The Ole Miss TPUSA chapter has more than two thousand active members and just hosted the largest campus event in Turning Point history. Chapter leaders Lesley Lachman and Kent Tonos join to discuss the explosion of youth enthusiasm for Charlie's message and the conservative movement. Plus, Sarah Rogers of the State Department talks about owing her administration position to Charlie's advocacy, and lays out her mission to promote America's free speech values in places like Europe where they are in retreat. 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.
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All right, welcome back, hour two of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Honored to be with you.
I'm Andrew Colvett, executive producer of this fine show, and Blake Neff, our not-so-secret weapon.
Our show is devoted to maintaining the legacy of Charlie Kirk, making sure his mission expands, grows, multiplies.
And I'm really excited about this next guest because her name is Sarah Rogers.
She's the Under Secretary of State, so the State Department for Public Diplomacy.
And I don't want to say too much.
I'm going to kind of throw this over to Blake, but she is what Charlie helped when, you know, was very involved with the transition and helping with certain appointees.
And man, Charlie just completely was just really impressed by Sarah.
And now she has been confirmed.
And it's just, it's just a continuation of Charlie's legacy.
But Sarah is somebody that we got to know via you, Blake.
So I'm going to, the floor is yours.
Let's welcome Sarah in.
But I'm excited to listen to you guys.
Of course.
Of course.
Yeah.
Well, welcome, Sarah.
We've been looking forward to this for a long time.
You know, this is someone Charlie was asking for people who should pitch to the administration.
He asked me.
He asked a lot of people.
And I remember Sarah was one of the first two people that I sent a resume for.
I said, I think she was the first.
Get her in something.
She's extremely smart, extremely effective, extremely based, as we say.
And, you know, very sad that we were so looking forward to having her on the show.
And, you know, unfortunately, she couldn't come on while she was just a nominee.
The Senate was taking a very, very long time on these nominees.
And we finally got her confirmed only after the tragedy.
But Sarah, we're very, very glad to have you on the show right now.
Blake, Andrew, thank you so much for the warm welcome.
It is a thrill and a privilege to be here.
And I will try to live up to that glowing intro.
I can't promise that I'll be smart, but I can promise that I'll be based.
All right.
Well, so I think we should introduce people to what your job is because, you know, you're not just the Secretary of State.
You're Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy.
I don't know that people necessarily know what that is.
But so let's just say, you know, Charlie was America first.
We are America first.
What is the America first framing of American diplomacy?
Thanks very much, Blake.
So before I get into that substantively, I'll just say it's absolutely correct that I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Charlie, for his trust and confidence, as well as that of President Trump and Secretary Rubio.
And one of my greatest regrets is that I couldn't work with him longer on issues dear to both of us, like free speech, during his life.
So now my duty and my goal when I wake up every day in this job that I'm thrilled to have is to work in his memory for the president and on behalf of the American people to advance those goals and get done the things that Charlie would have wanted and we still want.
So public diplomacy refers, you know, when we think about diplomacy, we usually think about the relationship between the American government and foreign governments.
Two ambassadors shake hands, sign a trade deal.
But public diplomacy, which is my silo of the State Department, deals with the relationship between the American government and the foreign public.
And this is a critical instrument of national security because when we have to do something like secure a strategic port or convince a foreign populace to use our AI or our 5G instead of China's, the public barometer matters a lot.
And now today's public is very different than the one we confronted during the Cold War.
Information during the age of mass media flowed downhill.
So legacy authorities like governments, like legacy media would speak and the masses in the mass media age would listen.
But that's not the age we live in now.
The public is online.
They're more networked.
They're more reactive than ever before.
And predecessors of mine, both within state and other parts of the government we now know, saw this democratized, chaotic information environment and they panicked.
They said, we've got to sanitize and censor everything.
They even tried to censor Charlie, which I worked with him on and Blake on, as you guys know.
And that is one of the vignettes, that whole Murphy Supreme Court case that we will be doing thorough truth and reconciliation on.
We will be releasing documents as soon as we are able to complement the ones that have already surfaced through the Twitter files and other sources.
And it is my job to hold out to the world what America's values and priorities are.
