They have slick accents — but do they actually have brains? Charlie flew across the Atlantic Ocean to Britain so he could debate the students at Cambridge University. But are the kids at the UK's #2 school any better than kids in the U.S.? Charlie fields questions on abortion, the Bible, Trump, marriages and broken homes, and a lot more in a epic showdown that is not to be missed. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com! Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
This is my conversation at Cambridge University.
I thought I did pretty well, to be perfectly honest.
It was an incredibly difficult environment.
I walk in, no applause, just stares and glares from the Cambridge intelligentsia.
400 people against me and a professor.
I talk to the president of Cambridge, who didn't even do the niceties, just went straight into trying to brutalize me publicly.
I kept my calm.
I kept my cool.
I felt pretty good about the points I made.
There are some points I probably could have made better.
But understand, it was literally kind of like a Moscow show trial where you're standing there for an hour and a half and they're throwing a debater after debater and they're applauding at the dumbest stuff.
So I just have to warn you before you listen to this podcast, this one – I mean, it was so overwhelming against me.
That's why I kind of love it, because we need to be unafraid to go into those environments.
We need to be unafraid to go into the lines then.
We need to be unafraid to go into the place where we're not always going to be applauded.
We're not always going to be celebrated.
We're not always going to be welcomed with open arms.
No, that's not what free speech is all about, is sometimes going into the greatest place of opposition.
And so I was thankful to do it.
There's a lot of insults that they throw at me.
There's a lot of, let's say, clever little remarks.
It was far from a debate.
It was more just kind of like a verbal melee.
And I think you will agree, and I would love your thoughts, freedomatcharliekirk.com, that the students of Cambridge, they could have done a lot better.
They could have been far more sophisticated, more polite, but they decided to take the gloves off and we got into the arena.
And of course, when I made a good point, it was met with silence.
And when they made a mediocre point, it was met with roaring applause as if they split the atom.
Hilariously, they actually split the atom at Cambridge.
Make sure you guys subscribe to our podcast and enjoy this lively, controversial, viral fight at Cambridge University.
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.
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Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining us tonight.
Our speaker tonight is Charlie Kirk, a prominent conservative commentator.
He's founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, which has a presence on over 3,000 high school and college campuses.
It is the largest and fastest growing youth activist organization in USA, and he's written four books.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you.
Great to be here.
Brilliant.
So I'll start with some questions from me, and then we're going to move to the questions from the audience, from the people who've submitted them, and you'll be asking them at the dispatch box.
My first question is about Turning Point USA's Professor Watchlist.
Its mission is described as exposing college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom, with examples including feminism, abortion, and socialism.
How would you respond to critics, such as PEN America?
Well, we're getting right into it, aren't we?
Thank you.
So yeah, just by background, Turning Point USA has now grown to be the largest campus conservative organization in the country.
I come from a view that conservatism is widely underrepresented in American campuses, and by conservatism.
I literally mean the defense of Western values, free markets, rule of law, individual initiatives, entrepreneurship, the Constitution, so on and so forth.
And an American college campus is in particular, and I don't know, I'm guessing that this campus is...
We'll see what happens when we have dialogue.
But I do know that there are some great professors that do teach the Western canon, which is far too missing from American universities.
Is that American college campuses have become a place where they strive to have everyone look different but think the same.
And in America, university and college tuition is through the roof.
And students and parents have a moral obligation to know who is teaching their kids.
And for these professors that have such a major objection for being on our professor watch list, if they don't say obscene things, then they will not end up on our watch list.
I'm talking about professors that were I'm sorry.
If you're excited about what happened on October 7th, then you deserve to be on a professor watch list, and people should know all about you.
And if people want to fire you as a consequence of that, or if people don't want to go to that school as a consequence of that, then so be it.
And so what was the criticism exactly?
It was...
Sorry, thank you.
If the publicizing of certain ideas is intimidation, then I think that's just laughable.
It is using our own free speech to expose professors who we believe are making America a worse country.
And in fact, I believe in America, higher education has largely posed a threat to Western values.
And I think we need more students and more parents to realize the moral rot that universities have become in the Western world.
So, Turning Point Accountomy mentions the importance of promoting intellectual growth.
How would you respond to critics that such an education system stifles intellectual growth through establishing a fixed set of values, for example, regarding God, life beginning at conception, and two genders, rather than promoting intellectual diversity?
Sure, I mean, at some point, you're going to have to get to a truth claim.
So, even to say that you want intellectual diversity means that you think intellectual diversity matters, but by what standard?
So you have to actually, at some point, say that something is good.
So if someone says, well, the criticism that you're going to tell a kid that something is good is something else, you should have intellectual diversity.
Okay, why?
By what standard?
By what book?
By what scholar?
By what author?
By what worldview?
We believe, as an organization, that the West is the best for many reasons.
In particular, my own personal views.
I'm a Christian.
I'm not ashamed of it.
And Christianity brought to the world things that we all take for granted.
Tom Holland, who actually was educated here and is one of the great classicists and taught himself ancient Greek, he wrote in his book Dominion that even if you hate Christianity, your critique of Christianity is actually using Christianity itself.
And so this idea of intellectual diversity, I totally support that.
And I think that students should read different books and should read different authors.
At some point though, the purpose of education is not to have an endless buffet line for students to sample every bad idea in the world.
It's to point them to the good, the true, and the beautiful.
And I think we've lost what the purpose of education is.
To lead forth out of the cave was the original analogy.
And so at Turning Point Academy, we take the biblical idea to train a child up in the ways in which they will go, and we make no apologies for instituting a belief that...
The defense of universal human equality is a good for all humanity, amongst many other things that you articulated.
So, how would you reconcile the importance of freedom, which is listed as Turning Point USA's mission on your website, with the restrictions on bodily autonomy, which you support, including abortion, trans-affirming health care, and birth control?
And how would you respond to criticism of your limited view of freedom?
Sure.
So first of all, birth control, I don't have that strong of views of.
So I mean, except the fact that I've criticized how actually young people that take young women that take hormonal birth control might have side effects that are not always disclosed to them.
As far as abortion and trans affirming care, I'll get into that in a second.
But I find it laughable, not from you, of course, but some of the people that are always very critical of.
Charlie, why don't you just believe in bodily autonomy?
I'm sorry, didn't you just mandate a vaccine for the last couple years?
I couldn't visit your country for two years because I didn't take a vaccine.
So it's my body, my choice, unless it's...
That was neither safe nor effective, and we all must be very honest about the fact that the public health experts of both of our countries never apologized for the fact that they made you take a vaccine that, by the way, has a lot of side effects for a lot of people in this room, and no one wants to say that.
As a side note, though, all the bodily autonomy people, and you guys can laugh all you want.
It's fine.
All the bodily autonomy people suddenly got really silent when we decided to say, we're going to control your body and control the movement of what you can do.
You can't go to the pub.
You can't go to the local gathering of friends.
You can't go to university.
You can't even go into the UK if you don't have a card.
So that's a fun contradiction for me.
At the same time, there's a difference between freedom or liberty and license.
Liberty is the pursuit of things that allow human beings to flourish at its highest possible potential.
License is not those things.
So on the first thing, you do not have an ability, and I'm sure there will be a question about this, under any agreed-upon Western morality, which is derived from a Christian construct, to murder another human being.
You do not have that freedom.
And so we believe, obviously, because we believe in very basic biology and science, that life begins at conception, and therefore that life deserves universal human rights as applied equally under our laws.
As far as trans-affirming care, as far as if you want to do something over the age of 18, knock yourself out.
you guys actually have been better than our country on this.
You have the Cass Report that our country has lost its mind, where the Cass Report itself And so we all can agree that students or young people that are not yet of age or mature age of 18, of course we limit certain freedoms or liberties for 15-year-olds.
In my country, they can't own guns until they're 18. In my country, they can't even drink until they're 21. In my country, they can't vote until they're 18 in America.
And so until someone is of age, you're going to limit that.
And so I believe that we should all agree that.
So you spoke about vaccines and the COVID-19 vaccine.
How would you respond to accusations about you misusing your platform and purporting misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, including speaking against the COVID vaccine and speculating about deaths caused by it and being briefly banned from Twitter for claiming that hydroxychloroquine was 100% effective in treating the virus?
Well, I'm back on Twitter now, thankfully.
New ownership.
I appreciate the question.
Has anyone asked our public health leaders that question?
Will they apologize for everything they got wrong?
The lockdowns were completely unnecessary.
They should never have happened.
And the young people of the West lost proms, graduation, whatever equivalent you have here in the UK, for no good reason whatsoever.
And you guys can laugh all you want.
But let's look at the data.
Suicide rates of young people in the West went up after COVID.
There's speech delays.
There's a misery problem.
And we locked down the generation of people that needed to be locked down the least that have now bared the consequences the most on top of a hyperinflation crisis, which caused a housing crisis, which has caused a sovereign death crisis.
All for what?
Because we were worried that something that materially was never a greater threat than the seasonal flu to these people in this room was never a greater threat than the seasonal flu.
That is a fact of science, because we have to trust the science.
And again, we can go back and forth, but this is the more important thing.
It was never about trusting the science.
It was about trusting the scientists.
That confirmed this view.
There is something called the Barrington Declaration.
If you don't know what this is, all of you have a moral obligation to know what it is.
The Barrington Declaration was thousands of scientists from around the world that said these lockdowns are doing more harm than good.
And the one thing that we never talked about through all of this, that now the pharma companies magically discovered after they were able to proliferate a vaccine, is early interventions.
Is the fact that if you catch COVID early, what is your vitamin D level?
Let's have a serious conversation about whether or not you're chronically overweight.
In my country, we are a fat country.
Why don't we also say to the American people, and be honest, if you are 50 pounds overweight, you have a much higher likelihood of dying of COVID.
That would be considered to be politically insensitive in America.
So how do I respond to critics?
Honestly, I'm proud of the work that we did during COVID.
I opposed the lockdowns from the beginning.
We talked about early interventions.
We platformed people that were right all along.
And meanwhile, the people that got the most important public policy questions of our time wrong have never felt any sort of criticism.
They've never actually faced justice.
And I think we, the people of the West, deserve an apology from our leaders for all the suffering that they inflicted on the young people of both our countries.
So you've described recently how it used to be 10 vaccines.
Now it's 72 shots for our babies.
Something's not right and our kids are sicker than ever.
