The Charlie Kirk Show - Reclaiming the Nation for the Next Generation—LIVE from Clemson University

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, happy Saturday.

00:00:01.000 My conversation at Clemson University.

00:00:03.000 They say go tigers.

00:00:04.000 I hope you enjoy it.

00:00:05.000 We talk about a lot of different topics, very wide-ranging.

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00:00:18.000 And if you become a monthly supporter, you get to come to our exclusive invite-only Zoom calls with me where I answer all the questions I can.

00:00:24.000 Donna, charliekirk.com slash support from Georgia.

00:00:28.000 Thank you, Steve from Indiana.

00:00:29.000 Thank you for supporting us.

00:00:30.000 Laura from California.

00:00:32.000 Thank you, Cody from South Carolina.

00:00:34.000 Thora from Texas.

00:00:35.000 Thank you.

00:00:35.000 Mildred from Alabama.

00:00:37.000 Jenna from California.

00:00:39.000 I want to thank Rachel from California.

00:00:42.000 And I want to thank Liana from California and Jonathan from Ohio, charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:00:48.000 My stop at the Turning Point USA, Clemson University, buckle up.

00:00:52.000 Here we go.

00:00:53.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:54.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:57.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:00.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:03.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:04.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:05.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:01:12.000 Turning point USA. 0.65

00:01:14.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:22.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:25.000 Wow, what an awesome room this is.

00:01:27.000 This is really cool.

00:01:29.000 I hear this is the oldest building on campus.

00:01:31.000 Is that true?

00:01:31.000 That's pretty awesome.

00:01:33.000 Great to be here, everybody.

00:01:34.000 And I just want to first say thank you to this administration at Clemson University.

00:01:40.000 You know, I travel the country.

00:01:41.000 I speak at a lot of different campuses.

00:01:43.000 We are at University of Vermont and University of Oregon.

00:01:46.000 Definitely did not receive this kind of welcome.

00:01:49.000 This is actually the first time we're speaking on a college campus in like two years.

00:01:55.000 And that's not to say we're not going to campuses.

00:01:58.000 We just usually go to the campus and we have to go to a hotel next door because of all sorts of different reasons, virus protocols and stuff.

00:02:05.000 But I just want to thank the administration truly for allowing this to happen here.

00:02:09.000 It says a lot about this great institution.

00:02:11.000 So thank you.

00:02:12.000 It's really special.

00:02:19.000 I want to thank our Turning Point USA chapter here.

00:02:22.000 You guys are doing an amazing work.

00:02:24.000 Now, I'm told that this is the largest turning point chapter in the country.

00:02:28.000 That's what I'm told.

00:02:29.000 And so we're going to go with it.

00:02:31.000 There you go.

00:02:36.000 So there's a lot I want to get to, and then I want to do some questions.

00:02:40.000 And it's going to be a lot of fun because we're on campus and I want to kind of hear about what's happening on the ground here.

00:02:45.000 First, I just want to say, you know, growing up in Chicago, Illinois, anyone from Chicago here?

00:02:49.000 Anyone from the North?

00:02:51.000 Yeah.

00:02:53.000 I love the South, and I think it's super unfair that there's this kind of constant war on the American South.

00:02:59.000 And in many different ways, from the removal of monuments to just kind of this.

00:03:04.000 And when I grew up, I was always, there was always kind of this slight tone or undertone towards anyone that grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line.

00:03:12.000 Now, for those of you that grew up in the South, which I'm guessing is a majority of you, you might not know this, but there is kind of this kind of arrogance or this snobbery that a lot of people that grew up in the North have towards people that kind of live in the South.

00:03:27.000 And it's almost like we're better than you, you know, kind of get out of our way.

00:03:31.000 We don't like your politics.

00:03:32.000 We don't like your worldview.

00:03:34.000 And I never liked that.

00:03:35.000 And I think it's honestly evil and awful.

00:03:38.000 And let's just look at one statistic that I think is super important before we kind of get into the main part of the speech, which is how people in the South disproportionately serve in the United States military.

00:03:49.000 And this is something that I always challenge people.

00:03:52.000 They say, oh, yeah, you know what's the problem with the country?

00:03:54.000 The problem is Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina.

00:03:58.000 And I say, you do realize that despite having only about 32% of the population, 44% of all armed service, all service members are from a collection of six states.

00:04:10.000 And you're in one of those states right now.

00:04:13.000 And so you look at our amazing veterans and the people serving in the military.

00:04:23.000 They're from a portion of the country that gets kind of a majority of all the condemnation for whatever possible reason.

00:04:31.000 I think it's super unfair.

00:04:33.000 And when you go look at who's willing to go die for our nation, it's from right here.

00:04:38.000 It's from this part of the world.

00:04:39.000 It's from South Carolina.

00:04:40.000 It's from North Carolina.

00:04:42.000 It's from Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama.

00:04:45.000 And there is kind of this ethos of this part of the world of service and of duty and of love of nation and country.

00:04:54.000 And, you know, I travel the country, you know, we were just in Vermont and we were in Oregon and Boise.

00:04:59.000 There is a continual war on the American South.

00:05:02.000 And I'll let you guys sort out if, you know, there's problems that the South has to fix, like whatever.

00:05:07.000 But you're my fellow countrymen.

00:05:10.000 And I think it's so wrong to say, you know what, we are now going to impose our values.

00:05:13.000 And by the way, you have to go remove all of your statues, which now they removed Thomas Jefferson, who was a wonderful man, and they removed him from Virginia, I think in Richmond, Virginia.

00:05:22.000 And I'm always struck in the Bible, one of my favorite things in the Bible is this kind of refrain of remember.

00:05:32.000 And right before the Ten Commandments, many people don't remember this, is it says, I am the Lord your God who delivered you from Israel, from captivity in Israel.

00:05:41.000 There is this constant emphasis on remembrance and on not forgetting what happened before you.

00:05:47.000 And when you forget your history, when you forget the ties that bind you together, there might be other reasons why those monuments might be standing.

00:05:54.000 They say, oh, they're there because of white supremacy, or they're there because hundreds of thousands of people from this region bled and died for a cause that they believed in.

00:06:02.000 And maybe that was part of the healing process to keep our nation together.

00:06:05.000 And who are you, like smug person from Manhattan, to come in and say that we have to go remove every single statue from this part of the world?

00:06:12.000 You guys shouldn't put up with it, quite honestly.

00:06:14.000 And I think it's wrong on a variety of different levels, but it also goes towards this idea of trying to impose one's values in a different part of the world. 0.90

00:06:24.000 I'll give you a really silly example.

00:06:25.000 I'm not a fan of sweet tea, okay?

00:06:27.000 And let me just say that being in the South, I always go to, I always, I order iced tea, and they ask me sweets.

00:06:32.000 I'm like, what are you talking about?

00:06:33.000 Like, it doesn't make much sense.

00:06:35.000 But you guys obviously have a different taste, obviously, here.

00:06:38.000 Don't impose it on a different part of the country, the world.

00:06:41.000 When you have a big country and a diverse country, you're going to have to rely on citizen government and self-government rule.

00:06:49.000 And the national project that we all enjoy, the United States of America, is made possible thanks to a lot of different reasons, but also thanks to the industrial might and the service and the sacrifice of people from this part of the world.

00:07:02.000 And so I just want to acknowledge that from the beginning, because I, for one, is coming someone that did not grow up from around here and does not live here.

00:07:09.000 I live in Phoenix, Arizona now, which is not part of the South.

00:07:12.000 They say it's part of the Southwest, but it's its own thing, which is that if we're serious about actually keeping our country together, like enough of the regional warfare, enough of all of a sudden saying like these six states, we don't want them.

00:07:23.000 We want to separate them.

00:07:24.000 No, we're supposed to be one country of fellow citizens and fellow countrymen, and that includes South Carolina to the south of Bronx and in Phoenix, Arizona.

00:07:33.000 So I just want to start with that.

00:07:35.000 And so I want to kind of frame this conversation of kind of why we framed our tour and named our tour what it is.

00:07:41.000 So a couple years ago, we would do tours on socialism.

00:07:45.000 Happy to talk about socialism.

00:07:46.000 Anyone wants to talk about it tonight?

00:07:48.000 Happy to talk about American history or all these sorts of different things.

00:07:51.000 But over the last year and a half, there has been an overemphasis on the racial aspect of American political conversation.

00:07:59.000 And kind of within that came this teaching of critical race theory, diversity, equity, inclusion, kind of the whole Wokestan kind of belief system.

00:08:09.000 And we're going to dive into what all that stuff means.

00:08:11.000 But very simply, we need to do a much better job of explaining exactly the significance of these ideas.

00:08:18.000 So critical race theory is an academic theory that started in Yale and Columbia by Herbert Marcuse, came from the Frankfurt School in Germany.

00:08:26.000 And these ideas have been around for a couple decades.

00:08:28.000 But in the last year and a half, they've been accelerating at a rapid pace.

00:08:33.000 And so some people accuse us of trying to expose this and push back against this as saying, Charlie, it doesn't exist in America.

00:08:39.000 It's just a theory.

00:08:40.000 We're just trying to have our kids go through different exercises of different ways to view things.

00:08:45.000 So let me give you an example of exactly what we're trying to push back against.

00:08:49.000 And by the way, this is not a right issue.

00:08:50.000 This is not a left issue.

00:08:51.000 This is not conservative or liberal.

00:08:53.000 What I'm about to articulate, every human being should say this is evil, this is wrong, and it should be rejected.

00:08:58.000 For example, at over 75 schools across the country, they have black-only dormitories.

00:09:04.000 75 schools across the country.

00:09:06.000 They have black-only graduation ceremonies at Columbia University.

00:09:10.000 They have Hispanic-only graduation ceremonies at Columbia University.

00:09:14.000 Now, we don't have to overthink this.

00:09:15.000 Segregation is wrong. 1.00

00:09:17.000 Dividing people based on the color of their skin should be completely and totally rejected.

00:09:22.000 Instead, the new era, the woke movement, says we now need to divide people based on the color of their skin.

00:09:28.000 At Western Washington University, a long ways from here, they are now having dormitories where only black students are allowed to walk in, but closer to home.

00:09:36.000 In Georgia public schools, it has now been revealed that black sixth graders go to one classroom, white sixth graders go to another classroom.

00:09:45.000 Regardless of your political affiliation, we should find this repulsive.

00:09:48.000 This is creating a hyper-racist society that is organizing and stereotyping people based on things they cannot change, based on things that are their immutable characteristics.

00:09:59.000 And let me just say this.

00:10:01.000 I couldn't care less about your skin color. 1.00

00:10:03.000 It means absolutely nothing to me.

