https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CqU7D_ONJQs

I’m in a new place, trying out something new. I’m talking to Charlie Kirk, and Charlie is a native of Chicago, and he’s been working, building an organization in the U.S. to promote free speech on campuses. For how long now? It’s been six years now. Okay, well, I’m going to let you take it away and tell people exactly what you’ve been up to. Sure. So I started this organization called Turning Point USA when I was 18 years old. It took a very unusual path to it. I decided to start this movement instead of going to college. I saw something brewing in the states that I felt more instinctual than anything else, that there was a countercultural kind of revolution that needed to happen on our college and high school campuses, and I saw it through social media, and I saw it through my local high school community, that my generation was being so inundated with cultural Marxism, and also economic Marxism, but even worse, it was the cultural side of it, and that my generation was yearning for a different perspective and political viewpoint, or at least ideological diversity and the capacity to have your viewpoints challenged. So it started as kind of a whim, has ended up to be a quite large success. When I started this organization, I had no idea what I was doing. I had no political connections and no money, so that was a good start. So you started thinking about this when you were in high school, obviously. That’s correct. Okay, so what happened in high school, and how did you come to these conclusions, and what motivated you? Always loved history, economics, and of the more conservative persuasion. My lifelong ambition, I wanted to go to the United States Military Academy at West Point, which is a very difficult school to get into in the States, so I got my congressional nomination, which is the first of a two-step process, and then I ended up being wait-listed and denied on my senior year of high school, which totally shattered me, but ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me, because it really made me reflect on who I was and what I wanted to do. And what I realized is my motivation to go to the Military Academy was that I was a patriot and I loved my country, and I wanted to serve it in some capacity, but I felt like the West was under attack, and I still feel that to this day. So why do you think you developed a sense of patriotism in, say, junior high and high school when that is increasingly lacking, I would say, not only lacking, but seriously criticized? What made you different? It’s difficult to say. I definitely love my country based on my upbringing, but by my… What about your upbringing? My parents are generally center-right people, and we are always taught patriotic values from a young age, read the Constitution around the dinner table, things like that, but I’m disagreeable by nature. And so when my teachers would go out of their way to make anti-American or anti-patriotic statements, it only made me reaffirm my own beliefs and dig in deeper and want to challenge that even more, which I then sought out the great thinkers of the American founding, the the U.S. Constitution, and down that rabbit hole, I went to the great thinkers that created Western civilization, both intentionally and unintentionally, whether it be Aristotle and all the great, you know, thousands of years of writings that the founding fathers drew inspiration from. Did you do that on your own in high school? That’s correct. It was autodidactic, so it was self-taught, in middle school as well. But it was driven by this inspiration of I wanted to be able to effectively articulate my beliefs and values and ideas to a core of teachers that felt as if they had to indoctrinate me to hate America, hate free enterprise, and hate free speech. So I grew up in a rather generally liberal area of the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, and the teacher community for the most part, they were not trying to allow a free flow of ideas. They were trying to impose a specific doctrine upon their students. And being a disagreeable contrarian by nature, I would always debate them and I would find in proving them wrong as wrong or right as that might be. That’s just who I was. That’s who I always have been. And then by doing so, I sought out these books, I sought out these ideas, and I found Milton Friedman and I found individuals that articulated what I knew to be true, and I only went down that path even further. So what did that do for your social life, just out of curiosity? How are your peers reacting to this? So it’s quite interesting you mentioned that. So I was heavily involved in football and basketball and a generally well-liked individual. Ever since my graduation of high school and my entrance into political and social activism, the hostility from my high school community towards me has been extreme. I’m not trying to play a victim, I’m fine with it. Those people were never my friends, they just pretended to be as such. But it’s amazing to me that you just have a different viewpoint on how the world should on the left will immediately ostracize you and categorize you differently. And I always say, I’m a conservative, I don’t look at people that are on the left any differently than I did. I look at who they are as a character and as a person, and the politics are just layered on top of that. The left is completely different. If you disagree with them, that’s who you become. And I think that’s one of the most cancerous and divisive aspects of modern political culture today is that, especially my generation, if you dare not be a leftist or dare not be a liberal, then you’re somehow less human, or you’re somehow less acceptable to them, or you’re immediately intolerant or racist or bigoted or homophobic, which of course is untrue. But it’s almost as if they view you as a subspecies of them, which I’m experiencing every day and some of the categorizations thrown towards you, it seems that in popular culture that remains consistent as well. So tell me about your organization. Tell me its scope now and what you’ve been doing and then we can talk about how you built it. Of course. So we’re on 1,300 college and high school campuses across the states. We have 115 people on full-time staff and last year we raised 15 million budget this year and it’s been quite an experience and a blessing to say the least, right place, right time with a great group of people. And how many campuses now? 1,300 college and high school campuses represented throughout the states. And so what’s happening at the high school level? Chapter development. It’s quite interesting. We have seen an explosion of high school interest and chapter development over the last couple years especially because the activism that is so prevalent in our colleges has now seeped down into our high schools. And so students that are finding my videos or finding Dave Rubin or Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager or your content, they’re now 14, 15 and 16 and they seek out that content because they have to if they want to be able to defend their beliefs. It used to be that college used to be the only place that these ideas were really not the only place I should say but the main focus of the left was colleges, no more. I mean they are teaching the beginning stages of postmodernism as early as freshman years in high school where there is no such thing as absolute truth. Or in Ontario as early as grade one. That’s correct, yeah, that’s right. In Ontario the Elementary Teachers Association, that’s not quite the right name, maybe it’s Ontario Teachers Federation. I can’t remember at the moment but they’ve put together a social justice curriculum from grade one to grade eight which even bends the study of literature itself in a social justice direction. So they’re so shameless that they’re willing to bend art to the purposes of political propaganda. It’s stunning. It is, it’s quite remarkable. So what do you expect from the high school chapters? What is it that they’re doing that you think is good and useful? So it’s a different strategy and it’s a different implementation that our staff goes about when they deal with high school students. The number one thing with high school students, high school chapters that we deal with is trying to make it culturally acceptable to believe these conservative ideas. So even if they meet weekly and bring in a guest speaker of a local political nature or they watch a video, it’s much more of a camaraderie building activity in high school than in college. And I say that because the mindset of being in high school is quite different. In college, you’re entering into kind of that rugged independence, I want to rebel or conform to my parents’ ideology. In high school, you still are still very much anchored to your local and cultural institutions, your high school football team, your basketball team. And so but we’ve here, that’s exactly right. Whereas college, by the dynamic of the geography of college, you try to break out of that. But we try to hold them, the high school chapters, to a specific standard of at least meeting weekly trying to go to some of our big national events, hosting guest speakers, debates and lectures. So a great example is in the States, there was that horrific shooting down in Parkland High School. I’m going to go down, I’m actually going down to MSD, the school where the shooting took place. I’m going to give a speech on the Second Amendment and natural rights. They’re not allowing me on campus, but I’m doing it right across the street. So that’s one of the groups we have. When are you doing that? Not Tuesday, coming up this Tuesday. They say it’s highly controversial, which I don’t consider it to be. The Second Amendment is some would say a controversial thing, people that aren’t in the States. The First Amendment is controversial. That’s exactly what I was going to say is that the idea of natural rights doesn’t, shouldn’t offend anyone, but unfortunately it does. So that’s one example of an event that I have on a high school kind of arena that I’m doing coming up. Okay. And then at the university level, you have, you said 1500, 1300? So 1300 is the number high school and college combined. So that’s divided about 900 college, 400 high school. And do you have any estimate for total membership? It’s difficult to