How would you respond to criticism that your rhetoric regarding vaccinations is dangerous and irresponsible when considering a global rise in vaccine distrust and deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases, including measles and meningitis?
Well, first of all...
I'm not preventing that.
I think, though, that a robust conversation needs to happen that inoculations have risen across America.
I'll just talk about America.
I know this for certain.
Inoculation and vaccine rates have risen, and chronic diseases are higher than ever, and there is a perplexing rise in a lot of the secondary and third-tier issues.
Of course I'm pro-vaccine.
If you want to get vaccines, we should do it prudently.
We should do it appropriately.
We should do it smartly.
But in the same way, we should also simultaneously respect medical freedom and religious conscience.
The criticism is this.
I'm not a scientist and I don't play one on TV, but also I use human reason and one would say common sense to also ask the very simple question.
The public health authorities got almost every question of COVID wrong.
Why should we continue to delegate trust to them?
Trust is earned.
It is not given.
And so, yeah, look, I'm sure someone's going to ask a question or two about that.
That's fine.
I'm by no means a quote-unquote expert on all that.
But let me also question this.
The experts, they have to now, number one, you have to apologize when you get something really wrong.
And I think you have to get back into the public square and prove to us why we should trust you.
When, for example, in my country, I'm not sure if it was for you guys, we had this thing of six feet to slow the spread.
Anthony Fauci just made it up.
The data shows that he just arbitrarily made it up.
There is not a single public health reason why we had six feet to slow the spread.
Locking down schools.
Actually, what made COVID worse and delayed the inevitable spread.
The only country in Europe that I think was a model was Sweden.
They kept schools open.
They kept restaurants open.
They leaned into herd immunity.
And generally, their statistics were way better than some of the other countries that were correlated to it.
Everyone has the agency to do what they want to see fit, and yes, I do think that there is something troubling when the childhood vaccination schedule goes from 10 shots to 72 shots, some of which are things, for example, hepatitis B. Upon birth in America, I don't know how it is in the UK, within seconds, they will inoculate a child against hepatitis B. Number one, hepatitis B vaccine expired by the age of 13, and there's only two ways to get hepatitis B: through sexual intercourse, or through intravenous drugs, or some other correlated way.
So unless it is a son or a daughter of an active drug user or a drugman, And so those of us that even ask the question, why are we using a hepatitis B vaccine when we can maybe wait until they're 12 or 13 and when they're sexually active?
No, you must do it and you must just trust the science.
Okay, well, that's not good enough for us.
So, Turning Point USA acquired students for Trump in 2019 and worked on targeting students on college campuses, especially ahead of the 2020 election.
However, despite an increase in youth turnout in 2020, Trump's support was worse with young people in several battleground states than 2016.
How would you respond to critics who claim that this failure was partly due to Trump outsourcing youth outreach to Turning Point USA?
How did he do this last election?
Well, I mean, his support was better in youth, but it was still lower amongst youth than the Democrat support was.
We won the youth vote in the state of Michigan.
And we ran, basically, an entire youth operation in 2024.
In fact, anyone can look on ChatGPT, Grok, or Google.
I mean, whatever you want.
We crushed the youth vote.
Even Democrats acknowledge it.
There's story after story after story.
Why are young people moving so far to the right?
And so, will you give me credit for that?
I mean, why do you think that, like, In several key states, even in 2024, amongst young people.
We did anywhere between 10 to 25 points better in the key battleground states.
This is not just conjecture.
It is material fact.
Both young men and young women moved to the right dramatically.
In America, young people are Donald Trump's most loyal cohort, not even baby boomers.
According to the Yale Youth Poll and the Harvard Youth Poll, Donald Trump has actually made the most gains amongst younger voters.
And I guess maybe something we did had something to do with that?
And what do you see as the future of conservatism amongst young people?
I think it's going to be the dominant, God willing, dominant worldview amongst young people in America.
And it's ascendant.
Again, what we are seeing in states, and I don't know if it's the case here in the UK, young men in particular are on pace to be the most conservative generation in history.
And it's an exciting trend, and we're leaning into it.
We see this in the macro trends.
We also see this in micro.
Young women are following suit.
There's kind of two Gen Zs.
There's Gen Z that was basically out of college or near end of college at COVID, and then there was Gen Z that was in high school.
What would the equivalent term be in high school?
Whatever you call it.
Yeah, okay.
And they had their lives obliterated.
Those are the most formative times of their life, 15, 16, 17, 18. They were forced to wear masks.
They had to do school through Zoom.
They saw friends, many of whom that took their life or suicide rates went up exponentially.
And also, on top of that, we had this insane race stuff in America during 2020, otherwise known as Floydapalooza, where we decided to burn our country because a guy drug overdosed on the streets of Minneapolis.
That's true.
He did drug overdose.
It's not just my opinion.
Just read the medical examiner report.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner Report.
So then all of a sudden we decided to commit cultural suicide and throw statues.
By the way, in London they threw a statue into the river or something because we're systemically racist.
I'm sorry, our two countries are the two least racist countries ever to exist in the history of the world?
And you guys should also be thanking the Lord that you have someone like William Wilberforce to look up to, and you should be building statues to Wilberforce, not taking down statues of your history, because it's thanks to Western values that we abolish slavery, and the world is a profoundly better place because of that worldview, and we as conservatives are unafraid to tell that story and that truth.
So you've condemned the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a huge mistake.
Correct.
Why do you believe it was a mistake to pass anti-discrimination legislation?
And what do you think would be a better policy for being treated fairly and equally, which you see as an American principle?
Nothing against the intent, but it was too broadly written and it played into something called disparate impact.
Disparate impact was woven within the Civil Rights Act, and disparate impact basically says if two racial groups have different outcomes, the answer must be racism.
It does not allow any legal nuance.
So there are four components to, quote unquote, the anti-racist regime of America.
I don't pretend to know what goes on in this country.
I could just talk about America.
I'm sure that's fine.
And it's four components.
Affirmative action, critical race theory, DEI, and disparate impact.
Those are kind of the four components.
All of them have their subsection.
The Civil Rights Act led the way to affirmative action, which is weaponized, quote unquote, reverse racism against Asian and white people.
And the Civil Rights Act also blazed the trail for disparate impact as a legal theory.
I'm saying that if black Americans are doing worse in a group, it might not be because of marital differences or cultural differences or single motherhood issues.
It must be racism.
And so because of that, the Civil Rights Act was too broadly written.
It's now being applied in my country as a way to get rid of voter integrity, to get rid of election integrity, to get rid of voter ID.
The Civil Rights Act is also now being applied to put men in female locker rooms.
So the intent, it should have been a single-page or a two-page bill to say that you cannot discriminate against based on the color of somebody's skin, period, end of story.
Instead, we get a multiple hundred-page bill with lots of chapters and lots of lesser-known amendments that created basically a permanent anti-racist bureaucracy within our federal government to go find racism where it doesn't exist and create it in new places where it otherwise did not exist.
So you've described Martin Luther King Jr. as awful, not a good person, even though many conservative commentators have spoken in support of what he says, including his quote, where they will be judged about his children, where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
I liked that statement.
He was right there.
So does his speech and his general ethos not then agree with your views?
No, I've complimented him as well, but I mean, first of all, he was a personally morally flawed man.
And to be fair, a lot of people I sometimes look up to are morally flawed.
But also, I mean, we're all morally flawed.
We're all sinners, I would hope.
Oh, actually, many of you probably don't believe in God, so never mind.
So the...
I don't want to go too deep into this.
and maybe it's very interesting to UK students about MLK, but there is a mythology around MLK that does not warrant the reverence that he gets treated with in America.
Should he be mentioned amongst lots of people in the 20th century that was complicated and at the end of his life advocated for a more communistic view and then actually got away from race blindness and actually got towards race obsession?
He did some great things.
He did some things that were not so great.
In America, though, you must understand, he is looked to as the new founding father.
The main contention that I have with the Civil Rights Act and the Civil Rights Movement and how it ended, not how it started, is that we refounded the country fundamentally.
We cast aside our founding roots and our founding documents of the U.S. Constitution, and we decided to basically usher in the Civil Rights Act as a new anti-racist dogma creed.
And I find something fundamentally wrong with that.
Our birth certificate as Americans is the declaration and the law of the land is tied with the U.S. Constitution.
It was not the Civil Rights Act.
With all of that to say, we have a national holiday to MLK.
We got rid of a national holiday for our first president and our founding father, George Washington.
We used to call it Washington's birthday.
Now we call it President's Day in our country.
So that's just maybe some context to answer that question.
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So you tweeted ahead of the January 6th Capitol attack that Turning Point USA and Students for Trump were sending more than 80 buses of Patriots to D.C. to fight for this president, although it ended up being seven.
Do you see your claims, including that the election was stolen, as contributing to January 6th?
It's somewhat of an irrelevant question, but no, of course not.
In fact, our students were the ones that Didn't even go to the Capitol and peacefully went home.
But, I mean, how deep into January 6th do you want to get?
It wasn't an insurrection by any means whatsoever.
There were some people that acted totally improperly, and they should not assault police officers or break windows.
But there were also a lot of people that walked into the Capitol building and the doors were open for them and they walked between the cued lines that were there and said a prayer.
And these are the people that walk around with pocket constitutions, and they were smeared in the largest witch hunt and manhunt, I should say, the largest manhunt in American law enforcement history that resulted in 1,300 arrests of nonviolent offenders that walked into the people's house in the United States Capitol building, while violent crime rose in almost every major city in the country.
And so, I don't know how much.
You've compared same-sex sexual behaviour to drug and alcohol use and described it as an error and said you don't agree with the lifestyle.
How would you justify these comments whilst also speaking about welcoming gay people into the Conservative movement?
Well, first, we all have flaws.
That's number one.
But number two, how do I justify it?
It doesn't matter what Charlie Kirk believes.
That's a view derived from Scripture.
The Bible talks very clearly about God's natural order.
We see this reflected in the natural law.
Some of my closest friends and closest people that work with me alongside at Turing Point USA participate in a same-sex lifestyle, and that's their own prerogative.
But if you ask me what I believe and why I believe it, it's derived straight from Scripture.
And you've spoken of marriage as between one man and one woman, even whilst polls have consistently shown most Americans as in support of same-sex marriage.
How would you respond to critics regarding your position on this?
I don't derive my morality from up-or-down vote.
How would you respond to criticism that far-right-wing discourse, particularly online, is inflamed by organizations such as Turning Point USA and your rhetoric, even as you condemn attendance of neo-Nazis at your events?
