← The Charlie Kirk Show
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Hey, everybody. Live from Lexington, Kentucky, the five biggest lies that people tell you about America and that your professors or teachers are teaching your children or maybe even you about our country. We go through that in live format. Then I take questions and this episode is brought to you by our friends who could protect your data and anonymize your activity@expressvpn.com charlie e x p r e s s vpn.com charlie protect yourself against Big Tech and Big Brother. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy, his spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa. 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. That's why we are here. It's great to be here in the great state of Kentucky. So many friends here. We're going to have a lot of fun. I want to thank the University of Kentucky, really, really worthy of praise because we've been doing this campus tour and the fact that we're able to do this basically on campus is a great thing. So I want to thank the University of Kentucky. I don't actually make a habit of, of thanking colleges, but I think this is actually one where I'm going to say thank you to University of Kentucky. Given everything that's happening, they had every reason not to allow this event to happen and they deserve some thanks for that. So I want to make sure I start with that. I also want to say that my friend Senator Rand Paul was not able to join us tonight. We had a video from him, but unfortunately we weren't able to get that done. Rand is a great guy and he represents everyone in this room. If you're a citizen of Kentucky, every single day in Washington, D.C. i also want to say Senator Mitch McConnell, I don't agree with him on everything but what he did with Gorsuch Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. And protecting the filibuster is incredible. And now we look back, we say, you know what, I'm glad that we protected the filibuster. And so I just want to say you have two good senators, different, different ways of going about things. And I'm going to say nothing but positive things about both of them tonight. And I think Senator Rand Paul, I probably agree with him on more issues. But Senator Mitch McConnell, what he did with Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and 200 circuit court judges, he deserves applause for that. He really, truly does. He represented a lot of your interests very, very well. So we're going to have some fun tonight. I'm going to make this speech a little bit different than some of the other ones that we've been doing. We were in Oklahoma and Missouri. We've been crisscrossing the country. And I want to talk about kind of the biggest lies that we are told about the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world, America. The United States of America. The country that we all love and that we're really worried about the current direction and the trajectory of our nation. And over the last year, I think it's fair to say that we've never seen a year like this. We probably never will again. I hope never will again. And my goodness, have things changed. And not only with the lockdowns and the infringing of our freedoms and liberties, but also over the summer, with BLM Incorporated basically burning down our civilization, we had an entire national conversation. I can't stand that. Because it wasn't a conversation. No one was having a conversation. As we were being lectured by people that hate our country and they got billions of dollars from our corporations to basically platform really, really bad ideas. And before you know it, our children are being taught hatred of our country and a misrepresentation of who we are, why we're here and what we believe. And so there. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but I pinpointed five lies about America that I want to talk about tonight, that I want to explore with all of you, that I want to talk about. And every single one of you have seen this, either in social media, in your classrooms, from your professors. You might have seen it on television. And the first one is this. And I've seen this repeat itself. And it's this idea that America was founded on slavery. You've probably heard this before, right? And this one bothers me more than anything else because it is an intentionally lazy and inaccurate argument. It's an argument that if you do not do further research, you don't really know the complexities of what was surrounding the American founding. It sounds true, because certain founding fathers did own slaves. But when you take a broader picture at it and you say, wait a second, why were the founding Fathers, who, by the way, were not Just. They were not just special men. They were. And women, of course, if you count Abigail Adams and the amazing people that were involved. But these people gave our entire the generations to come a civilizational gift that we're totally screwing up right now. And these Founding Fathers were. And this is another lie that I'm not even getting into, but they were people that believed in the Bible. They believed that people were made in the image of God. They believed that our rights were given to us by God and not from government. They believed that you deserve a right to live the life as you see fit. And the greatest threat to that is probably going to be government. And I'll make an argument tonight that there's actually another threat against that in addition to government. And it's something that we use every single day in our right hand pocket. But this idea that we were founded on slavery is pathologically untrue. So really, the birth certificate to our nation was the Declaration of Independence. What's so amazing about that document is it very well could have been a death certificate. The Founding Fathers who signed that document, they did not know how things were going to end. Now, mind you, they signed that in Philadelphia, which was right there on the coastline. You're basically picking a fight with the greatest naval power in the history of. Of the planet. At any time, the British Navy could have came in and killed all of them almost instantaneously, but they did that. And they pledged their lives and their fortunes and their sacred honor for a purpose. And Thomas Jefferson beautifully wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we want to contest for the laws of nature and nature's God. But if you look at the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, it's very interesting. Thomas Jefferson, in his own handwriting, in some of the harshest language. He blames King George for slavery. He says that slavery is unacceptable. He says that it was the British Empire that brought slaves to the United States and America should do everything they possibly can to try to get rid of it. Now you might say, well, why didn't that make it into the final draft? Well, because you need to build a coalition of states. And the only way you could possibly ever push back against the British Empire is involving Southern states. Southern states were obviously more likely to support slavery than Northern states. A year after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Vermont independently abolished slavery in 1777. The first sovereign state in the history of the planet that we have recording that actually abolished slavery. Why? Because of the teachings and the writings of the Declaration of Independence. Many of you have probably heard about the Northwest Territories before Northwest Territory was actually just right over the Ohio River. It was considered the Great west in the 1780s and there was something called the Northwest Ordinance. After the Treaty of Paris in 1783, George Washington signed what was called the Northwest Ordinance. And that was the first new territory where slavery was completely outlawed and it was ratified by the United States Congress. If we were founded on slavery, why is it that new lands we are expanding to were free of slavery? It would be the opposite, right? We'd want to expand slavery into more territories and that's a very, very big deal. The Northwest Territories included Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois. Nowadays they didn't have those state lines back then. And the fact that those states were non slave states ended up being a tension point in years to follow. Not to mention Thomas Jefferson, who was a very complicated person himself, the third American president. He, as one of his first acts as president, signed a moratorium of no new slaves allowed to be brought into the United States of America, which actually was a provision allowed in the US Constitution. And he signed it into law. And America was a better place because of that. Now, the second great crisis in America was of course, the crisis of slavery. And then you saw a re emergence of people that tried to defend slavery. Calhoun in the 1820s, Andrew Jackson among it. Of course, obviously that came to a boiling point with the American Civil War. But the idea that our founding and our ideals were rooted in the apology of slavery is completely untrue. Now a better way to say it is that some of the Founding Fathers had very complicated, very complicated issues that they were personally dealing with. But their ideal remained true. And here's how I can prove it to you. When Martin Luther King Jr. Was advocating for civil rights legislation, he said that we are here to cash in on the promissory note of the Founding Fathers. He never said that we have to get rid of the Declaration or get rid of the US Constitution. He said if we're actually going to live up to these ideals, then we must pass the Civil Rights act that all men are created equal and we should care about character, not skin color. Now, unfortunately, in our country right now, we care more about skin color than character and we're actually regressing backwards thanks to critical race theory and all these bigoted ideas that are being taught in many of your classrooms across the country. But America was founded on freedom. Now, mind you, slavery was a human and universal and by the way, slavery still exists on our planet. Before we start to get on our moral high horse and we act as if all slavery has been abolished, just look at the Southern border. Thousands of children are being sold as slaves. For unaccompanied minors, rented would be the term. And it's a disgusting thing to even think about. To be able to gain access into the United States with a cartel member or someone who wants to come into America. That's not my own words. That's Tom Homan, who used to ran immigration, customs and Enforcement. Many of the world right now, actually, there's more slaves in the world today than there were back in the 1800s. Horn of Africa, all throughout the Middle East. So the question should be slavery was a human universal why and how was it abolished? And the answer to that is that men and women who took the teachings of the Bible very seriously, who took the Enlightenment very seriously started and they created a great leap forward that we know is the United States of America to challenge humankind and mankind to be better and to create civil government to protect first principles. We did not completely and totally live up to it at the beginning, but as you could see in the Northwest Territories, the Northwest Ordinance, when we had an opportunity, actually live out that value system, our founding fathers did it. And people say, and I'm never going to say America's a perfect country. We've made plenty of mistakes, and I'm happy to go through it, but it's kind of a waste of time. Because that's why you go to college, right? You go to college to learn how terrible America is. Tonight you're going to learn how great America is, right? That's the opposite of why you're here tonight. I could go through everything we've done wrong, and I'll probably admit many of those things, we've made mistakes. But America is not a mistake. America in itself is a moral good for the world and the greatest country ever to exist, as I said, in the history of the world. Okay, that goes to my second big lie about America that is just floating around. And we need to. We need to quite honestly cut this entire thing out, which is that America is systemically racist. I mean, and this, this is. There's a great book written on this topic. Thomas Sowell wrote it, Discrimination and Disparities. Which is when there's a dispar, you cannot automatically just blame discrimination. And so I'm sure you've all heard that America systemically racist repeatedly over the last couple of years and built on this idea is that our systems, our systems of law, our systems of how we engage in commerce, they're so broken, they're so Backwards, that only white people can succeed and black people cannot succeed. You've probably heard this in one manifestation or the other. And it's not just that this is true, but the opposite is actually true. Do you know that one of the richest immigrant groups to America are Nigerian Americans? If America was systemically racist, how do Nigerian Americans do so well in our country? They say, well, white privilege is what is guiding our entire country. And if you're a white person, you must take a knee and atone for your privilege. Let me be very clear, and I've said this, you know, for years, and I don't consider this to be controversial. White privilege is a racist myth that is rooted in bigotry, trying to classify people based on their skin color. If you are a racist, you have something to apologize for. If you are a white person who is not a racist, you have nothing to apologize for. And anyone who makes you apologize just based on the color of your skin, they're the racist and you're not. It's that simple. And so this idea of our systems are racist also does not stand up against any sort of cross examination of different ethnic groups in our country. White people on average, if you were to classify it. And again, I don't like the over racialization of our country. But if that's where the left wants to lead this, the facts don't even support. Their entire charge against our country is that Asian Americans and Indian Americans are far wealthier on average in our country than white Americans. There are twice as many white Americans in poverty than black Americans in our country. Now black Americans are, they have a higher percentage to live in poverty. But this idea that every single white person in the country is living a life of luxury and convenience is totally untrue. And according to not just the Hoover Institution, but U.S. census data and government labor data, this is the greatest statistic to dispel it, which is that a black child raised by a mother and father is more likely to succeed by every independent metric than a white child who is raised by a single mother. Now I'm not bashing single mothers. I think that they're modern day heroes. The point is that there's two parent privilege in our country, not white privilege in our country. And if we're serious about rebuilding the black family, which we should be, we should be putting fathers back in the home. And currently the black fatherless rate is 74% in our country. 