00:10:05.000 The emphasis on a skin color, I believe, creates racism where it does not exist.

00:10:11.000 Instead, we should be looking at the soul, the spirit, and the character of people.

00:10:17.000 And so this has real significant implications.

00:10:21.000 And again, I just want to thank Clemson.

00:10:24.000 This is amazing to kind of have this conversation and the different perspectives on this, because most campuses do not want to have a conversation about this at all.

00:10:32.000 Instead, it's completely kind of a silencing and chilling effect.

00:10:36.000 And we don't have to, in my personal opinion, have to have this overarching, complex way of looking at it, which is segregation was wrong in the 1950s.

00:10:48.000 And segregating children in the Georgia public schools, which is what's happening right now, is wrong again.

00:10:54.000 And it goes even further than that.

00:10:56.000 Whether it's not just graduation ceremonies, it's not just dormitories.

00:11:00.000 But also, I'll give you another example.

00:11:02.000 United Airlines has come out and they have said that they are going to be hiring pilots based primarily on based on the color of someone's skin.

00:11:11.000 Now, I don't know about you.

00:11:12.000 When I'm flying in an airplane, I couldn't care less about the skin color of the pilot. 0.99

00:11:17.000 I care, can you land the plane?

00:11:19.000 And this emphasis on diversity for diversity's sake comes with a price.

00:11:25.000 And when you elevate diversity over competency to try and fit some sort of esoteric political agenda, then there will be a price to pay for that.

00:11:36.000 And I also think that there's a deeper game at play here, which is, and I know a lot of you are obviously in college.

00:11:42.000 I know you're here.

00:11:43.000 You know, I'm 28 years old.

00:11:44.000 I'm not that much older than you.

00:11:46.000 But this has changed rapidly.

00:11:48.000 You know, 10 years ago, some of you were eight, and 10 years ago, I was 18.

00:11:52.000 I want you to think about kind of how that generate, like, we're more peers now.

00:11:56.000 We were not peers 10 years ago, obviously.

00:11:58.000 I would look at you at an eight-year-old, like, go away, right?

00:12:00.000 That's kind of weird, right?

00:12:01.000 But you've kind of become peers as I'm in my late 20s, and you're now kind of entering formal adulthood.

00:12:07.000 And 10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable to have an entire political movement or an entire cultural social movement that would emphasize the color of someone's skin.

00:12:21.000 In fact, we used to call those people racists that would do that.

00:12:24.000 And the excuse is always given: well, Charlie, we just need to have a conversation on race.

00:12:28.000 It's not going to go beyond that.

00:12:29.000 But when you start to see 75 schools and growing that then prioritize people based on things they can't change, it should be a timeout.

00:12:36.000 Like, wait, what exactly are we doing here?

00:12:38.000 And let's go to the obvious question, which is, well, why is it wrong to judge people based on things they can't change?

00:12:45.000 Because we should always have a preference on human action.

00:12:47.000 And that is what always made America different.

00:12:50.000 If you think about it, it doesn't matter who your parents were.

00:12:53.000 It doesn't matter where you come from.

00:12:55.000 It should always matter how hard are you willing to work.

00:12:58.000 What are you willing to dedicate?

00:12:59.000 Are you willing to improve your character?

00:13:01.000 Instead, what CRT, diversity, equity, inclusion does is it gives a preference based on things you cannot change no matter how hard you work at it.

00:13:10.000 It's disempowering more than it is empowering.

00:13:13.000 And then the obvious critique of it, which is super important, which is, are we actually trying to heal and trying to mend these forces or whatever they might be or these things in the past?

00:13:25.000 Or are we actually trying to harbor new resentment and new forms of racism?

00:13:29.000 And so now that I'm actually on a college campus, I can say this to our generation, which is really important.

00:13:35.000 Regardless of your political affiliation over how you view this, we need a consensus that says we are not going to enter a new era where we are going to tolerate all of a sudden saying to anyone based on their skin color, that is your worth or your value.

00:13:50.000 It's disgusting and it's wrong. 0.94

00:13:52.000 It's evil and it's racist. 0.97

00:13:53.000 And that should be regardless of your political affiliation on any other sort of thing.

00:13:58.000 And this is a question that now our generation needs to ask itself, which is, what is the direction we want to go?

00:14:09.000 And, you know, this is a, you know, kind of you look at the country, it's falling apart.

00:14:14.000 I could overcomplicate it.

00:14:15.000 I won't.

00:14:16.000 I'll just simply say, let's go, Brandon, and then we can just move on, honestly.

00:14:20.000 So I mean it.

00:14:29.000 I'm a big fan of the NASCAR driver.

00:14:31.000 Let's go, Brandon.

00:14:32.000 Look, the border's wide open.

00:14:34.000 Inflation is kicking in.

00:14:35.000 There's a lot of problems.

00:14:36.000 We can go through those and question and answer.

00:14:38.000 But here's the important question.

00:14:40.000 And then I want to go into kind of the solution part of it, which is our generation, we now need to be leaders.

00:14:46.000 So I consider you part of your generation, even though I'm early millennial.

00:14:49.000 I disowned millennials a long time ago. 1.00

00:14:51.000 So I'm an adopted member of Generation Z, if you guys will take me.

00:14:55.000 I'm right on the edge.

00:14:56.000 But are we going to re-embrace the beauty and the gift that we've been given in the United States of America?

00:15:03.000 Or are we going to go in a path that is rooted in what I believe is the downfall of any organization, movement, or system that works, which is ingratitude?

00:15:14.000 Now, this is something that I wish colleges focused more on, which is the divide between people that live meaningful and happy lives versus people that don't is those people that wake up every single day and are more thankful than are bitter or people that are more bitter than they are thankful.

00:15:31.000 Now, that's not to say you shouldn't point out problems and not to say that you shouldn't be involved in fixing them.

00:15:36.000 But make no mistake, living in this nation is a gift from the Lord.

00:15:39.000 It is the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.

00:15:46.000 And when you are thankful for something, you're far less likely to want to revolutionize it or act like an activist and want to change it.

00:15:56.000 When you are thankful for something, you understand the sacrifices and the exceptionalism of the thought and of the philosophy that actually went into the creation of the nation that we live in today.

00:16:08.000 And so the kind of the status of where it happens right now, and this is why... you know, you're going to notice tonight, we'll talk about a lot of different things.

00:16:18.000 I'm really kind of bored with some of the political arguments, to be perfectly honest, because it kind of needs to transcend this.

00:16:23.000 It's, do you believe in a very, a couple simple American promises, and are you willing to do something about it, such as a citizen government, consent to the governed, independent judiciary, checks and balances.

00:16:35.000 And it is right now, what we are experiencing is a dynamic of the ruling class versus the citizen.

00:16:42.000 And the citizen is supposed to be us.

00:16:44.000 Citizen comes from a Greek term, which means co-ruler.

00:16:47.000 Now, this is a very important thing.

00:16:49.000 The people that run the country are a completely different group of people than who make the country run.

00:16:55.000 Those are two different groups of people.

00:16:57.000 The people that run the country have never been more disconnected, regardless of what political affiliation you might think it is, than the people who actually make the country run.

00:17:06.000 The people that make the country run are the police officers, the firefighters, the people that work in the medical clinics, the people that drive the trucks.

00:17:13.000 They have never been more disconnected from the American ruling class.

00:17:17.000 And the question is why?

00:17:19.000 Well, the American ruling class, and this is kind of an overarching term, whether it be economic, technological, or scientific, has a contempt for almost every single person in this room.

00:17:30.000 It has a contempt for people that are part of the muscular class, a contempt for people that do not want an overemphasis of trying to put America's sovereignty into an internationalist type globalist style project.

00:17:43.000 And the charge for us and our generation is, are we going to be willing to slow down and stop the progressive lie, which is just because times change, human beings change with it.

00:17:57.000 And are we going to be willing to preserve things that are good and true and beautiful?

00:18:02.000 In fact, preserve what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the laws of nature and nature's God.

00:18:09.000 And so people ask me all the time, they say, Charlie, what does that mean for our generation?

00:18:13.000 This means we must take a time out and stop and ask ourselves the question, is this the type of country I actually want to raise children in and grow old in and pass down to future generations?

00:18:25.000 And for many people, they haven't thought that deeply about it.

00:18:28.000 But public polling shows us that our generation is more dissatisfied with the current state of affairs.

00:18:34.000 In fact, there is an admission that we believe that we are inheriting something worse than our parents had.

00:18:39.000 Now, instead of just kind of protesting about it, the question should be, what are we actually going to do about it substantively?

00:18:45.000 And the first question is this.

00:18:46.000 The first question is, is it easier or is it harder to get married and have lots of children?

00:18:51.000 Which, by the way, is a moral objective good.

00:18:54.000 Now, this drives people nuts when I say this on college campuses.

00:18:57.000 It is a moral good to get married at a young age and have lots of children.

00:19:00.000 I encourage all of you to do it.

00:19:02.000 See, I get golf claps.

00:19:04.000 I always do.

00:19:05.000 I always do.

00:19:06.000 Now, we'll get to this later.

00:19:10.000 You will be a happier person the sooner you engage in monogamous relationships.

00:19:17.000 You will be a happier person.

00:19:19.000 You will be a happier person.

00:19:23.000 People don't, again, I get the sparing applause.

00:19:27.000 Our society would benefit and you will benefit too.

00:19:30.000 Now, it is harder than ever to have children in America.

00:19:33.000 In the 1980s, you used to be able to support a family of four on 36 weeks of labor a year.

00:19:41.000 Now it takes 53 weeks of labor a year to support a family of four, which forces what?

00:19:46.000 It either forces the other spouse to go into the workforce and work alongside of it, not voluntarily, but involuntarily, and it also requires families to go into debt.

00:19:57.000 You should be able to raise a family on a single income in America.

00:20:01.000 You should be able to raise a family on one income.

00:20:05.000 And by the way, Not everyone on the right agrees with me.

00:20:11.000 This is something where all of a sudden you start to see a little bit of fault lines.

00:20:14.000 People say, Charlie, just cut the taxes, deregulate the markets.

00:20:18.000 Who cares if it's more expensive to have children? 0.64

00:20:20.000 What's important is corporate profits.

00:20:22.000 I say nonsense.

00:20:23.000 I say, I love free markets because they serve people.

00:20:26.000 And if all of a sudden it's hard to have big families and strong communities, and we're seeing church enrollment go down and not up, and we're seeing the social and moral decline of the nation, I'm willing to say timeout and say, wait a second, do we really want to say Facebook, Google, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, their profits come above the well-being of the American citizen?

