The Charlie Kirk Show - In Depth and In Person with Madison Cawthorn - A 24-Year-Old On His Way to Congress
Aired: 2020-07-19
Duration: 01:17:42


=== Charlie Kirk's Entire Life (03:57) ===

[00:00:00]  Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
[00:00:02]  Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcast.
[00:00:08]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:09]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:00:12]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:15]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:18]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:19]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:20]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:00:27]  Turning point USA.
[00:00:29]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:00:37]  That's why we are here.
[00:00:41]  Hey, everybody.
[00:00:42]  Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:00:44]  I'm joined by my friend Madison Cawthorne, who has an incredible story.
[00:00:47]  He is going to probably be the youngest member of Congress come this November.
[00:00:52]  Probably the youngest you could possibly think of.
[00:00:54]  Madison, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:00:57]  Tell us a little about why you're running and your story.
[00:00:58]  Oh, brother, it's great to be here.
[00:01:00]  The number one reason I'm running for Congress is because just like I'm sure you know, because I'm sure that's why you started Turning Point USA, there is no time to wait.
[00:01:09]  I look out at my country right now, and you know, I just got engaged to a beautiful young woman, very excited about it.
[00:01:14]  But, you know, we're having the conversation that almost every single engaged couple has, and that's, hey, how many kids do you want to have?
[00:01:20]  When do you want to have them?
[00:01:21]  And as I'm sitting there thinking about the world that I'm going to be raising these children in, you know, I shudder to think that one day they're going to look up to me and say, hey, dad, tell us about capitalism.
[00:01:32]  Tell us about freedom.
[00:01:33]  Why don't we have that anymore?
[00:01:36]  And then I have to hang my head in shame and say, well, the reason is because I wasn't willing to stand up and fight.
[00:01:41]  And so, you know, just like James Madison says he did, you know, he stood up at 25 years old to try and change our nation for the better, to create our nation.
[00:01:49]  You know, I'm wanting to stand up right now because I think it's time for a change agent.
[00:01:53]  And I think it's time for someone who isn't going to back down.
[00:01:56]  Someone who's got a backbone of titanium, as I like to say.
[00:01:58]  And you literally do.
[00:01:59]  I literally do.
[00:02:01]  Good.
[00:02:02]  That's the piece, but tell me about that.
[00:02:04]  Yeah, the accident is what you didn't get.
[00:02:06]  Okay.
[00:02:07]  Then we'll do that.
[00:02:07]  So you literally have a titanium back.
[00:02:10]  How did that happen?
[00:02:11]  Well, I mean, you know, my entire life was going as good as it could have been.
[00:02:15]  You know, I was born in 1995, grew up in the mountains, Western North Carolina, incredible family, incredible community.
[00:02:21]  I had always dreamed about going to the Naval Academy, had just gotten nominated, 18 years old, planned on playing football.
[00:02:26]  My entire life was going however you'd want it to go.
[00:02:29]  Sharp mind, incredible physical abilities.
[00:02:33]  But then, you know, as I'm on a road trip with my best friend, I'm taking a nap in the passenger seat.
[00:02:38]  For whatever reason, I assume he thought it would be better as a group activity.
[00:02:42]  And so he accidentally fell asleep behind the wheel of the car.
[00:02:47]  We were going about 70 miles an hour in a construction zone on the interstate, not really speeding, nothing bad.
[00:02:51]  But, you know, when there's no one on the wheel of the car, dangerous things happen.
[00:02:55]  So 70 miles an hour, we run headlong into a concrete barricade.
[00:02:58]  Wow.
[00:03:00]  And from there, you went through years in the hospital.
[00:03:04]  You're in a month in a hospital?
[00:03:05]  Year and a month in a hospital, three months in ICU.
[00:03:09]  You know, all that mental capacity, all those physical abilities all ripped away from me.
[00:03:13]  You know, I had traumatic brain injury.
[00:03:15]  I was terribly damaged, just my entire body.
[00:03:18]  I'm now bound to a wheelchair from now on.
[00:03:22]  But for the very first time after I came out of the hospital at about 150 pounds in a wheelchair, and I went to a professional baseball game, I realized what it was like to have people look over you in a crowd, to feel disenfranchised, to feel like the society had left you behind and that you were no longer a part of the process.
[00:03:44]  And so that enabled me to empathize with people and really want to walk a mile in someone's moccasins before I make a decision about what should happen in their life.
[00:03:52]  And so you started going across the country speaking about your story, right?

