The Charlie Kirk Show - January 09, 2026


The Radical Left Wants Your House and Your Children's Minds


Episode Stats


Length

37 minutes

Words per minute

171.9982

Word count

6,384

Sentence count

477

Harmful content

Misogyny

18

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, we are joined by Michelle Tandler to discuss the new tenant director in NYC, Sia Weaver, and her views on the need for more single family housing in the city.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.
00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.
00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.
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00:01:09.000 All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:11.000 I wanted to bring on Michelle Tandler. 0.96
00:01:14.000 She had a tweet that went extraordinarily viral about Mamdani's new tenant director in New York City.
00:01:22.000 She is now the head.
00:01:23.000 Her name is Sia Weaver, and she is boy, is she a peach, Blake.
00:01:28.000 She is an absolute peach. 0.96
00:01:31.000 And to help us unpack just what a peach she is, I wanted to bring in Michelle Tandler. 1.00
00:01:37.000 She has her website is notesfromthefront.com.
00:01:40.000 She is based in New York City.
00:01:42.000 She's fighting the good fight.
00:01:44.000 Michelle, welcome to the show.
00:01:45.000 Hi.
00:01:46.000 Thank you for having me.
00:01:47.000 Absolutely.
00:01:48.000 Very, very good to have you.
00:01:49.000 Your tweet was illuminative.
00:01:51.000 It was illuminating.
00:01:53.000 And it was crazy because she scrubbed her social media accounts and her crazy tweets, but you grabbed these and screenshotted them and made sure the world still had access to them.
00:02:04.000 And Blake, why don't you just set the table for why this is important?
00:02:09.000 Because there's two real competing visions right now.
00:02:12.000 So we want to talk about this.
00:02:12.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:02:14.000 Obviously, it's especially big news yesterday.
00:02:16.000 So yesterday, President Trump announces he's going to take steps to stop very large institutional investors.
00:02:22.000 BlackRock is the meme one, but there's others from owning single-family homes.
00:02:27.000 And this was a hobby horse of Charlie's.
00:02:29.000 He talked about the need.
00:02:30.000 You need ownership.
00:02:32.000 You need people to own a stake in society.
00:02:35.000 So we talked a lot about young families owning homes, getting access to those things.
00:02:39.000 Now, housing affordability is also a topic on the left.
00:02:43.000 Both sides talk about it.
00:02:44.000 And Charlie would talk about that choice, Mamdonnyism versus MAGA.
00:02:48.000 And so I think President Trump's actions are hopefully the MAGA version of this.
00:02:52.000 But we are seeing Mam Donnie is sort of the avatar for what the left is considering to do on housing.
00:03:00.000 And he has this new advocate for tenants or whatever her office is, Sia Weaver.
00:03:08.000 And she has some very radical takes of her own that I think are a good insight into what's...
00:03:15.000 Oh, it's an insight.
00:03:16.000 It's peering into the leftist mind in a very scary way.
00:03:19.000 So, Michelle, why don't you just take this away from us? 0.93
00:03:22.000 You logged a bunch of her statements.
00:03:24.000 You were very clever.
00:03:25.000 You logged all the things she'd said before they got any attention, before they could get deleted.
00:03:29.000 What were you able to find?
00:03:30.000 Yeah, I wish I had captured more.
00:03:33.000 I took these back in September, actually, when she first was sort of, I first came across her, her as a person, her Twitter account, and just saw a lot of stuff that was pretty concerning.
00:03:46.000 So I took some screenshots back in September.
00:03:48.000 I was planning to write a thread on her views on housing since she was the housing advisor for his campaign, which I thought was pretty relevant.
00:03:55.000 Housing in New York City is one of the most important topics politically.
00:04:00.000 We have a huge housing shortage.
00:04:02.000 I believe the vacancy rate is something like 1.4%.
00:04:06.000 The cost of housing is astronomical here.
00:04:09.000 And I have for a long time believed that the reason the cost of housing is so high here is because of progressive housing policies.
00:04:15.000 Things like rent control, rent stabilization, zoning restrictions, a lot of bureaucracy and red tape on building.
