Charlie Kirk Reveals Why Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover Terrifies the Left and What It Means for Free Speech

[Music] more students here at turning point usa's america fest you can watch haley mackie you guys are at the front line of freedom of liberty of justice this is the greatest nation on earth fight for the last best hope on earth america is our home america it's our home that is a gift we get to live in america [Music] [Applause] that's the only thing we're here for [Music] [Music] what's going on maybe [Music] [Music] right calling all based patriots meme lords and cute servatives student action summit is happening 2022 tampa florida july 22nd through the 24th you don't want to miss it you'll make lifelong friends you'll probably meet your soulmate and you'll be able to network with the biggest names in the conservative movement sign up now on tpusa.com you guys scared me i knew it was coming dude wow well hey everyone my name is marcos delano rodas i'm the nicest army veteran and i have the honor of serving as the president of cal state fullerton turning point usa wow all right yes oh and our chapter has been absolutely been blown away by the response from the community your support allows us to stay motivated and stay in the fight day in and day out so thank you to everyone here thank you from the bottom of my heart so i'd first like to start by thanking god for blessing us to be here today in health flexing our first amendment muscles and allowing us to be in the greatest nation on earth every single day as well as my mom and all the amazing turning point families who are here their guidance and wisdom support us and guide us every single day now as a former police officer in the united states army i'd like to thank all our security and our law enforcement here from the fullerton police department that's right [Applause] yep their diligence and self-service and hard work protect us every single day across america and they put their lives on the line for us every single day and at turning point we back the blue so thank you gentlemen now uh i cannot continue 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organizations to save california and save america and if you are interested in starting a chapter please check out our booth in the back or visit turningpointusa.com get involved so tpusa.com says get involved and we encourage you guys and welcome you to our young women's leadership summit and our student action summit this summer these events are things you do not want to miss and these are the way that we empower students and get going and trigger left while helping promote our values every single day right that's what we're here for thank you guys for coming so much god bless you all [Applause] [Music] well good evening everybody my name is victor marks thank you i'm the guy with the dog uh recently charlie and i spoke at an event and he posted a video about my dog this is scout and uh scout is one of the few dogs that face isis fighters in iraq and within two hours children uh that we had recovered are rescued from isis were able to pet her and hold her as a comfort so this is this is super scalp and that's actually her instagram it's kind of funny she's a big instagram i just actually returned from my 16th pump from iraq my wife and i we're high-risk humanitarians that are also missionaries so it kind of explains as one person said we saw a picture of you carrying an ak and i said yeah i said uh you know once you get shot by i had ice you want to shoot back so um yeah so you guys well i'll just say this i'm thankful that we live in a country that when i travel i can come home to and know that there's young people just like you and some of us voters that are in the fight and willing to stand and make a difference to save our country thank you from the bottom of my heart for guys yeah i mean it matters and uh for scout too because we're we're doing work here in the us by actually hunting pedophiles and we're getting them [Applause] well if it's okay i'll go ahead and say a little prayer to open up tonight sound good all right heavenly father thank you so much for this evening thank you for this gathering for each person here for those watching lord some of here's the centers some watching actually don't like what's going to be said but i pray you soften the heart and help them to realize what we share tonight is being said in truth but in love lord and i ask god that you put a seamless canopy of your blood jesus around this room to destroy any and all communication between any demonic forces on the outside those would seek to disrupt this evening for what you have god we give you all glory and honor and we thank you for your goodness and mercy in our life and grace in jesus name amen thanks again [Applause] it is government's role to protect it is government's role to protect our rights against tyranny government does not give you rights government is not going to tell you how many people you get to have over for thanksgiving or christmas they work for us the united states constitution starts with we the people they work for us everybody now welcoming to the stage charlie kirk [Applause] hey everybody great to be here thank you we are uh we're on tour right now this is our last stop uh three stops we started in boulder and then we went to berkeley and now we're here so i think this will be what you think will be the most conservative stop of the three we'll see i don't know um it'll be tough to say there's been uh some chatter of protests and stuff so we'll see what happens but it's great to be here i love california um why let me say this this way i love parts of california well i don't know let me say it differently i love the people of calton i need i like i love some of the people of california but i re i have a whole theory on california and it really is a test of how important is weather in your life that really is the question right i mean you you wake up i woke up very early this morning and a morning in southern california say all right 18 income tax homelessness vagrancy crime all right if this is the trade-off then so be it it really is the great test of weather um because i guarantee you if california was like fargo north dakota in the winter this there would be nobody left here um but i love it here and we have so many great friends that have supported us for so many years and thank you for that at turning point usa and orange county is a really important place this is a place where um used to be really conservative and then it kind of has veered to the left a little bit but i think there's a conservative revival happening in orange county right now i really do and moms and dads are starting to show up at school board meetings students are starting to rise up and start turning point usa chapters pastors are starting to take stands like the great jack hibs who's not too far from here i know a lot of you go to jack's church he does a great job and so i i'm honored to be here and some people say oh charlie why do you go to california why don't you give up on i say look we're we're a big country this is the largest state it's the wealthiest state and we're going to give up on this amazing place where there's actually more conservatives in california than any other state in the country and i feel an obligation to our fellow countrymen here in california live in arizona i wouldn't live here currently but i i just want to say though that there's so many amazing people in california that refuse to give up and i really really touches me it does because you know i i have an opportunity to to travel the country and it's easy to get cynical but there's this remnant of california conservatives that just keep on fighting that just keep on organizing that refuse to give up and know that they might not see victory immediately but one small victory at a time in organizing and putting things together and that that really is something that inspires people all across the country it really does and if