00:00:14.000I will call her the unofficial campus correspondent for us at Turning Point USA.
00:00:18.000Please support our podcast at charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:00:23.000Email us your questions at freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:25.000You are not going to believe what is happening our universities of contact tracing students at all times, 24-7 surveillance, World War II memorials being taken down, and so much more.
00:00:36.000Isabel Brown is here with the frontline report.
00:00:38.000You guys want to hear this if you have kids in college, if you are in college, of ways you can fight back, and we dive deeper into what's happening with our nation's youth.
00:01:00.000His 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.
00:01:09.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:21.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:24.000I am thrilled to be joined by a friend, someone who has been fighting on campus for liberty and freedom and for America for quite some time now, Isabel Brown, who actually works with us at Turning Point USA as a contributor, former chapter leader at Colorado State University, hosted me on campus back in February of 2018.
00:02:05.000Yeah, well, it's so great to know everybody and to get to know you more as we continue to do some more engagements together with me and Charlie.
00:02:12.000I am Turning Point USA's spokesperson on the contributor team.
00:02:16.000So I do a lot of work in traditional media and digital media as well, talking about what's happening on college campuses and even high school campuses these days with how crazy everything's gotten for indoctrination.
00:02:26.000I never intended on working in politics or communications or social media, anything in this realm.
00:04:04.000But that's been such a rude awakening, I think, for me.
00:04:06.000When we first started getting started with our campus events, when I was trying to build the chapter, even just two years ago, they were still trying to hide the fact that they were such a leftist university.
00:04:15.000And I think that's so true for all college campuses across the country.
00:04:48.000It is absolutely shocking what is happening at our nation's institutions of higher education these days.
00:04:54.000And I think what's so alarming to me is that it's not just shocking to parents or grandparents who may have graduated 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
00:05:01.000It's shocking to people who graduated five years ago and even two years ago.
00:05:04.000The level of insanity just keeps exponentially growing in these colleges.
00:05:08.000Yeah, they're determined to shove leftism down your throat in any way humanly possible, not just in your academics, but in every extracurricular in your dorm, when you're eating in the dining hall with your friends.
00:05:19.000Every poster that lines the hallways of the residence halls is all about racial justice this year.
00:05:24.000It's all about say everyone's name, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor.
00:05:28.000If you don't adhere to the very radical Marxist ideas of BLM Incorporated, you're not welcome on campuses these days.
00:05:34.000And you will fail your classes if you fail to adhere to your professor's political ideology these days.
00:05:39.000And is it fair to say that there's very little learning that's happening anymore at these institutions?
00:05:45.000It's not about learning at the end of the day.
00:05:47.000It's about indoctrination, which is so unfortunate because college used to be this place where you were encouraged to explore all sorts of opinions and ideas on every subject.
00:05:55.000And you were there to broaden your thinking, not to narrow it.
00:05:58.000But unfortunately now in 2020, you're there to have one subscribed set of ideas crammed into your mind.
00:06:04.000So let's get into some of these examples here.
00:06:07.000I tell people, the last question I'll ask before we get to that is, would you hesitate to automatically send your kids to college if you were a parent?
00:06:27.000And I'm definitely a nerd, so I love school.
00:06:29.000And I know that's unpopular to say, but it's very, very scary to me.
00:06:33.000I was in the hard sciences for both my undergraduate and graduate education.
00:06:36.000And even in classes like anatomy and physiology and chemistry, we were talking about the wall and President Trump's latest viral tweet.
00:06:43.000We weren't talking about the things that I was paying tuition to go to school for.
00:06:46.000I tell parents all the time, I say, be very careful sending your kids to college.
00:06:49.000And I got in a discussion at an undisclosed location.
00:06:52.000I don't want to out this person, but it was a great conversation, and she meant really well.
00:06:56.000But I asked this parent, and I hadn't had something to eat almost all day, so my blood sugar was running low, and I just have very little patience at times for this stuff.
00:07:53.000But you actually have more credibility than I do to make this argument because you have the degrees and you're saying you don't need the degrees.
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00:10:22.000There's some really crazy things happening these days.
00:10:24.000So I'm going to start with just generally what's happening on campuses, and then we're going to dive into more specifically what's happening with professors because, oof, those stories are absolutely crazy.
00:10:41.000If you haven't heard about some of these things, the idea of student privacy and transparency with their university has completely gone out the window.
00:10:48.000And this line of what's considered acceptable continues to move further and further and further to the left.
00:10:53.000For example, the University of Tennessee is going to require all students and faculty to get not only the flu vaccine when it becomes available this fall, but also the COVID-19 vaccine if they want to keep working there or going to school there.
