The Charlie Kirk Show - Why Conservatives Must Play Offense for America to Survive
Aired: 2020-08-04
Duration: 57:47


=== Protect Your Family With SimplySafe (02:21) ===

[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.
[00:00:40]  There is rioting, arson, and murder happening in the streets of our great cities.
[00:00:46]  Criminals are on the loose.
[00:00:48]  Democrat governors are releasing criminals by the thousands.
[00:00:52]  California just announced they're going to release another 10,000 criminals.
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[00:02:13]  Well, I want to start.
[00:02:15]  I bet a lot of these people know you.
[00:02:18]  Some of them don't.
[00:02:19]  So I want to start at the beginning.

=== No Contracts Or Hidden Fees (04:17) ===

[00:02:22]  Tell us about growing up.
[00:02:25]  You know, your family, your faith.
[00:02:28]  How did you become who you are now?
[00:02:30]  Well, honored to be here.
[00:02:32]  First of all, I want to say before we get started, Kelly, what you're doing is one of the most important efforts in the entire country.
[00:02:39]  I've been more made aware of what you're doing in the last 24 hours than I was previously.
[00:02:45]  And something the left has really perfected is what I call lawfare, like warfare in the law arena, which is overly using the courts to basically get their backwards and malevolent worldview by fiat.
[00:02:58]  And what you're doing to fight for first principles is incredible and so important.
[00:03:02]  So everyone who's supporting Kelly and First Liberty, it's incredible.
[00:03:05]  It really is.
[00:03:08]  I'm born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, or the suburbs of Chicago.
[00:03:12]  Went to public high school, Wheeling High School.
[00:03:14]  I had a pretty traditional upbringing.
[00:03:16]  My father, an architect, my mother, a mental health counselor.
[00:03:20]  I always wanted to go to West Point.
[00:03:24]  Kind of had my whole life designed around going to West Point, I guess you could say.
[00:03:28]  Eagle Scout, football, basketball captain, did good in school and got at other plans for me.
[00:03:32]  It actually was the best thing that never happened to me.
[00:03:34]  Ended up not getting into the United States Military Academy at West Point.
[00:03:39]  And I just took a pause.
[00:03:41]  And my parents said, you're on your own for college.
[00:03:43]  You got to pay your own way through.
[00:03:44]  We're not going to help you at all.
[00:03:46]  And that was a great, great thing they told me because I had to try to, I had to grow up in a hurry.
[00:03:52]  And so I was then had to go through the decision: is it worth me going $70,000 to $80,000 in debt like this for college I really wasn't that passionate about?
[00:04:00]  And so I told my parents, like, hey, I'm going to take a gap year.
[00:04:03]  And they said, what are you going to do?
[00:04:05]  I said, I don't know.
[00:04:05]  I'm going to try to save the country.
[00:04:07]  They laughed.
[00:04:08]  I said, yeah, go do that.
[00:04:09]  Sure.
[00:04:10]  And prior to that, I grew up as a Christian, most important thing in my life.
[00:04:15]  Saved early in my life, around when I was 12 or 13 years old.
[00:04:18]  But that means more as you get older, right?
[00:04:19]  There's a salvation and there's a discipleship.
[00:04:21]  As you get older, really start to grow in your faith.
[00:04:24]  Raised Presbyterian until they decided to basically become not the there's, I always get the PC USA and PCA.
[00:04:33]  I grew up in the liberal one.
[00:04:35]  As soon as they decided to be kind of like a spokesperson for the Democrat National Party, our family left.
[00:04:41]  And not kidding, it's if you know, if you know that tradition of Presbyterianism, as soon as they were spending more time commenting on Rachel Maddow's opening segment and not on the gospel, I was like, there's something wrong here, right?
[00:04:56]  Church should not be hardball with Chris Matthews at organ music.
[00:05:03]  So anyway, really, faith is always very important to me and convinced my parents to let me take this gap year, which was really a gap six months.
[00:05:14]  I felt like we were losing our country back in 2012.
[00:05:17]  I felt like our generation was completely unaware of the type of intergenerational theft that was happening and the kind of decisions that were being made on our behalf or we were making in the ballot box.
[00:05:30]  So I started this organization, Turning Point USA, on June 5th of 2012.
[00:05:34]  No money, no connections, and no idea what I was doing.
[00:05:38]  A lot of energy and some sort of a vision to try to get started.
[00:05:42]  And I just, that's exactly what I did.
[00:05:44]  I got started and I visited all sorts of different Tea Party rallies, Republican groups, talking about how we needed to have a youth conservative organization that would really recapture this country and really re-educate my generation in particular.
[00:06:01]  Never actually thought it would work, but I thought that we would make some sort of an impact.
[00:06:05]  And I didn't even know what success looked like.
[00:06:07]  And for those of you that have been entrepreneurs, you know exactly that feeling.
[00:06:10]  You just get started and you kind of God takes you in a different path.
[00:06:13]  And so fast forward eight years now, it's been actually incredible.
[00:06:18]  It's been one of the most incredibly humbling journeys.
[00:06:21]  Actually, the individual who helped me get started passed away just last week, Bill Montgomery.
[00:06:27]  He was the first person I called in June of 2012.
[00:06:31]  And he believed in me when I was an 18-year-old, when he had no reason to, by the way, when everyone said, go to college, sit in line, stop doing what you're doing, go get a degree.

