Ask Charlie Anything 45: My Biggest Lessons from 2020
On the last installment of Ask Charlie Anything of the year, Charlie looks back on 2020 and reveals his biggest takeaways, his greatest highlights and the most important lessons learned. In this very personal episode, Charlie walks through his election experience, his personal accomplishments including his engagement to Erika, and how to make a proper New Years Resolution heading into 2021. Send your questions to Freedom@CharlieKirk.com for a chance to have your question answered in a future episode of The Charlie Kirk Show. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hey everybody, on a special Monday episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, we of course are doing our Ask Me Anything.
This is the last Monday of the year, so I take your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, and I kind of share some 2020 lessons as we say goodbye to this year.
I know some of you are saying this year should never come back, and I agree with that in a lot of different ways.
If this program has blessed you in any way whatsoever and you want to help us out right here at the end of the year as we are making plans to reach millions of more young people next year, when you support us at charliekirk.com slash support, you make that possible.
If you want to help this program in another way, and you want to win a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine, just send me alongside a screenshot of you being subscribed to the Charlie Kirk Show at freedom at charliekirk.com.
Send me your greatest lesson from 2020 and those that I really like will win a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
Last Monday of the year, brought to you by those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
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Hey, everybody.
Happy Monday.
I'm thrilled to be back speaking to all of you.
What a 10 days it has been on the Charlie Kirk Show in Turning Point USA.
We have worked hard in our life, but I can tell you the last 10 days have been the most stressful yet rewarding 10 days in the history of Turning Point USA, the Charlie Kirk Show, and everything that we really want to do on this program and that all of you so generously support.
Started December 17th when things really started to get ramped up right before our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
On the 18th, we had our major event, fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, and then opening session on December 19th.
And you heard some panels and discussions from that, but I could tell you, I have never been more proud of a group of people than I am of our amazing team here on the Charlie Kirk Show and Turning Point USA.
We had thousands and thousands and thousands of people come to Palm Beach.
The county made it difficult, to say the least, to satisfy all the people that we were promised that were going to be able to come hear from all these incredible speakers.
Our staff adapted beautifully and wonderfully on their feet, accommodating students the best they could, especially in opening night.
And eventually, we were able to accommodate basically everyone that was there, which we were really pleased of, just because of county ordinances and shutdowns and lockdowns and all that nonsense.
But our staff really persevered amazingly.
My days would start at 6 a.m. if I was lucky to sleep in a little bit.
We would be interviewing people all day.
You've heard some of those interviews from our Student Action Summit, taking care of logistics, trying to wrap up end-of-the-year business at Turning Point USA, running all over that convention floor.
Long days, very stressful, dealing with a lot of press, a lot of media, local health officials, but we did it.
And I can tell you, I have been incredibly blessed by just enjoying what we have done the last couple days at Turning Point USA and here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
Our team has been taking a couple well-deserved days off, but here we are just kind of knocking on the door on the last Monday of the year.
And I told our team, look, I want to get back in the saddle.
I want to do our Ask Me Anything episode.
That is something that we have always promised you.
That we are doing here on the Charlie Kirk Show to take your questions.
And I had a couple days to enjoy Christmas.
I had a couple days just to kind of reflect on this last year.
And I have some big kind of takeaways and lessons that I want to share with all of you.
Some things that I think are important, just to kind of take a moment to reflect on what exactly was this year.
It's a year that we're not going to forget anytime soon.
What was the best part of 2020?
And what was probably the worst part of 2020?
But I think more than anything else, all of you should do this in one way or the other.
Take a moment this year, turn off your smartphone, and just reflect on the last 12 months.
Where were you 12 months ago?
What were you seeing?
What were you thinking?
What were you hearing?
Were you excited?
Were you nervous?
You probably couldn't have imagined these last 12 months.
But I look at everything as a potential blessing, as a seed of equivalent benefit.
And this last year, despite it being just awful in so many different ways, has been one that has been filled with blessing and, quite honestly, some lessons that I would love to share with all of you.
And that's kind of the first question I want to take.
Cynthia from Alabama asked me, Charlie, what has been your highlight of 2020?
And so I had the opportunity to journal the last couple days.
I wasn't very active.
I just kind of took a pause to reflect and to pray and to kind of have an opportunity to think, wow, what a wild year.
So just give you an idea of how many podcasts we did here on the Charlie Kirk Show this year.