I don't even know how to respond to that.
I mean, how do I respond to critics that I'm inflaming tensions?
If the truth inflames you, you have a problem.
It's not my problem.
What do you see as the role of an institution such as Turning Point USA in shaping national discourse?
And what do you think is next for the organization in terms of what you discuss?
Yeah, I mean, look, we're very known for hopefully what we'll see here, which is respectful dialogue.
We have an open mic on campuses.
I did over 100 hours of campus debates this semester, seen billions of times around the world.
Yeah, look, as far as conservatism, we plan to win.
And for the three conservatives that are here tonight, I hope you guys get your mojo back.
This was once a great country.
I want to see it great again.
You guys are a husk of your former self.
You guys, you can laugh and sneer all you want, but the country that split the atom and invented the steam engine and eradicated slavery and brought common law to the world can do a lot better than this.
And you are...
And for whatever I can do, I hope that this country finds a leader or a group of leaders.
I'm not here to give you political advice.
I hate when foreigners do that to Americans, you guys, whatever you want.
But I do have a wish that the world feels like it's missing something.
It feels like it's missing something when Great Britain or England or whatever politically correct thing I have to say, because I guess England, I can't fly an English flag now, whatever nonsense that is.
Be proud of your heritage.
You've done good for the world.
Stop apologizing.
Get your energy.
Get your vitality.
Get what made England and made Great Britain such a phenomenal place.
I hope you get that back, and I hope that you reject the swan song of multiculturalism and get back to the fundamental truism that a strong Britain means a strong world, and therefore a strong West, and we can stand up for what is good, true, and beautiful.
Would you agree with commentators that your politics have become more conservative in recent years and what's caused this shift?
Yes.
Partially, honestly, getting married and having children, something that I hope all of you do.
Getting married and having children is an objective good thing for yourself and for society and for, of course, your children.
The fact that we're having less children in the West is a very alarming trend.
And as I got married and I started to have a couple kids, I started to realize this is what I'm fighting for.
And I understand the threats against their well-being and their livelihood.
And then also I got more serious about my faith.
So you've spoken today against affirmative action in educational institutions.
How would you propose making excellence in education more equitable for students from disadvantaged backgrounds?
IQ tests.
And do you see equal treatment as possible without considering it?
Just so we're clear, IQ tests don't have anything to do with background.
I mean, meaning like, okay, if you have somewhat of an equal nutritional capacity, it doesn't matter how much you study or you get an IQ, maybe you can get an IQ tutor and boost it by a couple points, but we should bring back IQ tests in the West.
Please continue.
I was just going to say, do you see it as possible without considering any external factors for students when applying for higher education, such as economic background?
Well, external factors can be factored in, but affirmative action isn't that.
at least in America, I don't know how it works here.
Affirmative action in America is...
Great.
We're going to move now to...
Am I going to stand here?
Yeah.
of the discussion.
Thank you.
Yeah, the one.
Okay, thank you.
Can we settle down, please?
We're going to move on to our questions.
Our first question is from Zenocha Zubair from Sydney, Sussex.
Come up and ask a question.
APPLAUSE APPLAUSE I have quite a simple question for you.
Now I know you've debated Dean Withers on Jubilee before.
I was wondering why you now refuse to engage with further debate with him.
Wait, hold on.
First of all, he's coming on my show this summer.
And let me get this straight.
I flew 5,000 miles across the world to have you ask why I'm not going to debate a left-wing YouTuber.
Well, I mean, he continuously tries to get your attention at your campus.
I've debated him twice in the last calendar year.
He's coming on my show this summer.
Let me be clear.
I came to Cambridge to have you ask me that.
I mean, you talk about freedom.
I'm just using my freedom of speech to ask you a simple question.
You seem to be dodging it for some reason.
I've debated him twice in the last year, and he's coming on this summer for a long-form discussion.
But is this what I can expect?
Yeah, he's making videos about you avoiding him on your campus debates.
Right, so let me tell you how this works.
I do a campus event, like at Texas A&M University.
I rent it out.
I'm there for three hours.
He shows up demanding to come up to the mic immediately, cutting in line of other students.
It's not Joe Biden's America anymore where you can just cut in line and get whatever you want.
So therefore, I say, excuse me, Dean, we'll talk at another time.
He makes this YouTube video as if I'm scared to debate him, even though I debated him twice in the last year.
Does that sufficiently answer your question?
Yes, it does.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Our next question.
is from James Loveridge from Anglo-Ruston University.
Thank you.
So, firstly, thank you for coming here, Charlie.
It's nice to meet you.
So, my question is, I am a Conservative and I did back Trump in 2024, but I'm troubled that the GOP refuses to hold him accountable for his personal and legal failings.
And how can we claim to stand for moral values and the Constitution while excusing behaviour that we condemn from the left?
Isn't it the hypocrisy undermining our credibility, especially with the next generation?
What specifically do you have issue with?
Countless things he's done.
The what?
Stormy Daniels.
You know, the bus interview that he put down to Locker Room Talk.
You know, his multiple legal values, filings.
And what would you like to see them do?
And you voted for this man.
No, I can't vote for him.
Whatever, you said you voted or whatever, I don't know.
Plenty of Americans, I don't know, you said you supported him, so...
Is that correct?
You supported him, okay.
No, I'm not saying that.
I supported him on some of his policies and him, but...
I mean, I critique him.
He's a friend of mine.
I critique him.
I don't think Canada should be the 51st state.
We have enough liberals in America.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
cheers.
Next question is from Kai Bevan at Trinity Hall.
So thank you for coming, Charlie.
My question to you, I mean, I'm a medical student, and I'm going to throw out the big A word.
I know you get asked about it a lot, but I want to hear from you what your opinion is on abortion.
Life begins at conception.
But about abortion specifically.
Why do you think abortion is wrong specifically?
Well, you agree murder is wrong?
I agree.
Okay, so this is where we get to the question, right?
Because what is it about murder you say is wrong?
Like, why is murder wrong?
Well, because it's a human being.
Not just because it has consciousness or because it's of a certain age.
Because it's a human.
And what is it that gives human being this moral worth?
Not its consciousness, necessarily.
I didn't say it's consciousness.
I know.
I can imagine it's because it is a human being because it has a soul.
And what is this soul?
Where does this come from?
Exactly.
I mean, again, the Greeks postulated that it is the entirety of your being.
You guys can laugh.
I mean, it's true.
I mean, every civilization has had a different belief, but agreed upon ethical monotheism, which is the creed of the West and what the birth certificate of my country articulates, that every human being is more than just matter, it's more than just a clump of cells, but it also has an invisible element to you that will live beyond you.
Fine.
Ethical monotheism, which is the creed of the West.
And again, the Declaration of Independence mentions God four times.
The founders were explicitly believed, not in a secular morality, but a divinely given one, of at least this idea that there is a God and you are not him.
And let me ask you, what is the first stage of human development?
This is the thing, right?
We can take it from the sperm being generated in the father and the oocyte being generated in the mother, right?
They fuse at conception.
The only thing that happens at conception is these two cells fused.
No, DNA is created.
DNA is not created.
No, that's not true.
The DNA coding at the zygote.
Hold on, time out.
Does a zygote have a unique marker?
Does a zygote have a unique marker?
You have to let me speak.
Answer it, yes or no.
Does a zygote have a unique marker?
Define a unique marker.
Meaning, can you differentiate the DNA coding between the mother and the zygote if you examine it under a deoxyribonucleic acid analysis?
Can you?
Only purely because the addition comes from the father.
Oh, so it is something different.
Charlie, Charlie, DNA is not created.
DNA is not created.
The father has his own genome, the mother has her own genome.
They fuse.
This is why you have the same characteristics, similar ones to your mother, similar ones to your father.
That's why you have similar characteristics to your siblings.
DNA is not created, right?
So when you ask me, where does a human being come from?
I can say to you, it starts at conception, but all conception is these two cells joining, right?
These two cells were created, the mother cells were created long before, they were created when she was a fetus.
So there's none of this DNA being produced, right?
So we can't establish The only thing that happens at conception is these two cells fuse.
Now this idea that that means that for some reason suddenly that moral worth comes in, but it wasn't there before when you had these two cells who had half the DNA, but suddenly there's a Something magical happens at that point.
It's not magical, Charlie.
We know about this.
Well, hold on.
Hold on.
Charlie, Charlie.
Time out.
Hold on.
I promise you, I'm not trying to score points.
I'm not trying to score points on you.
We call it the miracle of life for a reason.
We've not been able to yet replicate human life development outside of the womb.
We call it the miracle of life because, yes, it's something beautiful.
The ability to form a new human.
It's magical.
You say magical.
Oh, it's beautiful.
It's an incredible thing that happens, of course.
But it's not incredible in the sense we don't know what's going on.
There's no new DNA coming out of nowhere.
Hold on, but time out.
Isn't there a separate DNA, though, than the mother?
Yes, from the father.
Okay, yes, but it's not the father's DNA either.
A new coding is created.
You are a blend of the two.
So when did your life begin?
When did your life begin?
I mean, again, this comes from what you define as where life starts.
You can say life starts at conception, but I'm telling you, I believe that's just an arbitrary point, right?
That's just the moment these two cells fuse.
Now, you say about this mother thing, so the way DNA is arranged in a cell is it's arranged in chromosomes.
Chromosomes are paired up, so you have one from the mother, one from the father, typically, in a healthy individual, right?
Now, you can take those maternal chromosomes out and you can find that this is who the person's mother is.
And you can do the same with the father.
Now, the reason you are different to your mother and father is because some of those chromosomes express genes that are different from each other.
And so those genes interact and that's what gives rise to you, right?
There's no space for any kind of moral framework to come into that until you consider that a human being is capable of consciousness and of suffering.
But unless you, if you take that out of the equation, these two DNA, you know, whatever they call molecules, right?
These two DNA molecules are fusing.
That does not suddenly flip a switch that attributes moral worth to that individual.
I'm just saying, I'm not trying to score points.
By what moral standard do you believe that?
I believe that if an individual is capable of suffering, then it's wrong.
Now, can I explain my opinion on abortion, just so you can understand?
I would agree, as many reasonable people would, that at nine months...
Unless you have some extreme circumstances.
But for an elective abortion seems a bit radical to me.
But it also seems radical to say that a woman who has just, you know, the cells have just fused, to deny her of an abortion also seems wrong to me.
Because that, you know, that zygote is not capable of suffering, as far as we know.