=== Organizing Young Conservatives On Campus (10:04) ===

[00:06:39]  No one's going to take you seriously.
[00:06:41]  I mean, everybody told me that except this guy.
[00:06:44]  And he was an incredible mentor and friend of mine.
[00:06:47]  And so, yeah, look, God has had his hand on our journey.
[00:06:50]  And eight years later, we're on 2,000 high school and college campuses across the country.
[00:06:54]  We have done something that everyone thought was impossible.
[00:06:56]  We've organized hundreds of thousands of young people in the places that, quite honestly, are the most hostile to conservative, reasonable, pro-American, patriotic ideas.
[00:07:06]  We have a great relationship through our political arm with the president.
[00:07:09]  Just last month, we had 3,400 students in Phoenix, Arizona, in the midst of a pandemic, 107 degrees outside, hosting an event for the president of the United States.
[00:07:18]  Absolutely incredible.
[00:07:19]  Not one seat open.
[00:07:21]  Joe Biden couldn't have like 50 people show up, you know, even without a pandemic.
[00:07:26]  And so there's something very special happening.
[00:07:28]  And I've just been blessed to be on this journey.
[00:07:31]  And I really think that we're just getting started.
[00:07:37]  I don't even know, I don't think you know this, but I grabbed a clip, just a minute and a half, just one of your interactions that I want to show because not everybody's seen you in action.
[00:07:47]  Thought.
[00:07:47]  Let's just show one and then we'll talk about that and sort of what you're doing.
[00:07:51]  Israel has done nothing but defended their borders since their legal declaration of existence in 1948.
[00:07:59]  Israel bombed Lebanon and I was there and I was evacuated in 2006.
[00:08:03]  As a defensive measure when Hezbollah, the terrorist, started attacking them from the north.
[00:08:08]  Hezbollah is a recognized international terrorist organization.
[00:08:11]  Israel should do everything they possibly can to obliterate Hezbollah.
[00:08:14]  Can I ask you?
[00:08:14]  Are you pro-Hezbollah?
[00:08:16]  Can I ask a question?
[00:08:16]  Sure, happy to.
[00:08:18]  What formal education might you have?
[00:08:19]  Plenty.
[00:08:20]  I mean, formal education.
[00:08:22]  If you're going to argue, if you're going to argue from authority, that's a logical fallacy.
[00:08:26]  Tell me why I'm wrong.
[00:08:27]  Don't tell me how many degrees you have.
[00:08:29]  Don't ask me to change the conversation.
[00:08:31]  I'm actually, I would argue I'm more informed because I didn't go to college and I've traveled the world and I've met with world leaders and I've read many books.
[00:08:38]  So tell me how am I oppressive?
[00:08:43]  Can you name one example of how I'm oppressive?
[00:08:45]  I can name a lot of examples.
[00:08:46]  Can you name one?
[00:08:47]  Name one example of how I'm oppressive because you just said it.
[00:08:49]  I'm not literally here telling people that they are wrong about you.
[00:08:51]  Well, no, they just don't have facts.
[00:08:52]  Can you tell me one time that I've been wrong about anything I've said?
[00:08:54]  Tell me a time that Israel has launched an offensive war.
[00:08:57]  They didn't.
[00:08:58]  They're attacking Hezbollah.
[00:08:59]  It's within their borders.
[00:09:02]  Hezbollah occupies southern Lebanon, which is Iranian-funded, is it not?
[00:09:06]  Really?
[00:09:06]  I have no idea.
[00:09:07]  Thank you for informing me.
[00:09:08]  Anytime.
[00:09:08]  Maybe if you didn't go to college, you would learn more.
[00:09:14]  So that's one of the more civil ones, but there's ones where, I mean, I could have shown when you walked in front of the Kavanaugh protesters.
[00:09:21]  That was.
[00:09:22]  Yeah.
[00:09:23]  So tell people a little bit about what you do, what Turning Point does, the kind of things you walk into, the dangers sometimes.
[00:09:32]  I don't want them to feel your world a little bit.
[00:09:34]  Thank you.
[00:09:35]  So our whole philosophy at Turning Point USA, people say, what is your mission statement?
[00:09:39]  We play offense with a sense of urgency to win America's culture war.
[00:09:44]  Our entire modus operandi is we're tired of managing a declining culture.
[00:09:50]  We're tired of just trying to play defense on the terms of the left.
[00:09:53]  Unlike most conservative organizations and pundits out there that are happy to prognosticate about the best analysis of the decline of America, we're actually not accepting the premise.
[00:10:04]  Like we don't actually accept the premise that this country has to go into inevitable decline.
[00:10:08]  And so because of that, we play offense.
[00:10:10]  And so the entire premise of what we do is that college campuses have become islands of totalitarianism.
[00:10:16]  They are infecting the next generation around the most sinister, malevolent, backwards ideas imaginable.
[00:10:22]  And we are going to go on the college campuses physically, culturally, and in every way you could possibly imagine and organize young conservatives, talk about indistinguishable truth and irrefutable truth.
[00:10:33]  We'll do so civilly.
[00:10:34]  I mean, I put myself out there right there on a college campus, as you saw, that was University of Connecticut.
[00:10:39]  No conservative in their right mind would ever do such a thing as go to stores, Connecticut, set up a coffee table.
[00:10:46]  But what's been amazing, and you kind of saw me, I always wear the jersey of the campus I'm going to.
[00:10:51]  It makes the potential for physical retaliation far less, which I've been through plenty of times.
[00:10:57]  Trust me, I've been stormed out of restaurants and I've been dealing with Antifa for years, and I could tell you all about them.
[00:11:02]  But what really captured there, and that's one of the many clips that has been seen tens of millions of times, my personal content has been seen over 750 million times, Turning Point USA, well over 2 billion times.
[00:11:14]  And that doesn't even count some of the stuff we're actually doing on the ground.
[00:11:17]  But it's really important because the left, they despise what we are doing.
[00:11:23]  Because what you saw right there is actually one of the reasons why America was actually able to exist for so long.
[00:11:29]  Is the collision of ideas in the marketplace of ideas, which college is not, by the way?
[00:11:34]  Just dismiss that out of your entire, get that out of your mind.
[00:11:38]  If you think college is a place where civil discussion exists, and a lot of people say, oh, yeah, my child is going to be exposed to all sorts of different ideas.
[00:11:46]  Yeah, all sorts of different Marxist ideas, absolutely, all sorts of different anti-American ideas.
[00:11:51]  But that individual is just one example.
[00:11:53]  And again, I have probably 2,000 videos like that.
[00:11:56]  I personally travel absent the pandemic, and I'm actually making up for it because we've been traveling nonstop, 330 days a year.
[00:12:04]  I visit over 55 campuses personally.
[00:12:06]  We host over 850 campus events a year.
[00:12:09]  We have over 20,000 students attend our events off campus every single year, which include the largest black leadership, Black Leadership Summit, Hispanic, and Women's Leadership Summit.
[00:12:19]  And look, we have a country that right now is teetering on the brink.
[00:12:23]  It's either going to go a direction that none of us want it to go, or we can reassert first principles.
[00:12:28]  And one thing that we don't talk about is that if you want to see the direction the country is going, just look at where the 16, 17, and 18-year-olds are.
[00:12:37]  And so if you go straight to the campuses, and let's just be honest, that's not good.
[00:12:41]  I mean, we have, as a generation, decided the best decision is to put 6 million of our smartest people into indoctrination factories to learn from 4,000 professors that are all bitter, resentful, and arrogant.
[00:12:54]  And that's a really, that's a recipe for disaster.
[00:12:58]  The way we fix that is to go straight into that place of indoctrination.
[00:13:03]  And the amount of people, Kelly, young people, that say, Charlie, I was a liberal, now I'm a conservative.
[00:13:08]  Charlie, I never heard that before.
[00:13:11]  I've never heard one nice thing said about America in my four years at Boulder, at Colorado State, at University of Texas Austin, at Texas AM.
[00:13:21]  And yes, I know there's a lot of Texans in here.
[00:13:23]  I'm happy to talk about any school in the country because I've visited almost every, you know, every, and I'm aware of a lot of them, that it is widespread.
[00:13:31]  And so we've had a lot of success.
[00:13:32]  We're just getting started.
[00:13:34]  The future of our country really depends on our ability to communicate our values to the next generation that will soon be in charge of this country.
[00:13:43]  And our failure to do that will mean that Alexandria Casio-Cortez is nothing but a preview of the type of country, the leadership of this country of what's to come.
[00:13:53]  You mentioned something there that a lot of people don't know about, which is your effort to focus on colleges that need to be divested.
[00:14:01]  Yes.
[00:14:02]  Tell them about that, about what that is, and maybe is there a place online where they can go look at the colleges or your information?
[00:14:08]  There is.
[00:14:09]  And this has been, I think, mislabeled as probably an overly controversial project.
[00:14:13]  Again, the people labeling that, I get attacked every day, so it really doesn't bother me that much.
[00:14:18]  But look, our viewpoint is this: if you are someone that cares deeply about the future of America and first freedoms and the Constitution, you should not be voluntarily giving over your hard-earned money unrestricted to places where their mission statement is to make sure this civilization no longer exists.
[00:14:36]  That's probably a pretty simple equation.
[00:14:39]  So thank you.
[00:14:40]  Yeah.
[00:14:41]  And so now, I mean, no offense to anyone in this room because I know there's a lot of people that have given big gifts to higher education in this room.
[00:14:49]  So I want to just preface it by saying this is not an attack on people that have done that.
[00:14:54]  Instead, it's an honest observation that the unrestricted gift model, where Harvard is now sitting on $41 billion, which is a bigger endowment than the combined GDP of Hungary, that's probably, they probably don't care what anyone thinks, and they're going to become the most liberal institution they possibly can, right?
[00:15:15]  So our whole idea is how do we get decent Americans, reasonable Americans, business people, to say, I'm no longer going to give these massive seven-figure checks to higher education if what you are producing is bitter, resentful, arrogant, angry people that want to destroy our history and quite honestly hate the very civilization that has given them so much opportunity.
[00:15:37]  If you're creating ungrateful people and not thankful people, we should take a pause and ask why exactly that's happening.
[00:15:44]  And what we have found and discovered through mountains of research is these universities actually depend on the unrestricted gift flow of their alumni.
[00:15:53]  Is one of the main reasons they've been able to have these professors that have nothing but bad ideas given credibility and a platform is because they sit on these massive endowments and they're able to start these new schools of North African lesbian poetry or some ridiculous nonsense that they're teaching your kids.
[00:16:11]  Or, you know, how to destroy your country now.
[00:16:14]  Okay, great.
[00:16:14]  I got that.
[00:16:15]  Okay.
[00:16:15]  I thought we learned that in high school.
[00:16:17]  And so we are celebrating donors that divest their dollars from higher education.
[00:16:23]  And so far in just three weeks, we have successfully divested $30 million from over 15 schools across the country and from the biggest schools, including some in Texas, some across Harvard, Yale, University of Southern California.
[00:16:37]  And look, divestment is a tactic, right?
[00:16:39]  So divestment is something that the left has used against us for decades.