00:20:44.000 I don't think so.

00:20:45.000 I don't think that's a good thing.

00:20:46.000 In fact, we should say, if you do not have strong families, the entire nation crumbles.

00:20:51.000 The only one of the 10 commandments that comes with a promise is honor your mother and father so that you may live long in the land that you are in.

00:20:58.000 43% of American children grow up without a single two parents stably in the home.

00:21:05.000 Do you know it's the highest rate in the world?

00:21:07.000 Now, you might say, Charlie, how is it that America, the wealthiest nation, the richest nation, has the highest rate of children being raised by one parent?

00:21:16.000 Now, I always have to qualify this because I get lots of angry emails.

00:21:20.000 Single parents are modern heroes.

00:21:23.000 This is not an accusation against them.

00:21:24.000 I'm not attacking them.

00:21:26.000 I'm instead saying that statistically, it is harder for a child to succeed if they are raised by just one parent versus two parents.

00:21:37.000 You could disagree with that.

00:21:38.000 You can yell and shout at me about that.

00:21:40.000 The numbers speak for themselves, likelihood to go to prison, to graduate from college, to have high income, that two-parent households are a barrier against any one of those things from happening.

00:21:50.000 In fact, it's a firewall.

00:21:52.000 Now, the reason, though, is exactly in the question.

00:21:55.000 Why is it that the wealthiest, richest country in the world, in the history of the world, has the highest rate of children growing up without a father or mother or kind of together?

00:22:07.000 Most of it is single motherhood, not exclusively, though.

00:22:10.000 And the answer is because we're so wealthy, because we can afford to divorce.

00:22:14.000 In most countries, they can't.

00:22:17.000 Divorce is a luxury of abundance.

00:22:20.000 You might say, what are you talking about?

00:22:22.000 If you go look at third world countries, all that keeps that family together is the family, meaning all that keeps the incomes coming. 1.00

00:22:29.000 Sharing and pooling resources, division of labor.

00:22:32.000 But when you have such an abundance of goods and services, all of a sudden you say, yeah, I'm bored.

00:22:37.000 And now I'm not saying that every divorce is a divorce of convenience.

00:22:37.000 I can move on.

00:22:41.000 There's plenty of examples of abuse and adultery and treachery.

00:22:45.000 But it is an arguable where we have to look and say, wait a second, we look at 43% of children that are not growing up with a mother and a father.

00:22:52.000 Is that a good thing for the type of nation we want to live in?

00:22:55.000 Of course not.

00:22:56.000 And so we, and I'll say, I don't want to speak for all of you, but those of us that are conservatives have to ask ourselves the question, what do we prioritize more than anything else?

00:23:05.000 And for the last 10 years, I think conservatives have put an overemphasis on corporate profits over how easy it is to have children and have a family.

00:23:12.000 So I'm looking at everyone in the audience right now.

00:23:15.000 It is going to be harder for your generation than any generation in American history to do something your grandparents did without much thought, which is have lots of children.

00:23:24.000 The number one excuse it is to have lots of children in America, the number one excuse people give is financial.

00:23:29.000 The number one excuse.

00:23:30.000 It's too expensive.

00:23:31.000 You know, I'll have one of each, like they're picking out tiling or something, you know, in the kitchen.

00:23:36.000 I'm not joking as if that's like the person should be accused of it.

00:23:39.000 I just think it's kind of a funny answer for people to give.

00:23:42.000 Instead, if you want the society to grow stronger, not weaker, if you want people to go off of government assistance, then you have to be willing to all of a sudden have a conversation about public policy proposals to say, what will make it easier for all of you in this room to want to have children?

00:23:59.000 Because we have the least married generation in American history.

00:24:02.000 Millennials are the least married generation in American history.

00:24:06.000 Now, millennials say that they don't want to get married because it's too expensive or they can't find a significant other.

00:24:12.000 I'm going to get into dating advice and stuff for all of you guys, which everyone always pays super attention when I say that.

00:24:18.000 And everyone like sits up in their chair.

00:24:19.000 They're like, ooh, I can't wait to hear.

00:24:20.000 No, it's going to be very harsh.

00:24:22.000 Don't worry.

00:24:23.000 But it will be true. 0.99

00:24:24.000 We'll get to that in a second.

00:24:26.000 But the first thing that we have to ask ourselves as the type of nation that we want to reclaim of our generation is that, do we like the nation where the top apps are Tinder and Snapchat and not the Bible app or anything that is meaningful?

00:24:45.000 And I don't mean that as a joke.

00:24:48.000 That's not a joke, by the way.

00:24:49.000 That's a very real thing.

00:24:51.000 And I'm not, and by the way, let me be very clear.

00:24:54.000 I'm not moralizing.

00:24:56.000 Everyone deserves grace, forgiveness, and mercy.

00:24:58.000 We've all made mistakes.

00:24:59.000 I mean that, okay?

00:25:00.000 We're all in this together.

00:25:01.000 I'm not going to be the type of person that points to you and says your salvation is put like, you know, it's kind of the southern preacher thing, no offense, but it's like a big thing around here, right?

00:25:09.000 I don't do that, okay?

00:25:10.000 Instead, I'm making a societal critique.

00:25:12.000 It's like, hold on a second.

00:25:13.000 Is this actually the type of country we want to live in?

00:25:17.000 We'll get to more of that in a second.

00:25:18.000 I want to talk a little bit about human nature, the Constitution.

00:25:22.000 How am I doing on time?

00:25:22.000 Oh, wow, we're doing good.

00:25:24.000 Oh, yeah, by the way, did you guys know China actually banned the Bible app?

00:25:27.000 It's interesting.

00:25:28.000 They just banned the Bible app.

00:25:31.000 Very interesting.

00:25:33.000 By the way, I'm actually not a big fan of digital Bibles.

00:25:36.000 I like physical Bibles.

00:25:37.000 It's a whole different speech for a different time.

00:25:39.000 But yeah, I got a couple fans up there.

00:25:42.000 I'll get to that.

00:25:43.000 That's a totally different thing.

00:25:44.000 I like being able to, you know, when the pastor says, now everyone opened their Bibles and they bring up their phone, every time, if you sit in the back row, they'll respond to a text, respond to an email, take a selfie, and then go to Mark.

00:25:54.000 Like, it's that simple, right?

00:25:55.000 It's like they got to do three digital pinpoints.

00:25:57.000 Anyway, that's a different topic.

00:25:58.000 Completely different for a different time.

00:26:00.000 Okay.

00:26:03.000 So the Constitution is the greatest political document ever written in the history of the world.

00:26:07.000 It's the longest lasting Constitution in the history of the planet.

00:26:11.000 And it's longest lasting for a reason.

00:26:14.000 And this is where it's going to get a little bit, people that might on the right might even disagree with me, which is that the founding fathers had a very specific view of human nature.

00:26:24.000 They believed that human beings were nasty, brutish, and short to each other.

00:26:28.000 Put simply, they believed human nature was naturally sinful.

00:26:33.000 I agree, by the way. 0.95

00:26:34.000 I think human beings are naturally awful.

00:26:36.000 Now, no, it's true. 0.71

00:26:39.000 It's true.

00:26:40.000 I'll prove it to you.

00:26:42.000 I don't know if I'll be able, I'll be able to, I can't prove it scientifically, but I'll prove it through a way that reasonably you'll be able to.

00:26:47.000 I'll use two examples, one recent and one that's not so recent.

00:26:50.000 Okay.

00:26:51.000 All of, it's just one that's timeless, I should say.

00:26:53.000 Every single person's dealt with a toddler before.

00:26:55.000 We all used to be toddlers, right?

00:26:57.000 Now, did you ever teach a toddler to lie or to manipulate their parents?

00:27:05.000 No.

00:27:06.000 They kind of have that uploaded into their operating system when they come into this earth.

00:27:11.000 That's the best argument I can give without having to overcomplicate.

00:27:14.000 I could go deeper, but that's...

00:27:15.000 The second one is this, about how dark the human soul can become, okay?

00:27:20.000 And everyone will agree at this, regardless, and you have different reasons as to why that is.

00:27:23.000 But recently in Philadelphia, this should have been the number one news story on the planet, by the way.

00:27:28.000 It's our generation's Kitty Genovese story, which most people don't know who Kitty Genovese was.

00:27:32.000 But Kitty Genovese was a woman that was raped on the side of a New York City block for 40 minutes, 35 witnesses heard and saw and did nothing.

00:27:40.000 Well, this is our generation's equivalent of this.

00:27:42.000 In Philadelphia, an illegal alien who should have been deported under the laws of our nation was on a subway and a woman was there too.

00:27:50.000 For 40 minutes and 25 train stops, he raped the woman and people filmed and did nothing and he stopped at his own convenience and just walked off the train.

00:27:59.000 People filmed it for TikTok, Instagram, and I don't know, future use and refused to intercede or do anything about it.

00:28:06.000 We're pretty dark people.

00:28:08.000 And now, before you say, Charlie, I would have done something.

00:28:10.000 I would have done something.

00:28:11.000 You're probably right.

00:28:12.000 You would have stepped up like a hero.

00:28:14.000 The point is, we need to take a real picture of, hold on a second, there's something in our soul that can go really dark really quick.

00:28:20.000 And need I go any further of the history of the 20th century to prove my point.

00:28:25.000 Is the attempted extermination of a people based purely on religious beliefs, on racial beliefs, any so further?

00:28:32.000 Now, why does that matter? 0.87

00:28:34.000 Okay, people are naturally awful.

00:28:34.000 Okay, Charlie, fine.

00:28:36.000 So what?

00:28:37.000 Well, there's three social contracts.

00:28:39.000 All of you guys in Intro to Political Science probably have a test on this very soon.

00:28:42.000 There's three different social contract theories.

00:28:43.000 Thomas Hobbes, who wrote The Leviathan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote many books, including the Confessions, and John Locke.

00:28:49.000 In the three different social contract theories, they all had different views of human nature.

00:28:53.000 Now, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which many of your leftist friends and many people here tonight, he believed humans were naturally good.

00:29:01.000 He believed that human beings at the core were naturally very good to one another.

00:29:06.000 He valued the primitive over the civilized, the infant over the adult, the adulterous lover over the loyal spouse.

00:29:15.000 Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that a man is born free, but spends the rest of his life in chains.

00:29:21.000 Put simply, everything you see bad around you is a byproduct of racism, misogyny, colonialism, capitalism.

00:29:28.000 It's not a human nature problem.

00:29:30.000 It's a human planning problem.

00:29:32.000 Now, that belief was basically scooped up by Marx and many others and turned into an economic theory.

