Did Trump Energize Republican College Students?

charlie kirk thank you so much for coming in it's great to see you again thank you it's such an honor i listen to your podcast regularly and it's you're uh brilliant and witty and it's an honor to be on on the show oh well thank you that stuff will rot your mind you gotta or or liberate it or liberate your tell me i keep reading about you keep seeing all the stuff on twitter and everything about tpusa turning point usa what are you up to uh so i founded this organization seven and a half years ago where a high school and college organization focused on educating and empowering students around very radical ideas such as american exceptionalism free enterprise in the constitution all right so i get hurled the worst things in the world you could possibly imagine uh insulted by the left um the basics of this is that we believe that we're in the midst of an american culture war and the winners of this culture war will set the trajectory and set the bearings of the future of our country for the next you know many generations and never before we had such an insurgency from within or a generation that has so much to be thankful for does not embrace gratitude but instead anger and the lack of gratitude and a generation that has so much blessing so much opportunity so much access information yet they choose by a default position um hostility and the rejection of what has made this the greatest country and the greatest experiment in the history of the world and so our sales in our sales pitch if you will or our kind of mission is to try to get students not to blame other people for their problems but to look inwardly to not say that government should solve all whatever they think is wrong with the world but large in part it's government that actually has caused these problems but even more specifically um or we we believe that when people are allowed the opportunity to be free um then flourishing happens it's a tough sales pitch it's a lot easier to say i'm going to give you a bunch of free stuff i'm going to take you know money from this person and give it to that person that feels good but it doesn't always do good right right so when i when i visit universities one of the things that strikes me is these kids have been stripped of their heritage that they're not really taught what america is where it came from why they they sort of feel all this freedom and wealth and power just kind of dropped on them because they're such wonderful people how do you how do you educate them how do you turn that around so it's difficult so first and foremost there's a a multi-decade indoctrination campaign that now begins when students are two or three years old and students i mean they're young kids and it's through the disney movies and it's through um hollywood and you've done a wonderful job of kind of picking that apart and talking about the validity of telling better stories and i just you deserve to be commended i remember you talked at a retreat five or six years ago when i was first getting turning points started when conservatives weren't as critical as hollywood as they should have been and you really spotted kind of how cancerous you know hollywood has been to our culture um so look here here's the difficulty is that how do you teach gratitude and how do you teach students to hey this is actually exceptional the the default position of the world is actually not that your life will get better and your kid's life will get better and your grandkids life will get better in fact you're usually born into some form of a caste system and the lack of freedom is actually the default position for a majority of the world um and even the countries that have some forms of freedom they don't have it like we have it here where you have freedom of expression freedom private property the freedom to have private property and so it's really interesting because i have there there's this unique entitlement that exists in upper middle class college students that have given have been given everything by their parents or by society that now tell us that tell me and tell us that our country is racist bigoted homophobic all these horrible things so there's some very logical ways that you can cross-examine it such as for such a horrible country why does the caravan go north to america not south to venezuela right there's why do people flee havana cuba for miami florida but they're not fleeing miami florida for havana cuba do you have to keep people from leaving your country you generally don't have a great country right and so these are all very logical rational ways to approach it and we do do this um but even beyond that students will say charlie i see so much suffering see so much horrible things in the world you know how am i supposed to go about doing that and you have to tell a brutal truth that if you actually want to change the world you probably won't but you could change yourself and i always laugh because this is one of jordan peterson's biggest things he talks about now i'll have these kids that they are very they're very let's just say convicted to tell me how to live my life but they've never done anything wrong ever you can never dare question them yeah and i'm sure you experienced that as well i always wonder about these guys the cancel culture who come out and say you know you won the heisman but three years ago you sent a tweet have these guys never said anything that they were no they're perfect no they're absolutely perfect people so one of the things i worry about and i i i think a lot of people worry about this donald trump who i've kind of warmed up to over the years but he's very off-putting to a lot of people and i think this especially to people who are very sensitive who are as they say snowflakes you know his blunt uh sometimes even boorish style puts people off is that hurting you is trump hurting you in in the universities or is he helping it might surprise you to hear since his presidency we have seen an explosion in membership growth interest and students getting involved that's very encouraging and and there are people that focus heavily on the style not on the substance but more than anything else we have more people more young people that are interested in political conversation debate than ever before and i think that's a positive thing now there's a lot of misinformation around his presidency and around conservatives in general but when i would rather have students out there protesting me than not being involved in politics at all and that's quite a statement when you think about it i would rather have activism than apathy in the early stages of turning point usa we always talk about what conservative policies would look like it was very theoretical now we could point to certain states we could point to the success stories in wisconsin or michigan and you know contrast that with i don't know california if there's been a disaster but now we can say this is what happens when a conservative president cuts taxes cuts regulation when you have a booming economy when you stand with your allies you stand with israel you stand up to iran all of a sudden you're able to say this is no longer in theory this is in practice lowest ever black unemployment rate lowest ever black poverty rate all these sorts of things it's no longer in theory and it becomes a lot easier to be able to sell the ideas of free enterprise and american exceptionalism to a generation that is told that these things are not possible and not the correct you know public policy to pursue when people protest you can you engage them or will they just shout you down most of them will just try to shout me down so we have a rule and i got this rule from you know the great ben shapiro that if you disagree you're allowed to go to the front of the line and ask a question right despite that i get interrupted all the time you know at my last campus event five people you know five different times i was interrupted by different student protesters when they did that i said can you please come to the front of the line and let's have a conversation they want nothing of the sort yeah and but i'm