Just since June, we averaged two podcasts every single weekday and one on Saturday and one on Sunday.
That is a little over 300 podcasts that we produced just since June.
And on the entire year, we surpassed 370 podcasts.
The most high-producing team, I think, in the entire country here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
And that's what you guys help support us.
That's what you guys help support at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Gave hundreds of speeches all across the country, did hundreds of interviews.
And amazingly, despite the lockdowns, despite the shutdowns, despite a lot of things that were uncertain, we were able to accomplish almost all of our goals here on the Charlie Kirk Show and independently at Turning Point USA.
So, I want to go through a couple lessons that I think a lot of you would benefit from and hopefully be blessed to hear.
Five big lessons that I learned in 2020, which is number one, take what is in front of you, don't make excuses.
I want you to think back to the beginning of the lockdowns in March.
There was uncertainty.
People were very troubled.
They were worried.
And a lot of people all of a sudden started to use all of the chaos as excuses, excuses not to hit their goals, excuses not to reach to the next level.
We never did that at the Charlie Kirk show and at Turning Point USA.
Instead, we use this as, dare I say, an opportunity.
More people at home, maybe it's a chance for us to produce more content, less travel.
Maybe it's a time to dive deeper into big ideas.
I learned in 2020, more than any other lesson, that no matter what is happening around you, look at it as a blessing.
I know that might fall on deaf ears for some people here that have lost loved ones.
I lost friends this year, but generally, everything can be turned into an amazing opportunity and a blessing.
For us here on the Charlie Kirk show, we stayed put for seven straight weeks.
From mid-March to early May, we did not travel.
We didn't board a plane.
It was the longest period of time that I went without traveling ever since the start of Turning Point USA.
And I could tell you during that time, I was more at peace.
I was more focused on exactly what we wanted to achieve.
It was a great opportunity for us to go through the entire organization at Turning Point USA and on the Charlie Kirk show.
Why are we doing what we are doing?
Should we start doing podcasts every single day?
Because before the lockdown, we were not doing episodes every single day.
So it proved to us a great opening to really challenge every one of our guiding principles and beliefs.
Take what is in front of you.
Do not give or make any excuses.
Number two, be open to major changes.
Ride the current.
Don't fight the current.
During the lockdown, it was tempting to kind of want to fight what was happening on the local level.
Instead of trying to act as if things were not changing in front of us, the major changes, at first, I thought there's no way I'm going to be grounded for more than 10 days.
Well, it ended up being 50 days that I was in Phoenix, Arizona, without traveling.
And that was a big change for me.
And so instead of fighting the current, I kind of just released, I let go.
I said, God, you're in charge.
What do you want me to get out of these 50 days?
And I can say definitively, those 50 days was one of the greatest gifts I've ever had in my entire life.
Spent more time with family, spent more time with my now fiancé.
We'll get to that in a second.
I was able to really put out two or three year goals of where we wanted to be on podcasting.
That was where a majority of our idea of launching this podcast into a national radio show came from, which now we're on radio stations all across the country.
If you would have told me at the beginning of the year, Charlie, you would be a radio show host in addition to a podcast host, I said, what are you talking about?
I don't have time for that.
You see, I had certain limiting beliefs in only the lockdown, which of course I'm against lockdowns, but we all played kind of team ball for the first couple weeks of which I'm talking about.
But without the lockdown, without this sort of disruption, I never would have found the path that we are on right now.
We recommitted to our ideals at Turning Point USA, also to not take government PPP taxpayer funding.
We doubled down on the original mission statement of the Charlie Kirk show.
So we are open to major changes.
I was a little bit resistant at first, but I can tell you that riding the current instead of fighting the current ended up being one of the sweetest gifts that I had in 2020.
The third lesson I learned in 2020 is learn something new every single day.
I forget stuff just as much as anybody else.
Actually, I walk around, everyone in the office here knows this to be true with this notepad filled with notes and kind of just one-off sentences that I hear.
But more than anything else, in my notepad is when I start to explore big ideas.
I'm hardly an expert in astrophysics or in Newtonian physics or in the laws of thermodynamics.
But there were a couple days where I really committed myself to spending a few hours to try to at least understand the big picture ideas.
What am I not currently understanding about the laws of physics and how can it apply to my life?
