Thank you for listening to this podcast, one production now available on Apple podcast, podcast, one Spotify and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody, happy Monday. What is what to do about big tech? How about family formation in America? I just had a really interesting conversation at the Steamboat Institute, Vail, Colorado, that I want to share with you. That is going to be exclusively aired here on the Charlie Kirk Show. We get into many different types of topics as to what is happening with the younger generation and what can we do to actually fix it. I've been barnstorming the country post the Republican National Convention.

We have gone from Colorado to stops in Montana, Vegas, L.A., ending in San Jacinto and then back to Phoenix. Please consider supporting our work as we barnstorm the country at Charlie Kirkconnell. Support Charlie Kakamega report. And as always, you guys can email us Freedom at Charlie Cook, Dotcom Freedom at Charlie Kirchen. Important conversation here from the Stebenne Institute. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go, Charlie.

What you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Cook is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Cook, Charlie Cook's run in the White House. But I want to thank Charlie is an incredible guy, his spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

That's why we are here.

All right. I'm going to I'm going to start it off here quickly with just a you take one minute and tell you a little about my college experience. So I went to a very liberal college.

I wrote a I wrote a paper about eight, 10 years before you were born. Right.

So I wrote a paper that I didn't really believe in and I thought was a fun experiment, though, a fun intellectual experiment. I wrote a defense of monarchy just for fun. And I think if I were in college now, I think I'd be afraid to write that paper just in terms of what could happen. I was the editor in chief of our schools, conservative libertarian newspaper. I ran for school, government office, and people went around writing fascist on my on my posters.

She's a weird thing to write about a libertarian Jew, but what are you going to do? But I don't think I don't know that I would have I didn't feel I didn't feel unsafe physically.

But I think if I had if I wrote now what I had written, then I might fear for my physical health.

And the last thing is, you know, if I had wanted to go around my college campus and talk to people about whatever back ten years before you were born, I might have had a lot of people disagree with me, but I would have been able to do it. These days, you can't actually go around on a lot of college campuses and just talk and free speech zones and things like that. I'm sure you guys will. You'll talk about.

And it seems to me that that universities have gone from being liberal leaning to aggressively anti intellectual and aggressively ignorant.

And I'm really looking forward to hear you to talking about that. Charlie Kirk, one of the most prominent young conservatives in the country today, a favorite source of President Trump's re tweets for founder and president of of Turning Point USA, which is a nationwide student organization dedicated to the important, but I think increasingly difficult task of teaching and encouraging young people to promote individual liberty, limited government and free markets. Charlie hosts the Charlie Kirk Show and is the author of The Magga Doctrine The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future, that was published earlier this year.

Congrats on publishing a book. Kelsey Bowler is a contributor to the Federalist. There'll be some other Federalist folks here with us this weekend into the Daily Signal, which I commend to you if you don't know about the daily signal. Excellent senior policy analyst at the Independent Women's Forum. And in 2017, shield the Tony Blankley chair for Public Policy and American Exceptionalism right here at the Steamboat Institute. Quite an honor. Congrats on that. And in suggesting that Kelsey's a little geographically confused, she and her family live in Washington, D.C. with an Australian shepherd named Utah.

So pick a place and stick with it. All right.

I'm gonna give Charlie the mike now hypodermics on the show, Chinon Kolevar. It's so great to be back at the Steamboat Institute once again, my bio does need a slight update. For those of you who I saw last year, you might remember me seven months pregnant on stage about losing my breath in this altitude. A few of you were concerned that I might pass out on stage. I was concerned myself, too. But this year I am back with my almost one year old daughter, who came not long after you both saw me.

So it's been quite a year for me personally for this country. We have a lot to talk about. And as I was thinking about what we want to discuss on this panel today, I was looking at the title Restoring Free Speech and Ideological Diversity on College Campuses. And this morning I was scrolling through Twitter seeing a bunch of videos of people who attended the RNC last night, including Senator Rand Paul. You were there last night to Charlie open the entire RNC in case you missed that.

And I saw these videos of these Trump supporters being physically attacked. And it made me realize it's not just restoring free speech on college campuses that we need to do. We need to restore peace on college campuses and beyond. And that's where I want to start this conversation off. I want to ask Charlie how much our college campuses to blame for the riots and violence that we're seeing break out today. You know, first of all, great to be with everybody.

Also, be back to the students to thank you, Kelsey, for the very important introduction. A lot of friends in the audience, both here and upstairs, Tom Cox, Donna the Daises, Arlen Whiteaker. So hello there. There, Marco, who's been boy, Marco was a turning point. Remember back in 2013 before we were a national student movement. So lots of friends here. So honored to be here.

Look, one of the things that we kind of convinced ourselves about college campuses like a couple of decades ago is we used to say they were liberal, but we never thought for whatever reason, which was kind of foolish, that the leftism would continue to spread throughout our culture.

We almost treated it like a nuclear spill, almost like Chernobyl, like we can wall it off. It's really bad. We have our kids put on hazmat suits and go to Brown and maybe they'll come back untouched. We hoped. But excuse us analogy, it's actually more like a virus. And what happens on a college campus doesn't stay on a college campus. It infects your entire culture. What happens on a college campus will happen in the halls of Congress and corporate boardrooms in the streets of the biggest cities in our country.

And what we've done, and it's probably one of the most suicidal things we've done as a civilization in a country is we've spent hundreds of billions of our own dollars in unrestricted gifts to higher education, which conservative donors, by the way, have written these massive checks to these schools. So we've taught our kids to hate Western civilization and train them to burn down everything that we love. Not to mention we kept sending these kids to these universities saying, go borrow money.