74% of black children will not be raised with a stable father in the home. So I'm happy to Go if people have questions about this specifics throughout all of it. But be very careful to try to try to connect disparities necessarily with discrimination. And so there's other parts of privilege as well in our country that are non racial privilege. For example, anyone here, the firstborn child. I am. You know that you have an exponentially higher likelihood of succeeding than the second child or the third child or the youngest child. You ever heard of firstborn privilege? Probably not. How about anyone here, an only child? You have way higher likelihood of succeeding. Every independent study shows this. Now we can laugh and chuckle. Of course the point is that there are different inputs at times for why certain disparities are created. And blaming all of it on deep seated harbored racial resentment is not just incorrect, it's really corrosive for all of us. And I would actually make the argument we're not just, we're not systemically racist in our country, we're the opposite. We're the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world. We bring in more people into our country and happy to talk. I actually think our immigration policies are way too generous and relaxed. But we are the most generous, the most open minded, most benevolent country ever to exist on the planet. And yet we get labeled and categorized as the exact opposite. And what my, my challenge and my charge to everyone, you know, here in one way or the other is instead of just looking at skin color, look at other circumstantial factors such as education, such as two parent households. And the argument that they'll, that the activists will make, and I'm sure someone here will make the argument is that racism created those systems. Right? That it was racist. And I can actually agree with part of that. Just be very specific of what systems those are like racist. Southern Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson created the Great Society program to take black fathers out of the household to create a generation of blacks in poverty. I can sympathize with that. And if we're serious about improving the livelihood of our fellow countrymen, maybe we should be less focused on government welfare and more focused on work and literacy education, bringing fathers back into the home. Did you know that actually the black marriage rate was higher than the white marriage rate in the 1920s, 30s and 40s and 50s. The black middle class was actually growing faster than the white middle class in the 1950s despite discrimination. And so we passed the Civil Rights act, which I'll get to in a second. And then despite after the Civil Rights act, we passed the Great Society act where Lyndon Baines Johnson himself, it's reported to have said that he said something so gross where he said, I will have black people voting Democrats for the next 200 years by having them addicted to government programs. That kind of black middle class boom that you were seeing in cities like Chicago and Detroit completely destroyed through housing and urban development, through the subsidies of single motherhood. Okay, so the third lie about America is that we are like every other country. We're not. We are an exceptional nation. Now, people misinterpret this where they say, oh, what are you making some sort of supremacist argument? No, absolutely not. All human beings are created equal. All cultures are not created equal. Now, this is something. This is like trigger warning USA at a college campus, right? You are not allowed to say this, but we, Our culture is more decent than the current culture in Iran. It is. We have freedom of speech. We don't throw people off the tops of buildings because they happen to be homosexuals. We do not engage in genital mutilation in our country. And we don't imprison reporters if they happen to have a story that the ruling class doesn't like. So why is it that the American culture is different? What is different about our culture? Why is it that we're the wealthiest, for now, most generous? We give more to charity than any other country in the world. And there's a couple reasons for this. One of the reasons is our history is a history of a hero's journey, which is always improving, constantly reanalyzing, reorienting ourselves. Our ideas are also centered in things that do not change. Whether, no matter what your professors might tell you, human beings are not malleable based on public policy. Now, let me be very clear, because it might come across as if I'm contradicting something earlier. Human behavior and human character in its raw material form, who you are at birth is consistent all throughout time, regardless of technology. This is something that the left will completely, you know, reject. And I can ask, I can ask this audience, do you think human beings are naturally good, basically good, or basically bad? And the answer is, of course they're basically bad. Of course you have to teach goodness to young children. You have to tell young kids to stop stealing things and to stop making themselves the center of attention and manipulating one parent against the other. You didn't teach them those things. It's naturally in their nature to try to do those. You have to tell a young person to continually say, thank you. We should have entire institutions based on teaching goodness. And that wrestling between good and evil is very important. So the question is, why is it that America that doesn't have the most oil? And I'm going to get to this Green New Deal nonsense in a second in this environmentalist garbage because it's just since we're in Kentucky, it's just going to be kind of fun. And so we don't have more oil, we don't have more natural resources. Russia has us beat there. We don't have more people. Why is it that our country has such a unbelievable success rate? And I will contest to you. It's because of our history, our culture, our ideals and our constant pursuit of improving our own character for the pursuit of the good. And not every country can boast that. Not every country is able to boast the no country ever is what America has been able to do. Okay, this is one of my favorite ones I really want to get into tonight, which is the fourth lie about America. And I'm sure all of you have heard this before and I'm actually most excited to go through this, which is that the parties have switched. How many people have heard this? That basically what they're saying is that the Republicans now are actually still the KKK people from 60 years ago or 150 years ago. That's about right. Am I summarizing that that there was this massive switch after the Civil Rights act and that everything that used to be Republican is actually think of that as a Democrat and everything that used to be Democrat think of that as a Republican. This is completely untrue. And there are three myths around that. And the reason I really want to get into this is that this is a huge talking point in the American South. Right? This is what a lot of your professors talk about. This is. I gave the speech in California. They kind of just shrugged their shoulders here. I'm sure a lot of you are propagandized with this nonsense. And so I'm going to first debunk it and I'm going to say it's a little bit more complicated than the absolute switch. But I'm going to say that the talking point that saying the parties switched is completely untrue. Okay? So in order to believe in this great switch, you must believe in three big kind of mythologies around that. So basically it's around this idea of the Southern Strategy. Anyone heard of the Southern Strategy before? Richard Nixon gets in a kind of a cigar filled room and he says, hey, we're losing and in order for us to win the south and win the country, we have to Be more racist. And we have to go pander to deep seated racial resentment. You guys have probably heard this in one way or the other in your political science course. But in order for that to be true, those people, the left or the professors, they'd have to explain how is it that Herbert Hoover in 1928 won 47% of of the Southern vote? How is it that Dwight D. Eisenhower, well before the switch ever happened, Dwight D. Eisenhower won Tennessee, Florida and Virginia. And Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican Reran, in 1956 won this state as well as Louisiana and West Virginia. Dwight D. Eisenhower supported the integration of schools. He supported the ruling of Brown versus the Board of Education and sent in federal troops to the Little Rock Nine. How is it that Republicans started to do better in the American south before the great switch ever happened? The answer is that maybe the great switch never occurred. So the myth number two, which of course, as I mentioned briefly, is that the Democrats all switched parties at once. This is around one man. This whole myth is around one person by the name of Strom Thurmond. You've probably heard of him before, a Southern Democrat from South Carolina. He was one of 20 Democrats who filibustered the Civil Rights Act. They filibustered for how long? Anyone know? 75 days. Now, this is wrongly used as a reason not to use the filibuster, right? This is something that, again, Mitch McConnell deserves a tremendous amount of credit for holding the line on the filibuster. What he's doing right now and he's articulating is so important. I know it's like a procedural, wonky thing, but it might actually be the end of our civilization if we don't have the filibuster right now with these maniacs running our government. So only one person switched parties. One person, and that's Strom Thurmond. Now, the reason for why he switched could be largely attributed to that he just wanted to continue to win reelection. It wasn't a massive ideological switch. It was one guy. It wasn't like the whole party switched overnight. And so if you look deeper into that and you say, wait, hold on a second. I thought that Republicans started to do a lot better than in the south after the great switch. It's not that simple, actually, if you look into it. The Republicans did not start dominating the deep south until 1994. Bill Clinton won Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, this state and West Virginia in 92 and in 96. I'm not sure if he won the state, but he won most of the South. Jimmy Carter. In 1976, just 12 years after the Civil Rights act passed, Jimmy Carter swept the entire South. So if the great switch was enacted, why was it that Jimmy Carter was. Was continually doing pretty well in the racist South? By the account of the media, the professors, and the people that are trying to recreate history in reality? Here's what actually happened. What actually happened is that the American south got considerably less racist over time. And as the American south got less racist, it got more Republican. As the south got less racist, more Republicans were able to. To be in elected office. Like your former wonderful lieutenant governor, who did a great job and she deserves to be applauded. And she knows all about this. She had to hear that. Stand up, please. Did a wonderful job. So this point is deeper, though. This point is, I will contend with you, that the philosophical underpinnings of the Democrat Party have been largely unchanged. That the Democrats went from the plantation to intimidation to entitlement. That the Democrats have always cared about skin color then and they care about it