In a Father's Day speech delivered live from Calvary Chapel Montclair in California, Charlie gives a speech outlining seven things American men need to do to improve themselves, be better men, better husbands, fathers, sons, and Christians. He also walks through the inherent differences between men and women and why those differences are worth protecting and preserving. This is a speech that every man in America needs to hear—if you're a woman, send it to the men in your life; if you're a parent, have your sons hear it. If we focus on finding purpose for young men in America, we can build a stronger nation for everyone, this very special episode gives a roadmap on how to get that done.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Restoring Strong Men in America00:07:14
Hey everybody, happy Sunday.
This episode was the speech I gave on Father's Day of seven things that we need to restore strong men in America.
If you guys like this message and want to support us, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
It's charliekirk.com/slash support to get behind our program and to support us.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Seven things that men need to do in America.
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 is 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.
Hey, everybody.
Good morning.
It's great to be with all of you.
Thank you, Pastor Joe.
When you emailed, I said, of course, I'd love to make this work.
I'm trying to speak everywhere I possibly can, as many places as possible.
We're doing over 330 speeches a year and from churches to college campuses.
I visit college campuses, so you don't have to.
And I'm also, we're doing three hours of radio a day.
I'm here locally on AM 590 The Answer, if you guys want, here locally in the Inland Empire.
So you guys can listen to me every single day.
They take all three hours of our show, and we're growing very quickly.
Thank you for those of you that listen to our podcast and our show.
I want to talk about a couple things today.
Obviously, it's Father's Day, and Victor kind of stole some of my thunder, but not all of it.
But I want to get into this idea of what does it mean to be a man in today's America and why we need to have strong men because there's an attack on men like never before.
And it's happening in a way that you might not even expect.
It's happening, I think, chemically.
It's happening societally, culturally, and spiritually.
But those of you that haven't kind of heard what I do and what we do, I run Turning Point USA.
We're the nation's largest student organization dedicated to bringing first principles, the Constitution, free markets, and American exceptionals in the high school and college campuses across the country.
We have hundreds of thousands of members and we host the biggest events on campus and off campus.
We reach millions of people every single day through digital and social media.
You guys have probably seen some of our content and some of the fun things that we've done online.
And in addition to that, we are launching Turning Point Faith to try to get Americans Christians to rise up and to take their proper right of leadership in our society and country as we see the ever-present decay of this beautiful gift that we have been given.
And so we're trying to rise up thousands and thousands of pastors.
And you have a wonderful one here.
And we have something in common.
My pastor is Pastor Rob McCoy, so kind of in the Calvary family.
He's about an hour down the road.
And God speak Thousand Oaks.
And actually after this, I'm going to go see Jack Kibbs, who's always fun to kind of go and see.
So we're all kind of in the same world together.
And we need more pastors that are willing to stand and proclaim truth in this moment.
And so I love the scripture, Jeremiah 29, 7, which is the Lord demands us to seek, which comes from a word badrash in the scriptures, or to demand the welfare or the shalom of the city or the nation that we are in.
We are called to care about what is going on around us.
Some Christians and some churches say, we're just going to do the gospel.
We're just going to do the Bible.
I don't care about what's happening around us.
I think that's irresponsible.
First of all, we've been given a nation, a constitutional republic that was inspired by the gospel, by the Bible, by Christians that was fought, fought for, bled for, and sacrificed for so that we can have first freedoms to be able to gather, be able to associate, to be able to actually be able to worship our Creator.
This is the exception to the rule.
Most of human history has lived under some form of penalty, some form of persecution, if you are doing what you're doing today.
In fact, the window of freedom in the world is shrinking.
It is not increasing.
Countries are becoming more harsh towards religion.
They are not becoming more acceptable towards religion.
So I think it is Christians' rightful place to care about what's happening in the news, to know what's happening in your local school board.
We're going to talk about that as well.
Some Christians say, well, politics is messy.
So is the church.
What's your point?
Victor just mentioned some pastor that did something like that.
You guys didn't hear that.
Just to reiterate it, for those of you on the live stream or listening to this on a podcast, pastor, adultery, 40 years younger.
Like, okay, it's a human institution.
It's corrupt.
So don't give me this idea that all of a sudden I'm not going to go into politics because it's messy.
Plenty of churches are messy too.
The point is whether or not are you going to proclaim things that are true, Paul says in the scriptures very clearly, contest or fight for whatsoever is true.
And that goes from the laws of nature and nature is God, which is articulated in our declaration, to the principles of the Constitution.
And that's where we as Christians must be very clear.
And it's tempting.
It's tempting not to care.
I wish I could be in that position because this is a hard fight.
It's hard to have to continually see what's happening to this beautiful gift we've been given.
It's hard to see critical race theory implemented in our schools.
It's hard to see our children have to be taught to hate themselves and hate the nation.
It's hard to see drag queens on Nickelodeon.
It's hard to see all this stuff.
It would be easier just to kind of self-medicate and just kind of enjoy whatever that is and be like, oh, it's not my responsibility, whatever.
This is tough.
We as Christians are called the tough fights.
In fact, we are commanded into the tough fights.
And there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.
You don't want to make an idol out of politics?
Never, obviously.
There's one ultimate purpose, and that purpose is Jesus, who came here and we gave our life to him.
And every single day, we should just be on our knees with gratitude that we have been able to be given eternal life through our Creator, His Son, Jesus Christ.
And the question is, what kind of civic and political involvement should we actually care about?
And this is something that is now more and more hotly debated.
I don't think it's that really that difficult.
Happy to walk through it in kind of a bite-sized fashion.
I'm going to kind of get into more like a Father's Day type message.
Which is, look, we're called first and foremost by Christ, our Savior, to love those that do not have as much as we do, to care for the unfortunate and the disadvantaged.
But even before all of that, when we talk about what kind of government system that we want, the most important thing is to give your life to Christ.
