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April 15, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
01:28:54
My Speech LIVE at University of Illinois-Chicago

What happened to Chicago? Why did one of America's most decent, hard-working cities become infamous for corruption, decay, and hyper-racialized politics? Can it be saved — and if so, how? Charlie addresses the condition and fate of his hometown in an appearance at the University of Illinois-Chicago.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Saving Sweet Home Chicago 00:05:14
Hey everybody, it's Anna Charlie Kirk Show, University of Illinois Chicago.
I give a speech about Sweet Home Chicago.
It's a great talk talking about how we can save Chicago.
And also, I take some questions from some very heated people, but some honestly some great folks.
I think you'll really enjoy this chat.
If you want to support our program directly, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
If you want to get involved with TurningPointUSA, go to tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com.
Get engaged and get involved.
At charliekirk.com/slash support.
You can support us.
I want to thank David from Illinois.
Thank you.
Dustin from Wisconsin.
Thank you.
Rachel from New Jersey.
Thank you.
Eva from Texas.
Susan from California.
Annette from North Carolina.
Leslie from Arkansas.
Emily from North Carolina.
Alita from Wisconsin.
Ronald from Alaska.
Great.
It's a great spot.
Rita from Illinois.
Jonathan from Arizona.
Jay from North Carolina.
Thank you for supporting us.
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.
Thank you.
Please take a seat.
So I have the hardest job of the evening here.
One of my favorite Bible verses is Exodus 2:23, and the people groaned.
So you can all groan together.
Unfortunately, because of weather, Candace was unable to leave Nashville.
You can groan now.
So you're stuck with me for the evening.
So don't groan at that part, okay?
But we're going to still have some fun tonight.
We're going to talk about Chicago.
We're talking about Illinois.
And then we're going to take some questions and then we're going to have a lot of fun from there.
So, and Candace feels terribly, but unfortunately, the weather was too terrible.
She wasn't able to get out.
And airlines are not what they used to be.
Just chalk that up to many different things.
It's great to be back home.
It's great to be back home.
I want to thank our amazing Turning Point USA chapter leaders.
They're doing an amazing job putting this together.
It takes a lot of courage, and it takes, quite honestly, conviction.
It's easy to be a liberal on campus.
It's not easy to be a conservative.
And you should ask the question then: why continue to be a conservative on campus if it's not easy?
Obviously, because we believe it and we know it to be true, but if you're looking for hope and you're here tonight and you say, Charlie, everything's terrible, everything's falling apart, this should give you hope.
The amount of young people that care for the cause of freedom and for America.
Now, I have to do this.
Anyone remember when the Chicago Tribune was a respectable newspaper?
Do you guys remember that?
I saw this.
Somebody sent me this article of the Tribune's coverage of our upcoming event here, which was basically a press release for the Apparatch outside.
And it's so incredible because the lack of self-awareness of how they try to attack our events.
Did anyone else see this article?
So, okay, I just have to read part of this.
Students at UIC are planning to protest a Turning Point USA college event Thursday featuring far-right speakers, Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens.
This is what's amazing.
Known for their rhetoric, often targeting various minority groups.
Candace Owens is known for her rhetoric targeting various minority groups, and that's what we're best known for.
This is the statement that UIC Against Hatred said, who asked to remain anonymous because they're cowards.
Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens' past use of hate speech and discriminatory language against marginalized groups indicates that these figures are in search of furthering divisions and triggering people rather than engaging in meaningful discussion.
The main goal of our rally is to create a space for UIC students to feel free to express their concerns regarding the TPUSA event.
This is what's so amazing.
And the university's failure to act and the need for more solidarity and community among students.
And so they say they want the event canceled.
And this is why they say they say we want the event canceled because it's unacceptable that this extremely diverse campus is allowing other opinions to come on campus.
Wait a second.
I thought welcoming is your core value.
Like you're just preaching about how wonderful and diverse and open-minded we are.
Except you.
If you disagree, you're not allowed on campus.
That's totalitarian.
That is not welcoming or diversity, everybody.
So I just get a kick out of this.
I'm very concerned because Kirk and Owens have a very vicious anti-trans rhetoric, which is dehumanized, and they go on from there and all this stuff.
The Problem with Hyper Race Focus 00:15:57
Okay, but it's interesting and it's fascinating.
And here's how you know that there is something to the conservative movement.
If our ideas were terrible, they would not work so hard to shut us up.
If our ideas did not have merit, if our ideas did not resonate, then they would not do everything they possibly could to try to silence us, to try to stop us from speaking.
Because when you live in an ideological bubble, it is easy to think that there are no other ideas out there.
But actually, it turns out that there are millions of people, yes, in Illinois and across the Midwest, that think it's absolutely insane to defund the police.
They think it's wrong to try to talk about race all the time.
They think that maybe we should have a border in our country.
That maybe we should care more about fentanyl deaths than some abstract foreign conflict 5,000 miles away.
Like they actually look at this.
Wow, that's not right.
And so when we look at things today into the prism of the immediate, I think it's really interesting and compelling that if universities have four years with a student, our argument is give us 90 minutes and they might be able to actually see the world differently.
Give me 90 minutes, you get four years, and we'll see who's able to make an impact.
So I want to talk about the immediate and the personal and the local here.
I love this city.
Full disclaimer, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago before somebody says I'm not actually from Chicago, okay?
Full disclaimer, because I get correct.
Charlie, you're not from Chicago.
Okay, I'm from Wheeling, okay, for the record, but I still consider myself a Chicagoan, albeit suburban Chicagoan, but that's fine.
And but it actually is not exclusive because the damage that has been done is the whole area.
It's not just downtown Chicago, it's gone well into the suburbs.
And I'll be very honest: you know, when I visit here and I drive through a city that used to be the greatest city in America and might be the greatest city in the world, it still is.
Okay, we could talk about that.
I hope you're right.
I hope you're not delusional.
I hope so.
I actually mean that.
I want Chicago to be great, but I also know what it used to be.
I remember MAG Mile that didn't have a bunch of stores vacant because of looters and because of criminals.
I remember a city where people were not afraid to walk on Michigan Avenue because they were going to get slammed over the head.
I remember a city where the rest of the country didn't say, oh, you're going to Chicago?
You go for the food and you stay because you get murdered.
Like, that's not a good thing to hear other people say.
Okay?
It's the laughingstock of the country, is what Chicago has become.
If you don't believe me, go travel and go ask other people.
They're like, oh, is it safe?
Is it this?
All this.
And you might think it's perfectly safe.
I totally disagree with that.
That's fine.
But the point is, I actually have a yearning for this place to be strong once again because I remember what it was.
And I think a memory is really important.
We can't allow that to disappear to take a second and say, why was this city so spectacular?
What was it about Chicago that made us so incredibly wealthy, that the center of industry, of entrepreneurial activity?
And there's many things.
First of all, growing up in this place and being raised by amazing parents, but also having really good friends and mentors in the local area, and then traveling and seeing the contrast, you could start to see, okay, New York, it's all about money.
D.C., all about power.
LA, all about fame.
Miami, sex and other things.
But Chicago seemed to always be about work.
Chicago was a place where we valued the merit and the input into your effort more than who your father was, more than what skin color you are, more than who you work for.
And Chicago became the industrial capital for many reasons, not just because of our good geographic location, but for a short period of time, this was a place where largely people from the Midwest, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, they saw Chicago as a portal to the American dream.
And it's not just the Chicago location or industry, it was the values of this place.
And you know one of the values that I was taught by some of you in this room?
I was taught that your skin color does not matter.
When I grew up in this state, I was told that your skin color doesn't mean anything.
And now, in the school district right down the street that I went to, District 214, a place where I went to a high school that was a majority Hispanic high school, 53% English is a second language.
Now they're doing the opposite.
They're teaching kids that your race does matter.
They're teaching kids that you should be looking at the melanin content in somebody's skin.
That creates more racists.
That creates more division.
That creates more bitterness.
Chicago was not made great because of these ideas.
In fact, it was a pursuit of trying to prove the rest of the country wrong.
You see, Chicago was always called the second city, and that bothered me.
It always bothered me that we were considered to be some stepchild to New York or kind of like an uglier Los Angeles.
It really bothered me.
You know what?
I think some of you, it bothered you throughout your career.
And there was a grittiness to a Chicago in, wasn't there?
There was an attitude where it's like, you know what?
Okay, fine.
New York has more population.
LA has better weather.
We're going to outwork you.
We're going to build a good team.
And we're going to not just win sports championships.
We're going to create better businesses.
We're going to create good families.
And that chip on the shoulder created this city to be the envy.
Or all of a sudden said, wow, there's something special happening in Chicago.