now. That Republicans have always cared about character and not skin color. And so you go through the last and final point of this, and then I'll connect it all together, which is kind of the history of the Democrat Party, which is that in order to believe this, you must think that the south is as racist as it was back in the 1960s. Some people believe that, which is just pathological. It really is. South Carolina, which is considered to be one of the most racist states, according to the New York Times, has a Republican black senator where Republicans said, I don't want a white liberal, but I prefer a black conservative. Louisiana, which is the home of David Duke, who, by the way, is a Democrat. Just so we're clear, he endorsed Joe Biden for president. And Elon Omar. Louisiana had an Indian American governor. So did South Carolina. Again, as the south started caring less about skin color, it started to become more Republican. It's a very, very important thing. And so the history of the Democrat Party is one that must be reinforced. Did you know the Dred Scott decision, which was an evil decision in our country, that every single Supreme Court justice who voted for it, all seven, all of them were Democrats. And the two dissenters were Republicans. John Wilkes Booth, also a Democrat, who killed the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said, quote, unquote, if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendment were all opposed by Democrats. Do you know that Republicans sent 22 black people to Congress before the year of 1900? And Democrats did not send a Single black person to Congress till 1935. What was the first movie ever shown in the White House? A racist movie by the name of Birth of a Nation. You might have heard of this before. Who was it shown by? Democrat Woodrow Wilson from Princeton University, who became governor of New Jersey. Then an awful president of the United States screened that movie as the first ever movie shown in the White House. And so I am not contending that either party has a monopoly on racism. I'm not saying that when you have a group of people that is 75 million, you're going to have a couple scumbags. Instead, what I'm contending with you is that you have been sold a lie. You've been told a lie by the people in charge, that there is this some sort of perfect, seamless switch, when in reality it's not just more nuanced than that. It's simply untrue that people that harbor racial resentment, they have no place in the American conservative movement. And if I have anything to say about it, and you look at what the conservative movement cares about, it's upward mobility, it's about improving people's lives, about school choice, it's about caring about your soul, about your character. Which side of the aisle right now can't stop talking about skin color? So the fifth lie about America. And then we'll get to some questions. I just. I wanted to make sure I hit that. Actually, can I just. Can I say something about. Is the environmental thing a big deal around here? Is that a big thing? Sort of cold country. So let me just say this, that I'm not going to get too weedsy into some of that stuff, but let me say this, if your biggest concern, and this might not be anyone here, but it could be someone. If your biggest concern is something that you cannot control or something that is not directly impacting you, you just must first admit you're living a great life. So if your biggest concern is existential, you by definition have a great life. For example, the 300 million people that do not have access to toilets in India, their biggest concern is sanitation every single day. They're not living a great life. And what I find about the activists that are finding on the environmental movement, more than anything else, there is an ingratitude baked into it, and it's also alarmist in nature. Now, I'm not going to get into. I'm not going to contest every single one of their charges, but I am going to say is this, is that the alarmism that is built around the climate change and The Green New Deal nonsense is not just bad for our country, it's bad for humanity at large. You want to know why we're able to improve products so quickly? Because fossil fuels are cheap, plentiful and reliable. When you're in negative 30 degree weather in New Hampshire, solar panels are not going to be able to help you very much. And what's amazing is that there's also a misunderstanding of actually what our energy grid is. So 33% of our energy grid would be classified as petroleum, right? About 11% as coal. And they are pathologically obsessed about destroying every single coal job, despite the fact that the demand for coal is both domestic and international. A lot of the coal demand is also overseas in the third world because they have such rising populations. Wait a second. You were able to use coal to develop your economy, why can't we use it to develop ours? About 11% of our grid is renewable energy, which is solar and wind. If you hate birds, you probably love wind energy because there's no better way to destroy just millions and millions of birds than wind energy. And they're also just awful to look at. And then nuclear energy, about 8%, but the environmentalists want to get rid of nuclear energy as well. Then about 32% is natural gas, which again is thanks to fracking and those developments, which is another thing they want to get rid of. And so when you talk about energy, it's really a morality argument. And I don't make this argument lightly. It's this. Do you care about human beings more or do you care about the planet more? And they're not mutually exclusive. I care about the planet, I care about the environment. I do not want to see dirty rivers and air that we can't breathe. With that being said, I care about the flourishing of human beings and mankind a lot more than some delta smelt fish that they have in Central California that causes power outages every single summer where the working class and lower middle income people, mostly racial minorities, are not able to have access to reliable, plentiful and cheap energy. And you want to know why utility rates are rising in other parts of the world? In parts of the country, it's because of the attack on, on fossil fuels. And so happy to talk about that if that interests people when we open up for questions. But understand that most of the lifestyle you enjoy is made possible thanks to the amazing advancements that we have made in the fossil fuel industry. Okay, my last point, my fifth lie about America and then I want to get to some questions because that's always fun, which is that the Constitution is outdated. I'm sure you've heard this before. So really the main thrust of this contention is whether or not you think human behavior is constant over time or whether it changes over time. I will submit to you and I will make this argument that the Constitution was not written for the times. It was written to stand the test of time. It was written by. Thank you. It was written by a group of thinkers and scholars who studied very seriously about Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, St. Augustine, Burke, John Locke. Every one of the thinkers that really cared deeply about who are we, why are we here, and how are we supposed to interact with the natural world. And they made the contention over a long period of history examination that the greatest threat to your freedom and liberty is resigning all of that power to an unchecked bureaucracy or an unchecked, unchecked governmental authority. So the Constitution comes from the premise that you actually deserve to be free and that you are the sovereign and whomever's in charge is only there thanks to you. They only have any power because you have what? The consent of the governed. You see this throughout the Declaration, which obviously came before James Madison was the father U.S. constitution, Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration and James Madison contended in the Federalist Papers, which I encourage all of you to. To read, that liberty must be the default condition of humanity. Otherwise government will come in and act despotically and like a tyrant. And I want to be very clear. Liberty is really hard. It's really hard. You know why? You will have unequal outcomes. We need to say this more. You're going to have unequal outcomes. Some people are going to make better choices. If I gave $100 to every single person in this room and I asked you to come back tomorrow night and we saw what happened, we're going to have all sorts of different decisions being made. Some people will save it. Some people go on Robin hood and buy GameStop and we'll see how that works. Some people will buy Bitcoin. Some people will go to a local bar and some people go buy a bunch of masks. Right, like that. Whatever. The point is that when you have liberty, the choices are infinite. Therefore the outcomes will be different. Now, those different outcomes sometimes create tension. They create distrust. They create people that sometimes say, I don't like that someone has more than I do, and if they stole and they. They compromise the system, that's a perfectly valid complaint. But the Constitution is so remarkable because it treats you in a position that you must act responsibly. And that's why. That's one of my biggest complaints over the last year with all these unconstitutional and immoral lockdowns, is all of a sudden we went to this kind of compact or this construct where all of a sudden we are acting as if the government was supposed to be the one that was telling us how to best live our life. Give people the freedom to act. And if they're going to do something foolish and stupid, then so be it. Especially when it comes to the. And I make the contention the lockdowns will go down as the worst mistake in American history is the worst conscious, repeated mistake in American history. I'll make that contention. The rise in suicides, the mental health issues, the small business closures, it only created more. It created so many more problems than it ever actually solved. That's not to say I'm not minimizing the virus. The virus is a very real thing. And it's an. It's a very, very real thing. If you're a certain age with certain underlying health conditions and you should take that risk seriously. Just like how. If you have a. If, if you have difficult seeing. I probably wouldn't recommend go buying a Ford F150 and driving. Every person has to make decisions based on your own condition. And in the natural world. If all of a sudden we're gonna. If we're gonna micromanage every single decision. And we've already, we've already been through that. But I'm gonna say this, that the Constitution also spread authority over time and space, geographic space. This is really important. This is something. It's almost impossible to take over the entire United States government in one election cycle. It takes at least six years because one third of the Senate is up every. Every two years. You have to win the House, maintain the presidency. That means you must have really good ideas that are popular and you advocate them for a long period of time. And you're able to then make the contention that those ideas must be put in place. A good example of that, the Civil Rights act, that you're able to then get that done. And also over space. The states created the federal government. The federal government didn't create the states. It's a really important distinction that every state is ever able to operate, as Louis Brandeis would say, as a laboratory of democracy, that Kentucky is going to do things different than California, that Kentucky is going to do things differently than New York where they're banning fossil fuels and fracking. I hope that doesn't happen here anytime soon. I don't think it will. And that those kind of ideas of differences between states is a uniquely American idea. And I'll close with this, when it comes to the Constitution, which is that it can be very frustrating to activists that want to fundamentally reshape the image, the country in their image. It's hard to get massive things done quickly. And what I'm going to say to you is I think there's either a storm or someone's. I don't know that. What I'm going to submit to you is that that's a good thing. That's an attribute of the American system. In the French system and in the British system, you could take over the government in almost one election cycle and completely change the way of life. We are not a democracy. We are a republic. And that difference is so critically important. So to recap the five things, and I'd love to interface on these five things in particular, we were not founded on slavery. We were founded on freedom. America is not systemically racist. We are the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world. We are an exceptional nation who's made mistakes, but we are not a mistake. The party's never switched. In fact, there's a through line that I would make from the original Democrat Party, the Democrat Party today, and the Republican Party, then the Republican Party today. And the Constitution is not outdated. In fact, it's the opposite. The Constitution is more applicable today than in any other time in American history. And so with those five things, those are the five biggest lies that I think professors and teachers