Charlie Kirk came out of nowhere 10 years ago and built the world s most influential organization of young conservatives. He did that by going to universities, setting up card tables, offering to discuss and debate all the issues that weren t being discussed and debated in these places set up for exactly that reason, and iterating as he grew, establishing conservative clubs on campuses all across the U.S., building a grassroots organization, learning how to debate despite the fact that he hadn t gone to college, and actually playing the role that the professors in the classes were supposed to play.
00:00:00.160Looking back from your position of wisdom, what do you have to say to the American public about your cookie advocacy?
00:00:06.040I should have been advocating for, you know, reduction in hamburger or steak prices.
00:00:12.420The funny undercurrent of that is that's kind of what started my political advocacy.
00:00:15.320I know. It appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe.
00:00:20.380When I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged.
00:00:25.560Maybe cauldron's not the right metaphor.
00:00:27.500But I'm curious, I think that your political rebellion took a conservative form.
00:00:32.880Yes, the non-political, non-historical literature that we were being assigned was what I call pre-woke, very much anti-colonialist, anti-Western, that we are the contaminants on the world, that we are polluting other tribes.
00:00:46.980I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad I don't know how to recover exactly.
00:01:12.780Charlie came out of nowhere 10 years ago and built the world's most influential organization of young conservatives, and he did that from scratch.
00:01:27.540He did that by going to universities pretty much single-handedly, setting up card tables, offering to discuss and debate all the issues that weren't being discussed and debated in these places set up for exactly that reason.
00:01:42.580And iterating as he grew, establishing conservative clubs on campuses all across the United States, building a grassroots organization, learning how to debate despite the fact that he hadn't gone to college, and actually playing the role on campus colleges that the professors in the classes were supposed to play.
00:02:07.460And so, why watch my discussion with Charlie?
00:02:13.580Well, to learn who he is, to listen to how he did this.
00:02:18.140You know, he had a vision and a calling, and he found his way and made it spectacularly successful.
00:02:26.840Well, he was still very young and has ended up playing a very significant cultural role, a transformative role that is by no means over.
00:02:38.080And so, I think the podcast is interesting in and of itself because the story is so compelling.
00:02:43.360But it also contains many lessons, you might say, for those who are searching for a productive, adventurous, romantic way forward.
00:02:56.660So, join me in my discussion with Charlie Kirk, founder and leader of Turning Point USA, the world's largest conservative youth organization.
00:03:08.680So, I've got a gotcha question for you.
00:03:12.740Okay, so, you know that Robert F. Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, and I suppose Jay Bhattacharya, too, are all hands on deck to restore American health.
00:03:28.560And that likely the biggest problem that's confronting us is insulin resistance.
00:04:01.540And yet, when you were in high school, one of the first things you did to begin your political career was agitate for a, what, reduction or stabilization of the price of cookies at the school?
00:04:14.160Yeah, so, looking back from your position of wisdom, 13, 14 years later, what do you have to say to the American public about cookie advocacy?
00:04:23.980I should have been advocating for, you know, reduction in the hamburger or steak prices.
00:04:31.600You see, that would have been a much better health approach.
00:04:33.800But all kidding aside, the funny undercurrent of that is that's kind of what started my political advocacy.
00:04:51.480And I look at these high school kids now, but they're able to order into high school.
00:04:55.560They have entire cubby rooms of, like, half of the high school class that is just getting takeout.
00:04:59.580So, in our high school in the suburbs of Chicago, the biggest thing was these basically homemade cookies that nearly tripled in price over the course of a year.
00:05:07.540So, we started Students Against Cookie Inflation, which was a rather righteous effort, I might say.
00:05:54.040And Obama was a homegrown, which he really wasn't, but he was, you know, a senator from Illinois.
00:05:59.120A homegrown, almost quasi-messianic political figure.
00:06:02.480I mean, you remember how it captured the nation times 10 in the Chicagoland area.
00:06:06.720Remember, Obama did his victory speech in Grant Park in downtown Chicago.
00:06:11.640That's where he celebrated his victory in 2008.