The second most important thing is to make sure you can do the first thing.
And if you do not have that kind of ability, that freedom, that liberty, which means to pursue virtue, then all of a sudden, what are we doing here?
And the window of religious liberty is closing in this country.
I'll give you an example.
You might have saw this story.
Just this last week, the Internal Revenue Service came out and they decided not to give a tax-exempt status to a Bible-based group in Texas because they said, you're a political group because you preach the gospel and the gospel is basically the same tenets of the Republican Party.
That's our government.
Now, we've been warning against this, trying to get the church to rise up and do something about this.
This is just beginning.
Pastors in Canada went to prison because they reopened their church.
Mike McClure, who's a Calvary pastor up in San Francisco, is facing $2.5 million in fines because he's doing what we're doing right now.
The Second Amendment and Liberty00:02:41
$2.5 million in fines because he opened his church.
And so if we don't have a framework, a system to be able to actually express the gospel, to be able to share the good news, we're going to be all sharing it from prison.
And that is not an over-exaggeration.
That is what history tells us, is that a small group of people are threatened by the truth and they're willing to do evil, immoral things to try to prevent that truth from being spread.
Beyond that, we as Christians must appreciate the system that we have, a constitutional republic with a framework that first and foremost respects that you're made of the image of God.
We are the speaking beings.
It says in the two creation stories in the Bible, Genesis and John, God spoke and it was.
We are made of the image of God.
Speech is fundamental to who we are.
Speech and reason, logos, is what makes us different than the beasts of the wild.
Love dogs.
In fact, we just had a whole like hour-long discussion about dogs.
Dogs cannot talk.
That's a fundamental difference between the beasts of the wild and other animals.
We can speak.
And that's the First Amendment for a reason, because that is the most peaceful amendment.
It prevents us from tearing each other apart.
The Constitutional Republic that our founders gave us, fundamental in the system, was the ability to be able to solve differences without actually having to get to physical conflict.
The Second Amendment, the ability to protect yourself, protect your family against, yes, people that might want to harm you in the middle of the night, but also a tyrannical, usurpatious government.
The Third Amendment, that they can't put soldiers into your home.
The Fourth Amendment, they can't spy on you and they can't take your records without a warrant.
The Fifth Amendment, the right against self-incrimination.
Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendment, all about due process, quick and speedy trial, juror of your peers.
The Ninth Amendment, it says that we might not have articulated all the other rights, but there are other rights out there granted to you by God, and those are worthy of protection too.
The 10th Amendment, which of course is that all of the rights not articulated are left to the states and to the people.
The framework of the Bill of Rights passed in December of 1791 is a gift to us that says you have the freedom, the rights to be able to pursue virtue.
That is a rarity, everybody.
And our founders had the wisdom and the foresight to be able to write a document that was not written for the times, but written to stand the test of time.
This Constitutional Republic is under assault every single day.
And so we as Christians, I believe, have a moral prerogative to try to contest for this document, to try to contest for this beautiful system that has been given us.
All around this wonderful room are imagery of veterans and people that have sacrificed for our country.
Let's give it up for our veterans, please, for your amazing contribution to our country.
Guardians of the Good00:02:22
I love the United Kingdom, but here's a difference between the United Kingdom and America.
When the United Kingdom is about to send some of their troops out to war, do you know who they pledge allegiance to?
The Queen.
Do you know who our troops pledge allegiance to?
The Constitution of the United States.
It's a big difference.
So our troops are pledging allegiance to basically a hierarchy of principle that our rights are given to us by God.
The United Kingdom, they say that's the same thing when they do the vessel, the queen.
I'm not as philosophically convinced of that.
Our troops, when it comes down to it, it's not a flag, it's not a person, it's not a lineage, it's not a bloodline, it's a set of eternal principles.
That's what they pledge allegiance to.
That's a big deal.
And that's something that is so unprecedented, and we're on the verge of losing it.
We're losing it, in my opinion, largely because the people that are supposed to be the guardians of the good have decided they don't care, us Christians.
We are supposed to be the guardians of the good.
We're supposed to contest for what is good and hate what is evil.
One of my favorite scriptures in the entire Bible, my wife and I, we read this at our wedding.
We just got married May 8th, by the way.
And May 8th, and Romans 12, 9.
I love this verse.
Love must be sincere.
Hate what is evil.
Cling to what is good.
What a great verse.
We are called to hate what is not good, evil.
And we're supposed to cling what is good.
Well, then we open up this, well, what is good?
And then for those of you that listen, like Aristotle, we can have a whole five-hour conversation on that.
But there's a hierarchy of good.
There are some things that are better than not.
The ultimate good is Jesus Christ.
There is no greater good than Jesus.
There is.
There's not a love or a mercy that's greater than Jesus.
And so if you believe that the good is worthy of preserving and protecting, then my goodness, we better preserve and protect this country.
So we say, hate what is evil, cling to what is good.
I will make an argument that there's a hierarchy of nations in the world right now.
That America is a much more moral nation than whatever Hamas is or ISIS or Iran.
We must hate what is evil and cling to what is good.
The scriptures tell us that.
Again, I could reiterate Jeremiah 29, 7.
Here's the issue.
A lot of Christians are hesitant to do this for a couple of reasons.
Number one, maybe you got involved in politics in years past and you got burned by it.
You know, politicians are a bunch of liars, thieves, deceitful people, and I want to stay away from it.
You're right.
What's the point?
You still have to get involved in the public square.
You still have to be aware of all those things.
Hate Evil, Cling to What Is Good00:10:58
Number two, it's not clear what the best way to do it, or you're like, I don't know.
Both parties, I don't know what really represents my biblical values.
Let's just forget politics.
There's three things that I don't think that are even controversial.
Number one, life begins at conception.
Every Christian has to believe this.
That I knew you before you're in the womb, and we must protect those that can't protect themselves.
