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Oct. 18, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
50:32
Why Young People Are Turning to Cultural Marxism — And How To Fix It

Live from Calvary Chapel Chattanooga, Charlie breaks down exactly the cultural and ideological root causes behind America’s newest generation turning increasingly to cultural Marxism and anti-Americanism. High debt, low ownership rates,...

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Young People Stagnate Despite Hard Work 00:14:06
Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
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Hey, everybody.
This weekend, I had the amazing opportunity to speak at Calvary Chapel Chattanooga.
I am honored to be able to share this episode with you.
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And as always, email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Very important topics here discussed.
People really have been enjoying this sequence of speeches aired to you exclusively here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
First of all, awesome to be here.
Thank you.
You have a great pastor here, by the way.
You should give it up for that.
You're an amazing pastor.
And love this weekend that we've had a chance to spend together.
Yeah, every one of these services has been different.
So if you missed the prior three, I think each one has its own unique flavor.
And I said I wanted one to be kind of dedicated to what's going on with young people in this country, specifically in education, some of the struggles.
And I just call it a crisis.
I'm just being as clear as I possibly can because there's a crisis with people under the age of 25 in this country.
And I think that almost everyone in a position of like political and cultural leadership is completely missing it.
And so in addition to being on 2,000 high school campuses, I also run a podcast.
We get about 6,000 emails a week from young people across the country of what they're struggling with and what they're dealing with.
And so I really kind of wanted to build this out of what's going on.
And I think that there's an interest.
There's a lot of agreement that there's something wrong.
I think a lot of adults think that there's something just not right and there's misaligned.
And I think that if we look at the landscape of young people in this country, let's just tell it as it is.
One out of four young people in this country in the last 90 days have seriously contemplated suicide.
Let's just stop there.
That should be the number one number.
Forget about employment statistics.
I mean, one out of four of our young people are contemplating killing themselves.
That's a center for disease control.
What are we doing?
And so, not to mention antidepressant medications up 300%, alcoholism, drug use, sexual abuse, social isolation, every number we could possibly imagine.
And you couple that together with we're on verge of a population collapse in this country.
Again, another number that should be kind of on the headline news.
We're on pace to have 500,000 less children next year than this year.
It's the most dramatic drop-off in the population that we've ever seen in our country's history.
So what exactly is going on?
And there's a lot of contributing factors.
The last three services, I focus primarily on the philosophical, theological, and ideological problems that are happening in our country.
And I'll touch on that briefly.
I just think that we're teaching ingratitude to our children.
We're not properly teaching our history.
We're teaching people to be angry that they live in America, not thankful that they live in America.
And I've focused on that quite a lot, but I don't think that's the complete picture.
I think that's definitely one of the input variables and formulas.
But there's something a lot deeper going on.
And there's a material side to this that people have to recognize and realize.
And so if you've grown exhausted in seeing Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, or even Louisville kind of being burning and rioting and looting, it's very easy to attribute some of that when it goes on for days.
It's like, oh, the kids, the young people don't quite understand their history, which is true, or they don't understand what's going on.
It's all correct.
But there's something that I think we have to get honest about, that despite a lot of young people working very hard and playing by the rules, their lives are not getting materially better.
And a lot of young people borrowed money they didn't have to go study things that didn't matter, go find jobs that didn't exist.
And we carted off a huge portion of our younger population to highly inflated degree mills with class sizes that are bigger than this church attendance, where learning is sparse, wisdom is non-existent, and skills are not being taught.
And we acted as if that's going to make us a wealthier and happier country.
And now 10 years later, when we've doubled our college population, we recognize that only 59% of kids that go to college graduate, 41% drop out.
The average college graduate in this country is graduating with $38,000 in student loan debt.
And we stuff them in our major metropolitan cities such as Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York, where you're not building equity, you're not buying property, you're renting, you're barely making enough money to survive.
And then after 10 years, we look at the data, we say, wow, out of all the people that borrowed money and went to college, 44% of them are employed in jobs that don't require college degrees.
So why did they go to college in the first place?
And so all of a sudden, we're seeing this very understandable outrage that when a young person is 28 and then they're 32, their material net worth is almost unchanged.
They're still maybe $40,000, $50,000, $70,000 in the hole.
They're working hard.
They are maybe sometimes working minimum wage jobs.
And so the traditional kind of center-right conservative response is like, well, work harder.
I agree with that.
I think that some people should work harder.
How are they supposed to work harder in the last nine months?
You shut down the entire country.
For a virus for young people that had a 0.00005 death rate for people our age, you took away spring sports, summer sports, prom, graduation, commencement, social gatherings, any sort of social connectivity, church gatherings across the country, trying to stop the spread.
We knew that was a lie.
It was never going to happen.
Slow the spread, maybe.
Stop the spread.
Stop saying it.
Be honest with us.
Don't treat us like infants.
And our generation is paying a disproportionate price here.
When you have bad trends that are happening, when you shut everything down, you have a crisis, those trends only continue and they accelerate.
And so now we need to kind of take a timeout and we say, what exactly is happening with people under the age of 25?
And are we creating, are we actually being able to hand a country to the next generation where they're going to have family formation?
They're going to have robust church attendance.
Are they going to have agreed upon morals and values?
And will they want to accept the country in the prior state?
So I'm telling you right now, when you have 30 million young people that don't believe the system works for them, when they're working hard and their net worth is not improving at all, where their debt burdens are unsustainable, medical debt, personal debt, credit card debt, student loan debt, not even talking about home mortgage debt, by the way.
At some point, the people with the most energy, they're going to topple the system that you live in.