So you're, again, by what moral standard?
Is that just your opinion?
Where did you get that moral standard from?
Because suffering is a bad thing.
We all know suffering is a bad thing.
That's an objective fact, right?
Okay, so you do believe in objective morality.
I believe that suffering is an objectively negative feeling.
So if you can't feel it, is it okay?
What do you mean if you can't feel it?
If you can't feel the pain, is it okay to inflict the pain?
In the sense that if no one's suffering from it, if you have a scenario where nobody is suffering from something, then yes, of course.
There's no moral...
So let me just make sure I understand this correctly.
That if it doesn't affect their well-being, so dementia patients that don't know who they are or where they're from, can we execute dementia patients because they're confused about their well-being?
Can you imagine a scenario?
Or Alzheimer's patients.
Alzheimer's patients don't really know much about anything.
Can we schedule them for execution because they can't technically suffer?
Can I respond?
So can you imagine a scenario where we lived in a society where we killed people when they underwent dementia?
Suffer from dementia.
We're incapable of suffering.
And we killed them, right?
That would not, that does not...
of still suffering involved.
Imagine living your life thinking, I could get dementia and suddenly I'd be killed by my state.
Imagine a world where you slaughter a million babies every year in America.
Charlie!
Charlie, it's not slaughter.
That's the problem.
Hold on.
It's a forcible removal from the umbilical cord.
Of another human life.
Again, we have clarity but not agreement.
Biologically, you know that your entire coding began at conception.
Your coding.
No, no, that's what I'm denying.
I disagree with that.
When those two cells fused together, to use your terminology, that is where the process of human...
In the interest of time, can we bring this question to a close?
The process of human development objectively begins at that moment.
Therefore, those human beings are deserving of human rights.
Would we keep going or do you want to?
Can I finish?
Yeah, you can finish.
The process of development begins from the moment the sperm is being generated in the That's just a point you've taken.
It makes perfect sense because that is when your journey as a human being, when the sperm and egg were separate, you were not yet a fused human being.
You were not created uniquely in any image.
DNA existed.
Your DNA existed.
Your DNA did not exist.
It's like saying that we have a full car just because we have all the parts.
It was not yet put together until conception happens and the zygote was By the way, thank you guys for supporting it.
We really appreciate it.
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The next question tonight is from Rudy Ellis-Jones from Emanuel College.
Hello, thank you for coming to today's talk.
So my question, as someone studying archaeology and biological anthropology, I've learned that moral codes and social norms have always been fluid, shaped by time, culture, power.
So many ancient and recent societies embraced same-sex relationships and even the idea of third genders well before Western conservatism even existed.
So when you claim that modern conservative values represent some kind of universal, objective moral truth, like you said on your chair over there, aren't you just defending a selective, historically recent ideology that erases most of human history and targets people who have always been part of it?
No, but can you point to me of a...
Can you point to me a great power that endorsed same-sex marriage?
Not cohabitation, but marriage.
Ancient Mesopotamia.
As marriage.
As marriage that existed.
Recognized by the state.
100%.
And how did that work out for them?
It worked out perfectly fine.
It was an accepted norm of society.
Okay, I still think it's wrong.
Okay, swiftly moving on.
So you said it was based on scripture and you believe that there are moral, objective, universal truths.
Yes, there are.
Murder is wrong today and murder was wrong 2,000 years ago.
Right, okay, that's not same-sex, but fair.
I see your point.
There are moral truths that are transcendent of time, place, and matter.
Okay, but so just to clarify, you believe that this is in the Bible, this is laid out in the Bible, that man shall not sleep with man, and so therefore it's also repeated throughout the New Testament as well.
In the book of Matthew, Jesus reaffirms the biblical standard for marriage.
Okay, so I'm going to make two very, very quick points.
So the first, so if we look at the Old Testament in isolation, just to start off with as an example.
So let's look at Exodus 35.2, which suggests that if you work on the Sabbath, you should be put to death.
If you look at Leviticus 11.7, It suggests that if you have pork, you should be put to death.
If you plant two crops side by side, you should be stoned by your entire village.
If you wear a suit, which you are wearing now, that contains two different fibres intertwined into the same jacket, you should be burned at the stake by your own mother.
Now, following that rationale, in Leviticus 18.22, and it states that man shall not sleep with man, why aren't we burning ourselves at the stake as well?
Why aren't we stoning ourselves to death?
Do you care to address my main contention that Christ affirmed biblical marriage in the book of Matthew?
And can you tell me the difference between the ceremonial, the moral, and the ritual law?
And then finally, also, tell me about Christianity, the difference between the new and the old covenant, or are you just going to cherry-pick certain verses of ancient Israel that do not apply to new Christianity?
Fair, fair.
So we'll look at two points then.
So firstly, if we look at the Old Testament, we can see the kind of inconsistencies there.
We've already touched upon that, right?
That makes sense.
Second, you mentioned the point of Jesus and Christ.
He never mentioned anything to homosexuality at all.
Well, hold on a second.
He affirmed biblical marriage as one man and one woman.
He said a man shall leave his mother's house.
Romans, right?
In the New Testament.
No, in Matthew.
That is not correct.
In the New Testament.
In the New Testament.
Well, Romans is also in the New Testament.
Secondly, in Romans 1, the Apostle Paul talks negatively about homosexuality.
Explicitly.
Also, homosexuality is repeated in the book of Titus and in the book of Jude as not being favorable as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Not even talking about the Old Testament verses.
There are three types of the 613 Levitical laws.
And you, you know, of course, in your own way, cherry-pick some of them.
We do not live under the ceremonial.
We do not live under the ritual.
But we do live under the moral.
There's only ten of the moral that we as Christians believe we're bound to.
Some believe nine, which of course is the Decalogue.
And so none of those that you mentioned we as Christians believe that we live under.
However, we do look at what Christ articulated as the biblical standard of marriage.
And we can also look to church tradition for this as well.
And the church has had a tradition for well over 2,000 years.
Even myself as a Protestant acknowledges that tradition is marriage between one man and one woman.
Fair point.
But, okay, say we put aside the Old Testament for now.
We'll put that aside and the inconsistencies there, and we'll look purely at the New Testament following your rationale, okay?
Now, when you say that Christ lays specifically, and the New Testament states specifically that man shall not sleep with man, I'd like to point out a linguistic error on that point.
I did not say that.
I said the biblical marriage was affirmed, and then Romans 1 did talk negatively about the action of homosexuality.
But ultimately, that affirmation comes from eight lines in there that suggest that man shall not sleep with man.
Yes, of course, yes.
The Old Testament and New Testament It wasn't just enough to say that you shall, you know, man shall strike eye for eye.
It's that you shall turn the other cheek, that you shall love your enemy.
Christ's moral standard was much more even elevated than that of the Israelites and the Hebrews.
I'm going to ask you whose Bible, okay?
Now, your Bible that you use currently is written in the English language, right?
Correct?
Yeah, the King James Version, yes, thanks to Tyndale.
Yeah, well, exactly.
It's written in the English language, which in itself is only, say, 500 years old.
Now, but the Christianity in itself, say, is 2,000 years old or even older.
Yeah?
Correct?
Now, which means that the Bible was originally written not in English, but in ancient Greek.
Koinye Greek.
Huh?
Koinye Greek.
Yeah, correct.
Now, if we look at the Greek terminology.
And man.
Yes, and Jesus spoke Aramaic.
You could translate things.
You acknowledge that.
Well, we translate things, but translations are linguistically ambiguous.
As a former classicist, I know that language can't be translated directly.
So, for example, if we look at the translation of certain words into man, so I've got two words here.
so I've got malakoi which means essentially soft which isn't necessarily directly saying a gay man and then we've got asana koitai, which essentially means prostitutes.
Now, if we look at things linguistically, we can pick apart the Bible and say that actually, it wasn't saying man shall not sleep with man, it's saying man shall not sleep with prostitutes, which is an entirely different linguistics.
My contention is completely New Testament focused.
But you said man shall not speak another man.
So you're talking about Romans 1. Well, actually, in Romans 1, it was actually women sleeping with women.
So you got your verses wrong.
In Romans 1, Paul is prophesying about the end of the world.
And he's saying that in the end times, woman will like, with woman like, and man will, I think it might say man will like, man will like.
You have to get the verses specifically.
But it is agreed upon, and you can agree.
This is why tradition is important.
And I even say this as a Protestant, is that we believe that Scripture is very important.
but also look to tradition.
Church tradition has had an unbroken chain affirming matrimony, holy matrimony being one man, one woman, And so I'm not even sure your contention, your point.
Are you saying that the Bible doesn't affirm marriage as one man, one woman?
Are you saying church tradition doesn't affirm marriage as one man, one woman?
The Bible doesn't affirm.
That is completely nonsense.
It's a linguistic error.
But Christ our Lord, which is the standard, he affirms this idea that you will leave your father's home.
Going back to Genesis 12 and this idea of Abraham leaving his father's home, and you will cleave to your wife.
That it will be called one.
In fact, this idea of a new creation, which is something that is then used by the Apostle Paul to describe the church of Christ and the church being the bride of Christ with Jesus.
So I'm not even sure your contention.
But you're just avoiding my point.
I'm saying the Bible that we have today, I acknowledge that.
Well, hold on.
But what about specifically in Matthew or in the book of Romans?
But in order for you to be correct, you mean the church fathers translated it wrong when they were within like 50 years of this.
In order for your contention to be correct, you have to say that the early church fathers that wrote the early letters to the church, they were translating it wrong and the tradition they established was wrong.
So by then we can lean on tradition and scripture.
So when you get tradition plus scripture, you get something that is authentic, that is real, and that is...
We've gone back thousands of years to ancient Mesopotamia.
But understand, they all spoke Greek, they wrote Greek, and they spoke Aramaic.
So, for example, when they were writing the early Gospels, the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they were obviously writing in Greek.
They knew that language.
So in Matthew, when they were writing Greek, and then the early church fathers...
We have a 2,000 unbroken chain.
I think you would irrefutably say that it was the teachings of Christ for one man and one woman.
Because the church tradition has been unbroken for 2,000 years and they derived it from scripture of that original language.
You can't argue that.
That makes sense.
I mean, if we agree to disagree, then why don't we look at biology?
So you know better than the church fathers?
No, I'm not saying I know better than the church fathers.
What I'm saying is, linguistically, there is undeniably an error, regardless of what you say.
