The Charlie Kirk Show - January 08, 2023


The Right and Wrong Way to Teach: Charlie Speaks to the TPUSA Educators' Summit


Episode Stats

Length

33 minutes

Words per Minute

179.55112

Word Count

6,000

Sentence Count

462


Summary

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

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:00.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, my speech at our Turning Point Academy Educators Summit.
00:00:07.000 And then I take questions from the audience.
00:00:09.000 If you guys are interested in Turning Point Academy, it is turningpointacademy.com.
00:00:16.000 That is turningpointacademy.com to reclaim, revive, and restore.
00:00:22.000 Check it out, turningpointacademy.com.
00:00:26.000 Check it out today.
00:00:28.000 If you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
00:00:33.000 That is charliekirk.com slash support.
00:00:37.000 We deeply appreciate it and thank you for your support.
00:00:40.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:42.000 Here we go.
00:00:43.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:45.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:47.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:50.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:53.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:54.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:55.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:00:57.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:04.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:13.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:15.000 Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
00:01:18.000 For personalized loan services you can count on.
00:01:21.000 Go to andrewandtodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandtodd.com.
00:01:28.000 Welcome to our Educators Summit.
00:01:30.000 I just want to brag on Hutz.
00:01:32.000 He's real special.
00:01:34.000 I've got to know Hutz well, and we're going to keep on working together on lots of different things.
00:01:38.000 And from kind of idea of Turning Point Academy in the heat of a Phoenix summer to really now where we are, it's incredible.
00:01:45.000 And I want to welcome all of you.
00:01:47.000 I hope these couple days at both the Educator Summit and America Fest are life-changing.
00:01:52.000 That is our goal, to create immersion experiences that make you really challenge yourself to want to be bold and courageous, maybe to take a stand to homeschool your kids, maybe to start a Turning Point Academy, maybe to send them to the Dream City Christian Turning Point Academy right down the street.
00:02:09.000 Maybe to, hey, I'm going to, as a student, I'm going to stand up against the nonsense that is being taught in my local school.
00:02:15.000 Whatever it might be, we try to create that experience for you.
00:02:20.000 And Turning Point Academy is just getting started.
00:02:22.000 It's going to be incredible to see what God does through Turning Point Academy in the coming years.
00:02:27.000 And Hutz, you're doing a wonderful job, and the whole team has worked really hard.
00:02:30.000 So I'm going to talk just about one very basic thing, and then we could do some questions.
00:02:36.000 I think truly the issue with American education, and there's plenty, but the one that is most important for us to focus on is the people that have run our education system over the last 100 years, started with John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson played a big role, is they fundamentally do not understand what education is.
00:02:59.000 We have a completely different opinion of what education is and what it should be.
00:03:04.000 And so if you walk into any government school here in Phoenix or across the country, they believe that education is allowing students to choose what direction they want to go, presenting them with a bunch of options to liberate them from a very broken world, and really having young people find themselves.
00:03:28.000 That's a really bad idea.
00:03:31.000 In fact, it's an evil one.
00:03:33.000 It's immoral to say to a fourth grader, you got to start to figure out stuff for your, you know, figure out your own path.
00:03:39.000 Instead, education comes from a Latin word, which means to lead forth.
00:03:45.000 And the next question is, well, what are you leading them forth towards?
00:03:48.000 To truth.
00:03:49.000 You're leading them forth towards a fulfilling life towards beauty, towards truth, towards goodness, towards virtue.
00:03:55.000 And so therefore you must know what the end in goal is, the end goal is before you even begin the education process.
00:04:02.000 Far too often teachers will get their fourth or fifth graders kind of sitting around a room and they'll ask them their opinions on the news cycle.
00:04:11.000 A controversial thing that shouldn't be controversial to say is it's completely irrelevant what a fifth grader opinion is on the news cycle.
00:04:18.000 That's not what education is.
00:04:20.000 It's not about the votes of a fifth or a sixth grader.
00:04:22.000 You can get their perspectives and guess what?
00:04:25.000 You need to correct them when they're wrong.
00:04:27.000 That's what a teacher is supposed to do.
00:04:30.000 A teacher needs to know the path to put a student on.
00:04:33.000 That's not to say you have to get a student to agree with everything that, you know, how you see the world, but there is a right and a wrong way to educate a child.
00:04:45.000 For example, at Turning Point Academy, we proudly say there will be no critical race theory.
00:04:50.000 There will be no wokeism.