And they aren't censorship anymore.
They're America first.
And America's crown jewel value, and Charlie knew this.
He lived for it.
He regrettably died for it, is free speech.
Yeah, so we actually have a clip we want to put up here.
So Charlie, he was starting to go abroad a lot more this year.
He got to speak at Oxford earlier this year.
And this is one of the things he said that got the most attention.
Let's play clip 292.
In Britain today, 30 people a day are arrested for offensive posts on social media, according to the Telegraph.
Praying silently within 600 feet of an abortion clinic can get you arrested in Scotland, as a 74-year-old woman named Rose just learned weeks ago.
Members of parliament scold British citizens for thinking they have the right to say things, say that they do not have the right to say things that offend Muslims.
So I think a lot of our, you know, our foreign charm offensives, we've gotten used to seeing stuff in the Middle East where we're saying, oh, why you should be more secular or more pro-gay or something.
But now I think, especially on the right, we've seen a lot of interest in, well, why don't we try to pressure Europe to embrace free speech instead of censorship?
And do you see a role in the Trump State Department where we're going to see more of that?
And what are we fighting?
Also, Leo, what are we fighting against?
What is going on in Germany and the UK that we all should care about as Americans?
Blake, that is a fantastic question.
Charlie obviously was very fired up on this too.
So what's going on in the UK and Germany?
What's going on is that there's no First Amendment, and there's a much more safetyist approach to speech that has really had some absurd effects that I think even sectors of these societies are becoming quite embarrassed of.
So there's a case in Germany that Americans are shocked whenever I tell them about it.
And so I talk about it whenever I can because our failure as free speech activists is that more Americans don't know it.
This case regrettably involved a gang rape in a public park of a German teenager by nine men.
Those men were all convicted.
There's no question of their guilt.
During their trial, their expert witness said they'd committed the rape for cultural reasons.
They were traumatized by the migration experience.
So most of those rapists did not receive jail time because in Germany, if you profess to be a minor or considered to be under the age of majority by the court, it turns out you can commit gang rape and walk free.
Big surprise.
But someone did go to jail in connection with this gang rape, and that was a woman, because a woman texted one of the rapists and called him a disgraceful rapist pig, which of course is true.
Of course he is.
All nine of them are.
But in Germany, that's hate speech.
So the woman was arrested and the woman, not the rapist, received two days in jail.
That's the kind of value system that it is our job to persuade people to abandon in favor of one based on the First Amendment.
So that's Germany.
In the UK, which Charlie just mentioned, there's actually a recent incident that occurred following the tragedy, so Charlie couldn't comment on it.
There's a relatively accomplished comedy writer named Graham Linehan who was arrested, detained, and jailed for joking on Twitter about transgenderism.
And I'll paraphrase here because I don't have the tweet, but it's something like, if you see a man in a ladies' room, you can kick him in the nuts.
And that apparently was, it was a threat of violence in Britain in the way that some of the Islamist demonstrations in the street apparently don't rise to.
So Linehan was jailed.
And by the way, I'll just say that if there were ever a case for censorship, right, it would be a memetic internet contagion like transgenderism that targets children results in either death in a lot of cases, suicide, or lifelong permanent disfigurement or sterility.
And the censorship apparatus did not protect us or our children from trans.
The censorship apparatus suffocated even the most reasoned criticism of it.
So really, like even the steelman case for censorship fails there.
Also in Britain, as Charlie mentioned, we have people arrested for acts like praying silently or wearing a priestly collar within a visible radius of an abortion clinic because the idea is in Britain, it's not merely a crime to do something like block the clinic doors, which might actually impede someone from obtaining an abortion.
You're not even allowed to try to dissuade someone from obtaining an abortion.
So that's another shocking reality.
Yeah, we'll continue this past the break, but we've really got to lay out that it's very bad when our closest cultural compatriots, so to speak, are just our allies are just embracing this ideology that's totally hostile to the world.
I did not realize, Sarah, that you can't wear a priestly collar near an abortion clinic.
I guess the demons don't like it.
Yeah, demons are more and more prominent in our discourse today.
Sorry.
Yeah, no, they are.
