Ask Charlie Anything 222: Live Q&A at the Investors Retreat
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Hey, everybody. Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio. Charlie, what 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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We're going to take questions live from all of our great supporters. Lorraine, what is on your mind? And thank you so much for your great support. Hey, Charlie. I'm just curious your thoughts on Gavin Newsom made the announcement that California is already doing Dodge only better. So, Andrew, you're a native Californian. I'm not native. Well, you're a Californian. I'm a parasitic species to the people of California. I'm an invasive species.

What, is he doing doge but better? No, of course he's not. No. This is laughable on its face. Yeah, he just, I mean, this is, you saw this with, I mean, Gavin Newsom puts his finger in the air and sees which way the wind's blowing and says, oh, I can get on that train. And so he's actually good.

pretty level-headed when you meet him in person and he'll kind of come to your frequency to your level and so I think he just sees the way the the political movement is going and he wants to get out ahead of it and and of course he's not going to do that you cannot do anything sensible in the state of California without being sued up left right and center without being without having this commission get in the way of that this committee get in the way of that of course he's not

And by the way, nobody is flocking to Gavin Newsom's side like they would Elon Musk with the brainpower and the patriotism and the sensibility that you would need to get it done. And again, people vote with their feet. People are leaving the state in record numbers. It's the highest housing prices, highest cost of living, most homelessness.

And also the greatest wealth disparity of any state in the country. It is harder than ever for regular middle class people to get ahead here in the state. And so I don't know what they're going to doge in the state of California. But Gavin Newsom's done nothing but protect the special interests in California. God bless you, Lorraine. Thank you. All right. Bernadette, what is on your mind? God bless you. I love the shirt. Turning Point USA shirt.

Speaking of parasites, I was just wondering how do you feel about changing the word abortion back to its original name, termination of pregnancy?

And how that will maybe pop some neurons on all these college campuses that you're going to leads to the next question, were you ever a pregnancy? Were you part of a pregnancy? What is a pregnancy? And then it can open a big door. Because the third-party insurance companies changed it to the benign word abortion so they could get more of them.

They wiped out the word termination of pregnancy because I was a nurse before I was a doctor at that time, and they made us change it on the admission sheets. I haven't thought that deeply about it. You know Blake on our show? Blake disagrees in the chat. He says he thinks the opposite, and so you guys can debate on that offline. I'll get him later. You'll get him later. Great. He says people do not actually like abortion as a word. He thinks termination is a euphemism. He thinks it's backwards. I haven't thought that deeply about this. Have you, Andrew? No.

No. That being said, I think both terminate and abort – I mean the pro-choice movement, it doesn't say they're pro-abortion, right? So we like to throw that back into their face and say you're the pro-abortion movement. They hate that already. I just want to throw the word pregnancy back in there. Yeah, well, I do like that. It's interesting. I just did a quick Google search of the definition of pregnancy because I was curious what it would say.

It says, pregnancy is the state of carrying a developing fetus in utero. There you go. But it's not a fetus. I mean, fetus is a little baby, basically. So, yeah, I mean, the whole dialogue is filled with euphemisms. It kind of reminds me of adultery. No, it's like you're having sex with somebody else, and that's not nice. So when you use the harsher words, it really brings the truth down. So whatever that...

combination of words that really brings the truth home to that person, I'm all for. Thank you. God bless you, Bernadette. Talk to you soon. Thank you. Okay. Next question. Yes. We have a new friend named Madison here with a question. Okay, great. Hi, Madison. How are you? Hi, I'm doing well. Thanks. How are you? Great. Thank you. Wonderful. I'm a mom of four. I'm a native Californian. I've lived here my whole life besides college. And

And my kids go to a public charter school, thank God. And however, I know in the United States, we have failing schools. We have failing test scores. We have failing public education in general. The dropout rate is skyrocketing. And so how would you, saying that the United States is the best country in the entire world, how would you explain that?

You know, it's actually interesting. Our education is way better if you take out a certain portion of the population, which is people without fathers, specifically in urban areas. Our education actually at the top level is really, really good. But look, I mean, you are diagnosing a serious problem, which is our public education system is a catastrophe.

And it has been for quite some time. Our private education is the envy of the world and continues to be. We do private education better than almost anybody else on the planet, especially classical education and even more so Christian education.

But the main reason why are why is government run education so terrible? And there's a lot of factors into this. But public sector teacher unions, I believe, have done more damage to America than the Sinaola drug cartel. And I believe public sector teacher unions are the true cartel that are holding kids back in the country in this in this country.

And so second to that, this is why I'm really happy that Texas passed school choice and Arizona has school choice. We need full school choice that parents can actually choose what school they want to send their kids to and not be locked into the local failing public school. I did a tweet the other day and I'll just let's find that it was about school choice where there were 30 schools in Illinois, 30.

in Chicago where not a single kid can read at grade level or do math. Let me just tell you a very basic truism. Unless you are Michael Jordan...

Unless you are LeBron James, if you cannot read by fifth grade, you're probably going to jail. That's literal. I mean, go to jail or you're going to live just a very sad life. What happens is we have millions of people that are illiterate, literally illiterate. They go to school every single day and they are doing something called failing forward. So Mississippi, called the Mississippi miracle, Mississippi had some of the worst schools in the country.

And they changed a lot. But one of the things that they changed was a super simple practice, which the left hates. No more failing forward. That's it.

And so Mississippi, half of the state is very poor black, half the state. So 50% of Mississippi is black, half of it is white. Approximation, I think it's like 30 or 40%, but it's one of the highest black populations in the country. And it goes to show bait. And so all the left was like, this is racist, you must fail forward. And Mississippi said, no, we're not going to. So what is failing forward? It means that by the time you're in second grade, if you can't read, you can't progress to third grade. You're going to keep on repeating second grade until you can read. So what happens is sometimes you had to redo second grade two or three times.