00:06:14.480And so, it was just an all-encompassing, almost, you know, political moment where it was at very high social cost to be disagreeable with the rise of Obama in 2008.
00:06:27.820And mind you, I was a seventh or eighth grader at the time, actually going into ninth grade.
00:06:31.620And so, I decided at my very best to push back, oh, really, is he going to fulfill all these promises?
00:06:36.440Is he really going to be able to bring utopia?
00:06:39.080And admittedly, I was rather clumsy and shallow in my capacity to be able to articulate those beliefs.
00:06:43.960But I had something in me that wanted to push back against the orthodoxy of the time.
00:06:57.820I came to Toronto because I, and still to this day, this is correct, I was so moved by your lectures and your videos that they significantly changed my life.
00:07:08.200And I really wanted to meet you more than anything else.
00:07:14.580And I, you know, I remember trying to figure out who you were because of what you were doing and the fact that you had this remarkable organizational capacity.
00:07:24.080But what I'm interested in now, you know, is what I'm very interested in trying to figure out what inclined you to take the path that you took.
00:07:36.220Now, you said, okay, so you said Obama, but you said something else at the same time.
00:07:41.280You said that you had been reading American history, okay, and that you were concerned with, interested in, and convinced by, I suppose, all of those.
00:07:52.920This issue of what made America great.
00:07:56.400Okay, so now, well, so this is interesting and worth taking apart because for decades, certainly since the 60s, the typical pathway for someone young who was assessing the history of his or her country would have been to read it through a highly critical lens.
00:08:16.120So, for example, I remember when I was 13 or 14, so that would have been mid-70s, I was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and some of the so-called new journalists.
00:08:29.920And they're not, they weren't of the left exactly the way you would conceptualize the left now.
00:08:36.260They were more like radical literary figures, I would say.
00:08:40.420But the mid-70s ethos certainly was to read history, sociology, critically.
00:08:52.760And I don't mean you were being uncritical, I mean to take an anti-establishment stance.
00:08:58.900Like in the 60s, that was all, well, anti-establishment, free love, the sexual revolution is coming, everyone's going to be free.
00:09:07.240By the time the 70s came along, which was the milieu I was embedded in, all of the optimism of the 60s had pretty much vanished.
00:09:15.120But all of the cynicism 100% remained.
00:09:19.740Now, you, though, interestingly enough, in Chicago, and this would be mid-2000s, so quite a bit later.
00:09:48.080Like, what do you think, what made you different?
00:09:50.340Like, when I met you, you were very, I would say, relatively sheltered still and very, very straight-laced.
00:09:57.720And from the Canadian perspective, you know, you were of the, it appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe, which we have some of in Alberta, not a lot.
00:10:14.340And so when I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's, that's the cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged.
00:10:24.160Maybe cauldron is not the right metaphor.
00:10:26.140But I'm curious, like, why do you think that your political rebellion took a conservative form when that isn't, it's not common for young people.
00:10:36.080And it certainly wasn't the pattern of the time from, say, 1965 till, well, probably till about you, till about when you were adolescent.
00:10:45.660So that's a phenomenal analysis and question.
00:10:48.500Let me just add to it, the literature, the non-political, non-historical literature that we were being assigned in 6th, 7th, 8th grade was what I call pre-woke.
00:11:12.060I'm just drawing from, like, 13, 14 years.
00:11:14.840Basically, the entire premise of the book, based on my memory, is that there are these, this, you know, wonderful tribe, and they all get along in Africa, and these evil colonialists come in, and things fall apart, and there's internal strife.
00:11:27.140And the end of the book is basically the summary of all of these relationships of these evil colonialists that say, and, you know, here's the history of just the under, you know, sub-Saharan Africa.
00:11:36.780Basically dismissing all of the complexities and the beauties of, you know, this specific tribe.
00:11:41.800Right, so it's kind of a testament to Rousseau, but it was written by an African, that book.
