The Charlie Kirk Show - Reclaiming the Nation for the Next Generation—LIVE from Clemson University
Aired: 2021-11-13
Duration: 01:17:06


=== Clemson University Conversation (02:49) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, happy Saturday.
[00:00:01]  My conversation at Clemson University.
[00:00:03]  They say go tigers.
[00:00:04]  I hope you enjoy it.
[00:00:05]  We talk about a lot of different topics, very wide-ranging.
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[00:00:11]  So if you like this show and you have some extra capital to deploy and you want to give back, go to charliekirk.com/slash support and become a partner with us.
[00:00:18]  And if you become a monthly supporter, you get to come to our exclusive invite-only Zoom calls with me where I answer all the questions I can.
[00:00:24]  Donna, charliekirk.com slash support from Georgia.
[00:00:28]  Thank you, Steve from Indiana.
[00:00:29]  Thank you for supporting us.
[00:00:30]  Laura from California.
[00:00:32]  Thank you, Cody from South Carolina.
[00:00:34]  Thora from Texas.
[00:00:35]  Thank you.
[00:00:35]  Mildred from Alabama.
[00:00:37]  Jenna from California.
[00:00:39]  I want to thank Rachel from California.
[00:00:42]  And I want to thank Liana from California and Jonathan from Ohio, charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:00:48]  My stop at the Turning Point USA, Clemson University, buckle up.
[00:00:52]  Here we go.
[00:00:53]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:54]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:00:57]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:01:00]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:03]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:04]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:05]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:01:12]  Turning point USA.
[00:01:14]  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.
[00:01:22]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:25]  Wow, what an awesome room this is.
[00:01:27]  This is really cool.
[00:01:29]  I hear this is the oldest building on campus.
[00:01:31]  Is that true?
[00:01:31]  That's pretty awesome.
[00:01:33]  Great to be here, everybody.
[00:01:34]  And I just want to first say thank you to this administration at Clemson University.
[00:01:40]  You know, I travel the country.
[00:01:41]  I speak at a lot of different campuses.
[00:01:43]  We are at University of Vermont and University of Oregon.
[00:01:46]  Definitely did not receive this kind of welcome.
[00:01:49]  This is actually the first time we're speaking on a college campus in like two years.
[00:01:55]  And that's not to say we're not going to campuses.
[00:01:58]  We just usually go to the campus and we have to go to a hotel next door because of all sorts of different reasons, virus protocols and stuff.
[00:02:05]  But I just want to thank the administration truly for allowing this to happen here.
[00:02:09]  It says a lot about this great institution.
[00:02:11]  So thank you.
[00:02:12]  It's really special.
[00:02:19]  I want to thank our Turning Point USA chapter here.
[00:02:22]  You guys are doing an amazing work.
[00:02:24]  Now, I'm told that this is the largest turning point chapter in the country.
[00:02:28]  That's what I'm told.
[00:02:29]  And so we're going to go with it.
[00:02:31]  There you go.
[00:02:36]  So there's a lot I want to get to, and then I want to do some questions.
[00:02:40]  And it's going to be a lot of fun because we're on campus and I want to kind of hear about what's happening on the ground here.
[00:02:45]  First, I just want to say, you know, growing up in Chicago, Illinois, anyone from Chicago here?