00:29:38.000 Thomas Hobbes had a different belief.

00:29:40.000 Thomas Hobbes wrote a book called The Leviathan during the English Civil War, I believe in the mid-1600s.

00:29:46.000 Someone could fact check me on that.

00:29:47.000 I think it was 1600s. 0.91

00:29:48.000 And he saw the English Civil War and he said that human beings are nasty, brutish, and short. 0.70

00:29:53.000 He said, you are so awful, you don't even understand how bad you are to one another.

00:29:57.000 Now, he said, because of that, we need a massive government to control you.

00:30:00.000 We obviously disagree at that.

00:30:01.000 Now, John Locke, who was the main inspiration of the American founding, he took somewhat of a Hobbesian view, but his own.

00:30:08.000 He believed human beings were a blank slate.

00:30:10.000 He believes that it could go either way based on social circumstances.

00:30:13.000 And there is some evidence to show that, even though I would yield more on the Hobbesian view of human nature of how awful we are.

00:30:19.000 But the founding fathers studied all this.

00:30:21.000 They said, wow, what is the one thing that ancient Rome and ancient Greece and Napoleon, Napoleon came a little bit after, but kind of what happened in France and what happened all across the planet, what do they all have in common?

00:30:33.000 Is that when you have a system that is established and people are able to get power without a check and balance and they're able to abuse that power, bad things start to happen.

00:30:42.000 This is a very important point.

00:30:44.000 If you were able, if I took 10 random people and I put you in a room and I said, design the country and the government of your choice, what would you do?

00:30:51.000 Write the Constitution, write the system.

00:30:53.000 Where do rights come from?

00:30:54.000 It's an interesting social experiment, actually.

00:30:56.000 Now, Founding Fathers had an opportunity to do this.

00:30:59.000 They won the war against the British.

00:31:00.000 The Declaration of Independence was the beginning of such.

00:31:03.000 It's our birthday.

00:31:04.000 The fact our nation has a birthday is a big deal.

00:31:07.000 Not every nation has a birthday.

00:31:08.000 It's like, oh yeah, China's been around for thousands of years.

00:31:10.000 What's the date?

00:31:11.000 I don't know.

00:31:12.000 France has been around for a while.

00:31:13.000 What's the date?

00:31:14.000 We have a date where we declared our values that are just as true then as they are now.

00:31:19.000 When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political ties that has tied them to another, deriving from the powers, the separate and equal station of the earth of the laws of nature and nature's God.

00:31:30.000 That is a beautiful statement.

00:31:31.000 That is a statement that is true then as is true today.

00:31:36.000 And the view of human nature, though, the founders took was, hold on a second, we're not going to try to create utopia.

00:31:45.000 Now, this is what I have to tell every college audience.

00:31:47.000 You have to restrain yourself whenever you hear a politician talk to say, wait a second, that's never going to happen because the raw material you're dealing with is nasty, brutish, and short and selfish and sinful people.

00:31:59.000 The founding fathers said, okay, we're not going to create perfection.

00:32:02.000 Let's create something that's really hard to mess up.

00:32:05.000 That's slow, it's deliberate, and it's decentralized with rights saying that they come from God, not from government, a natural rights doctrine, an emphasis on states' rights.

00:32:14.000 And they went through this process.

00:32:15.000 And a question that we need to ask ourselves is, is the promise of the Constitution always true?

00:32:22.000 And this is why the Constitution was not written for the times.

00:32:25.000 It was written to stand the test of time.

00:32:28.000 It's because it was written on an observation of human nature.

00:32:31.000 And this is a disagreement.

00:32:33.000 There might be some professors here that are listening that will say I'm totally wrong because they'll say, you know what?

00:32:37.000 The founding fathers didn't have Twitter or airplanes.

00:32:40.000 Therefore, it's outdated.

00:32:42.000 And we should laugh at that, but you hear that argument a lot.

00:32:45.000 It's an old document.

00:32:46.000 So what if it's old?

00:32:47.000 The question is, did it talk about things that are eternal and true and things that do not change?

00:32:52.000 And so if you kind of put people in a room and you ask yourselves the question, what's the type of society that you want to design?

00:32:58.000 And the founders answered that question by one that protects your rights, that has a check and balance on your own desire to dominate.

00:33:07.000 And boy, have we seen that desire manifest in the last year and a half, from public health officials to unelected bureaucrats to people on social media or in tech.

00:33:17.000 And the best example of a person that has basically removed himself from the check and balance of the founding fathers is Anthony Fauci.

00:33:25.000 And no one voted for him.

00:33:36.000 I want you to think about how much power he has.

00:33:36.000 It's true.

00:33:38.000 You did not show up to the voting booth and say, yes or no, I think he should have this kind of power.

00:33:43.000 It's an extra governmental, extra constitutional position of an unelected, largely unknown, and unchecked power of someone that is then able to micromanage so many of your decisions of assembly, to vaccines, to masks, and so on and so forth.

00:33:57.000 Where the Constitution, the power of the Constitution is in you.

00:34:00.000 It emphasizes consent and your ability to do something about it.

00:34:06.000 And to tie this all together, and then I'll get into the dating advice and life advice, which I think is really important, and then we'll do questions, which is wokeism and the CRT nonsense is trying at every single corner to undermine the core, deliberate, stable promise of the United States Constitution.

00:34:24.000 The Constitution is one that recognizes human beings for their worth, regardless of skin color.

00:34:29.000 Not tribes, not how you look, not on some sort of grievance political issue.

00:34:34.000 Instead, it's you're the same sort of thing.

00:34:36.000 You're a human being.

00:34:37.000 You're a speaking being.

00:34:39.000 You have a soul and you deserve dignity.

00:34:42.000 And it's a promise of rights and freedom.

00:34:44.000 And this is where all of a sudden you lose some people on the political left, not of outcomes or the certain station that you want to have at the end of it.

00:34:52.000 That's something that people aren't always comfortable with, by the way.

00:34:54.000 Because when you have liberty, you will have disparate outcomes.

00:34:57.000 If I gave everyone here $100 and I'd say, come back in a week, some of you would be $100 in debt.

00:35:02.000 Some of you would have $1,000.

00:35:04.000 Some of you would go buy Bitcoin and be worth a million dollars or something, right?

00:35:08.000 You would all make different decisions because liberty allows you to take risks and therefore you're going to have different outcomes.

00:35:14.000 And so, but wokeism is an assault on all of this.

00:35:17.000 And critical race theory is just the current placeholder of that.

00:35:20.000 Okay, I want to now say something that's probably one of the more controversial things I'm going to say tonight.

00:35:24.000 Happiness is a choice.

00:35:26.000 And many people are not going to teach you this on a college campus.

00:35:30.000 How happy you are is a moral good for yourself and for the world.

00:35:34.000 Now, my mentor on this is the great Dennis Prager.

00:35:36.000 He's phenomenal.

00:35:37.000 And he's, for those that don't know, Dennis Prager, he's terrific.

00:35:40.000 And I'm going to give you some life advice that has blessed me.

00:35:45.000 If you are judging how happy you are based on how much fun you are having, you are going to be a miserable person.

00:35:52.000 Because not every moment of your life is going to be fun.

00:35:55.000 In fact, very little of your life will something be called fun.

00:35:58.000 Now, in college, it doesn't kick in yet because everything, it's kind of outdoing oneself, right?

00:36:06.000 But eventually, for you seniors in the room, it's kicked in a little bit.

00:36:10.000 Kind of like drinking till 4 a.m., you know, doing, I'm not even going to get into the stuff that I'm sure that happens at this fine institution.

00:36:20.000 Bible study, right? 0.99

00:36:21.000 You know, playing blackjack with, you know, whatever.

00:36:26.000 I'll stop there.

00:36:27.000 So fun is not what gives you happiness.

00:36:33.000 You might say, Charlie, what gives you happiness?

00:36:35.000 Number one, you have to choose to be happy and you have to work at it.

00:36:38.000 It's your attitude that matters.

00:36:40.000 And if you look at a couple things, it's the expectations of what you think comes next that matters a lot.

00:36:47.000 Keeping your expectations in check is a very important thing, meaning not having too high of expectations where you expect a massive dopamine rush of every room you come into, which ties to how I started this speech, gratitude.

00:37:00.000 Are you thankful for what you have around you?

00:37:04.000 I am afraid we have raised and are raising the least thankful generation in American history.

00:37:12.000 Now, some people say, thankful to who?

00:37:17.000 Well, that's a good question.

00:37:18.000 I believe thankful to the Lord, at the least your parents.

00:37:22.000 At the least someone that came before you and sacrificed something for you might say, Charlie, I have awful parents.

00:37:27.000 I worked my way through everything.

00:37:28.000 All right, you are the most rugged individual I've ever met on the planet.

00:37:31.000 I guarantee you, somebody offered you something you could be thankful for.

00:37:35.000 Something.

00:37:35.000 What does that do?

00:37:36.000 All of a sudden it takes a step back and all of a sudden dismisses the gateway drug to misery, self-pity, feeling sorry for oneself.

00:37:47.000 Feeling sorry for oneself is the gateway drug for a miserable life.

00:37:52.000 Oh, Charlie, you don't understand how hard it is to be me.

00:37:54.000 You're right, I don't.

00:37:56.000 I have no idea.

00:37:58.000 And maybe that's, you want that your identity.

00:38:00.000 Maybe you want to be the banner waiver of the oppression Olympics.

00:38:03.000 Go do it.

00:38:05.000 Instead, you want to live a happy life.

00:38:07.000 You have to say, I have to start to choose to do one, rooted in gratitude and rooted in things and meaning.

00:38:11.000 Now, this is important.

00:38:12.000 People say, well, Charlie, what are you?

00:38:14.000 You don't want to have fun?

00:38:14.000 The fun police?

00:38:15.000 No, fun can be like dessert, where you have it every so often.

00:38:19.000 But you know this.

00:38:20.000 It's a very important thing.

00:38:21.000 The friends that you grew up in high school with that were nothing but pleasure seekers and having fun, I'm sure some of you already have seen kind of how that has a downward spiral of chaos.

00:38:31.000 That lasts for a season.

00:38:32.000 But the question then is, well, then Charlie, what do I do?

00:38:35.000 What do I pursue that is eternal and meaningful?

00:38:37.000 Like, I'm glad you asked.

00:38:38.000 A relationship with the transcendent matters a lot.

00:38:42.000 Philosophy comes from a Greek word, philosophos, which is the love of knowledge or the love of wisdom.

00:38:48.000 Well, wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord.

00:38:51.000 And try to find some time of your life or some of your day where you can start to all of a sudden engage in wonder.