And part of that is an awful idea.
I spent the last three services talking about how none of that is warranted.
But we have to get a lot better at recognizing that it's harder than ever in this country to be a 26-year-old, financially and materially.
And we made it really hard the last six months.
A great example is the airlines.
So we tell young people, just work harder, go get a skill.
I agree with that.
I'm going to talk about that in a little bit.
We just let off 13,000 pilots from working.
I mean, we are talking about people that have an incredible technical skill that are now being laid off.
And a lot of it was preventable, this kind of mass blanket shutdown where we were trying to kill a mouse with a missile, where we should have had people shelter in place, trust people to make good decisions.
And by the way, despite the attacks, despite the misrepresentations, front page of the New York Times five days ago, Sweden outpacing European countries in death rates, infection rates, mortality rates.
And then the subhead is: it's still unsure exactly what Sweden did correctly.
Well, I don't know.
They didn't shut down the entire country.
They treated people like adults.
And they also said, our young people are going to inherit whatever mess we create.
Maybe we should be very slow to shutting everything down.
And it turns out that their suicide rates remain basically unchanged.
The businesses weren't catastrophically destroyed.
And we shut, by the way, 100,000 businesses went bankrupt in just the last 90 days.
100,000 small businesses.
And so here's what ends up happening, which needs to be recognized.
Who's the shutdown been good for?
People say, no one, that's not true.
It's been really good for rich people.
And I'm a capitalist saying this.
And I'm telling you right now, when people that, Jeff Bezos, when his net worth has gone up by $65 billion when all of your net worth went down, there's a problem here.
And the problem is that working people are going to lose faith in this system.
And people that shower before work and shower after work, that work with their hands, these are the people that, whether you like it or not, they're the backbone of this country.
And I think that sometimes some of that anger is misaligned.
I think sometimes it's misattributed, but it's real, nevertheless.
You can try to convince people that you're wrong, stop doing this.
But when Bezos is $65 billion richer, Zuckerberg is $50 billion richer, and normal working families are seeing medical debt, student loan debt unchanged, their mortgage debt almost, and they're saying, is this system really in the best interest of myself?
So what do we do about this?
There's a lot of things we can unpack with that.
The first thing is we have to basically have a full-fledged prosecution of higher education in this country.
It's a disaster.
What we have done to young people is we have asked high school seniors, and that's why I wanted to do this with the high schoolers out here and with young people, is we ask the same question over and over again.
Hey, where are you going to school?
Where are you going to school?
Where are you going to school?
Rarely do we ask, hey, why are you going to school?
Why are you borrowing $80,000?
Why are you studying that?
Number one reason I get when I ask that question is, well, my parents are making me go to school.
It's a really bad reason to go borrow $80,000.
Second reason, to be perfectly honest, is they say, well, it's what everyone else does in my community.
It's what you have to do to succeed.
Little do they know that they only have a 59% chance of graduating on average national graduation rate.
Every college kid I ask, I say, can you name at least five kids that started with you in the freshman year, they didn't graduate?
Every hand always goes up.
Everyone knows people that drop out of school.
You know what happens to dropouts?
They're statistically the most likely to be addicted to drugs, perpetually in debt, and least likely to succeed.
So that 41% that doesn't graduate, it's not like they have successful re-entries into society.
Their morale is diminished.
Their entire world, their whole path or their career path is completely disrupted, and sometimes it takes a decade for them to get back.
So if I could say it as bluntly as I can, we have way too many people going to four-year college in this country.
Way too many people.
We need more plumbers, electricians, HVAC police officers, entrepreneurs, gap year, people that serve in our United States military, people that work with their hands.
And I find a lot more wisdom in the plumbing community than in the Ivy League intellectual community.
And so, and I get it, it's hard.
I came from the suburbs of Chicago.
I understand that if you didn't go to college, you were considered to be a dumb person.
I didn't go to college.
Okay.
And look, by the way, college is the right choice for some people.
I completely say that.
So for parents out there that want to throw whatever object is next to you at me, let me be very clear that it might be the right choice for your child.
It might.
Or it might not.
So don't think of this pathologically.
Please don't.
Because I find that all the time.
Sometimes parents come up to me with anger, like, how dare you say my kid shouldn't go to college?
I said, I never said that.
I said, prove to me why they should.
Like, make the argument, the case.
And also, by the way, you're going to play Russian roulette with your kids' values, by the way, if you send them to college.
They are going to come across evangelistic atheism.
They're going to come across an anti-American, anti-Western belief system of which we don't have to completely talk about again, but it's highly effective, very persuasive, and it creates unhappy people.
It just does.
So I think that the disruption that needs to happen is we need to ask ourselves the question: what is the goal of college?
I think that's the first question we have to ask.
Is it about ideological exploration or is it about skill development?
So we employ 160 people at Turning Point USA, mostly young people.
And I enjoy doing interviews still, and I come into some of these interviews, and we have some phenomenal workers.
That's the best employees in the entire space.
I really believe that.
And I ask the question, I say, what's your skill?
They say, well, I went to University of Tennessee.
I said, what's your skill?
They said, well, I have a degree in political science.
I said, no, no, what's your skill?
And they said, well, what do you mean?
I go, what can you do that a high school kid can't do?
They said, well, I have a political science degree.
I said, yeah, I got that point.
Like, what can you do that a high school kid can't do?
And their eyes expand.
He's like, I don't know.
I was like, why'd you even go?
And the answer is usually, I don't know.
Or my parents made me because I wanted to get the piece of paper.
