How Smartphones are Strangling the Soul of America
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hey, everybody.
I recently went to North Dakota.
Great people up there.
And I had probably one of the most provocative conversations on why I think these smartphones are destroying our humanity.
I talk about other things as well.
I make a case for life.
I take questions.
And I'm interviewed by a good man, Chris Berg, in North Dakota.
And we have a great conversation.
If you are moved by these conversations, please support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Buckle up, everybody.
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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Well, this is awesome.
Thank you, guys.
Please sit down.
Thank you.
I wanted to talk for a couple minutes and then we're going to have a fun conversation.
But first, let me just say, isn't it nice to be in person together at an event?
This is terrific.
I love the state of North Dakota.
You know, I travel the country to college campuses, so you don't have to.
And is that Teddy Roosevelt?
How you doing, man?
Good to see you.
I think the last time I saw you was literally at Mount Rushmore.
And so it's nice to be in a state that actually loves America and mostly.
And it's very rare, actually, unfortunately.
So, no, we're going to have some fun tonight.
And for those of you that don't know, I'm born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Illinois.
It's a good place to be from.
And unlike most states, Illinois has term limits, but it's a different type of term limits.
It's one term in office, one term in jail.
And so when we ask for our governor's cell number, we actually mean his cell number.
One more.
My grandmother was a lifelong Republican from the north side of Chicago.
She passed away in the mid-1990s, and she's been voting Democrat ever since.
So promise that's it.
No, it's been an amazing journey.
I've been at this for nine and a half, eight and a half years, nine years in June.
I did this instead of going to college.
I took a gap year.
It's been eight and a half gap years of traveling the country.
And I was trying to make the argument back then, and it's more applicable today than ever before, that if we do not take decisive and dramatic action, we're going to lose this gift that we have been given, this constitutional republic of the people and for the people.
And it is a gift because generations before us sacrificed for what we enjoy today, or what we should be enjoying today.
And so what gives me hope is gatherings like this.
And I know that there's a lot of people here that have been open critics of what I consider to be the worst mistake in American history, which is what we did to ourselves, which is the lockdowns.
The lockdowns will go down as the worst mistake in American history, and we should never lock down our country again.
Ever.
Now, let me be very clear.
And I prefer clarity over agreement, as the great Dennis Prager says.
The virus is a very real thing, and it's especially a very real threat for certain people in the American population.
There's all sorts of threats, though, to humanity and human beings.
And you must have a really good reason to want to shut down the entire American economy, mandate masks.
We'll get to that in a second.
Shut down all of our schools and micromanage human behavior.
And if all of a sudden you're losing more young people to suicide than to the Chinese coronavirus, which is what happened in California, then all of a sudden that's a government-inflicted trauma on its own citizens.
That's government coming in and saying, we know what is best for you, and we are going to micromanage every single one of your decisions, forgetting this idea of American liberty, especially when we had churches being closed across the country and Planned Parenthoods remaining open.
When if you just wanted to be able to assemble, I guess we could say this is a peaceful protest or whatever they're going to say in Minnesota.
You know, yeah, the buildings are burning, but it's a mostly peaceful protest here, you know, in Minneapolis.
That was perfectly fine.
And what it really showed me more than anything else over the last year is how fragile our freedoms are.
It's very important to recognize government does not give us our freedoms.
This is something that we don't do a good enough job of teaching our young people.
Our freedoms are natural.
They come from our Creator because we are made in his image.
Our rights come from God, not from government.
And for the first time in American history, we decided to give away all those freedoms and liberties by a group of people that said they were trying to keep us safe.
And so there's a whole new kind of weird, strange cable expert that came expert, that came, cable news expert that came onto the scene, these medical experts that have been wrong about everything.
And Dr. Fauci should have been fired the first time he opened his mouth.
He's been wrong about everything.
And what we have found, what we have found is the states that locked down actually are in a worse position than the states that opened up their economy fully in May, like Florida that had open restaurants and open schools and opened small businesses in May versus California.
Florida has a much older population than California, yet their death rate and their virus rate is lower.
They have a lower rate of mental health issues, alcoholism, drug usage, higher small business rate.
We've lost 40% of our small businesses over the last year.
And so if you wanted to get Jeff Bezos richer, well, then of course you're going to lock down the American economy because all of us then go straight to our smartphones and our devices and we start ordering packages instead of going to the local carpenter, going to the local convenience store.
If you wanted to make America's ruling class, who hate you, by the way, they actually hate the values of North Dakota.
And this is the first time in our country's history where the richest people actually have contempt for the people that got them rich.
I want you to think about that deeply.
I'm a big fan of Teddy Roosevelt, which is somewhat controversial in Republican circles because I don't think they understand Teddy Roosevelt.
But I'm a big fan of Teddy Roosevelt.
But even the people that Teddy Roosevelt went after, the trust-busting that he did, Andrew Carnegie, Mellon, J.P. Morgan, they loved their country.
The industrialists back in the early 1900s, they might have had too much power and influence, but they were Americans.
I cannot say that about our tech companies right now.
I cannot say that about Bill Gates.
I cannot say that about Jeff Bezos.
I cannot say that about the people that run these companies that have made literally hundreds of billions of dollars.
In fact, it's the opposite.
In fact, the people that run our big companies, Delta, that run major league baseball and Coca-Cola, they have contempt for you.
And this is what I call down, this is what I call a top-down revolution, which is a small group of people that are preemptively striking you.
People in the heartland, you understand they're obsessed with you, right?
You have people that are worth $100 billion that could take a plane to anywhere on the planet, that can eat any food that they desire, that could drink anything at any time.
They have real power, but yet they continually comment that the real problem in America is not Jeff Bezos and $165 billion he has.
No, it's the Christian welder in North Dakota.
That's the problem.
And we have to do everything we can to crush that person.
No, it's the person that's working in an oil rig in western North Dakota.
That's the problem.
And this is a top-down revolution, and it's happening in real time, where the most powerful people, instead of trying to govern our country and try to pass down something at least somewhat healthy to the next generation, they're saying, you know what?
We're going to strike the people before they get angry that we have stole so much from them.
And that's a very unprecedented cycle of events.
And so we go back to these lockdowns.
The lockdowns only made this worse.
The lockdowns made the wealthiest people in America wealthier than any other time in human history, even wealthier than when Teddy Roosevelt was president, which is really hard to believe.
It also did nothing for health at all whatsoever.
Now, two weeks of lockdowns, I understand.
You're trying to figure out what you're dealing with.
You're waiting for the data.
I sympathize with that.
But then you go into June, you go into July, you go into August, you go into the fall, you go into the winter, and they took Christmas and Easter from us, by the way.
And we're supposed to believe this is all under the guise of public health.
I said this back in May, and I'm going to say it again.
This is a social conditioning exercise, and we are failing it.
This is about control.
This is not about health.
So what's the proper way we can go about doing this?
And again, I actually have a rule.
I try not to weigh in on local politics.
I really don't because I don't live here.
And the same way I don't like Americans trying to go weigh in on foreign countries politics unless you really know the issue.
But from what I understand, there is a bill that has passed through the House and the Senate that would remove a mask mandate.
And that's at least what I understand.
And if that is true, then the governor should sign that bill.
And that's as far as I'm going to weigh in on that.
And so, again, there might be more complications on that.
So again, I only say that because this idea that we're going to use, we're now going to require you to go wear a piece of cloth over your mouth because we are now in control.
I thought it was my body, my choice, first of all, from all the collectivists.
Secondly, there's, and if you believe masks work, then so be it.
I'm mask agnostic, meaning it comes from a Greek word agnosis, which without knowledge, if you believe they work, then go ahead, do it.
But you're all of a sudden going to force people to wear them, then that's a violation of their individual liberty and their sovereignty.
And it's against what I, people say, Charlie, what does it mean to be a conservative today?
I said, it really means this, is that our agenda is a pro-human agenda.
It's that simple.
It's not a pro-technology agenda.
It's not a pro-woke agenda.
It's not a pro-chaos agenda.
Every single public policy choice that we support as conservatives, from being pro-life, to putting more police in the streets to allowing parents to have choice in their education to not mandating masks to caring more about small businesses than Amazon is a pro-human agenda.
That's exactly what conservatives should articulate.
And I'm afraid, I'm sure you guys are, in a variety of different ways, we are dehumanizing our young people and we're dehumanizing each other.
And what a better example of dehumanization than forcing people to walk around with masks all the time.
That is the literal definition of dehumanization.
And I have been a critic for a long time.
And again, the media hates it when I mention it, but I'm going to be consistent.
I'm a critic of, in the Middle Eastern world, of women having to literally mask up.
I always called it dehumanizing.
And we have too, by the way.
If you guys don't remember some of the debates like 10 years ago, a lot of conservatives weighed in on it and they've been really silent on us masking ourselves.
And I think it's child abuse to have a three-year-old wear a mask.
I think it's child abuse to have a child thinking that this is normal.
And they're like, oh, they're going to have this new normal.
Like whatever sort of weird tech company-funded normal you think it is, I already hate it.
You haven't even finished your sentence.
Because these are people that don't believe there's a difference between man and woman.
These are people that want to destroy women's sports.
They're funding it and they're espousing these ideas.
And so, insofar that that fight has come here to North Dakota, you know, I want to applaud the state legislature for pushing forward that bill.
That's the right thing to do.
And so I'll say a couple other things and then we'll come out and we'll have a conversation.
And actually, it ties with the lockdown.
So America went through three inflection points the last year.
And those of us that love America and love human beings and are conservatives, we failed all three of them.
The first was the lockdowns.
We're finally, hopefully, getting past that.
And all the mandates that came from there.
By the way, I could go for two hours on the human cost of the lockdowns.
You guys don't even understand the beginning of it.
Do you know that prescriptions for young children for anxiety is up 2,000% in the major counties across the country?
We did that because we decided to lock that down.
And we say that human contact is not essential.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, I could go through every single statistic.
Suicide, mental health, anxiety, depression, self-inflicted harm, one after the other.
By the way, not to mention domestic abuse.
All of a sudden, we're like, hey, let's make it so that women who are abused have to go live with their abusers, which was one of the most anti-women things we could have ever done in our country.
Anyway, the lockdowns, we failed.
The second thing, which is not far from here that I do want to comment on, is because of one incident that was immediately misrepresented, we decided, without very few people acting with courage, to accept this argument that America is a racist country.