=== Grassroots Revolution in the 20s (15:48) ===

[00:03:57]  Of being a victor, not of a victim.
[00:04:00]  And then you had this idea, I'm going to run for Congress because you felt like we were losing our country.
[00:04:04]  You were the youngest candidate, probably by half, probably, in a very crowded primary.
[00:04:10]  How many people were in your primary?
[00:04:11]  We had 12 people in the primary.
[00:04:13]  So the way the system works in North Carolina, like a lot of southern states, they have a very crowded primary.
[00:04:17]  Then the top two vote getters have a runoff.
[00:04:20]  And so it was a surprise you even made the runoff, right?
[00:04:23]  It was.
[00:04:23]  You know, we were considered a dark horse in the race.
[00:04:26]  No one really ever gave us, thought we'd be able to do it.
[00:04:28]  But, you know, at the end of the day, what it came down to is hard work and a great message, you know, that message of conservatism, of freedom, of personal responsibility, of having the pen of destiny in your own hands.
[00:04:40]  And so no one gave us a chance.
[00:04:43]  But when all the votes came out, we realized we were in second place.
[00:04:46]  My team was actually frustrated because we thought we were going to be in first.
[00:04:49]  And so then we started into our runoff election.
[00:04:53]  And, you know, Charlie, you know how the odds are even stacked against us more at that point.
[00:04:57]  Yeah.
[00:04:57]  And I could speak personally to that.
[00:04:59]  You know, I met you at one of our events and you drove out there and I was really impressed by you.
[00:05:04]  And without getting into too much detail, the power structure was, you know, no, go to the other person or stay out of the whole race was basically the tone.
[00:05:12]  And I will never forget, I sat down with you, like, we're going to win.
[00:05:14]  I'm like, all right, Madison, like, just let's, you know, let's kind of plan this out.
[00:05:18]  And it's like, no, we're going to win.
[00:05:19]  I was like, okay, well, I remember saying, like, that's the attitude to have, you know, and I didn't doubt you because I, you know, would have been foolish to do that.
[00:05:28]  I was just very open-minded to the idea of a 24-year-old becoming a congressional member of Congress.
[00:05:36]  It was incredible.
[00:05:37]  And what I struck was you were so focused on victory.
[00:05:40]  You're like, we're going to knock on more doors.
[00:05:42]  We are going to have a grassroots revolution.
[00:05:44]  You're going to have a precinct-by-precinct model, right, that will be bottom-up, grassroots-focused.
[00:05:49]  And I thought to myself, like, this could work, you know?
[00:05:52]  And it did.
[00:05:53]  And so you shocked the world.
[00:05:54]  I think it was like June 23rd, June 24th, right?
[00:05:56]  June 23rd, yeah.
[00:05:57]  It came out, and we knew that we were ahead, but then President Trump endorsed my opponent.
[00:06:02]  Yeah, and so I want to be clear: you're not anti-Trump.
[00:06:05]  No, very far from it.
[00:06:07]  Because that's the way that some of this liberal media spun your victory.
[00:06:10]  Right.
[00:06:10]  Because they're like, oh, you know, look at this young guy who defied Trump's endorsement.
[00:06:15]  I think that's a misleading headline.
[00:06:16]  Well, it is.
[00:06:17]  You know, I try to make very clear, even with my very neck, my victory speech at night, that I by no means thought that was a referendum on Trump.
[00:06:26]  That's an important point.
[00:06:27]  You know, my voters, I guarantee over 99% of them will be voting for President Trump.
[00:06:32]  And the only reason there's a 1% missing from that is because they'll probably just forget there's an election.
[00:06:36]  That's funny.
[00:06:37]  But in all seriousness, I support our president.
[00:06:40]  I think his America's first agenda, his coming in and not playing Washington by Washington's rules.
[00:06:46]  That's what this country needs.
[00:06:47]  And I'm so thankful that I get to grow up in a generation that has someone actually fighting for me.
[00:06:53]  Well, I want to compliment you on one thing, which is when you won, you were so gracious and you were magnanimous because there were so many figures that opposed you and spent money against you.
[00:07:06]  And you were given opportunities by every way that liberal media works, the activist media, and you know this, is they'll say, oh, look, this guy defied Trump.
[00:07:13]  Let's try to give him 20 questions to try to say one bad thing against someone conservative.
[00:07:20]  And then they can write their favorite story, which is conservative-friendly fire continues.
[00:07:24]  They love writing that story.
[00:07:25]  And you didn't give them that opportunity.
[00:07:27]  You were very gracious.
[00:07:28]  You're like, let's think forward to the election.
[00:07:30]  And I think that really upset a lot of the activist media.
[00:07:32]  They're like, well, how many times do I have to bait him into this?
[00:07:34]  And you would just refuse.
[00:07:35]  You're like, no, actually, I love the president.
[00:07:36]  And I can't wait to see him soon.
[00:07:39]  Because they tried to lay that trap many times.
[00:07:42]  Oh, so I mean, we went on the View.
[00:07:44]  We went on MSNBC.
[00:07:46]  We went as far left as you could go.
[00:07:47]  But I was confident going into these viper pits because I knew that I know what I believe.
[00:07:53]  And I know that there are a lot of people.
[00:07:55]  And, you know, I've always portrayed this primary battle that we went through.
[00:08:00]  It was just a family feud.
[00:08:01]  You know, people always want to say, oh, you went to war with the establishment and you won.
[00:08:05]  I was like, no, we just, we just, the people of Western North Carolina were trying to make a discerning decision about who they wanted to go and defeat this liberal idea.
[00:08:14]  Well, and I will get into this in depth.
[00:08:16]  The president should be very thankful that you won because he needs to carry North Carolina to win the White House.
[00:08:23]  And you're going to boost turnout for him in North Carolina.
[00:08:25]  You're going to get new voters for him in North Carolina.
[00:08:28]  So when people support your campaign, they're also supporting the president winning in North Carolina.
[00:08:33]  They're supporting boosted turnout.
[00:08:34]  And so you had the highest level of millennial and youth engagement ever in the primary North Carolina.
[00:08:40]  Primary North Carolina, yes.
[00:08:41]  So you're bringing new voters into the Republican Party.
[00:08:44]  Indeed.
[00:08:44]  You know, we hear everywhere we go from people who are, you know, the largest voting demographic in my district and emerging in our entire state is undecided voters.
[00:08:55]  These unaffiliated voters, not Republicans, they're not Democrats.
[00:08:58]  They're people who are still just trying to have someone that represents them.
[00:09:02]  And they're very issues-based voters.
[00:09:04]  They vote on the person.
[00:09:05]  And we are bringing them out in droves.
[00:09:07]  One, because the far-left liberals have left the Republicans.
[00:09:11]  Not the Republicans, the Americans.
[00:09:13]  The normal average American citizen is no longer represented in the Democratic Party.
[00:09:19]  And I think they are just looking for a champion to go out and fight for them and not just be worried about virtue signaling and trying to say, oh, well, I'm the most woke person there is.
[00:09:30]  And no, we have a, this is the thing that I think delineates Republicans versus Democrats.
[00:09:37]  And let me say conservatives versus liberals.
[00:09:39]  Let's get away from the parties.
[00:09:41]  I stop at the Constitution.
[00:09:43]  You know, I can go as far right as just about anyone goes, but I have a line.
[00:09:47]  That's the Constitution.
[00:09:48]  That's where I stay.
[00:09:49]  I don't go any left.
[00:09:50]  I don't go any farther right.
[00:09:51]  That's where I stay.
[00:09:51]  I read it through the lens of original intent from the authors, mainly through James Madison's writings and the Federalist Papers, to understand what he really meant when he wrote this wonderful.
[00:10:01]  And of course, it's an imperfect document, but it's very nearly perfect.
[00:10:04]  But the liberals have no line.
[00:10:06]  You know, you can look at it, whether it was the feminist movement, whether it was the LGBT movement.
[00:10:14]  There were some people they would come up and they might come up with a rational idea saying, hey, you know what?
[00:10:19]  I want to have an equal position in the workplace and have equal pay as a woman.
[00:10:21]  So it's like, oh, that's fine.
[00:10:23]  Or whether it's the African American movement or people coming in with Martin Luther King saying, hey, judge us based on the content of our character and not on our skin color.
[00:10:31]  Yeah, totally for that.
[00:10:32]  Or the LGBT community saying, hey, we just want to get married.
[00:10:37]  Things that are pretty reasonable ideas that they want to move for.
[00:10:41]  But then I believe that now they've achieved those, you have this third wave feminism that comes in and says, no, we don't want to be equal to men.
[00:10:49]  We want to be greater than men at this point.
[00:10:51]  We want to put them down.
[00:10:52]  Or you have what started out as the Black Lives Matter movement has now been hijacked by Marxists who are taking it so far left, just trying to destroy.
[00:11:00]  What is it?
[00:11:01]  Joe Biden said they want to get rid of shareholder capitalism.
[00:11:04]  And I mean, I know that doesn't make a lot of sense to people, but shareholder capitalism is private equity in companies.
[00:11:09]  That is private ownership of our country.
[00:11:12]  Or, you know, the LGBT movement, it was just some two people wanted to be able to get married.
[00:11:17]  But now it's saying that we need to be able to have gender reassignment surgery for 12-year-olds.
[00:11:21]  There's funded by taxpayers.
[00:11:23]  Exactly.
[00:11:23]  They never stop at a line.
[00:11:25]  They always go further.
[00:11:26]  Yeah, and that's a very important point.
[00:11:29]  And I mean, you actually read the Constitution and understand it, unlike most of our leaders in both parties, and you actually know who wrote it and why they wrote it.
[00:11:37]  So that's a very important thing.
[00:11:39]  And so I want to talk generationally, then I want to go just issue by issue.
[00:11:44]  So generationally, first, there's something very exciting happening where young people are now introducing themselves into the political system, and they're saying The ruling class have made decades of poor decisions on our behalf.
[00:11:59]  And Madison, you spoke out against this wonderfully.
[00:12:03]  And I think the Republican Party has just decided to forget about this issue.
[00:12:07]  We have $26, $27 trillion in debt, and we're spending multiple trillions of dollars a year.
[00:12:12]  That's not good for the middle class.
[00:12:14]  That's not good for future generations.
[00:12:15]  And it's both parties, by the way.
[00:12:17]  It's both parties equally guilty.
[00:12:19]  And it's our generation that's going to now have to live in a sub, a sub-standard economic climate because of that.
[00:12:27]  And yeah, it's fine if you're, you know, I guess in your 60s or 70s, you're not going to have to see the whole program play itself out.
[00:12:35]  And what I'm very, what gives me promise is that now we have a generation that says, I'm just really kind of exhausted with just you telling me you're going to do that because you haven't.
[00:12:45]  Right.
[00:12:46]  And now you're actually assuming leadership into that position.
[00:12:49]  And you probably know the ages better than I do, but the founders of our country were in their late teens and early 20s when they founded this country.
[00:12:56]  John Hancock was 19 years old.
[00:12:59]  James Madison, 25.
[00:13:00]  Alexander Hamilton, 21.
[00:13:02]  And the framers, the people that we consider to be the architects of this beautiful country, were in their 20s.
[00:13:09]  And they were 20s and late 20s and early 30s.
[00:13:13]  I think there's something to that because when you're the age that you and I both are, 26 and 24, soon to be 25, there's a commitment to the ideal of creating something multi-generationally better.
[00:13:25]  And I'm not saying that I'm not against, obviously, leaders that are not in their 20s and 30s, but I do think that when it becomes your career, it becomes more about, I want to keep my job intact and less about I actually want to do something correct for the generation that I'm care about, which you should always be trying to make public policy for the next generation.
[00:13:45]  That's why you're in leadership, right?
[00:13:48]  We have civil government so that your posterity, literally in our framework, can be successful.
[00:13:54]  That's why we do what we do, right?
[00:13:56]  I mean, this idea that we're just trying to create laws for today, that's actually very short-sighted.
[00:14:02]  Countries don't actually succeed when you do that.
[00:14:05]  And so that's what gives me so much promise about what you're doing here is because there's a variety of reasons.
[00:14:09]  And that's one of the biggest ones is I can't actually probably think of a scenario in the U.S. Constitution that says you must be 25 to be seated in the House of Representatives.
[00:14:18]  So in American history, the only person who wasn't 25, he was 22, I think, but he was allowed to be seated.
[00:14:23]  He wasn't elected.
[00:14:24]  I believe there was some intricacy there.
[00:14:25]  And so you're not even 25 yet.
[00:14:27]  You will be 25 soon, August 1st.
[00:14:29]  Is that right?
[00:14:29]  August 1st, that is correct.
[00:14:30]  Coming right up.
[00:14:31]  So, and then, God willing, you'll win your election, and then you'll be seated as probably the youngest within a couple months that you could possibly even be to be seated.
[00:14:39]  And it won't be a Democrat, won't be a leftist.
[00:14:42]  And just be prepared.
[00:14:42]  They're going to try to ignore you that you even exist.
[00:14:44]  They're going to try to still say Cortez is the youngest congresswoman, even though actually she's much older than you.
[00:14:49]  And you can kind of be like, okay, boomer, Cortez, like, right?
[00:14:52]  And I think that will be, that'll drive her nuts, by the way.
[00:14:55]  So, but it's interesting because the left tries to make it seem like they have a monopoly on our generation.
[00:15:01]  They think they've cornered the market.
[00:15:03]  Talk about that.
[00:15:04]  They really believe that they have cornered the market.
[00:15:06]  And in many ways, I think that they have.
[00:15:09]  We've had so few people who are standing up to try and lead that people when they think of young conservative or young politicals, young politicos, young people in politics, they think of Elon Omar and Alexandria Casa-Cortez.
[00:15:24]  They think, oh, well, that's what the left is.
[00:15:26]  They look on, you know, they look on to BuzzFeed News to see what millennials are talking about.
[00:15:31]  God forbid.
[00:15:32]  But you know what?
[00:15:33]  I believe that the Republicans have had a really bad time of messaging for about the past two to three decades.
[00:15:39]  I completely agree.
[00:15:39]  And that's why you see so many people in my generation, our generation, who are saying they're not registering as Republicans, and they're not registering as Democrats.
[00:15:47]  This goes on to what I was talking about earlier, people registering unaffiliated.
[00:15:52]  It's because, you know, they, sure, maybe they like the environment, but aside from that, the Democrats don't represent them.
[00:16:00]  But if the Republicans would just tell our message better, articulate it in a way that people can understand, I think we would see droves and droves of our generation coming to it.
[00:16:09]  And I want to start something.
[00:16:11]  You know, I say, you know, we need a patriot revolution, but, you know, I'm really fortunate that my name is Madison.
[00:16:17]  I hearken back to James Madison.
[00:16:20]  You know, I want to lead kind of a James Madison revolution of young people.
[00:16:25]  And you know, he was 25 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence.
[00:16:27]  He went on to write the Constitution of young people realizing there is a problem in my society and I'm going to need to stand up and do something about it because there's no time to wait.
[00:16:36]  And that is what I want to see for our generation.
[00:16:39]  I want to see this generation rise up and say, hey, you know what?
[00:16:44]  Not only is it a terrible financial decision for us to cast ourselves further and further into debt, but it's immoral.
[00:16:50]  You're saddling me, my children, all the future generations with this terrible substandard economic setting that they're going to put people into.
[00:16:58]  And so I think it's time for us to shake off these bonds and not listen to these people who say, oh, well, you know what?
[00:17:05]  You're going to do great one day, but it's time for you to wait in line.
[00:17:08]  Who are we standing in line behind?
[00:17:10]  Because the people that I see that are ahead of me, who have gone before me, there's not many that I look up to.
[00:17:17]  Yeah, that's very true.
[00:17:19]  Yeah, and it's a very important point because, you know, the tone of the conservative movement is we feel betrayed.
[00:17:27]  And that's why we love Trump so much, is that Trump actually did what he said he was going to do.
[00:17:32]  But we feel betrayed by people who said that they represented our value system.
[00:17:35]  And the reason we feel betrayed is because we really care about our value system.
[00:17:39]  We go to church for a reason.
[00:17:40]  We care about these ideas.
[00:17:42]  And this is not, it's not just like wearing a Carolina Panthers jersey, right?
[00:17:47]  And that's the way I think the Republican Party feels.
[00:17:49]  Like, oh, yeah, I'm going to put on the jersey when I go to a pro-life rally, and then they just take off the jersey and then they go do something else.
[00:17:55]  No, you live it.
[00:17:56]  You breathe it.
[00:17:56]  And if you don't go and fight for it, then you've turned your back on us.
[00:18:00]  And if there's some really good senators out there, and there's some really good Congress people, but there's not enough.
[00:18:05]  And we know that.
[00:18:06]  And we always go out of our way to mention the Jim Jordans of the world, to mention Matt Gates, to mention Senator Josh Hawley and Senator Tom Cotton.
[00:18:13]  The list is not very long, right?
[00:18:15]  And I think that one of the reasons, and we've talked about this, is the system and the structure in Washington has been so difficult for people like you to win, first and foremost.
[00:18:27]  And I think social media and technology really afforded you, you know, an opening to be able to kind of compete on this landscape.
[00:18:36]  And I think that's an incredibly positive thing, you know, for our country and for the next generation.
[00:18:40]  And you know, and I wrote a note here, you now have a burden of responsibility.
[00:18:44]  And you know this, is because now you will be the youngest elected member of Congress in the history of our beautiful country, youngest ever.
[00:18:51]  And you will get older, but that will probably never be taken away from you, right?
[00:18:54]  And with that, there will be an expectation of the media and people say, okay, now sell me the Republican Party, young Republican, like sell it to me.
[00:19:03]  And that's a big burden.
[00:19:05]  I think you're up for it because you had to defeat 12 other people and then a runoff with all this outside money coming in.
[00:19:11]  And outside of the legislative side of it, and I would love to get your thoughts on this.
[00:19:16]  Outside of the legislative side of it, which we all know is a very difficult, complicated, convoluted process.
[00:19:20]  And I think that that will take longer to change.
[00:19:23]  What won't take longer to change, though, is a 16-year-old in Boston, Massachusetts that will then see you as, wow, there's a young Republican.
[00:19:31]  I actually see millions of people coming to the conservative movement because of your singular victory and because what we're doing and our podcast and all that.
[00:19:39]  But now that it's not, now that it's a reference point where it's like, wow, you can actually be a lawmaker in your mid-20s, I think that's incredibly important.

