Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Dr. Jordan Peterson had me on his podcast. We discussed the origin story of Turning Point USA, how we got started, and much more. We don't agree on everything, but it's a phenomenal discussion, and I annotate it here on the show.
00:00:50.000His 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.
00:00:58.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:11.000Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
00:01:20.000Learn how you can protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:01:43.000We discussed my biography, kind of the origin story of Turning Point USA, and it was a phenomenal honor.
00:01:50.000And so I'm going to walk you through it, actually, and kind of give you some commentary and some things to go even deeper into some of the stuff we talked about.
00:01:57.000So we started with Dr. Peterson asking a very provocative and funny question about insulin resistance.
00:02:04.000It's quite a start to the conversation.
00:02:09.000Okay, so you know that Robert F. Kennedy and Mehmet Oz and I suppose Jay Bhattacharya too are all hands on deck to restore American health and that likely the biggest...
00:02:30.000The problem that's confronting us is insulin resistance.
00:02:59.000When you were in high school, one of the first things you did to begin your political career was agitate for a, what, reduction or stabilization of the price of cookies at the school?
00:03:12.000So, looking back from your position of wisdom 13, 14 years later, what do you have to say to the American public about your cookie advocacy?
00:03:21.000I should have been advocating for, you know, reduction in the hamburger or steak prices.
00:03:28.000You see, that would have been a much better health approach.
00:03:31.000But all kidding aside, the funny undercurrent of that is that's kind of what started my political advocacy.
00:03:48.000And I look at these high school kids now, but they're able to order into high school.
00:03:52.000They have entire cubby rooms of like half of the high school class that is just getting takeout.
00:03:56.000So in our high school in the suburbs of Chicago, the biggest thing was these basically homemade cookies that nearly tripled in price over the course of a year.
00:04:04.000So we started Students Against Cookie Inflation, which was a rather righteous effort, I might say.
00:05:05.000Victory speech in Grant Park in downtown Chicago.
00:05:08.000That's where he celebrated his victory in 2008.
00:05:11.000And so it was just an all-encompassing, almost, you know, political moment where it was at very high social cost to be disagreeable with the rise of Obama in 2008.
00:05:24.000And mind you, I was a seventh or eighth grader at the time, actually going into ninth grade.
00:05:29.000And so I decided at my very best to push back, oh, really, is he going to fulfill all these promises?
00:05:33.000Is he really going to be able to bring utopia?
00:05:35.000And admittedly, I was rather clumsy and shallow in my capacity to be able to articulate those beliefs.
00:05:41.000But I had something in me that wanted to push back against the orthodoxy of the time.
00:05:47.000So to kind of expand on that, I got my start protesting cookie prices.
00:05:53.000It was Students Against Cookie Inflation.
00:06:07.000It's a great place to grow up, and it's just gone so insufferably woke.
00:06:11.000Wheeling was this amazing place where no one cared about the color of your skin or where you're from, your background, and now it's just unfortunately completely lost its core or its center.
00:06:21.000Even though it was a very racially diverse school, no one cared.
00:06:38.000I think it might have been 17, 18. I came to Toronto because I, and still to this day, this is correct, I was so moved by your lectures and your videos that they significantly changed my life.
00:06:49.000And I really wanted to meet you more than anything else.
00:06:56.000And I remember trying to figure out who you were because of what you were doing and the fact that you had this remarkable organizational capacity.
00:07:05.000But what I'm interested in now is what I'm very interested in trying to figure out.
00:07:15.000Inclined you to take the path that you took.
00:07:17.000Now, you said, okay, so you said Obama, but you said something else at the same time.
00:07:23.000You said that you had been reading American history, okay, and that you were concerned with, interested in, and convinced by, I suppose, all of those, this issue of what made America great.
00:07:37.000So this is interesting and worth taking apart, because for decades...
00:07:43.000Certainly since the 60s, the typical pathway for someone young who was assessing the history of his or her country would have been to read it through a highly critical lens.
00:07:57.000So, for example, I remember when I was 13 or 14, so that would have been mid-70s, I was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and some of the so-called new journalists.
00:08:12.000They're not, they weren't of the left exactly the way you would conceptualize the left now.
00:08:17.000They were more like radical literary figures, I would say.
00:08:21.000But the mid-70s ethos certainly was to read history, sociology, critically.
00:08:34.000And I don't mean you were being uncritical.
00:08:36.000I mean to take an anti-establishment stance.
00:08:42.000That was all, well, anti-establishment, free love, the sexual revolution is coming, everyone's going to be free.
00:08:48.000By the time the 70s came along, which was the milieu I was embedded in, all of the optimism of the 60s had pretty much vanished, but all of the cynicism 100% remained.
00:09:01.000Now you, though, interestingly enough, in Chicago, and this would be mid-2000s, so quite a bit later.
00:10:04.000The Matrix out of which he emerged, maybe Cauldron's not the right metaphor.
00:10:08.000But I'm curious, like, why do you think that your political rebellion took a conservative form when that isn't, it's not common for young people, and it certainly wasn't the pattern of the time from, say, 1965 till, well, probably till about you,
00:10:56.000Basically, the entire premise of the book, based on my memory, is that there are this wonderful tribe and they all get along in Africa and these evil colonialists come in and things fall apart and there's internal strife and the end of the book is basically the summary of all of these relationships.
