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00:01:24.000His 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.
00:01:32.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:46.000Let that be your welcome for the next hour.
00:01:48.000We have with us a special guest, head of Turning Point USA, author of the new book, The College Scam, Charlie Kirk, king of the boomer cons.
00:01:57.000Welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.
00:02:07.000Before we get started talking about the book, because things have changed a lot since I was in college and nowadays and for the better in many ways and for the worse in many other ways, you were trending last week on Twitter.
00:03:56.000And I have plenty of reason to believe that.
00:03:58.000Happy to dive into it if that's interesting.
00:04:01.000But it's just the evidence is pointing in that direction.
00:04:04.000In fact, we're dedicating a lot of resources to actually prove it in a variety of different technological ways.
00:04:09.000But anyway, so we denounce it, we condemn it.
00:04:11.000You know, there's a couple of media stories about it, and then it dies down.
00:04:14.000And then the View decides to go do a whole segment on our event where Joy Behar started to say, well, you know, well, outside of the event, they had all this Nazi propaganda and all this.
00:04:22.000And then Whoopee Goldberg says, Yeah, and they let them into the event.
00:04:26.000Oh, and so that's that's slanderous, right?
00:04:30.000And it's so transparently slanderous because, I mean, we, it's well known how we reacted to it.
00:05:11.000So then the next day, the third chapter in this multi-chapter thing, they had a woman by the name of Sarah Haynes.
00:05:18.000So I'm sorry, we sent a cease and desist then over the evening, and then they decide to actually respond to our cease and desist because I think they realize that they might have been over some very trouble, you know, troubling legal footing, especially after Nicholas Sandman and Kyle Rittenhouse and some of these other major decisions.
00:05:34.000And so then Sarah Haynes, I think that's her name.
00:06:11.000And so it's this kind of, we went from the view try to compare us to Nazis to kind of multiple apologies.
00:06:17.000But I'll tell you this: it would not have happened if we did not respond with force.
00:06:20.000If we did not respond with a cease and desist letter and threaten legal action, which we're still entertaining, by the way, none of this would have happened.
00:06:27.000Yeah, I think what there's two things that happened in the last in the post-Trump years, which I'm curious to hear your thoughts about, which is before Trump, and still to some extent to this day, declaring someone to be a racist was enough to read them out of polite society.
00:06:45.000If someone is advocating for things like slavery or segregation or like that, I think that's a non-starter for, I think, the vast majority of Americans of both political parties.
00:06:55.000When Trump came in and they were calling him every name under the book, including literally Hitler, figuratively Hitler, and the Antichrist, that mechanism ceased to be effective, but they stopped using that tool.
00:07:07.000And now it's become a point where it's like, wait, wait, wait, wait.
00:07:10.000How for conservatives, I think, how have we let you for years just accuse us of advocating for genocide and just like, all right, you know, you're in the biggest talk show host.
00:07:21.000You're on the Karen mothership to view.
00:07:23.000We're just going to sit here and just be like, we disagree.
00:07:27.000Disagreeing is like, you know, you could disagree about tax policy and so forth.
00:07:30.000To accuse someone of advocating for an extermination of a race, I think is a whole other thing.
00:08:02.000I mean, you think that that would even be remotely tolerated?
00:08:04.000But yes, I mean, they're, I call this the weaponized name calling.
00:08:08.000They used to be able to get conservatives to go into a place of paralysis by just calling us racist, bigot, homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic.
00:08:16.000And that just doesn't really work anymore at all.
00:08:19.000And now all of a sudden conservatives, thanks to Trump, in my personal opinion, have more of a backbone and are willing to fight and are willing to punch back twice as hard.
00:08:28.000Were you surprised to see how quickly the view folded as opposed to doubling down?
00:08:35.000And I think the one reason is Nicholas Sandman and Kyle Rittenhouse, I think these legal departments are incredibly skittish.
00:08:40.000And I think we don't know the numbers, but I think we're getting a little bit of indication that the payouts to Sandman were probably pretty sizable.
00:09:06.000Non-negotiable because we don't want to be in court, you know, having to contest the $200 million judgment.
00:09:11.000Yeah, my understanding is there's different kinds of defamation.
00:09:14.000There's defamation, which is based on actual malice, like they are intentionally lying, but there's also defamation of prima fascia, something fasci, but basically on its face, meaning I'm just accusing you of, you know, musting a child or so on and so forth.
