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We're active in about 15 campuses and we're growing very, very quickly. And keep in mind, this is not just a flash in the pan movement. We're going to become an institution. You go from being
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a high school student to all of a sudden kind of being on your own. It was it was difficult. It's been quite a journey. I
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know we're making a difference. The work that Turning Point USA is doing every single day, it's significantly moving the dial for freedom in our country.
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[music]
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The mission didn't end with Charlie's life. It's being lived out through each and [music] every one of you. His passion was my passion and now his mission is my [music] mission.
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We should be thankful, not angry to live in this country. We should kiss from the ground and say we are the luckiest human beings ever to exist that we are able to live in this country at this time.
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[music]
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The world needs Turning Point USA.
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Charlie's life was a turning point for this country. [music] Let that miracle be your turning point as well.
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And now it's on us. What are you going to do about it?
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1 minute, 6 seconds
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1 minute, 15 seconds
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1 minute, 31 seconds
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1 minute, 43 seconds
Today is the 14th anniversary of Turning Point USA. 14 years ago on this day, one
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1 minute, 52 seconds
day before the D-Day anniversary, I'll note Charlie started at Turning Point. He ran it out of a garage in Chicago.
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But of course, today is a very different anniversary. This is the first anniversary of Turning Point
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without Charlie. Without Charlie with us, Charlie built Turning Point up from nothing into one of the most important
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2 minutes, 16 seconds
organizations in America. He would say the most important organization. And you know what? He was right. The most important organization in America. A
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2 minutes, 24 seconds
force known all around the world. A force others wanted to learn from. A force that changed the culture of
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2 minutes, 31 seconds
America in the way certainly in my lifetime nothing else on the right was able to. And on this 14th anniversary,
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2 minutes, 39 seconds
our first one without Charlie, I I want to remind you of what it Charlie was able to accomplish with his organization in his life, which was far too short.
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2 minutes, 51 seconds
When Charlie started Turning Point USA, I remember it. I was in college myself when he started it instead of going to college, which he thought was a scam.
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The belief was that young people were just incurably left-wing. They voted for Barack Obama in absolutely overwhelming
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numbers. Every cohort of college student was getting more leftwing by the year.
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And there was this huge sense of defeatism about it on the right. Well, young people are leftwing. What are you going to do? It always involved this
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3 minutes, 20 seconds
implicit concession that the left had better arguments than the right. They were just better at winning over young people. If they had any hope at all, it
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3 minutes, 29 seconds
was always in this cope that would be, "Oh, well, young people will leave college. They'll have to pay taxes, they'll have to get a job, then they'll
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3 minutes, 37 seconds
definitely become more right-wing. And that was all they had was cope. There was never this belief that we could go and confront the left in its own
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3 minutes, 45 seconds
territory, argue with them and win because our arguments were better. And that happened on economics. It happened on foreign policy, but it also happened
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3 minutes, 54 seconds
on faith. Young people were getting less religious every single year. The decline was absolutely precipitous and it was
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4 minutes, 2 seconds
routine to just hear Christians talk about, well, in the future, we'll be this tiny minority. We'll have to go through this dark age perhaps of
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4 minutes, 10 seconds
persecution and there's no way to just win these young people back. And Charlie rejected that. That's why he called it turning
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4 minutes, 17 seconds
point USA. He believed that there could be a turning point for this country and it could come through young people and it would come through confronting the problems with America at their source.
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He thought, "We can go on campus. We can go on social media and we can win the argument. We can outperform the left."
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And the results have spoken for themselves. In the 2024 election, which Charlie was one of the chief players in, young people, they moved to the right in
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4 minutes, 46 seconds
an election for one of the first times in ages. And on top of that, we can see in polls that the decline in faith, the decline in religious belief among young
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4 minutes, 55 seconds
people, for the first time in memory, it's stopped going down. Some polls show that it's going the other direction. And
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I strongly believe that it was Charlie's doing. Charlie as a major force in history played a central role in all of
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5 minutes, 9 seconds
that happening. I wouldn't say it would be going too far to say that Charlie won the battle. We know that's not true. But Charlie showed that the battle could be
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5 minutes, 18 seconds
won, and that's of central importance.
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But last year, God called Charlie home to heaven as a martyr. Now, it's the obligation of all of us who knew
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5 minutes, 31 seconds
Charlie, who Charlie chose to work with him. It's our job to carry on Charlie's mission because we know the battle isn't won. We know the battle still has to be
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5 minutes, 39 seconds
fought. And the work is continuing. As I said, today is the opening day of the Women's Leadership Summit in San
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5 minutes, 47 seconds
Antonio. We have a lot of great speakers, including Erica Kirk, but also Alli Beth Stucky, Riley Gaines, Sarah Huckabe Sanders, Alex Clark, Kaylee
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5 minutes, 55 seconds
Mcanini, a lot more. They're going to speak to thousands of young women about Charlie's message, which is that faith and family are integral to the best
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lives that you can live. Charlie spoke above all to young men, but he always had a very special place in his heart for young women. He knew that young
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6 minutes, 12 seconds
women were being harmed a tremendous amount by the modern lies of feminism, the modern just and secularism and
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6 minutes, 19 seconds
modern culture. And he wanted to use his own marriage, his own family as a model that they could look towards that a
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better life can be lived. And that message was getting through as at the end of Charlie's life and we are
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going to be continuing to carry that forward. So for the rest of the show, I want to invite all of you who are watching, send in your emails about how you started following Turning Point.
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Have you been with us for 5 years, 10 years, 13 years, 14 years, send us emails about how you got involved and how Charlie impacted your life? And I'll
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6 minutes, 52 seconds
try to read some of those. Uh, but I also want to since it's since it's the Women's Leadership Summit, I want to and also since actually first they've just
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put this up. It's Charlie talking about how he started Turning Point USA 14 years ago. Let's get that plane. Clip 38. It was June 5th, 2012.
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I was wrestling on kind of what we're gonna call this organization and my dad came up with a list of names and all of a sudden he said turning point. I said that's the one.
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Spoke at a Tea Party rally out in Rockford and the journey started.
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No money, no connections, and no idea what I was doing. started to barnstorm Illinois and in the Midwest speaking at every possible Tea Party rally I could.
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That was the garage that we literally started in Lamont, Illinois. I had burning desire. Looking back at it,
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I wanted to grow this thing more than anything imaginable. I poured every part of my being into this. As Napoleon Hill
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would say, conceive, believe, work, achieve. CBWA was the daily mantra that I would have.
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Charlie lived by that mantra every day.
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Conceive, believe, do. He more than anyone I knew, he was a person who really believed in the power of one
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individual through hard work, intense self-belief, intense self-discipline, he could change the world.
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There's uh there's a sign that Charlie kept in his office that we still have there and it has three things on it and it's how can I honor God today? How can
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8 minutes, 25 seconds
I serve others today? How can I do something in the world today? I'm going off memory here. I might have it wrong, but Charlie more than anyone I know
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lived by those principles. And as a result, he was able to change the world.
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14 years later, we live in an America that it did reach a turning point.
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things in this country changed because of the model Charlie set and the life he lived. We have a faith revival. We have
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different beliefs among young people that we thought were impossible when this group was started 14 years ago and we have Charlie to thank for that and
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especially the faith revival. I really want to remark on that. All of us have heard here have heard firshand stories of people who dedicated their lives to Christ because of what they saw Charlie
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say and we'll be frank because of how Charlie lived his life all the way to the end. And he accomplished so much in the first 13 years of Turning Point.
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We're now at year 14 and we're going to carry on that legacy.
