LIVE from Albuquerque, New Mexico at Pastor Steve Smothermon's Legacy Church, Charlie delivers the fourth and final speech from his visit, detailing why the best thing that never happened to him is perhaps the most counterintuitive non-event to most parents. As we begin to flip decades-old paradigms on their heads in the conservative and Christian movements, Charlie works methodically through many of the conventional wisdoms of our time and examines why many of these "wisdoms" have led Americans down exactly the wrong paths. 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, should you go to college?
Do we have too many people going to college?
My off-the-cuff, extemporaneous remarks in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with my friend Steve Smotherman here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
If you want to support us, the hardest working podcast team in the country, and our mission to reach millions of young people across the country, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
Every time you support us at charliekirk.com/slash support, you make it easier and more likely that young people are going to come in contact with the truth.
So please consider doing that.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you are a high school or college student, you must get involved with TurningPointUSA, tpusa.com.
Check it out right now.
And go back a couple episodes previous and listen to the speeches I gave last week.
I was very happy with how they turned out.
We had question and answer candid in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kentucky.
Make sure you check it out at tpusa.com.
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.
Thank you.
Thank you guys.
Love the signs, and I love the books.
Thank you.
Anyone has gone to one other service before this weekend that heard me speak?
Wow, a lot of repeat customers, Steve.
This speech will be completely and categorically different, and it will be designed towards young people and students in particular and parents.
And before you roll your eyes and say, I'm not young, this applies to everyone because I'm going to be talking about a true crisis happening in our country, which is a crisis with our students, crisis on our colleges, and a crisis of the younger generation.
Before I do that, there have been a couple things I have repeated that I will repeat again because they're worthy of repeating.
And that is, you have a phenomenal pastor here and a morally courageous man.
You have a team that has remained strong, and it's not just Pastor Steve, but it's the incredible network that he has created around him.
The staff, all of you that have supported him.
He has taken stances.
He has done the right thing.
And he is passing the test, and so are you.
And so, when Steve and I officially met, we've been texting for a while about me coming out here.
I said, I want to do it absolutely.
I want to do it as soon as possible, especially when you guys are under a lot of pressure not to be having gatherings.
So I'm just honored to be here under that circumstance with everything that's happening with your governor.
And on that note, with your governor, I don't remember her name because she doesn't have a name worth remembering.
She's not doing anything with any sort of wisdom or strength or clarity.
She is a tyrant, and she should open up this state immediately, fully, and instantaneously, and allow people to worship.
So it's an honor to be here.
We hear a lot about all the crises happening in America.
That is a common refrain.
We hear about the environmental crisis.
We hear about the pandemic crisis.
I want to talk to you about a crisis that is happening in slow motion in front of us that is going to impact all of our lives.
And that is a crisis of anyone between the ages of 14 and 30.
And there's different problems all up and down here.
And I'm going to talk about them.
I'm talking about solutions.
I'm going to talk about what the Bible has to say about it.
But first, I'm going to diagnose the problem.
So now, in the speech prior, I talked about don't be a victim.
The biggest problem in the world is you.
That your decisions, your actions are incredibly important.
But I nuanced that.
I said that what we have done in the last year is evidence, real evidence, of an unfair hand that has been dealt to far too many people.
What I mean is not the virus.
The virus is terrible.
I know people that have died from the Chinese coronavirus.
I know people that have suffered from it, but it's our reaction to it.
And I will make the argument that our reaction to this virus will go down as one of the worst mistakes in American history.
The closure of schools, businesses, mental health, suicide.
And then it only has played further into so many underlying troubling trends that already exist with students and young people in this country.
And so I'm going to give you your trigger warning right now.
If you're not on a university campus, you don't know what this means.
And do we have any Turning Point USA students here?
We have a couple.
I know in the prior service we did.
I encourage all of you to get to know about Turning Point USA and the work we're doing on high school and college campuses.
A trigger warning is when I give you a warning that I'm going to say things that are not allowed to be said in popular culture.