00:09:29.000It is incumbent upon me to be really sure that I've done my homework before I'm making such an accusation publicly, because it's something that is so defamatory that any reasonable person would look at your reputation in a worse regard.
00:09:43.000So all it would take would be like one even quasi-reasonable jury to be like, okay, was this person, Whoopi Goldberg, negligent in terms of what she was saying?
00:09:53.000And is what she was saying the kind of thing that would harm the reputation of Turning Point as an organization.
00:09:59.000And I think it would not be very hard to make the case for both of those things.
00:10:06.000We're in the shopping phase of kind of, I should say, it's discovery and searching phase.
00:10:10.000Other lawyers say there's all these other thresholds you have to hit because a public figure and all this stuff.
00:10:14.000But we're not, we are going into it with the intent to hold them accountable legally.
00:10:20.000A lawyer is going to have to talk me out of it.
00:10:22.000Again, this stuff gets immensely complicated because of New York Times v. Sullivan, the laws and the threshold to do that.
00:10:28.000Again, I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV, but I, you know, I do have a desire to defend our students who are the real victims here, right?
00:10:37.000I mean, you have a 16-year-old kid at our student action summit who then has to go home and be called a Nazi sympathizer by Whoopi Goldberg.
00:12:53.000Taylor Lorenz is going after Libs of TikTok to find out that person's identity.
00:12:57.000Or moms and dads are targeted to go for school board meetings, but you got a guy with a swastika and you don't even care about his identity.
00:13:26.000The way they're talking is if they're left-wing agitators.
00:13:29.000They're not talking like true believers.
00:13:30.000They're like, oh, you guys are so weak.
00:13:32.000Like, oh, you conservatives are all the same.
00:13:34.000As if they went back to kind of like muscle memory of left-wing activists.
00:13:38.000And so we're using Greg Phillips, who helped produce 2000 Mules through cell phone ping technology.
00:13:44.000We're going to be able to geolocate these cell phones, create a pattern of life, find out where they were the last 18 months.
00:13:49.000We're putting a lot of money behind this.
00:13:50.000And because we know where they were and how long they were there, and find out, you know, where their home would be, because you could see where they would spend their nights and their weekends and their idle time.
00:13:59.000Find out if they ever went to Democrat organizing areas.
00:14:02.000And if they had their cell phones with them, which they did, and they had them before, which is probable, then we should be able to create a pattern of life behind these people.
00:14:10.000And so the media doesn't care about who the Nazis are, but I certainly do.
00:14:14.000And let me just say one final thing, which is I've never, ever seen any, I think I reinforced this though.
00:14:20.000It's so uncharacteristic for anything.
00:14:21.000It's just such obviously an op, right?
00:14:27.000It's like, okay, so you have a Nazi flag next to the DeSantis country flag.
00:14:31.000The guy that helped move the embassy to Jerusalem enforces BDS in Florida and has been accused of being too close to Israel by Democrat opponents.
00:14:52.000It just felt like a complete and total, it felt like an op.
00:14:55.000It seems like they don't have their history right because if they're prejudiced against black Americans, they should be in the Klan, not the Nazis.
00:15:00.000So they can't even get their kind of hate groups correct.
00:15:06.000One of the big arguments conservatives often have is that free speech is being censored on places like Twitter and other forms of social media.
00:15:14.000Aren't you just engaging in what you decry by bringing in attorneys to censor Whoopi Goldberg's free speech?
00:15:51.000But you go attack a 15-year-old that went into his or her savings to go to Tampa, Florida from Missouri or Kentucky, and they show up to every single speaker and they're super polite.
00:15:59.000And now maybe for the rest of their life, they have to go to a job interview.
00:16:02.000Maybe they want to become a lawyer, pass the bar exam, go in front of an ethics board.
00:16:05.000And they say, well, I see here that you attended an event early on in your life and there were neo-Nazis out there that according to some reports, that's how they would do it.
00:16:47.000So that's kind of, it's, I'm just, I'm a little surprised.
00:16:52.000I think a lot of people in this country, and I want to hear your thoughts about are whether they're black pilled or white-pilled, they are black-pilled.
00:16:58.000And I'm like, my argument is I don't think the enemy class is made up of impressive people.
00:17:03.000And I think it's not really that hard to just get in their face, tell them no.
00:17:09.000And they, you know, it's not just Whoopi Goldberg who has to be accountable.
