The Conservative Movement After 9/10: The Path Forward
In this exclusive live episode from AmFest, Michael Knowles joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of the conservative movement and what comes next in the aftermath of 9/10. He breaks down the cultural and political challenges ahead and outlines how conservatives should think strategically about the future. Michael also addresses the dominant online narratives surrounding Israel and Palestine, offering clarity on how digital discourse is shaping public opinion. The episode concludes with a live Q&A, where he answers questions on Christianity, free speech, and offers practical advice for students navigating campus culture today. Join future CK Exclusives recordings in person by becoming a member at https://members.charliekirk.com/ 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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Here we go.
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Without further ado, the great Michael Knowles.
Thanks so much.
Good to see you.
How are you?
Michael, you're always looking so dapper.
Stop it.
Get out.
Flattery will get you somewhere.
It will get you.
I did have this thought.
I said, yesterday I was on the main stage, you know, so I had to have my more official Republican blue suit, red tie.
But I said, this is more the casual day.
Is that purple?
It is a purple.
I like to call it aubergine, but it is purple, in fact.
Yeah.
All right.
So your boss said some crazy stuff last night.
You know, I don't know who put together the calendar, the schedule of events.
I look, I said, okay, Charlie actually did that.
It's actually, this is it.
This is Charlie special.
Opening night is basically all Charlie.
That's great.
Right toward the top, we got Ben, then we got Tucker.
And I looked, I said, okay, here I am right in the middle.
It's kind of like being in the middle of India and Pakistan.
In the middle of Iran and Iraq.
But it's funny, too, because the point of my speech was to say, okay, what did Charlie do?
Charlie did a million things.
We were just talking about this backstage.
Charlie did a million things, right?
He debated at the top levels.
He fundraised at the top levels.
He organized.
He campaigned.
He did this, that, and the other thing.
He wrote books, right?
But the distinctive thing that he did was build and maintain coalitions, often thanklessly behind the scenes, mediating, negotiating, sorting things out, keeping some people out.
You're too kind.
Keeping people in, even people in who hate each other's guts, and always moving forward toward a goal.
So I get up there and I say, you know, I think my thesis is going to be, blessed are the peacemakers.
This is Charlie's distinctive quality.
We need to emulate this.
Leo, Pope Leo.
And then what happens?
No one agrees with me and everyone starts throwing elbows the whole night.
And I said, okay, well, never mind.
I'll be over the bar.
Listen, the audience liked Russell Brand's prayer and his whole thing last night, right?
You guys?
Yeah.
They didn't have as high marks for you, but that's okay.
That's why you're here.
That's why you're here.
You're redeeming yourself.
I'm so glad that you had Russell come in because, you know, it opens up.
Erica gives her beautiful speech.
Then Ben just starts throwing elbows everywhere.
And I said, hold on.
And then you know Tucker's going to be punching back at Ben.
And I said, I really need Russell to come there, shirt buttoned down to the navel, I don't know, talking about some kind of hippie thing.
It was great.
Really, it was a nice palette cleanser.
It really was.
The evening went well, but then, of course, the headlines were MAGA Civil War, MAGA Mayhem.
They were like looking for all the M-words they could put the Daily Mail in a headline.
So what do you make of that?
Is this healthy?
Is this destructive?
What do you make of it when you think of 2026?
So, look, you know, I mean, my speech last night was contrary to maybe some of the other ones, which is that I think it's very important to recognize that there's a coalition Charlie built, and maybe you like that he invited some people.
Maybe you wish he didn't invite some people in.
Maybe you wish he invited people in that he excluded.
I don't know.
I don't really care.
He built a team.
This is the team.
This is the army, okay?
Everyone here, all of you, this massive gathering of people on the stage and more off the stage, you're on the team, okay?
And so the team has a purpose.
The team has a goal, and you got to move down the field, and you got to win.
And the losers make policy, the winners make policy, and the losers go home.
So my view is we don't want to paper over our differences.
We're in a period of extreme flux right now.
Obviously, we're coming to the end of the Trump era.
Trump has dominated.