00:11:46.300Correct, and I, again, I'm drawing from almost a decade old memory, but I remember the discussions we'd have in class were very much anti-colonialist, anti-Western, that we are the contaminants on the world, that we are polluting other tribes.
00:12:00.580And again, mind you, we're in eighth or ninth grade discussing this, so I don't know what post-structuralism is or post-modernism is, but it was pre-woke.
00:12:10.740And so, from the historical standpoint, it was not 1619 Project, but it was, we're going to spend a whole month on slavery, and we're going to spend three days on the founding.
00:12:20.900Right, and did you spend any of the time when you were studying slavery assessing the fact that the UK was the only country that's ever existed in the history of the world that spent, what, two centuries and a tremendous proportion of its treasury eradicating slavery around the world at the behest of Protestant Christians?
00:13:32.320And it's also the case that his ideas wouldn't have fallen on fertile ground, because they did relatively.
00:13:38.380Like, when you can make a radical cultural shift in one lifetime, which is no time at all historically, you know that you're at the forefront of ideas whose time has come.
00:13:48.700And that was clearly the case for Wilberforce, and he certainly is one of those people who stood up against the greedy, self-centered, and malevolent ethos of his time.
00:14:02.560But the UK swung around behind him impossibly rapidly, and then with their full might.
00:14:08.860And it is, you know, I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad, I don't know how to recover exactly.
00:14:18.340And one of them was that the public school system was set up by fascists on the Prussian military model.
00:14:24.320I just, I've never been able to figure out exactly what to do with that.
00:14:28.460They were literally trying to make thoughtless worker drones-
00:14:37.840And what that in itself wasn't so bad, because the country was industrializing.
00:14:42.260But right underneath that was the idea that while you were doing that, it was necessary to pretty much stamp out or fail to develop anything that would produce any kind of creative entrepreneurship.
00:14:52.600It's like, okay, that's hard to swallow.
00:14:56.020And then when I read about how the food pyramid was developed, that's just beyond comprehension.
00:15:01.680I don't know if that's the worst crime ever committed in the United States, but it's up there.
00:15:08.360And then this, the next mystery is, Wilberforce is another mystery of that magnitude.
00:15:13.620And even, you might say, particularly on the left.
00:15:18.920It's like, okay, you guys, you're for the oppressed, which I don't buy for a second, but especially because I've watched in the last 10 years, the lefties sell out the poor worldwide to the climate apocalypse mongers.
00:15:33.300And that's just been a catastrophe for places like Africa, like Bagat Wade has been so forthright in observing.
00:15:40.840But the fact that slavery and reparations, all of that, the unfair founding of the United States has been a central dogma of the radical leftists.
00:15:55.340They blame slavery on the West, and the fact that the radical types have control over the education system means that no one, even educated in a conservative milieu, knows who the hell Wilberforce was.
00:16:12.380And I just don't know what to think about that.
00:16:14.700Or Thaddeus Stevens, or the heroism of John Quincy Adams.
00:16:20.560Those would be, you know, some main protagonist characters for the abolitionist slavery here in America.
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00:17:43.860And so when I was in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, something in me, and I don't quite know, my parents, very patriotic, but not political.
00:28:28.300And then, there's a commandment not to use God's name in vain.
00:28:35.700And then, there's the comments in the Gospels about the Pharisees, right?
00:28:38.760The Pharisees are exactly the people who use religious terminology, so moral terminology, to cloak their power-seeking machinations, right?
00:29:02.120They're like graves full of rotting bodies that someone whitewashed, right?
00:29:07.160And he says that if they would have, they're the people, had they been alive in the time of the prophets they purport to follow, they would have been part of the mob that would have killed them, right?
00:29:19.460That's actually part of, you may know this, but that's part of what sets them up for the crucifixion.
00:29:23.540Because they're not very happy with those insults publicly delivered.
00:29:26.840But that shows you also how old the problem is.
00:29:29.160So you can imagine one of the worst possible sins is to take the highest possible virtue, so that would be, well, we stand for the oppressed, we stand for the poor, and then to gerrymander that so that your standing for that only pushes you towards power.