And we look at the amazing stories the last 20 or 30 years of what came here.
And then something changed.
And it didn't happen immediately, but boy, it happened gradually than suddenly, didn't it?
Where a couple things happened, if I can pinpoint them.
The first thing that started to happen is that your decency was taken advantage of.
Most people in Illinois did the right thing for 20 or 30 years.
You paid your taxes, you raised your kids, you went to work, and your leaders abused you.
And I have to be honest, it's not just like one party thing.
I honestly don't care about that.
It's just about an ideology of deceit and plunder of what happened in this state the last 20 or 30 years.
And the only reason Chicago and Illinois is not what it used to be is because people that had political power lied to you, looked after their own self-interest, and did it repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly, and eventually that damn broke.
And it wasn't just in one thing or there.
It's not just the pension system or the taxes or how we fund schools and all that.
It was a culture.
And you know what the culture was?
The culture was the silly people of Illinois are too polite and too decent to ever challenge me, Mike Madigan.
And I mean, finally, Mike Madigan is out of office, but it's not like things are about, there's just another creature that's going to fill the void, right?
Yeah, Madigan should have been in prison when I was born in 1993, okay?
Not just in prison recently.
My whole life, Mike Madigan was head of the Illinois House of Representatives, Speaker of the House.
And so, but it bothers me, and it should bother you, when good people are taken advantage of and they're just asked to roll over.
And honestly, when I look around what's happened, the outward migration of this great city and this great state, it makes me bitter because it has become kind of a relic to a memory of once was.
And the other thing that has really bothered me in the last couple years is the hyper emphasis in this city and in this state on race.
I don't think that has helped anybody at all.
And the hyper emphasis, I think, has actually created deep fissures and not just division, but conflict where it's not necessary.
And I have to be lectured by leaders in Chicago about systemic racism.
Where it's like, okay, stop lying to me.
There's 500 murders in this city, and most of them are black on black crime.
So why don't you just shut up about systemic racism and actually talk about some of the root causes in this city?
No, it's white supremacy.
No, it's not.
It's not white supremacy.
Okay, it's not.
It's, yeah, white supremacy is killing people in West Chicago.
That's brilliant.
How many white people are killing black people in West Chicago?
I'll let you count for a second.
White supremacy is so rare in Chicago, you have to fake your own hate crimes to try to get attention.
But we can talk afterwards if you would like.
I would actually enjoy that.
But this city still has great potential, and it could be turned around.
It can be.
But one of the things it's going to take is it's going to take an attitude to re-embrace what Chicago once was.
If my message could be condensed to one thing, I want that chip on the shoulder back in Chicago.
I want not just the 85 Bears and the 90s Bulls, which showed the world that this city can produce championship sports products, but also the fans that supported them that was able to understand that even though we are insulted by the national news media and never taken seriously, we could do great and ambitious things.
So what does that mean?
I want Chicago to kind of just tell BLM to go to hell.
I want Chicago to say, you know what?
It's not racist to go arrest looters and put them in prison for a long period of time.
It's not.
Because you do that out of a love for your home.
You do that out of a love for something that is greater than you.
And unfortunately, we have allowed false narratives and ideological lies after ideological lie to put us into a place of paralysis.
When you know it's not a good thing, when you know so materially in front of you, what is happening is not sustainable, is not good, is not beautiful.
And I'm not even talking about the school system issue here in Chicago, which is just such a catastrophe.
What we've allowed to have, you know, what the cartel has done to the kids in this city.
The cartel, of course, which is the Chicago teachers' union, that has done unbelievable damage to the children in this city.
And again, I'm not going to weigh in on any politics.
We're here just to talk about education, hopefully to teach something.
If you guys want to talk about it, whatever.
I literally don't care that much except for the fact I'm glad to see people starting to wake up in one regard.
But nothing is actually going to structurally change until you break the back of the Chicago Teachers Union and allow parents to be able to send their kids to better school.
Nothing is actually going to structurally change.
It's not.
And it's a tragedy.
It's a shame because the people that suffer the most are the ones that the left tells us they care about the most.
Isn't that something?
It's the ones that they say, oh, you know, we care the most about the victimized, marginalized minority groups.
You have been in charge of every instrument of power in Illinois and Chicago for 30 years.
How have you done?
Almost every major business has left.
You can't get a U-Haul, literally at times, in Illinois, leaving the state.
Yeah, or boxes.
There you go.
South Barrington is basically Naples, Florida now.
It's basically what it is.
Like, oh, yeah, I live in South Barrington, otherwise known as Naples.
Oh, really?
That's great.
And it's something.
I don't mean to be all negative because you guys are here, and you could change it.
And you could change it because of something I mentioned earlier, which is the power of memory.
It's easier to restore something you remember than to build something that people won't believe in.
And I'm afraid they're trying to eradicate any sort of memory of this place being the beacon of hope that it once was.
And so one of my messages I want to reinforce here is I'm touched by the stories of people that came here into the city with absolutely nothing.
Nothing.
And they built a life for themselves.
And they lament and they say, boy, I wouldn't raise a family in Chicago.
And I mean this with 100% clarity.
I really wish I could still live in Illinois.
You might say, Charlie, why don't you?
It makes zero practical sense at all.
It's just it is impossible to run a business of our size and our scale to attract people that see the world the way we do.
You got to go to the Sun Belt if you want to grow, if you want to expand.
And also, just honestly, I also want to be in a place that shares my values, or at least in some way shares my values.
But that's an interesting point, isn't it?
Which is how much is Illinois actually fallen and what can be done to save it?
That's a deeper question than it is to have actually a serious answer.
But I'll close with this, and then we could do some questions, which I really look forward to.
Which is, the attendance tonight demonstrates that there's a lot of fight still in this city and in this state.
And thank you.
I'll be very honest, selfishly I was upset in one way that Candace couldn't be here, but selfishly I was glad I actually had the soapbox to talk about my home to you guys because this is very close and personal.
I get angry when I see Chicago continue to descend.
This place has such untapped potential.
And for those of you that are making a decision to stay, God bless you for that.
For those of you that say, I'm going to stay as long as I can, and we're going to keep building a family, and we're going to keep building communities, and we're going to keep building churches, and we're going to keep building businesses.
I'm with you 100% of the way to revive this place.
Because I still believe at a deep fundamental level, this place can be brought back to greatness.
The goodness that so many of you have demonstrated was derailed and detoured and taken advantage of.
And I've had the opportunity to travel all 50 states twice over.
There's no place like Chicago.
There is no place like this.
And I want to see it restored.
But unfortunately, this is not an infection that has just happened in Chicago.
This has happened around the rest of the country.
And it's also, it really is an argument of material reality versus ideological pursuit, right?
At some point, good people have to rise up and say, this is insane, and we're not going to stand for this any longer.
For example, for example, when somebody says that men can become pregnant, you should say, you're insane.
I'm not going to stand for this any longer.
Racism Across the Nation 00:15:32
When somebody says that America is a racist country, you should say, we're the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world.
We are the greatest example of a multilingual, multiracial country.
And instead of focusing on victimhood narratives all the time, maybe we should focus on how the heck have we been able to get along pretty well with each other over the last couple decades, and what can we do to actually lift the standard of living of people and white supremacy.
We'll have a chance to talk about that.
It's amazing.
It's interesting.
End white supremacy coming from a city that just had a black mayor that was one of the worst mayors in the history of the city.
Yeah, but the problem's white supremacy.
No, maybe the problem is stop electing dumb people.
Anyway, you sir can get the mic.
I mean that in a second.
So that's part of what we do here tonight because we want to hear other ideas and see who's right.
You got to fight.
And you have to love your home enough to sacrifice for it.
I'm touched and honored to be here.
It is a great encouragement to me to see so many of you still care.
The rest of the country is written off Chicago and Illinois as a hellscape and a wasteland.
I know you have not.
And I think that's really beautiful.
And I'm here to help.
God bless you guys and let's do some questions.
All right.
Okay.
A couple ground rules on the questions, please, and thank you for that warm reception.
This is obviously an ideologically sympathetic audience.
Thank you for that.
If somebody comes up to the microphone and says something that you think is laughable or objectionable or on the left, but I repeat myself, let them finish.
Don't mock them.
Don't laugh at them.
Don't interrupt them.
The left is out there trying to cancel our event.
I get death threats every single day because I believe in things that are very simple.
I never want to become the monster that we oppose.
So, if a liberal comes up to the microphone, let them speak and we can have dialogue, okay?
All right, thank you.
And we'll start with the questions here.
The white supremacy person is you're able to come up.
Anyone who disagrees, you're allowed to go to the front of the line and you're able to ask questions and we're able to have dialogue, okay?
We're going to start here, and then we'll go from there.