00:17:12.000You have the entire ABC network or whether the syndicate or whatever, you know, you have a whole infrastructure there.
00:17:19.000And they do have to cover their ass because it looks really bad if this blows up that you have Whoopi Goldberg cavalierly referring to high school students or college students as Nazi sympathizers.
00:17:47.000That's where I think the institutions have legitimate staying power.
00:17:50.000The machinery, the funding, the customer base, the brands, those things are legitimately powerful.
00:17:56.000The rest are just interchangeable parts.
00:17:58.000The real power, I mean, the actual, the smart people are all becoming center-right conservatives or free thinkers like you or whatever, just not, you know, a miserable, unhappy leftist, right?
00:18:08.000That you see this with Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, and you see this with Dave Rubin, that if you have anything interesting to say, or Russell Brand, or even to a lesser extent, Bill Maher or Joe Rogan, you know, all those guys, they're smart enough and good enough to survive on their own.
00:18:23.000They don't need the interchangeable parts of the machinery.
00:18:25.000I mean, do you think if Whoopi Goldberg right now started a podcast and did a radio show like I did for three hours a day, do you think it would be a hit?
00:19:15.000And so by definition, we as freedom lovers have to be more dissident in our thinking, which then we actually end up being better than the other side.
00:19:23.000Well, I can counter you by saying that as someone whose podcast does suck, it is possible to have crappy content and still be.
00:19:34.000I did have him last week because when you were just talking about it being an op, which I think you've clearly made out the case why it's at least plausible or if not like that it's an op.
00:19:44.000This is the kind of thing where I feel five years ago, if Charlie Kirk was saying, you know, these were kind of a planned op outside my event, you would be called a conspiracy theorist and read out of polite society, even in conservative circles.
00:19:58.000Why do you think that that tide has changed so much that you could say this and pretty much no conservative is even going to question your accusation?
00:20:07.000Yeah, look, I think the facts have shown us the last couple of years.
00:20:10.000I mean, I think Alex is wildly entertaining, by the way.
00:20:12.000I disagree with him on a lot of stuff.
00:20:13.000His style, I think the Sandy Hook thing was super questionable.
00:20:16.000If I ever talked to him, I'd love to ask him about it.
00:20:19.000And we're not allowed to say that out loud, by the way, that Alex Jones was right about a lot.
00:20:23.000And whether it be a lot of this globalism stuff, the open border stuff, and he obviously has a very, you know, unique style, I guess you could say.
00:20:30.000But there is something to be said, though, that what once was deemed to be a conspiracy theory is now deemed to be a mainstream accepted fact.
00:20:39.000And whether it be Russian collusion, I mean, the one I used the most, right?
00:20:43.000And Alex, to his credit, was on this as, let's just say, comically and as entertaining as possible, was the Epstein Island thing.
00:20:52.000And I remember very clearly bringing up Epstein Island in a conversation in Palm Beach in 2014 and being told by people that's a conspiracy theory when literally three streets away, three streets away was Jeffrey Epstein's home doing the exact thing that I heard a rumor about.
00:21:09.000And they're like, oh, that's a conspiracy theory.
00:21:12.000We just don't know to what extent it's true.
00:21:14.000We probably do, but there's some gaps to be filled in that there was an island that was probably intelligence operation where underage girls were flown on private jets with world leaders from many different continents and governments to probably accumulate blackmail.
00:21:29.000And so when people say, well, Charlotte's a conspiracy theory, I'm like, you mean the same one where you told me that I was a racist because the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China?
00:21:37.000You mean the same conspiracy theory when you said that Hunter Biden's laptop was not actually his laptop in Rudy Giuliani's hands?
00:21:44.000And so these things that they smear as conspiracy theories largely end up being true.
00:21:51.000And so the reason I can't quite pinpoint, but I just don't care anymore.
00:21:56.000I'm going to say what I think is true.
00:21:58.000And if you call it that, no matter what, but you know what's been amazing is that this, I've been really forceful about it.
00:22:03.000Greg Gutfeld has, Jesse Waters about this Nazi thing.
00:22:06.000And the media hasn't really been like conspiracy theory outside a turning point event.
00:22:10.000They're kind of, I think deep down they know it too.
00:22:13.000Well, because again, the Lincoln Project people admitted it to a year ago.
00:22:19.000It went from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact.
00:22:22.000It's not disputable that powerful people were secretly working with Jeffrey Epstein in the service of things that in any country, civilized country on earth are not only grossly illegal, but considered morally depraved.