00:04:22.000 It's not a very developer-friendly city.
00:04:24.000 I don't have enough knowledge to be able to speak to how friendly it is towards landlords, but I can certainly say Sia Weaver does not seem friendly towards landlords.
00:04:31.000 She seems to have a very, very defined view of landlords as being evil, which I just think is short-sighted and wrong.
00:04:39.000 You know, I don't, these housing units don't just like fall from the sky prefab, pre-made for people to inhabit.
00:04:45.000 Like, it takes a lot of people to create a housing unit and a lot of people to keep a housing unit operating.
00:04:50.000 And a lot of her beliefs are pretty destructive, in my opinion.
00:04:53.000 So I screenshot a bunch of her stuff, also just some of her other views that were pretty offensive.
00:04:58.000 She has a lot of really offensive things to say about people of different racial categories, et cetera. 1.00
00:05:04.000 And they just, yeah, when she was announced in a position of power, I shared it.
00:05:09.000 I've got one of them here.
00:05:10.000 Impoverish the white middle class. 0.82
00:05:13.000 She said that in 2018.
00:05:15.000 That was just like a definitive statement.
00:05:18.000 Like impoverish them.
00:05:19.000 Impoverish the white middle class. 0.82
00:05:22.000 Home ownership is racist slash failed public policy.
00:05:26.000 Yeah.
00:05:28.000 She hates gentrification, too.
00:05:30.000 I mean, what's so give us, read one of one of the one of your favorites here, Michelle.
00:05:35.000 Yeah.
00:05:37.000 You know, we can just start.
00:05:38.000 That one's perfect.
00:05:39.000 That's the one I started my thread with.
00:05:43.000 There is no such thing as a good gentrifier, only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren't.
00:05:55.000 I found that fascinating.
00:05:57.000 First of all, she lives in a gentrifying neighborhood.
00:05:59.000 And for people who aren't familiar with the word gentrifying, it usually refers to people who move into neighborhoods that are historically poorer or more filled with people of color.
00:06:08.000 So it's, you know, a term that used to describe whiter, richer people moving into those neighborhoods.
00:06:14.000 I mean, from what I understand, Sia Weaver lives in Crown Heights, which is historically a working class, mostly Jewish and black neighborhood in Brooklyn.
00:06:25.000 Yeah, so she lives there.
00:06:26.000 I think she's written that going to the suburbs is wrong, moving into the city is wrong.
00:06:30.000 And she seems to believe, I don't, I'd be curious to know her views on what kind of housing is okay in her mind.
00:06:36.000 Oh, yes, public housing.
00:06:38.000 She has a lot written about how she wants all of us to live in public housing. 0.99
00:06:41.000 I can share some of those.
00:06:42.000 She says, you know, public housing for everyone, rent control and public housing for everyone, massive government interventions to solve gentrification.
00:06:52.000 Yeah, she is against the private market. 1.00
00:06:56.000 Yeah, this is one from 2017.
00:07:00.000 So I'll make sure the team has it here.
00:07:02.000 This is a really amazing one that you pulled.
00:07:04.000 This country built wealth for white people through genocide, slavery, stolen land, and labor. 0.91
00:07:10.000 White supremacy built the North and the South. 0.94
00:07:13.000 So deep thoughts from Sia Weaver, who we also found out is her mom lives in a $1.4 million craftsman.
00:07:22.000 And the Daily Mail apparently tried to confront her about this, partly because of your tweet going so viral, Michelle.
00:07:28.000 I think you really helped shine a light on Sia Weaver and some of the crazy things.
00:07:32.000 And she bursts into tears and ran away.
00:07:36.000 And there's all these images of her.
00:07:39.000 I think she's never really had the spotlight put on her.
00:07:43.000 And yet, Mamdani is standing by her in this newly revitalized office for, I guess, tenant rights.
00:07:50.000 What new powers have?
00:07:53.000 Yeah, what new powers has he bestowed upon this office?
00:07:57.000 You say it's revitalized.
00:07:59.000 What is she actually in charge of? 1.00
00:08:01.000 What power does she have? 1.00
00:08:02.000 Unclear.