And Mississippi went from like 45th of education in the country to now top five in proficiency in reading. That simple. It's called the Mississippi Miracle. Can you get the data? Yeah, I've got it. And I will, yeah, the Mississippi Miracle, can you just, yeah. Yeah, it refers to the remarkable improvement in Mississippi student reading scores, particularly in fourth grade over a relatively short period of time. The state's reading scores, once among the lowest in the nation, are now amongst the top. So that happened overnight.

Virtually overnight. And what's interesting is that it's at third grade. They hold a ton of kids back at third grade. And so if you're just not cutting it, the teachers can see it and they hold you back. So 10% of all kids in Mississippi were held back at third grade. 10%.

That's what needs to happen. In the country, if we get rid of fail forward, our education gap with all these other countries would change dramatically. So it's not that our education system is terrible. Partially it is in government. It's just the way we do it. Think about it. Why would you be allowed to advance into another grade if you are at that grade level? Finally, let me just add two more things to this. If you are trying to teach a kid to read, phonics is the way to do it. Phonics is the way to do it. And

Thank you for the applause. That means you are a very elevated audience, honestly, because when I say that to some places, they say, what the heck are you talking about? So phonics has been removed from our schools completely because of why? Really lazy teachers. I'm going to be honest. Lazy teachers don't like it. They're like, oh, it's too much work. Phonics is, we're going to go to some other ways. And so teachers find phonics unexciting.

Well, too bad. It works. It is kind of tedious. It's the best way to get kids to learn to read. They want to do flashy and trendy stuff, and they don't want to get into proven practices. I'm going to read this tweet here. 2024 Illinois data. Not a single child tested proficient in math in 80 schools. 80 schools. And some of these are very well-funded schools. It's not a funding issue. Some of these are charter schools. Not a single kid can do math at grade level, and only 24 out of 80 of them can read at grade level.

And so you ask yourself the question, why is it because we put up with failure and we fail these kids forward. And then finally, we're running out of time on here. I could talk about education all day long school choice. And we must crush the public sector teacher unions in a way. We must have an all out blitzkrieg plan and understand that the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are keeping kids back.

in a way that is evil. They know how these kids' lives would be better, and they're holding them back because of their own union thug bosses. Let's go to the next question of our wonderful Turning Point USA partners and supporters here.

Any of us, how you are truly on the front lines supporting Jews and Christians for our Judeo-Christian values for Israel. We thank you every single day. Thank you. My question is, we see how powerful TikTok has become and how you have used that platform. Unfortunately, myself and many other pro-America, pro-Israel creators continue to get censored and banned. Where do we stand on the TikTok movement?

negotiations with the Trump administration and its ability to have better freedom of speech for its citizens. Yeah, thank you for that. And so we were banned multiple times, right, before we... Twelve? Yeah, twelve times. And again, this is all very well reported. And I reached out to TikTok after they got banned by Congress. And I said, hey, you guys say you're this free speech platform. Let us speak and not be banned. And so to their credit, we've gone super viral and billions of views.

Right now, I'm not sure what the status is. I think a lot of it is in limbo because of the China tariff situation. I will say, and I know this is not your perspective, there are, and I think Israel needs to get much better at the PR war. I think it's terrible with public relations, to be honest. There's a lot of truths about what's happening in that region that a lot of people do not understand. And I think some of the Israel PR is very cringe at times, to use kind of a Gen Z term.

There is a belief system out there of some pro-Israel forces like, oh, TikTok's a waste of time. Let's not do that. I reject that premise. And I know you probably agree with that. We need to engage in those public spaces. If I can help you get unbanned or uncensored, I'd be happy to help with that. But here's the major, like one of the more fundamental issues when it comes with the fight and the debate for Israel is that it's very hard for

for those of us that are not Jewish, to make the contention when most Jews do not care about Israel that much. When I actually have to debate Jews on Israel on campus. It's very hard, right? Do you understand what I'm saying? Like, I'm a Christian that cares about Israel, but I care about America obviously most. But Jews on campus are telling me that I shouldn't care about Israel and that, you know, Israel is a terrible apartheid state. I'm sure you know the Jews of which I speak.

For sure. Know them well. And they exist. And I don't think they're a majority, honestly, but I think that some of them are waking up post-October 7th. But let's also be honest. Two-thirds of American Jews are very liberal.

And one of the—and I'll throw to Andrew. I know Andrew has a thought on this. But just one other element and contextualization on this that I want to make sure I add. What's very frustrating is that anti-Israel belief system is an outgrowth of the left-wing worldview because you think of everything through oppressed and they look at Israel as prosperous and their neighbors not so prosperous, and so they look at it through that lens.

Unfortunately, Jewish Americans have financed their own demise. Jewish Americans have financed these left-wing organizations and colleges that have led to the rise of anti-Israel sentiment. So it's very, very frustrating. Andrew, do you have a thought here? Yeah, I just want to make one other point, and that's we have to avoid the temptation of clamping down on free speech or trying to censor or using left-wing tactics, right?

You know, there was the was Ambassador Friedman who said that, you know, maybe we need to deport and jail people that were anti-Semitic. Those types of policies or that approach to dealing with the anti-Semitism problem will only create more anti-Semitism. And it does. It does create more.

There is a distinction between anti-Semitic remarks and inciting violence, and that was the distinction. Yeah, the problem is a lot of these people were not inciting violence. They were writing op-eds, right? And that's the issue, is that a lot of people were being deported because they wrote an op-ed critical of a foreign country. Now, I don't think... Hilariously, if they're critical of America, I think they should be deported. But...

Hand in hand. Yeah, but again, so I don't think they should be here in the first place. But what happens then is our own Turning Point USA students say, wait, why are we deporting people for being critical of a foreign country? And then it plays into this idea that Israel is basically controlling foreign policy. That's not the case. Yeah, well...