And that not only that, we're going to go a step further.
We're going to say that all white people are racist.
And then if you do not admit it and take a knee and fund our companies and say it every single day and have a yard sign and the bumper sticker and post the black square, we're going to find you and humiliate you and make your life miserable.
And I was an early critic of this because I grew up in a very racially diverse part of Chicago where we actually cared about character, not skin color.
I know it's a really bizarre thing, where we didn't look at an audience or a group of people and say, oh, they're all white people.
I'm like, no, they're actually all really decent people.
And I actually didn't think about people's race.
In fact, if you're obsessed with race all the time, there's something really wrong with you.
Like, you should find Jesus and like read the Bible for a little bit.
I mean, there's something like really wrong with you.
And I actually believe that most Americans don't think about race all day long.
In fact, I think we're teaching that.
I've been a very vocal critic of all this because America is the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world.
America was founded on freedom, not on slavery.
The Northwest Ordinance, believe it or not, Ohio used to be considered the Northwest in America.
Ohio and Indiana was a declaration where it said no new slaves are allowed to expand into these territories, ratified by the United States Congress as one of their first acts of Congress right after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
They very well could have said, hey, we're going to allow all the slave traders to go into the Northwest Territories, but the founding fathers and George Washington, our first American president, said, no, any new territory is going to be a free territory because that's a reflection of our values.
Now, that short little vignette I just, 90 seconds, wouldn't it be nice if every single American kid in our schools understood that very basic truth?
And I could go on further.
There's so much depth there that I could dive into.
But whether, we all know this, almost every single person in America is afraid of being called the R-word.
It's the most powerful word in the American political discourse, being called a racist, obviously.
And no one wants to be called that because basically it's the new scarlet letter.
If you get called that, you could lose jobs, friends, you could potentially get kicked out of fraternities and sororities.
And so we are willing to do things we otherwise would not do to justify to other people that actually hate us that we're not a racist.
Now, let me be very clear.
If you are a racist and you harbor those deep resentments, then you have work to do.
You have people to apologize to.
I hope you get in contact with your Creator through his Son, Jesus Christ.
And I really hope that you seek forgiveness.
I mean that.
But let me be very clear.
If you're not a racist and you treat people decently and you have basically for your entire life, then you have nothing to apologize for.
You are not in default of that position just because God made you a certain way or because you have a certain skin color.
That's a wildly controversial thing to say on college campuses now.
And then the third inflection point is the election and what happened there.
And let me just say this as bluntly as possible.
If we do not fix the way we do elections in this country, we're never going to have another election.
We have to fix the way that we do elections in our country.
And I'm sure that North Dakota does it much better than Georgia, my goodness.
But look, I could go through the election in a variety of different ways.
There's things I think the president could have done better.
There's things that the campaign could have done better.
There's things that the media did.
There's things that the tech companies did to prevent the information from being spread.
Despite all of that, Donald Trump got closer than anyone would have ever believed, not to mention all of the nonsense and the shenanigans and quite honestly, the treachery that happened in the ballot registration, the ballot dropping, the voter harvesting, the vote counting, the late night ballot drops, that whole process, I really hope that it gets reformed, not just reformed, it needs to get dramatically moved in the right direction.
And so we need to ask ourselves the question, why are elections important?
Well, elections are pressure release valves.
It's all that prevent us from descending into the third world and going to a place of permanent chaos.
Elections are a place where if you're really angry, you could circle a date on your calendar and say, I'm so angry, but I can't wait to do my silent little protest and it's going to be our little secret because all my friends might like Biden, but I love Trump.
That's a thing that elections are supposed to offer you.
But when you don't trust your elections, if you do not trust the mechanism that you're actually able to express your voice, then all of a sudden that entire pressure release valve disappears.
So we are flirting with some very dangerous territory here.
And instead of reforming our elections, Democrats want to pass HR1, which would do the opposite, which would forever damage our elections.
And then Georgia wants to make a very, just very vanilla, moderate change to election law.
And they get accused of like, oh, you're saying that you can't distribute water to people in line.
First of all, you can.
Second of all, never knew voting was that dehydrating.
Third of all, you can bring your own water.
Fourth of all, again, we're talking about voting, not Navy SEALs training, right?
Like, the whole thing is like so bizarre.
And they're like, oh, it's Jim Crow 2.0.
Okay, you realize that this allows Sunday voting, which most black people use to vote in Georgia.
The only difference that drives them absolutely nuts is that if you're going to use a mail-in ballot, you have to prove who you are.
That's it.
It's not exactly a controversial thing, but they're so angry about it.
And this should give you the entire story of the 2020 election.
Because whatever just happened, that's probably where a lot of that happened is in the mail-in balloting nonsense, in a practice that the New York Times itself called ballot laundering, which is picking up ballots to people that never requested them, people that got extra ballots, to things that move.
And there's an entire underground criminal industry that does exist.
It was exposed by the New York Times to go pick up those ballots, fill them out anonymously, and put them in drop boxes funded by Mark Zuckerberg.
Now, people say, well, that didn't happen enough to be able to sway things.
First of all, you don't know that.
Second of all, we're talking about margins of 10,000, 11,000, 15,000, 20,000 votes.
So when all of a sudden things are right within that marginal difference, those things absolutely can be consequential.
And so then you have the president of the United States and the CEOs of Delta and Coca-Cola literally waging economic warfare against Georgia.
And so they say it's all about fighting systemic racism.
So they move the Major League Baseball All-Star game from a 60% black county that would have been a $30 million stimulus to the black community and $100 million stimulus to Atlanta to a white county in Denver with a bunch of kind of mountain hippies, I guess.
I'm sure if you guys have friends that are basically all white and really rich.
And they say, no, we do not want to economically support the black community in downtown Atlanta because we're fighting for the black community.
I'm like, wait, I'm sorry, what?
And of course they don't get called out on it.
And now Denver is going to get the Major League Baseball game.
And this goes to the final thing I'll say is this, and I want to explore this, which is that corporations are not your friend.
There are two threats to your liberty right now.
They're coming from both government and they're coming from corporations.
So we're going to have a conversation here.
And as we do, we're going to do some questions.
But I want to thank you guys for being here tonight because it's very important that we start to assemble physically again.
We are human beings.
We are not cyborgs.
Enough of the Zoom and Skype and YouTube nonsense.
And we have to start to show the world that we are not going to tolerate the intentional destruction of this beautiful gift and this constitutional republic that we have been given.
We're not going to take it anymore.
And it starts tonight.
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I don't know about you, but after that, I'm like, 18 million things I'm excited to visit with you about.
But one of the things that jumped out to me when I first met you is just your humility.
I mean, what you're doing is absolutely incredible.
And so because you're so humble, I don't think a lot of people really know your story from where you started to where you are today.
So let's just start there.
Let's start about the Charlie Kirk story.
Well, thank you.
So I grew up in Chicago, as I mentioned.
Went to Wheeling High School as a public high school.
And I was going to go to West Point.
That was my life ambition.
Didn't get in.
Ended up being the best thing that never happened to me.
And that's a good lesson for all of you guys out there that sometimes there's a better thing in store for you.
I told my parents that I was really concerned about the decline of Western civilization.
And they kind of laughed.
And I said I wanted to do something about it.
And so I had some really good mentors.
My parents were super supportive.
They really were.
And they were supportive.
And actually, the most provocative thing a young person can do in upper middle class Chicago suburbia when you aren't a complete loser.
And that's not go to college, right?
It's like the one thing you're not allowed to do.
You know, drugs, perfectly fine.
Drunk driving, we got a whole program for that.
You know, not going to college, like you really need some help, right?
And so I have a whole speech on that.
We can explore.
But no, they were super supportive.
And I had no money, no connections, no idea what I was doing.
And just started traveling the country and started to kind of learn as we went.
And Turning Point USA now is the premier conservative student organization on campus out there with thousands and thousands of young people.
We just had our Southwest Regional Conference and our Young Latino Leadership Summit in Phoenix yesterday.
I've been all over the place in the last 24 hours.
It's been very eventful.
And we launched a podcast about two years ago.
And it's now consistently the top 10 of all Apple News podcasts, which we're very thankful for.
We're on 85 radio stations across the country every single day.
And at Turning Point USA, we've got about 165 people on full-time staff and host the biggest events.
You guys have probably seen our videos.
We have a lot of success stories.
We've had a lot of fun.
Candace Owens got her start with us, who's terrific, as you guys all know.
And so, yeah, look, we want to play a piece, play a part, be a piece, I guess you could say, in changing the trajectory of our nation because currently we all know where it's headed.
But share with people where you started.
I mean, the story told me I'm Sarah's been, hey, Chris, I went to Madison, Wisconsin.
That's funny.
Yeah, I really didn't know what I was doing.
I just had energy, and that's about it.
So that's a good lesson for all the young people out there.
If you just are willing to outwork other people and take risks and be bold and be daring, this country still rewards that.
Do not let your teachers or the negative people in your life tell you different.
You could still be rewarded for that in America.
And so I had no idea what I was doing.
I didn't know college activism.
So I just drove up to UW-Madison.
Which is a bastion of liberalism.
Of course it is.
And I kind of had like a friend there and a connection of one of the people that were trying to get us started, Catherine.
And I set up a card table and started talking to students.
And we started the chapter from that.
And it was that organic, right?
And so then I traveled the country.
And as I started to speak more events, I started to meet some people and raise some more money.
And then I realized kind of what an organization is and what it can do.
And I mean, they don't teach you any of this stuff in high school, right?
They teach you how to hate your country, but they do not teach you.
I literally did not know how to write checks, bank account, personal finance.
Oh, it's true.
Find me a high school that does and send your kid there because my high school was all about, I mean, my high school when I was there was better than most, but there was definitely the liberal undertones and garbage there.
But it's been one amazing blessing after the other.
And we definitely hit an inflection point when I had an amazing opportunity to meet the president when he was a candidate.
I personally went all in for him when many conservatives thought he had no chance of winning.
And so I became the body man to Donald Trump Jr. and just basically fetched Diet Red Bulls and took pictures for him while still trying to figure all this stuff out.
That was only four years ago and a couple months ago.
And I mean, I wasn't nobody at the time.
I was still doing a couple things, speaking and TV here, but it was one 1,000th of what we have now, right?
And I just saw this amazing opportunity.
And again, this whole thing about Russian collusion, I always laugh about it.