Now, if I ask when we hire in the IT department, I say, what's your skill?
They say, I can code.
I understand computers.
I'm like, great, I don't.
You're hired.
You know what I mean?
Or when I'm hiring a plumber, it's like, what's your skill?
It's like, oh, I've been doing this for 30 years.
God bless our plumbers.
About plumbers, the whole world would be a disaster.
Think about it.
They're some of the most underappreciated people on the planet.
No, seriously.
I'll tell you a funny story about plumbers in a little bit, about how our society views them, which is just so awful.
And so the question should be: is it about ideological development?
Some people, just so you don't understand, parents out there have a complete misimpression of what college is.
Like whatever you think college is or what it used to be, it's not anymore.
Okay, I visited 155 campuses.
I represent 2,000 of them in our organization.
I've met more college kids, talked to more college professors.
College should be, and the ideal, and again, I buy into the idea of college completely, but it's not the idea is not happening, is to create tougher people for an uncertain world.
That's a good idea, right?
Doesn't happen.
It creates weaker people that are better at complaining.
That's what it does.
A college senior is far more mature than a high school senior.
No doubt.
I interview them for a living.
And I could tell you that employers across the country are in wide agreement.
Why is a high school senior far more mature than a college senior?
College Is Not What It Used To Be 00:12:33
Because their parents are around.
That's why.
It's because there is an accountability measure.
In college, some colleges are the exception.
You've got the College of the Ozarks, you got Liberty, you got Hillsdale, you got some good colleges out there.
They're the exception, not the rule.
Most colleges do not challenge students to become a better version of themselves.
They don't.
Instead, they challenge students to become activists to try to tear down the system around them.
And so people, the question is: so, well, if you want to become a lawyer, doctor, all those sorts of things, college is absolutely the right reason for you.
But if you're like, I'm going to figure it out when I get there, that's a really bad reason to go to college.
I'm going to figure it out.
People say, well, I need the degree to get the job.
No, you don't.
You don't.
You think you do.
That's what people have told you.
I mean, people say, well, none of these corporations will hire me if I don't have a degree.
That's a prejudice that you've built into yourself.
We don't.
We hire more high school graduates than college graduates, and they're our best employees that we have at Turning Point.
I know limitless entrepreneurs that do the same.
In fact, business owners across the country are demanding less people that have come from the academy and more people that have come from real-world work.
Military veterans, for example, people that have worked their hands, entrepreneurs, community college graduates.
And so applicably, what does this look like?
I think that we need to encourage more young men in particular, and I'm going to build this out, to take gap years.
I'm a huge fan of gap years for a lot of different reasons.
Because the college system, and by the way, if you have a biblical worldview, you should be very careful sending your kid to college because everything that you try to tell your kid not to encounter is not just there, it is encouraged.
You know that most university campuses have men's dorms and girls' dorms right next to each other, right?
You know that, most campuses.
And that horrifies parents when they hear about it.
Just like, wait, what?
They're right next to them.
Yeah, they're right next to each other.
And some of them have even more shared communal spaces that we don't have to get into.
The drinking culture, all those sorts of things.
And so I think that our best asset in our country is our young people.
I really do.
And why would we send our young people to a system that has been proven to put them into debt, lower their aspirations, and just kind of give them the only option is to kind of go work for kind of a less than desirable Fortune 500 company.
You know how many entrepreneurial ideas that just disappear because kids get student debt?
The next generation of business owners, and number one reason I hear from kids, I have this idea, I want to do this, why don't you do it?
I got $55,000 in student loan debt.
I got $80,000 in student loan debt.
And so for high schoolers out there and high school parents, it's a very serious thing.
I can keep going, but I just want to make sure you get a little bit of a...
I want to make sure that this is a little bit of a discussion, not a lecture, right?
There's really no reason to mess this up.
And I'll just mess it up.
And I'm not trying, I mean, if you have a kid in college, I'm not trying to say you're doing the wrong thing or condemning or any of those.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm simply, and I know exactly what I'm doing.
I'm trying to be intentionally a little bit more provocative than I need to be to start a conversation that I know will help you, your family, your kids in the country.
That's what I'm trying to do.
Because systems need to be challenged.
And it's really interesting.
You have a whole entire activist media that challenges our current government.
That's fine.
It challenges corporations, but like the one thing we're not allowed to talk about is higher education.
You think about that, right?
Who out there is repeatedly critiquing the fact that most colleges didn't offer tuition adjustments now that our kids are basically taking Zoom classes?
Right?
I mean, wouldn't like a nice price, like a little bit of a price adjustment would be nice for working families, right?
They're just looking at a screen.
And the reason they didn't adjust tuition is because they'd realize, because they would admit immediately they're charging your kid way too much to go to college.
That's why.
And so we look into this right now.
And so a lot of the kind of calamity of what's happening with young people, and it's playing out in every single way.
The birth rates, the alcoholism rates, the suicide rates, the depression rates.
It's a serious crisis, right?
And so that kind of framework is perfect for kind of a want to be socialist revolution because we need a lot of young people that are suffering materially.
Of course, it's tempting to want to steal other people's stuff to alleviate your own financial suffering.
I mean, it's hard.
My argument's really hard.
I get it.
I say it all the time.
My argument is stop complaining, go find someone to marry, be loyal to that person, stop doing drugs and drinking, and go work hard.
Like, okay, that's a really hard argument, right?
But actually, it's more of an opportunity than you might believe because I meet 18-year-olds that have lived in a world where they know nothing but hedonistic indulgence culture by the time they reach 18 years old.
And it's the most miserable generation in American history.
