Why a Secular America Can't Survive 01:08:44

Hey, everybody. My conversation from Sun Valley, Idaho. I frame of what this election is all about. Then I take questions to the audience. Some of my favorite conversations I've had recently hosted by the Sun Valley Policy Forum. Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and become a member. If you are moved or inspired by this program, you get a signed copy of my new book, Right Wing Revolution, when you become a member. That is members.charliekirk.com, members.charliekirk.com. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what are

you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.

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Hello, everybody. Great to see you. Actually, I can't see you yet. It's great to be here. I love Idaho, and I've wanted to come to Sun Valley for quite some time. And it's great to be here. And largely because I always watch it from the news, because I think the downfall of Western civilization is planned down the street. No, I'm half kidding. You got a lot of characters that visit here every so often. But went on a great hike today. Thank you, those of you that went to the radio program earlier. It was a lot of fun.

And super warmly received. I want to spend the most time on your questions and also the fireside chat. But there's one thing I want to make sure I emphasize here tonight. There's just one thing that you remember from my message. It's the following. It's that the people who are destroying the country, they are not making a series of mistakes. They're doing so intentionally. And I said this previously at lunch. And this is what we call the great divide right now between how you analyze what's happening in the country.

If you are to believe that the current ruling class or regime are making a bunch of mistakes, then you have to tell me that keeping a border completely wide open and spending trillions of dollars that we do not have, sending billions of dollars overseas unnecessarily, the destruction of the American dollar, allowing men and female sports, so on and so forth, reversing Title IX, that this is just a bunch of people that don't know what they're doing.

And they know exactly what they're doing. And I think it's important for us to go back into a period of time. And I understand why people are reluctant to talk the way I talk about this, because you have to then acknowledge and admit that you are now a stranger in your own country. And that is not a really comforting thing to hear.

that the people that are in charge don't share the core American values or principles. Now, let me be clear. I travel the country. I go to college campuses. The American people still share the American core values and principles, but the people in charge do not. So in the 1970s, 1980s, there was a paper that was written

Everyone should know about it. It's called the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was two political scientists, and they were communists, outward Marxists and communists, and they wanted to destroy America. They wanted to turn it into something different. They hated free market capitalism. They did not like private property rights. And they said the way that America will be destroyed, and this is called the Cloward-Piven Strategy, will be three things. Step one, have America borrow so much money and spend so much money that the American dollar is totally worthless.

that the dollar means nothing and we engage in unprecedented inflation step two build a deep state bureaucracy or an administrative state that swallows the private sector and the power and the influence in society is not found in entrepreneurs or risk takers but instead it's found in experts as scott rasmussen said earlier a council of an expert class that will rule over the american people

Step three, open up the borders and invite the third world and overwhelm schools, overwhelm the hospitals, overwhelm your public infrastructure, and confuse citizen from foreigner because then citizen means nothing. They wrote in great detail exactly what we are living through right now. And you can look at it, people all the time say, Charlie, there's no way that our people in charge, how could they be this sinister? And I'm actually uniquely qualified to answer that question.

Because I visit college campuses so you don't have to. And since I visit college campuses so you don't have to, I see what is coming next. And so I'm able to go to events like this, and I've been doing this for the last 12 years, and warn people, hey, there's some really radical stuff coming, and you should probably be worried about what's happening on these university campuses.

We'll talk about this, I'm sure, in the fireside chat. I believe that 95%, probably 99% of universities are completely lost and will never be saved. They should be metaphorically burned to the ground. Well, and some of them should actually be burned to the ground. And by the way, the fact that that's not being met by applause by many of you is because that's a shocking statement. But it's absolutely true. Those Hamas protests that you saw, they are not an exception. It is the rule of the ideological cancer that our campuses have become.

And so when I go to these college campuses and I have a chance to debate with professors, understand it all makes sense. The bitterness that they have towards Western civilization and towards America is so – it is so evident. And it is rooted in a couple different perspectives, the first of which is they believe that America from its founding was an unjust experiment.

This is why the 1619 Project was not some inconsequential textbook. They believe that America was racist from its founding, colonialist. It has always been terrible and will always be terrible because we believe in things such as the individual succeeding. We believe in the nuclear family. We believe that there is a God and we are not him.

These are all at odds with secular Marxism that you'll find in the academy. And so you see that then metamorphosize into now the ruling class orthodoxy. And the orthodoxy amongst those who are in charge of society is they have contempt for the country that they are running.

and that is exactly what you're seeing happen with the Biden regime. And I use that term intentionally, regime. He's not running the country. We know that, okay? So let's not fool ourselves, okay? That's a sideshow. There is a group of people who call themselves experts, right?

who have unjust authority over our life and the direction of our civilization. And a brief sidestep here, a perfect example of that is Anthony Fauci. If you want a living example, your government has 5,000 Anthony Fauci's. You think there's only one of them? No, there's an Anthony Fauci at the FBI, at the Department of Justice. Now, what do I mean by that? People that have no wisdom, lots of credentials, who have failed upwards for 40 years.

How about we, the American people, get an apology from Anthony Fauci? I don't know, for ruining young people's lives for two years? But we won't. Because an apology means that you did something wrong.

And the expert class will never acknowledge they did anything wrong, ever. It's just full, blunt, brute force against the American people. So you look at the Cloward-Piven strategy and what we're living through right now, the status quo, and I write about this in my upcoming book, which I call Right-Wing Revolution, which I'll tell you why I picked that title. It's very understated, obviously. And I'll tell you why, because I choose my words very carefully, is that

We have lived through a cultural Marxist, slow but steady revolution that has lasted 50 years. And again, that is a hard truth to swallow because in order to swallow that truth, we must all acknowledge and admit that we were not taking this as seriously as we should have 30 years ago.

20 years ago, 10 years ago. And honestly, it's because we were prioritizing things that matter more than politics. You were raising your kids. You were building your churches, building your businesses, taking care of your neighbors. And as America has become more secular, so not religious, people need to fill that void. And politics is the perfect substitute religion for a secular society.

It gives people meaning. It gives them purpose. It gives them community. So as America has become less focused on a belief in a central belief in God, then politics becomes infinitely more important. And so the question in front of us, which we'll explore tonight, is then how do you then defeat a regime that seems to control almost every institution –

And they don't even care about the nation that they are stewarding. And I hope you understand, you know, there's so much negativity in our textbooks, which is not warranted about Rockefeller and Carnegie and JP Morgan and the Robert Barons of the early 20th century. Yes. Okay. Some of them could obviously acted better, but we all know those Titans of industry. What did Rockefeller and Carnegie do with their money? They gave it back to the country.

