Theodore Roosevelt as Kirk's Model for Confronting Excess

Showing 24 Theodore Roosevelt videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

Theodore Roosevelt's presidency became Charlie Kirk's historical touchstone when warning Tucker Carlson about a potential Gen Z economic revolt, arguing that just as Roosevelt's era confronted the excesses of monopoly capitalism, today's Republicans need to reorder an economy that has delayed homeownership to age 38 and pushed young Americans toward Buy Now Pay Later debt just to afford groceries, or risk radicalizing an entire generation. Historian Wilfred McClay filled in the fuller arc of Roosevelt's own transformation of the presidency, tracing his rise from a sickly child to America's youngest president at 42 after William McKinley's assassination, and detailing how Roosevelt expanded executive power through the Forest Service, the protection of 230 million acres of public land, and the Great White Fleet's world tour, ultimately alarming conservative Republicans enough to produce his bitter split with handpicked successor William Howard Taft and the historic 1912 Bull Moose campaign. Senator Josh Hawley invoked Roosevelt in a different register entirely, citing him alongside biblical figures like King David as a model of strong, responsible manhood in his own book on the systematic dismantling of masculinity in America, part of a broader conversation with Kirk about pornography addiction, gender ideology in schools, and what fathers owed sons growing up in a culture Hawley considered hostile to traditional male strength.