You understand that, right?
It is the unhappiest generation in American history.
Barna.
And so, but what's really fascinating to me is all the things we spend our time talking about in this country and the people who are about to inherit it are on pace to have less babies than any other generation, less happiness, less wisdom, and more debt.
And that's somehow an issue that we don't even discuss openly and honestly.
And I don't even consider this to be political, by the way.
I don't.
And so here's another couple things that we have to get very serious about.
And here's more of the parent-directed way.
It's how we raise our children.
And so I meet thousands and thousands of kids every single year.
And some parents do a phenomenal job.
Some parents need a little feedback.
And we need to be much more firm about teaching our kids self-control rather than self-esteem.
The self-esteem movement has done so much damage to our country, I can't even tell you.
This idea that you're perfect the way you are when you're 11 years old is so incredibly abusive to children.
I can't even tell you.
Here's why.
They're like, wait a second, I'm perfect.
I don't feel perfect.
I don't have to better myself.
Or I can do whatever I want.
It quickly turns into hedonistic nihilism, like almost immediately.
Instead, teaching self-control is way more important.
Here's how to control your impulses.
Here's how to become a master of yourself.
Here's how to mature.
And here's what ends up happening: the education system is hyper-feminized in our country, which is a total disaster.
And third, fourth, and fifth grade boys should not be sitting for eight hours a day.
It's just an awful idea.
Whoever came up with it should be fired.
You've got to completely disrupt the system.
Third, fourth, and fifth grade boys are hyperactive.
They can't focus.
And that's the way God hardwired them.
They should have much more involvement learning.
And even the literature that we teach on average in fifth grade classes doesn't resonate with young boys.
They're teaching Little House on the Prairie.
Okay, that's great for young women.
Young boys should be given a biography about Teddy Roosevelt.
Or, you know, young boys love biographies.
Young women like more narrative literature form.
And that's how we're hardwired.
So what ends up happening for a lot of different reasons is we have a crisis of men in this country.
And it's bad for women, it's bad for men, it's bad for the family, it's bad for the country.
Let me just be very clear.
Where now you have more single 30-year-old men than married 30-year-old men.
Can you believe?
Let me just reinforce that.
And so, what does that mean?
You guys know Peter Pan.
We have the lost boys in our country, where we have grown infants, basically.
And I don't mean any insults to any men here, but that's just what it is.
Where you have a generation of men that have no responsibility whatsoever.
And whether it's been subsidized by somebody else or they didn't take responsibility for themselves, that's the way it is.
And so when I go and speak to audiences and I challenge young men to take responsibility for their life, which is exactly what is needed, all of a sudden kind of a light turns on.
They're like, no one's really challenging me to do that.
I've always been told everything from kind of a kind of a victim kind of complaining like I'm the problem and I have to change.
And that over time creates a very sad set of circumstances where men are 20 times more likely to commit suicide, far more likely to die at work, far more likely to declare bankruptcy, unemployment for men is much higher, college graduation for men is much lower, master's, doctorate degrees, all these sorts of things.
Yet we tell these young men from the time they enter college, you understand there's a patriarchy and a horrible person.
They're like, all right, I'm going to cash out.
I mean, you're going to keep screaming in my face that I'm the worst person in the world.
One of two things happen.
They just completely exit from any sort of responsibility and sometimes kill themselves.
And the suicide rate should alarm all of you because it's beyond anything of comprehension.
Or they feminize themselves.
And that's basically, or they end up taking responsibility.
Those are the three things.
And you kind of play that out.
It's really, really bad for the country and for the culture we live in.
So what do we actually do about it?
Young men need to be challenged at 14, 15, and 16-year-old by their parents, by their pastors, by the leaders in their community.
The best thing that ever happened to me was, first of all, I didn't have a smartphone.
I think they're destroying our country.
And I think that parents should not give kids smartphones until you're ready to give them a weapon.
It's that simple.
Seriously.
If you're not ready to give your kid a firearm, don't give them a smartphone.
These smartphones are designed through the social media companies to be more addicting than cigarettes.
Young women in particular, it's even more dangerous than with young men.
I cannot convey, I've deleted all the social media apps off my phone.
I have seven and a half million followers on these combined platforms.
I know the people that have designed these companies.
These things are doing more damage to your children than if they were smoking cigarettes.
From how they communicate, how they interface with the world, how they do not have romantic relationships.
We are seeing driver's licenses go down by 20%.
We are seeing dating go down, marriage rates, you name it, because we have these digital pacifiers that are supposed to give us some sort of comfort.
Where all of a sudden you interface through the prism of some sort of box that's supposed to give you the next dopamine rush.
It's actually possible to be raised in this country without one.
I thank God every day that I grew up in high school without a digital pacifier.
It was awesome.
And we had like one of those flip phones where if I needed my parent, I could call one.
So if you're like, oh, I need to be in touch with my kid.
Okay, we don't need to be Snapchatting your kid, okay?
Like that's crazy.
And it's actually possible to communicate with people outside of that little box, that supercomputer that they give you.
We need to become more human in our country, less cyborg.
And it's a very important thing that we need to do.
And I think the other thing that, and I'm happy to, you know, just kind of stop and we can dialogue more on this, which is I'm actually doing, this is the best I've done so far.
So.
You just keep going.
All right.
Okay.
This is my best interview yet.
Yeah.
As you can tell, I've done a little bit of thinking about these issues, right?
I mean, I deal with this every day.
And I get this picture when I just get these emails from these young people and I see what they're dealing with.
And I want to just say this as a side note before I get back to the social media aspect of this.
