Paul Krugman's Textbook and Charlie Kirk's Origin Story

Showing 7 Paul Krugman videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

Paul Krugman became the first ideological opponent Charlie Kirk ever took on in public, by way of a single line in a high school AP economics textbook Krugman had written, that Reagan's tax cuts produced no acceleration in economic growth, a claim Kirk considered flatly contradicted by the data showing 23 million jobs created afterward. Kirk's response, written and circulated while he was still a senior in Chicago, reached Breitbart's Joel Pollak, went viral, got picked up by the Drudge Report, and led to his first Fox News appearance, becoming the origin story he retold most often for how Turning Point USA came to exist at all. He returned to Krugman's book specifically as a symbol of a larger problem, textbooks he said normalized government dependency and collectivist thinking as reasonable positions rather than ideology, and used the episode to argue that parents needed to show up at school board meetings rather than leave curriculum fights to activist teachers alone. Not every account of that origin story goes unchallenged: investigator Baron Coleman has argued the official telling omits key details, including Kirk's early connection to Bill Montgomery and questions around the Crystal Clanton text-message controversy, suggesting a more orchestrated path to prominence than the essay-goes-viral narrative Kirk told.