You don't have to study things that don't matter to find jobs that don't exist. And then people are wondering, well, where did this entire kind of revolution in our streets come from?

We'll just come to a college campus with me. It's only going to get worse. Like this is just the preview. This is the this is the just the precedent for what's to come.

This is just the commercial. And so I think we need to look at things a lot more generationally. And we haven't been in fact, we as conservatives just look at one election cycle to the other. Where is the left? 40 years ago, they realized that taking over these core institutions of higher learning, that's exactly how you destroy a fabric of a civilized society. And we're to blame. I mean, the people to blame, quite honestly, are those of us that kept sending our kids to these universities and kept sending hundreds of billions of dollars in big gifts.

I'm not against the idea of higher education, by the way. I love the idea of raising up kids and understanding freedom of speech and dialogue and Western civilization and history. That would be great if that was actually happening on college campuses. It's the opposite. Most young people that I deal with cannot tell you about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle or Descartes or the great thinkers that built our civilization. But they could tell you about Angela Davis. They can tell you about, you know, the most ridiculous Marxist theory that is now really infected the entire Democrat Party and with it half of the country.

And so, look, there's there's a lot that goes into this.

But I think that we there's actually some really positives that are happening right now with the virus and with higher education. I think that we're finally realizing the scam that higher education is. And I don't use that word lightly. I mean, for you, parents out there are grandparents. You're still paying tuition for your kids to go get a Zoome call and they haven't adjusted your tuition at all. I mean, that's that there's a reckoning that needs to happen in higher education right now.

And this is not insignificant. I mean, one of the major reasons as to why middle class incomes as far as middle class income to debt ratio has not increased over the last thirty years is higher education. You have thirty five year olds that. Are still paying off bad student loan debt where they're like, I didn't really get that many skills when I went to college, but I'm eighty thousand dollars in debt and I'm still trying to pay off the principal.

So it's even worse than just being infected with bad ideas. You have the erosion of middle income earning capacity because of how expensive higher education has become, where the average student loan borrower owes thirty two thousand dollars to the federal government, where the majority, 59 percent of people that go to higher education, only fifty nine percent actually graduate. That means 41 percent of kids that go to college drop out. You would not be able to run anything with a fifty nine percent success rate.

The St. Louis Federal Reserve I'm sorry, the New York Federal Reserve came out and they said. Forty four percent of recent college graduates, 44 percent over the last decade, are employed in professions that do not require a college degree. Forty four percent. That means only 56 percent that graduate out of the fifty nine percent that graduate are actually gainfully employed with something that required the piece of paper that they.

And so at some point we have to ask yourself the question, what are we doing here? Like these are the people that are burning down our country. These are the professors that are infecting your kids with the worst possible ideas imaginable. We're writing them unlimited checks at some points. We should say maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if we had more plumbers, electricians, HVAC people, police officers, entrepreneurs and people that maybe just didn't go to college.

And if you want to be a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, I totally get it. But you understand that's less than 15 percent of all kids that go to college. Like the idea we have is that most kids go to college to be specifically prepared for the marketplace, and that's just not the case. 50 plus percent of kids that go to college don't even know what their degree is going to be when they come to the university. That means they're they're almost soul searching and career searching.

And I say commonly, if you're going to college to find yourself, you're going to lose yourself and likely you're going to find values that create bitterness, arrogance and resentment for Western society. But I think there's actually some positives here. Kelsey and I love to get into it, which I actually think people are now realizing the financial insanity of what we've been doing here when there's been no tuition adjustment at all whatsoever for a WebEx, for Harvard or for Yale or Stanford.

I think it's long past time that we start asking these very tough questions.

Well, on that front, I want to push you a bit, because conservatives are often, myself included. We're often very hypocritical in that we are quick to criticize higher education, but we are sending our children there. And it's hard for me not to dream of sending my daughter one day to college because that's sort of the script of American success in this country. But that said, I graduated from Lafayette College, which some of you and you write in Pennsylvania, I no longer retribution.

I no longer contribute to Lafayette College because I have not been happy with their response just this year alone to the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it's interesting. My father went to Bates and he was donated to Bates College his entire life and recently decided not just to stop donating to Bates, but start donating to Hillsdale College, which he has absolutely no affiliation with at all. And on that front. What do you think the future of higher education looks like, or is it going to be more divided where you have more schools like Hillsdale pop out, pop up in the traditional liberal arts schools like Lafayette College really start to suffer?

I think it's going to be a mixture of both. It's hard to say. I mean, if I wasn't doing my day job, if I wasn't doing Turning Point USA and traveling the country and doing two podcast today and filling in for radio, the multibillion dollar opportunity right now is whoever can get this college question right. I mean, the next the next Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. Again, I would do this if I wasn't, you know, distracted, but I would know how to take it's can you educate someone in 18 months or less for an affordable dollar without the accreditation service and prove that they're actually a better applicant for future jobs?

If you can solve that question, parents will send their kids there, because that's the gap, right, is that parents say they need to go because they need to get the job. But corporate America is not even happy with the colleges are producing, in fact, most out of Fortune 500 CEOs, four hundred seventy three or four thousand five hundred say they give an unsatisfactory rating with the type of applicants that they're getting from higher education. So corporate America is not even happening with the with the colleges are producing.

Parents aren't happy with the price. So the bridge for the entrepreneur is how can I educate a kid in eighteen to twenty four months and prove to the marketplace that they're ready to enter, that they actually grow in maturity, they grow in skills, and they actually have some sort of meaning to be able to enter to get a job.

That's the opportunity that's already being filled by some of these technical schools. But the question is this, which is where Hillsdale is phenomenal is like how do we get these kids to actually understand the great ideas that built our civilization? Right. And so some of these colleges are embracing the reason as to why donors are affecting them. That's actually going to be a losing model for them, because most of these donors are conservatives. By the way, most of the donors to these schools are center right, reasonable people and.