00:38:58.000 Wonder is the beginning of philosophy, Socrates said, which is beginning to ask questions that are bigger than yourself.

00:39:04.000 What is true?

00:39:04.000 Like what is good?

00:39:05.000 What is beautiful?

00:39:06.000 What ties all of this together?

00:39:08.000 That will all of a sudden put you in a place where all of a sudden the kind of self-pity parade won't matter as much because there is an entire universe out there that we should be in awe of that we should just try to study, understand, and that quite honestly is objectively beautiful.

00:39:23.000 And the other thing I think that's really important, which happiness being a choice, not a state of mind, is we have to put a heavier emphasis on self-control than self-esteem.

00:39:33.000 That self-control is far more important than the self-esteem movement.

00:39:36.000 Now, let me say this.

00:39:37.000 The self-esteem movement is largely rooted by well-meaning people.

00:39:41.000 It does unbelievable damage.

00:39:43.000 It does incredible damage.

00:39:44.000 Because I remember being in seventh grade, we had all these posters that came up.

00:39:48.000 It says, self-esteem, you're perfect the way you are.

00:39:50.000 And I went to my teacher, I said, if I'm perfect the way I am, why am I here?

00:39:52.000 Like, why am I studying?

00:39:53.000 Why am I still going to school?

00:39:55.000 Instead, it's you're made in the image of God.

00:39:59.000 You are loved by something beyond anything of your imagination, but you've got a lot of work to do to improve your character.

00:40:04.000 People, especially men, want to be challenged.

00:40:07.000 Men want to be challenged at a young age. 0.98

00:40:08.000 Instead, it's suppressing and it is almost lowering the kind of aspiration of people.

00:40:14.000 Okay, to dating.

00:40:15.000 Let's go to this really quick.

00:40:16.000 So, which gets people's attention.

00:40:19.000 I think I already said this, but please reject hookup culture. 0.53

00:40:22.000 It is a disgusting thing.

00:40:23.000 It's awful for everyone involved.

00:40:25.000 I cannot emphasize this enough. 0.99

00:40:26.000 It'll make you a miserable person. 0.95

00:40:28.000 And please reject that altogether. 0.72

00:40:31.000 That's number one.

00:40:32.000 Okay, let's start.

00:40:32.000 Let me talk to men, and I'll let my wife talk to the women if you guys want to, because I got to be careful.

00:40:35.000 I get into all sorts of trouble.

00:40:36.000 So, but if you guys, my wife is a great role model for young women.

00:40:40.000 Men, get your act together.

00:40:43.000 You see, the women always applaud when I say that.

00:40:44.000 And the men are like, what are you talking about?

00:40:48.000 Let me start with the men. 0.83

00:40:51.000 Do something really hard.

00:40:54.000 You need it.

00:40:55.000 Men need to be challenged at a young age. 0.97

00:40:57.000 Push yourself.

00:40:58.000 That could be pushing yourself physically, academically, spiritually.

00:41:02.000 You need a challenge.

00:41:03.000 Young men without a challenge does not go well. 1.00

00:41:06.000 It's like Lord of the Flies, which is what a lot of college campuses become.

00:41:09.000 But here's the other thing: is that challenge yourself to prevent, to say, can I not do something instead of, can I do something?

00:41:18.000 Can I go without drinking for six months?

00:41:20.000 Challenge yourself to that.

00:41:22.000 Can I go without swearing for six months?

00:41:24.000 Challenge yourself to that.

00:41:25.000 Now, what is the significance of that?

00:41:28.000 Women want to be with men who are able to control themselves. 1.00

00:41:36.000 Women want to be with men that are able to control themselves. 1.00

00:41:40.000 And a lot of men are like, what are you talking about?

00:41:43.000 Women, whether they realize it or not, many of them, they see nothing but men that are directionless, out of control, and do not have purpose in life. 1.00

00:41:54.000 Instead, they want to see, see, see a lot of young ladies nodding their heads, and a lot of young men that are very angry at me right now.

00:42:01.000 Very angry.

00:42:03.000 Which is, and this goes to something that's so incredibly important, which is you become more desirable when all of a sudden you are able to say no to the things that are tempting that everybody else is doing.

00:42:18.000 Because deep down, and this is where all of a sudden I'm going to lose some of the women, women want a leader in their man. 1.00

00:42:24.000 Deep down, they want to be led.

00:42:28.000 Now, I've lost the entire feminist community on campus. 1.00

00:42:32.000 Okay, fine.

00:42:34.000 But it's true.

00:42:35.000 It's that self, when you don't have self-control, you're inherently not leading.

00:42:39.000 You're following.

00:42:40.000 And so for young men, I hope that resonates with you.

00:42:42.000 For young women, I'm going to have to just plead the fifth. 1.00

00:42:44.000 You can listen to my wife, Erica.

00:42:47.000 I got myself in enough trouble already tonight.

00:42:49.000 Okay, let me close by this, then we'll do some questions.

00:42:52.000 But I want to just pour into you guys.

00:42:54.000 You can make a decision tonight.

00:42:55.000 Outside of politics, all that stuff.

00:42:56.000 Life advice.

00:42:57.000 Look, I travel 330 days a year.

00:42:59.000 I do two podcasts a day, three hours of radio day.

00:43:01.000 We write books.

00:43:02.000 We do all sorts of crazy things.

00:43:03.000 I sleep very little.

00:43:04.000 I love what I get to do.

00:43:06.000 And so people say, Charlie, what sort of career should I get into?

00:43:10.000 Find a career that if you won the lottery, you'd keep doing it.

00:43:13.000 That's what you should go do.

00:43:15.000 Find a career that if you won the lottery, you would continue to do it.

00:43:19.000 That's me.

00:43:19.000 If we won the lottery, I'd be here next year.

00:43:21.000 It's really nice to go, and I like speaking here.

00:43:24.000 Not everyone has.

00:43:25.000 I say, Charlie, and that's not to say you should discount trying to find a job and all of that.

00:43:29.000 But find something where it enriches your soul the more you do it.

00:43:34.000 And for some people, it's going to be following your skill, not your passion.

00:43:37.000 Because sometimes your skill can lead you to that because when you get good at something, you want to keep on following it.

00:43:41.000 But for those of you that are in the audience, 18, 19, 20, 21 years old, you can make a decision tonight where your entire life will change for the better.

00:43:48.000 You can say, you know what?

00:43:49.000 I've just kind of been schlepping around.

00:43:51.000 I'm not the person I want to be or who I am.

00:43:54.000 The cool thing is you have the agency and the power to change that today.

00:43:58.000 You have the agency and the power to say, you know what, no more.

00:44:00.000 I'm going to now wake up at an earlier time.

00:44:02.000 I'm not going to drink.

00:44:03.000 I'm not going to go out with that group of friends.

00:44:04.000 And that's another piece of advice for whatever it's worth.

00:44:07.000 Pick friends that make you a better version of who you are.

00:44:10.000 You are the combined average of the five people you spend the most time with.

00:44:16.000 And so, and then commit yourself saying, I want to work on being happy, which is not the same thing as pursuing fun, as we went through, but instead it's being thankful.

00:44:29.000 It's understanding and managing your expectations.

00:44:31.000 And then finally, it's pursuing things that objectively matter.

00:44:35.000 Things that last.

00:44:37.000 And being in the oldest building on campus, here's something you're going to realize.

00:44:40.000 It's hard to make things last.

00:44:42.000 Things go up and go down very quickly.

00:44:45.000 But things that last deserve to be appreciated and studied and understood because they lasted for a reason.

00:44:52.000 They lasted because they had a foundation, because they had something different about them.

00:44:57.000 And I want that for all of you.

00:44:58.000 Okay, let's do some questions and thank you guys so much.

00:45:11.000 One of the things I saw you saying was about how to have happiness in your life.

00:45:16.000 And one of my things is meaning.

00:45:18.000 That's one of the things I see as one of the biggest parts of making happiness in your own life.

00:45:22.000 And I wanted to see what role that you think that plays.

00:45:26.000 Yeah, meaning is, I mean, that's the purpose of life.

00:45:30.000 There's many different, there's a couple different philosophical constructs.

00:45:33.000 And obviously, I prefer the Christian biblical one, which is the life I live.

00:45:38.000 But Victor Frankl had a great book, which is Man's Search for Meaning.

00:45:42.000 It should be required reading for every young person out there.

00:45:45.000 And so he had this term that he coined, which is will to meaning, which is we know we have human will.

00:45:50.000 Are we going to use human will to human will to pleasure or human will to power or will to meaning?

00:45:57.000 Those are the three big ones.

00:45:58.000 That's not an exhaustive list, but let's go through those three, right?

00:46:01.000 Are you going to make your life about a will to dominating other people, a will to feeling good all the time, or a will to have things that matter that are meaningful?

00:46:11.000 That's the one that is going to create the happiest and quite honestly, most joyful citizenry.

00:46:16.000 And now, some of you might say, Charlie, why are you emphasizing happiness?

00:46:19.000 I'll tell you, it's the most miserable generation in American history.

00:46:22.000 It is. 0.94

00:46:23.000 It is the most suicidal, the most drug-addicted, the most directionless.

00:46:28.000 So I'm going to spend time talking to our target generation about what it's like to live a meaningful life.

00:46:34.000 And the most lonely generation, by the way, in American history, the least married generation in American history.

00:46:39.000 But here's the thing: meaningful things are hard things.

00:46:44.000 Meaningful things usually don't come from logging onto a website or flipping through your Instagram feed.

00:46:50.000 Meaningful things take sacrifice and they take work.

00:46:55.000 Meaningful things are things that require you to restrain sometimes your fleshly impulse, to sleep in, to want to kind of just kick the can down the road.

00:47:08.000 Instead, meaningful things take you to prioritize something that is good over something that feels good.

00:47:14.000 And all of you have experienced this.

00:47:16.000 You have.

00:47:17.000 You all know what it feels like, I hope, to work really hard and get a good grade in a certain class.

00:47:23.000 To legitimately work in a class that challenged you, not one that was easy for you.

00:47:27.000 But you woke up sometimes and you pulled the all-nighters and you challenged your instinct to get a better grade and you felt rewarded.

00:47:34.000 I know you did.

00:47:35.000 You felt satisfied by doing that.

00:47:37.000 What I'm saying is that that should be a lesson for the rest of your life that I think could be very instructive.

00:47:41.000 Thank you.

00:47:42.000 Okay, right here.

00:47:44.000 Hello, Mr. Kirk.

00:47:46.000 Nice to meet you.

00:47:48.000 So I have a roommate, and me and my roommate get into political debates all the time.