00:11:12.000of these evil colonialists that say, and here's the history of just the subsistence
00:11:17.000Right, so it's kind of a testament to Rousseau, but it was written by an African, that book.
00:11:28.000Correct, and again, I'm drawing from almost a decade old memory, but I remember the discussions we'd have in class were very much anti-colonialist, anti-Western, that we are the contaminants.
00:11:42.000And again, mind you, we're in 8th or 9th grade discussing this, so I don't know what post-structuralism is or post-modernism is, but it was pre-woke.
00:11:52.000And so from the historical standpoint, it was not 1619 Project, but it was, we're going to spend a whole month on slavery, and we're going to spend three days on the founding.
00:12:03.000And did you spend any of the time when you were studying slavery?
00:12:08.000Assessing the fact that the UK was the only country that's ever existed in the history of the world that spent, what, two centuries and a tremendous proportion of its treasury eradicating slavery around the world at the behest of Protestant Christians?
00:14:19.000And that in itself wasn't so bad because the country was industrializing.
00:14:23.000But right underneath that was the idea that while you were doing that, it was necessary to pretty much stamp out or fail to develop anything that would produce any kind of creative entrepreneurship.
00:14:34.000It's like, okay, that's hard to swallow.
00:14:37.000And then when I read about how the food pyramid was developed, that's just beyond comprehension.
00:14:44.000I don't know if that's the worst crime ever committed in the United States, but it's up there.
00:14:49.000And then the next mystery is, Wilberforce is another mystery of that magnitude.
00:14:55.000And even, you might say, particularly on the left, it's like, okay, you guys, you're for the oppressed, which I don't buy for a second, but especially because I've watched in the last 10 years the lefties sell out the...
00:15:11.000Poor, worldwide, to the climate apocalypse mongers, and that's just been a catastrophe for places like Africa, like Bagat Wade has been so forthright in observing.
00:15:22.000But the fact that slavery and reparations, all of that, the unfair founding of the United States, has been a central dogma of the radical leftists.
00:15:37.000They blame slavery on the West, and The fact that the radical types have control over the education system means that no one, even educated in a conservative milieu, knows who the hell Wilberforce was.
00:15:53.000And I just don't know what to think about that.
00:15:56.000Or Thaddeus Stevens, or the heroism of John Quincy Adams.
00:16:02.000Those would be some main protagonist characters for the abolitionist slavery here in America.
00:16:08.000And so when I was in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, something in me, and I don't quite know, my parents were very patriotic, but not political.
00:16:22.000Something in me desired to try to find the other side of the story, to try to push back a little bit from the incessant narrative that was being built.
00:16:32.000And I do want to make sure this is clear.
00:16:34.000We were not yet at the place where the teachers were saying America was racist.
00:16:40.000In fact, it was actually much more insidious than that.
00:17:38.000But we spent so little time on the brilliance of the founders and what they've created and the greatest political document in human history and what went into that.
00:17:48.000And it was an under-emphasis on the heroism and the courage and the brilliance and an over-emphasis on the evil and the tragedy and the horror without even the redemption arc behind it.
00:17:58.000Yeah, well, the thing that's so awful about that as far as I'm concerned...
00:18:02.000From the leftist perspective, let's say, is if you are concerned with the poor and the oppressed, you know, and then you have to be discerning there because there are people who are poor and oppressed as a consequence of their own idiocy,
00:18:18.000and that's not so uncommon, as you know, in your own life by watching your pathway to failure.
00:18:25.000So, but given that there are people who are unfortunate, you'd think that the appropriate Pack would be to determine who in history served them most effectively.
00:18:38.000And I just can't see anyone you could possibly point to.
00:18:43.000More effectively, who did that more effectively than Wilberforce, ever.
00:18:47.000And so you would think that instead of erecting monuments to Lenin, the leftists would erect monuments to Wilberforce.
00:18:54.000But not only do they not do that, no one knows who the hell he was.
00:18:58.000It is one of the greatest memory holing of a hero in Western history.
00:19:21.000I think that's right, that it is fundamentally...
00:19:24.000But that begs another question, and that would be why, given that Wilberforce was clearly a force for the good that Obama, for example, would have been pushing, right?
00:19:53.000If Wilberforce is the poster boy for that sort of effort, which if you understand his life and you read about it, I can't see how you can conclude that, then why would the lefties forego that merely to oppose the fact that His motivation was fundamentally Christian,
00:20:12.000because that points to something deeper, right?
00:20:13.000It points to the fact that the true war, so to speak, isn't political.
00:20:28.000Like, there's an enlightenment element there, right?
00:20:30.000The enlightenment types, especially after the French Revolution, generated this narrative that...
00:20:37.000Science and religion were radically opposed, and that if you were on the side of religion, you were against clear, rational, logical thinking.
00:20:46.000And so you could imagine a stream of anti-Christian sentiment emerging on the rationalist side, right?
00:20:54.000But it isn't obvious to me at all that the leftist types who don't talk about Wilberforce...
00:21:06.000All you have to do is talk to them for like 15 seconds and you find out that that's not the case.
00:21:11.000They might use those arguments from time to time, but they certainly don't apply the rigors of scientific thinking to their own radical hypotheses.
00:24:14.000And on the personality side, that associates with sadism.
00:24:18.000And so all of that culminates in a personality style that has the proclivity to take positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others.