00:04:52.000 There will be no transgender or genderqueer ideology.
00:04:55.000 There will be none of this insidious mind poison that exists in our country anywhere that Turning Point Academy operates.
00:05:03.000 We are not going to tolerate it.
00:05:04.000 We're not going to allow it, period whatsoever.
00:05:07.000 And thank you.
00:05:09.000 And some people ask then and they say, well, Charlie, what about freedom of speech?
00:05:16.000 And what about allowing different opinions?
00:05:18.000 I'm all for that, obviously, from a constitutional perspective.
00:05:21.000 The classroom is not a place for all ideas to get equal footing.
00:05:26.000 This is something that most parents don't wrap their heads around.
00:05:29.000 They say, well, I want my kid to be exposed to all viewpoints.
00:05:32.000 No, you don't.
00:05:33.000 You don't want your kid to be exposed to the flat earth theory or to bloodletting as a way to try to solve diseases.
00:05:40.000 You don't want your child to be exposed to eugenics.
00:05:43.000 Maybe that they might be aware and it's a silly idea.
00:05:45.000 No, education needs to be rooted in truth.
00:05:49.000 It needs to be rooted in.
00:05:51.000 And this is one of the reasons why our education system has gone so, so incredibly wrong.
00:05:58.000 And what's interesting is that it's not that the educators that are currently running our system don't believe in that.
00:06:06.000 It's they say they don't believe in it, but then they want their version of the truth to be taught to children.
00:06:12.000 We are seeing a crisis in American education unlike anything this nation has ever experienced, where children are being taught that men and women are basically the same.
00:06:23.000 They are being taught the awful ideas that there's white privilege and that there is this racism embedded at every single corner in our country.
00:06:33.000 And more than anything else, they are being taught in gratitude.
00:06:38.000 It is an entire generation that is being taught to view the world through a lens of not being grateful.
00:06:45.000 In the scriptures, it tells us time and time again, be thankful, be thankful, be thankful.
00:06:51.000 You know why?
00:06:52.000 Because being thankful is not automatic.
00:06:55.000 The raw material of human nature makes us very ungrateful.
00:06:59.000 It's easy to take things for granted.
00:07:00.000 You must teach children to say thank you.
00:07:04.000 It's one of the first things you teach them.
00:07:05.000 And guess what?
00:07:06.000 If our nature was to say thank you, you'd have to teach them once and they would do it automatically from that point forward.
00:07:11.000 No, we are inherently programmed through our broken nature, original sin, to not want to be grateful.
00:07:19.000 Guess what?
00:07:19.000 An ungrateful people is a deeply unhappy people.
00:07:23.000 And so we teach that.
00:07:24.000 When you go to college, you get a degree in ingratitude.
00:07:27.000 Better yet, when you go to elementary school or in high school in America, they are not just ungrateful, but they become increasingly bitter towards the world.
00:07:37.000 Now, you're going to hear from Dennis Prager in a little bit, but there's a couple things that at Turning Point Academy we are going to communicate very clearly that not even most private schools communicate, that almost no public schools communicate.
00:07:49.000 I should call them government schools, not public schools, because they don't serve the public school.
00:07:52.000 They're good.
00:07:53.000 Their government schools is very, very simple.
00:07:57.000 We at Turning Point Academy believe that a child is not basically good.
00:08:04.000 We do not believe in inherent human goodness.
00:08:07.000 And by the way, if you find that belief to be controversial, then you certainly are not a Christian.
00:08:12.000 And this is something I wish every pastor would communicate, and they're not.
00:08:16.000 I'm not saying you're inherently bad.
00:08:18.000 I actually do believe we're inherently bad, but I'm just saying you're not inherently good.
00:08:22.000 That at the very least, you have an inclination towards nature that is not something that is admirable or virtuous.
00:08:32.000 Therefore, any goodness in the world must be taught.
00:08:37.000 Therefore, anything that is good means it must be taught to the child.
00:08:41.000 It's not going to happen automatically.
00:08:44.000 So there is a thinker that did a lot of damage in the 1700s.
00:08:46.000 His name was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
00:08:49.000 He started what we know as the Romantic movement, also as a thinker in the Enlightenment.
00:08:53.000 He believed the exact opposite.
00:08:56.000 He believed that humans were good.
00:08:59.000 He believed that human nature, the child, starts perfect and is corrupted as it gets older.
00:09:05.000 That the child then gets corrupted through capitalism, through the patriarchy, through Western values, through Christianity.