we're serious about saving america we're gonna have to hopefully get california's house in order if not that then start a local level sort of a county level we're starting to see that happen in some very substantial ways so i want to talk about a couple things in particular um and then we can go into some q a which is you know obviously the most fun part of all this so um i don't have a twitter account uh currently um so i got banned from twitter you might know this so this has been one of the most interesting like unexpected news cycles in my my whole 10 years of doing this so i got banned from twitter for uh participating in dead naming do you guys know what dead naming is um okay i didn't know before i tweeted so here's one of the things um and it's i'm technically suspended from twitter not banned just to get the words correctly uh we'll get into what that means so here's how you know you're living in kind of a tyrannical moment when you can't keep track of all the rules that you're supposed to follow i mean if you're like me i can't keep track of all of them right they're they're going to kick you out of a social club or social media because you're like wait what what even is that so i tweeted out i think a month ago about the current health czar a person by the name calls themselves the name rachel levine whatever okay uh and i said this person used to have a name richard levine for 54 years of their life and then transitioned okay whatever and i said that in the tweet and then you can't even use the name that used to exist right can't do that um it's called dead naming so you lose your account for that and then in kind of like a soviet show trial way uh twitter comes out and they say okay in order to get your twitter account back you have to admit that you violated our hate speech policies and press the delete button so we very well could have done that but happened to the babylon be like two days before that and then it happened to us and i thought to myself you know i traveled to these events all across the country and i tell young people involved at turning point usa you know it's worth fighting for conservative values but it might cost you something and what a hypocrite i would be to tell you that and be like oh yeah by the way i'm just going to delete the tweet and kind of get my twitter account back so we're we're we're in this uh you would be banned from twitter for saying that so um and i didn't even say that so i um so this standoff started babylon b gets suspended we get suspended and you know we talked to seth dillon from babylon b and we're kind of like this is insane and maybe five years ago we would have kind of deleted tweet press the red button and move on but we kind of know that when you do that you conform to these ridiculous rules and there's more important things in life than having access to a twitter account there just is uh fighting for the truth's way more important than having access to a twitter account um not lying is way more important than having access to a social media account so then tucker carlson comes out and he tweets out the tweet of the babylon bnr tweet which then triggers twitter to ban tucker carlson as well but it gets better right so so we're kind of like all right whatever twitter is kind of a lost cause like you know we're not gonna delete the tweet we'll see what happens but there's really kind of there's momentum starting to be built and it caught the eye this kind of this thing i'm not i'm not not taking credit for it but we were definitely part of it no we were because the favorite news source for the world's richest man is the babylon b and he loves the babylon b's gone on his on their podcast on the entire thing and this is what i just love about this entire story now before we go any further i have a nuanced view of elon musk i think some of what he does is awesome i'm not a fan of other things i love his entrepreneurial spirit i don't like missing with the messing with the human brain i don't like the stuff that he does in china i think you can have a mixed bag opinion of people i think that's fair um but i just love what's going on right now with twitter it's awesome and so i love i'm i love every moment of it i think it's and every person who loves the country and loves the constitution free speech should just be eating popcorn just seeing the next tweet that elon's gonna come out so they ban babylon beat they ban us they ban tucker and then it catches the attention of elon musk so elon has nearly 300 billion dollars he's probably even wealthier than that we don't even know the true valuation of spacex um and he basically had a decision to make which is what am i going to do with all this money right and that is a question that a lot of elites wrestle with so you know bezos is like i'm going to go to mars whatever bill gates is i'm going to send vaccines all around the world right and musk was like you know what like what i could have mansions everywhere and i could send shuttles to mars but if we do not have like the fundamental value of freedom of discourse doesn't matter how many zeros i have behind my net worth and that's a really just unprecedented thing for someone in the ruling class to say it is they're supposed to obey to the censorship regime right like you're like it's we we shut out voices we don't like if you disagree with what we say don't get in our way well it just so happens elon is at the top level of the ability to be able to balance power so what what ends up happening then is elon makes this offer you guys know that two weeks ago he buys just like 10 percent of tick tock tick tock twitter um not yet buys 10 of twitter and so then he gets into all that he they say he's gonna come on the board of directors denies it and we're like oh is he going to back down but if he was on the board of directors he wouldn't be able to buy the entire company and at every corner people think he's not going to do it he's not going to do it he's not going to do it remember this is the guy that's trying to go to colonize mars um and has electrical vehicles ever he's kind of in the whole business of defying people which i kind of love personally to be honest and this morning he puts in a cash offer to buy all of twitter for 42 billion dollars um which is just insane right and it was 44 42 43 i'm sorry okay see you know what's so crazy about that i might get banned from youtube for disinformation because i said 42 instead of 43 this is the world i live in um so twitter's freaking out right so he's gonna buy the whole thing now just to kind of show how serious elon is is he's kind i don't know if you've seen elon's twitter account today um he's responding to like random people's tweets with these like super cryptic messages the world's richest man just kind of like i don't know he has extra time on his hands go and he says something so interesting which is that if twitter denies his offer they're gonna have to withstand possible accusations legal remedies that show that they're not um let's say obeying the fiduciary interest of their shareholder because of such a high offer which they could be they got huge lawsuits coming and so they're meeting right now and prague uh agarwal is the ceo of twitter now uh we don't really know where um we don't know where uh jack dorsey is i don't think he's really in the equation right now and so elon wants to buy the entire thing and so if you have seen even one percent of the reaction from the left today it's been one of the most entertaining things i've ever seen no it's even if you're a leftist in this room it's unbelievable just like hitler and just like stalin elon musk wants to buy twitter and suppress speech this is what they're saying and like it's not just like randos you know that are just walking on the side of the street these like journalists right like important people and what i love is people say like i'm gonna get off twitter if elon buys the entire thing like yeah just like you're gonna move to canada when trump went right like