He's been the big dog for 10 years.
The heir apparent, obviously, is JD Vance.
So whenever there's a transition like that, there's going to be a big shift.
And all the differences in the factions that have existed for decades are going to come out and people are going to vie for position in their view.
My view is we should try to work those out in a way that is productive, that offers grace to people.
Because if you take the infighting to its extreme and you say, look, give me what I want, or I'm taking my ball and going home, well, then we lose, you know, and then the left wins.
And I guess one of my very practical points in that speech is the left makes no distinction between any of those people on the stage, okay?
And they will go after us all together.
So we have to win.
This was an insight from Charlie that you don't always get from pundits because it's easy to have an opinion.
And opinions are interesting, and especially some of the drama online is really interesting and titillating.
But Charlie wanted to win, and Charlie did win.
And Charlie kept winning.
And Charlie insisted upon not just having this great Trump era, but getting the next guy in and building on that and building.
And so even these conferences would go from 1,000 people, or I don't know, like 50 people, to 1,000 people, to 5,000 people, to 15,000 people, to now, whatever, 30,000 plus.
It's just completely at capacity.
We need a bigger convention center.
Yes, that's right.
And so I just think you have to keep the focus on winning.
Not, yes, sort out your differences, have your fun debate club, really, you know, work those issues, but win.
You know what's crazy to me is when I see like 18-year-old Charlie, you know, like on Neil Cavuto, or it's like local Chicago news, and he's like, you know, we've got 15 chapters, and he's got the Chicago accent.
He's like, and we're going to build an institution, and it's going to be, you know, was he Al Capone?
Is that it blows my mind?
His first Neil Cavuto hit where he was like, we've been having tremendous success on Twitter.
And it's been, and I'm like, this is, it's like the guy was just so ahead of me.
He was always driven that way.
And, you know, so to your point, though, it's like, I want to, you know, talk about this coalition.
We did a thing before you got on here, but you should see it again.
And for the folks at home, just take my word for it.
So who last night appreciated the Ben Shapiro approach?
Hands up.
Let's see.
I'll put my glasses on.
Your glasses?
Half the room probably.
A little more than half the room.
And who appreciated the Tucker Carlson approach?
Half the room.
Red or right.
50-50.
So if you wonder why Charlie constructed an opening night the way he did.
Hey, hold on.
You left one.
Who appreciated the Michael Knowles approach?
Yeah, that's the whole room.
Look at that.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you.
You even get a whoop in there.
Yeah.
So, but when we talk about what we are dealing with, you mentioned that this stuff had been simmering under the surface for years.
I mean, you could go back to Buckley and the Birchers, and it's like some of this stuff is as old as time, and it's not going to go away.
Go back to Roosevelt and Taft.
I mean, you know what I mean?
You can keep going.
But when we talk about where this goes and kind of a sifting, a settling, hopefully we come back together, you don't expect necessarily some of the fault lines to go away.
Yes, look, I think Ben made a very important point that I think most people would agree with, which is a political coalition has to have boundaries.
Not everyone gets to come in.
Just like not everyone gets to come into the country, not everyone gets to come into the coalition.
So that in principle is true.
Where a lot of the civil war is going to take place is what they're going to say, you need to adopt my economic policy or you're not a true conservative.
You need to adopt my migration policy, my foreign policy, or you're not a true conservative.
That's where those battles have been taking place going back to the 50s and into the 90s after the Cold War and in the 2000s and to the present.
I think that's BS.
And here's my proof that that's BS.
The Republican Party now, I guess, supports tariffs, though some people in the coalition hate that.
Previously, for most of my lifetime, the Republican Party hated tariffs.
But you know what's kind of funny?
The Republican Party was founded on tariffs.
It was like Abraham Lincoln said, give me a tariff, I'll give you the greatest country in the world.
Does that mean, therefore, that we have to support tariffs at any given time?
Or during the, I don't know, actually, Reagan kind of liked tariffs too, but the Reaganites hated tariffs.
Does that mean we have to hate tariffs to be a true conservative?
No.
Because politics involves applying internal principles to constantly changing circumstances.