Since they escaped higher education, they decided not to become a professor. They built a big business and then they got called by their alma mater to go write a big check. And a lot of times they do. I think that's changing. We have that program at Turning Point USA called Divest You, where we celebrate donors that actually pull their gifts from higher education. We've divested 46 million dollars in just the last month, over 15 universities across the country.

And our goal is a billion. And we want to celebrate donors that pull their gifts and say, I'm not going to give that money anymore to Rutgers University, where their English department says, if you use proper English, that's racist, like John, you can look it up, Rutgers English Department, or we're not going to give money anymore to universities, you know, like in Texas for Texas A&M, for example, or the university professor says that Trump supporters should be, you know, put up and assassinated or I'm paraphrasing, of course, but I mean, just the extremism you see every single day.

And this is exactly who's teaching your children. And so, yeah, I think that's the opportunity.

Right. So for parents that actually want their kids to be enlightened, I also think that we need to think more creatively and less monolithic monolithically. Like who's to say you can't take a gap year and just watch you videos and Hoover Institution, YouTube livestream, you're actually going to learn more like if I kid you not I'm autodidactic.

I'm self-taught. I didn't go to college. I don't expect everyone to be my path. But if a kid has discipline, if you just watch Victor Davis Hanson podcast every week and you actually internalize what he's saying and you just do the Hillsdale Online College reconstitutes, which is free, by the way, and you just watch Prager You videos and just kind of listen to Rush Limbaugh. Every once in a while, you'll be exponentially more informed than the number one Harvard graduate when it comes to government.

I know this because I talk to these people. I've spoken at Brown, I've spoken at Stanford. These are educated fools. They are they do not know Edmund Burke. They don't know Thomas Paine, but they do know Ida B Wells and they know Michelle Fuyuko and they know Karl Marx and they know Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I mean, they know all the awful philosophers. So what I'm taking is some of a provocative position. I totally admit it. But I think it's time that we as conservatives start thinking more creatively.

I think we need to think less monolithically. I think we need to start challenging institutions. And isn't that what the last four years of Donald Trump has actually taught us, is that maybe we need to actually just kind of disconnect ourselves from how we've been thinking about certain things for the last couple of years. And I think higher education is one of them, because if we stay on this current path as it is. It's not it's not just not sustainable, it's like the civilization might actually break apart.

So what's actually happening in our streets, I could talk about this. I think that we as conservatives talk about the cultural element quite a lot, and I just did. But we don't talk about the material element to this, which is not we as conservatives kind of shy away from this, where this huge debate going on conservatism right now versus like rights rights.

Right. Based conservatism and kind of more kind of fair trade. You know, more talking about I'm I'm failing to describe it correctly, but it's kind of more populist centered conservatism.

And I fall right in the middle of it.

I actually see both of it really equally.

And I think it's really interesting where you kind of see the young person right now that's burning down Portland. And right now we say that's because of higher education. You're right, it is. But it's not the full picture. It's also because they're 32 years old and they own nothing and they're renting and they have a degree from Portland State University. I taught them to hate America, but their net worth is negative. Sixty thousand dollars. And when all of you guys were 30 years old and you went to college, you could see your life get a little bit better year after year.

Right. You got a job. You could see your bank account go up, your debt go down. And you actually were invested in the system. You were working in young people right now. And you can't totally blame them for that. You can you can definitely blame them for the destruction. You can't blame them for the analysis. The system right now is not working for a 31 year old. It's not. And I'm not one to say blow up the entire system at all.

I think that's foolish.

But if we just think that just tell a 31 year old you go work harder, like that's the solution. They have no skills. You told them to go to college. They're sixty thousand dollars into debt and they rent and they don't own anything and they're not getting married. And that's the other thing I want to mention that we as conservatives don't talk about enough. We're on the verge of a population collapse in our country. There's more single 30 year olds than married 30 year olds.

For the first time in the history of our country, we're on pace to have 500000 less children this year than last year, 500000. I mean, just think about how just catastrophic that is, so of course, they're going to burn down your cities. They don't children. You have a family, you're less likely to do ridiculously crazy things, right? I mean, this is the most ridiculously obvious way.

In my RNC speech, I mentioned twice, I said the party that can communicate to young people that we're the party that's going to make it easy to have many children is going to win the youth vote for the next 20 years. I think the RNC did a really good job of that this week, actually, way better than I would have expected. It's like no longer.

We just like the big business party. We're now actually the family party. That's how we win, because most 28 year olds, you know, the number two reasons they give for why they don't want to get married or have kids or at least have kids, it's too expensive. And I don't want to bring kids in this chaotic world all the time. I get this answer. And so here we are talking like high taxes, low taxes like that stuff's important.

But if you don't actually talk to a twenty eight year old, like, I'm going to make it really easy for you to have four kids.

That's a winning message and we're actually doing the opposite right now, and if we don't get that answer right, what you're seeing in Portland and Kenosha is literally just a 30 second commercial. What's to come? And no wonder why they want everyone to go do weed right now. Of course they do. They want to go to stay at home and have no ambition because they don't own anything.

I mean, you have a whole generation that has negative net worth. And so I think if we conservatives can crack that code and of course, we decided to shut down our entire country for six months, who suffered the most?

Young people? It was young people that had material income gains. It's young people that had the biggest mental health declines. They had no net worth. They had no savings to rely upon. They had no country clubs to retreat to. They had no private jets to travel on. They had no gyms to exercise in. They had no sports to listen. And then we look at this. We say, what kind of country are we leaving? A 30 something?