Well, then again, so it creates this narrative. And then all of a sudden, again, I will say this, that from our own rank and file at Turning Point, and I've said this publicly, I'll say it again. They are not as pro-Israel as people would say because no one's making good arguments in favor of Israel, honestly. Some of the arguments are like, well, if you don't support Israel, you're anti-Semitic. Again, like that doesn't really resonate. That's counterproductive. You know what I'm saying? And like, for example, Douglas Murray, who I have a lot of respect for, went on Joe Rogan and made a complete fool of himself.

Right. And like, thank you for agreeing with that. And he made some good arguments at times, but he started that podcast by like shaming Joe Rogan, who's the most popular podcaster on the planet for having like voices that he didn't like and basically got no pleasantries in the podcast. No, like, Hey Joe, good to see you. Like write him like, how dare you have? And it, and like that makes it seem as if the pro Israel world is like,

can't defend its position. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. And I just, with people like Joe Rogan, if he could have a survivor of a hostage situation, if he could have someone who served in the IDF, just to bring more balance and nuance to the conversation, everyone would benefit. No, I agree. And the fact, I mean, that's a fair point. I just, my biggest concern is that

Israel is losing support with conservatives for a vast hysterical overreaction against speech. And I see it happening every single day. Right, Andrew? I mean, it's losing support. And Israel's PR is probably the worst I've ever seen of any modern country. It's humiliatingly bad. I don't disagree. We have the cherry tomato. We have drip irrigation. We don't have good PR. Well said. God bless you and God bless Israel.

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Yes, sir. Thank you so much, Charlie, for having us. My name is Owen. I'm a student at Florida State University. I care a lot about this movement. And our Turning Point USA leader. Yes, sir. So give it up for Owen. And thank you for coming to campus. Yes.

Thank you for coming to campus in February. It was a ton of momentum. It was incredible, so I appreciate that. So obviously being in Florida, I work in state politics a lot, and it's a little messy right now on the conservative side, unfortunately. You've got a lot of division between the governor and the legislature. You have division between Byron Donalds and Casey DeSantis. And, you know, it's a shame because...

when conservative states are able to be unified, they can do really incredible things. So what would be your advice, I guess, to kind of mend these gaps and these difficulties and really get us back out there? Because, I mean, if we're divided in 2026 and everything, that's going to have an avenue for Democrats to come in and pick up seats. It's a really important question. So here's where we get to the tough stuff, right? There are, and this is to the

wonderful point previously that we had offline. There are major fissures happening on the right currently, more so than I think that people realize or recognize. Leadership can solve a lot of these issues. In Florida, the problem is you have Byron Donalds, who's likely to be the next governor of Florida, and I hope he is. I'm a big Byron Donalds fan.

And you have Ron DeSantis, who's not too happy about that. And so there is some infighting there. Let me be perfectly honest, guys. If the Republican House majority and the Republican Senate majority does not deliver on a lot of Trump's agenda, we're going to have huge problems.

We're going to have a drop off of voters that think that they can support a certain candidate and then all of a sudden believe, actually, we're not going to get what we voted for. There will be a huge drop off and fall. So what is the solution? Leadership. But how about our leaders should go do what they were elected to do? Like what has Congress done these last couple of months? OK, they're getting this reconciliation bill together.

I mean, right? I mean, am I right to say, where is the energy? Where is the spirit? Trump is carrying the entire country on his back right now, him and his team. And I don't feel that kind of urgency from Congress right now. Now, I want to try to give them a little bit of time. I know that there's only so much you could do. The number one way to get votes

is to actually do what you ran on. If you tell your voters and show them, hey, you told me to do this and I did this, they will vote for you again and then more people will vote for you. And so in Congress right now, number one, I'm afraid we're not going to get the spending cuts that we need. This is a major thing that we need to keep the pressure on. I don't know about you. I'm not okay borrowing trillions of dollars a year and I think it's a major problem. So that's number one. Number two,

Obviously, I think we're going to get the Trump tax cuts. But the third of which, and this is a really big problem, is are we going to get the funding for the border and for the deportation agents so that we can actually finish this job that President Trump was elected on? Homan's asking for $175 billion, just so everybody's clear, like the price tag on the mass deportation. And Doge cuts are hopefully going to help a little bit. But Republicans in Congress are just as addicted to spending as Democrats. So to your question more precisely—

If leaders start to deliver on what they said they're going to do, a lot of this infighting will stop. If we fall significantly short of the promises we made, we're going to have some big problems in the Republican Party. I want to say something just because I think I can say it and maybe Charlie can't. You know, I'm actually a big fan of Ron DeSantis. That might get me in trouble with some people. Other people might like it. I was very supportive of him. I didn't think he should run for president.

But I'm looking at this, and I genuinely cannot understand why Casey DeSantis is qualified to be the next governor of Florida. Like, what qualifies her other than being around the governor? So I don't understand this. It feels very weird to me that, like, it feels like one of those big megachurches where the, like...

wife of the pastor is just like, you know, I don't know. It's something, something's off there. And, and yeah, we love Byron. I think let, let the, let this process play out. Obviously, you know that there was some, you know, some back and forth with the legislature, especially on that immigration issue.

I mean, I was getting calls on that left and right. DeSantis saying that this is the toughest in the country. And look, DeSantis has done a lot of great in Florida. And I think that it would do him good to hand off the baton to Byron Donalds and do so gracefully and endorse him and stop the infighting. I think that's the right move. Thank you, man. Thanks for your great leadership. Thank you.

Hi, Charlie. Hello. I'm Heather, and I work at a non-traditional Bible-based school here in Orange County. Phenomenal. That still teaches phonics. That's what I'm talking about.

The high school students are in a government econ class as we speak right now. They're in session, so they're texting me some questions and being juniors and seniors. Their top questions are about college, so do you mind if I ask you three quick college questions? Really quick. I want to try to get through this line. They're super quick. First one, they know you didn't go to college, but if you did, what would you study? I would have went to Hillsdale, and I would have done, I think they have a PPE, which is philosophy, politics, economics. I could be wrong, but they have some bundle of that. Okay.