00:08:03.000 I think that's actually going to be the most interesting thing to be looking at over the next couple of years is how much power does the New York City Mayor's Office have.
00:08:12.000 There's a lot of unknown there about checks and balances.
00:08:15.000 From what I can tell, I think she'll be focused on the topics that she's been writing about a lot.
00:08:21.000 So hearing organizing tenants, basically.
00:08:24.000 And, you know, if you look, I don't know if you have the clips up of her videos, but she's pretty explicit.
00:08:29.000 She basically says, I don't know if you're able to get to it now, but she basically says, what we want to do is have, we want to drive down the value of housing.
00:08:39.000 So we want to have lawsuits against the landlords.
00:08:42.000 We want to have organizing.
00:08:43.000 We want to have complaints.
00:08:44.000 We want to have rent control.
00:08:46.000 She has sort of a list of weapons, you would say.
00:08:50.000 Yeah, we've got to bring down the value of real estate.
00:08:53.000 Yeah, we've, we, we, and this is, this echoes something that Mamadani said in his, when he was uh sworn into office, where he says, we're going to get rid of rugged individualism and we're going to replace it with collectivism.
00:09:03.000 314.
00:09:04.000 This is her take on it.
00:09:06.000 I think the reality is, is that for centuries, we've really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good.
00:09:15.000 And we are going to trend in transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently.
00:09:26.000 And it will mean that families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have. 0.93
00:09:41.000 So she's going to seize property from white families. 1.00
00:09:47.000 The part that I found so fascinating about that clip is it starts with for centuries, for many centuries.
00:09:53.000 It's like, yes, for many centuries, we've had private property.
00:09:56.000 Actually, yeah.
00:09:57.000 Like, that's what our modern world is based on.
00:10:00.000 Like, that's what built the brownstone she lives in.
00:10:03.000 It didn't come like it's not, this is not like they just grow out of the ground, these brownstones. 1.00
00:10:07.000 Like, people have to put in the plumbing.
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00:11:18.000 Michelle Tandler, you are a New York resident.
00:11:21.000 You have a website that is notes from the front because you're fighting the good fight in a very blue, very dystopian new world with Mamdani as your mayor.
00:11:31.000 And you've got absolute communists that are now appointed to really powerful positions.
00:11:38.000 We're sort of trying to figure out how powerful Sia Weaver is going to be.
00:11:41.000 Let's play one more clip from this peach of a lady. 1.00
00:11:46.000 Just an awful, awful way of looking at the world.
00:11:49.000 316.
00:11:50.000 People like homeownership because they like control, and that's been perverted by like deep racism and deep classism in our society.
00:11:57.000 So like we have to not have a racist and class of society.
00:12:01.000 And so that's like something we need to think about like deeply.
00:12:05.000 But you know, we, it's about, to me, it's about control and why rent control is really important is because rent control alters the dynamic, the power dynamic between renters and who owns the building.
00:12:20.000 So it's all about control, apparently.
00:12:22.000 People like having well, so what it is here is this is clearly a woman with just a giant, just a giant ball of resentment that that is, that's really what motivates her. 0.98
00:12:33.000 I mean, some of the stuff, I don't even think we've gotten a chance to read it yet, but she has stuff where she's like, oh, I wish, oh, yeah, really needing to repress the desire for revenge right now.
00:12:44.000 I wish I believed in God so I could believe that all men who take credit for women's work and all white men who take credit for the work of women of color would one day burn.
00:12:54.000 Like, that is not an emotionally well-calibrated individual.
00:12:59.000 She's a, she's a ball of resentment. 0.99
00:13:01.000 She grew up in a completely normal family in a relatively nice neighborhood.
00:13:06.000 She's had a huge amount of opportunity.
00:13:07.000 She has an incredibly comfortable life offered to her by the bounty of civilization.
00:13:12.000 And let's be frank, the bounty of free markets.
00:13:14.000 Because if she was stuck in an actual legit communist country, she'd be hosed.
00:13:19.000 Her life would be terrible.
00:13:21.000 And Delta should kick all white people and Christmas outfits off planes. 1.00
00:13:26.000 She's just, she's spent years posting depressive resentment against her neighborhood, her community, people who are white like herself, implicitly against her parents, whatever she may feel about them.