And the honest answer is, we've really done an awful job the last nine months with how we shut down our country the last six months. And so I think that we as conservatives actually have an opportunity here because the left is just they're just selling misery and grievance politics. And I think we can actually have a much better world view to sell.

Well, I can highly endorse having children because joy in my life, I want to ask Charlie, on a scale of one to ten, how bad or how bad are college campuses right now for free speech and how much worse could it get, particularly thinking of the Black Lives Matter movement that received millions of dollars in donations this summer, despite not really being a legitimate nonprofit where they transparently tell their donors where their money is going to. And we have now not just student activists, but we have administrations, entire colleges and universities getting behind them.

Well, it's worse than that, Kelsey.

We have corporate activists. I mean, again, I want you guys to think kind of beyond just the myopic view that some people on, you know, the 30 second television shows will give. What are we supposed to expect when we keep sending these kids to Brown and then they go work at PepsiCo?

What you expect then? PepsiCo is going to eventually give a billion dollars to BLM, which is what they did.

OK, they take over the corporate boardrooms because they were all educated in the very institutions that have these awful ideas. Right. So it spreads all throughout your culture. Or BLM does a billion dollars to racial justice, right? Bank of America, YouTube does a hundred million dollars to just black content creators for BLM Inc., the entire National Basketball Association, the entire Major League Baseball. But who's the one that are getting in their ears? And who do you think works at the New York Yankees H.R. Department?

All the kids that just graduated from Columbia, they're the ones that are friends with these players. I get messages from these NBA players, by the way, these MLB players, they're like, I don't know what to do. The H.R. department comes in, give speeches and they're encouraging us. This is the untold story of all this kind of sports stuff that's happening right now. And so it's worse than that is that our university system has created activists all up and down the landscape of our country.

Right. And so how bad is freedom of speech? I mean, it's it doesn't even exist, right? I mean, I have I mean, it's some public universities. You're able to do it because of the potential legal threat that you can get. Right. And God bless President Trump for signing the executive order. We played a role in that that allowed freedom of speech on college campuses. I'd like to see that more forcibly enforced by the Department of Education.

But that's a different topic for different for different time. And the president displayed enormous courage for signing that executive order, which said that any university that does not allow the First Amendment will lose its federal funding, essentially took a lot of courage for him to sign that. But if I so I've spoken at all these schools, I should say all. But like every type of school you can imagine. Right. I've spoken at Stanford Brown, Yale CEO, Boulder, Colorado State, UT Austin, Texas State University of Florida.

I've spoken at more campuses than anyone else in the last five years in the conservative movement. I'm not able to go on campus. That armed security that's just there is a physical threat to anyone that dares to espouse these ideas. Right. So that not alone should just give us pause. Like, what kind of place is this? Right. Like this is where we're sending our kids and our money, where I talk about the Constitution, the first principles and, you know, the Christian ethic.

And I I need enough armed security to go launch a coup in Nicaragua.

It's like I had helicopters before.

Seriously, snipers at the University of Central Florida. That should just take pause. Like, that's not that's not right. OK, the second thing is this, is that when it comes to freedom of speech, this is the deeper, more philosophical take away.

If you actually read these people's literature, if you read Michelle Fuyuko, if you read Jacques Derrida, which are these postmodernists thinkers from the nineteen sixties, that it has infected the entire academy, they do believe that dialogue is a problem.

So this is not a mistake. This is a strategy. It's a tactic that freedom of speech for us is a moral fight. Right. But we actually don't dive into the utility. And fight of free speech, that's actually a good thing to be able to have good ideas win, right? We say it's moral for every idea to be heard because we believe in the dignity of human beings. We believe in a marketplace of ideas. But if you eliminate freedom of speech, then all of a sudden tyranny has to exist after that.

It's just actually a really obvious next conclusion. Right. So if I'm not allowed to say something, then the person with the bigger stick wins, the person with the gun wins. But person generally has really bad ideas.

And so what we've allowed happen at university campuses is our kids to believe that dialogue, exchanging ideas is an instrument of white tyranny. OK, so they think having a conversation. Means that white people continue to control our country. This is why BLM Inc., it was so effective, because all of your children and your grandchildren through social media and propagandized to believe that white people are the enemy of our country. What's the inverse of that BLM right there? The solution there, the hero to the villain, a society that we live in.

And I know it might've been really confusing for you to watch for, but for me, it was like I'm watching the story unfold that I've seen written beforehand. For those of us that understand the left, it made perfect sense.

So, look, there's some schools that are better than others, but generally they think if this is what I always say, if they had a button where they could shut us all up and wipe us off the face of the earth, they would push that button.

If we had that button for the left, we would not push that button. We just want to talk to them and maybe persuade them like they consider us an obstacle. We consider them an opportunity.

So the last panel you heard about China's national security law and interestingly enough, this is impacting Chinese students and Hong Kong students who are studying at college and universities in the US and Harvard and Princeton, for example, are growing very concerned that this law could put those students in danger. And so they are taking steps to protect those students by making certain parts of the class anonymous and so forth. And I I saw quite a double standard there. An irony that Harvard and Princeton are willing to go out of their way to protect the free speech and physical safety of Chinese students and Hong Kong students.

But yet, when it comes to bringing provocative speakers onto college campuses who are conservatives, a lot of times you have to hire your own private security. That's that's exactly what we have to do.

And so it's a great point. Look, one of the other learning moments for all of us, and I encourage you to go to our website. We're the only organization that has done this, China on campus, dotcom, China on campus, dotcom.