Is college still a waste of time if you love learning or just figuring out what to do with your life? It's a great question. If you love learning, don't go to most colleges because it's not going to happen there. There are some colleges that are places of great learning. St. Andrews College, for example. I mean, Hillsdale being the one that I keep on repeating over and over again. Go to a great books college. But if you are a lifetime learner, you don't need to go to college to learn. I try to embody that. You can read 100 books a year. You can listen to podcasts. You could take the online courses.

If you love learning, you can also just do all the free stuff that is available. But if you want to do it rigorously, here's the problem is that you think you're going to go to college and be intellectually challenged. You might be, but towards like absolute garbage, like postmodernism, deconstructionist, anti-Christian, anti-Western, which I'm okay with understanding what they believe. But three years of diving deep in that literature, that's like bad for the soul. I mean, it's like, it's not good for anybody. And so we live in a golden age of self-directed learning.

And if you are a lifelong learner, you don't necessarily need to go to college to do that. But if you want to, make sure you choose a college that elevates good, true and beautiful things. OK, and the last question is, what are your thoughts on the current lawsuit with Harvard and the Trump administration? Well, I mean, first of all, I am glad that they're trying to defund Harvard. Why is Harvard getting billions of dollars a year when they're sitting on fifty five billion dollars themselves? And.

I mean, not only from their terrible Jew hatred to the previous question, to many of their other elements, it is terrible what they've actually embodied and done. Beyond that, though, the biggest critique of Harvard, the easiest way to disassemble it, is they are in direct violation of the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action.

Very simple. If I were to give the Trump administration advice, which I've attempted on this, but I think make it a single source complaint. We are not giving you money because you're violating the 14th Amendment and violating the Supreme Court, which is the Students for Fair Admissions case that says that you are actively discriminating against white and Asian students to accommodate black and Hispanic students.

based on the color of their skin. That is why we're not sending you money. And Harvard would collapse because we have the goods on them. They were the test case actually in the Supreme Court case. So I love the fact that we are pushing against Harvard because we want a meritocracy. And honestly, Harvard, go fund yourself. Okay? Go raise your own money. Thank you. Thank you. I know what I'm saying.

Hi, Charlie. I'm Ken from Florida. Great to see you. Thank you for your deep commitment to God and to our country. And thank you for your wonderful gift. Are we allowed to talk about that? I don't know if we're allowed or not. All right. Well, thank you. Yeah. I wanted to hear some comments from you on election reform. We hear a lot of it during elections. We haven't heard much lately. A question is, is it possible for President Trump to

to do a written demand to the states to change and be consistent with specific guidelines for elections to maintain their flow of income from the United States government to the states? Yeah, so the question is about election integrity reform, right? So here's my – it needs to happen on a state-by-state basis. I'll be honest. Congress is not going to do this, unfortunately.

Now, what President Trump can do and what he is doing is instructing certain U.S. attorneys to investigate widespread voting practices that are against federal law. The federal government has a lot of control over funds and can incentivize things, but, okay, he's not a dictator, despite what the left says, so he has to be very prudent and careful. Where is the biggest fight when it comes to election integrity? I've done a lot of thinking about this, and I've done a lot of work in this. There is one thing that requires more attention than anything else. The voter rolls.

Dirty voter rolls result in dirty elections. It is the original sin. So if we fail to clean up voter rolls, we fail to clean up who's on the voter rolls, then think about it. If you have voter rolls with a bunch of faulty, moved, or deceased voters, and they all get mail-in ballots, then you're creating the prerequisite for massive shenanigans and issues.

So the problem needs to be cleaning up voter rolls. Tom Fitton is doing good work on this. What I would like to see, though, is the Department of Justice civilly suing these jurisdictions and these states to have them also clean up the voting rolls because you would have the whole power of the federal government. That's where I think the best thrust and energy is. We should make it a four-year goal to go after to clean up the voter rolls in Colorado, to clean up the voter rolls in Illinois, to clean up the voter rolls in New York and California, etc.,

I don't want to hypothesize or speculate too much, but I think dirty voter rolls give Democrats maybe a one to two point advantage, potentially. Maybe more. Depending on the state. Depending on the state. So why does that matter? So when you have a bunch of ballots out there that are not tied to human beings, well, Democrats have organized labor.

They have a lot of people that then go scoop up these errant ballots, but they're actually real ballots. And that's where we get we're off. We're like, well, they're fake ballots. Well, they're fake people, but they're real ballots. Does that make sense? Yes. So the secretary of state is sending out legitimate ballots. It's not like they're counterfeit, but they're not assigned to the name and no one's checking signatures. And that's the other way that we could do this on the laws of the books. And most of these states on most of these states is signature verification and it's never enforced.

Signature verification. We have to go back to signature verification, which one of the main reasons why President Trump was able to win Georgia by so much in 2016 was robust signature verification. One of the reasons why it's now this battleground state is we don't check signatures anymore. Why? And this is another thing that why I'm so why I'm so against all this CRT hyper racialization, DEI stuff, because you're not allowed to check signatures in Georgia because it's racist.

Not kidding. That's literally what the Supreme Court, the courts have said. You are not allowed to check signatures because it harms black people more than white people. Not not an exaggeration. And so we need to challenge that. And finally, if we can get voter ID, that would be great. I'm not bullish on that. That would require Congress. Democrats know that when there are fewer protections on voting, they mysteriously do better.

Let's just put that again. The fewer protections there are, they mysteriously are able to do better. So I just I put forward five or six ideas here just right now. And I will say to President Trump's credit, he's not lost sight on this. And I think he wants to reform our elections for good. And God bless him for that. Right. Thank you. Thank you for your great support.