00:28:42.000The Pharisees are exactly the people who use religious terminology, so moral terminology, to cloak their power-seeking machinations, right?
00:29:11.000If they were the people, had they been alive in the time of the prophets they purport to follow, they would have been part of the mob that would have killed them.
00:31:36.000We believe that is one of the, if not the most evil...
00:31:39.000So you think that's the transgression against...
00:31:41.000Okay, so that's interesting because...
00:31:44.000My psychological understanding of the idea of the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is what possesses your words when you truly aim up.
00:31:55.000And this makes sense to me psychologically because the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you spontaneously are directly related to the intent of your aim.
00:32:14.000You know, if you go on a date and you aim at sexual contact on the first date, the fantasies that come along with that aim will be of that nature, obviously.
00:32:26.000And if you are on the hunt, so to speak, for a marital partner...
00:32:32.000The fantasies that accompany that will be quite different.
00:32:35.000So this is literally how your imagination...
00:32:37.000It's also the case that, you know, it's the same idea with the date.
00:32:41.000If it's short-term mating is your goal, which, by the way, is the goal of the dark tetrad types, differentially.
00:32:49.000So what that means is that the sexual revolution handed...
00:32:57.000But it's definitely the case that your aim determines what comes to mind.
00:33:01.000Now, you said that that sin against the Holy Ghost, which is the unforgivable sin, is the sin that occurs when you use the Lord's name in vain.
00:33:12.000So when you claim to be motivated by what's divine, but are actually serving...
00:33:18.000The Luciferian spirit of usurpation of power.
00:33:26.000And I take Dennis Prager's view of an Old Testament on this view, which is, think about how much, this is a great example, think about how much damage those evil priests did.
00:33:37.000Look, most of the people that I've spoken with who proclaim themselves to be atheists are atheists for two reasons.
00:33:44.000And I mean the good faith atheists, let's say.
00:33:48.000First of all, they tend to be tilted in the engineering cognition direction, so they're much more oriented towards things than people, and that's a stable temperamental trait.
00:33:59.000But they've almost all also invariably been hurt by someone or some institution that's claimed to be religious.
00:34:08.000And then you could also see that obviously betraying someone in Dante's...
00:34:14.000Account of the Inferno, when he goes down to the bottom of hell, he finds the betrayers right next to Satan, right?
00:35:09.000As the spirit of adventure, he says, go out into the world, leave your zone of comfort, move away from your people, and have the terrible adventure of your life.
00:35:18.000Well, if you reject that, you can't develop.
00:35:32.000To expand on that, the commandment says, thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain.
00:35:36.000It literally means thou shalt not carry the Lord's name in vain.
00:35:40.000You could make an argument one of the most evil things you could do is to carry and do evil in the name of God.
00:35:46.000I then talk with Dr. Peterson about what we're seeing on these college campuses, and it's remarkable.
00:35:50.000These Prove Me Wrong events are going so viral.
00:35:53.000We've reached billions and billions and billions and billions of people and views.
00:35:57.000And so please subscribe to the YouTube channel to watch that.
00:36:01.000It's been my experience that it doesn't take that much encouragement Those, the people you're describing, to be inspired to try.
00:36:15.000Now, I've talked to thousands of young men now who've had that experience, you know, like I see a lot of them at my lectures.
00:36:22.000They come to the meet and greets, for example, and they tell me, it's great, it's really great.
00:36:27.000They tell me that, you know, five years ago, six years ago, because it's starting to be a long time now, eight years ago even, they were not in good shape.
00:36:36.000And they came across my lectures or books and decided that there was something worth aiming for and then decided to try.
00:36:46.000So to tell the truth, that's a very common vow, let's say, to take on more responsibility.
00:36:54.000And they usually laugh about starting to make their bed or something like that, which is a lot less trivial than people think.
00:37:17.000First, the crowds alone, we're drawing crowds of 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people in the middle of the day just for me to debate a random college kid or a college professor.
00:37:33.000As we know, we started Turning Point USA.
00:37:35.000One of the things I really wanted to make sure is that I was in touch with the target audience that I was trying to convince and trying to persuade.
00:37:43.000No better way to do that than just go to the college campus itself, set up a card table with maybe a poster that says something like, I think government should be smaller, something like that, and start a discussion.
00:37:54.000I would do this at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
00:37:57.000I would do this at University of Illinois when we had almost no funding, no connections, no idea what I was doing.
00:38:03.000I've always believed in the grassroots interaction.
00:38:08.000No data, no chart, no abstraction can get to that personal human-to-human contact.
00:38:13.000So I've been doing that for many years, and then Stephen Crowder, his credit, kind of popularized this idea of debating and putting it on.
00:38:20.000I said, oh, well, why don't I also film these interactions?
00:38:23.000And so I started to do that around 2018.
00:38:25.000So it's been about seven or eight years now.
00:38:27.000And, you know, then 10 kids would show up and then 20 kids.
00:38:31.000And we started to put these on the Internet and kind of concurrent and simultaneous to your rise where you diagnosed what was going on in the West quicker and more accurately than anybody else, especially with young men.
00:38:43.000We started to see our popularity increase as we started to address some of the underlying problems that young people were facing, but in particular young men were facing.
00:38:52.000And then COVID happened, and we were basically out of business for, you know, a year in the sense where we weren't able to do campus activities.