=== Fighting Cancel Culture And Divestment (10:33) ===

[00:16:44]  It's not a tactic I necessarily would choose as my first selection, but it is unbelievably effective.
[00:16:50]  And you would not eat, you would not go to a religious service or to a restaurant if you knew the proceeds were going to Planned Parenthood, right?
[00:17:00]  You wouldn't do that.
[00:17:01]  Then why would you give millions of dollars to a college where the proceeds are creating people that want to make sure Planned Parenthood gets more money?
[00:17:09]  That's a very simple way to look at it.
[00:17:11]  And so, look, there's a lot of reasons why people do it, and I understand it.
[00:17:15]  Just a broader perspective, though, is until we use divestment as a tactic, which the left has, these universities will never reform themselves into places that respect free speech, where I do not have to walk onto a college campus with 15 armed guards, which is the average amount of I cannot go on a college campus without secure armament, something as if I'm ready to launch a coup against a Central American country, right?
[00:17:39]  I mean, I've had helicopter support before, snipers on the rooftop, you know, drone surveillance, you name it, because I have to go to college campus.
[00:17:48]  And my message is very clear.
[00:17:49]  I'm unafraid to say God is real.
[00:17:51]  Jesus is the son of God.
[00:17:53]  There are only two genders.
[00:17:54]  America is the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world.
[00:17:57]  Donald Trump is a great president.
[00:17:59]  We should build a wall.
[00:18:00]  And that our republic is worth saving.
[00:18:02]  And if that's too controversial and you have to go to a safe space and you all of a sudden have to resort to violence, your institution has failed you.
[00:18:09]  And quite honestly, you are not on a path towards, I think, a flourishing or a fulfilling life.
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[00:19:38]  Obviously, there's this cancel culture going on right now of people being fired, being intimidated, being bullied to not express their opinion, which is as anti-American as anything I can think of to not have the exchange of ideas.
[00:19:56]  How do you see that?
[00:19:57]  What do you think the solution is to it?
[00:20:01]  I mean, I think this started on the college campuses.
[00:20:03]  It's exactly right.
[00:20:04]  And so I kind of want to build out this argument more on the importance that what we are doing on the campuses.
[00:20:09]  For years, we viewed campuses in the 60s and 70s, and you remember all the protests.
[00:20:15]  It's not necessarily anything new, but we once viewed campuses as almost a nuclear spill, like Chernobyl, right?
[00:20:22]  So it's bad.
[00:20:23]  We're going to wall it off.
[00:20:25]  You know, go wear a hazmat suit and try to survive and then we'll get a job, right?
[00:20:30]  And so we always knew these places were bad, but we felt that the kids could be unaffected if they put on the right gear metaphorically.
[00:20:38]  And excuse this metaphor because it's not exactly the right time to use it, but it's actually a perfect metaphor.
[00:20:43]  It's more like a virus, honestly.
[00:20:45]  And it infects people and it's incredibly infectious and it doesn't just stay on the campus.
[00:20:50]  And so one of the most eye-opening things for me, and I encourage all of you to look very closely at this, is how incredibly against our country corporate America is.
[00:20:59]  And it's a hard thing for me to admit as a capitalist and as someone that enjoys entrepreneurial stories.
[00:21:05]  But when I see Bank of America commit $1 billion to BLM, I ask myself, what side are you on, Bank of America?
[00:21:13]  When PepsiCo dedicates $400 million to BLM, I ask myself, who are you really representing?
[00:21:19]  When the National Basketball Association goes out of its way to attack our police officers and they won't say one word about the 1 million Muslims in concentration camps and the Chinese Communist Party death camps, I ask myself the question, who are you representing?
[00:21:33]  And so that's been a real eye-opening, honestly, about how, and so you answer about cancel culture.
[00:21:38]  Well, what's happened is these HR departments and these corporate boardrooms are now being overrun by the storming of the Bastille tactics that they perfected on a college campus.
[00:21:49]  And so you take Tufts University in Boston.
[00:21:51]  Anyone familiar with Tufts?
[00:21:52]  It's a very good school academically, incredibly intolerant.
[00:21:57]  I mean, they are experts and specialists in making kids hate Israel and hate America.
[00:22:03]  I've never, probably one of the best institutions.
[00:22:05]  I think Brown's probably the best.
[00:22:06]  I spoke at Brown, and I had to come in with, again, an entire standing army.
[00:22:11]  So Tufts is really interesting because the Tufts is a feeder system to a lot of the best companies on the planet.
[00:22:17]  It's almost an Ivy League school, right?
[00:22:19]  So five years, four or five years ago, the Tufts radicals, they stormed the president's office, right?
[00:22:24]  And they got all these listed demands.
[00:22:25]  And instead of the president's office saying, get out of my office, I'm going to kick you out of school, he capitulated, of course, and was weak.
[00:22:32]  And if you ever experience infantile behavior, the worst thing you could do is to pander that.
[00:22:37]  I think we've learned that.
[00:22:38]  Any of you that are parents, you know that.
[00:22:40]  You have to have discipline and order and structure and some sort of accountability.
[00:22:43]  Anyway, where did those Tufts kids go?
[00:22:46]  Well, they now staff Bank of America and PepsiCo.
[00:22:49]  And the tactics that they once used to extort their college president, they're now using to extort the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
[00:22:57]  I mean, the radicalism that we have seen on these campuses has now infected every single portion of civilized society, including our churches, by the way.
[00:23:06]  I could go in at length about how our churches have become infected by just people that care much more about America becoming Marxist than America becoming Christian.
[00:23:17]  And that's a separate point.
[00:23:19]  But you see the cancel culture, and I call it even worse than that.
[00:23:22]  It's almost like social assassination, where you cannot say if you work at one of the companies in the Dow 30, right?
[00:23:31]  The top 30 companies on the Dow, if you at any of those companies say that you support Donald Trump, you will lose your job.
[00:23:37]  It is that simple.
[00:23:39]  And now, this is corporate America.
[00:23:41]  I mean, not just on college campuses.
[00:23:43]  We are now living in a society of what I really call the most dangerous mixture of fascist authoritarianism we could possibly imagine, culturally, where if you wear a Make America Great Again hat on a certain campus, you will end up in the hospital.
[00:23:58]  It's not a question.
[00:23:59]  And the person who does that to you will probably not be held accountable.
[00:24:03]  And we've had this happen to many students, right?
[00:24:05]  Where the campuses will not arrest them.
[00:24:07]  They will not find the kids.
[00:24:08]  We've had kids knocked out cold on University of California, Berkeley.
[00:24:12]  We've had kids firebombed at Tulane.
[00:24:14]  We've had kids bear sprayed in the face at Park City High School in right near Deer Valley, Utah.
[00:24:18]  Not an over-exaggeration, not an alarmist.
[00:24:21]  And so, yeah, it's a very troubling thing.
[00:24:22]  How do you fight back against it?
[00:24:23]  Well, that's part of the personal role that I play, quite honestly.
[00:24:26]  I say things so that other people can't.
[00:24:29]  I take the arrows for a lot of people that are not allowed to speak out.
[00:24:33]  I get journalists attack me every single day.
[00:24:35]  I'm one of the most targeted people under the age of 35 on the planet for this reason, because I'm not afraid to say all lives matter.
[00:24:43]  I'm not afraid to say that BLM Inc. is actually sowing racial division in our country.
[00:24:48]  I'm not afraid to say we only take a knee to Jesus Christ our Lord, not to some arbitrary cause that corporate America wants us to believe in.
[00:24:55]  And so that's part of the solution.
[00:24:56]  But I mean, look, a recent survey says that 71% of people under the age of 30 say if they speak their mind, they're going to lose their life.
[00:25:03]  That's not our country.
[00:25:04]  In fact, it's actually less in most European countries.
[00:25:08]  In most European countries, they actually have like 30% of people under the age of 30 think if they speak their mind, they'll lose.
[00:25:14]  We have become a very bizarre fashion of Fidel Castro's Cuba with Mao's Red Guard culturally.
[00:25:20]  We really have.
[00:25:21]  And the only way you fight back against that is with courageous people that are unafraid of the cost and are willing to stand unified with other courageous people and stand up against the tyrants.
[00:25:31]  That's the only way you can fight that.
[00:25:33]  It's not to hope it gets better.
[00:25:34]  It's not that, oh, things are going to go back to the new normal.
[00:25:37]  Or these people like, oh, we just have to wait it out.
[00:25:39]  Things are going to self-correct.
[00:25:41]  There's no evidence.
[00:25:42]  Like people who say that, what kind of evidence are you looking at?
[00:25:44]  Like that things are just always going to go back to the way they were.
[00:25:47]  What historical paradigm are you operating under?
[00:25:51]  Yeah.
[00:25:52]  Okay.
[00:25:52]  Lenin takes power in the Soviet Union.
[00:25:54]  Yeah, they're going to go back to the SARS.
[00:25:56]  Like, okay, that took 80 years and 60 million people being killed.
[00:26:01]  I mean, you can lose civilization really quickly.
[00:26:04]  And we need to recognize that.
[00:26:05]  And so how do you fight back against it?
[00:26:07]  We have to stop supporting the people that do it.
[00:26:09]  And then we also need more people being vocal against it.
[00:26:12]  Yeah, that's great.
[00:26:13]  I mean, I think the thing that's not talked about a lot is the cancel culture people are cowards.
[00:26:20]  They don't want a discussion.
[00:26:21]  They're scared of a discussion.
[00:26:23]  And so they're bullies.
[00:26:24]  They try to silence people.
[00:26:26]  And the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them.
[00:26:29]  I mean, that's the only way you stop it.
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=== Betting On Sports Online Today (05:26) ===

