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Ivy League Symbols and Allegiance
00:10:21
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| Hey everybody, for the full episode, Pete Hegseth joins us with his new fabulous book, The Battle for the American Mind. | |
| Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
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| That is tpusa.com/slash s-as. | |
| Sort of high school chapter, sort of college chapter today. | |
| We will see you at our student action summit. | |
| Remember, chapters change the world. | |
| Start a chapter today at tpusa.com slash S-A-S and support the Charlie Kirk Show at CharlieKirk.com slash support. | |
| Pete Hegseth is here. | |
| Buckle up, everybody. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. | |
| Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. | |
| I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. | |
| Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. | |
| I want to thank Charlie. | |
| He's an incredible guy. | |
| His spirit, his love of this country. | |
| He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. | |
| We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. | |
| That's why we are here. | |
| Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com. | |
| With us right now is a great American patriot. | |
| Can't wait to dive deep into his book and why he wrote it and how we can fix these problems. | |
| It is Pete Hegseth, and he is the author of the fabulous book, Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation. | |
| Pete, welcome back to the program. | |
| Hey, Charlie, thanks for having me. | |
| Appreciate it. | |
| So, Pete, tell us why did you write the book and we'll go from there. | |
| Well, I'm right. | |
| I wrote the book for the same reason you've done what you've done for the last 10 years, a turning point. | |
| We are at a moment in this country where we are in completely unchartered territory. | |
| Our schools across the board, government schools, not just public, which should be known as government schools, but also elite schools, private schools, most Christian schools are teaching students to be self-loathing activists who know nothing about God and who believe America is a evil place, stolen land, and only built on the backs of slaves. | |
| And as a result, it is an experiment that's never been tried, keeping a country while educating its citizens to hate the very country they live in and not believe that it represents anything good. | |
| If you look at the scope of the problem right now, it's utterly demoralizing. | |
| If you really, really take a look, because COVID-19, as you know, gave us a glimpse inside the classroom. | |
| We call it inside the book the COVID-1619 moment. | |
| It was the moment parents finally got a look and what they saw was not 1776. | |
| They saw 1619 and they saw gender pronouns and they saw critical race theory dressed up as diversity, equity, inclusion. | |
| And they were mortified because the assumption, their biases were toward the belief that the public schools, they're just fine. | |
| Maybe there's some bias in there, but they're just fine. | |
| And they looked for alternatives. | |
| And Hemingway once wrote, things happen gradually and then they happen suddenly. | |
| And what we're seeing is the sudden consolidation. | |
| And that's what parents saw. | |
| And we actually started this project long before, not long before, but before COVID-19 happened and this whole educational revelation occurred. | |
| And I partnered with David Goodwin, who is the head of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. | |
| And in that partnership, he had already done a great deal of research about what the early progressives had done to intentionally target the minds of our youngest. | |
| This was not just at first an Ivy League academic thing. | |
| They knew the idea of school, if they could take control of it, would eventually translate into political and social control. | |
| One of the first things they studied was how in the world a constitutional amendment prohibiting alcohol was passed in the United States in 1919. | |
| And Francis Willard, an avowed socialist suffragette in the 1870s, devised a curriculum that they put into the third grade classroom in an ad hoc sense across America. | |
| And those third graders became voters. | |
| And a generation later, not only was it passed into law, but a constitutional amendment was passed to prohibit alcohol. | |
| The progressives in the early 20th century wrote a great deal about that accomplishment. | |
| John Dewey and others went to work crafting a school system guised under the need for a future economy and vocational training. | |
| But underneath it all was societal change. | |
| And as you know, all these guys and gals, they were socialists. | |
| They were all atheists. | |
| They were humanists and eventually Marxists, which is how we see the consolidation today. | |
| There's so many things I want to unpack there. | |
| It's super smart. | |
| And this is not just Connie Runnin Mill book. | |
| This is a thoughtful book that has really dived deep in what we can actually do to fix American education, Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation. | |