=== Defining Human Worth (15:44) ===

[00:02:49]  Anyone from the North?
[00:02:51]  Yeah.
[00:02:53]  I love the South, and I think it's super unfair that there's this kind of constant war on the American South.
[00:02:59]  And in many different ways, from the removal of monuments to just kind of this.
[00:03:04]  And when I grew up, I was always, there was always kind of this slight tone or undertone towards anyone that grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line.
[00:03:12]  Now, for those of you that grew up in the South, which I'm guessing is a majority of you, you might not know this, but there is kind of this kind of arrogance or this snobbery that a lot of people that grew up in the North have towards people that kind of live in the South.
[00:03:27]  And it's almost like we're better than you, you know, kind of get out of our way.
[00:03:31]  We don't like your politics.
[00:03:32]  We don't like your worldview.
[00:03:34]  And I never liked that.
[00:03:35]  And I think it's honestly evil and awful.
[00:03:38]  And let's just look at one statistic that I think is super important before we kind of get into the main part of the speech, which is how people in the South disproportionately serve in the United States military.
[00:03:49]  And this is something that I always challenge people.
[00:03:52]  They say, oh, yeah, you know what's the problem with the country?
[00:03:54]  The problem is Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina.
[00:03:58]  And I say, you do realize that despite having only about 32% of the population, 44% of all armed service, all service members are from a collection of six states.
[00:04:10]  And you're in one of those states right now.
[00:04:13]  And so you look at our amazing veterans and the people serving in the military.
[00:04:23]  They're from a portion of the country that gets kind of a majority of all the condemnation for whatever possible reason.
[00:04:31]  I think it's super unfair.
[00:04:33]  And when you go look at who's willing to go die for our nation, it's from right here.
[00:04:38]  It's from this part of the world.
[00:04:39]  It's from South Carolina.
[00:04:40]  It's from North Carolina.
[00:04:42]  It's from Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama.
[00:04:45]  And there is kind of this ethos of this part of the world of service and of duty and of love of nation and country.
[00:04:54]  And, you know, I travel the country, you know, we were just in Vermont and we were in Oregon and Boise.
[00:04:59]  There is a continual war on the American South.
[00:05:02]  And I'll let you guys sort out if, you know, there's problems that the South has to fix, like whatever.
[00:05:07]  But you're my fellow countrymen.
[00:05:10]  And I think it's so wrong to say, you know what, we are now going to impose our values.
[00:05:13]  And by the way, you have to go remove all of your statues, which now they removed Thomas Jefferson, who was a wonderful man, and they removed him from Virginia, I think in Richmond, Virginia.
[00:05:22]  And I'm always struck in the Bible, one of my favorite things in the Bible is this kind of refrain of remember.
[00:05:32]  And right before the Ten Commandments, many people don't remember this, is it says, I am the Lord your God who delivered you from Israel, from captivity in Israel.
[00:05:41]  There is this constant emphasis on remembrance and on not forgetting what happened before you.
[00:05:47]  And when you forget your history, when you forget the ties that bind you together, there might be other reasons why those monuments might be standing.
[00:05:54]  They say, oh, they're there because of white supremacy, or they're there because hundreds of thousands of people from this region bled and died for a cause that they believed in.
[00:06:02]  And maybe that was part of the healing process to keep our nation together.
[00:06:05]  And who are you, like smug person from Manhattan, to come in and say that we have to go remove every single statue from this part of the world?
[00:06:12]  You guys shouldn't put up with it, quite honestly.
[00:06:14]  And I think it's wrong on a variety of different levels, but it also goes towards this idea of trying to impose one's values in a different part of the world.
[00:06:24]  I'll give you a really silly example.
[00:06:25]  I'm not a fan of sweet tea, okay?
[00:06:27]  And let me just say that being in the South, I always go to, I always, I order iced tea, and they ask me sweets.
[00:06:32]  I'm like, what are you talking about?
[00:06:33]  Like, it doesn't make much sense.
[00:06:35]  But you guys obviously have a different taste, obviously, here.
[00:06:38]  Don't impose it on a different part of the country, the world.
[00:06:41]  When you have a big country and a diverse country, you're going to have to rely on citizen government and self-government rule.
[00:06:49]  And the national project that we all enjoy, the United States of America, is made possible thanks to a lot of different reasons, but also thanks to the industrial might and the service and the sacrifice of people from this part of the world.
[00:07:02]  And so I just want to acknowledge that from the beginning, because I, for one, is coming someone that did not grow up from around here and does not live here.
[00:07:09]  I live in Phoenix, Arizona now, which is not part of the South.
[00:07:12]  They say it's part of the Southwest, but it's its own thing, which is that if we're serious about actually keeping our country together, like enough of the regional warfare, enough of all of a sudden saying like these six states, we don't want them.
[00:07:23]  We want to separate them.
[00:07:24]  No, we're supposed to be one country of fellow citizens and fellow countrymen, and that includes South Carolina to the south of Bronx and in Phoenix, Arizona.
[00:07:33]  So I just want to start with that.
[00:07:35]  And so I want to kind of frame this conversation of kind of why we framed our tour and named our tour what it is.
[00:07:41]  So a couple years ago, we would do tours on socialism.
[00:07:45]  Happy to talk about socialism.
[00:07:46]  Anyone wants to talk about it tonight?
[00:07:48]  Happy to talk about American history or all these sorts of different things.
[00:07:51]  But over the last year and a half, there has been an overemphasis on the racial aspect of American political conversation.
[00:07:59]  And kind of within that came this teaching of critical race theory, diversity, equity, inclusion, kind of the whole Wokestan kind of belief system.
[00:08:09]  And we're going to dive into what all that stuff means.
[00:08:11]  But very simply, we need to do a much better job of explaining exactly the significance of these ideas.
[00:08:18]  So critical race theory is an academic theory that started in Yale and Columbia by Herbert Marcuse, came from the Frankfurt School in Germany.
[00:08:26]  And these ideas have been around for a couple decades.
[00:08:28]  But in the last year and a half, they've been accelerating at a rapid pace.
[00:08:33]  And so some people accuse us of trying to expose this and push back against this as saying, Charlie, it doesn't exist in America.
[00:08:39]  It's just a theory.
[00:08:40]  We're just trying to have our kids go through different exercises of different ways to view things.
[00:08:45]  So let me give you an example of exactly what we're trying to push back against.
[00:08:49]  And by the way, this is not a right issue.
[00:08:50]  This is not a left issue.
[00:08:51]  This is not conservative or liberal.
[00:08:53]  What I'm about to articulate, every human being should say this is evil, this is wrong, and it should be rejected.
[00:08:58]  For example, at over 75 schools across the country, they have black-only dormitories.
[00:09:04]  75 schools across the country.
[00:09:06]  They have black-only graduation ceremonies at Columbia University.
[00:09:10]  They have Hispanic-only graduation ceremonies at Columbia University.
[00:09:14]  Now, we don't have to overthink this.
[00:09:15]  Segregation is wrong.
[00:09:17]  Dividing people based on the color of their skin should be completely and totally rejected.
[00:09:22]  Instead, the new era, the woke movement, says we now need to divide people based on the color of their skin.
[00:09:28]  At Western Washington University, a long ways from here, they are now having dormitories where only black students are allowed to walk in, but closer to home.
[00:09:36]  In Georgia public schools, it has now been revealed that black sixth graders go to one classroom, white sixth graders go to another classroom.
[00:09:45]  Regardless of your political affiliation, we should find this repulsive.
[00:09:48]  This is creating a hyper-racist society that is organizing and stereotyping people based on things they cannot change, based on things that are their immutable characteristics.
[00:09:59]  And let me just say this.
[00:10:01]  I couldn't care less about your skin color.
[00:10:03]  It means absolutely nothing to me.
[00:10:05]  The emphasis on a skin color, I believe, creates racism where it does not exist.
[00:10:11]  Instead, we should be looking at the soul, the spirit, and the character of people.
[00:10:17]  And so this has real significant implications.
[00:10:21]  And again, I just want to thank Clemson.
[00:10:24]  This is amazing to kind of have this conversation and the different perspectives on this, because most campuses do not want to have a conversation about this at all.
[00:10:32]  Instead, it's completely kind of a silencing and chilling effect.
[00:10:36]  And we don't have to, in my personal opinion, have to have this overarching, complex way of looking at it, which is segregation was wrong in the 1950s.
[00:10:48]  And segregating children in the Georgia public schools, which is what's happening right now, is wrong again.
[00:10:54]  And it goes even further than that.
[00:10:56]  Whether it's not just graduation ceremonies, it's not just dormitories.
[00:11:00]  But also, I'll give you another example.
[00:11:02]  United Airlines has come out and they have said that they are going to be hiring pilots based primarily on based on the color of someone's skin.
[00:11:11]  Now, I don't know about you.
[00:11:12]  When I'm flying in an airplane, I couldn't care less about the skin color of the pilot.
[00:11:17]  I care, can you land the plane?
[00:11:19]  And this emphasis on diversity for diversity's sake comes with a price.
[00:11:25]  And when you elevate diversity over competency to try and fit some sort of esoteric political agenda, then there will be a price to pay for that.
[00:11:36]  And I also think that there's a deeper game at play here, which is, and I know a lot of you are obviously in college.
[00:11:42]  I know you're here.
[00:11:43]  You know, I'm 28 years old.
[00:11:44]  I'm not that much older than you.
[00:11:46]  But this has changed rapidly.
[00:11:48]  You know, 10 years ago, some of you were eight, and 10 years ago, I was 18.
[00:11:52]  I want you to think about kind of how that generate, like, we're more peers now.
[00:11:56]  We were not peers 10 years ago, obviously.
[00:11:58]  I would look at you at an eight-year-old, like, go away, right?
[00:12:00]  That's kind of weird, right?
[00:12:01]  But you've kind of become peers as I'm in my late 20s, and you're now kind of entering formal adulthood.
[00:12:07]  And 10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable to have an entire political movement or an entire cultural social movement that would emphasize the color of someone's skin.
[00:12:21]  In fact, we used to call those people racists that would do that.
[00:12:24]  And the excuse is always given: well, Charlie, we just need to have a conversation on race.
[00:12:28]  It's not going to go beyond that.
[00:12:29]  But when you start to see 75 schools and growing that then prioritize people based on things they can't change, it should be a timeout.
[00:12:36]  Like, wait, what exactly are we doing here?
[00:12:38]  And let's go to the obvious question, which is, well, why is it wrong to judge people based on things they can't change?
[00:12:45]  Because we should always have a preference on human action.
[00:12:47]  And that is what always made America different.
[00:12:50]  If you think about it, it doesn't matter who your parents were.
[00:12:53]  It doesn't matter where you come from.
[00:12:55]  It should always matter how hard are you willing to work.
[00:12:58]  What are you willing to dedicate?
[00:12:59]  Are you willing to improve your character?
[00:13:01]  Instead, what CRT, diversity, equity, inclusion does is it gives a preference based on things you cannot change no matter how hard you work at it.
[00:13:10]  It's disempowering more than it is empowering.
[00:13:13]  And then the obvious critique of it, which is super important, which is, are we actually trying to heal and trying to mend these forces or whatever they might be or these things in the past?
[00:13:25]  Or are we actually trying to harbor new resentment and new forms of racism?
[00:13:29]  And so now that I'm actually on a college campus, I can say this to our generation, which is really important.
[00:13:35]  Regardless of your political affiliation over how you view this, we need a consensus that says we are not going to enter a new era where we are going to tolerate all of a sudden saying to anyone based on their skin color, that is your worth or your value.
[00:13:50]  It's disgusting and it's wrong.
[00:13:52]  It's evil and it's racist.
[00:13:53]  And that should be regardless of your political affiliation on any other sort of thing.
[00:13:58]  And this is a question that now our generation needs to ask itself, which is, what is the direction we want to go?
[00:14:09]  And, you know, this is a, you know, kind of you look at the country, it's falling apart.
[00:14:14]  I could overcomplicate it.
[00:14:15]  I won't.
[00:14:16]  I'll just simply say, let's go, Brandon, and then we can just move on, honestly.
[00:14:20]  So I mean it.
[00:14:29]  I'm a big fan of the NASCAR driver.
[00:14:31]  Let's go, Brandon.
[00:14:32]  Look, the border's wide open.
[00:14:34]  Inflation is kicking in.
[00:14:35]  There's a lot of problems.
[00:14:36]  We can go through those and question and answer.
[00:14:38]  But here's the important question.
[00:14:40]  And then I want to go into kind of the solution part of it, which is our generation, we now need to be leaders.
[00:14:46]  So I consider you part of your generation, even though I'm early millennial.
[00:14:49]  I disowned millennials a long time ago.
[00:14:51]  So I'm an adopted member of Generation Z, if you guys will take me.
[00:14:55]  I'm right on the edge.
[00:14:56]  But are we going to re-embrace the beauty and the gift that we've been given in the United States of America?
[00:15:03]  Or are we going to go in a path that is rooted in what I believe is the downfall of any organization, movement, or system that works, which is ingratitude?
[00:15:14]  Now, this is something that I wish colleges focused more on, which is the divide between people that live meaningful and happy lives versus people that don't is those people that wake up every single day and are more thankful than are bitter or people that are more bitter than they are thankful.
[00:15:31]  Now, that's not to say you shouldn't point out problems and not to say that you shouldn't be involved in fixing them.
[00:15:36]  But make no mistake, living in this nation is a gift from the Lord.
[00:15:39]  It is the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.
[00:15:46]  And when you are thankful for something, you're far less likely to want to revolutionize it or act like an activist and want to change it.
[00:15:56]  When you are thankful for something, you understand the sacrifices and the exceptionalism of the thought and of the philosophy that actually went into the creation of the nation that we live in today.
[00:16:08]  And so the kind of the status of where it happens right now, and this is why... you know, you're going to notice tonight, we'll talk about a lot of different things.
[00:16:18]  I'm really kind of bored with some of the political arguments, to be perfectly honest, because it kind of needs to transcend this.
[00:16:23]  It's, do you believe in a very, a couple simple American promises, and are you willing to do something about it, such as a citizen government, consent to the governed, independent judiciary, checks and balances.
[00:16:35]  And it is right now, what we are experiencing is a dynamic of the ruling class versus the citizen.
[00:16:42]  And the citizen is supposed to be us.
[00:16:44]  Citizen comes from a Greek term, which means co-ruler.
[00:16:47]  Now, this is a very important thing.
[00:16:49]  The people that run the country are a completely different group of people than who make the country run.
[00:16:55]  Those are two different groups of people.
[00:16:57]  The people that run the country have never been more disconnected, regardless of what political affiliation you might think it is, than the people who actually make the country run.
[00:17:06]  The people that make the country run are the police officers, the firefighters, the people that work in the medical clinics, the people that drive the trucks.
[00:17:13]  They have never been more disconnected from the American ruling class.
[00:17:17]  And the question is why?
[00:17:19]  Well, the American ruling class, and this is kind of an overarching term, whether it be economic, technological, or scientific, has a contempt for almost every single person in this room.
[00:17:30]  It has a contempt for people that are part of the muscular class, a contempt for people that do not want an overemphasis of trying to put America's sovereignty into an internationalist type globalist style project.
[00:17:43]  And the charge for us and our generation is, are we going to be willing to slow down and stop the progressive lie, which is just because times change, human beings change with it.
[00:17:57]  And are we going to be willing to preserve things that are good and true and beautiful?
[00:18:02]  In fact, preserve what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the laws of nature and nature's God.
[00:18:09]  And so people ask me all the time, they say, Charlie, what does that mean for our generation?
[00:18:13]  This means we must take a time out and stop and ask ourselves the question, is this the type of country I actually want to raise children in and grow old in and pass down to future generations?
[00:18:25]  And for many people, they haven't thought that deeply about it.
[00:18:28]  But public polling shows us that our generation is more dissatisfied with the current state of affairs.