=== Tech Giants vs Young Voters (13:11) ===

[00:19:46]  What's your message then?
[00:19:47]  What does the Republican Party stand for for that 16-year-old in Boston or the 20-year-old in Austin, Texas, that quite honestly will see you and they said, I never thought that existed.
[00:19:59]  My message is very simple.
[00:20:01]  I feel like so often people try to overcomplicate what the message of Republicans is.
[00:20:07]  And I think that's why so many young people are turned off to the party is because you ask, go ask your average congressman on the GOP side, say, hey, what is your message?
[00:20:16]  It says, well, you know what?
[00:20:17]  We need to get GDP up half a percent.
[00:20:19]  And then we got to focus on the affordable housing crisis.
[00:20:24]  It's not exactly as simple as you think.
[00:20:25]  You got to look at it from a macro sense.
[00:20:27]  And that I want to get away from that.
[00:20:30]  My message to that six-year-old in Boston who's listening to this podcast right now is, hey, the Republicans stand for freedom.
[00:20:39]  We stand for personal responsibility.
[00:20:41]  And yes, it means that you're accountable for your failures, but it also means that you get to feel the exhilaration of victory when you have success.
[00:20:48]  It means that I want you to go work hard and have ownership and own a piece of land and know that you are a part of this country and you take ownership for where it goes, which direction it takes.
[00:20:59]  But the whole thing is it's getting the government out of our lives.
[00:21:02]  I mean, Charlie, you know, if we take this page right here, grab any three letters and put them together, it's going to most likely, odds are, it's going to resemble the initials of some major government agency that is designed to tell us what to do.
[00:21:19]  Like AOC.
[00:21:20]  Like AOC, yeah.
[00:21:22]  Like AOC, like EPA, like CIA, whatever it is.
[00:21:26]  Our government has grown so large, so overblown that.
[00:21:30]  It's the fourth branch of government.
[00:21:32]  Exactly.
[00:21:32]  They tax us to death, and then they over-regulate us to death.
[00:21:36]  And I want to get that.
[00:21:37]  I want to get us back to a constitutional government.
[00:21:40]  I'm so pleased to hear you say that.
[00:21:42]  And a couple of thoughts is that we as Republicans, I don't even call myself a Republican at times.
[00:21:47]  Me as a conservative.
[00:21:48]  I don't even know what a Republican means.
[00:21:49]  I'm a conservative.
[00:21:50]  Of course, I don't support the Democrats, but some of these people that call themselves Republicans, I'm like, thanks, but no thanks.
[00:21:55]  As a conservative, far too often, it's this technocratic jargon.
[00:22:00]  Like, oh, elect us, and we'll be able to get marginal corporate tax rates down 2%.
[00:22:04]  Like, if that's your vision for our country, that's really stale and vanilla and boring.
[00:22:09]  And short-sighted.
[00:22:09]  It's incredibly short-sighted.
[00:22:11]  And we have to think multi-generational and transformative in a very restorative is probably a better word than transformative because transformative sounds, you know, far too, you know, kind of Marxist and socialistic.
[00:22:22]  But I think restorative is a much better term for it.
[00:22:24]  And it's very interesting because you mentioned the fourth branch of government.
[00:22:28]  They're unelected, they're unknown, and they have unlimited amounts of power.
[00:22:32]  And we don't know who these people are.
[00:22:34]  They're able to investigate our lives.
[00:22:36]  They're able to, in a lot of ways, tie up our businesses.
[00:22:38]  They're able to audit on demand.
[00:22:41]  And the founders never anticipated a fourth branch, a bureaucratic class, if you will, of endless amounts of millions of people that have this kind of power.
[00:22:49]  It's civil service that is completely unchecked and unregulated in a lot of ways, unregulated by the people.
[00:22:56]  And so the more light you shine onto that, I think the better.
[00:22:59]  And so you mentioned some issues that younger voters care about.
[00:23:05]  Let's get into them.
[00:23:06]  So tech censorship is a big issue for young people.
[00:23:10]  You're going to be one of the leading voices on this issue.
[00:23:13]  I make the argument that we should be against centralized power in all forms, including when centralized power gets more powerful than the government.
[00:23:21]  And I think Google is actually more powerful than the federal government in a lot of ways.
[00:23:25]  What is your view on tech censorship and the tech companies?
[00:23:28]  The view is, I respect the idea of private businesses being able to do whatever they want.
[00:23:35]  That's a conservative ideology.
[00:23:37]  But right now, we do stand against monopolies.
[00:23:40]  And I think we need to do some kind of trust busting because what's going on is we have these ginormous tech companies, whether we're talking about the Facebooks or the Googles of the world, who have an undue amount of influence on everyday Americans, on the whole globe, really.
[00:23:55]  And for them to be able to operate in two different forms.
[00:23:58]  One, they say, oh, well, we're just a platform, so we're protected by First Amendment rights.
[00:24:01]  So government, you can't come in and help regulators tell us what to do.
[00:24:04]  But two, they also say, well, we're kind of like a publisher.
[00:24:07]  So I don't really, I disagree with what you're saying there.
[00:24:11]  So we're going to censor that.
[00:24:13]  And then all of a sudden you get a pop-up on your Instagram that says, oh, your post has been deleted because it does not abide by our community guidelines.
[00:24:22]  And then you can never go read what the community guidelines are.
[00:24:25]  It's this arbitrary benchmark that they really don't even have specified because they don't want to have to abide by it.
[00:24:34]  If they see someone really making waves, and Charlie, I'm sure that you are so frustrated by this, see someone really making waves and cutting into that young demographic that they want to hold on to so badly, then they're going to do everything they can to limit your influence.
[00:24:48]  Yeah, and these companies, they know exactly where you are right now.
[00:24:52]  They know your purchasing habits.
[00:24:53]  They know your health information.
[00:24:55]  They track you at all times.
[00:24:57]  And look, you read the Federalist Papers, you're a student of the founding, which is just so underappreciated.
[00:25:02]  And I'm so pleased you talk about it because our young people need to be proud of our country's founding.
[00:25:07]  And I want to get into that in a second.
[00:25:08]  But the founders, they were really worried about centralized tyranny and power.
[00:25:13]  And in the 1780s and 1790s and the early 1800s, understandably, the biggest power they could think of was a governmental power.
[00:25:20]  But really, the underlying theme is we don't like the weak being exploited by the strong.
[00:25:24]  That's basically the...
[00:25:25]  And so when you see the weak being exploited by the strong, and that happens time and time again, I think that we as moral people have an obligation to intervene when the weak can't defend themselves up against the strong.
[00:25:38]  And the strong are Google, the tech companies, right?
[00:25:41]  And we have waited years for a free market remedy against them.
[00:25:46]  And we have not seen that happen, unfortunately.
[00:25:48]  It's just, you know, there's some competitors and they just fall in flat.
[00:25:51]  It's so powerful.
[00:25:52]  Yeah, and some of it is because they hide behind Section 230, the Communications Decency Act, which is a government-created regulation that gave them their super governmental status.
[00:26:02]  And so when we as conservatives look at this, it should always come from the perspective of how do I protect that beautiful Bill of Rights?
[00:26:09]  And if the beautiful Bill of Rights is being violated in a macro sense by anything, we should have concern, especially speech, right?
[00:26:18]  So when you have Diamond and Silk, you have Lila Rose, you have the California Republican Party be described as Nazis by Google, you have all these examples, thousands and thousands of examples, that all of a sudden violates the first amendment of our Constitution.
[00:26:33]  Now, it's very tricky because, as you said, it's a private business.
[00:26:36]  But in modern day time, how can you petition your government without using the internet?
[00:26:40]  Is that realistic?
[00:26:42]  It's where we get the flow of our information.
[00:26:45]  Very few people would even know how to find the DMV without Google.
[00:26:48]  That's right.
[00:26:48]  They really wouldn't.
[00:26:49]  That's a great point.
[00:26:50]  You know, a big thing that I always love having historical context to things because I don't believe there's anything new under the sun.
[00:26:57]  You know, you look at the Protestant Revolution that is very, very much so a byproduct that led to America's founding and creation.
[00:27:05]  You know, Martin Luther went into the town square where he was and he nailed his theses to the doors, which changed the world forever.
[00:27:12]  And this Protestant Revolution broke out of this Prussian area, which is now Germany.
[00:27:17]  And, you know, the world's been forever changed.
[00:27:19]  America's here now.
[00:27:20]  Everything's been different.
[00:27:21]  The thing is, Charlie, if you had your 95 theses, if you wanted to go change your world, where would you go?
[00:27:28]  I got a lot of doors to knock to nail them on.
[00:27:30]  Exactly.
[00:27:31]  And it's really funny.
[00:27:31]  It was just the 500th anniversary, I believe, 400th anniversary recently.
[00:27:36]  And I was like, I want to go knock it on the college campus.
[00:27:40]  Not the 95.
[00:27:41]  Stop selling the indulgences of our kids saying they have to go to college, they have to get a job.
[00:27:46]  Exactly.
[00:27:47]  It's not a perfect analogy, but it works.
[00:27:49]  Well, yeah, but social media and Google are the new town square, and we have got to protect the speech in there.
[00:27:55]  And I'm now going to make a very quick segue because you brought up something I really like talking about.
[00:27:59]  Go right there.
[00:28:00]  I think we do ourselves such a disservice when our parents and our families think that the ultimate way they can find success is by getting their child to a four-year degree education.
[00:28:11]  So, can I stop you really quick?
[00:28:12]  Go.
[00:28:13]  Did you graduate from college?
[00:28:14]  I did not.
[00:28:15]  Nor did I. You didn't, Charlie, did you?
[00:28:18]  You went for a short time?
[00:28:20]  That would be a very generous interpretation of my time.
[00:28:24]  Maybe like showing up to enroll and then.
[00:28:26]  And then realizing that, hey, I can go make my mark outside in the world.
[00:28:30]  But this is a very, I have to stop you.
[00:28:32]  It's a very important point that I want you to build out the argument.
[00:28:35]  These are two future members of Congress, most likely.
[00:28:38]  I have to always cushion that.
[00:28:39]  God willing, let's put it that way.
[00:28:41]  And the show, no college.
[00:28:44]  What's happening?
[00:28:45]  I think people are realizing that, you know, you don't need a four-year degree in Egyptology to shape public opinion.
[00:28:52]  And I think people are also realizing that, you know, sending more doctors and sending more lawyers to Congress, people who wear ties to work every single day, might not be as effective as what we want it to be.
[00:29:02]  Because, you know, I think we need more people who put on steel-toed boots every single morning rather than a tie shaping our public policy.
[00:29:09]  So, Madison, I encourage you to own the fact you didn't go to college.
[00:29:13]  Don't be ashamed of it.
[00:29:15]  Early years of Turning Point USA, I'd always kind of like dance around it and kind of like get in a fetal position.
[00:29:20]  Like, I'm sorry.
[00:29:21]  Maybe I'll go later.
[00:29:22]  And, you know, the more I, you know what the number one response I would get from our amazing patriots is they'd say, you didn't go to college, good for you.
[00:29:29]  You know, I'm inspired by that.
[00:29:30]  That's an interesting thing.
[00:29:31]  I mean, I mean, we've kind of could become a boring society for young people.
[00:29:35]  Like, yeah, you go to some four-year college, you get really drunk and get, you know, get into debt.
[00:29:39]  You learn to hate America.
[00:29:40]  And if you survive, good for you.
[00:29:41]  But then you kind of don't really have much direction.
[00:29:44]  It's an expensive four-year networking program.
[00:29:46]  Let's have an exciting country again.
[00:29:48]  We're like, no, I'm going to go try and start Tesla.
[00:29:50]  Like, great, go do that.
[00:29:51]  Like, you might fail.
[00:29:52]  You probably will.
[00:29:53]  And then you will learn something.
[00:29:54]  Or, you know, I'm going to go join the Marines.
[00:29:56]  Or I'm going to go be an AmeriCorps.
[00:30:00]  I mean, I think that there's so much energy that is being just misdirected amongst our younger generation.
[00:30:04]  And I encourage you just to own it.
[00:30:06]  And I know that it's tough because the intelligentsia and the ruling class, they want to say, oh, you don't have your piece of paper.
[00:30:12]  You can't get in.
[00:30:14]  Okay.
[00:30:14]  I mean, that's an argument from authority, but you were kind of also busy, I don't know, saving your life.
[00:30:19]  Just dying in a hospital, but got through that.
[00:30:21]  Minor details.
[00:30:22]  A quick side note I'd like to make.
[00:30:25]  There is a guy named Lucas Botkin.
[00:30:26]  He runs a really great company called T-Rex Arms.
[00:30:29]  I don't know him at all.
[00:30:30]  Follow him on social media.
[00:30:31]  I really like the guy.
[00:30:32]  And he's really big into firearms.
[00:30:34]  But he was never in the special forces or anything in the world.
[00:30:37]  So a lot of people in the community say, well, ask him, hey, how are you able to be so successful even though you don't have, you know, you weren't in special forces?
[00:30:45]  Like, how are you able to do that?
[00:30:46]  And he says, because proficiency beats any credentials you could ever have.
[00:30:50]  Of course.
[00:30:51]  And you know what?
[00:30:51]  There's this intelligentsia of the world.
[00:30:53]  There is these people who have a lot of letters after their name who are going to say, hey, you know what?
[00:30:57]  Well, you can't come in here because you won't be able to face me on a debate stage.
[00:31:01]  You won't be able to compete with me.
[00:31:03]  Proficiency and knowledge of the issues in the historical context of our founding, I think is all you need to have to be able to come into.
[00:31:11]  Oh, yeah.
[00:31:12]  And look, the argument from authority is a logical fallacy.
[00:31:15]  And this is what the left uses all the time.
[00:31:16]  And so they'll say, oh, this professor has 27,000 degrees and is inherently smarter than you.
[00:31:23]  And then they'll say something foolish.
[00:31:25]  And then we're supposed to believe that it's true.
[00:31:26]  So, for example, they'll have this professor from Brown say there's 128 genders.
[00:31:31]  And it doesn't matter that if you have all these degrees, you're wrong.
[00:31:35]  I mean, something does not become correct because of how many credentials you have.
[00:31:39]  Exactly.
[00:31:40]  And so, and on the inverse of that, anyone can have the access to truth.
[00:31:44]  And that's why those of us that are Christians know that.
[00:31:47]  And that's why it's been so incredible as Christianity has spread rights across the world have spread because it's an idea that you can actually access the same truth as the person at the top of the ivory tower can.
[00:31:58]  And of course, there's different levels of understanding, especially when you get to molecular biology and all of those sorts of things.
[00:32:03]  But there's nothing that they can state unequivocally that another person can also stay.
[00:32:10]  And it becomes less true because they say it.
[00:32:12]  And I think the argument from authority has actually protected the ruling class from any sort of criticism.
[00:32:18]  Agreed.
[00:32:18]  Despite them being professionally wrong.
[00:32:20]  And so to be exactly right about something, it's actually a very low percentage percentage correlation.
[00:32:26]  And so Trump's not going to run for president.
[00:32:28]  Trump won't win.
[00:32:29]  Trump will not beat the Bush dynasty or the Clinton dynasty, all these things.
[00:32:32]  And these same people that have gotten all these things wrong professionally for the last five years, we still keep them in, and we still call them experts.
[00:32:38]  Like, oh, yeah, experts.
[00:32:39]  It's ridiculous.
[00:32:40]  And, but in a lot of different ways, the plumber in Asheville, North Carolina had way more wisdom about the future of the political process than some silly Berkeley PhD person who hates America and was just basically so angry that Trump might be president, he just wanted to project it onto the world.