I want to just add on one thing. Just, Andrew, can you talk about, and then we will get to all the questions in the overflow stream, the profound impact of Turning Point USA and how we've kept the energy going post-election?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's unparalleled in at least modern American political history, but probably throughout our entire history that after an election, when we saw a movement like we saw in the fall semester and spring semester, by the way, that gets, you know, this movement really sparked in spring. I'll never forget 2024 in the spring, we went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Charlottesville.

Charlie is sitting there, and hundreds and hundreds of students just start singing the national anthem spontaneously. And Charlie and I looked at each other. We're like, something is happening here. That's true. And so we decided, hey, if we keep the pressure on, who knows how far we can push this. And you saw this recently with the youth Yale poll that showed that the youngest voters in our country, 18 to 21, are not just like leaning. They're not just like pushing.

dipping their toe in the water. They favor Republicans by 11.7%. Can you imagine? 11.7%. And not only that, excluding the wonderful company in this audience, a lot more than baby boomers. Baby boomers are going the wrong way. Gen Z is going the right way.

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Yes, sir. Hey, Charlie. My name is Matt. I come from Scottsdale, Arizona. Wonderful. And my question is about the youth.

You've built an incredible organization that helps youth from high school through college. But I'm seeing kids being introduced to complex ideas and, I'll say, destructive ideas earlier and earlier, younger and younger. And kids are getting cell phones at the age of 8 to 10 years old these days. And so my question for you is, you know, how do we...

capture and get that group earlier? And do you recognize it as a problem? And what do you think we can do about it? Yeah, it is a problem. It's not one that we're going to be fixing by organizing. I mean, we're not going to start turning point middle school, despite how many people want us to. The answer is in your question. I am, what's shocking to me is that when I go to a shopping mall and nine-year-olds are coming up and asking me for selfies. Now that's new and it's horrifying. And I'm like, you should not know who I am. No, I mean, I see, I mean, seriously, like

Don't you have something else to do than know about it? Like, no, I love your college debates. They're amazing. And I'm like, okay, great. You're nine. Like when I was nine, we were not watching videos all day long online. I mean, it's like, there's a, and let's just be honest. Like this is lazy parenting. Parents don't want to parent their kids. They just give them these digital pacifiers and they're like, here, you know, go entertain yourself, go stare at a screen all day long. So we actually are, again, I'm in some ways a beneficiary of that because our audience has only grown because we

A lot of eight, nine and 10 year old young boys now look at us as role models, which is amazing. But I don't like delight in the fact that I go to these shopping or ever shopping mall grocery store. And it's hilarious. There there might be a parent nearby and the parents like, who's that? Right. And the nine year olds like you have no idea. Again, so the best answer I have for that is that our digital dominance is

is paying dividends and better than listening to Turning Point USA videos than listening to, I don't know, whatever propaganda that they're seeing on social media. But let's be honest, we have a much deeper structural problem

If eight-year-olds are getting smartphones. I mean, that is a bad, bad, bad trend. So I hope it stops. Thank you for that. Andrew, you wanted to make an add-on point there. Well, yeah, and there's a larger point to be made with cell phones. They have seen wherever they take these out of classes, it's like the teachers that have been teaching a while since about there was a pivot point, an inflection point around 2012, 2013, when the cell phones became much more popular.

common in the classroom, for example. The attention spans, the sociability of the students, all of these fell off a cliff. I mean, there is no doubt in my mind that cell phones are a terrible, terrible thing for developing brains, especially smartphones.

And so what I would encourage, I would say there are things called dumb phones or basic phones. If you are worried about the security of your kids if they're playing out in a park somewhere and you want them to have a way to get a hold of you, there are alternatives and everybody should be looking into those. And they're actually cheaper. You don't have to get internet. But it gives you an ability to call them and keep tabs on them. So that's an alternative that you could do. But especially at a young age, I'm convinced with my own kids, I have a 7, a 5, and a 2-year-old,

The less screen time, the better behaved they are, the less frantic they are. So this summer, we're doing a total detox in our family where we're getting rid of all of those. We're only doing one family screen. That's for movies at night. I got that from Matt Walsh. That's right. And so I just encourage everybody to hold the line there and do the hard work because we've seen the benefits in our family almost overnight. And I'm thinking if I get a whole summer of this, I'm going to have –

You know, really well-behaved kids. That's, you know, so... Yeah, and I mean, we have much younger kids, but it still is an issue. I mean, you...

There's almost the way that they constitute some of these cartoons. It almost has like a quasi like mind control. I mean, they don't move when they watch this stuff. I mean, like, you know what I'm talking about? Totally. Their entire being shuts out and they are mesmerized, almost hypnotized by the way that these cartoons are now constituted and

Whether or not they're using AI to put it together or not, I don't know. But look, the rule that Matt Welsh has that is one that we're adopting and that Andrew is as well, just one screen for the entire family. I have a phone. My wife has a phone. That's it. If you want to watch something, everyone knows what you're watching. It's in a public space. You have to get permission to watch it. No one has screens in bedrooms.

A good rule is a child should not have a screen in their bedroom, whether it be an iPad, an iPhone, or a television or a computer screen. Nothing good comes of it. Well, and remember that there was a – I forget the study. You might remember it. But a lot of these executives at the social media companies – Oh, yeah. Yeah, they actually – It was called the social dilemma. Yeah. It was the Netflix special. Right. Well, they don't let their own kids on social media. Tristan Harris has done really good.

work on this. Yeah, they don't let it because the feedback loop, you're comparing yourself to millions of people, you're you're feeling insecure, it has a lot of social issues attached, I think you should only allow very mature and self confident, self assured people to get on social media. I think I should 18. I don't Yeah, I mean, there's different lines you could draw, but you have to have a sense of self and a security in yourself to get on social media and to use it

To go deeper, it's causing girls to develop puberty earlier. It's now 10, 11, 12 because they're getting signals of biological reproduction so their body enters puberty earlier because they're exposed to hypersexualized content, which is not good for anybody, by the way. It creates all sorts of hormonal imbalances. It also just throws off childhood. I mean, like this idea of developing kids, they...

