Charlie Kirk Built the World's Largest Conservative Youth Organization from a Card Table and Conviction

Looking back from your position of wisdom, what do you have to say to the American public about cookie advocacy? Well, I should have been advocating for, you know, reduction in hamburger or steak prices. The funny undercurrent of that is that's kind of what started my political advocacy. I know. It appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe. When I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged. Maybe cauldron is not the right metaphor, but I'm curious. think that your political rebellion took a conservative force. Yes. The non-political, non-historical literature that we were being assigned was what I call pre-woke, very much anti-colonialist, anti-western, that we are the contaminants on the world, that we are polluting other tribes. I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad I don't know how to recover exactly. And one of them was that I'm talking to Charlie Kirk and Charlie came out of nowhere 10 years ago and built the world's most influential organization of young conservatives. And he did that from scratch. He did that by going to universities pretty much single-handedly setting up card tables offering to discuss and debate all the issues that weren't being discussed and debated in these places set up for exactly that reason. and iterating as he grew, establishing conservative clubs on campuses all across the United States, building a grassroots organization, learning how to debate despite the fact that he hadn't gone to college, and actually playing the role on campus colleges that the professors in the classes were supposed to play. And so why watch my discussion with Charlie? Well, to learn who he is, to listen to how he did this. You know, he had a vision and a calling and he found his way and made it spectacularly successful while he was still very young and has ended up playing a very significant cultural role uh transformative role that is by no means over. And so I think the podcast is interesting in and of itself because the story is so compelling, but it also contains many lessons. you might say, for those who are searching for a productive, adventurous, romantic way forward. So, join me in my discussion with Charlie Kirk, founder and leader of Turning Point USA, the world's largest conservative youth organization. So, I've got a gotcha question for you. So, now now you're warranted. Okay. Okay. So, you know that Robert F. Kennedy and Mett Oz and I suppose Jay Badacheria too are all hands on deck to restore American health and that likely the biggest problem that's confronting us is insulin resistance. I agree with that. too much way too much sugar and obesity and all that goes along with it. But insulin resistance just it's just devastating. It makes you old. It makes you diabetic. It's it's terrible. It's it interferes with your cognition. It increases the probability that you'll get Alzheimer's. Um and that's all linked to carbohydrate excess intake. Right. You agree with all that? I agree with that. Okay. And yet when you were in high school, one of the first things you did to begin your political career was agitate for a what? Reduction or stabilization of the price of cookies. We were against cookie inflation. Yeah. So looking back from your position of wisdom 13, 14 years later, what do you have to say to the American public about cookie advocacy? what I should I should have been advocating for, you know, reduction in the hamburger or steak prices. You see, that would have been a much better health approach. But, uh, all kidding aside, the the the the funny undercurrent of that is that's kind of what started my political advocacy. I know. I know it is. I kind of look back, you know, even, you know, just 13 years ago when, you know, cookie prices were the number one, you know, concern. This was before Door Dash. This before all that. I look at these high school kids now, but they're able to order into high school. They have entire cubby rooms of like half of the high school class that is just getting takeout. So, in our high school in the service of Chicago, the biggest thing was these basically homemade cookies that nearly tripled in price over the course of a year. So, we started students against cookie inflation, which was a a rather righteous effort, I might say. How old were you? I was at that time 16, 17 years old. 16. And how how much before that do you think your interest in the political developed? I definitely had an interest. Um I would I'd first I'd say I was really fascinated by American history, why we were a great country. It was hard to not be politically oriented or opinionated based on the time that I grew up in. Understand the time and place. When I was in eighth grade, this guy named Barack Obama came onto the political scene from Chicago and everybody had an opinion about him. In fact, he became Where were you? Where were you at the time? I was in the suburbs of Chicago. So, Wheeling Arlington Heights area and Obama was a homegrown, which he really wasn't, but he was, you know, a senator from Illinois. A homegrown almost quasi messianic political figure. I mean, you remember how it captured the nation times 10 in the Chicagoland area. Remember Obama did his victory speech in Grant Park in downtown Chicago. That's where he celebrated his victory in 2008. And so it was just an all-encompassing almost um you know political moment where it was it was at very high social cost to be disagreeable with the rise of Obama in 2008. And mind you, I was a seventh or eighth grader at the time and actually going into nth grade. And so I decided at my very best to push back. Oh, really? Is he going to fulfill all these promises? is he really going to be able to bring utopia? And admittedly, I was rather clumsy and shallow in my capacity to be able to articulate those beliefs. But I had something in me that wanted to push back against the the orthodoxy of the time. Okay. I met you. Do you remember when we first met? It was two, was it 2016, 2017? Might have been 17, 18. I I came to Toronto because I and still to this day, this is correct. I was so moved by your lectures and your videos that they significantly changed my life and I really wanted to meet you more than anything else. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you were kind enough to make time for that. Yeah. Well, I remember that meeting and I I you know, I remember trying to figure out who you were because of what you were doing and the fact that you had this remarkable organizational capacity. But what I'm interested in now, you know, when when you is is is is what I'm very interested in trying to figure out what inclined you to take the path that you took. Now, you said, okay, so you said Obama, but you said something else at the same time. You said that you had been reading American history. Okay. And that you were concerned with, interested in, and convinced by, I suppose, all of those this issue of what made America great. Okay. So now while those so this is interesting and worth taking apart because for decades certainly since the 60s the typical pathway for someone young who was assessing the history of his or her country would have been to read it through a highly critical lens. So for example, I remember when I was 13 or 14, so that would have been se mid70s, um I was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and some of the uh so-called new journalists. And uh they're not they weren't of the left exactly the way you would conceptualize the left now. They were more like radical literary figures I would say. But the mid70s ethos certainly was to read history sociology critically. And I don't mean you were being uncritical. I mean to take take an anti-establishment stance. Like in the 60s that was all well anti-establishment, free love, the sexual revolution is coming, everyone's going to be free. By the