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So we're talking about the importance of free speech abroad, but people have claimed that the criticisms of like Antifa, for example, in the U.S., that there's a tension there, that the administration is becoming anti-speech in other ways.
So I thought you'd be a good person to lay out the differences.
Like what's the real difference between some of what we've seen from a quite, in my opinion, violent radical left, and then just what we see in Europe where you have crackdowns on basically any publicity on what migrants do or just dissent against the trans issue or Islam or a whole bunch of other lines.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there are lots of important lines on First Amendment jurisprudence, but I think this is the brightest and most critical one.
And that is the difference between actual violence, political violence, and political speech.
And by anathematizing and unequivocally opposing and crushing political violence, which is what Antifa engages in, we preserve the right to political dissent.
Because the First Amendment is what it really is, is the right to bring any viewpoint to the public square, any viewpoint, an unpopular one, a racist one, an inconvenient one.
Bring that viewpoint forth and aim to persuade people instead of kill them.
And the ability to do that, the ability to go out into the public square and persuade without having to shoot anyone and certainly without getting shot yourself, that is the sin quenan of a free society.
And that's what we have to protect.
And it's by opposing these groups that we preserve that right and make America safe for the First Amendment in the future.
Seems like a pretty obvious bright line.
If your freedoms impede my ability to have my freedoms or to live or to not be able to go out in the public space and not get punched or assaulted.
I like the clarity on that because we've had to endure so much of this BS of they love to muddle that where violent things, you know, burning down a police station is actually just speech, as long as they didn't directly kill anyone.
Or just that in general, they do this nonsense where, oh, your speech is actually violence because it upset me, because it traumatized me.
And I do think it's very important that we have people like Sarah here to really insist on the difference between those things and that there's consequences for real violence, but speech has to be sacrosanct.
So Sarah, obviously what you're doing is the State Department.
It is outward facing.
There's a lot of, a lot of people would say America first means focusing on America.
It's getting away from what you might call foreign entanglements.
Now, obviously that includes wars, but we also saw that with U.S. aid, people are, or AID, where people were frustrated that we were spending money on various programs overseas and that these are distractions.
They get away from what's really important.
So I assume what you do does involve to some extent spending money outside of the United States.
So I thought you could explain to our audience why is it worthwhile?
What is what we are going to do?
Why is it worth doing?
Great question, Flake.
So first of all, when we're talking about the scope of what we're spending, the foreign aid budget, and this is my understanding as of now, I don't have the spreadsheet in front of me.
I think it's about $50 billion.
That is a lot of American taxpayer money.
By contrast, we can do very high impact, very high-impact initiatives in the field of public diplomacy for much less.
So for example, my office just recently expanded the scholarship where we trade some of our top STEM AI like tech guys with Hungary.
So we take like the two smartest AI or math or technology scientists in Hungary, we bring them here, and critically, they don't immigrate to America.
They cross-pollinate their expertise with our experts and then we send them back.
So that costs less than $100,000 to do, and that actually benefits the United States instead of delusion us with migrants we don't want or advancing some kind of nebulous NGO network in a country that doesn't want or appreciate it.
So that's the first point I would make is dollars and impact.
The second point I would make is about unilateral disarmament.
So every time our side wins or even comes within range of it, there's this debate about, you know, do we unilaterally disarm or do we wield against the left the same kinds of weapons and tactics they wielded against us.
The woke left formulation of the same debate is, can you use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house?
And my answer is it depends on the weapon.
It depends on the tool.
Some of them, like disparate impact litigation, that has a clear kind of asymmetric leftist valence, get that weapon off the field.
We don't need it.
It helps them more than it helps us.
But the tools of public diplomacy are tools we should use.
And my answer to the left is like, I'm going to use these tools because these are our tools now because this is our house now.
Yeah, it's Jersey.
We had Biden pushing, you know, what do you want to call it?
Transform gay space communism or whatever.
Tony Blinken was Charlie used to rail against this, by the way.
It was one of the most, I think, clearest kind of pivots.
It was like, you know, growing up, we were like, we're going to spread American democracy and American values all across the globe.
And then Biden becomes president.
Charlie's like, wait, hold on a second.