00:38:59.000Donald Trump was no longer in office, and we had to really kind of rebuild on campus basically about two years ago.
00:39:07.000So let's just say the spring of 2023, things really started to change, where we would do these campus events prior, and we would bring in your traditional conservatives, 300 to 400 people.
00:39:19.000Maybe a couple hundred interested types, maybe 50 liberals, 500 students, call it a day.
00:39:26.000All of a sudden, in 2023, we were drawing a different type of person and student.
00:39:30.000First of all, we were drawing people outside of the campuses that were welders, electricians, and plumbers, and the working men that heard that we were in town.
00:39:44.000I mean, these were guys that would go up to the question line and they were not asking about Rousseau or they were not asking about Jacques Derrida.
00:39:51.000They were saying, how do I be a better person?
00:39:54.000Because I'm expecting a daughter in six months.
00:39:56.000Okay. And all of a sudden here I am, you know, not in the position where you are nearly as seasoned to give advice to that young man, but he's searching and he's looking for anyone that seems to have an idea of how the world is supposed to work, that is professing a worldview of order and structure and discipline.
00:40:50.000Dr. Peterson and I talk about how the educational model is hyper-feminine and how young men, especially working class men, are looking for meaning in their life.
00:40:59.000This is crucially important, this transformation, because one of the things that...
00:41:04.000So let's go back to that 60s dynamic, that anti-authoritarian 60s dynamic.
00:41:09.000Now, the role of the left in the 60s was like an entrepreneurial progressive radicalism, let's say.
00:41:21.000And the stance of the conservative was, well...
00:41:28.000You know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, guys.
00:41:31.000And that's a pretty good dynamic because you need a force for change and you need a force that resists that.
00:41:36.000But I think, you see, I think what the Conservatives did wrong, like profoundly wrong, was that they were, their breaks, this is why they're always dismissed as reactionary, their breaks, B-R-A-K-E-S,
00:41:52.000their breaks were fundamentally, they're also moralistic.
00:42:10.000But it was also strategically inappropriate.
00:42:14.000Because it's very hard to say to young people, who might tilt in the progressive direction, because they're a little more revolutionary in spirit, let's say, or also a little more immature, that the reason that...
00:42:26.000To abstain sexually, for example, is because you shouldn't do it.
00:42:31.000Now that's true, but it's a weak argument.
00:42:34.000You know, I was talking to my wife this morning about this.
00:42:37.000We'd been apart for a few days and I saw her again yesterday and I was very happy about that.
00:42:52.000They're just harder to talk to by a lot.
00:42:57.000Our discussion centered around the fact that it isn't that you should get married, although you should.
00:43:03.000It's that there is no alternative that's anywhere near as good by any standard whatsoever, regardless of position of analysis or time length.
00:43:15.000Anything you do other than that, even though marriage is very difficult, and every other alternative is far, far worse.
00:43:26.000And so if you want a pathway forward to what the Conservatives support, the Conservatives should be offering an invitation.
00:43:56.000And so now you're seeing that these young men who are coming, especially the working class types, they're not so interested in the political.
00:44:04.000They're probably not even interested in the arguments exactly.
00:45:27.000that might be true on one side of the sex spectrum.
00:45:30.000On the other side, or binary, the other side, there is something happening with men that no one is talking about, no one wants to acknowledge, no one wants to admit.
00:45:39.000And so separately, the Trump team, to their credit, believed in it and actually ran an explicitly masculine campaign going on podcasts like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn.
00:45:48.000And so they were very much embracing this, to their credit.
00:45:52.000But separately, we must diagnose why is this happening?
00:45:57.000The education system, as you've astutely pointed out many times, is hyper-feminine.
00:46:01.000There's no place for young men, especially young white men of a Christian.
00:46:05.000I think it's one in four boys is now given an ADHD diagnosis.
00:46:19.000So you know things have gone particularly sideways when the New York Times...
00:46:23.000I encourage people to read this cover story.
00:46:24.000It was unbelievable, where they were basically saying after this major study that like 1% of the kids actually do need ADHD medication that are completely out of control.
00:46:33.000But almost like 90% to 95% are just because the parents don't want to have an unruly kid around.
00:46:39.000Yeah, or, well, and if that's the New York Times diagnosis, then you can also be absolutely 100% certain that they underplay the role of the educational establishment in setting up the circumstances so that parents are likely to draw that conclusion.
00:46:54.000I mean, with all this trans-butchery nightmare, you know, my profession, particularly the social work end of it, but my...
00:47:01.000Like real psychologists, let's say, were also stunningly craven in their unwillingness to resist this.
00:47:08.000The mantra was to parents, well, would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child?
00:47:13.000Which there was never, Charlie, there was never.
00:47:49.000They put through that free speech legislation that the Labour Party tried to rescind that has actually reshaped the universities to some substantial degree.
00:47:57.000That was in part a consequence of me being disinvited from Cambridge, which had a long-term consequence that the disinviters...
00:48:06.000Hadn't really reckoned on because a whole group of professors at Cambridge got together and decided that they were going to change the policies at Cambridge, which they did in a historic vote, and then they changed the policies at the national level.
00:48:19.000And the repercussions of that haven't stopped yet.
00:48:23.000So yes, so this terrible demoralization.
00:48:26.000And to just expand on that, the entire education system is hyper-feminine.
