The Man in the Arena: My Speech to the International Order of Teddy Roosevelt
What lessons does Theodore Roosevelt teach to conservatives today? He has many, but one of the most important, Charlie argues, is the importance of discomfort. Theodore Roosevelt was a weak boy, but grew into a man of intense physical exertion. If we want to be the victorious "man in the arena," Charlie says, then we must reject comfort and reject ease, and instead embrace the importance of effort, challenging ourselves, and making ourselves into the strongest version of ourselves.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Teddy Roosevelt Spirit00:14:27
Hey, everybody.
My conversation at the International Order of Teddy Roosevelt, amazing people.
I talk about Teddy Roosevelt and the need for us to educate the next generation.
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Here's a little tease.
I was watching the other day.
I'm actually not a huge Martin Luther King fan or whatever, super flawed guy.
But I was watching the last, the audio.
I was listening to the audio of the last speech that he gave the night before he was killed, April 3rd, 1968.
He was killed the next afternoon.
And he gave this speech, and he had just been like cheating with a bunch of different women.
Okay.
Yeah, he had a tendency to.
Oh, my gosh.
No, he was like sexually out of control.
But he gave this speech in which he clearly predicted his own death.
Like, there is no doubt if you listen to this that God is speaking through Martin Luther King.
And again, I don't like Martin Luther King's program.
I don't like his behaviors.
You know, worshiping Martin Luther King is absurd to me.
But I got to say, if you listen to that speech, God is speaking through Martin Luther King.
There's no other explanation for that.
And you're like, well, that's kind of consistent with what we know.
We're all flawed.
The people in charge tend to be more flawed.
But it doesn't mean that they're not capable of greatness.
So let's just be honest about it.
The second you have to feel the need to pretend that you're perfect, you become a liar and you become paradoxically even less perfect, in my opinion.
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Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
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.
Wonderful surprise and honor to be here, everybody.
There's so many familiar faces.
I just want to first express my gratitude.
Many of you came up to me in the cocktail hour and they said, Charlie, I remember 10 years ago when you were at SCI, our Dallas Safari Club, introducing yourself for Weatherbee.
And I was talking to Sackmans earlier and so many amazing friends here.
And it really is this community that helped get Turning Point USA to the level it is today.
And I got to tell you, what we're doing every day, I believe, is America's best hope.
We are on thousands of high school college campuses across the country, fighting for the Constitution, fighting for American exceptionalism.
And I see Reedy Snyder back there, who's been a great friend for many years.
So many amazing people.
And many of you entertained me when I said, hey, we're going to try to start a youth movement.
And it sounded a little over the top and a little bit grandiose and very bold, but so many of you supported us financially and believed in us.
And I'm eternally grateful for that.
And so thank you.
And a lot's changed in 10 years.
10 years ago, it was a completely different country.
There are some of these forces that were growing in America, but the idea that 10 years ago we would have in our schools outward anti-Americanism as bad as it is today, it would be maybe on the fringes, maybe in Seattle, right, maybe in Portland or maybe New York, but it wouldn't be institutionalized.
What we have lived through over the last 10 years, and I want to emphasize why it's so important what you are doing tonight, why what you're doing tonight is so important, is we have kind of lived through our own version of a cultural revolution in the last 10 years.
And that's a radical thing to say, but the fact that our own military now, our military, is saying that men can give birth, that that's the United States military.
That's turned into almost like a college campus with tomahawk missiles.
And this cultural revolution we've lived through over the last couple years has started because, in my personal opinion, we did not do the education of our young people correctly or boldly.
Our mission statement at Turning Point USA is very clear.
We want your grandkids to live in a free America.
Is that true?
We want your grandkids to live in a country that is a free society.
In fact, some people say, well, Charlie, it's political.
I have very strong political views.
It's actually not political.
It's not political to say that you want American values to pass down from one generation to the other.
People who think that's political, they're part of the problem in the country.
It should not be a political statement to say that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln were some of the most exceptional people ever to live and were recipients of this incredible project that we call the United States of America.
You see, I visit college campuses, so you don't have to.
And bring in the good message of conservation and the Second Amendment and hunting and the Constitution.
And I can tell you, as I visit these college campuses, it's very clear that a majority of our nation's young people, they're going into debt, they're going to these colleges to learn a set of ideas that will create ingratitude.
Somebody asked me the other day, said, Charlie, what does success look like for you?
I said, I want to create a younger generation that has gratitude and is thankful to be an American.
One of the biggest issues in our country is that if you're not thankful for something, then why wouldn't you destroy that something?
