00:00:41.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:47.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:59.000I know we're effective at Turning Point and we're moving the dial.
00:02:02.000But we're also, we are successfully going after their most confident bet on the future, which is they believe that their quote-unquote takeover of America is inevitable because they think every young person is going to be obedient to this Marxist totalitarian left-wing worldview.
00:02:25.000And we're putting that into jeopardy every single day.
00:02:28.000We're putting it in jeopardy through what we're doing on campuses, high schools, podcasting, digital social media.
00:03:25.000I think that the young people right now in the movement that, like an Ana Paulina, James O'Keefe, Turning Point USA, they need to try to take us off the chessboard.
00:03:38.000We hang together because the left-wing apparatus, they understand the power of young people that are able to articulate a conservative worldview.
00:03:51.000When we go to college campuses, we routinely come across the same problem.
00:03:55.000We can't find rooms big enough to fit all the students that want to attend our campus lectures and our campus events.
00:04:01.000Literally, there's overflow after overflow after overflow.
00:04:04.000You look at the top podcasts on Apple Podcasts, seven out of 10 of them are routinely conservative podcasts.
00:04:12.000And so there's so much traction and there's so much movement.
00:04:16.000So how do you fight back on college campuses against the indoctrination?
00:04:22.000You know, a lot of these patriots that are here who've invested in CPI, many of them have invested in Turning Point USA, they've sent their kids or their grandkids to universities.
00:04:38.000And what comes out is something very different than what they sent in.
00:05:03.000We have a rather substantial radio and podcasting audience.
00:05:06.000We have 200,000 donors at Turning Point USA.
00:05:09.000And every day I get handwritten letters from parents that say, Charlie, I raised my kid with conservative Christian values and I sent them to college and now they've been totally turned against me.
00:05:19.000And so unless you are prepared to play Russian roulette with your kids or grandkids' values, I encourage you not to send them to college unless it's Hillsdale and maybe University of Dallas and a couple others.
00:05:41.000But if we're honest with ourselves, we have to think of our movement as dissidents in our own country.
00:05:48.000And so we train our Turning Point USA students to think of themselves as dissidents in a Soviet bloc country.
00:05:55.000And I know that might sound hyperbolic or an exaggeration, but it's literal that if you come out and you say a conservative, if you say that men cannot give birth on a majority of American college campuses, they will penalize you, kick you out of class, and they will condemn you.
00:06:13.000If you say that America is a great country, they will ridicule with everything you have.
00:06:17.000So what gives me hope is that when a Turning Point USA student wants to sign up or start a high school chapter, by the way, we're on pace for 1,000 high school chapters across the country, an incredible accomplishment, something that's very, very incredible.
00:06:31.000We tell them, you're going to lose your friends.
00:06:33.000You're going to get bullied, ridiculed, scorned, and condemned.
00:06:53.000Well, the way on college, you have to understand you're going to be in the ideological minority.
00:06:57.000However, there's more people out there that agree with you than will ever say that, and that you are part of a broader generational movement to save the country.
00:07:07.000And then finally, I mean, we really don't give an inch at Turning Point USA in our tactics, our methods, or how we communicate about it.
00:07:15.000We could talk about that, but we've been incredibly effective, you know, in what we've done.
00:07:20.000And I think what happens is, is when you have members of Congress willing to come on your podcast, your show, and quite frankly, to reach an audience that is far greater than certainly than MSNBC and CNN combined.
00:07:46.000What makes you so certain that when you go on a college campus that you're going to have this queue waiting because Benny showed the University of Tampa, and I was shocked because University of Tampa is not known to be the hotbed of Hillsdale.
00:08:21.000By the way, we're not going to win them over by diluting our values or all of a sudden becoming neoliberals in every regard or doing what the moderates in our party want us to do.
00:08:31.000They actually are attracted to articulate, deep, thoughtful, provocative stances on issues that are quote unquote thought crimes.
00:08:41.000You are not going to win over young people by saying, you know, this is the conservative case for trans surgery.
00:08:48.000You're going to win over young people and draw them in by saying truths that are rooted in eternal wisdom that might be repackaged in ways that can get their attention by saying something like, you know what?
00:09:15.000But they're loud, but isn't that the country we're living in?
00:09:17.000That's a perfect example of the country we're living in, which is 20% of these incredibly antisocial, incredibly aggressive people control everything because we're afraid of what they do to us.
00:10:05.000We have to make the opposition feel a penalty and a cost for what they're doing to us and to our voters.