00:22:41.000And this is tongue-in-cheek, but he had said, Pizza ate, Pizzagate aged better than Russia Gate.
00:22:46.000Now, there was nothing to the Pizzagate story, literally, but in terms of the premise that extremely powerful people are engaged in predation on young men and women.
00:22:56.000I mean, Dennis Hastert was Speaker of the House and the man was a horrible sexual predator.
00:23:02.000And the fact to me that the Democrats don't talk about Dennis Haster and what he did is very because that should be a huge weapon over the Republicans.
00:23:12.000Oh, you guys are always talking about rumors.
00:23:24.000He was Speaker of the House when Bush was from 2000 to 2006.
00:23:28.000He whipped the votes for the Iraq war for Medicare Part D. I'm not accusing Cheney of being in the same activity, but Denny Hassert, again, I'm from Illinois.
00:23:40.000Met him, but I know his politics is that he was one of the most effective uniparty speaker of the houses ever as far as international war, big spending, you know, open borders, massive government programs.
00:23:56.000So they find Donald Trump more reprehensible than Denny Hassert.
00:24:02.000I always say that it's a fair assumption that when you're looking at a politician in Washington, that they either want to screw kids or kill them.
00:24:09.000So it is fair that Dick Cheney did not want to have things like Dennis Hassert, but he certainly has the blood of many children in his hands.
00:24:16.000And we also saw it with this administration as well, when a bunch of children were murdered in Afghanistan accidentally, and no one even got it accidentally, but no one even got a demotion or any kind of reprimand.
00:24:27.000It's just really kind of insane to what a level the media lets people off the hook when it comes to the literal murder of children.
00:24:37.000Yeah, I mean, I could, I could go many different directions in that way.
00:24:40.000But yeah, look, to kind of your broader point, and I just want our audience to feel, you know, encouraged in this and also to draw, I think, a necessary framework is that a lot of the things the media says are conspiracy theories is true.
00:24:51.000With that being said, I get plenty of garbage emails, and there's plenty of things that people believe that are not true.
00:25:19.000Conspiracy theories can be true that are found on the internet, but that doesn't mean they are all true, right?
00:25:25.000So use prudence, use practical judgment, and some wisdom.
00:25:27.000But when the media goes really hard against one, that's when you know you're over the target.
00:25:32.000Let's talk about your new book because I have made the case.
00:25:34.000Like I, when I was in, I went to Bucknell and I was a business major because I understood and I was right that the most important thing you're going to get out of university is a credential.
00:25:46.000If I had that business degree, that that would be opening much more doors for me than if I was, let's suppose, interested in psychology.
00:25:51.000I could go to the school library, learn about psychology, read textbooks, so on and so forth on my own.
00:25:56.000But that credential is what's going to open the door for me.
00:25:59.000Your book, and again, I'm a lot older than you.
00:26:02.000Your book is saying that this is something that is falling away and that college is increasingly a scam.
00:26:13.000And so, yeah, the book's called The College Scam, and people can find it at college scam.com.
00:26:17.000So it's been about a decade of living this theme out, not going to college, as you mentioned.
00:26:21.000It's three years of work went into this book.
00:26:23.000A lot of research has 35 pages of footnotes at the end of the book because I knew we were going to come under criticism because this is an industry that you cannot touch.
00:26:31.000If you want to talk about the untouchable industries, it's the war machine, the pharmaceutical industrial complex, the media regime, colleges.
00:26:38.000That's kind of like top four as far as the institutions that we must just obey no matter what.
00:26:44.000So I thought to myself, most Americans actually don't agree with my premise, which is that college is a scam, at least most upper middle class Americans.
00:26:52.000So the best way to write the book is to write it as if I'm trying to persuade people.
00:26:57.000And so what is the most proven high-stakes game of persuasion?
00:27:04.000A prosecutor try to convince 12 normal people that this guy needs to go spend time behind bars or this woman needs to spend time behind bars.
00:27:10.000So I write the book as if I'm a prosecutor.
00:27:12.000I believe I've developed these facts over a long period of time and you are the jury.
00:27:15.000So I have a 10-count indictment in the book.
00:27:20.000And to go one after the other after the other, 10 counts.
00:27:22.000I believe college is guilty on all, if you will, college, the industry.
00:27:26.000And it's everything from how expensive they are to how radically intolerant they are to the ridiculous finances of these universities, how they literally lie to the federal government to get more money.