Like, oh, yeah, you colluded with Putin.
I'm like, I was the bodyman to John Jr.
We got our, we got our Columbus to Cincinnati and Cleveland mixed up.
We couldn't order a pizza, let alone collude with Putin, okay?
Like this idea that we were part of this like intercontinental conspiracy.
I'm like, this was the most organic, people-driven campaign in the history of the planet.
Like, oh, yeah, we're being driven by some Russian oligarch is ridiculous.
And so, obviously, Trump won.
And unlike most politicians, President Trump actually cared about the people that helped him get there, which is like a really weird thing, right?
And so most politicians are far too transactional.
It actually runs against the bias most people have about Trump, which is that he just uses people and discards them.
It's the exact opposite, and I could speak to that.
He spoke at our events.
He spoke at four of our events in a 16-month period.
He endorsed our book that I wrote about him that I still think is a very applicable, good book about kind of where these ideas came from and what we should be arguing for.
So, look, I'm the luckiest guy in the world and unbelievably blessed to be able to travel the country.
I give 330 speeches a year, more or less.
And so, a lot, sometimes multiple a day, and again, two podcasts a day and do the radio and plus run turning points.
So, I have trouble sitting still.
And so, this is a really good line of work for me to be in.
Well, congratulations.
Thank you.
Thank you.
One of the things that really jumped out in your conversation, we are going to do this town hall, so we're going to get to some of your questions as well.
But I think one of these that jumped out tonight was the power of your faith.
Yes.
So, talk to us about that.
Yeah, so I've been talking about that more in the last couple of years.
And I've been a Christian since fifth grade.
I gave my life to Christ when I was, yeah, I guess I was 12 years old.
Yeah.
And so, but I was taught incorrectly that Christians shouldn't get involved in politics.
Has anyone heard that at all?
I'm sure you have.
Of course, you have.
And I was always taught that whatever political engagement I did, do not let it kind of get into the religious sphere.
And I actually believed that up until a couple of years ago when I met my current pastor, Rob McCoy, at an event, I'll tell him he has an enthusiastic group of people that love him.
Thank you for that.
Yeah, he's awesome.
And so he's a pastor of a great church in California.
I'll tell you a little bit about him.
And he gave this unbelievable speech at this conservative event.
I had no idea who he was, right?
And then he exits by like, oh, come to my church.
I'm like, pastors talk like this?
Like, what?
And so I go up to him and I introduce, and we get to know each other.
And I realized that I was lied to, that not only should Christians get involved in politics, but Christians formed this country through the first great awakening of the sermons of Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield and many others, and that the Protestant Reformation was directly instructive towards the formation of America.
And there's been four great awakenings.
I'm happy to go through all of them.
But some Christians say theologically, we shouldn't get involved in politics.
It doesn't say that anywhere in the Bible.
First of all, that's just not true.
It says there's an extensive verse in Jeremiah to seek, which comes from a Hebrew word, badrash, which means the demand, desire, or aim, the welfare or the shalom, the peace of the nation of which you are in, for the peace, the shalom of that nation is your welfare.
So think about that.
So that your welfare is tied to the welfare of your nation.
Now, some of you might say, ah, no, it's not true.
What happens to the nation doesn't impact me?
We know that's a biblical truth through what happened in the Soviet Union.
That the welfare of the people of the Soviet Union was far less.
It was like a way worse condition than that what we had in the United States.
We knew that from Cuba.
We know that from now in China and North Korea.
So that biblical truth remains true to today.
But also, the people that say that will have to wrestle with the, they have to explain the Old Testament heroes of Esther, Mordecai, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Joseph, just to name a few, of people that were the counselor to the king to influence secular government for God's purpose.
It says in 1 Timothy, which is argued by historians, the last thing that Paul wrote, where it's a beautiful letter where he knows he's going to get killed, right?
Paul's in a Roman prison, and he's like, this is it, I'm done.
And that's the verse that is commonly quoted: I've run the good race, and I'm finishing well.
But there's a verse before that.
He says very clearly that to pray for the leaders in authority that you might live quiet and peaceable lives.
And if you go back to the original Greek, he's emphasizing quiet and peaceable as what we should desire.
And if you're not living in quiet and peaceable lives, then that's a contract that is being broken.
And even further, and I could go through verse by verse, like you know, the dozens that speak to this, but what pastors are really saying or what Christians are really saying is, hey, Christianity is supposed to be not controversial, okay?
That's what Christianity is about, which is a very bizarre theological belief if you actually read the scriptures.
It's like, it's just this weird, like, hippie Jesus that has started to come onto the scene the last 20 years, that hippie was like this John Lennon character that was like the birds and the bees and the meadows, and he's just kind of like, we're all going to get along.
Like, there's an element to Jesus, I guess, that you could point there.
But Jesus was 100% grace and 100% truth.
And Jesus was unafraid to call right from wrong, to say that he was the way, the truth, and the life, and the only way to get to the Father was through him.
And so this idea that Christianity shouldn't be controversial, I don't think you should seek controversy.
The scriptures tell you that.
Of course not.
You shouldn't go run after it, but you should always speak the truth.
And I also believe in the parable of the talents that we are going to be judged based on what we are given.
And we as Americans are given a lot more.
We are given more liberty, more freedom, more opportunity, more blessing than any other nation ever to exist in the history of the world.
And I truly believe that when our Creator, when we face our Creator, we are going to be judged of what we did, if anything, with this gift that we have been given that has afforded so many people so much unbelievable and quite honestly undeserved liberty.
That if you actually look at who we are in the state of nature, we're brutal.
We are nasty to each other, as Thomas Hobbes would often say.
So I'm speaking out more and more about my faith.
And I've come to realize, it's also kind of part of this thing that I've developed the last couple of years.
What else are you going to call me?
I mean, the New York Times or the Washington Post, you've already used every single word you could possibly do to slander me.
I don't care, so I'm going to tell you what I believe louder than ever.
And you can write whatever you want about me.
I really don't care.
And so it's the most liberating thing that could ever happen to you.
So I'm happy to dive deeper into that.
But Christian pastors in particular, if there's any here, any watching, you need to take your proper role in the ecclesia.
Ecclesia is a Greek word that means public square.
Jesus Christ used it at Caesarea Philippi, one of the most famous, yes, yet misunderstood scriptures in the New Testament.
When Jesus took his disciples up to the mouth of the Jordan River, I've been there multiple times.
And he says, who do you say that I am?
Or who do men say that I am?
And so they say, well, some people say you're Elijah.
Some say that you're John the Baptist.
And then he goes on to say, on this rock, he's pointing to Peter, build my, and the Greek word is ecclesia.
Well, we use church, but it's really deeper.
It's ecclesia, which means political gathering.
It means public square, all-encompassing group that cares about the welfare and the being of all around you.
And when Greeks used to meet about something wrong in their community, they'd say, all right, we're having ecclesia tonight.
And they used to unify around two other Greek words, eleutherian, isonomia, freedom, and equality.
I wonder what country has those two words as central organizing principles.
And so let me just talk pure political science on this really quick, though.
Maybe you're not a Christian or you've been burned by the church.
I get it.
And Christians have done a bad job in a lot of different ways in this country the last couple decades.
And myself included, I'm still learning how to better communicate these things.
But if Christians don't rise up louder than ever before, the country's done.
And so if you care even a little bit about the nation, churches and Christians and pastors have to get more involved than ever before in this fight.
Do you have a photographic memory?
No, I really don't.
I forget a lot.
I have these journals, these thick journals, because I try to take two hours a day.
I recommend this to anyone.
It's actually, it's the most liberating thing.
People say, Charlie, how do you keep up your good cheer?
I learn something new every single day.
And if you're learning, you're making progress in a good way, not bad progress like they want us to.
But you're developing your character, hopefully.
You're pursuing wisdom.
And so I actually, I look back at these journals.
My goodness, I forgot basically 95% of it.
But if I only remember 5% of what I learned over 10 years, I'm 50% smarter.
And so a decade from now, I'm going to be much smarter than I am today and wiser, hopefully.
So no, I don't have a.
So what was your strategy that you said that for two hours you do what?
Yeah, so ever since I started doing radio and podcasting, I learned this from my friend Rush Limbaugh, who was just, we should just honor him.
He was just the best.
He was just so great.
And I got to know him.
And I said, Rush, what does your daily schedule look like?
And he told me that he would take time with his phone put aside and not with emails, reading and reading history books or going into philosophy.
I mean, the one misrepresentation of Rush that people don't realize is he was a deep thinker.
And I could tell you from doing two hours of radio day, doing three hours is even harder.
And to make it interesting alone with no guests, that's hard.
And he was able to do that and predict things before they happened and come up with one-liners that all of us used because he was so deep into the knowledge that built Western civilization, therefore unafraid to make these bold, these bold predictions.
And so I try to do that.
And so I spend two hours a day.
I just did it on the plane right over of no distractions, listening to podcasts, of interesting people, authors, things I agree with.
I try to do a little bit less of what I disagree with, not because I'm any less interested in it, but I have a pretty good idea where they're coming from right now.
I do.
And I still do a fair amount of it, but I just find it less.
I just fall asleep.
I'm like, yeah, okay, everyone's thinking racist and the victim oppressor.
Like, I get it.
It's like after the 95th time, it's somewhat.
Maybe if they start to, maybe if they innovate themselves a little bit, then I'll listen to their garbage.
But not a lot of that.
But that's what I try to do every day.
So we want to take some questions.
So, Scott, if you have something, let us know.
But first, before we do, Scott, I just got to bring something up real quick because he and I were upstairs chatting for a few minutes.
And he said something, and I'm going to take my phone out, but he said something that I think is going to shock a lot of people.
And so I just want to give you a chance to expound on what we were talking about and see how that landscape.
Yeah, I've become strangely anti-technology in the last year.
And I want you all to think deeply about this.
And I'm intentionally going to be provocative.
I think these smartphones are destroying our humanity.
I think that our young people are being robbed of what I had, which was this amazing thing when I was nine years old, when my mom told me to go outside and I had to go play.
It's really an amazing thing.
No, it was actually awesome.
And I kid you not, I would go through these hour-long worlds that I created purely through my imagination.
And it was, people say, Charlie, how are you?
I actually think that was a huge reason why I'm able to do what I do today.
I was using my mind all the time.
And then I go out to these dinners and these parents are handing these smartphones and no one's talking.