=== Debt Grievance and Suburbs (06:41) ===

[00:32:58]  And I think we're seeing a big disruption of that.
[00:32:59]  And I think it's very healthy.
[00:33:00]  And I think your candidacy embodies that.
[00:33:02]  You know, I agree.
[00:33:03]  And I also want to touch on that plumber in Asheville, North Carolina a little bit more.
[00:33:07]  Because you know what?
[00:33:10]  I believe our education system, pushing people to go to these extraordinarily expensive, which are federally guaranteed loans, let me remind you, funded.
[00:33:19]  Got to get rid of that.
[00:33:20]  You go to these higher education institutions, and then you're basically going to be forced to be a perpetual renter for the rest of your life.
[00:33:27]  That's exactly right.
[00:33:27]  You will never own anything because as long as you are in debt, you cannot build wealth.
[00:33:31]  You're either accepting interest or you are paying interest.
[00:33:35]  And let me tell you, the problem is with everyone taking these student loans, which you can't even get out of through bankruptcy, they follow you to the grave.
[00:33:43]  Everyone taking all of these ginormous student loans, it keeps people dependent on the government because they're never going to be able to create the wealth to have the freedom that they want.
[00:33:55]  You're exactly right.
[00:33:56]  And so we, in the 60s, really, we as Republicans don't brag on Dwight D. Eisenhower enough.
[00:34:01]  That's one of my big new things.
[00:34:04]  Dwight D. Eisenhower was one of the greatest presidents in American history, was a Republican, fought against segregation, brought in federal troops to desegregate the armed forces, built the interstate system, oversaw the greatest economic renaissance.
[00:34:15]  And one of the biggest things he talked about is how middle-class wealth must be around equity building, not on debt accumulation.
[00:34:22]  And he talked about this.
[00:34:23]  And he, post-World War II, he was a communicator of peace and prosperity.
[00:34:30]  And people that lived through the Eisenhower era felt a very stable society that was growing with a national ethos and a purpose of rebuilding.
[00:34:36]  And we just have forgotten about that as Republicans in a lot of ways.
[00:34:39]  And I think that's a mistake.
[00:34:40]  And what's really important is that we have now, in a lot of different ways, we have hypnotized ourselves to just continue to amass massive debt burdens and not try to actually build institutional wealth.
[00:34:53]  And that's why I think that we the more that we become a renting society, especially for young people, the more liberal and socialistic they actually become.
[00:35:03]  It's these high-rise buildings.
[00:35:05]  Exactly.
[00:35:05]  And I'm really radical on this.
[00:35:07]  You and I talked about this yesterday.
[00:35:08]  I think that the Republican Party should say no more buildings over 10 stories for like five years.
[00:35:12]  And I know that sounds like really extreme, but when you think about it, every time a story, you know, building goes over a certain level, you're going to have a higher likelihood of those people being very far left wing because it's the tragedy of the commons.
[00:35:25]  They don't own it.
[00:35:26]  They really don't have much regard for what's around them.
[00:35:28]  Like, oh, the park, someone will take care of that.
[00:35:30]  The school, someone will take care of that.
[00:35:31]  But if you go to Mahalis, Arizona, or you go to Pueblo, Colorado, and you have to go build a ranch.
[00:35:39]  You really care about what happens around you.
[00:35:42]  By definition, you have to.
[00:35:43]  And then, even to a greater extent in the suburbs, you own, the less extent in the suburbs, you own that piece of land.
[00:35:48]  That is your property.
[00:35:49]  And I think that property ownership, as it has declined in our country, has been a really troubling trend.
[00:35:55]  And this is the, I'm so glad you're talking about this, Madison, because this is actual real life stuff that the Republican Party has decided not to talk about over the last 20 years.
[00:36:02]  It's all about the minor incremental increases we can get to the GDP.
[00:36:08]  Yeah, but that's what the American people are.
[00:36:09]  First of all, I just have to say this.
[00:36:10]  The GDP is not even the best metric to take.
[00:36:12]  It's insane.
[00:36:13]  I'm so sick and tired.
[00:36:14]  I mean, Jeb Bush, God bless his soul.
[00:36:16]  I actually think he's a generally okay person.
[00:36:18]  He's just so misguided.
[00:36:19]  And no energy at all, like zero, no energy.
[00:36:23]  And I know him.
[00:36:24]  He's nice and he's probably right on education, but his whole thing is like, we have to get back to 3.6% GDP.
[00:36:30]  You know how GDP is even factored?
[00:36:32]  The number one factor in a GDP is government spending.
[00:36:34]  Number one.
[00:36:34]  There's a number one contributing variable into the factor of GDP.
[00:36:39]  And then it doesn't count wage growth.
[00:36:41]  It doesn't count how long you actually have to work to be able to sustain a family or debt or any of that.
[00:36:46]  All they care about is macroeconomic growth.
[00:36:48]  Anyway, you were saying something and I was bashing on the GDP metric.
[00:36:51]  No, no, we were talking about the same thing: the fact that I believe, you know, what you and I are talking about right now, it's what people actually care about.
[00:36:59]  I care about dining room politics.
[00:37:02]  When my brother, who has got four beautiful little daughters who are my nieces, they're great.
[00:37:06]  I care about when he is sitting around the dining room table with his beautiful little family, that those girls have food, that him and his wife know if they want to go out and see a movie, they can because they feel safe in this society to go out and do so.
[00:37:21]  And I care about the issues that matter to them.
[00:37:24]  And let me tell you, incremental changes to the GDP do not matter to them where they're sitting.
[00:37:29]  My brother's a financial advisor, and so obviously he cares about finances a lot, but I care about what happens to the middle-class American family.
[00:37:37]  And that's where the Republicans need to get back to.
[00:37:39]  I totally agree.
[00:37:40]  And your district represents them.
[00:37:41]  And so people say, well, how on earth is it that young people are becoming so socialistic?
[00:37:46]  And of course, part of it, a big part of it, is you send them to these universities where they professionally hate America.
[00:37:51]  But also there's an economic component of it.
[00:37:53]  And we, as Republicans, have just kind of ignored this.
[00:37:55]  And Donald Trump saw this so beautifully and so clearly, which is you have a 28-year-old who did what he was supposed to do, right?
[00:38:01]  He went into debt, went to Clemson, you know, or wherever he went, University of Florida, and studied something that he wasn't really passionate about.
[00:38:08]  But everyone told him you have to get that piece of paper.
[00:38:10]  And then he gets very, you know, he gets employed maybe, but he's getting underpaid.
[00:38:15]  And he definitely can't save any of his money because he has to pay off his student debt and everything costs so much.
[00:38:20]  He definitely can't even go buy a car, let alone a home, let alone have kids.
[00:38:23]  By the time that person turns 31, 32, when someone comes around in grievance-based politics and is like, I'm going to wipe your debt away and you might actually live a more meaningful life, it actually resonates.
[00:38:32]  It does.
[00:38:33]  And we, as Republicans, you know, we don't recognize there's a huge economic component to this and that not every single human being is going to be able to engage perfectly in the information sharing economy.
[00:38:45]  There's actually a huge labor gap in our country for plumbers and for carpenters and for HVAC and for people that lay tile.
[00:38:53]  And we have demeaned those trades a lot.
[00:38:55]  We've dishonored them to the point that people don't want to have them.
[00:38:58]  You know, in my very first debate for this congressional runoff, I think it was back in February.
[00:39:04]  We were sitting there and our moderator had gone through all the questions, but then we went to this moment where people in the crowd could ask.
[00:39:09]  And there were a few hundred people, maybe four or five hundred people there.
[00:39:12]  And anyways, there's this young woman who stood up and she said, you know, my daughter, she graduated, she has her master's degree.
[00:39:20]  And she just found out that this person who paints this factory right down the road from her, just literally painting the walls outside, is making more money an hour than she is.
[00:39:29]  So how are we going to fix that?
[00:39:31]  And, you know, a lot of the other opponents gave their answers of how they thought, you know, we could make sure that that woman could find a meaningful work.