00:27:37.000And while you go further into debt, so I can go any way you want with that, but the book is not written like a traditional political book that people are peddling.
00:27:44.000And I'm not saying that I wrote the typical political book, right, a couple of years ago, MAGA Doctrine.
00:27:49.000That was written a little bit for persuasion, but mostly for clarity for Trump supporters that didn't quite understand all the ideas.
00:28:04.000That's the hardest type of book to write, in my opinion.
00:28:07.000One of the things that I disagree with conservatives the most, and I don't know your position on this, and I'm curious to hear it, is this idea that is very common in conservative circles that the universities have gotten bad, but back in the day, they were more open-minded places for exchange of ideas.
00:28:22.000And I sit there and wonder, I'm like, they've been taken over by, at the very least, like social democrats since like the 1910s.
00:28:38.000She was fair, but she made the claim in her textbook that because the laws of economics were discovered by men or maybe males, they are inherently sexist and have to be rediscovered by women.
00:28:50.000I don't know what supply and demand has to do with chromosomes or genitals, but I'm sure she has a Marxist argument.
00:29:28.000But the reference point is really important where I think some conservatives think back to the 60s and 70s, where they're like, yeah, going to campus was so much fun back then.
00:29:39.000They weren't the students themselves were really liberal, meaning they were doing a lot of drugs and they were anti-Vietnam War and it's free love.
00:29:45.000And they became more conservative, but they still kind of think of their university as that's the place where I discovered myself when I did psychedelics on Saturday night listening to John Lennon.
00:30:03.000The point is that they've always been, since the Frankfurt School mostly took over, right, in the 1940s and 50s, Herbert Marcuse, they've been infiltrated, right?
00:30:12.000They've been infiltrated from the top down, from Foucault to Derrida to Derek Bell to Angela Davis.
00:30:19.000But there is a difference, though, and it is the illiberalism.
00:30:22.000This is something that I think conservatives get partially right, is they say, well, the university used to be this wonderful place for free speech and free ideas.
00:30:32.000They were always Marxist in nature, but they did have some commitment to liberalism, but they didn't believe in liberalism, small L liberalism, because they actually believed in it.
00:31:30.000That's exactly what you were referring to: that free speech is a utility in order to get them to have this kind of sense of hegemony.
00:31:37.000And once they have it, they're going to shut the door behind them and make sure there's no amount of speech left.
00:31:43.000Let's also talk about the financial burden.
00:31:46.000There's no more privileged group of people in America than a college graduate.
00:31:51.000It's the best guarantee that you're going to have economic security, that you're going to have capability for a job, that you're going to have advancement in society.
00:31:59.000And yet, there's talk by Joe Biden and the Republican and the Democrats, excuse me, and some Republicans to have debt relief and have, and which is effectively be the poorest of Americans, the least privileged, are subsidizing the upward mobility of the most privileged.
00:32:13.000I'm guessing this is something you're not in favor of.
00:33:04.000Don't go ask the welders in Florida to have to go chip in for that.
00:33:08.000So I'm totally against debt forgiveness from a moral standpoint, from a pragmatic standpoint, but also it, I think it deteriorates and is an insult to the kids that paid their way through college, that took AP classes, that were financially prudent, that went to community college first.
00:33:25.000It's such an injustice, regardless of what they do towards that topic.
00:33:29.000One of the things that I am heartened by, and you're going to have your finger on the pulse of the kids much more than I will.
00:33:35.000I'm here in Austin and I was driving around recently with a friend of mine and on the GPS or the MapQuest, excuse me, it said Temple of Dr. Ron Paul.
00:33:43.000And I'm like, I don't know what this is.
00:33:44.000And I stopped by and it was Young Americans for Liberty, which is a kind of a, I guess, I don't know if you guys are rivals or however system.
00:33:55.000And it turned out to be, and the kids just blew me away.
00:33:58.000They had their heads screwed on so straight.
00:34:00.000They understood the nature of what they're up against.
00:34:03.000They had tactics that were very effective at holding people accountable.
00:34:07.000Back in the day, you would have things like Reagan saying, oh, the problem with our liberal friends is that they believe things that are just not true.
00:34:13.000But that seems to give this idea that the universities should be given the benefit of doubt, that they don't know what they're doing, that they're just, you know, it's just a difference of opinion.
00:34:22.000Whereas as opposed to having this kind of malevolent intent, have cultural control.