| So, Pete, I want to ask you about one of the things you mentioned, which is the unprecedented approach that the modern left is taking. | |
| It's very risky, and I think it actually presents great opportunity for those of us that love the country, which is they think they can get a citizenry to give them power while they say they hate the country they want to get power from. | |
| This is something that the Bolsheviks didn't even try to do, where, I mean, for example, and Saul Linsky warned about this for leftists. | |
| He said, hey, guys, if you're going to try to take over a country, burn the flag after you control everything. | |
| Don't try to do that while you're trying to get power. | |
| Meaning the symbols matter and the pledge matters and the national anthem matters and the statues matter. | |
| And if you try to go to war against those things, you might make it harder for you to be able to take over all of the mechanisms of power. | |
| The current left believes the opposite. | |
| They think they're going to be able to get more powerful by convincing people to hate themselves and hate their nation and hate their home. | |
| I think that presents an opportunity for those of us to actually say, no, we love this place, because I think deep down in our spirit is a yearning to actually be thankful for where you're from. | |
| What's your thoughts on that? | |
| I agree with you. | |
| However, we've been living off the fumes of that appreciation truly instilled on the hearts and souls of young people through proper education. | |
| I mean, the residue that brought about Make America Great Again, this guttural scream that like all it really was is America is good and we should love her and appreciate her was basically built on the backs of an educational system that no longer exists. | |
| I think politically that continues to present opportunities. | |
| You're going to see it in 22 and I think you'll see it in 24, no doubt. | |
| But the reason they've moved to the burning of those symbols or the rejection of those symbols, by the way, they put many of those symbols in place in the first place as placeholders. | |
| And we can get into the history, including the Pledge of Allegiance, which originally did not say under God and was written by a socialist to create allegiance to the state above allegiance to God. | |
| And they wrote openly about that. | |
| We revere the pledge and we should because we reveal the founding ideals of this country. | |
| They wanted it to create, to cast the eyes to the flag in front of the classroom instead of the cross, which had traditionally been at the front of the American classroom. | |
| So they use symbols until they don't need them anymore and then they disregard them. | |
| Politically, Democrats still get elected by feigning or shallowly showing appreciation for what this country represents because they're old school Democrats. | |
| There aren't many of them left. | |
| Culturally, they've moved beyond that and certainly in the classroom. | |
| I mean, when you dig into how in bed the just take the modern manifestation, the teachers' unions are, not just with the Democrats, but with Alinskyites to this day, as someone who is openly involved in educating educators in the NEA and AFT, to Howard Zinn, the Zinn Educational Project, which to this day is creating promotional and educational material that the unions advance. | |
| Ibram X. Kendi, who speaks at their conferences, culturally and educationally, they have crossed that Rubicon to tearing the institution down. | |
| But they are ahead of the political consciousness of just enough of that residue that still appreciates America. | |
| So that creates a political liability for them that you are entirely right about. | |
| But I think we get too distracted. | |
| I'm not talking about you, but I think Republicans and conservatives in general by the shiny object of winning elections and thinking that will be sufficient when ultimately it's the undercurrent of what the progressives and now Marxists control that are pumping out future voters who are much more difficult to be mugged by reality. | |
| And when you send them to college with common sense, they have some skills prepared to navigate them. | |
| When you confuse them about their gender at the age of six or seven and implant grievances on their heart, that's a lot more difficult to undo. | |
| And we talk about a phrase called paideia, which is an ancient Greek word long forgotten. | |
| Our founders understood it. | |
| The progressive left knew that word 100 years ago. | |
| Students did because they used to read Latin and Greek. | |
| And that it's about the enculturation and the imprint of the value of the good life on the youngest of our kids. | |
| It has a huge impact on what societies value. | |
| We're talking seven, eight, nine, 10-year-olds. | |
| They understood that and targeted that. | |
| We've never had that intentionally targeted toward atheist and anti-American sentiments. | |
| And so politically, I see serious vulnerabilities that we're going to need to capitalize on and then do the types of thing you're doing with Turning Point Academy to take over the educational pipeline on our own. | |
| But culturally, they are doing this because they really do control it all. | |