This is a terrible idea.
We're spreading like trans and kids and LGBTQ.
We can spend millions of dollars to sponsor, you know, CRT and sponsor trans radicalism all around the world.
It strikes me as insane that we can't spend, as you pointed out, not that much money in the grand scheme of things to instead say, actually, America is going to promote freedom of speech and like conventional American liberties instead of these novel woke ones.
And I'll also just point out quickly that the free speech issue is a national security nexus too, because these countries that are arresting their citizens for calling a rapist a pig, which is true, or for praying outside of an abortion clinic, are now trying to enforce their laws against American citizens and American companies.
So the UK is in litigation right now with the website 4chan, based in America, no operations in Britain.
The UK takes the position that merely because the speech is accessible in Britain, UK censorship law must apply.
There's also an American citizen, a Trump supporter, who was confronted by UK police for posting a meme the UK police did not like.
And if our tech companies and certainly our speech marketplace are subject to this kind of censorious safetyism, this kind of perverse regulation, we will never win the AI race against China.
Our rate of advancement will be slowed and it'll affect all of our critical interests, of which free speech is one.
Well, we are here at Turning Point in the Charlie Kirk Show.
We are passionate about spreading free speech around the world.
I used to not think about it like this, but truly, if we become an island of free speech, the last remaining island of free speech, guess what happens the next time the Democrats are going to get in power?
They're going to be looking at no more Europeans.
Yeah, they're going to be looking at their European allies in the UK and saying, well, they crack down on everything.
We're just doing this transatlantic crackdown on speech because we live in a scary world and these far-right extremists are going to, they're coming for us and they're going to crack down.
We need allies around the world that hold these values as top priorities.
You should tell us what we're hoping to do going forward.
So my office, when we engage in all these educational and cultural programs around the world, we hire organizations to implement them for us.
These are nonprofits in the past, an assortment with which other administrations chose to work.
I'm privileged to announce on this show that we'll be working with Turning Point USA to implement multiple international programs dealing with topics like free speech.
More details on that to come.
That's amazing.
I mean, that's what Charlie wanted.
Charlie, that's why he was going to South Korea, going to the UK.
He wanted to go to Germany, the Netherlands, and say, you know, American free speech is one of our greatest things, and the whole world deserves to have it.
That's a beautiful, beautiful way to end this interview.
Sarah Rogers, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.
Thank you both so much.
Got it.
Thank you, Sarah.
Pleasure to have you.
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That's if I just, you know, we're about to have a couple of the student leaders from Ole Miss join us because it was such a triumph.
We just figured, let's give them the stage.
Let's give them a moment to bask in what they accomplished yesterday evening, which was tremendous.
So let's just talk about, let's just throw one of these up here.
259.
This is JD Vance on H-1B visas last night, 259.
We let in about a million legal immigrants into the United States of America every single year.
And I think the evidence is pretty clear that a lot of those immigrants are actually undercutting the wages of American workers.
It's one of the reasons why the President of the United States, it's one of the reasons why the President of the United States and a lot of us in the administration have encouraged H-1B reform.
Because if you look at the H-1B visa, what it's supposed to be, what it's supposed to be is that you have a super genius who's studying at an American university, who's working at a great company.
You want that super genius to stay in the United States of America and not go somewhere else.
What it's actually used to do is hire an accountant at a 50% discount to an American citizen.
I don't think that we should be hiring accountants from foreign countries when we've got accountants right here in the United States that would love to work for a good wage.
J.D. Vance is masterclass just taking questions from students.
By the way, the students were throwing a tough question.
I was actually a little worried that people were going to think we screened them because there's so many, you know, conservative and fans of the administration in that part of the country.
And man, they came up with some good questions, I have to say.
Welcoming to the show now are two of the student leaders at our chapter at Ole Miss that made yesterday evening possible.
That'd be Leslie Lachman and Kent Tonos.
Leslie, you are the chapter president, Ole Miss.
You did a phenomenal job.
And Kent Tonos, you are the vice president.
Welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thank you so much for having us.
We're excited to be here, especially after last night.
We're coming down from it, but we couldn't be more thrilled.
Okay.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's an honor to have you guys here.