So here's me saying things, giving you a warning that I might offend you.
Okay, locking down America this last year and what it's done with students and young people is difficult to even describe.
Let's dive into it.
So I'm a big believer in telling young people, college graduates, work harder, play by the rules, and pull yourself up by the bootstraps.
I think that's critically important.
However, in the last year, we've made that nearly impossible.
When you shut down the entire American economy, they say, where am I supposed to go find the work?
You shutter them into home.
You addict them to their devices.
An average Gen Z or millennial is spending 12, 14, 16 hours a day on their screen, almost descending into a quasi-cyborg, not a human being.
More young people have died from suicide because of the lockdowns than from the virus itself.
Young people.
Self-inflicted harm is at the highest it's ever been.
You know here in this state all too well, drug usage, addiction, opioids, dramatic increase.
And this was all generally self-inflicted, but the trend was already happening before we did all of this.
So why is this happening?
Why do we have this crisis with students?
All right, here's where the trigger warning was for.
We have way too many people going to college in this country.
Way too many people.
Parse golf applause.
I never went to college.
I ended up okay.
College is not for everyone.
It's for some people.
If you want to be a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer, but we need more plumbers, mechanics, electricians, police officers, firefighters, entrepreneurs, people that work with their hands.
College could be for you, but it's not for most people that go to college.
You know what the number one reason I get when I talk to people that are going to go to college?
Number one reason.
I say, why are you going to school?
My parents are making me.
Number one reason.
To go borrow money you don't have, to study things that don't matter, to go find jobs that don't exist.
For parents to go play Russian roulette with their kids' values.
Now, and baked into a lot of first-generation Americans, of which I know there are a lot of people in this room, the belief is college entrance to success, right?
That is the formula that is sold to you.
The data doesn't support it.
41% of kids that go to college drop out.
How many people know someone that dropped out of college and they ended up worse because of it?
Nearly half the hands go up.
It hurts their confidence, hurts them financially, and they're kind of in this strange middle ground where they're not sure what to do next.
We have more people going to college than ever before.
It's dipped down a little bit because of the virus.
And the average student loan debt borrower in this country is $32,000 per borrower, not graduate.
Well, a generation that is in debt, that did everything they were told to do, it's very easy to command and control.
So hear me out here.
Our generation, my generation, I'm 27, is going to be the least married, most miserable, least employed generation in multiple decades.
Since the Great Depression, we've never seen it.
Never seen.
How?
Well, when you graduate tens of millions of people from college with no skills, filled with bad ideas, and send them to urban areas across the country, Denver, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and they rent and not own property, renting, so they're spending all their money on something that doesn't build equity.
They're not getting married largely because of the damage.
And here's another trigger warning for you.
The damage of the third wave feminist movement, which is destroying relations between men and women in this country.
Absolutely destroying relations.
Let me tell you something biblical.
Men are not women, and women are not men.
I should be unafraid to say that, right?
And my fiancé is here.
She's unbelievable.
We're getting married in early May.
And in fact, this is her clothing line that I'm wearing.
It's Proclaim Streetwear.
It's an amazing company, all made in America, and it's the most comfortable thing.
And there's differences between us.
That's a good thing.
We should be unafraid to admit that.
So God made us.
And instead, the American feminist movement has created weak men and angry women.
Where you have the least married generation in American history.
And then sometimes when the marriages do happen, see, Pastor Steve says, give them the hook.
That's it.
Get them offstage.
When they do get married, we're having less children than ever before.
You know, we're on the verge of a population collapse?
We're having 500,000 less children this year than last year.
500,000.
How's that possible?
First of all, the number one reason why you ask young couples, they say, why aren't you going to have more kids, financial.
Second reason is they say, this world is so screwed up, I don't want to bring more kids into this world.
The third and real reason is the secularization of our country.
If you don't believe in God, what is the real reason to have kids?
Why replicate your values?