And again, please allow just allow the dialogue to happen.
If you feel inspired to say something, then get in line and you'll have an opportunity to do that.
Okay, let's have a question.
Hi, Charlie.
How are you?
It's actually, I want to share a little thing with you.
It's actually my first time in Chicago.
I'm from southern Illinois, and I've never been to Chicago.
So, yeah.
I understand that you have a family, a wife, a daughter, and I just want to ask: how is your daughter?
Has she hit any big milestones yet?
She's amazing.
Thank you.
I encourage all young people to get married and have children.
It'll change your life.
It's a moral good for you and a moral good for society.
Be fruitful and multiply.
And she's amazing.
She's six months old now, and it happens fast, doesn't it?
And it's a great blessing.
And people say, I get asked the question all the time: Charlie, how has it changed you?
It's certainly radicalized me.
And it's radicalized me in a sense of it makes me more motivated to fight and to win of anyone that would dare to harm a child in this country.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of them.
Thank you.
Thank you.
John Hersey High School, I won't hold that against you.
Wheeling, even though they won't claim me.
How's it going tonight?
Good.
Make sure the mic is on.
I have a question.
What was the process of starting this organization in the first place?
What was the process?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Started June 5th, 2012, suburbs of Chicago, right after I graduated Wheeling High School on June 3rd.
No money, no connections, no idea what I was doing.
Great mentor of mine, who I wish was still alive.
He used to come to all these events, Bill Montgomery.
Some of you might remember Bill, one of the most amazing men, and his legacy lives on.
Without him, the organization would not exist.
And then Foster Freeze, who also passed away, unfortunately, wrote us our first check.
And people laughed at me and scoffed at me and thought we couldn't succeed or do anything from there.
And now we are the nation's largest conservative organization of its kind, and we're just getting started.
God bless you.
Thank you.
Hey, Charlie, how's it going?
My question is about the Second Amendment and also policing.
And I've been discussing with my friend, and then we figure it would be the best if we ask you.
So we all know the approval of the Second Amendment.
It's not for sporting, hunting.
It's actually for standing up against a government that's turned tyrannical to power.
So let's say if today some law enforcement agency they've turned tyrannical and they've been harassing people type stuff.
Do you think it's the right of the people to use their arms against these government agencies that is harassing people and that is overreaching with their power?
Obviously it depends.
I think we're far away from that and I hope we stay far away from that.
But you are correct.
The intent of the Second Amendment is not for duck hunting.
It's not even for self-defense.
It is to make sure that if a CCP-like power ever tries to colonize Hong Kong, the people are able to defend their right, their moral right to self-government.
If every single person in Hong Kong had an AR-15, the CCP would have thought twice and three times and not have gone in and just annexed the entire sort of country.
But let's just say city of Hong Kong.
All throughout history, we see a pattern.
We see bad guys that are able to do really bad things because people do not have the ability to defend themselves against their armies.
It is not a popular argument, but it is a true argument.
The Second Amendment is the one that protects all the other amendments.
We need to be able to have a power balance between the federal government and the people.
Ask anybody that lived under totalitarian communism over the last hundred years, Stalin, Mao, Cuchescu, I know we have some Romanians here somewhere that could tell you all about it.
What do they always do?
They take the guns, they confiscate them, and they try to limit your other freedoms and liberties.
And so, yes, I hope we're far away from that, but that is the reason why we have the Second Amendment.
It is the ability to protect all the other amendments, and it's not just for personal defense or duck hunting, of which I do enjoy.
God bless you.
Thank you.
Yeah, Charlie, I also want to thank you specifically because I used to be a Bernie Sanders reporter.
I used to be a Democratic Socialist.
It was one of your videos that really woke me up.
And you're an inspiration.
You're awesome.
Thank you.
You are why I do what I do.
All right, so I've been watching this for some 20-odd years.
Oh, ma'am, you've been doing it forever.
Welcome to the First Amendment.
I thought you were a family.
Sir, can you just stay focused on your pay jacket?
Sir, thank you.
Thank you.
I brought it overseas.
All right, sir, just ask me the question.
So what is it about conservatives and this whole racism thing?
Like, you guys are always just saying that it's either not a thing or it's, you know, just not in any of the institutions or the police department.
But it seems that over the past 18 years, we've had several race riots.
And the biggest one being in 2020.
So it's like, how are we still denying segregation in a city where we can clearly see what fucking neighborhoods are white, which ones are black, which ones are Latino?
And we know how we got there.
So it's like, what is it with conservatives and admitting that there's a problem and not addressing it?
Because it seems like you guys want to be obsessed with, oh, the gender thing or the racism thing.
And then you guys say, oh, it's not here.
It's not a big problem.
But why are millions of people rioting every couple years?
So let me ask you a question.
We can say that it's Democrats and shit, right?
Well, let me ask you a question.
So what do you think is a bigger problem facing America?
Single fatherhood or racism?
Racism, by far.
That's a problem.
Can you say that in the microphone?
Racism, by far, because racism gets people killed, not single fatherhood.
Well, no, a single motherhood.
Let me be more specific.
So single moms or fathers leaving the home, you think is a bigger problem than racism.
No, sir, sir, sir.
You're going to have, I'm going to repeat that one again for you.
I think racism is a bigger problem than fathers being outside of the home.
However, I do see fathers not being in the home as a problem.
Let's make sure we're defining our terms.
How would you define racism then?
Racism is a system of oppression used by a certain group using prejudice, institutional power.
And it's situated by the media, government, and all these things.
Give me an example of one thing you as a black man cannot do that I as a white man can do in America.
Got you.
Okay, so about two weeks ago, right, I went to a DeSantis rally, got my ticket, all that good bullshit, been to a million different rallies of a kind, whether I was a conservative at the time or whether I was a liberal, right?
I know that as a black person, I am far more likely to be arrested for expressing my view whether I am a conservative or a liberal.
And I've done it on both sides.
Oh, yes, I was.
I was afraid of the people.
You're probably being a jerk.
That's what I'm saying.
Oh, actually, and that's the best part.
And that's the best part, right?
That's the best part.
I wasn't even being a jerk.
And the courts even found our beloved courts.
Let me make sure I understand this.
You think the bigger problem than fathers not being in the home is a abstract conspiracy theory that you have that hecklers and jerks at political events are arrested because of the color of their skin.
That's the best definition of institutional racism.
No, that's not my definition on racism.
I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do.
Let me tell you what I'm saying.
I'm going to give an example of something a white man like me can do that a black man like you can't do.
Because guess what?
If I showed up at a DeSantis event and started heckling, I'd be kicked out and arrested.
No, you would not.
In fact, I even have evidence.
You know how I know that's true?
You want to know that?
You want to do that?
White suburban kids from Highland Park and they're arrested a lot more actually when you see the mug shots.
Yeah.
So white kids are arrested a lot more.
Could that possibly be?
Could that possibly be a matter of time?
And I'm just, and I'm just guessing here.
Could it possibly be that white people are arrested more because you have a higher population and therefore by proximity, you are more like...
Because it's math.
It's basic math.
I know we hate math.
I know we hate it, but I passed it.
So let me ask you a question.
How does racism contribute to black on black crime in Chicago?
How is white people to blame for that?
Oh, as a matter of fact, that's actually a whole other issue.
So let's talk about.
So you want to talk about intra-communal violence as it pertains to people.
Yes.
What does the white man have to do with it?
So, oh, and that's a great thing.
I love the red herring that you threw in there.
Yes, because hey, intra-communal violence is proximal, right?
So when we have segregation and we got racists sitting in one area and you got another race in another area.
Now, we never asked white people, why is white on white crime so high with white people?
And never.
But instead we focus on black people.
Yeah, so out of the 530 murders in Chicago of the last year, how many were black on black crime?
Hey, I wasn't looking, but you know what I do know, 420 of them were black on black gang related crime.
How is that racism to blame for that?
Let's talk.
So now are we going to talk about over policing?
I'm sorry sir, you're kind of demonstrating, you can't answer, would you?
Would you, would you like to talk about?
I mean, we can talk about it, we can.
Are you ready to address it though?
Well, are you ready to address it?
Are you?
Because we can talk about, because we can talk about black on black crime, but we need to talk about it as it pertains.
We need to.
Okay, let's talk about it.
Sister, i'm ready to talk about.
All right, hold on.
So let me talk about it.
Let me just narrow this down, so let me just.
Let me just say this, okay, so you were to rank the hundred biggest problems in America.
Yeah, the fact that I know we're not a racist country is the best example you have is okay so, so you know where the story of you getting kicked out of a Desantis rally.
If we were a racist country, you'd say Charlie, I can't go in a convenience store Charlie, I can't go into school.
