00:00:00.000Hey everybody, should you go to college?
00:00:01.000Do we have too many people going to college?
00:00:03.000My off-the-cuff, extemporaneous remarks in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with my friend Steve Smotherman here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:12.000If you want to support us, the hardest working podcast team in the country, and our mission to reach millions of young people across the country, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:00:20.000Every time you support us at charliekirk.com/slash support, you make it easier and more likely that young people are going to come in contact with the truth.
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.
00:01:33.000Anyone has gone to one other service before this weekend that heard me speak?
00:01:36.000Wow, a lot of repeat customers, Steve.
00:01:39.000This speech will be completely and categorically different, and it will be designed towards young people and students in particular and parents.
00:01:48.000And before you roll your eyes and say, I'm not young, this applies to everyone because I'm going to be talking about a true crisis happening in our country, which is a crisis with our students, crisis on our colleges, and a crisis of the younger generation.
00:02:01.000Before I do that, there have been a couple things I have repeated that I will repeat again because they're worthy of repeating.
00:02:08.000And that is, you have a phenomenal pastor here and a morally courageous man.
00:02:15.000You have a team that has remained strong, and it's not just Pastor Steve, but it's the incredible network that he has created around him.
00:02:25.000The staff, all of you that have supported him.
00:04:24.000I know people that have died from the Chinese coronavirus.
00:04:27.000I know people that have suffered from it, but it's our reaction to it.
00:04:31.000And I will make the argument that our reaction to this virus will go down as one of the worst mistakes in American history.
00:04:41.000The closure of schools, businesses, mental health, suicide.
00:04:47.000And then it only has played further into so many underlying troubling trends that already exist with students and young people in this country.
00:04:55.000And so I'm going to give you your trigger warning right now.
00:04:58.000If you're not on a university campus, you don't know what this means.
00:05:00.000And do we have any Turning Point USA students here?
00:05:57.000An average Gen Z or millennial is spending 12, 14, 16 hours a day on their screen, almost descending into a quasi-cyborg, not a human being.
00:06:07.000More young people have died from suicide because of the lockdowns than from the virus itself.
00:06:53.000If you want to be a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer, but we need more plumbers, mechanics, electricians, police officers, firefighters, entrepreneurs, people that work with their hands.
00:07:02.000College could be for you, but it's not for most people that go to college.
00:07:06.000You know what the number one reason I get when I talk to people that are going to go to college?
00:07:17.000To go borrow money you don't have, to study things that don't matter, to go find jobs that don't exist.
00:07:21.000For parents to go play Russian roulette with their kids' values.
00:07:24.000Now, and baked into a lot of first-generation Americans, of which I know there are a lot of people in this room, the belief is college entrance to success, right?
00:07:32.000That is the formula that is sold to you.
00:07:43.000It hurts their confidence, hurts them financially, and they're kind of in this strange middle ground where they're not sure what to do next.
00:07:52.000We have more people going to college than ever before.
00:07:54.000It's dipped down a little bit because of the virus.
00:07:57.000And the average student loan debt borrower in this country is $32,000 per borrower, not graduate.
00:08:05.000Well, a generation that is in debt, that did everything they were told to do, it's very easy to command and control.
00:08:32.000Well, when you graduate tens of millions of people from college with no skills, filled with bad ideas, and send them to urban areas across the country, Denver, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and they rent and not own property, renting, so they're spending all their money on something that doesn't build equity.
00:08:50.000They're not getting married largely because of the damage.
00:08:53.000And here's another trigger warning for you.
00:08:55.000The damage of the third wave feminist movement, which is destroying relations between men and women in this country.
00:11:22.000And there's plenty of wisdom to be learned intergenerationally.
00:11:25.000In fact, one of the things I'm going to talk about is honoring your mother and father and the important, the true, incredible biblical wisdom behind that.
00:11:34.000It's the only commandment in the Ten Commandments that comes with a promise so that you might live long and prosper in the land of which you are in.
00:11:41.000It's the only Ten Commandments that gives you, only the Ten Commandments that gives you a specific promise.
00:12:06.000There's a great quote at the Harvard Law School, and you're walking down it makes you stop when you're probably going to remove it because that's what happens now.
00:12:13.000It's way too much wisdom for a college.
00:12:16.000It says, The law is the wise restraint that keeps men free.
00:12:22.000Think about how contradicting that yet true that statement is.
00:12:48.000Instead, the idea of freedom that we've told millennials in Gen Z, what I'm right on the precipice of it, is put whatever substance you want in your body whenever you want to do it.
00:12:57.000Do whatever you want morally, however you want to do it.
00:12:59.000Spend a limited time on your phone or your computer, and that will bring you to a place of peace and happiness.