Go look at how many of your universities that you might give money to. You send your kids to that have Confucius Institutes on them that have, you know, the Confucius Institute is I don't know if they mentioned the previous panel, which was terrific, by the way, which is Chinese Communist Party military funded institutions on our U.S. campuses. There's over 70 of them. We've successfully helped close, 50 of them across the country. They're still 70, seven zero.

China on campus dotcom, Christopher Wray and his FBI confirmation testimony said this is the number one domestic threat against our country, the Confucius Institutes on our campuses, they have server rooms. They spy on students. They use information sharing technology. And these are just military camps basically on our university campuses. Don't take my word for it. Christopher Reeve's word for it, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

And so what's been amazing to me as a learning experience is how how higher education panders to the Islamist Islamists, the Chinese Communist Party. And yet they hate conservatives much more than they hate the CCP and they hate the government of Iran. It's actually been incredible. I mean, a lot of these universities take money straight from Iran, straight from the Brotherhood for Islamic studies, immersion institutes. They take money straight from the CCP. But the second that a conservative wants to come talk about the Constitution, which you call me provocative, I mean, I guess I'm provocative.

I don't think I am. I just think I'm honest. That's like me. Go figure that out. But as soon as I want to come show up, it's absolute bedlam, right? It's riots. It's windows being smashed. It is police officers everywhere. You know, the whole university has to shut down.

And so that also should ask our question, like, what kind of kids are we creating for the world? And that we're creating students that actually become less mature after four years when they go to university campuses. And I actually make this argument all the time.

And again, I use this as a generalization because there's plenty of good kids that go to university and they they survive and they do quite fine. But a high school senior is far more mature than a college senior, like it's not even close. Why is that to be on their parents? That's why they have to be around someone to hold him accountable. In college, it's the exact opposite, they typically gain weight, they indulge in the worst things a human being can indulge in.

There's no supervisor. They learn nonsensical ideas. In fact, they're encouraged by their professors to go do that. That you become your own God. Atheism is a very quickly growing religion on college campuses, and it's almost like indulging in this secular, hedonistic lifestyle. And then we wonder why our kids are so miserable. We wonder why the CDC came out and said one out of four kids contemplated suicide in the last 90 days. One of the four, right, we wonder why antidepressants have multiplied by a multiple of four over the last 90 days for kids under the age of twenty five.

Why marijuana usage has doubled, cocaine usage, alcoholism, all four kids under the age of 30. Well, I think we've covered some of that. But there's a crisis happening with young people in this country, and I hope I'm communicating and conveying it. And again, this is going to transcend political lines. If a young person does not believe they are materially invested in the country they live in, you will experience a French or Russian revolution that will make Portland look like nothing.

And it will be kids that call themselves conservatives that will not engage in it, too.

And I'm Tucker Carlson has been on this phenomenally. You have to have young people, I believe, in the system or else they're going to blow everything up and I don't support it. I'm just telling you how it is.

We're receiving lots of good questions, so keep them coming in. On that note, I want to ask one more of my questions before moving on to these. And that is about Turning Point USA. You guys do an excellent job, exciting the base and debating on college campuses. And I follow you on Instagram, the meme wars. You guys have that down. What is your strategy for winning over sort of the moderate middle that may be the meems?

Well, that's a fair question.

By the way, is great work to sell through it. You the daily signal. It's terrific. Look, we.

I have found through what we do and, you know, doing two podcasts a day and visiting a lot of campuses, it's an interesting strategy because first, our first and foremost. Objective is to get kids that are center right and conservative, to be excited, to be proud, that they're conservative, to be unafraid to speak out. That's a really big challenge and I think we've done a good job of that.

I would have had a different answer five years ago, and I've I believe this more than ever before. I actually think that we win more young people over by not compromising on our views and actually being better at explaining them than going to the mushy middle.

And so I'll give you a great example, you know, there are five Wannsee, four organization turning point action. We run Students for Trump, we have five hundred students for Trump chapters across the country. We hosted the president in June. We had three thousand six hundred students show up in the midst of a pandemic, 107 degrees outside in Phoenix, Arizona. Joe Biden couldn't do that with young people, regardless of what was going on.

Mitt Romney, at his absolute peak, had 80 students for Romney chapters. Right. And so Romney was always trying to be more moderate. Right. We've seen Romney's true colors. Right. He hates America so much he can't even admit that Donald Trump's doing something good. Mitt Romney is the worst Republican Party, by the way. He is an absolute dishonest human being, a nothing good to say about that total and complete fraud. He asked for the president's endorsement.

Begged him for his endorsement for the Senate race and then votes for his impeachment and calls him the worst things you can call him the day before he gets sworn in the Senate, that is that is just so unethical anyway. So I have to say that. So I know some people are here from Utah.

Sorry. So Mitt Romney goes to the middle and we actually lost young people that way. Like we actually I think we win young people and all people. That is by saying, here's what we stand for, rooted in truth. I'm going to explain it to you and I'm going be very convicted and courageous.

And I actually think that's a very effective way to go about it. And I think the Trump movement has showed us that more young people support Trump than the media would have you believe. A lot of young people hate Trump, to be totally honest about that. That's perfectly clear by what you watch on television. But Trump will do better than he did in 16. He'll do better than he did than Romney did in 12, in McCain in 08 with younger voters because he's convicted and he stands for something and he's unapologetic to talk about issues that actually affect people.

And so when I talk to people in the middle, I actually I have a rule not to pander.

So like what I say here is exactly what I say on a college campus, which is kind of breaks kind of the conservatism playbook, which is like be something different everywhere you are. That's like the last 20 year playbook. Right. I go to young people and try to know I'm actually going to talk about exactly what I say out there. And then I think we win more people that way because they're actually honest. Right. But people in the middle generally, they want the issues that when young people in the middle are the idea of canceling culture.