And that's why what I think you're doing with the International Order of Teddy Roosevelt is so beautiful and so important.
Because isn't that what conservation is all about?
Is it rooted in gratitude and understanding?
You know, I made a quip at the table that said, Charlie, are you going to talk about conservation tonight?
I said, I absolutely will.
I'm also going to talk about the greatest conservational project of all, conserving the United States of America for future generations.
That's the biggest conservation project that I think all of us can purchase.
But I want to mention one thing: Teddy Roosevelt.
What a man.
And I am so thrilled that you decided to name your entire order around Teddy Roosevelt.
I'm going to riff on Teddy Roosevelt for a second.
For those of you that have not studied the courage, the boldness, the eccentricity of Teddy Roosevelt, I encourage you to do it.
Teddy Roosevelt, of course, was a hunter and a conservationist.
Very few people know that he was a former police captain of New York City.
He was governor of New York, an accidental vice president, who then became an accidental president because of assassination.
Teddy Roosevelt didn't take crap from anybody.
In fact, he was accused of being, let's just say, if Teddy Roosevelt had Twitter, I think we know exactly what people would say about Teddy Roosevelt.
Let's just put it that way.
Teddy Roosevelt would be sending out a lot of mean tweets.
But you know what?
Teddy Roosevelt loved America, and Teddy Roosevelt left an impact.
He left a permanent footprint of something that was very rare in the early 1900s, citizen-led government.
He started something that could be called the populist movement.
I just, honestly, I call it the pro-American movement, where he said, you know what?
There's some things that I love and I treasure.
For example, he was very worried about the destruction of the American middle class.
We should be also worried about that today.
The middle class is disappearing.
But Teddy Roosevelt had a heart also for the things that he believed were created by God.
Natural beauty.
And we can thank Teddy Roosevelt for being America's greatest conservation president by far, for giving us Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park, hundreds of millions of acres of now untouched beauty that future generations can enjoy.
Teddy Roosevelt, most people don't even know this, he brokered peace and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
People don't know this for ending the Russo-Japanese war very quickly.
You see, he had a very interesting negotiation style.
Now, we would have no comparison today of anybody that was like this.
Grandiose, bold, talked a lot, you know, was hated by the press, called the news fake news.
You would have no idea anything like that.
It's a foreign concept, actually.
Teddy Roosevelt ended a war that people said was unique, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people.
He did it basically an afternoon.
It was a great book breaking about it.
More than anything else, though, the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt that I hope all of you appreciate and enjoy, and you dwell on and you pray about, is a legacy of action.
My favorite quote of Teddy Roosevelt, and I'm going to paraphrase it, but the essence is what matters, is he said, the man in the arena is what counts.
It's not enough to be a spectator or a bystander.
It's the man who gets stuffed up, it's the person who gets spat at, the person who gets insulted.
It's the person in the arena.
And I think we need more citizens right now in the arena fighting for the future of America.
We need more of that kind of Teddy Roosevelt spirit.
And I'm really thrilled you guys decided to name your organization after him.
There's a lot we can learn from him.
He lived a full life, and Huntington was a big part of his life.
It was his release.
But he was also just a physical specimen.
If you read about Teddy Roosevelt, he would exercise like two or three hours a day.
I mean, most people don't know this.
And that was back before air conditioning.
And I mean, he was an absolute beast.
And he loved America and was willing to do a lot about it.
But Teddy Roosevelt did wrong.
And this is one thing he did wrong.
And we could probably take some, again, I'm not sure how appropriate this is.
My one piece of advice to, let's just say, a former president: do not run as a third party.
Let's just say that.
Teddy Roosevelt ran, as well peaceful, a lot of people know this.
Teddy Roosevelt ran as a third party in the 1912 election against William Howard Taft and gave us one of the worst presidents in American history, Woodrow Wilson.
So, as we're learning lessons from Teddy Roosevelt, let's just all agree we're not going to put up with former presidents running in third parties.
I think that's a good idea, right?
I don't think that's something we should do anyway.
I'm not sure how applicable it is.
But the point being is, it actually gave us the progressive era, Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson was an academic from New Jersey.
He was former president of Princeton University.
And Woodrow Wilson is a complete 180 opposite of Teddy Roosevelt.
Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election won to a 46-47% of the vote.
He won because William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt split the then Republican vote between the Bull Loose Party and the Republican Party.
Woodrow Wilson was the first American president to declare war on the American founding.
Woodrow Wilson, as an academic, represents everything that many of your grandkids and kids learn if they go to college.