[00:27:17]  I mean, you're very well involved in the social media, and obviously there's a huge war going on censorship-wise there.
[00:27:24]  How do you see that?
[00:27:26]  I mean, you're probably one of the better experts on what's going on there.
[00:27:30]  So I'm a free market capitalist.
[00:27:32]  I am.
[00:27:33]  And I think we should break up the tech companies.
[00:27:35]  Go figure that one out.
[00:27:36]  And so I love the free market because I love my country.
[00:27:40]  I have patriotism, then I love the economy if I have to rank it.
[00:27:43]  I love Jesus Christ above my country, and one informs the other, right?
[00:27:47]  So I love liberty, and you should too, First Liberty.
[00:27:51]  So when all of a sudden people's liberties are starting to get infringed, we should just take a pause.
[00:27:55]  I think that's a fair assessment.
[00:27:57]  One of the reasons why we like limited government is because big government will infringe on people's liberties by definition.
[00:28:04]  What happens when a... company is more powerful than your government.
[00:28:08]  What happens if a company has amassed more power than every other government in the history of the planet?
[00:28:13]  And they won't talk to you.
[00:28:15]  You have no due process rights.
[00:28:18]  What do you do then?
[00:28:19]  What is the proper course of action?
[00:28:21]  So if you reread the Federalist Papers, I always try to go back to the roots of our country.
[00:28:24]  I think that there was such wisdom in that period of time.
[00:28:26]  It was such a deliberate process they went through.
[00:28:29]  The founders were really worried about tyranny.
[00:28:32]  And the biggest tyranny that they could think up was governmental tyranny.
[00:28:37]  So, and understandably, but what if I told you that Google laughs at how unsophisticated our government is?
[00:28:45]  That Google's far more powerful than the Pentagon.
[00:28:47]  Like, it's not even close.
[00:28:49]  Google knows everything about all of you, every one of you.
[00:28:52]  And you're like, well, I don't use Google.
[00:28:53]  Use YouTube.
[00:28:54]  You purchase anything on the internet.
[00:28:55]  You've ever had an email sent from a Gmail account.
[00:28:57]  All that is stored within their files.
[00:28:59]  They know your location.
[00:29:00]  They know your habits.
[00:29:00]  They know how you act, all of it.
[00:29:02]  Okay.
[00:29:03]  You say, well, that's not a big deal.
[00:29:05]  Okay.
[00:29:06]  If you trust a bunch of people that are godless, secular Marxists to have that much power, then maybe you don't believe in limited government.
[00:29:11]  Because that's why we believe in limited government, right?
[00:29:13]  We believe in due process.
[00:29:14]  If Google kicks me off tomorrow on YouTube, I have a successful YouTube channel.
[00:29:18]  What's my due process rights?
[00:29:20]  I can't sue.
[00:29:21]  I could sue the government if they actually shut me up.
[00:29:23]  That's why First Liberty exists.
[00:29:24]  I have no rights with Google.
[00:29:26]  None.
[00:29:26]  Zero.
[00:29:27]  They're a private company, right?
[00:29:28]  So they can do whatever they want.
[00:29:29]  Do you think that 92% of search results are too much?
[00:29:32]  I do.
[00:29:33]  I think that's a monopoly.
[00:29:34]  I think that if you have 92% of anything, you should probably like not have that much.
[00:29:38]  Dr. Robert Epstein, who is a Biden-supporting, formerly Hillary Clinton supporter, testified in front of Congress under oath.
[00:29:45]  And he said, I have been a lifelong studier of the internet and of search engine manipulation.
[00:29:52]  He says that Google manipulated at least 2 million votes in the 2018 midterms and manipulated at least 4 million votes in 2016, and they will manipulate up to 10 million in 2020.
[00:30:04]  How does that happen, you say?
[00:30:05]  I'll give you a great example.
[00:30:06]  Try to type in Breitbart to your Google search tonight and find out if any Breitbart.com link shows up.
[00:30:11]  It doesn't happen.
[00:30:12]  They have deleted Breitbart from the internet.
[00:30:14]  They just decided it should no longer exist.
[00:30:16]  Do you think anyone should have that kind of power?
[00:30:18]  No.
[00:30:19]  The answer is absolutely not.
[00:30:20]  I don't care if you're a private corporation or the government of Venezuela, that is you more.
[00:30:24]  You should not have the power to eliminate ideas.
[00:30:27]  And you say, well, they're a private company.
[00:30:28]  Use another search engine.
[00:30:29]  Let's be a little more realistic.
[00:30:30]  They control 92% of all search results.
[00:30:32]  They control the number one video processing site on the planet called YouTube that gets over 3 billion views a day on their platform.
[00:30:39]  So let's just be realistic about what we're actually dealing with.
[00:30:42]  Not to mention, they're building the fiber network all across our country.
[00:30:45]  They have more medical data than any other private company and soon to be that.
[00:30:48]  They have more drone technology.
[00:30:50]  They have driverless cars and they're just getting started into e-commerce.
[00:30:53]  They also have the number one email processing platform, the number one cloud sharing platform, Google Drive, which all of your kids probably use if they're in public schools.
[00:31:01]  And they have the number one search engine browser, Google Chrome.
[00:31:06]  At some point, you should say, well, we don't know their motives.
[00:31:08]  Actually, we do.
[00:31:09]  We have leaked video from Google right after the 2016 election where they said we are not going to allow Donald Trump to get re-elected.
[00:31:17]  So we know their motives.
[00:31:18]  We know what they believe.
[00:31:20]  And so, by the way, they are staffed by people that all went to these very same universities.
[00:31:24]  It's not like they stopped believing in this stuff as soon as they get this power.
[00:31:27]  And I mean, Lord Acton said this, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
[00:31:31]  Well, Google has that absolute power.
[00:31:33]  And trust me, I don't love the government.
[00:31:35]  I'm a huge government skeptic, but I don't love the government because I love free people and I love liberty.
[00:31:41]  That's why we're all here.
[00:31:42]  And I'm telling you right now, the liberty of millions of people are being violated hourly by this small, this company of small ruling class elites in Silicon Valley that if they have their way in 10 years, this country will be remade in the government of Google's image.
[00:31:57]  So, yeah, I am more aware of this than most people.
[00:32:00]  I tend to not be alarmist.
[00:32:02]  I did not come at that conclusion lightly because I think that we should use government power rarely.
[00:32:08]  But I think that we have the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act for a reason.
[00:32:12]  I support what the Republican president Teddy Roosevelt did in the 1900s to break up a lot of the monopolies that were controlling some of our industrial capacity.
[00:32:21]  And I think because of that, we actually had a flourishing middle class.
[00:32:23]  I think that's actually a good thing.
[00:32:25]  And I think that we should be unafraid to use that power when it comes to a company that controls 92% of all search results, which is literally the exploration of ideas.
[00:32:32]  And Orwell said it back to George Orwell.
[00:32:34]  He said, if they can get you to stop seeing something and thinking something, that thing will stop existing.
[00:32:41]  I'm not okay with a small company evidently.