=== Materialism and Forgotten Trades (05:23) ===

[00:39:39]  And I said, you know what?
[00:39:41]  I think the number one problem right now is that you believe that just because your daughter has a master's degree, she should be making more money than that guy who's created that painting business is out there busting his butt to be able to make money for his family and to better society.
[00:39:55]  And so I think we've got to stop dishonoring tradesmen.
[00:39:58]  And that's why trade skills.
[00:39:59]  Yes.
[00:40:00]  You won because you actually answered the question honestly, unlike the other political class where they want to protect the master's degree.
[00:40:06]  Like, no, maybe you studied something stupid, and maybe the guy that's doing something with his hands actually is delivering more value to America.
[00:40:12]  You know, I want to touch on that.
[00:40:13]  You were talking about Eisenhower just a moment ago.
[00:40:15]  He's a phenomenal president.
[00:40:16]  Incredible.
[00:40:16]  But you mentioned something that there was this Renaissance, you know, he created the system, the Renaissance that comes to the United States.
[00:40:22]  Degregation of America.
[00:40:23]  One big thing you mentioned was that we had a national ethos.
[00:40:27]  Yes.
[00:40:28]  And Charlie, let's touch on that right now.
[00:40:31]  Let's define what a great national ethos could be.
[00:40:34]  Because, you know, I think in our country, so many people are just, it's that classic saying, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.
[00:40:41]  I think so many people in our country do not have a true north.
[00:40:44]  They don't have a compass.
[00:40:45]  You know, me and many of my friends, we all wear these compass necklaces.
[00:40:50]  It's a compass that we wear around our necks.
[00:40:51]  And it's to remind us that we have a true north, that we know the direction we're going and that we know that, you know, we have a mission statement for our life.
[00:41:00]  So anytime we have to make a decision, we can just, you know, compare that decision to this narrowly defined one or two sentence mission statement.
[00:41:07]  Say, does this get me closer to that?
[00:41:09]  Does this get me closer to where I want to go in my life?
[00:41:12]  And do you know right from wrong?
[00:41:14]  You know, I think the only way you can truly know right from wrong is if you have a relationship with God.
[00:41:19]  Amen.
[00:41:20]  And Jesus Christ.
[00:41:21]  And of course, with Jesus Christ.
[00:41:22]  But I think that we have gotten so far away from that in the United States.
[00:41:27]  Yes.
[00:41:27]  We have made God so small that people don't have that ethos anymore.
[00:41:31]  And that's why we need big government because if people can't self-govern, they need a big government.
[00:41:35]  Well, we don't need it.
[00:41:36]  That's why they replace it.
[00:41:37]  But yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:41:39]  I know exactly what you're saying.
[00:41:40]  And I think that it's so important because in the 70s and 80s, we became so, because of Reagan, we became so phenomenally rich.
[00:41:46]  And God bless Reagan for that.
[00:41:48]  The downside of that, though, is that we became, I think, overly materialistic.
[00:41:52]  We decided to just get points on the deal, send our factories to China because a couple firms will really benefit from that.
[00:41:58]  And we didn't really realize the secondary and tertiary costs.
[00:42:02]  And when you shut down a factory in Boone, North Carolina, or in Asheville, North Carolina, or in Toledo, Ohio, and 600 jobs just disappear, well, the statistics show that 100 of those 600 people are going to stay perpetually unemployed for the rest of their life.
[00:42:16]  And 50 of those 600 people will probably either get into alcoholism or drug addiction.
[00:42:21]  Well, then they become a really issue for all of us.
[00:42:24]  Tax burden-wise, social fabric falls apart.
[00:42:26]  Divorces start to incur.
[00:42:28]  You know, domestic abuse skyrockets.
[00:42:30]  The school funding has issues.
[00:42:31]  And so we, as conservatives, we kind of fell in love with this endless materialistic import culture from China where decadence.
[00:42:39]  And it's really interesting.
[00:42:40]  I drive through suburban America and you guys have all seen this phenomenon.
[00:42:43]  And it's really troubling.
[00:42:45]  And it was always branded as a good thing.
[00:42:46]  And I don't think it is.
[00:42:47]  Where we have these garage sales and other countries really don't understand this culture we have in America where we basically say, take everything you can out of my house.
[00:42:55]  I'll give you a dollar for this.
[00:42:57]  And it shows, you know, I always love stopping at these garage sales and asking them, well, so why did you buy all this stuff?
[00:43:04]  Like, I don't know, Christmas gifts.
[00:43:06]  Like, I buy all this stuff.
[00:43:07]  Like, okay.
[00:43:07]  Well, do you have any allegiance to this stuff?
[00:43:10]  No, some of the stuff I've never even used.
[00:43:12]  We all know this stuff, right?
[00:43:13]  I never even wore this stuff.
[00:43:14]  I never did this.
[00:43:15]  It's like piles and piles of plastic garbage, right?
[00:43:19]  And then I asked him, I said, so if all this just went away and you knew that you would have just a little bit stronger community, would you be okay with that?
[00:43:27]  Like, of course.
[00:43:28]  And I think that's the conversation we need to have.
[00:43:30]  Like, what if you had half as much plastic crap as you have right now and you'd have a flourishing community?
[00:43:35]  And you had a relationship with your neighbor.
[00:43:37]  Yeah, and a neighbor, and a school that was properly funded and put together, and just a church that didn't have to beg for ties at the end of the year because there was actually middle-class wages.
[00:43:48]  Do you mind your kids walking down the street?
[00:43:50]  Exactly right.
[00:43:51]  Crime goes up when you send a factory to China.
[00:43:54]  Everything goes up.
[00:43:54]  Yeah, everything.
[00:43:55]  And what do we got in return is we overcompensated that.
[00:43:58]  Oh, we need as much materialistic stuff as possible.
[00:44:00]  And I'm not saying that's all bad.
[00:44:01]  I'm sure some of it's good.
[00:44:03]  But we have to go rent self-storage spaces to store our garbage and stuff that we don't care about.
[00:44:12]  And I think that's a really important conversation that the Republicans have always stayed away from.
[00:44:16]  Like, oh, no, GDP.
[00:44:17]  Like, well, GDP just means, in some ways, just more, you know, I don't know, Lego castles that you're never going to use or, you know, just dusty old, you know, shoes that don't yield allegiance to.
[00:44:29]  But the point is, this is that the country, I think, has to get back to a place of self-sufficiency, of production, but also what do we value, right?
[00:44:36]  Are we a country that has an economy in it, or are we an economy that happens to be in a country?
[00:44:43]  And in some ways, we're a country first, aren't we?
[00:44:45]  I mean, if you look at the Constitution, it's very clear that these are our values of a country and a fabric and a moral people, and that the economy will do whatever it wants.
[00:44:53]  And it should.
[00:44:54]  And I think that if we're serious about saving the fabric of America, we have to get back to that.
[00:44:59]  Agreed.
[00:44:59]  And Charlie, that all boils down to the home.