| Find me one major institution other than Fox News Channel, Talk Radio, and podcasts and organizations like yours that have any influence in our culture. | |
|
Magnesium, Stress, and Sleep Health
00:02:28
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| There aren't any. | |
| No, that's smart. | |
| I think that's tough to disagree with. | |
| I don't think their revolution is complete, though. | |
| I think that the burning of the flag, taking down the statues, because they don't control the people. | |
| They are so misaligned with the citizens. | |
| And interestingly, if you go to the National Paideia Center, they have dialogues on racial dialogue. | |
| JSON Justice, they've taken over the National American Paideia Center. | |
| Being an entrepreneur and running a business is not for the faint of heart. | |
| I have two jobs. | |
| I do the Charlie Kirk show till noon, then Turning Point USA till I go to sleep and all the problems in between. | |
| A lot of stress. | |
| 330 days on the road I spent last year. | |
| But if you're not careful, the stress can start to take a toll on your body, raising your blood pressure, making it harder to sleep, draining you of vital energy, and making you more irritable. | |
| That's why I recommend you supplement with magnesium daily. | |
| About 75% of people are magnesium deficient. | |
| That number might be higher among business owners and C-level professionals. | |
| That's because stress depletes magnesium levels. | |
| This can trigger a various cycle of rising stress and severe magnesium deficiency. | |
| This deficiency can lead to higher levels of anxiety, irritability, trouble sleeping, and low energy. | |
| It can even contribute to foot and leg cramps while you sleep. | |
| Now, you might be wondering, does magnesium really affect all these things? | |
| Well, the answer is yes. | |
| In fact, magnesium is involved in more than 300 chemical processes inside your body. | |
| So a lot of different things can start to go wrong if you're deficient. | |
| The good news is you can experience a number of positive health benefits just by getting enough magnesium, including better sleep, more energy, healthy blood pressure, less irritability, a calmer mood, stronger bones, reduced muscle cramping, and even a few migraines. | |
| But to experience these health benefits, you have to get the right kinds of magnesium. | |
| Truth is, most magnesium supplements you find in health stores use the only two cheapest synthetic forms. | |
| They're not full spectrum. | |
| There are actually seven unique forms of magnesium. | |
| You must get all of them if you want to experience its calming, stress-relieving effects. | |
| That's why I recommend Magnesium Breakthrough from Buy Optimizers. | |
| It's the only full organic, full-spectrum magnesium supplement that includes seven unique forms of magnesium for stress relief, better sleep all in one bottle. | |
| Simply take two capsules before you go to bed, and you'll be amazed by the improvements in your mood and energy levels. | |
| And how much rested you feel when you wake up? | |
| How much more rested do you feel when you wake up? | |
| For an exclusive offer for my listeners, go to magbreakthrough.com/slash Kirk and use Kirk10 during checkout to save 10% and get free shipping. | |
| Right now, that's magbreakthrough.com/slash Kirk. | |
| That's M-A-G-Breakthrough.com/slash Kirk. | |
| Kirk10 for 10% off any order. | |
|
Democracy Changing Towards Football
00:16:01
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| Pete, I want to talk about an issue that conservatives have. | |
| You could call it temperamentally. | |
| You could just call it as we are. | |
| We don't, we're not long-term thinkers. | |
| This is something that Dewey had, though. | |
| This is what the German historicists believe in: long-term projects, the long march of the institutions. | |
| You argue in your art, your book, that we need to build new things, but we also have to think generationally. | |
| We just can't think for immediate gratification. | |
| Why do you think conservatives have difficulty grasping that? | |
| Do you think it's changing? | |
| And if it's not changing, what would be required to turn that around? | |
| It is changing. | |
| I think our founders suffered from that. | |
| If you could fault them for one thing, it's making a bit of the assumption that the ideas that they landed upon not would be self-perpetuated. | |
| They knew they would not, but that they would be effectively the default. | |
| And that has been, as we've seen our culture wars and political wars erode, I think we all felt like, well, at least the stop for the longest time, at least the fallback line is, you know, America's a good place. | |
| Capitalism is beneficial and basic freedoms will be preserved. | |
| Now those are under siege. | |
| I think the wake-up call is indeed right now. | |
| There's absolutely no doubt about it. | |
| I also think school is a particular case. | |
| We cannot underestimate the gravitational pull that I had, that you likely had, that most of your viewers had, to the idyllic vision of public education. | |
| You know, you go, you go with your friends from the neighborhood and you play sports and you go to prom and you have all the Friday night lights and all the experiences that you remember. | |