okay sure and here's what's gonna happen it's like okay all like the weird people that wear masks when they shower like they'll get off twitter and all of us will go back to twitter and it'll be an awesome place right because we really don't use twitter much anymore and so you know we're at this moment where elon i and this is what i really want to kind of you know focus in on which is um elon is an example of what i think we've lost in the last 20 or 30 years which is someone with legitimate power outside of the government coming in and fighting for regular people and and and that is something that was worthy of reflection for a couple moments right because we're used to the opposite we're used to zuckerberg putting 400 million dollars into our elections to have mail-in ballots go everywhere right we're used to kind of this idea of you know cnn and all these massive mega corporations coming in and crushing the weak and kind of out of nowhere the very person who is a creation of the american left i'll prove it to you in a second is now the person who is offsetting it and so a majority of elon's wealth is because of the green energy nonsense that they've been pushing it's so hilarious right elon is only powerful because they want to get rid of fossil fuels so they want to get rid of all fossil fuels and drilling well someone has to be a beneficiary okay the electric car guy gets all the money the problem is they they did not realize they couldn't control him so like one of the um one of the tweets here is from this person i don't know their name um elon musk is why we need to abolish billionaires okay asking them asking them to chip in their fair share isn't enough regulating them isn't enough this is a blue check mark person on twitter when people are allowed to acquire this much concentrated influence they'll inevitably man spread economic power into every other form of power okay so i don't know what this person's name is whatever so the the interesting part of that though is they're okay with billionaires doing their bidding but they don't like it when billionaires come in and defend western values so a couple thoughts on this the reaction to elon coming in and trying to consolidate twitter is sh and their their insane reaction shows how central censorship is to their plans they need to be able to shut you up and if all of a sudden that gets put into jeopardy then a lot of their political control all of a sudden becomes less certain and you see the reaction one after the other after the other where these people on television are saying like this is the worst thing for democracy like robert reich you know at uc berkeley says that this is like a threat to our entire civilization and but it's it's so amazing because elon said this in his tech talk today he says this i'm not doing this for financial reasons he says i'm doing this because i don't want to live in a civilization that does not value freedom of speech and so you think about it what is he really fighting for he's now fighting for the true promise of the founding fathers in an internet and technological era like he's now saying okay twitter's a private company or it can make its own decisions but it really is the place where a lot of the you know ideas and news breaks today it's where the important people go to kind of report things and comment on them but if you're not even able to have free and open discourse on that then you're always constantly living in a different type of censorship regime and this is something that i think we as conservatives have started to realize last couple years is that the threat to our speech is is not just coming from the government it's actually primarily coming from private companies and so for years they're like oh twitter can do whatever they want they can censor conservatives but the moment then someone uses market principles that they were defending said like buying the company and then defending free speech they all of a sudden want to block it so this max boot guy you might know him he says i am frightened by the impact on society and politics if elon musk acquires twitter he seems to believe that on social media anything goes for democracy to survive we need more content moderation not less this guy's a columnist for i don't know the washington post columnist owned by jeff bezos and so there's article after article after article and you think to yourself like what what drives them to want to keep that kind of internet um kind of regime going and it does it really shows that they're so afraid of what would happen in the coming elections if really good ideas would be able to spread freely without them having the thumb on the scale that's what they're let me put it differently they're afraid of what happened in 2016 happening every two years because in 2016 we had the closest thing to a free internet my life 2016 the tech companies were taken by surprise by trump and all these people you guys remember 2016 internet it was awesome right no one was getting booted things went viral and guess what like that was how we checked cnn that's how we got the word out and these social media companies have kind of been in this non-stop apology tour like we're so sorry we're to blame for this we're so sorry we're to blame for this but guess what every single every single study shows that center-right content conservative content is the most popular on the internet when it's actually given a fair sharing to be heard it's and there's a lot of reasons for it it makes sense like it's so when you have a video that's like actually men can't become pregnant thank you for coming to my ted talk like that goes really viral instead of all this insane nonsense that you keep hearing and so there this is a glitch in the matrix that's what elon musk best represents now what's going to happen next and the question will be really how how strong is elon's resolve um and i think it's rather significant announced today this is how this works the security exchange commission has come out in their opening investigation at tesla for apparent market violations oh you better believe they're going to bite back you're not just able to go stop censorship we're going to put you in your place elon now that they're going to the company they can really go after is spacex because of all the government contracts and stuff and mark my words in the coming weeks and months if this continues at the pace it's continuing right now they're gonna have you're gonna have people on the left say we have to cancel government contracts with spacex we have to stop you know giving money to these sorts of people that want free speech like yeah they're the worst those free speech people and and so we're living through this amazing moment where finally those of us that feel as if we've been outnumbered and outgunned we're finally starting to see the equivalent of what the american revolutionaries got from the french government in the revolutionary war which is just a little bit of a fighting chance a bigger power coming in and helping people freedom loving people being pushed back against an overwhelming and it's sometimes very intimidating type of government or collection of power and so yeah this is the tweet here as elon musk offers to buy the rest of twitter legal sources say today the sec and the department of justice have announced what he described as a joint investigation into a myriad of musk regulatory issues primarily involving tesla coincidence right of course like you go on to buy twitter like you're going to have to go deal with all of this and i don't think that's going to faze him like he'll just go to mars like okay whatever i'll just like i'll leave like i don't know if the laws of extradition apply to you know interplanetary um that would be interesting actually to see to kind of push the boundaries um but the this is this i'll complete the point here and i'll make a couple others and we'll get the question and answer um which is the the anxiety and the frenetic reaction that we've seen i