More so than, I want one of each, as if you're like picking out curtains for your house.
That's what I hear.
I want one of each, like you have a car.
Like, okay, well, you might get one of each, but whatever God wants.
The point is that we are on the verge of a population collapse.
And so all of these trends are coming together with young people in our country.
And so this is mostly to the parents and adults.
The first thing is this.
And I say this as kind of an intermediary between a 16-year-old and a 60-year-old.
I don't mean this condescendingly at all.
But I believe that the baby boomers have largely failed this next generation.
That the public policy decisions, the political choices have not been in the best interest of the younger generation.
Now, for all the students out here, that's not an excuse to go demand-free stuff and not work and not apply yourself.
I'll get to that in a second.
It's a very important distinction.
And there's plenty of wisdom to be learned intergenerationally.
In fact, one of the things I'm going to talk about is honoring your mother and father and the important, the true, incredible biblical wisdom behind that.
What does that actually mean?
It's the only commandment in the Ten Commandments that comes with a promise so that you might live long and prosper in the land of which you are in.
It's the only Ten Commandments that gives you, only the Ten Commandments that gives you a specific promise.
And so where did we go wrong?
We taught my generation self-esteem, not self-control.
We taught my generation what you do, do whatever you want to do, however you want to do it.
You're perfect the way you are, and you don't need to put up limitations on your own behavior.
That is a recipe for misery.
There's a great quote at the Harvard Law School, and you're walking down it makes you stop when you're probably going to remove it because that's what happens now.
It's way too much wisdom for a college.
It says, The law is the wise restraint that keeps men free.
Think about how contradicting that yet true that statement is.
The law, restraint, free.
You're trying to tell me I could be restrained and then that will make me free.
That one sentence is the opposite of everything my generation has been told.
So when you think about it, it's what you prevent yourself from doing that can actually give you true freedom.
That's what the law is.
Instead, the idea of freedom that we've told millennials in Gen Z, what I'm right on the precipice of it, is put whatever substance you want in your body whenever you want to do it.
Do whatever you want morally, however you want to do it.
Spend a limited time on your phone or your computer, and that will bring you to a place of peace and happiness.
Then somehow we're shocked.
We say, why is drug use going up?
Why is people not getting married and all this?
Well, it's the values that we taught were secular and quite honestly, anti-biblical values throughout our entire country.
We're somehow stunned at the result.
So that comes from the top down, from the bottom up, from young people out there.
I have some very specific pieces of advice.
And so the first thing is this: I am completely understanding of the lockdown criticism, of saying that it's difficult to find work, what's happening in college.
I'll get more into that in a second.
But if I have to hear a continued narrative from still the most blessed generation in American history about how oppressed you are, I'm going to lose it.
Seriously.
You are the luckiest people ever to live on.
I get all the challenges, okay?
Every generation has different challenges.
The challenge for this generation is they have not been taught American values and the country locked down.
The challenge of the generation a couple prior, the greatest generation, is you got to go serve in a war and storm Normandy Beach and you're going to learn American values.
Every generation has different challenges.
And what is being taught in our colleges is we train kids for the oppression Olympics.
So you're looking at the ultimate oppressor.
I'm white, a man, heterosexual, and Christian.
And on top of it, I'm Anglo-Saxon.
Whoa.
You are looking at what they consider to be the most personification of an oppressor in this country.
And then there's a hierarchy of this, and any of you on college campuses have seen this in one way or the other, that there's a thing that says, I have my truth.
There is no such thing as your truth.
There's the truth, and then there's your opinion.
It's that simple.
Well, you don't know what it's like to walk inside.
I think shared experiences can be fine.
But I much prefer objective data and evidence than subjective emotive experiences.
In fact, the Bible tells us this clearly.
Multiple times, the Bible warns us about listening to your heart.
How many times have you heard this in society?
Follow your heart.
Your heart will misguide you.
In Proverbs, it says, Proverbs 28, 26, he who trusts in his own heart is a fool.