We used to be the party of foreign policy restraint, and then we, you know, like bombed the whole Middle East, and now we're the party of restraint again.
Does that tell us some eternal fact about the party?
I don't think so.
I don't think it's hypocrisy, for instance, to change your economic views to some degree to meet new circumstances.
A generation that now can't afford housing, a generation that's being priced out of food.
Both issues, by the way, tied to mass migration, which was cheered on by conservatives after the conservatives opposed it.
So, no, you can change these things.
That's called being responsive.
Not being responsive is what caused the left to get completely blown out of the water in the last election because they were so detached from reality that they thought boys could be girls and all the rest of it.
We have to be responsive.
But I do think there are some non-negotiables.
So, one non-negotiable, I would say, and I think Charlie was so clear about this.
If you advocate injustice, if you are cruel, if you promote a vulgar hatred on the basis of race or sex or religion, you're off the team.
You know, that sort of stuff is wrong in itself and it's politically toxic.
And I thought Charlie has done a great job of keeping that riffraff out.
After that, things are kind of up for grab.
So, what are the low bar?
Yes, that's the low bar of exclusion.
What are the things that we affirmatively have to believe in?
I think you have to love the country.
You know, you have to be like Trump and hug the American flag.
Was that the cover of the MAGA Doctrine by Charlie Kirk?
I seem to remember that.
When Trump hugged the flag, I love that.
Some people thought it was weird or cheesy or something.
No, I thought that was so genuine.
This guy loves the flag.
So, if you're the kind of person who doesn't love the country, wants to fundamentally transform the country, to use Obama's words, wants to burn the symbol of the country, you're off my team.
We're honored to be partnering with Allen Jackson Ministries.
And today, I want to point you to their podcast.
It's called Culture and Christianity, the Allen Jackson Podcast.
What makes it unique is Pastor Allen's biblical perspective.
He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today: gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge, Trump in the White House, issues in the church.
He doesn't just discuss the problems.
In every episode, he gives practical things we can do to make a difference.
His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies.
They've been great friends.
And now you can hear from Charlie in his own words.
Each episode will make you recognize the power of your faith and how God can use your life to impact our world today.
The Culture and Christianity podcast is informative and encouraging.
You could find it on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes.
Alan Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring biblical truth back into our culture.
You can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry at alanjackson.com forward slash Charlie.
What else do you have to believe there's a real thing as an American people?
And people assimilate into that, just as Ruth assimilates into the Israelites and is in the genealogy of Christ.
But there's still Israelites, okay?
There's still particular nations.
There's still an American people.
If you don't believe that, if you think America is like just an idea or not an idea, like every idea floating in outer, if you think it's nothing, you're not on the team to me.
You know, you've got to really defend the real American people.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
So we accept there's a few, maybe a tiny number of things that you just exclude on.
You have ideas.
We have that clash between Ben and Tucker last night.
Do you believe that they have the same assumptions about those same core things, or is that in conflict at all between them?
About unpopularity.
About what the core nature of a conservative party in America should be?
No, they riotously disagree on a number of issues.
What's kind of funny, though, as I was listening to their speeches, Ben adopts a more classically liberal approach.
And Tucker's response and defense also took a classically liberal approach.
He said, we should judge people as individuals.
There should be no restrictions on free speech.
And I had this kind of funny thought, which is I don't think I'm exactly mediating between these two guys because if we debated those fundamental premises, they would probably agree and I would disagree with them.
You know, so there are ways in which you'd be like, so Pat Buchanan said.
Russell Kerb, definitely.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, no, they riotously disagree on foreign policy, on economic policy, and they probably agree on immigration, I guess.
But no, they disagree.
And I think those debates are good.
The debates that actually focus on real policy challenges, I think that is good and productive and healthy.
Look, and both of these guys condemned the thing that I also condemned.
Anything that gets down to, you know, injustice, hatreds, animosities based on race or religion or whatever.
You know, I think that that is so ugly and counterproductive that that, you know.
Stop trying to bait me into the Catholic debate.
Yeah.