00:11:06.000So you will not be allowed to go to University of Tennessee unless you get the Chinese coronavirus vaccine.
00:11:10.000You will have your admission revoked if you refuse to get the vaccine.
00:11:13.000There's no exemptions provided to students, which is absolutely insane.
00:11:17.000Schools are even taking it steps further than that.
00:11:19.000Oakland University started the school year by mandating that all students who live on campus wear this little button that they call a bio button that constantly tracks your heart rate, respiratory rate, your temperature, and reports that 24/7 to the university administration, even when you're off campus, just in case you might have COVID-19.
00:11:41.000And it doesn't matter as soon as you step foot off campus, they're still tracking you.
00:11:44.000They're still making a note of where you are, who you've interacted with.
00:11:47.000If your heart rate gets too high, I'm sorry, doesn't your heart rate get too high if you're nervous about an exam or talking to someone you have a crush on or working out at the gym?
00:11:54.000But all of a sudden, you're pegged as a potential case of COVID-19 on campus if you wore this button.
00:11:59.000So obviously there was a lot of pushback from students.
00:12:01.000They decided to make it optional and not mandatory, but most students were encouraged to still do that and faculty were as well.
00:12:08.000Insane to me that this is where we have become.
00:12:41.000And I love that you used the 1984 analogy because honestly, campuses in 2020 look a lot more like campuses in George Orwell's 1984.
00:12:49.000Tulane University is just one of many students encouraging universities there, encouraging students to call the police if their friends are violating COVID-19 policies on campus, narc on each other, take videos, send it to the university administration.
00:13:03.000We're creating this thought-police community where all of a sudden, if you even think about breaking a rule, you're outed and you're no longer welcome in the whole community.
00:13:10.000I know some big donors to Tulane, no one else.
00:13:28.000But at the end of the day, it's not about science at all.
00:13:31.000When you look at what's happening on campus, massive protests and rallies and gatherings are allowed on campus as long as they have to do with the leftist agenda.
00:14:00.000And the new president of CSU, Joyce McConnell, sent out an email to students at the beginning of the year.
00:14:05.000All students received it when they came back to campus saying, we know at the university level that you guys might have varying political ideologies on campus, but we want to make one thing very clear.
00:14:15.000No political belief will be acceptable for you to violate university, state, and local health care policies when it comes to COVID-19.
00:14:22.000If you make some sort of political decision to, I don't know, stand within six feet of someone or attend any gathering, even off campus, of more than 10 people, we will expel you from this university.
00:14:32.000So they're very, very forward with the fact that this isn't about science.
00:14:37.000And it's a really unique microcosm of culture happening on college campuses right now where all of a sudden we're using the guise of science and healthcare to cover up for the fact that we're going more towards the terrain of leftist indoctrination and less towards actually exploring ideas on college campuses.
00:14:55.000But in case you haven't also heard, everything on college campuses is racist in 2020.
00:14:59.000And I think that's true beyond college campuses too.
00:15:01.000We're seeing that on social media and in corporate America as well.
00:15:05.000But anything remotely associated with anything has now become racist or white supremacist on college campuses.
00:15:11.000For example, the University of Rhode Island is going to remove their historic murals of World War II because there's too many white people in the murals.
00:15:19.000It creates this idea that we have a homogeneous population.
00:15:23.000In a very simple year, University of Rhode Island removing a mural to World War II.
00:15:40.000Everything has become white supremacy in the world.
00:15:42.000I want everyone to listen very carefully.
00:15:44.000Parents, when you send your kids to college, that's the type of radicalism and backwards thinking that your kids are being taught and validated.
00:15:53.000That the heroes that fought in World War II and our mural in remembrance of them, they take it down because they say those people were raised.
00:16:00.000Which is so ironic because if you know anything about World War II, it all has to do with not believing in the supremacy of one race or another, but just uplifting freedom for all people around the world.
00:16:09.000So we have gone so astray in the world of leftism and living in a completely alternate reality that we don't understand facts that have happened in U.S. history.
00:16:18.000But most alarmingly, what I love to see is when our Turning Point USA chapters get flagged on campus for hateful ideas or white supremacist ideas.
00:16:26.000It's a daily occurrence and definitely painted my experience at CSU more than anything when it came to our local chapter there.
00:16:32.000Most recently at the University of Indiana, there's a local group called No Space for Hate.
00:16:38.000I'm sure they actually really mean that when it comes to difference in ideology.
00:16:42.000They released a report a couple months ago about white supremacist recruitment at the University of Indiana.
00:16:48.000And the report specifically mentions Turning Point USA as potentially this fringe group.