00:10:15.000And so that's one example of many, right?
00:10:17.000And in Congress, that's difficult because you don't control all the chambers of power.
00:10:21.000Let me give you another example, though, right?
00:10:23.000Which is we, and I want to give credit to the Freedom Caucus, and I think Matt was appropriate by also acknowledging Kevin McCarthy keeping his word on this, but making Eric Swalwell and Elon Omar and Adam Schiff be ridiculed in public, that's a good thing.
00:10:39.000That shows that we have political power and we're willing to use it.
00:10:42.000I would go even further and say they shouldn't serve on any committees, but that's, you know, I'm unusual in that way.
00:11:04.000You know, I talked to a bunch of attorney generals and they, you know, their eyes kind of get wide when I say this, which is when they raided Mar-a-Lago, we should have had DAs and attorney generals, those that actually have the power to do this, just begin to start to sign subpoenas and search warrants of high-level Democrat officials.
00:11:23.000They need to believe that there's an equal and opposite reaction when they act tyrannical against us.
00:11:28.000And currently, they don't necessarily fear that.
00:11:30.000And so that's a deeper, more provocative thought that I think that there's some really amazing leadership being done in that regard.
00:11:38.000But I'll give you another example, which is instead of giving big tech a tax cut, which we know we did previously, which I love the tax bill.
00:11:48.000We should have done everything we possibly can to punish these big tech companies legislatively for their interventionist behavior in the 2020 election and other ways.
00:11:59.000This is not the way a lot of Republicans talk in D.C.
00:12:10.000And yet, and yet, Matt Gates brought up the hearing where he was in, where he was talking to the lobbyists.
00:12:18.000And literally, the lobbyists could not name all his customers or wouldn't name all of his customers until Matt says, well, it's on your website.
00:12:37.000Yeah, well, I mean, if you controlled all the chambers of commerce, you would obviously Congress, you would strip them of their special immunity.
00:12:44.000But here's the broader point, and you could apply it any way you want.
00:12:48.000We have to make their entire flow of business, their ease of access to government, and their lifestyle.
00:12:58.000We have to make it all so uncomfortable for them legislatively and culturally.
00:13:03.000And I think we're starting to finally learn this.
00:13:05.000And we learned it honestly from Donald Trump.
00:13:08.000And so if you look at kind of the allocation of power in America, one side of the American political spectrum is enthusiastic about using political power.
00:13:26.000And philosophically, I understand why he gets that conclusion because we think government, legislation, we can't do any of these things.
00:13:32.000Look, everybody, the only way you're going to be able to get these Stalinists to back off is if they believe that there's going to be a penalty for how harsh they come after us, right?
00:13:45.000And we have the legislative minds here.
00:13:47.000I mean, from impeaching Majorca's, all that stuff is fine.
00:13:50.000But a lot of this, honestly, Mark, comes at the state level.
00:13:53.000It has to, because the state level, and that's why the State Freedom Caucus you guys are doing at CPI is so incredibly important.
00:13:59.000And DeSantis has played around with some of these ideas, but it shouldn't even be a question.
00:14:04.000Every Republican governor in the country should say, if you medically mutilate children, you should go to jail or go practice medicine in a different state.
00:14:12.000Critical race theory has no place, but all of that requires courage and then obviously legislative action.
00:14:20.000So what you're telling this audience is that it's not enough to just have hearings and pretend like you're outraged over Benghazi and have nothing happen.
00:14:32.000The theatrics have to stop everybody, okay?
00:14:35.000And this room is the outlier because you guys actually want action and you want to do these sorts of things.
00:14:40.000And so this is considered, this is in some ways what the left fears the most and what the media fears the most.
00:14:47.000They actually fear the American right understanding how much power we have and then using that power.
00:14:55.000There is the lie of neutrality that has permeated the Republican Party, where I hear from Republican officials all the time and some donors, well, Charlie, we have to be better than that.
00:15:06.000I just want us to be neutral and we can get back to this place of decency and common sense.
00:16:12.000Go read the postmodern philosophical base of the American left.
00:16:16.000They believe if you strip down all of what they call the fake normative post-colonialist structure that built the American West, all that governs human behavior is whoever has more power.
00:17:22.000I'm sure he's great at the masters to hang out with or whatever, right?
00:17:26.000And why Abbott needs to make a decision really soon, and I'm afraid he's choosing incorrectly.
00:17:30.000Because DeSantis is all of a sudden showing a blueprint that governors have a lot more power than anyone ever wanted to acknowledge or realize.
