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The Charlie Kirk Show
"You Can't Make 80 Million People Disappear": My Opening Speech at AmericaFest 2024
00:28:26
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Hey, everybody. Enjoy this episode. Become a member. Members.charliekirk.com that is members.charliekirk. com email us. As always, freedomarliekirk.com and become a member to support this program. 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.
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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.
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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. Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble gold investments@noblegoldinvestments.com that is noblegoldinvestments.com it's where I buy all of my gold. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com welcome to America Fest, everybody. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. The real thank you is the Turning Point team that worked their tail off this last year. That's who you should be applauding, by the way. I like this touch. Look at all these students that we have at Turning Point. Look at this. I like that they helped win the election. Everybody. Young people, move by 30 points this election cycle. I'll tell you what, the kids are all right. Welcome, everybody. It feels good to win back our country. I'll tell you. This has been a difficult and challenging year in so many different ways. And we have to think back to where we were, as the video said, in January of 2021. January 7th of 2021, they said the MAGA movement was dead. They said that Donald Trump will never have a political future. Joe Biden was coming in and putting people in prison for going into the capital rotunda and praying. Joe Biden was mandating the vaccine, keeping the border completely and totally wide open. We were seeing our country disappear and vanish from us. But here's where you come in. For every single one of you in this audience that never wavered, that always had the President's back, that continued to support him, you guys are the beginning portion of the greatest political comeback in American history. Look at what we are up against, because it defies any sort of human reason from the lawfare they try to put Donald Trump in prison for 700 years. Every major tech company banned Donald Trump from their platform. Donald Trump was banned from Facebook. He was banned from Google. He was banned from Pinterest because he's like a big Pinterest guy. He was banned from Spotify. He couldn't even listen to Phantom of the Opera. They did everything they could to make him disappear. But there was a problem, is that you could put Donald Trump on in exile at Mar a Lago, but you can't make 75, 80 million people disappear. Is that they can make him as if, okay, we're going to try to solve this problem, but what are you going to do with the people of this country? And that's where all of you that continue to do the work you entered. We entered front stage, and it was difficult. We were told that this was never going to happen, that the Democrat Party was immovable. For all of you on campuses that continue to fight for conservative causes that were graded differently, kicked out of class, that were smeared, that were slandered, it was as if there was no immediate hope. But you guys had faith. And faith not just that we could take back our country. And if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot take credit for what happened on November 5th. The person, or more importantly, who deserves credit is God Almighty for saving this country and giving us four years of Donald Trump. We didn't earn it. We worked out of obedience, but we were inches away from a civil war. And Donald Trump just so happened to turn his head at a specific time to look at a PowerPoint. I mean, I've been to a lot of MAGA rallies. How many MAGA rallies does he do a PowerPoint presentation? And he just happened to turn his head at that specific moment, and that bullet whizzed by and grazed his ear. And by the grace of God, that we did not earn and we did not deserve, his life was spared on July 13th in Butler, Pennsylvania. He had every reason to play it safe after that. He had every reason to just kind of take it easy. He had every reason not to continue to campaign, to say that I'm just going to kind of hope for the best. He did more events. He said, I'm going to go do outdoor events. Forget it. We're not going to let the bad guys win. And you could tell who a person is in a moment of crisis. You see our leaders talk a big game, but anytime they actually feel the pressure, they fold. And we saw who Donald Trump actually is in that moment when he fell to the floor. And he rose. He spoke to all of us at a fundamental level, at a level that we can't even put into words. When he ascended, he said, fight, fight, fight. It was an anthem. It was a clarion call for all of us that regardless of what you are up against, this is a guy who did not need to be doing this. You know that. Donald Trump could have cut a deal. Donald Trump could have cut a deal. The final warning shot was when they raided Mar A Lago in August of 2022. That was the warning shot. Like, hey, you better not do this thing, run for the presidency, cut a deal, golf for the rest of your life, or else we're gonna put you in federal prison. And Donald Trump had a choice. Do I do the easy thing or the right thing? And if there is one thing that you teach your child, it's you must do the right thing, even if it is the challenging thing. He knew what he was signing up for. To be indicted by Fannie Willis, by Alvin Bragg. The show trial in New York. 700 years in federal prison. He could have just cut a deal, Guys, I'm not running for the presidency. Keep me out of jail. And every single gutless wonder politician of the last 40 years would have cut