Number two, God made man and God made woman.
Not that hard.
That this entire transgender nonsense goes at a complete and total war against nature.
I believe women's sports deserve to be protected, and I believe men should not be allowed in female locker rooms across the country.
Christians must be clear about that.
Number three, the church is more essential than abortion clinics, marijuana dispensaries, strip clubs, and whatever else that we saw that was given allowance in the last year.
The church is the most essential institution.
That without the ability to worship your creator and pursue virtue, everything else is going to fall apart.
So our troops, they swear allegiance to the Constitution.
What are the two things that are actually the shoulders that keep the head of the Constitution in place?
The two things that were actually before the Constitution?
Because the Constitution will fall apart like this if you do not have strong families and strong churches.
It's that simple.
So the founding fathers were able to even be able to write the Constitution because there were strong churches and strong families.
The first Reformation led to that, which is a beautiful transition to today, which is Father's Day.
And this is a really interesting kind of phenomenon because we have such an all-out assault and war on fathers and men in our country.
For young men in the audience right now, I hope you take my words very seriously.
I'm going to be rebroadcasting this as a podcast, which is kind of, I want to spend the most time on this, because you right now are basically enemy number one of what they want to do.
And I'm going to tell you why.
And that's, and again, for the women out there, you should want to have strong men in your country and in your life.
Some women, they send me these messages like, you know, men are terrible and patriarchal.
And I say, well, you don't really know what a man is if you think that all men are that way.
That you might have some sort of misunderstanding or misinterpretation of that.
And so without fathers, you can't have families.
Without families, you can't have a strong nation.
Right now, 77% of black kids are born without a stable father in the home.
And that number is going up in every community, white communities, Hispanic communities, and Asian communities.
We're talking about a divorce rate that is more likely than 50%.
You guys have been to weddings in the last year, and this is something my wife and I talked about.
And I'm just going to tell you a brutal truth.
You go to a wedding, it's a higher likelihood they're going to end up divorced and stay together.
That's tragic.
And a lot of it is the man's fault.
A lot of it.
I'm going to walk through kind of what that is and how that is.
And so I meet a lot of these young men and they look beat down for good reason.
They're beat down by their peers, by their teachers, by media, by the people around them.
They're told to be weak, afraid, intimidated, subservient.
They're lacking responsibility, direction, and clarity.
And the only way they can reconcile that is to become more feminine or to just kind of disconnect altogether and become the lost boys in Peter Pan, right?
Which is like, I'm going to play video games all day long, no responsibility.
I'm going to meandlessly wander.
And I don't know what I don't want to have to deal with all this.
That's the opposite of what creates a strong nation, strong families, and strong men.
And so what does it mean to be a strong man?
I pray I could be a strong man.
I'm just a vessel for these truths.
I'm not saying that I embody this perfectly.
I just want to be very clear.
This is something that I try to be clear about.
I'm no greater than anyone else in this.
I'm just telling you what is true because I'm just a communicator for what the Bible says about this.
Number one, true men follow God's commands with joy.
That's a true man.
A true man is obedient to the absolute father.
And that kind of hierarchy is really important.
And so every single person here today believes two things.
We believe that there is a God and you are not him, right?
We believe those two things, right?
And a true man believes those two things.
And those two things, a strong man, a determined man wants to always please his creator, his eternal father.
And understand, and I'm going to go through an actual checklist of this, for men out there that are like, what, you know, I want to get spring back into action.
And I'm going to kind of give a checklist.
It's really interesting when I give this speech on college campuses.
Some of these young men have, they enter.
You can just see the body posture of a young man that has just been broken down by the secular, collectivist, just hyper-feminine culture.
And by the way, there is a place for feminine culture.
In fact, we need a balance of both.
Without the feminine aspect of culture, we would be way, way, way too in one direction of hyper-aggressive, insensitive, monotasked, and no compassion, no understanding of the broader picture.
That mix is really important.
But if you get too feminine, then all of a sudden you will be conquered by your adversaries.
You will be less likely to stand up for the good, less confrontational.
And that is built into the psychology of women.
Some people are like, how dare you say that?
It's true.
Women are less confrontational.
They're less confrontational in work environments, less confrontational in relationships, less confrontational in romantic relationships.
They're more likely to try to sue or try to go for, let's say, a middle ground.
That is a fact.
Okay, so men follow God's commands with joy.
True and mature masculinity will be grounded in a man's underlying God-given purpose.
That's true masculinity.
It's trying to say, what does God want for my life?
And that goes back to what does it mean to be obedient?
Here's another thing that drives me nuts.
And my friend Ken Graves, who's a pastor for Calvary Chapel, Banger, Maine.
I don't know if you guys have ever heard him speak.
He's terrific.
And he kind of reminds me, you and Victor, Victor, you and him kind of got the same sort of thing going.
Yeah, you know, kind of like super alpha, alpha, alpha male.
You know, I was with Ken Graves in Banger, what was that, a couple weeks ago?
And we are eating lobster, obviously.
And he's like grunting as he's eating lobster.
And he's like, he has this massive Canadian lobster because they have different regulations on lobster.
And so it's huge.
He's like, I need a weapon.
And he goes in the next room.
He comes in with a sword, right?
Boom, breaks it open.
I'm like, oh my gosh.
Like, it's like a violent encounter having dinner with Ken Graves.
It's like, it's, it's like an all-involved, like, it's not just like, it's whatever gets the blood flowing.
Oh, my gosh.
Like, geez.
And he has a saying that I love.
He's like, I don't care about your feelings.
Stop talking about them.
No one cares about them, which is true.
And it's absolutely true.
And for men, I don't want to hear about it.
I honestly don't care how you feel.
I care about you think.
And I care about what's right.
Your feelings are absolutely irrelevant.
Stop it.
If you are being led by your feelings as a man, you're not a man.
It's true.