=== Understanding The Movement Behind Trump (06:46) ===

[00:32:44]  You mentioned a couple of the president a couple of times.
[00:32:52]  And you become friends with the president.
[00:32:55]  I mean, the president calls you out in the crowd.
[00:32:57]  I mean, you're a 20-something-year-old guy, and the president likes you.
[00:33:02]  You didn't start out that way.
[00:33:03]  I don't think you like the president.
[00:33:04]  Tell the story of how that happened, how you were kind of, I'm not sure this is the guy I would want to get behind.
[00:33:09]  And I think now you've written a book.
[00:33:11]  Yeah, look, I was never anti-Trump or never Trump.
[00:33:14]  I was Trump confused.
[00:33:16]  I think that's probably the right term.
[00:33:18]  I was young.
[00:33:19]  A lot of people are.
[00:33:20]  I was young.
[00:33:21]  I didn't quite get it.
[00:33:22]  That's okay.
[00:33:23]  I think we should say that.
[00:33:24]  I wasn't like a pathological opposition person.
[00:33:27]  I was a Scott Walker guy.
[00:33:28]  I knew the Walker family growing up in the Midwest of our country.
[00:33:31]  And I helped him with his recall election.
[00:33:33]  I think Scott Walker was a phenomenal governor of Wisconsin.
[00:33:36]  Then I became a cruise guy, three-stool conservative.
[00:33:38]  That's who I am.
[00:33:40]  And I was drawn very, I'll never forget, you know, I really didn't quite get the Trump movement or the Trump thing.
[00:33:47]  I just call it the Trump thing.
[00:33:48]  It's a total understatement.
[00:33:50]  Until kind of the end of the cruise Trump out back and forth, where I remember a friend of mine who was completely uninvolved in politics, all of a sudden became the biggest Trump supporter.
[00:34:02]  I'm like, what is he saying that communicates to?
[00:34:05]  He said, Washington, D.C. could not care less about me.
[00:34:09]  And there's finally someone who's going to go there and do something different.
[00:34:13]  I was like, wow, that's interesting.
[00:34:14]  So Trump came the nominee, and it wasn't even a question.
[00:34:17]  I got all in behind him.
[00:34:18]  I said, we have to defeat Hillary.
[00:34:20]  And I still didn't quite understand the movement, to be honest.
[00:34:22]  I didn't.
[00:34:23]  And I was born and bred in doctrinaire, Washington, D.C.-produced, somewhat libertarian economics, to be honest, right?
[00:34:32]  Where if you could not recite the 15 chapters of Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, you were like a heretic, okay?
[00:34:39]  That's basically the type of libertarian circles that I came up with, right?
[00:34:42]  If you didn't know Ludu von Mises or Murray Rothbard, and I think they're smart guys, that's fine.
[00:34:46]  But all of a sudden, you were like, no, you can't be in politics.
[00:34:48]  And so I was like, come on, this is like, what is this guy?
[00:34:51]  You know, I couldn't quite understand it.
[00:34:52]  So he gets the nomination.
[00:34:53]  I speak at the convention.
[00:34:54]  I was very positive.
[00:34:56]  And then I met Donald Trump Jr.
[00:34:58]  And I felt really moved.
[00:34:59]  I said, we have to do something to get the president elected.
[00:35:02]  And I volunteered my time.
[00:35:04]  I went to Don Jr. and I said, Don, I want to help.
[00:35:06]  I want to help run the youth operation.
[00:35:08]  I'm willing to take a leave from Turning Point USA to go help run the youth operation of the 2016 Trump campaign.
[00:35:14]  And he said, sure, come with me on this day.
[00:35:17]  It was like in two days.
[00:35:18]  And I started traveling with Don.
[00:35:19]  Yes, it was that easy.
[00:35:20]  There was no hiring process.
[00:35:21]  There was no infrastructure.
[00:35:23]  People say we colluded.
[00:35:24]  Like we were getting Cleveland and Cincinnati screwed up.
[00:35:26]  Okay.
[00:35:27]  So it's like collusion would not, we couldn't order a cheeseburger, let alone collude to the foreign government.
[00:35:32]  And so I traveled the country and then I really started to understand.
[00:35:37]  I started to go with Don to Michigan and Wisconsin, Ohio.
[00:35:41]  And I spent time privately with people that said, we have more people in opioid clinics than employed in our county.
[00:35:49]  And I was like, what?
[00:35:51]  I was like, I was told everything's going great because we shipped all our jobs to China.
[00:35:54]  And seriously, that's what they teach you.
[00:35:57]  When you're in early stage of Republican politics, they're like, everything's great because the GDP is going up.
[00:36:03]  And I love GDP, trust me, but I think that we actually, if we're losing the soul of a country, we should take pause.
[00:36:07]  And I think that we actually weren't looking at a full picture of our country.
[00:36:11]  And they were saying Donald Trump's the only person to talk about bringing dignity back to this part of the country.
[00:36:15]  I'm like, really?
[00:36:16]  And I started to totally get it.
[00:36:17]  I went from kind of a, you know, cruise guy that was supporting Trump to all of a sudden, wow, okay.
[00:36:23]  To pastors that were like, my church is going to go under because there's no one to ever tithe anymore because everything is shut down and the fabric of Youngstown, Ohio is gone.
[00:36:33]  So that is really something.
[00:36:35]  So anyway, point is traveled the country.
[00:36:37]  We did a lot of fun things with Don.
[00:36:39]  We hosted youth events in places where it's supposed to be Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania with my friend Gentry Beach and Tommy Hicks.
[00:36:44]  We did some crazy and wild things and got the, the president won in a surprise fashion.
[00:36:49]  And I became very close with him and the family.
[00:36:52]  And in a lot of different ways, I've understood kind of what this movement represents.
[00:36:56]  I've probably talked to more grassroots voters than most people ever will, traveled the country, understood different perspectives.
[00:37:02]  And to kind of put it all in one piece, it's this guy is a vessel for decent America that quite honestly has been taken advantage, taken advantage of by a bipartisan group of cartel elites for a couple decades.
[00:37:18]  That we have been told the decisions that were being made were, of course, sit down and shut up and do not question them.
[00:37:23]  It's a good thing that China is beating us in trade.
[00:37:26]  It's a good thing that we're in the World Trade Organization.
[00:37:28]  It's a good thing that we keep on invading countries halfway across the world.
[00:37:31]  And Donald Trump challenged that.
[00:37:32]  Donald Trump allowed us to question the elites in both parties for the first time in a long time.
[00:37:37]  And not only that, he actually did what he said he was going to do, which was so miraculous, is that he had a list of judges.
[00:37:42]  He actually stuck to it.
[00:37:43]  Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have ruled correctly on all these religious freedoms challenges, except one.
[00:37:49]  I think Gorsuch ruled incorrectly on the LGBT one, if I'm not mistaken.
[00:37:53]  But Roberts has been a write-off.
[00:37:55]  But President Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
[00:37:59]  He recognized the Golan Heights.
[00:38:00]  He canceled the Iran deal, most pro-life president in American history.
[00:38:04]  I understand it's very perplexing and puzzling for Christians out there because they say, wait a second, what?
[00:38:07]  You're trying to tell me that the three times married, twice divorced cover the Playboy magazine, Billy Bush taped guys, the most pro-life president in American history?
[00:38:14]  I'm like, yes, get used to it.
[00:38:16]  Because God uses people in mysterious ways.
[00:38:18]  Like, that's exactly right.
[00:38:19]  So the guy that said that two Corinthians walk into a bar when he was citing a Bible verse, seriously, that's the guy that's going to come on a white horse and put on 200 circuit court judges to make it possible for Kelly to go defy, to go defend religious liberty?
[00:38:33]  Yes, that's right.
[00:38:35]  Because God used Samson, God used David, God used Cyrus, and God is using a billionaire from New York who came down on a golden escalator who's willing to be prayed over to have a Christian vice president who says he loves the evangelical community, that is open to the word of God, that is willing to fight for it, which is nice and refreshing, not just allowed to be a doorstop for every time the left wants to do something to you.
[00:38:54]  You're like, well, I guess we have to capitulate to that one, who stood by Brett Kavanaugh when he was wrongly accused of all those things.
[00:39:00]  Someone who's been the greatest friend of faith of any president in my lifetime.
[00:39:03]  I think that's someone who's worthy of praise, re-election, and we have to get fully behind his effort for another four years of our country.
[00:39:11]  And I only touched on the surface of some of his accomplishments.
[00:39:20]  I think one of the things probably everybody wants to know is you're working hard for the future of the youth of this country.