And to quote Arthur Schlesinger, the deepest prejudice in American history is anti-Catholicism.
But, you know, we don't have to get into it.
So I'm going to put you on the spot here just a little bit.
You've never done that.
They only ask three or four piercing follow-up questions.
No, just kidding.
Yeah, I mean, listen, you exist at a company that's been at the sort of, you know, with Ben, obviously, he's Jewish.
There's been a lot of debate, yeah, it turns out.
I saw the Yarmulka myself.
I did.
Did you touch it, though?
No, I did not.
I know better than they did.
So, you know, this is the open question.
I was recently on the Ross Douthed podcast, New York Times, had a great time, really great guy.
I love it.
Good interviewer.
And, you know, he kept trying to get me to go into the Israel debate.
And my perspective, well, who cares about that?
You're on the show.
Tell us, what is your perspective about what, you know, we're talking about coalitions.
What do you do with Israel?
Yeah, Israel has been one of the dividing lines, especially for the online right.
I think less so for the broader public right, but especially for the online right, especially for the young right.
And I think it's perfectly reasonable that that would come up after this massive Gaza war.
Not only the realities of that war, but also the propaganda from both sides of that war that was, you know, but especially anti-Israel propaganda.
That is a real thing, obviously.
It happens in war.
So what do we do?
I guess I hosted a debate on this actually yesterday on my show, which is, should America continue to support Israel?
And I guess you have to get even more particular than that.
My position on the Gaza war was that the war had to wrap up.
That we have a long-standing affection for Israel.
Richard Nixon famously saved Israel.
Israel would have been destroyed in 73.
But he saved Israel.
I think we have more culturally and politically in common with Israel than with Israel's enemies.
And so I think there is a reason.
It's not a deceit.
It's not just a fraud.
There is a reason that we tend to look more favorably on Israel than on some of Israel's enemies.
But it can go too far.
I mean, when some people say that we have a religious demand that we must support the nation state of Israel in all things, I think that's kind of crazy.
When people say that the nation of Israel is the greatest ally that America's ever had, I don't see any evidence of that.
It can be a good ally, but that's such an extreme statement that we must always stand with Israel, that we need Israel more than Israel needs us.
Some people have said all these things.
I think that's just taking the argument too far, and it turns people off.
Now, on the flip side of that, when people, it's kind of like when people realize that feminism is wrong and they become misogynists for a period just out of their contrarian nature.
To recognize that the relationship with Israel is complex and there are reasons to support Israel, but there are obviously limits around that is not to say that we need to start wearing the kefias and marching with Greta Thunberg, okay?
It's not to say that, you know, hey, guys, I know what we can do.
We can form a Christian Islamic alliance and that will lead to a period of world peace.
I have about 1,400 years of history.
I don't know how much time we have on the show today, but about 1,400 years of history to say that's probably not going to work.
And of course, the migrant crisis in Europe and to a lesser degree in America is being driven in no small part by the unassimilability of Islam.
So how do we deal with Israel?
I thought that Trump's approach to this was quite right, which is that, look, you just want the war to end.
You want to have some peace and stability in the region.
And what would be best for the American right is not to pick all or nothing on Israel, but for the importance of Israel to diminish in the minds of right-wing voters.
It just shouldn't be the top issue, I think, for most people, maybe for anybody.
That would be my answer.
People are going to call that a moderate answer or an unsatisfying answer because it's either we need to be chanting from the river to the sea, the Arabs will be free, or we need to all put on yarmulkas or something.
But I don't want to put on a kefiyah.
I don't want to put on a yarmulke.
I want to recognize long-standing alliances and be prudent about it.
Yeah, it's a thing Charlie would talk about that it's just it would be a very dumb thing to destroy the conservative coalition over our attitude towards what is ultimately a foreign country.
Yeah.
And just for most people, that is not what matters in your life nearly as much as the economy, whether you can have a family, whether you own a home, what our immigration policy is.
And it's sort of a touch grass thing.
Get offline a little bit.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the notion, gosh, I mean, I have had people, kind of young, very online people, but they'll come up to me in public.