Super pleased that the president mentioned this in his speech last night. And look, the activist media, they're so incredibly dishonest. But what you saw last night and I was there, it was so good. The whole evening was gorgeous and beautiful was a really significant political realignment. And again, the activist media, this is actually an interesting thing to talk about. Like the Democrats are now the party of endless foreign wars. They're now the party of like corporate America and rich people.

And like the Republican Party is now the party of working people, the party of ending foreign wars, the party of family creation, and the party of religious expression and free speech. Like how did that happen? Like eight years ago? You guys bleep half of that stuff as Democrats like. That's really significant, right? That's an interesting thing. And that's actually how we're going to win more young people.

Young people are tired of these foreign entanglements overseas. President Trump is ending them. Young people love the idea of being able to speak your mind regardless of what it is about. Fear of retribution, 71 percent of young people believe are fearful that they will lose their job, get graded differently and could get kicked out of school if they dare say things. One thing that is contrary to the political orthodoxy. So now that President Trump is bragging publicly in front of thirty million people last night that he's the ambassador of freedom of speech and ending foreign wars, that'll win more young people than any sort of like Republican outreach strategy will about corporate tax cuts.

OK, because those things actually matter. It's like, yeah, I'm actually tired of invading these foreign countries while our our country, our generation can't even have children. Like, that's probably not a good thing. And then the freedom of speech issue is massive. So, look, also a couple of things. The life issue is a winning issue for young people. Don't let anyone tell you differently the pro-life issue. This is the most pro-life generation in American history.

I don't know the numbers you would know the better. You literally do this for a living, but I think it's like fifty six. Fifty eight percent of young people in battleground states are very pro-life, like very pro-life. And I was so proud to see the president embrace that. And look, the left, they are selling grievance politics. The one thing that we as conservatives struggle with is a good answer on the environment. It is a very top tier issue for them.

I think there's a lot of misunderstanding on under it. I'm generally kind of very dismissive of it just because I think that it's very rooted in alarmism. But I think we need a better answer, to be honest with you.

But the top three issues for young people are this. Am I going to be able to live a meaningful life in this country? No one like that's it. It's jobs. Family creation. Number two is the environment, some around it. Number three is freedom of speech and expression of ideas.

We're really good on two of those three issues.

Well, you just gave me the opportunity to give a plug to the organization my husband works for called ClearPath. And they add they are a conservative organization that advocates for conservative clean energy policies. And they really are turning around the message, working with a lot of Republican lawmakers on this issue. And I think it's a total farce to assume that conservatives don't care about the environment. The very root of conservatism is to conserve. We just are smart enough to recognize that banning plastic straws isn't going to be the answer on that front.

No, and I kid you not. Environment is a top three issue for voters under 35, and we are doing awful. And that does mean have to embrace the Green New Deal. Right. But maybe we should brag about Teddy Roosevelt once in a while, like all these national parks, I think to a Republican president like that would be nice. Instead, it's like, oh, we just want to drill everywhere. Like, I agree. I love oil and gas exploration.

I'm a huge fan of pipelining, huge fan of fracking, all those sorts of things. But if we don't get a good answer on the environment, they're going to destroy all those industries. Like, that's the. Playbook and is just a top tier issue for young people, I think we have to get better at answering that. I'm on it.

All right. Well, I'm going to some of our questions from audience members. One of them wants to know, are there any Democrats or progressives you respect or find worth dialoguing with?

See, like a lot of them don't believe in dialogue. So that's tough, as I just mentioned. But I will say this. I mean, as long as we're being honest and with where the Republicans get things wrong, I can tell you where I think Bernie Sanders, AOC Linamar and Rasheeda Talibe get something correct that we get wrong. And that's that's the money and politics issue. I've seen it up close and personal. I think we as Republicans are on the wrong side of this issue.

I think how we finance our elections is a problem.

It's whatever lobbyist has the closest access to the candidate. It's whoever gives the most contribution, gets the legislative earmark. And the fact that AOC does not take money from registered lobbyists is actually worthy of praise. She doesn't. She rejects it. No.

Only one Republican, Matt Gates, has made that pledge. And so part of it is because they have a better small dollar giving mechanism. Just to be honest, some of what Republicans would do this if they could raise the equivalent money. Right. But they are more invested in small dollar donor given. We have to do a better job of building durable multimillion members, small dollar giving communities so our members can say, I'm not going to take money from lobbyists that represent foreign countries.

Right. So a lot of our Republicans are taking money from lobbyists that are registered to lobby for literally a foreign country. And so the you guys all know how big of an influence lobbyists have in DC. A lot of you have seen it. If we're honest ourselves, that's not that's one of the reasons why we haven't gotten school choice done. Like we love school choice. We talk about all the time. Right.

Well, because the teacher unions have an immensely powerful lobby. It's one of the reasons why we have an to get price transparency done or hospital hospital pricing done. It's because these are the biggest lobbies in DC. And so I think that we're dialoguing with the bitter anti-American Alexandria cogito Cortez. I mean, if she'll talk to me, I'll talk to anybody. I really believe that. And I'll do do I think we should publicly finance elections? No, I think that's probably too far.

But I think that I think that if you're federally registered as a lobbyist, it should be illegal to give money to a camp candidate. I mean, that should be one of the obvious, most obvious things we should talk about. Right. Like if you're registered to lobby for a corporation and then you give money that you're not giving money, that candidate, because you're inspired by that candidate. Right. Like you guys give money to candidates because you're moved by their worldview and their vision.