00:34:28.000Are the conservative students now becoming more aware of what they're up against as opposed to this kind of sense of we could be like Reagan and Tip O'Neill and just get together and disagree and then have a drink after?
00:34:41.000And they're becoming hardened because everything's become political.
00:34:43.000They become radicalized in a good way where they realize the intentions of the opposition, like you said, are malevolent.
00:34:49.000They're dealing with an insidious force, a cancerous force.
00:34:53.000And look, regardless if you're a libertarian or conservative or a moderate or whatever, that matters less to me.
00:34:59.000What matters more, and obviously I'm very conservative in nature and become less libertarian over the years, but what matters more to me is, do you know who you're fighting?
00:35:06.000That's what really matters to me, right?
00:35:08.000So for example, if I had a libertarian, and I know you're an anarchist, which I find to be really kind of fun, I love listening to you on that stuff, which is, you know, a libertarian says, okay, I want, you know, drugs and all this stuff, or I want less gun laws.
00:35:22.000I'm like, great, that's something I can work with you on, okay?
00:36:08.000Some of my political views when I was 20.
00:36:11.000How is it that the kids are so have their are so red-pilled and are so aware now as opposed to being much more naive maybe a few decades ago in Europe?
00:36:21.000Yeah, I mean, Aristotle had a great quote.
00:36:23.000I'm paraphrasing that pressure makes the man, which is they're in these highly combustible environments early on where at 18 years old, they're asked by a professor, who here's a Republican?
00:36:37.000That either makes you weaker or makes you stronger.
00:36:39.000And for our kids, at turning point, you'll say, it makes our kids very strong.
00:36:43.000They lose friends, they get bullied, they get socially isolated.
00:36:46.000So if you were to kind of, this is, I totally agree with your enemy class kind of diagnosis, which is if you were going to try to create a group of people that was going to win in the future, would you want the people that have had their teeth kicked in from when they're 18 and they have bruises and broken bones to show for it and they have the muscle to be able to get through it?
00:37:06.000Or do you want the people that retreat to the hills every time they hear something they don't like?
00:37:31.000Just keep reading and keep listening and keep pursuing truth.
00:37:33.000Is your attitude one where you know who you're up against?
00:37:37.000Back in the day, especially in the post-World War II era, the GI Bill, going to college, you know, the first person in my family to go to college.
00:37:44.000This is a huge like upper middle class, middle class bourgeois aspiration.
00:37:48.000Like my daughter, my son's the first one to go to college.
00:38:01.000It seems to be an understanding that, wait a minute, this kind of, I'm going to use the word broadly, American dream of like, my kid's going to be the first one to go to college.
00:38:10.000All of a sudden, it seems that parents are increasingly aware that this isn't the bill of goods that maybe that had happened back in the day.
00:38:17.000Do you, given your contacts with kids and parents, is my perception accurate that this is decreasingly the case to be an inspirational thing?
00:38:27.000College enrollment went down by 660,000 people last year.
00:38:30.000I'm probably the only person on the planet that goes to the Department of Education website almost every day, waiting for them to refresh the statistics because I care so every day.
00:39:15.000Unless you want to go live in a very dystopian country, which I completely wholeheartedly reject.
00:39:21.000Cannot keep on sending your most prized possession to get filled with bad ideas, saddled with debt, with very little career prospects, and act as if everything's going to be fine.
00:39:29.000One of the things that's happened in recent years, like the biggest argument in terms of having a college degree is, you know, how are you going to get hired?
00:39:37.000It's become easier and easier, exponentially so, for young people to set up something in Shopify, something in Etsy, to set up a website.
00:39:44.000When you set up a website, no one knows that you're a high school kid or college or college age kid behind the computer and you could be a young entrepreneur.
00:39:51.000After four years, you know, one person could have a degree, another person could be like, I've built this startup or this website and I'm generating five figures a month.
00:40:00.000If I were hiring someone, I would much rather hire that young go-getter who started his own site than someone who's just been in the classroom.
00:40:07.000And I think as that increases, it's really going to be difficult for colleges to make the case.
00:40:12.000You should lose four years of getting job experience, four years of earning a salary at the cost of getting a piece of paper and then tens of thousands of dollars every year.
00:40:22.000And you don't have literally any experience at the end of the day.
00:40:24.000Is that something that you see is also a big threat to the university system?
00:41:17.000That's a complete disaster, completely irrelevant almost all the way through.