No, we actually live in such a live, a amazingly recent country that whoa whoa whoa, don't worry about racism, let's not, let's not do that.
Okay, all I did, all right, mostly peaceful everybody, mostly peaceful.
Okay, I didn't lay hands on you.
I didn't lay hands on you.
I got witnesses.
I did not touch you.
No, all right, I touched the mic.
We're gonna wrap this one up, but let me just let me say this, we got racism and we got racism all over the U.s.
We just had a race riot two, three years ago In 2020.
Oh, my God.
And then we had all 50 states plus 18 countries.
Don't worry, I was going to say that.
Wait, so by race riots, you mean mass looting of TVs?
Let me tell you, it is not an argument in your favor that we're a racist country because blacks decide to start burning down Wendy's and stealing stuff.
That's called action.
That's how it is because you're not already up.
You're not even looking as to why it happened.
And that's cool.
And that's cool.
You know, we can definitely play obtuse on the whole issue.
Yeah, black people were burning it down.
Why?
Racism.
Racism was a big issue, and we can pretend that it's not a big issue, but hey, hey, if you don't want to, then that's just called being obtuse.
And that's why I asked you, and that's why I asked you, why did you have such a big problem with talking about racism?
You want to claim that it's not there, and you can say all you want.
But that still doesn't prove.
That's still, that's still, that still does not.
If you want to talk about why we have racism, let me give you some examples of racism that could be proven.
How about affirmative action at this college that discriminates against Asian students and white students?
How about affirmative action hiring practices in the federal government?
We are such a decent, non-racist country.
The best example that he has is to show that he was mistreated.
And if he acted like this at the DeSantis event, I can see why he was kicked out of the DeSantis event.
Hi.
So you were talking earlier about teachers' unions.
You know, there's a lot of corruption in unions lately.
I see this issue happening.
It's very hard to fire a bad teacher.
You know what I'm saying?
I want to see our Chicago schools succeed.
I want excellence in our students.
You know, all that good stuff.
Would you agree that it's too hard to fire a teacher because of teachers' unions?
Yes.
The teacher unions instituted those practices.
And I don't like the cycle of mediocrity we see in the teachers' unions that perpetuate it.
Would you say the same about police unions?
Not as much, no.
I actually think police are treated like garbage and they have a much tougher job than teachers.
Also, yeah.
One follow-up to, I'm just going to leave it at this point, and I'll prove it to you.
There's not a defund the teacher movement out there.
Biological Reality in Schools 00:04:33
Well, you guys have been trying to remove schools from books from public schools.
No, no, no.
We want school choice so bad teachers can be fired and parents can be found.
I'm sorry.
How does school choice improve the schools in decaying neighborhoods, the ones that have been neglected for decades on end?
Competition.
Competition.
Parental agency.
So then bad teachers could be fired.
Administrators are put actually under pressure.
So that, for example, you do a 20-school survey in southwest Chicago.
You cannot find a single kid that can read at fifth or sixth grade level.
Not a single kid.
That's probably a failure, and a bunch of teachers need to be fired almost immediately for that.
And parents have a moral right to send their kid to a better school.
All right.
I'll just end with this.
Just picking up on something the last gentleman said.
You know, race riots, policing.
I know we have a lot of division, but I draw the line when the Wendy's gets burned down.
That is unacceptable.
We need to put a stop to that.
Thank you for coming out.
May God have mercy on your soul.
I'm glad that's your line.
My line is when cops started to get killed, but that's a weird line to have.
Next question.
All right.
Hey, so I know your buddy buddy with Michael Knowles recently he said the phrase, quote, we should eradicate transgenderism.
That is correct.
Yeah, you got it right.
So I know you.
From public life, yeah.
I know you agree with him on some level.
How would you go about that?
How do you eliminate transgenderism without eliminating transgenders?
I warned you about this.
I love the passion.
Let the process play out, okay?
Jeez.
So specifically, he said transgenderism, right?
Which is an ideology.
And he said it should be intertwined, like Judaism and Jewish people.
Well, he said from public life, okay?
So, you know, that's not the best example.
Just don't use that one.
But so, but let me kind of zero in on this.
Yeah, I do agree with it 100%.
The best way is that we should not be platforming or acting as if a mental delusion is normal, good for children, or something that is acceptable in decent society.
So, in what way is it?
Okay, so throughout history, we've had these medical breakthroughs where we learn that things are just like how people are.
You know, who's to say that somebody is not born the wrong gender?
Like, what is there?
Guys.
Do it again.
We're going to have to kick you out.
Please don't interrupt.
How do you know that what's happening right now isn't like a medical breakthrough?
How do you know it is a mental illness to be eradicated?
Yeah, 5,000 years of recorded history and common sense that men can't.
But back in history, were there not like skeletons being dug up with female artifacts around them?
Were there not sculptures of two married women?
I mean, it's been a thing forever.
It's been, I mean, transgenderism.
Let's play this.
So, how do I know that biological reality is true?
Chromosomes.
I'm arguing about biological reality.
Well, chromosomes instruct my opinion first and foremost.
So, XX, XY chromosomes.
And I reject the term gender, actually.
It's sex.
And you have a sex at birth, and you cannot change that.
So, let me just kind of ask a question: medical advancements, the medical community can be very wrong.
We used to do lobotomies, and I'm glad we stopped doing that.
So, doctors have been wrong before.
And, in fact, doctors have been wrong about a lot of things over the last hundred years.
And, in fact, if all of a sudden the medical consensus from the AMA, which is headquartered right down the street, by the way, is that we have to have these pediatric gender-affirming reassignment clinics that have breast reduction surgery or literally mastectomies for 12 or 13-year-olds to then assign them luperon, estrogen, and testosterone treatment for somebody that might just be going through puberty and having anxiousness and unease.
I'm probably going to call that doctor a fraud.
And any person with common sense should do that too.
Okay, super quick.
Last thing.
So, my main question was about the term eradicate transgender.
Can I give you some examples?
We shouldn't teach it in our schools.
We also shouldn't allow men to compete against women in NCAA sports.
Freedom of Speech on Campus 00:02:21
Okay?
What about the people who are transgender that have converted, are currently forcibly detransition though?
Why couldn't Thomas still compete against men despite his mental delusion?
Why do we have to reaccommodate all female sports for a single individual that obviously has an advantage with bone density and testosterone production?
Why is it now our problem?
Why does society have to reorganize and reconfigure for one very loud, obviously disturbed person?
Would it be more fair to say, okay, you have a problem, so keep competing in the category that you were born to?
You can still wear whatever you want, I guess, and dress and do the treatments you want.
But since you're such an excellent swimmer, go swim against boys.
Oh, because he's a narcissist and he used to finish 200 against boys, and when he competes against girls, he wins the championship because he's a cheat.
Because it's all about him, not about the competition or about fairness.
Okay, I mean, that's all I was wondering.
Thanks.
My question is about college students like us who are more conservative.
How do we kind of survive such a very liberal environment that is so hostile towards some of our ideologies?
As a moderate conservative, how do I have discourse with people without being labeled as such an evil bad person when in reality I'm just trying to have like express my opinions?
To be honest, so far in college, I've learned to just really be quiet and not say anything because just the overwhelming majority of people are so against like the fact that I'm pro Second Amendment or freedom of speech.
So how do you go about like for you it's easy because you're always like next to people who like agree with you and the older people who work like you know you guys have jobs and you're next to people who agree with you but like when you're young and you're in a place where everyone disagrees with you I actually think you're hitting on something.
Actually I now have the easier job.
It wasn't easy for the first five years when you don't have a significant organization and all that.
But you're right.
I get to leave here and go home and you have to go back to class with all these people, right?
National Debt vs Racism 00:04:31
No, that's a real thing.
So this is a moral question.
And I believe one of the biggest reasons the country is in the shape that it's in is good people that have the right worldview have been silent for too long.
I believe that firmly.
I believe that good people know what is happening is wrong like you.
And what do they do?
They bully you and they intimidate you into the number one form of censorship in America, which is self-censorship.
We complain a lot about censorship and we should.
But the most effective form of censorship is you shutting up you.
And I'm not going to tell you to speak out unless you're willing to pay the price.
And you know what that price is.
Here's what I will guarantee you, though.
When you first speak out, it's going to be really tough.
But then over a period of time, you'll get tougher.
And then you'll be happier.
And then you don't have to monitor your speech as if there's Big Brother looking over your shoulder all the time.
And then you don't have to be somebody different in private than you are in public.
And you'll be freer.
So it's a choice.
You'll be less free personally if you continue to be silent.
You might be more monetarily successful.
You might get better grades.
But if you want to be happier, tougher, and freer, the earlier and younger you speak out, the better.