And I'm just going to say that again.
If you are being led by your feelings, not a man.
That doesn't mean you have to never feel, obviously, but don't let your feelings lead you.
Listen to what I said precisely.
And it says this in the scripture.
It says it in Isaiah.
It says it in Proverbs.
It says it in Leviticus.
The heart can be very, very misleading to be a director, especially for men.
Super misleading.
We have reason for a reason.
We are able to hopefully be able to say, man, outside of how I feel about this, what is true?
What is good?
What is beautiful?
And then what is the calculated decision I want to make there?
And the over-emphasis on feelings for men in particular, I think has been very, very harmful in kind of creating this.
And I say this and the media goes nuts.
I'm just going to say it.
This kind of metro-sexual male drives me nuts, right?
And these men that are like, I eat vegan meat or like, I haven't worked out in like a decade.
Like, what?
That's weird.
You know, no, there's actually, there's an argument to say that men should actually be physically involved in trying to build muscle mass, in trying to eat things that hopefully increase testosterone.
I don't know if you guys have seen these articles.
The testosterone rates of young men in America are plummeting.
They're 50% less than they were 40 years ago.
50% less.
How many, I know a lot of people that are like, I can't have kids.
I can't do this.
There's an agenda to this.
They want to create weaker men.
Now, some of them are like, well, because men can be totally tyrannical.
Ah, what you're talking about is the mismanagement of power.
That's a completely different conversation, right?
You're talking about how someone might have the ability to do something, but that doesn't mean they have to do that something.
I'm going to get into that.
And so the biggest issue with men in our country and when it comes to fathers, I'll get to that, is this idea that many of them lack purpose.
Now, purpose happens to be one of my favorite English words.
I have like three words that I love in the English language.
Just so you guys know, I actually don't like the English language.
I don't.
It's actually, it's kind of a sloppily put together language.
Let me give you an example.
We use the word love way too much, right?
And the Greeks had a lot of words for love.
Eros, agape, storge, philejo.
Even the Spanish language has more appreciation of miancanta or mia mor, right?
I love that because those are two totally different things to say, right?
And in America, it's like, oh, I love this slurpee, or I love my wife, or I love this person's work.
Like, whoa, that's kind of weird.
And we know what it is because of the nuance of that, but I actually think it's really destructive.
And I think that if I were to just kind of give one long-term goal, like we in the English language have to fix that because I actually think if you go back to the original Greek, of which the New Testament was written, there is some brilliance to this idea, the different types of love, different types of nuance behind that.
So one of my favorite words in the English language is purpose.
My other favorite language is earn.
I'll get into that word, earn.
I love that word earn.
And so purpose comes from a Greek word telos, which means we get the word telescope from that, which means far out into the distance.
That which I want to go to.
I'm aiming towards that.
The North Star, that's telos.
So many men today have no telos and no purpose.
No idea where they're going.
Meandering, right?
They're just kind of drifting, kind of going from one thing to the other.
And it's interesting because if you look at the kind of feminine and masculine traits, that actually is more harmful for young men.
And then it puts a lot of pressure on young women that have to act like men.
And that's what ends up happening is that young women then actually have to take on more of a masculine character trait.
And so masculine traits would be more competitive, assertive, hopefully more likely to protect, more goal-oriented, more rational, linear, and logical, hopefully a little bit more independent, focusing on one thing, not multitasking, right?
Flawed Education and Gender Roles00:09:17
That is not, and that's not what men are naturally good at.
A bias for action, whereas women tend to be more compassionate, caring for others, collaborative, receptive, and grateful, more into nurturing, relationship-directed, a lot more intuitive.
Women intuition is a gift from the Lord.
Let me say that again.
I could tell that from my wife.
When she says not there, I say, okay, done.
Not even a question, right?
It's like a sixth sense.
And I honestly believe it is a gift from the Lord that we men do not have.
This kind of supernatural intuition.
And for those of you that have seen and experienced it, it is incredible.
And much better at multitasking, much more patient and likely to forgive, and more temporal.
Now, these are generalizations.
Are some women more likely?
Of course.
We're talking about the 95 rule here.
And this is what always drives me nuts: people say, well, Charlie, I'm not that way.
Again, the 95 rule is the basic categories of how these things tend to be true.
If we're going to just focus on the outliers or design entire cultural trends based on outliers, then we just throw away the rule altogether.
The rule is generally just what I articulated and went through.
And so because of this, because men tend to be more competitive and assertive, more likely to want to focus on something big without a purpose, they will perish.
And that is what the scriptures tell us.
When the people lack a purpose, they will perish.
And that's what's happened to young men across our country.
Here's a fire alarm.
The suicide epidemic that has happened across our country should be enough to have all the politicians stop and say, what are we doing?
We lost more young people, specifically young men, to suicide than the Chinese coronavirus in California over the last year.
That should be a five-alarm fire, everybody.
And we should be saying, what could possibly contribute to this?
And part of it is this overemphasis on self-esteem.
I'm going to get into that because I hate the self-esteem movement.
I think the self-esteem movement has done incredible damage to our country.
And my friend Dennis Prager completely agrees with me on that.
Actually, I agree with him.
So that's probably the better way to word it.
I agree with him on that.
And so, and so the other aspect of this, which is that young men don't, a lot of young men in the country, they've been so broken down.
They have been, they have to work against their nature at every single turn.
And by the way, our education system is the largest mass-scale feminized experiment in the history of America.
And we don't talk about this enough.
If you want to create young men to lose their mind, send them to school.
The whole schooling system is built for young women.
That's why they graduate with higher grades.
That's why they go to college more.
Think about it.
It's about sitting still for long periods of time, reading long romantic novels about like dogs on a prairie and like love stories.
It's about working collaboratively.
And if you're restless or if you have a lot of energy, you're the problem and you go get medicated.
I don't know how I survived public school.