00:47:54.000 And he's more centered than I am, right?

00:47:58.000 And we had this conversation the other night about the American economy and capitalism, communism, and whatnot.

00:48:03.000 And we both agree that in theory, communism works in theory, but in practice, never worked, never once in its life.

00:48:10.000 And I will stand by that.

00:48:12.000 And I'm very pro-capitalist.

00:48:14.000 And so he said that, did you know that 90% of Americans will die in the same economic status in the same economic class as they started in?

00:48:25.000 And I said, I disagree.

00:48:27.000 And I want to get your thoughts on that.

00:48:29.000 Do you think that, do you see that happening a lot?

00:48:31.000 Do you think that happens a lot?

00:48:34.000 Yeah, so let me just disagree with one thing you said.

00:48:38.000 I don't think communism works in theory if you're dealing with human beings.

00:48:42.000 You would have to change the entire operating system of what we as human beings are.

00:48:48.000 And the best example of why socialism and collectivism does not work is the biblical story of Cain and Abel.

00:48:56.000 Jealousy will come in very quickly as soon as one person wants something they can't have.

00:49:02.000 Now in socialism, excuse the metaphor, you take a rock and get what you want.

00:49:07.000 In a market-based, private property-based system, you can create something new.

00:49:11.000 You could hopefully go about it peacefully.

00:49:13.000 I will say this, though.

00:49:14.000 Your friend might be right with that statistic. 1.00

00:49:16.000 I don't know.

00:49:17.000 But understand when you're defending a market-based system, that doesn't mean you have to defend everything that's in America today.

00:49:24.000 Because we have far from a market-based system in a lot of different parts of American life.

00:49:28.000 Whether it, let's just take a good example, the drug companies, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson ⁇ Johnson, they get sweetheart deals with the government to force vaccines on people against their will.

00:49:40.000 Now, I'm not going to take a stance on a vaccine.

00:49:41.000 If you listen to my podcast, you know plenty of this.

00:49:43.000 But no one should be fired from their job for not wanting to take a vaccine.

00:49:46.000 No one should be fired from their job today.

00:49:57.000 And so I would add that nuance, but also it's inarguable that markets raise the standard of living for all people, that it's a much better system to allow human beings to create new things than redistribute pre-existing ones.

00:50:14.000 I could go on and on and on, but I think what you have with your roommate, if I could give you a little piece of advice to go back, is a debate on human nature.

00:50:22.000 And that's what I talked about tonight is, hey, do you think human beings are naturally good or naturally bad?

00:50:27.000 That's the most important question.

00:50:29.000 Because if you think human beings are naturally good, then yeah, you could believe in communism for sure.

00:50:33.000 That people will endlessly share stuff that they will not envy, that they will not want to steal, that they will not want to take.

00:50:39.000 But if you believe human beings have that in our natural operating system, you're like, huh, maybe I should create a system that makes you have to actually create new things, protects private property from theft, all those sorts of different measures.

00:50:52.000 And so thank you for being here.

00:50:53.000 I appreciate it.

00:50:54.000 Thanks.

00:51:00.000 Hi, Charlie.

00:51:00.000 My name is Cindy Gere, and I'm president of Turning Point USA at USC Upstate in Spartanburg.

00:51:11.000 I'm also a nursing student.

00:51:12.000 I'm a senior at USC Upstate getting ready to go in the medical field.

00:51:16.000 And I, for one, am a proponent of medical freedom.

00:51:19.000 And I know many nursing students and nurses who are. 0.99

00:51:22.000 And I just wanted to know your take on how we can be better proponents and advocates for people that we take care of that may agree with us, may disagree, but we just want to be proponents of medical freedom.

00:51:35.000 And what are your thoughts on that?

00:51:37.000 Yeah, first of all, thank you for that.

00:51:39.000 And thanks for leading our chapter.

00:51:41.000 You're in a tough spot.

00:51:42.000 And I think you know that.

00:51:44.000 So many people in the medical field are losing their jobs right now.

00:51:46.000 In the midst of a pandemic, we're firing frontline healthcare workers that don't want to get the vaccine, even though many of them have natural immunity from this virus.

00:51:56.000 And so I will say this, something broadly, then something specific to you, that if you're going to go this path and speak out about these things, you have to be willing to lose friends, sometimes lose income, lose social status.

00:52:08.000 And I think you've already learned that, right?

00:52:10.000 Is that for anyone out here that feels compelled to speak out, it might cost you something.

00:52:16.000 It might cost you a membership to a country club, or it might cost you a best friend.

00:52:21.000 It might cost you being in a fraternity or sorority.

00:52:25.000 It might cost you something.

00:52:26.000 So that's the first thing.

00:52:27.000 The second thing is I would keep on challenging people on the issue of alternative treatments and their proven efficacy when it comes to medical freedom.

00:52:37.000 I believe one of the great injustices is how people have not been able to learn at all about how other treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, azithromycin, aspirin, and monoclonal antibodies might have been helpful to them.

00:52:51.000 And let me be clear.

00:52:54.000 I'm not saying that I'm prescribing it to you or telling you that it should be for you.

00:52:59.000 I said learn about it.

00:53:01.000 Most people just say, oh, no, it's a horse D-wormer.

00:53:03.000 Hold on a second.

00:53:04.000 I mean, that's one of the great smears in modern America, okay?

00:53:08.000 Jimmy Carter brought ivermectin to Africa and cured millions of people of river blindness.

00:53:13.000 Ivermectin won a Nobel Prize for treatment with humans a couple years ago.

00:53:18.000 Okay, so let's just take a step back before we get into all of this kind of, you know, just ridiculously tribal conversation.

00:53:27.000 And this is one of the most disappointing things when it comes to the medical thing.

00:53:30.000 And I'll finish with this, which is it should have been a place where other ideas were entertained and other perspectives were allowed.

00:53:38.000 Instead, it became a very dogmatic conversation very quickly.

00:53:44.000 And yeah, and they shut you up and through arguments of authority.

00:53:47.000 So I hope that's somewhat helpful, but I do want to just make sure I manage your expectations, which is you're in a tough spot, but we have your back at Turning Point USA, and thank you for your wonderful leadership.

00:53:58.000 So thank you.

00:54:06.000 So I'll preface this question by saying that I personally don't believe in the abolishment of police, but I've heard arguments from specific people to like where I could see why they think that, and it's not necessarily a bad argument.

00:54:19.000 So like leftists say ANCAP and abolish all police because they think they're inherently racist, they're inherently evil, inherent minorities, things like that, which are obviously not true.

00:54:26.000 But then you have ANCAPs like, what's his name?

00:54:30.000 Michael, I forget his full name, but ANCAPs will say that we should abolish the police because they infringe on our rights.

00:54:36.000 Like the Compt in New York enforce gun laws that obviously infringe on our Second Amendment right, and that's why they're inherently evil and we shouldn't have them.

00:54:44.000 So I wonder what your rebuttal is to ANCAPs that say things like that.

00:54:48.000 Yeah, I'm happy to get into that.

00:54:49.000 Also, I'm talking way too fast.

00:54:52.000 We condemn political violence.

00:54:53.000 I don't know if I was talking too quickly, so I don't know if that came across, but thank you.

00:54:58.000 So don't have to overcomplicate this one.

00:55:02.000 Thank you.

00:55:03.000 Condemn, condemn, condemn.

00:55:04.000 Okay, so do not condone and we condemn.

00:55:07.000 Jeez.

00:55:09.000 Been a long week today.

00:55:11.000 So What I have to say to NCAPs that want to abolish the police, yeah, just come back to earth and let's talk about real things, basically.

00:55:20.000 I mean, I'm happy to talk to an anarcho-capitalist.

00:55:24.000 I used to read all that literature of Marie Rothbard and all that stuff.

00:55:28.000 Yeah, it's just not realistic.

00:55:29.000 The police are the law enforcement of the country.

00:55:32.000 They are the protectors of the law for good reason.

00:55:36.000 And so I really am not sure how to even begin with that argument.

00:55:39.000 So are you, I'm not sure if you're an anarcho-capitalist or not, but yeah, you're not.

00:55:43.000 I've heard arguments like these, and I was wondering about your specific rebuttal.

00:55:47.000 I'm like, you know, even though they, the cops in New York, New Jersey, California infringe on Second Amendment rights, First Amendment rights, you know, they're the hand of the government that would do this and they are in states like that.

00:55:59.000 And they say that's a reason for abolishing the police.

00:56:02.000 You know, I just wondering, like, what, the rebuttal to that, you know, you say, let me say something like, even though they do that, like, we still need them, things like that.

00:56:10.000 Yeah, I'm not really sure how to even begin with some of that.

00:56:14.000 So, yeah, I mean, look, we're seeing already kind of in the inner city of America what happens when you defund the police and you get rid of the police, murder rates go up, crime goes up.

00:56:23.000 We should stand with our police officers 100%.

00:56:26.000 And the war on police is making America profoundly more dangerous.

00:56:30.000 Thank you.

00:56:38.000 Hi.

00:56:40.000 First, I like to say I'm glad to be here.

00:56:42.000 My daughters and I came all the way from Baltimore, Maryland to see you.

00:56:51.000 And I'd also like to preface this by saying that I'm not necessarily a proponent of tearing down statues and this and that, but I'd like to ask you, how do you speak to people who ask about the character of Thomas Jefferson when he owned slaves himself and other founding fathers?

00:57:08.000 Yeah, happy to talk about Thomas Jefferson.

00:57:10.000 So thank you for being here.

00:57:11.000 Thomas Jefferson was a wonderful man, and he obviously had his own moral issues with that.

00:57:16.000 He entered a world he didn't create.

00:57:19.000 That's one thing we all have in common.

00:57:20.000 We all enter a world we did not create.

00:57:22.000 When Thomas Jefferson was born, slavery was widespread and unquestioned, but Thomas Jefferson was actually one of the leading criticizers and one of the leading people that actually started the American conversation on abolishing slavery.

00:57:34.000 I'll give you a couple examples.

00:57:36.000 Number one, Thomas Jefferson, the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, admonished King George for bringing the international slave trade to America, blaming King George, saying slavery is wrong.

00:57:46.000 I can't believe you brought it here.

00:57:47.000 That's number one.

00:57:48.000 Number two, in 1790s, when Thomas Jefferson was governor of Virginia, he submitted bill after bill into the Virginia House of Commons to abolish slavery in the Virginia House of Commons.

00:57:58.000 Number three, inspired by the Declaration of Independence, Vermont abolished slavery, the first state to do so in 1777.

00:58:06.000 And then in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson became the third American president, he actually signed a moratorium in March of 1803 banning new importation of slaves into our country in March of 1803.