God bless you and thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Hi, thank you for your.
Hi, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak.
How are you doing?
Good.
How can the Conservative Party encourage bipartisan cooperation and urgent action to resolve the impending U.S. debt ceiling crisis, which could potentially result in severe economic consequences for Americans, regardless of their political affiliation?
Specifically, what strategies can be employed to rally a coalition and work with Democrats to pass legislation that will mitigate the effects of a potential default on the government's interest payments while safeguarding vital social and government programs?
You just asked a very thoughtful question.
It is.
The national debt is a national security crisis.
It is a sovereign crisis.
Both parties are to blame for this, and that needs to be emphasized.
This is not a partisanship issue.
I actually got my start at Turning Point USA trying to warn people about the mounting debt and all that, and no one listened, and here we are.
When I started Turning Point USA 10 years ago, the national debt was $12 trillion.
It is now $31 trillion.
Both sides are going to have to compromise, and that's not a word people like.
How about this?
Let's stop spending $200 billion in Ukraine and maybe put that towards reducing our debt and deficit.
Just to start, right?
Probably a good idea, right?
There's going to have to be some concessions by conservatives on tax increases, and there are going to have to be concessions by liberals and Democrats on spending cuts, legitimate spending cuts, and not just the spending cuts that they want, which are always to our core military functions or to border security.
We're going to need to have real spending cuts on some social welfare programs and some of these bloated, just not this kind of ATM machine of government that we have.
But it takes political courage.
So both are going to have to happen.
And I'm an ideologue.
I don't want to see tax cuts, you know, taxes increased.
But if there can actually finally be some package of reform that, by the way, doesn't tax middle-income people, right?
But instead has something.
I'm not arguing for tax cuts.
But at some point, if we don't get a handle on our debt, the inflation is going to crush us.
I cannot tell you how critical this is.
It might seem wonky or abstract or up in the clouds.
That's why I think your question is so incredibly important.
It does not excite people.
Like the debt, why does it matter?
It matters a lot.
And so I hope that helps answer your question.
Spending cuts are necessary now to get inflation under control and also the spending spree that the government is currently on.
Given the gravity of the situation, how can we foster a sense of collective responsibility and engagement among citizens, particularly younger generations who feel disengaged or disillusioned with the political system?
That's tough.
I don't have a good answer to that, honestly, because this is so if I were to kind of way backtrack to the beginning of what is a bigger threat to the future of America, racism or the national debt, it's the national debt.
And that's one of my biggest complaints is talking about these esoteric, abstract, hard-to-define, emotionally charged political issues.
There are several things that are happening imminently that we actually end up not caring about, and that's deeply destructive.
So let's de-emphasize the woke stuff and actually balance our budget.
Finding Friends Who Share Values 00:04:20
That's the best answer I have for you.
Thank you so much.
Hi, Charlie.
So my question is a little slightly different.
So I have a boyfriend.
He is pretty liberal, and I fall somewhat moderately conservative.
And it works.
It works.
But I mean, I was long term, I was asking, can a relationship work if you have fundamentally different ideological values?
Like long-term, could it work?
So be careful.
I have seen it work rarely.
Here's a sad reality.
About half of marriages end in divorce anyway, and most of those divorces have people with the same values.
You are going to debate everything if you end up marrying somebody that doesn't share your values.
Where are you going to send them to school?
What kind of television programming are you going to watch?
Are they going to be religious?
Are they going to be secular?
What radio programs are you going to listen to in the car when you're driving?
What podcasts are you going to talk favorably about America or negatively about America?
Are you going to teach them that entrepreneurs are good or entrepreneurs are bad?
And then here's what ends up happening: parents will then turn against each other and try to take the kids hostage ideologically in a very, very bitter dispute.
I know that sounds cynical, and you might have a love for this person, and maybe you can make it work.
It can work rarely.
But when it does work, unfortunately, they stay married, but they really are far apart.
Aristotle said, the closest form of friendship are two beings that are looking at the same ultimate destination.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you.
Hello, Charlie.
Hello, Charlie.
My name is Jaylen.
I'm a first year at UIC.
In the classrooms, they're talking a lot about the woke stuff, like male privilege, like oppression from religion.
I just wanted to know, like, what are your thoughts and your suggestions for me as a first year confronting people?
Well, thank you for the question.
You said male privilege?
Yeah.
This one always makes me laugh, right?
Because they can't tell you what a man or woman is.
And so that they just appropriate these terms just for the pure purpose of victimhood, race, gender, class politics, right?
It's so sick.
And then they say, oh, there's no such thing as gender, and you can be whatever you want.
It's simultaneously contradictory.
But look, male privilege, let's pretend we actually have agreed upon terms, what those are, which we should.
Men are more likely to commit suicide.
Men are more likely to die at work.
Men are more likely to die at war.
Men are less likely to graduate college, get a master's degree, get a PhD.
There are more unemployed men than unemployed women.
Men are suffering in ways we've never seen before, and we have to be lectured about a patriarchy or male privilege.
It's actually the opposite.
We're seeing a crisis of the young American male, and nobody wants to say that out loud.
And so I would encourage facts.
What was the second part of your suggestion for me as a first year in college?
Yeah, learn as much as you can outside of the classroom.
And if you have a couple great professors, praise God, and you can learn from them and lean into them.
And then build community.
Get involved with the Turning Point USA chapter.
Find people that share your values.
Again, friendship is that are two people that are looking at the same ultimate destination.
That is the most beautiful form of friendship.
Okay?
So find those people, seek them out, and then make learning for your own sake a priority.
You have a cool thing in college because you have a window to be able to learn.
My recommendation is: if you're not going to drop out of college, you stay in college, it's fine.
Then expand your time of learning outside the classroom.
Podcasts, Hillsdale online courses, reading books.
Use your four years to become an incredibly deep and thoughtful person, even beyond your classroom.
Because you have a four-year where you don't have to pay bills, you don't have to pay a mortgage.
You have a four-year window to become a super weapon against whatever ideology you don't like, right?
And so lean into that.
And if you need book recommendations or podcasts, I can give you a couple.
But that would be my big recommendation: become so dedicated to learning, finding truth, finding goodness, finding beauty, finding virtue, and understanding what that means.
Responsibility Beyond Abortion 00:11:05
God bless you and thank you.
Thank you.
Sorry, Mark.
He's going to cut you in line.
Mark, I love you, but we see the world the same way.
So I'm going to just get a.
We'll get to you, Mark.
Don't worry.
Just make sure you speak up.
Hey, Charlie.
I guess I had a question pertaining to racism.
There was a lot of back and forth about how esoteric this all is and abstract.
And I wanted to take things to a more basic level.
It seems like a lot of the problems that pertain to the black community just have to do with class and wealth in general.
And I guess my question is: if black people just are at a lower place as a group, how can they advance themselves if there are so many things getting in the way of people making money, just like working multiple jobs, having to raise a family and all these things?
I feel like that's a big problem here that people don't really talk about.
Sure.
So I'm not trying to put you too on the spot, but just if you had an approximate, what percentage, if you were to guess, of black kids grow up with both a mom and a dad?
I don't know.
Yeah.
25%.
Okay.
So three out of four black kids in America grow up without a father.
If you want a ticket into middle-class America, put a mom and a dad in a home.
I can understand that, but I say, like, as things stand, that's not how they are.
And there's so many like building blocks and so many roadblocks that have been placed.
And I'm just curious, like, what substantive policy would you actually recommend?
So I am curious: what is the building block that is preventing black men to stay with the women they impregnate?
I'm not exactly sure what that building block is, except be a man and don't abandon the women that you impregnate.
Minor detail, but I will give you a policy detail.
We do subsidize single motherhood via Lyndon Baines-Johnson Great Society program, where sometimes, in some circumstances, black women or any woman can receive more money from the federal government by remaining single than actually getting married.
This is an ultimate example of a good intention that leads to an awful policy, okay?
The intention is we want to help single moms, right?
But then it actually encourages the woman to stay single because as soon as they get married, they might lose the check from the federal government.
Now, that is not a simple, that is one solution of many, but more than anything else, that number, the target number that impacts all the other numbers, and here's how I know this is true, okay?
Because a white kid in America that grows up with just a single mom is less likely to succeed by all agreed-upon objective metrics than a black kid that grows up with a mom and a dad.
If you have a strong parent presence of mom and dad, you're more likely to graduate high school, get a job, stay out of prison, and enter into middle-class America.
That right there is the one thing that has been proven.
Guess who agrees with me?
Barack Obama agrees with me.
He used to say this all the time until the left realized that this was a political liability for them.
The left used to talk about putting fathers back in the home.