Rockefeller donated land and we have Acadia National Park in Maine because of him. We have parts of Grand Teton and Yellowstone because of him. We have universities thanks to Carnegie Mellon, thanks to Andrew Carnegie. So then you ask, well, what is our current ruling class spending money on? Elon Musk aside, they spend money to then incinerate the very country that they have everything over.

And there really is no other explanation that you are being driven by a wicked ideology at that point. It's not about making the world a better place. That's the story they tell themselves, obviously. Oh, we're trying to fight climate change. They don't believe in that, obviously. If they were trying to climate change, they would sell all their homes in Martha's Vineyard immediately. Of course not. They don't believe it. They're walking contradictions. No, it's about power for power's sake.

And so how do you how do you defeat that? Well, we'll talk about that in a second. The Fireside Chat. And I lay this out in the book because it's time now for a revolution against the counterrevolution and against as a counterrevolution. And it is our ask is very simple, which is that we want what used to be considered non-controversial to be reinstituted. We want a border. We want men to no longer be able to go in female locker rooms in over 20 states across the country.

We say that children should be off limits from medical mutilation that they call trans affirming care, which is happening all across the country. And we also believe very simply that the American dollar should not be intentionally eroded time and time again through deficit spending sprees in Washington, D.C. Just very, very simple and basic stuff. But it's going to require and that's what I'm trying to do at Turning Point every single day. There is one thing left that they do not control.

They control the FBI, Department of Justice, Google, Goldman Sachs. They do not control the American people, and it terrifies them. On a daily basis, their obsession, they say their obsession is Donald Trump. Wrong. I can tell you why.

They will make excuses for every one of their politicians for the very same behavior that Donald Trump makes. It's not about Trump. It's about the beast that Donald Trump awoke. And it's you, the American people. It's that you are in the room now. And you're not supposed to. Because understand...

And Scott Rasmussen said it perfectly on my show earlier. Perfectly. He said they believe in the politics of administration, the politics of the experts. Anthony Fauci sitting in a room deciding whether or not your senior in high school gets to go to prom, that some guy in D.C. gets to make the decision that you have to go wear a cloth mask when you're hiking alone on a trail.

And what's not supposed to happen is in this new era of the governance of the experts is the deplorable people are not allowed a seat at the table. They're not allowed input. And that is truly what we are now debating as a country. And it's so much bigger than Trump versus Biden. I'm telling anyone who will listen, what's it actually? We are now debating what is the form and the structure of the very government we are going to have for the next hundred years.

Is the form or the structure going to be one of an oligarchy where you have two parties that pretend to fight each other all the time, but they agree on the big stuff? Like they agree on borrowing money and keeping the borders open. They agree on sending money to Ukraine. They agree on the big stuff and they'll disagree on like the little stuff, but the country still continues to fall apart.

where you have a politics of administration or the administration of politics where you are immediately considered a smarter person because you went to Harvard. And you might have a lot of knowledge or have a lot of intelligence. You have no wisdom if you went to Harvard, none. These are people that believe men give birth, not an exaggeration. By the way, just so you were clear, almost every college teaches men give birth today in America. So if you're sending your grandkid to college, that is doctrinaire mainstream curriculum. And I'm a transphobe for saying that men don't give birth.

So these people have no wisdom, but they have unbelievable ferocity to take over the country. And so the hope lies in the everyday American. And they are very worried, they being the oligarchy in the ruling class. And to give them a name, it's Soros, it's Susan Rice, it's John Podesta, it's Hillary Clinton, it's Chuck Schumer, it's Nancy Pelosi, it's Mark Zuckerberg, it's Bill Gates, it's some of the folks that come near here.

They are annoyed about we the people. 2024 is very simple. It's do you want to be governed by we the people or we the experts? It's that simple. And it should be we the people. That is our birthright, by the way. This election is about a restoration or an elimination of our birthright because oligarchies, that's a really, really bad way to run a country.

And to be honest, like I might offend some people. You are all going to get really rich if the oligarchy continues. A lot of people in this room, this will not impact you, but your kids will not have a country. And I hear it all the time. People like literally the other day. Well, Charlie, my stocks have done really well under Biden and

You know, I'm my 401k and, you know, my asset prices are higher. I was like, okay, that is an unbelievably self-centered way of looking at the world. Like, okay, great. Yes. When you print more money and you deploy more liquidity in the system, if you own homes, that value will artificially get higher because there's less goods. There's more dollar bills chasing less goods. But what country are you going to have a house in exactly? Or how about, do you think that your grandkids will be raised in the same nation that you were? Of course not.

And so that the question in front of us is, do we think the American people combined through a constitutional republic system have the wisdom to properly govern and steer us through this unknown chapter or period? Or we finally say the Constitution was a bad idea. We are going to give all of our power to a bunch of PhDs from Yale. That's the question in front of us. Let's do our fireside chat. Thanks, guys. That was fantastic.

Thank you, Charlie. I want to talk about all the things we talked about. So we can go through a little bit of that. We're going to take some questions. We've got some time. We do have a core topic that we talk about the Constitution. And you like to talk about freedom of religion in the Constitution.

and why that is one of the most important causes of the First Amendment and as a driver for freedom for all Americans, regardless of religion. Do you want to kind of just spend a little bit explaining that to us? Yeah, and I mean, I'm a deeply religious person, but even if you are not religious, you have to be intellectually honest that the country was better when more Americans took their religion seriously, period. And it's absolutely true. Thank you.

And you might say that the two are not related. I completely disagree. I think that it was better when most Americans believed that there was a creator of the universe that was not them, and they did not desire to be the creator of the world. I think it's just a better world to live in when you have that operating belief. And I could tell you that if you think it's okay, I'm not saying anyone has this belief, but just if you think it's okay that America loses its religious flavor or fervor,

Look to Europe what happens as they all of a sudden become less religious. That continent is a husk of its former self.

And you lose the moral center. There's a reason why. And this is a very important point. John Adams famously said, who's one of my favorite founding fathers, he famously said the Constitution was written wholly for a moral and religious people. It is inadequate for the people of any other. So basically, the form and structure that I just spent time talking about, you really can't continue if America becomes completely secular. And there's a reason for it.

If you have a body politic that believes that there is a God who judges them and believe that there's a God who cares about how they act and that God wants you to do certain things, you don't need the voluminous laws that we have in our society where we have 900,000 laws if you count the Federal Register and the Federal Code and so on and so forth. So I just want to say that...