00:09:15.000 He believed in the primitive over the civilized, the infant over the adult.
00:09:19.000 This is a romantic view of human nature.
00:09:22.000 And almost every single government school that we fund with our taxpayer dollars is teaching children exactly that.
00:09:28.000 They believe it.
00:09:29.000 They say anything that is wrong with the world is not because the seven-year-old has something wrong with them that they need to improve.
00:09:36.000 No, it's because of all the evil of capitalism or the evils of America.
00:09:40.000 And they teach that to the children.
00:09:41.000 You know what that does to kids?
00:09:43.000 It turns them into narcissistic activists who believe there's nothing wrong with me, but there's a lot wrong with stuff around me.
00:09:50.000 And it should be the exact opposite.
00:09:52.000 And I'll never forget, I stumbled into this accidentally, probably because of my education at Christian Heritage Academy.
00:09:59.000 When I was in high school, there was this sign that always bothered me.
00:10:03.000 And one day I was just rather upset.
00:10:05.000 And I just decided to ask my teacher about it.
00:10:07.000 And the sign says, you're perfect the way you are.
00:10:11.000 And I decided to ask my teacher, excuse me, if we're perfect the way we are, why am I going to school?
00:10:19.000 Why do I do homework?
00:10:21.000 Why do you grade me if I'm perfect the way you are?
00:10:24.000 The self-esteem movement has done more garbage.
00:10:27.000 The self-esteem movement is not biblical.
00:10:30.000 It's not moral.
00:10:31.000 It does the opposite.
00:10:32.000 It actually creates people with no self-esteem.
00:10:35.000 As Dennis Prager will tell you, and I learned this from him.
00:10:37.000 We need to be teaching children self-control, not self-esteem.
00:10:41.000 In fact, and people say, well, Charlie, people are hurting themselves and getting bullied.
00:10:46.000 I think that self-esteem only creates more self-harm because it makes people think, well, I don't feel perfect.
00:10:54.000 And maybe there's something wrong with me.
00:10:56.000 Instead, you should tell a child, hey, you got a lot of potential, but you are not there yet.
00:11:03.000 You got to put in a lot of work, a lot of sacrifice, a lot of diligence.
00:11:07.000 You got to wake up early and maybe you can get close to fulfilling that potential that God has in front of you.
00:11:11.000 That's a way to make sure depression rates go down and to make sure mental health is in a better direction.
00:11:16.000 Not telling children they're perfect.
00:11:19.000 And instead, the entire educational system is rigged in the exact opposite direction.
00:11:25.000 And it's because I believe there is a political purpose for this more than not.
00:11:28.000 And I think there's a spiritual purpose as well.
00:11:30.000 But it does create the raw material for activists.
00:11:35.000 If you talk to an average high schooler and you ask them, what are the biggest problems facing society?
00:11:41.000 They will say environmentalism, you know, the climate change, environmentalism, racism, sexism, anti-trans beliefs.
00:11:49.000 And do you know what they should say?
00:11:51.000 The biggest problem with society is me.
00:11:56.000 That's what they should say, is that I'm the biggest threat to society.
00:12:00.000 And I got to figure myself out before I try to tackle all these other isms.
00:12:04.000 We are being terrorized by a group of people that are telling us our world is awful that never make their bed.
00:12:12.000 They don't even do the, I mean, they don't shower either, but the very basic stuff.
00:12:16.000 The point is the biggest battle that we should teach.
00:12:20.000 This is biblical, by the way, is it's a battle against your own nature.
00:12:25.000 Is that it's you against you.
00:12:27.000 And through the Christian lens, we realize we're never actually going to be able to win that battle.
00:12:31.000 Only Jesus can win that battle for us.
00:12:33.000 And guess what?
00:12:34.000 Most children are never even exposed to this teaching whatsoever.
00:12:38.000 And this leads perfectly into the rise of anti-Americanism in our country.
00:12:44.000 You want to know why there's so much anti-Americanism, structural anti-Americanism in our country?
00:12:50.000 It's because we do not teach the students, young people, that there is something to be appreciative of, grateful for, thankful for, and instead, nothing but complaining for what happened before them.
00:13:03.000 What we're going to do at Turning Point Academy is we are going to teach the beauty of the American founding.
00:13:09.000 We're going to talk about the magic of 1776.
00:13:12.000 We're going to talk about how the founding fathers quoted Deuteronomy more than any other book in creating the freest best country ever to exist in the history of the world.