But whoever walks wisely will be delivered.
What is wisdom?
It's a question that 99% of young people can't answer.
Wisdom is the knowledge of things that never change.
That's wisdom.
There's practical knowledge and there's eternal knowledge.
Practical knowledge is who's the governor?
I don't know.
Practical knowledge, no, it's true, I don't, and I don't care.
She's a tyrant and a fool and all those sorts of things.
No, it's serious, true.
And eternal knowledge, it's true.
Eternal knowledge is anyone who tries to micromanage the decisions of a citizenry is going to fail.
Those things don't change.
So wisdom, we find there's a whole book dedicated to wisdom, Proverbs.
which I tell every young person out there, if you just want to recenter your life and reorient your life, just spend a whole month in Proverbs and apply what it says to your life, truly.
And we have all these self-help books, and I think some of them are fine, but most of them are this cacophony of self-indulgence and you being the center of the universe.
The moment that you realize that you actually might be the biggest thing that needs change, not the world around you, it's actually a very releasing feeling.
Here's another rule, another piece of wisdom.
If you are more concerned with the world around you, climate change, polar bears disappearing, which is not true, by the way, polar bears are multiplying.
The polar bears had a great decade, unlike what I have a whole speech on polar bears.
You want me to give you that?
That's Steve.
I got an old polar bear stick.
I'm not going to give the polar bear speech.
It's true.
I have a whole slide.
It's great.
If you're more concerned with existential problems than your own problems, you live a great life.
Do you think that people living in the slums of India are concerned about polar bear population?
No, they're concerned about sanitary needs and eating.
You want to know that you're lucky?
You care more about the external than the internal.
That's how you know you're blessed.
Three meals a day, shower, one or two parents.
There's tens of millions of people in India that are orphans.
There's orphans in this country, but we've reduced the orphan population, thank goodness.
And the Christian community is largely to thank for that.
But the entire popular culture narrative through the top podcasts, the top television shows and everything is don't focus on yourself.
Let's go abolish systemic racism, which is an unspecified objective.
Now, if you want to talk about creating better people, I'm all for that.
I think creating good people is a great task and challenge.
Let's start with stopping telling eight-year-olds you're perfect the way you are.
Or telling a six-year-old I feel like a girl.
Yeah, cut it out.
You're a guy.
That's how that should go.
It's that simple.
Not have taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgery, which is gender dysphoria and it's child abuse.
I really do.
I believe that it's child abuse to play into the confusion of young kids.
I saw a kid eat dirt a couple weeks ago.
You know what the parents said?
Cut it out.
Stop it.
That's what parents do.
They redirect them towards proper behavior.
Should be exactly the same for gender.
So, Steve, you're going to love the articles after this.
It'll be great.
It's biblical wisdom.
Again, Proverbs says, he who trusts in his own heart is a fool, but whoever walks wisely will be delivered.
Your heart will deceive you.
It will.
God gave us both.
Not saying the heart is irrelevant.
You need the heart to appreciate beauty and music, romance.
Those things are not irrelevant.
It's a very bad way to make consequential decisions.
So we have an entire public policy conversation and an entire educational program towards young people that is dedicated on them looks externally and not internally.
And I'm all for changing things externally.
There's plenty of problems.
And I told you that those problems are legitimate here in this state.
However, with no balance whatsoever, saying you are a product simply and solely of every single bad thing that happened around you.
It's not just not true.
It's just not biblical.
It gives people an excuse to not take responsibility for their actions.
There's a direct correlation with the rise in single motherhood, and single mothers are modern heroes.
I really believe that.
And weak, cowardly men that impregnate women and abandon them.
Why?
Because our entire national conversation is around running away from responsibility, not running towards responsibility.
Why are there a million abortions every single year?
We're quick to single out the tragedy of abortion.
And I'm happy to go through that at a different time.
However, we're slow to talk about how the rise in abortion is really a crisis of responsibility in our country.