00:48:31.000Young men that tend to be more restless sit down and shut up and read.
00:48:35.000Jane Austen, which of course Jane Austen's great, but are young men being molded into the future leaders of society?
00:48:43.000Are they being scolded just for their existence?
00:48:49.000being scolded just for their existence?
00:49:01.000We're going to save 35,000 babies to show the world that not only do we believe life is precious, but we're going to do something about it.
00:49:07.000Your gift of pre-born will give a girl the truth about what's happening in her body so that she can make the right choice.
00:49:13.000What better way to start this new year than to join us to save babies?
00:49:17.000And $28 a month will save a baby a month all year long.
00:49:20.000A $15,000 gift will provide a complete ultrasound machine that will save thousands of babies for years and years to come.
00:49:27.000We'll also save moms from a lifetime of pain and regret.
00:49:30.000I am a donor to this organization, and you should be too.
00:49:33.000Start this new year by being a hero for life.
00:49:36.000Call 833-850-2229 or click on the preborn banner at charliekirk.com.
00:49:41.000That is charliekirk.com and click on the preborn banner.
00:49:58.000Dr. Peterson did a great job of prodding and building out the biographical story of Turning Point USA.
00:50:03.000He asked questions that no one has ever asked about the origin story of what is now the greatest mass movement in the country, which is Turning Point USA.
00:50:11.000And thanks to all of you who support it.
00:50:13.000Dr. Peterson did a phenomenal job as an interviewer.
00:50:16.000Really getting down to the root of where this came from and the foundational and the philosophical roots of it.
00:50:22.000All right, now you're advertising on social media.
00:50:25.000Let's go back and tell this whole story because I'm very curious about it.
00:50:29.000So you had an intuition that you could go to campuses.
00:50:35.000Okay, so tell me where'd that idea come from, do you think?
00:51:12.000That's interesting, too, because it's like I asked you what your motivation for doing this was, and the first thing you said was that you didn't have a degree.
00:53:08.000I still am friends with all my high school friends.
00:53:09.000So I'd go to University of Iowa, University of Illinois to go visit them, Northwestern.
00:53:14.000And I realized as I was trying to get this political thing off the ground, this is where it all stemmed from.
00:53:20.000And I was trying to put pieces together that the academy was where the fight needed to go towards.
00:53:27.000And simultaneously, as I was trying to find funding and trying to get donors behind our effort.
00:53:33.000Something that almost every wealthy person that I would encounter is they had a soft spot and an interest in trying to invest in college campuses, especially conservative-leaning philanthropists and business types in America.
00:53:47.000That's turned around to bite them pretty damn hard.
00:53:50.000Oh, yeah, but it would get their attention, right?
00:53:52.000So here I would be at a cocktail party, and I'd be 18, 19 years old trying to get funding, trying to get someone's attention.
00:55:01.000And so in 2015, when Ferguson, Missouri, the lie, the scam of hands up, don't shoot with Michael Brown, Black Lives Matter was born out of Ferguson, Missouri, actually on a college campus at University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
00:55:16.000And that spread like wildfire through, of course, a lot of Democrat operatives and money being spent.
00:55:21.000Remember how long we spent on that news cycle of America's racist because of Michael Brown and all the CNN commentators famously said, hands up and don't shoot.
00:55:29.000We spent more time on race obsession in the last two years of Obama's presidency than the last four or five years prior.
00:55:39.000That's a hallmark of the danger of allowing...
00:55:44.000Race to be an issue in the presidency to begin with.
00:55:48.000But an underappreciated element here is Eric Holder was setting the table for that with very loyal people in the Department of Justice that believed that police were inherently racist.
00:56:10.000Well, you know, psychologists played a role in that in a major way, too, because you had Banaji and her crowd with the, what do they call that, the implicit association test, forcing the idea of implicit bias,
00:56:28.000you know, and social psychology is a very corrupt discipline, and it has been maybe from its onset, and it's very...
00:56:39.000It's stacked from top to bottom with careerists.
00:56:42.000And it was social psychologists, for example, who denied that there was anything, any such thing as left-wing authoritarianism until 2017.
00:57:01.000There was a couple of people working on it around 2016.
00:57:04.000The last bit of research I did was on left-wing authoritarianism, and then everything, my lab blew up.
00:57:10.000It just became impossible for me to continue.
00:57:14.000So that dovetailed with this insistence that people were looking at the world through a lens that was irremediably biased in terms of their privilege and their racial and ethnic identity.
00:57:29.000You know, and it's tricky because people do have a tilt in the ethnocentric direction, right?
00:57:35.000Because, well, how about because you favor your family, right?
00:57:59.000And then you have the alternative that would be like Jezebel, who's the foreign devil, so to speak.
00:58:04.000And so, you know, that's a paradox that's very difficult to properly navigate.
00:58:11.000And on top of that, this was when Woke was starting to crescendo.
00:58:14.000And that's where Turning Point USA and our impact really started to materialize.
00:58:21.000We started to realize at Turning Point USA that what we were doing to start high school and college chapters was the vanguard of civilization.
00:58:29.000I continue on this, talking with Dr. Peterson about pronouns and cultural shifts that start from the bottom up.
00:58:41.0002016, things went, like, seriously sideways.