I always laugh when parents say, oh, but I gave them a screen with family protection. They get around that thing so quickly. You have no idea. Anyway, I could go on. I don't want to be too provocative. Dumb phones without internet is the key. Yeah, again, and also I do kind of laugh. They're like, well, how am I supposed to call my kid if there's an emergency at school? Okay, yeah, I guess you could get like a jitterbug phone. But I went to school 13 years ago. No one had any phones. It's okay.

It's fine. You don't need to know where your kid is at all times. In fact, it's really bad to know where your kid is. I mean, up until the age of maybe 10, they've got to figure something out. And by the way, bored kids make really creative kids. Yes. Bored kids make really interesting kids. It's the death of boredom. And you need kids. So they should not be stimulated all of the time. They have to learn how to use their own independent free play. It's tragic when I see kids in restaurants just staring at me.

And I'm not even faulting parents at times. I get it. Parents are exhausted and they're tired, and it's an easy fix. It's just here. Here's your digital opium. Yes, ma'am. Charlie, God bless you and how he's using you for his kingdom. Thank you. My name is Demi Park. I'm the founding headmaster of the only Hillsdale member-affiliated school, Classical Charter School in California. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you.

We opened the school about five years ago with the intention of teaching our students to pursue what's good, beautiful, and true. And thankfully, with God's grace, we have been thriving. We've been recognized as California's distinguished school in the top 5%. Wow. And that's based on Common Core, which we don't teach. We teach classical standards. Good.

Anyway, so our school has been heavily targeted, as you can imagine. My nickname on the Salon article is a white supremacist Christian nationalist, as you can see. And despite all of that, we have been thriving. My question to you is, do you see, with the truth of classical schools having the Judeo-Christian values and principles because of the history and the nature of classical education,

Do you see a future in America where classical schools, charter schools, could be a Christian school? Absolutely. So what a wonderful question. And it's actually very timely because the Supreme Court is actually hearing a case on this very issue right now. Number one, if you are not aware of what a classical education is, you really should figure that out.

It is the premier way to educate children. It's not just Christian. It is the way that all of our founding fathers were educated. It is a blend of the Greeks and a blend of the Hebrews of Athens and Jerusalem, and it is the best way to educate kids. It's completely different than most private schools and completely different than most public

government-run schools, totally government schools. Now, Catholics actually do classical education very, very well, and they have for quite some time. Protestants, we're starting to get our act together. What makes it different? Number one, they don't line up in single-file classrooms. It's very collaborative. It's discussion-based. Number two is that the child is not acted—they don't act as if the child is right.

It's not like, oh, well, what do you have to think about this? No, in fact, they couldn't care less what the child's opinion is. They're going to pursue what is true and pursue what is beautiful. Am I correct in describing this? Teachers are an authority. Yes. They teach them what to... Where public education, that's not the case. The teachers are a partner.

But we don't teach them what to think. We teach them how to think. Yes, and that's correct. And I will say, but you're always pointing them towards something true. You want them to go on a journey towards a destination.

And so the classical education is the best way to do what is the most important thing in education, which is not teach skills. We have way too much of a skill based education system where we're like, well, we just want kids to go to school to learn how to do math and arithmetic. Yeah, but no, actually. I mean, that's better than the woke stuff. Like, OK, I can settle for that. Then you send your kid to go to school to learn out what it means to be a good person.

and to develop good character and to be a good citizen. You don't just send them so they can make a better trinket. So what happened in the 1800s is the Prussians, the Germans, they had a complete revolutionary idea of what education is. So classical was everywhere. It's how we educated human beings. They said this is wrong. They said we need more factory workers.

and we need more bureaucrats. So we're going to change the way education works, and we are going to have a centralized way of education. We're going to line up everybody single file. We're going to have a bell that will start class and end class, because this will make better factory workers, and it will be very totalitarian. A guy by the name of John Dewey, who was basically the most important education name in American history, brought this model to America, and it's been the case for 100 years. And

questioning it is now like very, you know, fashionable. We can finally question it. It creates obedient serfs that do not question authority and cannot think independently. They never develop that kind of opportunity. So classical education is growing quickly to your specific question. And by the way, Hillsdale College is the ultimate classical education. They are the premier. They are the best in the country because when you show up there and Dr. Arnn will tell you, it's like, I don't want to hear your opinions. You're here to learn.

You're here to pursue something meaningful, to elevate above yourself. The United States Supreme Court last week, or maybe it might have been earlier this week, heard a case from Oklahoma wondering whether or not taxpayer money can go towards religious charter schools.

They were very sympathetic towards it. And this could be one of the most consequential victories ever for education. Thank you, President Trump, for giving us those Supreme Court justices. Right. And again, we'd have to keep that's from his first term. Forget what he's doing this term. Now, what will be the profundity of that? That means that charter schools in California with taxpayer money could start a Christian classical education school.

It's a phenomenal, phenomenal thing. And so, yeah, do you want to talk about that? They seem inclined, by the way. Yeah, that's the headline from even ABC News. Supreme Court appears inclined to allow first taxpayer-funded religious charter school schools.

And that was after an Oklahoma court had blocked the Catholic Church's charter school contract. So, yeah, this has nationwide implications. So God bless you for that. I encourage all of you that care about education, know about classical education and know the differences between classical education and industrial education.

I am a product of industrial education, and I can tell you, has a lot of problems. And it does not do a great job because it could not care less about the kid's soul. It only cares about the kid's immediate applicable skill to make a better widget. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's an interesting legal argument, too, by the way. So the school is saying that the state's AG, actually, Republican Attorney General, is arguing that

It's a violation of the separation of church and principles of separation of church and state. Meanwhile, the lawyers for the school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, insists that it's a privately created controlled and that to exclude it from generally available charter school funding is religious discrimination. So.

interesting. I mean, the only problem you might run into there, Charlie, is if, you know, you might have some Sharia law school or something like that that pops up. So they're without a doubt that will happen. Yeah. I mean, which goes to a more fundamental issue, which is why are we importing so many people into our country that hate us?

