00:01:01.000His 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.
00:02:22.000And it's in the, it's in the, what is called the young person's demographics.
00:02:26.000You know, it's because they always like to talk about how Fox, the Fox audience is like your parents and your grandparents and their parents.
00:02:35.000Which is true because the audience is so large.
00:02:39.000So if you have a large audience, you will have a lot of older people, but we also have more younger people than MSNBC or CNN combined and Comedy Central.
00:04:34.000So you mentioned something interesting, Greg, which is at the core of the success of your program is teasing, which therefore, in order to be able to tease or receive teasing, you must not take yourself too seriously.
00:05:10.000You know, but it's like, you can't make fun of them.
00:05:13.000And so that's why, so now you're seeing the whole comedy sphere being taken over by really ballsy comedians.
00:05:21.000You start seeing it in England, you see Ricky Gervais or Russell Brand.
00:05:25.000Russell Brand was a big-time leftist, not anymore.
00:05:28.000And it's because he understood that leftism was suffocating comedy.
00:05:33.000And in the teasing thing, that's a great correlation you made.
00:05:37.000The teasing thing is that kind of like that hotel room flashlight, you know, where you try to look for the, that's how you can tell whether somebody has a sense of humor or not.
00:05:48.000And like, if you start making fun of a leftist and they get pissed off, you know, it's you're seeing this now with Twitter.
00:05:54.000It's like they were laughing their butts off when somebody would be permanently banned, but you give them a one-day suspension or a seven-day suspension.
00:06:35.000Whenever I talk, most people don't understand the references when we talk about her on the show, but I always amp her age up to like the Taylor Lorenz in her mid-50s.
00:09:14.000Gee, I actually, imagine a game show where baggage is just going around and the contestants have to grab it and you never know what's in it.
00:09:24.000Yeah, so, but I think what's so interesting about the story, though, is anyone who dare notice, and that's a theme I want to explore with you, Greg, is the crime of noticing.
00:09:45.000He is in charge of something rather significant, right?
00:09:49.000It's not as if he was in charge of, you know, like he was like a dog catcher for the Sacramento, you know, local, you know, mosquito abatement district.
00:09:57.000Okay, this guy's in charge of getting rid of the nuclear waste.
00:10:01.000I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, there's something of that, right?
00:11:12.000And what happened in this trans movement is they are smart enough to know that if they can silence you and keep you from talking about it, then it's over.
00:11:25.000People might be too young to remember this.
00:11:27.000There was something called conversion therapy.
00:11:29.000They thought that your child would be gay.
00:11:31.000They would like try to make him ungay.
00:11:34.000But it was all psychological therapy, maybe some aversion therapy, and it was wrong.
00:11:39.000Now the people that claim that it's wrong are willing to mutilate children.
00:11:43.000So it's like, okay, if your son is expressing effeminate features or your daughter is expressing masculine features, surgery is the answer.
00:12:22.000I keep going, like, where are the adults?
00:12:24.000Like, we used to, there used to be people.
00:12:27.000It's like, where are the people in your community, whether it was the doctors or law enforcement or political leaders who go like, this is, this whole thing is full of crap.
00:13:55.000There's honestly, there's no battle other than the battle over private property and how in the last four years, I'd say three years since the riots, we've decided that private property is no longer private.
00:14:07.000So you can have looting, you can have arson.
00:14:10.000That is potentially as big a problem here.
00:14:12.000It's like there's certain under there's certain like fabrics to society that hold us together.
00:14:18.000One of them is respecting property and the other one is like biology.
00:14:24.000So property and biology is under attack.
00:15:21.000Well, but this is how this all connects, right?
00:15:24.000So the lack of response or without challenging the lie of the DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, it becomes policy very quickly.
00:15:36.000So what begins on a college campus, what begins on your cable television program, what begins on Twitter will then soon become policy.
00:15:46.000For example, I remember seven or eight years ago, we hosted one of our first turning point events, and I said something, and I said, I really don't think it's a good idea to be normalizing the fact that you could just choose any gender that you want.