I'll be in a cigar shop or I'll be say, what do you think of Israel?
I say, I don't think about Israel all that much, if I'm being totally frank about it.
But if you want my really boring, dry answer, here you go.
You know, here are the recollections of Richard Nixon.
Does that work for you?
Yeah, well, you know, and I think we do a disservice to that debate by framing it in a binary.
Yeah.
You either have to be for or against.
And it's like, well, I like them better than the other guys.
Okay.
You know, Charlie was raging against the Islamification of the West.
I mean, I am very sympathetic to the fact that they are surrounded on all sides by people that have oftentimes a very hostile ideology towards them and want them dead, really.
But, you know, there's, I think if we presented more options on the menu that were, you know, that we gave young people to say, hey, you don't have to hate these people.
You don't have to be anti these people.
You don't have to rage against them or scapegoat them or create in them as a boogeyman that will, you know, that is the root of all evils in the world.
There are other options on the table.
If we simply presented that, but I think what is happening is that you have an older generation that does think in terms of the binary, and they're not really open to that debate.
And I think what's happening is you're seeing that ripped and wretched open.
And now we can finally have that debate.
And not, you know, you know, that's all Charlie wanted, actually.
Yes, I think in some ways, the way I think about this is it probably puts me on the outs with every, I'm in a bad position right now for the online right.
I'm going to upset everybody for two reasons in particular on these issues, because I really like Jews and I really like Indians.
And the internet tells me I have to hate Indians and Jews for some reason.
I don't know how Indians have got thrown into this, but I but I really have a H-1B.
Yeah, that is.
I do know how the Indians got thrown in.
Yeah.
But I was thinking this, I'm not even joking.
I was thinking this the other day when I was eating a pastrami and mustard sandwich on rye.
I was thinking, you know, I really like the Jews.
I say that.
But I don't, like, when I'm sure you've seen all of these debates, these questions, they say, are you a Zionist?
And I say, well, like, literally, I'm not, because I don't agree with the historical or religious claims of Zionism.
Because I'm a Catholic.
I don't know.
I'm an American Catholic.
Like, I don't, I just have a different view of religion.
And so if the claim is, you know, true religion tells us that this particular nation has an eternal right to this particular plot of dust, I would just say, no, I don't really buy that.
I kind of take the King Baldwin option, but that's not really on the table right now.
The Protestants in the room are really upset about you.
The land rights are in the Bible.
That's fine.
Okay, but so there's that.
And then there's the historical argument.
Well, you know, the Jews were here for a long time, 2,000 years ago, and so they should be here again.
And I think, well, by that same argument, we should turn over the Black Hills to the Lakota Sioux, but I'm not giving them Mount Rushmore, you know, so we don't accept that logic in other contexts.
And so I literally don't agree with that.
But I also think the Jewish nation came about because the British Empire, which controlled that territory, made a promise to them to give it to them.
And then the United Nations voted to recognize their nation.
And then on top of that, they fought a war of independence and conquest to take that area.
So by every single standard of modern nation states, Israel is a legitimate nation state.
And so I say, so I support it in that way, and I have an affection for the Jews.
You know, sorry that my answer isn't terribly ideological.
But I think the way to deal with this issue, especially as a fracture is the right, is to stop being so freaking ideological about it.
I hate ideology.
I think conservatism in many ways is an anti-ideology.
You know, we prefer the real to the utopian.
We prefer present laughter to utopian bliss, you know, the limited to the unbounded.
This is all the kind of conservatism of Michael Oakeshott and other right-wing thinkers.
And so I just think like, yeah, let's get down to brass tacks.
What's your real issue with Israel?
You don't want the war in Gaza to go on?
I agree.
Yeah, I'm glad that wrapped up.
Good job, Trump.
You know, that was great.
We have alliances with all sorts of nations in the world.
They're complicated and we navigate them.
And yeah, okay.
Anything else?
Can I have my pastrami now?
Is that fine?
We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries.
And today, I want to point you to their podcast.
It's called Culture and Christianity, the Allen Jackson Podcast.