From our lens, maybe, but not from the people when they were making these traditions of the time.
I agree.
They may have got that right, but that may not have been their original meaning.
What we're saying is the meaning has been warped over time because societal and cultural context, such as the British Empire.
Can we start bringing this question to a close, please?
It can be, but that is why tradition matters, because the tradition, they understood the context.
Tradition is context-dependent.
Well, yes and no, because of course tradition is, but if the tradition lasts for 2,000 years, then we look back as to how did they get to that conclusion, how did they reach that verdict.
And if that verdict is in alignment with what we see in Scripture, it means that their verdict was correct in Scripture.
They never reached that verdict.
as I have historically pointed out.
All of the major church councils, Well, no, no.
I'm talking about like 300 and 400 and 500.
Which in the scale of 2,000 years is nothing.
No, but they set this unbroken chain.
We've had an unbroken chain in a course.
That says that marriage is one man and one woman.
The church has never wavered on this truth.
Noted by the British Empire under British form of Christianity.
I'm talking all the way back to like 200 or 300.
The idea of biblical Christianity goes back to the early, early times of the church when it was a scattered, persecuted church well before King Justinian and well before the Eastern Roman Empire.
Well before mass conversions.
When it was a persecuted church, the church believed in one man and one woman because they got it from the scripture itself.
Do you want to keep going?
Can we move on to the next question, please?
Thank you.
Our next question is from Damzit Wimela Sena from Lucy Cavendish College.
Thank you.
Hello, Charlie.
Thank you for being here.
Just before I start with my question, I wanted to address something you said earlier.
On sort of Western Christian values being the reason for the abolishment of slavery globally.
I'm not sure whether you know this.
I've seen you repeating this quite often.
I'm a practicing Buddhist and it was actually Buddhism, Buddhist emperors, Emperor Ashoka of India, who first abolished slavery globally.
So I would sort of ask you to sort of look at other You did it globally?
The Buddhists had that much span of influence?
Oh yeah, within India.
Okay, I'll look into it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So first of all, my first question, or my only question is, you've advocated and applauded the reducing and removing of public funding for universities on the grounds they promote ideological biases.
Given that universities play a critical role in driving national innovation, research, and upward mobility, especially through federally funded grants, how do you reconcile this position with the broader societal value that higher education institutes offer?
Well, they can, but in Harvard's case, for example, who's getting their funding pulled, they have a $50 billion endowment.
Just so we are clear, in pounds, that would be like, what, $42 billion, $45 billion?
I mean, I'm trying to learn the conversion rate here.
I mean, it's an extraordinary amount of money.
They can either use their endowments to fund it, and if you have certain behavior and certain practices, then you should not get federal funding.
Harvard is in direct violation of the United States Supreme Court fair admissions case, which says you cannot discriminate people based on the color of their skin.
Go ahead.
But isn't the whole point of it?
You can't use endowments like that.
The point of an endowment is to manage a fund through perpetuity.
Cambridge has an endowment, and that endowment allows professorships to be funded, to allow for research into sciences.
That's the whole point of an endowment.
Hold on.
You just said it funds research into sciences.
That's what they should do with their monstrosity of an endowment.
Yeah, but the endowment is...
They have a $50 billion endowment.
Even like a podunk money manager in America can earn a 7-10% investment in the markets the last couple of years.
That's $5 billion of returns that that endowment could then reinvest in whatever they want.
Instead, Harvard has become a hedge fund with a radical school attached.
And I think that's very wrong for US taxpayers to continue to subsidize.
For example, like a lot of conservatives, Peter Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford.
Ronald Reagan studied sociology.
A lot of them did study liberal arts, and you keep undermining these august institutions, which have provided a lot for society.
Like society's backbones have been universities and higher learning institutes, and yet you keep attacking them.
Well, they used to be largely, but again, I don't want to speak too much about this country, but...
You know Peter Thiel, after he graduated Stanford, wrote an entire book criticizing college and then paying people not to go to college?
So Peter Thiel, who spoke at this very school, and you guys had a great conversation with him, do you know that he believes college is such a scam?
He would pay people $100,000 a year for 20 years straight not to go to college?
So not exactly a good argument in your favor.
Peter Thiel, who got a philosophy degree, made billions of dollars, and has now forked over tens of millions of dollars for people not to go to U.S. universities and colleges.
But it's not just Peter Thiel.
I know, but you mentioned him.
I didn't.
But to complete the point is that, yes.
Look, in America, there are far too many people going to college.
We need people to become welders, electricians, people that work with their hands.
There is a major trade deficit problem in the United States.
We have 11 million well-paying jobs that we cannot find enough labor for.
And instead, we have a lot of people going to university.
To go study North African lesbian poetry.
It might sound good, but it doesn't necessarily, A, either develop the content of the character or the development of the soul, and B, it does not necessarily also give you the skills necessary.
Some college is good for you.
I'm a big proponent of Hillsdale College.
Guys, can you please be quiet?
I believe Hillsdale College is America's greatest college, and I'm a big proponent of that.
But I would ask a question.
In your own words, what do you believe the purpose of college is?
It's critical engagement.
But coming back to your point on lesbian poetry or whatever.
North African lesbian poetry.
North African lesbian poetry.
So in the morning I actually had a lecture on development policy.
And one of the key authors on sort of development economics is Nussbaum, who talks about how liberal arts sort of engages you critically.
And one could argue, even North African lesbian poetry, I don't think that's a degree.
I think that's just a module within a degree.
Maybe.
Yeah.
That makes you engaged.
The fact you don't know shows how rotten to the core universities have become.
You're taking one example and telling conservatives and hoards of young people that college is a scam.
College isn't a scam.
I mean, I took my mom down to a pub just down the road where Watson and Crick announced DNA.
If college is a scam, then DNA wouldn't have been discovered.
Cancer research...
Yes, you're right.
At this specific university, you guys split the atom.
You had Sir Isaac Newton.
You had some of the greatest minds of the West.
I don't know about what's happening here, and I'm not going to criticize it.
But at most colleges in the West, they've gone away from places of inquiry and appreciation of what is good and what is beautiful and into this incessant oppression Olympics of trying to deconstruct the core canon that is our birth certificate.
I don't know if that's happening here.
That's not true, though.
In America, it is objectively true, okay?
It isn't true.
No, first of all, they removed Western civilization as a core course in Stanford in the 1990s.
They tried to bring it back with petitions and the university said, "No, teaching Western civilization is racist." I talked to some students earlier in the English department and they said, hey, I'm studying Shakespeare.
I said, that's refreshing because in a lot of US schools, they don't teach Shakespeare because he's called racist.
you'd be surprised at how wretched to the core some of these colleges have become in America.
If you look at the Global Innovation Index, They're number two on the Global Innovation Index.
China is somewhere near 13. There is a value in liberal arts, yet you're criticizing it.
Yes, and I'm going to keep on criticizing it.
Also, the vast majority of liberal arts graduates do not respect freedom of speech.
That is an empirical pull.
They increasingly do not have reverence or gratitude for the United States of America.
They don't care about the core values of the U.S. Constitution.
If you want to go to college, that's fine.
But in our country, The kids that do graduate, half of them end up getting jobs that do not require any sort of college degree.
There are all these made-up degrees.
In America, I know it's different than the experience you might be having here.
Your tutoring system here is objectively great.
I'm glad you guys have it.
The class sizes in America are 400 to 500 students, sometimes per introductory course.
To go hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, study things that don't matter to find jobs that do not exist.
And so let me just make one final point, is that, of course, some people should be going to college, but generally in the United States of America, it has become a racket of debt, it has become a burden, and a place where we're actually not putting our best and brightest into the job field itself to be equipped for the jobs of the future.
Instead, we have a lot of baristas at Starbucks with philosophy degrees.
You also mentioned indoctrination.
As per the Oxford Dictionary's definition of indoctrination, it means that you take a belief and you can't
lack critical thought in deciding what is thought in schools.
Again, I'm not using Cambridge as the school that I think of, but in America, we have millions of people that go to these massive state schools that have humanities departments, that are not reading the great books, that do not have a tutoring system, that are unfortunately laced with the most anti-Western thought imaginable.
I don't really quite following what one thing has to do with the other, why 3,000 chapters has something to do with your indictment.
Maybe you can clarify, but I think we're out of time.
You can clarify, but then we'll be fine.
In general.
Colleges should be a place that lift you up to what is good, true, and beautiful.
To study the great things that have been, to develop your soul, and develop your character.
Character in Greek literally means like tattoo, etched within you.
Far too often, colleges create ungrateful, pessimistic, and nihilistic revolutionaries that want to tear down what was before and instead have no alternative to build the future, and the West is suffering because of it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I disagree, but thank you very much.
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Learn more about TikTok's contribution to the U.S. economy Our next question is from Archie McIntosh at Jesus College.
applause applause applause applause It's good to meet you, Charlie.
I hope you can understand the first rule.
I'm a little nervous.
There's a very real chance I could wake up tomorrow, front page of YouTube.
Charlie Kirk owns Man Bun Idiot with facts and logic.
It destroys.
It destroys.
So my question is, I agree that stable monogamous relationships often produce the best outcomes for society, but if that structure really works for everyone, And why do so many marriages still end in divorce, even among people who generally try to make it work?
And just one final framing there.
If you believe in free markets because they are decentralized and they adapt to reality without top-down control, and given the individual ability to form healthy long-term pair bonds very significantly with factors like genetics and ecologically calibrated detachment styles, Why do you reject top-down control in economics, but not extend that same rejection to human behavior in terms of marriage?
Okay, so the first one, the second law of thermodynamics answers your question, is that it's the law of decay.
Societies tend to decay against the roots that created them.
For example, as a side note, here in this country, you guys invented the idea of free speech.
You brought it to the world.
You guys do not have free speech in this country anymore.
30 people a day are arrested in the UK for inflammatory social media posts.
Someone by the name of Lucy Connolly is currently facing prison time for a Facebook post that was critical of migrants.
It is normal, unfortunately, for civilizations to get away from how they once operated and how they once were.
Now, to your question, does that answer the first part of your question?
You were saying, why do they get away from monogamy?
I want to make sure I'm answering your question.
I would say I don't feel that that's a full answer.
Okay, so you're asking why do they get away from what works?
Is that correct?
Yes, yes.
Well, why do societies make this change once they become more prosperous?
Oh, yeah, okay.
I mean, because prosperity leads to degeneracy, for sure.
That would be the answer.
