00:00:11.000So if you like this show and you have some extra capital to deploy and you want to give back, go to charliekirk.com/slash support and become a partner with us.
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00:00:24.000Donna, charliekirk.com slash support from Georgia.
00:01:14.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:41.000I speak at a lot of different campuses.
00:01:43.000We are at University of Vermont and University of Oregon.
00:01:46.000Definitely did not receive this kind of welcome.
00:01:49.000This is actually the first time we're speaking on a college campus in like two years.
00:01:55.000And that's not to say we're not going to campuses.
00:01:58.000We 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.
00:02:05.000But I just want to thank the administration truly for allowing this to happen here.
00:02:09.000It says a lot about this great institution.
00:02:53.000I love the South, and I think it's super unfair that there's this kind of constant war on the American South.
00:02:59.000And in many different ways, from the removal of monuments to just kind of this.
00:03:04.000And 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.
00:03:12.000Now, 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.
00:03:27.000And it's almost like we're better than you, you know, kind of get out of our way.
00:03:35.000And I think it's honestly evil and awful.
00:03:38.000And 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.
00:03:49.000And this is something that I always challenge people.
00:03:52.000They say, oh, yeah, you know what's the problem with the country?
00:03:54.000The problem is Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina.
00:03:58.000And 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.
00:04:10.000And you're in one of those states right now.
00:04:13.000And so you look at our amazing veterans and the people serving in the military.
00:04:23.000They're from a portion of the country that gets kind of a majority of all the condemnation for whatever possible reason.
00:05:10.000And I think it's so wrong to say, you know what, we are now going to impose our values.
00:05:13.000And 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.
00:05:22.000And I'm always struck in the Bible, one of my favorite things in the Bible is this kind of refrain of remember.
00:05:32.000And 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.
00:05:41.000There is this constant emphasis on remembrance and on not forgetting what happened before you.
00:05:47.000And 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.
00:05:54.000They 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.
00:06:02.000And maybe that was part of the healing process to keep our nation together.
00:06:05.000And 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?
00:06:12.000You guys shouldn't put up with it, quite honestly.
00:06:14.000And 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.
00:06:35.000But you guys obviously have a different taste, obviously, here.
00:06:38.000Don't impose it on a different part of the country, the world.
00:06:41.000When you have a big country and a diverse country, you're going to have to rely on citizen government and self-government rule.
00:06:49.000And 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.
00:07:02.000And 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.
00:07:09.000I live in Phoenix, Arizona now, which is not part of the South.
00:07:12.000They 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.
00:07:24.000No, 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.
00:07:46.000Anyone wants to talk about it tonight?
00:07:48.000Happy to talk about American history or all these sorts of different things.
00:07:51.000But over the last year and a half, there has been an overemphasis on the racial aspect of American political conversation.
00:07:59.000And kind of within that came this teaching of critical race theory, diversity, equity, inclusion, kind of the whole Wokestan kind of belief system.
00:08:09.000And we're going to dive into what all that stuff means.
00:08:11.000But very simply, we need to do a much better job of explaining exactly the significance of these ideas.
00:08:18.000So critical race theory is an academic theory that started in Yale and Columbia by Herbert Marcuse, came from the Frankfurt School in Germany.
00:08:26.000And these ideas have been around for a couple decades.
00:08:28.000But in the last year and a half, they've been accelerating at a rapid pace.
00:08:33.000And so some people accuse us of trying to expose this and push back against this as saying, Charlie, it doesn't exist in America.
00:09:17.000Dividing people based on the color of their skin should be completely and totally rejected.
00:09:22.000Instead, the new era, the woke movement, says we now need to divide people based on the color of their skin.
00:09:28.000At 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.
00:09:36.000In Georgia public schools, it has now been revealed that black sixth graders go to one classroom, white sixth graders go to another classroom.
00:09:45.000Regardless of your political affiliation, we should find this repulsive.
00:09:48.000This 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.
00:10:05.000The emphasis on a skin color, I believe, creates racism where it does not exist.
00:10:11.000Instead, we should be looking at the soul, the spirit, and the character of people.
00:10:17.000And so this has real significant implications.
00:10:21.000And again, I just want to thank Clemson.
00:10:24.000This 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.
00:10:32.000Instead, it's completely kind of a silencing and chilling effect.
00:10:36.000And 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.