And it's everything that we are fighting against and everything the International Order of Teddy Roosevelt pushes against.
Woodrow Wilson believed that you must change your truth claims.
You must change the Constitution because the times change.
For example, he'd say, you know, now that we have a steam-powered engine and we have the Industrial Revolution, who needs a founding fathers?
We could throw that document away.
He basically said that repeatedly.
It's exactly what we hear today, isn't it?
We now hear from our leaders that the Second Amendment is completely irrelevant.
Now that we have Twitter and new airplanes, we no longer need the First Amendment.
But we, as people that understand the American tradition, know that the Constitution is actually more applicable today than any other time in American history.
The Constitution, because it's rooted on eternal truths.
And this is something that we talk about every single day at Turning Point USA, which is that times change, technology changes, but human beings do not change.
Human beings are just as broken and awful today as they were in the 1780s and 1790s.
Why is that important?
It means that, regardless of all the technology around us, the boundaries and the promises of the Constitution do not change.
Said differently, the Constitution was not written for the times.
It was written to stand the test of time.
It was written to be able to stand up against tyrants that want to take our guns away, against tyrants that want to prevent us from being free and engaging in self-government.
Nature Solves Masculinity Crisis00:03:49
And we're partnering every single day with the International Order of Teddy Roosevelt.
I'm pleased to announce, thanks to your support and what you announced tonight, last week we had an amazing thing.
Over 170 of our Turning Point USA chapters did an entire conservation activism week.
High school and college kids that are talking about hunting and conservation.
This is in the grassroots.
This is real impact stuff.
In fact, so much, I just have these notes, we have over 200 other college chapters that want to do the conservation week and bring speakers on campus and talk about hunting.
This is a grassroots movement, and this is something we talked about when we did the board meeting last summer.
I think this is the greatest, this is one of the greatest opportunities for the hunting community ever to be able to tell the beautiful story of what it means to go out in the woods without your phone, without TikTok, and be in touch with something that God created.
You see, this is the most depressed, miserable, alcohol-addicted, and drug-addicted generation in history.
You know who some of the happiest people are in the world?
Hunters.
Because they're not staring at their phone all day long.
They're doing tough stuff throughout the nature.
They have to figure out how to, I mean, some of the hunts that you go, I mean, Barbara Sackman, I got to tell you, Reed Snyder, I mean, I couldn't do those hunts.
I mean, you're not going to go to something that takes you five weeks to find is unbelievable.
But you know what?
That's a lot more fulfilling than just scrolling through your Instagram feed all day long.
We want to heal some of the mental health problems.
It's a big problem in our country.
Let's get more young people to get out in the woods and hunt.
Let's get more people to get out of nature.
It's going to solve a lot of problems.
And it's something that I think is, you don't have to overthink it, actually.
It's who we are as a species.
It's what we did.
You see, this idea that all your food is given to you with almost no effort and you have to sit in the air conditioning.
I think it's making us deeply disturbed as a society.
My favorite book of last year that I recommend for all of you to read is called Comfort Crisis.
It's fabulous.
In fact, when I read Comfort Crisis, I thought of so many of you West Gates and my kingdom, and those of you that do these unbelievably adventurous hunts, and you go into the wild and you go into the wilderness.
The argument that author Michael Easter writes in the book Hunker Crisis is that we are unhappy as a people because we're no longer in the wild.
That's what the whole book is about.
And he proves it scientifically, he proves it neurologically.
He proves it that this generation is the most out-of-touch generation in history to what it takes to survive.
And we do not have the ability to then replace going out in nature, physical activity, charting your own pork, having to survive for an evening in, let's just say, less than ideal climate, that three meals a day provided to you in perfect 71-degree temperatures, staring at a screen all day long.
His argument in the book Hunker Crisis is that the crisis facing us today is a crisis unlike any other.
100 years ago, it was a crisis of how do we solve communicable diseases?
The crisis 500 years ago is how do we feed everybody.
The crisis 1,000 years ago is how do we get drinking water?
The crisis actually today is how do we keep our young people from killing themselves because they have everything that they need and they don't know what to do with themselves.
The answer is not that complicated.
Put them out in the wild and say go kill some.
It's not that complicated.
Figure it out.
I truly believe, and I can go on at length about this.
We have a crisis of masculinity in America.
We really do.
You want to solve part of the crisis of masculinity in America?
Put forth a challenge to the young men.
For one week, can you just eat what you hunt?
Guns vs Mental Health00:08:52
I'll give you the ammunition.