First and foremost. Secondly, we've always been lectured about separation of church and state. That is not in the Constitution. But for argument's sake, let's pretend that's actually something that's in the Constitution. Instead, it's free exercise of religion and the establishment clause that Congress shall make no law abridging or respecting the religion thereof.

However, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a single letter in 1807 to the Danbury Baptist Convention. He said to the Danbury Baptists, we have separation of church and state. Interestingly, because the Baptists were really worried the government was going to come after them. Okay. So then the Warren Court or the Burger Court in the 60s, they resurrected this idea of separation of church and state. And they said, we cannot have any church in the state. Okay. Well,

Okay. Well, during COVID, if we have separation of church and state, why was the state allowed to shut down the church?

Oh, so you don't mean separation of church and state. You mean that the state can control the church, but the church can't have any input in the state. Got it. That's what this has all been about. Because they don't mean separation of church and state. They've always meant separation of morality and state. And nobody in this room believes that. That at some point, you will have to make a moral decision. And we're seeing this in the West right now. And I see it firsthand when I visit these college campuses. And you can watch my videos ad nauseum. Eventually, you have to get down to a truth claim.

And we as Christians believe in very simple truth claims. Ones that we can all agree on is the 10 commandments. And so eventually someone on college campus will say, why is it wrong for a 13 year old to chop off their breasts?

Like, I see nothing wrong with that. So now we're talking wrong and right, good and evil. And if there is no transcendent standard to be able to judge off of that, well, then that's how you get tens of thousands of kids that are medically mutilating themselves every single year. If we think we can fix our problems in the West by continuing to be more secular, I think we're fooling ourselves.

What did you, we had a governor in Louisiana just pass along. Yeah, why don't you talk about that, the Ten Commandments. That was really bold, and I, you know, it was, of course, MSNBC did not. Well, no, they attacked me for saying something good about it. So, first of all, how many of you guys know the Ten Commandments are actually in the Supreme Court building? Moe's is in the Supreme Court building. This is not controversial, okay? By the way, I would love any MSNBC host, they can even study ahead of time, to come on my show, can you name the Ten Commandments, okay? Okay.

I am the Lord your God who deliver you from Egypt. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall have no images in the form of no idols. Honor the Sabbath day and to keep it holy. You shall not carry or take the Lord's name in vain. Honor your mother and father so they may live long in the land of which you are in. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not commit adultery. And of course, do not covet. I think I skipped over one. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not...

do not give false witness. Thank you. Do not lie, essentially. So, by the way, who could, so then I asked the question, I asked the question of anybody who's secular. Okay, forget the first four. Okay, the last six. Why do you have a problem with those? I mean, like, do not murder, do not steal.

And the reason the Ten Commandments must be, I mean, the ACLU is suing. They're losing their mind over this. Again, this is what they spend their nonprofit money on, trying to remove the Ten Commandments from our schools. And the reason is this, is that they cannot finish their transformation project of America if people believed in the Ten Commandments. You cannot. You cannot.

And the founders knew and the founders believed in self-government. And the founders would say time and time again, if every citizen knew, believed and acted within the Ten Commandments, you have liberty. Think about that. You're a self-governing republic.

If you believe that there's something higher above you that tells you that these 10 things really matter. For example, I honor the Sabbath very religiously. I'm not Jehovah's Witness. I just adopted it because I think it's amazing. And my life is infinitely better that I turn off my phone every Friday night to Sunday morning. I encourage everyone to do it. One of my favorites, though, and I could talk about this literally because I teach on the Ten Commandments a lot because I think it's one of the most important topics in America, is the one commandment that the Marxists have targeted the most.

And it's the only one of the Ten Commandments that involves your nation and a promise. And it is the bridge commandment, the bridge commandment between our relationship with the divine and our relationship with our fellow man, which is honor your mother and father so that you may live long in the land of which you are in. Karl Marx and every Marxist thinker since has said, in order to usher in our revolution, we must destroy the nuclear family.

We are now a country that no longer fears God or fears our parents, but we fear the left instead. Yeah, I've got a follow up question, but I want the audience to get ready for their questions. And so I hope I had no idea. We were talking about no ideas like that's amazing. So I love this topic. So you also like to talk about the sort of the how liberty fits in a definition of liberty. And can just just explain that to and how that leads, what that leads to and how we have what liberty gives us.

Yeah, so this is a very important point. And liberty understood in the classical sense as the founders understood it is not being able to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. That is a new age term of liberty. That's how we get drug legalization, prostitution, open air homelessness, and all the nonsense we see. Liberty is having the ability, absent government interference, to do what one ought to do. It's completely different. License is the ability to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it.

So again, this goes back to truth claims. You cannot build a self-governing republic if you're not willing to say that one way of life is better than the others. Some conservatives don't even like talking like this. They say, well, who am I to judge? I'm sorry. The way of having a beautiful family and homeschooling your children and following the laws of the land, that's a better way of living than some bum on the side of the street in San Francisco who's a meth addict. Building a family is a way better life, and it's more virtuous, and we should lift that up.

And so liberty is the ability to do what one ought to do. Again, that invites a whole bunch of questions and disagreements because we've been propagandized by the modern libertarian movement to never like judge what another person does. We get the trans stuff because of that belief, just so we're clear. We get the fact that our children are being preyed upon in the classrooms when we are unwilling to say that is not liberty. I'll give you a great example.

There was a debate in the last five years ago between David French and Soa Amari. David French, who I can't stand, he thinks he's super smart. So David French says that it was the founders' view of liberty to allow drag queens to be able to dance in front of children in libraries.

And his argument actually made sense legally. And then so Rob says, no, the founders, they wanted liberty, not license. And this was this huge debate that blew up. And so that is the test I have for people. Do you think that grown men wearing thongs should be able to go into libraries and dance in front of eight year olds? And currently the law says yes, because it's liberty, right?

No, because we have not defined liberty correctly. That is degeneracy, not liberty. Liberty is that which lifts us up to a better version of ourselves and humanity. It is about the beautiful things in life. Drag queen story hour with some thong dude is the disgusting things in life.

Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here. America is the first nation in history founded on the idea of God-given natural rights. The first country dedicated the principles of liberty and limited government. That's why my friends at Hillsdale College want you to join them in continuing to celebrate America's founding on July 4th. So they created a special July 4th video that I think will inspire you. Go to charlie4hillsdale.com to see Hillsdale's video for free. The video portrays Thomas Jefferson reflecting on the Declaration of Independence

in one of his final letters written prior to his death on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. It'll help remind us and remind our children and our fellow citizens about the blessings of liberty and the need to preserve them. Again, go to charlieforhillsdale.com to view this inspiring video, and in appreciation, you'll receive a free commemorative copy of the Declaration from my friends at Hillsdale to keep or to pass on to a young person that you know, but this is a limited-time offer, so please do not delay.