00:10:48.000And segregating children in the Georgia public schools, which is what's happening right now, is wrong again.
00:10:56.000Whether it's not just graduation ceremonies, it's not just dormitories.
00:11:00.000But also, I'll give you another example.
00:11:02.000United 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.
00:11:19.000And this emphasis on diversity for diversity's sake comes with a price.
00:11:25.000And 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.
00:11:36.000And 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.
00:12:01.000But you've kind of become peers as I'm in my late 20s, and you're now kind of entering formal adulthood.
00:12:07.000And 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.
00:12:21.000In fact, we used to call those people racists that would do that.
00:12:24.000And the excuse is always given: well, Charlie, we just need to have a conversation on race.
00:12:59.000Are you willing to improve your character?
00:13:01.000Instead, 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.
00:13:10.000It's disempowering more than it is empowering.
00:13:13.000And 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?
00:13:25.000Or are we actually trying to harbor new resentment and new forms of racism?
00:13:29.000And so now that I'm actually on a college campus, I can say this to our generation, which is really important.
00:13:35.000Regardless 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.
00:14:56.000But are we going to re-embrace the beauty and the gift that we've been given in the United States of America?
00:15:03.000Or 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?
00:15:14.000Now, 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.
00:15:31.000Now, that's not to say you shouldn't point out problems and not to say that you shouldn't be involved in fixing them.
00:15:36.000But make no mistake, living in this nation is a gift from the Lord.
00:15:39.000It is the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.
00:15:46.000And 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.
00:15:56.000When 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.
00:16:08.000And 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.
00:16:18.000I'm really kind of bored with some of the political arguments, to be perfectly honest, because it kind of needs to transcend this.
00:16:23.000It'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.
00:16:35.000And it is right now, what we are experiencing is a dynamic of the ruling class versus the citizen.
00:16:49.000The people that run the country are a completely different group of people than who make the country run.
00:16:55.000Those are two different groups of people.
00:16:57.000The 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.
00:17:06.000The 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.
00:17:13.000They have never been more disconnected from the American ruling class.
00:17:19.000Well, 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.
00:17:30.000It 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.
00:17:43.000And 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.
00:17:57.000And are we going to be willing to preserve things that are good and true and beautiful?
00:18:02.000In fact, preserve what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the laws of nature and nature's God.
00:18:09.000And so people ask me all the time, they say, Charlie, what does that mean for our generation?
00:18:13.000This 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?
00:18:25.000And for many people, they haven't thought that deeply about it.
00:18:28.000But public polling shows us that our generation is more dissatisfied with the current state of affairs.
00:18:34.000In fact, there is an admission that we believe that we are inheriting something worse than our parents had.
00:18:39.000Now, instead of just kind of protesting about it, the question should be, what are we actually going to do about it substantively?
00:19:23.000People don't, again, I get the sparing applause.
00:19:27.000Our society would benefit and you will benefit too.
00:19:30.000Now, it is harder than ever to have children in America.
00:19:33.000In the 1980s, you used to be able to support a family of four on 36 weeks of labor a year.
00:19:41.000Now it takes 53 weeks of labor a year to support a family of four, which forces what?
00:19:46.000It 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.
00:19:57.000You should be able to raise a family on a single income in America.
00:20:01.000You should be able to raise a family on one income.
00:20:05.000And by the way, Not everyone on the right agrees with me.
00:20:11.000This is something where all of a sudden you start to see a little bit of fault lines.
00:20:14.000People say, Charlie, just cut the taxes, deregulate the markets.
00:20:18.000Who cares if it's more expensive to have children?
00:20:20.000What's important is corporate profits.
00:20:23.000I say, I love free markets because they serve people.
00:20:26.000And 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?
00:20:46.000In fact, we should say, if you do not have strong families, the entire nation crumbles.
00:20:51.000The 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.
00:20:58.00043% of American children grow up without a single two parents stably in the home.
00:21:05.000Do you know it's the highest rate in the world?
00:21:07.000Now, 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?
00:21:16.000Now, I always have to qualify this because I get lots of angry emails.
00:21:38.000You can yell and shout at me about that.
00:21:40.000The 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.
00:21:52.000Now, the reason, though, is exactly in the question.
00:21:55.000Why 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?
00:22:07.000Most of it is single motherhood, not exclusively, though.