say. So to give you an idea, we had 3000 students attend our annual meeting last year and we had over 14,000 applications. And so membership is well beyond that. But it’s definitely in the tens of thousands. Our total data list is in the hundreds of thousands. We have over a million Facebook followers. I have a half million followers on Twitter. That’s a very difficult thing to pinpoint. We don’t want to define. That’s correct. We don’t want to be like the AARP where you have 7 million people on your mailing list and you pretend they’re all members. But we’re very much more into the quality of leadership than the quantity of leaders. So that’s the one thing I’d rather have a hundred dedicated principled movement driven student leaders than a thousand that are just kind of lackluster and are there for the free pizza or pop. And what are you hoping for from the university chapters? So that’s much more disruptive. We want to challenge the status quo head on and do everything we possibly can to try to change the trajectory of our generation. And so our organization offers that in a lot of different ways, whether it be offering guest speakers on campus such as myself. So this last week I spoke at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Los Angeles, UC Berkeley and UCLA. One day after the other we had a packed house, every seat filled. We had a lot of protesters, a lot of opposition, hundreds of thousands of people watched the live stream. The live stream will hit a million people on kind of going, retroactive views happening right now throughout this next week. I knew you said you were there with Rubin. That’s correct. I was there with Dave Rubin and Candace Owens. So Candace Owens works for us. She’s our communications director. Oh, okay. Yeah. So Candace is a superstar. In fact, she just got a nice shout out from Kanye West saying, I love the way Candace Honestly, it’s hard to even put into words the significance of a rap artist like him singling out a conservative minded pundit like Candace. I think there’s a seismic shift happening in America in the black community that is going to be a generational ideological civil war in the words of Candace Owens. So we went to UC Berkeley and UCLA. What’s interesting about Candace Owens is she uses identity politics against the left. And so truth should be colorblind. And any individual should be able to say what they want to say despite their skin color, their gender. Unfortunately, that’s not the case on a college campus. So I’ll say something that might trigger the audience. But Candace will say that. And they’re perfectly okay with that. And that shouldn’t be the case. But that just shows how… But it must be harder for her on the contrary side to be conservative and black. Without a doubt. And the societal punishment she receives for that is horrific. Like what? What’s happening? Well, the things that they… I mean, the words they call her, I wouldn’t even repeat on camera, but the nice ones are Uncle Tom, Coon, things of that nature. She has a very… just the harsh backlash for what she believes and what she feels. Because how dare she stray away from the ideological monopoly that the left has on the black community? And for those people that don’t know that might be watching internationally, the Democrat Party receives 96 to 97% of all black voters in America, despite the Democrat policies having the worst impact on the black community. And so Candace is trying to wake up that community. And so we’re happy to have her as our communications director and help enhance her vision to try to at least get people to think differently. Yeah, I’m going to talk to Warren Farrell later today. And he just wrote a book called The Boy Crisis. In there he talks a fair bit about the pernicious effect of fatherlessness. And that’s something that I’m very interested in. In Ontario we have, as part of standard political policy, that all families are equal. You know, and the idea there is that respect should be given to familial units regardless of their structure. And you know, there’s something to be said for that, because people have to struggle through life the best they can, whether they’re single parents or regardless of how they put their family together. But the empirical data on the catastrophe of fatherlessness is extraordinarily solid and deep. And it seems to be something, in principle, that’s a particular plague for the black community. That’s correct. And I guess I’m wondering too, like, with the conservative approach to that, have you guys focused on the problems of fatherlessness? And what’s your take on that? Oh, without a doubt, if I had to pinpoint one societal trend that has harmed the black community the most, it would be the rise of single motherhood in the US. So to give a number, just so people understand, the single motherhood rate in the 1960s was about 18% in the black community. Now it’s 77%. 77% of US blacks will grow up never knowing their father. There is no rational argument that that is healthy for a society. There’s an article in the Atlantic Monthly just two weeks ago showing that, which is notable, right? Because it’s not like the Atlantic is a right-leaning magazine. Anything but. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I mean, they can be even-handed when they’re at their best. And they reviewed the new evidence that was presented in this research paper, which I also read, showing that if you look at those few locals where poor black people and poor white people do approximately as well, if you track them over a reasonable amount of time, the thing that characterizes the high-functioning poorer places is the presence of fathers. That’s exactly right. And they said that not only, the researchers claimed that not only was that good in the immediate family, so to have your father around, but in neighborhoods where having fathers around is the norm, every boy in particular does better in the neighborhoods. That’s right. And crime goes down. The likelihood of not going to prison obviously goes down. But the interesting question is we have to ask why. So we as conservatives always try to ask, what is the reason this is happening? Whereas the left, I don’t always think they go through that or they ignore it willingly. The reason is because the great society that was passed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in the where the U.S. government literally subsidized single motherhood, where if you got married, you lost your government check. And it still exists to this day in the states where the idea and the intention was, well, let’s try to help single mothers. Okay, that’s fine. I don’t think anyone doesn’t want to help single mothers. The problem is as soon as you get married, you lose that check because it was a program designed for single motherhood. And so when you incentivize bad behavior, you get more of it. And that’s exactly what you’ve seen in the states. You couple that with a disastrous public education system run by public sector teacher unions that have no accountability, protected by tenure, and really embrace mediocrity to its highest form with failing urban cities with Democrat mayors that have no grasp of free enterprise or how to properly run any sort of organization, let alone a massive municipality or city. That’s why you have the black community failing so much. The final point I’ll say is this. In the states, the two poorest communities by race, if you will, are the two communities that receive the most government assistance per capita, the Native American community and the African American community. And so we can draw a direct correlation and distinction between the rise of the welfare state in America and actually the decline of the black community and Native American community. And but the solution to that is black fathers. And so we always say black fathers matter. Well, there seems to be an employment issue too. I mean, that’s a complicated problem because the employment market for people who are less skilled has been, I would say, in decline, especially on the male end of the distribution. One of the stats that Farrell cites is that three quarters of women will not consider seriously dating an unemployed man, whereas one third of men would have a problem dating an unemployed woman. So there’s obviously a gender bias there. And I think there’s a reason for that. I think that it’s grounded in both rationality and evolutionary biology. The evolutionary biology element is that women across cultures tend to mate across and up hierarchies, let’s say. And the reason for that, I think, is that they’re logically, and this is where the logic comes in as well as the biology, they’re looking for a partner that can be of substantial economic utility, practical utility, when they put themselves in the vulnerable position of having a child. So then you also have this additional problem, is if the employment situation tanks in any serious way, then men become less desirable as partners. And your claim, I guess, in part, is that by filling that void, the government actually contributes to the problem rather than addressing it. Exactly right. And that’s tied in, I suppose, too, with the high rates of incarceration for black people in the United States. And you have a negative feedback loop where you get more of that bad behavior. So the black fathers go to prison, so they’re not there to raise the kids. The kids go to gangs, so they’ll end up either dead in prison, hopeless, or completely directionless. The black single mothers who want to continue to do what’s right for the community, they’re left with very few choices, have more kids. Right. So it’s a negative feedback loop. So you have bad behavior reinforcing more bad behavior subsidized by the government. Then you have the complete destruction of what used to be a somewhat civilized portion of American life, which if you look at the worst areas in America, it’s the inner cities, predominantly with the African-American community. And so the interesting point is, how on earth is it that black people today, their grandfathers, live a better life than their fathers? Is America more racist today than it was in the 1960s? Absolutely not. America’s become significantly less racist. But if you look to the American left or the social justice warriors, the academic and the neo-Marxist, they pinpoint racism as the significant driving force to why