You’d think that “Health, Wealth, and Happiness” is an uncontroversial topic, yet dozens of ASU faculty members apparently disagree. Hear Charlie’s speech to a sellout crowd that 37 professors tried to stop him from delivering.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Kick Dennis Prager Off Campus
00:05:47
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| Hey everybody, happy Sunday. | |
| My speech at Arizona State University on health, wealth, and happiness, where they did not want me to speak, but I still did. | |
| Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Get involved with TurningPointUSA today at tpusa.com, start a high school chapter, start a college chapter at tpusa.com. | |
| That is tpusa.com, tpusa.com. | |
| Support our program at charliekirk.com/slash support. | |
| 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. | |
| Thank you, everybody. | |
| Tom, that was excellent. | |
| Thank you. | |
| And thank you guys for showing up tonight. | |
| There's a lot more controversy around this than I would have expected. | |
| And I can't even see that. | |
| But that the name, could you think of a less controversial title of a speech, Health, Wealth, and Happiness? | |
| And somehow that gets to be super controversial, right? | |
| I mean, evidently, I suppose everything does. | |
| So, look, there's a couple things I want to talk about, and I do want to address this last week, but I want to make sure the proper thanks is in order. | |
| Despite all the clamoring and the nonsense, Arizona State University deserves credit for still allowing this event to proceed. | |
| And I mean that non-sarcastic. | |
| I'm not exactly a college fan. | |
| That's supposed to be somewhat funny, but no, I mean that. | |
| It's a big deal. | |
| This is allowed to proceed and happen and continue. | |
| So I want to address some of these attacks. | |
| Look, you could say whatever you want about me. | |
| It doesn't bother me. | |
| But when you start attacking Dennis Prager, I mean this. | |
| I mean, and the person who was attacking him was a religious studies scholar, which if you know anything about Dennis Prager, who probably has published more, written more, spoke more, or broadcasted more about the Torah and the Hebrew Bible than any person alive on the planet. | |
| I would just say that if you're a religious studies scholar, you could probably learn something from Dennis Prager instead of wanting to kick him off your campus. | |
| And look, I could defend myself. | |
| It's fine. | |
| I just, and Dennis probably won't even get into most of this, but it does tell you something that you could disagree with everything that I might say or Dennis might say. | |
| However, if your profession is to study religion and someone who has now successfully published four out of five Bible commentaries, which I don't know if you've seen Dennis's Rational Bible, it's one of the most amazing accomplishments of the modern era, going verse by verse of the five books of Moses and understanding the original Biblical Hebrew. | |
| And the quote is just so funny. | |
| It says, I want to make it clear that each signature on this petition was for a different reason. | |
| I believe these speakers represent ideas that go against the principles of ASU charter that stand for inclusivity and not exclusivity. | |
| Well, if you're for inclusivity, then why do you want the event not to happen? | |
| That's not very inclusive of you. | |
| I'm so tolerant, which is why I don't want other ideas to occur. | |
| It's really interesting. | |
| So, look, I also want to make a special shout out to the 10 professors who didn't sign the petition. | |
| Are any of them here if you're here? | |
| Because all the emphasis was 37 out of 47. | |
| I mean this non-sarcastically. | |
| I was impressed that there were 10 holdouts, that there were 10 professors that said, I'm not comfortable signing this petition. | |
| That was more than I expected, truly. | |
| But it does tell you a lot about, you know, where the academy is headed. | |
| And again, I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush, but if you are a professor that signs a petition like that, just so intellectually lazy and just so sloppy, you know, you're an intellectual midget or coward, in my opinion, not to want to be able to offend your position. | |
| And quite honestly, lazily and sloppily, and it's an insult to everyone who worked really hard to get a PhD just to say that stuff like, oh, he's a white nationalist. | |
| Like, really, what's your substantiation for that? | |
| Would you like to come up? | |
| By the way, open invite for any one of the 37 professors. | |
| You're welcome on my national radio program anytime. | |
| And you can have an uninterrupted opportunity to tell me in front of millions of people why you believe the stuff you believe. | |
| Or are you too cowardly because you just want to sign a petition and then go off into the distance with your moral superiority? | |
|
Live In Someone's Truth
00:13:22
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| All right. | |
| Enough of that. | |
| But again, the university deserves credit for not cowing to the mob. | |
| That is important. | |
| All right. | |
| It's funny because I'm still planning to talk about some of the most, I would say, non-controversial things, non-controversial for me, but there's two very simple things that I want you guys to walk away with that I think could be helpful and that I think could bless you. | |
| And I think that could address a lot of other issues. | |
| So the name of the talk is health, wealth, and happiness. | |
| I was thinking to myself, what is one thing that you could do that has been proven over a long period of time that could make it easier to be healthy, wealthier, not just wealthy financially or materially, but hopefully wealthier in the soul and happier. | |
| And it didn't take long for me to realize something I started doing a year and a half ago, largely thanks to Dennis Prager and many others, that has been proven to work for thousands of years that I think America, I know America used to honor. | |