00:16:01.000And I remember somebody said, Charlie, that's very inconsiderate, as an older person, considerate of people that have gender dysphoria.
00:16:09.000And I didn't think much of it, but not even entertaining that this could get, I don't know, wildly out of control and eventually turn into the chemical castration of 11-year-olds or the medical mutilation of 14-year-olds.
00:16:20.000So, Greg, in some ways, we are to blame for not fighting this stuff earlier.
00:16:26.000I will take, I kind of, I have to say, when I was doing like Red Eye or the Five and talking about what was happening on campuses, it was under this mocking assumption that it stayed on campus.
00:16:39.000It's like, oh, wait till these people, wait till these people get out in the real world, right?
00:16:43.000They're not going to get a job, these gender studies majors, these woke, they didn't have a word, it wasn't woke, but let's say PC progress.
00:16:52.000Once they need to, the first time they have to pay a bill, they become an adult.
00:16:57.000The first time they pay taxes, they'll become a conservative.
00:16:59.000Boy, was I wrong because they got, they, they got jobs because of DIE, because what's that other thing that's dealing with corporations, ESG, ESG, which sounds better than it is.
00:17:13.000What happened was you had middle management hiring these people that have nothing to do with profit or competence, but are you ticking the right box?
00:18:01.000Whenever you see a children's book that has the word body in it, bad news.
00:18:08.000It's like your body, yourselves, my body.
00:18:12.000And so I'm looking at the pages and talking about like, you know, if you don't like your gender, there are places that you can go to without telling your parents.
00:19:31.000So there's two really smart points here, which is wokeism becomes a shield, a almost iron dome missile defense system of the most unethical behaviors of corporate America.
00:19:45.000You cannot criticize Goldman Sachs anymore or American Express or Coca-Cola because they say, Hey, we got a bunch of trans people in our HR department.
00:19:55.000And don't you know, today is December 18th, which is, you know, the lesbian Navajo Nation Day or whatever.
00:20:04.000No offense, love the Navajo Nation, by the way.
00:20:35.000It's like, so they're looking at the sports, like, this is a great point because Disney appealed to people who don't go to Disney, activists.
00:20:47.000NFL appeals to people who don't watch football.
00:20:50.000So they were appealing to, say, the, I would say, mostly publicists, public relations people that are on the kind of like the exterior of the industries, of all industries.
00:21:01.000So they're the ones that go like, they're the white, guilty liberal that'll go like, oh my God, you know, this is so great.
00:21:07.000We should be doing this, blah, blah, blah.
00:21:08.000And it's like, no, the people sitting at home want to watch a football game.
00:22:21.000If you want one person, Harvey Weinstein, biggest left-wing, biggest left-wing supporter of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Obama, everybody gave millions and millions and millions.
00:23:50.000Where he said, he said, and it was like, it was a biblical term, sibleths or something in the sense of sibleths, the spirit of the time, basically.
00:23:56.000I just have to say the stuff and you'll stop.
00:24:00.000I mean, and the funny thing is, if you look at him, I mean, he looks like, I don't know, he looks like an inflated, well, he looks like he could be on the view.
00:24:13.000But I mean, like we said before, that is the fattest vegan I've ever seen.
00:25:58.000You mentioned something that I want to make sure we go back and re-emphasize, which is you thought that the nonsense that happened on college campuses would stay there.
00:26:07.000The equivalent metaphor I would use is we thought the gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Neurology would stay there.
00:27:42.000And by the way, gaslighting comes from a 1930s play that where literally a guy was psychologically manipulating his wife by slightly turning down the lights.
00:27:51.000And she said, Why is it getting darker in here?
00:27:54.000And so then it became in psychological literature, 40s and 50s, actually a clinical term of manipulating somebody to say, What you're what don't believe your lying eyes, essentially.
00:28:04.000You know, I'm going to repeat that entire story on the five tomorrow and pretend that I came up with that.