Topics such as the life and death of Stalin, the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong's Red Guard, the book of Enoch, to what was the first ever book written in the Bible, the book of Job.
What does it actually mean to be an Abrahamic religion?
All of these things I spent hours researching, watching lectures on, reading books on how the Scots built the modern world to the history of the Vikings.
I love to learn.
And every single day, I challenged myself to learn something new.
Now, I didn't remember all of it.
This is an excuse I get from people all the time.
Well, Charlie, why should I learn?
I'll forget most of it.
Well, first of all, write it down.
You're more likely to remember it than you can re-reference it.
But this year, because of all the idle time I had for those seven weeks, I learned something every single day.
I listened to new podcasts.
I read more books than I ever have.
And even when I read a book, I find one sentence that I really like.
I say, huh, I'm going to do a deep dive on that person.
Your mind is a muscle.
Use it every single day.
And I pray that we are able to bless some of you with some of these big picture ideas that we have been exploring, some of these moments in history, the moments in time where our teams is kind of sitting around.
We say, huh, it'd be super interesting to do a deep dive on Mao's Red Guard.
And we did.
You guys can go back in that episode over the summer that we dove deep into Mao's Red Guard or into Fidel Castro's Cuba or into Teddy Roosevelt.
I did an entire week on Teddy Roosevelt.
Some of you might have remembered that.
There's so much knowledge out there that we don't know.
And it's that old expression, the more I know, the more I realized how little I knew when I thought I knew it all.
And that has been a huge takeaway in 2020.
If there's one thing that I challenge you to do in 2021, and maybe this podcast can be a source to fulfill this challenge, learn something every day.
People say, Charlie, what do I do?
The more you learn, the more you'll realize what you need to do.
Dive deeper into the great ideas.
Read the Bible.
Read the great thinkers of Voltaire and Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Descartes and Hume and Mill.
Read the thinkers that have played with life's greatest questions.
Some of them you might fundamentally disagree with.
I know I disagree with plenty of them, but they always get my mind moving.
God gave us this beautiful gift, which is the ability to process information, retain information, be able to contemplate different ideas.
Wisdom is the capacity to distill information and apply it to your life.
And that's why I encourage all of you every single day learn something new.
I feel that I am pursuing life at its highest possible capacity when I'm learning something new.
And I try to do that every single day.
And people say, well, Charlie, how do you learn stuff every single day?
I watch lectures, long, information-rich lectures from Hillsdale College, from Hoover Institution, from some of the great thinkers and writers of our time.
And then I look at debates.
I watch people that I don't always agree with.
I'll watch a lecture from Sam Harris.
But you have to understand that it's more than just passively watching a lecture while you're on your phone.
You turn your phone on airplane mode.
When you watch a lecture, you need to really watch it.
You need to be there with a pen and piece of paper with subtitles on, capturing everything that they're saying, pausing.
A two-hour lecture should take you about six and a half hours to watch because you're constantly pausing, reflecting, writing things down, saying, do I believe that?
If I don't believe that, why don't I believe that?
A notepad should be filled with your reflections, with your limiting beliefs, with little questions that you might search on the internet afterwards.
That is an active listener of a lecture.
A passive listener is you turn on the lecture and you're kind of flipping through Instagram or you're flipping through Twitter and, oh yeah, I'm hearing some smart things here and there.
You will not be filled with the fulfillment of learning if you're just a passive learner.
And this is outside of college, this is outside of high school.
And you say, Charlie, I'm looking through how I can satisfy my desire to be a better citizen.
I'm feeling a little empty right now.
What I tell people all the time is if you feel empty, you feel like you're not getting enough out of life, you need to be learning more.
Learning is one of the greatest gifts that God gave us to be able to challenge our current preconceptions, to be able to wrestle with these big ideas.
And if you think you got it all sorted out, well, then please email me, freedom at charliekirk.com, because I would love to learn from you.
If you think that you've learned enough in your life, I'd love to learn from you.
So that's the third thing that was my biggest takeaway from 2020.
Learn something new every day.
I challenge all of you to do that.
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Number four, if you do something that you know is good for you daily, you will like where you end up.
This is one piece of advice in 2021 that I encourage all of you to do.
Do one thing that you know is good for you.
Do it daily and do it seriously and see where you end up a year later.
This is something that we don't talk about enough, which is some people in economics and finance would call this compound interest, but the same can be for investing in yourself.
What is one thing you know that is good for you?