What makes it unique is Pastor Allen's biblical perspective.
He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today, gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge, Trump in the White House, issues in the church.
He doesn't just discuss the problems.
In every episode, he gives practical things we can do to make a difference.
His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies.
They've been great friends.
And now you can hear from Charlie in his own words.
Each episode will make you recognize the power of your faith and how God can use your life to impact our world today.
The Culture and Christianity podcast is informative and encouraging.
You could find it on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes.
Alan Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring biblical truth back into our culture.
You can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry at alanjackson.com forward slash Charlie.
We're on a pretty tight schedule here, so I think we want to get to some questions from people.
Let's do it.
And we can get hopefully two, three, four of them.
Yep.
Emma?
Hi, guys.
Been praying for you a lot.
Keep doing what you're doing.
My dad was born in Tehran, Iran, and he came here in 1977 to escape the revolution that happened when Trump banned Muslims.
He was one of the first people to say that it was a good thing for the country.
And his thing was to say, why couldn't we not ask if they're going to care, love the country first over Islam?
And I think that that seems to be something that people are not realizing.
My dad is still a Muslim.
I was saved by Jesus Christ nine years ago.
And his parents were both Muslim and an atheist, and in hospice accepted Jesus Christ.
So he can save any of you.
I was an atheist for 24 years, and Jesus can change our life.
So I think putting Jesus first is the answer.
But with this stuff with immigration, we're seeing such an awful thing happen.
And not everyone over there is bad.
My dad's proof of that.
He's come, he's a Muslim, and he's assimilated, learned English, and started a business.
So how can we educate people on the horrors that can happen if we ignore this threat?
I think speaking to Muslims and ex-Muslims, but even current kind of moderate Muslims, is a good way to do it.
I'm not surprised to hear that your family left after the revolution in Iran.
Because if you want to hear the most trenchant critics of Iran, the people who most desperately want to just light up that country and blow up the mullahs, it is Iranians who left around the revolution.
It's so beautiful to hear of your conversion story.
You're so right about that.
You know, a friend of mine, a Jewish friend of mine, recently converted.
I said, wow, what did it?
He's very intelligent.
I said, was it this argument or this argument or this?
He said, no, I had a mystical experience of Christ.
I said, oh, that'll do it.
Yeah, that'll probably do it.
And then even I spoke to an ex-Muslim who has also converted.
And, you know, I think hearing those practical stories, this, again, this gets back to what we were just talking about.
You know, abstraction serves some purpose to clarify things.
But when you really want to get down into the brass tacks of politics, which is a practical art, you got to get into real examples.
You know, talk to the real people.
Talk to the real people who fled Iran.
Talk to real Muslims and ex-Muslims.
That's going to clarify things a lot more.
Well, you know, it's interesting, too, is seeing Trump go through the, you know, the Saudi, the tour through the Middle East.
And so many of those countries have done incredible amounts of labor and work politically, militarily, domestically to limit the reach of jihadism, of radical Islam.
And so, you know, the fact that we are playing fast and loose with immigration from that region of the world, here's my thing.
You know, Charlie was always very clear about making it macro versus micro Islam.
Yeah, on the micro level, there's good Muslims.
They're wonderful people.
They'll be a great neighbors.
They'll work hard, be good citizens.
I love Shwarma.
I love Pastrami and I love Shwarma.
Does that make me a moderate?
You're starting to sound like Piers Morgan here.
Dika Masalia, which is English, by the way.
But one last thing here, though, is that my point with importing Islam is that you might, say you import 10,000 of them.
You just need one that gets radicalized and then goes and drives through a market or detonates a device or something like that.
And my point is, the more you bring in, the more you're going to have of that.
We have seen this now historically play out.
So why play fast and loose with it at all?
And you said, put Christ first.
I'm on the team of we should probably do that with immigration too.
Just so just where of course.
I mean, we assimilate Christians in this country very well.
Why don't we just start there?
I mean, this, by the way, this goes back to the founding.
John Adams wrote this to Thomas Jefferson, that the principles of Christianity are the principles on which the revolution was won.