Somebody in this room is dealing with mental health and depression.
And two things.
You're a lot tougher than you think.
Understand that.
You're a lot tougher than you think.
And you might not be convinced of it.
And you might not think that you're worthy, but somebody else actually needs you, believe it or not.
You might not have met that person yet.
You might not have communicated with that person.
And you might think, I'm worthless.
Well, you might think that, but somebody else doesn't.
So understand that, know that, and talk to somebody through what you're going through.
Communication is everything.
Self-harm always happens when dialogue stops, always.
We are speaking beings.
One of the reasons why suicide is up 175% in our country in the last 18 months is because we stopped talking to each other.
We stopped seeing each other.
We shut everything down.
We acted like there'd be no social cost to this.
And by the way, we are going to be paying the cost of these lockdowns for the next decade.
And the young people are going to have to decouple from this horrific decision that we made that I pray we'll never do again.
And so back to the kind of the social media technology piece.
I mean, there's good and bad in all things.
I mean, some people say, well, it's great.
I met my high school classmates.
I stay in touch with them.
I know birthdays.
I'm like, that's pretty a bad reason why to have these social media platforms.
Anyway, I guess there's some good things to these things.
And I mean, one of the good things is that we have millions of people that listen to our content.
You know, praise God.
And we've brought people the gospel through it and we are able to reach them.
However, if we never look at the other side of the coin and we don't look at, oh, wow, these tech companies are actually designing the feed after what gives you the highest rush of outrage, addiction.
I mean, they're designing it and they change the feed constantly.
And they say, oh, the algorithm is neutral.
No, algorithms are opinions written in code, is what they are.
There's somebody out there that is designing your child to think differently about the world.
Do you know the average kid spends seven and a half hours on their smartphone every single day?
Seven and a half hours.
Algorithms Designing Our Children's Minds 00:02:04
We don't have humanity anymore.
We are now adjoined to some sort of tech oligarch of small group of people that don't share your values, by the way, just so you understand, that are impacting your kid more than the church and more than you are.
And so that should give everyone kind of a timeout.
And it's happening quicker than I think we can even understand.
These apps are more addictive.
They're more engaging than ever.
And so what do we do about it?
I already made the suggestion, don't give your kid a smartphone until you're ready to give them a firearm.
I think that maturity is very important.
You turn off push notifications on your phone.
It's a very important thing.
And I've done that.
It's played a very big role.
But even more than that, I think that there needs to be a recalibration and kind of a reassertion of what is a human being, right?
And a human being is, of course, first and foremost, broken and depraved by nature in the state of sin, and we need Jesus Christ as our ultimate and only salvation.
And the path that we are on right now in this country and this generation is one where we're going to encounter problems and difficulties that very well could put the entire system in jeopardy and could leave our country less free, could disintegrate our country, and is dealing with very real material, financial, cultural, and social costs around it.
And what are you, as you're traveling, what are you beginning to see in terms of, you know, an uptick, some signs of hope, some pockets of change and transformation, you go, that gives me hope, where the rest is deeply concerning.
What are you seeing that you go, that there is a bit hopeful?
Well, I think that the hopeful piece is that the solutions we have work.
And so when you have a married less, depressed generation, the solution is, well, go get married and stay loyal to that person and go have lots of children.
Like that's worked for a couple thousand years.
Like if you think you've cracked the code as being like this really like hip feminist and like I don't I don't need to get married.
Well, maybe it's going to work for you.
But like generally the rule is to get married and have children.
And that works really well and it's worked for a couple thousand years.
And in fact, I highly recommend it.
Responsibility For Future Generations 00:03:41
Like it's something that every human being should do, especially in a biblical context.
But I also think that the positives and the optimistic part of what we're seeing out there is that people have a yearning for learning right now.
And we've seen this in the last couple services where people are asking really informed questions.
They're coming with a reason.
Because when you see chaos and calamity, the response should not be outrage.
It should not be tearing things down.
It should be dive deeper into the understanding of exactly what is going on.
Understanding who Herbert Marcuse is in critical race theory.
Understanding who Milton Friedman was and what the market is.
Just always dive deeper when you're confused.
That's a really, really good rule.
And I'm seeing that.
And I see a re-engagement of the church on these sorts of issues, which is terrific.
And thank you for having me to be able to communicate this to you because it's not exactly a typical church service.
But I think we all agree, like, wow, if we don't get this thing with the next generation right, a lot of things are going to start to fall apart and crumble, right?
And so for the young people out there, everything I mentioned is legitimate.
And I just want to tailor it to the 25, 26, 27-year-olds, or 18 to 26-year-olds, or even high schoolers.
The country got shut down unnecessarily.
There's a few job opportunities.
We're all experiencing some sort of difficulty.
None of that is an excuse for you to play a victim, though.
Let me be very clear.
None of it.
I'm going to go communicate with the adults and continue to try to solve these problems.
But take responsibility for your life in this country because now it's our country.
It is.
And whether you're happy about it or whether you're uneasy about it, now you have to start making a sequence of decisions so that this life will be a little bit better for yourself and for future generations.
And so to be perfectly as blunt as I possibly can, stop complaining and start taking responsibility for every single action you make in your life.
What does responsibility look like?
It's easy.
We throw that word around a lot.
Here's the definition of responsibility.
If you don't have responsibility and you just take tomorrow off without telling anybody, no one will care.
If you do have responsibility, you take tomorrow off.
Somebody's life will be harder tomorrow.
That's responsibility.
If no one's life will be made harder tomorrow by your absence, you're responsible for nothing.
