Even as a teenager, Charlie possessed a powerful drive to change the world. In an interview recorded 13 years ago and never before seen on The Charlie Kirk Show, an 18-year-old Charlie explains why Turning Point USA is needed, what indoctrination is being taught in schools, and how to wake up the next generation. It's the some of the first public statements by the young man who would change the world. 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.
I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.
My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.
If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're gonna end up miserable.
But if the most important thing is doing good, you'll end up purposeful.
College is a scam, everybody.
You gotta stop sending your kids to college.
You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible.
Go start attorney point, you would say college chapter.
Go start attorney point, you'll say high school chapter.
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Sign up and become an activist.
I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.
Most important decision I ever made in my life, and I encourage you to do the same.
Here I am, Lord use me.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Good morning and welcome to another great edition of Champion News Talk Radio, brought to you by Champion News.net.
We are your choice for the conservative voice.
Uh today, our founder Jack Roser and myself have Charlie Kirk with us, and Charlie Kirk is a young man from Turning Point.
He's the founder of the organization.
And uh Jack, how are you today?
Well, I'm fine, but uh they've seen me before, but they haven't seen him.
And uh this guy is a mover and shaker of young years that uh marvelous experience uh you've done with your life.
And uh I understand that you're a bit of a critic of the school system.
Uh well, what is the matter with you that you're criticizing the system that has made you so wonderful?
Well, you know, it's not all because of the school system.
There have been some very good teachers, and uh through my years at Wheeling High School, I enjoyed my time, but there were a lot of times where I felt that the teachers were pushing an alter alternative agenda and that our textbooks were written in certain ways to make us think uh things that were not true.
Uh they were trying to remove the founding documents from the U.S. history classes, they said they were not relevant.
Um they try really spent a lot of time on the Progressive Era, and our economics textbook was written by Paul Krugman from the New York Times, and in it was factually incorrect data.
I stood up to my teachers several times, and uh I tried to get other students to do the same.
Yeah, I have a question for you.
What do you mean they removed our founding documents?
But they made a document who tried to remove it.
It did not pass in the school board, but they tried to remove it from our U.S. history class.
Specifically our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence.
They tried to remove for our U.S. history classes everything before 1860, saying it was not relevant.
That's stunning to me.
Now it did not pass.
It was did not make the news, of course, but it was it showed that some people found that our founding documents no longer had relevancy in our schools, which is really concerning.
That is extremely concerning.
Why what was the teacher's reasoning, Charlie, for our founding documents not having relevancy to our country right now?
Some educational people in our district said that we need to have a more progressive view of our country and that everything post-1860 was more relevant to what the kids need to be learning.
And I found that alarming, and um again, that wasn't all the teachers in the district, but it was a select few, and even a few, if they are teaching that way, it's very concerning.
Uh now uh you may or may not know this.
What was the pair parental involvement in something like that?
Or first of all, the awareness level of parents, and then the involvement.
It was minimal, and uh parents have not been involved in school boards like they need to be.
Uh, they do not run for school board, they don't show up to the meetings.
Just the fact that Paul Krugman had economics textbook approved and put into our public high schools is inexcusable.
And that's who is Paul Krugman and why is he relevant to this conversation?
What type who is he?
Okay, Paul Krugman is a nationally known Nobel uh prize winning economist from the New York Times.
He writes a daily column.
He also wrote the book, Conscious of a Liberal.
And he's a he's a renowned collectivist.
Obama was given the the uh prize in the same organization.
Right.
Uh, the right judgment wasn't so good there either.
And the uh the school board decided to put uh Paul Krugman's textbook into the public school system, where in quote it said the Reagan tax cuts did not accelerate economic growth.
Really public schools.
I wrote a piece for Breitbart.com exposing this lie in our public education school system, and it encourages the progressive train of thought into our students?
And it's unfortunate because if a young person wants to get into economics, they're probably gonna look as Paul Krugman as a credible figure.
But he's not economically viable.
His st his statistics do not add up, and he writes for a very partisan news source, the New York Times.
He should not be in our public school system.
And we need more students to stay.
Very similar to it.
He said that 9-11 was a stimulus and created jobs.
He thinks that a broken window creates jobs.
This is not this is an economic myth called the broken window fallacy.
And it's what is being taught in our schools and unfortunately being pushed onto fellow students.
Well, I do know that the some of the textbooks.
I have a 15-year-old son, and I've got a lot of friends whose kids go to even some private schools.
But there's they talk about communism versus capitalism.
And capitalism is somebody having the whole cow to themselves.
And communism is where everybody shares this cow.
Do they embellish in theory?
In theory, do they do they make communism and socialism sound like a more desirable way to live where it's just fairer?
Well, they they do put a very big emphasis on the progressive era in the early 1900s where they say that oh, there's a problem, there must be a government to fix it.
For example, you know, Upton King uh Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, you know, we had all the terrible meat factories, well, then we had to create the FDA.