00:13:21.000 We're going to teach the truth about slavery, that we were the first country to actually do something about abolishing the sin of slavery that pre-existed America, and guess what, still exists in the world today.
00:13:32.000 It's a tragedy.
00:13:33.000 Human beings owning human beings has been around for a long time.
00:13:37.000 The question is who did something to actually stop it?
00:13:40.000 The first anti-slavery convention ever hosted was in Philadelphia in 1775 by Benjamin Franklin.
00:13:46.000 Vermont independently abolished slavery in 1776.
00:13:49.000 By the time the Constitution was ratified, nine out of the 13 states had already independently abolished slavery.
00:13:56.000 George Washington said, it's a matter of when, not if, we abolish slavery in the United States of America.
00:14:03.000 It's our country that wrote extensively that this is wrong and we have to get rid of this.
00:14:09.000 Show me another nation that was able to have that kind of introspection, heroism, and courage to be able to get rid of a moral sin.
00:14:16.000 Are children being taught that?
00:14:18.000 Of course not.
00:14:18.000 They're being taught the opposite.
00:14:20.000 That, oh, something bad happened, and because of that, not just something bad, something evil.
00:14:24.000 I don't want to minimize it.
00:14:25.000 It was evil, period.
00:14:26.000 And therefore, the whole country must be thrown out.
00:14:29.000 Here's a good line about America.
00:14:32.000 The negatives about American history are universal.
00:14:37.000 The positives are unique.
00:14:40.000 Every country ever to exist has struggled with the same stuff that America struggled with.
00:14:45.000 Okay, but we're the only country that did the stuff that we did.
00:14:50.000 No other country comes even close.
00:14:52.000 And we are robbing a generation of being excited about their nation that is evil.
00:14:59.000 In our soul, I believe this.
00:15:01.000 I believe it's biblical.
00:15:01.000 Jeremiah 29, 7.
00:15:03.000 You know, pray for the nation of which you are in, or badrash, it's the badrash, which is the Hebrew word.
00:15:08.000 Demand or to seek the welfare of the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.
00:15:14.000 We are called to fast and pray for our leaders.
00:15:16.000 Said differently, I believe it's a good thing to want what's best for your country.
00:15:22.000 And we are teaching our children the exact opposite.
00:15:25.000 And honestly, I think it creates deeply unhappy people.
00:15:28.000 I think people are happier when they're able to say, I have a country that has done something pretty cool, that has done something heroic or epic.
00:15:38.000 And what we're going to try to do at Turning Point Academy is try to fix that.
00:15:40.000 But it's going to take all of you through our educators network, through our resources, through our curriculum, through our teacher trainings, through our partnerships that we're doing with so many of our schools.
00:15:50.000 It's going to be an all of the above approach.
00:15:52.000 And there's so many great educational opportunities out there that already exist.
00:15:56.000 But here's the one thing I could tell you: it's not enough.
00:15:59.000 More is more.
00:16:01.000 We are at a crisis right now in America where if we do not do something bold and dramatic, we're going to have an entire generation that suffers from historical Alzheimer's.
00:16:13.000 That's exactly where we are right now.
00:16:15.000 Our nation is suffering from Alzheimer's.
00:16:17.000 We don't know where we came from, who we are, or where we're going.
00:16:20.000 It's very sad.
00:16:21.000 I'm not trying to trivialize Alzheimer's.
00:16:23.000 If you've ever dealt with somebody in that condition, that's exactly where we are as a country.
00:16:26.000 We can't remember our history.
00:16:28.000 Turning Point Academy will restore the memory of the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.
00:16:41.000 Let me finish by saying this, and then we'll do some questions in the time I have remaining.
00:16:45.000 I cannot emphasize enough the moral danger that woke is poses to our entire society.
00:16:51.000 We are not going to dance around the edges.
00:16:54.000 We will not be politically correct.
00:16:56.000 We are not going to say there's two sides to the story.
00:16:58.000 We are going to say unequivocally that wokeism is from the pit of hell because it is.
00:17:03.000 Wokeism as defined as this: if it's so insane it requires a PhD to explain it, it is wokeism.
00:17:10.000 No offense, Hutz.
00:17:12.000 I know you have a PhD.
00:17:15.000 I mean, no offense, as you well know.
00:17:17.000 Meaning this: if you have to write 5,000 pages that men can become pregnant, you are woke.
00:17:23.000 If you have to write thousands of pages to say that borders do not matter or that white people need to atone for something they didn't do because they look like someone who was evil hundreds of years ago, you are woke.