No one's having any conversation.
They're just staring at these devices.
And so let me just say a couple things on this.
And we have to control technology before we are slaves to this technology.
And it's happening quicker than ever before.
Remember, I said pro-human agenda, right?
This is an anti-human device and an anti-human thing that's happening to us in real time, from virtual reality to augmented reality to the social psychology behind it.
Here's a couple things to think about.
Apple has dozens of full-time neuroscientists on their payroll that all day they have children as lab rats to find out how your kids can be more addicted to those devices.
There's something really wrong about that.
There's something really anti-human about that.
And I don't even think we're able to understand or process the complexity of what's happening to the neuroscience, the chemistry of the brain when we're spending six hours a day on average under the age of 20 on these devices.
That's number one.
Number two, the people that have actually built these applications, they don't let their kids use them.
I want you to think about that.
The people that have built them, that your grandchildren and your children are using or the young people, they know the power in them because they built it.
So they have rules in their own house.
No smartphones till you're 18.
Number three, these, you are not getting anything out of them.
You are the product.
They are selling you every time you go on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and YouTube.
You are the product.
Now, I'm not saying it's all bad.
I mean, we got cameras.
Some people are filming me now.
You could find out where you are a little bit easier.
Actually, that's a negative thing.
I'll be honest.
I got in this debate with somebody.
Oh, smartphones are the greatest thing ever.
Like technology all the time.
By the way, if we have no technological advancements in smartphones for the rest of my life, I'll be super happy.
Honestly, enough.
Like, we have to slow it down because it's destroying the spirit and the soul of how God made us.
But he's like, oh, no, it's a great thing because we have maps and GPS all the time.
And at first, I agreed with him.
I think there's some truth to that.
But I talked to these 16-year-olds.
They have no understanding of the neighborhood around them.
They do not know a compass.
They didn't even know how to find their home if they were 10 minutes outside of their.
And I said, you know what?
No, I actually don't agree.
I think it's a bad thing.
I think it's a good thing when you know physically where you are oriented with your point of reference and metaphorically where you're oriented in your life of your point of reference.
And you think about just the little social psychology things, right?
So all of a sudden you want to become a follower.
Well, that's a really way to make people obey.
Like, oh, I'm a follower of Beyoncé on social media.
Should we be creating leaders, not followers?
Little stuff like that has been thought.
None of this is a mistake.
So the way you have to look at these phones is like how you have to look at a Tarantino movie, or it's been thought through.
It's scripted.
Everything that you see, like, for example, if you're going to watch Saving Private Ryan and they show a character with a gun and they emphasize the gun, that gun is going to be used a couple minutes later, right?
That's you guys, that's film 101.
Same thing with these phones.
When you see something, nothing in there is a mistake.
They are built to have you be chemically addicted to them, including your children.
And so I'm of the opinion, and by the way, it's going to get probably a million times worse, and I'm not exaggerating with artificial intelligence.
And artificial intelligence, I understand enough to be dangerous, but I trust the people in charge that are warning us about it, like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
We have to regulate artificial intelligence before artificial intelligence regulates you.
And I believe that we've had multiple thousands of years of human beings having a certain pattern of behavior, getting married, having children, going to work, working with your hands.
And now we're basically saying all of that was a mistake.
And I'm calling BS on all of that.
I'm saying I do not want to live in this Aldous Huxley's Brave New World combination of 1984 with Orwell, where everything we do is monitored.
There is no solitude.
There is no privacy.
We only seek pleasure, the next dopamine rush.
There is no virtue.
And I think these devices have a lot to blame for that.
I think these devices where you get a next notification of your friend liking your post, or you're getting these endless Facebook arguments, that is not how I believe it's not the optimal human condition.
And so technology has a place.
I think it's a positive thing when we say that we can rebuild hearts for heart transplants using technology.
But that's us controlling technology.
We've done the opposite.
We've said everyone is able to handle a thermonuclear weapon in their right-hand pocket.
And I think that is a tragic error and mistake.
And so if I was in charge, which I'm not, I would say we have to regulate this like we regulate nuclear weapons.
That we are going to use it for the benefit of humanity, but we are going to be transparent with where they are and how they're spread out.
But we are going to understand very calmly, very, very clearly with our citizens that these things very well are going to create a generation of 10 or 20 years where we are going to be automatons and cyborgs.
And people are going to say, if you want to be happy, just go put on your glasses.
You're upset with the circumstance around you?
Mark Zuckerberg said that at a stockholder meeting last month.
He said, people are not going to have to leave their homes soon.
Just put on your glasses and you'll be able to be transported to a new reality.
As far as I have breath in my lungs, I refuse to be a slave to these devices and I will protect a pro-human agenda.
So have you ever browsed in incognito mode?
It's probably not as incognito as you think.
And why would it be?
Incognito mode, like the Chrome browser itself is a Google product and Google has made its fortune by tracking your movements online.
There's even a $5 billion class action lawsuit against the company in California where it's accused of secretly collecting user data.
Google's defense, incognito does not mean invisible.
So how do you actually make yourself as invisible as possible online, ExpressVPN?
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My question to you is because you talked about how the ruling class despises people here in North Dakota.
But it feels like right now we're run by a corporatocracy.
That's exactly right.
So how do you stop it?
Well, this, you guys being here right now is part of it.
Boy, how you solve it is the hardest part of it.
I'm really good at diagnosing the problems, then walking off stage.
Have a nice night.
Thank you.
So let me reinforce how hard this is because we are now in a moment in time when people you didn't vote for now have more power than people you voted for.
I want you to think deeply about that.
That's never happened before, where people you didn't vote for have more power than the people you voted for.
And so that's a violation of the constitutional promise.
So the constitutional promise is power is going to be left to the consent of the governed.
What was the American Revolution about?
It wasn't about tea.
It was not about taxes even.
It was about consent.
That you are not allowed to have major power without my permission.
That's basically the American system, right?
Now we have forgotten that system or we've just kind of ignored it because these corporations have funded our politicians' campaigns and we fell in love with this idea that the more cheap plastic from China, the better, that companies are always going to be in our best interest.
We know that's not true.
We've seen that in the last couple of weeks.
So it has to be a variety of different things.
Number one, if I was in charge, or if at least I have input, I'm going to tell you my input, is that the best thing that we can do is not send our kids to college and try to raise a new generation of entrepreneurs.
We have to build new stuff quickly and we have to build them boldly.
And I'm talking about, anyone want to start an airline?
I mean, that's how bold we have to think.
Soft drink companies.
I mean, we have to, college is a great way to learn not how to start a business.
I always laugh, like, oh, yeah, I'm going to college for entrepreneurship.
I'm like, you're learning.
What would you like?
The study of entrepreneurship.
It's the one thing you literally just do.
You have energy and you have spirit.
You take risks.
You get tougher.
You learn from other people and you self-correct.
I go to college for entrepreneurship.
Like, what are you talking about?
You're going to college for entrepreneurship.
And then I'm not trying to offend anyone that goes to college for entrepreneurship.
But like, I went to one of these schools and they're not even learning from an entrepreneur.
They're learning from some professor who has never started anything in their life.
And I'm like, at the very least, just go talk to a couple business guys before that.
And so entrepreneurship is one of the ways we're going to save this.
That's number one.
We have to start new stuff and start it quickly, invest in our people, and get these 16, 17, 18-year-olds that have the energy, the ambition, the wherewithal, the people to do what I did, which, again, the first five years when I started Turning Point, it was red-eye flights, never going home, getting my teeth kicked in, borrowing money, the stuff you have to do.
Praise God, we're not in that position anymore.
But I was nuts enough and 21 years old to do it.
But when you go to college, you immediately have a liability.
You have a student loan debt.
You have to service.
You're less likely to take a risk.
You're filled with bad ideas.
You're in a culture of negativity.
You want to be a cog in the machine.
When you're in a high schooler, you actually still think you could take on the world.
That's a good thing.
So the entire system of creating new risk takers has been completely inverted.
So that's number one.
Number two, and this is the more controversial one, which is that we as Republicans have to be willing to use political power to check corporate America.
And that's something we're usually afraid to say.
But if Delta Airlines and Major League Baseball want to wage economic warfare against Georgia, a sovereign state, our fellow countrymen, then we should be unafraid to say that you're going to lose your exemptions and that you're going to pay a price.
And I don't know what that price is, quite honestly, but we should explore it.
I'm sure someone has some good ideas.
I know Teddy Roosevelt showed us what a price could be.
Truly.
That if you do not represent our values, if all of a sudden you're going to be a company that treats America like a colony and not our home, then no, you're going to pay a price for that.
Because all of a sudden, you're against what is going to continue the American promise for our children and our grandchildren.
I do not come to that conclusion lightly.
I don't.
I don't like saying that we're going to use political power.
In fact, I try to hesitate.
I try to prevent myself from that.
I'm afraid that we have very few things left at our disposal.
So, what does that look like?
The Democrats are enthusiastic to use political power.
They use every level of agency to try to remake America in their image, all the time, always.
From the IRS to the Department of Justice to the Employment Prevention Agency, the EPA.
I know that would probably get some applause here in North Dakota, right?
They are enthusiastic about using political power to try to remake America in their image.
Republicans are terrified of it.
It's a very simple thing: is that if Amazon is going to continue to do what they're doing, or even a better example of Delta Airlines, is, I mean, will the Attorney General of one of these states just send a letter to them and say, why are you trying to wage economic warfare on a sovereign state like Georgia?
Maybe you have monopolistic practices.
Are you representing the best interest of your shareholders?
The point is that the people are actually with us.
This is the most interesting part of all this: we control 27 state legislatures and 31 governors' mansions.
I might have my numbers off a little bit, but the people continually elect Republicans, and then Republicans get paralysis when they're in power to actually do what the Democrats have done to us, which is use political power to destroy our country.
And so at some point, there has to be a reckoning here, which is that people keep showing up in massive numbers to give you power because they feel like they're losing their country.
It's time to wisely start using that power.
Amen.
Amen.
Scott, what do you have for us, my friend?
If you would like to ask a question of Charlie, I'm going to walk up and down the aisles here.
Just raise your hand and I'll stop and see you.
We have a few.
All right, tell Charlie your name and come on over here.
I'll hold the mic so you can just come right here.
Your name and your question.
Hi, my name is Cade Busik.
I'm a junior accounting student at NDSU.