Right. So I think that's that's something that I think actually could be a big bridge. And then I respect I actually lost a lot of respect for Bernie Sanders because of how nice he's been to Joe Biden. I mean, they philosophically don't agree he's the worst loser I've ever seen in my life. I mean, every time Bernie Sanders has a video, it feels like he's being held hostage, like he has to give it, like it's the lighting is all weird.

And he's like, I really loved you. You don't love Joe Biden. You you hate Biden more than you hate Trump, at least at least Trump is good on trade and good on war and cares about the middle class. Biden doesn't care about any of those things.

So, look, any leftist that wants to talk to me, I'll have a conversation with. But if I were to say one big take away the money in politics issue, whatever party demonstrates movement on the money and politics issue will win the next generation because most young people. Ninety two percent of young people believe the political system is rotten to the core and does not represent us. That's the number one issue that no one wants to talk about. See, when people talk like the biggest issues, when you leave off money in politics or government ethics, all these things there, when it's on there, it's almost always the number one issue.

It is the issue that affects all the other issues. Right. And so I think we got to get on the right side of that.

Now, their audience member wants to know, do you believe there is racism or oppression in the US today? Of course.

I mean, of course there's racists. Of course there is racism. I mean, it's like saying, do I believe there is sin in the country? I mean, racism is a sin. Of course. I believe it's like saying, do I believe there's murder and adultery? Of course I do. Do I believe that we as a nation are systemically racist country? No, that is one of the greatest lies ever told about the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world.

In fact, it's the opposite. It's Orwellian. It's not even a lie. It's the opposite of the truth. We're the least racist, multiracial country ever to exist in the history of the world. If we were so racist, why is it that two million Africans came to our country in the last since 1980 voluntarily? Why is it there's a waiting list in our country of thirty million people from African and Southeast Asian nations to come to America? No.

And if you actually just take African-Americans in our country or blacks in our country, they're the 18th wealthiest country in the world. If you just take them as a country, just the income and net worth of all the blacks in this country. And this idea about policing, when you'll hear from Heather McDonald tonight, she does it much better than I will. But this idea that police are the enemy of blacks, it's not again, it's not a lie.

It's the opposite of it's the opposite of the truth. Where is. Actually, the more police, the more black people are able to live, it's police that save black lives. And while we're about where we're talking about like policing in America, a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be shot by a black person than an unarmed black person is to be shot by a police officer. Black people comprise 60 percent of all the police killings in this country.

So if we can have a conversation about crime, a black person walking down the street to Chicago is exponentially more likely to be shot by another black person than by a police officer. And this cherry picking of evidence like, oh, the Kenosha example, OK, I'm not justifying a police officer shooting someone in the black back seven times, but let's talk about the situation. His girlfriend called the police on him because there was a restraining order against him.

They tried to arrest him with a Taser and he resisted arrest because he was so allegedly high on either methamphetamines or cocaine that he didn't feel the taser. Right. So put the Taser on him, didn't even want it, then runs to his car to go grab a lethal weapon. Ask any police officer in the country. They're just as worried about knives as they are about guns. In fact, some are more worried about razors and nodular about guns.

They slit your throat in an instance, and so they shot him in the back.

Not saying that's the right thing, though. There's a trial for that. But this idea that Jacob Blake was just sitting in his car and the police said that's a black guy want to kill today and came up and shot him in the head. And that's the way the media is making it seem, is that sinister and brutal lie. And they're insulting our country and they're dividing us at our core. They're bringing us back to our tribal lines. This is how you destroy Western society, is bring us back by dividing people based on their skin color.

It's reprehensible. And I've spoken out against BLM Inc. as an insurrectionist terrorist organization, which is what they are. They're Marxists. They want to destroy the family, abolish prisons, abolish the police. And this idea that we're a racist country must be refuted at the very instant it is spoken.

It can't. It is one of the most important conversations happening in America today.

I know it's four fifteen and you all are ready for your break, but I was given permission I could go for. No, I was going to go a couple minutes over. So let me do one more question from here. I talk for a then and then I want to end on one more circling back to the issue of free speech on college campuses. But let's see if I can combine two into one. Do you think President Trump is on the right track?

And Charlie, do you think you'll ever run for office?

I get that question a lot. Look to the second one. I'm twenty six years old. I love it. I get to do I do to podcast today.

I've literally started an organization from nothing. I see it impacting lives. So, look, I the answer is I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. So the first thing is this with President Trump, super is a really moving week for me because I was able to open the convention.

I was able to be there for when the president closed the convention. And I aptly called him the bodyguard of Western civilization in my remarks.

And the media lost it like it was perfect.

I was like, yes, well intended effect. Because, look, that's what he is, though. And I like the imagery of a bodyguard. You know why? Because when you hire a bodyguard, you really don't care about the tweets he sent out earlier in the afternoon. When you hire a bodyguard, you want him to be able to fight, want him to be good at it, too. And you want him to win. I love that image of a bodyguard because brutish.

But it's also, you know, where his loyalties lie. Right? So I just I thought it was perfect and that's why I said it. I'll triple down on it.

So the media is like, how dare you like the worst thing ever? I think they are more worried about the Western civilization than the bodyguard descriptions. They hate the West. But look, the president deserves a lot of credit here because in early July, I wasn't one of these people. People were saying it's inevitable that Biden was going to become president and the president was down double digits. And a lot of these tracking polls and a lot of the key battleground states.

And the president then realized he had to win the covid primary. He had to win the Chinese coronavirus primary. He had to get he had to get death and hospitalization rates down. And look at the numbers today. There are a lot better everybody there down 30, 40 percent in Arizona, Texas and Florida. It's not where they should be yet, but they're trending in the right direction. Joe Biden may have bad bets. Joe Biden made a bet that this is going to be chaos, endlessly straight to the election.