| And parents say, well, it's good enough for me. | |
| It's good enough for my kids. | |
| That was inevitable. | |
| The idea of the public school system about as sacrosanct as anything about our country. | |
| And progressives wanted it that way and they were very effective with that. | |
| And I had that very same experience. | |
| Unraveling that worm glow, it's just like what you're going at with higher education. | |
| You know, hey, I'm going to keep giving to my endowment fund because I like the football team. | |
| And I really remember those years in my early 20s where I drank a lot and spent time with friends. | |
| They still reflexively give money to those institutions 30, 40 years later, even though those institutions are completely antithetical to what they believe in. | |
| So the first, that's what makes this moment such an opportunity is we're finally breaking the status quo of the view of government schools. | |
| And now we get an opportunity to, it also required rediscovering what education actually looked like. | |
| I would say the darkest moment of education in America was the 1970s, when there was not a single classical Christian school in America. | |
| It was completely buried and dead. | |
| There were none. | |
| And they were close to outlawing homeschool. | |
| And they had attempted to outlaw through anti-Catholic legislation Catholic schools and parochial schools in Oregon. | |
| And thankfully, the Constitution, the Supreme Court overturned it. | |
| So they were going at complete consolidation and they were this close. | |
| They didn't succeed ultimately. | |
| The idea of classical Christian was revitalized around the 1980s and 90s. | |
| Today there are almost 500 schools. | |
| I would say the insurgency has begun. | |
| 500 brick and mortar schools with 60, 70,000 kids across the country. | |
| You're starting Turning Point Academy. | |
| You're going to accelerate that. | |
| It took us 100 years, but we've now realized how central education is. | |
| Conservatives were busy raising our families, going to church, fighting wars to keep the world safe from democracy and preserving free markets and focused on that in the political sphere as opposed to education. | |
| And we seeded it. | |
| So I think finally the idea of a retreat from the system and completing our creating our entirely new ecosystem is the moment and the opportunity we have. | |
| And you know what's heartening to me to get back to your point at the end of the last segment? | |
| I agree. | |
| Their consolidation is not complete as far as our country, because we don't need 100% of students to go to Turning Point Academy or classical Christian schools. | |
| We need to pump out 3%, 4%, 5%, fortified, elite, strong, courageous thinkers into the next generation. | |
| It's always about that number that turn the tide and can demonstrate the fallacies, the falsehoods, the lies, the lack of results of what the left always delivers. | |
| They will be the leaders. | |
| And the American Revolution was largely fought by, what, 3%, 3% to 5% of American patriots. | |
| And you need a remnant. | |
| That's such a smart point that you made about public school. | |
| Just 10 years ago, I graduated from public high school, and I started to see these ideas begin to infect the school. | |
| It wasn't nearly what it is now. | |
| But you're right. | |
| Why did I go? | |
| Because of all the trappings. | |
| The sports teams, the packed auditoriums, you know, the football team, all my friends I grew up with, you know, nicer computers. | |
| It was all the kind of window dressing. | |
| And now the window dressing has remained and, in fact, probably gotten better because of increased public funding. | |
| But the radicalism has also increased. | |
| So parents are like, huh, I know that my child might get on puberty blockers, learn to hate the country, and also not know if he's a man or a woman, but the football team's pretty awesome. | |
| And they have turf on the football field. | |
| I'm sure a lot of you are wondering how you can learn about things that are good, true, and beautiful. | |
| Well, I've talked about Hillsdale College for a while, but look, there's a video I want you to see. | |
| It's the trailer to Hillsdale College's newest free online course, C.S. Lewis on Christianity. | |
| We talk a lot about current events on the show, but some things are more important than today's news. | |
| And C.S. Lewis was a master at addressing life's most important questions through vivid language that's entertaining and fascinating. | |
| You may know Lewis as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but he's also considered the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. | |
| As a radio host, I appreciate Lewis' ability to communicate and inspire. | |
| In fact, not people don't know this, but Mere Christianity, his book, began as a series of radio messages. | |
| Hillsdale's free online course covers C.S. Lewis's profound insights into good and evil, prayer and the Bible, and even heaven and hell. | |
| And did I mention his course is entirely free? | |
| So go watch the trailer video of C.S. Lewis on Christianity and sign up for this new free online course at charlie4hillsdale.com. | |
| That's charlieforhillsdale.com. | |