00:58:18.000 Thomas Jefferson wrote extensively in his private journals of his own moral failings and issues with slavery and why publicly he's fighting against it, why privately he was struggling with it.

00:58:28.000 But here's an interesting thing.

00:58:30.000 Let's look at this from a biblical standpoint, right?

00:58:32.000 So in Genesis, there's this great verse where it says, no, Noah was an honorable man amongst the people in his generation.

00:58:43.000 That's an interesting way to put it, isn't it?

00:58:44.000 Why couldn't they just say that Noah was an honorable man?

00:58:47.000 Well, it's because if you compared Noah to Elijah, maybe Noah wasn't that great.

00:58:51.000 Instead, the Bible is telling us we must always compare people in the time of which they are in.

00:58:57.000 What was their impact?

00:58:58.000 What did they do?

00:58:59.000 Well, Thomas Jefferson started a movement of human freedom, human equality.

00:59:03.000 Nine out of 13 of the state, the states in the colony, nine out of 13 of the colonies, by the time of the ratification of the Constitution, had already independently abolished slavery largely because of the advocacy efforts of Thomas Jefferson.

00:59:17.000 Not to mention the Northwest Ordinance in Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance that abolished any slavery in the new territories of which Thomas Jefferson was a huge advocate for.

00:59:26.000 And so I'm happy to go into more detail about the detail, happy to go into the sophistication and the nuance and the contradiction of Thomas Jefferson.

00:59:36.000 But when you start to remove leaders and people that came before you and you start to discount any contribution they have, I think it's a huge mistake.

00:59:44.000 Instead, say, hey, that guy's really complicated.

00:59:47.000 So am I.

00:59:48.000 He got some good things.

00:59:49.000 He did some good things.

00:59:49.000 He did some things right.

00:59:50.000 And he got some things terribly wrong.

00:59:52.000 And as soon as we start to say, get rid of him because of one moral failing and not looking at any of the positives that he contributed, such as attacking King George for slavery, such as advocating for the abolition of slavery in Virginia and actually getting rid of the slave trade, I think all of a sudden you're doing something that is incredibly destructive, such as shredding our history.

01:00:11.000 And if you do not know your history, good luck planning your future.

01:00:14.000 So thank you so much.

01:00:23.000 Hi, Charlie.

01:00:25.000 I'm very excited to see you.

01:00:26.000 I am a high school junior at Liberty University's Online Academy.

01:00:32.000 And I was wondering when tyrannical policies begin to become implemented, where do you think it's more appropriate to fight such policies?

01:00:40.000 And where do you think it's more appropriate to just stop doing business with the implementers or giving them more time?

01:00:46.000 Yeah, that's a good question.

01:00:49.000 Don't buy products from people that hate your values and hate your worldview.

01:00:52.000 That's a good place to start.

01:00:54.000 And so we've partnered with SecondVote, secondvote.com.

01:01:00.000 And you guys can check it out, where it kind of talks about the second vote you can have, which is in what you purchase and what you do, and kind of what the places you shop from and the places that you actually buy products from.

01:01:12.000 And that may mean like giving up your Amazon Prime account.

01:01:16.000 That may mean not going to Starbucks, right?

01:01:18.000 But we have to start to make decisions that are in alignment with our political values and our social values, especially when it comes to purchasing products.

01:01:28.000 Corporate America needs to receive a message from us that we are not going to put up with their double standards, their contradictions, and their funding of these efforts.

01:01:38.000 And so I'll give you a great example.

01:01:40.000 Coca-Cola and Delta came out and they said that Georgia's voting law was against their values and then they moved the all-star game to Denver.

01:01:48.000 I just loved having to see the World Series, by the way, of like having to be in Atlanta.

01:01:53.000 It was amazing.

01:01:56.000 And by the way, Atlanta totally blew it last night.

01:01:59.000 I could do a whole baseball analysis.

01:02:02.000 Awful.

01:02:02.000 It's a whole different thing.

01:02:04.000 I'm telling you, they have to go to Houston and be careful.

01:02:08.000 They're going to know what you're going to pitch before you know what you're going to pitch.

01:02:11.000 And so that's all I'm going to say.

01:02:12.000 So I get so much backlash when I say that with the Houston Astros, but I mean, come on, it's proven at this point.

01:02:19.000 Anyway, your question.

01:02:20.000 So yeah, stop buying products from people that don't share your values.

01:02:24.000 And we as conservatives don't like boycotting.

01:02:27.000 Fine.

01:02:27.000 Then at the very least, you could boycott the good companies.

01:02:30.000 Do you guys have In-N-Out here yet?

01:02:32.000 I don't think you do, right?

01:02:33.000 No.

01:02:33.000 But In-N-Out is phenomenal.

01:02:36.000 Don't get me started on Chick-fil-A.

01:02:37.000 I know people like Chick-fil-A, but there's a whole different, whole different program at play with Chick-fil-A.

01:02:41.000 Very woke, very BLM-centric. 0.84

01:02:44.000 They fund groups that are pro-abortion.

01:02:45.000 People get really surprised when I say that.

01:02:47.000 Go look it up yourself.

01:02:48.000 Type in Chick-fil-A Family Research Council, entire study on this, where the CEO did all sorts of stuff.

01:02:54.000 But they're not the worst, obviously.

01:02:56.000 You see, people are always like, what are you talking about?

01:02:58.000 I thought they were amazing.

01:03:00.000 You can go look it up yourself.

01:03:03.000 Yeah, but in closing, support the good companies and don't support the bad companies.

01:03:07.000 Liberty's a great school.

01:03:08.000 God bless you.

01:03:16.000 Hey, Charlie, thank you so much for your ministry and just what you're doing around the United States.

01:03:23.000 I wanted to ask a quick question about voting integrity.

01:03:27.000 Do you...

01:03:30.000 I'm sorry.

01:03:32.000 Oh, do you have hope in the future of voting?

01:03:37.000 And do you feel like we as Americans have hope in the integrity of voting ever again?

01:03:46.000 Yes, and I think we have to make some changes.

01:03:48.000 Obviously, I think that we need to get rid of no excuse absentee mail in voting.

01:03:53.000 I think we have to restore the signature threshold that we saw in Georgia.

01:03:59.000 But I am not a cynic at all.

01:04:01.000 What I do, and I talk about this a lot, the 2020 election was heavily interfered with, no doubt.

01:04:07.000 And one of the things that the two issues that I focus on the most, though, is how Mark Zuckerberg spent $420 million in the 2020 election for vote counters and for the actual administration of the elections.

01:04:21.000 And then also how Facebook and Twitter and Google did not allow the discussion of Hunter Biden and that story and the laptop story to happen in the month of October.

01:04:29.000 And that's direct election interference.

01:04:32.000 Now, let me also say, though, when we are starting to treat John Gruden's emails with more scrutiny than Fauci's emails or Hunter Biden's emails, we have a problem in our country, let me tell you.

01:04:44.000 And so Mark Zuckerberg should not be a more powerful force than the average American in our constitutional republic.

01:04:57.000 And this is something, by the way, that people on the left should agree with.

01:05:01.000 They always used to say, we don't want billionaires corrupting our democracy.

01:05:04.000 We don't want to be living under a corporate oligarchy.

01:05:07.000 I agree.

01:05:08.000 I think it's wrong that the fourth wealthiest man on the planet can come in with $420 million and change the elections as we see fit.

01:05:14.000 Now, what do we have to do?

01:05:16.000 I think we have to try to get back to voter ID.

01:05:18.000 I think we have to try to get back to no excuse mail and voting.

01:05:21.000 But I do believe that we can restore faith in our elections.

01:05:24.000 I am not a cynic.

01:05:24.000 I'm not someone that ever believes things are structurally or permanently broken.

01:05:28.000 That means people have to be poll watchers and poll workers.

01:05:30.000 That means we have to work at our local election areas.

01:05:32.000 But I think election integrity is one of the most, if not the most important issue in our country right now.

01:05:36.000 So thank you so much.

01:05:37.000 Appreciate it.

01:05:43.000 Hey, Charlie.

01:05:44.000 I was wondering, how big of an influence do you think China currently has on our private sector and our federal government and what needs to happen to combat that influence?

01:05:55.000 It's massive.

01:05:55.000 Nike has come out and they have said that we are now a company that serves China and for China.

01:06:01.000 The Chinese Communist Party is the greatest enemy of America and the American way of life. 0.99

01:06:05.000 And I use that word, enemy, intentionally.

01:06:10.000 They do not share our values.

01:06:12.000 They have a 1.3 billion person population and growing.

01:06:16.000 They're going to take Taiwan at any moment. 0.99

01:06:18.000 And unfortunately, the consultant class and ruling class in our country has gotten to official partnership with the Chinese Communist Party, the same Chinese Communist Party that harbored the creation of this virus, very, very likely at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, almost certainly at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not some sort of bat soup that was created in the Himalayan mountains or whatever nonsense that they were spewing. 0.82

01:06:39.000 And so, yeah, I mean, this is an important question, though, because the American business elite, they're perfectly happy with the cheap capital flows from China, while it makes America at a significant disadvantage when it actually destroys American manufacturing.

01:06:53.000 And, you know, you guys have seen a good resurgence of American manufacturing here in South Carolina.

01:06:59.000 But one of the main reasons why we have a supply chain issue in our country right now is that we have not decided to be self-sufficient.

01:07:07.000 Now, puritanical free market people, they will say, oh, no, self-sufficiency is bad because we want cheaper goods and products from China.

01:07:14.000 Price is not everything, everybody.

01:07:16.000 Quality also matters too.

01:07:17.000 Do you notice that the stuff we get from China doesn't last as long?

01:07:21.000 You don't treasure it, you don't value it as much.

01:07:23.000 But when you have made in American products, it's made with better, it's better with higher quality labor and more intentional labor, better products, and it's actually built to last.

01:07:31.000 It's not just the price of something, but also it's the security around it as well.

01:07:35.000 What I think needs to be a new movement, regardless of political affiliation, is we need to make a list.

01:07:40.000 We need to make a list of stuff that we are never going to be allowed to make anywhere else than a majority in America.

01:07:45.000 How about this?

01:07:45.000 Vitamin C, penicillin, critical pharmaceuticals, toilet paper.

01:07:51.000 Believe it or not, toilet paper is made all across the world and out here.

01:07:54.000 And so, but what has happened, though, it's actually damaged our national security.

01:08:00.000 You guys, have you ever seen, have you seen car sales right now?

01:08:03.000 Have you tried to buy a car lately and why it's so expensive?

01:08:05.000 You want to know why?