black people are doing poorly in America. Yeah, well that’s a problem too that I’ve talked about with regards to gender inequality and pay. Which you’ve been wonderful on. Yeah, well, there’s a lot of different reasons for difference. If you analyze differences in important attributes by group, whatever your group measure is, you’re going to find that there’s a dozen contributors, just to pick a number out of the air. Multi-varied analysis, to use your quote. Yeah, well, and the thing is that you can attribute a certain amount of the difference in success between groups to, let’s call it racial attitudes or ethnocentrism on the part of the dominant group. It’s complicated because in the US, Asians do really quite spectacularly well. Jews do well. Nigerians do pretty damn well. Black immigrants do quite well. That’s correct. So, it’s much more complex than a simple racial analysis would indicate. And the problem, I guess, in part with the group-fostered analysis is that people make the claim that a single factor, prejudice essentially, is the cause of all the problems. And then that has the additionally pernicious effect of blanketing everyone who isn’t in the oppressed group that’s being spoken for at the moment as oppressors. And also, and this is an even more pernicious element, and I really believe that this is part of the fundamental motivation of the pathological left, is that there’s a war on the idea of competence itself. Because if you take someone who’s worked hard and been productive and been useful and admirable in all the ways that you might hope someone was, and then you tell them that the only reason that they’ve been successful is because of their skin colour, let’s say, and the systemic racism that characterises the society, then what you do is undermine the entire idea that competence itself might be the basis of a hierarchy. And I really think that that desire to undermine the idea that hierarchies can be based on is associated with the deep Marxism that’s associated with the radical left. And I can’t think of an idea that’s more pernicious than that. That’s right. And I have to tell you, Jordan, as you know, I’ve been doing this not for a long time, but I’ve been doing it for at least an equivalent six years of college activism and organising. And your video on postmodernism and neo-Marxism, I remember exactly where I was. I was driving to the University of Michigan just a couple months ago, and I literally in my car I said, I finally get it. I finally understand what is motivating these people, the philosophy behind it. And it was an hour and a half video where you really dissected postmodernism. And it’s exactly what you just said. They want the death of the individual, the death of logos, that any sort of success can be attributed to some sort of… Arbitrary prejudice. That’s exactly right. Yes, the equation of success with arbitrary prejudice. I can’t explain to you how significant that was. Well, I also think that’s tied in with what you might describe as, let’s say, the decline of boys, assuming that that sort of thing is reasonable. If you tell boys that, first of all, that society is a patriarchy, which it isn’t, if you tell them that, and then you say, well, not only is it a patriarchy, it’s a corrupt patriarchy, it’s a corrupt, destructive, racist, prejudiced patriarchy, and that anyone who succeeds in it is therefore corrupt, prejudiced, and racist, because that’s how you would succeed in a hierarchy like that, then what you do is you associate in the minds of people who might participate in the project the idea that any success whatsoever is actually a moral flaw. And I’ve seen that happen to lots of people. That’s right. I had a friend in particular who bought that line, and he had other problems as well, but he really believed that active engagement with the world, any pursuit of success on his part for him and for his family and for his community, but let’s say for him to begin with was merely engagement in the process by which the entire world is being destroyed and brought to its knees. He really believed that, and it really, many things destroyed him, but that was certainly one of the things that destroyed him. There’s no differentiation. History is obviously a bloody nightmare, and there’s no way around that, but it’s necessary to differentiate between activity that is good and activity that is evil and to state that all activity that supports the patriarch in, God, I can’t stand it that we even have to use that language. But it is more widespread in universities than people realize. You understand it, but for most parents, there is a concerted effort to delegitimize and, I would say, destroy the idea of the white Christian male in North American schools, especially the male aspect of it. We’re taught from the beginning stages that there is a patriarchy. It’s rigged against women, when in reality the numbers show men are far more likely to commit suicide. Men are not living as long as women. Men are much more likely to go to prison, much more likely to declare bankruptcy. Much more likely to be killed at work. That’s exactly right. Women are graduating in college in record numbers. Women 14 or less, 15 years have dominated in the, have gotten more master degrees and more PhDs than men. Oh, there’s another interesting stat, too, that you never hear discussed by feminists. It actually drives me, it’s one of the many things that drives me to distraction, let’s say, is that men, let’s accept for a moment that on average men make more money than women, although the reasons for that, as we’ve already discussed, are extraordinarily complicated. Women spend, the last time I looked, something approximating 75 to 80 percent of the consumer dollar. That’s exactly right. And you can make a real, at least you can pose it as a question, it’s like, well, who has the economic upper hand? Is it the person who makes the money or is it the person who spends the money? And I think that’s a real question because most of the men that I know that are worth their salt. It’s like the competitive guys, often they’re out for money because that’s the way they keep score in the competition. You really see that in places like law firms where everyone’s heavily competitive and they’re always, they always have an eye on the bonus because they’re trying to climb up the hierarchy. And in large part, from a biological perspective, that’s actually to make them attractive to women. But if men are motivated to earn heavily, to be attractive in part, which is certainly part of it, and to take their place in the male hierarchy and to succeed there, then it also means that a huge part of their motivation is to distribute the money and to distribute it to who? Well, at least in principle, to their wife and their kids. If you’re a man of any utility and you meet another man who’s fundamentally oriented in a selfish direction, who’s hoarding his money without any concern for how it might be utilized, who’s spending it all on, let’s call them juvenile adolescent impulsive pleasures, refusing to share, it’s not like that someone that you admire. It’s someone you have contempt for right away. And so if you ever meet someone who’s like the stereotype of the successful patriarchal male, then he’s not somebody that fills you with admiration. You’re looking for someone who, and the people I know that have been successful financially, that I’ve admired, and there’s been many of them, have done amazing things. They’ve produced technologies that are world changing often, you know, and, but they’re hyper concerned with what it is that they’re going to do with their money and how it should be well spent and where it would do the most good. And I don’t want to whitewash, I don’t want to whitewash our society, but the idea that people are fundamentally motivated by the sorts of selfish motivations that only accrue benefit to them and no one else is, it’s a preposterous claim. And I just don’t see any evidence whatsoever that that’s the case. I agree. And one of the other components of it that is taught in our schools, which one of the top things I have to dispel is the idea that just because someone gets rich, someone got poor is the zero sum game. And so there’s an idea that has penetrated the minds of youth in America that I can’t believe. It’s like, oh, this guy has a million bucks, he must have stole it from someone else. Wrong. You had to create value in order to get that money. In fact, or at least some people do that. Like you could say and should say that, you know, in every hierarchical enterprise of any There’s going to be a fractional criminal element. Without a doubt. Maybe you could say, well, it’s 5% of the sum total of the activity. And the problem with the criminal part of it is that it tends not to be very self-sustaining. You know, so you hear, well, there’s lots of psychopaths in business. It’s like, yeah, but they get not really pushed out. They do. And they otherwise they have to move from place to place because their reputations follow them around. And your reputation is actually quite fragile. And so you could say, well, amongst the pool of people who are wealthy, there’s an element that have obtained that wealth through means that aren’t admirable for reasons that aren’t socially beneficial. But to then say, because of that existence of that small fraction of people, which is actually ineradicable, right? You can’t have a certain amount of freedom without a certain amount of criminality. I think America is a really good example of that. To say that that means that everyone who’s been successful is a thief. It’s like you have to be very careful when you make a claim like that, because it also means that if you’re successful, then you’re a thief. That’s a hell of a value structure to adopt. And I would make the argument that the free market system forces you to be a better person. It forces you to tell the truth and create a better product and treat your customers well and to be responsive when something goes wrong or to lower your price or to improve the mechanism of which you are interacting with the person. Well, it’s not like customers aren’t demanding and that they don’t have choice. That’s another example of a different kind of cognitive problem, let’s say, is that people are taught, people aren’t taught that comparing what we have to their hypothetical politically ideologically