00:30:44.280Elijah, I mean, is that whole story is a manifestation of the nature worshipers versus the belief in God.
00:30:50.380But back to just to reiterate a very profound point you made.
00:30:54.800In evangelical circles, we get wrong, which is people think do not take the Lord's name in vain just to say do not say God in an expletive way.
00:31:02.860It actually, the word is don't carry the name of the Lord in vain, meaning don't do actions in the name of God.
00:31:33.680We believe that is one of the, if not the most evil thing you could do.
00:31:36.040So you think that's the transgression against, okay, so that's interesting.
00:31:39.640So my psychological understanding of the idea of the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is what possesses your words when you truly aim up.
00:31:53.000And this makes sense to me psychologically, because the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you spontaneously are directly related to the intent of your aim.
00:32:05.180That's how you're, literally how your verbal mind works, your imagination as well.
00:32:12.400You know, if you go on a date and you aim at sexual contact on the first date, the fantasies that come along with that aim will be of that nature, obviously.
00:32:23.740And if you are on the hunt, so to speak, for a marital partner, the fantasies that accompany that will be quite different.
00:32:32.640So this is literally how your imagination, it's also the case that, you know, it's the same idea with the date.
00:32:38.360If it's short-term mating is your goal, which, by the way, is the goal of the dark tetrad types differentially.
00:32:47.020So what that means is that the sexual revolution handed women over to the worst men.
00:32:54.600But it's definitely the case that your aim determines what comes to mind.
00:32:58.200Now, you said that that sin against the Holy Ghost, which is the unforgivable sin, is the sin that occurs when you use the Lord's name in vain.
00:33:09.680So when you claim to be motivated by what's divine, but are actually serving the Luciferian spirit of usurpation of power.
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00:34:33.740Most of the people that I've spoken with who proclaim themselves to be atheists are atheists for two reasons.
00:34:40.900And I mean the good faith atheists, let's say.
00:34:44.680First of all, they tend to be tilted in the engineering cognition direction, so they're much more oriented towards things than people.
00:34:53.380And that's a stable temperamental trait.
00:34:55.960But they've almost all also invariably been hurt by someone or some institution that's claimed to be religious.
00:35:04.620And then you could also see that obviously betraying someone in Dante's account of the Inferno, when he goes down to the bottom of hell, he finds the betrayers right next to Satan.
00:36:55.180They tell me that, you know, five years ago, six years ago, because it's starting to be a long time now, eight years ago even, they were not in good shape.
00:37:03.580And they came across my lectures or books and decided to, decided that there was something worth aiming for and then decided to try.
00:37:14.580So to tell the truth, that's a very common vow, let's say, to take on more responsibility.
00:37:22.380And they usually laugh about starting to make their bed or something like that, which is a lot less trivial than people think.
00:37:44.820First, the crowds alone, we're drawing crowds of 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people in the middle of the day just for me to debate a random college kid or a college professor.
00:37:54.760Yeah, so walk me through one of those events, Charlie.
00:37:56.880And so I've been doing that for a decade.
00:37:59.000Just so I started, as we know, we started Turning Point USA.
00:38:03.140One of the things I really wanted to make sure is that I was in touch with the target audience that I was trying to convince and trying to persuade.
00:38:10.120No better way to do that than just go to the college campus itself, set up a card table with maybe a poster that says something like, I think government should be smaller, something like that, and start a discussion.
00:38:22.320I would do this at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
00:38:24.860I would do this at University of Illinois when we had almost no funding, no connections, no idea what I was doing.
00:38:34.560No data, no chart, no abstraction can get to that personal human-to-human contact.
00:38:40.940So I've been doing that for many years.
00:38:42.300And then Steven Crowder, his credit, kind of popularized this idea of debating and putting it on.
00:38:48.200I said, oh, well, I also filmed these interactions.
00:38:50.760And so I started to do that around 2018.
00:38:53.140So it's been about seven or eight years now.
00:38:55.700And then 10 kids would show up and then 20 kids.