Of people that are afraid to take responsibility for their own actions.
So it's a macro trend.
So where does that originate?
Well, this is my next book, and I'm going to really have fun writing, finishing writing it, and publicizing it.
I believe that universities are ruining our country.
I do.
I believe that colleges are the root of almost all of this.
I do.
If you want to see where these arguments are given credibility, they're started, originated, and then exported across the country.
It's university campuses.
What happens on college campuses will soon happen in corporate boardrooms and the halls of Congress.
So if you want to go to college, great.
To be able to answer the most important question that we should ask our high schoolers: why are you going to college?
Not where are you going to college?
Why?
Maybe a gap year is for you.
Maybe starting a business.
Maybe you need to take a deep breath and to get a couple courses done at a local community college.
But what ends up happening is when you borrow a bunch of money and study really bad ideas and you go study North African migratory bird studies or South African lesbian poetry and you wonder why you can't find a job, a politician who walks on stage and says, the reason you can't find a job, South American lesbian poet, whatever.
And these are some of the degrees.
You'd be amazed at them.
It's actually quite stunning.
The reason you can't find a job might be because of the system that actually was a predator towards that young person.
The way that higher education works right now is a predator towards middle-class families, and minority families are falling victim at this.
First-generation minority families, specifically Hispanic families, are being fed a lie.
That your kid must go to college.
Now, if they go, if they know why they're going and they're going for a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer, or STEM, great.
You know, that's less than 12% of all degrees that are given out.
Most are in the humanities or the soft social sciences.
Most.
So what do you learn in the humanities?
Nothing I've talked about in the last three services.
No Socrates, no Plato, no Aristotle, no Aquinas, no Bible.
Instead, you read Nietzsche, Angela Davis, Nicole Hannah-Jones.
America's racist.
I'm going to motivate you to become an activist.
There is no God.
There is no moral.
There is no truth.
Men are awful.
Everything's racist.
Go burn it down.
That's what you're paying for.
And so when the university has basically taken over the entire country, so we send our kids voluntarily, and there's plenty of colleges that do a good job.
Hillsdale College is one of them.
You've got a great military school in southeast New Mexico, but they are the vast minority.
They are the exception.
And yes, there's good professors and there's good reasons to go to school.
Do so affordably and do so quickly.
But if you view college as a necessary rite of passage, I'm going to challenge your premise.
I want you to imagine a scenario.
The scenario is that instead of going to college, immediately you put $200,000 in a moderately managed stock portfolio.
You put it away and don't look at it for four years.
And you go find something.
You have a skill.
I tell young people all the time.
Don't follow your heart.
Don't follow your passion.
Follow your skill.
And eventually you'll intersect your skill with your passion.
Find something you're good at, not something you enjoy.
I enjoy basketball.
It wasn't for me, okay?
I'm pretty good better than most, but my skill was communicating, organizing, and I said, that's what I'm good at.
And now I get to go to whatever basketball game I want, like whatever.
The point is that we say, well, I really enjoy 12th century medieval art.
Great.
What are you good at?
Well, I'm really good at math.
Okay, so why don't you go study something where you can find a job?
And by the way, let me just rant on this for a second.
This whole side hustle thing drives me nuts.
Okay.
Oh, I have a side hustle.
Go get a job.
Okay.
It's like, oh, I'm doing like 30 side.
Like, stop it.
Like, go get an actual job.
Okay.
Anyway.
This drives me absolutely off a wall.
Like, oh, I'm like, you're not doing anything except posting on Instagram and reselling the same five products.
Okay.
Like, go find a job.
Okay, please.
And anyway, that's totally off course.
But the college system is currently supremely broken.
It will only fix if middle-income families, which a lot of you are, start to weigh the value proposition.
And you say, huh, maybe I'm okay with my kid being in the muscular class.
There's two classes in this country.
There's the Zoom and Skype class, people that open up their laptop, and the muscular class.
You know, there's 105 million people in our muscular class?