are teaching every single day. And I'd love to do some questions and we'll have some fun. So thank you, guys. Look, we all know cancel culture is a huge problem. And the fact is, the Internet never forgets. We all know this. That's why there's never been a more important time to protect your Internet activity. And that's why I urge you to get ExpressVPN. Every time you search, watch or click anything online, it's tracked by the big tech companies. They can then match your activity to your true identity using your device's unique IP address. The ExpressVPN app also encrypts my network data to protect my sensitive information from being compromised. What I like most is how easy it is to use. That's why I believe they're the number one VPN by cnet. That's right, number one, cnet and Wired. So stop handing over all of your data to big tech companies. Go to the VPN that I trust. Visit ExpressVPN.com Charlie to get three months free for a one year package. That's E X P R-E-S VPN.com Charlie to get three extra months free. Go to ExpressVPN.com Charlie right now to learn more. Hey, Charlie, what do you think President Trump's role will be moving forward with the Republican Party? Yeah, it's a great question. Do you guys hear that? Okay, I can repeat it. The question was, what do you think President Trump's role will be with the party moving forward? First of all, let's just understand that President Trump, he, he gave the Republican Party a gift in many different ways. We were stuck in a false paradigm of just Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton. That's what we were supposed to have in 2016. And then all of a sudden, a billionaire from New York who came down the golden escalator changed American politics forever. And he talked about three issues you are not supposed to talk about. In particular, trade, immigration and foreign wars. Those three things Republicans never talked about. If you look at Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, they'd actually agree on those three things. So Donald Trump said, hey, I don't like the fact that factories are closing in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I don't like that. You know, there's got to be some balance in this overindulgence in pro Chinese trade. I don't like the fact that we just keep on bringing people limitlessly into our country. Which is why I called for an immigration moratorium last year during the pandemic, where our obligation when it comes to immigration, by the way, should always be to serve our fellow countrymen and fulfill the promise. So for you college graduates, the way that I view immigration, you guys deserve jobs first. You went into debt, you played by the rules, you paid into the system. You, you guys deserve the, you guys deserve the jobs first. That's what the compact should be. The third thing is this, which was around the foreign wars where Donald Trump said, I'm sick of occupying Afghanistan indefinitely. How is that going to make our country stronger or better and challenging that? That's something that I really want to thank Senator Rand Paul on for leading on for quite some time. Senator Paul's been terrific on that and you guys are really lucky to have a spokesperson on that. And so then Donald Trump won an election he wasn't supposed to win in a style that no one thought he could win. Right? And boy, did he give our country some breathing room, didn't he? And that's the way we have to think about it. Right. And I'm also going to thank your other Senator here, Mitch McConnell, who unlike Trent Lott, put in more judges and more circuit court judges where now a lot of this nonsense that Biden is trying to do is going to get struck down by those judges. And that's a good thing. And then Donald. So we got some time. We got some time in the sense that the only, you know, the only, you know, whatever talks about this, you know, the only reason we were able to survive the lockdown the way we did is because we had a booming economy for the three years prior. So when you're able to save for the winter, metaphorically, all of a sudden 90, 100 days is a little bit more manageable thanks to what President Donald Trump did with a middle class renaissance, which is a segue to where I really want to see the Republican Party go. And I foreshadowed this a little bit, but I want to bring this out and then I'm going to actually answer your question. So which is the Republican Party has a moment right now that I hope we don't screw up to be the working class party. I believe that America is not divided by rich and poor. I think the current divide is the Zoom and Skype class and the muscular class. And we have treated the muscular class like trash the last couple decades. We consider them dumb, stupid, backwards rednecks. You guys have heard all the pejoratives. I will make the argument that a plumber or someone working in a coal mine has far more wisdom than a professor at Harvard University. And so I want to see him answer your question. Where do I want, I want to see him actively involved in keeping the Republican Party a people based party. And also, so I talked about the Constitution and the greatest threats to our freedoms and liberties. And I've talked about this the last two nights where we as conservatives also have to recognize that it's not just a binary threat against our nation. It's not just, oh, we're going to go to socialism or we're going to have American revival. There's a third threat. There's a second threat, which is we are possibly going to enter into a corporatist country. Now for all the Bernie Sanders people out there and the liberals out there, I could probably find some agreement with you guys on some of this. I don't think it's a good thing when Jeff Bezos is able to demolish 40% of American small businesses. I don't think it's a good thing when Four tech companies control all the information flow in our country. I don't think it's a good thing, nor do I think it's a constitutional thing, mind you, when our freedom of speech is basically controlled online by 5,000 people in their pajamas in Menlo park that hate our values. And so I want to see the conservative movement push back against this overly corporatist. And I'm talking about 10 or 15 companies that fund all the Democrat candidates, that fund all the liberal causes. So where does Donald Trump come into that? He's able to raise small dollar donations. Donald Trump could come here and just say nothing and just smile and he'd have 55,000 people. That's a really amazing thing. Right. And so if Republicans are serious about taking back the House and the Senate, they should involve him in that. And he might do something on social media. He might do something. We'll see what happens, as he likes to say. But I also want to see one last thing from him, which I think is a segue to your shirt. We got to fix the way we do elections in our country. We have to fix the way we do elections in our country. And I want to see Donald Trump get into the weeds of the policy debates and the fights to reform our elections. Mail in. Voting should never become universal in our country. It should be for specific reasons and specific purpose. We should fight for voter id. We should not have voting month in our country. You shouldn't have an entire week to count votes, compress the time, disallow people come in, all those different things. And Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin is where a lot of that is happening. So for that, I just want to say that's my answer to that. But I'm telling you, there are some people in the Republican Party that want to turn the page. Like, let's go back. I think that is an awful mistake. And as long as I have a platform, I'm going to make sure that never, ever happens. Thank you. Hey, Charlie. Well, first of all, I just wanted to say that you're a personal hero of mine, and if you ever ran for President, I would 100% vote for you. Not. You're very kind. Thank you. So my question is, as someone who's aspiring to be a pastor, what advice would you give to someone who wants to do that regarding the political ideas and issues of that time, especially considering how far left the church is becoming? Can you expand on that? Because I thought we're in, like, the buckle of the Bible Belt down here. Well, not. Not necessarily here, but I'M saying like places like California. Yeah, yeah. Well, some people might say it's here too. Yeah. So look, a couple things. First of all, I want to encourage you. We need more pastors that get it. And so I want to encourage you to absolutely do that. We're going to be launching a very big initiative very soon, which is very exciting, where we want to bring our capacity to organize and inspire and train into the pastor and church realm. I've spoken over 55 churches over the last year. My pastor, Rob McCoy has refused to lock down. He's been terrific. Jack Hibbs, James Cadiz, Ken Graves, the Barnett, Steve Smotherman. There's a lot of great pastors out there. So if I think this actually might be of some interest to this audience, because this tends to be, you know, a region of the world that has more awareness around American Christianity than not. When I'm in Malibu, it kind of goes right over their head. Right. So which is this? I will make the argument. And I'm an evangelical Bible believing Christian. I believe in the inerrancy of the word of God. I believe in the triune God. I believe we're made in his image. And I'm by no means if people have different opinions. I'm glad you're here. I really mean that. And if anyone wants to ask me questions, I about that, perfectly happy to. Right. And so with all that being set with that kind of framework, I think that Christians have a biblical mandate to get involved in the political fights of our time. And so this is controversial, right? So some Christians say, no, no, no, stay away from that. Well, how are we supposed to deal with Esther, Mordecai, Daniel, Joseph, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, all in the Old Testament who tried to influence secular government for God's purpose? How are we supposed to wrestle with. In Jeremiah, it says to pray for the welfare of the nation or the city of which you are in. It says in First Timothy that pray for the leaders who are in charge, that you might live quiet and peaceable lives. Jesus at Caesarea of Philippi. Philippi brought up his disciples and he asked his disciples, who do you say that I am? It's one of the most famous dialogues in the entire Bible. And it gets to the point where the one of the most famous verses ever, he says, on this rock build my. And we say church. But the real word for that is a Greek word called ekklesia. It means public square. Political influence. It's a Greek term where people used to come and meet to improve the welfare of the nation. Around them, around two Greek words. Don't want to get too into the weeds about this, Ella, utheria and isonomia, which means freedom and equality. I make the argument that Christians, we should not wall ourselves off and run to the hills and wait for the persecution to pass like it's some form of a hurricane or, or a tornado. Instead, we should have comprehensive Christianity, not compartmentalized Christianity. That we should be in the cultural fights with grace, compassion, but 100% truth, never compromising what the scriptures tell us to do and why we do it. What's happening is three things. Pastors that want to get engaged and involved, and they're speaking out, but they need a little bit of help. And, you know, I, I want to encourage them. Number two, pastors are like, I'm not doing that. I only do the gospel. I don't. We don't do that in our church. That is a mistake. And I want to encourage every pastor out there to please speak out on these issues. And the Bible speaks clearly about this, that we are supposed to be salt and light in every sphere of influence, and that if we have the truth, then we should bring the truth to every single arena imaginable. But let me. Possible. But let me also say this on the second group. They are under this false belief that their ties and their offerings and their church attendance will go down. Let me tell you, the churches that are open, that are taking stances on these issues, they're having parking problems. The American Christians are saying, wait a second. You're going to tell me you have a financial counseling ministry, you have a youth ministry, you have a marriage ministry, but you're not going to tell me whether abortion is right or wrong. You're not going to tell me whether or not this transgender garbage that is happening in our country, which is child abuse, by the way, what is happening in our country right now with this transgender nonsense? All of a sudden you're going to. All of a sudden people are going to leave those churches because, like, hey, I rely on you, Mr. Pastor, to speak truth and clarity when I'm confused. And if you're like, hey, I'm indifferent, then I'm going to go find another church. And that's what's happening. But then there's the third type of pastor, and I'm not going to name any names, and I usually do, but I'm trying to get better about this. There's a lot of national pastors, and you guys can figure them out yourselves. These are the complicit pastors. And These are the pastors that intentionally misrepresent the Bible to go