=== Slavery, Lies, and Self-Sufficiency (14:32) ===

[00:45:03]  I really, really believe it does.
[00:45:04]  You know, I think that one of the greatest problems we have in our country is fatherless homes.
[00:45:08]  I could not agree more.
[00:45:09]  Yeah, especially in minority communities.
[00:45:11]  I really feel like.
[00:45:12]  And we subsidize father.
[00:45:13]  We subsidize fatherlessness because there are so many financial benefits to these young women to not get married and have more children because then they can get more subsidies for those children.
[00:45:24]  That's what I have.
[00:45:25]  And then, you know, you have a woman who has seven kids from three different fathers, but none of those dads are around.
[00:45:33]  And these children are all growing up.
[00:45:34]  You know, Charlie, I gave you a hatchet.
[00:45:36]  Thank you for that, by the way.
[00:45:37]  Yes, yeah.
[00:45:37]  But, you know, with that hatchet, it had one end that was a cutting in the blade.
[00:45:42]  The other side was the hammer.
[00:45:43]  And I had talked to you about how I really believe that in America, we're all like this.
[00:45:48]  And really all over the world.
[00:45:49]  But as men and women, we are all like that hatchet.
[00:45:52]  We have a destructive side, and we have also the propensity to be able to build something.
[00:45:55]  And let me tell you, I believe children who are raised in homes without strong discipline, and it's hard for a mother, although there's a lot of strong single mothers out there who do raise incredible children, are some of the best parents in the world.
[00:46:08]  It is very hard for someone to be the disciplinarian and also the loving figure in the home at the same time.
[00:46:13]  And that's why I think we have got to have a father and a mother in all the homes because these children are being raised and are not learning that, hey, you know what?
[00:46:21]  I need to be put in check.
[00:46:22]  I cannot be this destructive nature that is inside of our human flesh.
[00:46:27]  It's natural.
[00:46:28]  It's original sin.
[00:46:29]  It's original sin.
[00:46:29]  It's natural for us to destroy.
[00:46:31]  It's unnatural for us to build, but it has to be cultivated.
[00:46:34]  And it's incredibly beautiful because God created that union for a reason.
[00:46:38]  Because if you look at it, just from the character attributions trait, the masculine and the feminine traits, they balance each other very beautifully.
[00:46:46]  And again, single mothers do a phenomenal job.
[00:46:48]  This is not an indictment of single mothers.
[00:46:50]  I always do the same sort of prefacing that you do.
[00:46:54]  However, every single study shows that a child that is raised by just a single mother is far more likely to go to prison, far more likely to commit crimes.
[00:47:01]  So there was a study done by the Illinois Bureau of Prisons where they went and they did a survey of current prisoners.
[00:47:07]  And 60% of rapists grew up without a father in the home, 70% of adolescent murderers, 75% of violent criminals.
[00:47:13]  I mean, you're talking about not just a majority, but basically almost the entire prison was no fathers.
[00:47:18]  And so who pays for the prisons?
[00:47:20]  We as the taxpayers.
[00:47:21]  And then who pays for rehabilitation and the disrupted family unity and the empty chair at Christmas when Uncle XYZ, Uncle Mark is not there because he had to, he robbed a 7-Eleven.
[00:47:31]  And you think, wow, if only Uncle Mark's father was there, then maybe that social cohesion would have stayed together.
[00:47:37]  I completely agree.
[00:47:38]  And also, I think that we have the hyper-feminization of America where, and society can get too masculine too.
[00:47:44]  Don't get me wrong.
[00:47:45]  Right, but saying that all masculinity is toxic, it's foolish.
[00:47:49]  It's dangerous.
[00:47:49]  It is pernicious.
[00:47:50]  It really is.
[00:47:51]  And so, but when a society gets too masculine, you get like Libya with Moamar Gaddafi.
[00:47:55]  Okay, like, so you don't want to.
[00:47:56]  Where all of a sudden you're like a dictator, like, that's bad.
[00:47:58]  Okay.
[00:47:59]  But like you were saying, the masculine side of people and the feminine side, they blend so well together.
[00:48:04]  And if you look just from a character attribution, you know, attribute standpoint, it works for a reason and it's designed intelligently by a creator to be able to balance it out, to be able to create children.
[00:48:15]  And so children that can exist in a very brutal and likely suffering environment.
[00:48:21]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:22]  I mean, and we also don't communicate that to our children.
[00:48:24]  And you know this, Madison.
[00:48:26]  We give our kids a false impression of life.
[00:48:28]  We do.
[00:48:28]  As if in a lot of, we lie to our kids and we teach them self-esteem, not self-control.
[00:48:33]  And like, you're the greatest thing in the world when they're 15 years old and they're really not.
[00:48:36]  And no one is.
[00:48:37]  But in reality, we should be like, here's how not to do that.
[00:48:40]  Here's how not to indulge.
[00:48:42]  Here's how to control yourself.
[00:48:44]  And I think self-control is a lot more important to teach than self-esteem.
[00:48:47]  And then, but if you do not have a two-parent household, it becomes incredibly more difficult.
[00:48:51]  And so it's really interesting.
[00:48:53]  And let's get into BLM because that's a big issue.
[00:48:55]  Oh, let's go.
[00:48:56]  And so.
[00:48:57]  Especially in my city right now.
[00:48:58]  Yeah, because you represent Asheville.
[00:49:00]  I do.
[00:49:00]  And Asheville just voted to have reparations.
[00:49:02]  And so I would love to get your opinion on that.
[00:49:04]  And you could, you know, as comfortable as you want to get with that, I can comment on it as well.
[00:49:09]  But I want to just first to close the point on the two-parent households.
[00:49:12]  A black child who is raised by a mother and a father is more likely to succeed economically and else otherwise than a white kid that is raised by just a single mother.
[00:49:21]  And so it's really two-parent privilege that we talk about, not skin color privilege.
[00:49:24]  So let's transition.
[00:49:25]  Asheville, North Carolina.
[00:49:27]  Reparations.
[00:49:28]  Unanimously?
[00:49:29]  Unanimously, 7-0.
[00:49:31]  7-0, city council to give reparations to the descendants of slaves.
[00:49:36]  And now I would say that.
[00:49:37]  Is that correct?
[00:49:37]  I'm just reparing it.
[00:49:39]  So they have transitioned to where it's going to be to all of the African Americans in our community.
[00:49:46]  So let me just ask a very simple question, and you can just not answer.
[00:49:51]  Like a recent immigrant from Nigeria, are they part of that?
[00:49:53]  They are part of that.
[00:49:56]  So if you read the actual text that they have written, it's basically what Senator Tim Scott and President Trump have been doing, which is an opportunity zone.
[00:50:06]  It's basically the exact same thing.
[00:50:08]  They're saying that they just want to take money and give it to historical black and lower income areas that are predominantly black.
[00:50:17]  But that, so you can hear them be like, okay, well, that's helpful.
[00:50:20]  Yeah, of course, let's invest in communities.
[00:50:23]  But where it gets so dangerous is when they actually named it reparations.
[00:50:27]  This is setting such a dangerous precedent.
[00:50:30]  One, this is setting a precedent that, hey, you are a victim.
[00:50:34]  For the rest of your life, you're a victim no matter who you are because of your skin color.
[00:50:37]  You have a victimhood mentality, not a victor's mentality.
[00:50:41]  And so that's terrible for our society as a whole.
[00:50:44]  But on another part, it's saying that they are owed something.
[00:50:48]  Did we not pay enough when 600,000 Americans died to free slaves?
[00:50:53]  We are the only country, aside from, I believe, Haiti, that fought an actual war to free slaves.
[00:51:01]  Yeah, and so I just have some very basic questions about reparations, and maybe you can ask them on behalf of the Asheville City Council.
[00:51:07]  What happens if someone's half black, half white?
[00:51:08]  Do they pay themselves?
[00:51:09]  I mean, I don't really understand how that works.
[00:51:11]  Keep going with your questions.
[00:51:12]  I see where you're going, but I'm just trying to infuse some critical thinking.
[00:51:18]  No, here's another question.
[00:51:19]  What about a white immigrant from South Africa?
[00:51:21]  Do they get reparations?
[00:51:22]  Because they're African-American.
[00:51:23]  They're African-American.
[00:51:24]  I mean, that's a little.
[00:51:26]  I mean, so that would be an interesting thing to see.
[00:51:29]  And more interestingly, do the Asian Americans get reparations because they were put in concentration camps?
[00:51:34]  But no, it's only, it doesn't fit their narrative.
[00:51:36]  How about Jewish individuals who literally had an extermination order against them?
[00:51:39]  The incredible thing about Jews in the world is there are still not as many Jews in America today, in the world today, as there were prior to the Holocaust.
[00:51:47]  Just think about that.
[00:51:48]  Wow.
[00:51:48]  You want to talk about extermination?
[00:51:49]  Wow.
[00:51:50]  The Jewish population worldwide has still not repopulated themselves to the level prior to the Holocaust.
[00:51:56]  That's incredible.
[00:51:57]  And so I think it's incredibly, I'd love to get the answer by the Asheville City Council of what is their criteria of the necessary form of oppression that didn't happen to you, but happened to someone that was related to you to get a redistributed check from the government.
[00:52:09]  I want to know the criteria because then once I have the criteria, and if it's their skin color, then LeBron James, if he lived in Asheville, North Carolina, or Michael Jordan even better, would get reparations, right?
[00:52:18]  It doesn't make any sense.
[00:52:20]  Is it income?
[00:52:20]  Because if Michael Jordan had a beautiful mansion in Asheville, I don't know if he does or does.
[00:52:24]  Probably not.
[00:52:24]  It's probably different from North Carolina.
[00:52:25]  I guess he would get a check.
[00:52:29]  This is the murkiness that we're walking into with the far-left liberals.
[00:52:33]  There's no definitions.
[00:52:35]  And this is why it's so hard to debate a liberal, and I'm sure that you can agree with that.
[00:52:38]  Yeah, I've done it once or twice.
[00:52:40]  Really, I think I saw a video of you one time on a college campus or something like that.
[00:52:43]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:52:44]  But we can never agree on the definition of terms.
[00:52:48]  And so whenever they feel like they're losing an argument, they just change the terms of an argument.
[00:52:52]  And that's why it's so hard to have a rational conversation.
[00:52:54]  Well, and so you make a great point about the American Civil War, and we did fight a bloody civil war.
[00:52:58]  But even before that, we don't teach our history correctly.
[00:53:01]  And even some conservative organizations have played into this 1619 lie that our country was founded in 1619, which is a complete and total pernicious lie.
[00:53:10]  Some conservative organizations have written op-eds saying that our country is 400 years old.
[00:53:14]  And I don't say any names on air.
[00:53:17]  I believe in Reagan's 11th Commandment.
[00:53:18]  You don't speak ill of another conservative Republican, but happy to fill people in privately.
[00:53:22]  You can figure it out yourself.
[00:53:23]  And this is so incredibly wrong.
[00:53:25]  And so they say, well, our country was founded on slavery.
[00:53:28]  But if you actually look at the Constitutional Compromise, there is a huge agreement that slavery was at its end.
[00:53:33]  I mean, in the founding of our country, we almost didn't have a compromise to form the 13 colonies because of slavery.
[00:53:38]  The northern states were like, we don't want this.
[00:53:40]  Vermont abolished slavery in 1777.
[00:53:42]  And a lesser not talked about provision of the United States Constitution was actually the Sunset Clause on the import of slavery.
[00:53:48]  It's Article 1, Section 6, something, and we can get the exact article.
[00:53:52]  But what's interesting is that Thomas Jefferson, right, like the worst president ever, according to the left, who's on Mount Rushmore and his statues are being torn down, they say, oh, he's a slave owner.
[00:53:59]  He's horrible.
[00:53:59]  Like, hold on a second.
[00:54:00]  What president signed the end of the American slave trade?
[00:54:03]  Tell me who that is and what year.
[00:54:04]  They won't tell you because they're the left.
[00:54:06]  It's Thomas Jefferson.
[00:54:07]  Thomas Jefferson signed the end of importing slaves in 1807, the day that the 20-year, the 20-year window actually elapsed.
[00:54:15]  So in the Constitution, it's still there.
[00:54:17]  In that specific article, they said, okay, we're only doing the slavery thing for these southern states.
[00:54:22]  We totally disagree.
[00:54:23]  You got 20 years and 20 years and one day, it's getting done.
[00:54:27]  It's over with.
[00:54:28]  And that promise was fulfilled by Thomas Jefferson himself.
[00:54:30]  He signed the end of the slave trade.
[00:54:31]  So our country is founded on the end of slavery, not on slavery.
[00:54:34]  And it's a beautiful history.
[00:54:35]  And they say, well, what about the three-fifths compromise?
[00:54:37]  Like, hold on a second.
[00:54:38]  Understand the history of the three-fifths compromise.
[00:54:40]  The South, who did not have good intentions at all, they're like, no, let's count slaves as fully people, and then we can get more power.
[00:54:48]  We can make slavery there forever.
[00:54:50]  And that was the reason why they wanted, they didn't actually want to give dignity or the voting rights.
[00:54:54]  They wanted just for population counting.
[00:54:55]  That was the reason they wanted it.
[00:54:57]  And of course, that never gets clearly communicated either as well.
[00:55:01]  So I know that's kind of a tangent there, but can you just expound, Madison, on the founding of our country, how beautiful it is, how exceptional it is, and how we need to communicate that.
[00:55:10]  We do.
[00:55:10]  I think the big problem is, you know, with the Federal Department of Education being formed back in the 70s, I think the worst crime that it has committed is that it changes what our schools focus on in history class.
[00:55:21]  They focus on some atrocities.
[00:55:23]  I believe what's going on is our history classes are focusing on the wrong thing.
[00:55:27]  So, you know, there's this Project 1619, which is the first time.
[00:55:30]  Yes, New York Times project.
[00:55:31]  That's right.
[00:55:32]  Yeah.
[00:55:32]  But I feel like what the left is doing, it's more, I call it the Project 1692.
[00:55:37]  What they're doing more, it's more like Salem Witch trials.
[00:55:40]  Wow.
[00:55:40]  You know, they are looking for something that doesn't exist.
[00:55:43]  They're saying, hey, every single Republican is already a racist.
[00:55:46]  I know they've said that about you.
[00:55:47]  I know they said that about me.
[00:55:48]  They said that, you know, we probably want to run lynch mobs and all kinds of, it's ridiculous.
[00:55:53]  I think racism is repugnant and disgusting.
[00:55:55]  It's sinful.
[00:55:55]  And the left are racist.
[00:55:56]  But they want to hunt us down, and they want to say they're racist.
[00:56:00]  We need to take them out.
[00:56:01]  Yet they're the ones who try to divide us on race the most.
[00:56:04]  And I have a very strong opinion on this, and I've come to this recently, and it worked on a recent cable television appearance.
[00:56:10]  The left doesn't know how to handle it when you call them racist because they are.
[00:56:13]  And I'm done being called the worst thing you can call a human being while they're the ones that are actually racists.
[00:56:18]  And so every time you encounter them, you say, you're an unbelievably bitter racist.
[00:56:21]  And have them defend themselves because it's an awful thing to do, but they're actually racist.
[00:56:25]  They defend the Smithsonian document on whiteness.
[00:56:28]  You know, they're saying that showing up on time, speaking clearly, and working hard are attributes of whiteness.
[00:56:34]  I can't make any difference between that.
[00:56:37]  What?
[00:56:38]  Oh, you didn't hear about this?
[00:56:39]  This was the Smithsonian Museum, African American History Museum, funded by your tax dollars.
[00:56:42]  They recently took it down because we went so hard after it on cable television and otherwise.
[00:56:47]  And basically, they had a document that said that speaking clear English, showing up to work on time, working hard, individual initiative, going to church are attributes of whiteness.
[00:56:56]  And the interesting part is you had liberals defending it.
[00:56:58]  I said, if I just took your quote and copy-pasted it to a KKK leader in 1870s, there'd be no difference, right?
[00:57:04]  Basically, you're just arguing for racial hierarchy and supremacy.
[00:57:08]  I reject that because the Republican Party has always been on the side.
[00:57:11]  They've always been on actual racial equality, unlike you racists, and that's what they are.
[00:57:16]  And I have no tolerance for that.
[00:57:17]  But it's really interesting because the left has always been hyper-fixated on race.
[00:57:20]  And we as conservatives have always actually been hyper-fixated on colours.
[00:57:23]  That just makes me so upset.
[00:57:24]  My fiancé is, she works, we won't go into too many details about what she does, but she works in the medical field.
[00:57:29]  She's incredible, incredible.
[00:57:31]  She's also African-American.
[00:57:33]  And so for them, someone to come in and say, oh, you know what, people who show up on time, speak clearly, work hard, that's attributes of white people.
[00:57:39]  That's not you.
[00:57:40]  They want to tell that to my fiancé.
[00:57:42]  I'll defend her very aggressively.
[00:57:44]  But also, the fact that I am going to have children that are going to be biracial, you want to go ahead and give them this victimhood mentality.
[00:57:54]  This is disgusting.
[00:57:57]  It's an abomination what the Democrats are trying to do.
[00:57:59]  And they want these people to constantly be in need for the government.
[00:58:02]  They don't ever want them to be able to stand on their own.
[00:58:04]  And what's interesting, Madison, I've talked about this before, and I want to do this kind of fun thought exercise for you because we, and I recently came to it because I've been reading Orwell.
[00:58:12]  I encourage all of you to read Orwell.
[00:58:13]  It's just so clarifying.
[00:58:14]  And 1984 is probably the most dystopian prophetic novel.
[00:58:18]  And now, but now it seems so real.
[00:58:21]  I feel like I'm reading the New York Times.
[00:58:23]  I'm reading the daily news.
[00:58:25]  It's like, this is happening today.
[00:58:27]  And so Orwell was actually a socialist, allegedly.
[00:58:30]  And then he saw what the socialists were all about, went to the coal mines in northern England and saw the move.
[00:58:34]  And he's like, this is way more about hating the rich than helping the poor.
[00:58:37]  Anyway, Orwell wrote 1984.
[00:58:39]  And we always talk about 84 in just terms of surveillance, right?
[00:58:42]  But there are a lot other little amazing pieces of wisdom here.
[00:58:45]  So we always say the left lies, right?
[00:58:47]  The left lie.
[00:58:47]  And it's actually worse than that because a lie would be this.
[00:58:51]  So let's pretend Madison is eating some Oreos, right?
[00:58:53]  And I come up and I say, hey, Madison, how many Oreos did you eat?
[00:58:56]  And you really ate 10, but you said, I ate three.
[00:58:58]  Right.
[00:58:59]  Okay.
[00:58:59]  That would be a lie.
[00:59:00]  And so then here's what the left does.
[00:59:02]  It's actually called double speak or double think.
[00:59:04]  It's an Orwellian term, right?
[00:59:05]  I come up and say, hey, Madison, how many Oreos did you eat?
[00:59:08]  And you have crumbs.
[00:59:09]  I ate three.
[00:59:09]  You have crumbs all over, and you say, No, no, no, you ate the Oreos.
[00:59:13]  No, no, I didn't.
[00:59:13]  No, you're eating Oreos right now.
[00:59:15]  No, no, no, you ate them.
[00:59:16]  See, you eat them.
[00:59:17]  No, I don't.
[00:59:18]  Like, I literally see you're eating the Oreos.
[00:59:20]  No, no, you ate the Oreos.
[00:59:21]  That's what the left does every single day.
[00:59:22]  That's not lying.
[00:59:23]  It's actually, it's a completely different thing.
[00:59:25]  That is what they do on a daily basis.
[00:59:27]  It's double speak.
[00:59:28]  It's so incredibly.
[00:59:30]  And actually, psychologically, Orwell talked about this.
[00:59:32]  We're not prepared for that.
[00:59:34]  Like, we can deal with lies, right?