Go to charlieforhillsdale.com as we forever and always celebrate Independence Day. That is charlieforhillsdale.com. All right, I know you have a lot of questions, and I'd love to start looking for a question. I'm going to hand it to front row Ray. Sean, you ready? Okay, I have a question, and maybe it's not appropriate for this, but for the last four or five years, I've always been, I've never heard an explanation for this. Why 2% of the population...

takes over 80% of the airwaves, like you're talking about, right? Everybody in the administration has to be bi or gay or dressed in dresses with beards. I don't get it. But, you know, I'm not saying it's bad or good or anything. I'm just wondering how, who is involved in this? I mean, who presses this? It's a great, it's a very deep question. So what you're talking about is the new state-run religion of the West, which is the religion of pride.

And we have a whole month dedicated to it. We have a month dedicated to Jesus. No, we have like two days, Easter and Christmas. We have a whole month embraced by corporate America, the federal government, the department of defense, the CIA around like people's personal private sexual behaviors.

That's very like at its face, that should immediately be like, what are we doing as a civilization here? And so the answer is this, is that it is one of the five fake religions, counterfeit religions that have infected Western culture. I can go through the list, but it's not totally applicable to this. But one of them is the religion of earth worship or environmentalism, the religion of anti-racism, the religion of scientism. But it has a fervor that feels as if

that you're watching some sort of weird counterfeit Pentecostal revival. And you might say, well, that's heretical. Think about it. They have chantings and sayings that they all agree on. They have a core doctrine. They also have symbology that is more in the month of June. I've seen more publicly displayed rainbow flags than American flags. Maybe you disagree. Maybe Idaho is different.

No. OK, that's good. I'm glad Idaho's the exception. I may be Boise. I don't know. Boise. Yeah. So Huntington Beach Bandit. Good for them. So the so who is pushing it? Well, it's being pushed internally. But this is, again, the death of God in the West is one of the great moral tragedies.

Frederick Nietzsche, who wrote a lot of books, he was wrong about a lot. He famously came up with that God is dead. That was one of his famous things. He actually was lamenting it. And he put forward and thus says that Zalathustra in one of his books that he wrote, he says that, I'm paraphrasing, be very careful Westerners, what comes after God.

And he was somebody that was not even a Christian. He was a nihilist who was saying God has already died. This is the 1870s, to be clear how prophetic this guy was.

And he's like, what comes next will be very dark. And we are, we're living through that darkness essentially. And they will not stop. And I'll just, I'll go really quickly. The pride thing and the gay thing is we've all been taken advantage of on this because it started with, okay, you must tolerate it. I think a lot of us, our temperament was like, sure, we're tolerant people who wants to be called intolerant. Right. But then all of a sudden they said, you must accept it. Like, wait a second. I thought it was about tolerance. Now you care about my personal beliefs.

And then all of a sudden they said, now you must celebrate it. I thought this was about tolerance. And they're like, where's your gay flag outside of your home? Why don't you have it at your corporate banner? What's your gay pride index? Not kidding. A real thing. How many openly transgender people do you have in your HR department? Questions they ask. Then finally they say you must participate in it. And if you're like, well, how do I do that? Oh, give us your kids. And I will say something that might offend somebody and that's fine. I don't care. Um,

They cannot reproduce, so they must recruit.

All right, we have another question. I see one over here on the aisle on the right. Hi, Charlie. My name's Tanya. My husband and I are huge fans of you. Thank you so much for what you're doing. We're strong believers of preserving the nuclear family. We are 31 and 30. He's going to be 33 soon. We've been together 17 years. We have a 14-year-old, 9-year-old, one in heaven, and one on the way.

And we give credit to God, to Jesus Christ. So I started to get into politics because of the things that I see that are being brought into the school system. And a lot of people here in Blaine County don't think that the CRT movement or like the DEI is as bad as it is in the bigger cities, but it is. Yeah.

I want to, if you could share with a lot of the people here that, you know, reside in Blaine County, how dangerous the CRT, DEI things are, because for a quick, real quick, when I was working in the school system, that's when it started to infiltrate. There was one day that I left in tears because

I had to sit through a training that was anti-white. It was just telling us how the whole system is anti-white, everything from being clean, like me being Hispanic, me being clean, or being expected to be clean at work is white supremacy. And this is the local school district here? Yes. Yeah, I believe that. And in the after-school programs, we were required to go through these trainings.

And one of them, the interesting thing was everyone was on board. But the other interesting thing was that all of the women that agreed with it were all of Jewish descent. And they agreed that the people of color have had it worse. Like they were willing to give up their own trauma for this. And I just want you to share how dangerous that is. Yeah, that's a great question. First of all, God bless you. And I'm glad you have another one on the way. So.

I will do this as quickly as I can. It's very simple. The American project has always been about individual over tribe. The Marxist project is about tribe over the individual. And CRT and DEI is about inverting us away from individual rights to tribal rights or group rights.

So you are no longer made in the image of God. You are simply part of whatever ethnic group that we could be designated. And they can't explain the contradictions. What if you're half white, half black? They can't go through any of that, right? But because this is a means of control that actually ushers us back to primal governance, not Western governance. And if you look at most forms of government around the world, they're largely tribe-based.

They are not individual based. If you look at most governments in the Middle East, it's about who your father was. I mean, the best example I can give is India, which is the caste system. You're born in a certain caste. That is what matters. It is immovable. And this goes back to my religious argument is that the woke, which I talk about in the book, critical race theory, diversity, equity, inclusion are just the latest manifestations. Also ESG, environmental sustainability governance, which is a way that they're taking over corporate America right now.

is that they will constantly criticize the white man. There's a reason why they hate me so much, right? I'm all the things you're not supposed to be, right? Married, white, Christian, heterosexual, entrepreneur. They say this, by the way, right? That the only role for me is to constantly apologize for the rest of my life and become what they call an ally of the revolution.

And so what they have been able to do so successfully is they have been able to convince the white majority population in America to effectively hate themselves. Now, I'm not big on, actually, I guess I hate any sort of racial group saying that they're great because I actually don't believe in that. But self-hatred is really bad and should not exist. And white guilt, if you will, by the way, this is not my thesis. This is Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell that have talked about this for multiple decades saying,

has really allowed this to usher in to our school system and our curriculum. And you say something really interesting. The individuals in your school system say, well, these groups have been marginalized in the past.