think goes to show that if we can even liberate speech a little bit in the coming weeks months and years that that's one of the fundamental ways that we make america a more stable and healthy country you want to know why you think like america is going in the wrong direction it's because of how much censorship there actually has been in the last couple of years how many i mean i could do show of hands how many people you know that you have friends and relatives that have never heard of news stories that would be so obvious to you i mean i just was at uc berkeley yesterday and there were like trans activists that had no idea had not heard that the person who thought that they were a woman won the ncaa championship ensuing never heard of it and like no one like i would say half probably had heard of it half had not and a lot of you saw the story repeatedly covered in all that and you got to think boy if we had a free and open internet and not kind of algorithms that would immediately suppress sorts of content how many other people would then be able to be persuaded because here's why we know every one of their stories there's not one of their stories that we can't recite by name right like okay like support ukraine like maskinvax ninth booster like every everything is racist let all the immigrants in like whatever like we can it's like an incantation right at this point but how many of them could actually recite what we believe are some of the more cultural and economic problems facing the country okay so i'm going to kind of go through two more things here um so i went super viral yesterday i don't have like you guys know i don't have twitter someone would you it's so great when you don't have twitter and someone texts you that you're trending on twitter it's awesome it's like so i did something worthy of still trending on that godforsaken website at wasteland um it's so funny when they're tweeting at me on twitter i'm like you realize i don't have like okay sure um so i said something at cu boulder that's really true which is that we want more we should make it a goal to try to have more young people to own property and make it easier for young people to be able to own property um that we need to have less renters and more people that own property and at times there's an unexpected cost and this is a thought experiment and it's proven through data there's an unexpected cost to having um having development that prioritizes renting especially development that goes over five 10 15 20 stories in fact when you have when you have concentrated population density those areas tend to be a lot more liberal than areas that would be more suburban or rural now i said this and i said it in a way that really bothered people where i said that tall buildings can be a prerequisite towards a city all of a sudden taking a turn away from being a conservative city to a liberal city and they just like lost their mind like how dare you blame tall buildings i was like okay well obviously i'm not blaming the height of the building right i'm making an argument that population density and having people living on top of one another creates a couple of factors like the tragedy the commons when everyone owns something nobody owns it and so you're not actually responsible for the dog park you're like 1 100th responsible for it and then all of a sudden you might be using more public transportation than driving yourself so you're not as like connected what gas prices might be or a car insurance payment i'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with those things but they definitely foster an environment that make you look at things more collectively and less individually or kind of less in a way of what are all these different factors and you guys know this when you rent there's a way to find out but a lot of people pay rent without actually looking at their bill you're usually immune not immune but you're not totally dialed into what the property taxes are and the kind of what all the factors are you just kind of pay your rent you move on but when you own a home you know what your property tax bill is and you know whether or not property values are going up or not and so i said this they lost their mind i totally stand by it i don't know why that was just like such a triggering thing but like we should try to encourage young people in particular to try to own homes and to try to actually be able to be in communities that are not as population dense as urban cities that i believe actually create liberal thinking habits and behavioral habits in fact i mean we have a lot of land in this country i think that we should encourage young people to go west again like to go on the frontier and to grow your own food and to actually be self-reliant independent not just be like uber eats is down and i don't know how i'm going to feed myself and so i'm going to make another argument with this though which is you know a little bit a little even more provocative media matters is going to love this um which is when you live in vertical housing units you're a lot easier to control and that you look at what's happening right now in shanghai shanghai is completely locked down from top to bottom because all you have to do is bar the door and you can control the movement of every single person in the building so that's just this is a technical thing right you if you can control a building you can control every single person in that building it's a lot harder to control so if you have let's say you have a 250 apartments and if you're able to control that building in control of all the people in there that's a lot harder to actually control 250 suburban homes in a community that would be all spread out right so you see that in shanghai they can lock down 25 million people because for the technical reasons are easier in that way now it's not obviously you could still lock people down and control them if they're in single family homes but it comes a lot harder it takes more manpower and it also i think in a lot of different ways i think it has a psychological um component to it as well so um i stand by those comments um i don't know why it's so controversial so i live in phoenix uh phoenix you should have height restrictions on their buildings uh maricopa county anyone from phoenix arizona lived there maricopa county used to be the most conservative major county in america it's now flipping a little bit unfortunately but because they had height restrictions maricopa county would always spread um through east west north and south development and it had the largest explosion per capita of single-family home development in the country because developers were capped at how high they could make the buildings and because of that that actually made the valley as we call it in phoenix more conservative um because young people were like okay i'm gonna go buy a house instead of go buy a penthouse or whatever and your behavioral habits change and the data shows it political scientists show that there's a decisive break between left-wing ideology and right-wing ideology when the population density changes between 800 person per square mile okay the second thing that i said oh my goodness i say these things and like all of a sudden these reporters start writing them and i don't think they actually this is what i say so i'm going to clarify it so this i read this headline and they say charlie kirk blam blames trans people for inflation like what are you what like i never said that let me tell you what i did say okay um which is nothing even like remotely close so dishonest these people here's what i said i said that if you are willing to believe in a certain worldview where things are not true right such as men can become pregnant or that biological reality can be changed then you also might be likely to believe in economic things that are also not true such as you can create money out of thin air and it will start to create wealth that's what i said and it's true by the way which is that if you