So just take the audience into what it's like to be you.
You are chapter president, vice president of this campus.
You find out that J.D. Vance and Erica Kirk are going to be coming to Ole Miss.
Like, how does this work?
What are your roles?
How'd you pull this off?
Yeah, I think so.
I found out just about two weeks before.
I think immediately I thought to myself, oh my goodness, this is going to be the event of the year, not only for Ole Miss, but for Turning Point USA.
It's the largest event in history.
So I thought right away we have to get to work.
Kenneth is my right-hand man when it comes to all things details, event coordination.
And so I think a lot of it was tabling, spreading the word, details.
What would you say?
I have, yes, tabling.
And actually, it's odd because somebody random came up to me when we were telegating for the LSU Ole Miss game and said, do you know who the speaker is?
And I said, I have no idea.
And they said, I heard it could be J.D. Vance.
And this was far before anything was announced.
Anything was in the works.
So I just had that in the back of my head.
I was like, maybe this guy's just pulling my leg.
And then the day I find out when everybody else founds out with the announcement.
And I was like, there's no way this guy is.
I don't know if he was like a CIA agent or something.
It was funny, but I know.
It's been like a, it's been a very uphill battle and it's, it's been phenomenal.
Well, that's, that's amazing to hear.
Yeah, I might have had a little advance notice on that because I was part of the team working behind the scenes to figure out if we were going to be, because we were kind of getting down to the wire and it was like, oh, he's either going to do November 5th at Auburn or he's going to do October 29th.
And obviously when you're working with a vice president's schedule and all the travel and all the other obligations, it's tough to get it locked in.
And man, I just, so take us into this, to the campus, though.
I mean, first, I think I would love to know how your chapter is doing in the aftermath of Charlie's assassination.
What's the vibe, the tone?
How big is it?
Is it growing?
Tell us about those details.
Yeah.
So when I first took over presidency, we were looking at 200 members.
There's a smaller organization on campus.
It had a presence, but nothing to the size it is now.
We're looking at 14,000 on Instagram, just over 2,000 on our Group Me.
You know, we were prepared.
We were ready.
We had meetings already booked, tabling ready on the calendar.
So when the whole thing boomed, we felt really prepared in moving with this whole thing.
So it is exponentially grown.
Students not only want to be involved with this campus, but you can see the impact it's had across the country.
We've become a forefront chapter for what Turning Point USA should look like, kind of a model guide, everything from buttons custom made to what the table should be set up as to how can you do positive conservative conversation on the campus of Ole Miss.
And I'd say not only is it growth and a win for Ole Miss, but I think it's a win for all Turning Point chapters.
Yes, as Leslie said, we've grown exponentially.
And it's crazy to see the access that, you know, through the Regroup Me and just our university site, I think call it the forum.
We get almost 20, 10 to 20 people that want to join every single day.
And it's just, it amazes me how many people want to be involved.
And it's great.
It's fantastic.
Wow.
So maybe, I mean, it's probably too early to tell, but I mean, I've got to believe after last night's event.
I mean, to your point, that was not only the biggest chapter tour stop in Turning Point's history.
I mean, there was 10,000 people in that arena last night.
And people need to understand this.
Like, sometimes at our events, we have mostly students and some adults because, you know, there's a little room left over and we can get some, the adults sit in the standby line and we get them in as soon as all the students get seated.
We had to turn away students last night.
I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure that's a first in, especially one of these bigger tour stops.
It's a 10,000 person arena and it was 10,000 students packed to the brim, standing in line in the rain.
And I'm told that you guys have about 27,000 student body count or whatever.
There was 14,000 student registrations, 13,000 adult registrations, and we had to work to tell the adults, please do not come.
You won't get in.
Please do not come.
And yet they still, a lot of them came.
I mean, it was truly, truly amazing.
You guys have to, I've got to imagine after an event like that, your chapter is only going to continue to grow.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you could talk to, I mean, this was really a starting point.
This was the turning point.
You know, it's kind of ironic, but it is really true.
You see, it's not only people wanting to, you know, they came to the event.
They were excited.
They're wearing the merch, but it's action.