time the 70s came along, which was the millu I was embedded in, all of the optimism of the 60s had pretty much vanished, but all of the cynicism 100% remained. Now you though, interestingly enough, in Chicago, and this would be mid 2000, so 2008, 2009, right? Right. near the end of the two 20 thou or the first decade of the 2000s, you were reading American history and and as you said in the height of the Obama craze fervor. Sure. Um but your take was positive and patriotic. Correct. So why why do you think that was like what do you think it what made you different? Like when I met you, you you were very, I would say, relatively sheltered still and very very straight laced. And from the Canadian perspective, you know, you were you were of the it appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe, which we have some of in Alberta, not a lot. It's not really a Canadian thing. And so when I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's uh that's that's the cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerge. Maybe cauldron is not the right metaphor, but I'm curious like why do you think that your political rebellion took a conservative form when that isn't it's not common for young people and it certainly wasn't the pattern of the time from say 1965 till well probably till about you till about when you correct were adolescent. So that that's a phenomenal analysis and question. Let me just add to it. The the literature, the non-political, non-historical literature that we were being assigned in sixth, 7th, 8th grade was what I call pre-woke. It was almost there. And so it was it was like books that come to mind is a book called like things fall apart. I don't know if you're familiar with this book. Shininoa Okabi, I think. Yeah, exactly. I think it was the main character was Okonquo. I could be wrong. I'm just drawing from like 13 14 years. Basically the entire premise of the book based on my memory is that there are these this you know wonderful tribe and they all get along in Africa and these evil colonialists come in and things fall apart and there's internal strife and the end of the book is basically the summary of all of these relationships of these evil colonialists that say and you know here's the history of just the under you know subsaharan Africa basically dismissing all of the complexities and the beauties of you know this specific right so it's kind of a testament to rouso But it was written by an African in that book. Correct. And I I again I'm drawing from almost a decade old memory, but I remember the discussions we'd have in class were were very much anti-colonialist, anti-western, that we are the contaminants on the world, that we are polluting other tribes. And again, mind you, that we're in eth grade discussing this. So I don't know what post structuralism is or postmodernism is, but it was pre-woke. We weren't quite there, though. And so from the historical standpoint, it was not 1619 project, but it was we're going to spend a whole month on slavery and we're going to spend f three days on the founding. Right. And did you spend any of the time when you were studying slavery assessing the fact that the UK was the only country that's ever existed in the history of the world that spent what two centuries and a tremendous proportion of its treasury eradicating slavery around the world at the behest of Protestant Christians because that's the story and we let me I never remember knowing the name Wilburforce Wilburforce yeah see this is a very interesting thing you know I actually didn't come come across. This is so strange, but life is very strange. I didn't come across the name Wilburforce till I was probably in my 40s. Isn't that amazing? It's beyond comprehension. I didn't get to know him until the last 5 years. Last five years. Is that right? A even is that even the political I might have heard it, but not until someone looked at me seriously said, "You have to study this guy. This is a preacher. This is a man of faith that led to the abolition of slavery probably the entire under impossible conditions. He devoted his whole life to it. And the the link between that and the religious idiation is rock solid rock. It's it's one to one. Absolutely. And it's also the case that his ideas wouldn't have fallen on fertile ground because they did relatively like when you can make a radical cultural shift in one lifetime which is no time at all historically you know that you're at the forefront of ideas whose time has come and that was clearly the case for Wilburforce and he certainly is one of those people who stood up against the greedy self-centered and and malevolent ethos of his time But the UK swung around behind them impossibly rapidly and then with their full might. And it is it's it you know I've learned a lot of things in the last 10 years that have shocked me so bad I don't know how to recover exactly. And one of them was that the public school system was set up by fascists on the Prussian military model. I just I've never been able to figure out exactly what to do with that. They were literally trying to make thoughtless worker drones, desk workers. That's what bureaucrat means. Yeah. Well, or or factory workers, right? And it what what that in itself wasn't so bad because the country was industrializing. But right underneath that was the idea that while you were doing that, it was necessary to pretty much stamp out or fail to develop anything that would produce any kind of creative entrepreneurship. It's like, okay, that's uh hard to swallow. And then when I read about how the food pyramid was developed, that's just beyond comprehension. I I don't know if that's the worst crime ever committed in the United States, but it's up there. And then this the next mystery is Wilburforce is another mystery of that magnitude. And and espe even you might say particularly on the left. It's like, okay, you guys, you're you're for the oppressed, which I don't buy for a second, but especially because I've watched in the last 10 years the lefties sell out the poor worldwide to the climate apocalypse mongers. And that's just been a catastrophe for places like Africa, like Beat Wade has been so what forthright in observing. But the fact that slavery and reparations, all of that, the unfair founding of the United States has been a central dogma of the radical leftists. They blame slavery on the west. And the fact that the radical types have control over the education system means that no one even educated in a conservative millu knows who the hell Wilburforce was. And I I don't I just don't or or Thaddius Stevens or the heroism of John Quincy Adams. Those would be, you know, some main protagonist characters for the abolition of slavery here in America. And so when I was in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade, something in me, and I don't quite know, my parents very patriotic, but not political. Patriotic, but not political. They're conservative, but we were not a political family, but very patriotic. Something in me desired to try to find the other side of the story, to try to push back a little bit from the the incessant narrative that was being built. And I do want to make sure this is clear. We were not yet at the place where the the the teachers were saying America was racist. In fact, it was actually much more insidious than that. And so that even in 2008 that that's no occurring. In fact, I could make at least in my environment. I could make an argument though that what they were doing when I was in high school is actually long-term much more effective to create revolutionaries for the left than what they're doing now because it really didn't warrant that much of a backlash. It wasn't it wasn't overly provocative. They weren't saying to the white kids in class, "Hey, go sit in this side of the class and black kids on this side of the class." Yeah. Well, those things always happen one tiny step at a time, of course. But when I was being schooled, there was no parents showing up at schoolboard meetings about critical race theory. Now, these elements were laced throughout all the curriculum, right? And it took a very discerning eye. And for whatever reason, you know, how I was raised or just something in me around 10th or 11th grade, I asked the question. I said, 'Look, we have spent an entire month on slavery. Totally get it. Terrible thing. But we spent so little time on the brilliance of the founders and what they've created and the greatest political document in human history and what went into that. And it was an underemphasis on the heroism and the courage and the brilliance and an overemphasis on the evil and the tragedy and the horror without even the redemption arc behind it. 