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In fact, 74% of businesses on TikTok say TikTok has allowed them to scale their operations, increasing sales and expanding to new locations. And that growth means jobs. Today, there's over 7.5 million U.S. businesses on TikTok employing more than 28 million people. And that number keeps growing. Small businesses thrive on TikTok. Learn more about TikTok's contribution to the U.S. economy at TikTokEconomicImpact.com. How are you? Hi, good, Charlie. Good to see you.

I'm curious where you see Trump's talks with Iran going and reading and hearing what Mark Levin is saying. And he talks about a divide in the conservative movement between dealing with Iran and appeasing Iran, which President Trump says he will not allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon deal.

If we can't trust Iran, and frankly, I don't, is there any recourse other than a preemptive strike in your opinion? Yeah, I don't know enough about it to comment on that. I will say that I trust President Trump to figure this out. So let me explain to you President Trump's position, is that he is rightly obsessed with nuclear proliferation, meaning he thinks that if Iran gets a bomb, it would cause a trigger movement throughout the region and the world that would be a disaster.

And if you remember, President Trump famously and hilariously would talk about the devastating effects of nuclear. Have you heard the speech where he'll just go on and on and on about like my uncle worked for MIT and he showed me, you know, I'm talking about this like he has this famous shtick he does. You guys know that like his windmill thing. Yeah, it's like he's got like, you know, 10 or 12 of these that we love. And one of them is when he talks about the devastating effects of nuclear.

The major problem and the major concern is for many people is can we do this without getting involved in a foreign entanglement or a foreign war? That is an open question. I mean, I certainly hope so.

I know for Israel's sake that Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be catastrophic for Israel, without a doubt. I do think, though, that what President Trump did with using a lot of prudence yesterday was very smart. I don't know if you saw it. It's a non-military potential intervention where President Trump said, if you buy Iranian oil, we're not going to do business for you.

So he's choke pointing Iran in a non-military way. And so, look, Iran is very weak right now. They're a weakening regime. I think we should keep the sanctions on and intensify them. But just to explain how part of our audience thinks, because I asked our audience the question yesterday, right? And I'm simply just the communicator here. Part of our audience says, listen, you lied about Iraq. You lied about Afghanistan.

Let's be very careful with more military entanglements in the Middle East. That's how part of our audience feels. And honestly, I can see that perspective. However, it comes down to the fundamental question. What is the most important question? Is Iran a rational actor? And it seems as if they're a bunch of theocratic mullahs that are completely out of control and hate the West. So if that is your operating principle, then that should answer all the other subsequent questions.

And by the way, my final point, I trust President Trump to solve it because President Trump has the highest of all the virtues in statesmanship, which is he has prudence. He's not ideological. He wants what's best for America and best for the free world. And also wants to keep the shipping lanes open. Can you read his truth social? Yeah. He he said, alert, all purchases of Iranian oil or petrochemical products must stop now.

Any country or person who buys any amount of oil or petrochemicals from Iran will be subject to, immediately, secondary sanctions. Looking at you, China. They will not be allowed to do business with the United States of America in any way, shape, or form. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. And by the way, to Charlie's point, in Trump 1.0...

He basically had bankrupted Iran. And then Joe Biden, time and time again, I remember you had this, actually speaking of Mark Levin, Mark Levin talked about this tweet on his show. I remember Charlie listed out all the different ways that essentially Biden had turned his back on Trump era sanctions on Iran and was allowing all of this hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue to flow into Iranian coffers, which is partly why

Israel got attacked. They now had more resources. They had more funding that were emboldened And so starving the beast choke these choke points have proven really effective. Thank you last question Hey great event so

It can be very demoralizing to watch something that keeps happening, namely where leftists will identify a real or fake problem and then propose something that will make it worse. And then they manage to saturate the narrative with this. And so I'm wondering...

How are they doing this? How do we stop them from doing it? And how do we keep people from getting demoralized when we see them doing it? Sure. Can you give me an example that comes to mind to that? Well, an example would be one you gave earlier when you talked about reading in Mississippi. Okay. Yeah. It's not going to help black children to not be able to read, but...

They funnel them through and make all the problems that they want to talk about worse. Yes. Do you have an immediate thought on that? Because I do, but you go first. My immediate thought is that – and we've come a long way as a movement – is when they call you racist, laugh in their face. Mock them for how stupid they are. When they call you all of these – and by the way, this is one of the reasons –

It's not the only reason. This is one of the reasons why young kids, they're becoming immune to these old attack vectors from the left. And the boomers, God bless you, not you in this room. By the way, just so we're clear, I got 15 hate emails on that little thing I said about baby boomers. Someone has to explain to me why baby boomers are protective of their generation.

Because we aren't as millennials. It's the strangest thing. I'm not even upset. I'm infinitely curious why I get thousands of angry emails when I talk about data about baby boomers, like as if I'm insulting like the Episcopalian Church or something. And by the way, it's obviously not you in this audience. This is not what we're talking about. I don't mean this. It's not an accusation. I want to understand the boomer mind.

as to why when I talk about data of boomers moving to the left, that incites anger as if I insulted a loved one.

You know what I'm saying? Like, it's kind of strange. I just, I don't get it. But anyway. And it's not, I'm responding to one of these emails now of someone that says, I'll never listen to you again because you insulted me. By the way, this is the wildest thing, being on this show. No, you know these emails too. Charlie's hosting a national radio show and he's sitting there talking to the camera while he's saying, you're wrong and here's why. And it's like, I don't know what's going on. Like, there's multiple planes of activity. Keeps the circuitry going.