I'll give you a rifle.
I'll give you whatever.
Can you eat what you want?
Prior generations say, yeah, of course, that's what we do every night.
I think that one of the reasons we're seeing the rise of, let's just say, very feminine men.
And it's sometimes men who think they're women, which only get me started.
I promise I wouldn't talk about that stuff tonight.
Is anyone drinking Bud Lead tonight?
I should have done that.
There's nothing wrong with you at all.
There's nothing but that's all I'll say.
Is we have a nation of young people and a generation that is out of touch with what is most natural to them.
And so we are proud, we're thankful to bring this message.
Now, with millions of young people at Turning Point USA, we are reaching millions of people on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and make no mistake, all these things come together.
There is a war against hunting, just the same there is a war against the Second Amendment.
I don't have to convince you of that one.
Just in the last couple days, the state of Washington has passed an assault rifle ban.
Illinois, I think, is outsane, right, John?
Oh, well, you just said something wacky and crazy.
And I know there's a lot of lawsuits against it.
I'm one of the few people that has a sizable platform that's willing to say what needs to be said off the Second Amendment.
I'm going to just reiterate it for tonight, which is the Second Amendment is not about hunting.
I'm glad we're able to hunt.
The Second Amendment is not even about personal protection.
I'm glad we have that.
The Second Amendment is, God forbid, for us to defend ourselves against a government that might go tyrannical.
That's why we have a Second Amendment.
Now that freaks some people out.
That might make people nervous.
But you have to say that over and over again.
You know why?
Because if we say it's just for hunting, then they're going to get rid of any gun except things that are only used for hunting.
The point is this, is the founding fathers wrote explicitly that the intent of the Second Amendment was to protect all the other amendments.
And who are we that all of a sudden turn our back on 20th century history?
Every major totalitarian, tyrant, and despot disarmed the citizenry before they did their mass acts of evil.
I pray it never comes to that in America.
But boy, I'll tell you what, the people that want to take our weapons away, I do not trust their intentions.
I don't trust their intentions because they're unwilling to talk about some of the root causes that are actually driving gun violence, which is the lack of fathers in our home in America.
If there were more fathers in our homes in Chicago or Philadelphia, there would be less gun violence.
You know, we're the only country in America, the only country in the world that counts death by suicide with a firearm as a firearm death.
Do you know that there's about 32,000 gun deaths every single year, or less 3235,000 deaths by guns?
Two-thirds of them, two-thirds of them are death by suicide with the gun.
Now, that's a problem.
But that is not a gun problem.
That is a mental health crisis that is being used as a way to try to take our weapons away.
Those are two totally different issues.
The second issue, the next biggest population of gun crimes, is gang-related urban pistol gun crime, mostly of black on black or Hispanic on Hispanic crime in 10 cities.
You remove those two things, death by suicide and gang-related firearms, you're talking about less than 2,000 gun deaths every single year in a country of 330 million people.
Every death is a tragedy.
I'm not minimizing.
I'm instead adding context.
Because if you watch the major networks, it would make it seem as if gun deaths and mass shootings are the number one cause of death in America.
And it's not.
Here's a fact.
A young person is exponentially more likely to kill themselves than die in a mass shooting.
Mass shootings are a problem.
We could solve them if we had people with guns protecting our schools the same way we have people with guns protecting our sporting events and our banks and our airports.
Very simple.
More good guys with guns against bad lunatics that come, you can end these shootings very, very quickly.
The issue at hand, though, we know this, is that there has been a decades-long agenda to disarm the American public.
Now, some of you might disagree.
Some of you might say, I just came here for hunting and conservation.
That's fine.
But hear me out.
That the liberties we enjoy, Fourth Amendment liberties, 10th Amendment liberties, First Amendment liberties, all hinges in our ability to defend those liberties.
And just again, look at the 20th century.
Over 100 million people were murdered after they disarmed the citizenry.
Now, we must be willing to say this repeatedly, because that is the true intent of the Second Amendment.
And I love the Constitution because the Constitution is very important.
We talk about this every day at Turning Point USA.
The Constitution are not rules for us.
This is why the founders were so brilliant.
The Constitution is rules for our government.
Think about that.
They started with what the government cannot do.
Shall not infringe on our speech.
Shall not be infringed.
Shall not search and seizure.
Why would they do that?
Because their biggest fear was not individual people doing evil.
The biggest fear of the designers of the Constitution, in particular, James Madison and John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, the biggest fear was government coming after free people to make them free no longer.