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Sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today at shopify.com/jbp. Go to shopify.com/jbp. Again, that's shopify.com/jbp. Yeah. Well, the thing that's so awful about that, as far as I'm concerned from the leftist perspective, let's say, is if you are concerned with the poor and the oppressed, you know, and then you have to be discerning there because there are people who are poor and oppressed as a consequence of their own idiocy. And that's not so uncommon as you know in your own life by watching your pathway to failure. So, but given that there are people who are unfortunate, you'd think that the appropriate tack would be to determine who in history served the most effectively. And I just can't see anyone you could possibly point to more effectively who did that more effectively than Wilburforce ever. And so, you would think that instead of erecting monuments to Lenon, the leftists would erect monuments to Wilburforce. But not only do they not do that, no one knows who the hell he was. It's one it is one of the greatest memory hauling of a hero in western history. I completely agree. Why is it my hypothesis is he's Christian is that you cannot highlight a man of faith who did something with such valor and such significance. It is it is at odds with almost every other fundamental narrative that they must try to present. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. that I think that's right that it is fundamentally but that begs another question and that would be why given that Wilbur Force was clearly a force for the good that Obama for example would have been pushing right by by which I mean movement towards a uh polity where there were no racial there was no racial or ethnic prejudice uh If if Wilbur Force is the poster boy for that sort of effort, which if you understand his life and you read about it, I can't see how you can conclude that. Then why would the lefties forego that merely to oppose the fact that his motivation was fundamentally Christian? Because that points to something deeper, right? It points to the fact that the true war, so to speak, isn't political. It's not left versus right. It's something deeper. And then if it is anti-Christian, then why? Like what does that mean? Like there's an enlightenment element there, right? The enlightenment types, especially after the French Revolution generated this narrative that science and religion were radically opposed and that if you were on the side of religion, you were against clear, rational, logical thinking. And and so you could imagine a stream of anti-Christian sentiment emerging on the rationalist side, right? But but it isn't obvious to me at all that the leftist types who don't talk about Wilbur Force are anti-Christian because they're scientific rationalists. Like no, all you have to do is talk to them for like 15 seconds and you find out that that's not the case. They might use those arguments from time to time, but they certainly don't apply the rigors of scientific thinking to their own to their own radical hypothesis. So, it's deeper than that. And so, what is it exactly that what is it exactly that they're objecting to? Is it the fact that the more radical leftist story, Marxist, let's say, is in its essence anti-Christian, which I think is a fair statement. and that. But why would that be more important? This is the strange thing. Why would be that be more important than serving the poor and fighting for the abolition of slavery and all of its associated prejudices? Because it still doesn't get you out of the conundrum, which is why then why not Wilburforce? Instead of tearing down statues, why not erect statues to him? Yeah. So, well, what do you I know that's a that's a hard thing to sort out, but you got any obviously you were feeling something like this in high school, right? Correct. You guys are throwing out the baby with the bathwater here. Correct. Yeah. Which baby exactly? So my initial thought is that the leftist types, the ones that really understand it, they they they do not seek to achieve what a Wilburforce type figure would want, which is actual liberation and actual eradication of evil. Yeah. I hate to say it. I think they just want to be in charge. Yeah. No, no. I think Okay, so let let's pivot on that for a minute. Okay. So because this is a problem that's going to face the right or and is already and and we can talk about that. So there are a group of people 4% of the population and then there's still a fringe around that that would maybe be another 5% where you'd have to take it seriously. And so they're in the psychiatric diagnostic literature they fall under the cluster B heading. Okay. They're histrionic, which means they're dramatic and and I suppose if they're healthy and histrionic, then they become actors, right? And entertainers. So there's a there's a positive spin on that. But if they're negative histrionic, they dramatize their pathology and use it as a weapon. Okay? They're narcissistic, which means they want unearned social uh status. They're psychopathic, which means they're predatory parasites. and they're antisocial and that's just your standard criminal types. So that all fits in cluster B. Then there's personality traits that go along with that. Machavelian, they use language not to convey information but to manipulate and to manipulate instrumentally for their own purposes. So if I'm speaking with you in a macavelian manner, I have a goal in mind that has nothing to do with the words that I'm using. You may have talked to journalists like that many times. Many times. Yes. Many times. Okay. So, they're Machavelian. They're That's so Well said. They're narcissistic. Again, that's that's an overlap. They're psychopathic. Oh, yes. And on the personality side, that associates with sadism. And so, all of that culminates in a personality style that has the proclivity to take positive delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. Okay. So, now those people, let's say they're 4% of the population. Okay. So, this is what they do. is they they look for a story that's working. Could be Christianity, Judaism, Marxism, could be conservatism. Doesn't matter what the story is. They look to see where it has purchase. So where the people who play that game are have power. They infiltrate that. They advertise themselves as the vanguard of that movement. And they do that for no other reason than to gain power. Right? And so this is politically agnostic. Now they'll guide themselves in political cloaks and they'll learn all the tropes. I mean this sort of thing you can see this sort of thing emerging like mad on the right on Twitter for example. But it's certainly it's been characteristic of the left for for a long time in so far as the left has power. But you know you you were the one who just said I I think they want power. Yes, that's part of that. You know, in the in the in the biblical tradition, there's a battle always between the ethos that brings abundance. So that would be the miraculous provision of fish and bread and water that never exhausts itself. That's all consequence of a particular kind of ethos. The one that Wilburforce embedded, that's juxtaposed against usurppation. Luciferian usurppation of power. Right. That's the temptation that Christ has offered in the desert. Right. The third temptation is the temptation of power. The whole world. Yeah. That's right. That's right. That's right. And one of the things that's Moses is punished brutally by God for using power near the end of his and for thinking he has the power to actually make water come out of the rock, not that it's dependent on him. Dependent on him, not God. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and worse than that, not only on him, but on it, God tells him to invite with his words and he uses force and authority, right? So, he doesn't enter the promised land. So, that's a good indication of the danger of power even when wielded by someone who is estimable, right? Because you have to give Moses's a lot of credit, right? Well, exactly. For dealing with that that Yeah. And then, of course, that's the temptation that's offered Christ. So, I do think it's a power game. Yes. And that and then there's a commandment not to use God's name in vain. And then there's the comments in the gospels about the Pharisees, right? The Pharisees, the Pharisees are exactly the people who use religious terminology, so moral terminology to cloak their power-seeking machinations, right? And Christ goes after them. I think the best account of that is in Matthew where he tells them that they're like it's pretty brutal that they're like broods of vipers. Yeah. Worse. They're like graves full of rotting bodies that someone whitewashed. Right. And he says that if they would have they were the people had they been in alive in the time of the prophets they purport to follow, they would have been part of the mob that would have killed them. Right? That's actually part of, you may know this, but that's part of what sets them up for the crucifixion because they're not very happy with those insults publicly delivered. But that shows you also how old the problem is. So you can imagine one of the worst possible sins is to take the highest possible virtue. So that would be well, we stand for the oppressed, we stand for the poor, and then to gerrymander that so that your standing for that only pushes you towards power. That's right. Right. And so and then it it also there's a clue in the gospels I think it's in the gospels as well about how you figure that out and the answer is by their fruits you will know them right so you look at well what I've done is I looked at the consequences for example of the green energy programs in Germany and the UK well what's the consequence let's take Germany Germany pollutes far more per unit of energy than they did 10 years ago and their energy prices are five times as high. They're completely dependent on dictators of the worst sort. Yes, they continue to make the same mistakes. They're de-industrializing very very cataclysmically. It's destabilizing their political environment. And that falls disproportionately on the poor. I I don't see a way around that analysis. And nature nature worshiping is not anything new all throughout the no. That's right. Elijah, I mean is that whole story is a manifestation of the nature worshippers versus the belief in God. But back to to just to reiterate a very profound point you made in evangelical circles we get wrong which is people think do not take the Lord's name in vain just to say do not say God in an exploitive way. It actually the word is don't carry the names Lord the name of the Lord in vain meaning don't do actions in the name of God. You're exactly right. And so people wear the costume of the holy or they appropriate Well, that's exactly what Christ tells the Pharisees literally. He says they wear the garbs of the priestly to elevate their moral status. And this is what we believe is partially blasphemy the Holy Spirit, which is to to take the all of the trappings of religion. Oh, that's interesting. And and to do evil in that name. We believe that is one of the if not the wor most evil. So that you think that's the transgression against Okay. So that's interesting because so my psychological understanding of the idea of the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is what possesses your words when you truly aim up. And this makes sense to me psychologically because the thoughts that make themselves manifest to you spontaneously are directly related to the intent of your aim. That's how your literally how your verbal mind works. Your imagination as well. You know, if you go on a date and you aim at sexual contact on the first date, the fantasies that come along with that aim will be of that nature obviously. And if you are on the hunt so to speak for a marital partner, the fantasies that accompany that will be quite different. So this is literally how your imagination. It's also the case that you know it's same idea with the date. If it's short-term mating is your goal, which by the way is the goal of the dark tetrad types differentially. So what that means is that the sexual revolution handed women over to the worst men. That's right. So that's fun to know. But it's definitely the case that your aim determines what comes to mind. Now you said that that sin against the Holy Ghost which is the unforgivable sin is the sin that occurs when you use the Lord's name in vain. So when you claim to be motivated by what's divine but are actually serving the Luciferian spirit of usurppation and power. It it can be. I mean it's it's an open theological discussion. No fair. But I I and I take Dennis Prager's view of an Old Testament on this view, which is think about how much this a great example. Think about how much damage those evil priests did. Oh yeah, that's a great example. Look, most of the people that I've spoken with who proclaim themselves to be atheists are atheists for two reasons. And I I mean the good faith atheists, let's say. Um first of all, they tend to be tilted in the engineering cognition direction. So they're much more oriented towards things than people and that's a stable temperamental trait. But they've almost all also invariably been hurt by someone or some institution that's claimed to be religious. And then you could also see that that's right obviously betraying someone in in Dante's account of the inferno when he goes down to the bottom of hell he finds the betrayers right next to Satan. Judas, Cassus, and um Brutus, right? Okay. So, the idea and the the lake of ice, which is right, that's where Satan is encased, right? Cuz he's too brutal, brittle to move. What if I told you there's a tiny nutrient missing from your body that could potentially change everything about how you feel? Well, if you've ever wondered why you're feeling sluggish, sleeping poorly, or aging faster than you'd like, the answer might be simpler than you think. That's where Fatty 15 comes in. Our cells need essential nutrients to stay healthy. And most of us are deficient in one critical one, C-15. 