I'm kind of curious to hear how automation factors into your people-first technology, things like automated trucks or the removal of cashiers from places like grocery stores.
Do you think that's a good thing or a benefit to the country going forward?
Or do you think the loss of jobs is going to be detrimental to the country going forward?
Yeah, so this is a great question.
If you would have asked me that five years ago, I would have said, yeah, it's a great thing.
Things are getting better and we'll be able to have less human contact, I guess.
I could see an argument for why driverless cars are better from the auto fatality standpoint.
But until I'm willing to embrace the automation craze, which I'm not, that's part of my entire technology criticism, then you better have a very good reason, very good plan of what you're going to do with 15 million patriotic Americans that shelved all of your grocery stores and busted their tail to make sure you had a wonderful way of life the last couple decades.
And no one has an answer to that.
And another social welfare program is not going to satisfy me.
And so, again, I haven't studied that particular issue deeply, but if you said, Charlie, are you forward or against it?
I would probably be against it because I believe things are changing far too quickly.
And this is why I'm a conservative, not a libertarian.
I'm libertarian on a couple issues like firearms and lockdowns, because I'm very libertarian on guns.
I think the government has no business finding out about any of your guns ever.
That's my opinion.
But I'm not of that opinion when it comes to automation.
And because again, you're looking at already the displacements.
Let me use an example of this.
I was just in Hubbard, Ohio, earlier today for a funeral of a dear friend who was just awesome.
And his name is Tom Patrick.
He loved his country.
And for years, as I got to know him, I grew up in the conservative movement when you never questioned free trade, right?
Like that, you never talked about it.
Free trade is awesome.
Don't you understand?
We get all these piles of plastic from China.
Aren't you happy?
And I was too young and naive to really understand what was happening.
So I drove through Hubbard, Ohio.
It's a population of 7,000 people.
That's eastern Ohio.
Those are like the swing counties, right?
That's Trumbull County, Mahoney County.
You probably seen it on TV.
They view it as like kind of almost like the African jungle, like you go there to go meet a Trump voter, right?
Like that's one of those counties, right?
They come with their news trucks and they like film you like walking back and forth, right?
And so the I was driving through downtown Hubbard, Ohio this morning, and you guys know so many cities like this in North Dakota.
And so many just run-down businesses, completely closed manufacturing plants, but they had one business on the street corner.
They had a Dollar Tree.
And I just found that to be a massive middle finger to Hubbard, Ohio.
You know what that was, though?
No, I want you to think deeply about this.
They had a Dollar General five minutes down the street.
Made a couple of McDonald's and Wendy so we can go give the community diabetes.
Like that's the trade, right?
That somehow we're going to worship the corporate giants.
We can go get overweight and a bunch of cheap plastic from China.
And I said, oh my goodness, this is the best visual I've ever seen of this automation, low-cost craze.
Okay, so all the stuff used to be made within 100 square miles of Hubbard, Ohio.
That's in that dollar tree.
But our leaders decided that free trade was the best thing ever.
So we're going to go shut down all of those manufacturing plants in eastern Ohio because we're going to get cheaper stuff.
Not all for cheaper stuff.
I think that plays a component to trying to make a decision.
But then all of a sudden those manufacturing plants close and you're not going to find a new job for every single person.
So opioids come in.
Families fall apart.
Church tithes go down.
The school district has a little less money.
People move out.
The aspirational ones go to big cities.
And Hubbard, Ohio becomes this kind of slow-motion relic of a time that used to exist.
And for the people that are still there, they get the opportunity to go buy stuff for a dollar for the stuff that used to be made in Hubbard, Ohio.
And so we worshiped the God of seamless economic innovation for decades.
So I'm going to say for all the people that are trying to push that, excuse me, while I call a timeout, before we really soberly try to weigh the costs of always trying to have a small group of corporate oligarchs say what's best for us, or a bunch of investment bankers or private equity guys like Mitt Romney, who literally went around to manufacturing plants and gave them pink slips for a living.
I think that's a really unhealthy thing for our nation.
And I'm willing to pay a little bit more for products if it's made by my fellow countrymen.
So my partner.
How do you make that shift when you've got corporate CEOs, all they care about is Wall Street's quarterly earnings report?
What a great question.
The merger and acquisition model is one of the main problems because there's so much cheap money flowing around and we've indulged in this long-term debt cycle where we don't build companies anymore.
You guys do in North Dakota.
You're one of the few states that do.
But instead, you start companies and you sell companies.
I want you to think about that.
So we used in America, we used to build companies you would hand down to your kids or grandkids.
It'd be this multi-generational ownership.
Now we start companies and try to boost their valuation as quickly as possible and hand it off to some Wall Street firm that are just going to fire all of your friends that used to work there, give you a big check, and merge you into some sort of cog of a massive corporate machine.
So the system itself has to change.
And let me be very clear.
I believe markets are the best way to organize society.
I do.
I believe in private property.
I just gave a whole speech on entrepreneurship, and I hate lockdowns and government orders and edicts.
But if government is good for anything, it is about, as it says in the United States Constitution, protecting the general welfare of its citizenry.
And it must balance every public policy decision.
And so how do you change it?
Well, the short answer is that you guys have more power than you might think.
And so there's about 800 people here and thousands of people that will be watching here.
And probably a million people will listen to this because I'm going to rebroadcast it as a podcast.
And so if every person who hears me say this all of a sudden makes a decision, you know what?
I'm going to purchase my values for the rest of my life, even 5% or 10%.
That makes a huge difference.
In fact, I can tell you how big of a difference it made.
Coca-Cola is retreating on their entire thing.
They sent out this whole thing.
Like, we believe it's time to work together.
Like, actually, Coke, screw you.
I'm going to buy Pepsi.
Thank you so much.
Amen.
Amen.
And let me say one last thing.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
We're ready, Chris?
I'm literally a talk coach, so I could talk all day long.
Go to the next question.
All right, right here.
Gentlemen, what's your name?
My name's Mike, and I have a question about the incredible double standards that continue.
And the one that comes to mind the most to me is the 2016 election, where the Democrats protested and protested for three and a half years about Russia.
And then this past election, we can't have any hearings.
We can't have nothing.
Everything's shut down.
Social media is shut down.
News don't run stories.
And it's just a terrible corrupt system we have.
And I also want to thank you, Charlie, very much for appearing here in Bismarck.
And God bless you.
Thank you for saying that.
This is an unfortunate reality of the country we're living in right now.
If the left didn't have double standards, they wouldn't have any standards at all.
And it's all they have.
And it's to be on every single side of every issue.
I just love having Joe Biden debate himself on a previous issue.
Whatever issue it is he's been on the other side of.
But look, and this is that what you're actually pinpointing, though, is a deeper problem.
And I think we're all waking up to it.
And I think the awakening is going to happen before the actual end result.
I'm not talking about a religious awakening.
I'm happy to talk about that if people are interested because I think it's a separate issue.
I'm talking about the awakening of this double standard.
We've been lied to by the press.
There is a manipulative top-down scheme to social condition us and sit down and obey.
But the result is going to be what we do today that's actually going to materialize a year or two years from now.
So what do I mean by that?
It's going to be creating the next social media company.
It's going to be creating the next server farm.
It's going to be creating the next institution.
And we as conservatives are not great at building institutions.
Do you know why?
Because we're too busy building things that matter more than institutions, like our family and our communities.
And so now it's time for us to build things that are even bigger than that, that actually have a national appeal and a patriotic underpinning.
So, for example, we need to fix the distribution of information problem in our country.
It is massive.
It is real.
It is significant.
We're trying to do it through radio, and Scott's been amazing with that, and also through podcasting every single day, where we reach millions of people through over-the-top broadcasting.
I am on all the social media channels.
It's just a matter of time before they kick us off or until they render us completely useless.
And so that's actually how we're going to fix this.
They're never going to stop having double standards.
But the only way we're going to fix it, and how many people here say, man, if only my liberal friend or relative saw the things that I saw, then they wouldn't be liberal.
Everyone would agree with that.
It's a distribution of information problem.
And now we have to start getting into the weeds of fixing it.
And so it might be creating your own content.
It might you becoming your own channel of information, of doing a great job of covering the news.
All those things are really, really important.
And so what we can actually do about it is going to take a longer term project.
All right, we have more questions here.
A number of questions were gathered before this audience came.
I want to do one of those, and then this young lady has a question next to me.
Says, Charlie, what are some of the keywords or phrases that divide us?
And how can we as conservatives do better at defining those phrases?
Wow.
Okay.
So what are the keywords and phrases that divide us as conservatives or as the country?
It doesn't say that.
Okay, yeah.
So I'll say this with this whole idea that we're divided as a country.
Of course we are.
I mean, we have the left waging war on our culture.
Like, of course, we're divided.
It's about time we start drawing the lines and we win.
I mean, this idea that we're going to get back to this moment of peace and harmony anytime soon.
You just said they're militarizing downtown Minneapolis in D.C. because someone's going to have a trial of their peers and it's a result that they don't like.
We have Aunt Jemima gone with the wind, Dr. Seuss all canceled.
We have our children learning to hate themselves and hate our country.
We have 100,000 people pouring over our border every single month.
We're bringing in a million people into our country legally when our college graduates and our middle-class workers can't find jobs.
They want to take our weapons and they're suppressing us on social media.
And we're trying to find harmony.
The only way this ends, and this is not a popular thing for people to hear, it wins when we win.
It ends when we win.
And that means that we're going to have to convert and mobilize more people to our perspective to crush the American left in its current form.
And I do not mean physically, obviously, they mean that to us.
I mean that we're going to have to have the dominant cultural institutions.
We're going to have to win elections by bigger margins.
We're going to have to register more voters.
The things we do control, which are like nothing, which is talk, radio, and churches, we're going to have to get even more mobilized and engaged and involved.
And do I seek a time when we can get along with the left?
Of course I do.
It's not in my spirit to try to have discord.
But they're waging war on our home, everybody.
And I want you to look at America as our home.
And that's what it is.
And my grandfather didn't fight in World War II.
So some self-righteous 26-year-old wearing a full mask and antif outfit in Minneapolis can wage war on my home.
I'm not going to tolerate that any longer.
And you guys shouldn't either.
By the way, thank you for supporting the Mass Freedom Bill.
And so I listen to your podcast while I do my cleaning job and everything.
Thank you.
But every once in a while, I'll listen to the liberal podcasts like David Pachman or The Young Turks and stuff.