00:16:54.000They call themselves, they say that Turning Point USA is a right-wing group that's not necessarily classified as white supremacist, but that some of the leaders of the organization have expressed public support for members of the Boogaloo movement, which they say is a militia movement seeking to replace our government with a white fashion.
00:17:12.000We are looking at legal remedies for these sorts of things.
00:17:14.000We've actually won several court cases in the last few months against universities.
00:17:18.000So I love when we get to have a little bit of a victory there.
00:17:23.000But it is shocking to me that the idea of even being remotely conservative automatically assumes that you are a white supremacist on college campuses.
00:17:31.000And our chapter leaders are dealing with that on a day-to-day basis.
00:17:34.000I really feel for everyone right now because I can probably not even relate very much to just how extreme their campus experience has been.
00:17:45.000And I think a lot of that is really propagated by university professors.
00:17:49.000They're on campus for many, many years, often even decades, and eventually become tenured where they have the freedom to say whatever they want with absolutely zero consequences.
00:17:58.000And that's when some of these really crazy things happen.
00:18:11.000Because it's based on, I don't know, reality of the universe and how the universe works.
00:18:16.000But there's a professor at Brooklyn College who is a math professor who tweeted this week that 2 plus 2 equals 4 as the equation, in her words, reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.
00:19:20.000And it reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.
00:19:22.000Although she is a female math professor, so I have a hard time believing she's living in such a patriarchal world as a successful math professor at an American university.
00:19:32.000And some of the responses are: yes, this is exactly the type of thing we need to be teaching.
00:19:42.000Maybe they were students of Professor Rubel's.
00:19:45.000And the American, the Smithsonian Museum said this exactly at the African American Museum, that math is racist.
00:19:52.000And so for young mothers out there and young parents out there, please take note of this.
00:19:55.000Your kids are going to be learning these things at a younger and younger age, that the multiplication tables, division tables, math, it's racist.
00:20:03.000And there is no justification for it at all whatsoever.
00:20:06.000Well, I think it's because there's this idea on college campuses that everything is racist that remotely has to do with an institution of America.
00:20:13.000And right now, the big hot button issue that we're talking about is police brutality, especially on college campuses.
00:20:18.000Lots of students are moving into their dorms littered with posters all over the wall saying Black Lives Matter is the best organization ever and you have to agree with every single one of their ideas.
00:20:26.000There's a professor named Jennifer Harvey at Drake University who recently wrote an op-ed for CNN talking about how white parents in America need to start educating their white children at a very young age about the idea of backing the blue and the idea of law and order.
00:20:42.000She says that we need to be teaching white children the important components of racial justice activism and that telling white children that police officers are good guys is actually perpetuating racism in American culture moving forward.
00:20:55.000So there's this slanderous idea that anything associated with law and order, especially people who give up so much to serve as our men and women in blue, are actually the most racist idea ever.
00:21:38.000Well, and you're required to learn about this nonsense to even graduate.
00:21:41.000They make you take diversity classes about queer expressions or the Black Lives Matter movement in order to even graduate and move on to get a greater job.
00:21:49.000So, you know, I'm not really sure I buy into the narrative anymore that a college degree is necessary to be successful.
00:21:54.000Most of the most successful people I know, yourself included, never even went to college.
00:21:57.000Yeah, I mean, you went to college and you're doing great, but I don't think that college gave you your capacity to succeed.
00:22:04.000If anything, I think college challenged me in new ways to push back against the establishment of college rather than just so your parents and you paid or went into debt.
00:22:13.000I don't know your financial situation, worked for scholarships, all of that, so that you then could go fight the system that you're paying for.
00:22:19.000Yeah, amazing how that works, isn't it?
00:22:21.000But what's most scary to me on college campuses now, and I think we started to see this a couple of years ago, is that this idea of a culture war being an ideological one is very quickly transforming into an actual physical altercation more often than not.
00:22:34.000And we saw that, obviously, with one of our activists at the University of California, Berkeley getting punched in the face while tabling on campus.
00:22:40.000Now, obviously, with the rising riots and violence and looting across the country, people are being targeted for their ideological beliefs.
00:22:47.000But most recently, there was a professor at Marshall University, Jennifer Mosher, who's been placed on administrative leave after she was teaching a Zoom class, which students were recording in West Virginia, of all places.
00:23:16.000So she was placed on administrative leave because a student was filming the Zoom class.
00:23:19.000Thank you to whoever filmed this, saying that she hopes that all Trump supporters die before Election Day in November, talking about President Trump choosing to hold peaceful protest rallies in the midst of COVID-19 and how irresponsible and reckless that behavior is.