do not have a let's say a coherent world view based in reality then you might be more likely to believe that yes seven trillion dollars created a thin air is somehow going to give us some sort of ticket to prosperity um and that's why i think some of these more fundamental issues of kind of what is real what is true and what is good are super important it comes down to this this idea of deconstructionism though if you're able to deconstruct what we can tr consider to be the laws of reality then you are able to i think get closer to um a place where people question everything all of a sudden they're like yeah well maybe money's just a construct and we could create a trillion and who's to say maybe inflation is just how you feel about things we think that's insane as conservatives right we believe that creating money at a thin air is going to have dollar bills chasing value not value chasing dollar bills and um best best articulated we could go into this in q a if you want it's called modern monetary theory it's this plague on economic thought that has just just totally spread over both political parties that believes you can inflate your way out of all the problems i believe that inflation is a tax on working people it's a tax on young people and inflation is a killer inflation is a killer of a country a nation and a society inflation is bad for everybody unless you're in the top one percent of one percent and you're able to allocate resources separately and you're able to uh differently you're able to move money around quickly and you're gonna able to outpace your rate of return on top of that of inflation and it's especially dangerous inflation is for young people because by the time you guys graduate college you guys you know going to get into the workforce you're going to be a set of circumstances where everything costs three times as much wages are not keeping up with inflation not even close and i mean i know some of you drove from all across southern california here it cost like 180 to like drive there and back um and then you know your boss might give you a two percent or three percent raise and at some point you're gonna have to cut back on your spending or you're just going to go into debt now the other group of people that benefit from inflation are people that have incurred a lot of debt those are people that actually benefit from inflation this is why corporations increased their borrowing during the virus by 600 billion dollars they increased their borrowing now why would they do that because they knew that they would never be able to get money this cheap again with interest rates that low that even the growth rate will outpace the interest rate it will almost pay for itself long term and so basically overly leveraging their position if you will is what that benefits their position so what what a lot of you are now encountering like wait a second so you're trying to tell me that people that owned homes they actually were you know or had mortgages they're the big beneficiaries the last two years your property value probably went up i don't know if that's the case in every community probably did especially in orange county and then your debt burden or let's say a 500 000 mortgage or a 600 000 mortgage it actually has decreased the more dollar bills that we print because it's relative to how many dollars there are because half a million dollars is not what it used to be especially if it's 20 inflation year over year over year that is a that disenfranchises students in particular because now you're saying wait a second i need seventy five thousand dollars just to make the down payment for a home that my parents used to be able to put twelve thousand dollars for a down pay to my home and so inflation is a silent killer of working people and young people so um we believe in those pesky shackles of reality we believe we must be anchored to a natural law and things that do not change and this is we don't have to overthink it we don't have to over complicate it things such as money cannot be printed out of out of nowhere and create wealth we believe that um we believe in something as simple as men are different than women we believe in certain things like human life is worthy of protection and preservation we believe a nation needs borders in order to be able to survive or else it ceases to be a country and it turns into a colony and kind of a mixture of all sorts of different you know factors that play into it these are principles that do not change despite what year or time or circumstance you are in um and what really you're seeing right now is you're seeing a collection of people that are kind of wearing the jersey of team reality and people that are kind of on the woke side and here's the great opportunity and why i'm optimistic and then we'll get to questions when you start to have someone like bill maher and joe rogan all of a sudden like i'm agreeing with them more than i'm disagreeing with them there's something massive that is going to come in the next couple of years that is going to obliterate these woke people the wokies i call them it's like if you have bill maher that's basically like yeah i think men and women are different and looting is wrong and defunding the police is a bad idea he is a little bit of a salty language um and so but has bill maher changed or has what it means to be a leftist in america radically changed in the last couple years and that's really the dividing line do you believe that we have to operate within the framework of things that we can agree upon and then find ways to solve them or do you want to just completely deconstruct everything that we've known to be true in humanity for as long as we've existed and think that you got it all figured out because you're a 20 year old that took a sociology class at a local university like i figured it out because my professor said something that you know i've never heard before like actually this is the problem it's a humility verse pride problem we as conservatives need to have the humility that there are a lot smarter people that wrote books gave speeches and governed societies before we were ever here and we have a lot to learn from those people and people that make promises of restructuring society and revolutionizing things they're not just probably wrong they're probably going to do a lot more damage than good and those people need to be stopped in their tracks and partners like elon musk and joe rogan and bill maher i consider them to be incredibly exciting and helpful allies in this now new moment where it's like okay are we going to go in the direction where at least we recognize reality or are we going to go say that we need to defund the police you know that it's just gender is a social construct and all that that is the dividing line and my bet is that team reality is going gonna win okay let's do some questions everybody and uh thanks for sitting through that all right guys hello all right guys we're gonna do a q a all right let me say something about q a before we get started so uh this is a majority conservative audience i would imagine right so um if someone who is on the left or someone who disagrees comes up to ask a question i ask you not to heckle or interrupt show respect and show them the respect that they usually do not show us when we show up to events and public places so uh please just be tolerant and to the extent of let them get their ideas out and then we can respond appropriately okay well it takes courage to come up at a conservative event and let your voice be heard so just show them that and then we can respond from there okay the first question um i was wondering if you could give some encouraging words to students who are being alienated by teachers their communities and their friends because of their christian or conservative values it's a really important question so students there raise your hand if you think you've been graded differently or treated differently because your beliefs yeah basically every hand goes up so