00:28:37.000And so, Greg, you mentioned another thing I'm going to harness on, which I do want to make sure at this event we celebrate the good things because we've been talking about some heavy stuff.
00:28:45.000But what is your take on the significance, the improbability of what is happening at Twitter?
00:28:51.000I mean, more than anything else, it's fun, it's exciting, but it's also, I believe, a moral good for Western civilization that we are able to now speak freely online.
00:28:59.000Okay, there's so many, I will be scattershot on this because there's so many good things.
00:29:04.000Number one, I did a monologue called, I think it was called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and I said something like, They got media, they got the arts, and they got academia, they're going to go for social media.
00:29:17.000And that's the way it, that's what happened until now.
00:29:21.000So finally, we actually are taking something back to a guy who is willing to spend $44 billion on a principal.
00:29:29.000And you can tell he's, I mean, when you listen, when you look at, I mean, the greatest thing about this is that he's not just running Twitter, he's using it.
00:29:51.000The way Elon is running Twitter is how I wish Trump would have run the FBI and the CIA and protests.
00:29:59.000No, I'm not, it's not a criticism of Trump because the government is harder, but I think we wanted to see mass firings like, oh, Christopher Ray, Russia Gates suspended.
00:31:02.000And especially after all of the people who are complaining right now had the thumb on the scale.
00:31:07.000And the only reason why they're complaining is Musk is showing you where the thumb was and pulled the thumb off.
00:31:13.000And they're mad that they're and also, this isn't a speech thing when he did it because, you know, if they're doxing his family, he just turned into a dad.
00:31:22.000It's like, you're telling people where my kids are, you're out of here.
00:32:58.000But it's also, I mean, I just got, you know, there's a lot of media here, and the media smears all of you as conspiracy theorists far too often.
00:33:06.000And the thing that you have to respond with, if you ever called that, say, hold on a second.
00:33:09.00010 years ago, if I were to mention that a former president was flying on a private jet to an island with underage girls, you would have smeared me as a conspiracy theorist.
00:33:19.000So maybe you should expand the horizons of what is possible and what is happening and stop calling people names and entertain that there might be more to the story actually unfolding.
00:33:29.000It's kind of interesting to see how the family as an issue is bifurcated into you know a parents' party and an anti-children party.
00:33:59.000It's like, you know, you don't mind that kids are being taken from their parents or having these anonymous whatever dealings with surgeons.
00:34:24.000Saying, if you want, hey, look, if you want to do your drag queen story hour, you go ahead, do it to your, to the, do it with your children, your, you know, family.
00:37:35.000So some leftist goes, I'm done with Twitter.
00:37:37.000And that person goes to Mastodon, and that person linked a New York Times piece got banned for Mastodon for linking a New York Times piece.
00:37:44.000So it's like, there's nothing more pleasurable than watching the left, you know, eat their own.
00:37:53.000You said something super smart the other day where you said Twitter is the assembly line of elite opinion.
00:37:57.000Yeah, which is exactly right, where it kind of gets put together.
00:38:00.000All right, so we only got a couple minutes remaining here, Greg.
00:38:02.000We have a massive student audience, a really big student activist army at Turning Point USA.
00:38:07.000You know, I always like to have you talk about, you know, what it's like to be in a community where you're not in the ideological minority.
00:38:20.000I always say, I said this, I think I said it the last time I was here.
00:38:23.000And I'm going to say it again because I think it's the most important thing because I wish somebody had said it to me.
00:38:29.000When you're outnumbered by somebody about an idea, let's say it's abortion, something that's like divided, you know, and you're in a situation on a campus, there's seven people just laughing at you.
00:38:42.000You really don't believe the whole thing they always say to you is, you really don't believe that, do you?
00:40:00.000And you might actually, out of those seven or eight people, one of them might actually go, wow, that person just told me I'm a sheep and they're right.
00:40:36.000That's like they will go like, wow, it's like they have to go home and then they have to do the strategic empathy where they have to think about, well, what is, why does Charlie think that way?
00:40:45.000What does Charlie know that maybe I should listen to?