I think this is going to convert into voting numbers later on.
I think this is going to convert to a bigger picture thinking.
And I see this later on turning blue states red.
Yes, and preventing further government shutdowns too.
It's another thing.
We see it just right now.
And it's great to have this positive feedback from not only our tour, but hopefully other tour stops that come along just to see the young people get involved.
And the conservative way is the right way.
So I love the way that people view that.
You know, Charlie always, he loved to talk to Gen Z people.
He just, he loved to hear what motivated them, what had they seen to try to understand them better.
So you guys have seen that there's been a conservative shift among young people.
So I thought I'd ask, you've probably talked to a good number of freshmen who've just arrived on campus.
Have they said what shaped them, what shapes their worldview the most?
And how do they even differ from maybe seniors on your campus?
What have we seen just over the past four years in terms of how American young people are feeling politically?
I'd say that conservative values on the campus of Ole Miss have always been alive and well, but this freshman class is passionate.
I think Charlie's Kirk really pushed off that conversation of deeper involvement in the Conservative Party.
I think it's one thing to, you know, go out and say you love it, but to see the persuasion of almost everyone around you, it's immaculate.
Yeah.
And the freshmen have a different mindset.
The seniors that I've talked to are like, well, am I even going to be able to get a job?
As J.D. Vance pointed out, you know, with the visas that we have, am I even going to be able to get a job when I graduate?
Can I even be, you know, come from this accounting school and go be an accountant where I want to be an accountant, or am I going to get beat out somewhere?
So it's one of those things where the drive for our seniors is a different type of drive than the freshmen.
And the freshmen are, you know, they're happy, they're excited, and they have different values.
But when they get to that senior level, they'll go back and be like, well, I want that job too.
So another thing to note also, you just brought up, we have a freshman on our team.
She's new.
She wants to make these buttons and design them and spend hours versus, you know, if you're a senior, you know, you've gone through college, you've done it.
You're a little bit, you know, but I think it's crucial to have both parts because at the end of the day, everyone needs to go to those polls.
Everyone's still voting.
So I think whether you're hands on at that table or stepping a little bit back just to be a part of the events, all of it is very important to us.
Well, so tell me, to kind of piggyback off what Blake said, what was the reaction of students to some of the answers that JD gave?
What was the reaction to students about Erica's speech?
I mean, what are you people telling you?
What are the students saying?
I mean, I would definitely say the reaction has been nothing but positive.
Those questions were hard-hitting.
I mean, we sat next to each other.
We were in the front row.
We were seeing this happen live.
I'm looking at Kenneth.
I'm like, ah, some of those, you know, but I'd say he handled it so well, so delicately.
I'm so proud of Ole Miss for these well thought out, developed questions.
You know, you never know if kids are going to come up there and say crazy stuff.
But I felt really proud of our community that they came with strong questions prepared.
And the reactions have been positive.
I think personally, we can all remember Ricky Bobby comment one, the comment of the evening.
Our pages were all about it.
I think that kids are hoot.
I said later in the group chat, haha, he's got to be on exec.
And so I think even how raw and true it was to what Ole Miss was, I couldn't be prouder.
It also shows like, you know, we all don't have to agree on everything.
And they even pointed that out yesterday as like, you know, even if they have only 20% to something in common that you have, that doesn't mean you get to turn them away.
That means that they can ask questions and you can even ask questions because JD even said there is no neutrality.
You're always going to be biased on one side or the other.
So, and it was great to see that last night.
Man, that is great.
You know, Leslie, I have to tell you, I ran into a reporter there.
The outlet will remain anonymous for our sake here.
This is off-the-record conversation, and those do go both ways.
But I will tell you, this reporter was singing your praises, and she was like, we have to, you know, Turning Point has to make sure we hold on to Leslie.
Are you a senior this year, Leslie?
No, I'm a junior, and I actually just turned 20, like a little bit ago.
It was just my birthday.
And so it's always funny when people approach me and they're like, you're the president.
And I'm like, yes, because cool, hot, young, conservative women can be the forefront of this conversation, especially at Turning Point.
And I think, you know, me being the face of it, I think sometimes you get a little confused.