And every once in a while, they do sometimes stump me a little bit.
So I'm wondering, do you have any tips on when we're hearing the other side, like what to think about?
Should we not listen to the other side?
No, again, I listen to it somewhat.
Happy to help you navigate through any of their arguments.
And again, it's my job to think deeply about this.
You know, you should go live a happy life and not have to worry about this all the time.
No, but the fact you're actually worried about like listening to the other side and going through it says a lot about who you are and your character.
Yeah, we should listen.
Of course, again, I listen to the left quite often, and it's hard not to because, again, I own a smartphone to my own distaste.
I'm trying to divest from it.
In fact, my screen time is going down every single week this year.
That's my goal.
My goal is to get to less than an hour of screen time.
I think I'm going to get it, which is hard.
Good luck.
And so, which is, I get Apple news all the time, which is just filled with dribble.
I'm sure all of you guys do.
Apple gets a total pass in this whole thing, by the way, and they should.
They have access to basically every single smartphone in the country to push notify you with some ridiculous Washington Post article.
So, and I read the Times, and I commonly say in my podcast, I read the New York Times so you don't have to.
But look, I mean, I do encourage you to listen to podcasts that push your boundaries or pursue information that are rooted in truth.
And if a liberal podcast does that, tell me because I'd be very fascinated by that.
But generally, don't spend too much time on that.
If that's not part of your value system or your viewpoint, it could be fun, it can expand your horizon.
But most of why you're going to be listening is to make sense of the world with your deeply held beliefs so you can communicate it to others to keep persevering through what you're doing.
But if there's anything in particular I can help unpack for you, I'd be happy to do that.
I was just wondering, yeah, for some tips.
That's really good, though.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate that.
All right, time for two more.
Raise your hand.
We've got time for two more.
I got one over there.
Anyone else right here?
Okay.
We do have one that came in earlier from the young Republicans.
Do memes really spread the message, Charlie?
Do memes help spread the message?
I think part of it, I mean, sure, I think they probably got Donald Trump elected in 2016.
Yeah, I think it's partially yes.
I think that we obviously do a lot of them at Turning Point.
I'm not even on social media, so I'm not.
My team has all my logins.
That's how I actually found myself.
I'm such a happier person since I deleted all my social media apps.
And I literally just text them what I want tweeted.
It's actually a fun thing.
It's so funny.
I said that I deleted all my social media apps and some ridiculous reporter wrote it up.
Like, Charlie Kirk tweets 20 minutes after he says he deletes all his social media apps.
Like, yes, I deleted them.
I don't have access to them.
Other people, like, it's again, they don't actually believe I don't have them.
But I encourage you guys to maybe do one day a week or two days a week because I realize that I'm a much happier, more centered person because the value of who I am and what I believe and what I think has no influence on some random blue check person on Twitter.
It's actually things that I've read or I've prayed about.
And so I could speak so freely.
So people say, oh, Charlie, you're trending on Twitter.
There's 300,000 tweets about you.
I say, do you know what's so amazing?
It feels exactly the same as you're not trending on Twitter.
It's completely irrelevant.
It's not real life.
It's just some albatross of noise.
And so, do memes work?
I suppose they do.
Yeah.
And I think there's obviously a ceiling to that.
Another question on that note before Goodyear: this young man wants to know who tweets for Donald Trump.
Does Donald Trump tweet when he used to have a Twitter account?
No one tweets for Donald Trump anymore.
But yeah, yeah, he did.
He did it himself.
I've saw him tweet before.
Yeah.
I've seen him.
In case you were wondering, he was a one-finger guy.
All right, tell me your name.
My name is Levi Corum.
I'm a senior at Jamestown High School.
First thing, I just want to say thank you for setting the bar really high for us, young conservatives.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you for saying that.
I just have two questions here.
I'm going to be a freshman in college this fall, and I want to start a Turning Point USA group at Bethlehem University of Minnesota.
And how do I do that?
And then my second question is: in Joe Biden's first couple months as president, he's already gotten the stimulus bill out, and a very small percentage of that bill has gone to us, the people.
And now he wants to get an infrastructure plan, and a very small percentage of that plan wants to actually go to roads and bridges.
How much inflation are we going to face with these bills?
Big time.
If you own land, which there's plenty of it here in North Dakota, you're actually going to do quite well with inflation, unfortunately, because things you can touch and feel do very well when there's more dollars than value.
I'm going to talk about that one second.
First of all, happy to help you with the Turning Point USA thing.
We have Turning Point USA chapters all across the country, high school and college.
I want to thank those of you here tonight that support Turning Point.
You're doing a moral good for our nation.
These are the most courageous young people.
And I want to shout out the young Republicans here, wherever they are.
I saw them.
I met them.
They were great.
Terrific.
Oh, hi.
I'm sorry.
I'm looking in front.
You guys are awesome.
Keep up the great work.
They have courage.
You want to see courage?
Find a young conservative and outspoken about it.
I'm going to tell you a story, though, because we're actually not far from Minnesota of something that happened at White Bear Lake High School last week and a half.
A young lady by the name of Avery Severson wanted to start a turning point USA group at White Bear Lake High School.
You might know it, it's right outside of St. Paul.
And as soon as she decided to start a group, she was a couple days later met with these messages that she did not send, that she's never seen these horribly racist messages and accused of sending these messages.
So instead of having presumption of innocence, due process, the school went nuts.
The teachers had sponsored walkouts.
The students walked out of the school.
She had her name smeared and she was just completely almost destroyed by it.
She had to go to class with security.
She had to take off of school.
And so the FBI got involved, right?
Because it was potentially a hate crime.
They investigated it.
They exonerated her in a couple hours because they find out who actually did it.
Now, they interestingly won't release the name of the person who did it, obviously, because they said the person who did it poses no threat to fellow students in regards to social justice.
It's true.
It was all a hoax.
The school superintendent's own terms was a hoax.
She nearly had her entire life completely and totally destroyed just because she wanted to start a turning point USA chapter.
You guys and young Republicans have experienced similar sort of outrageous things that are happening.
So, but I want to commend you, and I hope you know the people over 50, the adults in the room here, I hope you draw inspiration from young people that are like, you know what?
I know the price and the cost, and I want to do it anyway.
Now, Bethel's not going to be an easy place to do that.
I'm going to be honest.
Like, that's not at all.
And I don't know that intimately, but I know it enough to know that it's probably been taken over by the woke industrial complex.
And so, good luck.
But we're going to be there to support you.
So, when you start the group and you want to advocate and they come after you, you're going to have an infrastructure behind you.
And we need courageous young people to stand up.
But please, for the adults, draw inspiration from these young people that want to do something to save their nation.
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It's such an honor to have you here.
And I just can't thank you enough for coming to North Dakota.
So my question is kind of a tactical question.
There is a group of local parents, grandparents, concerned citizens who are trying to convince the Bismarck School Board to lift the mask mandates.
Or give the parents schools in the schools or to give the parents the ability to make the decision if they want their child masked or not.
What kind of suggestions or tactics do you have for us to convince them to lift the mandate?
First of all, thank you for the question because the fact you guys care about that is awesome.
And again, we're one of the few nations on the planet right now that are actually pushing back against this.
You know, most of Europe just sits and takes it.
They have a couple protests here and there, but nothing like this.
And it's special and it's beautiful.
And it's what makes America America.
And you guys should be commended for that.
It's awesome.
And so tactically, make more noise.
You show up to the school board meetings if they have them with a group this big and you take public comment to 4.30 in the morning.
Seriously.
That's number one.
Number two, you have to come, I don't know, you probably have already done this, but come up with a title and a name for your group.
And don't make it necessarily issue specific if you want it to ever tackle other issues in the future.
So it could be moms for child safety or whatever it is, or moms for, you know, moms for local reform.
You can make it very generic.
But once it's a group, then all of a sudden it has real power.
And it's not just kind of this like sparing thing, like, oh, there's a couple people.
No, there's infrastructure and we have membership and we can contact them and we can mobilize them and we have hierarchy and we meet regularly.
That threatens people.
You see what I'm saying?
A couple of people speaking out.
All of a sudden, as soon as you have a name and you have maybe a logo and a website, then all of a sudden it's a very legitimate thing.
And just the idea that this is even controversial, that we're going to mandate young kids that are not at risk at all, significant risk of dying from the Chinese coronavirus, that we are going to...
If I had to wear a mask in high school, it would have destroyed my high school experience.
And I mean, we are social beings.
We are meant to be able to see people's facial reactions.
God gave us a face for a reason.
It is the argument we used against the Islamic fundamentalists when they push masks for a different reason.
Mask mandates all throughout the Middle East because we believe that connection with human beings is something very special.
And so I think they said you wanted to say something too, right?
No, I think that's the thing.
I wanted to share with you.
There's a fantastic, brand new Stanford peer-reviewed study regarding masks.
Thank you.
And they're like, hey, these things don't work, right?
I mean, it's fantastic.
Yeah, and again, it draws good skepticism towards it.
It finds, it doesn't say they don't necessarily don't work.
It's just like they see no evidence that they do work.
I know those are two different things, but if you don't use that language, then all of a sudden they're going to come after you.
But I don't mean to be semantically technical, but I literally got kicked off Facebook because of something like this, because I used one word wrong on the Dante Wright thing.
I got to tell this story.
So I don't know if you guys saw this video I did on Dante Wright.
It got like six million views in like 24 hours.
I was literally going for a walk and I just decided to do this video.
So Facebook fact checks the video and makes me take it down because they say, oh, you got a fact wrong.
I said, what fact did I get wrong?
They said, you said he was wanted for a warrant for aggravated robbery, when in reality, he was wanted on a weapons charge.
I said, oh, yeah, what a wonderful human being this guy was.
Like, I mean, the essence of what I was saying is that he was wanted on a warrant.
And they said, oh, you got it wrong.
Anyways, that really matters.
You have to get, or else the spread of information gets, you know, gets impacted.
I do have one more here, Chris.
If you're ready, otherwise, up to you.
Let's do it.
Okay, you ready?
Okay.
Let's go here and see this young man right over here.
With a quick question.
Okay.
Go ahead for Charlie.
Tell me your name.
My name is Ryan Baibetto.
I'm actually a nephew of Amber Bavetto.
I go to Ireland's Christian School.
I'm a junior.
And I was wondering, as abortion is ravaging the country, what are some arguments against the argument, it's my body, it's my choice.