motivated utopia is actually a bad idea. Because it just isn’t difficult to take a look at a system like our system and say, well, look at all the problems it has compared to a hypothetical system that doesn’t have any problems at all. It’s like, well, yeah, man, there’s problems. We’ve taken like 99% of the fish out of the ocean and the degree to which our current level of economic activity is truly sustainable without alteration is at least debatable, even though I don’t think it’s nearly as terrible as people make it out to be. But I don’t think it’s disputable that our current socioeconomic structures are the most productive and the most free structures that have ever been produced by people anywhere in the world. One of the things you can say about capitalism and free enterprise and the Western stress on individuality is that even though it does produce inequality, A, all systems produce inequality, and without any real distinction between the right and the left, by the way, because there’s a new book called The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel, who I’m going to be talking to later this month. He did an analysis, empirical analysis, trying to figure out if you grouped governments by right-wing philosophy, say, or by left-wing philosophy, and then you calculated inequality coefficient, would the left-wing organizations be characterized by reduced inequality? And the answer was no, there’s no evidence that they are. And what that points to, and this is something very fundamental, it’s far more fundamental than political, is that inequality is the rule in cooperative slash competitive organizations. You can’t posit a value without producing a hierarchy, right? Because you posit a value, say, this is worth doing. Everyone says, yeah, this is worth doing. Well then what happens automatically is that it turns out that some people are better at doing it than other people, no matter what it is. And then they get better and better at it, like the Pareto principle that you talked about. Well, there’s that too, and then they start getting better at it. So the problem is that without, if you’re going to posit a value, which you have to do if you’re going to act, then immediately you create a hierarchy. And you also build into the value claim, the claim that A is better than B, you also build into that the idea that if A is better than B, then people who are doing better at A should be differentially rewarded compared to people who aren’t. There’s no way around that if you’re going to play the game. And so you’re stuck with inequality, but there isn’t any evidence that social engineering policies are really very good at dispensing with inequality, which is a fundamental political problem and no one really knows what to do about it. But criticizing the entire society. I mean, the thing about the West, and this is increasingly true all over the world, is that it’s generating, our approach generates a tremendous amount of wealth. I mean, it even happened in China, despite their exceptionally totalitarian leanings. And so what happens with the lefties is that they say, well, inequality is a consequence of the West and a consequence of capitalism, which is a palpably false claim. And they say, well, because it produces inequality, then it’s a corrupt system. It’s like, no, every system produces inequality, but hardly any also produce wealth. That’s correct. And mobility. And reward for creativity, entrepreneurial activity, and risk taking. That’s something that the free market system is quite unique at. And whereas a more neo-Marxist view, how do you get rich in a socialist country? You run for a political office. That’s true exploitation, is you run on the best intentions of the public while implementing what you believe to be the best socially engineered construct. Look at Venezuela. I mean, the leaders are doing just fine. Meanwhile, people are dying in the streets. Oh, yeah, Venezuela is a complete catastrophe. It’s 13,000% inflation, so on and so forth. So I have a question for you. And I’ve watched hundreds of hours of your content on the internet. You’ve opened up my mind in ways I cannot describe. You’ve made me a better speaker. You’ve made me a better lecturer, a better person, more organized. I can draw a direct corollary to our organization’s budget and everything from when I first interacted with your content. Because I’ve never heard anyone describe the reality of life. Life is suffering. What are you going to do about it? It’s just so bluntly and so directly, but with- Struggle up the damn hill. That’s exactly right. With a roadmap to deal with that. Because- I’ll tell you something cool, and then I’ll get to the question. Of course. Sorry. We have this program. It might be something interesting for your organization. The Future Offer program? Yeah. I’ve used it with people that deal with drug problems. Aha. Aha. Well, we have a fairly new study that came out last year from Mohawk College, which is a junior college with a vocational element. And the kids came in during the summer in their orientation and spent just an hour writing out their life plan, right? What they would like to have in their life across six standard dimensions. Intimate relationship, family, education, care of their own mental and physical health, strategies for dealing with temptation like drug and alcohol use, useful application of their time outside of their obligations. So the question is, it’s predicated on a New Testament principle, I would say, in part, which is if you could have what you wanted by asking, what would you ask for? Ask and you shall receive. Yes, exactly. Knock, knock and you will answer. Right, exactly. It’s in Matthew. Yeah, exactly. It’s in Matthew. And the idea there, I think, from a psychological perspective is that while you’re not going to get what you want unless you know what it is, you’re not going to hit a target unless you aim for it. Of course. You don’t organize your perceptions in relationship to the world unless you have a goal. Okay, so you write down what you think you might want and need in order to stand your life and then you write for a while about what your life could be like in three to five years, what your vision would be for your life three to five years and then you write a counter vision, which is an analysis of where you might be in three to five years if you let all your bad habits take the upper hand and then you write a plan. Okay, and it takes a long time to do a really good job of that, but it turns out that you can do a bad job of it in about an hour. And so we had the kids at Mohawk do it for an hour when they came in for their summer orientation and it knocked the dropout rate for young men down 50 percent. And so I thought it just blew me away because it’s sad. You know, I thought, just look at that. If you get young guys to sit down and think for an hour about what they would like their life to be, it decreases the probability that they’ll drop out of college by 50 percent. It’s like, what the hell, man? That kind of correlation, it’s just stunning. Well, and we have three studies demonstrate that was the biggest effect. I’ve seen it. I’m dealing currently with one of my best high school buddies that was on opioids. It’s a huge problem in America. And I’m guessing here in Canada, it is as well. I’m not as well versed in it. And I sat him down and I did the future authoring program and it changes life. And I made him watch all your videos and he became hooked on it. And it saved. Pedonopioids probably. Well, yeah, you saved his life. I can say that. And you changed my life. I wouldn’t say you saved because I wasn’t in that same dire condition. But the number one thing I said to him, I said, listen, buddy, I’m not going to use his name to protect his privacy. I said, your whole life, you’ve been seeking freedom. He’s like, yeah, that’s what I’ve been told. I said, things in life that give you meaning will come from responsibility. That’s what clicked. One of the things that you said that really clicked with me is because we have inundated, especially young men, go seek freedom, go do what you want, how you want to do it, when you want to do it, which is fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong to that when you’re young. But if you really want meaning, if you want satisfaction, if you want direction, it’s the stuff that has consequence. It’s family, it’s work. It’s waiting. Yeah, well, freedom is freedom. But we’re not teaching young men that. Intentionally, that’s the other thing I wanted to get to. But go ahead. Right. I think it’s intentional. Well, I think it is too, because it’s part and parcel of the idea that the productive activity of young men, and this also goes for the masculine, symbolically masculine activity of young women, by the way. But the productive activity of young men is indistinguishable from the force that gives rise to the crushing tyranny of the patriarchy. It’s like, well, and that also gives young men a moral excuse not to engage in life. It’s like, well, productive activity. I see it all the time. I’ve been told I’m a horrible person my whole life. What use is this to me? I’m going to go play video games in my basement. I’ve been told from all my teachers, my parents, that it’s rigged, that I’m a horrible individual just because I’m a man. And it really diminishes men that might want to succeed. And I see it happen all the time. Yeah. Well, and it gives an excuse to the useless part of men that don’t want to succeed, because it’s easy to sit around. I mean, it isn’t, because the long term consequences of that are just absolutely devastating. Yes. But you see, so when we have a discussion about freedom, you know, we might also say, well, the freedom is, I think this is right, it’s freedom to pick your poison. It’s freedom to pick your responsibility. That’s correct. You might say, well, there’s a set of weights in front of you that you have to pick up in order to stand yourself. Because that’s the other thing I think about human beings. Well, you know, conscientiousness is a trait. We don’t have an animal model for conscientiousness. In fact, we don’t understand conscientiousness at all from a psychological perspective. Or Darwinian perspective. Well, that’s more complicated, because conscientious men tend to do better. And so they’re going to be more successful. But we don’t have a model for