I know how I survived government school.
It was before they actually started to deem people like me as problems.
It was right on the beginning of it, right?
I tend to be a little bit hyperactive, obviously, but that is an issue now because you can't control that, right?
Whereas when I went to school, the young women, they mature quicker, right?
They took grades very seriously.
Almost all the top people in my high school were either super feminine men or women that got the top grades.
It was the men that wanted to kind of work with their hands and do things.
They would always be considered like the problem students.
When in reality, they were just kind of looking for something.
They wanted to go pursue the good and fight against evil.
That's what they wanted to do.
And men have a higher tendency to want to do that.
Women want to do that too, but in a different way.
And so our government-run school system, I think, has been one of the most tragic failures of this in history.
And there's a great essay written about this by Heather McDonald.
In fact, a woman by the name of Christine Hoff Summers wrote a whole book about this called The War on Boys, Our Failure of Public Education, where schools should be a lot more involved learning for men.
It should be shorter periods of time, way more competition, pushing them, putting more pressure on men, way less idle reading time and more like, you could do better than that.
Come on, let's go.
That's the way, and young women don't respond as well to that, right?
And that's where you start to see these discrepancies of young women doing a lot better in every other metric, but they're actually miserable because their early 30s, unmarried, can't find men because our men are so weak, but they have a really, really great career, right?
So we're kind of seeing this crisis right now where we have the most successful generation of women.
That's the most unhappy generation of women in American history, right?
They're running the companies, they're partners at law firms, they have a bunch of money.
The number one complaint I get on my podcast is, Charlie, I'm 31 years old.
I love your podcast.
I go to a good church and I'm earning, you know, $200,000 a year and a partner at this thing and Irvine or whatever, but I can't find anyone to marry because all the men are complete and total slobs and like whatever.
Or they just have no direction, right?
They're kind of this, again, it's like the lost boys in Peter Pan.
Like, what do you do?
I play Xbox.
Like, okay, that's not very compelling.
Whereas the woman's like, I'm a partner.
I'm getting up at 6 a.m.
I'm working out.
I'm running like a marathon and a triathlete, whatever, right?
They got their whole life together.
Meanwhile, the man's like, yeah, I play Call of Duty, like, or whatever, right?
So it's like, whatever.
And it's kind of like, I'm just kind of figuring it out, right?
And so, and I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong, but at some point, that woman, and again, this is so politically incorrect, which is why I love talking about it.
I stopped caring a long time ago.
In the back of that woman's head around age 27, 28 is this biological clock, like, I want to have children.
And that's a real thing.
There is no suppressing that.
And it comes to a head right around 29 and 30, which is where you get these hyper-liberal activists that are like, all men are evil.
And well, it's not exactly the case.
It's just that maybe we need to create stronger men.
And also, you need to care about your career a little bit less and maybe building something that lasts like a family.
But that's, but they've been lied to by our public education system and specifically college, that you must go to college, become a partner, and do all these sorts of things.
And again, generally, that's fine.
If you're able to do that, I'm just saying that you're going to be miserable.
And that, and it's true.
If you want to go see miserable people, go to New York City and go meet early 30s-somethings women.
They are the angriest, most bitter.
And then, no, it's true.
And by the way, I see a lot of women nodding their head.
Like, it's true.
And, but they, you know what their religion is, their religion then becomes leftism, right?
Because then, since I'm so angry, I need a vehicle to go change the world and like, whatever.
Okay.
And so here's the first thing.
So here are seven steps for a man that's like, all right, I got it, Charlie.
I want to be that.
Or maybe it's like, man, you know, I think it's all bluster or whatever.
Here's seven things you got to do on Father's Day that a man has to do.
And for women, you got to demand this out of your man.
This is the other thing: is that women, you got to be like, what's your problem?
Like, why am I, why are you sleeping in later than me?
You know what I mean?
I'm being somewhat harsh on that, but it's got to be like, you know, and women, do not be afraid to say this to your male counterparts, which is like, can you lead me?
Like, can you start leading me?
That's what you have to say.
Be like, that's your job.
Lead us.
You know, don't just like be okay, just kind of meandering through this.
And that's a lot of pressure.
So, number one is that young men, men in particular, they need to become really, really good at self-control and forget about self-esteem.
I hate the self-esteem movement.
Again, this is, I'm going to zero in on this for a sec, which is all across the country, we decided to be a great idea in like 2008, 2009, 2010 to have this massive propaganda campaign in high schools across the country with all these like really creepy, like big yellow, smiley face emojis, posters.
They say like self-esteem, you're perfect the way you are.
Have you ever seen these things?
It's awful.
And like there's big kind of huge auditorium, like they fill up these auditoriums.
Like, let's talk about self-esteem, you know, all these.
And they never actually talk about things you have to do to improve your character.
It's just your existence is perfect.
Well, it actually has the opposite intended effect.
So I was kind of a smart aleck in high school and I was low on sleep one day.
And one of my teachers was doing this whole like pre, like this, this literature, this liturgy literally on self-esteem.
Like you are perfect.
You never have to change yourself, like all this sort of crazy thing, right?
And I know the intention was probably to stop bullying.
The intention was probably to stop self-harm.
The intention was, it had the opposite effect, though.
It was the exact opposite.
And so this, I remember asking my teacher, I raised my hand, I said, well, if we're all perfect the way we are, why am I in school?
Why do I have to improve?
What's homework?
What's character development?
And she was like, oh, stop it.
Like, you know, she had no real answer to that, obviously.
But that's the point, right?
Instead, here's the way education should work when you're 16.
Be like, man, you got a lot of problems, but I see a lot of potential in you.
And if you do a couple things, you could actually make something of yourself in a couple of years.
Let's do it together.
But I believe in you to be able to do that.
Do you?
That's what a young man needs to hear.
That's what a young man, not like perfect the way you are.