=== Preserving Founding Principles (15:22) ===

[00:18:34]  In fact, there is an admission that we believe that we are inheriting something worse than our parents had.
[00:18:39]  Now, instead of just kind of protesting about it, the question should be, what are we actually going to do about it substantively?
[00:18:45]  And the first question is this.
[00:18:46]  The first question is, is it easier or is it harder to get married and have lots of children?
[00:18:51]  Which, by the way, is a moral objective good.
[00:18:54]  Now, this drives people nuts when I say this on college campuses.
[00:18:57]  It is a moral good to get married at a young age and have lots of children.
[00:19:00]  I encourage all of you to do it.
[00:19:02]  See, I get golf claps.
[00:19:04]  I always do.
[00:19:05]  I always do.
[00:19:06]  Now, we'll get to this later.
[00:19:10]  You will be a happier person the sooner you engage in monogamous relationships.
[00:19:17]  You will be a happier person.
[00:19:19]  You will be a happier person.
[00:19:23]  People don't, again, I get the sparing applause.
[00:19:27]  Our society would benefit and you will benefit too.
[00:19:30]  Now, it is harder than ever to have children in America.
[00:19:33]  In the 1980s, you used to be able to support a family of four on 36 weeks of labor a year.
[00:19:41]  Now it takes 53 weeks of labor a year to support a family of four, which forces what?
[00:19:46]  It either forces the other spouse to go into the workforce and work alongside of it, not voluntarily, but involuntarily, and it also requires families to go into debt.
[00:19:57]  You should be able to raise a family on a single income in America.
[00:20:01]  You should be able to raise a family on one income.
[00:20:05]  And by the way, Not everyone on the right agrees with me.
[00:20:11]  This is something where all of a sudden you start to see a little bit of fault lines.
[00:20:14]  People say, Charlie, just cut the taxes, deregulate the markets.
[00:20:18]  Who cares if it's more expensive to have children?
[00:20:20]  What's important is corporate profits.
[00:20:22]  I say nonsense.
[00:20:23]  I say, I love free markets because they serve people.
[00:20:26]  And if all of a sudden it's hard to have big families and strong communities, and we're seeing church enrollment go down and not up, and we're seeing the social and moral decline of the nation, I'm willing to say timeout and say, wait a second, do we really want to say Facebook, Google, Twitter, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, their profits come above the well-being of the American citizen?
[00:20:44]  I don't think so.
[00:20:45]  I don't think that's a good thing.
[00:20:46]  In fact, we should say, if you do not have strong families, the entire nation crumbles.
[00:20:51]  The only one of the 10 commandments that comes with a promise is honor your mother and father so that you may live long in the land that you are in.
[00:20:58]  43% of American children grow up without a single two parents stably in the home.
[00:21:05]  Do you know it's the highest rate in the world?
[00:21:07]  Now, you might say, Charlie, how is it that America, the wealthiest nation, the richest nation, has the highest rate of children being raised by one parent?
[00:21:16]  Now, I always have to qualify this because I get lots of angry emails.
[00:21:20]  Single parents are modern heroes.
[00:21:23]  This is not an accusation against them.
[00:21:24]  I'm not attacking them.
[00:21:26]  I'm instead saying that statistically, it is harder for a child to succeed if they are raised by just one parent versus two parents.
[00:21:37]  You could disagree with that.
[00:21:38]  You can yell and shout at me about that.
[00:21:40]  The numbers speak for themselves, likelihood to go to prison, to graduate from college, to have high income, that two-parent households are a barrier against any one of those things from happening.
[00:21:50]  In fact, it's a firewall.
[00:21:52]  Now, the reason, though, is exactly in the question.
[00:21:55]  Why is it that the wealthiest, richest country in the world, in the history of the world, has the highest rate of children growing up without a father or mother or kind of together?
[00:22:07]  Most of it is single motherhood, not exclusively, though.
[00:22:10]  And the answer is because we're so wealthy, because we can afford to divorce.
[00:22:14]  In most countries, they can't.
[00:22:17]  Divorce is a luxury of abundance.
[00:22:20]  You might say, what are you talking about?
[00:22:22]  If you go look at third world countries, all that keeps that family together is the family, meaning all that keeps the incomes coming.
[00:22:29]  Sharing and pooling resources, division of labor.
[00:22:32]  But when you have such an abundance of goods and services, all of a sudden you say, yeah, I'm bored.
[00:22:37]  I can move on.
[00:22:37]  And now I'm not saying that every divorce is a divorce of convenience.
[00:22:41]  There's plenty of examples of abuse and adultery and treachery.
[00:22:45]  But it is an arguable where we have to look and say, wait a second, we look at 43% of children that are not growing up with a mother and a father.
[00:22:52]  Is that a good thing for the type of nation we want to live in?
[00:22:55]  Of course not.
[00:22:56]  And so we, and I'll say, I don't want to speak for all of you, but those of us that are conservatives have to ask ourselves the question, what do we prioritize more than anything else?
[00:23:05]  And for the last 10 years, I think conservatives have put an overemphasis on corporate profits over how easy it is to have children and have a family.
[00:23:12]  So I'm looking at everyone in the audience right now.
[00:23:15]  It is going to be harder for your generation than any generation in American history to do something your grandparents did without much thought, which is have lots of children.
[00:23:24]  The number one excuse it is to have lots of children in America, the number one excuse people give is financial.
[00:23:29]  The number one excuse.
[00:23:30]  It's too expensive.
[00:23:31]  You know, I'll have one of each, like they're picking out tiling or something, you know, in the kitchen.
[00:23:36]  I'm not joking as if that's like the person should be accused of it.
[00:23:39]  I just think it's kind of a funny answer for people to give.
[00:23:42]  Instead, if you want the society to grow stronger, not weaker, if you want people to go off of government assistance, then you have to be willing to all of a sudden have a conversation about public policy proposals to say, what will make it easier for all of you in this room to want to have children?
[00:23:59]  Because we have the least married generation in American history.
[00:24:02]  Millennials are the least married generation in American history.
[00:24:06]  Now, millennials say that they don't want to get married because it's too expensive or they can't find a significant other.
[00:24:12]  I'm going to get into dating advice and stuff for all of you guys, which everyone always pays super attention when I say that.
[00:24:18]  And everyone like sits up in their chair.
[00:24:19]  They're like, ooh, I can't wait to hear.
[00:24:20]  No, it's going to be very harsh.
[00:24:22]  Don't worry.
[00:24:23]  But it will be true.
[00:24:24]  We'll get to that in a second.
[00:24:26]  But the first thing that we have to ask ourselves as the type of nation that we want to reclaim of our generation is that, do we like the nation where the top apps are Tinder and Snapchat and not the Bible app or anything that is meaningful?
[00:24:45]  And I don't mean that as a joke.
[00:24:48]  That's not a joke, by the way.
[00:24:49]  That's a very real thing.
[00:24:51]  And I'm not, and by the way, let me be very clear.
[00:24:54]  I'm not moralizing.
[00:24:56]  Everyone deserves grace, forgiveness, and mercy.
[00:24:58]  We've all made mistakes.
[00:24:59]  I mean that, okay?
[00:25:00]  We're all in this together.
[00:25:01]  I'm not going to be the type of person that points to you and says your salvation is put like, you know, it's kind of the southern preacher thing, no offense, but it's like a big thing around here, right?
[00:25:09]  I don't do that, okay?
[00:25:10]  Instead, I'm making a societal critique.
[00:25:12]  It's like, hold on a second.
[00:25:13]  Is this actually the type of country we want to live in?
[00:25:17]  We'll get to more of that in a second.
[00:25:18]  I want to talk a little bit about human nature, the Constitution.
[00:25:22]  How am I doing on time?
[00:25:22]  Oh, wow, we're doing good.
[00:25:24]  Oh, yeah, by the way, did you guys know China actually banned the Bible app?
[00:25:27]  It's interesting.
[00:25:28]  They just banned the Bible app.
[00:25:31]  Very interesting.
[00:25:33]  By the way, I'm actually not a big fan of digital Bibles.
[00:25:36]  I like physical Bibles.
[00:25:37]  It's a whole different speech for a different time.
[00:25:39]  But yeah, I got a couple fans up there.
[00:25:42]  I'll get to that.
[00:25:43]  That's a totally different thing.
[00:25:44]  I like being able to, you know, when the pastor says, now everyone opened their Bibles and they bring up their phone, every time, if you sit in the back row, they'll respond to a text, respond to an email, take a selfie, and then go to Mark.
[00:25:54]  Like, it's that simple, right?
[00:25:55]  It's like they got to do three digital pinpoints.
[00:25:57]  Anyway, that's a different topic.
[00:25:58]  Completely different for a different time.
[00:26:00]  Okay.
[00:26:03]  So the Constitution is the greatest political document ever written in the history of the world.
[00:26:07]  It's the longest lasting Constitution in the history of the planet.
[00:26:11]  And it's longest lasting for a reason.