Just think about it.
It could be eating a certain vegetable.
It could be doing a certain exercise.
It could be stop doing something, which is the same as doing something.
It takes a conscious act to stop doing something.
Maybe it's stop drinking something.
Maybe it's not going to a certain website.
Maybe it's stop doing business with a certain person.
Whatever that might be, find that one thing that you know is good for you.
It might be a hard thing.
It might be running.
It might be stretching.
It might be reading a certain book.
Find that one thing and do it every day.
Do it for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes.
It might be reading the Bible every single day.
I could tell you that this year, I had three things that I do every single day, every single day.
And for me, there is something as simple as stretching because I had a really bad back injury in the days I don't stretch.
I very much regretted it, but I could tell you I did this every single day in 2020.
For number two, it's listening to something that challenges my limiting belief to a scientist, to a lecturer, every single day.
That kind of goes back to number three, which is learning something new every single day.
And then number three, eat something absurdly healthy every single day.
I do it every day.
You'll have more energy.
You'll have more clarity.
You'll have more fulfillment.
Some people might just be taking your supplements.
Whatever that is, you do it every single day.
Become focused on what that might lead you to.
And hopefully it'll be a fulfilling life.
But that idea of committing yourself day in and day out, maybe it's self-sacrificial.
Maybe you hate those 10 minutes of exercise.
Maybe you hate those 15 minutes on the treadmill.
Whatever that might be, but you know that if you do that every day, or even most days, but challenge yourself to do it every day, where you will end up a year from that day is ahead of everybody else.
Because most of the world does not apply themselves daily to good things.
They do the opposite.
They apply themselves negatively daily.
They'll put a substance in them that is not very good for them.
They'll watch just total and complete trash on TV.
They won't take notes.
They won't dive deep into big ideas.
They won't surround themselves with people that lift them up.
Instead, they become hyper-focused on significance as the world measures it today.
Am I getting enough Instagram likes?
Am I getting enough Twitter engagements?
Am I getting enough retweets?
When in reality, it's, am I pursuing an ultimate good day in and day out?
You know, having the last couple days to kind of rest, which I do highly recommend those of you that are living very active lives, rest is critical.
However, if you do nothing but rest, you will not live a fulfilling life.
I truly believe that progress and that movement is what life is all about.
Showing that you are moving up the ladder, that you are improving yourself, which means you must measure everything.
And measure everything from not just financial, that's helpful, I guess.
That won't bring you happiness, though.
But are you making progress to a certain goal?
I know a lot of you are going to be making New Year's resolutions, a lot of you.
And a lot of you are going to be making weight loss goals and all this.
I can tell you, I have never not kept a New Year's resolution.
I'm very careful and very precise in the goals that I make because I take them very seriously.
Because I feel that if I do not fulfill that goal, I will have betrayed myself, which there is no greater feeling of being let down than the betrayal of oneself.
And I hope you feel very similar to that.
But life is movement and life is progress.
Progress with the ones you love.
Progress with your children.
And you will be beaten down.
There'll be times you fall short.
But the things that you do daily, that you promise yourself that you are going to do every single day, that you know are good for you, that might be difficult, those are the things that will keep you anchored when life inevitably throws a tsunami or a hurricane or an unpredictable curveball towards you.
That is what will keep you focused on true north.
That is what will keep you focused on attaining success.
Number five, the fifth takeaway that I learned in 2020, which is to forgive people.
Everyone makes mistakes, myself included.
I've made a lot of mistakes in my life.
I encourage all of you to be more open to forgiveness in the next couple of weeks and months, because people are on edge right now.
People are making mistakes and people are saying things they don't mean, I being one of them.
But if people are willing to ask for forgiveness, I encourage you to be willing to give that forgiveness.
It's not easy to live in the world right now.
It's not.
There's a lot of difficulties, a lot of challenges.
I think social media is a rotten to the core cancer that is ruining our young people.
It's ruining our interactions.
It's destroying our humanity.
And if people really mean it and they realize the misstep that they made, be open and willing to forgive.
I know the reason I'm sharing this advice is because I have been forgiven this year by many people.
I've made a lot of mistakes, said a lot of things I didn't mean.
And when I asked for forgiveness, it was one of the greatest gifts.
For those of you that have ever done anything where you had a pit in your stomach and then you confront that person and you ask for forgiveness and you get it, it's a gift that is beyond anything you could ever touch.