=== Optimistic About Religious Liberty Future (15:00) ===

[00:39:30]  How do you see the future?
[00:39:32]  Are you hopeful?
[00:39:33]  Are you making progress?
[00:39:35]  You know, how do you analyze how you're doing and how you see the future there?
[00:39:39]  So it's a great question.
[00:39:41]  And I get this a lot.
[00:39:42]  People say, Charlie, are you optimistic or pessimistic?
[00:39:45]  And I have a policy to actually answer things honestly.
[00:39:49]  So unlike most people in the work that I do where they just tell you what you want to hear.
[00:39:54]  But before I answer the question, I always make sure that when people ask it, they're not asking it for an excuse not to fight anymore.
[00:40:04]  And I think that some people want me to say that I'm pessimistic so they can say, okay, so I can stop fighting.
[00:40:09]  I can go back to my life and retreat to the hills.
[00:40:12]  No, no matter, it's actually irrelevant whether you're optimistic or pessimistic for how hard you should fight.
[00:40:19]  You think that the people storming the beach at D-Day were optimistic about their chances that day?
[00:40:23]  I don't think so.
[00:40:24]  But they did it anyway because it was the moral thing to do, to go defeat a great tyranny.
[00:40:27]  So here's the honest answer.
[00:40:29]  I'm very optimistic about certain things.
[00:40:31]  I'm incredibly worried about a couple of things.
[00:40:33]  We'll start with the worry, then I'll get to the optimism.
[00:40:35]  How about that?
[00:40:36]  I'm incredibly worried about, first and foremost, I think that we're actually coming up against some very serious economic headwinds that no one wants to talk about.
[00:40:45]  In conservative circles, this is one of my biggest critiques of the Senate Republicans and the House Republicans.
[00:40:51]  They refuse to have a conversation that a portion of America, specifically recent college graduates under the age of 35, are actually not doing as well as their parents economically.
[00:41:01]  It is a hard conversation to have, but it is brutally true.
[00:41:06]  When you do not have, when 29, 30, and 31-year-olds, after five years post-college, their net worth is negative $30,000, and they can't buy a car, let alone take a girl out on a date, let alone buy an apartment, don't be surprised when they start smashing your cities.
[00:41:25]  Don't be surprised when all of a sudden all those bad ideas that they were taught five years ago start actually turning into real action.
[00:41:33]  So it's a mixture, of course, the cultural indoctrination, but it's also a very serious economic reality that we just, quite honestly, we've just said, well, the GDP is going up, unemployment is low, everything is great.
[00:41:44]  That's just not true.
[00:41:45]  It just isn't.
[00:41:46]  There's entire parts of the American population, and they were getting better under the Trump economy if we could have sustained it, but we decided to lock down our country, which hurt middle-income earners.
[00:41:57]  And I understand there were some reasons for it.
[00:41:58]  I'm not saying it's just truth.
[00:42:00]  That middle-income earners, especially young people, we are on the precipice of something that is very dangerous.
[00:42:07]  And I'm not talking about just the cultural indoctrination.
[00:42:10]  You ask anyone that lived through the Cuban Revolution, go read Dolsieski, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which was the number one book that brought down the Soviet Union.
[00:42:20]  You read anyone that has lived through a Marxist revolution in the 20th century.
[00:42:24]  It is disgruntled 25 and 26-year-olds that you have to watch out for.
[00:42:30]  They're the ones that can bring down your civilization.
[00:42:32]  Do not take this lightly.
[00:42:33]  So if all of a sudden they don't believe that the system works for them, take that very seriously.
[00:42:39]  And some of it's complete rubbish, by the way.
[00:42:41]  Some of them have to get their act together.
[00:42:42]  They got to work harder and all that.
[00:42:44]  Some of them, they actually have been convinced, go borrow $80,000 to go study North American migratory bird studies and go move to Seattle and your life is going to improve.
[00:42:54]  They go become a barista where 40% of recent college graduates, according to the New York Federal Reserve, 40% of recent college graduates are in jobs that don't require a college degree.
[00:43:04]  So they have all this debt and they're not getting anything for it.
[00:43:06]  Nothing.
[00:43:07]  According to the federal government, which is the number one holder of student loan debt, most students are not even getting close to paying the principal of their student loan debt.
[00:43:14]  They barely can even service the debt.
[00:43:15]  They're barely even touching the interest.
[00:43:17]  The average age of someone that is debt-free is 59 years old.
[00:43:20]  It takes them that long to pay it off.
[00:43:21]  That doesn't count medical debt, car debt, mortgage debt.
[00:43:24]  So we have leveraged an entire generation, not to mention the national debt and the hyperinflation that's probably going to happen because we've decided creating $5 trillion out of thin air is a good idea, which I completely morally and economically oppose, what Congress is doing to continue to create money out of thin air.
[00:43:38]  It's going to hurt young people the most.
[00:43:39]  It just will.
[00:43:40]  And so that's actually what worries me the most.
[00:43:42]  And in a very sinister way, I kind of understand why they're pushing weed on our society so much.
[00:43:47]  Like, of course, they want everyone to do marijuana.
[00:43:49]  They're about to revolt against you.
[00:43:51]  Of course, you want them to be on marijuana all the time.
[00:43:53]  Like, this is you, yes, it makes actually, I think it's reprehensible to legalize it, but it makes perfect sense why the ruling class wants everyone to be on weed.
[00:44:02]  Like, it's a lot easier to control them.
[00:44:04]  Like, it's a lot less likely they're going to burn down everything.
[00:44:08]  And I take that, I actually say that half kiddingly.
[00:44:11]  And so I'm really worried about that because now all of a sudden, when I talk to young people, 31 and 32-year-olds, especially in these urban clusters, they don't think the system works for them.
[00:44:21]  When you guys were seven years out of college, you probably thought the system was generally working if you kept working hard.
[00:44:27]  So that's something that's an alarm bell that we got to fix.
[00:44:30]  We got to do it quickly.
[00:44:31]  I have some ideas to do that.
[00:44:33]  What am I optimistic about?
[00:44:35]  I'm optimistic about a couple of things.
[00:44:37]  Number one, we have truth on our side.
[00:44:39]  Let them control everything.
[00:44:40]  They control the institutions.
[00:44:41]  They control the tech companies.
[00:44:42]  They control the mega corporations.
[00:44:44]  They control this.
[00:44:45]  We do have truth.
[00:44:46]  And one sentence of truth can defeat a lifetime of lies.
[00:44:50]  One sentence of truth.
[00:44:50]  I've seen it happen.
[00:44:52]  It is like revival style, Billy Graham, unbelievable.
[00:44:55]  One sentence of talking about irrefutable truth with conviction can get someone completely converted.
[00:45:00]  I'm also optimistic that the furthest extension of a left-wing worldview is actually really miserable people.
[00:45:07]  And we are seeing records amount of people that are coming towards us looking for how am I supposed to live my life?
[00:45:13]  I've been told that I should indulge myself with every sort of substance, no moral code, and God doesn't exist.
[00:45:19]  I'm a really unhappy person.
[00:45:20]  I'm like, it's funny that actually worked that way.
[00:45:22]  Okay, there's a reason why this worked for like 2,000 years because God gave us these laws because he actually loved us, not because he wanted to be the fun police, right?
[00:45:30]  Because he wanted you to be able to live peaceable and quiet lives, as Paul said in 1 Timothy.
[00:45:35]  These laws are there for a reason, so you can actually survive as a species.
[00:45:39]  And so I'm actually optimistic about it because if you have the amount of it's almost religious, is what the left has become.
[00:45:46]  They've almost created a religion out of their core beliefs that you're going to see in some ways an opening.
[00:45:50]  So I'm very optimistic about it.
[00:45:52]  But if I were to say something I'm worried about, I mean, we are on pace to have 600,000 less babies next year than this year.
[00:45:58]  We are seeing a population collapse, the likes of which we've never seen.
[00:46:01]  It was in Bloomberg the other day, and I'm doing the whole podcast on it tomorrow.
[00:46:05]  This is one of the idea how unbelievably dishonest our activist media is.
[00:46:10]  Did you know that we are on pace to have 600,000 less children?
[00:46:13]  That's an unbelievable, that should be like the front page of every newspaper.
[00:46:17]  That's a population collapse that none of us are prepared for.
[00:46:20]  Now, you might say, why is that?
[00:46:22]  Well, number one, your young men are not dating, let alone marrying anymore, because you've been told, we've been telling our young men they're the worst things on the planet since they were five years old and that they're guilty on two brim and innocent and sit down and shut up.
[00:46:33]  And okay, well, then they become basically feminized men and they have no direction.
[00:46:38]  Number two, they have no resources to be able to marry.
[00:46:40]  Number three, a lot of young people do not want to bring children into this world because they see the world around them burning and they're like, why do I want to continue to bring people into this awful existence?
[00:46:48]  Because they're so nihilistic.
[00:46:50]  And number four is that we, quite honestly, are not making it easy to build a family.
[00:46:56]  In 1985, and I don't want to go too far in the time, but in 1985, you could support a family of four with 35 weeks of work.