Be like, no, I see a lot of potential in you, but man, you're kind of a mess.
Like, that's the best thing that was told to me, by the way.
Like, when men lean to me, like, man, you could be something of your life, but you got to dress better.
And like, you know, you got to start working out.
Like, whatever it is, right?
That sort of challenge, that kind of teasing to a journey is what a man needs to be on.
Responsibility and Human Nature Barriers00:16:25
Needs a journey.
Needs adventure.
Needs the call to the wild, literally.
And by the way, all these books that used to embody that, we've completely removed it from the canon of elementary high school, right?
Literally.
The call to the wild.
The tales of Huckleberry Finn.
Anything by Mark Twain.
These stories were written to be able to elevate the idea of the masculine adventurer fighting for the good when the unknown comes and you encounter it.
And now we've removed those stories and now we read like white fragility or whatever, right?
Brobin Dean.
I want to be an anti-racist or whatever that is, right?
And so what does that do to a young white man?
What it does to a young white man is like, wow, I'm an awful person.
And like, it's the opposite of the self-esteem thing.
It's like, not even like, we want to make you better.
It's like, no, the only way you could do this is like atone and become a revolutionary.
Like that's basically what they say.
And they're like, fine, I'm going to disconnect.
Like, there's nothing for me here.
I'm going to go find things that make me feel good.
I'm going to go do weep.
I'm going to go do heroin.
I'm going to go become substance abused.
And like, if I'm not needed here and you're going to keep on berating me, I'm done.
And men are more likely to do that than women, by the way.
So men operate on extremes.
You guys ever see this before?
Right?
Very little nuance at times.
It's either I'm all in, we're going for adventure, like I'm pulling the cord, the game's over, I'm going to go drink.
Done, right?
Very little nuance at times.
And then we see that, right?
Where women tend to be a little bit more like, oh, okay, we can navigate this.
But again, a lot of this is hyper designed for women because they want to create a feminized society.
And so that's number one, self-control, not self-esteem.
Number two, this is really, really important for young men.
And it's very biblical.
And Christ was amazing at articulating this, obviously.
But it's stop sinning early.
And this is something we don't talk about enough.
So sin is the distance from God.
If you choose to sin, you choose to suffer.
But you talk about that pastor that had adultery with the 40 years younger and a child.
No, that sin was that very big evil sin actually started when he didn't put himself in check when he started to have adulterous thoughts.
And Christ talked about this, right?
You have to be in control of not just your physical domain, in charge of your thoughts.
He said, if you even have lust in your eyes towards a woman, you've already committed adultery, right?
What is he really saying there?
Like, you got to get yourself in check right there, or else that's going to manifest itself into something really bad.
If your arm causes you to sin, cut it off, right?
And that, so you got to stop sinning early.
And this is a good lesson, by the way, for every person, man or woman, which is you've got to identify it.
You've got to spot it, and you got to be honest about it, and you got to remove it.
Maybe it's Instagram.
Maybe Instagram is causing you to go into a pattern of behavior you don't like.
You don't have to have Instagram.
You don't.
Delete it.
If it causes you to sin, get rid of it.
Go through an inventory of things that you spend your time on and say, am I glorifying God using this or am I falling away from God using this?
And now maybe you can adjust your behavior and all of a sudden say, hey, maybe I can do Instagram for God's glory.
And stop following these five accounts that always swear and do post things that are not kind of in disobedience.
Or maybe it's like, man, it's too much.
I'm going to delete it.
That's okay, by the way.
That's okay.
And that's a sign of strength to say that I'm not able to go through that.
And that's okay.
And that's why some people are like, I don't even want to go to that movie.
I don't want to watch that movie.
And that's a sign of maturity and strength.
It causes you to sin.
Cut it off.
Men need to be clear in particular to spot sins early and then preempt them and say, I'm not going to do it.
Because those sins then grow.
They grow into other sins, right?
The small lie then becomes an entire lie for the rest of your life, whatever that might be.
Okay, number three, which is this is for men in particular.
If you feel like you're without direction, and maybe you're watching this, and we have a lot of young men that listen to my podcast, you got to find something you don't want to lose.
You got to find something that if you lose it, all of a sudden you're willing to do something and sacrifice to get it back.
It's one of the biggest problems.
They lose video games, like, yeah, I guess whatever.
No, you got to find something that you're willing.
And all of a sudden, if it disappeared, you would go to the ends of the earth to get it back.
Like a meaningful relationship, right?
Like a connection with somebody that is just bigger than life.
One of the big problems with men is they don't have that.
There's just a bunch of substances after kind of direction aimless movements.
Find something that if you lost it, you would have to sacrifice for it, which we also call responsibility.
Number four, men, if you're like, man, I just can't get my life in order.
What do I do first?
Here's a mission.
And the next day or two, go find someone or something that can't protect themselves and go protect them.
Anything.
It could be someone at a homeless shelter.
It could be a bully in a school.
Go find someone that is currently under attack and go protect them.
It could be a pastor, by the way.
It could be someone who's getting ridiculed and just getting rolled over.
Go find them.
That's who you're built.
That's what you're built to do.
You are built to go protect the people that can't protect themselves.
And all of a sudden, you're like, no, this is an injustice.
If you're a man out there, you're looking for a purpose.
Go find injustice and do something about it.
Quickly.
That will all of a sudden make you feel as if that it's all just about my own substance flow.
And then all of a sudden you're like, man, I'm standing by these Calvary pastors that are under attack.
And my job right now is to assist them and run errands for them, whatever it might be, you know, during the lockdowns and all this.
And all of a sudden, you're like, man, I'm not able to do that as much if I get drunk every night.
Maybe I should stop doing that.
All of a sudden, your life naturally orders when you find a purpose bigger than yourself.
And people are like, well, what is that purpose?
Again, let me reiterate that.
Protect something that can't protect themselves.
It's that simple.