[00:26:14]  And this is where it's going to get a little bit, people that might on the right might even disagree with me, which is that the founding fathers had a very specific view of human nature.
[00:26:24]  They believed that human beings were nasty, brutish, and short to each other.
[00:26:28]  Put simply, they believed human nature was naturally sinful.
[00:26:33]  I agree, by the way.
[00:26:34]  I think human beings are naturally awful.
[00:26:36]  Now, no, it's true.
[00:26:39]  It's true.
[00:26:40]  I'll prove it to you.
[00:26:42]  I don't know if I'll be able, I'll be able to, I can't prove it scientifically, but I'll prove it through a way that reasonably you'll be able to.
[00:26:47]  I'll use two examples, one recent and one that's not so recent.
[00:26:50]  Okay.
[00:26:51]  All of, it's just one that's timeless, I should say.
[00:26:53]  Every single person's dealt with a toddler before.
[00:26:55]  We all used to be toddlers, right?
[00:26:57]  Now, did you ever teach a toddler to lie or to manipulate their parents?
[00:27:05]  No.
[00:27:06]  They kind of have that uploaded into their operating system when they come into this earth.
[00:27:11]  That's the best argument I can give without having to overcomplicate.
[00:27:14]  I could go deeper, but that's...
[00:27:15]  The second one is this, about how dark the human soul can become, okay?
[00:27:20]  And everyone will agree at this, regardless, and you have different reasons as to why that is.
[00:27:23]  But recently in Philadelphia, this should have been the number one news story on the planet, by the way.
[00:27:28]  It's our generation's Kitty Genovese story, which most people don't know who Kitty Genovese was.
[00:27:32]  But Kitty Genovese was a woman that was raped on the side of a New York City block for 40 minutes, 35 witnesses heard and saw and did nothing.
[00:27:40]  Well, this is our generation's equivalent of this.
[00:27:42]  In Philadelphia, an illegal alien who should have been deported under the laws of our nation was on a subway and a woman was there too.
[00:27:50]  For 40 minutes and 25 train stops, he raped the woman and people filmed and did nothing and he stopped at his own convenience and just walked off the train.
[00:27:59]  People filmed it for TikTok, Instagram, and I don't know, future use and refused to intercede or do anything about it.
[00:28:06]  We're pretty dark people.
[00:28:08]  And now, before you say, Charlie, I would have done something.
[00:28:10]  I would have done something.
[00:28:11]  You're probably right.
[00:28:12]  You would have stepped up like a hero.
[00:28:14]  The point is, we need to take a real picture of, hold on a second, there's something in our soul that can go really dark really quick.
[00:28:20]  And need I go any further of the history of the 20th century to prove my point.
[00:28:25]  Is the attempted extermination of a people based purely on religious beliefs, on racial beliefs, any so further?
[00:28:32]  Now, why does that matter?
[00:28:34]  Okay, Charlie, fine.
[00:28:34]  Okay, people are naturally awful.
[00:28:36]  So what?
[00:28:37]  Well, there's three social contracts.
[00:28:39]  All of you guys in Intro to Political Science probably have a test on this very soon.
[00:28:42]  There's three different social contract theories.
[00:28:43]  Thomas Hobbes, who wrote The Leviathan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote many books, including the Confessions, and John Locke.
[00:28:49]  In the three different social contract theories, they all had different views of human nature.
[00:28:53]  Now, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which many of your leftist friends and many people here tonight, he believed humans were naturally good.
[00:29:01]  He believed that human beings at the core were naturally very good to one another.
[00:29:06]  He valued the primitive over the civilized, the infant over the adult, the adulterous lover over the loyal spouse.
[00:29:15]  Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that a man is born free, but spends the rest of his life in chains.
[00:29:21]  Put simply, everything you see bad around you is a byproduct of racism, misogyny, colonialism, capitalism.
[00:29:28]  It's not a human nature problem.
[00:29:30]  It's a human planning problem.
[00:29:32]  Now, that belief was basically scooped up by Marx and many others and turned into an economic theory.
[00:29:38]  Thomas Hobbes had a different belief.
[00:29:40]  Thomas Hobbes wrote a book called The Leviathan during the English Civil War, I believe in the mid-1600s.
[00:29:46]  Someone could fact check me on that.
[00:29:47]  I think it was 1600s.
[00:29:48]  And he saw the English Civil War and he said that human beings are nasty, brutish, and short.
[00:29:53]  He said, you are so awful, you don't even understand how bad you are to one another.
[00:29:57]  Now, he said, because of that, we need a massive government to control you.
[00:30:00]  We obviously disagree at that.
[00:30:01]  Now, John Locke, who was the main inspiration of the American founding, he took somewhat of a Hobbesian view, but his own.
[00:30:08]  He believed human beings were a blank slate.
[00:30:10]  He believes that it could go either way based on social circumstances.
[00:30:13]  And there is some evidence to show that, even though I would yield more on the Hobbesian view of human nature of how awful we are.
[00:30:19]  But the founding fathers studied all this.
[00:30:21]  They said, wow, what is the one thing that ancient Rome and ancient Greece and Napoleon, Napoleon came a little bit after, but kind of what happened in France and what happened all across the planet, what do they all have in common?
[00:30:33]  Is that when you have a system that is established and people are able to get power without a check and balance and they're able to abuse that power, bad things start to happen.
[00:30:42]  This is a very important point.
[00:30:44]  If you were able, if I took 10 random people and I put you in a room and I said, design the country and the government of your choice, what would you do?
[00:30:51]  Write the Constitution, write the system.
[00:30:53]  Where do rights come from?
[00:30:54]  It's an interesting social experiment, actually.
[00:30:56]  Now, Founding Fathers had an opportunity to do this.
[00:30:59]  They won the war against the British.
[00:31:00]  The Declaration of Independence was the beginning of such.
[00:31:03]  It's our birthday.
[00:31:04]  The fact our nation has a birthday is a big deal.
[00:31:07]  Not every nation has a birthday.
[00:31:08]  It's like, oh yeah, China's been around for thousands of years.
[00:31:10]  What's the date?
[00:31:11]  I don't know.
[00:31:12]  France has been around for a while.
[00:31:13]  What's the date?
[00:31:14]  We have a date where we declared our values that are just as true then as they are now.
[00:31:19]  When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political ties that has tied them to another, deriving from the powers, the separate and equal station of the earth of the laws of nature and nature's God.
[00:31:30]  That is a beautiful statement.
[00:31:31]  That is a statement that is true then as is true today.
[00:31:36]  And the view of human nature, though, the founders took was, hold on a second, we're not going to try to create utopia.
[00:31:45]  Now, this is what I have to tell every college audience.
[00:31:47]  You have to restrain yourself whenever you hear a politician talk to say, wait a second, that's never going to happen because the raw material you're dealing with is nasty, brutish, and short and selfish and sinful people.
[00:31:59]  The founding fathers said, okay, we're not going to create perfection.
[00:32:02]  Let's create something that's really hard to mess up.
[00:32:05]  That's slow, it's deliberate, and it's decentralized with rights saying that they come from God, not from government, a natural rights doctrine, an emphasis on states' rights.
[00:32:14]  And they went through this process.
[00:32:15]  And a question that we need to ask ourselves is, is the promise of the Constitution always true?
[00:32:22]  And this is why the Constitution was not written for the times.
[00:32:25]  It was written to stand the test of time.
[00:32:28]  It's because it was written on an observation of human nature.
[00:32:31]  And this is a disagreement.
[00:32:33]  There might be some professors here that are listening that will say I'm totally wrong because they'll say, you know what?
[00:32:37]  The founding fathers didn't have Twitter or airplanes.
[00:32:40]  Therefore, it's outdated.
[00:32:42]  And we should laugh at that, but you hear that argument a lot.
[00:32:45]  It's an old document.
[00:32:46]  So what if it's old?
[00:32:47]  The question is, did it talk about things that are eternal and true and things that do not change?
[00:32:52]  And so if you kind of put people in a room and you ask yourselves the question, what's the type of society that you want to design?
[00:32:58]  And the founders answered that question by one that protects your rights, that has a check and balance on your own desire to dominate.
[00:33:07]  And boy, have we seen that desire manifest in the last year and a half, from public health officials to unelected bureaucrats to people on social media or in tech.
[00:33:17]  And the best example of a person that has basically removed himself from the check and balance of the founding fathers is Anthony Fauci.
[00:33:25]  And no one voted for him.
[00:33:36]  It's true.
[00:33:36]  I want you to think about how much power he has.
[00:33:38]  You did not show up to the voting booth and say, yes or no, I think he should have this kind of power.
[00:33:43]  It's an extra governmental, extra constitutional position of an unelected, largely unknown, and unchecked power of someone that is then able to micromanage so many of your decisions of assembly, to vaccines, to masks, and so on and so forth.