00:23:34.000And in her words, Trump supporters need to die before the November election.
00:23:39.000BLM Inc. Hosts massive demonstrations with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, and yet she wants Trump supporters to be dead in the streets.
00:23:49.000Oh, and massive supporting rallies on campuses as well.
00:23:51.000I mean, you're seeing thousands of students turn up.
00:23:56.000They're linking arm in arm, ignoring every sort of idea that the CDC has put forward and their university has put forward in order to advance this idea of racial justice and anti-racism, which is a nice fun buzzword that's popped up in 2020.
00:24:09.000But as long as it fits your agenda, it doesn't really matter.
00:24:11.000The science won't affect that when it comes to a certain pandemic, which is just terrifying.
00:24:16.000So I'm alarmed to see this idea of the culture war make that big transition.
00:24:21.000And I'm curious, Charlie, what you think of that?
00:24:23.000And are we going to continue moving into more violence and more rioting and looting and targeting people with actual violence rather than just mean words as we continue to do it?
00:24:33.000I mean, the transition from a civil, peaceful society to tribalism and conflict, the bridge between the two or the wall, to kind of use an analogy, what prevents that flood from happening is freedom of speech.
00:24:45.000If you can't discuss your ideas, then you're not able to have any nuance.
00:24:51.000And so what you end up happening is lunatics like these professors, they win the argument because they shut up any sort of disagreement.
00:24:59.000So freedom of speech is a way where mature people are able to kind of discover truth, pursue truth, I should say, find their differences, find their agreements, and then you don't kill each other.
00:25:42.000In fact, I think that's almost a hard thing to talk about.
00:25:47.000But if you look in the streets of Louisville right now, where you look at people that are burning down Louisville, they have riot shields, anarchist gear, Molotov cocktails, everything waiting for them after a complete lie that the police wrongfully killed Breonna Taylor, which is not true at all, where Breonna Taylor was still doing business with her ex-boyfriend, the drug dealer, and currently dating another boyfriend who tried to kill a cop.
00:26:12.000So she was not really dealing with good people.
00:26:54.000When you do not have dialogue, when you do not have discussion, when you do not have people that are able to disagree in a marketplace, you will get to tearing each other apart.
00:27:11.000They won't have me on their show, and they won't come on my show.
00:27:14.000Because for them, speech is a threat to their power.
00:27:16.000Instead, they would rather have baseball bats than speech.
00:27:19.000And there are some good liberals that'll come on.
00:27:21.000We had James Lindsay and we had Peter Bogogi, and they're great.
00:27:24.000And I want to give them credit for that.
00:27:26.000But they are the exception, not the rule.
00:27:29.000And so I want to just kind of make this point that if we get back to a country where you can agree or disagree, that's a very healthy thing.
00:27:37.000However, if you send your kid to college or if you support your college financially, in one way or the other, you are playing into this idea of the disintegration of America.
00:27:47.000A lot of really good patriotic Americans that are listening to this, and I'm not actually anti-college.
00:27:58.000It's supposed to be, which is a marketplace of ideas.
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00:29:28.000And that sort of taps into this idea of millennials versus Gen Z, too.
00:29:32.000We love to say at Turning Point USA, Gen Z is gen-free because my generation, 1997 or later Americans, I'm at the oldest bracket of this new generation, saw what happened with millennials on college campuses.
00:30:03.000But the pushback from their administration is even louder about forcing leftism onto you, forcing leftism into your classes and your curriculum.
00:30:11.000And honestly, students who are attending college right now are supporting that in one way or another because they have to deal with it in one way or another to graduate.
00:30:17.000So I'm very supportive, especially this fall with everything crazy happening with COVID-19 of students taking a gap year, taking some time off, analyzing, you know, is this really the best move for me?
00:31:18.000And especially when I talk to older Americans, there seems to be this sentiment that's existed for several decades that, oh, young people are always a little crazier.
00:31:26.000But once they get to the quote unquote real world, then they'll wake up and they'll realize that, you know, these fringe ideas are so crazy and they'll conform more regularly to what we consider normal traditional ideas.
00:31:35.000That could not be farther from the truth.
00:31:37.000And we're seeing right now in 2020 what's playing out when what happens when very extreme leftist ideas graduate with us and then get to the streets of Kenosha, get to the streets of Chicago and San Francisco.
00:31:48.000This is the reality if we keep letting this full-blown leftism happen on college campuses.
00:31:52.000Again, these students have no net worth.
00:31:54.000They're negative $30,000, negative $50,000, negative $70,000 in debt.