And you're like, well, I can't do that.
Yes, you can.
There is somebody in this town right now that can't protect themselves.
That's in a cycle where they need help.
And it could be as simple as like, I have an abusive relationship.
I need someone to stay.
I need to be able to just offer a bed for somebody, right?
I need a meal with somebody to be able to empathize with and pray for, right?
Any one of those things.
That's a form of protection.
Then all of a sudden, you are now in the service capacity, not just in the served capacity.
I need everything all the time.
No, no, no, no.
That's not what you're called to do, especially as men.
Protect something that can't protect themselves.
Number five, this is something that I think is not talked about enough, which is be super honest with your failures.
If you want to look at a cycle of hopelessness or directionless, it's built on a mountain of deceit to the self and the soul.
It's built on like, man, it's other people's fault.
You know, they screwed me over.
You know, they keep on whittling me down.
No, you got to be brutally honest with yourself.
And maybe you have to write to yourself, like, man, I could have done a lot better job there.
I was kind of a jerk to that person.
Or I was 10 minutes late to that job interview.
Whatever that is, that's being honest with yourself and holding yourself to a higher standard.
And for men out there, this is liberating because all of a sudden you write down, you're like, man, I have been screwing up a lot.
And I can fix a lot of this stuff because I have agency and I have the ability to do that.
And I think I can live a more fulfilling life when I do that.
Be honest with your failures.
And it's the most liberating thing in the world.
You want to know people that are kind of looking for that direction.
Every around every single turn is a half-truth and a lie that they told first and foremost to themselves.
Number six, which is be clear with your goals, is that you need to go find something worth doing.
You got to go find something meaningful and eternal, which is why I'm a big supporter of young men trying to be worthy of someone that women want to marry.
And so you got to do it early and you got to be, and so men say all the time, like, man, I just can't find a woman.
I'm like, you know what's interesting?
In Scottsdale, it's the most single city in the country, right?
Which is where we spend a lot of time.
There's five single women for every one man.
And it's funny, all the women have a completely different understanding of what's going on.
They're like, oh, we can find men and they're all losers.
Right?
All of them.
And like, we have like this married list kind of demographic in Scottsdale.
And this is, I'm just being very honest with men, be like, you got to raise your own standard.
Go work out a little bit.
Stop eating saturated fats and all that garbage of fast food, right?
Stop drinking.
Stop doing drugs.
Start telling the truth.
Go find a little purpose.
Save a little money.
Like, go put your life together.
I mean, and if I have to hear, like, oh, like everyone hates me, I'm going to go like watch some website that I shouldn't be watching.
Like, fine.
Then you really don't deserve to do it.
And so my call is more for the men than the women.
It really is.
My wife will be through the women's ministry of how to find, you know, a man and all that.
She's amazing.
But for men, I'm telling you, you got to raise your own standards.
You have to.
And you got to be harsh on yourself.
And that's actually going to be, in my opinion, the most liberating thing.
You might say, well, Charlie, harsh on yourself.
Doesn't that cause self-harm?
No, it doesn't.
No, it doesn't.
For men, that is the most liberating thing because we are called to a challenge.
We're called to pressure.
We're called to finally our breaking point.
We're like, I'm going to push through that.
That's what gives us purpose and meaning.
And then finally, this is the opposite of what you're told.
And then I will kind of do a pastor's close, so like 35-minute close.
Right.
So I'm kidding.
I'm kidding.
Which is discipline is freedom.
Discipline, it's the opposite of what you're told, is that when you decide to put a framework in place of where you have rules for your own life, you're going to be the most free person.
And so it's the opposite.
We're told freedom is being able to do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it.
Indulge in yourself.
Be able to kind of do whatever substance you want.
We're going to listen to music that glamorizes it and hang out with friends that think it's terrific and we're just going to do enough to get by.
You're not going to be free.
You're going to be, I said this at the women's conference last week and it got written up everywhere.
And I'll just say it again, whatever.
You're going to be a metaphorical slave to whatever that stuff is.
You guys know what I mean when I mean that, by the way, okay?
Again, all the media is like, oh, you're like Jim Crow.
Like, that's not what I mean.
Okay.
A metaphorical slave to whatever that is, right?
And you guys that have ever dealt with alcoholics, you know exactly what I mean, by the way.
You know exactly what I mean.
And so all of a sudden, what if I told you that the wise restraints that you put yourself are going to keep you free?
That all of a sudden the rules that you write down, the things that you're not going to do.
Now, I want you to think about something.
The Ten Commandments are amazing, right?
I think it's six between us and God and four between yourselves.
I could be wrong.
Anyway, I think that's right.
But God's telling us to do and also not to do.
God's trying to put barriers on our own human nature.
And guess what?
If you just follow those 10 commandments, they're not like the fun police.
They actually, your life will be blessed immeasurably.
And that's the amazing thing is God gave us these rules to bless us.
He didn't give us these rules to all of a sudden be like, yeah, you're going to have a funless life and you're going to be miserable.
Actually, if you put those restraints on yourself, you're actually going to live a more free and flourishing life than before.
There's a beautiful sign at the Harvard Law School.
They're going to get rid of it really soon because way too wise.
And it says, The law are the wise restraints that keep men free.
And I want you to think about that.
That if you want to be free, you got to all of a sudden become controlling of yourself.
And you got to be able to have rules for yourself.
There's a guy that did this really well, Jordan Peterson.
You've probably read his book.
Some of them are really good rules.
Some of them are kind of silly, and a couple I disagree with.
But generally, they're really good and they're rooted in kind of biblical truths.
And one of them is sit up straight with your shoulders back, right?
Come on, present yourself like you're someone worthy to talk to.
Another one is when you shake someone's hand, look at them in the eye and speak clearly who you are and what your purpose is and what you want.
Never ever tell a lie and always tell the truth.
Those are really, really good rules, right?