| And America, I'm getting LASIK surgery, so my eyes are not what it, I don't know, what a sign said. | |
| I'm sure it was not wise. | |
| Am I right? | |
| I'm just guessing. | |
| So if hey, that's what it said, you'll go with that. | |
| That's my truth tonight. | |
| So what has worked for thousands of years that have helped people get healthier, happier, and wealthier, the real wealth that matters is the wealth of the soul, the depth of the soul, not material wealth, but material wealth can help you. | |
| And it's something I started to do a year and a half ago that I didn't come up with, obviously, but it's something that I think America has forgotten. | |
| And it's stopping for 25 hours a week. | |
| Put simply, honoring the Sabbath. | |
| This is something that I'll be very honest, modern American Christianity has done a horrendous job of this. | |
| However, I'm going to challenge even the atheists or the secularists that thank you for coming for the speech. | |
| I'm not going to even try to make a religious case for this. | |
| I'm going to tell you that if you do stop, which is what the word means, Shabbat, to stop, you'll be healthier, you'll be wealthier, and you will be happier. | |
| So, if you think about the idea of the Sabbath or the Shabbats, I know we have some religious Jews here that do this every week. | |
| So, for them, this is somewhat easy, but I'm just, I'm a newcomer to this, right? | |
| My idea of the Sabbath was like putting my phone away for 30 minutes and watching football, right? | |
| That was my idea of the Sabbath. | |
| I would work every day, every minute, every hour. | |
| And a really good pastor friend of mine, plus Dennis's teaching, said, Charlie, you need to stop. | |
| I said, Why do I need to stop? | |
| I got work to do. | |
| They said, Well, you need to stop in the name of God, kind of a playoff of the stop in the name of love. | |
| And I said, Well, what do you mean? | |
| Shabbat means stop. | |
| If God rested after creating the world, of which I believe, then you should too. | |
| And so, July of 2020, what would that be? | |
| 2021, a year and a half ago, I decided to do it. | |
| Friday night, turn off my phone. | |
| And at first, it's incredibly difficult. | |
| I'll tell you, if you do this, it creates anxiety separation with your phone. | |
| You're one at the world's falling apart. | |
| It's tough. | |
| And it takes work the first couple months to do it. | |
| But then after five or six months and you really get into it, you start to expect it and you start to look forward to it. | |
| And I kid you not, with no exaggeration and no hyperbole, the way that you used to look forward to Christmas once a year, I look forward to Friday nights. | |
| Because now I, and I believe that you don't have, I don't expect you to necessarily adopt this belief. | |
| I believe God commanded us to do it. | |
| So therefore, I say, God wants me to turn off my phone. | |
| He doesn't want me to watch the news, which is honestly refreshing because it's all I do for six days a week. | |
| And all I care about is family, reading books for 25 hours. | |
| I stop. | |
| And I am a healthier and happier person because of it. | |
| And in our mental health issues are across the country, depression, anxiety. | |
| And I would just submit, maybe instead of prescribing incredibly, let's just say, powerful pharmacology, benzodiazepans, diazepines, Xanax, Zoloft, maybe first we should tell a young person, turn off your phone for 24 hours a week. | |
| It slows down your life in a more religious, transcendent context. | |
| It also makes you have to do the work, go through the action of saying, I did not create this world. | |
| I am not in charge of this world. | |
| And what I'm doing is not necessarily as important as at least for one day honoring that there is a transcendent melody and harmony to our existence. | |
| Now, but for those of you that say, Charlie, I'm too busy. | |
| I'm too busy. | |
| It's too much for me. | |
| I get that, maybe. | |
| However, what could be more important than stopping and saying, I'm going to honor the cathedral built-in time to say that my health, my relationship to my creator, my family is so important. | |
| And I would argue that the more radical you are about the Sabbath, the more you're going to get out of it. | |
| To say, totally turn off the phone, totally put it away. | |
| I'm going to totally disconnect from technology. | |
| And I could tell you, it is one of the greatest blessings in my life. | |
| And you have something to say once a week, at least I have a Sabbath to be able to honor. | |
| America used to do this. | |
| We have blue laws. | |
| It used to work really well. | |
| I truly believe it's not the only reason, but one of the reasons why America has become a less happy country, more depressed, and more anxious, is because we are hurrying ourselves into oblivion. | |
| It is the joyless search for joy. | |
| And that is what modernity has given us. | |
| You want a 3,000-year-old hack? | |
| Just stop for once a week. | |
| Okay, the second thing, which is also part of the Ten Commandments, which I wasn't planning on talking about this. | |
| I was so moved by a conversation I had upstairs, which this is mostly for young people, but it's also for all people. | |
| It's so incredibly important. | |
| And this is something that if I were to say one thing that college does not do a good job of, it is telling young people that you have a moral obligation to honor your parents. | |
| And I cannot emphasize how important this is. | |
| And I'm not saying you have to love your parents. | |
| As a Christian, it does say that in the New Testament, but just focusing on this word honor means to treat your parents heavily. | |
| If you do not honor your parents and you do not, and it doesn't just say that, it comes with a promise, also involves your nation, because it says, honor your mother and father so that you may live long in the land of which you are in. | |