00:32:05.000And after a couple years where they just work minimum wage jobs because they have no skills, they're going to lose faith in the system and they're going to want to burn the system down.
00:32:13.000And then these very well-meaning suburban parents say, I don't know where I went wrong.
00:32:55.000And so I think that what you're saying here, though, is parents need to liberate their thinking and say, what if my kid doesn't go to college?
00:33:04.000And I say, this is a thought experiment.
00:33:06.000How much, I don't want to pee on the spot, Isabel, but it probably cost you $200,000 all throughout graduate and undergrad.
00:33:30.000And luckily, through that, I was able to save up enough money to even graduate graduate school debt-free because I had the opportunity to spend a little bit more money for one year.
00:33:38.000But even still, I mean, it is just astronomical how much the cost of college has risen because we're in this cycle where the government will keep giving loans as long as the school keeps raising tuition.
00:33:47.000And we are just always on the hamster wheel of the increasing cost of college.
00:33:51.000And I tell parents, and I'm going to tell students this right now, that if you have the money saved, what if you started a business?
00:34:13.000Well, there's a couple more, but I really want to ask you, just generally speaking, obviously there's a crazy situation happening on campuses right now where professors can get away with saying whatever they want.
00:34:51.000They taught you about conservative values in the Constitution very early on in life.
00:34:56.000But a lot of parents have just given their kids off to the state and hope that they come back with values.
00:35:01.000You give your kids to the state, they're not going to learn about why America is a beautiful country, our founding values, first principles.
00:35:11.000And so at a more root cause issue, I think that this is parents that have abdicated their responsibility in the involvement of the education of their children.
00:35:25.000I was not homeschooled, but we definitely talked about it a few times.
00:35:28.000And growing up, that became a moment of concern for my parents.
00:35:31.000I mean, they were always very involved in what we were learning.
00:35:33.000And honestly, if COVID-19 has done one good thing for parents with younger kids this year, it's the opportunity to listen to what their teachers are saying when they're in these Zoom classes learning from home.
00:35:42.000I know several elementary school teachers went viral on Twitter saying they were so concerned about parents being able to hear about their curriculum because they had a moral duty and a moral responsibility to educate about race.
00:35:53.000Some of the school districts in Missouri, for example, were making the parents sign waivers that they would not go listen in on what their kids were being taught.
00:36:22.000I paid for that 90 minutes with Dr. Liberal about why America is awful.
00:36:28.000So tell me why I cannot see that lecture.
00:36:33.000And so look, that's one of the ways it stems from.
00:36:35.000But also, and I talk about this, and this is something that we as conservatives don't talk about enough, which is the material side of this.
00:36:42.000And so there's an ideological and a material side.
00:36:44.000The left only focuses on the material side.
00:36:46.000They never focus on the ideological side.
00:36:48.000Conservatives almost only focus on the ideological side and they don't focus on the material side.
00:36:53.000And the material side, which is, and this is, people say like, oh, it's a Marxist view to believe this.
00:37:00.000I mean, it's just a silly thing to say.
00:37:01.000But if you have people that are 28 years old and they're in debt and they don't own property and they have no skills, do not be surprised when they want to burn down the world, even if they weren't directly exposed to all this indoctrination or they don't believe it.
00:37:15.000So kind of the popular conservative view is saying they're only burning down because of the ideas they were stuffed with.
00:37:55.000Because just only the side of ideas and values and morals, here's the kind of the equation is you can have the best morals in the world, but you'll become dispirited as a 29-year-old and you will leave the church and leave Christianity if your life materially does not get better.
00:38:12.000And I had this conversation very briefly with Ben Shapiro, and he did not view it this way.
00:38:16.000He said that people still stayed faithful in the Great Depression.
00:38:19.000It doesn't matter their socioeconomic status.
00:38:33.000And when you have 29-year-olds that have nothing they can point to, where they say, yes, my life has gotten better since the time I was 24, their debt burden has gone up.
00:38:43.000Their entire upswing of life has actually just been kind of a downward trajectory in the nihilism.
00:38:51.000And so that's something I think we have to get right.
00:38:54.000I think that we should sell federal lands for basically pennies on the dollar to people under the age of 30 to go have families.
00:39:01.000I think that we should, in Arizona, it's almost all federal land.
00:39:04.000Governor Ducey and President Trump should partner and say, we're going to sell 3,000 acres for young families to be able to just start a community.
00:39:32.000And I think that goes back to your college experience.
00:39:35.000You know, young Americans are being taught from every angle of society in their class on their social media with who's running for president that America is a failed idea and there is no hope and we cannot save it and life sucks and your life sucks most importantly.