um that's right marco says worth it um yeah look i want to say this so there's a uh there's a disagreement on the right um and i have a lot of respect for ben shapiro but he has a different answer than i do on this and i'll kind of say this so uh ben and this is not precisely your question but i'll incorporate it so the question here's the question do you lie on your term paper or how you present yourself to your professors to get a good grade that's a question a lot of people ask right it's like it's easier to kind of hide and to not confront things so ben says yes uh lie misrepresent your beliefs get the good grade and get through college or high school i see it differently i do not believe getting a good grade is nearly as important as creating strong people filled with integrity willing to fight for truth at all and so now why am i bringing this up um because if you if you wanted the kind of those you that are conservative wanted to have an easier life then just pretend to not be a conservative and just keep your head down and you know just pretend to be something that you're not and delete your social media i think there's a lot more important things in life than that so the word of encouragement is this uh first something that is true uh that you don't wanna hear and then something that is true that you probably will wanna hear um it's never gonna stop you will be harassed called names demonized uh victimized uh you will be smeared and slandered uh you will lose a lot of your friends um and you'll doubt whether it's all worth it sound fun right well here's the second thing though you will be a stronger tougher more resilient person that will look around at your peers one day while they're worried about whether or not they're being called the right pronouns and you will be you will have your direction you'll have resolve you'll have a intestinal fortitude you'll have gusto that will run circles around an increasingly fragile society and you will have what is so lacking in america today grittiness and toughness and that is something that i want to instill in every single young person so yeah it's going to be tough we here at turning point usa are here to help you get through that through our networking events through our young women's leadership summit through our chapter events through the events like this tonight so you know you're not alone but we want to try to continue to rise up the citizen of young people and students to be able to take a stand but it's gonna be tough but it's worth it god bless you thanks for being here tonight hi i wanted to ask how would you advise that those of us who plan to stay in california effectively convince others to do the same instilling the same passion to fight for a conservative california instead of fleeing to other conservative states yeah that's a great question right so start local i think that for those that live in orange county take back orange county orange county is a great project focus on it it's doable if you're not personally volunteering for local candidates get involved orange county is a great first step it really is on a variety of ways whether it be congressional involvement whether it be city council school board super important look you're not going to be able to change the whole state in just one election cycle it's not going to happen i know a lot of people were upset with the results of the recall i certainly was but i really was in support of the recall then and now i thought it was a great thing to show the people in charge in sacramento that they're at least still going to have to get up and you know pretend that they represent their voters spend a bunch of money and i think it also invigorated a lot of you to get involved in the process that you otherwise would not have been involved in i thought it was a really beautiful thing so um and also i just got to say that from a political standpoint which is not you know something that i'll just talk about personally not on behalf of turning point usa in the sense which is if the the races you get involved from a congressional standpoint in orange county they can and will determine the future of the house of representatives in washington dc so all the while it might feel as if the state is lost but the there's five congressional districts in orange county or do they go down to four now with the new maps there's three now there used to be five if i'm not mistaken right there yeah there's four so those four i don't know how they probably obliterated the maps right but um the direction of those four seats will be highly consequential to whether or not it'll be speaker pelosi or a republican speaker of the house right that's a very very important dividing line um and so finally i'll say with this though is that one of the keys to saving california is continually getting the churches to rise up and to speak truth and i we have some pastors here in the audience that have done such an amazing job james kadis was here rob mccoy jack kibbs uh so many phenomenal people and then uh look if you believe california is your home and is your future then don't allow someone to just automatically take your future in your home from you fight for every inch and i believe that it's going to be a long-term project but there is there's a lot more hope for california than i think people realize thank you god bless you i appreciate it hi charlie my name is jared i'm the president of the turning point chapter at europe linda high school awesome so last week on april 5th in a 382 vote my school board passed a resolution to ban critical race theory in my district so my question is what's the next steps to ensuring that we have a good education even after that ban that's great so it's a two-part dance um so that's great now you need to say okay let's get pro-american curriculum in our schools so what does that look like right um hillsdale college has done a lot of work in this so we're starting to do a lot at turning point usa but we have to teach people what is the american story what is the prop what is the proper way to view american history what is america was it a mistake was it something that just kind of fell out of the sky there's just a couple things i'll share here that i think could really excite high school students that they're definitely not taught in school um america was summoned into existence at a time and a place that is very unusual in fact it's almost never happened before in human history most civilizations or countries stumble into existence they're not summoned into existence i want you to think about that there was a decision to create america china just kind of existed and you know it's kind of the yangtze river valley civilization is kind of built into itself indus river valley into india and so on and so forth but america was a group of people that made a decision founding fathers we have a set of principles we don't like what's happening we're going to declare independence of things that are always true and i'm afraid that most young people are not just being taught that even worse they're being taught the opposite they're being taught the founding fathers where racist bigoted slave owners and they don't know their history they don't know that the first anti-slavery convention in america was hosted in philadelphia by benjamin franklin in 1775. they don't know that nine out of 13 states before the constitution was ratified in 1787 had already independently abolished slavery they didn't a lot of young people never taught that vermont was the first state to abolish slavery in 1777 inspired by the declaration of independence so the next step is get your local school districts not just teach this but inspire young people to be excited about the country they live in a lot of young people i think are unnecessarily depressed and negative about their life because they've been told the one thing that you have a yearning to associate with your country is awful deep down i think most people actually want to support their home and you