what conscientiousness is. But conscientiousness is, at least in part, the necessity to carry a load for yourself and for other people, or to suffer guilt and shame as a consequence. And so that seems built in, especially to conscientious people. Now conscientious people tend to be more conservative, because that’s one of the predictors of conservatism. But it could easily be that freedom is the freedom to choose your yoke, let’s say. And then you choose the weight that you have to carry so that you can justify your miserable existence to yourself, so that you can go to bed at the end of the night and you can think, look, I did what I needed to do to set things right today. And I don’t have to carry the existential weight around of my failure and uselessness as a consequence. The existential psychologists in the 1950s, who emerged out of the chaos of World War II, were very much concentrated on the idea of existential guilt. You know, that you owed being a ransom for your existence. And the way that you paid that ransom was to work for the betterment of being. I mean, it’s a very ancient idea. But it is the one idea, I think, that gives people the self-respect, not self-esteem, the self-respect that’s necessary to carry them through terrible times. And to use a story that people are familiar with, when I’m asked, well, what has Jordan Peterson done for your members, the people you know? I say, he hasn’t stopped acting like Peter Pan. So I think they can actually be a man and not a boy. Well, the Peter Pan story is a really interesting one, because Peter Pan, Pan means everything, right? Technically, that’s what Pan means. And Peter Pan wants to be a child because a child can be anything, can be everything, right? So what you have in childhood is that a plethora of potential. And the problem with growing up is that you have to sacrifice that Pan potential for a defined actuality, right? That’s to grow up and become something instead of staying potentially anything. Now, the problem with Peter Pan is that he looks into the world and sees Captain Hook as his role model, right? And so that’s his model for adulthood. And Hook is terrified of death. The crocodile is chasing him with a clock in his stomach and the crocodile already has a piece of him, it’s got a taste of him. And so Hook is constantly chased by the dragon of chaos, essentially, that’s already got a taste of him. And because Hook is terrified of his own mortality and terrified in general, he’s a tyrant. And so Pan looks at Hook and says, well, if that’s adulthood, I’d rather stay king of the lost boys. That’s exactly right. And so, yeah, it’s a very powerful story, which is why people still tell it 100 years later. That’s correct. And I think, at least from my experience, is that the idea of staying a boy is idolized and is made more culturally acceptable in America than ever has been. And it’s almost as if that… You ask a young man that is generally on the direction towards hopelessness and just kind of what you bring men out of, it is they look towards that MTV, VH1 lifestyle of being able to do whatever you want to do, how you want to do it, get extraordinarily drunk, have no responsibility, be with women all day long. What happens, you do that for a couple years, you end up a horribly miserable person. And so here’s my question is… Yeah, you don’t want to be the oldest guy at the frat party. No, that’s correct. No, that’s pretty dismal. But here’s my distinction, though, is that in some ways, it’s the women that are embracing the masculine archetype in some ways that are being successful. I mean, they’re being extraordinarily responsible and they’re filling a lot of these positions quicker than men can. I mean, and they’re graduating in higher rates of college and they’re declining motherhood or they’re at least suspending it throughout the West, which is… You could argue for either ways, there’s reasons for that. But I guess my question is… Well, I think that the expression of the masculine spirit in women isn’t denigrated. Women don’t get accused of contributing to the patriarchy even when they take positions in society that you would think are fully patriarchal, which is a strange thing. So women who go to law school and then practice, as corporate lawyers say, aren’t subject to the same, what would you call it, claim that their activity is facilitating the decline of the planet. Yes. I guess because they’re seen as… Well, because of their gender, I suppose, they’re seen as leaders of the rebellion against the patriarchal spirit, even though structurally it boils down to the same thing. So that masculine, classically masculine, symbolically masculine yearning for hierarchical productivity and competition is rewarded in women, but not in men, which is also a very perverse thing because it doesn’t make any sense conceptually. It makes sense through the postmodernist view, which is they’re just undoing the oppressorship of the man in the last 150 years. So the ends justify the means. That’s the way they look at it. Well, there’s a funny thing about that too, that I reviewed this in 12 Rules for Life. I was looking at some of the Pew Research data and I don’t remember the figures precisely, but over the last 15 years, the percentage of women, young women who claim that they would like to be married in a permanent relationship has gone up a substantial amount. I don’t remember what it was, 50% approximately, but it’s been a very, very, very, very, very approximately springs to mind, but a lot. At the same time, it’s declined almost to the same degree among young men. And so what’s perverse about this, this is something I’ve talked to my daughter a fair bit about, is that, I mean, if you ask young women what they want, I don’t know if they can answer because I don’t know if they know if they’re 19 or 20 because I think their heads are so muddled by what they’ve been told that they don’t really know. That’s correct. The thing is, the thing is that women want the opportunity to develop their career in whatever direction they see fit, and fair enough, but they want an intimate relationship and usually a monogamous one that’s permanent, and they want to have the opportunity to have kids. And what you see happening inevitably, and I believe this to be the case, I’ve watched very carefully as I’ve grown up and got older, because I’ve worked with women my whole life, women are less compelled by their career as they approach their 30s and more compelled by the desire to have a permanent relationship and a family. Biological, too, I would argue, too. Well, I mean, I think it’s a biological necessity because women have to have children relatively young. That’s correct. But it’s interesting to watch it phenomenologically. And even the women that I’ve seen who’ve had very high-power careers is that as they move into their, especially their early 30s, they start to realize that the career is a pretty one-dimensional enterprise, even if it’s a good career, because even good careers are still jobs. And good careers are also very hard jobs. They’re like 70-hour-a-week jobs, and they’re full bore commitment jobs. And to figure out how to have a career like that and to have a life, to have a family, to have an intimate relationship, to have children, and then to also be able to take care of them, that’s a very complex job to manage. And so what’s strange is, I think what’s strange is that the very things that the radicals are undermining, like the monogamous family, are actually those things that women most want, especially as they approach their 30s. And so this is a catastrophe on both ends of the gender distribution. So if there’s one thing I would love to get your opinion and take on is, and I deal with these college radicals, is at least the professors, the people that should know better of the roots of Western civilization, the only description that I could give to their motivation is, some people just want to see the world burn. It’s almost as if they want chaos for the sake that they were not able to contribute meaningfully. I would love your take on that from a social psychology standpoint. I’ve talked to my brother-in-law about this, and I’ve thought about it a lot. What is their intention? Well, the question is, to some degree, what’s the intention of resentment and failure? Yes, that’s correct. Well, look, let’s say that everything hasn’t turned out for you the way you want it, and you’re angry about that, and maybe you’re angry about the people who have been successful because they cast you in a dim light. And so there’s the anger that motivates the desire for destruction. That’s resentment, right? You never want to underestimate it. That’s part of the evil triad, right? Greed, envy, and resentment. Arrogance. That’s correct. I forgot about arrogance. Yeah, it’s arrogance, deceit, and resentment. That’s a bad triad. That’ll take you down. And the thing about, so there’s anger, and maybe in the anger you want everything to burn, but there’s also the idea, too, that, and this is part of the reason that inequality actually is a problem for people on the right and on the left, is that if you put people in a position where they don’t have what they need and want, and they can’t see a way to get it, they have high motivation to flip the game board over and start again, or maybe to try to play a new game. And so part of the reason that those on the right, for example, have to be careful not only to raise wealth overall, but also to be careful about inequality, is that as societies become more unequal, the motivation for those who feel dispossessed to flip the entire game over grows and grows quite rapidly. And I see that sort of resentment in the universities, although to some degree it’s difficult to say why, because of course university professors aren’t unsuccessful by any stretch of the imagination. They’re well compensated. And they have very secure positions. But there’s still an anti-capitalist ethos that runs through the universities that’s difficult to make a case for. Is it, and this is what I try to figure out, is it that I know better than you sort of thing, and you deal with these professors. Is it that I’m a smarter individual and we can create society more equitably? Yeah, it’s partly that. It’s hubris, right? Yeah, that’s partly the rationalist of hubris, yeah, absolutely, that you can systematize utopia, and that you’re smart