00:17:35.000 If all of a sudden you have to apologize for something you did not do, you are woke.
00:17:39.000 We're not going to put up with it.
00:17:40.000 I'm so sick of people saying, Well, Charlie, we have to hear them out.
00:17:43.000 I'm not going to hear them out.
00:17:44.000 I know their ideas.
00:17:45.000 I've read their books.
00:17:46.000 I've read Intro to Critical Race Theory.
00:17:48.000 I've read Foucault.
00:17:49.000 I've read Derrida.
00:17:50.000 I've read Derek Bell.
00:17:52.000 I've read Angela Davis.
00:17:53.000 I read it so you don't have to.
00:17:54.000 And by the way, we're going to be working with some of the best anti-woke theorists, James Lindsay, many other people, to just with precision and with incredible tenacity, make sure you're informed to know how much of a danger this is.
00:18:07.000 I believe this set of ideas that we are now teaching our children, that is in our military, in corporate America, is in every corner of society.
00:18:15.000 If we do not do the most ambitious and bold counter-offensive of this, it will destroy everything that we love.
00:18:22.000 It will destroy our banking system.
00:18:24.000 It will destroy our economy.
00:18:25.000 It'll destroy our education.
00:18:26.000 And guess what?
00:18:27.000 Their number one goal is to destroy the backbone of any functioning society, the family.
00:18:33.000 Wokeism is the virus that will last a lot longer than COVID, and dare I say, do more damage.
00:18:41.000 And far too often, churches, schools, and businesses tap dance with this evil, and I will say it again: this evil set of ideas.
00:18:50.000 If you teach an 11-year-old that you could take a set of drugs that will chemically castrate you and that will liberate you, you are an evil human being, period.
00:18:59.000 Including the people that put up with it, that administer the drugs, the entire system.
00:19:03.000 If all of a sudden you go into a Francis Parker School, I'm going to excuse you the details, okay?
00:19:08.000 It is so graphic.
00:19:09.000 It is so terrible.
00:19:10.000 14, 15, and 16-year-olds are being distributed.
00:19:13.000 Let me just say this: incredibly graphic sex toys to 14, 15, and 16-year-olds in class, not extracurricular, by the dean of students at Francis Parker School in downtown Chicago.
00:19:26.000 But this is another important thing.
00:19:29.000 Not only should we need to answer the question of what is a human being made in the image of God, mind, body, soul, but it's also what is a child?
00:19:38.000 I got to give credit to my Jewish brothers and sisters.
00:19:41.000 They really get this idea of protecting child innocence.
00:19:45.000 There's a moment where you are a child no longer.
00:19:47.000 Bar and bot mitzvahs.
00:19:49.000 Think that Christians need to have some form of an equivalent, not necessarily in a religious context, just as a ceremony like, hey, you are now an adult.
00:19:56.000 Like, now you are responsible.
00:19:57.000 In fact, in Jewish culture, the prayer that the parent says is in Hebrew, thank you, God, I am no longer responsible for my child's sins.
00:20:09.000 That's pretty cool, isn't it?
00:20:12.000 I think the Bar and Bat Mitzvah tradition is one of the most awesome things in the Jewish faith.
00:20:16.000 I wish we in Christianity took coming of age as seriously.
00:20:19.000 I mean that.
00:20:20.000 Done correctly at the study of the Torah and all that.
00:20:22.000 What's the point of that?
00:20:24.000 It's that up until that moment of the crossing of the line of where the parent says, Thank God I'm no longer responsible, it's that child's innocence must be protected by adults.
00:20:36.000 The protection of the innocence of children is the mark of a moral or an immoral society.
00:20:43.000 The left doesn't believe that.
00:20:45.000 They believe that children should be sexualized.
00:20:48.000 That is not an exaggeration.
00:20:51.000 They're bringing drag queens into churches.
00:20:54.000 They're bringing drag queens into schools.
00:20:56.000 You can see the material, you see the videos, you see all of it.
00:20:58.000 And it goes back to a theorist, Rousseau, but also a thinker who is an evil person, Dr. Kinsey, who believed in the widespread sexual manipulation of children.
00:21:10.000 I truly believe one day we will be judged as to whether or not we stand up against this widespread, unspeakable immorality.
00:21:19.000 I really do.
00:21:20.000 As I said yesterday at the Jewish summit, one of my favorite verse, which is kind of my life verse, Psalm 97, 10.
00:21:26.000 Who here loves God?
00:21:27.000 Raise your hand.
00:21:28.000 Well, if you love God, you're commanded to hate evil.