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Fatty 15, essential nutrition for healthier cells and a healthier you. So, the reason for that, I think, is that there isn't a more upsetting psychological phenomenon than being betrayed. You stake yourself on someone, you trust them, they're now a foundation, they're part of the foundation of your life completely. So, and there's no worse form of betrayal than betrayal that's done in the name of the highest good, right? I mean, there can't be. OB obviously. Yes. Okay. So, all right. So, I thought that sin against the Holy Ghost was something like rejection of the Abrahamic call. You know, God comes to Abraham as the spirit of adventure. He says, "Go out into the world, leave your zone of comfort, move away from your people, and have the terrible adventure of your life." Well, if you reject that, you can't develop. Yes. Right. Because you're rejecting the spirit of learning. Think of how many young men are rejecting it every day. Well, what's and what's terrible about that, this is something we could talk about, too. I'm I'm curious about your experience. It's it's been my experience that it doesn't take that much encouragement for those the people you're describing to be inspired to try. Now, I've talked to thousands of young men now who've had that experience. You know, like I see a lot of them at my lectures. They come to the meet and greets for example and they tell me it's great. It's really great. They tell me that you know 5 years ago, 6 years ago cuz it's starting to be a long time now, 8 years ago even, they were not in good shape and they came across my lectures or books and decided to decided that there was something worth aiming for and then decided to try. So to tell the truth, that's very common um vow, let's say to to take on more responsibility and they usually laugh about starting to make their bed or something like that, which is a lot less trivial than people think and then it's straightened them out. The terrible thing is how little encouragement that that actually took. So would when are people coming out to see you on campuses and what kind of response do you get from the people that you talk to? The responses have been incredible. First, the the crowds alone, we're drawing crowds of three, four, 5,000 people in the middle of the day just for me to debate a random college kid or a college professor. It's remarkable. So, walk me through one of those events, Charlie. And so, I've been doing that for a decade just so I I started, as we know, we started Turning Point USA. One of the things I really wanted to make sure is that I was in touch with the target audience that I was trying to convince and trying to persuade. No better way to do that than just go to the college campus itself, set up a card table with, you know, maybe a poster that says something like, you know, I think government should be smaller, something like that, and start a discussion. I would do this at University of Wisconsin Madison. I would do this at University of Illinois when we had almost no funding, no connections, no idea what I was doing. I Right. Right. I've always believed in the grassroots interaction. So where are your meet and greets? No, no data, no chart, no abstraction can get to that personal humanto human contact. So, I've been doing that for many years. And then Steven Crowder, to his credit, kind of popularized this idea of debating and putting it on. I said, "Oh, well, why don't I also film these interactions?" And so, I started to do that around 2018. So, it's been about seven or eight years now. And you know, then 10 kids would show up and then 20 kids. And we started to put these on the internet and kind of concurrent and simultaneous to your rise where you you diagnosed what was going on in the West quicker and more accurately than anybody else, especially with young men. We started to see our popularity increase as we started to address some of the underlying problems that young people were facing, but in particular, young men were facing. And then CO happened. and we were basically out of business for, you know, a year in the sense where we weren't able to do campus activities. Donald Trump was no longer in office and we had to really kind of rebuild on campus basically about 2 years ago. So, let's just say the spring of 2023, things really started to change where we we would do these campus events prior and we would bring in your traditional conservatives, 3 to 400 people, maybe a couple hundred interested types, maybe 50 liberals, 500 students, call it a day. That's a success. All of a sudden, in 2023, we were drawing a different type of person and student. First of all, we were drawing people outside of the campuses that were welders, electricians, and plumbers, and the working men that heard that we were in town, and they just how they hear social media. Okay? And so decentralized promotion. And so they would show up and I saw that. I mean, these were guys that would go up to the question line and they were not asking about Rouso or they were not asking about Jacqu Dereda. They were saying, "How do I be a better person because I'm expecting a daughter in six months?" Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. And all of a sudden here I am, you know, not in the position where you are nearly as seasoned to give advice to that young man, but he's searching and he's looking for anyone that seems to have an idea of how the world is supposed to work that is professing a worldview of order and structure and discipline, something that he could do. Yes. And then he want he was looking to me for ad. And that was a different dynamic. Whereas prior all the questions the last, you know, eight years before that were, hey Charlie, what do you think about the tax rate? What do you think about abortion? And I still get a lot of that, but it was something different. It was young men especially that were seeking purpose and seeking a destination. So this is crucially important this transformation because one of the things that so let's go back to that 60s dynamic that anti- athoritarian 60s dynamic you know the the role of the left in the 60s was like an entrepreneurial progressive radicalism let's say and the the stance of the conservative was Well, you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, guys. And that's a pretty good dynamic because you need a force for change and you need a force that resists that. But I think, you see, I think what the conservatives did wrong, like profoundly wrong, was that they were their breaks, this is why they're always dismissed as reactionary. Their breaks B r a kes, their breaks were fundamentally, they're also moralistic. It was finger wagging. And and this is something that was distasteful, let's say, especially about the hypocritical evangelical conservative types. I agree with that. Okay. So, so, but it was also strategically inappropriate because it's very hard to say to young people who might tilt in the progressive direction, uh, cuz they're a little more revolutionary in spirit, let's say, are also a little more immature that the the reason that to abstain sexually, for example, is because you shouldn't do it. Now, that's true, but it's a weak argument. You know, I was talking to my wife this morning about this. Um, we'd been apart for a few days and I saw her again yesterday and I was very happy about that. And she's she has a podcast. She's trying to reach out to young women cuz they're just as in much in or more trouble. They're just harder to talk to by a lot. Um, our discussion centered around the fact that it isn't that you should get married, although you should. It's that you there is no alternative that's anywhere near as good but by any standard whatsoever regardless of position of analysis or time length. Anything you do other than that even though marriage is very difficult and every other alternative is far far worse. And so if you want a pathway forward to what the conservatives support, the conservatives should be offering an invitation. They shouldn't be moralizing. And so and so and you're you're saying that they shouldn't even be political at the moment. And and I know you're you're a figure whose political activity is grounded in a religious substrate like Shapiro is of course like that too and Dennis Prager. Christianity is my foundation. Right. Right. Right. And so now you're seeing that these young men who are coming, especially the workingclass types, they're not so interested in the political. They're probably not even interested in the arguments. Exactly. They're looking for something else. That's right. They're looking for direction. They're looking for connection. They're also looking for validation that the way they're thinking, the way they're feeling is directionally correct. That it's the And so Yeah. So that having a direction is correct. Exactly. That not being not meandering through life. Yeah. Not having, you know, the aimless despair of walking in circles. Yeah. Not castrating yourself so your toxic masculinity vanishes sometimes. Literally, far too often now. Literally. Literally. They're chopping off. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And so what we saw in 2023 again, so I have to wear multiple hats. Part of my hat is a political strategist. Part of my hat is just trying to be a role model for young people. Part of my head is explaining these ideas to young people. I kind of connected all the dots. I said, "2024 is going to be a rebellion of the men of the West unlike anything that we've ever seen." And I would say this to the experts and they would dismiss it. They said, "No, no, no. Row versus because Row versus Wade got repealed, remember that that either that summer or summer 2022. I can't remember. It might have been I think it might irrelevant. The point being is that Row versus Wade was supposed to be the most important political issue of 2024 and that women were going to rise up in major numbers. I said, first of all, that might be true on one side of the the sex spectrum. On the other side or binary, the other side there is something happening with men that no one is talking about, no one wants to acknowledge, no one wants to admit. And so separately, the Trump team, to their credit, believed in it and actually ran an explicitly masculine campaign going on podcasts like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn. And so they were they were very much embracing of this to their credit. But separately, we must diagnose why is this happening? And the the education system, as you've astutely pointed out many times, is hyper feminine. There's no place for young men, especially young white men, of a Christian. One in four boys is now given an ADHD diagnosis. It's something and even the New York Times has said this is for parents not for kids. Meaning this there is there's no medicinal reason for this to happen according to the New York Times. Yeah. Right. So you know things have gone particularly sideways when I encourage people to read this cover story. It was unbelievable where they were basically saying after this major study that like 1% of the kids actually do need ADHD medication that are completely out of control. But almost like 90 to 95% are just because the parents don't want to have an unruly kid around. Yeah. Or or well and and if that's the New York Times diagnosis, then you can also be absolutely 100% certain that they underplay the role of the educational establishment in setting up the circumstances so that parents are likely to draw that conclusion. I mean with all this trans butchery nightmare you know my profession particularly the social work end of it but my like real psychologists let's say were also stunningly craven in their unwillingness to resist this the mantra was to parents well would you rather have a live trans child or a dead child which there was never Charlie there was never a shred of evidence for that it's one of the most evil things that has happened it it it it is unbelievable the people who promoted that should be imprisoned. It's it's absolutely widespread and it's still in the fibers of the pediatric community. Yeah. Yeah. That's for sure. It really is for sure. Well, the Supreme Court of the UK may have broken the back of that movement a week ago. That was unbelievable. I That was one of the most Now and then the Brits, God love them, do something quite radical in the right direction, you know. Well, Brexit was a good example of that. That's interesting. They put through that free speech legislation that the Labor Party tried to resin that has actually reshaped the universities to some substantial degree. That was in part a consequence of me being disinvited from Cambridge, which had a long-term consequence that the disinvitectors hadn't really reckoned on because a whole group of professors at Cambridge got together and decided that they were going to change the policies at Cambridge, which they did in a historic vote and then they changed the policies at the national level and the repercussions of that haven't haven't stopped yet. But so yes, so this terrible demoralization, right? So all right, now you're being c you're advertising on social media. Let's let's go back and tell this whole story. So because I'm very curious about it. So you you had an an an intuition that you could go to campuses. Okay. So tell me how where did that idea come from, do you think? Well, I never went to college. Uh first of all, which is right. You've been to many colleges. I've been to more colleges than most people. You might have me beat, but I've been to well over 200 campuses across the No, no, you've got me beat. Yeah. I mean, almost every almost every college. Yeah, you can imagine. I can uh I can I've either given a lecture, a speech, or started a chapter there. Yeah. So, my daughter doesn't have a university degree, so she started a university. So, that's very comical, but this is good. Okay. So, so that means you do have a university education. You just got it a very different way. Okay. So, so you decided that's interesting too because it's like I asked you what your in your your motivation for doing this was and the first thing you said was that you didn't have a degree. So, that's very interesting. So, so what were you also curious about going to campuses like? Yes. And that that's really a great point. So, just as a little background, I wanted to go to West Point. I didn't get in. I told my parents I would take a gap year to kind of figure this out because I saw some momentum of a local political group that was out of the cookie group by the way that kind of kept growing. I said I want to keep this going and play this out. See where this can be. This was after high school. Just after high school. That's correct. That was the summer I graduated high school. Okay. A really amazing mentor uh by the name of Bill Montgomery, may he rest in peace, was the only guy ever, he said, "Charlie, you shouldn't go to college." I was like, "That's the most radical thing someone could say." So that idea was planted in my head and I said, "Okay, I'll just take a gap year. I'll kind of figure things out." Why did he tell you that? He thought he, in his own words, he sensed an entrepreneurial gift and skill that I had, right? And a drive. He was a kind of an entrepreneur himself, part of business. So he could see the entrepreneurial part of me. He didn't think that would work well in college. Yeah. And he said, "You have to go create, not just Oh, good. Oh, that was what he said. I see. You have to go build." He said, "You have something in you. You have a drive. you have a passion, you have a relentless kind of um spirit. And he says, "You shouldn't go to college." That was the most radical thing that a suburban kid in Chicago could hear cuz everyone would go to college. Of course, it's a mark of failure not to go to college. Yeah. And so not getting into West Point was very demoralizing. However, it was the greatest gift ever from the Lord because I took the gap year and to your credit, which is no one's ever put this together. All my friends were in college. So I would start visiting my friends in colleges. So you think about it because I would go to high school. I I graduate high school. I still have friends with all my high school friends. So I'd go to University of Iowa, University of Illinois to go visit them, Northwestern. And I realized as I was trying to get this political thing off the ground. This is where it all stemmed from. And I was trying to put pieces together that the academy was where the fight needed. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. To go towards. And simultaneously as I was trying to find funding and trying to get donors behind our effort, something that almost every wealthy person that I would encounter is they had a soft spot and a interest in trying to invest in college campuses, especially conservativeleaning philanthropists and business types in America. I think about 2012 that's turned around to bite them pretty damn hard. Oh yeah. But they it would get their attention, right? So here I would be at a cocktail party and I'd be 18, 19 years old trying to get funding, trying to get someone's attention. They say, "Okay, what do you do?" I said, "Well, I'm trying to bring conservatism to college campuses." Oh, really? And they they would be sincere. They would lean in. Right. Right. They say, "What about my alma mater? Have you spoke there?" And so I'd have a little connection. I'd say, "Well, maybe I could visit there if we have a little bit of money." And so it helped. So I had interest from the donor community. And so you could see that there was an opening there, the door that was open. And I had no idea how big that opening was. And the more that I learned some of these donors, as you you would say, they'd give hundreds of millions of dollars to these schools. Yeah. Right. And so they had a lot of vested interest. They were very um they were very curious about a young guy that wants to go shake up these campuses because remember that's when woke was really starting to come up. Yeah. 13, 14, 15, we saw it bubble up. 15 was I think the Pearl Harbor moment. It was Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri. Hands up, don't shoot. That's where woke started to present itself in Oh, you'll have to tell me why you think that event was at least at least from the because I I think at the top of all woke elements, race was the primary, let's just say the primary fencing. Yeah, it's the it's the division point. Correct. And so in 2015 when Ferguson, Missouri, the lie, the scam of hands up don't shoot with Michael Brown, Black Lives Matter was born out of Ferguson, Missouri, actually on a college campus at University of Missouri in Colombia, Missouri. And that spread like wildfire through, of course, a lot of Democrat operatives and money being spent. Remember how long we spent on that news cycle of America's racist because of Michael Brown and all the CNN commentators famously said, "Hands up and don't shoot." And we we we spent more time on race obsession in the last two years of Obama's presidency than the last four or five years prior. And that's because Well, that that's that's a hallmark of the danger of of allowing race to be an issue in the presidency to begin with. Exactly. But an an underappreciated element here is Eric Holder was setting the table for that with very loyal people in the Department of Justice that believe that police were inherently racist. Right? They were launching investigations into very successful police police departments trying to find police brutality and racial bias. And so the table was set and that was the mini George Floyd moment of the beginning. Well, you know, psychologists played a role in that in a major way too because you had uh Baggi and her crowd Oh yeah. with the u what do they call that? the the implicit association test completely forcing the idea of implicit bias, you know, and social psychology is a very corrupt discipline and it has been maybe from its onset and it's very it's stacked from top to bottom with careerists and it was social psychologists for example who denied that there was anything any such thing as left-wing authoritarianism. until 2017, right? You just that was something you didn't get to think if you were a social psychologist or even investigate. We cracked that. There was a couple of people working on it around 2016. The last bit of research I did was on left-wing authoritarianism and then everything my lab blew up. You know, it just became impossible for me to continue. But so that that dovetailed with this insistence that people were looking at the world through a lens that was irmediably biased in terms of their privilege and their racial and ethnic identity and you know and it's tricky because there people do have a tilt in the ethnosentric direction right because well how about because you favor your family right you tend to favor the local you also tend to favor the non-nvel and the familiar. Well, exactly. And now there are exceptions to that. Well, you see this in the Old Testament accounts because sometimes the foreigner is the best thing that ever happened. So that would be like Jethro in the story of Moses, Moses' father-in-law and Midian. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And so, and then you have the alternative that would be like Jezebel who's the foreign devil, so to speak. And so, you know, that's a that's a paradox that's very difficult to to properly navigate. Okay. So yeah, it's 2015 2016 things went like seriously sideways and that's where just to complete the point my job on campuses became far more interesting because our our organization shifted from primarily you know economic discussions of Marxism and capitalism to core cultural hotbed topics in 15 161 17 race and then of course the next layer gender transgenderism. So the beast that Betty Fredan and Judith Butler raised that monster reared its head with incredible ferocity in 16 and 17 in the academy and people don't believe it when I say this I I saw this happen though it's okay just really quick in 2012 2013 there was almost no transgender anything on these campuses it didn't exist I could tell you I went to these campuses I talked to these students you might have a you know an a feminant looking guy maybe wearing a dress as a joke it was not anywhere The social contagion within 5 years was dramatic. It was a different place. You went from just, you know, okay, you are who you are to you're not going to use my pronouns. Hyper tyrannical, hyper authoritarian. So then here we are a 5-year-old organization with a, you know, a growing infrastructure and a growing presence and a growing staffing um, you know, organization. And we we multiplied significantly because then the donor types like hold on what happened on my alma mater why is it that they're burning down UC Berkeley? Remember Milo Yiannopoulos went to University of California Berkeley in the spring of 17 and they burnt the whole place down. Ben Shapiro very similarly. And so we then be found ourselves accidentally or through serendipity on the front lines of the American culture war. Yeah. Well, there's there's a lot of that that's not accidental. you know, you you think about the way that you told your story. I mean, it's improbable, but you were of the temperamental type. That's that strange blend of entrepreneurial temperament and conservative temperament. Those things don't generally go together, right? The conservative temperament, you could accept the libertarians because they're probably the entrepreneurial conserv and and growing up, I actually was more libertarian. It's very interesting. Okay. Okay. Cuz well that's where the entrepreneurial conservatives hang out is with the libertarians. That's right. Right. And and they have an uneasy alliance with a great point. Mhm. Okay. Okay. And so that that temperamental factor was already operating at you in high school and then you didn't get into West Point, you said, but you were interested in universities and you obviously had the intelligence to manage them. And so, you know, it's it's it's very useful to develop an idiosyncratic pathway forward if you have the IQ horsepower to manage it because it makes you unique if you could do that. So, okay. And so, you had a mentor who told you that it's probably best for you not to go to college because you have an entrepreneurial bent. Now, you're trying to build a political organization, but you're not exactly sure how. you're visiting the campuses and you have friends there and you see that there's an opportunity to talk on campuses where you can also get an education in doing that but also that there's donor interest and that's very interesting too because if