If somebody's life will be made harder tomorrow by your absence, you're responsible for something.
It could be a small group.
It could be a business.
It could be a family.
It could be a family member.
So, responsibility is the interconnectedness of human beings and loving your neighbor as yourself, a biblical idea.
When you're just in your basement sipping, you know, energy drinks endlessly to 3 a.m., not caring about your appearance, like the lost boys that we let happen far too often in our country, you have no responsibility at all whatsoever.
So, as Jordan Peterson says, sit up straight with your shoulders back, look at people in the eyes, make your goals sharp and clear, and stop doing one thing in your life you know that's bad for you.
Everybody in this room is doing one thing that you know that is bad for you.
Maybe it's drinking, maybe it's too much of a TV show, maybe it's a relationship.
Addition sometimes happens through subtraction.
And if you drop one thing in your life that's bad for you, you'd be amazed at how you could liberate from that addiction, from that focus.
And I think you can live a much more fulfilled life because of it.
You might have heard this.
It reminds me of something that John Maxwell said.
He said, you'll never change your life until you change something that you do daily.
Just one thing, just one simple thing, and you can see some really profound, you know, broader life change.
What else would you say to this next culture as we sort of head forward?
Yeah, I mean, how much time you got?
Regret Over Student Debt And Choices 00:10:15
Jeez, there's a lot to cover.
So, for anyone over the age of 55, if you're not mentoring somebody under the age of 25, you're doing it wrong.
What are you doing with that wisdom that you have?
If you're over the age of 30 and you have wisdom, go find a mentee right now because they need you and they do not have the confidence to ask for it.
So, don't be wait to ask.
Do not be wait to be asked.
Stop it.
Don't do that.
I meet these people that they were Fortune 500 CEOs.
They had an incredible wealth of knowledge.
They're steeped in the Bible.
And I'm just like, are you mentoring anyone?
No one's ever asked.
I was like, really?
Like, go, these 16-year-olds are not taught to go ask for mentors.
So go find a 16-year-old in your church and be like, hey, what do you have an interest in?
And they will talk to you because they're going through a lot right now.
And so the other thing I encourage is if you're young, go ask for a mentor.
So it's not just, that's not an excuse.
It's an amazing kind of intergenerational wisdom that can be communicated to non-family members being mentors.
It's very important.
There's an inherent rebellion when you're 17.
My parents don't know it.
But all of a sudden, when kind of a semi-father figure comes into the picture or a semi-mother figure comes into the picture that's non-family related, that's rooted in biblical wisdom, that has a skill in something you care about.
It could be technology, computing, or carpentry.
I can't communicate to you how effective that is to the stewardship of young Christians.
And necessary, and it happens so rarely, it stuns me.
And it shows people that you care.
It shows that you're one phone call away from being able to walk you through what you want to do.
And so kind of back to the education piece and kind of asking the question of what should we do with young people and how should we prepare them for this ever chaotic world.
Of course, ask the question, hey, why are you going to college?
Not where are you going to college?
And also just a thought experiment.
And every family should do this.
Tally up the entire cumulative cost of what college will cost your family financially.
Could be $100,000.
It could be $200,000.
It could be $250,000.
And ask yourself the question, if I put this in a very conservative money market account over four years, what would that look like?
And if my kid went and worked for four years and acted ethically and did the right thing, where would they be in four years versus four years of going to this university and all that money disappearing?
And a lot of families, when I communicate, they're like, oh, wow, that $250,000 would turn into $300,000.
The four years, they'd have a job, pay rent, be debt-free.
And if they still went to church, I'd be proud of them.
And I'd be okay with that.
And can I just speak something as honestly as I possibly can here?
And I mean no offense by this.
But parents, you need to hear this.
The number one reason why kids go to college is because of you.
And it's because of your egos.
And I mean this as lovingly as I can.
It's because parents are unwilling to turn to their neighbor and tell their neighbor, yeah, my kid's not going to college and I'm okay with that.
That's a conversation that is like a no-fly zone.
Instead, it's like, no, I'm a proud Stanford mom.
Okay, well, how's that working?
Well, my kid hates the country and he changed his gender, but besides that, everything's great.
That's, you know, it's sad, though, isn't it?
It is sad.
Well, I mean, look, especially if you're talking about someone who has, you know, you've got a lifetime invested in these little lives.
Especially if you're a child of God, a follower of Christ, you've done the best you can, though imperfectly, to try to instill ideas that are eternal, ideas that long after you're gone, they're still going to work in the life of your children.
And then you, you know, again, we succumbing to pressure from the outside as a parent, you go, well, like, I couldn't stomach the fact that we would be one of those that our kid didn't go.
You know, not only is it to school, but where specifically is it to school?
And then only to have your kid, you know, just completely scrambled in that way and say, I kind of, there was a stewardship granted to me and my child, my children.
And at the end, because of pressures not divine, I have great regret, great, great regret, and some, in some cases, some terrible loss.
You've shared in times some very specific, practical, I mean, super practical details for the young kid as it relates to the gap year.
Yes.
So like specifically, they show up here.
Yeah, what's your question?
That's a great.
You know, so share a few of those because I think they're super practical, but very important, very helpful.
So here's why I'm a fan of a gap year is that you only have that kind of youthful energy and excitement once.
And no, it's true.
I mean, and you might have it again.
I mean, tell me how that happens.
But like when you're 18, 19, and 20-year-old, there really is kind of the I can conquer the world mentality.
And some of that is not good.
Some of it's awesome, actually.
Some of the greatest companies and greatest innovations that we all enjoy today were from people in their early 20s that took massive risks.