And for the young male crisis we have in our country, that is very, very helpful.
Because you know what is missing?
What's missing is order.
We have nothing but chaos at every single turn, right?
Unpredictability, just kind of we don't know what next is going to happen.
Then maybe we need to create a framework which is discipline.
And I could tell you the most free people that I ever meet are the people that get up at 5 a.m. and they run like five and a half miles and they have their entire schedule built out.
And for some people, that's too manic, right?
But the point is that there's order and there's freedom in actually being able to structure your life that way.
And there's some human beings need variety too, and you could always kind of space that in.
But the opposite is this.
The opposite is like, man, I stayed up to 6 a.m. playing video games and I got marijuana delivered to my door at like 2 a.m.
And I don't remember what I ate.
I woke up at 3 and like I hadn't been outside in a week and like whatever, right?
That's not freedom.
Of course not, right?
And so that's the extreme of just total abyss and chaos.
And so I'm going to go through this list again.
Seven things that men have to do, seven charges, and you guys can spread them to men.
And these are good for women too, but for men in particular, because we have a male crisis in our country, the likes of which no one wants to admit.
And it's bad for women, it's bad for men, it's bad for families, bad for our nation.
Self-control, not self-esteem.
Stop sinning early.
Find something you don't want to lose, or that if you lost it, all of a sudden you would feel as if there was an urge to try to fight for that.
We call that responsibility, use that word responsibility.
So here's the test of whether or not you have responsibility in your life.
If you don't show up tomorrow morning, somewhere or anywhere, will anyone care?
If the answer is no, you don't have any responsibility.
If all of a sudden, if you don't show up anywhere, you're not responsible for anything.
Right?
But all of a sudden, if you are, let's say that you work at a dentist's office and you got to open that door at 8 a.m. to be able to get patients in at 9 a.m.
And you don't do that, all of a sudden the whole office is going to be like, why wasn't this open?
The coffee's not on.
That means that you have some responsibility.
Congratulations, people need you.
That's a big deal.
That you got something that all of a sudden you're in a connective tissue of humanity.
That's the definition of responsibility.
Number four, protect something that can't protect themselves.
Be the defenders of the good against evil, especially against people that are trying to do things that are nefarious.
Be honest with your failures always.
Be clear with your goals.
And discipline is freedom.
And I do want to speak to the women out there.
I just want to reinforce this, especially the moms.
Please, every way you possibly can with your sons, challenge them to be the best version of a biblical man.
Because everything around them in society is telling them to do the opposite.
And that kind of idea of responsibility and direction and goal is so incredibly important.
And so it's Father's Day.
In order for us to have fathers, we must have strong men.
Fathers build strong families alongside mothers.
And we currently don't have that.
One of the reasons we're losing our freedoms and our liberties is because of that.
It's because all of a sudden we don't have a father.
What replaces the father?
The state.
And the state becomes the father.
The state then sends all of a sudden sends the checks.
The state is the one that sends the assistance.
You want to all of a sudden be able to contest for liberty and freedom and virtue?
That's the best way to do it.
I'll close with this.
The church has to continue to rise up, everybody.
We're going to be doing this at Turning Point Faith.
I'm going to keep on talking about this on our radio show.
I would consider it a personal favor if every person here subscribed to my podcast.
It's super easy to do.
It's free of charge.
Every single smartphone has a podcast app.
And if everyone in this room did it here, we would beat the New York Times, the podcast charts by tomorrow morning, which I think would be a lot of fun.
Now, if you're like, Charlie, how do I subscribe to that?
Well, every Apple phone has a podcast app.
Is there like a 14-year-old around?
Just ask the 14-year-old.
They'll be able to help you very easily with that.
But look, this was obviously a less political speech than I usually give.
I give these speeches for a reason because I think that politics is just a reflection of the type of culture that we have.
The great Andrew Breitbart used to say politics flows downstream from culture.
And culture is how we build our families, how we educate our children, how we have our churches, how we communicate our values and what our values are.
And I think we all agree that without strong men and fathers and families that are being built that are having a lot of children and willing to raise them, then all of a sudden we're just kind of reorganizing chairs on the Titanic.
And so I hope this was helpful for a lot of our young men out there and for families.
And I can tell you, for our nation, everybody, we got to keep on fighting for what is true and what is beautiful and what is good.
And it starts with the church.
It starts with all of you showing up to school board meetings.
If every single person here showed up to a school board meeting and all of a sudden was like, wait a second, why is it that we're teaching this transgender nonsense?
Action Items for School Boards00:01:39
Why is it that we have this kind of men can go into lockrooms?
Why are we teaching critical race theory in our local schools in Chino or Ontario?
Don't put up with it.
You guys have the power to be able to do something about it in your local school boards.
We hold the power.
So I encourage all of you to try to find your local school boards and do something about it.
So I just want to thank this incredible church and Pastor Joe.
And for those of you that might have just come and haven't given your life to Jesus Christ, that's the ultimate action item that I have here.
My friend Bob is watching all the way in Naples, Florida, and he's like, Charlie, give action items.
So here's my action item: give your life to Christ if you haven't already.
It's the most important thing you can do.
And I want to see you in heaven and have eternal life.
That's number one.
Number two, if you're a man that's currently a member of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan, get your life together and do these seven things.
If you have a man in your life that's like that, challenge them.
Put some pressure on them.
Believe in them and say that I see potential and I want to see you get to higher levels.
And remember those seven things.
If you could subscribe to the podcast, it would deeply bless me.
And guys, our best days are ahead in this country.
We have the truth and we are growing in numbers.
We have momentum.
Now, what is the physics definition of momentum?
Force, momentum, equals mass times acceleration.
I'm feeling our numbers increase and we're moving at quicker speed.
And it all starts with you guys.
I'm so blessed to be able to be with you, you guys, here today.
God bless you.
Thank you so much.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.