that deal. They tried to take his business empire from him. They did everything they could to cut him off. But there's something that drives this man that is different, and it's why all of you are here. It is a love of the beautiful things. It's a love of our home, a place that we inherited, that we were sick and tired of seeing abused. To see our border wide open, to see our kids trans in classrooms. To see our beloved homeland become a dumping ground for the third World. To see our taxpayer dollars being sent to Ukraine while our southern border remains wide open. Donald Trump loved his nation. So much so that he put all of his business empire on the line so that he would go and take a bullet for you to save America for your kids and grandkids. And more than that, I want you to understand the cultural reversal that we all lived through because it was repeated. Now, I'm going to ask somebody. Can somebody throw me your MAGA hat here for a sec? Who wants the. There you go. Okay, 90 volunteers. Thank you, guys. Look at this. Who remembers back in 2016, if you wore this hat on the streets of New York, it was open hunting season. If you Wore this in 2021, they would come after you. And yet I saw something fundamental. It's fundamentally different and something change. And it goes to show that the good guys can win if we push hard enough. It goes to show that we can turn the symbols where they are trying to ostracize us into symbols of victory. When I went to college campuses this last cycle, we ordered a couple hundred MAGA hats. All of a sudden, all the kids wanted them. We started passing them out. I said, okay, we'll do a couple thousand. I go to the University of Georgia. I'm handing out 5,000 of these things. This MAGA hat that all of you guys own went from a symbol of those people are terrible Nazis to the coolest, most desirable thing that one can wear in American politics. And that didn't happen overnight. Whose MAGA hat is this? There you go. That happened because we refused to. To accept the names they would call us. And we kept on wearing the hat. We refused, like, okay, you're going to call me a racist? I don't care. What else do you have? I'm going to keep wearing the hat. It became a symbol of strength. It became a symbol of resolve. It became a symbol of grit. It became a symbol of American masculinity coming back into our culture. It became a symbol that American greatness is what we demand that we deserve, that we are not going to apologize for being the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world, that we are going to have a mass deportation effort, and that we're going to take back our nation. That hat then represented something even more. President Trump, the greatest dealmaker that politics has ever seen. He brokered quite a deal over the summer. He said, okay, Democrats, you guys get Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. We get Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, let's make a deal. And that hat, all of a sudden represented not just common sense, but it represented people of all sorts of different political stripes and backgrounds that were coming together with their sphere of focus and influence. Maybe you are a Parents Right advocate. Maybe you are here as a Second Amendment enthusiast. Maybe you are a school board member. Maybe you are a pastor. Maybe you are a Make America Healthy Again advocate. Whatever focus group that you have, as long as we can agree on the big stuff, the country's collapsing. Things are amiss. We need to combine forces and defeat the incumbent regime. Welcome aboard. We are going to make America great again. And. And what we witnessed on November 5th being this great comeback story was also the result of the hard work that all of you guys did in the grassroots. For those of you that chased ballots, for those of you that registered Voters. For those of you that gave powerful sermons on the Sundays before the election, for those of you that showed up at Republican meetings at 7am to make sure that everyone had the yard signs that they need, this is your victory. You see, it is easy just to say that it's just one candidate versus another. What it really is is one army of activists versus another army of activists. And guess what? We were outspent. But we outworked them this election cycle because we wanted it more. Kamala Harris had a billion dollars. And hey, by the way, where did that, a billion, where did that billion dollars go? She sent it to China. She sent it to Zelensky. He's got enough money, a billion dollars to do what? And yet we were outspent. We know it. We knew that we were up against the most powerful, well funded machine in American political history. And it was a machine versus a movement. And the movement were people, many of us in this room. Yeah, that we're not. And there's not an oligarch, not a billionaire, but you could knock on a thousand doors, you could chase 100 ballots in this state of Arizona, which I, as you know, care deeply and passionately about. We, we made a promise. We said we are going to invest the greatest ground force Arizona has ever seen. We hired well over a thousand full time people here on the ground in Arizona at Turning Point Action. And I can say now Arizona was the best performing swing state of the 2024 election. We chased over 200,000 low propensity ballots here in the state of Arizona. And in fact, when I was, you know, Mr. President, can we have you at this event? Can we, you know, try to get you. And he said, charlie, I will only come under one circumstance. It is called a tribute to Arizona to honor the great people of Arizona that gave me my greatest victory ever in Arizona and brought State 48 back to greatness. And that happened because of the hard work and the grit, the resolve of all of you in this room. And it goes to show that things can change. It goes to show that we can improve this country. That we