00:41:21.000And so what's going to be required on both sides, required for kids not to go out of a leap of faith.
00:41:25.000And then employers have to start hiring kids that didn't go to college that are willing to work and learn whatever your company needs along the way.
00:41:33.000I believe, and I write about this in the book, college actually makes you lazier.
00:41:36.000I think it decreases work ethic, not increases it.
00:42:44.000I don't have no against, I'm not against people having a good time, but that's a super expensive proposition to just kind of have a good time to just go socialize with friends.
00:42:52.000And that's the other argument people make is like, well, I meet a lot of people when I'm at college and it's good for networking.
00:42:58.000Let me tell you right now, it's better for you to network people that have already graduated from college than people that are going to graduate from college.
00:43:53.000And I could say this as a subject matter expert because I visit so many of these campuses and I talk to so many of them.
00:43:58.000Going to Berkeley, I literally set up a card table at Berkeley and I spent an hour, hour and a half there talking to students, and their cynicism and their nihilism is depressing.
00:44:09.000No wonder why this is the most depressed, suicidal, alcohol-addicted, and Medicated generation in history.
00:44:14.000And that's the other thing is that we have more kids killing themselves than ever before, more kids doing hard drugs, more kids getting, you know, addicted to alcohol, more kids on antidepressants, and we have more kids graduating from college up until last year.
00:44:36.000Many of this college thing isn't working too well.
00:44:39.000And so you have all of these environmental factors.
00:44:41.000I'm not blaming college for all of it, but it certainly isn't helping.
00:44:44.000Since we've had the mass infusion of people going to college, which is baby boomers' kids, right?
00:44:48.000Baby boomers kids going to college kind of from 2005 till today, 2022, that 17-year window where college enrollment almost doubled over the course of 10 years, almost like 45% increase.
00:44:59.000America has become a less free, less happy, less joyful, more suicidal, more depressed nation.
00:45:05.000One of the things that you really excel at is crafting a tweet that is perfectly targeted to conservatives to go viral.
00:45:12.000So can you share with us your trick to writing the perfect Charlie Kirk tweet?
00:45:56.000But so I studied Twitter and I was like, what goes viral?
00:45:59.000What goes, you know, so around like 12 and 13, I would really kind of get into this and I realized that Twitter was changing its algorithm and almost becomes kind of an extension of you where you kind of realize the pattern.
00:46:09.000And so I did this for year after year after year, starting with no followers, unverified.
00:46:13.000And during the kind of the top of the Trump years, you know, we ended up having the third most engaged Twitter account on the planet.
00:46:19.000I mean, I was averaging 145,000 retweets a day at our heyday, which is a lot, right?
00:46:26.000Not to mention all the likes and favorites and all of that.
00:47:08.000So then, the, yeah, but not to mention, it's just tweets don't go as viral as they used to because they're shadow banning all of us, which has now been revealed in CDC documents that if you dare to question the vaccine, of which I do, they come after you and they shadow ban you.
00:47:21.000And so, it's just not fun anymore either.
00:47:23.000Twitter used to be a legitimately fun place where I would send out one of those tweets and be like, oh, a New York Times reporter is going to tweet back at me.
00:47:29.000Like, yes, it's like the only way I could communicate with people I absolutely hate.
00:47:33.000And because I don't have their phone numbers, right?
00:47:35.000And you could do it in front of millions of other people.
00:47:37.000Like, oh, yes, this degenerate from the Huffington Post decided to tweet at me.
00:49:11.000I'm not even that though, because one of the issues that I think you and I would very much agree on is the problem with drug cartels, right?
00:49:18.000Oh, I totally agree, but it hasn't made them weaker.
00:49:20.000It's made them stronger since we've legalized.
00:49:22.000Especially OLA cartel is stronger than ever since we've legalized weed.
00:49:25.000So you, so is it in your opinion that if marijuana were nationwide, nation, excuse me, nationwide made in something equivalent to like what is a substance, a schedule, whatever, drug, that this would be, would hurt the cartels?
00:50:08.000And one of the promises that I used to believe in from a lot of libertarians is legalize weed and the cartels are going to be able to do whatever they want to do.
00:50:15.000They won't be able to do what they want to do.
00:50:58.000And then I realize that a lot of it is just very idealistic, built for academic arguments.
00:51:04.000It could be helpful and instructive at times, but it's not, it's not, I don't believe it's a governing principle or a way to live your life at all.