00:58:44.000And that's where, just to complete the point, my job on campus has became far more interesting because our organization shifted from primarily, you know, economic discussions of Marxism and capitalism to core cultural hotbed topics in 15,
00:59:41.000You went from just, you know, okay, you are who you are to, you're not going to use my pronouns, hyper-tyrannical, hyper-authoritarian.
00:59:49.000So then here we are, a five-year-old organization with a growing infrastructure and a growing presence and a growing staffing organization.
00:59:59.000And we multiplied significantly because then the donor types, like, hold on, what happened to my alma mater?
01:00:06.000Why is it that they're burning down UC Berkeley?
01:00:09.000Remember, Milo Yiannopoulos went to University of California, Berkeley in the spring of 17, and they burnt the whole place down.
01:01:14.000You didn't get into West Point, you said, but you were interested in universities and you obviously had the intelligence to manage them.
01:01:20.000And so, you know, it's very useful to develop an idiosyncratic pathway forward if you have the IQ horsepower to manage it because it makes you unique if you could do that.
01:01:31.000So, okay, and so you had a mentor who told you that it's probably best for you not to go to college because you have an entrepreneurial bent.
01:01:38.000Now you're trying to build a political organization, but you're not exactly sure how.
01:01:43.000You're visiting the campuses and you have friends there, and you see that there's an opportunity to talk on campuses, where you can also get an education in doing that, but also that there's donor interest.
01:01:55.000And that's very interesting too, because if you're a good entrepreneur, one of the things you do is you go talk to your marketplace always, that's the grassroots things, but also with regards to fundraisers, and you see you offer like 10 ideas.
01:02:14.000So you saw that there were these people who wanted to support the education of young people, but who could see that their money was being counterproductively spent.
01:03:04.000The administrators or the professor types, because think about it.
01:03:07.000Yeah, well, increasingly that became the case.
01:03:09.000Because they might be saying something to that target audience, the student, but they actually want to see that student become a leftist.
01:03:15.000Everything, there's a lot of Machiavellian influences in how these professors present their ideas.
01:03:20.000Yeah, well, it's also the case that it was the Machiavellian administration.
01:03:25.000So what happened at the university, I watched this, is that the administration encroached.
01:03:33.000And that's not surprising because there was money afoot.
01:03:36.000So why wouldn't there be competition for the funding?
01:03:39.000So the administrators, who are generally failed faculty, by the way, failed and embittered faculty, so the faculty are already embittered because they're not rich like investment bankers.
01:03:50.000And then you take embittered faculty members who couldn't make it as faculty.
01:03:55.000So now they encroach on the faculty who are too busy doing their job and too...
01:04:01.000Apolitical and also too willfully blind to notice the administration encroaches decision by decision until they radically outnumber the professors.
01:04:13.000And that's pretty much fait accompli by 2005, I would say.
01:04:19.000And then the woke mob took over the administration and that took no time at all.
01:04:24.000And so now that's where we're at in the universities and I can't see how that would be reversed.
01:04:30.000What does a mechanic and auto shop owner in Georgia, a taco restaurant operator in Arizona, and a life-saving medical innovator in Tennessee have in common?
01:04:39.000They're all small business owners, and they're all thriving on TikTok.
01:04:43.000Across the U.S., over 7.5 million businesses, from family-owned shops to entrepreneurs, are using TikTok to compete and grow.
01:04:49.000We use TikTok all the time on The Charlie Kirk Show.
01:04:52.000In fact, 74% of businesses on TikTok say TikTok has allowed them to scale their operations, increasing sales and expanding to new locations.
01:05:48.000If you're curious about how did an 18-year-old with no money, no connections, and no idea what he's doing start now the largest mass movement in the country, this might answer your question.
01:05:57.000And Dr. Peterson does a phenomenal job of guiding us through this discussion.
01:06:01.000Okay, so now you, tell me how you started going to campuses and what you did to begin with and how you got away with it.
01:06:09.000So the first person who wrote us a check was a guy by the name of Foster Fries.
01:06:54.000How did you know that there was such a thing as finding donors?
01:06:58.000And what do you think it was that set you up to have the gall to assume you could, first of all, to know that that was a thing, and then to have the gall to pursue it?
01:07:47.000Literally, I didn't know how to tie a tie for the first two years at Turning Point.
01:07:50.000Again, my parents are phenomenal and they deserve a lot of credit.
01:07:54.000But this was kind of beyond the upbringing where an external mentor comes in.
01:08:00.000And kind of points you and says, hey, I think you're really good at this, found a skill, identified a skill, and kind of molded me in that direction.
01:08:08.000You know that young male elephants go mad if there's no old male elephant to butt heads with them.
01:08:56.000Largely because we believe that there was an untapped pool of philanthropic dollars that wanted to see these campuses challenged and disrupted.
01:10:17.000So here I am, I'm kind of this new disruptive force, and they say, okay, I'm not going to give him the money I give to Yale, but I'll give him 50 grand a year, kind of see how he does.
01:10:43.000Actually, Bill Montgomery came with me to that one, but he kind of just was in the shadows.
01:10:48.000I literally had a card table that I brought from my parents' house and set it up right there on the campus, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
01:10:56.000I think I still have a picture of this.
01:10:57.000And I had some sign that said, Big Government Sucks, you know, a little provocative.