For the record, we love everyone in the audience and there's a lot of great boomers. Okay. Obviously the boomers that watch the show or listen or that are in this room are not the boomers we're talking about. Oh my goodness. Like, I don't know how many times you have to say that. Did I make that clear? Right guys? I think so. Goodness. And yet they still get ticked off at you and send you emails. And I, I have access to the same email account. I'm not making it up. I'm looking at, I'm like, oh my gosh, they cannot hear you saying this is not you, you know? And, and,

I don't know if they were just something, though, because I just I think there's something deeper, though. And we'll get to the other point, though, is that that was asked, which is why? What about generational loyalty exists with boomers that other generations don't have?

Meaning, like, that I feel obligated to defend every person that was born within my specific window. Well, and I've just, you know, we're both millennials. It's like we've just grown up being... Everyone's hated millennials my whole life. We've only been hated. And I've insulted millennials, and I'm like, yeah, okay, we suck. Okay, great. I know. Anyway, so...

To the point that we were, you know. Yeah, so that's my first thing is that we as a culture have to grow, you know, strength under these type of criticisms that had so much power for so long, especially coming off the civil rights era, right? That was like the worst thing you could be called is like a racist or a fascist. Like when they throw out these personal attacks

We have to get stronger and get better at just ignoring them because they're dumb. And I think we've come a long, long way. I mean, you think back to like 2015 even when Trump came down the escalator and made the comment about some are good people, but they're sending the rapists. I mean, it was like racism, racism, racism, right? And George Floyd was peak woke. And now we're starting to get immunities culturally. So I would say that's one thing. And I can't stress this strongly enough. I cannot write.

wait for the full death and demise of the legacy news media because that is pumping poison into our culture and they're losing. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I agree. And finally, so how do we overcome that? There's something called the thought terminating cliche.

And it's a very important term that you should all know about, terminating cliche, which is designed to stop all discord and discussion. What is an example? Well, we can't talk about fail forward because you're racist.

It ends all discussion. Think about how many times we have good policy or good ideas, and then they use a thought-terminating cliche. Well, you're transphobic, or you're hateful, or you're xenophobic. And what it does is that then it prevents all further exploration of the topic. You're

because it just terminates the thought immediately. You're seeing this, by the way, on a DNC-backed movement to basically stalk Charlie across campuses. They're so fixated on Charlie Kirk, they've come up with a whole tour that literally... Charlie's on the website. It says, we have to stop Charlie Kirk. They've seen the impact of Charlie. They're funneling tons of money into this thing. But what happened was, and I'll give Charlie so much credit, this is one of the best calls I've ever seen Charlie make. It was a week before Texas A&M, and...

And we catch word that they're going to come and bring like 30 to 50 influencers on the left, all to Texas A&M to just basically harass Charlie and try and get this movement, you know, trip it up. And Charlie calls it before the event even happened. I don't like giving him that many compliments. It was a Babe Ruth moment. It was a real good one. It was like an all-timer. He said, yeah, go ahead and try. They will be blown up by infighting before you know it. This will not get off the ground. And...

literally one stop, one stop, Texas A&M. And guess what's happening all over left-wing Twitter right now? It's all over. They're done. The discussion is off Charlie. Now they're all calling each other racists. They're talking about microaggressions of the leader who happens to be a white girl named Z who used to be a Bernie Sanders staffer and she microaggressed all the black woman creators. And so it's like, you talk about this thought terminating ideas that Charlie's talking about. They had this mission to go get Charlie. Well,

Boom. One victim mentality person claims racism and poof, the whole thing is just, and you know, one of the, one of the main leaders is taking a leave. We don't know why exactly, but like, you know, they're all taking breaks. There's these mass apologies for not calling it out sooner. They are off mission. You cannot build with woke. So yeah, just look on screen guys. So on the right side of the screen, that was their counter tour to us at A&M, all four people. Yes.

On the left side of the screen was one of two events we had at Texas A&M. Let's show the other picture, too, by the way. The one on the left is our daytime event at A&M. Gotta do the shake it back and forth. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they had a really great crowd. Look at that. All four of them. Well, and by the way, they call it the Un-F America Tour. I mean, it's so profane and just classless. Typical liberal, right? It's disgusting. And by the way... This is their website, funded by DNC operatives and all that. Taking the fight to Charlie Kirk in the far right.

By the way, they're in complete implosion. They don't really exist. One week we basically destroyed them. Accusations of laundering money, of stealing money, of not paying the colored BIPOC. Think about how empty... Huh?

On the first one, that's right. Think about how empty your life is if this is your identity, to take the fight to Charlie Kirk in the far right. This is their whole identity, but also shows how much of a difference Turning Point is making every single day that they need to make this their whole. But yeah, final thought I have on that is, listen, you have to reject their premise and

Especially when they call you racist or transphobic or any of this nonsense, right? It's just completely exhausting. And I think we're stronger because of it. I think we're stronger. And how do you beat it eventually? You become the dominant media platforms and voices. You build your own media. This was why the main narrative that came off of the – if you watched any legacy news media – That's Texas A&M. We're going to show that again tomorrow. Okay, yeah.

That was our evening event. By the way, we do have the clip from Cal Poly if you want to play it. It's so good. But anyway, so the point is we have to get bigger and stronger and better. And what happened was the legacy news media is forced into the TV box. It's forced into your computer screen. They have all these modes of distribution.

But what happens is that covers over a multitude of sins. But those sins can only be covered up for so long, namely lack of talent, not being interesting, shoveling down thoughtless garbage into the minds of the masses. Well, guess what? People like Charlie had to go forge his own route and had to sink or swim based on his own talent.

And guess what that meant after about five to eight years of that? It meant we had the more talented people that survived because they deserve to survive. Meanwhile, they had these talking heads that said nothing but garbage all day. And it requires you to be more interesting, more thoughtful, wiser, and dive deeper. So great question, my friend. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening, and God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.