kind of see that when you start to see like a dodgers hat here and like a rams hat here like that's a different way of kind of showing association that you care about where you're from yet the one thing they're trying to get rid of is the jersey of america like and that's something i think that excites people it creates happier lives it creates stronger communities when obviously you're like you know what i in america here in california have a direct connection to a time where people decided to say that self-government was a moral issue and that separation of powers and consent to the government was worthy of protection and preservation and they were willing to do something about it i think it actually creates a much happier country to live in than one where you think everything is racist bigoted awful colonialistic homophobic and backwards at some point that only way you could solve that question is to revolutionize the country and that's what they're trying to get young people to do it's like if all that buildup was nothing but evil then you might as well just burn it all down to the ground so we as conservatives and answer your question in your belinda the home of richard nixon if i'm not mistaken right um is uh is to do this which is to say to your local school district we want to create a curriculum that creates grateful and informed citizens and an informed sense of patriotism that is not political that is essential to the survival of the country thanks for being here tonight god bless you hey charlie my name is jonathan i go to cal state fullerton i guess i have a simple question um like in a family full of like conservatives we're kind of the minority in the in a grand family i just want to know how i can converse with the rest of my family being like liberal and especially my friends as well um without obviously causing discourse and too much hurt i guess yeah um well never be the source of hurt that's my first piece of advice so don't be the one to call names or you know um try to disassociate from people but i think every conservative here in this audience would agree that you lost friends but they left you you didn't leave them a lot and that's i never support the severing of friendships over politics but i'm also realistic it happens all the time where people stop being friends with you because of politics i bet every single person in this room could resonate with that so look this is a this is a situation where you're going to have to balance are you going to tell the truth when there might be a consequence to it right and it's also how you say it it's also how you communicate it having that balance of 100 grace with 100 truth trying to be magnanimous in how you communicate i think is really really important but also um you know understanding that in family dynamics um there you have to prioritize whether or not you want the family to kind of stay together or whether or not you want to make a political point and i don't say this advice slightly there's some politics that should there's some families that should never discuss politics um and there's an argument for that it's like they're so rigid in their beliefs it's just going to cause a civil war now some people say you know what i'm going to you know say what i want to say and i know personally dozens of examples of parents that don't talk to children anymore and that's really unhealthy i think it's not good at all um but it's a balance i think that everyone should know where you stand um and then the final piece of advice is go to work on the family members where there's a little bit of openness if you believe that you're right if we believe we're right then start to send articles ask questions start to understand their you know their points of where they think that they view the world in a certain way like well i just want to help people like okay then start to find things where all of a sudden left-wing policies are not helping people right like how exactly does it help people when the borders wide open and women are being sex trafficked across there every single day how does that help people exactly and start to ask those questions but um and then with your friends i mean i kind of answered that already just um you know you're probably going to lose friends and i'll probably continue and also know the difference between good faith arguments and bad faith arguments do not waste your time in bad faith arguments just don't if people are just putting their hands in their ears saying i don't want to hear anymore just disengage but if people are really curious and they're dialoguing with you that's worth your time but don't waste your time you and you could use your own prudence and your wisdom to navigate that thanks for being here tonight appreciate it [Applause] hey charlie uh i love your comment about how you said we should encourage younger people to invest and like buy property and buy land um recently florida's governor ronda sanchez he passed uh sb i think 10 50 10 44 i forgot the exact name he wants to encourage or he wants to teach financial literacy yes um is that something it's kind of surprising because i've seen a poll that said a lot of parents disagreed with schools teaching financial literacy and do you think that's something that um that as a nation like can be pushed forward and financially can be taught across all schools yeah i mean it depends what the devils in the details like what do they mean by financial literacy right uh if the federal government is teaching us about financial literacy certainly exactly trust them on that can balance a budget to save their lives right so um but no i think financial literacy is super important but here's the thing is that so if you if you take a financial literacy textbook from 2003 or whatever right they'll say saving is good save as much money as you can right that's probably something you were taught in financial literacy that's actually really bad advice right now like you shouldn't be saving money right now you're gonna lose it you're like what do you mean inflation like you're getting poorer every day that money's in a bank account so yeah people need to know that that's really important now i hope and i wish for a set of economic circumstances that reward good behavior and don't reward bad behavior uh saving is a good behavior we should have a society that does reward saving but right now we don't right now people get actively poor when they have cash sitting in their bank account and so um to kind of piggyback on this i i do i do support financial literacy i think it's super important the lack thereof is unbelievable to me um i think that a lot of the financial models kind of prey on young people and their illiteracy when it comes to credit cards and debt and all of that and the first thing is this is why i can't believe this is not a law i want to start with financial literacy like okay you want to go borrow 80 000 to go to some school to study some kind of super fringe degree like can we can we put some more checks and balances in for that like before you actually know what you're signing up for it was an amazing poll that showed like 45 to 50 percent of young people are borrowing money student loan debt without their parents understanding how much money it actually is or their payment plan post graduation that's insane the way it used to work is you had to go dress up in a suit and tie and go to your local community bank and you'd have to persuade a banker to give you a loan to be able to go to college and you know what they would say show me your grades what are you going to study and how are you going to pay our bank back and now you can go borrow 80 000 in your pajamas from your basement and your parents might not even know that and so yeah i'm a big supporter and an advocate of getting more people financially literate and finally to be able to have young people um own property is what we would call a conservatizing event a people that own homes they don't go burn wendy's they don't when you have a