I'd have to leave my basement. We're going to wear masks when we shower and I'm going to become president. Right. It's basically to bet that he made and now, like, all of a sudden.

The virus rates are going down, the riots are the number one issue in the key battleground states, which are my people in the Midwest, right. I grew up in northern Illinois. I know the people in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I can tell you right now, if the election were held today, Trump wins Wisconsin by 10 points. OK, and I'll say that lightly.

Every person I know in Wisconsin is like Trump, Trump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump. And now Trafalgar, which is a center right polling firm, but they got the presidential race perfectly in 2016, has Trump up one in Michigan.

Has Trump tied in Pennsylvania as Trump to Minnesota and has Trump tied in Florida, this race that seemed inevitably like deficient for Trump is all of a sudden the trends are all in his favor. And now the number, the number one, two and three issue in America, maybe the virus, but it's riots, it's safety. And who are we as a country for a party that I criticized quite a lot, the Republican Party, they blew me away this week at the convention.

They did an unbelievable job and they deserve credit for that, Tony.

My friends that produced that convention, I mean, I was getting emotional watching. It was a celebration of our country, anticipate a huge polling boost. The issue is going to be this for the Trump campaign. Can they play with a lead? I'm telling you right now, there will be polls the next week and a half that show Trump in certain polls. I actually think they're better playing from behind players.

If they can figure out how to play with a lead, he's going to get four more years.

All right. Well, ending this fabulous discussion, I want to circle back to the issue of free speech and honestly protecting peace on college campuses. And this conference is filled with parents, grandparents and also students who are in the thick of it as we speak. What is your practical advice for those who can't wait 10 years for these transformations that we hope for and need to be a part of for higher education? What is your practical advice for them now for such a.

Thank you again for having me. And Jennifer, you're amazing. And thank you to the accounts for having me deeply appreciate it.

Look, practical advice is that stop giving money to your alma mater. Unless you went to Hillsdale, please seriously cut them off. It's that simple, and especially if you're your alma mater has multibillion dollar endowments.

I mean, just look at the fruit that they're producing. Look at the people in New York City, two of them, two lawyers, one that went to Princeton, I think I see a Princeton shirt there. It could be mistaken. I always have to single out the Princeton individual, one that went to Fordham when I went to Princeton, when I went to Fordham and they threw Molotov cocktails at police officers.

You have to ask yourself what class in the Woodrow Wilson School of Government like it put them on their path, were that I mean, one that went to Ford within the prison.

And so please stop giving money to alma maters police. And then the other thing is this. Here's one challenge for you, for young people. Right. Start from the default position. That your 17 year old doesn't have to go to college and then have them make the argument that they do. If that's not the way that you're viewing college, you're viewing it wrong, if it is, they have to go and have to prove that not to go.

I believe that's an incorrect analysis. I'm not saying they shouldn't go.

Just make the argument up to it, say, OK, borrowing 80000 dollars, traveling to another state for four years, that's worth it for me to go through that argument. No different than buying a home or buying a car would be start from the default position that I'm not going because you don't have to go. Don't that's the other thing is please be more accepting to anyone in your system where it's not, hey, where are you going? To college.

Why are you going to college and demand better answers? I implore you and be OK with kids that take gap years that become entrepreneurs. I guarantee you this. If a kid took the if a student took the equivalent of going to Princeton for four years is about two hundred and forty thousand dollars, if you count room and board and travel and invested in moderate stocks for four years and just watch Prager, you and the Hoover Institution, who's going to be better after four years?

Think about that, that two hundred and forty thousand thanks to Trump, would be probably three hundred and twenty three hundred thirty thousand beautifully matured. He would love Western civilization and he probably would have a little bit more motivation. That's a thought exercise for you, isn't it? Go start a business.

Go do anything. You just put the money in a money market account. It still be there and you have no debt. You're not to repay anything. What we are doing is so financially foolish for the next generation and culturally troublesome. I encourage you to think more creatively and less monolithically. The final thing is this. Like I say, one more thing. For young people to have young children, just take the education of your young children so seriously.

I'm talking about five, six, seven and eight year olds. How do you do that? Get them excited about the founders of our country, get them defensive of Theodore Roosevelt, of Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington, make them think of those people as heroes, because one day they're going to have to defend them. And if they're not ready to do that. They will be susceptible to the left, and if you have the financial means to do so, homeschool your kids.

Please do not trust your kids to the state or to private schools that are very infected. Do you think that homeschooling is too difficult? You might be right. It is hard. But Hillsdale, other schools have great resources to do that. I think we have to double the homeschooling population in the next five years, double it. And for you out there that are looking for a calling, maybe there's a homeschooling parent that could use your 40 years of wisdom and maybe you could stop by their house every day at eight a.m. to go homeschool five families.

I think we as conservatives need to create better networks of homeschooling communities where some of the most accomplished business minds here at this institute would if all of you guys chipped in to a homeschool co-op just this next year, because that's happening all across the country. So those are some actionable items. The final thing is this. Please treat this election as the most important election since 1860, because it is if they win, they're coming after all of us. They will punish us.

They will penalize us, they will imprison us, and they will destroy this country. I am not overexaggerating I know who we're dealing with here. So take this election very seriously. And God bless you guys. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening, everybody, please listen to our sister episode, right, take your questions and please consider supporting us at Charlie Kirkham Report if you guys want to get involved. Turning Point USA, go to USA, Dotcom, t.P, USA, dot com, get engaged, get involved with turning point USA at USA, Dotcom. And if you guys want to win a signed copy of the New York Times best seller, the Magna Doctrine, type in Charlie Keryx or your podcast provider hit subscribe, give us a five star review, screenshot it and email us to Freedom at Charlie Dotcom.

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