help progressive political aims. For example, this lie. Did you know that Jesus Christ was a socialist? You've heard this before? Well, first of all, socialism violates two out of the ten Commandments. Thou shall not covet, thou shall not steal. It violates the parable, the talents, which is basically a parable on fruitful multiplication. Socialism is not about creation, which God says, you speak into existence to be fruitful and multiply. He never said, go, conquer, divide, pit people against each other and steal. It's against every single biblical mandate that we can say where a man does not work, he shall not eat. That's both in the New Testament and the Old Testament. Paul said it and Solomon said it in Proverbs, but they misrepresent it. Why? Because they conflate compassion with socialism, when in reality, socialism is the opposite of compassion. Socialism is coercion, socialism is force. Socialism is putting a gun to your head and saying, give me what you have or otherwise I'm going to put you into prison. Those pastors have got to cut it out. I encourage any pastor who thinks that the word of God confirms some sort of aim of the Democrat Party. They're very, very confused. And I'm happy to go through it chapter and verse, what it says and why it says it. And so I want to just finish with this. I want to encourage you again. We need hundreds of pastors like you. If anyone out there is wondering what you want to do with your life, please consider being a pastor. It's not easy. Being a pastor is a lot of pressure, it's a lot of work. But we need people that get it, that are courageous to step into it. And I want to commend you and God bless you for being here tonight. Thank you. Again, we want to say thank you, Charlie, for being here today. My question for you is many people just like me in this room are men and women that are pro life. We've all come to the consensus that life begins at conception. And because that argument is solidified in science and in the Bible. Okay, we've come to this split in the road where we're not arguing over whether life begins at conception. Now we're arguing if life has value at conception. For that reason. As a Christian and as a man of science that believes in science, what is your biggest argument for that claim? Yeah, that's a great. That's a great point, a great question. So here's how I look at the abortion debate. We just had A wonderful dialogue last night. And I encourage you guys to think about what that word dialogue means because we don't have enough of that in our country. Dialogue comes from the two Greek words dia through log logos, which we know in the Bible, John one reason thinking speech. So the more that we're able to reason, we're actually able to find truth and we're not going to tear each other apart, which is what the people that don't want dialogue want. So we had a great dialogue on this last night, but really, really gentle young woman who was asking about my position on abortion and what exceptions I would have. And my, my position on that is only life of the mother. That's the only exception that I would, would have and I'll tell you why, which is if I had a child right here in my arms, I would say is it right to terminate that child? And you'd say, no, I'd say, well, you're right. And it's irrelevant whether or not that child was conceived in a brutal unspeakable tragedy of which rape is or whether it was done the otherwise. The point is that it's a life either way. And let me be very clear on my position on rapists. I think they should be castrated and put in prison for the rest of their life. Like I'm, I'm not trivializing that. I'm not. But let me say this. So we had a great dialogue on that yesterday, which is a side note. But how do size shouldn't matter? It's this simple. Size is irrelevant in whether or not you believe human life has value. The only argument they have is, is the size of the human life. So our best argument is that DNA starts to be formed the minute that conception happens. Deoxyribonucleic acid, something that is beyond human comprehension. That the more we actually study it, the less we know. Think about that. We're able to know a little bit. We're also like, there's more questions around it. The better way to actually say it, where we say, we get deeper into how does this miracle, and that's really the best way to describe it, actually be formed that is deserving of constitutional protection. But here's why this argument is framed as difficult in the public arena because small things are easier to crush. There's a belief that I'm already fully developed, therefore I should be able to have the moral authority to get rid of things that are smaller than I am. To just reinforce the lunacy of that argument. I'm 6 4-6 3 6-4- Anyone smaller than me, you die. Like, I mean, that's insane. Right. And so the other argument they'll make though is degree of dependency. Right. There's a great acronym. I didn't come up with it. My good friend Seth Gruber, who only talks about this, by the way, he's far more fluent on this than I am, and I consider myself to be pretty engaged in the pro life movement, has the acronym SLED, where these are the four biggest kind of framing of the pro abortion activist, the one that really is the one that stumps most pro life people, is the level of dependency. Right. Is that that child is dependent on a host. Well, anyone who's raised children knows if you just leave a child in a crib, once it's fully born, it will die. That'd be infanticide. So this idea of dependency doesn't actually logically extend itself out. And also, should we just pull the plug on every single person in a nursing home in our country? Of course not. What about people that are mentally, you know, really have mental, you know, challenges in our country? They're. They're dependent on other caregivers. So that doesn't stand up in any way. In any way at all. Here's the bigger argument, though, is that we have 1 million abortions in our country every single year. 3,000 every single day. So by the time some of you listen back to this podcast tomorrow, 3,000 more children will be aborted. Right. It's easy to do this because it's done in private and it's not done in public. And I'm going to contend to you right now that the abortion argument is the new moral fight for every, not the new one, but it's the moral fight that's a winning argument. It's a winning issue. But let me also offer a little bit of piece of advice to the pro life movement. We have to do a better job of being over the top, compassionate and graceful in the way we talk about this. If there is a young woman out there watching online or anyone that has had an abortion, I actually don't fault you. I fault the abortionist that lied to you when you did that. I feel it's a predatory scheme to go after young women and lie to them about what's actually happening. And I think that we should say that there's grace and forgiveness in finding healing in that. So I kind of went all over the place. I hope that helped answer it, but I appreciate the question. Thank you. Hello, Charlie. A lot of people go to churches that don't take firm stances. And I think that's part of the problem. And how do you know when to leave a church or whether to stay around and try to reform it? Because some of these people, you know, their parents built up that church and they have attachment to it. That is such a good question. I've. I actually wrestled with this. So I was raised in a church in the suburbs of Chicago that was a Presbyterian church. I always get them confused. FPC USA or fpca? Which one's the super liberal one? FPC usa, I think. Super liberal, right. I mean, like, for example, it was like watching Rachel Maddow with organ music. Right? It was like as liberal as you could possibly imagine. Right. We would just. We would. We would sing the. The Democrat National Committee anthem. And it was hard because I was raised in that church. Right. And we eventually made the decision to leave when we felt as if it was far more about politics on the left than it was actually about character development or pursuing truth. It's not an easy thing, but here's my. Here's my specific pieces of advice. Number one, have private dialogue with your pastor. If you do not feel they are speaking out correctly on these issues or not speaking out at all, and lay out all the facts and the information and give them repeated attempts to try to make it right. Don't just leave all of a sudden like, all right, that's it. Do your best to try to nudge or to try to correct. That's number one. Number two, when you do leave a church, don't do so publicly. This is a very important point. Leave quietly. Those people are still in the kingdom. Don't make a big scene. You could write a private note and then just all of a sudden, your noticeable empty chair will send a very, very big message right after you've had those meetings. That is actually a lot more powerful than a scathing, incendiary email to the entire church elder board. Right. In fact, I think that actually makes them less likely to reform. I think that makes them less likely to correct course. So it's not easy, but I encourage everyone to have those tough conversations and try to offer a little bit of grace for that correction. Because we need the churches that start stepping up in our country. We need our churches start speaking the moral clarity and talking about what is right and what is wrong. The proper education of our children, character development. What is the good, the pursuit of truth. Look, the church has built this country. The first great awakening brought to you by Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards. And before that Roger Williams, that's what built the basis for this country. Anyone know who Edmund Burke is? Okay, a couple people. Cool. He's like the original conservative. He was an Irish English member of Parliament. How you're Irish English, you're really from Ireland. And he originally from Ireland and served in England. He's known as like the first conservative. He wrote reflections on the French Revolution. But he has a super interesting paragraph. I encourage you guys to look at it where he's looking as a foreigner on what's happening in America right before the American Revolution. And now mind you, this guy's Anglican at the time. Right. He's not, he wouldn't be what was considered necessarily Protestant, but he's, he's mainline hierarchical English church. Right. Obviously after the English church stopped being Catholic for, for very selfish reasons. But he's looking at the American Revolution. He says, I have never seen a people desire liberty like the Americans because they read their Bibles, they understand what it says and they're willing to fight for it. And so he actually counseled the King of England, King George, who was actually not a very smart person. Don't get involved there. You have no idea what it's actually going to take. These people are willing to die for freedom. And King George, like who people are going to willing to die for freedom? What are you talking about? Like they're colonists, we're just mow them over. And Edmund Burke was like, no, no, no. There's something different with the Americans. They have a spirit moving within them. And that was the black robe regimen of activist pastors that started our country and this rich, beautiful history I encourage all of you to check out because the deeper you get into it, the more you realize how much you've been misled by the popular narrative. But this country, when that Declaration of Independence was signed and it says the laws of nature and nature's God, you know, God is mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence. Why? God the God over everything, God the executor, God the legislator and God the judge. That's where we get our three branches of government, the vertical relationship we have with rights. All of these ideas were brewing in the minds of the founding fathers and in an apex point. So the church founded the country and the church can decide whether or not to save the country. It's that simple. So I hope that was somewhat helpful in how to go back to your churches. So thank you. It may be a cliche, but when we say you are what you eat, it is the absolute truth. Eating the Right foods ensures you get the right nutrients into your body that are essential to maintain your health and vitality. It's also true that if you're not getting enough fruits and vegetables every day, you could be seriously deficient in those nutrients so vital to your health. Can you imagine how you'd feel if you were eating 10 servings of fruit and veggies every single day? I can tell you from personal experience it is a game changer because I take six daily capsules from Balance of Nature. Just knowing I'm getting vital nutrients sourced from 31 fruits and vegetables every day makes a huge difference in my life. Join me and experience the Balance of Nature difference for yourself for a limited time. All new preferred customers will receive an additional 35% discount and free shipping. On your first Balance of Nature order, use discount code CHARLIE. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com you can get all of the vegetables and fruits you need. I take it every day. Balance of nature.com use the discount code Charlie. Hey Charlie, you're a big inspiration to me. Thank you. I wanted to know, what do you. What do you think about the current gun situation in Congress? Like for example, they're trying to pass the magazine registrations and capacity ban. What kind of outcome do you think that will have in just in America? So I'm not libertarian on a lot of things. I'm very libertarian when it comes to firearms. And I think that our firearm laws are too restrictive and cumbersome in our country, truly. And if you do not understand, I'm going to say what almost every pundit is afraid to say, which is why we actually have a second amendment. Everyone tap dances around this right. I'm going to go right into it. It's not for hunting. Love hunting. It's fun. It's great. Self protection. That's also important. It's because the founding fathers knew that an unarmed citizenry has no leverage, no power against despots or tyrants whatsoever. The Second Amendment protects all the other amendments. Now I get wrong. People will get wrongly labeled and categorized. As if I'm trying to incite something by saying that. It's the opposite, actually. I think that's what prevents conflict. So let me prove it to you. When the Hong Kong freedom fighters were fighting against the evil and sinister Chinese Communist Party, what's the one thing Hong Kong didn't have? Well, Hong Kong used to be a territory or a province or port of the British Empire and they basically outlawed all firearm ownership. Hong Kong people had no leverage. Deep down, the Communist Party knew that. They had tanks, they had bullets, and they, you know, they don't. And we're going to win. If every Hong Kong freedom fighter came with an AR15 around their back, you know, slung around their back, not use it and say, hey, all of a sudden, it would be a negotiation, not a hostage situation. You see that. That whole geopolitical situation would have been more peaceful if the people would have been armed. So let me say this. Any Republican that supports gun control measures, I think should leave the party completely. And we're seeing that right now. Eight Republicans voted for it. And they got to go find a new political party or they got to get primary. This is that big of an issue in our country. It really, really is. And I do want to say this because we got Media Matters and everyone. I think what happened in Boulder was a tragedy and an atrocity. And my heart truly goes out to those victims. I'm not minimalizing pain and suffering. I'm not. That's not what my argument is. Instead, I am reinforcing the need for the freedom and the liberty that we uniquely have. The Second Amendment protects all the other amendments. And every trend of civilization we see are the few dominating the many. The only balance we have against that is if the many have something to protect themselves against the few. And that's what the founding fathers saw, and they built that in there for a reason. If I may, one of the biggest lies around the Second Amendment, and I love your hat, it says we the people, which is obviously the beginning of the greatest political document ever written, which is the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment. In the Bill of Rights, some people will wrongly say, well, Charlie, only people in a militia are allowed to have a firearm. Well, if you understood what a militia meant back then, it was every man over the age of 18. So basically everybody. So basically, the gun laws that they were advocating for back then were way more laissez faire using their own definition of militia than they would even today. And I encourage all of you to dive deep into the Federalist Papers, understand why we have these rights. And the final thing I'll say is this, is that states that actually have the most pro freedom gun laws actually have reducing crime, they have safer streets. It is an Oxy. It's actually the opposite. I come from the suburbs of Chicago. I could tell you last year, 732 people were killed in the streets of Chicago despite having the strictest gun laws in the country. Now they say, well, in the Indiana Loophole, they're trafficking guns in from Indiana. Okay, well then compare Chicago's death rate with Gary, Indiana's death rate. It's a fraction of it. So the loose gun laws in Indiana, in Gary, Indiana have a much lower crime rate than that in Chicago. So here's my position on the gun debate and both your senators have been terrific on guns. I have to say I see a no compromise position which is very, very good. It's not going to happen. We have to hold the line and looks like Joe Manchin's not going to vote for that. So it looks like it's not on arrival. Thank you for the question. How you doing? First of all, thank you for all your efforts that you do and thank you for coming here. What I'm interested in is I've been following for some time the Convention of States and I find it interesting. I find it a double edged sword. If it's not anything you've kind of exercised and run through, that's fine. But if you have any thoughts to lend to that, I'd love to hear them. I have done a lot of thinking about it. So just so everyone knows, there's some amendments called the Liberty Amendments, which that's what Mark Levin calls them. My friend Mark Meckler ran Convention Estates for years and essentially a lot of people don't know this. There's a provision in the US Constitution that allows the states to call a convention, basically a convention of states around certain issues. Some people argue that that could eventually turn into a runaway convention. I actually don't agree with that. My friend Dr. Larry Arne makes that argument because the states could just disengage if it ever became a runaway convention. So here's how it would work. It takes I think 2/3 of states to call a convention. They convene around a couple different issues. Let's say term limits balance, budget amendment and building a southern border wall. Right. And then they'll vote amongst themselves and it's a way to kind of bypass Congress. My, my actual concern with the Convention of States is that it's never going to happen. It's just is not. We're not going to get 2/3 of states. I wish we would, but there's just the math is not currently there. But I am supportive of it philosophically and I'm also supportive of it as a expansion of the conversation of the constitutional tools we have at our disposal to push back against tyranny and protect liberty. And so for that reason I hope it's very successful. Has Kentucky passed the Convention of States. I don't know. I know some of the bordering states have, but I would encourage your legislators still to have it. I'm just looking at a big picture. I think it's currently unlikely to pass through. And if anyone's interested, I think it's article, not Article three. I could be wrong. But anyway, it's called the Liberty Amendments. I encourage you guys to check it out. Mark Levin wrote an entire book on it, so great. Thank you so much. Mr. Kirk, your second point during your speech was specifically on systemic racism. And I'm going to expand on that. Recently the Blaze, the news site I'm sure you're aware of, reported a story that cigna, which is a major insurance company, has urged all of their hiring managers to avoid hiring white men. Now naturally, if this was done with, you know, black men or Hispanic men or whoever, whomever, it would be immediately outcried. So my question is, why is it okay for the left and corporations to specifically discriminate against white men? Yeah, great question. It shouldn't be okay. It's evil and it's wrong. But let me tell you why it passes. Because we're talking about two different forms of the definition of racism. So the definition, based on your question, I think we'll agree, of what racism is. Is any person of any skin color harboring racial resentment of which is immoral and evil against another group of people. That could be a black person against a white person. It could be a white person against an Asian person or a Latino person against a black person. They don't believe that. They believe only white people can be racist and black people cannot be racist. They look at racism not as the individual prejudice or stereotype of one person against the other. No, no, no. Instead they look at as a power struggle, therefore, that any sort of wrong that you put towards white people is actually for a greater good of correcting a past injustice. This has got to stop. This is a very, very big problem. And I would make the argument that affirmative action is legitimate racism against white people and Asian Americans. And by the way, let me say this. The anti Asian hate thing that we've seen in the media, absent that one issue that we saw in Georgia, which was done by a scumbag for non racial reasons, might I add, just so we're clear, this was not an issue of white supremacy. This is an issue more about the black community and the Asian American community. Just so we're all clear about what the mainstream media narrative actually is there. And again, I don't like overly racializing these things. But that's just the truth of the matter. So why is it okay? It's okay because it's perfectly fine according to the eyes of the media and government bureaucrats to do that. And I think we need to stand up against it. That is racism and it's wrong and it's bigotry and it's evil and it's immoral. So thank you for your question. Hi, I'm a student here at the University of Kentucky. I'm actually in. I'm in mining engineering and I'm going in to be working in the coal industry this summer. I have an internship. Well, okay. So one of my close friends here, she really, really, really supports AOC and she really likes the Green New Deal. And I was wondering if you were able to have a conversation with her here tonight, what would you say to her to try and convince her or change her mind on why it is an awful proposal and also why you don't have to go into this as much if you don't want to on why AOC is not fit to run anything. I like the way you think. So let's talk about climate change, if we can. There's a couple questions that we must ask about it. First of all, you must establish with anyone you're talking about what is called shared intentions. Don't allow them to have the moral high ground that they somehow want what's better for innocence or for even the planet or the environment more than you do. They win this argument because they make the argument I'm a better person person than you are and all you want is dirty rivers and dirty lakes. That's how they win the argument, not actually on the merits. So when it comes to climate change and rising global temperatures, first we must recognize that CO2 is not just something that we emit. It's a necessary emission needed for life. CO2 is not just an inconvenience, it's actually necessary to. For our species to continue. There's also many different ways that the climate can cool and the climate can warm. Sun, clouds, oceans, orbital variations. There's a lot of different inputs that go into that. And there is no evidence, despite what your professors might say, that CO2 is the dominant factor in rising global temperatures. Between year 1800 and 2000, the best science that we can look at, global temperatures have raised 1.8 Fahrenheit. That's not really alarmism. And the other question is, are there any things that are happening favorable when it comes to the environment and then I'll get to your point about the green New deal, which is, do you know that there's more greenery on the earth than ever before? That the Earth is more green than any other time in American history? How's that possible? Well, more CO2, you're gonna have more green. Like that's, that's, that's basic science. Now they say it's a bad thing because we have more CO2 and rising global temperatures. By the way, the polar bears aren't disappearing. There's more polar bears than ever before. Just so we're clear. I'm so sick of hearing the polar bear argument. There's plenty of polar bears. They're everywhere. The polar bears are doing great. They're in like Boomtown usa. Polar bear. Okay, let's just be very clear enough for the. If I have to hear about the polar bears again, I'm gonna lose it. Right? It's like one of the biggest. It's all emotional, right? And that's really the basis of it. So here's the couple questions you have to ask when it comes. And I'm not, I'm not proposing I would be able to convince her. I'm not. Because the environmentalist argument comes down to something deeper and comes down to purpose. It has given a lot of people purpose. In a rich, generally fair society where you work hard and play by the rules and you're able to have an output that you can count on, a lot of people want to find some reason everything's actually awful and it's about to end. And it gives a lot of people purpose. And these social movements have a tendency to do that. Now if there's a social movement that I believe is actually trying to eradicate an immoral wrong in our country, I will join it. Like the March for Life, I will go join that. But all of a sudden, these people that say, well, the world's gonna end tomorrow, that's climate alarmism. So let me go to the three questions you must ask. Number one, can you definitively prove, using the scientific method, that CO2 human activity is absolutely contributing to rise in global temperatures? They cannot. How many times