And so once you are prosperous, you tend to no longer have the moral guardrails or the limitations.
Let's just say you no longer have delayed gratification because you have instant gratification, because you have a surplus of goods, and then you have a decline of a transcendent moral order.
The second part of the question, can you remind me, please, what the second question was?
Yeah.
About markets?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, well, for example, I believe in intervention in markets if there is something that is improper morally.
So, for example, I do not believe that you should be able to scam your neighbor or have misleading advertising because I believe in a transcendent moral standard, and the same goes for my personal views on marriage.
Okay, so I think we largely agree on the foundation.
I'd like to propose something that you might like to think about.
So firstly, I absolutely acknowledge...
Again, there's strong data showing the independence of socioeconomic factors.
Broken homes are some of the strongest predictors of poor life outcomes.
We totally agree.
And even, I'm not sure if many people here are aware of this, but if you track as countries become more socially egalitarian, somewhat surprisingly, rates of female depression and anxiety also spike disproportionately.
I think one of the problems here is that when you try and impose more absolutism, inevitably, again, due to variance in attachment issues, due to industrialized culture, absent parents, screens, raising kids, around 50% of adults in the West develop attachment disorders, which make it very difficult to maintain long-term pair bonds.
And then additionally, you have things like variation of ketocin receptors, density and shape, also invasive pressin.
There are going to be, even if there's 5% of people who feel that these rules really do not fit them, they will push back.
And this will create ideologies that then grow into more wider appealing ideologies, which then leads to the change.
I think this is what happened in the sexual revolution.
It started with a push for female autonomy.
And then it was almost morphed into a really exaggerated expression of pushing for maximizing individual freedom.
And I think that when you try and impose moral absolutism this way, And I think if you were to, as someone with a platform, instead say, hey, monogamy is great, it works best for most people, but I also understand there are some people it doesn't work so well for.
More people would hear the message that you want to push.
Okay, thank you for that.
I've actually never gotten that question before.
It's very thoughtful.
Would you say you're against moral absolutism then?
Yes, yes I would.
Are you against that absolutely?
No, I'm very open to having my mind changed.
So it's not an absolute thing?
Well, I'm against moral absolutism.
Are you against moral absolutism?
Absolutely.
No.
Okay, so then you're consistent.
So it's all just kind of, it's preference, not...
And you could just basically do whatever you prefer.
There is no transcendent moral order.
Well, I think what you're doing there is slightly unfairly putting me into a loop, because I'm very open to having my mind changed.
What I'm saying, though, is that by definitionally, and this is something that will keep on coming back, you must choose what moral standard we live by.
I'm very clear as to what moral standard.
The lie of the West, of modernity, the last 30 years, is that we're going to have you live and let live, and there will be no moral standard.
That itself is a moral standard, and it's a really bad one.
And to your point, that yes, it creates more suffering, it creates more despair.
No, I disagree with what you say, and I respect the heart of which you're saying it.
I will say that I have a moral obligation not to accommodate when people fall short, but instead try to lift them up towards the standard that is true and that I know that works.
So where I'd push this is that I'd ask you, you describe people falling short when they fail to engage in long-term monogamy.
What do you think causes that?
Why do you think some people struggle?
Many reasons.
Economic is one of them, but the biggest is the death of religion and the death of Christianity in the West.
As America, I'll just talk about America.
The UK is unfortunately far less churched than America.
But as America has become less churched, so many of these social ills rise.
So one thing I would say, I study the evolution of behavior, in particular sexual romantic behavior.
If you track all the different hunter-gatherer cultures that we can study, and we track how agriculture shapes things, you see that ecological conditions really reliably predict the prevalence of monogamy, certain marriage systems.
And what I think is what we refer to as attachment issues.
They seem to be an ecological calibration to an environment.
In environments that are more unstable, it's less optimal for an individual to grow up with a tendency to rely on long-term pair bonds.
And I think there's a mismatch with the modern world, again, coming back to industrialization.
There are so many people who raise kids as absent parents.
Daycare is massively linked to attachment issues.
This then causes people to struggle to bond long-term.
And then again, coming back to the genetic part.
There's, again, real research showing that especially vasopressin mutations and oxytocin mutations, some people really just do not have the proclivity for this.
What brings stability?
Because you say stability is a good thing.
And what would bring stability?
So, first of all, I would say we had what you might consider stability in the previous century, and then it became unstable.
Why?
I'm saying because moral, absolute, simple was imposed.
Moral absolutism was lost.
You see, modernity rose.
We started to teach our kids moral relativism, and we got rid of moral absolutes.
So it's the opposite.
So why was it lost?
Was it lost because people stopped pushing from top down?
Why was it lost?
That's a question for far smarter minds.
I can only tell you that it was.
In America, it's honestly one of the worst decisions, just worst ideas ever, which is modern feminism, largely from Betty Friedan's feminist critique, feminist mystique, I'm sorry, feminist mystique, And it has led to the women of the West being the most miserable, most depressed, most suicidal, most prescription drug-addicted cohort on the planet.
And I think we need to appropriately challenge feminism and tell young women that it's okay, in fact it's courageous, to get married and have children again.
I think it would solve a lot of our problems.
Well, I've been told to, very brilliant.
Thank you.
Next question is from Tilly Middlehurst at Fitzwilliam College.
Oh, I'm a feminist.
My question is about the role of women, though.
What should women's role in public and private life look like, and what are the material benefits of that?
Well, thank you for that.
Can I take it?
I don't even want to take this detour, but can we both agree on what a woman is?
Yes.
An adult human female is a biological state of being that is also socially experienced.
Can I please elucidate just one example of that social experience?
Yeah, I was going to answer your question, but sure, go ahead.
Yeah, okay, okay.
So let's say you're a member of a tribe, and in that tribe you have the biological female anatomy, and in order to become a woman in that tribe you have to also get a tattoo.
That's a social experience that's mapped onto biological reality.
So can a woman have a prostate?
Can a woman have a prostate?
Biologically speaking, a woman is an adult human female that has a biological reality, but it's also a social experience, right?
It's super easy.
Can a woman have a prostate?
As per my definition of a woman, I would say that people who have a prostate are biologically male, but they can sometimes be socially treated as women.
Okay, got it.
So women can have prostates, got it.
Okay, so you're a feminist that actually isn't just fighting for women, you're also fighting for men.
So, yes, yeah.
Men also experience harms from patriarchy, but I argue...
Yeah, sure, go ahead.
So men also experience harms from patriarchal domination, but I would argue that those harms come from that system of domination itself.
In the same way, for example, this isn't a threat, but if I reached across and punched you in the face, then my hand might hurt.
Right, so are we understanding that there are patterns of power?
So I would also fight for the rights of men as a feminist, just as I would fight for the rights of women.
Sure.
Do you think women are happier than they were 40 years ago?
I think that women report more stress and dissatisfaction today, not because they have more rights or because of feminism, but because they're under dual pressure to both excel professionally and also because of the domestic labour in homes that is structured around outdated expectations.
So for example, studies like the OECD's Better Life Index show that women's life expectancy, education levels, professional achievements have risen in countries with higher gender inequality.
So I would argue that what you're calling unhappiness is actually Yeah.
That's really rich.
I didn't know women not to complain 50 years ago.
That's funny.
So, hold on a second.
Why are suicide rates going up more for women?
Materially, women are killing themselves more.
Why is that?
I think that even if both men and women have become unhappier, men's suicide rates have risen as well, and that's also been exponential.
Can you at least concede that feminism offers only one potential explanation?
There could be also other explanations.
Of course, obviously, but feminism is the glaring thing in front of us where we have fertility rates down, we have marriage rates down, we have unhappiness up, and we did something in the 1960s out of the universities of Bredi Friedan and Gloria Steinem and all these feminists that basically said, You're trapped in a home, go get a job, freeze your eggs, take birth control, and all of a sudden women are way unhappier than they were 40 years ago.
And I just have to ask the question, why is that?
Is it working?
And maybe there are biological differences between men and women that we should respect and that deep down a lot of women want to get married and have children.
In fact, we should applaud it and we should support it and we should say, it means nothing if you're going to be a CEO of some shoe company or be some banker in London.
What matters?
If you raise children and you have something to pass down long after you're gone.
I think I would bring two points to that.
The first one is just really simple.
I would argue something else.
I would say that it's an economic policy that has very little to do with the social acceptance of alternative lifestyles.
I would say that we can recognise that income inequality across a vast swathe of Western countries has increased which causes all kinds of socialills, a lack of social cohesion, housing price growth doesn't correspond with wage growth, monopolies increasingly become kind of emboldened to interfere with politics and monopolies don't prioritise social health either.
I think that those offer more compelling reasons for a decline in happiness than an increase in freedoms.
On an intuitive basis, generally speaking, people want more freedom, not less.
Okay, so if that's true, do you agree that the happiest women in the West are married with kids?
I would have to look into it, but I think there are certain...
The women with kids are not the ones tearing down statues, right?
They're the ones that actually have obligations.
Does tearing down statues correspond to some kind of smiles per capita data set that I wasn't aware of?
Again, it's like, it's a little bit of a one-liner.
But the happy and the grateful.
Okay.
But as a side note, you would agree objectively, study after study, survey after survey, that the women of the West that are married and have children, especially a lot of children, are far happier than even the ones that earn more money correlated at the same age.
So I also don't think that happiness is a very good metric, and neither do you, because you think gay people shouldn't just pursue happiness by being gay.
They have other moralistic considerations to be making.
So I don't think smiles per capita is a particularly convincing way to measure whether or not we should encourage women to be autonomous.
I think we should maximize agency within a fair system that has reasonable parameters because it's expedient, it's good for the economy, it's logical, it's the moral thing, because if we can't prove the material harms, we shouldn't discourage it.
And also self-reported studies is a really flawed way to do psychology.
It's the week before my university exams right now, and I'm standing here explaining the basic methodology behind survey collection in sociology, which you don't even think is a real subject, to Charlie Kirk.
If I took one of those surveys right now, I'd check extremely miserable.
No, I'm kind of making a joke.
I mean, like, that's an important point, though, is that the women in the West have it the best in the world, and yet they're way unhappier than women of Sub-Saharan Africa.
There's something fundamentally wrong here.
Because the women of Sub-Saharan Africa have something that a lot of women in the West do not have.
The women in the West have cats, and they have good jobs.
And the women of Sub-Saharan Africa, they have a belief in the divine, and they have kids.