But at the end of the day, if you dig deep, I think it makes sense.
I'd say our team responds pretty well.
And our team is significantly young, too.
And the way we work with each other is just crazy.
The amount of stuff that we can work together on and get done is just, you know, it's pushing each other.
You know, hey, we're college students, too.
Let's get it.
Let's get this ball rolling.
I love that.
And Kenneth, I didn't get a chance to meet you.
Leslie, I was backstage when you met the vice president.
So I didn't want to interrupt that at that moment, but I saw the way you comported yourself and handled yourself, and it was very impressive.
So congratulations to Leslie and Kent from Old Miss.
They run a great chapter there that's bursting at the seams.
2,000 people on your group me.
So congratulations, you two.
Well done.
Keep it up.
You're making Charlie proud.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right.
God bless you guys.
Well done.
I mean, if you're in the audience, you're wondering, what's the future of America you just saw it?
And that was all made possible by their grit and tenacity and by Charlie's vision.
So God bless everyone that played a part.
This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and Founding Partner of YReFi.
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, here Charlie, in his own words, tell you about WhyReFi.
I'm going to tell you guys about whyrefi.com.
That is why FY.com.
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Private student loan debt in America totals about $300 billion.
WhyReFi is refinancing distress or defaulted private student loans.
You can finally take control of your student loan situation with a plan that works for your monthly budget.
Go to yrefi.com.
That is whyrefi.com.
If you have a co-borrower, why ReFi can get them released from the loan.
You're going to skip a payment up to 12 times without penalty.
It may not be available in all 50 states.
Go to yrefi.com.
That is why FY.com.
Let's face it, if you have distress or defaulted student loans, it can be overwhelming.
Because of private student loan debt, so many people feel stuck.
Go to whyrefi.com.
That is why FY.com.
Private student loan debt relief, yrefi.com.
You know, Blake, it occurs to me that we've had a very eventful second hour here.
First, we had Sarah Rogers makes a smart woman, very based woman, giving kudos to Charlie and paying her respects for Charlie's role in getting her into her current position as Undersecretary of State for Foreign Diplomacy.
Public Diplomacy.
Dang it.
Got to say it the whole thing every single day.
I almost got it.
And then she just kind of slides in there that the State Department works with nonprofits, groups like Turning Point to achieve certain ends internationally.
And obviously, we are America first through and through, but we do have a foreign interest.
We have a domestic interest.
What we've seen is Charlie's mission was a global one.
We saw that with the global reaction to what happened.
But if we don't have, yes, that's exactly right.
Charlie's legacy is now global.
And as I've said before, he belongs to history now.
And the world took note.
It was a huge global story.
But now it sounds like there might be this opportunity to use the legacy of Charlie Kirk to expand free speech around the globe.
And people like Sarah Rogers are going to make that possible.
And then we bring in two absolute all-stars from Ole Miss and 2,000 students on their group me.
That is the impact that Turning Point is having.
That is the impact of the legacy of Charlie Kirk.
And so like, well, all this is such a huge tragedy.
And, you know, there's certain people online that say, oh, we're not grieving the right way or we're not sad enough.
We're not crying.
It's like, listen, man, we don't grieve the way the world grieves.
We don't have to wallow in this because, A, Charlie would not accept it.
I walk around with that thing in the back of my head all the time.
I know Charlie would not accept it.
Charlie would demand that we get every last ounce out of his life and his legacy.
And he gave the last final measure for this mission, for this country, for his faith.
And we just don't grieve the way the world grieves.
And there is so much good.
And in this hour, you have seen so much of it.
And it's just so powerful.
So Michael in our studio, he says, when I was in a TPSA chapter at U of A in 2018, there was like maybe 15 people, which, you know, I'm sure a lot of chapters.
That doesn't matter.
No, you can still win, but it really shows what good leadership, especially, can do.
When you take interest and then you convert that into action and activity, you know, it's like a snowball.
It just gets bigger as it goes downhill.
And it was like that with Charlie.
Turning point was, you know, you could have fit all of Turning Point in the studio room 12 years ago and then what he built it up into from there.
Yeah, and Michael says, I'm sure it's way bigger now.
