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Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest growing conservative youth activist organization in the country with over 250,000 student members, over 150 full-time staff, and a presence on over 2,000 high school and college campuses nationwide. Charlie is also the Chairman of Students for Trump, which aims to activate one million new college voters on campuses in battleground states in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month and according to Axios, he is one of the "top 10 most engaged" Twitter handles in the world. He is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which regularly ranks among the top news shows on Apple podcast charts.
Connor Boyack on Teaching Kids Liberty Through Tuttle Twins Books After Disney's Snow White Flop
Connor Boyack, author of the Tuttle Twins book series, joins Charlie Kirk to discuss how families are pushing back against modern entertainment and seeking resources that teach children timeless principles. With Disney's Snow White remake flopping at the box office, parents are searching for content that celebrates liberty, entrepreneurship, and American founding principles. Boyack explains how the Tuttle Twins books fill a gap in children's education, offering families simple stories that introduce ideas like free markets, property rights, and personal freedom, concepts increasingly absent from schools and mainstream media.
The Cultural Backlash Against Modern Entertainment
Connor Boyack, author of the Tuttle Twins books, joins Charlie Kirk to discuss the growing parental pushback against modern entertainment. Disney's Snow White remake, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, became a box office flop, demonstrating that millions of families reject modernized versions of classic stories. Charlie Kirk notes that families don't want a "repurposed modern take" on beautiful stories that have existed for over a hundred years.
Boyack sees this as part of a larger trend of families stepping up and refusing content that doesn't align with their values. He emphasizes that what parents have lacked are resources to help them teach their children good ideas and principles that aren't being shared in schools or on social media.
What Are the Tuttle Twins Books
The Tuttle Twins books are a resource for parents to read alongside their children, featuring simple and fun stories that introduce ideas of human flourishing. The series covers the power of entrepreneurship, the importance of personal freedom, why merit matters, property rights, and free markets—the ideas upon which America was built.
Boyack points out that increasingly in American schools, these ideas are not only not taught, but when similar concepts are addressed, they're presented in opposite ways. Parents then wonder how their children became "brainwashed social justice warriors" when they go off to college. The answer, according to Boyack, is that parents haven't engaged their children's minds when they were younger.
The Tuttle Twins aims to help parents engage their children with these ideas in a simplified, fun way so that when they go off to college or get on with their life, they have a foundation of true principles to rest on.
Making Liberty Digestible for Children
Charlie Kirk acknowledges that finding good kids books is very hard and asks how Boyack incorporates these beautiful ideas—liberty and family-friendly content—in a way that kids actually want to read. This isn't a textbook or Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom," but those ideas distilled in a digestible way for a child.
Boyack shares that when they started the Tuttle Twins in 2014 with their first book, they received pushback even from conservatives and libertarians who said, "Wait, let kids be kids. We don't need to talk to them about these big adult ideas. We can wait until they're getting close to voting age."
However, after the BLM and DEI movements of recent years, nobody on their side talks that way anymore because they see what the left is doing—pushing out a cacophony of content whether it's cartoons, books, or online material. Parents now recognize that their children's minds are "ground zero in an ideological battlefield." If parents don't give their children armor, weaponry, and knowledge of the enemy, then their children will become casualties.
Empowering Parents to Teach
The biggest problem Boyack encounters is freedom-loving moms and dads who want their kids to learn these ideas but feel ill-equipped to explain and teach them. Parents increasingly feel that they don't know how to talk to their kids about economics or history because they did poorly in those subjects in school 20 years ago.
That's where the Tuttle Twins come in. Parents don't need any prerequisites or prior knowledge. They can just read fun storybooks with their kids. The books include discussion questions at the end so families can have meaningful conversations.
Boyack shares his belief that America won't be saved at the capital or in the courtroom, even though engagement in both places is important. If the country is going to be saved, it's at the family dinner table. Americans have to rebuild social fabric and model for children what civic engagement and critical thinking look like. This requires empowering parents to do this daily in their homes, creating an environment where they can incubate strong, entrepreneurial, critical-thinking minds that can be the future of saving the country.
From Idea to Over 6 Million Copies Sold
Charlie Kirk asks how Boyack conceptualized all of this, noting there are many similar duo-based children's series like the Hardy Boys that follow characters on adventures.
Boyack explains that he and his partner Elijah, who illustrates the books, both had young kids at the time. They're both passionate about freedom—Elijah had worked on the Ron Paul campaign, and Boyack had been helping. They had discussed partnering together at some point.
Meanwhile, Boyack started a think tank, Libertas Institute, and was out fighting for freedom. He wanted to share with his kids what dad does. When he was helping a farmer fight eminent domain to save his land, he wanted to tell his 5-year-old what dad did all day, rather than just saying he "typed on a computer."
He did what any dad would do in his position—he went on Amazon in 2013 and searched for "books that teach about property rights for kids" and "children's books about free markets." There was nothing. While there were other children's series for adventure and ideas like kindness and honesty, for economic ideas, civic and political ideas, and historical content, there really was nothing.
That was the spark. Boyack and Elijah did a book with no vision of what it would become—it was just something they wanted for their kids. A lot of people bought it and asked when they were doing the second one, and a series was born.
Things didn't really explode until COVID with all the craziness that happened. Suddenly families were asking what's happening to their country. All the freedoms they had been taking for granted were now under assault. And they were suddenly homeschoolers because all the schools were shut down. That was the Tuttle Twins' big moment to really break through and start selling over a million books per year.
Books for All Ages and Educating Entire Families
When Charlie Kirk asks if there are books for toddlers aged two to four, Boyack confirms they have board books for toddlers such as "The ABCs of Liberty" and "The One Two Threes of the Bill of Rights"—indestructible books that toddlers can slobber on and still learn about freedom. They also have books for teenagers, running the entire gamut no matter the age of the child.
Boyack shares that when they've surveyed their audience, over 52% of parents tell them that they are learning new things for the first time. Even though they got these books for their kids, they're educating entire families.
A Vision for America's Future
Boyack emphasizes that while groups like Turning Point USA engage on college campuses—which is important—we must also invest earlier and help families incubate these ideas even earlier. This helps solve so many other problems downstream.
He references the NAEP scores that came out about a year ago—the National Assessment of how kids are learning in America. They found that for eighth graders, when they tested them on American history, only 13% were proficient. Not 30%, but 13%. Boyack asks what becomes of America if the future voters are so ignorant about the past. Those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
His vision for the country is to empower families across America to learn these ideas together, to give their children an intellectual, ideological, and historical foundation so that as they go out into society and are bombarded with garbage from peers, social media, academia, or whatever else, they'll be able to withstand it. They won't be impressionable robots assimilated into the "Borg hive mind." They'll have the capacity to think critically and act independently.
But this requires putting in the work. Americans can't assume best intentions of a system that's clearly been corrupted, where the curriculum has been dumbed down. Parents need help. They need a lifeline. They want to step in and help their kids. That's what the Tuttle Twins is trying to be—a resource for them to do exactly that.