The purpose of the United States Constitution is recognizing God-granted rights and making sure the government doesn't come afterwards.
And this is one of the things I love that the International Order of Teddy Roosevelt is doing so beautifully.
You guys are pushing for states to now allow hunting and fishing access.
Because the other beautiful wrinkle of the Constitution is that it's the states that created the federal government.
The federal government did not create the states.
And now, in some ways, this is troubling.
It's troubling because all those different Americas are being created.
And honestly, in some ways, it's promising.
It's promising that we're able to be here in Naples, Florida, that is significantly a freer state than Connecticut.
That is a good thing.
It's a good thing that certain states can say, you know what, we're not going to do a woke stuff.
We're not going to have these crazy gun laws.
We're going to have open carry or concealed caring.
States are willing to save so many of our liberties, everybody.
And that is a bottom-up citizen-led movement.
I want to mention a couple other things.
And when I visit these college campuses, I'm asked frequently by these students.
They say, what is good about America?
And for them, what they're saying is they've been taught that America is the worst country ever.
If you were to summarize Turning Point USA to a friend or why it's important to support our work, it's very simple.
If you do not teach a generation why their home is worthy of protection, they will not protect that home.
Excuse us analogy.
It's a little bit blunt.
But we are a nation suffering from Alzheimer's.
We have forgot our history.
And we're unwilling to articulate it.
We are the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.
Not only do we have a history we should talk about, we have a history we should celebrate every single day in the classroom of our era.
We have a history that we should clean in and say, no other history as the name of no other country has been able to be so generous, so benevolent, so productive, so uplifting of all people of different races and backgrounds.
And of course, sometimes they'll say, well, Charlie, what about slavery?
Here's one thing that we all have in common.
We're all born into a world we did not create.
Every founding father was born into a world where slavery was everywhere.
By the time those founding fathers died, slavery was on its way out.
The first anti-slavery convention was hosted by Benjamin Franklin in 1775.
The first state ever to abolish slavery was Vermont in 1776.
Nine out of 13 of the original colonies had independently eradicated slavery by the time the Constitutional Convention came around in 1787.
This country started the abolition of slavery.
And before your liberal friend gets on their high horse, just remind them, there are more slaves alive tragically today on this planet than any time during the transatlantic slave trade.
In fact, I want to go even more blunt, there are slaves still today on the United States southern border that are being trafficked into our country every single day.
It's America that deserves credit, not blame, for ending the sin of slavery in the world that spread like a wildfire.
How many kids are actually learning that every day?
Answer, not enough.
The point is this.
Is that our history?
It's just complicated.
We've made mistakes, but it's a story of heroism, of courage, something that we have to lean in.
Because I'll tell you, you read the 1619 project in the New York Times, you read all these what these academics are teaching.
They want to create many revolutionaries in the world ways of women.
Let me say one thing that might be very nasty to talk about, which is slightly political, so I might get in trouble, but whatever.
You guys can get rid of it.
Americans Can Turn It Around00:07:16
Okay, I am not going to talk about my preference of who I want the candidate or the nominee to be.
Let me just say one thing very quickly.
We need to learn that, regardless of who is running for the Presidency of the United States, that the American Democrat machine believes they can elect someone that is politically brain dead.
Senator Fetterman is evidence that candidate quality is not as important.
What is important is whether or not we invest in the states that matter in voter registration.
Early voting, it's way past time that we embrace early voting.
Ballot chasing, this is something we're going to be doing at Turning Point Action a lot.
Because people say, Charlie, how can Joe Biden win?
And I tell people, it's not about the candidate, it's about the machinery.
And the final thing I'll say about this: Georgia, the great state of Georgia, had 248,000 mail-in ballots in the election of 2018.
Now we have 2.48 million mail-in ballots, a 10 times increase in four years.
Maybe it's time that we as Republicans, maybe you're not a Republican, or we as Americans start engaging in early voting.
If we don't, we will lose regardless.
They could literally elect Jimmy Carter, and that's not an exaggeration because of their sophisticated machinery in these key states.
Let me close out a couple thoughts.
Some of you asked in the cocktail reception, Charlie, are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?
I always refuse to answer that question because if I was optimistic, you would go home and you would say, I don't have to do anything because Charlie said he's optimistic, everything's going to be fine.
If I said I was pessimistic, you would go home and say, I don't have to do anything because Charlie said we're going to lose.
I have no idea this country is going to make it.
I have no guarantees to share.
I don't do hopium.
Hopium is hope and hoping.
It sounds good.
You mix it together.