00:13:19.000So that comes from the top down, from the bottom up, from young people out there.
00:13:22.000I have some very specific pieces of advice.
00:13:25.000And so the first thing is this: I am completely understanding of the lockdown criticism, of saying that it's difficult to find work, what's happening in college.
00:13:42.000But if I have to hear a continued narrative from still the most blessed generation in American history about how oppressed you are, I'm going to lose it.
00:13:56.000Every generation has different challenges.
00:13:58.000The challenge for this generation is they have not been taught American values and the country locked down.
00:14:05.000The challenge of the generation a couple prior, the greatest generation, is you got to go serve in a war and storm Normandy Beach and you're going to learn American values.
00:14:14.000Every generation has different challenges.
00:14:17.000And what is being taught in our colleges is we train kids for the oppression Olympics.
00:14:24.000So you're looking at the ultimate oppressor.
00:14:28.000I'm white, a man, heterosexual, and Christian.
00:14:37.000You are looking at what they consider to be the most personification of an oppressor in this country.
00:14:47.000And then there's a hierarchy of this, and any of you on college campuses have seen this in one way or the other, that there's a thing that says, I have my truth.
00:16:16.000So wisdom, we find there's a whole book dedicated to wisdom, Proverbs.
00:16:21.000which I tell every young person out there, if you just want to recenter your life and reorient your life, just spend a whole month in Proverbs and apply what it says to your life, truly.
00:16:30.000And we have all these self-help books, and I think some of them are fine, but most of them are this cacophony of self-indulgence and you being the center of the universe.
00:16:41.000The moment that you realize that you actually might be the biggest thing that needs change, not the world around you, it's actually a very releasing feeling.
00:16:52.000Here's another rule, another piece of wisdom.
00:16:54.000If you are more concerned with the world around you, climate change, polar bears disappearing, which is not true, by the way, polar bears are multiplying.
00:17:03.000The polar bears had a great decade, unlike what I have a whole speech on polar bears.
00:19:12.000It's a very bad way to make consequential decisions.
00:19:16.000So we have an entire public policy conversation and an entire educational program towards young people that is dedicated on them looks externally and not internally.
00:19:28.000And I'm all for changing things externally.
00:21:21.000Maybe you need to take a deep breath and to get a couple courses done at a local community college.
00:21:26.000But what ends up happening is when you borrow a bunch of money and study really bad ideas and you go study North African migratory bird studies or South African lesbian poetry and you wonder why you can't find a job, a politician who walks on stage and says, the reason you can't find a job, South American lesbian poet, whatever.
00:21:51.000The reason you can't find a job might be because of the system that actually was a predator towards that young person.
00:21:58.000The way that higher education works right now is a predator towards middle-class families, and minority families are falling victim at this.
00:22:05.000First-generation minority families, specifically Hispanic families, are being fed a lie.
00:22:48.000And so when the university has basically taken over the entire country, so we send our kids voluntarily, and there's plenty of colleges that do a good job.
00:25:06.000They're the people, many of whom in our audience right now, kept the economy going while the Zoom and Skype class ordered them their packages the last year.
00:25:15.000The Zoom and Skype class are the ones that call them for the Uber and demand it in two seconds or less.
00:25:22.000The Zoom and Skype class are the ones that blitz through the airport and don't say anything to the people that are bringing the bags on and off the plane, the people that are serving them their food.
00:25:31.000The muscular class keeps us together, yet they are the least respected, most condemned, most made fun of portion of American society.
00:25:40.000And all of a sudden, a guy in politics comes and starts to give a little bit of voice to the muscular class, just a little bit, and everyone loses their mind as if, no, they can't have a voice.
00:28:50.000Might give you a skill, probably won't.
00:28:52.000And that goes to a deeper problem in American society, which is, by definition, unbiblical, which is that your value is based on accreditation.
00:29:03.000That I went through a certain sequence of schools or I went to a certain country club.
00:30:33.000There is nothing of long-term wisdom or value of 12 hours of screen time a day, of 30 minutes of flipping through TikTok for another lip-syncing video.
00:30:41.000That's not going to bring you to be a better person.
00:30:57.000In Proverbs, it says, wisdom begins at the fear of the Lord.
00:31:01.000So for students out there, it's so tempting to want to act as if the Bible, God, Jesus, all that stuff's a bunch of thousand-year-old mythology.
00:33:04.000Grace is that when you die and you face your creator and they have a list of everything wrong you've ever done, ever, private and public, omniscient, omnipotent, all of it.
00:34:01.000And there is a massive effort to try to silence me and everything I just talked about through social media.
00:34:06.000There's one way that can push back against it, which is kind of circumvent it, is when people on their own individual devices, on the podcast apps, actually subscribe.