00:39:47.000And so I think we lack this idea of a sense of purpose and a drive to make our lives better because a lot of that does have to do with personal choice and personal responsibility, but we're not teaching that anymore.
00:39:56.000And the students who start college with that idea of excitement and personal drive and a willingness to work very hard to succeed become so downtrodden because they are so targeted.
00:40:06.000We lose the stars in our eyes for the things that we dream in to turn them into reality.
00:40:10.000And I think a lot of that has to do with not being prepared and not understanding what's going to be confronting you in your college experience.
00:40:17.000And so, parents who are listening to this, if you're a high school senior listening to this, you need to be aware that college is not all the fun football tailgates, it's not all the fun parties.
00:40:27.000But in reality, if you're walking in as a conservative student or even just as an open-minded student that's not already to the left of the political spectrum, you are going to get targeted.
00:40:36.000And we're seeing so much of that on college campuses.
00:40:38.000You know, automatically, every mainstream Republican or conservative is labeled a Nazi, labeled a white supremacist, anti-woman.
00:40:46.000I got a lovely DM from a current student where I used to go to school the other day, never met this student in my life, saying, Don't come back to our school.
00:40:53.000You know, as an alum, you're not welcome here.
00:40:54.000And we're talking about you in our class at Colorado State.
00:41:01.000She referred to me as such a thing because I'm supporting President Trump, which makes absolutely no sense.
00:41:06.000But those are the types of names that your child or you might get called on a college campus.
00:41:11.000So being aware of that and empowered about that on the onset and realizing that there's no validity to those claims can help you succeed during your four years.
00:41:42.000I wear that as a badge of honor still to this day.
00:41:45.000But, you know, I was so shocked as a student because I didn't expect any of that.
00:41:49.000I didn't expect to be called that white supremacist girl on campus.
00:41:51.000I didn't expect to get death threats or have my address doxed, and all of those crazy things happen.
00:41:56.000And I know that doesn't happen to every conservative student, but it happened to me because I was willing to be bold and push back against this sea of leftism.
00:42:03.000And I wish I would have known that up front because, you know, we like to pretend sometimes that it doesn't hurt our feelings when that does happen.
00:42:09.000But of course, it hurt my feelings the first time a close friend of mine called me a racist or a white supremacist.
00:42:14.000I went home and was miserable for several days because I couldn't imagine that someone I had called a friend and genuinely thought they understood who I was believed I lived my life that way.
00:42:22.000And had I known that that was part of the package of being a conservative on a college campus, even not being an outspoken one, I think I would have had a thicker skin moving into college to begin with and didn't have to grow that through my experience, but would be more confident to fight back against that from the onset.
00:42:37.000Yeah, I tell people, and you're a great example of this, that if you're going to get into politics and get into the fight, be prepared to lose all your friends and be prepared to really pay a price.
00:42:46.000And I hope the adults listen to this, you know, really think carefully.
00:42:50.000Here you have Isabel, who was a college activist at Turning Point.
00:42:53.000By the way, we have thousands of amazing activists at Turning Point USA that are fighting for our country.
00:42:58.000And if you're an adult out there and you're not in the arena, why are you letting the kids fight for you?
00:43:03.000And that's what I tell adults all the time.
00:43:04.000I say, because now that I'm 26, I can kind of look at this a little bit more intergenerational than I did four years ago.
00:43:10.000I can say, because I go to these, you know, events and they're like, oh, yeah, keep fighting.
00:44:34.000I could spend a whole other podcast talking about that.
00:44:36.000But it's also given us a chance to reevaluate the institutions in our country that are and are not working.
00:44:42.000And across the board, education is one of those institutions we can think about.
00:44:46.000You know, kids are going to kindergarten on Zoom now, and they're also going to their college campus classes on Zoom.
00:44:50.000And so I think parents, grandparents, people who are mentors and authority figures in young adults' lives have a unique chance right now to listen in, to actually lend an ear to what's happening because otherwise you have no idea what happens in your child's psychology 100 class or even their math class, apparently.
00:45:06.000And all of a sudden, racism, the idea that America is a failed experiment, that we need to be completely dismantled, that the nuclear family is evil.
00:45:13.000I hear a lot about that from our students in conversations on social media.
00:45:17.000That is what's being taught to your children, and it should be very alarming to you.
00:45:21.000And we should take a moment to think about that in 2020.
00:45:23.000And address root causes, which is universities, the school system, how we educate our kids.
00:45:31.000Look, we've got a very different kind of sponsor for this episode, the Jordan Harbinger Show, which is a podcast you really should be listening to.
00:45:39.000And I know that every day somebody tells you you have to listen to some podcasts.