You feel liberated.
You feel as if you've been given something you don't deserve.
Quite honestly, none of us deserve forgiveness, especially those of us that are Christians.
So my challenge to you, maybe you're sitting through a Christmas season right now and you just got in a very big debate and a very big argument and a shouting match with somebody or somebody took something from you.
And now if they don't ask for forgiveness, I encourage you to forgive them anyway.
That's a much higher level of forgiveness to offer.
But let's just, let's just, for argument's sake, that's a different podcast for a different time.
Should you forgive people that don't ask for forgiveness?
The answer is yes.
It's a very hard thing to do.
It's much more complicated than just a yes or no answer.
But let's pretend there's someone that has asked you to forgive them, even if it's half-hearted, but they mean it a little bit.
Give them the gift is my piece of advice to you.
It'll make you a happier person.
You're never going to find life's greatest moments of breakthrough by harboring resentment and bitterness because you say to yourself, I'm not ready to forgive this person.
And maybe there is something that is so beyond.
And by the way, I don't take this out of context.
If somebody committed a crime against you or did something unspeakable, that is not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about arguments.
I'm talking about disagreements.
Talking about things that you know deep in your heart that you're withholding forgiveness that you could release.
That's what I'm talking about.
So, forgive somebody.
One day you'll be in need of forgiveness.
It's a beautiful gift.
Give into the world that which you hope to receive.
So, here are three big highlights for me this year.
I guess I'm spending a lot of time on just a singular question.
By the way, I'm taking all of your questions.
You guys email us at freedom at charliekirk.com.
I hope to get some other questions, but I think this is important as we kind of just do a year-in review reflection.
My biggest highlight of the year is I was engaged this year.
I got engaged, which we're super thrilled about, Erica and I.
I encourage all of you guys to listen to that podcast episode, I'm Engaged Exclamation Point.
You guys can listen to that by scrolling back in the podcast archives and checking that out.
My second biggest, and just kind of another thought on that: I encourage all of you that are thinking to yourself, How do I live a fulfilling life?
Go find somebody worthy of pouring love into and stay loyal to that person.
It's the opposite advice that you'll get from many people in kind of our secular humanist culture, but it's how you find fulfillment in the world.
And I'm still learning this, obviously, just got engaged, and maybe next year I'll have even more advice to be able to share with you.
But it's a very, very sweet, wonderful journey.
It really is.
It's beyond any form of podcast or radio or political success that God has blessed me with.
It's something that is one of life's greatest gifts.
It really is.
And so, I know a lot of you are struggling to find somebody.
Well, first of all, pour into yourself and ask yourself, maybe be critical of yourself: am I somebody worthy of attraction of another person?
And that means in a variety of different ways.
Am I living with integrity?
Am I going out into the world sending energy and sending a message that I am ready to be loyal to a singular person?
Or am I doing the victim Olympics?
I can't find anybody.
It's so horrible out there.
Love doesn't exist.
You become the energy mantra that you repeat.
You do.
But if you're focused on gratitude, Lord, thank you for today.
I can't wait to find somebody.
You exercise every day.
You eat responsibly.
You tell the truth.
You'll find somebody.
I guarantee it.
It's the laws of nature.
You will find somebody, and God will make sure of it.
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The second greatest experience that I had this year was a very conscious decision I made over Labor Day weekend with our team.
We had a conference call at Turning Point Action, our political vehicle.
And I asked our team, I said, what do we want to do the next 63, 64 days, however much time it was?
And we all made the decision that no team would work harder than the Turning Point Action team.
And I traveled nonstop.
I gave speeches all across the country, from Maine to California to Wisconsin to Florida.
Many of you listened and heard and attended a lot of them.
And thank you for that.
I spoke to tens of thousands of people up close and personal, hundreds of thousands of people.
If you count the live streams, millions of people, if you count the clips and the podcasts, it was a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and blessing.
And I mean it because of this.
A lot of people are saying, Charlie, what are we going to now do about the election?
It's a great question.
We'll dive into that.
We'll unpack that.
But a lot of the election was decided on whether or not you volunteered, whether you stepped up and registered voters, whether you went and bet to go be an election judge.
And some of that made a difference, some of that didn't, because of the obvious fraudulent systems that were built.
But here's a blessing that God gave me.
I can rest assured that I could not have done any more during that election season.