have you heard that 97% of all scientists agree? First of all, that's not even true. It's a government funded study. But let's pretend it was. All people were on government payroll. It's very, very flawed, but let's pretend it's true. I did not know science was a democracy. Typically we use the scientific method to prove things. And the one thing about the climate Change cabal is they're unable to predict anything. I wish I could believe in something. Whether it gets hotter or colder, it stays the same. I'm right, because their guiding thesis is unpredictability. Like, no, no, you must be able to prove something in order to. You have to be able to predict anything, right? That's kind of inherent in any sort of formulation of trying to say that we should massively reconstruct our society. That's number one. Can you prove that? Number two, which is a very important question that we must ask, is what can you. Let's pretend that the answer is yes. I believe it's CO2. Okay, then what can you say human beings can do to necessarily contribute to lower CO2 levels that will then result in lower global temperatures? Which is basically what are you willing to do? Which is part of the third question. At what cost are you willing to destroy our entire civilization to try to get our temperatures down by half a degree? Right? Like what. What are. What. At what cost? Because everything comes at a cost, right? And by the way, let me just say this with the electronic electric cars, right? Electricity comes from somewhere. Usually it's fossil fuels. I love these people. Where does it come? It comes from the holes. Like, no, it doesn't come from the holes, okay. Because it's like I get my energy from electricity. Like, okay, yeah, electricity must come. Must come from something combustible or something transferable. Either the sun or wind. Just have to say, I've heard almost everything. And also, if you love the environment, you should be really worried about electric cars. You know why? Batteries. They do not know what to do with these batteries. We are having massive issues of disposal of batteries in the American West. Huge issues. And these batteries are leaking. They have to build entire landfills of just these Tesla batteries. So until that's figured out, there's like, let's release them to space. It's kind of funny. It's like, maybe they'll get there before Elon Musk gets to Mars. Like, I don't know, like this. I guess that's gonna work. The point is this. If you believe in climate change and you believe that things are getting warmer dramatically, the other question is, is it happening mildly or is it happening catastrophically? You see, we human beings can adjust to things mildly. For example, in northern Scotland in the 1500s, they had a Mediterranean climate, but no more. My whole ancestry is from Scotland. I could trust you that. Not. Not exactly. That happened without carbon emissions, right? So it's in that post ice age period we're in. Here's my biggest complaint about it. I think it's an unbelievable distraction and it also delegitimizes our intentions. I want clean air and clean water. I don't like people that pollute. I want what's the best for human beings first. And I want to live in a country where we can breathe easily. And I do not want to live in China. So I believe in reasonable environmental regulation. And if you talk to people that are in coal and gas, they will never say they want to get rid of every regulation. They just want to be treated fairly and they want to be able to count on what regulation is happening year over year that won't shut them down. Fossil fuels have been a gift to humanity. We have gotten so rich so quickly and we live longer thanks to them. It would be a brutal mistake to all of a sudden turn it off because of a 29 year old bartender who thinks all of a sudden she can micromanage the decisions of 330 million people. All right, Charlie, I have a very simple question, but I want to give some context first. So my family, we haven't been gun owners until the pandemic, like many other people, with the guns sales rising. And that's saying something because my dad got shot in Vegas and he didn't even buy a gun after that, so. And now we're also looking for a house in Florida. And that's all because the turning point for us was like, I'm from St. Charles, so, you know. You know St. Charles, Illinois? Yeah, right by. You're from St. Charles? Yeah. So Target, Dick's Sports, what else? Walgreens, all that. Like many other places in the country were boarded up and like, we're very far from the city, you know that where Chicago's having all these murders. And that was the turning point for my dad to go buy a weapon. And now we're looking for a house in Florida. So my question is, what's next for other people like me and like many other people across the country moving and arming themselves? Like, do you see, like, us coming out of this better or people like Tim Pool and Steven Crowder talking about like the whole propaganda civil war? Like, what's next, in your opinion? First of all, I'm sorry your father went through that. He's cool now. All right, well, he's a tough man. That's. That was a terrible thing that happened. Which, by the way, you said he was injured in the Las Vegas shooting. Yeah, so he got shot in the leg at Las Vegas shooting. And he didn't care about motive. He said it was evil. And he didn't even look torn. Turned towards, like buying a gun to just defend ourselves. That's the point in me. No, I only asked as a complete tan. I only asked as a tangent to make sure I heard it. Because just so you guys know, we never actually found out the motive of that shooter, which is like the weirdest thing ever. It's the largest mass shooting in American history. History. And we just never got a motive. Anyway, it's a complete tangent. We should never forget about that. There's just something very suspicious there. Total tangent. Okay. The movement of people between states is historic of what's happening right now. So I actually, this was part of my speech yesterday, which is my rules for people that move between one state and the other. Then I'm going to make a couple predictions, okay, which is you moved for a reason. Identify that reason. Might be crime, might be bad schools, might be taxes. Number two, don't go implement the complaint you previously had in the new state you moved to. Don't all of a sudden move to a new state and then implement the reason you move, which is what we're seeing in Arizona all the time, people coming from California and they're trying to change it. Okay, Number three, this is a really interesting point that we need to talk about more. And it applies to national immigration too, which is your change is likely worse. And the people that were there before you probably know how to govern that state or that country, which is why you're moving there. And your vote to change that place is going to disenfranchise people that can't move and didn't move. Does that make sense? So making an argument for assimilation is what I'm saying and kind of connected to a previous question. The Bible talks about assimilation when it comes to immigration. Every single Bible verse when it comes to immigration is about assimilation. But to more pinpoint to you're moving to Florida. I'm a Florida resident. I'll be there the next couple days. Florida's amazing state with a phenomenal governor, Ron DeSantis, who is doing a great job for our country. He's saying no critical race theory in our schools. He's allowing open carry, anti rioting act, going after the tech companies. He opened his state back in May. He has open schools, open businesses, the second oldest population in the country with one of the lowest death rates and virus rates and hospitalization rates. That's a pretty amazing success story. So I just want to say that so where we are headed, it's all dependent on us, actually. So I actually think we're at a moment. So the Greeks had two words for time. They had kronos, where we, you might know, Kronos watches or chronology. That's where we get that word chronological for. They had another word for time, which is all throughout the Gospel of Mark, which is kairos, which means an action point, an inflection point, a time that is not like other times. Right. So I would make the argument at this time, every one of your actions and your point of involvement matters with an exponent behind it. Right? So, look, it could go in a really bad direction. I hope it doesn't. Obviously. I think that what these tech oligarchs are doing to our country is evil and immoral, and it has to stop. They are manipulating human behavior and they're acting monopolistically, not just in the marketplace, but also ideologically. That really, really bothers me and concerns me. You know what the number one form of censorship in our country is, though? It's not even from the tech companies. It's self censorship. It's people shutting themselves up because they don't want to lose a friend, lose a job, get kicked out of class, or have to deal with it. We have to end this plague, if you will, of self censorship in our country. And I encourage all of you, own your beliefs publicly and have each other's back. And so I'm a big believer that a lot of this nonsense and this tyranny of the left actually goes away the moment we have each other's back. We don't offer this ridiculous cancel culture circus. I can't. I hate that word, that term, cancel culture. Really bother. I just. It's not. It's deeper than that, right? It's just civilizational decay. Someone tweeted something 10 years ago. If they're a liberal or a Democrat and you see that they're not that person anymore, defend that person. I defend liberals all the time that come under this ridiculous craze that we must judge them by this insane standard. And so prediction, it's all depending on us. It all depends on our action and our involvement and our engagement. So, as President Trump says, we'll see what happens. Great, thank you. Hey, Charlie. I see you're not wearing your two masks, so. I am not wearing two masks, you're right. But my question was. So in recent. There have been times where we have seen two very, like, far ends of the spectrum actually find some common ground. The one was AMC where AOC and yeah, AOC and Ted Cruz actually were tweeting basically the same thing. And then it, and then it happened with the border crisis as well, where the stars aligned and cnn, Trump and AOC were, you know, sharing some similar thoughts about how the media was not given a chance to report accurately on the situation there. So, I mean, I don't know what universe it would be. It would be the craziest universe ever. But do you see a point or room for. Obviously not someone like aoc, but you know, conservatives and liberals, you know, moderate liberals, moderate conservatives being able to mesh together and break away from a two party system. No, not in the current state of affairs. Let me tell you why. And I wish, I wish that we lived in an America where we had a wonderful place, policy debate and we had all this shared common interest. We are in a brute force political fight for the future of our country where if you have one more vote than the other person, they are going to jam through their agenda at any means necessary. I yearn for an America where we can want the same thing and have different ways of getting there. How many of you have heard this before? We want the same thing, but we have different ways of getting there. It's a lie. They want a different America than we want. They do. They want men in women's locker rooms. They want the assistant secretary of whatever health and human services to be a man who's completely confused about himself. That gives puberty blockers to 8 year olds, which is again, as I said, a form of child abuse. They're okay with a million abortions a year. They want that border wide open. They might have a different way of housing the people that are there, but they want that border wide open. And I would be able to find some common ground with some of the progressives on corporate oligarchy and some of these other things I talked about. But here's the problem. If they are going to continue to say that we are the worst people on the planet and accuse our character and call us these awful things, I mean, you guys have seen it. I mean, you had a former head in the National Intelligence Service say that we need to go after libertarians and we need to. You saw it. They want to use the security state against Trump supporters. And so we're in a moment of time right now and I wish this wasn't the case where this kind of John Lennon song, we're all going to kind of be running to the meadow and like finding a Kumbaya moment, like that's not going to Happen. I wish it was. I wish we could all have this wonderful moment. They want us gone. They do. They have no interest in subcommittee meetings. They have no interest in marking up bills. You guys know this. On college campuses, the nastiness, the venom, and you can find common ground, and you should. And my one piece of advice to all of you is try to first, before you. You, you know, judge immediately, try to say that I want to have agreement with the best intentions of the person talking to me. We think they're wrong. They think we're bad. Right. They think we are bad people, and we think