don't have to accept the premise. But then it brings us to today's time because we must simultaneously look at the past, what we've been through, the present, which is celebration and giving glory to God for what was given, but also the future. Because if we let our guard down and act as if that everything is fine, the transformation of the Republican Party is not yet complete. You see, for those of you that follow me on social media, you know, that I've been very outspoken the last week saying the following. Very simple. It's not radical, it's not revolutionary. I think it's reasonable. Which is this. If you are a Republican from a deep red state and you voted for Joe Biden's nominees and you're giving Donald Trump a hard time about his nominees, we will primary you and remove you from office immediately. And for all of those red state senators out there, let this be a warning to you that the 20,000 people here at America Fest and the 1 million people here that are watching online and the millions of people that will see these clips, we are not going to take a Republican Party that gets in the way of the will of the people. We want a Republican Party that fights to win. And for every US Senator out there, you must confirm Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Cash Patel, Bobby Kennedy, Pam Bondi and Trump's entire cabinet, or you will face a primary challenger immediately. Because we want a Republican Party that is as conservative as its voters. We want a Republican Party that is responsive to all of you. We want a Republican Party that actually listens to what you want. Not a Republican party goes to D.C. and becomes something completely and totally different. And look at the power that you have. In just the last 24 hours, we did something that we never would have been able to do before. They were trying to do this ridiculous, sick and twisted and concocted 1,500 page Democrat boondoggle giveaway, continuing resolution. Under old circumstances, that thing just would have passed. But there's new voices. And we took to social media. Elon Musk took to social media, many of you took to social media. And the President took the lead and said, no, we're not going to give Congress a 74% pay raise while Americans are being crushed by inflation. We're not going to send more money to Ukraine. We're not going to have this boondoggle of bio labs being spent overseas. We're not going to have immunity for January 6th committee. And what you did, and I want to show the power that you have, is that you, everybody in this room and everyone watching online, you defeated the Washington insiders in hours. Everybody. And that CR is dead. It is dead. And you did that. And it is going to be a relentless fight. Now, the new CR that they have went from 1500 pages to now, it's like four or five pages. And President Trump is going to get what he's asked for, which is a clean slate, a debt ceiling increase so that we can actually get the biggest, baddest and best border bill in the history of our country as the first piece of legislation for President Donald Trump, the top priority. But it is only going to improve if we stay engaged in the grassroots. If we continue to knock on doors, take over local precinct committees to start turning point USA high school and college chapters. And I just gotta brag on our high school chapters. It said this briefly in the video. Everybody but young men are the most conservative they have been in over 50 years. 50 years. Think about that now. A reporter asked me, they said, charlie, can you try to explain this phenomenon? I said, yeah, it's very simple. Young men want to be part of a political movement that doesn't hate them. In fact, let me go a step further that thinks they're essential to a future of a country. That we need strong men and strong women. That we're sick and tired of hearing about toxic masculinity when we are drowning in toxic femininity, when we become a feelings based culture. You can't say that. You can't do that. You're going to offend somebody. And who is the most overtly masculine political figure of the last hundred years? No, it's not Tim Walsh. Stop it. Okay? That's not true. No, of course. It's the man who would never apologize for America, that stands proudly for our tradition and our history, that doesn't care about what sensibilities he offends, that calls Justin Trudeau governor, the guy that just said, and in many ways, this was an election that was more about culture than it was about politics. That it was about, who are we as a people? What are we doing to the next generation to say that you have to be taught diversity, equity, inclusion and critical race theory, that you have to be under this transgenderism nonsense. As a side note, by the way, as one of the first things that I hope this new administration does, we need to end the medical mutilation of our children called gender affirming care in this country immediately. And also say, no men in women's sports ever. But understand that was a controversial thing to say three or four years ago. It took a little bit of a. I don't care energy, a little bit of a masculine chip on the shoulder to say, no, actually, you're not going to have some dude in my locker room change with my daughter. And I'm not going to allow that to happen. You see, they wanted us to be quiet and afraid and silent and subservient. They wanted us to cower into our corner. But the Conservative movement has changed fundamentally. I hope you guys understand this. And we can't lose it. We must lean into it. We call the shots, not the media, not the oligarchs, not Washington D.C. and our asks are so simple. The media likes to say, oh, there's radical. They're revolutionary. Here's our ask. We want a border. We want our kids to learn reading, writing, arithmetic and not graphic pornography at the age of 11. We want our founding documents to matter much more than federal registry and