[00:47:05]  35 weeks of work.
[00:47:06]  Now, in order to support a family of four, it takes 54 weeks of work.
[00:47:10]  So, what does that mean?
[00:47:12]  The women have to go into the workforce.
[00:47:14]  Now, I'm not against that, but it makes it impossible to have four kids anymore.
[00:47:18]  You just can't do it unless you're in the ruling class and you have savings and you have intergenerational wealth, especially when you're talking about cost of healthcare, student loan, all this sort of intergenerational.
[00:47:29]  And boy, I mean, if I was a socialist, I couldn't have designed a better set of economic circumstances for that.
[00:47:34]  But here's the opening: is that if we are able to win this election and if what we are doing continues to work, I think we can actually see a revival the likes of which the left is not anticipating, where people are going to be saying, what does it mean to live a meaningful life?
[00:47:49]  And my answer actually might be kind of boring on the surface, but they've never heard this.
[00:47:54]  You want to hear it?
[00:47:55]  Stop doing drugs and stop drinking.
[00:47:58]  Be loyal to a singular human being.
[00:48:00]  Go find a job.
[00:48:02]  Tell the truth and at the very least don't lie.
[00:48:05]  And do that for a decade and tell me if you're fulfilled or not.
[00:48:08]  They've never heard that.
[00:48:09]  They've heard the opposite.
[00:48:10]  They've heard, destroy everything around you.
[00:48:12]  Everything's a mistake.
[00:48:12]  You live in an oppressive place and you're the most important thing.
[00:48:15]  You are your own God.
[00:48:15]  Well, that's where you get miserable people.
[00:48:17]  So I'm actually optimistic that the pendulum back from that is actually going to create an opening for us to be able.
[00:48:21]  I think there's a revival happening that's about to happen.
[00:48:24]  I really do.
[00:48:24]  Call me, you know, brutally bullish or whatever.
[00:48:27]  I actually think we're going to see a third American, third or fourth.
[00:48:30]  Were we at this with you, the third?
[00:48:31]  It depends if you count Billy Graham's revival as one.
[00:48:33]  I actually think we're about to see more people come to Christ than any other time per percentage in American history.
[00:48:38]  I really do.
[00:48:43]  Last question, because we could go on all night, but why do you see?
[00:48:48]  I mean, we're talking about religious liberty.
[00:48:50]  What do you see as the future for religious liberty?
[00:48:53]  I know you've been visiting.
[00:48:54]  You were just with Jack Hibbs in California.
[00:48:57]  You're talking with pastors.
[00:48:58]  I mean, how do you see the future for religious liberty?
[00:49:02]  Yeah, how much time you got?
[00:49:03]  My goodness.
[00:49:04]  By the way, this conversation will be rebroadcast tomorrow morning on my podcast.
[00:49:07]  Kelly was nice enough to allow this conversation.
[00:49:09]  I only did one podcast today.
[00:49:11]  I do two a day.
[00:49:11]  And so this is me doing my podcast.
[00:49:13]  So thank you for being a live audience.
[00:49:16]  Look, there's a crisis happening in Christianity, the likes of which no one wants to talk about.
[00:49:22]  There are some amazing pastors out there.
[00:49:23]  I say them in every speech.
[00:49:24]  Jack Hibbs, God bless John MacArthur for opening up his church.
[00:49:28]  He might get arrested, but God bless him for that.
[00:49:29]  Pastor Rob McCoy from Thousand Oaks, who's my pastor who never closed his church, and a couple others that are very courageous.
[00:49:36]  Jerry Falwell Jr., who's not a pastor, but he runs a Liberty University, and he never closed his campus.
[00:49:41]  And they had zero cases of COVID-19.
[00:49:42]  God honored that bold decision.
[00:49:44]  And I appreciate him for that.
[00:49:46]  But beyond that, there's a crisis in Christianity where we saw more Christian churches get more involved in BLM than they ever did for the fight for life, where most of the funding came from Christian woke celebrity pastors that were mobilizing their congregation around a lie, which is that we're a bitter racist country.
[00:50:07]  We're actually systemically unracist and we're systemically decent.
[00:50:11]  So they mobilize their congregation in the streets to go protest an institutional lie.
[00:50:16]  So that was really incredibly disheartening.
[00:50:19]  I see more pastors speaking out, and I think they need to.
[00:50:22]  A lot of pastors say a couple things, that I shouldn't get involved in politics.
[00:50:25]  Outrageous statement.
[00:50:26]  Number two, I can't defy authority because of Romans 13.
[00:50:30]  Complete and total misinterpretation of Romans 13.
[00:50:33]  We are the sovereign.
[00:50:34]  It says we the people in our documents.
[00:50:36]  We don't have a Nero.
[00:50:37]  We don't have a king.
[00:50:39]  So therefore, we, the people, actually determine which laws are just and are not just.
[00:50:43]  And if there's an immoral law, you have absolutely a biblical and theological, not just right, but prerogative to defy that law, especially the misapplication of the law when you allow indulgences like casinos and marijuana shops to remain open, and we can't go to church on Easter Sunday.
[00:50:57]  And the fact the church was okay with this, not all, but too many were far okay with this.
[00:51:01]  And that very much troubles me.
[00:51:03]  So religious liberty, I think it's really interesting.
[00:51:05]  I think it begs the question, what is religion?
[00:51:07]  And we haven't had this conversation in a long time in our country.
[00:51:09]  And Kelly, you might not agree with me on this, but not because it's not that far.
[00:51:14]  It might just be a semantical disagreement.
[00:51:16]  But I actually think that atheism is a religion.
[00:51:18]  And this is a hotly contested debate amongst certain circles.
[00:51:22]  I think that atheism is the fastest growing religion in America.
[00:51:25]  That I see more people proselytizing and evangelizing to believe in nothing than believing in Christ.
[00:51:31]  That the boldness of the atheists and the humanists to get in the courts, if it wasn't for Kelly, is incredible.
[00:51:36]  The amount of money they spend to make sure that God doesn't exist, they do it with religious fervor.
[00:51:40]  They've agreed upon theology, nothing.
[00:51:42]  They've agreed upon funding mechanisms.
[00:51:45]  For all intents and purposes, they are religion, right?
[00:51:47]  And so what's really interesting is that they don't believe in separation of church and state.
[00:51:52]  They don't.
[00:51:53]  They believe in the abolition of the church and only the state.
[00:51:56]  So we've got to stop giving them even that much rope.
[00:51:59]  Because they start like, oh, yeah, the separation of church and state.
[00:52:01]  First of all, never in the Constitution, written a singular letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Convention.
[00:52:07]  Is that right?
[00:52:07]  Association.
[00:52:08]  Association.
[00:52:09]  It's close.
[00:52:10]  Close.
[00:52:10]  I'll get there in a couple decades.
[00:52:12]  We get that history right.
[00:52:14]  It's a miss, and it's nowhere in our document.
[00:52:18]  And so the future of religious liberty really lies in people like Kelly and First Liberty's capacity to fight.
[00:52:25]  I mean, what Kelly's, what First Liberty is able to do with the budget they have versus the ACLU, which raised 50%, their budget plus 50% in 24 hours post-Trump's inauguration.
[00:52:37]  Is that fair to say?
[00:52:38]  Is incredible.
[00:52:39]  And look, there is a very determined, diabolical, pathological campaign where they know this.
[00:52:46]  They have studied the playbook of Stalin and Lenin and Castro and Mao.
[00:52:50]  And the one thing they all had in common is you got to shut up the church.
[00:52:53]  You have to.
[00:52:54]  In order to get the power grab that they desire, the church has to go.
[00:52:58]  It's got to be abolished.
[00:52:59]  How do you do that?
[00:53:00]  Tie it up in the courts, you demonize it, and you infiltrate it.
[00:53:02]  Well, the infiltration has happened through once Christian institutions that call themselves Wheaton College and Calvin College and all that.
[00:53:09]  I mean, you talk about the most leftist universities in the college, in the country.
[00:53:13]  Oh my gosh, go to these theological seminaries that call themselves Christian seminaries, and they are the ones that are driving this.
[00:53:20]  Like you wouldn't believe.
[00:53:20]  So they are infiltrating churches all across the country.
[00:53:23]  Then they also intimidate us to have us not fight.
[00:53:25]  And finally, they do a full frontal attack to try to make it illegal for us to practice our faith.
[00:53:31]  If they had a button right here, this is the biggest difference between us and them.
[00:53:35]  They had a button to shut down all the churches, they would press it.
[00:53:39]  If we had a button to shut up all the atheists, we would not push it.
[00:53:43]  The very big difference.
[00:53:45]  We look at the atheists as an opportunity.
[00:53:48]  They look at us as an obstacle.
[00:53:50]  It's a very important distinction.
[00:53:52]  See, we look at it as an atheist like, wow, that person could one day be in heaven with me.
[00:53:56]  They look at us and say, they're getting in the way of my power grab.
[00:54:00]  Whoa.
[00:54:01]  That is not an equal moral playing ground.
[00:54:03]  We have to be more clear about how we distinguish and we categorize that.
[00:54:08]  So look, the future of religious liberty is to be determined, actually.
[00:54:12]  I'm incredibly optimistic about fighters.
[00:54:15]  I think we don't have enough fighters right now.
[00:54:17]  We don't.
[00:54:17]  Kelly's one of them, and so is First Liberty.
[00:54:19]  Would have been really easy for you to kind of just do nothing during all of this, because that's what most people did in this kind of space.
[00:54:25]  Or they just filed every lawsuit under the sun recklessly, which actually set us back the different ways.