00:22:10.000And the answer is because we're so wealthy, because we can afford to divorce.
00:22:41.000There's plenty of examples of abuse and adultery and treachery.
00:22:45.000But 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.
00:22:52.000Is that a good thing for the type of nation we want to live in?
00:22:56.000And 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?
00:23:05.000And 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.
00:23:12.000So I'm looking at everyone in the audience right now.
00:23:15.000It 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.
00:23:24.000The number one excuse it is to have lots of children in America, the number one excuse people give is financial.
00:23:31.000You know, I'll have one of each, like they're picking out tiling or something, you know, in the kitchen.
00:23:36.000I'm not joking as if that's like the person should be accused of it.
00:23:39.000I just think it's kind of a funny answer for people to give.
00:23:42.000Instead, 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?
00:23:59.000Because we have the least married generation in American history.
00:24:02.000Millennials are the least married generation in American history.
00:24:06.000Now, millennials say that they don't want to get married because it's too expensive or they can't find a significant other.
00:24:12.000I'm going to get into dating advice and stuff for all of you guys, which everyone always pays super attention when I say that.
00:24:18.000And everyone like sits up in their chair.
00:24:19.000They're like, ooh, I can't wait to hear.
00:24:26.000But 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?
00:25:01.000I'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?
00:25:44.000I 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.
00:26:03.000So the Constitution is the greatest political document ever written in the history of the world.
00:26:07.000It's the longest lasting Constitution in the history of the planet.
00:26:11.000And it's longest lasting for a reason.
00:26:14.000And 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.
00:26:24.000They believed that human beings were nasty, brutish, and short to each other.
00:26:28.000Put simply, they believed human nature was naturally sinful.
00:26:42.000I 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.
00:26:47.000I'll use two examples, one recent and one that's not so recent.
00:27:15.000The second one is this, about how dark the human soul can become, okay?
00:27:20.000And everyone will agree at this, regardless, and you have different reasons as to why that is.
00:27:23.000But recently in Philadelphia, this should have been the number one news story on the planet, by the way.
00:27:28.000It's our generation's Kitty Genovese story, which most people don't know who Kitty Genovese was.
00:27:32.000But 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.
00:27:40.000Well, this is our generation's equivalent of this.
00:27:42.000In 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.
00:27:50.000For 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.
00:27:59.000People filmed it for TikTok, Instagram, and I don't know, future use and refused to intercede or do anything about it.
00:30:01.000Now, John Locke, who was the main inspiration of the American founding, he took somewhat of a Hobbesian view, but his own.
00:30:08.000He believed human beings were a blank slate.
00:30:10.000He believes that it could go either way based on social circumstances.
00:30:13.000And 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.
00:30:19.000But the founding fathers studied all this.
00:30:21.000They 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?
00:30:33.000Is 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.
00:30:44.000If 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?
00:30:51.000Write the Constitution, write the system.
00:31:14.000We have a date where we declared our values that are just as true then as they are now.
00:31:19.000When 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.
00:31:31.000That is a statement that is true then as is true today.
00:31:36.000And the view of human nature, though, the founders took was, hold on a second, we're not going to try to create utopia.
00:31:45.000Now, this is what I have to tell every college audience.
00:31:47.000You 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.
00:31:59.000The founding fathers said, okay, we're not going to create perfection.
00:32:02.000Let's create something that's really hard to mess up.
00:32:05.000That'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.
00:32:47.000The question is, did it talk about things that are eternal and true and things that do not change?
00:32:52.000And 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?
00:32:58.000And the founders answered that question by one that protects your rights, that has a check and balance on your own desire to dominate.
00:33:07.000And 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.
00:33:17.000And the best example of a person that has basically removed himself from the check and balance of the founding fathers is Anthony Fauci.
00:33:38.000You did not show up to the voting booth and say, yes or no, I think he should have this kind of power.
00:33:43.000It'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.
00:33:57.000Where the Constitution, the power of the Constitution is in you.
00:34:00.000It emphasizes consent and your ability to do something about it.
00:34:06.000And 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.
00:34:24.000The Constitution is one that recognizes human beings for their worth, regardless of skin color.
00:34:29.000Not tribes, not how you look, not on some sort of grievance political issue.
00:34:34.000Instead, it's you're the same sort of thing.