00:21:32.000 So if you love God, you must hate evil.
00:21:34.000 That's Psalm 97:10.
00:21:37.000 My question is to how many pastors who talk about and sing good that you love God do you also tell your congregation you must hate evil?
00:21:43.000 That is a harsh teaching.
00:21:44.000 Guess what?
00:21:45.000 It's true.
00:21:46.000 And there's a lot of evil to hate right now.
00:21:48.000 And we don't have to look too far.
00:21:49.000 Turning Point Academy is going to be a light.
00:21:51.000 It's a movement.
00:21:52.000 I'm so excited about it.
00:21:54.000 I pray it brings a revival.
00:21:55.000 I have no idea where this is going to go except up and wide and just be able to be a blessing to many people.
00:22:03.000 And it really is, I think, the next and most exciting development that we have at Turning Point USA and all the other programming we have.
00:22:12.000 And so I'm going to take some questions, but I encourage you: if I have just piqued your curiosity at all, talk to Hutz, talk to Francine, talk to Jennifer, come to the booth, the Turning Point Academy booth, sign up for information, get our materials, and we're super thrilled and excited to work with you.
00:22:27.000 Okay, let's do some questions, everybody.
00:22:30.000 Great, thank you.
00:22:31.000 Is that okay if I do questions?
00:22:33.000 Okay.
00:22:33.000 Thank you.
00:22:35.000 Thank you so much, Charlie.
00:22:36.000 We're going to take some questions.
00:22:37.000 I have a mic on this side.
00:22:38.000 Ryan is over here.
00:22:40.000 Just raise your hand and we will come to you as quickly as we can.
00:22:46.000 Excuse me.
00:22:50.000 Yes, sir.
00:22:51.000 Is it on?
00:22:52.000 Can you hear me okay?
00:22:54.000 So, Charlie, because I believe that the Bible teaches that there is no such thing as a separation between education and religion.
00:23:07.000 The two are synonymous.
00:23:09.000 You can't divorce the two.
00:23:11.000 And I believe woke and communists and Dewey and all those people all said the same thing.
00:23:18.000 They spoke in terms of religious education.
00:23:22.000 Therefore, I believe government-controlled education is unconstitutional.
00:23:30.000 Certainly, we need to get rid of the Department of Education.
00:23:34.000 But.
00:23:34.000 Can you just ask your question?
00:23:36.000 I'm so sorry, we're tight on time.
00:23:37.000 I apologize.
00:23:38.000 What can we do now that we control Congress to push that agenda to remove the Department of Education?
00:23:47.000 Well, I wholeheartedly agree with that.
00:23:48.000 That's never going to happen, but I totally agree.
00:23:51.000 It should, and we should aim high, and maybe my lifetime that will happen.
00:23:54.000 But let me tell you what we can do, is we have to be more in the mold and the model of Ron DeSantis and do this on a state level and kick out CRT and wokeism on a state by state, county by county, school board by school board level.
00:24:08.000 That, I think, is a great use of time.
00:24:10.000 Federal government, here's what I would like to see the new Congress do.
00:24:14.000 I want to see a special committee to investigate Merrick Garland to find out why moms and dads were put on the domestic terror list for showing up at school board meetings.
00:24:24.000 That I want our new Congress to do immediately.
00:24:27.000 And people should go to jail for that.
00:24:28.000 They should.
00:24:30.000 Parents who show up to ask questions about sexually charged curriculum should not be put on terror lists on their own government.
00:24:38.000 We should never forget that, everybody.
00:24:40.000 It is so awful what happened there.
00:24:42.000 So, look, I'm a big believer.
00:24:44.000 One of my beliefs that I have right now is local, local, local.
00:24:49.000 I am less interested in the federal than I ever have been.
00:24:53.000 I'm not totally cynical about it, but there's a lot wrong.
00:24:58.000 It feels as if there's like this Praetorian guard of the administrative state that is almost untouchable.
00:25:04.000 I have some ideas on how long term to solve that, but the local, the state, the county, the municipal, just right now, there's a pastor, Tim Thompson, who's amazing, who just, his church helped take over a school board in Temecula, California.
00:25:19.000 And within their first meeting, they banned critical race theory from all of their schools.
00:25:24.000 That is a church with involvement that won with action.
00:25:28.000 That is the way.
00:25:29.000 It's very, very exciting.
00:25:31.000 So, thank you, sir.
00:25:33.000 All right.
00:25:34.000 Yes, next question.