=== Managing Expectations and Identity (13:17) ===

[00:33:57]  Where the Constitution, the power of the Constitution is in you.
[00:34:00]  It emphasizes consent and your ability to do something about it.
[00:34:06]  And to tie this all together, and then I'll get into the dating advice and life advice, which I think is really important, and then we'll do questions, which is wokeism and the CRT nonsense is trying at every single corner to undermine the core, deliberate, stable promise of the United States Constitution.
[00:34:24]  The Constitution is one that recognizes human beings for their worth, regardless of skin color.
[00:34:29]  Not tribes, not how you look, not on some sort of grievance political issue.
[00:34:34]  Instead, it's you're the same sort of thing.
[00:34:36]  You're a human being.
[00:34:37]  You're a speaking being.
[00:34:39]  You have a soul and you deserve dignity.
[00:34:42]  And it's a promise of rights and freedom.
[00:34:44]  And this is where all of a sudden you lose some people on the political left, not of outcomes or the certain station that you want to have at the end of it.
[00:34:52]  That's something that people aren't always comfortable with, by the way.
[00:34:54]  Because when you have liberty, you will have disparate outcomes.
[00:34:57]  If I gave everyone here $100 and I'd say, come back in a week, some of you would be $100 in debt.
[00:35:02]  Some of you would have $1,000.
[00:35:04]  Some of you would go buy Bitcoin and be worth a million dollars or something, right?
[00:35:08]  You would all make different decisions because liberty allows you to take risks and therefore you're going to have different outcomes.
[00:35:14]  And so, but wokeism is an assault on all of this.
[00:35:17]  And critical race theory is just the current placeholder of that.
[00:35:20]  Okay, I want to now say something that's probably one of the more controversial things I'm going to say tonight.
[00:35:24]  Happiness is a choice.
[00:35:26]  And many people are not going to teach you this on a college campus.
[00:35:30]  How happy you are is a moral good for yourself and for the world.
[00:35:34]  Now, my mentor on this is the great Dennis Prager.
[00:35:36]  He's phenomenal.
[00:35:37]  And he's, for those that don't know, Dennis Prager, he's terrific.
[00:35:40]  And I'm going to give you some life advice that has blessed me.
[00:35:45]  If you are judging how happy you are based on how much fun you are having, you are going to be a miserable person.
[00:35:52]  Because not every moment of your life is going to be fun.
[00:35:55]  In fact, very little of your life will something be called fun.
[00:35:58]  Now, in college, it doesn't kick in yet because everything, it's kind of outdoing oneself, right?
[00:36:06]  But eventually, for you seniors in the room, it's kicked in a little bit.
[00:36:10]  Kind of like drinking till 4 a.m., you know, doing, I'm not even going to get into the stuff that I'm sure that happens at this fine institution.
[00:36:20]  Bible study, right?
[00:36:21]  You know, playing blackjack with, you know, whatever.
[00:36:26]  I'll stop there.
[00:36:27]  So fun is not what gives you happiness.
[00:36:33]  You might say, Charlie, what gives you happiness?
[00:36:35]  Number one, you have to choose to be happy and you have to work at it.
[00:36:38]  It's your attitude that matters.
[00:36:40]  And if you look at a couple things, it's the expectations of what you think comes next that matters a lot.
[00:36:47]  Keeping your expectations in check is a very important thing, meaning not having too high of expectations where you expect a massive dopamine rush of every room you come into, which ties to how I started this speech, gratitude.
[00:37:00]  Are you thankful for what you have around you?
[00:37:04]  I am afraid we have raised and are raising the least thankful generation in American history.
[00:37:12]  Now, some people say, thankful to who?
[00:37:17]  Well, that's a good question.
[00:37:18]  I believe thankful to the Lord, at the least your parents.
[00:37:22]  At the least someone that came before you and sacrificed something for you might say, Charlie, I have awful parents.
[00:37:27]  I worked my way through everything.
[00:37:28]  All right, you are the most rugged individual I've ever met on the planet.
[00:37:31]  I guarantee you, somebody offered you something you could be thankful for.
[00:37:35]  Something.
[00:37:35]  What does that do?
[00:37:36]  All of a sudden it takes a step back and all of a sudden dismisses the gateway drug to misery, self-pity, feeling sorry for oneself.
[00:37:47]  Feeling sorry for oneself is the gateway drug for a miserable life.
[00:37:52]  Oh, Charlie, you don't understand how hard it is to be me.
[00:37:54]  You're right, I don't.
[00:37:56]  I have no idea.
[00:37:58]  And maybe that's, you want that your identity.
[00:38:00]  Maybe you want to be the banner waiver of the oppression Olympics.
[00:38:03]  Go do it.
[00:38:05]  Instead, you want to live a happy life.
[00:38:07]  You have to say, I have to start to choose to do one, rooted in gratitude and rooted in things and meaning.
[00:38:11]  Now, this is important.
[00:38:12]  People say, well, Charlie, what are you?
[00:38:14]  The fun police?
[00:38:14]  You don't want to have fun?
[00:38:15]  No, fun can be like dessert, where you have it every so often.
[00:38:19]  But you know this.
[00:38:20]  It's a very important thing.
[00:38:21]  The friends that you grew up in high school with that were nothing but pleasure seekers and having fun, I'm sure some of you already have seen kind of how that has a downward spiral of chaos.
[00:38:31]  That lasts for a season.
[00:38:32]  But the question then is, well, then Charlie, what do I do?
[00:38:35]  What do I pursue that is eternal and meaningful?
[00:38:37]  Like, I'm glad you asked.
[00:38:38]  A relationship with the transcendent matters a lot.
[00:38:42]  Philosophy comes from a Greek word, philosophos, which is the love of knowledge or the love of wisdom.
[00:38:48]  Well, wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord.
[00:38:51]  And try to find some time of your life or some of your day where you can start to all of a sudden engage in wonder.
[00:38:58]  Wonder is the beginning of philosophy, Socrates said, which is beginning to ask questions that are bigger than yourself.
[00:39:04]  Like what is good?
[00:39:04]  What is true?
[00:39:05]  What is beautiful?
[00:39:06]  What ties all of this together?
[00:39:08]  That will all of a sudden put you in a place where all of a sudden the kind of self-pity parade won't matter as much because there is an entire universe out there that we should be in awe of that we should just try to study, understand, and that quite honestly is objectively beautiful.
[00:39:23]  And the other thing I think that's really important, which happiness being a choice, not a state of mind, is we have to put a heavier emphasis on self-control than self-esteem.
[00:39:33]  That self-control is far more important than the self-esteem movement.
[00:39:36]  Now, let me say this.
[00:39:37]  The self-esteem movement is largely rooted by well-meaning people.
[00:39:41]  It does unbelievable damage.
[00:39:43]  It does incredible damage.
[00:39:44]  Because I remember being in seventh grade, we had all these posters that came up.
[00:39:48]  It says, self-esteem, you're perfect the way you are.
[00:39:50]  And I went to my teacher, I said, if I'm perfect the way I am, why am I here?
[00:39:52]  Like, why am I studying?
[00:39:53]  Why am I still going to school?
[00:39:55]  Instead, it's you're made in the image of God.
[00:39:59]  You are loved by something beyond anything of your imagination, but you've got a lot of work to do to improve your character.
[00:40:04]  People, especially men, want to be challenged.
[00:40:07]  Men want to be challenged at a young age.
[00:40:08]  Instead, it's suppressing and it is almost lowering the kind of aspiration of people.
[00:40:14]  Okay, to dating.
[00:40:15]  Let's go to this really quick.
[00:40:16]  So, which gets people's attention.
[00:40:19]  I think I already said this, but please reject hookup culture.
[00:40:22]  It is a disgusting thing.
[00:40:23]  It's awful for everyone involved.
[00:40:25]  I cannot emphasize this enough.
[00:40:26]  It'll make you a miserable person.
[00:40:28]  And please reject that altogether.
[00:40:31]  That's number one.
[00:40:32]  Okay, let's start.
[00:40:32]  Let me talk to men, and I'll let my wife talk to the women if you guys want to, because I got to be careful.
[00:40:35]  I get into all sorts of trouble.
[00:40:36]  So, but if you guys, my wife is a great role model for young women.
[00:40:40]  Men, get your act together.
[00:40:43]  You see, the women always applaud when I say that.
[00:40:44]  And the men are like, what are you talking about?
[00:40:48]  Let me start with the men.
[00:40:51]  Do something really hard.
[00:40:54]  You need it.
[00:40:55]  Men need to be challenged at a young age.
[00:40:57]  Push yourself.
[00:40:58]  That could be pushing yourself physically, academically, spiritually.
[00:41:02]  You need a challenge.
[00:41:03]  Young men without a challenge does not go well.
[00:41:06]  It's like Lord of the Flies, which is what a lot of college campuses become.
[00:41:09]  But here's the other thing: is that challenge yourself to prevent, to say, can I not do something instead of, can I do something?
[00:41:18]  Can I go without drinking for six months?
[00:41:20]  Challenge yourself to that.
[00:41:22]  Can I go without swearing for six months?
[00:41:24]  Challenge yourself to that.
[00:41:25]  Now, what is the significance of that?
[00:41:28]  Women want to be with men who are able to control themselves.
[00:41:36]  Women want to be with men that are able to control themselves.
[00:41:40]  And a lot of men are like, what are you talking about?
[00:41:43]  Women, whether they realize it or not, many of them, they see nothing but men that are directionless, out of control, and do not have purpose in life.
[00:41:54]  Instead, they want to see, see, see a lot of young ladies nodding their heads, and a lot of young men that are very angry at me right now.
[00:42:01]  Very angry.
[00:42:03]  Which is, and this goes to something that's so incredibly important, which is you become more desirable when all of a sudden you are able to say no to the things that are tempting that everybody else is doing.
[00:42:18]  Because deep down, and this is where all of a sudden I'm going to lose some of the women, women want a leader in their man.
[00:42:24]  Deep down, they want to be led.
[00:42:28]  Now, I've lost the entire feminist community on campus.
[00:42:32]  Okay, fine.
[00:42:34]  But it's true.
[00:42:35]  It's that self, when you don't have self-control, you're inherently not leading.
[00:42:39]  You're following.
[00:42:40]  And so for young men, I hope that resonates with you.
[00:42:42]  For young women, I'm going to have to just plead the fifth.
[00:42:44]  You can listen to my wife, Erica.
[00:42:47]  I got myself in enough trouble already tonight.
[00:42:49]  Okay, let me close by this, then we'll do some questions.
[00:42:52]  But I want to just pour into you guys.
[00:42:54]  You can make a decision tonight.
[00:42:55]  Outside of politics, all that stuff.
[00:42:56]  Life advice.
[00:42:57]  Look, I travel 330 days a year.
[00:42:59]  I do two podcasts a day, three hours of radio day.
[00:43:01]  We write books.
[00:43:02]  We do all sorts of crazy things.
[00:43:03]  I sleep very little.
[00:43:04]  I love what I get to do.
[00:43:06]  And so people say, Charlie, what sort of career should I get into?
[00:43:10]  Find a career that if you won the lottery, you'd keep doing it.
[00:43:13]  That's what you should go do.
[00:43:15]  Find a career that if you won the lottery, you would continue to do it.
[00:43:19]  That's me.
[00:43:19]  If we won the lottery, I'd be here next year.
[00:43:21]  It's really nice to go, and I like speaking here.
[00:43:24]  Not everyone has.
[00:43:25]  I say, Charlie, and that's not to say you should discount trying to find a job and all of that.
[00:43:29]  But find something where it enriches your soul the more you do it.
[00:43:34]  And for some people, it's going to be following your skill, not your passion.
[00:43:37]  Because sometimes your skill can lead you to that because when you get good at something, you want to keep on following it.
[00:43:41]  But for those of you that are in the audience, 18, 19, 20, 21 years old, you can make a decision tonight where your entire life will change for the better.
[00:43:48]  You can say, you know what?
[00:43:49]  I've just kind of been schlepping around.
[00:43:51]  I'm not the person I want to be or who I am.
[00:43:54]  The cool thing is you have the agency and the power to change that today.
[00:43:58]  You have the agency and the power to say, you know what, no more.
[00:44:00]  I'm going to now wake up at an earlier time.
[00:44:02]  I'm not going to drink.
[00:44:03]  I'm not going to go out with that group of friends.
[00:44:04]  And that's another piece of advice for whatever it's worth.
[00:44:07]  Pick friends that make you a better version of who you are.
[00:44:10]  You are the combined average of the five people you spend the most time with.
[00:44:16]  And so, and then commit yourself saying, I want to work on being happy, which is not the same thing as pursuing fun, as we went through, but instead it's being thankful.
[00:44:29]  It's understanding and managing your expectations.
[00:44:31]  And then finally, it's pursuing things that objectively matter.
[00:44:35]  Things that last.
[00:44:37]  And being in the oldest building on campus, here's something you're going to realize.
[00:44:40]  It's hard to make things last.
[00:44:42]  Things go up and go down very quickly.
[00:44:45]  But things that last deserve to be appreciated and studied and understood because they lasted for a reason.
[00:44:52]  They lasted because they had a foundation, because they had something different about them.
[00:44:57]  And I want that for all of you.
[00:44:58]  Okay, let's do some questions and thank you guys so much.
[00:45:11]  One of the things I saw you saying was about how to have happiness in your life.
[00:45:16]  And one of my things is meaning.
[00:45:18]  That's one of the things I see as one of the biggest parts of making happiness in your own life.
[00:45:22]  And I wanted to see what role that you think that plays.
[00:45:26]  Yeah, meaning is, I mean, that's the purpose of life.
[00:45:30]  There's many different, there's a couple different philosophical constructs.
[00:45:33]  And obviously, I prefer the Christian biblical one, which is the life I live.
[00:45:38]  But Victor Frankl had a great book, which is Man's Search for Meaning.
[00:45:42]  It should be required reading for every young person out there.
[00:45:45]  And so he had this term that he coined, which is will to meaning, which is we know we have human will.
[00:45:50]  Are we going to use human will to human will to pleasure or human will to power or will to meaning?
[00:45:57]  Those are the three big ones.
[00:45:58]  That's not an exhaustive list, but let's go through those three, right?
[00:46:01]  Are you going to make your life about a will to dominating other people, a will to feeling good all the time, or a will to have things that matter that are meaningful?
[00:46:11]  That's the one that is going to create the happiest and quite honestly, most joyful citizenry.
[00:46:16]  And now, some of you might say, Charlie, why are you emphasizing happiness?
[00:46:19]  I'll tell you, it's the most miserable generation in American history.
[00:46:22]  It is.
[00:46:23]  It is the most suicidal, the most drug-addicted, the most directionless.
[00:46:28]  So I'm going to spend time talking to our target generation about what it's like to live a meaningful life.
[00:46:34]  And the most lonely generation, by the way, in American history, the least married generation in American history.
[00:46:39]  But here's the thing: meaningful things are hard things.
[00:46:44]  Meaningful things usually don't come from logging onto a website or flipping through your Instagram feed.
[00:46:50]  Meaningful things take sacrifice and they take work.
[00:46:55]  Meaningful things are things that require you to restrain sometimes your fleshly impulse, to sleep in, to want to kind of just kick the can down the road.
[00:47:08]  Instead, meaningful things take you to prioritize something that is good over something that feels good.