00:13:40.000 And she just, she's now manifesting all of her personal resentments as a political platform. 1.00
00:13:47.000 And that's actually a lot of the modern left is it's taking personal gripes and grievances and justifying them on the grounds of actually, I have a revolutionary political platform.
00:13:59.000 That's how it functions here.
00:14:01.000 Michelle, I totally agree, by the way.
00:14:03.000 And there's a whole spiritual dynamic.
00:14:04.000 I think that tweet you pulled is like very telling because the left oftentimes tries to replace God with some sort of, you know, mission here on earth to fill the gaping void in their hearts.
00:14:16.000 But Michelle, on the ground in New York, what is it like?
00:14:19.000 I mean, are people talking about this person a lot?
00:14:22.000 Is her profile raising because of how extreme some of her views are?
00:14:26.000 Yeah.
00:14:27.000 And by the way, I completely agree.
00:14:28.000 There's a spiritual element.
00:14:29.000 We don't know what's in her heart or mind, but it's certainly, I don't, I've never met someone who has like a deep sense of peace writing that they want to see people burn.
00:14:40.000 No.
00:14:41.000 The, yes, people are talking about this.
00:14:44.000 It went viral beyond what I could have ever expected.
00:14:50.000 People are nervous and scared.
00:14:52.000 I mean, I don't have many friends who are Mamdani fans.
00:14:57.000 Most people, people are scared for a number of reasons.
00:14:59.000 People are scared about what's going to happen in public safety.
00:15:02.000 You know, Mamdani has a long track record of saying very, very negative things about the cops.
00:15:06.000 I think people are very nervous.
00:15:08.000 We're going to see a huge walkout and a lot of cops like retiring early or quitting, which could impact public safety. 0.97
00:15:14.000 People are nervous about just his general lack of job experience.
00:15:18.000 I don't think he really worked for his first six years after college.
00:15:21.000 He's had like a bunch of different stints, but people are nervous about his ability to run the complexity of the city, things like sanitation, transportation.
00:15:29.000 Obviously, landlords are nervous.
00:15:31.000 Like the what's concerning is I think Mayor Mamdani agrees with Sia.
00:15:37.000 If you go to the last tweet in the thread, it shows Mamdani saying back in 2020, people often ask what socialists mean when we say we want to decommodify housing.
00:15:47.000 Basically, we want to move away from a situation where most people access housing by purchasing it on the market and toward a situation where the state guarantees high-quality housing to all.
00:15:55.000 So, you know, people are wondering, why isn't he firing her after all these tweets have come out?
00:16:00.000 I think the reason is because he agrees.
00:16:03.000 I mean, that was, I think, how I originally came across her.
00:16:07.000 I saw that she was retweeting this, but anyway, so this is, this is a belief system.
00:16:07.000 I don't know.
00:16:13.000 It's anti, I would say it's anti-American.
00:16:16.000 It's definitely anti-the Constitution to say we want, you know, the state to manage housing for everybody.
00:16:25.000 I don't think anybody wants to live in state-owned housing.
00:16:28.000 And there are actually a lot of people who do live in state-managed housing here in New York City.
00:16:33.000 We have, I think, 178,000 units of NYCHA, a New York City Housing Authority.
00:16:39.000 They have a reputation for being in horrible disrepair.
00:16:42.000 There are tens of billions of dollars of unfixed repairs at stake right now.
00:16:47.000 I would love to see the mayor and Sia focus on NYCHA.
00:16:51.000 In fact, I actually think Sia should move over to NYCHA. 1.00
00:16:54.000 I don't think she should be living in a free market unit if she's against the free market. 0.90
00:16:59.000 I think she should show solidarity with her constituents and move into a public housing unit. 1.00
00:17:05.000 She'd have a lot more credibility if she did.
00:17:07.000 You should tweet that and I will retweet it.
00:17:10.000 But that, I mean, absolutely.
00:17:12.000 And I think that the fact that there already is this sort of socialist government-run housing, you know, vertical within the New York City government, and it's being run poorly, it sounds like, notoriously bad, shows that this is going to end in a very bad position.