mortgage you don't go march in the streets against like systemic inequality like your responsibility we need to try to create a set of circumstances more more young people have responsibility in their lives the first of which is do you own property like do you own something that eventually could get more valuable and you have a reason to keep going to work when you're renting that's not always the case and so and then you might say well charlie i own a car well that's a depreciating asset well actually not anymore amazingly used cars are not a depreciating asset everything's upside down right remember the financial literacy stuff it's like the more you drive it it's actually getting more value so strange um it's not sustainable i'm just giving you a warning this stuff is not system when you have cars that have 60 000 miles on them going more than what a used car did two years ago that's like a fire alarm something ain't right i'm telling you not sustainable thank you for your question appreciate it hi charlie my name is kiara and i'm the president of the turning point usa chapter at san diego state university thank you as we enter into yet another very important election cycle and with campaign ads popping up left and right i find myself feeling torn on the citizens united versus fec ruling my question is what is the conservative approach to the supreme court's ruling that corporation spending on campaign election communications can be unlimited that corporations are people and that their spending doesn't need to be regulated yes so let me let me walk you through this great question by the way and you do a wonderful job you gave one of the best school board speeches i've seen by the way you did a phenomenal job you really did so it's a great question so let's go through the lawsuit the lawsuit was an organization called citizens united run by david bossie uh and it was about a movie actually the question was whether or not a movie that attacks a political candidate is political speech that needs to be regulated by the federal election commission okay so it goes all the way up to the supreme court and there was a couple there's a couple questions i want you to think about before i get to the opinion and a lot of the even left-wingers will agree that there might be some problems here where there was a question in front of the u.s supreme court someone asked they said wait a second would you consider for example a book written unfavorably about hillary clinton to be political speech that should be regulated and they said yes so i think that's incredibly dangerous i think that if all of a sudden my podcast my radio program my articles and my books will be start regulated as if it's a campaign ad on television i think there's something very wrong with that in fact that's what would have been the standard we would have expanded a speech bureaucracy that would go after anyone any person any time and say that's the equivalent of running an ad on television that's the equivalent of running a 30-second ed that's that that is that is an attack on journalism on commentary and speech but you do bring up a good point which i will say i do not think it's healthy nor do i think it's sustainable to have major corporations that whether it be the pharmaceutical corporations or labor unions or kind of public sector unions or tech oligarchs like reid has things or you know reid hoffman or um you know any one of the big tech billionaires zuckerberg or bill gates be able to parachute in and completely basically carpet bomb a race and make it where it matters less of what the candidates messages and it's just who's going to get the more outside money now this is an important point the left they're always trying to repeal citizens united so basically the decision the cities united was you can spend as much money as you want no matter what there'll be no restriction on it okay now because of that believe it or not the left has always been trying to get rid of that in 2020 left-wing groups spent 1.5 billion dollars conservative groups spent 900 million dollars so it's actually the left that has been using this more in recent years understanding they can pump a lot of what's called dark money into the system and trying to change you know persuasion and outcomes and all this let me just talk about from like a health of society standpoint um i don't like it i i wouldn't i don't like the idea that someone can just parachute in with 500 million dollars like 400 million like mark zuckerberg and change the way elections themselves are actually done so what is the conservative approach i think the conservative approach should be the following that you make sure that political speech by individuals commentators podcasts authors and movies are protected no matter what that is not political speech however i would support a law that is common sense and transparent that would say that if you're going to donate you must be disclosed within 24 hours that there's no more anonymous donations we must know where it's coming from no more like giving through shell stuff or dark money we want to be able to see it and i do think that a reasonable cap on money and racist is something that i think would actually de-radicalize our politics when all of a sudden we're starting to say that the pennsylvania senate race is going to be 185 million dollar senate race and wisconsin's going to be 110 million senate race what then ends up happening unfortunately massive corporations that don't always have our country's best interests at heart like disney will come in and start to run ads and then candidates will then be beholden to those corporations to not represent their voters but instead the people that drop the biggest ad spend towards the end of the campaign and i don't think that's a good thing in fact i think we can have common cause on the left so i'm worried that if we just blanket say yeah you know repeal that decision political speech from people like me would then soon to be regulated but i do think that a common sense middle ground could be found where all of a sudden we try to make it see we say there has to be some form of transparency and regulation with the amount of money pouring into some of these races um and i don't know about you i'm so sick and tired of seeing these political ads already it is exhausting i don't think it's i don't think it's good to constantly see negative political ads about how awful things are on this person and i i don't think it's healthy or good thank you for your question you're doing a great job thank you so charlie you've been a very strong supporter of president trump but when lockdown has descended on our country two years ago president trump did not take a strong stand for freedom he consistently refused to fire dr fauci on march 20th 2020 he gave a press conference where he said that gavin newsom and andrew cuomo locking down their states he said they're taking bold strong steps and i applaud them on april 22nd he criticized brian kemp for reopening georgia and he also attacked thomas massey for criticizing the two trillion dollar cares act which has contributed at least as much to this inflationary crisis as anything biden's done so when trump did not stand up for our liberties why should we stand for him as opposed to say ron desantis in 2024 okay um fair question uh so let me just first take my opinion uh let's just so you know where i i stand so i wrote a book that was published in february 2020 called the mega doctrine uh defending trump and his policies and all that you're right um and then with all of that i came out in march and april saying that this fouchy guy's got to go i was against lockdowns federal spending so i've been consistent all the way through even publicly disagreeing with the trump administration i think trump's instincts were right i will push back a little bit i think his instincts were right um and i think he was suffocated and unfortunately overwhelmed by a deep state medical bureaucracy that scared the living daylights o