00:51:11.000But you, I mean, you don't think this country was like the founding fathers were basically libertarian in their principles?
00:51:56.000I mean, there's a fourth option, which is this idea that's been bubbling up of national divorce.
00:52:02.000The concept being that the two are completely irreconcilable, and that even if there's any kind of victory in terms of some kind of conservative Republican landslide, it is, you know, the pendulum is only going to swing for a short period of time and eventually it's going to revert to the left and it's going to just be this kind of interminable war against one group of people versus another group of people.
00:52:24.000Whereas if there were two guns, one group can do as they well please, the other group goes as they well please, and everyone will be happier ever after.
00:52:31.000We don't really, I mean, we complain about, you know, the policies in Canada, but no one really cares to the extent that they care about the policies less than most of Chicago or New York.
00:52:52.000Like, I mean, there's some pretty serious questions.
00:52:55.000How do you break what states together and for what purposes?
00:52:58.000What I think you're striking at, though, is something I can agree with libertarians on a lot, which is a revival of self-government and local government, which I think needs to be the necessary step and kind of the restoration of what a republic actually is, not this overly federalized system.
00:53:13.000But I'm afraid that this idea of a national divorce would be way messier than people realize.
00:53:17.000So at least in the short term, in the immediate, I'm going to keep on fighting for my fellow countrymen.
00:53:22.000But I mean, whether it's in New York City or whether it's in Chicago or San Francisco or LA, but I'm also realistic that I don't want to live in a country with most people that live in San Francisco and they don't want to live in a country with me.
00:53:35.000So the best way is that can we take over enough positions of power to try to mediate some form of a detente where it's like, you guys keep on stepping out of line.
00:53:44.000You better stay in your corner and we'll stay in ours.
00:54:34.000We want to have our liberties protected, that our children should be off limits, and that the psychos that run the country from Malibu and Manhattan can and should be completely put into a permanent political minority.
00:54:45.000Don't you think that the lockdowns and quarantining demonstrated that in fact 60 to 70% of Americans were perfectly happy to sacrifice their liberties if the people on the televisions told them that this is something that needs to happen?
00:55:00.000That's a very good point, but it didn't last because we did our job and we were out there and educating and talking and then the tide turned.
00:55:09.000Now lockdowns are super unpopular, right?
00:55:26.000Maybe we're slow to the truth in our country, or maybe I'm woefully idealistic and I'm actually living in a country that wants a totalitarian government.
00:55:55.000And I think self-government is on the rise.
00:55:56.000People are starting to ask questions of how can I sustain myself?
00:55:59.000How can I be able to feed my family, you know, navigate the waterways, navigate the highways outside of government control.
00:56:08.000So, but it's a hard, it's a difficult point to counter.
00:56:11.000One of the things I am most heartened by is how so many people, regular people, not necessarily public figures, although that has changed a little bit with people like Carrie Lake in Arizona and Governor Sanders and others, is how many people are willing to go up to corporate journalists who are on the street or trying to get interviews and be antagonistic toward them.
00:56:34.000Call them out on their BS, as opposed to years where Republicans and conservatives would be yelling at, let's suppose, Pelosi or Obama or Biden, whereas the New York Times and all these other, the Washington Post could be safe in their offices lobbing bombs and no one's coming near them.
00:56:51.000Is this something that you also see as a white pill in terms of saving?
00:57:25.000Like, are you going to French laundry again?
00:57:27.000Like, that kind of citizen journalism, what we call the rise of the citizen at Turning Point USA, rise of the citizen, gives me great, great hope.
00:57:34.000And I will say, though, that you're dealing also with something that can constantly change.
00:57:40.000And so it's incumbent on us, those of us that have platforms, to make arguments and to know the pie can increase.
00:57:45.000And that even though not everyone is with us now, more people can be with us.
00:57:49.000And so the untold story, or I should say the unexpected benefit of COVID was a lot of people realizing how corrupt and deceitful and treacherous, not just our government, though.
00:58:02.000Pfizer is, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Facebook.
00:58:06.000It's the power structures in general, not just the CDC, the FDA, and the federal government.
00:58:12.000And so, look, the fact that regular everyday people are rising up to challenge authority, it's probably one of our best hopes.
00:58:21.000One of my biggest criticisms of President Trump is how he left the January 6th people who were his biggest supporters in some ways out to dry.
00:58:29.000He has not really spoken out in favor of them or done much to defend them.