You see, if you looked at every individual made in the image of God, that's actually not relevant. It's because every individual has their own agency, their own ability to make choices, and they all have the ability to be developed of good character regardless of what happened previously to them. That's the American promise, by the way. The American promise is not what tribe you are from or what you look like. And they are trying to reduce us down to the melanin content in our skin, right?

and not try to ask the more deep questions of what is your soul, spirit, character, actions? What have you done for the world? Instead, they want to put you into a prearranged box based just on how you look. Look, I can go at an hour's. I don't want to spend all the time on this. But CRT and DEI, if left unopposed, will destroy America and will do it very quickly. That is not just my opinion. It's the opinion of other moderate voices like Elon Musk.

and many other people that are opening up and reading the literature that I've been warning about for many years, it is currently enveloping anything successful and taking it down. So I'll give you an example, and I got a lot of heat for this, and I stand by it 100%, because anybody with intellectual honesty agrees with me, which is this, is that United Airlines has come out, and they say in their new pilot hiring classes, 50% will be black people or women in their new hiring classes.

Okay, so currently it's like 15%. So they're going to go from 15% to 50%. Every time DEI and affirmative action, which are sisters of each other, are implemented, standards go down. Every time. At Harvard, in the federal government, there has never been an isolated example ever where you prioritize race and merit is simultaneously achieved.

You have to lower the standards. So I say to people, are you comfortable flying in a United Airlines plane if you find out that your pilot was hired because of his race, not because of his excellence? And if you're honest, you say, of course not. And you say, how about this? You're going to go into surgery. And it comes in for the pre-op. It's like, hey, I don't know what I'm doing, but I stayed at Holiday Inn Express last night, and I'm black, and this will be the most diverse surgery in this hospital's history. Right.

That's right. Well, so the black population is shifting. Yes. And they're wakening. We saw that. You had this amazing big event in Detroit. Yes.

and you hosted former President Donald Trump with the former mayor of Detroit and a group of black leaders. Will you talk about that for a few minutes and what they are thinking? Because they think a lot of these things are just bananas and absurd. Yeah, it's funny. When I made that comment about the pilots, you know, the world erupted. It was mostly white liberals attacking me. It's actually blacks and Hispanics who are the most favorable in defending me saying no, that we do not want to be looked at just as a skin color. It's insulting to us

and our career, and our future, and our achievements, because then people think we're only there because of a quota. And by the way, they're correct. People start to think that if you start to hire just on those practices. So yeah, look, we're making huge gains in those communities. And for good reason, because the idea of a meritocracy should be appealing to anyone that wants to work hard and to succeed in this country. And so yeah.

Well, you know, and I think about that, I think back in the 30 years of school choice and vouchers and really opening up freedom to so many families to have an opportunity to choose where they go to school. And particularly children who are born or live in the wrong zip code. And they happen to be a majority of them are minorities. And their lives have changed tremendously by having other opportunities. And we've seen a whole generation of kids rise up.

Do you have any thoughts on that? And, you know, just to just talk a little bit about, you know, what what freedom really can do for raising every kid. Yeah. And I I loved when President Trump came out a couple of days ago, said he wants to abolish the Department of Education, which I think is amazing. And it is long overdue.

And it is 100 percent achievable if Congress would actually act on it. By the way, there's a lot he can do through federal executive order to just reduce the power of the federal federal department education. It has been one of the great stains on society.

Again, I don't want to monopolize too much on these one-offs, but the whole premise of education in our country is wrong. And I hear from conservatives a lot. How many times, maybe some of you have said it, Charlie, I just want my kid to go to school and have a politics-neutral experience and they learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. You might have heard that before. Okay. That is not what education is, everybody. I know you just applauded. It's not about skills. It should be about developing good people of deep character. And you say, what are you talking about?

is that properly understood the founding fathers were all classically educated and they got their skills outside of school. What they got in school was reading the great beautiful texts that had built the world prior and they were in pursuit of what is good, true, and beautiful. Children are something that you need to nourish and allow them to grow, not something to be engineered as a project.

And so let me say two things. If you think you're ever going to get a politics neutral classroom, it will never exist because eventually there will be a truth claim. I'll give you an example. Eventually somebody will show up late to class. Does the teacher discipline that kid? Yes or no. That morality will then be instilled on the rest of the class. Are you allowed to interrupt the teacher? You say no, but that's a, that's a political statement to say you can't interrupt the teacher. How about this? I'm allowed to turn in my homework late because I'm black.

That happens all the time, by the way, in school districts across the country. So this idea that we're going to get a depoliticized classroom is never going to happen. Instead, what we should have is embrace the classical model of education. Every founder was classically educated. Hillsdale College is a classical institution and they're America's greatest college.

And so the whole premise of education is wrong because the current experts of the DC regime, they look at children as widgets to be engineered.

when they should look at them as plants to allow them to grow. It's completely different. Education comes from the Latin word to lead forth. You must lead them forth towards something. And I ask parents this all the time. Actually, somebody earlier, they said, how do I say to my grandkid? And it's very simple. Would you rather have your grandkid be somebody of upstanding character or have a college degree?

And sometimes you can get both, right? But we have lost, we've lost the plot because it should be about creating good people, about people of high character and high esteem in society. Anyway, so look, school choice and mobility is incredibly important. We need to break the back of the teacher union cartel. The teacher union cartel has done more damage to America than the Mexican drug cartel. I believe these people should be

Some of them I think should be criminally investigated for what they've done, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. So school choice is a great way to solve that. Thank you.

Hey, we're going to go to another question. Okay. Charlie, you have talked about colleges not performing for our children. So what do you say to graduating seniors from high school? What should they do? Yeah, it's a great question. So if you have to go to college, I can give you advice on that. If you want to be a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer, 95% of kids that go to college should not go to college.

And I'll prove it to you. Those of you that employ people, would you rather have somebody from University of CU Boulder or somebody that has visited 50 countries? Which person would you hire? 50 countries. So why don't we do that? I mean, you say, oh, I want my kid to go get high and have unlimited like STD sharing for four years and...

like learn nothing and hate the country and get like sloppy overweight. And like, that's what happens by the way, almost all these kids go to college. I don't think people understand how destructive these institutions have become to our country. And,

And so I think we have to we have to look at things way more creatively. People say, oh, I can't get a job if I don't go to college. That is increasingly not true. We prove that in the book, The College Scam. Mike Rowe has also been a great backup on that. I'm also a living example. You don't need to go to college. I have a high school degree. I'm proud of it. And so I'm like one of those non-college educated people that support Donald Trump. You always see that in the polls. And so.