00:38:58.960And we started to put these on the internet and kind of concurrent and simultaneous to your rise, where you diagnosed what was going on in the West quicker and more accurately than anybody else, especially with young men.
00:39:11.080We started to see our popularity increase as we started to address some of the underlying problems that young people were facing, but in particular, young men were facing.
00:39:21.820We were basically out of business for a year in the sense where we weren't able to do campus activities.
00:39:26.840Donald Trump was no longer in office, and we had to really kind of rebuild on campus basically about two years ago.
00:39:35.580So let's just say the spring of 2023, things really started to change, where we would do these campus events prior, and we would bring in your traditional conservatives, 300 to 400 people, maybe 100 interested types, maybe 50 liberals, 500 students, call it a day.
00:39:53.280All of a sudden, in 2023, we were drawing a different type of person and student.
00:39:58.440First of all, we were drawing people outside of the campuses that were welders, electricians, and plumbers, and the working men that heard that we were in town.
00:40:12.180I mean, these were guys that would go up to the question line, and they were not asking about Rousseau, or they were not asking about Jacques Derrida.
00:40:18.700They were saying, how do I be a better person because I'm expecting a daughter in six months.
00:40:23.980And all of a sudden, here I am, you know, not in the position where you are nearly as seasoned to give advice to that young man, but he's searching, and he's looking for anyone that seems to have an idea of how the world is supposed to work, that is professing a worldview of order and structure and discipline.
00:40:50.300And I still get a lot of that, but it was something different.
00:40:52.280It was young men especially that were seeking purpose and seeking a destination.
00:40:56.340So this is crucially important, this transformation, because one of the things that, so let's go back to that 60s dynamic, that anti-authoritarian 60s dynamic.
00:41:08.320You know, the role of the left in the 60s was like an entrepreneurial progressive radicalism, let's say.
00:41:19.420And the stance of the conservative was, well, you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater guys.
00:41:29.980And that's a pretty good dynamic, because you need a force for change, and you need a force that resists that.
00:41:35.380But I think, you see, I think what the conservatives did wrong, like profoundly wrong, was that they were, their breaks, this is why they're always dismissed as reactionary,
00:41:46.700their breaks, B-R-A-K-E-S, their breaks were fundamentally, they're also moralistic.
00:42:50.200They're just harder to talk to by a lot.
00:42:52.120But our discussion centered around the fact that it isn't that you should get married, although you should.
00:43:01.840It's that there is no alternative that's anywhere near as good by any standard whatsoever, regardless of position of analysis or time length.
00:43:13.380Anything you do other than that, even though marriage is very difficult, and every other alternative is far, far worse.
00:43:24.860And so, if you want a pathway forward to what the conservatives support, the conservatives should be offering an invitation.
00:43:55.120And so, now you're seeing that these young men who are coming, especially the working class types, they're not so interested in the political.
00:44:02.420They're probably not even interested in the arguments, exactly.
01:19:42.700He's near Mount Sinai or Horeb, which is where heaven meets earth and something attracts his attention.
01:19:48.940And then what happens to Moses is that he takes it seriously and he gets to the bottom of it, and that transforms him.
01:19:55.740So the idea is something like, if you watch for adventure and opportunity, if you watch for the pathway forward, something will grip your attention.
01:20:11.920Okay, so you were doing that with economics.
01:20:13.440And it's funny, as I went to the bottom of it, it actually brought me back to my Christian upbringing and my roots.
01:20:18.280Which is, well, that's what happens to Moses, because when he gets to the bottom of things, it's the voice of the spirit of his ancestors, right?
01:20:25.080Because eventually, I was reading Hayek, Road to Serfdom.
01:21:46.480Daily Wire types deserve a lot of credit for that, too, because they took a big risk.
01:21:50.400Yeah, but you had the initiative to bring everybody together, and you did a great job with it.
01:21:54.760And you presented it in a way that I'd never have—because you have a very unique psychological understanding and interpretation of the Scriptures.
01:22:02.500Yeah, well, we had great panelists, too.
01:22:04.660Like, they were a very good crowd, the people that decided to purchase me.