I pushed myself as hard as I have ever pushed myself towards anything in my life.
Red-eye flights, speaking till midnight, live streaming radio every day, two podcasts a day, taking questions till they kicked us out of venues, speaking from Miami to Dallas to southern Wisconsin to all over North Carolina, crisscrossing the country for a unified purpose.
It was a blessing because a lot of people feel guilt.
If Joe Biden becomes president, I feel sadness.
I do not feel guilt.
I don't.
I looked back to my calendar.
I said, I don't know if I physically would be able to do that again, truly.
I don't know if I'd be able to survive that schedule, that rigor, that intensity that it took.
God gave us the strength.
And I believe that if every single political team out there worked as hard as we did at Turning Point Action, especially towards election fraud and electoral fraud, maybe there would have been a different outcome.
Maybe not.
We don't know that.
But the answer to a lot of people's questions is, what can I do?
The answer is next time an election comes up, because there will be another election.
And there's some stuff on January 6th I do want to talk about, and there's some measures that we can get into that I do want to add some detail and color to.
However, let's pretend Joe Biden becomes president.
What can I do?
Remember, learn.
And number two, so next time there's a moment that requires action, you shouldn't have to answer that question.
Because instead, it's, no, no, no, this is what I did.
These are the doors I knocked on.
These are the precincts that I dominated.
These are the people I talked to.
These are the votes I was responsible for.
It's the money I raised, the money I gave.
That's the correct answer.
Because I can tell you, a lot of well-meaning patriots out there are feeling guilty.
We do not have that feeling here.
There is nothing we physically could have done more.
In fact, a lot of our team members got sick right after the election because we worked ourselves so hard, literally into the ground.
There's a team member who fell asleep in his car driving out of the office.
Thankfully, it was in Park.
So that was a great gift.
It taught me a lesson, too.
That when I was on that conference call on Labor Day weekend, going into the election, I made a decision and I acted upon that decision.
That's a very fulfilling thing.
For those of you that say, Charlie, I'm in a rut right now.
What do I do?
Go make a tough decision and stay focused on that.
It might be, you know what?
I feel like garbage.
I don't like the way alcohol makes me feel.
Then go write down on your calendar right now, March 10th, and you say, I'm not going to drink till March 10th.
Can you do that?
If you can't, you have a problem.
If you can't go over New Year's, you can't go through Valentine's Day.
March 10th is a completely arbitrary date.
But if you just say, oh, I'm going to take some time off, you're going to break that promise to yourself.
Make it a date.
A goal is a dream at the deadline.
And for us, it was Election Day.
We're going to collapse.
And we did, I can tell you.
As a team, no one worked harder.
It's a phenomenal opportunity.
The people I talked to, the things I learned, the vistas that we traveled through, once in a lifetime opportunity, despite the fraudulent outcome.
And that's kind of the second lesson here: which is while a lot of people were waiting for other people to do the work for them, we did not step up the way we should have when it came to election judges, voter fraud operations.
And we're going to step up and make sure that never happens again at turning point action in a lot of the work that we're doing.
We will never allow what happened to happen again.
But the thing I encourage you is to become a participant, not a spectator, and all these different things.
Number three, the third biggest highlight is my learning breakthroughs: the late night lectures, the late night conversations I had with experts and researchers and books I read, where all of a sudden I had that kind of eureka moment.
2020 was a beautiful blessing for me because things made more sense than they ever have.
They made more sense religiously, philosophically, politically, spiritually.
2020, because I committed myself to learning more than ever before, I had more breakthroughs than I ever have had.
That allowed me to make better arguments, to think more clearly, to see the direction of head, to see who we're up against.
It was a phenomenal blessing.
So, those are the three big highlights for me.
In 2020, getting engaged, the 2020 election experience, not the outcome, of course, currently, and learning breakthroughs.
The biggest story of the year, I know a lot of you are emailing me, and Victor from North Carolina just emailed me this as well.
Charlie, what do you think the biggest story of the year is?
Well, obviously, the lockdowns and the virus are the biggest story of the year.
But three other big stories that I had: obviously, the Great Steal, the election fraud.
I'm going to get into that in another episode.
I don't want to spend too much time on this episode on that.
But remember impeachment when they impeached our president, when they thought that was going to be the top story of the year?
When Adam Schiff led the fraudulent political impeachment against Donald Trump?