And so but I think that's it's very important, though, because I again, this this room is obviously very, you know, is college educated and all that. But it's very important because what they're doing in that polling is they're saying, here's what the smart people think of Trump and here's what the dumb people think of Trump. That's what they're doing. They are they are propagandizing and mind shaping you through a long period of time. And parents say, I'd rather have my kid, of course, be in the college educated category, not in the other category. I guarantee if we went around the room.

there would be story after story of people that have lost kids or grandkids to college, that they come back something completely different. And I see a lot of heads nodding. And, you know, you send Brian off to University of Oregon, and he, you know, he comes back Brianna. And so...

It's not a one-size-fits-all suggestion. I wrote a whole book about it. I will say this. We do not have enough entrepreneurs and risk-takers in this country, people that want to start businesses, scrap and hustle. This is not just me. Employers will say that if they see an application from Gen Z, they'll say they'll immediately throw it. They do not want to touch anyone that has gone to college. It is the least desirable hiring class. In fact, having a college degree, at least one,

with what we do hurts you. I immediately think that you're a tainted object. But here is the limiting belief. You have to be okay with your kid or grandkid not going to college.

And until you are able to swallow that pill, then nothing will change. And the problem is in high society circles like this, it's an expectation. I know that because I came from suburban Chicago. I was the only graduate at the top of my class, Eagle Scout football basketball captain, good student. When I told people I wasn't going to college, they say, are you okay? Are you like on drugs? Like, do you need to like get a, you know, do you need to see us like a psychiatrist or something? It's like, no, no, I'm going to go start an organization to hopefully save the country. They're like, yeah, good luck with that. Cynicism, negativity, you know.

But, again, glory be to God, right? That's great. No, you're not. That's great. Okay, we have some more questions. Can you hear me? Yes. Charlie, I listened to your recent interview with Roger Stone about his prediction for June 11th. Can you speak to that and tell us what you think about that? Yeah, it's a great question. So, yes, Roger Stone came on my show and he said,

That on July 11th, which will be that will be one of the most consequential days in American history, which is the day that Donald Trump will be sentenced for the 34 convictions. By the way, great fun trick with your liberal friends. Ask them to name the 34 things he was convicted of. They can't name one of them. Right. By the way, neither can the judge. Just so we're clear. No one knows. It's completely made up. And I'm not kidding. They convicted him for a fraud of covering up a crime and they cannot tell you what the actual crime was.

Just so we are clear. Andrew Cuomo has now come out and he has said that I'm former attorney general of New York, former governor. This case should never been brought. If it wasn't Trump, it shouldn't have been brought. So anyway, so Judge Mershon.

who is a raging left-wing Democrat. I don't say this lightly. He would have been a perfect Politburo member of Stalin's cabinet as a judge. This guy is a nasty, evil person. I'm not under a gag order, so I can say whatever I want about this guy. So, and he has the full authority on July 11th. He could go anything from one extreme to the other. He could say, Donald, Mr. Trump, Rikers Island right now. He could do that. He could send him to prison right then and there.

He could say you have to report to jail a month from then. You could do house arrest. He could say that you have to stay in Trump Tower for then to the end of the year. He could also do something more creative, which I think they might do, which is he could turn it. We could be like, OK, I know you're running for president. You have to report to prison in February. And all of a sudden it becomes a political issue.

That becomes more of a political issue than of just being a convicted felon, right? And people think, can he serve as president? What does that look like? So two thoughts. Number one, he has to announce his vice president before July 11th. We just need to like this is we can't we cannot go through this with the uncertainty of the unknown that he get hauled off the jail and he has to announce his VP via Zoom or Skype or something. Right. I don't think that's a good idea.

The second thing is what do I think they're going to do? I have no idea. But if I study the left for a living and I fight them for a living, they have shown no signs of slowing down. Instead, they are accelerating. They are accelerating against us. They still are raiding homes, raiding homes of people that were hundreds of yards away from the Capitol and never went into the Capitol.

They are still raiding those homes on a daily basis. There are still dozens of people in pretrial detention in Washington, D.C. for January 6th related crimes. There are 1,400 people that have been arrested and convicted of crimes January 6th related. 1,400 people. There were zero for BLM on the federal level during that summer of love, otherwise known as Floydapalooza.

So they are accelerating, not de-accelerating. So I don't know. Judge Mershon, he could change the entire election. I hope for the good of the country.

He will say probation, you know, good luck if you want to be president. That would be the right thing for the country. And by the way, not just the right thing for the country. He has every precedent and every legal reasoning. He's a first time offender. It's a nonviolent crime. These are misdemeanors that were upgraded to felonies. So every reason. But we're not living in an era of the law. We are living in a post-constitutional moment. And I hope it does not become a post-constitutional reality.

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So if you look at D.C., you see rhinos who are centrists at best and you see Democrats who are moving more and more progressively.

I was struck by something Ms. Mitchell said last night where she said that Democrats have spent the last 11 years focusing on electoral process, whereas conservatives have focused on policy. And so as we sit here today, if we can't win from an election perspective, what can each of us do in the room to kind of bolster immigration?

to embrace, activate conservative values to actually win? Yeah, that's a really profound question. So I'll give you two answers to that. First of all, in Idaho, you can win.

a political basis and you have one and I'm going to tell you a very, in my opinion, disappointing statewide elected officials here. And I don't mean to insult anybody. You do not have fighters in DC right now. You don't, maybe you agree or disagree. They are not fighters. Sorry. They are not people that are fighting for you guys. They're, they're checking boxes and doing all sorts of stuff to waste the time. This, this country is about to no longer be a country and they're sending more money to Ukraine and telling you how great they are. It's a waste, waste,

waste of rations. So but yes, I think we can win electorally. So what you can do is every person needs to take over the Idaho Republican Party from the grassroots level and to make this a grassroots party. You are the reddest state in the country. Maybe it's time that Idaho starts acting like it. Instead, you have Republicans that are more moderate than Ron Johnson, who's from a battleground state in Wisconsin.