enough to do that. I have a doctorate. I can figure this stuff out sort of thing. Well, and that your systematizing of utopia isn’t going to generate unexpected consequences. Now, you know, social scientists should be much smarter than that, because if you’re a social scientist who has any sense, what you learn from your research is that the probability that you can predict the outcome of your procedure, which is what you’re trying to do as a scientist, is very low. You run an experiment predicated on a hypothesis. You put the procedure in place that’s supposed to produce the hypothesized outcome. And likely is not, it doesn’t. And that’s under simple conditions in the lab where you can control almost everything. And then there’s also the case that, and this has been well known among good social scientists for a long time, is that large scale social engineering projects almost never produce the results that are intended, because systems are very complex. And you tweak one thing and you think you’re only tweaking one thing, but you’re tweaking 20 things, and a lot of the things that you tweak inadvertently kick back against… And variance of that too. Yeah, yeah. So it’s a hard thing to put… Well, because I get this question a lot from, because this is all I deal with. I deal with the leftist activists and the social justice mind. And two things that are so important, the activists are taking over governments now, and at a rapid rate. The Democrat Party in America has been taken over by the social justice neomarxist postmodernist left. And that it’s extraordinarily dangerous to the West. But I’m always asked by people what motivates them, because it’s so damn obvious the ideas that they’re trying to advance don’t work. I mean, we have a plethora, we have a century of evidence that central planning will weaken societies, will cause civilized chaos, civilization chaos, will not create wealth, will cause debt. So what still motivates them? I think part of it is just, it’s actually complexity. It’s like, I’ve been thinking about this, and it’s relatively straightforward to identify pathology on the right, I think. And basically, you look at claims of racial superiority and the right-wing identity politics types who are making claims of racial superiority, everyone says, well, you’re wandering down the Nazi pathway, and that’s unacceptable. And virtually everyone, 99% of people, agree that that’s a bad idea. But on the left, the problem is that it’s clear that some concatenation of leftist policies, when taken to extreme, produce a catastrophe. Without a doubt. But it’s not just the economic, it’s the cultural, too. Well, absolutely. But the problem is, it’s not that easy to point to which policies. So if you read the Gulag Archipelago, for example, Solzhenitsyn’s work on the prison camp system, he does a really good job of detailing out the relationship between the utopian policies of the Leninists and the catastrophes that occurred. But it’s not simple. You can’t point to one thing and you say, oh, well, that’s like a racial superiority doctrine. Because, well, we want to foster inclusion of oppressed groups. Who could be against that. Right, right. And we want to level the playing field. Okay. Yeah, well, exactly. And so in isolation, each of these ideas not only sounds plausible, but sounds positively beneficial. But the problem is that you put a number of them together, and somehow things tilt in a direction that’s really, really terrible. But isn’t it, this is the other part of it that I try to dive into. I ask, when I do my speeches on campuses, I ask a series of five questions. And the first question is, are people good or bad by nature? And the neo-Marxists will get in front of a mic, and I have these videos that have 10, 15 million views, where they’ll try to argue to me that people are good by nature. It’s just the social construct that makes them bad. That’s one of the big problems here. It is, definitely. But you’re the expert here. I mean, you’ve been doing this for decades, and you have a plethora of research. My argument is always, well, then why do we have to teach goodness to our youth? Why do we have to tell young people to stop crying? Why do young people pit their parents against each other where they’re ever taught that behavior? Of course not. Well, even aggression. Sure. The evidence that aggression is innate is, I think it’s, well, I don’t think it’s overwhelming. Look at the… It’s conclusive. We evolved from chimpanzees. They go to war. Right. But that’s one of the key things is, how did the neo-Marxists find any sort of intellectual consistency with believing that? And they teach young people that, that this is all just a flawed social construct, but we’re actually good people by nature, not aggressive, we’re not prejudiced in any sense. Well, it’s a compelling story because it’s half true. You know, I mean, part of the reason that human endeavor is pathologized is because there’s a tyrannical element to social organization. Sure. And so you can say, well, people are basically good and culture makes them bad. And you can tell a good story using those axioms. I mean, you can reverse it and you can say, no, people are basically like uncivilized and barbaric as individuals, and that only society makes them good to the degree that they’re good. That’s the difference between Hobbes and Rousseau, right? Because Rousseau would argue for the former and Hobbes for the latter. And you can make a very strong case for both. And because the case is compelling, you don’t necessarily hear the other side of the story. Sure. So that’s the thing about ideologies is that they tend to tell half the story in a compelling way. And I mean, it’s also kind of a nice story if you’re a naive person, because you think, well, I’m a good person and everybody else I know is good. That must come from somewhere. So it’s really interesting you say that. So we were at UCLA, and this is a very interesting thing. And there was a black woman that said, Candice Owens, I think you’re a white supremacist. Of course, another black woman. And I asked her, I said, wait a second, are you a racist? Are you a racist? No, I’m not. Then where’s the line? Where does one stop becoming a racist? Because you’re not, of course, right? You wouldn’t be saying this if you weren’t. So what do I have to do to be more like you? It’s like everyone else is a horrible person except me. Yeah. You know, it’s that kind of narcissism, self-centeredness. There’s a great quote by Dennis Prager where he said, growing up in the 1970s and 80s, we taught our youth that they were the problem and America was a good thing. Now it’s the exact opposite. Now it’s that America is the problem and you’re the greatest thing ever. One of the most impactful analysis you ever made was kind of something Carl Jung said is, treat others the way you want to be treated, but you don’t always want to be treated with ubiquitous love and kindness. You want to be sometimes have discipline. Lots. You want that lot. I mean, one of the things I’ve learned as a clinician, well, and as a private person for that matter is that we outsource our sanity. You know, the psychoanalysts believed, and most psychologists believe that your sanity is sort of something you carry around in your ego, in your head, and if you’re sane, it’s because your psyche is well structured. But that’s actually not true. It’s true to some degree. But what’s more true is that the way you stay sane is by knowing how to behave in a manner that makes you sufficiently acceptable so that other people will put up with you. And then you surround yourself with other people and hopefully they’re doing reasonably well. And every time you do something stupid, they slap you on the side of the head, you know, either fairly gruffly or subtly by raising an eyebrow or failing to listen to you or not phoning you to go out for a beer on Friday night because you’re boring. Then you change your behavior a little bit or you reflect, you say, well, I have to do something different. Well, if you’re lucky, you have 20 people around you that are always tapping you and telling you when you’re funny and witty and interesting and when you’re boring and stupid. You do more of that or you do less of that. Right, right, right. And so the social structure plays a key role in maintaining individual sanity. There’s no doubt about that. So I want to switch this a little bit. I want to get back to some things that are more specific to you. So let’s talk about your plans for your organization over the next couple of years and your goals. You know, because a critic might say, well, you know, you’re complaining about activism on the left, but here you are engaging in activism and who cares if it’s on the right or the left? It’s still activism and that carries with it all the problems of activism. So I’d like you to address that, but also then to say where you’re headed and how you expect to get there and why. Sure. So first I would say we have to reclaim the term activism. Activism for the right ideas is virtuous and correct and always has been, I think, throughout Western civilization. And we’re on the side now where we’re fighting for intellectual and ideological diversity and free speech. Now, activism does not necessarily mean you have to storm the president’s office or defy the rules that be, but it does mean you try to be disruptive on campus wherever you mean necessary as long as you’re not doing what the left does, which is trying to suppress someone else’s rights to speech or try to, you know, destroy private property. So I’ll give you a great example. Me going to UC Berkeley with Dave Ruhman and Candace Owens. That’s a form of activism. We were welcomed by our group there on campus and the Young Republican group, but there was petitions trying to get us off campus. There was immense hostility. The administration did not want us there. We had to pay thousands of dollars for security fees and for police. Yeah, that whole security fee thing. That’s pretty extraordinarily cumbersome. Well, it’s so underhanded. Absolutely. It’s so unbelievably underhanded. And so there’s an interesting distinction here that I want to make. And I’d love to get your analysis. I don’t want to deviate too much from your question, but for doing this for the years I’ve done this, almost daily, one of our groups will get disinvited from campus, have