you're a good entrepreneur one of the things you do is you go talk to your marketplace always that's the grassroots things but also with regards to fundraisers and you see you offer like 10 ideas all of which you're interested in and you see where the door opens That's knocking. Exactly. So you saw that there were these people who wanted to support the education of young people, but who could see that their money was being counter counterproductively spent to say the least. Yeah. Well, leave large piles of money laying around unguarded and see who comes in first to take it. Right. Right. That's that parasitical type that they'll swarm in there like mad. That's happened in gravitate to the universities. Yeah. It's the same phenomena that we talked about earlier that cluster B narcissistic dark tetrad 4% of the population they're looking around to see where uh what would you say inhabitable carcasses are lying around unintent and they're disproportionately represented at the academy that 4% might be 40% of the administrators or the professor types because think about it well increasingly that became the case because they might be saying something to that target audience the student but they actually want to see that student become a leftist everything there's a lot of Mchavelian influences in how these professors present their ideas yeah well it's also the case that it was the Machavelian administ so what happened at the university I I watched this is you lived the the administration encroached and that's not surprising because there was money at a foot so why wouldn't there be competition for the funding so the administrator ers who are generally failed faculty by the way, failed and embittered faculty. So the faculty are already embittered because they're not rich like investment bankers. And then you take embittered faculty members who couldn't make it as faculty. So now they encroach on the faculty who are too busy doing their job and too apolitical and also too willfully blind to notice. The administration encroaches decision by decision until they radically outnumber the professors and that's pretty much fate to comple. And then the woke mob took over the administration and that took no time at all. Right. And so now that's where we're at in the universities and I can't see how that would be reversed. Okay. So now you tell me how you started going to campuses and what you did to begin with and how you got away with it. So the first person who wrote us a check was a guy by the name of Foster Freeze. May he also rest in peace. Uh amazing philanthropist. I met him very early on. Uh I decided to go to the Republican National Convention in 2012 in pursuit of finding donors. This was August after I graduated high school and I just had this idea to try to bring I the conservative agenda to young people to the next generation. I met him in a stairwell at the Republican National Convention. I gave him a stairwell pitch and to your point, which is exactly right, I kind of presented four or five things really quickly. Yeah. No one trained it. No one I just kind of instinctively I said, "Well, here's five ideas that I have." He laughed. He chuckled. Gave me his business card. He said, "Be in touch. Sent me 10,000 bucks the next week." That was like, "How did you know that there was such a thing as finding donors?" And what do you think it was that set you up to have the goal to assume you could do first of all to know that that was a thing and then to have the goal to pursue it? The second one I don't know. I don't know where I got the goal to pursue it. Uh I will say Bill Montgomery being a mentor of mine was very uh encouraging to me. Okay. Okay. You had someone encouraging you. Yes. Um but but and you said he saw something in you. Yes. And he was he was and he was an entrepreneur. Yes. And he never asked for anything from me which was very unique. It wasn't like he was trying to have some agenda. He was 72 years. So you had a mentor which you desperately need as a young person. Definitely someone who believes that you can do it. And and you think about it, you're 18 years old, you know, you don't know how to check cash checks. You don't know you barely know how to put on a tie. Literally, I didn't know how to tie a tie for the first two years. Uh you know, at Turning Point. Again, my parents were are phenomenal and they deserve a lot of credit. Um, but this was kind of a a beyond the upbringing where an external mentor comes in and kind of points you and says, "Hey, I think you're really good at this, found a skill, identified a skill, and kind of molded me in that direction." You know that young male elephants go mad if there's no old male elephant to butt heads with them. That's very well. That's very apppropo for Republicans. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. So, yeah. But, but it was it was I'm a quick learner. I'm a quick study. And so I started to do research. I said, "Well, are there things such as external nonprofit political organizations?" Oh, there's a 501c3 or there's a 501c4 and you can raise money. And so the first couple months was me actually learning what am I building? Am I building? So you were training as an administrator and a manager then too. I I was everything for the first of course. I was CEO, I was janitor, I was I was everything. And so I had to make a decision. Of course, I asked for advice. Am I going to start a for-profit company? Am I doing a non and I we decided on nonprofit largely because we believe that there was an untapped pool of philanthropic dollars that wanted to see these campuses challenged and disrupted. And how do you figure that out? Having a lot of conversations with a lot of wealthy people and I realized that there so if you talk to a donor type they will they'll have two different ways of deploying capital in their after years. The first of which is investment which comes with strict return on investment requirements and they look at that as hey I need to make sure that this money is stewarded and shepherd and eventually I get an ROI. Right. Right. The second bucket is philanthropy where they actually aren't looking for a material or a monetary ROI. They're looking for a cultural or a macro ROI. And those sometimes are in donor advised funds or they're in 501c3 type categories. And we saw a lot of amazing patriotic donors that stepped up and said, "Hey, I have done very well in my business." And this is what I found. And I connected the dots. They said, "I have this money sitting around that I pledged to Yale, right? A million bucks a year, and I'd hate not to give it to them. Is there some other better idea?" What we found was so many conservative donors that had a lot of money, but not a lot of great ideas of where to deploy that 501. Think about it. The predominant amount of 501c3s in the in the in the educational space are leftwing. Yeah. All of them. Right. Exactly. So, here I am. I'm kind of this new disruptive force and they say, "Okay, I'm not going to give him the money I give to Yale, but I'll give him 50 grand a year. Kind of see how he does." Right. Right. Right. And so, we started to earn the trust of a lot of donors and earn the trust of a lot of philanthropists. Okay. Okay. So, now you now you're going out on campuses. Do you remember the first time you did this? Oh, yeah. University of Wisconsin Madison. Okay. Tell me about that. I drove up there. We had a singular stand. Who's we? Uh, well, we being like, actually, Bill Montgomery came with me to that one. Um, but he kind of just was in the shadows. I literally had a card table that I brought from my parents house and set it up right there on the campus, University of Wisconsin Madison. I think I still have a picture of this. And I had some sign that said big government sucks. You know, a little provocative. Yeah. And I sat there at a chair and I think a student would come up maybe once every 15 minutes. And I was there trying to so