00:25:35.000 Charlie, how are you?
00:25:36.000 I'm good.
00:25:37.000 How are you?
00:25:38.000 Thank you so much for having me speak real quick.
00:25:40.000 I just have a quick question.
00:25:42.000 This schoolhouse is on fire.
00:25:43.000 We need media access to get the children out of the schoolhouse before we can put these fires out.
00:25:48.000 That's why I'm a huge supporter of school choice.
00:25:50.000 But one of the biggest hurdles that I see in that movement is teachers.
00:25:54.000 How can we get teachers to understand and support the school choice movement?
00:25:58.000 Because it is very beneficial to them, incentivizing the private sector and giving them more opportunities to use their God-given talents.
00:26:08.000 Yeah, that's a great question.
00:26:09.000 So at least here in Arizona, there's been a fair amount of momentum to pass school choice legislation here.
00:26:15.000 Arizona has the best school choice laws in the country.
00:26:18.000 It does.
00:26:19.000 And it's a huge win.
00:26:20.000 The money follows the child in this state more than any other state.
00:26:24.000 Here's my argument, and this is why we're doing the Educators Teacher Summit right here, is that we need teachers who are willing to leave the comfort and the safety of a government job with a government pension, trust in the Lord, and trust in faith to go maybe go into a pod school or a private school to not necessarily even earn less money, but to have less certainty.
00:26:47.000 And a lot of people in the American teaching profession are too comfortable with their tenured pension job.
00:26:54.000 And I'm not that, I don't blame them.
00:26:56.000 Comfort, we as human beings are designed to go towards comfort, right?
00:27:01.000 But that comfort is not going, in my opinion, going to change or save the country, right?
00:27:05.000 And so, look, I could tell you this, that there are so many good government school teachers out there.
00:27:11.000 I know we have some in the audience right now.
00:27:13.000 I think there's more not so good than good, but that's my own personal opinion, right?
00:27:19.000 But look, I'll say this.
00:27:21.000 I had teachers that I went to a government, I went to Christian Heritage Academy, and I went to government school, and I had some fabulous government school teachers, and I had some awful government school teachers.
00:27:31.000 And you're going to hear this over and over again.
00:27:33.000 The awful government school teachers earn just as much as the fabulous ones.
00:27:38.000 The idea that we pay bad teachers, that they're still employed, I think we should fire 10% of all American teachers and then pay the top 10%, 10% more.
00:27:47.000 You don't have to overthink that, right?
00:27:49.000 Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.
00:27:51.000 That's why I'm a big fan of school choice, where you can actually do that within the public government school model.
00:27:55.000 It's so difficult.
00:27:56.000 Yes?
00:27:58.000 Hi, Drew here.
00:27:59.000 If I don't come off clear, let me know.
00:28:02.000 With the Twitter files being released and all these things going on, specifically, what do you think will change?
00:28:09.000 Like on a scale of zero being nothing, business as usual, 100 being like it would reverse everything that Twitter did, or government, Twitter, all the stuff.
00:28:19.000 What do you think?
00:28:20.000 I think it's very significant and substantial.
00:28:23.000 I'm going to answer it super quick because I do want to keep the questions focused on education.
00:28:27.000 But I have said this, and I will say it again.
00:28:30.000 Elon Musk liberating Twitter is a bigger deal than Republicans controlling the U.S. Senate.
00:28:36.000 It's that big of a deal.
00:28:38.000 So you can kind of put a number figure on that.
00:28:40.000 But I, for 18 months, was labeled by Twitter with a do not amplify tag, and I no longer have that on there.
00:28:47.000 And we are reaching tens of millions of more people a month, just my account alone.
00:28:52.000 And so I could say that's substantial, very much so.
00:28:56.000 Thank you for the question.
00:28:57.000 I didn't mean to be short, but I just want to get to as many education ones as we can.
00:28:59.000 Charlie, your people are saying you need to wrap here.
00:29:02.000 All right, we'll take two more.
00:29:03.000 Okay, two more.
00:29:07.000 Hey, Charlie, how are you doing?
00:29:08.000 Good seeing you, my friend.
00:29:09.000 You mentioned the, it's going off the question to mention about teachers.
00:29:12.000 And do you suggest we have something in California called the California Parents Union that just started, but it's smaller.
00:29:19.000 And I talked to a lot of teachers.
00:29:21.000 They feel hamstrung by the teachers' union.
00:29:24.000 Would a suggestion be also in a local level, getting individuals to organize their own kind of union to be able to go up to Sacramento or whatever your state capital is and advocate for them so that those teachers then also have a place to go and a place to actually that's a good idea.