00:45:43.000You nod and say sure, and then you never listen to it.
00:45:47.000Jordan's show, which Apple named one of the best of 2018, is aimed at making you a better informed, more critical thinker so you can get a sense of how the world actually works and come to your own conclusions about what's happening, even inside your own brain.
00:45:59.000Each episode is a conversation with a different, fascinating guest.
00:46:04.000He's terrific, lots of energy, very smart.
00:46:07.000In one episode, Jordan talked to a hostage negotiator for the FBI who offers techniques on how to get people to like and trust you, which sounds useful and kind of disturbing at the same time.
00:46:16.000So right now, you go to Jordan Harbinger Show, and you guys can listen to the FBI negotiator or the one about the story of a cinematographer who discovered a lost city in the jungle, or how about one of the most important archaeological finds of the century?
00:46:57.000I'm actually doing another podcast just on the film because we've received so many emails from people on it.
00:47:02.000I actually had to watch through somebody else's Netflix account because I deleted Netflix because they are the pro pedophile over-the-top service.
00:47:09.000They think very highly of pedophilia at Netflix with their latest movie, Cuties.
00:47:14.000And of course, Susan Rice and Obama have not been to answer for it.
00:47:17.000But anyway, I watched the social dilemma, thought it was very interesting.
00:47:20.000What role does social media play in what young people can consume and how people are interpreting what's actually happening?
00:47:28.000Well, frankly, social media is everything.
00:47:30.000Think, especially right now when everything is digital and people lack the opportunity to connect one-on-one in person, social media is your connection to your friends and your family.
00:47:37.000It's the way that you get your news, it's the way that you express your opinions.
00:47:41.000But it's this weird, distorted world that I think we don't fully understand when we first open your Instagram app at the beginning of the day and start scrolling through.
00:47:48.000You have a very carefully curated set of posts that you are allowed to see based on algorithms.
00:47:53.000And so I think we're creating these ideological silos for America's next generations that they don't understand how to communicate with people who are different from them.
00:48:01.000They don't understand how to articulate the fact that they may be wrestling with an idea.
00:48:06.000But the vast majority of millennials and Gen Z, well over 50%, get all of their primary news from social media.
00:48:13.000And let's take a second to just ask ourselves, what does that even mean?
00:48:17.000It means we're not reading full-length stories.
00:48:19.000We're not watching full-length videos.
00:48:21.000We see a five-line headline and think, okay, I know everything I need to know about.
00:48:24.000I know everything about Breonna Taylor because the Washington Post said it.
00:48:28.000So all of our knowledge is, you know, an inch deep and a mile wide.
00:48:31.000And all of a sudden, everyone thinks they're an expert on subjects like the Breonna Taylor case, on subjects like the Black Lives Matter Incorporated movement.
00:48:38.000And we've lost the skill to do the digging of what things actually mean and start asking those really hard questions.
00:48:44.000So, in many ways, social media is a great tool.
00:48:46.000It's an opportunity for us to reach kids who may not have heard conservative ideas ever shared in their family or in their classroom.
00:48:52.000And I love that part about what we do at Turning Point USA and our jobs in particular.
00:48:56.000But it's also a really interesting world that we don't really fully understand.
00:49:00.000You know, not all of our content will reach every single person that's following us.
00:49:04.000And even the things that we put out don't even start a very deep conversation about the future of America, about why freedom is important, why we need to create this culture moving forward that returns to our roots in America.
00:49:15.000So I'm hopeful that social media can do more of a deep dive into the future.
00:49:20.000And I think that my issue, I will say a couple of thoughts on that.
00:49:24.000I think conservatives are actually more equipped to have disagreeable conversations than liberals, just because we're always around liberals all the time, and liberals aren't.
00:49:31.000We go to, you know, our kids go to liberal universities, liberal schools, liberal family members.
00:49:54.000I have the blessing of having that opportunity because I was spending so much screen time just going through Instagram.
00:50:00.000And I actually hit me four or five months ago when I first deleted everything.
00:50:04.000And I deleted Twitter first, then I deleted Instagram.
00:50:06.000When I was going through Instagram and I started to just see that I was seeing more posts of things I wasn't even liking, but just spending more screen time on, I wasn't even liking it.
00:50:15.000I said, they're monitoring my screen time.
00:50:28.000I was a sophomore in high school when I got my first cell phone and everyone made fun of me but this is the craziest thing for I don't understand this at all and I don't mean this in condemnation I mean this from a position of love and inquiry and compassion why do high school kids need phones they don't no I don't I mean seriously I mean, I got my first film as a senior in high school and it was a brick.