their funding cut. I will get shouted down, fire alarms pulled, windows smashed. Daily, conservatives will try to get disinvited from campus. I’ve never once seen a conservative student, a student group, a conservative group or conservative professor try to disinvite or try to prevent a liberal from coming on campus. Not once. Not once. So you have here the left being the predominant political viewpoint on college campuses, a monopoly, yet they do everything they can to prevent anyone else from challenging that viewpoint. And we conservatives are in the political minority, and we perfectly allow the free discussion and free flow of ideas. So to answer your question, at least from the activism standpoint, if someone would be a critic and they say, well, Charlie, you’re just doing the left, he’s going, no, I will defend a socialist’s right to be wrong to the death. I think that free speech and dialogue discussion is the solution. Well, I do think too that the idea of civil behavior is unbelievably useful. One of the things that I’ve experienced over the last couple of years is that if I keep my head and I stay reasonable in the face of provocation, which can be very severe at times, fire alarms being pulled and people blowing air horns a foot away from me and getting in my face in a serious way as I’m leaving places that I’ve been speaking and carrying a garrote, which is really pushing it a bit too far as far as I’m concerned, and pounding on windows and doors and barricading. You see it, sure. It’s primal. A good thing to really teach your participants is that they’re to remain civil and not to engage in acts that discredit them, regardless of the provocation, and that’s no firearm alarm pulling. That’s no yelling people down, civil dialogue and proper behavior. And we win converts by doing that. I’ll send you a couple videos of, and I’ve taken a cue from you, the way you handled that BBC interview. The Channel 4. Yes, I’m sorry. That’s okay. It was extraordinary. You had every right to pull her tongue out. She was being just, I mean, it was almost impressively ignorant, what she was doing. Yet you remained so calm and so in control. And I think even though you had a right to do it, if you would have went a little bit more towards the direction of abrasiveness or confrontational, you wouldn’t have been as effective. Well, I learned something, you know, and this is something that’s worth knowing, is that just because you’re being attacked doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing. You know, like for now, let’s say that I go and give a talk. Well, two things can happen. I can either give the talk and film that and put it on YouTube. And then there’s the advantages of that. Or I can go give the talk and be shouted down by protesters like the ones at Queen’s University. They literally stormed the stage. I saw that video. Yeah, they stormed the stage. And you handled it beautifully and then you said something like, this is exactly, you know, why we’re doing what we’re doing or something to that effect. Well, there’s a couple of things. The first thing is, it’s not such a terrible thing for people who are unreasonable to manifest their unreasonableness and then to have that publicized. That’s a good thing. We do a lot of it. And the second thing is, is that just so there’s the event, which would be the place that you’re speaking, but then that’s not the event because all of this is filmed. The event could easily be in the two months after it. That’s correct. And so one of the ways that you can keep your head in this sort of situation is to understand that it isn’t obvious when things are unfolding what’s good and what isn’t. And if you, well, like that interview. Sure. I mean, my sense of the interview was that they were going to just cut it to five minutes, which is what they broadcast and do everything they could to make me look like a fool. You know, but they put the whole thing up because they didn’t have any idea what happened in that interview. No one knew. It’s not like Channel 4 knew that that was a disaster and they put it up anyways. They thought the interview went fine and then were absolutely shocked by the public response. But by that time, it was too late to bring it down. But my point is that it’s a lot easier to keep your head if you don’t jump to conclusions about what’s happening in the moment being what’s actually happening. It’s like it’s a long game. This is so short. It’s so interesting you say that. So I went to the the anti-gun march in Washington, D.C. And I went and challenged some of these anti-gun protesters and I had someone follow me around with a camera and I had four hours of discussions with people. There was one discussion that I didn’t even remember with a woman. It was about Second Amendment rights. We put it up nine and a half million views. I couldn’t understand what it was. And she was kind of getting very abrasive, but she was saying such crazy things. But I must have struck a chord. And so interesting to say that that there’s there’s two realities. And really, there’s one where you have it’s how it’s perceived when you’re there, how people feel and how it sounds, you know, echolocation wise and all that. But also the people that watch it when you cut it up or the video afterwards, which in some ways is even more powerful. Well, it is more powerful, period. Well, this is also why I think it’s so useful just to say what you think, you know, in a more fundamental way, because one of the ideas that has guided me in doing what I’ve been doing is that you want to you want to let go of the consequences of your actions and say what you believe to be true. That doesn’t mean you should be a fool about it or that you should say everything all the time. But the reason that you this is this fundamental hallmark of faith, I believe in faith in the truest sense is the belief that truthful speech redeems the world. And that’s a weird faith, because what that means is that let’s say you say some things and you’re doing your best to be truthful and you get in trouble. You think, oh, my God, that didn’t work. It’s like actually, you don’t know whether or not it worked because you can’t calculate the full consequences of your action. And so it could be that it worked just fine, but it was painful in the short term and lots of things that work fine are painful in the short term. And so there is a leap of faith that has to be made. And I think that the reason that the biblical corpus is so powerful in part is because it’s predicated on the fundamental assumption that truthful speech turns the potential of reality. The truth turns the potential that you free. Well, that which is which is who the hell would ever believe that right? Because that isn’t what that isn’t how it looks. What it looks like is that the truth will get you in trouble. Of course. But what happens is it gets you in trouble in the short term and and freeze you and other people in the medium to long term. And so OK, so back to your plans. Where are you headed? Of course. So the organization is growing rather dramatically. It’s quite exciting. So we have what’s called Vision 2020. We want to help move youth sentiment towards free enterprise and free speech, kind of those general issues. Twenty points by 2020. So we’re ramping up our organization dramatically to hopefully a 20 million dollar budget and the higher, you know, over 200 people on staff across the states, which will be a monumental accomplishment to be able to do this near field staffers. These are organizers. And in some ways, my whole perspective from the very beginning, I called ourselves the move on dot org of the right. Now move on dot org is a political social activism organization based in the states for far left wing causes. I don’t. And to this day, this is what drives our organization. I don’t think the left should have a monopoly on grassroots activism. And they almost always have. There’s no reason for that. What the biggest is that we have a built in counterrevolution brewing on our college campuses of students that are being punished for thinking differently. And there is an organic uprising of students that are joining our organization, attending our events, you know, implementing leadership positions and student government and other places because they’re fed up. They’ve had enough. And I can’t tell you what would be really good if if for about 15 years, it wasn’t the most left leaning radicals who controlled the student newspapers and the student unions. It’s been like that since I went to college back in the 1990s, part of the 1970s, part of the programming we’re implementing is encouraging our students to be more inclusive. It’s encouraging our students to run for student leadership on campus rather successfully. And there’s a lot there’s a lot that we can show to actually change the campus culture and climate by doing so that that these student unions aren’t divesting from fossil fuels fuels or saying there’s no such thing as genders or just astonishingly radical, you know, sentiments. And so as an organization, more broadly, there’s a lot of different ways we measure success things I could talk about publicly and things I can’t talk about publicly. But we we are we are very concerned about the current trajectory of the West. And I believe and I said this many times, I believe the greatest threat to Western civilization is what’s happening on American college campuses. It’s even more so than any other geopolitical foe. It’s more so than what’s happening in Washington, D.C., because more than anything else, you have a generation that has been inculcated to believe that America is a mistake. Everything about the West is wrong. Well, the thing is, America is a mistake. And so is the West. But compared to other mistakes, it’s pretty damn good. Like you said, it’s life is suffering. It’s it’s finding the worst. It’s finding the best worst model that is possible. And what’s so divine, I think, about what the founding fathers realized is they said, yeah, people suck that systems get corrupted. Yeah. Civilizations are ruined. Things fall apart. Yeah, essentially. So how do we decentralize that to the furthest extent so that we can have a hedge against the inevitability of human demands? I agree with you completely. I do think that that was that’s the fundamental stroke of genius. It isn’t how can we bring about utopia is