Remember, BLM Incorporated?
Of course, you do.
They're still here when they burn down the streets of our city, burned down the streets of our cities in the name of racial justice.
No other story was so manufactured, so artificial, than the idea that America is a racist, bigoted, homophobic, colonialist country.
And it has done irreparable damage to our country.
And then finally, we've talked about this in another episode: the great silencing: Hunter Biden, hydroxychloroquine, and heinous voter fraud.
The three stories that shaped 2020 that we were not allowed to talk about.
The fact that Joe Biden is bought and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, and Hunter Biden was the cash cow for that.
Hydroxychloroquine, which is a cheap drug that very well could have solved the Chinese coronavirus epidemic and outbreak and heinous voter fraud.
A whole episode on all of this on how voter fraud happened in plain sight.
Nevada Native Voter Project from the whistleblowers in Wisconsin that had developmentally disabled people vote for them, or people vote for the developmentally disabled people.
The 1,774% voter registration increase for 90-plus-year-olds in Pennsylvania, Allegheny County stopping all of their votes, the random vote drops in Fulton County, the signature verification problems, the changing of voting locations in heavily Republican areas, the $400 million spent on the Center for Technology and Civic Life, all of it.
If you talk about Hunter Biden, hydroxychloroquine, or heinous voter fraud, you get kicked off social media.
We've talked about how creepy and eerie the great silencing is.
And that's where we are headed right now, where they're going to shut us all down on social media.
If they can't shut us down on social media, they'll try to shut us down through other ways, legal ways and other ways.
They are now, the left is planning their great invasion.
They are trying to plan their metaphorical kill shot against decent, patriotic, conservative Americans.
And that's where all of us must come in.
We must have a counteroffensive.
We must take terrain.
We must grow to new horizons.
And that's what we are pledging to do here on the Charlie Kirk Show every single day.
It's been a very difficult year for a lot of people.
I lost friends this year, very good friends.
I know a lot of you did as well.
I hope my lessons are somewhat helpful to a lot of you.
But more than anything else, be thankful this New Year's and this Christmas season.
Be thankful that you have the blessings you have in front of you.
And if you, like me, are feeling unsettled and angry about what has happened in our country, make a plan and let's stick to that plan.
Find a date where you want something to happen and let's make that change happen.
We still hold the power in this country.
We are citizens, not subjects.
We are co-rulers in America.
And I'm getting thousands and thousands of your emails, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Charlie, what can we do?
What can we do?
I hope some of my advice is helpful to that.
And I pray that on January 6th, some senators step up.
I am skeptical whether or not the Republican establishment will step up and challenge the election results in great numbers.
But if none of that happens and Joe Biden gets sworn in as president of the United States, it's time for a metaphorical battle plan.
There is no giving up.
It's now time to fix our election system, end this mail-in ballot nonsense.
Apply yourself to a better country, a more active citizenry.
And that's exactly what we are going to do.
I feel so thankful for what we've been able to accomplish here at the Charlie Kirk Show, Turning Point Action and Turning Point USA.
We're on radio stations all across the country.
We have college chapters, over 1,000 high school and college chapters across the country at Turning Point USA.
We had an amazing event at our Student Action Summit.
All of that and more is made possible thanks to you guys.
Especially if you like this program and you feel this program has benefited you in any way, you can go to charliekirk.com/slash support and support us.
I guess I only got to two questions today, but I think it was fitting to go through this last year and talk about some of the biggest stories.
Obviously, the virus, the lockdowns, the election, the fraud, and the social media silencing that went with it.
Stay focused on the good and what you can do.
Learn, dive deep, listen to this podcast daily, and make sure you're subscribed to it and support it if you can, because that's what we are doing for listeners all across the country and patriots that feel like they're losing their country.
It's a great blessing to be able to speak to you guys every day.
We take these conversations very seriously.
There's hours and hours of prep that go into these conversations every single day.
And so I want to thank you guys for getting behind us and supporting us.
CharlieKirk.com/slash support.
Email us your questions, what you learned this year, freedom at charliekirk.com, and how God blessed you and kind of the journey that you've been on.
I'd love to hear and see, you know, kind of what you guys are thinking and what you guys have been reflecting on.
We'll be back with more episodes very soon.
I wanted to take this last Monday of the year to say thank you.
Hopefully share some of the wisdom that I know that I learned this last year.