We had an unstable currency, we had to create the Fed.
So the kids start to subconsciously feel that, oh, the government solves every problem.
And we did a poll in our in our high school in the local area.
Which economic system would be most prosperous to create wealth for the middle, lower, and upper class for all people over the next hundred years.
Twenty-eight percent said capitalism, forty percent said socialism, the rest said they don't know the difference between socialism and capitalism.
Really?
Which was really the more intelligent answer.
Right.
And um Well, yeah, at least yeah, I'd rather have them not know because there's opportunity for education.
That's exactly what our group is doing is getting these kids understanding the morality of free markets, the immorality of excessive borrowing.
This is Lane Schoenberger, chief investment officer and founding partner of Y ReFi.
It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us.
His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come.
Now, hear Charlie in his own words tell you about why refi.
I'm gonna tell you guys about why refi.com.
That is Y R E F Y dot com.
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You're gonna skip a payment up to twelve times without penalty.
It may not be available in all 50 states.
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Because of private student loan debt, so many people feel stuck.
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Private student loan debt relief, why refi.com.
So your group, what is it specifically?
What does that mean?
You have a group.
What is it?
Turning point USA is turned into a national movement.
It was launched uh June 5th.
We have over 20 to 25 national chapters, and we have 30 to 50 uh student columnists from all over the country that contribute to our website.
We give them a platform of empowerment so they can write something, they can publish it, they can show their friends, their family.
But let me ask you a question.
Do you organize that when you were still in high school?
Uh at the at the ends of high school and then throughout the summer, yes.
But you have a website.
How are you how specifically are you reaching out to this percentage?
I think it's 40 percent that don't know the difference.
Right.
How specifically do you reach out to that 40 percent that's unsure and then re-educate that other 40 percent that is obviously misled.
We're doing it in three specific ways.
Uh, number one is Facebook and Twitter.
Social media is extremely important.
We have 12,000 likes, we're on the cutting edge of social media for young people.
The second of which is in July, we're hosting hopefully one of the biggest debate tournaments in the Midwest.
We're we're planning to have three to four hundred high school debate teams come and debate fiscal policy.
The third is a very innovative way that we came up with, and it's to read that reach that 40 percent of kids that usually don't care about politics.
We're hosting a three-on-three basketball tournament to get young people to come and play basketball, they leave with our t-shirt and they leave with a little bit of literature.
It's innovative, it's new, it's fresh.
Not many think tanks think to do a basketball tournament.
And that's the way we reach kids that are usually apathetic or they don't know because we go to where they are.
And that's that's what's innovative and creative about Turning Point USA.
So you you're trying to do an outreach.
Now do you ever do I mean do we have things right affiliated with the school?
Because I know there are some um young folks out of the Will County area too that have a youth program and they reach out and they have meetings and they've really tried to they actually do walk precincts and things like that.
No, we do not we do not do sp do specifically for any candidate, at least this last election cycle.
And the reason is is we go at it in a nonpartisan point of view.
Now we believe in fiscal uh responsibility, free markets, but instead of we we encourage uh civic participation, we encourage people to be interns.
A majority of our uh people in our group were interns for Joe Walsh or Congressman Dold.
We love that.
But also we educate in meetings and debates.
Like we hosted a debate at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and we're starting a chapter there.
We have 20 high schools and colleges representative where they have meetings and they they gather and they educate their peers in innovative ways, like through basketball tournaments.
Or one of the chapters they emailed me, they said, could we do an ultimate frisbee competition for turning point?
Like how cool is that?
Who would have thought of that otherwise?
That's how you get college kids engaged in politics.
You know, it's good to have the slideshow and the graphs, but we have to get them through the door first.
But do you get them through the door and you do this frisbee thing and you give them literature?
What's enticing them to even open this up?
They they give us their email, they have to like us on Facebook, they like us on Twitter, we tie them in perfectly because through social media, it's kind of you last sue them in and then you reel them in later.
Because these kids have their their minds going in so many different directions that once you tie them in, they're going to uh be educated.
What topics are you mainly interested there?
Mm-hmm.
What topics are you?
The debt and the deficit, we think it's extremely relevant to our generation.
We're gonna have to pay it off.
And it's immoral.
We we think that it's immoral and we do call it socialistic behavior, absolutely.
And we also focus on education.
We think that every student should have a six uh chance to learn, and we think that teachers are not being held accountable in our public school education system.
To give some perspective, uh, fifty teachers in the district two fourteen area earn 150,000 or more with no accountability.
And you ask these students.
That's uh that'd be Arlington Night.
Right, the Arlington Heights area, Mount Prospect, Elk Grove, and Wheeling area.
And most of the students even believe that's excessive.
When the students believe it's excessive, you know that we need reform.
And a lot of the there are some great teachers that I've had in my life, but they're also teachers that take advantage of the system.
And we need private sector reforms to make sure our education system is better for the students.
