fine until Barack Obama pointed these things, pointed us in a totally different direction.
00:31:48.000I'd like to ask you, tell me about your family and your character, the traits that got you to be where you are today, got you to be at 27, heading a substantial organization with substantial cash flows in and out, hiring people.
00:32:54.000And, you know, building buildings and also developing very difficult business, obviously, once 2008 hit and, you know, that kind of whole market got uprooted.
00:33:03.000But I grew up seeing my dad always be there for every single sporting event, every be there, be there for anything I needed.
00:33:10.000But he'd come home for dinner, then he'd go back to work till one o'clock in the morning.
00:33:16.000You know what it's like to build a business.
00:33:18.000And so that was the culture I was raised in.
00:33:21.000And I was also, you know, obviously I'm very, you know, active and I have trouble sitting still.
00:33:28.000And my parents, to their great credit, you know, anytime anyone would be like, oh, Charlie has trouble sitting still in class, they're like, you know what?
00:33:44.000It was the third grade in, or second grade, one of the two.
00:33:48.000And we're learning how to print letters.
00:33:50.000And Mrs. Kershaw, that was her name, went to the blackboard, said, class, here's how you make the letter A. You one line, lift the pen, another line, and a third line, three lines, and here's how you do it.
00:34:03.000And then she says, okay, I want everybody to do that.
00:35:45.000So i'm not surprised that you had that same trait, and so you when when, when we first started turning point and my parents instilled this in me as well, which was that entrepreneurial approach too, which is, take risks, think big I was always taught that this country was a place to be able to do impossible things.
00:36:05.000And I, you know, young people ask me all the time, Charlie, how'd you start this?
00:36:09.000You know, one of the things that, you know, I always laugh, and I don't mean to insult anyone watching this when people say, yeah, I went to college to study entrepreneurship.
00:37:34.000So, you know, it's important to plan, but it's important to plan for the near term and be flexible, ready to change your actions and change your plan.
00:37:44.000And then also the other thing, you know, taught, you know, growing up through sports and other ways was perseverance as well, which is a very important thing, which, you know, that's a tough thing to instill in somebody other than if you have parents that are willing to tell you no and willing after you lose a sports game, be like, yeah, well, you should.
00:39:48.000I think that, you know, this tendency to force communities to have low-income housing called affordable housing, of course, called affordable housing next to mansions, it makes no sense at all.
00:40:32.000Whether it's a $5 million home or $100,000 home, it's all affordable housing.
00:40:37.000But forcing the mixture between those kinds of different strata of the economy, I think is harmful.
00:40:47.000And it does create a group of people that can be mobilized for their grievances, which create activists and potential voters.
00:40:59.000I'd like to talk a minute and hear your views on capitalism.
00:41:03.000First, I'll give you mine, because I clearly am a capitalist and I've benefited from the capitalistic system, as have all my employees and as have all my customers and as have all my shareholders benefited from capitalism.
00:41:19.000The left thinks that capitalists are greedy.
00:41:23.000Well, capitalists, successful ones, certainly have more money than people who are poorer, right?
00:41:30.000Than or people who are less successful.
00:41:33.000And what happens when you go to work, whether you're mowing a lawn or whether you're selling computer systems, what's happening is you're delivering goods or services to the customer.
00:42:06.000Now, income tax is a tax that taxes people for producing goods and services.
00:42:14.000In reality, you want people, the nation, society should want people, should incentivize people to create as many goods and services as possible.
00:42:25.000Who cares if they get these pieces of paper or dollars?
00:42:28.000Now, we all have to pay taxes and raise taxes, but the better tax is a tax on the money when it's spent, because then the person who produced those goods and services gets the dollars, then buys products for his own self, for his own consumption.
00:42:48.000And that is sort of taking away from, it's not punishing society, but he's taking it for his, he or she is taking it for his own benefit.
00:42:54.000And if you're going to tax, that's a better tax.
00:42:58.000We don't want to place a disincentive on people for working.
00:43:02.000And yet that's exactly what an income tax is.
00:43:06.000And markets are the best way to organize a society economically.
00:43:11.000It has lifted more people out of poverty.