| You think about it. | |
| As America has stopped honoring our parents, we have become less free and closer to totalitarianism. | |
| The less that we honor our parents, the less likely we are to be able to engage in self-government. | |
| This is not the most popular message to give on college campuses because the propaganda that is typically said on not just campus, all campuses, is your parents don't know as much as we know. | |
| We're enlightened and they're not. | |
| And for your sake and their sake, for the country's sake, I want to implore you. | |
| You will be a happier, wealthier person if, and a healthier person, if you do the work to honor your parents. | |
| And I'll give you two specific reasons. | |
| Number one, as you get older, especially if you have a child, which by the way, I think this is a thought crime. | |
| You should get married and have children. | |
| You will be happier and healthier and wealthier if you do those three things, by the way. | |
| It changes your life for the better. | |
| Once you have children, your respect of your parents goes up dramatically. | |
| It does. | |
| And they're worthy of honoring. | |
| They are. | |
| Now, you might say, Charlie, I have the worst parent in the world. | |
| Dennis has written so much about that topic, you guys can just go into it with him and ask him questions about it. | |
| Here's the point: 99% of you tonight do not have abusive parents. | |
| They might have different politics. | |
| They might have different views. | |
| They might have different religion. | |
| None of that is an excuse not to honor them. | |
| Period. | |
| You talk to them and you spend time with them. | |
| Okay, last thing. | |
| I have no idea how I'm doing on time. | |
| I think I'm okay, but all right. | |
| How do you live a healthier, wealthier, happier life? | |
| I didn't come up with this. | |
| The next speakers are going to talk about this. | |
| You have to go through the intentional steps of being thankful. | |
| Every single person in this room has something to be thankful for. | |
| Modernity in general, and unfortunately, far too many colleges, will encourage you to be ungrateful, not grateful. | |
| Here's something that we all can say that we should be thankful for that I'm afraid we are losing. | |
| We live in the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world. | |
| The second part of that is you didn't build it. | |
| You inherited it. | |
| So don't mess it up. | |
| You see, the brilliance, the heroism, the courage, the piety, the virtue that went into building this civilization was not a mistake. | |
| And I'm afraid we're not telling young people that as best as we could. | |
| And so when I hear that America is systemically racist, bigoted from the start, colonialist, misogynistic, homophobic, all these different things. | |
| And I think to myself, you live in the freest, the once freest country. | |
| I don't know if we're still the freest, but I'll use that as a general sweeping term. | |
| Definitely the most successful materially, without a doubt, the most benevolent, the most generous country ever to exist in the history of the world. | |
| Are you even able in a 30-second soundbite, tell me why? | |
| Or are you able to recite the reasons why there's all these flawed injustices? | |
| Here's just a really simple truism for life: most countries are crummy. | |
| They are. | |
| You happen to live in a good one. | |
| That's a reason to be thankful. | |
| Okay. | |
| Second thing that I encourage you to do: blame yourself for your own problems. | |
| There are exceptions to all rules, and I'm sure somebody here could tell me an exception of something so terrible that happened to you, and that you got to deal with that. | |
| But 99.9% of all of you watching online are here. | |
| You are the reason you are unhappy. | |
| You are the reason you are poor. | |
| And you are the reason you are not where you want to be. | |
| Period. | |
| That is actually very empowering. | |
| As Victor Frankl famously said in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, that I encourage all of you to read. | |
| There's a patient that came into his office one day and he said, Boy, I hope there's something wrong with me. | |
| I said, What do you mean? | |
| He said, Well, if there's something wrong with me, then I can fix it. | |
| But if there's something wrong with society, then there's no hope. | |
| So if you are not where you want to be, that should actually be really empowering. | |
| Maybe you can work harder, wake up earlier, stop drinking, stop doing hookup culture, stop doing drugs, become a better person, read a book, get off TikTok, stop spending so much time on your phone. | |
| You are to blame for where you are. | |
| It's not your parents' fault. | |
| It's not society's fault. | |
| It's not racism's fault. | |
| It's not transphobia's fault. | |
| It's you. | |
| So decide who you want to be. | |
| And finally, the last thing I'll say, and I suppose I'm somewhat approximating my time limit, right? | |
| So am I okay? | |
| Ish? | |
| I'll land the plane. | |
| Okay, got it. | |
| They're giving me the hard pull. | |
| I apologize. | |
| I have no prompt. | |
| I was once on a college campus, and someone said, Charlie, there is no such thing as absolute truth. | |
| And I asked, Do you believe that absolutely? | |
| The people that are telling you there's no truth in the world are pretty convinced that that is true. | |
| At some point, you're going to have to live in somebody's truth. | |
| There is a truth. | |
| I hope you find it. | |
| There is a God, and you are not him. | |
| He wants you to be happy and healthy and to honor him. | |
| Thank you, and God bless you all. | |
| Thanks so much for listening, everybody. | |
| Email me your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Thank you so much for listening, and God bless. | |
| For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com. | |