convinced that they're doing it because it makes them feel good it makes them feel morally righteous it's virtue signaling in practice is really what it is now when you actually are able to have a conversation have a rational conversation about well why do you feel that way what have i said that you might think is hateful they're never actually able to cite any specifics whatsoever and so but if we are the ambassadors of decency and respect and discussion which we should be eventually those radicals will get pushed out of the general consensus of conversation what i love is i have these events and i go very hard about the american after the american left because the american left they do not go out of their way to expel demons from their ranks or to denounce radicalism within their within their um they are they just become more running precisely or they actually embrace it and they they're okay with it so what i find is i there's these liberals that come up in line they'll ask a question they always do this charlie i just want to make sure you're clear i'm not like them that's not what i stand for and i kind of laugh inside i say well good at least now you're beginning the process of what we conservatives have to do every single day we have to say first and foremost we reject all these hateful ideologies is what we're not and this is what we're for and we're actually forcing the american left to hopefully become more moderate and to become more decent but i will say this that we end up finding more agreement with students who think they are liberal and think they're leftist despite all the hostility and the backlash there is more curiosity than there is combativeness there are more the american socialists on campus they are decreasing in number but they're increasing in volume so there's some positive that and some negatives to that and more students think they are liberal when they're actually more libertarian than they are liberal they don't trust the government institutions have a lot of power and they think being a bernie sanders leftist or an elizabeth warren leftists is being on the side of freedom they truly believe that because the college professors are very smart they say well true freedom is being able to not have to worry about where your health care is coming from right right are you really free are you really free so you don't have everything given to you so but the republican party is getting smaller and one of the reasons i think it's getting smaller is the demographics in the country are changing and young people are basically instructed from almost from the cradle that this is the evil party i was when i was growing up i was told these are the evil guys do you see with your eyes any sign that that is going to change that these guys that i'm talking about numbers that numbers of growing numbers of people will switch over so i'm going to push back a little bit okay you might enjoy it so why is the left becoming more radical and so the my answer that is a little unconventional okay some people would say well they're embracing their roots i think there's some truth that's built into the system if you're progressive you've got to progress sure i think there's another explanation though that donald trump took their original base away from them that i think there's truth to that fitters plumbers oh yeah people that didn't have a four-year college degree so i break the democrat party into and this is i didn't come up with this but there's the the beer part of the democrat party and the wine part of the democrat party two different kind of quadrants donald trump has taken away a lot of the beer drinking democrats away yeah and that's a positive thing so if you were to break american politics oversimplified into four quadrants upper right quadrant would be social conservatives and fiscal conservatives the left quadrant would be social conservatives but more fiscal liberals and then the bottom left would be all just liberals on every issue and then the bottom right would be kind of more libertarians and more kind of the establishment type republicans would they be fiscally conservative socially liberal donald trump has gone into a quadrant that no republican president has been able to go into successfully since ronald reagan in the 80s and a little bit of george w bush 104 with his socially conservative stance which is the reagan democrats right and so i believe firmly that what donald trump has done is he has positioned and positioned himself for better as i am the candidate that will stand against the corrupt institution of washington dc which i have full agreement with right and i'm going to stand for people that work for a living and i think it's it's we we as republican conservatives got a little bit away from the success of the reagan revolution yeah no in the senate olson says the same thing yeah in the sense and i i totally agree with henry olson he says this where there is something to be said that not everyone wants to start a business in america that the gop talking points at times like the mitt romney 2012 convention says yes i did build that that's a great talking point for gop donors and you know i actually think that entrepreneurs and billionaires are the basis in the backbone of a vibrant market economy i actually think billionaire billionaires should exist unlike britain but when people see that yes i did build that and there's a teacher that looks like at that they say that doesn't resonate with me like what does that mean or a veteran i mean okay that's fine what does resonate with them is when president trump says drain the swamp or let's make this country great once again so i would i would push back a little bit where i think in some ways the republican party has lost some appeal with suburban women and lost some appeal with um younger well that's what i'm talking about yeah you're the people you're talking right and and younger people and especially younger people of color um there are certain portions of the population though that the students that we deal with i would i will tell you right now that president trump is far better for the young conservative movement than president mitt romney would have been because he's bold he's courageous he's delivered on his promises he stands up to corrupt institutions such as hollywood the media the cultural left they like this of course because because young conservatives or young christians that tend to be more conservative they are they are under constant and hourly if not minute by minute assault by the left for why they believe what they believe there's one thing that i think everyone can agree on that's even on the center right donald trump is the most effective anti-leftist president in america no question about it he's amazing this way this is the best thing about them yeah and so like reagan united the conservative movement against the soviets right against the idea of communism where the libertarians the establishment republicans and the movement conservatives all played very nicely together because of the existential and real threat of soviet communism and the revitalization of america president trump i think has done the same thing where now the cultural left is the modern day equivalent of the soviet union where where i think they actually interesting well i i believe it that i think they actually pose a similar threat within our country not militarily i don't mean it that way but culturally and in some ways if they're able to get half of my generation to believe that we're a racist bigoted homophobic horrible country that's more harm and damage than an existential force could possibly ever do all right i'm out of time one minute tell me this what keeps you up at night what do you what's your biggest problem my biggest problem um i believe that the left controls so much that they're not going to play fair voter machines right um lines of communication social media you name it and that really bothers that that potentially worries me it's tough it's nice to know you're out there i think you're doing a great job and i'm i really think yeah you have a shot thank you it's really good talking [Music]