| Look, charlieforhillsdale.com. | |
| You guys should go there at least once a week. | |
| You guys can get online courses, sign up for Imprimus, learn about Aristotle, learn about the Constitution, learn about the Declaration, learn about the Federalist Papers. | |
| It's charlieforhillsdale.com. | |
| Again, Charlie, F-O-R, Hillsdale.com. | |
| We are a republic, not a democracy. | |
| That's right. | |
| Pete, what's the significance of that? | |
| You're one of the few people that will actually be able to tell us what that means. | |
| Well, democracy has long been one of the favorite words of the left. | |
| In fact, when the Marxists came over from the Frankfurt School, just that one particular strand, they actually changed. | |
| text that they had written in Germany. | |
| And rather than saying communism or authoritarianism, they would insert the word democracy. | |
| Democracy has long been a code word for do what we want, conform to the system we like. | |
| And our founders were well versed in Greek, Roman, and Western history and understanding the inevitable impulse of democracies, what the tyranny of a majority may look like. | |
| Now that we've ripped civics, history, you know, even things like geography and put them under the umbrella of social science and social studies, which was also a move of the progressives because they didn't want to ever study objective truth. | |
| They wanted to study how you look at different pieces of different items through the prism of challenging the patriarchy and challenging the Western Christian paideia, the assumptions of what our country was founded on. | |
| So democracy became a catch-all word for how the people respond to their relationship with government, as opposed to a republic, which is precisely what our founders chose after studying what previous governments and democracies had been. | |
| It also is a reflection. | |
| This is the key point, Charlie. | |
| You know this. | |
| The difference is a reflection in the understanding of human nature. | |
| And that actually, if you look at the hierarchy of questions that matter the most, is there a God? | |
| And the second one is, are we inherently good or inherently sinful? | |
| And the Bible and Christianity answers that question. | |
| Our founders studied it and understood you had to put in the checks and balances it required in a republic to check the impulses of human beings who have an inherent drive for power and consolidation and control. | |
| That's a key distinction. | |
| Every time I hear the word democracy fall off the lips of politicians all the way up to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that is a continuation of precisely what they've wanted our kids to believe so that they can advance social control. | |
| It's such a great explanation of it. | |
| And this all comes down to a question of human nature. | |
| Do you think that people are going to act, as Thomas Hobbes would say, in a nasty, brutish or short fashion? | |
| Do you think people are naturally good? | |
| And if you think people are naturally predisposed towards greed or anger or towards tyranny, then you should have a check and balance. | |
| You have to get permission from the governed. | |
| You have to have separation of powers. | |
| These are all characteristics of the constitutional framework. | |
| You were going to chime in about the kind of window dressings of these Marxist indoctrination factories. | |
| It's a brilliant strategy, by the way. | |
| You put the worst ideas imaginable, you fill it with incredibly motivated left-wing activist educators. | |
| And then alongside of it, or all around it, I should say, you have these incredibly expensive and beautiful, you know, football stadiums and astroturf and all of that. | |
| What are your thoughts on that? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And then you put massively high property taxes on the backs of taxpayers to pay for those things so they feel invested in them. | |
| And you, I mean, effectively, parents these days know what's going on and they kind of go like this and they go, I think my kids will be okay. | |
| I'm going to spend a little bit more time talking to them because if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for them. | |
| And look at the shiny new gym and the iPads that they have and the new STEM program that is going to set them up for success. | |
| STEM program is the same argument that they made, by the way, in the early 20th century about the industrial economy and the new skills needed for the new economy for workers. | |
| Don't train their minds to be liberated through the liberal arts. | |
| Teach them a skill for the future economy and make them useful workers. | |
| It's that same sentiment. | |
| STEM's fine in and of itself. | |
| I'm not against it. | |
| I think we need scientists and technical folks and engineers and mathematicians. | |
| That's important. | |
| But I also want them to understand where their freedom comes from and have a liberated mind as they go through life. | |
| And so the same goes with even AP courses. | |
| Oh, they've got AP courses and you can qualify for college credits. | |
| Yeah, but they're teaching your kids that they should potentially consider changing their gender. | |