Yeah, I actually know for a fact it's way bigger now.
And we actually saw this, you know, Mike, it was funny.
Mikey made a comment about his high school, which is Oaks Christian in Thousand Oaks, California.
Well, we tried to get a chapter there for a long time and couldn't get it through.
And then they, so Mikey was under the impression that it didn't exist still.
But they have now started a chapter, and it's hundreds and hundreds of students have joined that chapter.
And so in death, Charlie's legacy obviously expanded even more.
And these chapters have ballooned all across the country.
And I just loved seeing Leslie and Kenneth and their passion and their, you could just tell they were very dedicated.
They took this like a job and they're really pouring their whole self in.
So if you're a chapter member listening around the country, you have that same opportunity right now.
Take this as seriously as you can.
Blow it up.
Make it as big as you can.
And you would be amazed at the amount of power and influence that you can exert on your own campus and your local community.
And yeah, if there's a, it's funny because Leslie brought that up.
If there's a lockdown or some sort of COVID V2 that comes out, you can be a firewall in your community to stand up to tyranny if you have this large group on a campus like Ole Miss and other places.
So please, please, please pour your whole self into it.
Be courageous.
Be the courageous generation as Erica Kirk implored us.
There is a little bit of other news that I think our audience would get a kick out of.
There is some refugee news, Blake.
What is this?
Oh, yes, this is great.
I just saw this and tweeted about it.
But so this, there were rumors about this a few weeks ago, but it just hit.
The Trump administration is formally cutting the annual refugee admission amount from $125,000 a year to $7,500 a year.
And then this is what really has people, you know, you know who, extremely upset about it because they said they're going to give some priority to white South Africans who have faced a lot of violence, a lot of discrimination.
We've had Ernst Roots and others on the show about this.
And so they're going to say, we're going to give some priority for them coming here because they haven't really been treated as refugees by other places.
And on top of that, they're often very talented people, very immediately economically useful people.
And so they'll be able to support themselves and they're facing real violence in their home country.
And people are going to be very mad about this because they're Western-ish.
They're Western.
Yeah, they are crazy.
They assimilate or integrate immediately into America.
They have skills.
What you've really seen is America's Americans have gotten fed up with what is clearly the scam, where we take people, first of all, they're often not really refugees from anything other than the fact that their societies are really rotten and poor.
And then they're deliberately brought in and they're settled where they can cause the maximum disruption.
So we get all these refugee resettlements in small towns in Idaho, small towns in Iowa, small towns in the Dakotas, in Texas.
And they, yeah, they put them there.
They assimilate badly.
They tend to not be economically, they tend to not contribute economically, not even in the short term, but the long term, on the dole.
And there's tons of fraud.
I think, did Ilhan Omhard literally come here as a refugee, or did they come here under some status?
But remember her background.
Her dad was an official with like an authoritarian, I think even genocidal government.
That's why they had to flee.
And then they come here.
They're part of a community that routinely defrauds the American system.
And it's so obvious that what the refugee system had become for the left was it was just another lever for what their overall agenda was, which was to do the great replacement to demographically transform the United States, to just get people in by whatever door is available.
Sometimes it's H-1B.
Sometimes it's asylum seekers.
Sometimes it's refugees.
Sometimes it's just the diversity lottery.
Get them in however we can.
That's always the goal.
And the Trump administration has said: one, we're scaling this back, so you can't do that.
And we're going to focus on people who will improve America the most, or at least assimilate to America the quickest, instead of a scam.
Well, and I think if you look at, and I love that news, so 125,000 to 7,500, massive, massive decrease.
Thank God.
But secondly, if you look at what J.D. Vance talked about at Ole Miss last night, I think the one huge big takeaway in something Charlie railed against.
I could find you dozens of tweets and posts on X about this.
We have to reform our legal immigration system.
And I understand that there is a limitation with our current GOP and the way it is made up.
But J.D. Vance is pointing to the future.
And for him to say out loud, question after question, we need to reduce and reform our legal pathways to immigrate into this country.
And then you pair it with that news.
The future is going to get better if we stay the course.
There is light at the end of this tunnel, and common sense can prevail if we earn it.