And maybe there's a biological undercurrent that is keeping a lot of women from realizing their full potential.
And so without reading your phone and just like, you know, connecting.
Well, it's fine.
Sure, then you can answer without it.
Fair enough.
Would you agree that it's a good thing that more women get married and have children in the West?
I would ask you, would you say that a sub-Saharan African woman who's experienced female genital mutilation and checks extremely happy in a survey, and I also would check extremely happy in a survey, who do you think would be objectively more happy, even if they both check the same answer?
Again, so if you want to talk about how Islam mistreats women, we could talk all day long.
I'm all for that.
Me too.
Okay, good.
So we agree.
Absolutely.
We agree on many, many things.
That we should shut off Muslim immigration to the UK, right?
We totally agree.
I think that all religious fundamentalism is bad, and if you take that logic, we should also not allow evangelical Christians in the UK either.
Hold on.
Hold on a second.
Hold on.
That's funny.
Hold on.
Can you show me a single...
Show me what would your example...
America.
Oh, really?
Yes.
We had a female woman vice president.
We had a female vice president, a female speaker of the house.
Women earn more than men in America.
In Rwanda, female representation in government supersedes the UK by quite a lot.
Do women get treated better in Rwanda?
I might be super off of this.
Like, is Rwanda Islamic?
Like, I'm not totally sure.
I don't think it is.
Like, is it?
Like, I don't know, actually.
It's not.
So, again, we're just talking about Islam.
It's a little bit of a side note.
But you must be morally clear, because you brought up female gender mutilation, which is a teaching of the Islamic faith.
But as a side note, again, this is very important, which is I'm not here to require you to do anything or not.
I'm making a simple observation, which is The women of the West are miserable.
And they're miserable for a reason.
Because we've told them to suppress how they are made by God and pursue something else and get a bunch of trinkets and get a bunch of promotions and they end up at 38 years old with a big flat in London and they're miserable.
And we should tell them to stop freezing their eggs and start finding their partner earlier and have lots of babies.
Yeah, okay.
I think I'd bring two just final points to this.
First one is just really intuitive, right?
Which is that if you actually care about women's happiness, then the solution is to structurally support them.
That means universal childcare, shared legally enforceable parental leave.
And in Nordic countries where women have high workforce participation and also some state support, they report higher life satisfaction than in more conservative countries, including America.
So if your metric is happiness...
You just told me they're BS.
So are satisfaction surveys bullshit or not?
Because you told me they're bullshit.
Do you acknowledge satisfaction surveys or not?
You just told me that they're BS.
Do you think we can use that as data?
I don't think that it's the only sole data set.
You told me they're so flawed and you self-report.
Okay, by the macro self-satisfaction data.
I am correct.
And you are right.
When you have paid family leave, you are happier.
I'm actually a proponent of that.
At Turning Point USA, we pay for six months when somebody has a child.
I think there's a lot of agreement we can have on that.
We need to encourage having more children.
I think the Hungarian child policy is phenomenal.
We should look at that.
Because the greatest thing that is plaguing the West is we're not having enough kids.
And it's not just bad because we won't have a future.
It's also bad because the present is awfully miserable for too many women as well.
Okay, in which case I think we get...
Okay, I think just one final thing, which is in which case we get to a really interesting argument about what parts of womanhood can be demarcated to the social and what kinds of womanhood can be demarcated to the biological.
So, for example, my anatomy is demarcated to the biological, but the fact that I might potentially be a better nurturer than a man, I would demarcate that to the social, you might demarcate that to the biological, in which case we have differing moral scales of value.
I would ask why we should necessarily prioritize your moral scale of value, which prioritizes things like the birth rate, when in actual fact there are various other moral scales of value.
And if you yourself are a free market American, why is it the case that you would not, like the previous speaker noted, extend personal freedoms towards all spheres, including a private sphere?
I believe in absolute truth claims.
And it's absolutely wrong and bad when a society stops having kids to replace their own population.
And then you have to import the third world and you become the third world.
You know one of the biggest lies being sold to American people right now is that you're in control of your money, especially when it comes to crypto.
But the truth, most of these so-called crypto platforms are just banks in disguise, fully capable of freezing your assets the moment some bureaucrat makes a phone call.
That is not what Bitcoin was built for.
That's why I use Bitcoin.com.
I just did a major transaction on it.
They offer a self-custodial wallet, which means you hold the keys.
You control your assets.
No one can touch your crypto.
Not the IRS or not a rogue bank.
Not some three-letter agency that thinks it knows better than you do.
This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin, peer-to-peer money, free from centralized control, free from surveillance, and free from arbitrary seizure.
So if you're serious about financial sovereignty, go to Bitcoin.com, set up your wallet, take back control, because if you don't hold the keys, you don't own your money.
Bitcoin.com.
Freedom starts here.
Thank you.
And the final question that we've got time for today is from Sammy MacDonald from St. John's College.
Thank you.
Good evening, Mr. Kirk.
You've obviously devoted a lot of your life to electing, keeping in power Donald Trump.
And you did so partly because you said Trump would put Americans first and take them out of foreign conflicts.
Shall we see how that is going at the moment?
Currently, Trump has just accepted a $400 million debt from Qatar, which we're assured is perfectly above board.
Billions in arms are going to Saudi Arabia, which they're using to bomb and starve Yemeni children.
Not sure how that's in the interest of the United States.
but it might be in the interest of the $5.5 billion deal his failed sons are receiving.
At the same time, this great president of peace has greenlit mass killings, not just in Yemen, but in Gaza, where he greenlit an invasion called Operation Gideon's Chisholm.
Haven't you and your ilk sold America out?
applause applause applause applause applause applause Well, I'm glad you have great intellectual substance and can answer.
Because it's all the culture wars for you, isn't it?
The second someone actually tells you what you're doing, Pound on the table, you're all over the place.
No.
Do you want me to go piece by piece?
or would you like me to talk slower?
Number one, Donald Trump is convening a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
It's going well.
Can you not interrupt me?
I allowed you to talk uninterrupted.
You're famous for not interrupting.
Yeah, I haven't interrupted a single person here today.
Can I speak uninterrupted, actually?
He is convening a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
I believe we will see an end to that war.
Number two, he's actually talking to Iran and discouraging Israel to strike the interior of Iran and has stopped many other international countries to do the same.
Number three, can you give him credit for ending the Indian-Pakistan war?
Both of them said he didn't do that.
Well, hold on a sec.
Let's go back.
No, no, no.
Russia-Ukraine.
Can I speak now?
Yes, but the Indian-Pakistan thing, you've got to go deeper than that.
Let's go in order.
Is a peace summit where the main person in question, Russia, doesn't show up, is that a success, Mr Kirk?
I'm not even sure.
Well, again, these are ongoing negotiations, and it's a lot better than when your Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, went alongside our Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, to Istanbul and unnecessarily blew up a potential Russian peace deal, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians, one of the great unnecessary wars of the modern era.
Donald Trump believes in conversation and police through strength.
He has been president for well over 120 to 130 days, and he has already ended a war between two nuclear conflicts of India-Pakistan.
He has secured our own U.S. southern border while we were being invaded by foreign powers.
And thirdly, he is brokering a potential settlement with Iran that will prevent a major escalation in the Middle East.
And finally, it is very difficult, but I believe they'll get it done, that we'll finally see an end to the Russian-Ukrainian war.
But do you really think leverage, negotiations work if you cut off all your leverage and scream at one party in the Oval Office?
Don't you think that has just emboldened Russia?
Because look at the approach.
Putin thinks so much of your glorious president, he can't even be asked to show up.
You have elected, or help elect, somebody who is at best an idiot and at worst is deeply corrupt.
Okay, again, so Trump and Putin had a two-hour phone call today.
You'll acknowledge that's a good thing.
The pursuit of peace can sometimes be a winding road, and it's a lot better than sending hundreds of billions of dollars further into the killing fields of eastern Ukraine, something that tragically, both the UK government and the US government, has been unnecessarily supporting for a couple of years.
President Trump wants to see a brokerage, an ending of this settlement.
I pray we can get it.
It's very complicated because of the mess that Joe Biden left, which was an active kinetic war with a nuclear power sending American-made missiles into the interior of Russia.
So President Trump has already ended a At this point we are merely speculating, which I think we should not spend our time doing that, because eventually one of us will be right.
I believe we'll be right, and I believe we'll see an end to this war.
Can we just talk about 100 billions worth of weapons?
Because you dodged my question on what was going on in the Middle East, where Trump has just signed enormous arms contracts with Saudi Arabia and with Qatar.
And I noticed you ignored the fact that this might have had anything to do with the blatant corruption going on through the Trump coin and going on through giving the very competent sons of Donald Trump.
Billions of investment from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
This is something that is directly embroiling Americans into conflict but is importantly killing many innocent people.
Those nations have been known to terrorise innocent civilian populations.
So if you're coming to me and you're objecting to America selling weaponry, why are you defending shilling for the Saudis?
Well, hold on.
One is sending weaponry.
One is purchasing.
Secondly, you do know that the biggest purchase that was announced was commercial airliners, 737, $100 billion.
We've heard of Qatar Airways.
They purchased $100 billion of commercial airways.
You are right.
There were some weapons contracts.
But I guess the question is, would you rather have Saudi Arabia buy weapons from America or China?
I'd rather they not have American weaponry at cut price rates.
Let's talk about Qatar for a second.
You mentioned Qatar.
You've been talking a lot about Hamas and the evils of Hamas.
Can I ask you, who's the main funder of Hamas?
Well, the palace state?
Well, the West actually funds Hamas.
Which state?
Well, Iran funds Where are the Hamas leaders?
And also Qatar funds Hamas.
It is a combination of international relief organizations.
Is this a state we should have a 400 million jet with the President of the United States on it?
Well, hold on.
First of all, it was not given to him personally.
I understand the optics of it.
But it was not given to him personally.
It was given to the U.S. government.
And under that standard, no U.S. government should ever receive any gifts from any foreign countries whatsoever.
It's not given to him personally.
Why is he trying to transfer it to his personal library?
He is.
We're lying.
This is way too in the weeds.
If you want to keep on going, we can.
It's a fundamental moral principle.
Under that fundamental moral principle, can you acknowledge, though, that President Trump is getting more done in a less period of time than any president we've seen, while our prior president did not even know what year he got elected?
You understand the contrast here?
What about autism again?
I'm not a defender of Biden.
No, I'm not saying President Trump is far better than the predecessor.