how can we design a system that idiots can’t screw up too badly given that we’re all idiots? Precisely. Yeah. Yeah. That’s real wisdom. And it’s and it’s it’s wisdom. It’s real humility to me. It is. It is. It’s real humility as well. It means that you don’t overreach yourself is that you’re not presuming that you know enough to bring about heaven on earth, but that maybe you can stave off the worst excesses of hell. That’s right. And what we teach our students and what’s not taught in our schools is the American founding was the first political revolution where the victors voluntarily gave up political power. Right. Wash. It could have been the Washingtonian, Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian monarchy that ruled America for the next 200 years. They would have done quite well. Rich in natural resources, unaccompanied land that they could have took over. But what was so amazing to them and their motivations, I believe, were pure, is that they wanted to try something completely and totally different. They did not want to embrace that which they rebelled against. And as you said, the humility for them to implement a system has been replicated all throughout the West. I mean, the idea of natural rights and decentralized government and democratic elections and a constitutional republic, it’s what built Western civilization. Spain, Portugal, France, Denmark. They all have some form of that governance, a little differences here and there. And but now that’s being challenged. That wealth of prosperity and standard of living increase and human rights accomplishments is now being in our university saying, no, no, that was this is all wrong. This is all a racist, homophobic, bigoted construct designed to benefit white males. It’s a patriarchy. We must uproot the system. And so more broadly, we are unbelievably privileged and blessed to live in Western civilization, even more specifically as an American. I’m lucky to live in America. And I’m going to fight every single day through the conduits and the vehicles that I’ve created to try to save this experiment. Yeah, well, the the the the the move that makes that something other than jingoistic patriotism is the move that says this is all good fortune and that and and that we should be grateful for that. And that our moral obligation is to sustain that, to take up the responsibility necessary to sustain that and to improve it. It’s not ours by birthright, not not by any means. This is also why, you know, I’m I’m loathe to this is why I have trouble with right wing identitarianism, because the right wing identitarians tend to take to themselves the positive attributes of their states without having to do the work necessary to place themselves among the people who are the actual founders. Without a doubt. So it’s identity politics of the right. Yeah. So. All right. So where can people learn more about your organization? So they can go to our website, TPUSA.com. We have a massive conference coming up that I mentioned that we’d love to, you know, of course have you keynote and your and I’ll say that I don’t know if I said this, but if I repeat myself, I apologize. You know, I’ve seen you save people’s lives and you’ve changed my own and you’re by far the most requested speaker. And I guess the question I have for you in the time, the short time we have remaining, I guess, is have you have you seen any of this visibility or popularity or fame change you or at least change your pattern or your style of life or any of that? No, it’s completely changed it in some ways. How do you how do you keep order in this? Because it’s chaotic, isn’t it? Yeah, very well, I from the master of infrastructure. Sure. You know, so I have more and more people helping me all the time. And we’ve been fortunate because we meaning my family, because we’ve gone through this as a family. We’ve been fortunate that people who have the expertise necessary to help us with this have showed up at opportune times. And I have enough people around me with their eyes open to help me point myself in the right direction and avail myself of that help. I would say what it’s done to me personally, mostly is just to make me more careful because the costs of mistakes are well, the cost of mistakes for me over the last two years have been incredibly high because people have been watching my every move, including things that I’ve done in the past to see if there’s any credible evidence that I’m any of the terrible things that people would like me to be. Because it’s a pain in the neck for my leftist opponents, let’s say, if I’m not a brute, because then I have to be contended with seriously. And so everything I’ve said and done has been gone over with a fine tooth comb. And luckily, so far, that’s worked out, although, you know, that’s grace of God and all that. And so mostly it’s made me more careful and more awake and more nervous all at the same time. Yeah, I just I wanted to say that you’ve you’ve kept an unbelievable discipline of consistency throughout your career. And what I always joke around here will do that to you. Well, and proper humility, which you have. And if you read enough 20th century history and you actually try to understand it, that’ll make you humble enough because you start thinking that if you have any sense and you read that history, you don’t read it as a victim and you don’t read it as the person that would set things right. You read it as a perpetrator and you think, oh, yeah, that’s what people really that’s what I’m like. That’s what really again opened my eyes. One of the stuff you said is imagine being a prison guard at Auschwitz. Worse imagine enjoying it. That’s right. Imagine benefiting from it. Right. Which which you would. And you think you’re such a good guy. Really? You’d stand up to the SS if you were part of them. And as you said, the real evil of Hitler is he didn’t even use the utility of the Jews. He tried to kill more as his civilization was crushing around him. That’s sinister stuff. I mean, it would have made more sense to put in the work camps to make rifles and, you know, and bombs. Instead, he tried to kill more of them. Well, that that does seem to indicate that the fundamental motivation was destruction. That’s correct. Regardless of the overlaying story, which I think is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. OK, so let’s say again the Web site. Sure. It’s a TP USA dot com. So TP USA dot com. They can follow me on Twitter at Charlie Kirk 11. And we’re fighting for the ideas that created West. Yeah, well, it would be nice, you know, to to think hard about how a couple of things that might be useful adjuncts. And maybe you guys have thought this through to your organization is, you know, there are places like the Founder Institute in California that are doing everything they can to start to help early stage entrepreneurs. And it might be really nice to make part of your your message. Yes. The necessity for the people who are part of your organization to to make a life plan, to figure out how they’re putting themselves together as individuals and to center the activism on that. And then to say, well, you have to stand up and talk and speak whenever your right to do that or your responsibility to do that is being interfered with. But the fundamental thing that you have to concentrate on is putting your life in order. That’s that keeps the hubris at bay, at least to some degree. That’s correct. And you have 1200 women coming together in June. That’s correct. And that’s in Phoenix. That’s in Dallas. That’s in Dallas. Of course. You have an open invite to everything and anything. Well, that’s that’d be something. Well, I’m interested in both of those. You know, I would like to I haven’t spoken enough to young women. I don’t think we’re doing a young men’s summit. I think next summer to love the design around you. But the young women is interesting. I’ll tell you why I it is extraordinarily hard to be a young conservative on American College campus. It is a multiple of difficult to be a young conservative woman. There is an expectancy of leftism. There is a hostility towards espousing any sort of conservative beliefs and the gathering of young ladies together in this kind in a in a summit, if you will, which has grown dramatically at 300 800 and now of 1200 has been so useful. And I’m a very firm believer in gender segregated education at times. And that’s a horrible term. You know what I mean? Essentially having women only events. There’s something quite special that happens. And same with men only events. That’s where the fraternity and sorority structure came across in North America. So we’d love to have you maybe take a look at that. Yeah, well, that would be I’ll do that. We can stay in touch about that. And so. All right. Well, thank you. We should probably bring this to a close. Thank you very much for agreeing to know. Thank you. This is one of the greatest honours in my life. Thank you. The problem with wanting to be friends with your child is that that’s not good enough because as a parent, you’re not less than a friend. You’re far more than a friend. You’re someone that’s going to be in the child’s life for the duration of your life. With any luck, you’re a long term island of stability in a sea of turbulence. And the child needs that far more than than he or she needs a friend. Parents need to be courageous because they have to let their children go and make mistakes. You have to let your child fall when they’re learning to walk. They bump themselves up against the world a lot. And you don’t want to do any more for your child than you absolutely have to. And it means that there’s a certain amount of detached harshness that has to go along with your love and compassion. You have to stand back and let your child stumble forward towards mastery. Today’s parents are terrified of their children because they’re often afraid that if they intervene in their lives that they’ll make a mistake and that that will be irrevocable. And you have to have the courage of your convictions when you have children. And you have to understand that if you do make mistakes that you can learn and you can be forgiven. You don’t have to be a perfect parent, although you should aim up with your children. Parents are terrified of making mistakes and that means that they’re terrified of being parents. And that stops them from being parents. .