My journey, not yours.
I have a tough time with that argument, but I was just wondering if there's any counter-arguments to that.
First of all, thank you.
I'm going to help you right now.
I'm going to give you a one-liner.
If it's not your DNA, it's not your choice.
So it's a separate point of DNA.
And I actually got that one liner, and I'll give you a couple more.
I've done a lot.
So I actually got that.
I was at the March for Life last year before all the lockdowns, and there was this eight-year-old girl with this sign.
And it said that if it's not your DNA, it's not your choice.
I said there is more wisdom on that sign than the entire Harvard faculty.
I said that one sign is just awesome.
And it's true.
What is conception?
It's when DNA is formed.
That is a scientific fact.
The heartbeat begins as early as 21 days.
Some people say six weeks.
It depends how you define a heartbeat.
21 days is legitimately when the heartbeat begins.
Here's a couple thought-provoking questions: not your journey, not your choice.
I actually haven't heard that one.
That one's interesting and new.
Why is it that when a pregnant mother gets murdered, we count it as a double homicide?
Why is it that when a pregnant mother has a baby shower, not a fetus shower, that she could all of a sudden decide then to go to an abortion clinic right after that and decide to terminate that pregnancy?
So, what really we're debating here is a subjective view or an objective view of life.
That's basically what we're debating.
And so, we have a lot of ways in America we actually have come to a consensus of when life ends.
We have no consensus of when life begins.
That's probably an even more important question.
It's a fundamental question of who we are.
And so, we know when life begins, it's when deoxorbonucleic acid is formed, and that's never going to happen again.
It's when the sperm and egg meet.
It's a magical moment that only quite honestly can't be explained by science, but a belief in a creator who loves us and wants us to be able to reproduce because we're made in his image.
So, a couple of things to think about, a couple other things to think about is this: which is sometimes they'll throw at you the rape and abortion thing.
Well, first of all, that's less than 1% of all abortions in our country.
99% of all abortions are elective abortions because people do not want them.
They're abortions of inconvenience.
While there are millions of people wanting children for adoption, there are robust Christian ministries for children to be able to enter this world.
And what they're really trying to say, and what they're arguing in that moment, is that I want an escape hatch for a decision that I made.
And that all of a sudden is saying, I want to prevent another person from living because I regret something I did.
And that in any sort of moral construct is never acceptable when you think about it.
Is saying, I'm going to do, I'm going to prevent someone from being able to exist because I wish I wouldn't have done something.
It's separate on the other issue.
I'm happy to go in on the rape and incest issue, but not necessarily worth it right now.
I did a whole speech on that recently.
The final thing I'll say, the final, final, final thing I'll see is this: which is we've aborted 60 million people since Roe versus Wade.
And there was another decision.
Roe and Doe were happening simultaneously.
I actually just learned this from Kristen Hawkins from Students for Life.
60 million people.
And if we believe that life begins at conception and we've allowed 60 million people to be aborted from our country, then that's a moral stain on who we are as a nation.
Maybe we wouldn't need to bring in all these immigrants into our country to go do the jobs other people won't do, which is not true, by the way, if we didn't abort a million of our own citizens every single year.
They say Black Lives Matter.
Did you know that 46% of all the abortions in our country are black children?
That if you know, if you see a black pregnant woman on the subway in New York City, she's more likely going to the abortion clinic than going to the delivery room.
The abortion rate is higher than the birth rate in New York City.
It's become a form of birth control.
They used to say it's going to be safe and rare, and it's been anything but that.
It's abundant, and actually, it has a huge amount of spiritual harm.
It has a huge amount of mental harm on the women that actually do it.
I'll say one thing to all of us that are pro-life.
We have to do a better job for the women that have had abortions to have compassion and not make them the brunt of our criticism.
Instead, go after the abortionists.
They're not doctors.
I'm not even close to being doctors.
They're abortionists, the ones that practice these abortions and go after them.
But I'll just kind of close how I started, which is that we do not have a moral right to terminate a life that is not our own, and it's not her body.
She's the temporary host of somebody else's body, and the science tells us that.
When I talk to parents, they're so concerned right now because they feel like as they send their kids off to some high school or some colleges, it's these indoctrination camps.
You just brought up DNA.
We're now in a place in the world where chromosomes are not science.
Yeah.
Wow.
I mean, that is like.
So I guess my question to you is, what would you say to parents and young people here about, okay, if you feel like you're sending your kids doing a doctor indoctrination camp, here's some things you should be doing.
Yeah, and I actually don't know how your state schools are here.
I don't.
So when I talk about colleges, please understand it's most of the other schools across the country.
I don't know if your schools are doing a good job or a bad job or an okay job on the issue of indoctrination.
I don't.
So I don't mean to impart any sort of not so good of a job, not good, pretty liberal.
Yeah.
You see, they're awful.
See, this is what I can't understand.
And so, but this is an example of Democrats using political power and we don't.
We fund these schools and we have Republicans in every chamber of power and yet we tolerate this garbage.
I do not understand why this is acceptable.
And if they're garbage and you say they are, the students themselves are saying that, then I just don't get it.
But look, let me just say this for everyone out here, and I think this is actually going to resonate with this audience.
I gave this very same little thing I just am about to give to a bunch of Manhattan businessmen, and it was totally silent.
It was silent.
And so they were.
And this is how it goes.
Not everyone needs to go to college to succeed in America.
In fact, we have way too many people going to college in America.
And let me walk you through it.
The numbers speak for themselves.
We have a deficit in America of welders, electricians, and plumbers, carpenters, police officers, and entrepreneurs.
And we have far too many people that have gone to these universities and be filled with bad ideas, filled with debt, that have no direction, and have been taught to hate the country.
College should be about getting a skill, not ideological exploration.
If you go there to go find yourself, you're going to lose yourself.
41% of people that go to college drop out.
They never should have gone to the first place.
Let me say that again for emphasis.
41% of people that go to college drop out.
Out of the people that do graduate, only 10% are in science, technology, engineering, or math.
The people that are in the soft social sciences, psychology, North African lesbian poetry, North American migratory bird studies, they have very low, they have very low chance of actually getting a job in that field.
And so, obviously, you'd be amazed at some of the stuff I've seen.
So what we really have here is we've decided to try to have an entire generation of young people to go borrow money they don't have, to go find, to go study things that don't matter, to find jobs that don't exist.
And then all of a sudden we're really kind of confused why they all moved to Minneapolis and they want to go burn down the entire country.
But I do want to say this, that it's not all the young people's fault.
It's not.
In fact, I'm not one to play into the victim thing.
I hate victim culture.
You guys know this.
But I'm going to give a little bit of grace to young people, which is that they've been mistreated by the generation that was supposed to be guardians.
They were told a lie.
And they were told a lie to go to college and check all these boxes and borrow this money and do all these things and their life was going to get better.
And it's a absolute, none of the data shows that.
None of it.
And yet we do that because, and I don't necessarily think it's the case here in North Dakota, but in most places, parents are afraid to turn to their neighbors and tell their neighbors their kid isn't going to college.
Like they're afraid to go to the grocery store and all of a sudden see, you know, someone that they know and be like, yeah, Henry's doing just fine and he's become a plumber and he's not going to North Dakota State or he's not going to University of Minnesota.
Becoming a plumber is like a pejorative in most social circles.
I love plumbers.
Why?
They are the least appreciated people.
Could you imagine a world without plumbers or good plumbers?
No.
And so what's really happened here, I want you to view America in the term of two different economic classes.
It's not middle class and all this.
No, no, no.
There's two classes.
There's the Zoom and Skype class, people that open their laptop for a living.
And then there's the muscular class.
The people that roll up their sleeves that actually keep the economy going.
The truck drivers.
The people that work on the oil rigs.
The people that work in the butcher shops.
The people that actually help make the agricultural backbone.
Farmers, yes, obviously.
That help make all of this possible.
The people that are in the daily grind more than ever.
And we have decided as a country that we don't care about the muscular class, that we want everyone to go get a piece of paper from a meaningless institution to go be filled with really bad ideas in debt.
Well, that makes perfect Democrat voters, first of all.
You want to know why the country, I mean, that is a Democrat vote-producing scheme.
But young people did all the right things that they were told to do.
And then all of a sudden, we wonder why they're 30 years old, unmarried, renting an apartment in Minnesota, not owning land, big difference.
We have a renter's crisis.
We have way too many people renting because they can't afford to own because they're in debt because they went to college.
And then we wonder why they're all of a sudden so liberal.
And so I want you guys to understand this for a second.
I understand why young people are attracted to Bernie Sanders, and it's not because of free stuff.
It's partially that, but it's not.
And you guys have to understand this.
They look at Bernie Sanders for freedom.
And you guys laugh and you should, but there's a part of this that's true.
How would you feel if you were $145,000 in debt and someone said they could make that debt go away?
It's a form of freedom.
They are a slave to the debt because they check the boxes you told them to go check.
And Bernie Sanders to them is their Moses or their Harriet Tubman.
They're going to lead them out of that slavery of student loan debt.
That's why he's popular with so many young people.
And it's also the free stuff stuff and all that.
But it's also like we told our generation to go do this garbage and then we're like, oh, they're a bunch of victims.
Like there's part of that that's true.
They should pull themselves by the bootstraps.
They should stop complaining and stop throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers, obviously.
Stop doing all that stuff, right?
Like that's not good.
But there's also a part of it where parents have to realize, man, we screwed up.
Like we sent an entire generation of our most valuable asset, which is our young people.
The most valuable asset is not found in the Permian Basin.
It's not fountain cold mines.
It's young people.
The country goes and lives and survives based on young people.
And we're producing indebted and ungrateful young people because we told them to go do a sequence of events that actually does not help them.
And then we decide to lock down our whole country so they can't find jobs and they're not able to build wealth.
And we go ACH them $1,900 payment as if that's going to do anything.
And so what to do about it?
Look, some people should go to college.
You should go to get a skill.
You should be able to answer this question.
It's the most simple question.
Why are you going to college?
And if the answer is my parents are making me, that's a bad reason.
If the answer is they have a good sports team, that's a bad reason.
If the answer is my counselor is making me, that's a bad reason.
If the answer is all my friends are going, that's a bad reason.
Here's a good answer.
I'll give you a good answer.
I'm going to North Dakota State because it's affordable and because I think I can graduate quickly and I want to go become an engineer.