00:34:39.000You have a soul and you deserve dignity.
00:34:42.000And it's a promise of rights and freedom.
00:34:44.000And 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.
00:34:52.000That's something that people aren't always comfortable with, by the way.
00:34:54.000Because when you have liberty, you will have disparate outcomes.
00:34:57.000If I gave everyone here $100 and I'd say, come back in a week, some of you would be $100 in debt.
00:35:37.000And he's, for those that don't know, Dennis Prager, he's terrific.
00:35:40.000And I'm going to give you some life advice that has blessed me.
00:35:45.000If you are judging how happy you are based on how much fun you are having, you are going to be a miserable person.
00:35:52.000Because not every moment of your life is going to be fun.
00:35:55.000In fact, very little of your life will something be called fun.
00:35:58.000Now, in college, it doesn't kick in yet because everything, it's kind of outdoing oneself, right?
00:36:06.000But eventually, for you seniors in the room, it's kicked in a little bit.
00:36:10.000Kind 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.
00:36:40.000And if you look at a couple things, it's the expectations of what you think comes next that matters a lot.
00:36:47.000Keeping 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.
00:37:00.000Are you thankful for what you have around you?
00:37:04.000I am afraid we have raised and are raising the least thankful generation in American history.
00:37:12.000Now, some people say, thankful to who?
00:38:21.000The 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.
00:39:08.000That 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.
00:39:23.000And 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.
00:39:33.000That self-control is far more important than the self-esteem movement.
00:41:25.000Now, what is the significance of that?
00:41:28.000Women want to be with men who are able to control themselves.
00:41:36.000Women want to be with men that are able to control themselves.
00:41:40.000And a lot of men are like, what are you talking about?
00:41:43.000Women, 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.
00:41:54.000Instead, 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.
00:42:03.000Which 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.
00:42:18.000Because 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.
00:43:25.000I say, Charlie, and that's not to say you should discount trying to find a job and all of that.
00:43:29.000But find something where it enriches your soul the more you do it.
00:43:34.000And for some people, it's going to be following your skill, not your passion.
00:43:37.000Because sometimes your skill can lead you to that because when you get good at something, you want to keep on following it.
00:43:41.000But 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.
00:44:03.000I'm not going to go out with that group of friends.
00:44:04.000And that's another piece of advice for whatever it's worth.
00:44:07.000Pick friends that make you a better version of who you are.
00:44:10.000You are the combined average of the five people you spend the most time with.
00:44:16.000And 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.
00:44:29.000It's understanding and managing your expectations.
00:44:31.000And then finally, it's pursuing things that objectively matter.
00:45:58.000That's not an exhaustive list, but let's go through those three, right?
00:46:01.000Are 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?
00:46:11.000That's the one that is going to create the happiest and quite honestly, most joyful citizenry.
00:46:16.000And now, some of you might say, Charlie, why are you emphasizing happiness?
00:46:19.000I'll tell you, it's the most miserable generation in American history.
00:46:23.000It is the most suicidal, the most drug-addicted, the most directionless.
00:46:28.000So I'm going to spend time talking to our target generation about what it's like to live a meaningful life.
00:46:34.000And the most lonely generation, by the way, in American history, the least married generation in American history.
00:46:39.000But here's the thing: meaningful things are hard things.
00:46:44.000Meaningful things usually don't come from logging onto a website or flipping through your Instagram feed.
00:46:50.000Meaningful things take sacrifice and they take work.
00:46:55.000Meaningful 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.
00:47:08.000Instead, meaningful things take you to prioritize something that is good over something that feels good.
00:48:14.000And 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?
00:49:17.000But understand when you're defending a market-based system, that doesn't mean you have to defend everything that's in America today.
00:49:24.000Because we have far from a market-based system in a lot of different parts of American life.
00:49:28.000Whether 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.
00:49:40.000Now, I'm not going to take a stance on a vaccine.
00:49:41.000If you listen to my podcast, you know plenty of this.
00:49:43.000But no one should be fired from their job for not wanting to take a vaccine.
00:49:46.000No one should be fired from their job today.
00:49:57.000And 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.
00:50:14.000I 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.
00:50:22.000And that's what I talked about tonight is, hey, do you think human beings are naturally good or naturally bad?
00:50:29.000Because if you think human beings are naturally good, then yeah, you could believe in communism for sure.