| And then the social pressure on top of it, Charlie, we hand cell phones to kids at the age of eight, nine, 10 years old, and expect them to deal with both the authority of their teacher because teachers are the authority. | |
| I remember that when I was 14, 15, 16, the teacher said it, it's true. | |
| And kids are waking up to that. | |
| You're a huge part of that, but that's the assumption. | |
| So put them in a nice building, teachers with lots of authority with fancy devices, and then try to undo that with one morning on Sunday and Wednesday night at church. | |
| The progressives wrote about that openly. | |
| Good luck with your theistic training when we have 40 hours of progressive indoctrination. | |
| We did a Fox News interview together this morning, and we got great feedback from the audience. | |
| And you were asked a question by the great Ainslie Earhart where you said, Are you ready to give up on government schools? | |
| And you were really blunt in your answer. | |
| Tell our audience what you said. | |
| I am ready to give up on government schools. | |
| That consolidation, that portion is complete. | |
| They control every single aspect of the pipeline. | |
| And I salute parents that go to school board meetings. | |
| I think that's useful. | |
| I think it's great. | |
| I'm glad they are. | |
| They're waking up. | |
| But in the book I write, you know, it's like charging a fortified machine gun nest with Nerf guns. | |
| We salute your efforts, but you're all going to die. | |
| My mom tried the same thing in the 80s and the 90s. | |
| She protested. | |
| She pulled me out of certain things, but nothing changed. | |
| That was a self-esteem program back in the day. | |
| The system is stacked against you. | |
| It doesn't want to hear from you. | |
| It doesn't care what you think. | |
| It's kicked God out 50 years ago, and they're not teaching what you would teach them. | |
| Find an alternative, run away. | |
| And there are cost-effective options if you're doing it or build one like you are. | |
| And I think building is a big part. | |
| Retreating just into homeschooling, as useful as that is, and it's very useful, I don't think is sufficient. | |
| We got to build alternate institutions of learning that have their own status to them, that are respected, that have their own traditions, that we then push generations through to take it back. | |
| So, so, Pete, I didn't know this about you, and I promise I'm not going to hold this against you, but you went to Princeton, if I'm not mistaken, right? | |
| And so I read that about you and Princeton and Harvard, which is which is awesome. | |
| And so, part of this, though, is very impressive. | |
| When I was reading your bio, I immediately think higher of your intellect because you have the stamp of approval of Princeton and Harvard. | |
| Understandably, it's really hard to get into. | |
| But can you, as someone who's gone to Princeton and Harvard, can you tell us about how that actually probably creates from a parent's perspective a push towards over-credentialing, right? | |
| Where you got to go to Princeton, got to go to Harvard. | |
| And so, can you, what's your thought on that as someone who's actually been to these institutions? | |
| Because I think a lot of parents are willing to put aside, you know, this idea that men can become pregnant or all this insane stuff, the inability to answer the question of what is a woman. | |
| If you get that piece of paper from Princeton and Harvard, you're uniquely positioned to be able to answer this question. | |
| We have to take them off a pedestal. | |
| We have to stop revering them as now. | |
| Society is not going to change that. | |
| The elite crowd is going to continue to perpetuate it. | |
| We have to take that. | |
| I am now actually, I shake my head and am ashamed by the sheepish fashion in which I pursued what I deemed to be the best in the eyes of the world. | |
| And I will forgive myself because that's what I thought it was when I was there. | |
| I now, I mean, I've already told my wife I'm mailing at a minimum my Harvard degree back and likely the Princeton one too, with return to sender written on it in dramatic fashion at the right point, because I don't want to be a part of perpetuating the elevation of those institutions as if they should be an impremature of your credibility inside our culture and elite society. | |
| Because you've set the example and you're writing a book about it now, about how when we take them off those pedestals, it reduces their ability to set the terms of what is valued and what is important. | |
|
Hope in Conservative Institutions
00:02:40
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| But I want to ask you, though, a lot of parents are struggling with this, though, because they say, it's worth it. | |
| That piece of paper will be an admission ticket. | |
| They go to Harvard. | |
| They go to Princeton. | |
| They'll be taken seriously or they go to Stanford. | |
| Do you think that it's worth the risk? | |
| Do you think it's worth the metaphorical Russian roulette with their values to go to these institutions? | |
| It's not worth the risk. | |
| I've said openly, I don't want my kids to go to college unless it's on a list of colleges about this many. | |