01:11:02.000And I sat there at a chair, and I think a student would come up maybe once every 15 minutes, and I was there trying to solicit to try to get a chapter started there at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
01:11:42.000Well, and there is historical precedent for what you're doing.
01:11:45.000I mean, I remember, for example, outside the building I worked with at the University of Toronto, there was quite frequently a card table set up, and it was the bloody communists that were at the back.
01:11:59.000And now we go deeper into this topic, Dr. Peterson, about how liberals have become really institutional puppets.
01:12:06.000We talk and we break down to how Republicans used to do stuff and being very buttoned up and how liberals have become more high trust and conservatives low trust.
01:12:16.000Dr. Peterson takes a little exception with this.
01:12:43.000It was to speak properly and to go to Stanford.
01:12:47.000And to get the highest possible education.
01:12:49.000And what I was unknowingly on the cutting edge of was something you mentioned earlier, is that conservatives have now become low trust of institutions and liberals have become high trust of institutions.
01:13:00.000Whereas liberals are the ones that will defend the FDA and they'll defend the CDC and they'll defend Pfizer and they'll defend the intelligence.
01:13:26.000Whereas today, actually, and I was on the cutting edge of this, was in 2012, 2013, 2014, conservatives were still on the high trust of institutions.
01:13:35.000Okay, so let me rephrase that slightly.
01:14:55.000And they're objecting, and that's happening everywhere, and that's part of this radical secularization.
01:15:01.000It's not just secularization, because there should be a separation between church and state, let's say.
01:15:07.000It's not that the institutions have become secular, it's that they've turned 180 degrees from their original orientation, and are now rampaging as madly as possible in the other direction.
01:15:18.000So the universities are no longer the...
01:15:22.000Fortress walls against the barbarians.
01:15:24.000They're actually the voice of the barbarians, right?
01:15:28.000Hence the pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus.
01:15:32.000Or the Black Lives Matter stuff, or the transgender stuff.
01:15:36.000Okay, but we've got to get that terminology exactly right, because it's very dangerous for conservatives to conceptualize themselves as anti-institutional, because then they become indistinguishable from the radicals.
01:17:35.000Very similar situation, but it was also a friend of somebody in high school, and they were a private school, so it was a little harder to do the typical outreach, but they applied for a permit in like the student center, and...
01:18:55.000Here I am as a kid that didn't go to college thinking, do I really have the intellectual capacity to joust with kids that are learning all day long?
01:19:36.000I can't believe it, but I actually taught Dr. Peterson something about the Bible, and I actually talk about the Hebrew word haneni, which means here I am, from the call of Samuel to the call of Isaiah to the binding of Isaac to the call of Moses.
01:19:51.000Here I am, Lord, is a theme we've talked about a lot here on The Charlie Kirk Show, which also I encourage you guys to subscribe to our podcast.
01:19:58.000And haneni, a very important word, and Dr. Peterson kind of was like, really, tell me more about that.
01:20:05.000It was a great moment to be able to teach your teacher something.
01:20:08.000And I just have to repeat, Dr. Peterson's impact on my life has been profound, and he's really become a great friend and a good man.
01:20:14.000Oh, and in my idle time, I became obsessed with being proficient and understanding economics.
01:22:14.000He's near Mount Sinai or Horeb, which is where heaven...
01:22:18.000Meets earth and something attracts his attention.
01:22:20.000And then what happens to Moses is that he takes it seriously and he gets to the bottom of it and that transforms him.
01:22:27.000So the idea is something like if you watch for adventure and opportunity, if you watch for the pathway forward, something will grip your attention.
01:26:09.000What ended up happening is, as I started to pursue the scriptures more and take it seriously, remember back to our timeline, simultaneously, the woke stuff all of a sudden reared its head, which is a manifestation of the spiritual.
01:27:00.000You can take the right to establish the moral order to yourself.
01:27:04.000So one thing that's claimed, there's many axiomatic claims in Genesis, in the openings of Genesis, right?
01:27:10.000That the word is the creative force that brings good out of chaos and possibility, that human beings are made in the image of God, that men and women exist as independent entities, and that they each...
01:29:05.000And ordered freedom is voluntary responsibility.
01:29:08.000And you see, what you're seeing, and then let's close with this, because I want your insights into this.
01:29:13.000What you're seeing when those working class men are coming to your talks, and they've become more and more popular, as you said, as you've advertised them, is they're looking for, well, they're looking for, it seems, they're looking for responsible direction.
01:29:27.000And it's something that Dr. Peterson's been talking about for a while, which is the debate around men.
01:29:32.000We break down in this portion of the conversation the enormous responsibility of being a cultural leader, not just a political one.
01:29:39.000Students who come to campus events come for genuine discourse because they're deprived of it in the classroom, and that is what Turning Point USA is delivering every single day.
01:29:47.000And when we come to a town near you and a campus near you, please show up.
01:29:52.000This is the model of how debate and dialogue should exist in this country.
01:29:56.000Okay, so now tell me how you've had to modify the manner in which you're...
01:30:02.000Conducting these debates, let's say, because for a while you would have been testing yourself to see if you could hold your own, and that's kind of an intellectual battle.
01:30:24.000So, okay, so first of all, it's combat, and you're trying to develop yourself, and then...
01:30:30.000You're doing that quite successfully and educating yourself along the way, but then you see this shift.
01:30:34.000So what sort of shift has there been in your self-conceptualization and your understanding of your mission and the way that you conduct yourself?