=== Protecting the Weak from Strong (06:13) ===

[00:59:35]  Like, oh, this doesn't matter.
[00:59:37]  Okay, like, we kind of had, but when all of a sudden it becomes so projected on the opposite of what the other person is doing, we get just so disarmed.
[00:59:43]  And in fact, Orwell argued that's how you can control a population because we're not psychologically prepared for that kind of brutal attack on our psyche.
[00:59:51]  Exactly.
[00:59:52]  Exactly.
[00:59:52]  To just instantly be called the exact opposite of what you are.
[00:59:55]  Exactly.
[00:59:55]  I mean, it's sure we're always ready to defend a defeat a lie.
[00:59:59]  You tell me the sky's green.
[01:00:00]  I'm like, oh, no, I can see it on the other side.
[01:00:02]  Exactly.
[01:00:02]  Right.
[01:00:03]  Yeah, but do you tell me you're green?
[01:00:05]  No, no, I'm not.
[01:00:06]  Like, I'm not.
[01:00:07]  And I promise I'm not a racist.
[01:00:09]  Like, that's basically where we get in, right?
[01:00:10]  And then people, they start, their arms start flapping, and then all of a sudden they get exasperated.
[01:00:14]  And conservatives then.
[01:00:16]  And then the Democrats say, well, why are you getting so defensive?
[01:00:18]  Right, precisely.
[01:00:19]  Yeah.
[01:00:19]  And because I actually care about what you're saying.
[01:00:21]  So I want to get into some issues here, Madison, and I'm willing to stay here as long as you're cracking down.
[01:00:25]  Let's go.
[01:00:26]  So what's great?
[01:00:27]  Well, again, we have plenty of time on my schedule.
[01:00:29]  I want to be respectful of your time, but we're good.
[01:00:32]  So, okay.
[01:00:32]  And this is kind of like Rogan style.
[01:00:34]  This will be good.
[01:00:35]  So let's just go issue by issue, if that's okay.
[01:00:37]  Abortion.
[01:00:39]  Abortion is an archaic ruling from the Roe v. Raid ruling from the Supreme Court is archaic.
[01:00:44]  One, we didn't even have the ability to do an ultrasound at that time.
[01:00:48]  So now women can look inside their wombs.
[01:00:50]  They can see that this baby has a heartbeat.
[01:00:52]  They can see that this lump of cells literally defends itself and reacts to pain.
[01:00:58]  If you tell me that's not a life, we can't agree on that.
[01:01:01]  And I'll give you a fun thing.
[01:01:03]  It's really interesting.
[01:01:04]  We do this all the time, and I encourage you guys to email me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[01:01:07]  Any thoughts for Madison?
[01:01:09]  I learned something from Rush when we did the show: the combined intelligence of America is greater than one single host.
[01:01:15]  So some of the greatest pieces of wisdom I get are just random listeners that email me.
[01:01:19]  And so we were at the March for Life, Erica and I, with Falkirk at Liberty University of Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty.
[01:01:24]  And there was this eight-year-old girl who came up with her own sign.
[01:01:27]  I'll never forget it.
[01:01:28]  There was more wisdom in that sign than the halls of Yale.
[01:01:31]  And it was at the March for Life, and she had this poster.
[01:01:34]  And it was so beautifully put.
[01:01:35]  She said, if it's not your DNA, it's not your choice.
[01:01:39]  Whoa.
[01:01:39]  It's like, that's so perfect.
[01:01:41]  And I go up to her.
[01:01:42]  I'm like, who came up that?
[01:01:42]  She's like, I just thought of it.
[01:01:44]  I'm like, this is perfect.
[01:01:46]  I was like, that is so well.
[01:01:48]  It's not your DNA.
[01:01:49]  It's the future of America is going to be strong.
[01:01:50]  Right.
[01:01:51]  And but also, it's really interesting.
[01:01:52]  There's a whole there's very insightful.
[01:01:54]  But I think that it goes to show that if it isn't your specific composition of DNA, then do you really have the choice to disclose it?
[01:02:01]  Of course, it's murder.
[01:02:02]  It really is.
[01:02:03]  And it's hard to be able to call it out for exactly what it is because I'm sure, like you, I know many people who've had an abortion.
[01:02:09]  Well, yeah, and I think we need to be more compassionate people that have had abortions.
[01:02:13]  I think that we get to fire and brimstoney now.
[01:02:16]  Agreed.
[01:02:17]  But I will tell you that we have got to, while being compassionate to them, we have got to fight hard against it because this is a genocide that's happening on our soil.
[01:02:25]  It's sad.
[01:02:26]  We allow a million abortions a year.
[01:02:28]  The black birth rate completely has flatlined.
[01:02:31]  The black population is 14%, 14 to 15% of the American population.
[01:02:35]  And about half of that are women, 6 to 7%.
[01:02:37]  Half of that are infant-bearing age.
[01:02:39]  And so it's about 3% to 4% of the American population, which comprise about 47% of all the abortions in the country.
[01:02:45]  So there are 470,000 black abortions every single year, which I think is just inconscionable.
[01:02:51]  So just to give you an idea of what that means, if you go to New York City in particular and you see a pregnant woman on a subway, she's more likely going to the Planned Parenthood Clinic than the delivery room.
[01:02:59]  So abortion was promised as being safe, legal, and rare, and it now has become abundant.
[01:03:05]  It's a contraceptive part of birth control.
[01:03:07]  And I just think that so I'm glad to hear your position on that.
[01:03:11]  Firearms, Second Amendment.
[01:03:13]  Well, you know what?
[01:03:14]  Charlie, you know, it's written so you like hunting, right?
[01:03:17]  I do, yes.
[01:03:18]  Right, but that is not what the Second Amendment is about.
[01:03:22]  It's not about having a sporting rifle or going out and shooting clays or shooting does, although I enjoy all of those things.
[01:03:28]  The Second Amendment is a very grave and very serious amendment on our Constitution because it is designed for us as citizens to be able to stand up to a tyrannical government.
[01:03:37]  Because trust me, a tyrannical government is coming.
[01:03:40]  I'm not saying it's coming tomorrow.
[01:03:41]  I'm not saying it's coming in 10 years.
[01:03:43]  But there are greedy people who always want more power and they will stop at no ends to get that.
[01:03:48]  And so the greatest weapon we have to be able to fight against that is having a firepower in our own possessions, in citizens' possessions, to where we can offset and counterbalance the military.
[01:03:59]  Yeah, and this revisionist history by the left, that somehow we've never seen a usurptatious government.
[01:04:03]  I mean, just look at the 20th century.
[01:04:05]  I mean, every single continent, they disarm the citizenry and then they take complete and total power.
[01:04:11]  I mean, just imagine how the negotiation would be different in Hong Kong if they all had AR-15s.
[01:04:18]  Oh, yeah.
[01:04:18]  They would be like, you know what?
[01:04:20]  You guys can have your own country.
[01:04:21]  All of a sudden, sovereignty is recognized when the people are armed.
[01:04:24]  And actually, it's interesting.
[01:04:25]  If people are armed, it actually dissuades conflict.
[01:04:28]  It actually prevents conflict.
[01:04:30]  An armed society is a polite society.
[01:04:32]  I genuinely believe that.
[01:04:33]  There you go.
[01:04:34]  You do represent Western North Carolina.
[01:04:36]  So that is very, very clear.
[01:04:39]  So, any other thoughts on the Second Amendment?
[01:04:41]  I always say there's no First Amendment without the Second Amendment.
[01:04:44]  No, we actually released a really great video on the campaign where we were saying if we lose the Second Amendment and the end line's great, the first will fall.
[01:04:51]  Yeah, I mean, just right away.
[01:04:53]  But, you know, I honestly believe that the Second Amendment, it's women's rights.
[01:04:58]  It's rights for its disabled rights.
[01:05:00]  Because let me tell you, just as it works in a nation when people are armed, they have sovereignty.
[01:05:05]  But I'll tell you, I mean, you know, I'm able to defend myself in a wheelchair because I have a firearm.
[01:05:11]  And that dissuades people from ever coming up and wanting to mug me or hurt me or do anything like that because they know that I can defend myself even though I'm in this position.
[01:05:20]  I mean, there's a funny saying, which always gets a chuckle, but I think it's relatively pretty true.
[01:05:24]  God created all men, Smith and Weston made them equal.
[01:05:26]  That's very funny.
[01:05:28]  But it's something that I think is pertinent to the weak being able to defend themselves.
[01:05:33]  Yes, and that is a common theme, as you guys can tell, is: are we allowing the weak to be unfairly attacked by the strong, whether it be in the womb, whether it be in the streets, whether it, what do we do for those that can't defend themselves against the strong?
[01:05:47]  And I think that's what it means to be a conservative, right?