105 million people.
They're the people, many of whom in our audience right now, kept the economy going while the Zoom and Skype class ordered them their packages the last year.
The Zoom and Skype class are the ones that call them for the Uber and demand it in two seconds or less.
The Zoom and Skype class are the ones that blitz through the airport and don't say anything to the people that are bringing the bags on and off the plane, the people that are serving them their food.
The muscular class keeps us together, yet they are the least respected, most condemned, most made fun of portion of American society.
And all of a sudden, a guy in politics comes and starts to give a little bit of voice to the muscular class, just a little bit, and everyone loses their mind as if, no, they can't have a voice.
They're deplorable.
They should be condemned.
They must be ostracized.
I will take a plumber with wisdom in a second over a person from Harvard with a doctorate any day.
But here's the root of it.
The root of it is this.
This is for parents.
A lot of parents get nervous about their kid becoming a plumber.
It's true.
You laugh.
How many, I spoke at Winnetka, North Chicago, very, very upper middle class, like Beverly Hills of Chicago.
I said, how many of you here would be okay with your kids becoming a plumber?
No hands went up.
I said, that's the problem.
You'd rather have your kid become an atheist liberal than a plumber.
You are not okay going to the cocktail party saying, oh, yeah, Sally Sue's at Dartmouth.
She doesn't know what gender she is, but she's doing great.
Brian Smith is at Stanford and he's at a climate protest.
Or Ron is at University of Wisconsin-Madison and he got arrested after throwing a Molotov cocktail at the police.
But no one wants to talk about at the cocktail party.
Yeah, my kid decided to go learn a skill, carpenter, electrician, HVAC, and he's doing great.
Parents are afraid to have that conversation because parents live vicariously through their kids.
That's normal.
What's not normal is them sacrificing what's best for their kids for their own ego.
That is not normal and it's not moral and it's not good.
And so now it's time for a serious introspection and self-examination.
And for the young people out there, here's my advice to you.
If you go to college, awesome.
Do it right.
Do it quickly.
Keep your values.
Read books of wisdom, for goodness sake, because you won't get it at most colleges.
Listen to the right things.
Stay close to your parents.
They know more than you might think.
Because what do totalitarians always try to do?
They try to turn their kids against the parents.
We talked about this in the last service, right?
What place teaches kids to rebel against their parents?
College!
It's perfected.
Your parents were wrong about everything.
America's terrible.
There are no genders.
There is no God.
Let me tell you about all these authors you've never heard of.
You've never heard of them because they're all a bunch of fools.
That's why you've never heard of them.
Most of them.
My time is running short, so let me wrap a lot of this together.
So if you go to college, do it right, do it affordably, do it quickly, but not everyone needs to go to college.
And so part of what I think God is drawing me to do, I got lucky.
I didn't go.
I was going to go to West Point, didn't get in.
Best thing that never happened to me.
I'm the type of guy that should have went, right?
Eagle Scout, football, basketball captain, good grades.
I should have went.
I didn't.
It didn't feel right to me at the time.
I lucked out.
I think part of what God is calling me to do is tell you it's okay if you don't go.
That if anyone that looks down at you has more problems than you will ever have, and anyone tells you that you must go.
You must get that piece of paper.
There you go.
It does not make you a better person.
Might give you a skill, probably won't.
And that goes to a deeper problem in American society, which is, by definition, unbiblical, which is that your value is based on accreditation.
That I went through a certain sequence of schools or I went to a certain country club.
I'm born from a certain part of town.
Therefore, I'm a better person than you are.
No, you're not.
Not even close.
I care about your character and I care about your actions far more than I care about your accreditation or what college you went to.
So here's some specific advice for young people.
Okay, social media is destroying our country.
Period.
These tech companies hate you.
They hate your values and they're monetizing your children.
Parents, I beg you, take the phones out of your kids' hands.
I beg you.
You have no idea.
Do you know that Google, Facebook, and Twitter has full-time neuropsychology?