00:51:32.000Every time that somebody likes one of your pictures or has a follow-up request, you actually get a release of hormones in your brain, which is dopamine, exactly like what happens when you do drugs.
00:51:40.000So we should be talking more about this.
00:51:42.000We've addicted our children to the idea of using their phones.
00:51:45.000Even people that I know, my younger sister, for example, she can't even go on vacation without keeping her Snapchat streaks alive.
00:51:50.000So she'll give her friends her login information to Snapchat so that they can do it while she's on vacation for her.
00:51:56.000And I don't think she means poorly because of that.
00:51:58.000I just genuinely believe that is such a big part of culture for the younger version of Generation Z that nobody's really talking about these days.
00:52:06.000Yeah, and I think it's a huge part of it.
00:52:08.000And young people are getting all their information from social media professors.
00:52:12.000And again, I mean, I'm the first one to admit it.
00:52:14.000We have 7 million followers combined on all platforms on social media.
00:53:27.000You know, but I think there has to be something to be said: can you, it would be a great documentary, be a phenomenal documentary, where you have a 16 or 17-year-old, or even a 20-year-old.
00:53:35.000That's be better, 20-year-old, sit in an auditorium.
00:53:38.000Could they, without screaming something, listen to a really bad idea?
00:54:05.000You know, all the lovely teen angst stuff.
00:54:07.000But I showed up for a few weeks in a row, and then I completely fell in love with it because debating and having peaceful discussions isn't actually at all about what you say.
00:54:15.000It's about your ability to sit back and listen and realize what the other person is saying so that you'll have an appropriate response.
00:54:21.000They're not teaching that to high schoolers and college students these days.
00:54:24.000And that's why we've just completely lost the ability to not only articulate what we believe in a peaceful way, but listen to anything that's remotely in disagreement with what we're saying.
00:54:32.000And if you dare disagree, the totalitarian in them will want to silence you and shut you up.
00:54:37.000But yeah, the freedom of speech issue is really important, but it's even more than that.
00:54:40.000It's the self-censorship issue that worries me the most because I think that because the way the courts are going and President Trump will probably get another Supreme Court justice, I think we're going to still gonna have freedom of speech in our country.
00:54:52.000So that meaning, what do I mean by that?
00:54:54.000Meaning governmentally, I think you'll still be able to get a poster and go outside.
00:54:57.000I think that will probably be protected.
00:54:58.000But there's two other issues that I really fear about.
00:55:01.000It's not actually the governance side of it.
00:55:38.000And the second thing is the self-censorship of people think they're going to lose their friends and lose anything that they care about if they say something that's not correct.
00:55:46.000And so those two things paired together, in some ways, the government has now been less important in the fight for speech for the first time in our country's history.
00:55:54.000So usually the government was always the biggest threat of shutting you up.
00:55:57.000So the government would come say, you can't say this, you can't assemble here.
00:56:00.000Now for the first time in our country, there are two other bigger threats to shut you up, which is private corporations and private individuals that will just basically punch you in the face, not be tried for it, or just the bully in school that will come after the teacher, the professor.
00:56:17.000So now it actually takes a non-governmental approach.
00:56:19.000Now the cultural landscape is actually more important than just filing a lawsuit for freedom of speech.
00:56:23.000I actually think we're going to be okay that way.
00:56:25.000I actually think that we're winning those.
00:56:47.000Well, every day we're seeing Twitter accounts shut down for sharing an idea of how to trade a virus, even not anything about policy or politics, but even just about science.
00:56:56.000So we're seeing this idea of objective truth being completely erased.
00:56:59.000And what an interesting commentary about people just being afraid to say anything to begin with.
00:57:04.000Culturally, it is more important for people to silence themselves and tell themselves in an internal monologue, what I'm about to say is not culturally okay.
00:58:14.000Yeah, so assuming you say something that's in contradiction to what the leftist mob wants you to say, they're saying your speech is violent.
00:58:21.000It's harming someone's safety, and that's what they consider to be hate speech.
00:58:24.000But lately, there's also been this idea that you failing to join the mob, that you failing to say anything, failing to post a black square on your Instagram, failing as a company, for example, to post your commitment to anti-racism all over your website, that your silence is also actually violence and threatening someone's safety or even just emotional well-being.
00:59:08.000And everybody, if you guys really are just fed up with the way this country is going, go to tpusa.com, chip in some money, do something to help us, tpusa.com.
00:59:16.000Also, you guys can support our program at charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:59:22.000You guys want to signed copy the MAGA doctrine, type in Charlie Kirk, show your podcast provider, hit subscribe, give us a five-star review, and email it to us at freedom at charliekirk.com.