00:17:29.000 Michelle Tandlert, thank you for capturing these tweets.
00:17:33.000 Thank you for joining us.
00:17:34.000 I think this is just a fascinating insight into a really radical person that represents, I think Blake's right, sort of a larger swath of the left than we really care to believe, but I think it's true.
00:17:45.000 There's a lot of these crazies out there, and now they're getting into positions of power, which is terrifying.
00:17:50.000 Michelle, thank you for joining us.
00:17:51.000 Thank you for having me.
00:17:54.000 This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and Founding Partner of WhyReFi.
00:17:59.000 It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us.
00:18:04.000 His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come.
00:18:10.000 Now, here Charlie, in his own words, tell you about WhyReFi.
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00:19:03.000 We are monitoring the press conference with Vice President JD Vance and Caroline Levitt.
00:19:08.000 It is ongoing right now.
00:19:09.000 They're talking about the Minnesota stories, ICE, all of those good things.
00:19:14.000 But right now in studio, we have Dr. Kent Ingle, who has a book out that came out in October, College Without Communism.
00:19:23.000 You can see it right here.
00:19:24.000 Let me move it over.
00:19:25.000 And if you can't probably see it on your screen, but right up here, it's actually got an endorsement from Charlie.
00:19:32.000 He sent it in on September 8th, his endorsement, which is two days, obviously, before September 10th when we lost him.
00:19:39.000 So that says something right there.
00:19:42.000 He says about the book, college education has become rotten to its core, but it doesn't have to be.
00:19:48.000 Higher education began as a Christian endeavor.
00:19:51.000 And in College Without Communism, Dr. Kent Engel and Joshua Lisek explain how we can undo the damage and restore college as it is meant to be.
00:20:01.000 And so, Dr. Engel, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:20:05.000 What a privilege to be here.
00:20:05.000 Well, thank you.
00:20:07.000 So thank you for your kind invitation.
00:20:09.000 You are, it's a pleasure to have you.
00:20:11.000 You are the president of Southeastern University based out of Lakeland, Florida.
00:20:16.000 You got 13,000 students on that campus alone?
00:20:20.000 Not that campus, about 4,000 students.
00:20:22.000 Okay, so it's a celebrity.
00:20:23.000 Yeah, but you have satellite campuses and you have one right here in Phoenix as well.
00:20:28.000 So tell us about this book.
00:20:30.000 I mean, you obviously know something about this.
00:20:32.000 You're creating a network of universities and college campuses that partner with local churches often that doesn't have communism in it, which has become a radical idea.
00:20:46.000 Right, absolutely.
00:20:47.000 Yeah, tell us about that.
00:20:48.000 Yeah, well, first of all, as a president who is on the front lines of having the privilege to invest in a generation that we believe God is raising up to make a difference in this world, to come alongside their life, the original intent of higher education is focused on spiritual and moral development.
00:21:07.000 When you get the chance to be able to pursue truth and able to pursue character development and shape virtuous leaders, all in the purpose of helping these students discover their divine design, the way God made them, the way God created them.
00:21:23.000 We're reminded in Ephesians 2.10, you are a masterpiece created in Christ Jesus to do good things, which he prepared long ago.
00:21:31.000 Well, how long ago we know in Psalm 139, before you took your first breath, God was creating you and making you in your mother's womb.
00:21:38.000 And you would be able to go on.
00:21:40.000 And we tell every student that comes our way, you're a solution to an issue, to a challenge, to a people group in this world.
00:21:46.000 And we get the privilege to pour education into your life so that you can be a good steward of that.
00:21:51.000 But what's sad is we see so many universities and colleges, and of course, as of late, we see that in a lot of the Ivy League colleges, but that have drifted from this original understanding of how education started.
00:22:06.000 It was all about formation, all about discipleship, all about the integration of truth, faith, and learning.
00:22:13.000 And they have drifted.
00:22:14.000 What they've done is they've traded truth for ideology and they've traded wisdom for indoctrination and for freedom of thought to conformity.
00:22:27.000 And so we need to create a new framework that helps us to make sure that we get education back on track, doing the very thing that we're supposed to do, provide stewardship for these amazing students that God sends our way.