I don't know if they have an engineering school or not.
I'm guessing they do.
And I believe that I can get that skill to go live a robust and fulfilling life.
That's a good answer.
Less than 1% of college kids can answer it in that way.
Instead, they're like deers and headlights when you ask them.
Not these young people because they're directed and they're conservative, but most of them, they're like, I'm here because everyone else is here and we're just kind of meandering together.
It's all part of this scheme, I really believe it is, to try and make us less free thinking, less independent, and more likely to try to be a cog and a machine.
And so I'm a big critic of college.
I think we have to decline.
I think we have to get college enrollment down like 50% to save the country.
Last question.
When you and I were chatting earlier, we said, Chris, the most important thing people are going to be doing is you've got to take action.
We feel right now like we're trying to save the greatest nation in the world.
So if everybody here tonight and the group that brought you here talks about getting involved locally, right?
What's one or two things you would say?
Here's what you can do to make an impact and make a difference.
Yeah, so I'm going to do a totally shameless plug.
Is that okay?
Please.
Of one thing that I think that the young lady who asked the question, has my podcast helped you in any way?
All right.
She's singularly applauding.
Okay, so look, we do a lot of thinking on our podcast and a lot of exploring of these ideas, a lot of action items of things as they arise.
People to support, heroes to get behind.
It's a daily news flow of action.
That's why our podcast has skyrocketed from nothing to be able to compete with the giants, right?
And so the way that we are able to not get canceled and censored is when people subscribe to our podcast and get behind it.
And so if every person here, there's 800 people here.
So the way the podcast charts work is a rush of new subscribers.
So I have this obsession about beating Rachel Maddow in the podcast charts, right?
No, it's true.
No, it's a very real thing.
And so Rachel Maddow and I go back and forth.
She's currently beating me in the podcast charts because she plugged it on her show.
And so if every person in this room took out their phone, I know we talked about how much we hate phones, but every Apple phone has a podcast app.
And if you type in Charlie Kirk show and hit subscribe, it's free of charge.
It literally takes 15 seconds.
We would beat Rachel Maddow in the podcast charts tomorrow, which is a moral good for our republic.
And so if you do not know how to do it, go find a 14-year-old.
They'll walk you through it.
Or Levi, right?
Levi can help you.
And so that is a shameless plug, but it actually really helps us a lot.
It grows our podcast audience, and it makes us less likely to be canceled.
We have some amazing conversations on there.
This one will be rebroadcast.
If you're like, wow, he made me think about this.
We're going to get rebroadcast here.
So I would consider it a personal blessing and favor if you guys did that, pulled out your phone and subscribed.
Okay, you did it?
Subscribe.
Hey, there you go.
Awesome.
Thank you.
Right there?
Thank you so much.
It's a great blessing and favor to me.
Okay, let's get more local.
What you guys are doing with the moms is so critically important.
In fact, the number one demographic, actually number one or two demographic on our podcast, believe it or not, are 30 to 45-year-old women of young mothers.
And our advertisers look at us.
They're like, your demographics are so surprising for a conservative podcast.
And I say, yeah, it's because we talk about action items of what to do.
I have a whole belief on this, and no offense to men, but only mothers can save this country at this point.
I actually believe this.
Mothers have to rise up and make noise.
And here's a reason for this.
It's true.
And by the way, there's a pro-men argument for this, which is they're just better at this, okay?
They are.
No, let's just be honest.
And I want every mother across America to think of what's happening to your country as if it's happening in your home to your children, right?
What a mother would not do for your children, right?
There's something really special and magical and biblical and beautiful and wondrous about that, right?
And so I just want to commend you for doing that.
But I want you to come on to points of action.
Number one, we as conservatives have to get louder.
That's right.
We have to get louder.
We have to do more public displays of support like this.
We have to get more friends engaged or involved.
Number two, we have to know our stuff.
That's what we're trying to provide through our lines of communication.
Read the great books.
Take the Hillsdale online courses.
Be always armed with the information necessary to be able to refute your friends.
And by the way, don't get complacent.
North Dakota is on their list to try to flip this state soon.
So don't act as if this is going to be a Republican state forever.
I were headquartered in Arizona.
It used to be a robust Republican state that now voted for Joe Biden and has two Democrat senators and has more Democrat congressmen than Republican congressmen.
These states can flip like that.
And if I can say a totally weird thing that you've never allowed, the mayor of Bismarck might like yank me off stage.
I have a whole theory about this.
I did a whole podcast on this: that do not allow tall buildings to be built in North Dakota.
I have a whole theory on this.
The taller the buildings, the more liberal the area is.
It's a rule across America.
There's a reason for this, though.
There's a reason for it.
I know he's like, oh, you're going to screw up all my development.
No, there's actually a reason for this.
That you're less likely to own the higher the building goes.
And it's the tragedy of the commons.
When you're less likely to own, you're more likely to become a liberal.
How did Minneapolis and Atlanta and Dallas and Phoenix all of a sudden become these liberal hotbeds?
They went up and not horizontal because they are not actually in the earth.
They're not in the soil of what actually makes America special.
So they're like, oh, yeah, we'll go tax all those people.
We'll take their guns.
We don't need it.
We live on the ninth floor.
We look down on them.
Literally, the higher America has become, the lower our politics has become.
And so just please have a moratorium on new buildings being built.
You got plenty of land.
Have people go build it.
Seriously, no more tall buildings in North Dakota.
No more.
Anyway, so that's a strangely fantastic.
I did not think I was going to come talk about that tonight.
And by the way, the developers can't stand when I talk about this stuff.
They're like, oh, no, America's better because we have taller buildings.
Like, no, we're not.
Nothing about our greatness comes in 110 buildings.
Like, that's not our greatness.
Anyway, so what else we can do is, look, I want to tell you guys right now, if we commit to this, we're going to win.
And we're not just going to win a little bit, we're going to win massively.
And here's why.
There's the law of thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics.
Anyone know it?
Inevitable law of decay, right?
Things fall apart.
There's force equals mass times acceleration.
There's the law of gravity.
We know the laws of physics.
There's also the law of the left.
Do you know what the law of the left is?
Everything they touch destroys, gets destroyed.
They screw it all up.
It's the law of the left.
Everything that they do, they mess up.
So we're going to get another chance at this.
They're going to mess this up.
So the question is: what do we, as conservatives, people who love our country, do in the meantime?
We have to build new stuff.
We have to get behind the people that are boldly telling the truth and have courage.
You know, we promote my pillow on my show because that's someone who has courage and he's unafraid to do something, right?
And so that's.
And more than anything else, the best thing you could do is you have to write down on a piece of paper tonight something that's hard for you to do.
We are going to win.
Why is that important?
They want you to give up.
They want you to say the machines are broken.
The ballots are going to disappear.
That's the enemy whispering in your ear of surrender.
The hardest thing I have to do is get conservatives convinced to write down, we are going to win.
That's what you have to believe.
That we are going to build new institutions that are exciting.
That we want to have more American-born children.
That we want church attendance to go up.
We want opioid deaths to go down.
We want our children to love their country more than their parents do.
We want our kids to love America again.
And that's only going to happen if you write it down and then commit to a series of action that follows.
Here's the one thing that drives me nuts.
You know the thing I can't stand?
I'll tell you the two things, and then we'll do like a pastor's clothes.
So we'll be here for 45 minutes, right?
When you're like, I'm kidding.
No, which is this, which is when people ask me the question, so Charlie, do you think we're going to win?
And I do, but I say, you know why you're asking most times?
Because you want me to give you permission to give up.
Because if we are going to lose and it's baked, the script is written, then why act?
Right?
Why do anything?
You want me to give you a permission slip so you can go take a vacation and say, no, I was told I don't have to do anything.
That's why most people ask that question.
Then the second question I can't stand when people ask is they say, so Charlie, how's it going out there?
And I said, what are you talking about?
You know, out in the culture war out there.
I said, what am I?
Like Maximus from Gladiator?
Like, it's become a spectator sport.
It's become a thing where we watch Fox like, oh, Tucker's going to take care of it for me.
Trump's going to fight that battle for me.
Be honest, all of us did it, right?
We were all like, he's going to do that for me.
No, no, this is not a spectator sport any longer.
You got to get in the arena, everybody.
You got to get into the fight yourself.
So next time when someone says, no more do we ask that question like, oh, how's it going?
Like, I'll tell you how it's going.
We knocked on 400 doors.
We mobilized 800 people to a school board meeting.
We're running local candidates for office.
We're going to forbid critical race theory from coming to our schools.
We repeal the mask mandate.
We have all these new businesses that are popping up that share and love our values and we're supporting the heroes in our community that are doing the right things.
We're going and finding new heroes and supporting them every single day.
I no longer have to ask people what the fight's like because I'm in the fight myself.
And here's the thing that happens when you get in the fight.
Your life changes for the better and it gets more difficult.
It gets more difficult because all of a sudden your head's exposed.
You're going to lose a couple friends.
People are going to call you names.
You're going to have less free time and you worry all the time.
But the Bible says be anxious and nothing.
And then all of a sudden you kind of get down.
You're good.
Okay, good.
Victory's already assured because the battle's already won, right?
It's like kind of that up and down thing that happens every day.
And then when you're in it, though, you no longer feel helpless.
What makes us different than all the other countries, the French and the Italians and the Greeks, God bless them.
They do leisure well.
We solve problems here.
We do.
That's what Americans do.
They enjoy themselves.
That's why we go there for vacation, okay?
We solve problems.
So we have a problem.
And if we combine all of our intelligence and all the courage, and I know that's in this room and in our country, that statement that you wrote on that piece of paper becomes true.
We are going to win.
And that only happens, though, when we have the boldness and the courage that I know exists.
Final thing I'll say, I promise.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, it was an awful day for America.
But there was one man who was the greatest man ever to live in the 20th century who smiled.
And he went into his war cabinet with a smile on his face.
And they said, sir, didn't you hear the news?
All these Americans died.
He said, the war is over.
We have won.
He said, what are you talking about?
He said, the Americans are in the game.
We've won the war.
It's just a matter of time.
What is the truth of that?
We might be late to the game sometimes.
We might be worried about building our families in our churches.
But when Americans step up, we are going to win.
And that is the message I want you guys to carry with you.
God bless you guys.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And please consider supporting us at charliekirk.com slash support.
God bless you guys.
Speak to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.