they're wrong. And we also think they want bad things for the country ever increasingly. But I do think that there can be a very. If we can. I don't know what it's actually going to take to get past this moment of just persistent, perpetual hostility. But I see that hostility basically coming from one political party and one side. And I gotta tell you right now that there will not be political discourse if that does not change. But on just basic policy, yeah, there's a lot that we can agree with some of those people on. A lot. But we're in a moment right now where they've convinced themselves that the conservatives in this country are moral equivalents to Benito Mussolini. They've basically made that argument to themselves and that any action justifies what they want to do. Any action. And for the time being, I'm just far too cynical to believe that we can all kind of come together. So then what do you do? You never have. You never stop having dialogue or discourse, but we just got to be very focused on winning. And that's something that the conservative movement has to really be focused on. And we got to take terrain. You know, we got to play offense. So thank you. Hey, Charlie. First off, I want to say thank you for everything that you do. You inspire a lot of people, and I hope someday I can impact people like you do. But actually, I had two questions. My first question was, how do you think that leftist ideals have become, quote, politically correct? And how can conservatives challenge that? And how long do you think, or how probable do you think it is that conservative ideals could become the politically correct ones? And then my second one was, what advice would you give to a young kid that wants to do something similar to what you've done with their career as far as starting Turning Point USA and just impacting people? These are two great questions. Let me start with the first one. The first question, which the essence of it is, remind me. It was about the discourse and the dialogue. And then also just. Can you repeat that? The leftist ideals. That's right. Leftist ideals. How they got politically correct. You're right. Thank you. So I'm actually shocked that leftism isn't more popular than it is. I'm actually shocked we do as well as we do. It is so easy and tempting to believe they're garbage. You know how easy my job would be to go on a college campus like this and say, you know what? Free cash, don't work, weed everywhere. You never have to take responsibility for your actions. And I will give you a list of who to blame. Thank you very much. And that's it. I can't believe it's not more popular. I'm actually stunned at how resilient our people have been. When I see some of these election results, I'm like, wow, you know, some people actually are pushing against this nonsense. Look, it's nothing new. If I can use a biblical story about this. In Exodus, Moses famously brought the slaves out of Egypt. God freed the slaves and God's chosen people, the Israelites, were wandering in the desert and they turned to Moses and start getting mad at him. And they said, bring us back to Egypt because we had meat. They were saying, bring us back to slavery because we ate better. People do not want to be free. Freedom is a value. You must teach people the value of freedom, that you live a more fulfilled life, that you're able to reach your highest level of human potential. So I'm shocked that they're actually not in control of even more. I know that sounds kind of stunning, but what they're selling is no responsibility, indulgence all the time. And I will tell you who to blame. Our. I mean, you saw tonight, I have to go through these very logical, rational arguments to tell you, you know what, I'm really not going to give you anything for free. And you got to work hard and wake up earlier and take responsibility for your life, and I'm going to try to preserve your liberty. Like, that's a harder argument. Right? But it's a. It's a. You will live a better life and you will be a better person. And so in order for conservatives to get back into the predominant position, I think we have some, you know, kind of momentum. We have to be serious about being four things, specific things. Number one, rebuilding the American family. We have to rebuild the American family. We have to support young mothers and we have to support young fathers. And we have to do whatever it takes to bring the divorce rate down and the marriage rate Up. Do you know where on par. To have 500,000 less children this year than last year. We should do everything we possibly can to have more children in our country. And having Americans having more children, we must be serious about that. Number two, we want church attendance to go up. We want the church and the family to have a higher, a bigger role in local society than it currently does. Number three, we want opioid use and screen time on your phones to go down and involvement in things that matter to go up. Now, what I'm articulating is a pro human agenda, and I think that's actually how we're going to win. Let. Let them talk about secular nihilism and endless indulgence. We're going to talk about building something that every person in this room can build a family. That's a really important thing, right? And it's not building, you know, the Library of Alexandria. We can get to that later. It's like, no, I believe in you to make a sequence of good moral choices over a long period of time which will replicate your values and of course, genetically replicate yourself. To pass down, you know, to pass down what you believe in, which will then allow the country to do that. And then from there we can expand. And that's what Aristotle said. It goes from the. Goes from the individual to the family, to the village, to the city, and then to the county or the colony, whatever you want to call it. So we got to get serious about that. Okay, your second part of the question advice. How old are you? I'm 18. 18. Great age. So I started Turning Point USA when I was 18. I never went to college and ended up being a great decision for me. I took a gap year, and it's been nine and a half gap years. And I kind of talked about this a little bit. And let me just say, some would call it provocative or extemporaneous comments. When it comes to college, not everyone in this country needs to go to college. We have way too many people going to college in our country. Now, some of you are doing the golf clap because you're probably at the University of Kentucky with some debt. Get the most you can out of it. Get a skill, learn. Don't get indoctrinated. Graduate as quickly as possible for the least cost imaginable and outwork your competition in the workplace or whatever. But here's the biggest piece of advice I could give anyone that is young, let's say they're 18 years, like you're 18 years old. Strive to be a better person every single day. Because your character is a reflection of your soul, and your soul is a reflection of every single human action that you make, every decision you make. You see, the secularists that are teaching our children, they don't teach you that. They say that your human decisions and your actions really don't mean that much. Learn something new every single day. Doesn't matter where you go to college. It's just a piece of paper. Honestly. What matters is who you are as a person. If you want to succeed, you also must be willing to keep pushing on and enduring when things get really, really tough, when everyone wants you gone and it feels like the pressure on the world. The best person that you can emulate in that is Winston Churchill, who I think was the greatest man of the 20th century. Winston Churchill wrote 50 books, fought in a couple wars, he saved Western civilization, and he gets nothing but hatred from the left for being a colonialist. Okay. A man that basically put our entire civilization on his shoulders and had the wherewithal and the fortitude to keep pushing. And the other thing I'll say is this, and I wish I would have known this when I was 18. Take the relationships with people that are older than you very seriously and memorialize those conversations forever. So those smartphones, I think, are destroying our country. But one thing they're good for is they're really good at recording. They're good at recording voice memos or conversations. Next time you sit down with a grandparent or a business person, record those conversations, you're going to want them, Trust me. When you're 25 or 30, you're going to wish you had them. You're going to wish you pushed that red button on the voice memo thing. And the final thing is, this is when you encounter difficulty, train yourself to blame yourself. Train yourself to say, it's my fault. What did I do wrong? That's hard. Trust me. It's really easy to blame others. It might be somebody else's fault, but find something you could have done differently. And if you get in the practice of doing that, you'll be a stronger person. The final thing is this. Immerse yourself in eternal knowledge. There's two types of knowledge, practical knowledge and eternal knowledge. Practical knowledge is. Who's the governor? I don't know, in Kentucky? Bashir or whatever. Not a fan. Right. So whatever. Yeah. So there's two types of knowledge. Practical knowledge, those things. Eternal knowledge, things that never change. Those are the things that are constant all throughout time. Where do you find eternal knowledge? Well, we also call it wisdom. There's a whole book written about that. Proverbs. There's a lot of people that have walked in your shoes before. And the more wise you are, the more cheerful and happy you will be. There's a great quote that says, the wise man loves to be corrected when you're 18 years old. Enjoy correction from other people. I know that's hard, right? Enjoy the process of people leaning into you and correcting your path. You'll be thankful for them one day. I wish I would have known that when I was 18. It would have been. I would have avoided a lot of nonsense and adversity. But the final thing, the final, final, final, final thing I'll say is this, which is, you live in a wonderful country. We got problems, we got ridiculous leaders. Got all that stuff, man. What a gift we've been given. Don't get into the whole complaining that everything around me is terrible and awful. We talked about many of that. But believe that your actions matter. Apply yourself accordingly. Work harder every single day. And after a decade of that, I think you'll be in a pretty good place. So thank you. Thanks, man. So I want to close with this. I want to thank you guys for coming tonight. Look around if you're losing hope in our country. A mostly young audience here on a college campus is here to hear ideas and have thoughtful questions and care about the welfare of their country. Our best days are ahead of us only if we decide to act in a certain way. Make today a starting point for your activism. Maybe you're going to run for office. We need more young people to run for office. Maybe you're going to be more serious about educating the people around you. Maybe today you say, you know what, I am done allowing someone to self censor me and I am going to wear the hat and I'm going to wear the shirt and I'm going to post on Facebook. Maybe you're a behind the scenes person and you're like, now I am going to every single day dedicate myself to listening to a certain podcast or a radio show. But make today the starting point. And I want to thank those of you I know some of you are here that listen to our podcast every single day. If those of you just completely self promotional, if you're not yet subscribed to our podcast, and if every single person took out their phone subscribed right now to the Charlie Kirk show, we would beat Rachel Maddow in the podcast charts by tomorrow morning. This room can do that. So I believe in you guys so that Rachel Maddow can have a bad morning tomorrow morning. That'd be really great. But our podcast dives into a lot of these ideas every single day. We've been given a gift. It's our generation's turn, guys. No more blaming other people and all that. We've had difficulty over the last year. It's time to step up. I want to thank our amazing turning Point USA leaders, the Purple Shirt Freedom Warriors. You guys are totally amazing. You guys are making a huge difference. And I know that it's dark, I know it can be gloomy, but I'm telling you right now, if you apply persistent activism and action, maybe five years, maybe 10 years from now, all of a sudden, you are going to see the fruit of that labor. The left is getting a little lazy right now. They're starting to fight amongst themselves. They have really, really bad ideas. We have good ideas, and we're going to rededicate ourselves to this. I know that there's a lot of bruises. I know there's a lot of people licking their wounds. Get over that. Time to put a plan of action and we are going to take this country back. God bless you guys. Thank you so much for coming tonight. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. If you want to support us, please go to charliekirk.com support and as always, email us your questions freedomarliekirk.com thanks so much for listening, everybody. God bless. Talk to you soon. For more on many of these stories and news you can Trust, go to charliekirk.com.