01:08:06.000 It's because the two major places that you actually get a chip to actually go into a car is in Japan, not China.

01:08:13.000 Both of them mysteriously burnt down last year.

01:08:16.000 And there's a massive chip shortage right now.

01:08:19.000 America is the wealthiest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.

01:08:22.000 We need to become a self-sufficient nation, though.

01:08:24.000 We need to make things here.

01:08:26.000 We need to make them proudly.

01:08:27.000 And we need to...

01:08:32.000 And this goes to what actually makes a nation strong, which is a flourishing middle class.

01:08:38.000 If you do not have a strong middle class, then your country falls apart.

01:08:42.000 It is the golden mean that matters.

01:08:44.000 It truly does.

01:08:45.000 And so I just want to say that as far as our dependence on China, this is going to be one of our generation's greatest struggles.

01:08:51.000 It's going to be one of our most important battles.

01:08:54.000 They're hacking our cyber grid.

01:08:56.000 They're coming into our nation at a rapid pace. 0.98

01:08:58.000 And what I mean by that, they're buying up farmland.

01:09:00.000 They're buying up critical infrastructure.

01:09:02.000 The Chinese Communist Party wants world domination, and only American can stop. 0.93

01:09:06.000 Only America can stop them.

01:09:07.000 So thank you so much.

01:09:13.000 Good evening, Charlie.

01:09:15.000 This is a question about immigration, specifically your stance on a certain policy.

01:09:19.000 I know your stance has pretty much changed on immigration, especially since this last census.

01:09:25.000 But this policy that you have been for in the past, called the EB5 Visa Program, has been rife with money laundering and fraud.

01:09:33.000 And lots of investigations have been brought about by the SEC.

01:09:37.000 I'm wondering if you are still pro EB5 visas and if you have changed your mind on it at all.

01:09:44.000 Absolutely not.

01:09:44.000 No, we need to put our graduates first, especially our own citizens first.

01:09:49.000 And I said that we should have a complete moratorium in immigration, especially after the pandemic. 0.99

01:09:54.000 And here's my thought process on this.

01:09:56.000 All of you guys are going into debt.

01:09:57.000 Now, EB5, you have to remind me, that's not college graduates, right?

01:10:00.000 That's purchasing, right?

01:10:00.000 No, it's 500K or more.

01:10:02.000 That's right.

01:10:03.000 That's right.

01:10:04.000 So, no, I'm totally against it.

01:10:05.000 It's right, especially from the Chinese issue that I just talked about, right?

01:10:08.000 So let me add, and I've dug really deep into this.

01:10:11.000 So the EB5 visa is supported by certain politicians in the state and other places.

01:10:16.000 Seems like a great idea.

01:10:17.000 Here's how it works.

01:10:18.000 You could be a foreign national and you come in with a bunch of money and you invest it into America. 0.74

01:10:22.000 And as long as you employ, what, 10 people or $500,000, you get a visa, right?

01:10:26.000 Well, here's the problem, is all of a sudden you get massive amounts of people from adversarial nations like China coming in and buying up billions of dollars of critical infrastructure.

01:10:35.000 And next thing you know, all of a sudden, hotels, manufacturing plants, and assembly lines are actually in America, but they're owned by foreign adversaries.

01:10:44.000 So no, I think we need a total timeout and a cooling off period with this stuff.

01:10:48.000 And that's on the EB5 issue.

01:10:49.000 But let me talk about the other issue, which is the H-1B issue, which is that for those of you that are in college right now and you're going into debt, we have a moral obligation to make sure you are employed and you have a strong wage before we all of a sudden say we want to bring in foreign workers to try to undercut you in the jobs that you're trying to get to. 0.80

01:11:05.000 You guys deserve, because we've invested in you as our countrymen, a chance to get employed here.

01:11:11.000 And that's just part of what the social contract is all about.

01:11:14.000 So happy to go into that deeper and thanks for being here tonight.

01:11:16.000 So thank you.

01:11:22.000 So about a week or so ago, one of our friends from church got COVID and he was really sick and he was coughing like really bad and he was coughing up blood and stuff.

01:11:31.000 And the hospital he went to wouldn't even give him cough medicine.

01:11:35.000 So what are we supposed to do to stand up against big pharma and the government when they're like making antibodies and all these different options that really work?

01:11:46.000 What are we supposed to do when they're taking those away and needlessly harming people?

01:11:50.000 Yeah, I'm not going to give medical advice to people.

01:11:52.000 I don't do that.

01:11:53.000 I just tell you what's available and what's working.

01:11:55.000 I could tell you that in Arizona where we are, we know where all the monoclonal antibody treatment centers are.

01:12:00.000 We know the doctors that do ozone therapy and IV treatment therapy that are able to give vitamin D infusions, vitamin C infusions.

01:12:08.000 Again, I'm not saying this from a medical perspective.

01:12:10.000 You could just go read this stuff online.

01:12:12.000 Azithromycin, aspirin, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin.

01:12:17.000 I try to not generalize, but there have been a disturbing amount of stories about how hospitals have not been administering some of these treatments.

01:12:25.000 And I think you just talked about some of those issues lately.

01:12:28.000 But you guys should all make the best decision as you see fit in that capacity.

01:12:32.000 I would just encourage all of you to be made aware in your local area of maybe some of these other treatment centers, especially monoclonal antibodies.

01:12:40.000 Monoclonal antibodies is white blood cell treatment that has been proven to be very, very effective with certain parts of the population.

01:12:48.000 So at least for us in Arizona, we know where all those are.

01:12:50.000 But I'm very careful not to tell people ever what to do with their medical decisions.

01:12:54.000 It's not my role.

01:12:55.000 I don't ever want it to be my role.

01:12:57.000 I just tell you what's happening and what's available there.

01:12:59.000 And I think if any person starts to tell you what to do with your body and with your medical decisions, I think it's wrong.

01:13:04.000 I think it's terrible.

01:13:05.000 And I think it's disingenuous.

01:13:06.000 So thank you.

01:13:12.000 Last question.

01:13:13.000 Last question of the night.

01:13:15.000 I got in a good time.

01:13:17.000 Hey, Charlie, hope you're doing well.

01:13:19.000 My name is Noah Seitz.

01:13:20.000 I'm a freshman here at Clemson.

01:13:22.000 And so the question I want to ask, it stems from some research I've done, reading Wall Street Journal and some other articles, essentially talking about how the Federal Reserve is about to start combating inflation and that Starbucks is planning in the summer of 2022 to raise their minimum wage to $15.

01:13:42.000 And so my question to you, I know obviously a very high blanket minimum wage nationally isn't a good thing because obviously it costs more to live in New York than it does here in South Carolina.

01:13:54.000 But do you think it would be beneficial after all these years of having the same minimum wage?

01:14:00.000 Do you think it would be beneficial for areas like here in South Carolina to increase that minimum wage at all?

01:14:07.000 Probably not, especially as we're seeing an inflation cycle right now.

01:14:11.000 And wages are going up, but the prices, the price of goods, are going up so dramatically right now.

01:14:16.000 And there is a direct correlation with arbitrarily raising the minimum wage and higher prices.

01:14:21.000 Here's what I will say, though.

01:14:22.000 I do think that workers need to be able to keep more of their money, and we have a moral obligation for that.

01:14:26.000 All of you that have jobs, you guys pay a FICA tax.

01:14:29.000 You guys know what I'm talking about, 8% or whatever, 7.5% to FICA.

01:14:32.000 I think that the conservative movement should say we want to get rid of FICA for anyone earning $100,000 or less.

01:14:38.000 That would be the effective same thing.

01:14:39.000 That would be a 6% bump in the wage without actually having to put the burden on employers.

01:14:44.000 That makes sense.

01:14:45.000 So I agree with you.

01:14:45.000 I want to put more money in workers' pockets.

01:14:47.000 I think it's incredibly important.

01:14:48.000 Let's start with doing it by saying you don't have to pay 6% of your hourly wages to some sort of distant off Social Security trust fund when you're 24 years old and you could barely make ends meet.

01:15:01.000 I'll finish with this with the minimum wage thing.

01:15:04.000 With the minimum wage thing, the Congressional Budget Office did a huge study that showed that it would cost millions of jobs nationwide.

01:15:11.000 And we see that in New York.

01:15:12.000 We see that in Seattle and Portland.

01:15:13.000 Now, you might be able to get me to agree to a minor minimum wage adjustment regionally if we were not in the midst of a massive inflation cycle, right?

01:15:21.000 If all of a sudden we had full employment.

01:15:24.000 None of those things are happening right now.

01:15:25.000 If you guys try to eat out lately, there's a labor shortage across the country, the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetime, not to mention the price of goods are going up dramatically.

01:15:34.000 So thank you for your question.

01:15:35.000 Very thoughtful.

01:15:35.000 Appreciate it.

01:15:41.000 So in closing, everybody, I just want to say, first of all, thank you guys for sitting through all that.

01:15:46.000 It's amazing.

01:15:47.000 This is our generation.

01:15:48.000 It's our opportunity to do something about this.

01:15:51.000 And it's time for us to say that we are going to apply ourselves in this sense and that you're going to be strong and courageous with your beliefs.

01:16:00.000 I know you can feel outnumbered at times, but look around you.

01:16:02.000 At this school, you already see hundreds and hundreds of people that share your values and that want to see this country go in a very specific way.

01:16:10.000 I'm going to close with two things.

01:16:11.000 Number one, if you're not yet involved with our wonderful Turning Point USA chapter, you guys have got to get involved.

01:16:16.000 It's amazing.

01:16:17.000 Also, I know a lot of you guys listen to our radio show and our podcast.

01:16:21.000 Thank you for that.

01:16:22.000 And if you guys aren't yet subscribed, we'd be blessed if you guys would consider doing that.

01:16:25.000 We work really hard on that, and this entire discussion will be rebroadcast with that.

01:16:29.000 And I'll close with this, which is that you guys, we have such an amazing gift to live in this country at this time.

01:16:35.000 It's time for us to apply ourselves, to be the optimistic, happy warriors.

01:16:40.000 And I'm telling you, our best days are ahead when I see so many young people starting to rise up, starting to think in a way where they want to do something, not just sit idly by.

01:16:50.000 Our best days are ahead, everybody, if we apply ourselves correctly.

01:16:53.000 God bless you guys.

01:16:53.000 Thanks so much for having me tonight.

01:17:01.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

01:17:02.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:17:05.000 God bless you guys.

01:17:06.000 Speak to you soon.

The Charlie Kirk Show - November 13, 2021

Reclaiming the Nation for the Next Generation—LIVE from Clemson University

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