00:50:33.000That people will endlessly share stuff that they will not envy, that they will not want to steal, that they will not want to take.
00:50:39.000But 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.
00:51:12.000I'm a senior at USC Upstate getting ready to go in the medical field.
00:51:16.000And I, for one, am a proponent of medical freedom.
00:51:19.000And I know many nursing students and nurses who are.
00:51:22.000And 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.
00:51:44.000So many people in the medical field are losing their jobs right now.
00:51:46.000In 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.
00:51:56.000And 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.
00:52:08.000And I think you've already learned that, right?
00:52:10.000Is that for anyone out here that feels compelled to speak out, it might cost you something.
00:52:16.000It might cost you a membership to a country club, or it might cost you a best friend.
00:52:21.000It might cost you being in a fraternity or sorority.
00:52:27.000The 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.
00:52:37.000I 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.
00:53:04.000I mean, that's one of the great smears in modern America, okay?
00:53:08.000Jimmy Carter brought ivermectin to Africa and cured millions of people of river blindness.
00:53:13.000Ivermectin won a Nobel Prize for treatment with humans a couple years ago.
00:53:18.000Okay, so let's just take a step back before we get into all of this kind of, you know, just ridiculously tribal conversation.
00:53:27.000And this is one of the most disappointing things when it comes to the medical thing.
00:53:30.000And I'll finish with this, which is it should have been a place where other ideas were entertained and other perspectives were allowed.
00:53:38.000Instead, it became a very dogmatic conversation very quickly.
00:53:44.000And yeah, and they shut you up and through arguments of authority.
00:53:47.000So 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.
00:54:06.000So 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.
00:54:19.000So 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.
00:54:26.000But then you have ANCAPs like, what's his name?
00:54:30.000Michael, I forget his full name, but ANCAPs will say that we should abolish the police because they infringe on our rights.
00:54:36.000Like 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.
00:54:44.000So I wonder what your rebuttal is to ANCAPs that say things like that.
00:55:29.000The police are the law enforcement of the country.
00:55:32.000They are the protectors of the law for good reason.
00:55:36.000And so I really am not sure how to even begin with that argument.
00:55:39.000So are you, I'm not sure if you're an anarcho-capitalist or not, but yeah, you're not.
00:55:43.000I've heard arguments like these, and I was wondering about your specific rebuttal.
00:55:47.000I'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.
00:55:59.000And they say that's a reason for abolishing the police.
00:56:02.000You 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.
00:56:10.000Yeah, I'm not really sure how to even begin with some of that.
00:56:14.000So, 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.
00:56:23.000We should stand with our police officers 100%.
00:56:26.000And the war on police is making America profoundly more dangerous.
00:56:40.000First, I like to say I'm glad to be here.
00:56:42.000My daughters and I came all the way from Baltimore, Maryland to see you.
00:56:51.000And 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?
00:57:08.000Yeah, happy to talk about Thomas Jefferson.
00:57:19.000That's one thing we all have in common.
00:57:20.000We all enter a world we did not create.
00:57:22.000When 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.
00:57:36.000Number 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.
00:57:48.000Number 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.
00:57:58.000Number three, inspired by the Declaration of Independence, Vermont abolished slavery, the first state to do so in 1777.
00:58:06.000And 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.
00:58:18.000Thomas 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.
00:58:59.000Well, Thomas Jefferson started a movement of human freedom, human equality.
00:59:03.000Nine 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.
00:59:17.000Not 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.
00:59:26.000And 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.
00:59:36.000But 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.
00:59:44.000Instead, say, hey, that guy's really complicated.
00:59:50.000And he got some things terribly wrong.
00:59:52.000And 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.
01:00:11.000And if you do not know your history, good luck planning your future.
01:00:54.000And so we've partnered with SecondVote, secondvote.com.
01:01:00.000And 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.
01:01:12.000And that may mean like giving up your Amazon Prime account.
01:01:16.000That may mean not going to Starbucks, right?
01:01:18.000But 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.
01:01:28.000Corporate 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.
01:01:40.000Coca-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.
01:01:48.000I just loved having to see the World Series, by the way, of like having to be in Atlanta.
01:04:01.000What I do, and I talk about this a lot, the 2020 election was heavily interfered with, no doubt.
01:04:07.000And 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.
01:04:21.000And 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.