And it's just, again, they talk a good game. That's fine. I'm sure all of you guys, they went to your ribbon-cutting ceremony at some factory or whatever. I'm sure they're nice people. Are they the fighters of Josh Hawley, Rand Paul? Are they fighting every single day in the trenches? You don't see it. If you see it, you're seeing something that's not there, right? And so, yes, my friend here from Boise knows, taking over the Republican Party, right? You are, but that's what you have to do, is that here's one of the main problems in American politics. The American people...

are a center-right people. They do not have an opposition party.

that they can attach to. This is why when DC people are like, oh, I don't understand Trump. Trump is the only person that has come and has disrupted the status quo for millions of people that have been so upset with the old Republican Party for decades. And that is part of his appeal. That's why he can do no wrong in the eyes of so many people because he represents something bigger than that. So yeah, just take over the Republican Party, to be perfectly honest with you. It's not good enough to just go to DC and reorganize the chairs on the Titanic, which is what they're doing. Yeah.

That's great. Very motivating. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about your book. You have some great recommendations in there. A lot of times we'd say, what can we do? And that is one of the great things is to get more active locally. Talk about

Talk about some of these interesting, some great recommendations. Thank you. Yeah. So the first is, of course, start local. So try to take over this school board, take over the local city here. I know that you're in the minority and it's tough, but that would be a really good action item. Secondly, you have to care less about one thing. You should never care about the names that left wingers call you. At its core, the amount of power that the American left has over us by nothing more than weaponized name calling is extraordinary.

It's like we give them so much power because we think that their insults to us mean something.

Oh, I'm not a racist. I'm not a misogynist. I'm not a sexist. It should mean nothing. It's just you should care less about that. And then finally, look, there's a lot of people in this room that give philanthropically and have done very well in business. And, you know, we raise a lot of money at Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action. Praise God. We raise over $100 million a year. We have 300,000 donors. So I see a big change in this regard. But we have to stop giving money voluntarily to institutions that hate us.

Cut off your college guys is the first thing. Stop giving your money to alma mater. And if you say, oh, well, my alma mater is different. Unless you went to Hillsdale College, you're wrong. Okay. And so, but think about it. How many left wingers are voluntarily giving money to Hillsdale? None of them.

Why do we voluntarily give money to the institutions that are destroying the nation? And then finally, you have to – maybe you should find a new wealth manager if you have Fidelity. Fidelity is awful, for example. They cancel conservators all the time. Find a donor-advised fund like Bradley, an impact fund that does a great job. And I think the world of them, and they've done such a great job. So their action items I'm getting at, though, is that everything you do should be colored by the idea of –

Is it consistent with my patriotic American values from where you shop to the goods and services? Public Square is a great resource for a lot of people. But it's it's a different mindset because I, like you, miss the country where we could just kind of go to Starbucks and not have to worry if we're funding the opposition. That country no longer exists. And the greatest untapped asset.

and it's barely been touched on, is the combined purchasing power of red America. If that beast ever wakes up, we could bankrupt corporate America. And by the way, look at just Bud Light, for example.

By the way, they've recovered in the stock price because we kind of forgot to stop boycotting them. But again, I don't drink. I think it's all nonsense. But that's okay. You guys have a great day. By the way, if you're drinking Bud Light, we've got bigger problems, just so we're clear. You guys in Idaho, you've got a lot better options, right? You've got microbreweries and stuff. You've got to do better than that.

Yeah, I was going to say, I have no moral problems with drink. It's just not for me. But I'll say with Bud Light, though, they had like a slight dip in sales that became a big dip and they totally reconfigured their company. I will say one promising thing. I have noticed versus last year, a little bit more of a muted approach to Pride Month from some companies than we did last year.

Again, it's still in your face. It's still there. But last year was like out of control. I mean, that was outrageous. So look, and then in my book, I go through action items of what people can do. I think everyone gets a book here now. Is that right? They do. They do. I think we have enough left to go per household. We're hoping to. So let me ask you that. I want you to transition. I think you include this in your book as well because I just got my copy on this trip too because you just released it.

is just the existential threat of the American family and young families and what we should be thinking about in terms of family life, you know, families prioritizing the family and just kind of talking to that a little bit and just that recommendation that if young adults just started reading about this before it was too late and they decided they didn't have a family. Yeah, it's a great, great thing. A great point. So,

The I blame both parties on this regard, but most most let's just look at Joe Biden on this. We get we get symposiums on systemic racism. He turns Easter in the Transgender Day of Awareness. Did he do a single press conference or mentioning that the birth rate in America is the lowest ever in recorded history? I mean, just just so we're clear that that is like species ending stuff. Like if you don't get that right.

How many of you did not know that, by the way? I see tons of hands. You know the fertility rate is at the lowest it's ever been in American history, and it is collapsing in real time. It's getting so low, and it's an interesting shoehorn, actually. It's that the people who are having the most kids are the ultra-wealthy and the ultra-poor. Middle-class America is having the least amount of kids. It's kind of a very interesting shoehorn, and it makes actually a lot of sense. The ultra-poor, their treasure is their kids.

The ultra rich have everything else. So they want the most beautiful thing in life because they can afford it, which is kids. And so it's the middle class that really can't afford having children anymore. So affordability is a big problem. And we've made it nearly impossible to have a single income provider of a family. I'll give you one number really quick. I got it from Elizabeth Warren, of all people. She wrote a great book, believe it or not, before she became a nutcase called The

It's a really good book called The Dual Income Trap. In the early 2000s, she was a Harvard professor, and she correctly argued, by the way, that America will decline if we force women into the workforce who want to be stay-at-home moms. Can you believe Elizabeth Warren wrote that? And she did an amazing job. It's an incredible book. And she goes through all the numbers saying that the country will be better if the man can support the family alone,

And we don't, so she gets this amazing number. In 1995, when a lot of you guys were in the heart of your business and really doing a lot, it required 36 weeks of work a year to support a family of four in America.

It now requires 60 weeks of work a year, so more than 52 weeks. So it forces the woman into the workforce unnecessarily and not voluntarily. I'm all for, of course, women in the workforce if they choose, but a lot of moms don't want to have to go to work immediately. They want to spend those first five or six years with those kids and then maybe go back at their own choosing. So we're seeing the birth rate just plummet because of that. Secondly, we're seeing the marriage rate plummet.

Less and less people are getting married than ever before in American history. We have more single men and women in their early 30s than married men and women in their early 30s. Never happened before in American history. And it makes sense, of course, because we prioritize sending them to college, which teaches them not to get married. So why should we be shocked that they don't get married? Again, you might say, what do you mean they teach you not to get married? Come with me.

To University of Denver and sit in a sociology class, they are taught that marriage is a misogynistic open air prison. They read feminist theory. It's not an exaggeration. They are taught that these are unjust, oppressive constructs. So we shouldn't be shocked that 10 years later, no one's having kids and the marriage rate plummets.