00:17:37.000The federal government is actually a creation of the states, not the other way around.
00:17:41.000And the media is doing everything they possibly can not to allow, because they know that all of a sudden, 20 Republican governors that grow a spine with a legislature that supports them, all of a sudden you're talking about a restoration of federalism in a way where they could not possibly comprehend it.
00:17:57.000So they need to have, look, the Chamber of Commerce, they need to have business as usual.
00:18:21.000My political philosophy is about victory.
00:18:24.000And I think it's about time that we start to realize what we love requires a little bit of fights that we haven't actually exhibited in the past.
00:18:36.000Well, I wish you would just, Charlie, say what you mean.
00:18:41.000I mean, this is, but there is a pressing question that most of the people in the room really have been anxious to ask you is, does Relief Factor actually work?
00:20:02.000But what makes liberals' heads explode on college campus?
00:20:10.000I've seen your viral videos, you know, and now I understand from Benny why exactly they went viral.
00:20:18.000But when you get a million, two million, three million views on a video, what do you think makes their head explode and why do people react to it?
00:20:28.000Yeah, so I'll actually broaden it because I think the entire country is becoming a massive open-air college campus.
00:20:34.000And what I mean by that, the elements that I've been fighting for the last decade are everywhere.
00:20:38.000The thought police, political censorship, all the kind of things that used to be isolated is now, I believe it's more dangerous than even the virus of 2020.
00:20:51.000But what makes them most angry, Mark, is actually best exhibited by something I think the movement did pretty well.
00:20:59.000And that's when they tried to take Matt Gates off the chessboard.
00:21:02.000And what they thought is they thought they could ice him out and he would no longer be invited to events and he would no longer be put on podcasts.
00:21:10.000And in fact, they were stunned by how many people stood by him, including CPI and others.
00:21:17.000And that all of a sudden made them less powerful.
00:21:20.000In fact, we still had him at turning point events and still came on the show and all that.
00:21:32.000When we hold the line, they're all of a sudden not as powerful as they think they are.
00:21:37.000Okay, Washington Post, you wrote another story.
00:21:39.000Okay, DOJ, you put another press release.
00:21:42.000So what makes their heads explode, what makes them worried, is that all of a sudden there's a new conservative movement that stands by their own in solidarity, that when they try to take out James O'Keefe, all of a sudden the clamoring thing on Twitter is like, actually, no, we should stand by him and he's terrific.
00:21:56.000We're not going to go put him out to Alba into exile and wish him well.
00:23:10.000Because when you have truth, agreed upon language, people are a lot harder to control tyrannically.
00:23:17.000When everybody has a truth in their own eyes, it says in the Bible, whatever does what is right in their own eyes, it's so much easier to be able to create a tyrant to come in.
00:23:52.000The band of rebels when I was young in politics were always kind of portrayed as like the crazy wacko people, and sometimes they didn't do themselves any service when they went on cable television.
00:24:01.000I'm not going to say any names, but you could kind of think of, you know kind of some of that and remember, just in the 2012 t the Tea Party wave, that wasn't the Todd Aiken moments that were misportray.
00:24:13.000Now though yeah, I think that actually, the conservative movement might have been able to bail out a Murdoch Aiken senate campaign in turmoil with proper media training, social media assistance, going and doing rallies, clarifying correctly and then playing offense against the Democrats.
00:24:30.000The 2012 Republican movement abandoned two winnable senate races in red states, Indiana and Missouri.
00:24:36.000One of them where the candidate said something legitimately you know, that needed clarification one where he really didn't say anything that bad at all, and we just abandoned them and we allowed two Democrats to win.
00:24:47.000Well, all of a sudden they're realizing like, oh my goodness, this is a movement that stands by their own, they're embracing the principles of solidarity, they're willing to punch back twice as hard, they're willing to use mockery and ridicule, and nothing is more effective against tyrants than ridicule, which is why, by percentage, more comedians and cartoonists were put in Soviet gulags than any other profession, because the people that mocked the ruler were the most effective in penetrating irrational tyranny.
00:25:13.000That's why what Benny does is so incredibly effective and so important.
00:25:17.000And so look, I will say this, our victory is not inevitable.
00:25:36.000Okay, there is, is an opportunity, and you have agency and free will and i'm blessed to fight along so many of you, and we have an opportunity.
00:25:45.000Will y'all give up a great warm welcome for my good friend Charlie Kirk?