01:04:29.000And that's direct election interference.
01:04:32.000Now, 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.
01:04:44.000And so Mark Zuckerberg should not be a more powerful force than the average American in our constitutional republic.
01:04:57.000And this is something, by the way, that people on the left should agree with.
01:05:01.000They always used to say, we don't want billionaires corrupting our democracy.
01:05:04.000We don't want to be living under a corporate oligarchy.
01:05:44.000I 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?
01:06:12.000They have a 1.3 billion person population and growing.
01:06:16.000They're going to take Taiwan at any moment.
01:06:18.000And 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.
01:06:39.000And 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.
01:06:53.000And, you know, you guys have seen a good resurgence of American manufacturing here in South Carolina.
01:06:59.000But 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.
01:07:07.000Now, puritanical free market people, they will say, oh, no, self-sufficiency is bad because we want cheaper goods and products from China.
01:07:17.000Do you notice that the stuff we get from China doesn't last as long?
01:07:21.000You don't treasure it, you don't value it as much.
01:07:23.000But 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.
01:07:31.000It's not just the price of something, but also it's the security around it as well.
01:07:35.000What I think needs to be a new movement, regardless of political affiliation, is we need to make a list.
01:07:40.000We need to make a list of stuff that we are never going to be allowed to make anywhere else than a majority in America.
01:10:18.000You could be a foreign national and you come in with a bunch of money and you invest it into America.
01:10:22.000And as long as you employ, what, 10 people or $500,000, you get a visa, right?
01:10:26.000Well, 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.
01:10:35.000And 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.
01:10:44.000So no, I think we need a total timeout and a cooling off period with this stuff.
01:10:49.000But 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.
01:11:05.000You guys deserve, because we've invested in you as our countrymen, a chance to get employed here.
01:11:11.000And that's just part of what the social contract is all about.
01:11:14.000So happy to go into that deeper and thanks for being here tonight.
01:11:22.000So 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.
01:11:31.000And the hospital he went to wouldn't even give him cough medicine.
01:11:35.000So 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?
01:11:46.000What are we supposed to do when they're taking those away and needlessly harming people?
01:11:50.000Yeah, I'm not going to give medical advice to people.
01:12:17.000I try to not generalize, but there have been a disturbing amount of stories about how hospitals have not been administering some of these treatments.
01:12:25.000And I think you just talked about some of those issues lately.
01:12:28.000But you guys should all make the best decision as you see fit in that capacity.
01:12:32.000I 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.
01:12:40.000Monoclonal antibodies is white blood cell treatment that has been proven to be very, very effective with certain parts of the population.
01:12:48.000So at least for us in Arizona, we know where all those are.
01:12:50.000But I'm very careful not to tell people ever what to do with their medical decisions.
01:13:22.000And 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.
01:13:42.000And 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.
01:13:54.000But do you think it would be beneficial after all these years of having the same minimum wage?
01:14:00.000Do you think it would be beneficial for areas like here in South Carolina to increase that minimum wage at all?
01:14:07.000Probably not, especially as we're seeing an inflation cycle right now.
01:14:11.000And wages are going up, but the prices, the price of goods, are going up so dramatically right now.
01:14:16.000And there is a direct correlation with arbitrarily raising the minimum wage and higher prices.
01:14:48.000Let'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.
01:15:01.000I'll finish with this with the minimum wage thing.
01:15:04.000With the minimum wage thing, the Congressional Budget Office did a huge study that showed that it would cost millions of jobs nationwide.
01:15:13.000Now, 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?
01:15:21.000If all of a sudden we had full employment.
01:15:24.000None of those things are happening right now.
01:15:25.000If 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.
01:15:48.000It's our opportunity to do something about this.
01:15:51.000And 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.
01:16:00.000I know you can feel outnumbered at times, but look around you.
01:16:02.000At 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.
01:16:22.000And if you guys aren't yet subscribed, we'd be blessed if you guys would consider doing that.
01:16:25.000We work really hard on that, and this entire discussion will be rebroadcast with that.
01:16:29.000And I'll close with this, which is that you guys, we have such an amazing gift to live in this country at this time.
01:16:35.000It's time for us to apply ourselves, to be the optimistic, happy warriors.
01:16:40.000And 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.
01:16:50.000Our best days are ahead, everybody, if we apply ourselves correctly.