So I think there are ways to fix this. It's starting to begin to fix naturally because we're seeing just the country fall apart as a lack of it. But it's a serious problem. And the Democrat Party is capitalizing on it. The most reliable voting group for the Democrat Party are college-educated single women living in urban areas with cats. And I'm not kidding. The cats I made up. The other part is...

And they are incredibly loyal to the Democrat Party. And there's a lot of reasons for that. The data is amazing. I wish Scott was still here because he would reinforce me on this. The data is unbelievable. As soon as they get married, if they get married, they go from 95% Democrat to like 55% Democrat. Once they have kids, they become Republicans majority.

It's if you can go from an adherent to the Democrat Party worldview to almost a Republican to a raging right winger by getting married and having children. It's pretty incredible.

We have a question in the back. I see, yep, standing up. Do we have a mic ready? Hello? Yeah, okay, good. Hi, Charlie. My name is Esther Williams. I am a Christian, conservative, did not go to college, and was also homeschooled all 12 years. I have my parents to thank for that, for going against the grain.

More often than not, I'm shamed for either all four of those or one of those in not only this town, but in my generation. My question to you, and I ask this very genuinely, is how does someone tap into their inner Charlie Kirk?

Yeah, that's great. So first of all, that's part of the book, which is you shouldn't care if they shame you. And that's important, right? I admit, I have a genetic deformity. I truly don't care what people think of me. And I totally acknowledge it. I think it's actually hilarious when people attack me. I care if people I care about attack me or criticize me. If my wife says something about me or my close friends or my pastor, then I listen.

But if some like purple haired jihadi calls me like not wise or smart because I didn't go to college, like, okay, whatever. And so it's about as a Christian, I'll give you some advice, just releasing that to the Lord and just being like that. None of the approval of man matters at all. The approval of man is actually a scorn, it says in the scriptures. And that's, by the way, that is a discipline and a practice that

more than anything else. You will get stronger at it the older you get and the more you decide not to care. But you shouldn't become someone who is not able to receive loving advice or coaching from those who should be correcting you. That's narcissistic type behavior, which no one should endorse. So yeah, look, I acknowledge it. I've never been bothered by the mob hating me or the New York Times hating me or whatever. In fact, I think it's one of our superpowers at Turning Point USA. I really do. That's great.

See, one more question. Good to see you again. Thank you. So you're going to go to college? I'm a 13-year-old, and I'm going into eighth grade, and I'm trying to make some positive change. Like, I had this guy say that, like, you can't prove that God is real because every religion was made by man. Is there, like, a way I could, like, deal with school? Yeah. So, um...

Yeah, I'll give you a fun counter and be like, hey, you know without God there would be no atheists. So I didn't come up with that. That's a G.K. Chesterton quote. So yeah, look, for an eighth grader, let me think about this. You had the best argument that you could probably give

is that we now know because of science, thanks to science, that the universe had a beginning, and we call it the Big Bang, and so time, space, and matter started at a specific time. Therefore, using the laws of logic, which are always applicable, in order to have time, space, and matter start, you need something that is outside of time, space, and matter, and that thing is called God. And so the question is, who caused the Big Bang to actually go into effect?

We have an answer to that. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. You see, the atheists, they have a tough task ahead of them. And we as religious people must acknowledge our task. We have to deal with suffering. That is the hardest issue as a religious people, to explain away unjust suffering. Why does the kid get cancer? Why does the loving wife die in a car accident? It is the greatest challenge of religious people. Atheists, they have to explain everything else.

They have to explain where these mountains came from, the earth, the planet, meaning, existence, morality, children, deoxyribonucleic acid. They have to say all of that is an act of randomness and chance. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. That's what you should tell your friend. That's beautiful. Thank you. All right, we have time for just one more question. Did I miss?

Thank you for being here, Charlie Kirk. I am curious about how we as brave conservatives can be out in the world when we have a legal system that seems to be so against us. We had Jonathan Turley here. Thank you, Christina, who was saying that there are really basically no conservative professors out there. And so if we are trying to find justice, if we're fighting the good fight, and we know that we're going to this...

What advice do you have for us? So that's great. I'll tell you my advice. You just have to expect to end up in federal prison at some point. It's true. Right, Cleta? And I mean, I don't invite it, but it's, you know how liberating it is once you say that and you're like, okay, great. My wife knows it. My family knows it. Like, okay.

We live in an open-air Soviet country right now where people like me that have certain politics, we are relentlessly investigated. We're relentlessly – the government is obsessed with us obviously because we're effective and because we're outspoken and because we have opinions that they don't like. And so again, I don't expect people to have the attitude that I have, which is a whole of life just like, hey, I might end up in Gitmo. And if I do, then it will be a life well lived because I did the right thing.

But there's probably smaller versions of that.

And I'm a big believer that you cannot have beautiful things without sacrifice. I think that is a law of nature. I believe that we have the beautiful country that we have because of the sacrifice of the heroes at Normandy Beach, for example. And we remember that on D-Day. We remember the greatest generation. I believe that we have the country because of the revolutionary generation that sacrificed, so on and so forth. And so we can't continue to have a beautiful country if people aren't willing to sacrifice.

And I'm afraid that we kind of want it both ways. We want the luxury of a great country, but not everyone wants the sacrifice. I'm willing to do that. And I know other people are too. A lot of other great patriots. And I will say, I'm not trying to do this. Cleta is one of them. I am so encouraged by how many people are willing to sacrifice everything they have to go into debt, to go into bankruptcy, to say, if I have to just never see my kids again. There is a rising demand

duty spirit in the conservative movement in this country that is so promising. But I'm also not going to do hopium, hope and opium mixed together. That feels good. But it's really bad for you. If we're not successful in November, that will be the future for a lot of us. It will be maybe later than sooner or sooner rather than later. And you see what's happening. Donald Trump will end up in federal prison if he doesn't win. End of story, period. And there will be many of us that they're going to try to do after that. And

Bring it on. We get to live in a country that was once great. We want to make it great again. And I wouldn't want to live in any other time because the civilization itself hangs in the balance. And I consider myself and all of us that get to fight in it immensely blessed because the stakes have never been higher. That's great.

Charlie, thank you so much. This has been a delightful evening and a wonderful day for all of us. I just want to say, this is a great organization. They treated us so well. I speak all across the country. This is a first-class operation, I've got to tell you. The Sun Valley Policy, this is a first-class operation. Thank you.

And I'm a tough grader. So they treated us so well, so great, amazing hospitality. And I love it here, and I hope to return. God bless you guys. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening. God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.