01:22:09.160And so what ended up happening is, as I started to pursue the Scriptures more and take it seriously, remember back to our timeline, simultaneously, the woke stuff all of a sudden reared its head, which is a manifestation of the spiritual.
01:22:26.6802020 was peak woke, where I was starting to understand what was really going on here, that this was a manifestation of a spiritual struggle.
01:25:05.040And ordered freedom is voluntary responsibility.
01:25:08.140And you see, what you're seeing, and then let's close with this, because I want your insights into this.
01:25:13.520What you're seeing when those working class men are coming to your talks, and they've become more and more popular, as you said, as you've advertised them.
01:25:50.760He did, and a lot of trauma, a lot, a lot.
01:25:55.580So, okay, so first of all, it's combat, and you're trying to develop yourself, and then you're doing that quite successfully and educating yourself along the way.
01:26:05.700So, what sort of shift has there been in your self-conceptualization and your understanding of your mission and the way that you conduct yourself?
01:26:15.440Like, you see you're being called upon to be a leader, let's say, that's not merely political.
01:26:25.760I mean, when I show up to college campus after college campus, mind you, during the day, they have got a million other things they could be doing.
01:26:31.880This is 12 p.m. lunchtime, and 4,000 people are waiting for me.
01:27:09.460But you think about it, what I am doing is hyper-masculine, which is no rules except, hey, we're just going to go basically figure this out.
01:27:18.120This is the closest thing to a verbal street fight that one can have.
01:27:51.320Well, even that guy that you just talked to, and maybe we'll throw this.
01:27:54.740Yeah, so he was radically anti-Semitic, but also he said he had served, he looked to me like someone who'd been very, very hurt, he's fallen to this sort of snake pit of conspiratorial theories.
01:28:08.960Yeah, yeah, but you could also see that he is, he would be very happy, and he did listen to you to the degree that he could, because he had tilted pretty hard towards paranoia.
01:28:20.360And that's very difficult to escape from once it's established.
01:28:45.720So now I look at myself as a father of two kids, 31 years old.
01:28:49.760So I'm no longer a colleague of these college kids.
01:28:52.440I'm not quite a professor, but I have a little bit more wisdom, a little bit more life experience.
01:28:58.060So I'm trying to be more tender when I see someone that is not overly aggressive.
01:29:02.340Now, if someone comes and they say, you're the worst person ever, they start insulting me, I'll kind of meet them at their own frequency to try to just a little make an example out of them.
01:29:10.000However, that one guy I could see, that's a very deeply hurt individual.
01:29:28.320Well, that's that issue of trying to love your enemy.
01:29:32.120Okay, so we could, maybe we'll close with this, a little investigation into what that means.
01:29:36.520So, you know, in the Gospels, when Christ is telling people how to conduct themselves and also how to pray, he basically says, well, first aim up.
01:30:24.540Well, if you were sensible and you thought about things in the frame we just established, what you'd hope is that, what you'd notice is that you probably don't want an enemy.
01:30:37.080And someone, one person who decides to go out of their way to make your life miserable because you treated them badly, that might be it for you, right?
01:31:18.900Well, and then he was throwing out these ideas to you and willing to do it because he respected you to see how you would sort through them.
01:31:26.140You know, and you said to him that, well, you didn't go along with many of the, virtually everything he said, but you did it without being dismissive.
01:31:33.600And, okay, and so now you've also said that you've shifted into, you didn't use these words, but that you've shifted into more of a mentor role.
01:33:02.960I try to do an hour and a half to two hours a day.
01:33:05.040But when I'm in season, which is I'm doing 27 campus stops, plus my two-hour podcast radio show every single day, plus speeches, plus two kids, plus a marriage.
01:33:30.100So if I have a two-hour radio show, three hours on campus, and a speech in the evening, and I do that for three days straight, that's tough stuff.
01:33:38.100But in the off-season, which is the summer and the winter, I try to do two hours of studying a day, which is a combination of reading, podcasting, or kind of a kind of like playing with AI on a certain topic.