00:22:43.000 And we're delighted to do that.
00:22:44.000 And not only do we get it back to its original purpose, but here's the deal.
00:22:48.000 We also have to hit the three most important issues in higher education today.
00:22:52.000 How are we providing great access?
00:22:55.000 How are we providing affordability?
00:22:57.000 And how are we providing experiential education so that actually what they're learning in the classroom, they actually get to do it right at the same time and get out into the workforce and do things that will make a difference and have an impact in their communities.
00:23:11.000 Yeah, a lot of people, one of Charlie's favorite things to say was that the root word of education means to lead forth, to bring about something which is potentially present in that student.
00:23:22.000 And so much of education has turned into a conversation.
00:23:25.000 What do you feel?
00:23:26.000 What do you think?
00:23:27.000 To put in.
00:23:29.000 Or to figure out what they already think.
00:23:31.000 I mean, and really, you need to have leadership leading students towards something that is defined, that is clear.
00:23:38.000 And I feel like so much of modern education has just become aimless, you know, secular rot, brain rot.
00:23:45.000 And, you know, I was looking it up.
00:23:47.000 So of the Ivies, you mentioned it, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Congregationalist, Puritan.
00:23:51.000 They were started as institutions by those denominations.
00:23:54.000 Princeton was Presbyterian, Congregationalist.
00:23:56.000 Brown, Baptist, and Columbia, Anglican.
00:24:00.000 Penn and Cornell were non-sectarian.
00:24:02.000 Yeah.
00:24:03.000 That's a very penned thing to do.
00:24:04.000 Yeah, but still deeply influenced by Protestant culture at the time.
00:24:07.000 Blake went to one of the Ivies, so we won't hold that against it.
00:24:12.000 So give us some examples of how you said college without communism, how Christians can reclaim truth in higher education.
00:24:18.000 Give us some examples of how communism has infiltrated higher education that maybe they're not aware of.
00:24:23.000 Maybe our audience would not be aware of.
00:24:25.000 Yeah, well, what they do is they begin.
00:24:28.000 And I see it so often.
00:24:29.000 I've seen so many students from our local church and from our community that have chosen to go to a state college or to a private college that doesn't focus on the foundational issues.
00:24:42.000 And what happens is they're told truth is relative, that faith is, you know, not part of what we really believe shapes our lives.
00:24:54.000 They look at patriotism as naive, and then they look at this whole idea that moral clarity is fluid and it's all opinion.
00:25:02.000 And that's what's shaping these students at these classes.
00:25:06.000 In fact, what's crazy to me is the president of Harvard, President Garber, just came out just a few days ago and said, we were wrong.
00:25:15.000 We went too far too far.
00:25:16.000 Yeah, we went too far.
00:25:17.000 We should not have allowed faculty activism in the classroom and for them to be in to form political thought that was more conformative rather than being able to reason together.
00:25:30.000 And that's what I loved about Charlie, and that's what we resonated.
00:25:33.000 And Charlie had the privilege to visit with Charlie on our campus, our traditional campus there in Lakeland, about three years ago.
00:25:42.000 And we talked about these very issues.
00:25:45.000 And I love that he understood his divine design.
00:25:50.000 He understood what God called him to do to come alongside this next generation to help form them so they could live out truth.
00:25:59.000 They could live out what it means to have a call of God upon their lives to make a difference in this world and to get education that would simply become stewardship for their life.
00:26:10.000 And I love how he chose the greatest place to do that, the university.
00:26:14.000 Why?
00:26:15.000 Because that's the place where they are forming character.
00:26:19.000 They are pursuing truth.
00:26:20.000 You have the ability to dialogue and reason together and talk about thoughtful engagement that will hopefully give you the tools that will connect you to truth.
00:26:34.000 And of course, true education is connecting to truth that we understand is a person, and that's Jesus Christ.
00:26:41.000 Jesus said, I'm the way, the truth, and the life.
00:26:45.000 And if you abide in my word, and we know the word is Christ, because John chapter 1 talks about the word became flesh, lived among us full of truth.