=== The Cost of Meaningful Sacrifice (05:36) ===

[00:47:14]  And all of you have experienced this.
[00:47:16]  You have.
[00:47:17]  You all know what it feels like, I hope, to work really hard and get a good grade in a certain class.
[00:47:23]  To legitimately work in a class that challenged you, not one that was easy for you.
[00:47:27]  But you woke up sometimes and you pulled the all-nighters and you challenged your instinct to get a better grade and you felt rewarded.
[00:47:34]  I know you did.
[00:47:35]  You felt satisfied by doing that.
[00:47:37]  What I'm saying is that that should be a lesson for the rest of your life that I think could be very instructive.
[00:47:41]  Thank you.
[00:47:42]  Okay, right here.
[00:47:44]  Hello, Mr. Kirk.
[00:47:46]  Nice to meet you.
[00:47:48]  So I have a roommate, and me and my roommate get into political debates all the time.
[00:47:54]  And he's more centered than I am, right?
[00:47:58]  And we had this conversation the other night about the American economy and capitalism, communism, and whatnot.
[00:48:03]  And we both agree that in theory, communism works in theory, but in practice, never worked, never once in its life.
[00:48:10]  And I will stand by that.
[00:48:12]  And I'm very pro-capitalist.
[00:48:14]  And so he said that, did you know that 90% of Americans will die in the same economic status in the same economic class as they started in?
[00:48:25]  And I said, I disagree.
[00:48:27]  And I want to get your thoughts on that.
[00:48:29]  Do you think that, do you see that happening a lot?
[00:48:31]  Do you think that happens a lot?
[00:48:34]  Yeah, so let me just disagree with one thing you said.
[00:48:38]  I don't think communism works in theory if you're dealing with human beings.
[00:48:42]  You would have to change the entire operating system of what we as human beings are.
[00:48:48]  And the best example of why socialism and collectivism does not work is the biblical story of Cain and Abel.
[00:48:56]  Jealousy will come in very quickly as soon as one person wants something they can't have.
[00:49:02]  Now in socialism, excuse the metaphor, you take a rock and get what you want.
[00:49:07]  In a market-based, private property-based system, you can create something new.
[00:49:11]  You could hopefully go about it peacefully.
[00:49:13]  I will say this, though.
[00:49:14]  Your friend might be right with that statistic.
[00:49:16]  I don't know.
[00:49:17]  But understand when you're defending a market-based system, that doesn't mean you have to defend everything that's in America today.
[00:49:24]  Because we have far from a market-based system in a lot of different parts of American life.
[00:49:28]  Whether it, let's just take a good example, the drug companies, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson  ⁇ Johnson, they get sweetheart deals with the government to force vaccines on people against their will.
[00:49:40]  Now, I'm not going to take a stance on a vaccine.
[00:49:41]  If you listen to my podcast, you know plenty of this.
[00:49:43]  But no one should be fired from their job for not wanting to take a vaccine.
[00:49:46]  No one should be fired from their job today.
[00:49:57]  And so I would add that nuance, but also it's inarguable that markets raise the standard of living for all people, that it's a much better system to allow human beings to create new things than redistribute pre-existing ones.
[00:50:14]  I could go on and on and on, but I think what you have with your roommate, if I could give you a little piece of advice to go back, is a debate on human nature.
[00:50:22]  And that's what I talked about tonight is, hey, do you think human beings are naturally good or naturally bad?
[00:50:27]  That's the most important question.
[00:50:29]  Because if you think human beings are naturally good, then yeah, you could believe in communism for sure.
[00:50:33]  That people will endlessly share stuff that they will not envy, that they will not want to steal, that they will not want to take.
[00:50:39]  But if you believe human beings have that in our natural operating system, you're like, huh, maybe I should create a system that makes you have to actually create new things, protects private property from theft, all those sorts of different measures.
[00:50:52]  And so thank you for being here.
[00:50:53]  I appreciate it.
[00:50:54]  Thanks.
[00:51:00]  Hi, Charlie.
[00:51:00]  My name is Cindy Gere, and I'm president of Turning Point USA at USC Upstate in Spartanburg.
[00:51:11]  I'm also a nursing student.
[00:51:12]  I'm a senior at USC Upstate getting ready to go in the medical field.
[00:51:16]  And I, for one, am a proponent of medical freedom.
[00:51:19]  And I know many nursing students and nurses who are.
[00:51:22]  And I just wanted to know your take on how we can be better proponents and advocates for people that we take care of that may agree with us, may disagree, but we just want to be proponents of medical freedom.
[00:51:35]  And what are your thoughts on that?
[00:51:37]  Yeah, first of all, thank you for that.
[00:51:39]  And thanks for leading our chapter.
[00:51:41]  You're in a tough spot.
[00:51:42]  And I think you know that.
[00:51:44]  So many people in the medical field are losing their jobs right now.
[00:51:46]  In the midst of a pandemic, we're firing frontline healthcare workers that don't want to get the vaccine, even though many of them have natural immunity from this virus.
[00:51:56]  And so I will say this, something broadly, then something specific to you, that if you're going to go this path and speak out about these things, you have to be willing to lose friends, sometimes lose income, lose social status.
[00:52:08]  And I think you've already learned that, right?
[00:52:10]  Is that for anyone out here that feels compelled to speak out, it might cost you something.
[00:52:16]  It might cost you a membership to a country club, or it might cost you a best friend.
[00:52:21]  It might cost you being in a fraternity or sorority.
[00:52:25]  It might cost you something.
[00:52:26]  So that's the first thing.
[00:52:27]  The second thing is I would keep on challenging people on the issue of alternative treatments and their proven efficacy when it comes to medical freedom.
[00:52:37]  I believe one of the great injustices is how people have not been able to learn at all about how other treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, azithromycin, aspirin, and monoclonal antibodies might have been helpful to them.

=== Rebutting Police Abolition Arguments (03:47) ===

[00:52:51]  And let me be clear.
[00:52:54]  I'm not saying that I'm prescribing it to you or telling you that it should be for you.
[00:52:59]  I said learn about it.
[00:53:01]  Most people just say, oh, no, it's a horse D-wormer.
[00:53:03]  Hold on a second.
[00:53:04]  I mean, that's one of the great smears in modern America, okay?
[00:53:08]  Jimmy Carter brought ivermectin to Africa and cured millions of people of river blindness.
[00:53:13]  Ivermectin won a Nobel Prize for treatment with humans a couple years ago.
[00:53:18]  Okay, so let's just take a step back before we get into all of this kind of, you know, just ridiculously tribal conversation.
[00:53:27]  And this is one of the most disappointing things when it comes to the medical thing.
[00:53:30]  And I'll finish with this, which is it should have been a place where other ideas were entertained and other perspectives were allowed.
[00:53:38]  Instead, it became a very dogmatic conversation very quickly.
[00:53:44]  And yeah, and they shut you up and through arguments of authority.
[00:53:47]  So I hope that's somewhat helpful, but I do want to just make sure I manage your expectations, which is you're in a tough spot, but we have your back at Turning Point USA, and thank you for your wonderful leadership.
[00:53:58]  So thank you.
[00:54:06]  So I'll preface this question by saying that I personally don't believe in the abolishment of police, but I've heard arguments from specific people to like where I could see why they think that, and it's not necessarily a bad argument.
[00:54:19]  So like leftists say ANCAP and abolish all police because they think they're inherently racist, they're inherently evil, inherent minorities, things like that, which are obviously not true.
[00:54:26]  But then you have ANCAPs like, what's his name?
[00:54:30]  Michael, I forget his full name, but ANCAPs will say that we should abolish the police because they infringe on our rights.
[00:54:36]  Like the Compt in New York enforce gun laws that obviously infringe on our Second Amendment right, and that's why they're inherently evil and we shouldn't have them.
[00:54:44]  So I wonder what your rebuttal is to ANCAPs that say things like that.
[00:54:48]  Yeah, I'm happy to get into that.
[00:54:49]  Also, I'm talking way too fast.
[00:54:52]  We condemn political violence.
[00:54:53]  I don't know if I was talking too quickly, so I don't know if that came across, but thank you.
[00:54:58]  So don't have to overcomplicate this one.
[00:55:02]  Thank you.
[00:55:03]  Condemn, condemn, condemn.
[00:55:04]  Okay, so do not condone and we condemn.
[00:55:07]  Jeez.
[00:55:09]  Been a long week today.
[00:55:11]  So What I have to say to NCAPs that want to abolish the police, yeah, just come back to earth and let's talk about real things, basically.
[00:55:20]  I mean, I'm happy to talk to an anarcho-capitalist.
[00:55:24]  I used to read all that literature of Marie Rothbard and all that stuff.
[00:55:28]  Yeah, it's just not realistic.
[00:55:29]  The police are the law enforcement of the country.
[00:55:32]  They are the protectors of the law for good reason.
[00:55:36]  And so I really am not sure how to even begin with that argument.
[00:55:39]  So are you, I'm not sure if you're an anarcho-capitalist or not, but yeah, you're not.
[00:55:43]  I've heard arguments like these, and I was wondering about your specific rebuttal.
[00:55:47]  I'm like, you know, even though they, the cops in New York, New Jersey, California infringe on Second Amendment rights, First Amendment rights, you know, they're the hand of the government that would do this and they are in states like that.
[00:55:59]  And they say that's a reason for abolishing the police.
[00:56:02]  You know, I just wondering, like, what, the rebuttal to that, you know, you say, let me say something like, even though they do that, like, we still need them, things like that.
[00:56:10]  Yeah, I'm not really sure how to even begin with some of that.
[00:56:14]  So, yeah, I mean, look, we're seeing already kind of in the inner city of America what happens when you defund the police and you get rid of the police, murder rates go up, crime goes up.
[00:56:23]  We should stand with our police officers 100%.
[00:56:26]  And the war on police is making America profoundly more dangerous.
[00:56:30]  Thank you.

=== Nuance in Thomas Jefferson's Legacy (02:57) ===

[00:56:38]  Hi.
[00:56:40]  First, I like to say I'm glad to be here.
[00:56:42]  My daughters and I came all the way from Baltimore, Maryland to see you.
[00:56:51]  And I'd also like to preface this by saying that I'm not necessarily a proponent of tearing down statues and this and that, but I'd like to ask you, how do you speak to people who ask about the character of Thomas Jefferson when he owned slaves himself and other founding fathers?
[00:57:08]  Yeah, happy to talk about Thomas Jefferson.
[00:57:10]  So thank you for being here.
[00:57:11]  Thomas Jefferson was a wonderful man, and he obviously had his own moral issues with that.
[00:57:16]  He entered a world he didn't create.
[00:57:19]  That's one thing we all have in common.
[00:57:20]  We all enter a world we did not create.
[00:57:22]  When Thomas Jefferson was born, slavery was widespread and unquestioned, but Thomas Jefferson was actually one of the leading criticizers and one of the leading people that actually started the American conversation on abolishing slavery.
[00:57:34]  I'll give you a couple examples.
[00:57:36]  Number one, Thomas Jefferson, the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, admonished King George for bringing the international slave trade to America, blaming King George, saying slavery is wrong.
[00:57:46]  I can't believe you brought it here.
[00:57:47]  That's number one.
[00:57:48]  Number two, in 1790s, when Thomas Jefferson was governor of Virginia, he submitted bill after bill into the Virginia House of Commons to abolish slavery in the Virginia House of Commons.
[00:57:58]  Number three, inspired by the Declaration of Independence, Vermont abolished slavery, the first state to do so in 1777.
[00:58:06]  And then in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson became the third American president, he actually signed a moratorium in March of 1803 banning new importation of slaves into our country in March of 1803.
[00:58:18]  Thomas Jefferson wrote extensively in his private journals of his own moral failings and issues with slavery and why publicly he's fighting against it, why privately he was struggling with it.
[00:58:28]  But here's an interesting thing.
[00:58:30]  Let's look at this from a biblical standpoint, right?
[00:58:32]  So in Genesis, there's this great verse where it says, no, Noah was an honorable man amongst the people in his generation.
[00:58:43]  That's an interesting way to put it, isn't it?
[00:58:44]  Why couldn't they just say that Noah was an honorable man?
[00:58:47]  Well, it's because if you compared Noah to Elijah, maybe Noah wasn't that great.
[00:58:51]  Instead, the Bible is telling us we must always compare people in the time of which they are in.
[00:58:57]  What was their impact?
[00:58:58]  What did they do?
[00:58:59]  Well, Thomas Jefferson started a movement of human freedom, human equality.
[00:59:03]  Nine out of 13 of the state, the states in the colony, nine out of 13 of the colonies, by the time of the ratification of the Constitution, had already independently abolished slavery largely because of the advocacy efforts of Thomas Jefferson.
[00:59:17]  Not to mention the Northwest Ordinance in Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance that abolished any slavery in the new territories of which Thomas Jefferson was a huge advocate for.
[00:59:26]  And so I'm happy to go into more detail about the detail, happy to go into the sophistication and the nuance and the contradiction of Thomas Jefferson.