Oh, yeah, we're going to win no matter what.
That's not a guarantee.
It's not.
I have a lot to be hopeful for.
And so do you.
The movement of young people at Turning Point USA where we do our college events.
You know, our biggest problem at Turning Point USA?
We can't find rooms big enough to fit all the students that want to come to our on-campus events.
The biggest problem we have for me.
So the question then is, what do we do?
That's the most important question.
Because there's a chance this entire country falls apart and your kids don't live in a free America.
Or there's a chance we turn this thing around.
Some of you are probably looking at me and say, Charlie, I've already been, I've done everything that has been asked of me.
I watch, well, I used to say it, it's not funny.
I watched Tucker Cross and I guess I can't say that anymore.
I watched Fox News Life today.
Charlie, I do everything that's been asked of me.
I bought the pillow.
How about that?
Highkiller.com, by the way, just a real clip.
I bought Relief Factor.
I reverse mortgage my home.
I've done everything that has been asked of me, Charlie.
What else can I do?
And the answer is this: we need every patriot, whether you've been involved in this fight, like Mike Abraham has been in, for, I think, twice as long as I've been alive, Mike Agram has been fighting for liberty.
Or maybe you've never been involved.
Maybe you've heard me and you're like, oh, I don't like that political thing.
And maybe I'm touching you in a way you're like, ah, I got to do something.
It doesn't matter.
It's a question of what do we do.
And here's the thrill.
Here's the excitement.
The excitement is actually in the mystery.
And those of you as hunters should totally understand this.
You have no idea that you're going to get what you went to go get.
That's America right now.
I have no idea how this is going to end.
But we need every God-fearing patriot, regardless of politics, throw that out.
If you just believe America is a decent country and you think it's won rapidly in the wrong direction by radical forces, I believe every single one of them.
And one of the ways you can do that is support the International Order of Teddy Roosevelt in the auction and throughout this weekend.
We need this organization to double and triple in size next year.
It's very, very important.
And I'm telling you, we're going to use the resources you guys have given us to go to the front lines.
I'll close on this because I think I'm right up against my time here.
Which is, I'm asked often about then, Charlie, what is it I should do?
Give me the marching words.
The best answer I have for that is if you have not lost something significant in the last couple of years, then I challenge you to get further into the arena, as Teddy Roosevelt has called us.
It's the man in the arena that counts.
It's the man in the arena that the opposition fears, like Tucker Carlson or James O'Keefe or any of these people.
And what the opposition fears more than anything else is us awakening.
They want you to surrender.
They want you to be cynical.
They want you to just give up and say, this country has no hope.
I tell you right now, we are still a decent country.
You want to know what gives me hope?
What gives me hope is that the people in charge are doing things so out of step with normal everyday Americans that is not sustainable.
It will, of course, correct at some point.
It's going to be up to us to do that.
The greatest man to live in the 20th century is Winston Churchill.
Winston Churchill has not taught our schools nearly enough.
Winston Churchill is a great, courageous, and bold man, very similar to Teddy Roosevelt.
Winston Churchill was the only man smiling the morning after Pearl Harbor.
He walked into his war cabinet meeting with a cigar and a thing of whiskey, and everyone was down and they were sad.
And Winston Churchill comes into the war cabinet and proclaims, Gents, we have won the war.
They've gotten way too many drinks the night before.
They looked at him and he said it again, we have won the war.
And a brave soul in the war cabinet meeting decides to step up and ask Winston Churchill and challenge the prime minister.
Sir, have you all stood buggy mine?
We're losing a thousand loyal Air Force members a day.
We barely got our troops out of Dunkirk.
You're less popular than ever.
The military is cracking at the seas.
The Nazis are planning an invasion of Brighton and they might conquer this isle at any moment.
They're literally blitz-free in London and our hospitals and our schools every night.
What do you mean we have won the war?
And Churchill took a pump of his cigar and a sip of whiskey and he looked across his war cabinet and said, Ah, the Americans, they're a tricky bunch.
I've got to know them rather well over the last couple of decades.
Often late to party, but almost never wrong.
Let me tell you something about those tricky Americans.
When they awaken, they are an unstoppable force.
And let me tell you, folks, with this happened at Pearl Harbor, that sleeping giant is awake, and this war is over.
Ladies and gentlemen, we wake up, we win.
God bless you, and thank you for the role this year.
Thanks so much for listening.
Email me freedom at charliekirk.com, your favorite president and your opinions of Teddy Roosevelt, to get in the running for a free membership.
Members.charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
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