John Jay writes this in the Federalist Papers.
He says, I thank God for the providence that we come from a common people with a common experience of the revolution with a common religion.
And so it's not that we, you know, Washington writes his letter to the Jews.
He doesn't write a letter to the Shiites, I notice, but he writes a letter to the Jews.
And we do have a, they even tolerated some Catholics every now and again.
Obviously, we have a history of toleration, but we got to be practical about it.
A little bit of spice flavors the melting pot, but you don't want to pour in whatever that somali dish that Jacob Fry tried to choke down the other day.
Let's get another question or two here.
Oh, over there.
Hi, Michael.
My name is Brody.
I'm 16.
My mom and I wanted to know what you were doing when you were 16 and what advice you had for someone that might want to get into politics when they're older.
Oh, great question.
I was a political junkie as a kid, going back to when I was six, actually, even earlier.
I remember the Bob Dole election in 1990.
I was the most excited about Bob Dole winning, including Bob Dole.
And I was doing student government, class president, all that stuff when I was 16.
I was also smoking cigars.
I started doing that at 15.
I'm not recommending.
I'm not recommending, but I'm not legally.
I'm not allowed to recommend.
Contractually, you only got one company pitch for your cigars.
And everyone else I got to say for.
But I was civically engaged, and I would recommend starting in those small and local ways.
The great counterexample to this is, of course, our pal Charlie, who decided that he was going to be on the fast track to president at 18.
He got involved in local campaigning in Chicago a lot.
And so I totally agree with you on that.
You've got to start a little local.
And I would recommend not getting famous at 16.
I think there's a real impulse, especially for Zoomers who are raised on the internet, basically weaned on TikTok.
You don't want to get famous before you really formed, before you really have something to say and to do.
So I would recommend, on the one hand, get that practical experience that you can't get from books out of student governments, school board elections, maybe even a congressional helping out interning or something.
But then also read, immerse yourself in history and political philosophy, and really take the opportunity to be a kid, albeit a precocious kid, and to have a real education.
That's going to set you up in a much stronger way to be then seriously involved in politics.
And then you're not running for class president.
Maybe you're running for president president.
I know it stinks.
I think we only have time for one more, probably.
We have five minutes left.
All right.
Well, let's get another one.
Let's see how fast it goes.
Hi, my name is Katie.
I have the honor of serving as president of our turning point chapter at the University of Cincinnati.
Thank you.
I would love your advice on two issues I'm seeing.
First, we have a lot of students who want to get involved but are afraid, and that stops them from coming to meetings.
And second, we have a ton of students who want to know so much more about Christ, but they don't want to talk about that nearly as much as they want to talk about politics.
So how can I best reach both of these groups?
You guys run turning point.
I just show up every now and again.
It showed up for you, though.
Fair enough.
Okay, that's fine.
I would say you should embrace the fact that they are drawn to these two things and not even push against the fact that they find politics more titillating.
Maybe recognize that politics has something to say about religion, and religion certainly has something to say about politics.
There has been an impulse in American Christianity for a long time to try to divorce the two and to say that politics is icky and we shouldn't play with it.
And, you know, Christianity is something totally different.
You know, Christ is incarnate in history.
That's what we're about to commemorate.
He'll return again, by the way, in the second coming.
And he's born into an empire.
And that's significant because he's born into the Roman Empire, which claims the right to tax the whole world, which is a recognition that the civil authority has jurisdiction over the whole world, which means that the passion and the crucifixion of Christ saves the whole world.
You know, the historical and the political tells us something about the religious truth and vice versa.
And of course, St. Paul tells us the civil authority is there for our own good, is given by God and doesn't bear the sword in vain.
So I would just say, don't try to split them apart or say, you want to talk about politics, let's only talk about religion.
Maybe recognize that this is an integral whole because Christ is the God, not just of your church or some other church.
He's the God of the whole cosmos, which means he's even the God of politics.
I think we have time for one more.
Okay, I just want to add one other point to this, is that Charlie became an expert at integrating his faith into political answers.