=== Protecting American Workforce Sovereignty (11:35) ===

[00:59:36]  But when you start to remove leaders and people that came before you and you start to discount any contribution they have, I think it's a huge mistake.
[00:59:44]  Instead, say, hey, that guy's really complicated.
[00:59:47]  So am I.
[00:59:48]  He got some good things.
[00:59:49]  He did some good things.
[00:59:49]  He did some things right.
[00:59:50]  And he got some things terribly wrong.
[00:59:52]  And as soon as we start to say, get rid of him because of one moral failing and not looking at any of the positives that he contributed, such as attacking King George for slavery, such as advocating for the abolition of slavery in Virginia and actually getting rid of the slave trade, I think all of a sudden you're doing something that is incredibly destructive, such as shredding our history.
[01:00:11]  And if you do not know your history, good luck planning your future.
[01:00:14]  So thank you so much.
[01:00:23]  Hi, Charlie.
[01:00:25]  I'm very excited to see you.
[01:00:26]  I am a high school junior at Liberty University's Online Academy.
[01:00:32]  And I was wondering when tyrannical policies begin to become implemented, where do you think it's more appropriate to fight such policies?
[01:00:40]  And where do you think it's more appropriate to just stop doing business with the implementers or giving them more time?
[01:00:46]  Yeah, that's a good question.
[01:00:49]  Don't buy products from people that hate your values and hate your worldview.
[01:00:52]  That's a good place to start.
[01:00:54]  And so we've partnered with SecondVote, secondvote.com.
[01:01:00]  And you guys can check it out, where it kind of talks about the second vote you can have, which is in what you purchase and what you do, and kind of what the places you shop from and the places that you actually buy products from.
[01:01:12]  And that may mean like giving up your Amazon Prime account.
[01:01:16]  That may mean not going to Starbucks, right?
[01:01:18]  But we have to start to make decisions that are in alignment with our political values and our social values, especially when it comes to purchasing products.
[01:01:28]  Corporate America needs to receive a message from us that we are not going to put up with their double standards, their contradictions, and their funding of these efforts.
[01:01:38]  And so I'll give you a great example.
[01:01:40]  Coca-Cola and Delta came out and they said that Georgia's voting law was against their values and then they moved the all-star game to Denver.
[01:01:48]  I just loved having to see the World Series, by the way, of like having to be in Atlanta.
[01:01:53]  It was amazing.
[01:01:56]  And by the way, Atlanta totally blew it last night.
[01:01:59]  I could do a whole baseball analysis.
[01:02:02]  Awful.
[01:02:02]  It's a whole different thing.
[01:02:04]  I'm telling you, they have to go to Houston and be careful.
[01:02:08]  They're going to know what you're going to pitch before you know what you're going to pitch.
[01:02:11]  And so that's all I'm going to say.
[01:02:12]  So I get so much backlash when I say that with the Houston Astros, but I mean, come on, it's proven at this point.
[01:02:19]  Anyway, your question.
[01:02:20]  So yeah, stop buying products from people that don't share your values.
[01:02:24]  And we as conservatives don't like boycotting.
[01:02:27]  Fine.
[01:02:27]  Then at the very least, you could boycott the good companies.
[01:02:30]  Do you guys have In-N-Out here yet?
[01:02:32]  I don't think you do, right?
[01:02:33]  No.
[01:02:33]  But In-N-Out is phenomenal.
[01:02:36]  Don't get me started on Chick-fil-A.
[01:02:37]  I know people like Chick-fil-A, but there's a whole different, whole different program at play with Chick-fil-A.
[01:02:41]  Very woke, very BLM-centric.
[01:02:44]  They fund groups that are pro-abortion.
[01:02:45]  People get really surprised when I say that.
[01:02:47]  Go look it up yourself.
[01:02:48]  Type in Chick-fil-A Family Research Council, entire study on this, where the CEO did all sorts of stuff.
[01:02:54]  But they're not the worst, obviously.
[01:02:56]  You see, people are always like, what are you talking about?
[01:02:58]  I thought they were amazing.
[01:03:00]  You can go look it up yourself.
[01:03:03]  Yeah, but in closing, support the good companies and don't support the bad companies.
[01:03:07]  Liberty's a great school.
[01:03:08]  God bless you.
[01:03:16]  Hey, Charlie, thank you so much for your ministry and just what you're doing around the United States.
[01:03:23]  I wanted to ask a quick question about voting integrity.
[01:03:27]  Do you...
[01:03:30]  I'm sorry.
[01:03:32]  Oh, do you have hope in the future of voting?
[01:03:37]  And do you feel like we as Americans have hope in the integrity of voting ever again?
[01:03:46]  Yes, and I think we have to make some changes.
[01:03:48]  Obviously, I think that we need to get rid of no excuse absentee mail in voting.
[01:03:53]  I think we have to restore the signature threshold that we saw in Georgia.
[01:03:59]  But I am not a cynic at all.
[01:04:01]  What I do, and I talk about this a lot, the 2020 election was heavily interfered with, no doubt.
[01:04:07]  And one of the things that the two issues that I focus on the most, though, is how Mark Zuckerberg spent $420 million in the 2020 election for vote counters and for the actual administration of the elections.
[01:04:21]  And then also how Facebook and Twitter and Google did not allow the discussion of Hunter Biden and that story and the laptop story to happen in the month of October.
[01:04:29]  And that's direct election interference.
[01:04:32]  Now, let me also say, though, when we are starting to treat John Gruden's emails with more scrutiny than Fauci's emails or Hunter Biden's emails, we have a problem in our country, let me tell you.
[01:04:44]  And so Mark Zuckerberg should not be a more powerful force than the average American in our constitutional republic.
[01:04:57]  And this is something, by the way, that people on the left should agree with.
[01:05:01]  They always used to say, we don't want billionaires corrupting our democracy.
[01:05:04]  We don't want to be living under a corporate oligarchy.
[01:05:07]  I agree.
[01:05:08]  I think it's wrong that the fourth wealthiest man on the planet can come in with $420 million and change the elections as we see fit.
[01:05:14]  Now, what do we have to do?
[01:05:16]  I think we have to try to get back to voter ID.
[01:05:18]  I think we have to try to get back to no excuse mail and voting.
[01:05:21]  But I do believe that we can restore faith in our elections.
[01:05:24]  I am not a cynic.
[01:05:24]  I'm not someone that ever believes things are structurally or permanently broken.
[01:05:28]  That means people have to be poll watchers and poll workers.
[01:05:30]  That means we have to work at our local election areas.
[01:05:32]  But I think election integrity is one of the most, if not the most important issue in our country right now.
[01:05:36]  So thank you so much.
[01:05:37]  Appreciate it.
[01:05:43]  Hey, Charlie.
[01:05:44]  I was wondering, how big of an influence do you think China currently has on our private sector and our federal government and what needs to happen to combat that influence?
[01:05:55]  It's massive.
[01:05:55]  Nike has come out and they have said that we are now a company that serves China and for China.
[01:06:01]  The Chinese Communist Party is the greatest enemy of America and the American way of life.
[01:06:05]  And I use that word, enemy, intentionally.
[01:06:10]  They do not share our values.
[01:06:12]  They have a 1.3 billion person population and growing.
[01:06:16]  They're going to take Taiwan at any moment.
[01:06:18]  And unfortunately, the consultant class and ruling class in our country has gotten to official partnership with the Chinese Communist Party, the same Chinese Communist Party that harbored the creation of this virus, very, very likely at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, almost certainly at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not some sort of bat soup that was created in the Himalayan mountains or whatever nonsense that they were spewing.
[01:06:39]  And so, yeah, I mean, this is an important question, though, because the American business elite, they're perfectly happy with the cheap capital flows from China, while it makes America at a significant disadvantage when it actually destroys American manufacturing.
[01:06:53]  And, you know, you guys have seen a good resurgence of American manufacturing here in South Carolina.
[01:06:59]  But one of the main reasons why we have a supply chain issue in our country right now is that we have not decided to be self-sufficient.
[01:07:07]  Now, puritanical free market people, they will say, oh, no, self-sufficiency is bad because we want cheaper goods and products from China.
[01:07:14]  Price is not everything, everybody.
[01:07:16]  Quality also matters too.
[01:07:17]  Do you notice that the stuff we get from China doesn't last as long?
[01:07:21]  You don't treasure it, you don't value it as much.
[01:07:23]  But when you have made in American products, it's made with better, it's better with higher quality labor and more intentional labor, better products, and it's actually built to last.
[01:07:31]  It's not just the price of something, but also it's the security around it as well.
[01:07:35]  What I think needs to be a new movement, regardless of political affiliation, is we need to make a list.
[01:07:40]  We need to make a list of stuff that we are never going to be allowed to make anywhere else than a majority in America.
[01:07:45]  How about this?
[01:07:45]  Vitamin C, penicillin, critical pharmaceuticals, toilet paper.
[01:07:51]  Believe it or not, toilet paper is made all across the world and out here.
[01:07:54]  And so, but what has happened, though, it's actually damaged our national security.
[01:08:00]  You guys, have you ever seen, have you seen car sales right now?
[01:08:03]  Have you tried to buy a car lately and why it's so expensive?
[01:08:05]  You want to know why?
[01:08:06]  It's because the two major places that you actually get a chip to actually go into a car is in Japan, not China.
[01:08:13]  Both of them mysteriously burnt down last year.
[01:08:16]  And there's a massive chip shortage right now.
[01:08:19]  America is the wealthiest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.
[01:08:22]  We need to become a self-sufficient nation, though.
[01:08:24]  We need to make things here.
[01:08:26]  We need to make them proudly.
[01:08:27]  And we need to...
[01:08:32]  And this goes to what actually makes a nation strong, which is a flourishing middle class.
[01:08:38]  If you do not have a strong middle class, then your country falls apart.
[01:08:42]  It is the golden mean that matters.
[01:08:44]  It truly does.
[01:08:45]  And so I just want to say that as far as our dependence on China, this is going to be one of our generation's greatest struggles.
[01:08:51]  It's going to be one of our most important battles.
[01:08:54]  They're hacking our cyber grid.
[01:08:56]  They're coming into our nation at a rapid pace.
[01:08:58]  And what I mean by that, they're buying up farmland.
[01:09:00]  They're buying up critical infrastructure.
[01:09:02]  The Chinese Communist Party wants world domination, and only American can stop.
[01:09:06]  Only America can stop them.
[01:09:07]  So thank you so much.
[01:09:13]  Good evening, Charlie.
[01:09:15]  This is a question about immigration, specifically your stance on a certain policy.
[01:09:19]  I know your stance has pretty much changed on immigration, especially since this last census.
[01:09:25]  But this policy that you have been for in the past, called the EB5 Visa Program, has been rife with money laundering and fraud.
[01:09:33]  And lots of investigations have been brought about by the SEC.
[01:09:37]  I'm wondering if you are still pro EB5 visas and if you have changed your mind on it at all.
[01:09:44]  Absolutely not.
[01:09:44]  No, we need to put our graduates first, especially our own citizens first.
[01:09:49]  And I said that we should have a complete moratorium in immigration, especially after the pandemic.
[01:09:54]  And here's my thought process on this.
[01:09:56]  All of you guys are going into debt.
[01:09:57]  Now, EB5, you have to remind me, that's not college graduates, right?
[01:10:00]  That's purchasing, right?
[01:10:00]  No, it's 500K or more.
[01:10:02]  That's right.
[01:10:03]  That's right.
[01:10:04]  So, no, I'm totally against it.
[01:10:05]  It's right, especially from the Chinese issue that I just talked about, right?
[01:10:08]  So let me add, and I've dug really deep into this.
[01:10:11]  So the EB5 visa is supported by certain politicians in the state and other places.
[01:10:16]  Seems like a great idea.
[01:10:17]  Here's how it works.
[01:10:18]  You could be a foreign national and you come in with a bunch of money and you invest it into America.
[01:10:22]  And as long as you employ, what, 10 people or $500,000, you get a visa, right?
[01:10:26]  Well, here's the problem, is all of a sudden you get massive amounts of people from adversarial nations like China coming in and buying up billions of dollars of critical infrastructure.
[01:10:35]  And next thing you know, all of a sudden, hotels, manufacturing plants, and assembly lines are actually in America, but they're owned by foreign adversaries.
[01:10:44]  So no, I think we need a total timeout and a cooling off period with this stuff.
[01:10:48]  And that's on the EB5 issue.
[01:10:49]  But let me talk about the other issue, which is the H-1B issue, which is that for those of you that are in college right now and you're going into debt, we have a moral obligation to make sure you are employed and you have a strong wage before we all of a sudden say we want to bring in foreign workers to try to undercut you in the jobs that you're trying to get to.
[01:11:05]  You guys deserve, because we've invested in you as our countrymen, a chance to get employed here.