Chris Rock used to joke around, he still jokes about it a little bit, but Dave Chappelle, they all said, why is it that we are putting up with a culture in the black community of fathers or dads abandoning their kids?
That number right there can fix a hundred other numbers, and it's not racism that is doing it.
Do you have a thought really quick?
I guess my question is: who created that culture by forcibly taking all these people to America?
Like, that's all I have to say.
Well, so that's that's an interesting question.
So, more blacks have voluntarily emigrated to America since 1980 than were ever actually brought in the slave trade from West Africa and the Caribbean.
So, more blacks are here today due to their own voluntary movement than ever being forcibly brought to this country.
I'm not sure if you knew that or not.
But those aren't the people who have had like decades and generations of not having wealth.
These new people are like some of the top people within their society.
There's a brain drain from the people.
I wouldn't say that about Haitians because they come here with very, very poor earning potential, but they build a life.
You could say that about some Nigerian immigrants, but especially from the Caribbean, they enter at the lower rungs, and they have to make decisions.
Every person's an individual.
But you make an interesting point about intergenerational issues, right?
So, here's the good question.
And I could tell you're coming at this from a good place.
Do you think we're more racist or less racist than we were in the 1960s, generally as a country?
I'd say generally less.
Okay, I agree.
So, in 1963, 20% of all blacks were single-mother homes.
Now, it's 75%.
What changed?
The decline of unions is a big one, in my opinion.
Okay, fine.
I disagree.
But you see what I'm getting at here?
Instead of just focusing on racism or policing or this abstract, the thing that is staring us in the face that is so obvious is that generation of generation of young blacks are raised without a father figure.
And that's unfair to the mother.
It's unfair to them.
It's unfair to the rest of the community.
I guess we'll just have to disagree with our solutions to that then.
Thank you.
Okay.
Thank you.
Hi, Charlie.
I immigrated from Brazil three years ago.
Brazil is a socialist country and in middle school.
I used to have to do projects on how communism is great and even worship people like Mao and Stalin.
I used to agree with these points until I immigrated to America.
Actually, I live in Skokie.
You've probably been there?
I have been there.
And I changed my mind after coming here and realized that after seeing all the opportunities that I have here, that just isn't the way to go.
So my question is, how can we make our educational environment in America healthier?
Man, well, first of all, praise God for your testimony.
That's very powerful.
It really is.
I mean, it angers me because I have to be lectured at times by uppity-class white liberals that socialism is the answer.
And you lived it.
And Brazil is a beautiful country with great people, but it's a broken country.
And that's a fact.
So why is it?
Why is Brazil not America?
Well, we have an amazing constitution and a tradition for things that they don't have in Brazil.
Private property rights, entrepreneurship, impartial courts, checks and balances, separation of powers.
So first, I just want to say something to you personally.
You need to tell as many Americans as possible the hell that Marxism can bring to this country.
You have to do that.
It's so important.
Secondly, the education system, we just got to keep on doing what we're doing.
But I find the testimony of especially Central and South American refugees to America to be some of the most powerful.
And some of my favorite conservative activists are people like you from Brazil and Venezuela that at Columbia, they're screaming at me, Charlie, why don't Americans get it?
You probably feel the same way, right?
For sure I do.
And it's easy if you've grown up in an affluent, rich society to be generous with other people's money.
When you have to go a week without eating, or you have to be displaced like so many people in Venezuela has, all of a sudden, those Marxist songs and poems and mantras start to fall apart.
We need more of you.
God bless you.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you.
And again, if you disagree, you have an open invite to the front of the line.
Our staffer will help you with that.
Thank you.
Okay.
Hi.
So my question is on the topic of abortion.
So I am involved with Greek life at my school, and the culture that is currently being promoted is that you hook up with random dudes and then you can go and get that baby gone.
What do you think we should do as college students to prevent that culture from continuing to build and build?
Well, first, praise God for your moral clarity.
Hookup culture is awful and it's especially awful for women.
It actually makes women very miserable because men and women view sex differently.
Women do not view sex as transactional as men do.
It's a very personal and emotional experience.
And when they start to have sex with a lot of men, it actually leaves them psychologically damaged and broken.
And that is a fact that we're seeing manifest of a generation of young women that think that they can participate in hookup culture and they get a lot happier.
And they're actually the most miserable they've ever been.
The second thing is this, we have to educate that that is a human being.
You're not just going to go get plastic or cosmetic surgery.
I ask people sometimes, how many abortions do you think happen in America every single year?
I got an answer at a recent campus event.
They said, oh, about 20,000.
It's a million.
I know.
It takes people's breaths away, right?
There's 3,000 abortions a day in America.
That's not good for anybody.
And nobody likes to say this out loud, and the people in Highland Park will scream at you if you say this.
But abortion has become a type of birth control as a last chance measure.
Do you agree with that, that people look at abortion that way?
Yeah, I mean, personally, my mom had me at 21.
She was a young adult living in the city, and she made the choice to keep me.
Praise God she made that choice, by the way.
I come from a place where it's like she raised me.
She took ownership of her actions and raised me to be a great young woman.
So I can only imagine that if more young women take that step, what this society could be.
So there's two things.
It's not just the woman that needs to take responsibility for their actions.
It's the man that needs to take responsibility for their actions, too.
And these weak men.
I could go on and on and on about how awful that whole culture is.
But you said something important.
Take responsibility.
We have a generation that prioritizes pleasure over duty.
One of the reasons we're in the mess that we're in is we want to do what feels good over what is right.
And the abortion industry hinges on an entire flawed moral argument that my temporary orgasm matters more than a baby being able to live in this world.
Nobody wants to say that out loud, but that is exactly what drives the abortion industry.
We need to educate people that you might have done something you regret.
You might not have been proud of yourself.
But terminating another human being because you made a mistake is not good for you, and it's not good for them, and it's not good for society.
Thank you for your moral clarity, and thank you for being here.
Thank you.
A Call to Moral Clarity 00:03:14
Hello.
So the left continues to claim that they are the party for minorities.
I'm a Mexican-American, but I'm also a proud conservative.
Thank you.
The thing with that is that I've broken away from this lie, but I have seen many family members and members of my community continue to believe this lie.
As a young Hispanic conservative, what can I do to change this and to break the lie that the left has told us for years?
Wow.
I'm really moved by these testimonies tonight, aren't you?
There's a lot of hope out there that is not covered by the media.
This is really powerful stuff.
I got to tell you.
You need to keep speaking out.
I'm going to keep saying that.
But honestly, the Hispanic one I think is very interesting.
In the Hispanic community, Mexican-American community, do you think most people would laugh if you say men can become pregnant?
Absolutely.
Everyone in my community, from uncles to parents, they're all like, what in the world are you talking about?
Yes.
So I think wokeism, which is really white liberal imperialism put into minority communities of these ridiculous, deranged ideas that are being forced into black and Hispanic neighborhoods, I think it's going to break.
I think that Hispanics are going to revolt on the idea that 10-year-olds should be exposed to pornography in classrooms.
I think that Hispanics are going to push back against the devaluing of man and womanhood.
But we need more voices like yours.
And I believe firmly, I believe it's the black community and Hispanic community, they are far more conservative than we ever give them credit for.
And we need more voices like you to make sure that message gets out.
God bless you, my friend.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We'll go a little later on questions because we started later.
Is that okay?
Keep going.
Yeah.
I'm willing to stay if you guys will stay.
So, yeah.
Good evening, Mr. Kirk.
I want to say thank you so much for coming to our campus.
You're a personal hero of mine.
This is my last semester at UIC, and I'm just so thankful that you came to our school right before I leave.
Thank you.
I wanted to, so a very good friend of mine, he's been a social worker on the South Side, and he's seen himself, he was lucky enough to have a mother and a father in the picture growing up, but he's seen himself working with kids in elementary school, like visible changes in behavior from people who have only a mother in the home or only a father in the home.
And I wanted to ask you, As a father, as a husband, what can young men do today to prepare themselves to be a high-quality father and a high-quality husband?
It's a great question.
When they're older.
Okay.
Stop watching pornography, number one.
Save yourself for marriage and improve yourself every single day, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
What I've just said used to be agreed upon morality and simply stated truths that people in America would say over and over and over again.
One of the reasons why men are so afraid of marriage is because they're grown infants and they haven't actually become men.
Genesis 12 is a great instruction for what we need in men.
Get up and go on an adventure.
Men need an adventure.
Abram was called to adventure by God, and man needs a call to adventure.
Resisting Gun Violence and Rigged Systems 00:09:13
More specifically, a call to responsibility.
Here's the test of whether or not you have responsibility in your life.
If you don't show up to something, will somebody miss you?
If the answer is no, you do not have responsibility in your life.
Find it.