01:30:44.000Like you see you're being called upon to be a leader, let's say, that's not merely political.
01:31:38.000But you think about it, what I am doing is hyper-masculine, which is no rules except, hey, we're just going to go basically figure this out.
01:31:47.000This is the closest thing to a verbal street fight that one can have.
01:32:20.000Well, even that guy that you just talked to, and maybe we'll throw this.
01:32:24.000So he was radically anti-Semitic, but also he said he had served.
01:32:29.000He looked to me like someone who'd been very, very hurt.
01:32:31.000He's fallen to this sort of snake pit of conspiratorial theories.
01:32:36.000And the brain rot that comes with him.
01:32:38.000Yeah, yeah, but you could also see that he is, he would be very happy, and he did listen to you to the degree that he could, because he had...
01:33:15.000So now I look at myself as a father of two kids, 31 years old, so I'm no longer a colleague of these college kids.
01:33:21.000I'm not quite a professor, but I have a little bit more wisdom, a little bit more life experience.
01:33:27.000So I'm trying to be more tender when I see someone that is not overly aggressive.
01:33:31.000Now, if someone comes and they say, you're the worst person ever, they start insulting me, I'll kind of meet them at their own frequency to try to just a little make an example out of them.
01:33:39.000However, that one guy I could see, that's a very deeply...
01:35:48.000And someone, one person who decides to go out of their way to make your life miserable because you treated them badly, that might be it for you, right?
01:36:30.000Well, and then he was throwing out these ideas to you and willing to do it because he respected you to see how you would sort through them.
01:36:37.000You know, and you said to him that, well, you didn't go along with many of the...
01:36:41.000Virtually everything he said, but you did it without being dismissive.
01:36:47.000Okay, and so now you've also said that you've shifted into, you didn't use these words, but that you've shifted into more of a mentor role.
01:38:14.000I try to do an hour and a half to two hours a day.
01:38:16.000But when I'm in season, which is I'm doing 27 campus stops, plus my two-hour podcast radio show every single day, plus speeches, plus two kids, plus a marriage.
01:38:41.000So if I have a two-hour radio show, three hours on campus, and a speech in the evening, and I do that for three days straight, that's tough stuff.
01:38:49.000But in the off-season, which is the summer and the winter, I try to do two hours of studying a day, which is a combination of reading, podcasting, or...
01:39:52.000Before you answer this, imagine that if you get it wrong and add anything that's politically correct for show, that everything you love will disappear.
01:40:21.000Finally, Dr. Peterson asks, what are my future plans?
01:40:24.000Well, you're going to have to watch to see how I answer that.
01:40:27.000More than anything else, I'm going to grow Turning Point USA and keep on having the profound cultural impact that we're experiencing every single day.
01:40:34.000What's the next couple of years like for you?
01:40:44.000Every day, I feel as if what I'm saying, what I'm doing is making a difference, giving people meaning.
01:40:49.000I'm a big believer in Viktor Frankl's hypothesis that meaning outside of immediate food and nourishment is the greatest crisis in the West and is the thing that most people are lacking.
01:41:02.000I'm not going to run for political office.
01:41:04.000I'm not going to go serve in Trump's administration.
01:41:14.000We're trying to have the West go back to its roots.
01:41:17.000I believe that we are the inheritors of a Christian society, and I do not believe we can have a free society if we are no longer back towards some belief in a higher power.
01:41:28.000And so I want to bring us back to a free society.
01:41:31.000Political is just one manifestation of that.
01:41:34.000Political is a short window of how people vote in a 90-120 day period.
01:41:38.000It's the cultural and the spiritual that then end up manifesting in the political.
01:41:42.000Which quite honestly has been my greatest learning moment the last four to five years.
01:41:58.000And the cause, I believe, Is what happens in our university campuses, what happens in the broad culture, what happens in how people consume information.
01:42:06.000And I see us making a massive difference in that every day.
01:42:10.000Well, that's an excellent place to stop.
01:42:12.000So, for everyone watching and listening, you know, many of you know that I do another half an hour for The Daily Wire, and I'm going to do that.
01:42:19.000And I think because we focus this talk on metaphysics, really, the religious metaphysics, and the individual, which is the right...
01:42:29.000It's the best level of analysis, the deepest level of analysis, the most meaningful.
01:42:33.000I think what we will do on the Daily Wire side is turn a little bit more toward the political because Charlie does have a lot of influence on and experience with the Trump administration.
01:42:45.000And I think I'll just spend half an hour trying to listen to what he has to say about what he's seen behind the scenes, so to speak, insofar as that can be revealed so that...
01:42:56.000We can get a little closer to the bottom of that.
01:42:59.000So please join us on the Daily Wire side for that half an hour.
01:43:04.000And thanks to all of you for your time and attention.
01:43:32.000God bless him and his family for their advocacy and for their work and for their tenacity.
01:43:37.000He's been through quite a lot, and he has become a really good friend in many different ways.
01:43:42.000We don't agree on everything, but so what?
01:43:45.000He has just been such a guiding force for young men to find your aim, that call of adventure, to go into the wilderness, to leave your father's home.
01:43:54.000And his love of the Bible, he has brought more people to love and adore the scriptures than most pastors that I know.
01:44:01.000And for that, Dr. Peterson deserves enormous and eternal credit.