And I can sympathize with that because I had an idea when I was 18 and I didn't go to college and I took the risk and it's grown into something bigger than I ever could have imagined.
If I would have went to college, it never would have happened.
And so here's the thing that I encourage for gap years.
So just you understand, I originally took a gap year and it's been eight and a half gap years, right?
And people say you're going to go back to school.
I'm like, yeah, maybe, sure.
Like, I don't know.
I mean, probably not.
But if you're like, yeah, maybe a gap year sounds right for me.
Find something that you really care about.
Find somebody in your church or community that's really good at that.
Dress nice.
Go to bed before the next, you know, the night before early.
Look at them straight in the eyes and say, take a chance on me.
I will work harder than any person you have working for me.
I'll work below minimum wage.
Please give me a chance.
And I'm telling you right now, adults, it'll be like a hurricane.
They'll be like, of course I'll hire you.
I've never met someone like this.
And they will give you a job that would have taken you four years and a million interviews to get.
I'm telling you, it's so rare to have that kind of confidence where a young person dresses nicely, looks in the eye, and they'll say, I'll sweep the floors.
I will do whatever it takes.
And any entrepreneur out there can sympathize with that kind of gritty attitude.
I've done this recently, where a young man from Thousand Oaks, California, who's the son of my pastor, Rob McCoy, 18 years old, was being told by everyone he has to go to college, and God bless his parents for believing in him.
He's 18 years old doing the Mr. Miyagi thing for us at Turning Point USA, you know, kind of stuff and shirts.
But he's earning a good wage, no debt, has his own apartment, meeting amazing people.
He listens to Jordan Peterson podcasts and our podcast every day.
The kid has more wisdom than any other college professor I've ever met at 18 years old.
And he has found out what he wants to do and doesn't want to do in his life.
He never wants to work on a shipping dock ever again.
And now, why is that important?
Because if you're working at a young age, all of a sudden you'll figure out quickly if you love it or you don't love it.
College just kind of insulates you from that.
It like immunizes you from any sort of idea because when you go and find that job or that internship or that, please give me a chance.
Please take a risk on me because I want to be a computer IT.
I want to be a doctor, whatever it is, right?
You'll see the workflow.
You'll see the culture.
And you'll either lean in or disengage.
You're like, I don't know if I want to do that.
That's the best thing.
That would have saved you so much time and energy.
I can't tell you how many kids that graduate from college, they go to places like, I found out the hard way.
I didn't like this.
And that could have been an easier way to go about it.
And the other thing is this, which is the most important thing that kind of in the marketplace that I have found that is the differentiator, which is what, if you are willing to work harder than the person next to you and act ethically with integrity, those two things are so hard to find.
And it's really interesting.
The kids that don't go to college end up being always having to prove themselves.
And I'm in that boat, by the way.
Everywhere I go, people are like, oh, you didn't go to college.
I shouldn't listen to you.
I'm like, I'm going to prove you wrong.
That's why I give 330 speeches a year.
It's why we speak, you know, I sleep four hours a night.
I do it because everyone tells me I can't do it.
And I'm like, okay, fine.
But if I would have went to Stanford, I probably wouldn't have that kind of grit, to be honest with you.
Or Harvard.
I would have been like, oh, I went to Stanford and Harvard to go listen to how great I am.
So there's an element to kind of grittiness that's created there that sometimes I think gets kind of insulated, but also applicable steps, which is, and this is just a rule, and the Bible talks about this so clearly, just be so careful taking debt, guys.
I mean, debt is the slavery of the free.
There's verse after verse in Proverbs about the danger of indebtedness.
And we kind of just sign away the debt with young people that is so horrifying when it's $100,000, $150,000, $175,000 in debt before they're even 22 years old, before they even can comprehend these numbers.
And so, you know, just go through the same sort of financial management you would getting a car or a home when you kind of take those applicable steps.
And maybe community college is the answer.
Maybe more AP classes is the answer.
Maybe a state school versus an out-of-state school is the answer.
You know, maybe I'm going to go to a technical school and get a skill for 18 months.
By the way, just so, you know, there is such a massive gap right now in the skills in our country.
Computer engineers, IT.
In fact, there's such a skill gap that the politicians like, we have to continue to import people from India that actually have these skills.
Meanwhile, 57% of our college graduates are studying psychology or the soft social sciences, which is fine, but it's a great way to get a job at Starbucks.
It's a really bad way to get a high-paying job that actually has a skill.
And again, it's going to be all about kind of skill development.
And the other thing is this, and I want to kind of comment on the kind of the church vein here, which is kind of in the college landscape, the fastest growing religion is atheism.
And I am approached by more atheists on college campuses that try to persuade me to believe in nothing than Christians that approach me that try to persuade, that they don't know me, that try to tell me about the good news of Jesus Christ.
So if you send your kid to college, there's a chance that all of a sudden you will never recognize their value system or them again.
Safety Versus Bravery In A Crisis 00:02:51
And everyone needs to understand that truth.
I get thousands of emails of parents, and it pains me.
Charlie, I sent my kids to school and they won't talk to me anymore because I'm a Christian and I'm a conservative.
And I'm like, I'm sorry.
And because that kind of ingratitude is taught quite often at these university campuses.
And so anyway, I just want to be kind of very clear about this.
The goal should be, how do we create a country where our young people can live quiet and peaceful lives like it tells us in 1 Timothy.
And so we have to challenge our young men to marry earlier and marry women and have, be loyal to those women, which is a rarity in the landscape, make good choices and have many children.