| And, you know, there is hope in some of these institutions. | |
| Robbie George at Princeton has 25 open conservative professors at the James Madison Institute. | |
| I mean, he was one of my mentors at Princeton. | |
| Amazing guy. | |
| There are glimmers of hope, and you know your kids better than anyone else does. | |
| But I think feeding into that rat line, feeding into the elite school so they can get into the elite colleges and get the paycheck, what is the paycheck worth if at that very same time your child is a Bernie Sanders style socialist or is prescribing to the belief that America is a horrible place? | |
| Because if you didn't fortify them, I mean, really, really fortify them. | |
| That is the group think of what they will come out with. | |
| Sure, they might have a beach house and they'll be set up for better opportunities, but what kind of legacy do you want to leave? | |
| And that's probably the most difficult part of this project, Charlie. | |
| High school is one thing. | |
| College is another. | |
| Breaking that pipeline. | |
| I see it with friends of mine, and I won't name any names, who are very conservative and very open about the topics we talk about, but still give in to the gravitational pull of I'm going to pay 60 grand for my first grader to go to this elite school, even though it is the wokest of the woke woke, because if they get into that elementary, it leads to this middle school and that high school. | |
| And that means you got a ticket to the Ivy Leagues, possibly. | |
| And what would I do if my kid wasn't in the Ivy League? | |
| I hope we can break, we need to break that misconception down. | |
| And it starts by people who've been to those institutions saying, it's not that cool. | |
| It's not that great. | |
| And yes, I had some opportunities later in life, but if I worked my tail off, I could have had them anyway. | |
| I credit where I am today, not that it's some great achievement, to the military. | |
| I learned everything I needed at Samara University, Baghdad University, from the guys who stood shoulder to shoulder with me. | |
| I learned about human nature. | |
| I learned about good and evil. | |
| I learned about real sacrifice and I learned why America is such a special place. | |
| I didn't learn it at Princeton, where they taught me in the first day of my class on Christianity that Jesus was likely buried in a shallow grave and eaten by dogs by their biblical scholar on the first day that I arrived. | |
|
Legacy Box Saves Your Memories
00:02:33
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| I didn't learn it from eggheads at Princeton? | |
| This is at Princeton. | |
| I said, I'm going to take a school in Christianity. | |
| Harvard was founded by John Harvard, who is a Christian. | |
| And Princeton used to be the premier Presbyterian seminary. | |
| And that's what they teach you their biblical scholarship. | |
| Exactly right. | |
| Elaine Pagels, New York Times bestseller. | |
| She immediately said, nothing you've ever learned is true. | |
| But it led me to Firestone Library where I did my own research. | |
| And that's the first time I encountered the reality of how close the events were to the actual gospels written down, which compared to any other, you know what I mean. | |
| I want to tell you guys about Legacy Box. | |
| Legacy Box is the simplest and safest way to digitize all your aging videotapes, camcorder tapes, and more. | |
| Look, it was a wake-up call for me when one of our team members' homes burned down. | |
| I was like, whoa, all this family memories gone, vanished, vaporized. | |
| Where are your family's old film reels? | |
| It's going to be fire season in parts of California soon. | |
| Forest fires all across America. | |
| What happens if your vacation home burns down or your home burns down? | |
| God forbid. | |
| But will your memories be saved? | |
| How are you going to pass them down to your kids? | |
| Well, here's how Legacy Box works. | |
| You put them all in a box, you send it off to them, they barcode it, they save it forever, and it goes in the cloud, and you're able to make your legacy permanent and preserved. | |
| What memories do you wish you could relive or pass down to your kids? | |
| Look, each kit includes everything you need to safely pack and send you recorded moments. | |
| Each item is hand-digitized by a hand by 200 trained technicians right here in America. | |
| So experience the joy and excitement of rewatching your wedding day, baby's first steps, or Christmas mornings. | |
| We love Legacy Box. | |
| We love using it here on the Charlie Kirk show. | |
| Many of our Turning Point USA team members love it. | |
| So go to the Legacy Box event. | |
| The Legacy Box Father's Day event is happening now. | |
| Go to legacybox.com slash Charlie and say 50%. | |
| Legacy Box is great for your family or is a gift for your father. | |
| That's legacybox.com slash Charlie for 50% off. | |
| LegacyBox.com slash Charlie. | |
| The archaeological evidence for the gospel, the life, ministry, unfair death, burial and resurrection of Christ. | |
| It's amazing when you look into the archaeological evidence for it, from the inexplicable record of female witnesses to how close Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John was written to actual events themselves, to Josephus, the extra biblical reinforcement. | |