00:29:43.000 I think that effort is better spent just leaving the government school system altogether and building an alternative.
00:29:48.000 But it could be, look, if you are a government school teacher and you're here, welcome.
00:29:52.000 We love you guys.
00:29:53.000 Thank you.
00:29:54.000 You could leave the union immediately thanks to the Supreme Court Janice decision.
00:29:58.000 Do not pay your dues anymore.
00:30:00.000 Leave the union.
00:30:01.000 They do not represent you.
00:30:02.000 They are robbing your money and you'd have more money in your own pocket, everybody, okay?
00:30:06.000 So that would just be an immediate kind of takeaway there that I would encourage.
00:30:10.000 But I am increasingly cynical, unfortunately, about the future of government schooling in America.
00:30:17.000 That's why we've got to build alternatives.
00:30:18.000 The final question.
00:30:20.000 Hi, Charlie.
00:30:22.000 My name is Tracy, and I am a middle school teacher at a Christian Academy locally here in Chandler.
00:30:29.000 Thank you.
00:30:30.000 And although we don't have woke ideology as an issue or CRT, you know, we have some other insidious things, as I'm sure many of you can identify with, as far as the social media access that a lot of our kids have, TikTok in particular.
00:30:46.000 And I know that many of my students have access to that.
00:30:50.000 And of course, I don't have direct ability to maybe speak into that with the parents.
00:30:57.000 But I've noticed that those are the most defiant children that I encounter.
00:31:01.000 They are the most disrespectful.
00:31:03.000 Super quick.
00:31:03.000 I'm sorry.
00:31:04.000 Sorry.
00:31:05.000 Yes.
00:31:05.000 What can I do to help maybe partner with Turning Point to fill in those holes?
00:31:11.000 Thank you for being here.
00:31:12.000 That's a beautiful question.
00:31:13.000 First, on TikTok, if there's only one thing you remember me saying, anyone you love should stay far away from TikTok.
00:31:19.000 There is no reason for it whatsoever.
00:31:21.000 It will destroy your child's life.
00:31:23.000 It'll make them depressed, anxious.
00:31:25.000 It is neurologically rigged to make your children hate themselves.
00:31:29.000 It is digital heroin and opium.
00:31:31.000 It was designed by a military firm in China for the exact intent to make the American population depressed, anxious, on psychiatric drugs.
00:31:40.000 If you think I'm kidding, go into the research of what is behind TikTok.
00:31:44.000 And also, it is a feeder of the most incredibly awful and just unspeakable transgender ideas and all that other stuff.
00:31:53.000 So as a teacher, I would do a special night where you bring parents together and you try to educate them on what exactly is this stuff.
00:32:01.000 I praise God that I grew up in a time without smartphones.
00:32:06.000 Look, I could go on a whole different speech of this.
00:32:07.000 Parents, please don't give your kids smartphones.
00:32:10.000 It will ruin their life.
00:32:11.000 There is no redeemable value for a smartphone until they're 18, period.
00:32:14.000 I stand by it.
00:32:15.000 I grew up in a life without them, and boy, was I lucky and blessed.
00:32:19.000 And I see children now with them, and they are anxious, and they're on benzodiazepans, and they're on Zoloft, and they're on Prozac.
00:32:26.000 And we have 6 million teenagers in the last two years, 6 million new teenagers that are now on psychiatric drugs.
00:32:31.000 And it's gone like this ever since we've decided to give everyone a smartphone.
00:32:35.000 We wonder why kids are killing themselves more than any other cause of death.
00:32:38.000 Well, it's because it's a portal into every worse impulse a human being can have.
00:32:43.000 You might say, well, Charlie, I need to communicate with my child.
00:32:45.000 Eh, not really.
00:32:46.000 You don't.
00:32:47.000 I grew up without it.
00:32:48.000 But if you do, give them a jitterbug.
00:32:49.000 It's just fine, which is the phone where all you could do is call smartphones.
00:32:54.000 No redeemable value whatsoever until you're actually running a business, in my personal opinion.
00:32:59.000 And even then, it's questionable.
00:33:00.000 Get involved with Turning Point Academy, everybody.
00:33:02.000 Hutz, you're doing a great job.
00:33:04.000 Thank you.
00:33:04.000 And we so appreciate you, Charlie, and so grateful for your speaking.
00:33:10.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:33:12.000 Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:33:15.000 Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.
00:33:21.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.