And for young women, We should be very clear.
Whatever you want to do, you should have the freedom to do.
But it's okay to get married before the age of 30.
Like, it's okay.
And I meet so many young women.
They're like, I'll get married after I have a really successful career.
Okay.
And all of a sudden they realize they're 30 and all the good men are gone.
I hear this all the time.
All the time.
Like you wouldn't believe.
It's like, okay.
I mean, I think that there was something that kind of worked in the 1950s where all of a sudden the birth rates were going up and families were flourishing and we valued the nuclear family and fatherlessness wasn't 77% as it is in the black community.
And so there's a responsibility crisis in this country.
There is.
Where people are saying other people should be responsible for me.
One of the things that has just driven me nuts the last couple weeks and months is where they say like, well, everything is about being safe.
Drives me out of control.
And I say, I'm all for safety.
I'm not for recklessness.
But there's a balance in all things.
If we were just about safety, speed limits should be 10 miles an hour.
They should be.
They should be, right?
We have high speed limits because we want the liberty to get places quickly so that we can live more efficient lives.
I mean, 40,000 people die on the road every single year because of high speed limits.
A lot of that could be mitigated with 10 mile an hour speed limits.
Instead, what's always made our country different is not safety.
I mean, in prison, you're safe, right?
You've got three meals a day, but you have no liberty.
It's about being brave and being wise.
That's what the Bible tells us to be, right?
Being safe.
Okay, make choices that are okay for yourself.
But this idea that all of a sudden we are going to micromanage every single decision and you're going to be comfortable and safe is so unbelievably misleading and it's dangerous.
Because what has always made decent Western civilization different is a commitment to the brave, a commitment to the wise, and a commitment to the reason, not a commitment to the automatic that we're just going to say that, well, we can keep you safe.
Praying For The Lost Generation 00:04:58
Like maybe you can't.
There's a lot of other ways to die than besides this virus.
There's a lot of other ways.
Heart disease.
I'm not diminishing the virus.
Trust me.
I've lost a dear friend to it, okay?
But this kind of idea that all of a sudden we're going to micromanage people's behaviors at the expense of so many other people is just foolish and wrong and backwards.
And so the other kind of point to this with young people out there that I highly encourage every student out there is the amount of opportunity afforded you at this period of time is incredible.
It really is.
We have a whole generation that goes around playing the victim.
It's the oppression Olympics.
Feel sorry for me because of all these sorts of things.
Okay, whatever.
It's actually your country to dominate.
Like, it is easier than ever because there are so many people that just are kind of in the professional complaining industry, like Colin Kaepernick.
He does it professionally, right?
His whole thing is just complaining.
Everything, right?
If you take risks and you apply yourself, it's incredible what you're able to achieve in this country.
It really is.
And I want to challenge you to that because it's an optimistic message.
It's a message that whatever you think you can, whatever your dream is you have for yourself, do so in the pursuit with biblical values and for the good of the kingdom.
But only in a matter, and I'll give, I'm look, I'm living proof of this.
I'm a kid that didn't go to college from the suburbs of Chicago, who's now 26 years old, 2,000 campuses, 160 people on staff.
We've been blessed to have, you know, $31 million operating budget, two podcasts today, soon-to-be national radio show, and Friends of the President of the United States.
Only in America is a story like that possible.
Only in America.
Incredible.
It's incredible.
Well, we've closed each of our services in prayer, but I would love if you would close the service in prayer.
And would you pray, you know, for this next generation?
And just as you feel, I'd know we spoke in the back, and you get these emails about kids that say, look, if it weren't for your podcast, if it weren't for what you just said, I would have taken my life.
I did feel completely hopeless.
We get a lot of those.
So would you just close our, by the way, as we mentioned earlier, we've got, we'll have four or five almost hours of content.
This is one specific thing that Charlie really wanted to talk about, and we kept it for this audience because we felt like we might have the broadest sort of reach of the young people and the parent.
But we've talked about all kinds of things that matter right now for the church in this day and age.
And we'll have it all available for you.
But so would you just close our weekend in prayer over this next generation and those even maybe struggling right now in sort of that deep, depressive state?
Can I just say one thing, sir?
Which is if anyone is dealing with that sort of self-harm problem, my email is always available, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And remember, you're a lot tougher than you think.
Amen.
And there's a reason why you're here.
Amen.
And don't try to convince yourself or have somebody else convince you that that is not true.
And there is an epidemic right now of suicide.
And every parent has to recognize this, and every grandparent has to get very serious about it.
And everything I talk about contributes to it.
So please take that very seriously.
And I've lost seven friends to suicide in just the last three years.
And that should take everyone pause and say, that's no longer acceptable.
You say that in California we've lost more to suicide.
More young people to suicide than from the virus, yeah, in California.
So, okay, let's do some prayer.
So, dear Lord, thank you for this incredible country that we live in.
Thank you for this church service and your incredible pastor.
And thank you for this congregation for warmly welcoming us this weekend.
We pray for our young people.
They're experiencing a lot of difficulty and struggle.
We pray for those people that are just thinking in the terrain of self-harm that you might give them comfort and that you might give them direction and that they might find the mentorship that they need.
And we pray for the adults out there that they may make informed and wise choices for their children and with their children and that they may take the education seriously.
And we thank you for the gifts that have been given to us and afforded to us that we might acknowledge those every single day.
And we thank you for sending your son, Jesus, the ultimate salvation.
And we pray that we might be a wise and brave church in this moment in our country.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen.
Amen.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, God.
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God bless.
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Thank you again.
Talk to you soon.
God bless.
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