bureaucracies. We believe the Constitution is the law of the land. We believe in three branches, not four. We also believe, I know this is so radical for them to understand that when you appropriate money, American citizens are first, not Ukrainians. Wow, like, what a concept. And you add all of that together, they are the radicals and they have been the radicals for quite some time. And the final point I'll make is this is the remarkable power and potency of the truth tellers in this room. You see, we have grown up in a time where we say the media is the worst. The media is this. And in fact, President Trump said that at his first ever MAGA rally. Do you know where his first ever MAGA rally was? In this building. This building was the first ever MAGA rally. Did you know that? And the only feedback I have for President Trump is he says the media is this, the media is that. Guys, we are the media now, not them. Their power is fading and waning. No one reads their stuff. Their subscriptions are going down. Like CNN has less views than Hallmark movie reruns, which again, it's Christmas. A lot of people watch Hallmark during Christmas. Anyway, that separate issue or is it lifetime? I don't get them both confused. Whatever. And they are increasingly irrelevant. And what is relevant is the democratization and the decentralization. And I said it when it happened. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I believe it was the most important singular purchase since the Louisiana Purchase for this country. I truly believe that. And look at the cause set in motion that happened since Elon Musk bought Twitter. It gave us the ability to speak our mind, think about all the things that would have just happened without our ability to challenge it. We were able to call out the BS on the southern border. We were able to talk about the transing of our kids. We were able to talk about what they're actually teaching in our schools. We were able to actually talk about like, hey, Kamala Harris can't speak in sentences. Let's watch this clip. Simple, basic things. And we joke around. I Do not think that we would have been able to expose the American people to how Joe Biden was brain damaged if it wasn't for Twitter or X because the media wasn't doing their job. By the way, the media should all immediately lose their government issued licenses day one for the malpractice they did for covering for Joe Biden's senility. We are in the driver's seat and that comes with a lot of obligation. We are the cultural force. We are ascendant. The bad guys are scattered, confused and afraid and they will be back. And the posture should not be one that, oh, we won and that we're the greatest now we're indestructible. No, it's the opposite. It should be one of humility that we are actually in charge and we didn't earn it. But we have an obligation to deliver that we have an opportunity that we may never happen again. It is a once in many lifetimes opportunity to fill the government with change makers. I believe the four years of exile is the ultimate. Romans 12:2 verse that God will use all things, all things for good for those who love him. When we got displaced from power in 2020, how many of you guys said, boy, 2020, this is the worst thing to happen. We lost our country. We were trying to see what, what was. What was the takeaway here. It felt as if it was so unjust, which it was. And it was so much lying and so much manipulation. But God knew what he was doing. What he was doing is he was putting our movement in a temporary state of exile where we could become stronger, we could become better, where we could turn the. We could separate the frauds from the real people. We could see who people really were, where we could expand our ranks. We had to desire it more when our back was against the wall. If we would have won in 2020, the second term, I don't know if it would have been that great. It would have just kind of been a little bit of COVID Okay, that's fine. And the second term is almost never as good as the first. And now we almost get two first terms. In the second one, we have a team that is ready to change the world and bring America back to greatness. I will close with this. Soak in this conference, everybody. This is the first major turning point conference where we can just celebrate what has been done. But also, we got to keep our eyes on these students. They're gonna go nuts these next couple days. But also go start A Turning Point USA College Chapter. Go start a Turning Point USA High School Chapter. Go start at Turning Point USA 5C School. Go find out how your church can get involved. Sign up and become an activist. America Fest is the starting point for us to take America to Greater Heights in 2025. Remember how lost we felt a year ago? Remember how directionalist we felt? And instead of saying we've won everything, I could take it easy and said is that God gave us reprieve so that we can reload, that we can lean in and that we can make the conservative movement stronger than ever before. And that's the resources you're going to see in the exhibit hall. There will be people here that could change your life. Future jobs, future friends, maybe future spouses. You never know. We hear that a lot but have that posture of activism and action. We have a slate of speakers that is the greatest in the entire country. I mean, this is unbelievable. We have here it's going to be four days of energy and enthusiasm and you guys help make it possible. This is the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world. And I can say, wow, there was a debate, is God done with this country? And now I can say confidently, no, God is not done with America and our best days are ahead. God bless you guys. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us. As always, freedomarliekirk.com thanks so much for listening and God bless.
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