00:26:56.000 And so if we can connect students to truth and declare that truth in their lives, they're going to be able to live lives of purpose and lives that fulfill destiny that God has for them and to make a difference in these communities.
00:27:09.000 That's why we're also about going into communities nationwide.
00:27:13.000 We also know that students can't necessarily come to our traditional campus, but why can't we go to them and help shape their lives with truth and character development and formation and all the things that are important to be a good steward of God's call upon your life?
00:27:28.000 About the traditional campus.
00:27:30.000 As college has spiraled out in cost and it's, you know, you started to see the backlash to it, more people not going or curtailing it to save money.
00:27:38.000 There have been people who have said this is an anachronism that you can learn as well online.
00:27:45.000 You can maybe learn using AI.
00:27:46.000 You can self-teach yourself a lot of things.
00:27:49.000 And that going to a campus in person, it's almost like a luxury consumer good.
00:27:54.000 All these campuses, they just built a bunch of fun stuff here.
00:27:57.000 Check out our gym, check out our theater, check out our big dorms.
00:28:00.000 And they just made it a big consumer good.
00:28:01.000 You go there, you party, and have a fun time for four years.
00:28:04.000 And if you can afford that, great.
00:28:06.000 But most a lot of people can't and they're just going into debt for this.
00:28:10.000 What's the case to be made for an in-person traditional college campus shorn of those things?
00:28:18.000 Like what's the value that that does still provide in a good in a true college?
00:28:23.000 Yeah.
00:28:24.000 Well, first and foremost, I think a traditional campus offers things that obviously other types of delivery models can't.
00:28:31.000 And I think an in-person opportunity is to create community.
00:28:36.000 What's it like to live in community that can pursue what higher education is all about together?
00:28:45.000 And there's something about being face-to-face in a way where you can reason with each other, dialogue with each other, learn with each other, if it's done with that original commitment of what higher education should be, that formation process.
00:29:01.000 And then you have all aspects of life because it's about a holistic development.
00:29:05.000 It's about physical, mental, emotional, all those kinds of things.
00:29:09.000 Those things can happen on a residential, traditional way if it's guided and it's committed to what the original purpose is all about.
00:29:18.000 So I think that's what makes it unique.
00:29:21.000 But again, we want to be able to provide, which is an important issue in higher ed today, is accessibility.
00:29:27.000 And I think that's why we have seen the tremendous growth that we've had.
00:29:31.000 When I first came to Southeastern University almost 15 years ago, the student body was about 2,000.
00:29:37.000 But we started to look at what are the issues in higher ed, and that is accessibility.
00:29:44.000 How are we, are we, first of all, offering the need-oriented educational programs the workforce is calling forth?
00:29:50.000 And we constantly are changing and updating that.
00:29:53.000 And then look at the accessibility of delivery.
00:29:57.000 How are we delivering education?
00:29:59.000 There are those that want that traditional experience.
00:30:02.000 Maybe they're athletes.
00:30:03.000 They want that co-curricular development and the sports programs, things like that.
00:30:09.000 But you also want students to be able to have access in other ways too.
00:30:14.000 So how do you deliver that?
00:30:15.000 So we provide online learning.
00:30:17.000 We go out into communities and create campuses and communities in SERV.
00:30:21.000 And we partner with a lot of churches because churches are on the front lines of shaping culture.
00:30:28.000 And we want to come alongside and provide educational.
00:30:31.000 So I think, again, access to education is important to students.
00:30:35.000 And if we recognize that, then we can also hit the affordability issue.
00:30:40.000 And that's the problem with, and I love Charlie talking about it all the time, about the scam of education.
00:30:47.000 You know, you look at, first of all, the drift from truth, but then they saddle students with all this debt.
00:30:53.000 How do you go about providing a way that students can actually graduate debt-free?
00:30:59.000 And that's what we've done with our campuses across the nation.
00:31:02.000 We actually can go into communities like right here.
00:31:05.000 We have SEU Arizona.
00:31:07.000 It's housed at Dream City Church.
00:31:12.000 And it is a flourishing college there.
00:31:14.000 But we can cut the cost of that educational program by two-thirds.
00:31:22.000 Think about it.