=== Economic Realities and Inflation (05:09) ===

[01:11:11]  And that's just part of what the social contract is all about.
[01:11:14]  So happy to go into that deeper and thanks for being here tonight.
[01:11:16]  So thank you.
[01:11:22]  So about a week or so ago, one of our friends from church got COVID and he was really sick and he was coughing like really bad and he was coughing up blood and stuff.
[01:11:31]  And the hospital he went to wouldn't even give him cough medicine.
[01:11:35]  So what are we supposed to do to stand up against big pharma and the government when they're like making antibodies and all these different options that really work?
[01:11:46]  What are we supposed to do when they're taking those away and needlessly harming people?
[01:11:50]  Yeah, I'm not going to give medical advice to people.
[01:11:52]  I don't do that.
[01:11:53]  I just tell you what's available and what's working.
[01:11:55]  I could tell you that in Arizona where we are, we know where all the monoclonal antibody treatment centers are.
[01:12:00]  We know the doctors that do ozone therapy and IV treatment therapy that are able to give vitamin D infusions, vitamin C infusions.
[01:12:08]  Again, I'm not saying this from a medical perspective.
[01:12:10]  You could just go read this stuff online.
[01:12:12]  Azithromycin, aspirin, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin.
[01:12:17]  I try to not generalize, but there have been a disturbing amount of stories about how hospitals have not been administering some of these treatments.
[01:12:25]  And I think you just talked about some of those issues lately.
[01:12:28]  But you guys should all make the best decision as you see fit in that capacity.
[01:12:32]  I would just encourage all of you to be made aware in your local area of maybe some of these other treatment centers, especially monoclonal antibodies.
[01:12:40]  Monoclonal antibodies is white blood cell treatment that has been proven to be very, very effective with certain parts of the population.
[01:12:48]  So at least for us in Arizona, we know where all those are.
[01:12:50]  But I'm very careful not to tell people ever what to do with their medical decisions.
[01:12:54]  It's not my role.
[01:12:55]  I don't ever want it to be my role.
[01:12:57]  I just tell you what's happening and what's available there.
[01:12:59]  And I think if any person starts to tell you what to do with your body and with your medical decisions, I think it's wrong.
[01:13:04]  I think it's terrible.
[01:13:05]  And I think it's disingenuous.
[01:13:06]  So thank you.
[01:13:12]  Last question.
[01:13:13]  Last question of the night.
[01:13:15]  I got in a good time.
[01:13:17]  Hey, Charlie, hope you're doing well.
[01:13:19]  My name is Noah Seitz.
[01:13:20]  I'm a freshman here at Clemson.
[01:13:22]  And so the question I want to ask, it stems from some research I've done, reading Wall Street Journal and some other articles, essentially talking about how the Federal Reserve is about to start combating inflation and that Starbucks is planning in the summer of 2022 to raise their minimum wage to $15.
[01:13:42]  And so my question to you, I know obviously a very high blanket minimum wage nationally isn't a good thing because obviously it costs more to live in New York than it does here in South Carolina.
[01:13:54]  But do you think it would be beneficial after all these years of having the same minimum wage?
[01:14:00]  Do you think it would be beneficial for areas like here in South Carolina to increase that minimum wage at all?
[01:14:07]  Probably not, especially as we're seeing an inflation cycle right now.
[01:14:11]  And wages are going up, but the prices, the price of goods, are going up so dramatically right now.
[01:14:16]  And there is a direct correlation with arbitrarily raising the minimum wage and higher prices.
[01:14:21]  Here's what I will say, though.
[01:14:22]  I do think that workers need to be able to keep more of their money, and we have a moral obligation for that.
[01:14:26]  All of you that have jobs, you guys pay a FICA tax.
[01:14:29]  You guys know what I'm talking about, 8% or whatever, 7.5% to FICA.
[01:14:32]  I think that the conservative movement should say we want to get rid of FICA for anyone earning $100,000 or less.
[01:14:38]  That would be the effective same thing.
[01:14:39]  That would be a 6% bump in the wage without actually having to put the burden on employers.
[01:14:44]  That makes sense.
[01:14:45]  So I agree with you.
[01:14:45]  I want to put more money in workers' pockets.
[01:14:47]  I think it's incredibly important.
[01:14:48]  Let's start with doing it by saying you don't have to pay 6% of your hourly wages to some sort of distant off Social Security trust fund when you're 24 years old and you could barely make ends meet.
[01:15:01]  I'll finish with this with the minimum wage thing.
[01:15:04]  With the minimum wage thing, the Congressional Budget Office did a huge study that showed that it would cost millions of jobs nationwide.
[01:15:11]  And we see that in New York.
[01:15:12]  We see that in Seattle and Portland.
[01:15:13]  Now, you might be able to get me to agree to a minor minimum wage adjustment regionally if we were not in the midst of a massive inflation cycle, right?
[01:15:21]  If all of a sudden we had full employment.
[01:15:24]  None of those things are happening right now.
[01:15:25]  If you guys try to eat out lately, there's a labor shortage across the country, the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetime, not to mention the price of goods are going up dramatically.
[01:15:34]  So thank you for your question.
[01:15:35]  Very thoughtful.
[01:15:35]  Appreciate it.
[01:15:41]  So in closing, everybody, I just want to say, first of all, thank you guys for sitting through all that.
[01:15:46]  It's amazing.
[01:15:47]  This is our generation.
[01:15:48]  It's our opportunity to do something about this.
[01:15:51]  And it's time for us to say that we are going to apply ourselves in this sense and that you're going to be strong and courageous with your beliefs.
[01:16:00]  I know you can feel outnumbered at times, but look around you.
[01:16:02]  At this school, you already see hundreds and hundreds of people that share your values and that want to see this country go in a very specific way.
[01:16:10]  I'm going to close with two things.
[01:16:11]  Number one, if you're not yet involved with our wonderful Turning Point USA chapter, you guys have got to get involved.
[01:16:16]  It's amazing.
[01:16:17]  Also, I know a lot of you guys listen to our radio show and our podcast.

=== Empowering the Turning Point Community (00:45) ===

[01:16:21]  Thank you for that.
[01:16:22]  And if you guys aren't yet subscribed, we'd be blessed if you guys would consider doing that.
[01:16:25]  We work really hard on that, and this entire discussion will be rebroadcast with that.
[01:16:29]  And I'll close with this, which is that you guys, we have such an amazing gift to live in this country at this time.
[01:16:35]  It's time for us to apply ourselves, to be the optimistic, happy warriors.
[01:16:40]  And I'm telling you, our best days are ahead when I see so many young people starting to rise up, starting to think in a way where they want to do something, not just sit idly by.
[01:16:50]  Our best days are ahead, everybody, if we apply ourselves correctly.
[01:16:53]  God bless you guys.
[01:16:53]  Thanks so much for having me tonight.
[01:17:01]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[01:17:02]  Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[01:17:05]  God bless you guys.
[01:17:06]  Speak to you soon.