Go find a job where if you don't show up, somebody's going to have a tough day.
Go find a friend that needs you so badly that if you don't show up, they're going to have a tough day.
We have a society where if you go missing, people can go on their happy way.
That is a society without responsibility.
Thank you, Charlie.
God bless you.
Thank you.
God bless you, man.
It's an honor to speak to you.
So I just had a question.
Why do you think gun violence is sorry?
Why do you think Chicago has such a bad gun violence problem?
And what do you think politicians should do to change this?
Yeah, great question.
It's a symptom of broken homes and fatherlessness.
You know, Kim Fox has really been, she's been a delight.
It's not because of the Indiana gun loophole thing pouring in.
And look, I also, I want to be very clear.
I'm very pro-Second Amendment.
I think it is utopian to say that you're ever going to get gun violence or gun deaths down to zero.
There is a price to have guns in your society.
People will do bad things with them.
The amount of gun violence that we have is completely and totally unacceptable.
And so a Washington, D.C. example that I think applies to Chicago as well, but it was just so alarming.
They say the average assailant in D.C., murderer, has been arrested 11 times prior to committing that crime.
We are now having to relearn all of the tough lessons of the 1990s.
We pander more to criminals than we do to decent, law-abiding people that want to raise their kids and start businesses and go to church.
We have gone way in the wrong direction.
So what do we need?
We need to have harsher sentencing for criminals that do the stuff that then leads to the tougher crime.
Carjackings, for example.
We need to increase the sentencing requirements for carjackings.
Here's the thing.
Here's a thought crime.
You're jacking a car at 2 a.m.
You're probably on a road to go murder somebody in the next decade.
That's a thought crime.
I don't care.
I'm not going to go out of my way to go pander to carjackers or arsonists.
And what I think is the problem is Kim Fox and all these ridiculous people that George Soros comes in and pumps this money in to destroy your city is they prioritize the criminal over the law-abiding citizen.
And so we need tougher sentencing.
We need DAs with a backbone.
And I'll tell you, cities that do this are safe and flourish.
New York was once the safest city in America.
Now it's just becoming a complete catastrophe.
And they've done it successfully in Chicago for quite some time.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Hi, Charlie.
I just wanted to know what do you think among the 800,000 parents in federal and state prisons, 92% of them are fathers, and how do we go about avoiding that?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Well, they should stop committing crimes.
And that might sound harsh, but I don't go out of my way to pander to people that commit violent crimes, especially.
I just don't.
What do we do about it?
Yeah, look, I think that there's a growing culture of acceptability of allowing for criminality and violence and for activity that isn't, let's just say, virtuous.
I said this the other day and the media came after me, so I'm going to be very specific with how I say this.
In the last 20 years in the black community, has the music and the culture and the art has it platformed piety and virtue and nonviolence, or has it probably platformed violence and gang behavior more than the other?
Let's be honest, right?
And that culture manifests into action.
Is that the only reason?
Of course not.
But I also just think very simply and solely that over a period of time, you show behavior, you commit crimes, you go to jail, and you encourage men to stay loyally married to the women that they are with and to go into the proper course of action.
I think there's also some negotiation and compromise of the trade deals that we're signing, the jobs that we shipped overseas, the muscular class that has disappeared.
And also, an issue that really animates me, I'll be honest, is our complete and total open, poorest southern border that disenfranchises black Americans directly.
Why the black community is not angry about 5,000 low-income, let's just say, let's say, entrants into the country is perplexing to me, right?
If you want a real America-first immigration policy that puts black Americans first, close the border.
And guess, you know who said that?
Jesse Jackson used to say that.
But now, for other reasons, they want a complete and poorest southern border.
Thank you, though.
Appreciate it.
Too many agreements.
We need more opposition, but sure, hope maybe you're one of them.
I don't know.
Hi, Charlie.
I'm so glad to be here today.
Yeah.
I'm a delivery driver here in Chicago.
It's one of the most dangerous jobs in Chicago, except for our brave Chicago police officers, first of all.
You said you're a what driver?
A delivery driver.
Oh, that DoorDash delivery driver.
That's it.
And I want to just say I keep attuned to AM 560 here in Chicago all the time.
I'm on AM560 every day, by the way.
Yes, I listen to your show all the time, and I want to thank you for standing up against the woke Democrat mafia here in Chicago.
It's so important.
And for saying the truth that the 2016 election was rigged, it was stolen.
And that is why, that is why 2020.
You said 16.
What's that?
2016, right?
No, 20.
Oh, 2020.
I'm sorry.
I'm so nervous, Charlie.
I'm so excited to speak to you.
I'm so sorry.
I like it.
2020.
Yes, the 2020 election was rigged.
It was stolen.
Yes, no.
It was stolen, right?
And I want to thank you for standing up for that.
And that's why when the 2022 elections came around, I told all of my friends and family, I said, there's only one way to stop this woke Democrat mafia, and that is to boycott these elections because they're never going to hear us if we don't really stop from participating in their lives.
It's a farce.
It's a farce.
And why should we participate?
You said it yourself.
Why should we participate?
Okay, let me tell you why.
So I love the energy.
You buttered me up perfectly, right?
But I got to disagree.
It is not rational to stop engaging in the civic process that decides who is in charge.
Hold on.
Even if it is, hold on, let's hold one second.
Even if it is rigged, okay?
Even if it is rigged, going through a tradition of voting at least opens an opportunity, a chance, a micron that you actually might still be able to have representative government.
What you are doing, respectfully, is a guarantee that you'll never have a voice.
The other side yearns, hear me out, they yearn for a day where we decide to stop voting ourselves because we're so disenfranchised.
So, it's a chicken and the egg thing.
But the right answer is not to stop, you know, stop showing up and boycotting all that.
It's a guarantee the other side will win in that regard.
It makes no sense to me just because we know they're stealing our votes.
Here in Chicago, they say vote early and often because the Democrat mob is stealing the vote.
They make sure they control these elections.
We have no power here.
There's no point in voting.
So I say we have to resist this.
We have to fight this.
We have to find other ways because we just can't vote.
It can't be the only answer.
You know, I don't think it's the only answer.
However, the other side is salivating that our best and most reliable patriots will disenfranchise themselves.
I got to get to the next question.
Love the energy, though.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, Mr. Kirk.
Not showing up is not the only way to beat them, unless you're a liberal.
Hi, Mr. Kirk.
Thank you so much for being here.
I'm a third year at UChicago.
I helped run a conservative libertarian publication and was actually called a fascist by protesters for my hoodie.
But I wanted to ask you, as a conservative, I do strongly disagree with you on college.
You just said this about Chicago, and you actually just said to the guy in front of you about voting that these are things, even if the odds are stacked against us, we shouldn't abandon these institutions.
Why would you not feel, especially given that college, you know, you have to go to college to have certain positions of power, why would you not apply that same logic to college?
So to the previous example, it doesn't cost you $200,000 in debt to go vote.
Breaking Normalized Ideologies 00:12:50
Right.
Fair.
And four years of time.
It's like 15 minutes and a piece of paper, and you show up and you do it again in two years, right?
So it's not exactly a one-to-one.
But there is a need for some of our people to go to college.
We just have way too many of our people going to college.
There's way too many people going to college in America.
It is largely a scam.
I literally wrote the book.
You can read it and challenge me on it.
But look, if you go to the University of Chicago and you're a conservative libertarian, God bless you, man.
We need you.
We need you to go infiltrate the highest places of power and fight for freedom and liberty.
I'm all for that.
What I'm not for, though, is perpetuating a lie where 41% of people that enter college do not graduate.
That's way too many people going into college.
You want all of a sudden reform college?
Then stop taxpayer funding of the anthropology, sociology, feminist studies, all this left-wing nonsense that has just taken over the academy in a very terrible way.
So I'm not for abandoning.
I am for a large retreat, though.
Fair enough.
I agree.
Way too much attendance.
So fair enough.
Cool.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
God bless you.
We'll take a couple more.
Hey, Charlie, thank you for coming to UIC.
I'm actually a student here, and I'm part of Turning Point USA on campus.
Awesome.
So I'm a third-year student, and many of the people my age have normalized pornography and OnlyFans.
This has caused many of them in my age to become addicted to this garbage and messed up their minds and made them weaker.
As someone who has struggled with this when I was younger and was able to recover from it, what are some of your suggestions that you can give me to break this ideology that is so normalized amongst people my age?
Yeah, I don't mean to moralize on the topic.
I've been very open.
I mean, when I was younger, I struggled with it too.
Almost every young man in America has struggled with this cancer, this pathogen in one way, shape, or form.
Praise God that you could break free from that.
And only, in my opinion, Jesus Christ, can get you free of that.
But let me.
There's a great book by Gary Wilson.