No, it's true.
Neuroscientists earning a million dollars a year, hundreds of them.
You know what their job is?
To make their devices and applications more chemically addictive to your eight-year-old.
This is drug dealing.
You wouldn't allow your eight-year-old to take opioids, but you have a drug dealer from Menlo Park take the phones out of their hands.
I didn't get a smartphone until I was 18, and it was a gift from God.
It really was.
Now, if you're 15, 16, or 17, you have the phones, then limit your time.
Self-control.
Put barriers.
Monitor your screen time.
Reduce it by 30%.
Take a phone Sabbath.
Social media is a death spiral.
I have all my public front-facing apps.
I have a team that helps management.
I'm lucky.
I look at none of the feeds.
None of it.
The moment I stopped doing it, it was one of the greatest things I ever did.
It was like shekels.
There is nothing of long-term wisdom or value of 12 hours of screen time a day, of 30 minutes of flipping through TikTok for another lip-syncing video.
That's not going to bring you to be a better person.
It's just not.
Might momentarily entertain you, but it's not.
There's a great quote, which is: cheerfulness, optimism is the result of wisdom.
You want to know why everyone's so miserable?
There's no wisdom anymore.
In Proverbs, it says, wisdom begins at the fear of the Lord.
So for students out there, it's so tempting to want to act as if the Bible, God, Jesus, all that stuff's a bunch of thousand-year-old mythology.
I will challenge you.
Go on a hunt.
Go try to find something better than Jesus, and you never will.
Don't try it all.
Go travel, read, do whatever.
Every truth of the Bible remains true for your whole life.
And so, in summary, this, I know this speech was a lot different than the other ones, and it was intentionally different, right?
For young people and students, no more excuses.
Okay?
You apply yourself correctly.
Self-discipline.
Every day you try to improve.
For parents, try to do a timeout and a hard stop and say, Am I actually leaving a better country for my kids?
So there's an ask for both, right?
The pressure is not on either side because the consequence of what we're living through is coming from both directions.
And so I want to give this opportunity here.
So being a Christian is the most important thing in my life.
And I said this last service and I'll repeat it again.
The gospel in four words is Jesus took my place.
Three words is him for me.
Two words is substitutionary atonement.
One word is grace.
This is why Christianity is different than every other religion in the world and no college will tell you this.
People say, all the religions are the same.
No.
Christianity, unlike any others, all the other religions is you trying to get closer to God.
Christianity is God who came to you.
What is grace?
We know what justice is.
You break into a store and you get what you deserve.
You get a month in prison.
Mercy is you go in front of the judge and he says, you know, I'll give you a week in prison.
Now, grace is something different.
Grace is that when you die and you face your creator and they have a list of everything wrong you've ever done, ever, private and public, omniscient, omnipotent, all of it.
And a judgment is about to be given.
You're about to get your sentencing.
And instead of mercy, instead of justice, all of a sudden someone steps up and says, Hold on.
I know him.
I know her.
I'll serve that prison sentence.
You can go live free.
That is grace, and only Jesus Christ can give you that.
I want to thank you guys.
These last two days have been unbelievable.
We are on the verge of something very special here in New Mexico.
Pastor Steve mentioned it.
I know it might sound silly or kind of not important, but every day I fight these big tech companies and I do two podcasts a day.
We're on 200 radio stations a day.
And there is a massive effort to try to silence me and everything I just talked about through social media.
There's one way that can push back against it, which is kind of circumvent it, is when people on their own individual devices, on the podcast apps, actually subscribe.
It becomes a lot harder to censor.
And so every phone has a podcast app or Spotify app.
Apple has it.
And I encourage you guys, we do a lot of content.
And so to summarize the last four talks, be courageous and stand up for what you believe in.
New Mexico is on the verge of something very, very special.
And the church is essential.
Fight for it.
Thank you guys.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thanks so much, everybody.
God bless you.
Speak to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.