=== How To Get Involved Now (03:16) ===

[00:54:31]  Don't even get me started on that.
[00:54:32]  But yeah, look, we have to fight.
[00:54:35]  And that's one of the things that we as Christians have to recognize is the defense of the faith is so necessary.
[00:54:40]  Christianity does not call us to be pacifists.
[00:54:42]  That is one of the main lies ever.
[00:54:44]  We have to be fervent in our defense of whatsoever is true, as Paul tells us in Philippians.
[00:54:50]  Whatsoever is loving.
[00:54:52]  Whatsoever is the five-year-old in Orlando that's trying to pray to our Creator that's being shut down by a tyrant.
[00:54:59]  That is immoral.
[00:54:59]  That is evil.
[00:55:00]  And that's why we have a court system.
[00:55:02]  And so here's my final point, my optimistic point to kind of close it, all of this, is that the left, they're a bunch of cowards.
[00:55:08]  I deal with these people every day.
[00:55:09]  I have to walk around with armed guards.
[00:55:11]  I wish I didn't.
[00:55:11]  I've received death threats.
[00:55:13]  FBI, you name it.
[00:55:14]  I've dealt with it all.
[00:55:14]  Okay?
[00:55:15]  So, what and I'm not saying that as a victim, not saying feel sorry for me.
[00:55:18]  I embrace it.
[00:55:19]  It's part of the fight.
[00:55:20]  I know what I signed up for, and I know it's coming.
[00:55:22]  They're only going to try to ruin me more.
[00:55:25]  Thankfully, I actually know that, so I can process it.
[00:55:29]  These people are the most miserable human beings you could deal with.
[00:55:33]  They truly do need Jesus.
[00:55:35]  I mean that in the most clear sense I could possibly need salvation, they need ultimate truth.
[00:55:40]  However, when they are confronted, they scatter.
[00:55:44]  They are not prepared for an active, vibrant, faith-centered community that says you're not going to give it no more, no more, not one more inch.
[00:55:55]  I actually think that there can be a counter to this, the likes of which they're not prepared for, that can put them into ideological and the cultural minority for the next couple decades.
[00:56:05]  All we have to do is activate.
[00:56:07]  That's all we have to do.
[00:56:08]  And so, people say, well, what can I do to get involved?
[00:56:10]  A couple things.
[00:56:12]  Everything you do now has to be political.
[00:56:14]  I know that's a really hard thing to say.
[00:56:16]  The left has turned everything into 24-7, 365 politics, where they shop, where they buy, what they do, what they say.
[00:56:22]  Guess what?
[00:56:22]  You have to be the same.
[00:56:23]  I don't like it.
[00:56:24]  You don't like it.
[00:56:24]  It's the way it has to be.
[00:56:26]  Okay?
[00:56:26]  So no more supporting mega corporations.
[00:56:29]  Let's say a billion dollars to BLM if you so can do that decision, right?
[00:56:32]  If that choice is there, then great.
[00:56:33]  The other thing you could do is don't allow tyranny to go across your radar screen without you doing something about it.
[00:56:39]  What does doing something mean?
[00:56:41]  Communication, dialogue, confronting that tyranny head on, eye to eye, and saying what you are doing is using your strength to exploit the weak.
[00:56:50]  It is immoral.
[00:56:51]  And I will not tolerate it with the power that is invested in me.
[00:56:55]  They don't know how to process that.
[00:56:58]  These are authoritarian, cowardly tyrants that all they have to do is be confronted by decent, reasonable, and courageous people.
[00:57:06]  And then we can win.
[00:57:08]  I think there's a lot more of those than people know.
[00:57:10]  Amen.
[00:57:11]  And we're going to see if they rise up.
[00:57:13]  Thank you for all you're doing, Charlie.
[00:57:15]  Thank you, guys.
[00:57:17]  You're a hero.
[00:57:17]  Thank you.
[00:57:21]  Thank you guys so much for listening.
[00:57:22]  Please consider getting involved with Turning PointUSA at tpusa.com.
[00:57:27]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:57:29]  Email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:57:32]  Type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider.
[00:57:34]  Hit subscribe and give us a five-star review.
[00:57:37]  And please consider supporting us by going to charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:57:41]  That is charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:57:44]  Thanks so much for listening.
[00:57:46]  God bless.