I don't mean to moralize.
I'm not saying you're a bad person.
It's just the facts.
Read Gary Wilson's book, Your Brain on Pornography.
It'll change your life.
And you just have to understand that if you don't, you're basically doing the neurological equivalent of hallucinogenic drugs, and you are destroying your body's ability to create dopamine, which is the reward molecule in your brain.
And it changes the entire way you view the world.
And if people are positive on that, they're wrong.
And it actually, I believe, is contributing to a lot of social ailments and a lot of other issues.
And what it's actually doing even more than that, it's really sad is that young men, there's a percentage of young men, 20 to 30 percent, that are so addicted to online pornography, they will not engage in real-person relationships.
And that's not some speculation, it's a real research study.
So the message, I don't know, it could be factual, it can also be very compassionate, but it's harming you.
I just want to make that very clear.
It is bad for you.
And so I wish you the best in that crusade because unfortunately, pornography rates have nearly doubled over the last decade, and it's not good for anybody.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello, Mr. Kirk.
My name is Alejandro.
I'm thanking you for being here.
My question is: I'm a third-year Mexican-American, Republican, and raised by a single mother.
And I have a question.
What do you think about the emasculation of men in universities and the less and less amount of men that are going into furthered education?
Women being more present in the classroom, which is not a bad thing, but I think it is when there's less men versus women per se.
How do you think we can combat that in a sense to strengthen young men once more?
Yeah, I mean, it's so funny.
You read some of these articles, they say the mystery of why men don't want to attend college.
I don't know, they're told they're the problem of every single thing in society for four years and to go into debt for that.
They're like, yeah, I'm not going to go do that, actually.
It really isn't a mystery.
Society needs strong men and strong women.
We need to understand those archetypes and their roles and their duties and responsibilities clearly and how they complement one another and how they need each other.
And our society has become hyper-feminized.
And men have gone into the Peter Pan, lost boy-type mentality.
And it creates, like I've said, the most suicidal, alcohol-addicted, drug-addicted, depressed generation in history.
And so we see that in the testosterone rates that are declining considerably.
So how do you go about fixing it?
I don't know.
We need a society that actually will be willing to say out loud that it's not toxic masculinity.
It is necessary masculinity in our society.
Thank you for the question.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Nick.
Thank you.
Two more.
Hi, Mr. Kirk.
How are you?
Good.
So I'm from New York.
I actually just moved here not too long ago.
And you spoke about carjackings earlier.
My car last week just got stolen down this road.
Sorry to hear that.
Yeah, the police did absolutely nothing.
You know, that's just how it is.
Born and raised in Long Island as a conservative.
My family is also very conservative.
So I'm also a computer science student.
I do a lot of software work.
So my question to you is: what are your thoughts on big tech?
Do you think it's beneficial to society?
Do you think that it is something that we need in the future?
Something more of, something less of?
Startups, what are your kind of thoughts on that?
Yeah, it's definitely not good for society, especially in its current form.
Big tech has been an incredible damaging effect on society and on young kids.
I could go onto this at length, but we need more entrepreneurs.
We need to break up Google, especially Google is a monstrosity in more ways than one.
And I hope people go to jail for what they did when they used the social media companies to interfere with the 2020 election and prevent voters from being actually able to hear the truth.
People need to go to jail for that.
So there's a mostly good documentary on Netflix called The Social Dilemma with Tristan Harris.
The end is absolute garbage.
75% of it's really good, though, which talks about screen time and algorithms and addictive person.
You know, that's terrific.
The end actually defeats their argument that they say we're never going to be able to solve climate change because these companies only push people what they want.
Like, okay, maybe I don't hate them as much as I thought I did.
But the movie's actually pretty good about the health of children.
And a study literally just came out where it shows that if young women do social media fasting or they limit their social media intake, their body image, their self-body image improves dramatically.
After 30 days, depression thoughts, anxious thoughts, suicidal thoughts plummet.
These things are doing more damage to our children than we could ever put into words.
That's why I don't think a kid should get a smartphone younger than the age of 18.
I think it's more damaging than even some of the drugs that they're doing in high school.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
All right, the final question.
Hi, Charlie.
I just want to say thank you so much for coming out here, and God bless you.
So being from the suburbs of Chicago, I'm pretty sure that you've taken public transport at some time.
I'm also from the suburbs of Chicago.
And I take the train to school daily.
And honestly, the conditions on the train are pretty atrocious.
And public security isn't what it used to be.
So if some drugged up guy comes running at you, there's really not much you could do.
It's terrible.
And that's actually happened to me a few times, unfortunately.
So my question is: what role as an American-born Middle Eastern, more specifically an Assyrian, could I do to try to not only survive, and I'm not even kidding when I say that, but also to help stop the insanity on the trains?
First of all, I just want to emphasize that most of the cowards outside that didn't want to come here tonight said that we were racist.
And the vast majority of the comments tonight were from people of every single corner of our beautiful planet because we don't care about race around here.
We care about your ideas and your values.
So I just think it's been one of the most beautiful question lines we've ever done that make those idiots outside look like what they are.
Because all week they're like, they're racist, they're this, they're that.
And I mean, think about Brazil, Assyrian, Mexican-American.
It's a beautiful picture, right?
Because it's values that matter.
Skin color does not.
Okay, that's a side note.
I was just moved by that.
Look, here's what I want to encourage you not to do something, though.
Don't take things into your own hands.
I know that sounds opposite, but where we're at now is that the good guys are actually getting penalized by these DAs, not the actual bad guys.
It is such a messed up situation right now.
And where if you actually interject yourself and you might, I don't know, let's say that you took like a deranged drug addict, homeless person comes up to you and does something and you slam him down and he has a concussion.
The DA might then all of a sudden come after you for assault.
That's true.
And so I just want to make sure I give you proper advice for self-preservation.
There are lines, I think, that if someone is legitimately getting harmed, then insert yourself and do the right thing.
And this is, this really, really bothers me.
There was a situation in New York about 20 or 30 years ago called the Kitty Genovese Story.
I don't know if any of you guys remember that or not.
It was largely overblown, but it was a woman that was raped in an alley, and allegedly 20 or 30 people heard it happen, and they did nothing.
It really wasn't that many.
It was more like three or four people.
But the point being is that it really bothered people.
Who will we do?
This kind of country is this.
Little do people know that in Philadelphia, a year and a half ago, a year and a half, summer ago, an illegal was on the train and for 45 minutes raped a woman in broad daylight.
No one did anything and stopped six times.
And I had a torn take on that on radio because I said, our country is not the country it used to be.
You should take it in your own hands.
And then I got emails from people in Philadelphia.
They said, well, Charlie, if we take it into our own hands, we'll go to jail.
And boy, is that the heroes are now getting treated like criminals.
And the criminals get off scot-free.
And so I don't have a good piece of advice for you personally, but it's a tragedy.
I used to take the Metro all the time.
I mean, all the time.
And literally, it was safe and it was clean.
It was on time and orderly.
You're telling me that it's not.
The Metra is not that bad.
It's the CTA.
That's more of the problem.
Especially the red and blue line.
It's horrible.
It's actually horrible.
So, I mean, that was, I don't know if that's also, you know, declined or descended.
So, but that's why I want that Chicago attitude back, that chip on the shoulder.
Thank you so much, Charlie.
God bless you.
Let me close by saying this.
I want to thank two groups of people.
The university received a lot of pressure not to have this event happen, and they deserve credit for allowing this event to happen.
So please give it up for them.
Secondly, I want to thank the amazing amount of police that made sure this event could happen tonight.
So thank them for that.
And the activists outside said they wanted to have a 2.0 of Trump and 16 here at UIC.
They lost and we won.
And the police were able to have this event go on.
As I mentioned earlier, you need to fight for your home.
I love this place.
Fight for every inch.
And that might just mean raising your kids with your values, homeschooling your kids, building and starting churches that are lights in your community, whatever it might be.
But my call to action for you tonight, summarizing all of that, is good people need to do more.
Good people need, whatever that means for your life, it might just, you might just all of a sudden be hearing a little prick like, oh, I could do more.
Everybody can do more.
I can do more.
You could do more.
I know a lot of you here tonight have said, Charlie, I've done everything that's been asked of me.
I watched Trucker Carlson.
I bought the pillow.
I've done everything that has been asked of me.
By the way, promo code Kirk at mypillow.com, just so we're clear.
And those Giza dream sheets are amazing.
It's more than just being a spectator.
We need people in the arena.
We need participants.
And yes, we need it in Chicago and Illinois more than ever.
I love this place.
I want to see it revitalized.
You matter in that.
Be courageous and bold and fight for your home.
God bless you guys.
Thank you so much.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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