But he started by being able to give you a political answer to any political question without bringing in politics.
So he spent a long time sharpening his arguments without politics at all.
And then as he got older, he started just incorporating them.
But you get really good at the logic with or without.
It's the first thing I would say.
And then, you know, to Michael's point, it's like politics can be the doorway in.
But Charlie used to always say that those who drink from the streams of liberty will eventually find its source.
But we believe that's Christ.
And so you may not know the order through which door they're going to walk in first and just be open, listen to the spirit prayerfully, and you'll get there.
All right.
Two minutes.
We have two minutes.
Two minutes.
Fast question.
Hi, guys.
My name is Jamie.
I'm from the state of California.
I don't know if I should be too full of that.
It's a beautiful state.
It is a beautiful state.
My family and I were so blessed to be here last year in this room, actually.
We saw the great back and forth, the friendly banter that Michael, you, and Charlie had last year about Catholicism and Christianity.
And that brings me to, I came with my family.
Like I said, I have my 11-year-old and my 13-year-old here.
They were here last year as well.
And my question for you is: my 13-year-old will be going into high school next year.
We've prayed on it a lot.
Unfortunately, it's kind of out of our scope right now to put him in a private high school.
So he will be going into a public school next year.
He's been in private school from kindergarten through eighth grade.
So I wanted to ask the three of you really words of encouragement, words of wisdom that you can give to just not just my son.
We actually brought five kids with us, ranging from seven-year-olds to 13.
Now we're talking.
So we'd love to hear what you guys have for them.
Thank you.
First, how many kids did you say?
Five.
Five.
So Mormon, Catholic, or Orthodox Jew.
We're actually here with three families.
The four, it's me and my husband and my 11-year-old and 13-year-old are here for the second time.
We actually brought two other families with us this year that we're so excited just to really hear of what Charlie left.
And I saw, I will say this in this room, the words of wisdom with Charlie.
I saw at firsthand the impact that Charlie had on these kids.
Yeah.
My 11-year-old came up to me the night that he was shot and he put his head in my lap when Erica was speaking and he's like, why did this happen?
So I just want to say that we miss Charlie so much and I got to meet Daisy.
Thank you so much for what you've done.
So anyway, I didn't expect to cry, but we just, it's happy.
We know Charlie's here.
We feel his presence.
But anything you guys can give us on closing out, especially to this young youth that really is looking for some words of wisdom?
Well, I would say on the very practical school point, you know, happily you've given your kid a great formation, you know, and even like with William F. Buckley Jr., great American conservative, he was homeschooled through eighth grade, you know, he had that, and then he went to whatever other school.
And so you really, that's the formation, that period right up until the teenage years.
You've done such a great job of making that really solid that I think you can have reasonable confidence that the teachers won't screw it up too much in the public school.
But you have to keep an eye.
I would say you have to keep a real eye on it.
The reason homeschooling spiked during COVID is because kids went home.
They looked at what their teachers, the parents looked at what the teachers were telling the kids over the computer screen, and they yanked their kids out of schools because they said, this is insane and it's poison.
So you have to be very responsive to that.
It sounds though from your story about Charlie, obviously all of us are, you know, this is a big one.
This is the last event that Charlie directly left us that dawned on me yesterday when I was coming in here.
And, you know, his picture's all over.
And, you know, yeah, this is a particular America.
It's always growing.
It's always big.
It's always spirit-filled.
And this one in particular.
So we're all kind of working through that a little bit and living that.
The fact that your kid would have that reaction to this event tells you he's in a good spot.
I think he's going to be all right.
No, we still have a lot of, of course, if they want encouragement on the other practical things.
There's a lot of videos of Charlie arguing with liberals in schools.
They can still show us.
And I guess because people like that, to close on a pedantic religious point, would they be allowed to pray for Charlie's intercession on their behalf?
Or is that not allowed unless he's canonized?
He's not formally canonized yet.
Although there was a bishop who, I forget which bishop it was, who said that Charlie was almost certainly a martyr, a martyr for the faith, though he's not the Pope.
And I guess we'll have to save the Pope debate for the next one.