00:43:13.000It has given people the opportunity entrepreneurially to start something from nothing.
00:43:18.000And at the lie of the anti-capitalist critique, the whole thing, if you had to reduce it down to one thing, they think that if someone gets rich, therefore somebody got poor.
00:43:28.000When in reality, that trade happened in most cases voluntarily and both people benefited tremendously.
00:43:43.000And if you don't like a product, you can compete against that.
00:43:46.000And you could take a risk in the marketplace to be able to maybe create a better widget or go up against this company that might look really big, but they're actually kind of inefficient and they might be able to be disrupted.
00:44:00.000And at the heart of all of this is entrepreneurship, which is really the small guy with a big vision that wants to take a risk to be able to benefit people so that he can get something out of it.
00:44:10.000This goes back to our conversation of incentives.
00:44:13.000If all of a sudden people don't have incentives to go take risks, well, then you're not going to see new products.
00:44:18.000Well, right to that point, let's talk about computers, which I know something about.
00:44:23.000The largest computer company in the world about 20 years ago, 30 years ago, was IBM.
00:44:29.000And the second largest was digital equipment.
00:44:32.000And an entrepreneur called Steve Jobs said, you know, we can make computers cheaper and we can give them many people will want computers.
00:44:42.000And there's a famous RAND study that was done on how many computers, how many people would buy computers and how many needs would be computers.
00:44:50.000And they said there's a need for 200 computers in the country.
00:44:54.000There's no, no, no person, no individual is ever going to want a computer.
00:44:58.000And in a matter of years, IBM is no longer the largest computer maker in the world.
00:45:05.000Digital equipment went out of business.
00:45:08.000And it's because of the free market that allowed a kid who didn't go to college, by the way, is another story.
00:46:42.000Not to mention, some of the biggest companies get loopholes too.
00:46:45.000I mean, you have Amazon that almost pays no taxes, and they're able to do that through a variety of different loopholes and all this.
00:46:52.000And so there's an incredible crony component to a lot of this as well, when people that are producing real things probably pay upwards of 60 to 65% at times in state, local, federal sales tax.
00:47:06.000And in California, not only do we have to pay an income tax, but after you've paid the income tax, you have after tax dollars, then you have to pay 15, 16% sales tax, which is property tax.
00:48:32.000In my view, and people who talk about the wealth gap will say, look, you have these people who are multi, multi-billionaires and other people living on $50,000 or whatever it is.
00:49:56.000I mean, are you stuck in a government-run school by some teacher union thug that doesn't give you the access to be able to read or write?
00:50:03.000And if you kind of look at it, the people that complain the most about wealth inequality are actually the ones implementing the policies that make it the hardest for people to move up and actually get into a middle class or upper middle class lifestyle.
00:50:14.000And so instead they're distracting people about like, well, look at this sort of gap.
00:50:21.000And then what in reality, it's like, wait a second, you are implementing a series of economic policies and also a series of educational policies in particular and crime.
00:50:57.000They're trying to focus on a couple people like Bezos, who I'm not a fan of because it's politics and Elon Musk, who is whatever, to try to focus all on that.
00:51:06.000When in reality, it's, wait a second, are you able to go to school?
00:52:21.000And that's on top of the property taxes that they're paying for for the public school system.
00:52:28.000And there's another note I want to mention on this, Dr. Bob, which doesn't get mentioned as much, which is if they really are complaining a lot about why Bezos and Elon Musk are getting wealthier, a lot of it has to do with our monetary policy as well, is that when we open up cheap money or if we spend $6 trillion in Washington, D.C., what does that do to the purchasing power of a $50,000 a year family, right?
00:52:50.000What would that do to someone like your father?
00:53:52.000And I like what President Trump said when he was running for president, when he was either in Chicago or Detroit, one of these horrible cities that have extremely high poverty, extremely high crime rate, which have been run for decades by the Democrats.
00:54:09.000And he said to the people, what have you got to lose voting for me?
00:54:35.000First of all, I want to thank you for coming to my home and spending time with me.
00:54:40.000But I want to thank you even much more for what you are doing, investing your energy, your life into building an organization that has the potential to change the direction of our country.