You're going to have to defend the person you spent millions to write.
I will defend every day of someone who ends an invasion, who brings down the price of oil, who is revitalizing the American economy, who is brokering peace, who stopped the potential nuclear war, who is bringing Iran to the table and bringing Russia to the table, someone who does not want armed conflicts with the greatest powers of our time.
I will defend that endlessly.
You are living in a fantasy world.
Let's check on how Trump is doing in terms of diplomacy.
Look, with the war in the Middle East, do you think it was a defensible decision to tell the Israelis you wanted Trump-Gaza to agree for Israel to invade the Gaza Strip and to continue to murder thousands of innocent children and civilians in a pointless war?
Is that in America's interest?
Is that in humanity's interest?
Well, first of all, you should know something about Trump.
If you haven't realized with Trump over the last 10 years, he is quite the social media user and uses hyperbolic language at times.
But let me ask you, in the conflict of Israel versus Hamas, who's the good guy?
I believe both Hamas and the Israeli government are evil, but I think also that there is no justification for the murder and mutilation of thousands of innocent people and children.
There's no justification, Mr. Kerr, for invading hospitals, for bombing innocent populations, and dragging out a war which is damaging Israel and the West.
You've made that point, but it's not a point, it's a moral truth, isn't it?
It was also a moral truth that the war started because 1,300 Jews were killed and 200 were taken hostage.
And when you declare war on Israel, expect a firestorm in reaction.
Let me finish.
I let you talk.
On Shabbat, Hamas invaded Israel, deciding to go recklessly to music concerts.
To homes, to kibbutzes, and taking 200-plus hostages.
They knew what they were doing.
In one of the most cloistered urban environments on the planet, 2 million people live in a place where it's impossible to wage war.
Impossible.
Where they wear civilian clothing, they violate every tenant of the Geneva Convention, and the IDF, when they do something right, they get no credit.
When they do life-saving surgeries of a Gazan child, they get no credit.
When they drive leaflets, drop leaflets, they get no credit.
But when they happen to bomb a place where they are operating their military from, which we now know from third time, I'm sorry, the country where they were living in relative peace on October 6th.
That all of a sudden we had a war, and Hamas started the war.
And I don't see people that were really upset about the two million Germans that were killed in World War II, civilians.
A tragic truth of war is that civilians die.
I don't like it, and you don't like it.
And they brought it upon themselves.
The only operation at NTG to blame is the leadership of Hamas, not the Israeli government, for fighting this defensive war after they were invaded.
I am no defender of the terrible pogrom that was launched against Jews on that day.
But the justification for the death of innocents cannot be an infinite cycle of bloodlust.
It cannot be killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians with a war with no end in sight.
People who are not complicit in those atrocities.
It cannot be bombing hospitals which children use.
It cannot be bombing hospitals in which cancer patients are dying and starving in there.
The deaths that have been inflicted, nobody knows the true toll, but somewhere between 50 and 100,000 people lie dead under the rubble.
What is left for Gaza except for to continue to suffer under Hamas?
Because it turns out Netanyahu's political strategy has not worked.
it has entrenched her mass within the territories.
To be a Christian, I would have thought Mr. Kirk, would never have involved suggesting that the price for an atrocity must be an infinite cycle of bloodlust, that innocent people and the young population must be killed to avenge some kind of providential No one likes what's happening in Gaza.
No one with a heart or a soul or a mind likes when kids die.
but you must understand who started the conflict so that you could end it correctly.
And until Hamas brokers an unconditional surrender, They could release the hostages and drop their weapons and their lives would be spared.
Instead, they are using children of Gaza as cannon fodder, financed by the Iranian mullahs and dragging the entire world into this conflict.
So, I don't even know what we're debating at this point other than I believe that Israel, I believe the facts, Israel was unconditionally attacked on October 7th.
They're responding in kind.
And I would just ask you a very simple moral question.
How should Israel have responded?
Not with the blanket carpet bombing of the city, not with bombing hospitals.
Of course, some kind of military operation might have been necessary, but not murder on this scale.
There is no justification for what is happening with the enormous death toll that is being produced.
I really cannot see how you come here and you have the gall to lecture us on Christian morality and then sit here and justify the murder of thousands of civilians.
Is it working?
I've never said that.
You just did.
This is your whole thing.
In war, these are called casualties of a war.
We're going to stop bringing this to the house.
Again, I'm not going to justify every military maneuver of a 100,000-person army.
Instead, what I will do is I'll be clear that there is a good guy and there is a bad guy.
I honestly Well, hold on.
It's interesting you say that because a child I will be glad that I will not have been somebody who has defended the genocide of the Palestinian people.
And I think you will have to reckon one day that you have reckoned with...
I want to close on this.
So can you tell me what African country is currently ongoing in civil war?
Believe it or not, I know about Sudan.
Okay, good.
Because I'm an idiot.
How about what Southeastern Asian country has an ethnic cleansing going on right now?
I know.
Good.
And you have strong opinions on both sides?
Unlike you, I take an effort to be informed about foreign policy and to come to conclusions.
You are a culture warrior.
I believe when everything is done, Mr. Kirk, people will see you and the people you've supported as corrupt, as selling the country out to the lowest bidder, and of doing irreparable damage to a country I'm sure we all deep down love.
The difference is when...
...
Next question.
Thank you.
That's all we've got time for today.
Mr. Kirk has another engagement, so we're going to walk out of the chamber.
Questions with the students or no?
I'm fine with what you want.
No, I think this is all we've got time for today.
You guys are easy.
A couple more.
Does anyone have any questions?
Who's the best?
Over there.
Thank you.
Marvellous.
Thank you.
A very, very short question.
Israel versus Hamas.
Good guy versus bad guy.
Russia versus Ukraine.
Who's the good guy and who's the bad guy?
Both are bad, one is worse.
Which way around?
Russia is worse than Ukraine.
Okay, so why haven't we pursued that?
What do you mean?
Well, it seems to me that in the whole of the current US proposition, That Ukraine is being the bad guy.
In what way?
We funded Ukraine upwards to $200 billion.
Absolutely.
We just signed a mineral deal with Ukraine, not Russia.
You are expecting Ukraine to give up 20% of its territory to someone who invaded it?
Well, is Crimea part of Russia or Ukraine?
Ukraine.
That's where we don't agree.
Well, I'm afraid that's part of international treaty.
That's not up for grabs.
Well, it's interesting.
I mean, thanks for coming.
I mean...
APPLAUSE APPLAUSE APPLAUSE APPLAUSE Even Zelensky has said he's willing to give up Ukraine.
No, no, no.
America signed the agreement that gave Ukraine Crimea.
Right.
When the Soviet Union ended.
Right.
It was done.
First of all, it never should have been done.
It was largely ceremonial.
However, it was annexed under Obama.
Yes, and it was a mistake, and it should be given back to Russia as a sign of good gesture to end this conflict.
Who's currently controlling Crimea?
Where was the Russian Navy headquartered in World War II?
Where was the end of World War II sign?
This is very important.
I'm not doubting that, I'm just saying that if we're being logical on what has happened...
And I don't understand it.
Because actually, why is Ukraine the bad guy?
No, I said they're bad, they're not the bad guy.
Yeah, well you said they were both bad, but one was more bad than the other.
Correct, yes.
So why is Ukraine bad?
Well, there's a lot wrong with Ukraine.
First of all, they're not a democracy.
Zelensky refuses to hold an election.
Well, no, he can't hold an election.
Wait, did Churchill hold an election during the war?
Because under his constitutional law, That's not true.
He can call an election.
He can call a snap election.
He's full dictator of the country.
No.
Because he knows that the people of Ukraine would kick him out immediately because he's deeply unpopular.
In fact, if he wanted to show a statement to the world, he would call an election and win by 80% and say, see, I'm super popular.
So that's number one.
I have a problem with that.
I have a problem with a person being propped up as a government we're sending $200 billion to that refuses even to face his voters.
Okay, I can't agree with you factually on that at all.
Constitutionally, Ukraine is not able to hold an election because it's under military law at the moment, and that's just a matter of fact.
Again, he can, as a prime minister or president, he can do whatever he wants.
He can't.
He can't sign an executive order and change their constitution.
Neither can the American president either, so hopefully there's a bit on that.
He could even do a ceremonial election to see where he actually stands with the people.
I think we call those opinion polls.
Yes, and they're very negative.
But you would agree that a person that holds on to power without the election of the sovereign is pretty questionable?
No, not in those circumstances.
Okay, then we disagree.
Okay, that's fine.
But give me another reason why you're Do you not know where a lot of this money is going?
I don't disagree that there is a problem with corruption, but the most corrupt country in Europe, are you sure about that?
I'd have to think, I'd have to double or triple think about that, but they're very corrupt.
Okay, so that's a little bit doubtful.
It's not absolute.
There's plenty of corruption around.
I mean, you know, let's face it, we are talking about comparison with some of the states you're doing business with in the Gulf.
Of course, but we're not giving them money, they're giving us money.
That's the difference, right?
Saudi Arabia's Well, hold on a second.
It's morally acceptable to take money from corruption.
Well, hold on.
First of all, as far as morally acceptable, you do what's best in the benefit of your country.
And so, for example, we were allied with Russia during the Second World War, and I'm glad we were.
And I would ask you, how much money is too much money to send to Ukraine?
We're at 200 billion right now.
I don't think you have to send any more money to Ukraine.
We agree.
I think you have to agree to support them as a free country and perhaps sell them weapons.
Aren't you very happy to sell weapons to less free countries?
And I think Europe will pick up the slack, as we ought to.
And I don't disagree with some of the comments about Europe not looking after its own security.
I just don't get this approach, which was supposedly to end the war quickly, which now seems to be elongating it.
And in doing so, throwing up a smokescreen of very variable facts, if they are facts at all, about how things occurred, which actually isn't helping things.
And if people can't see that Putin is stalling, I'm just...
I think he might be stalling.
And therefore, and I think even your president has acknowledged the fact that he thinks he might be stalling.
That's correct.
So we don't have a disagreement there.
No, we don't.
We just have a disagreement about the efficacy of tactics.
And we don't know.
And I'm willing to say we could be wrong.
Of course you could be wrong in life.
We could all be wrong.
But actually bringing that war to an end consistently actually isn't going very well.
And I would just suggest to you that whatever tactics have been used are perhaps not the best.
And they are certainly inconsistent with what's going on in the Middle East.
And how America has been treating parties in the Middle East.