00:31:23.000 Every single dollar you spend is either supporting your values or working against them.
00:31:28.000 In today's economy, where you spend your money, it really matters.
00:31:32.000 And that's how we take back our country. 0.97
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00:32:45.000 You were just telling me a story about your visit to post-communist Romania.
00:32:50.000 Yeah, Romania.
00:32:51.000 And tell us about how that impacted the writing of this book.
00:32:56.000 Yeah, well, yeah, this book, I share the story of why I'm so passionate about this issue.
00:33:02.000 My wife and I had the privilege in the early 90s to, right after the Ceausescu government had fallen.
00:33:08.000 So they were reeling from the effects of the devastation of communism in the nation of Romania.
00:33:15.000 And we had the privilege to go there to adopt three of our three children.
00:33:20.000 And I remember going there and I was just shocked at what I saw.
00:33:23.000 I saw a nation that was impoverished and oppressed and spiritually bankrupt.
00:33:31.000 And we went to all these orphanages around the country and thousands upon thousands of children there.
00:33:39.000 And several of these orphanages, we would walk in room after room, and there would be 30, 40 babies lying on a cold floor, underfed, uncared for.
00:33:51.000 And what was wild is the eeriness of it being silent.
00:33:56.000 You would think with all of those babies, there'd be crying and all that.
00:34:00.000 And you would look and there would be this distant stare even at that infant because there was a lack of love and care.
00:34:06.000 And I'll tell you, it's not because the parents who abandoned them didn't love them.
00:34:11.000 They couldn't afford them.
00:34:13.000 Because, of course, communism comes in rooted in Marxism and you add socialism comes in promising opportunity and equality.
00:34:22.000 But what happens is the state takes control and you're left with control and you're left with an impoverished state, stripped away from the very freedom that allows you to flourish and have hope.
00:34:37.000 And we were able to, we talk about this all the time with our three children.
00:34:43.000 You know, we had the privilege to rescue them and bring them to America.
00:34:47.000 And our home became their home.
00:34:50.000 And what a privilege it has been to come alongside them and helping them to fulfill what God designed them to be.
00:34:58.000 Yeah.
00:34:58.000 Well, and it sounds like your children have gone on to do pretty good things too.
00:35:02.000 Yeah.
00:35:03.000 So we'll leave that for another conversation.
00:35:05.000 I did quickly here.
00:35:07.000 We've got two minutes left here.
00:35:09.000 You say in chapter three, you ask the question, what happens when conservative students get a liberal education?
00:35:13.000 This was a massive question that Charlie confronted.
00:35:16.000 What do you explain in your book?
00:35:18.000 Yeah.
00:35:19.000 Well, here's what happens.
00:35:21.000 I've seen these students, these good, strong, conservative students that go to a place like this.
00:35:28.000 And after just a short period of time, their faith, they start questioning their faith.
00:35:34.000 They start questioning their values that they were raised in their home.
00:35:38.000 And again, it's because of this intentional design to lead them off the path of truth, that truth is just a relative thing, and that your faith is really outdated, and you should question that.
00:35:56.000 And so they get this indoctrination and it starts to lead them away.
00:36:00.000 And they want to give up when what we get to do at a faith-based university is quite the opposite of that.
00:36:08.000 We get to help them really get in tune with truth and reality and character and morality and all the things that are important to live a life that will give them joy, that will give them peace, that will give them that sense that I am significant in what God designed me to do and accomplish.
00:36:25.000 And that's what's so great.
00:36:27.000 And I look at these universities that have come in, and this hasn't been by accident.
00:36:33.000 They have realized that the way you shape the world, the way you shape a nation, is by starting in the classroom.
00:36:40.000 If you can shape the student, they will go out and shape the culture.
00:36:45.000 And that's why this issue is so important that we make sure we're getting a hold of these amazing students, letting them know that God has a plan and a purpose for their life, and we can provide that educational stewardship.
00:36:57.000 Well said.
00:36:58.000 Dr. Kent Ingle, College Without Communism, with an endorsement from Charlie Kirk.
00:37:03.000 It's an honor to have you here.
00:37:05.000 Thank you for coming.
00:37:06.000 God bless you.