=== Healthcare Hostage Situation (11:52) ===

[01:05:49]  Standing up against the exploitation of the weak when the strong decides to be tyrannical.
[01:05:54]  And Charlie, you know, I'm not trying to sit here and say that you and I are strong, but I think you and I share that same passion to where we believe it is the God-mandated duty of the strong to protect the weak.
[01:06:03]  Amen.
[01:06:03]  And I think that's why you and I both probably wake up and work 18-hour days because we care so much about our fellow man that we want to work.
[01:06:11]  We will give our blood, sweat, and tears, our treasure.
[01:06:14]  We will give ourselves to be able to defend the weak and give them a better society.
[01:06:18]  Tyranny should never be allowed to exist without good people standing up against it.
[01:06:24]  When tyranny, even in the micro-tyranny, you know, a boss that is tyrannical or a neighbor and you don't do something about it, you're basically tolerating that tyranny to continue to grow.
[01:06:33]  And I have a very extended theory on how the Soviet Union actually came to be: is once they saw Lenin go to power and overtake the Romanovs, all of a sudden it gave license to all these mini tyrants to become into power.
[01:06:45]  So all the same thing in the Roman Empire right after Caesar fell.
[01:06:49]  Exactly.
[01:06:49]  But you all of a sudden, like, oh, Lenin is awful to people.
[01:06:51]  Well, maybe I can be the awful little mini Lenin in this small town.
[01:06:55]  And all of a sudden, the whole moral code gets thrown out at that point.
[01:06:58]  And then you have not just Lenin as the singular tyrant, you have a million Lenins.
[01:07:03]  And that's a different conversation for that's a longer conversation.
[01:07:05]  So immigration.
[01:07:07]  So, immigration, you're strong on the wall, right?
[01:07:11]  You're strong on being able to restrict the individuals coming into our country.
[01:07:15]  Tell us about immigration.
[01:07:17]  So, one, I feel like we've messaged that wrong.
[01:07:19]  We've made it seem like we're xenophobic, whereas I really believe it's a message of national security.
[01:07:24]  You know, we have cartels in our southern borders who do billions of dollars of revenue every single year.
[01:07:29]  They showed in October they can defeat the Mexican military whenever they want, and they can successfully get thousands of people across our border every single year.
[01:07:36]  I mean, that is a major national security concern that we've got to be able to defeat.
[01:07:40]  But more than that, especially right now in the middle of a pandemic, we should not be accepting new people into our country right now.
[01:07:45]  Amen.
[01:07:45]  You're right.
[01:07:46]  Although, I think immigration creates a very strong, adds diversity to our country, especially a merit-based immigration system.
[01:07:53]  If we could transfer over to that, I think that would make us the greatest because then, you know, we're basically an NFL team going out saying, Let's get the greatest talent the world has to offer, bring them here, let's create the greatest society the world's ever seen.
[01:08:05]  That's something I can get behind.
[01:08:06]  But I do not believe that it's my job as an American to be the caretaker of the rest of the world.
[01:08:12]  And there is a limit to our resources.
[01:08:14]  We cannot just continually bring people here because, one, we'll lose our national identity.
[01:08:19]  And two, we just can't support it.
[01:08:21]  That's exactly right.
[01:08:22]  And we take in more immigrants than any single country at any age.
[01:08:26]  Over a million a year.
[01:08:26]  Yeah, and I actually, you know, I've done a lot of thinking about this and studying.
[01:08:30]  I believe firmly that the Democrats want immigrants for low-wage, unskilled immigrants.
[01:08:36]  And I mean that as lovingly as I can for future voters.
[01:08:39]  And Republicans want them for cheap labor to bring down wages and maximize corporate profits.
[01:08:44]  And I don't think either of those things are good.
[01:08:46]  And the issue is all of a sudden you will see a state like Virginia almost get flipped politically because of that.
[01:08:54]  And so it's terrible.
[01:08:55]  It's that.
[01:08:55]  So, all right, we'll go really quick here.
[01:08:57]  How about defunding the police?
[01:08:58]  You believe we should defund the police?
[01:08:59]  That's insane.
[01:09:00]  I mean, the only reason I think people should want to defund the police is so the anarchy can reign out, then the people will cry out for a protector, and then we'll have a nationalized police force that answers to the federal government one step closer to tyranny.
[01:09:14]  Trade.
[01:09:15]  I used to be all for free trade.
[01:09:17]  I really was.
[01:09:19]  I thought we should get rid of the, you know, I just said, let's have free trade.
[01:09:22]  You know, that's the best system I can think of because I'm a free market capitalist.
[01:09:26]  But you know what?
[01:09:26]  When it comes to overseas trades, we're not competing on a fair playing field.
[01:09:30]  They don't have to operate under the same rules I do.
[01:09:33]  The People's Republic of China basically have unlimited slave labor.
[01:09:37]  They have to pay pennies a day.
[01:09:39]  And we cannot compete with that.
[01:09:40]  So I believe in fair trade and I believe in actually, you know, I don't even want it to be fair.
[01:09:44]  I want it to be unfair.
[01:09:45]  I care about Americans first more so than anyone else in the world.
[01:09:49]  That's well put.
[01:09:49]  I want to make sure that we have the greatest trade negotiators there are.
[01:09:53]  That's terrific.
[01:09:54]  You mentioned the environment.
[01:09:56]  Yeah.
[01:09:57]  So I did mention the environment.
[01:09:58]  And, you know, as someone who's a landowner, someone who cares about the land, like you were saying, and as a hunter and as someone who's a devout Christian, you know, in Genesis, we're called to be stewards of the earth.
[01:10:08]  Amen.
[01:10:08]  And I think we're supposed to take care of our earth.
[01:10:11]  We're supposed to make sure that it thrives.
[01:10:13]  But by no means am I some climate alarmist.
[01:10:16]  You know, I'm not going to use my beliefs behind that, oh, yeah, you know what?
[01:10:20]  Sure.
[01:10:20]  If we can have cleaner air, I'm all for that.
[01:10:22]  Although I don't think we need to be putting in new regulations in the middle of a pandemic.
[01:10:26]  In 2019, sure, you want to make a little cleaner emissions?
[01:10:29]  I'm okay with that.
[01:10:30]  Companies can handle that.
[01:10:32]  But right now, I think we should be slashing regulations.
[01:10:35]  And I think that we should always, the economy should come first.
[01:10:39]  And so if the economy is in a hard position, we should be able to say, hey, let's create opportunities in the entire country, slash regulations, allow companies to really build out and thrive until we get our country back on track.
[01:10:51]  I think that we as conservatives get this issue, the environment, so terribly wrong.
[01:10:55]  We should brag about Teddy Roosevelt.
[01:10:57]  Oh, my God.
[01:10:57]  I mean, Teddy Roosevelt.
[01:10:59]  Established in national parks.
[01:11:01]  Part of the blessing of living in America is we've been given the most incredible natural resources that we should develop for energy reasons, but also appreciate, protect, and enjoy.
[01:11:08]  I mean, the Grand Tetons, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone National Park, Bryce Canyon, Acadia National Park, so on and so forth.
[01:11:16]  So I'm really pleased to hear you say that.
[01:11:18]  Really quick, healthcare.
[01:11:19]  And the Blue Ridge National Forest.
[01:11:21]  That's right.
[01:11:21]  Healthcare.
[01:11:24]  So I want to be the face of healthcare reform in the Republican Party.
[01:11:28]  You know, I think for too long, we've really been this party.
[01:11:30]  Oh, we need to repeal and replace.
[01:11:31]  But I mean, Charlie, what is the Republicans' plan on healthcare?
[01:11:34]  Serve their corporate interests.
[01:11:37]  Wow.
[01:11:38]  You know, okay.
[01:11:39]  That is very, very true.
[01:11:41]  They serve these lobbyists, which is a major problem in our country.
[01:11:44]  Yeah, we can get into that.
[01:11:45]  The Republican plan is like whatever they tell me to do.
[01:11:48]  We're going to stay on healthcare, but trust me, we want to get money out of politics.
[01:11:51]  That's number one.
[01:11:52]  Amen.
[01:11:52]  But on healthcare, my plan, because I believe that the Republican Party, and it's because they're having to serve these corporate interests, they've never been able to give a concise plan to the American people that people want to get behind.
[01:12:04]  And it's always just saying, well, you know, we want to make sure we can make as much profit as we can.
[01:12:08]  No.
[01:12:09]  I mean, when I came out of the hospital at 19 years old, I had $3 million in medical debt.
[01:12:14]  It was obscene.
[01:12:16]  I believe what we need to do, and the reason we have that, is because there's no competition.
[01:12:20]  So I live in Hendersonville, North Carolina, at my house, and this is an extremely simplified analogy of what I think our healthcare system should be.
[01:12:29]  But at my house, there are six pizza companies that will all deliver to my house at any time, day or night.
[01:12:35]  If I pick up the phone and call one of them, they all know that when I go into Google Pizza Near Me, they know that they are at that moment all competing for my dollar.
[01:12:43]  So they are going to want to have the reputation of giving me the best pizza as fast as they can for the lowest cost.
[01:12:48]  And right now in North Carolina, Blue Cross Blue Shield has a virtual monopoly over the entire state.
[01:12:53]  And I think we've got to break that.
[01:12:54]  We need to reduce it.
[01:12:55]  It's a terrific answer.
[01:12:56]  Because, I mean, this is a problem we see in a lot of areas in our government is that we have these ginormous monopolies.
[01:13:02]  And it's stuff we've got to be willing to combat.
[01:13:04]  And the president talked about this, and the hospital lobbies are trying to shut it down, but price transparency is incredibly important.
[01:13:08]  When you go into a hospital, you should have a menu of what exactly everything costs.
[01:13:12]  And I think when you have no transparency on a price side, it's incredibly, you know, dangerous.
[01:13:17]  It's off of the consumer.
[01:13:18]  And again, we are free market capitalists.
[01:13:21]  Milton Friedman talked about very clearly, if you do not have a price system, you don't have a market.
[01:13:25]  In order to have a price system, you have to know what things cost.
[01:13:27]  If you don't know what things cost, you can't make informed choices.
[01:13:29]  And if you can't make informed choices, then you're not in a market.
[01:13:32]  They're like Crassus back in Ancient Rome.
[01:13:34]  You're in a hostage situation.
[01:13:36]  Crassus in Ancient Rome created the first city fire department system.
[01:13:41]  And so he would go, wait for your house to be on fire, then he'd look at you, and he became a real estate investor because of this.
[01:13:47]  He'd say, hey, I'll buy your house right now.
[01:13:49]  And their house is on fire.
[01:13:50]  Everything's going out.
[01:13:51]  And so they say, yeah, sure.
[01:13:52]  He's like, okay, here's a fourth of the value.
[01:13:54]  And then so they would give him ownership.
[01:13:56]  He would send his fire department in and save the property.
[01:13:59]  But I feel like that's what they do to us in our healthcare system.
[01:14:01]  They wait until you need an emergency surgery, say, hey, come in here and have this surgery.
[01:14:06]  But they're not going to tell you the price.
[01:14:07]  You can't negotiate.
[01:14:08]  It's a hostage situation, just like you said.
[01:14:10]  And the problem is that the left wants full Medicare for all and nationalization of health care.
[01:14:14]  And the right is we can't do anything because then it'll just be that.
[01:14:18]  And that's not true.
[01:14:19]  There's so much middle ground that we can do, I think, to make people's lives better significantly.
[01:14:23]  You've endorsed one bill, one subject.
[01:14:25]  So have I. Can you talk for a minute about that?
[01:14:27]  Absolutely.
[01:14:27]  You know, so I think one of the biggest tragedies in our governing system is that we have, and this is what we were just talking about earlier, there's a lack of transparency.
[01:14:37]  There is some, there's things called omnibus bills, which come from the Latin word omni, which is all.
[01:14:43]  And so it's these ginormous package bills where they say, hey, just slip everything you can into here.
[01:14:48]  Yes.
[01:14:48]  And then we'll, we'll roll it out.
[01:14:49]  And then, but then it's, you know, it's 2,800 pages long.
[01:14:54]  And the American people have no ability to read that.
[01:14:56]  The lawmakers don't even have to read.
[01:14:57]  They have like 45 minutes to read it.
[01:14:59]  It's insane.
[01:15:00]  Because they and you can't tell me that you don't want me to know what's inside of a bill before you vote on it.
[01:15:06]  Exactly.
[01:15:07]  Because you have my best interests at heart.
[01:15:08]  No, it's because you want to pull the wool over my ass.
[01:15:11]  So I think we should have one bill, one subject.
[01:15:13]  If the bill doesn't directly pertain to the subject, it shouldn't be allowed in.
[01:15:16]  For example, if you want to have NPR funding, have a clean bill on that.
[01:15:19]  If you want to have PBS funding, have a bill on that.
[01:15:21]  If you want to give everyone $2,000 because of the stimulus, have a bill on that and just vote independently on each one and one bill, one subject would solve so much of that because what they do is like, oh, there's so much nonsense in the bill and all that.
[01:15:33]  All right, Madison, we've been through a lot of topics.
[01:15:35]  How can people support you?
[01:15:36]  So big way you can support me, you know, as Charlie said, we are a grassroots organization and company.
[01:15:41]  And oh, you know, Siri is actually trying to jump in here.
[01:15:43]  This is big censorship.
[01:15:45]  Here's what they can do.
[01:15:45]  They can go to Siri and say, I want to donate to Madison Cawthorne's campaign.
[01:15:50]  So what you need to do is go to MadisonCawthorne.com.
[01:15:54]  There's a big, big donate button right there.
[01:15:56]  I really donate into our campaign.
[01:15:57]  Give us the money to buy the bullets to fight that.
[01:15:59]  And look, help out Madison, everybody.
[01:16:01]  He's not taking the traditional kind of corporate money cycle thing.
[01:16:05]  And I think it's really important.
[01:16:06]  And I've encouraged people to contribute.
[01:16:08]  I encourage you to do that.
[01:16:09]  And help out Madison.
[01:16:11]  Anything other thoughts in closing?
[01:16:12]  No, just final thoughts.
[01:16:14]  I really want to commend Charlie.
[01:16:16]  I want to commend the Turning Point USA organization.
[01:16:18]  I know you probably want to cut this short, but I can stay as long as you want.
[01:16:21]  I'm going to get on my soapbox to just talk about you for a second.
[01:16:25]  We are not in a policy battle in this country right now.
[01:16:30]  The way to fix our country right now is not going to be decided behind closed doors in a committee hearing.
[01:16:36]  We are in a culture war.
[01:16:39]  There is a far left, which used to be the fringe element of the Democratic Party, which is now the mainstream, who has taken over, who want to get rid of capitalism, who want to get rid of our Judeo-Christian faith, who want to get rid of our history, who want to fundamentally change our country.
[01:16:55]  And they are doing that by winning the hearts and minds of the future generations.
[01:16:59]  They use this because they are better at packaging ideas.
[01:17:02]  They can put it in shiny objects, which tug on your heartstrings and your sentiments.
[01:17:06]  But Charlie is fighting that head-on.
[01:17:09]  Not only does he have good ideas that will actually do good for you, it makes you feel good about them too, because he explains how it does good for all of society.
[01:17:15]  And so I just really want to commend you, Charlie.
[01:17:17]  Thank you.
[01:17:18]  You're building a better society.
[01:17:18]  Well, I appreciate that.
[01:17:19]  That's very kind.
[01:17:20]  And we need you in Congress.
[01:17:21]  And I think you'll get there.
[01:17:23]  And you have a really good team behind you and people that are helping you out.
[01:17:27]  And there will be a great amount of eyeballs and burden responsibility there.
[01:17:31]  And so you're going to do terrific.
[01:17:33]  We went through a lot of topics here.
[01:17:35]  That was fun, man.
[01:17:35]  We're going to get it again.
[01:17:36]  Yeah, everyone can email me, freedom at charliekirk.com and freedom at charliekirk.com.
[01:17:40]  Thanks for listening, everybody.
[01:17:41]  See you guys.