|
Listening to Break the Complex
00:04:41
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| Just had to add that little, you know, little fact in there to push back against the Harvard and Princeton lady. | |
| Your thoughts? | |
| And I had to find that truth in the dark corner of the basement on dusty books inside an institution formerly founded, as you pointed out, to train Presbyterian ministers. | |
| That's where you had to search to find it. | |
| One other thing on these lead schools, though, I think many, many people in different industries in our country are realizing they don't want a bunch of highly, first of all, very woke activists who think very highly of themselves and don't think they should have to work hard, often many of which are produced by these institutions. | |
| And not to mention the standards that have been reduced based on the attack they've made on the SAT at College Board. | |
| I mean, Common Core has turned into the SAT. | |
| They removed reasoning completely. | |
| Now it's just a test you can study for alongside all the other ways in which the engineer who goes to these schools, the product they're creating has been so wildly diluted. | |
| There will be a point where the return on investment is far less worth it when you hire someone who they allowed in the gate of these institutions. | |
| So, in closing, here, again, it's Pete Hegset's amazing book, Battle for the American Mind: Action Steps. | |
| You mentioned building new things. | |
| What else? | |
| What is the solution agenda for the American grassroots? | |
| Okay, the first thing, and you're doing it, and I'm doing it with this book, is it's a word of the left raising awareness or getting rid of implicit bias that parents have toward their public schools. | |
| You have to understand the depth of the problem to get to a solution. | |
| And that's what is going to be ongoing, and we'll continue doing that. | |
| Then, as a former counterinsurgency instructor, I turn to what's the tactic that's going to work the most. | |
| First, it's tactical retreat. | |
| We retreat from the government schools because we can't win in that fight. | |
| And what's the form of warfare, ideological warfare, that's most effective when you have the have-nots against the haves or the weak against the strong? | |
| It's insurgency. | |
| Mao wrote about insurgency. | |
| We studied it in the military. | |
| It was very effective for insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. | |
| You have to, your phase one is to identify your networks and your allies and start building robust networks and institutions. | |
| You don't pop your head up too high because you don't need to. | |
| You start building schools. | |
| You start exposing the corrupt nature of the educational regime, and you start encouraging people to find an alternative. | |
| Once you've built enough of those schools and that capacity, then you really ramp up the awareness effort to the point where there's a flood. | |
| There's such a demand that it starts, and then you start to build the ecosystem that supports it, new teachers' colleges, additional curriculum, higher education that supports it, ecosystem of everything else. | |
| And then you get into the policy realm, which is universal educational tax credits. | |
| The idea that the dollars follow the parents and they can go to government schools if you so choose, or to vocational schools, parochial schools, Christian schools, whatever you want. | |
| That's how you break the back of the educational industrial complex. | |
| They believe they have a monopoly because they have a monopoly on the money right now. | |
| So, we've been yelling about vouchers and school choice for years ineffectively as conservatives. | |
| We have to take the action first and not expect some policy to change it. | |
| Because if you can have a choice to go to just a little less woke school, that's not really a choice that's going to change the trajectory of our republic. | |
| So, we lay it out in the book through five chapters what these phases look like, what classical Christian education looks like, and other forms of education that are going to save the republic. | |
| The Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth. | |
| Pete, thank you for being so generous with your time. | |
| It's terrific. | |
| I encourage everyone to pick up a copy or two. | |
| You will learn a lot about how they were able to capture American education and how we can reclaim it. | |
| Also, a small plug: the miseducation of America on Fox Nation is terrific. | |
| It's great. | |
| I've heard so much feedback from people on it. | |
| So, Pete, I'm so pleased that you're making it. | |
| We're on the hook for season two. | |
| We're making another season and you're on the hook. | |
| I will be honored. | |
| Thank you, Pete, so much. | |
| I'm so glad education is becoming kind of your primary crusade right now. | |
| I love it. | |
| Likewise, thank you. | |
| Likewise. | |
| Thank you so much for listening, everybody. | |
| Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Thank you so much for listening. | |
| God bless. | |
| For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com. | |