The Indoctrination of Youth to Transform America to Socialism By Destroying Our Culture
By Charlie Kirk
This could be the most important message you might read about the destructive transformation that is currently underway in America.
Editor’s Note: Following is the entire speech given at Coeur d’Alene’s GOP Lincoln Day Dinner on Mar. 2 by Charlie Kirk, a most sage 25 year old authentic American patriot who at the age of 18 founded Turning Point USA a 501(c)3 non-profit organization on June 5, 2012. The organization’s mission is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government. His organization has taken the fight for clarity about true American culture and values to 1400 high schools and colleges and he personally is traveling non-stop an average of 345 days a year delivering the message to the youth of America. His remarks reveal the seriousness of the siege America is currently undergoing from the crazed ‘New’ Socialist Democrat Party. This should be read by all Americans. [Sub Topics Headings are mine]
My name is Charlie Kirk. I am from Chicago, Illinois. The fun thing about being from Illinois is that we have term limits. We’re a little different than most states though. One term in office and one term in jail. So when we ask for our former Governor’s cell number…it actually means his…cell number. We actually have more governors in prison than not in prison. My grandmother was a lifelong republican from the north side of Chicago who passed away in the 90’s and has been voting Democrat ever since.
I heard that Idaho is the most conservative state and this is the most conservative part of Idaho and I was pretty thrilled to hear that.
What President Trump has done in the face of relentless media attacks is truly historic. If he walked on water then they’d say he couldn’t swim. And if he cured cancer there would be a CNN headline ‘Donald Trump Puts Doctors Out Of Business.’ Time and time again he does exactly what he said he would do on the campaign trail. He is the first American president being attacked for doing exactly what he said he would do.
We are living in a tale of two different Americas. I agree that socialism is on the rise and I’ve been saying that for a couple of years. I might disagree though when I hear that we will never be a socialist country. I don’t know. I don’t know, and I wish I could say that with authority, because what I do, for those of you that don’t know, is I run a nonprofit called Turning Point USA. I founded it when I was 18 years old. We have amazing voices in our ranks such as Candace Owens and Brandon Tatum and Kyle Kashuv some of the most outspoken conservatives in the entire movement. And our job is to fight on over 1400 high school and college campuses for three big things: American exceptionalism, free-market capitalism and the Constitution. That’s it. That’s what we fight for.
So now when I hear that America will never become a socialist country, I want to believe that, I really do. But my answer currently is, I don’t know because, folks, I’m telling you right now, Cortez is a moderate compared to most college students right now. A moderate! The universities are teaching hatred for America to our youth. The greatest threat to our country is colleges and universities right now. The number one threat to our country without a shadow of a doubt.
Programming Hatred
They are programming hatred into the minds of our youth. To hate America, to hate free markets, to hate the idea of God, to hate the flag, to hate everything that we stand for and they hate our veterans. I go to these college campuses and find that it’s not that students are inherently opposed to our value systems, it is that they have not been exposed to them in the first place.
Far too often, I hear people say ‘Well Charlie, college campuses are a place where different ideas are allowed to be exchanged.’ And I have to say that you must be thinking of a far different place than universities today. These are islands of totalitarianism. Where Marxist ideology has become mainstream. Where students are indoctrinated not educated. Where if you dare disagree with the professor your grade will be lowered. Where if you might start a college conservative group like Turning Point USA at the University of California in Berkeley you might get punched in the face, which is what happened two weeks ago.
The most amazing poetic justice was today at CPAC, and I had to watch at 35,000 feet as I was on my way to see you folks, where President Trump called that very student activist on stage with him at CPAC and announced to the world that he is signing an executive order saying ‘If you do not protect the free speech of All-Americans I’m going to withhold federal funding from your institution.’ This is long overdue folks, long overdue!
Something that I’ve been saying for many years I talked about in my book Campus Battlefield where I have a whole chapter on how the federal government and US Congress needs to do real oversight of these universities, in many different ways.
What happens on campus will soon happen in Congress. Right now you’re seeing campuses coming to Congress. Students are taught to adore Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. She’s constantly wrong but never in doubt. But there’s more coming folks. There will be 100 of her in the next five years. A 100!
The Democratic Party is now dead.
It is now the Cultural Marxist Identity Politics Socialist Party. If you don’t believe me look where the energy is in that party. You can always tell where the heart and soul of a party is based on where the energy is. Who’s filling up the rallies, whose raising the small dollar donations? Joe Biden had to apologize for complementing Vice President Mike Pence two days ago. Do you have any idea how indecent their party has become?
The most parallel reality of where the Democratic Party is is their base stemming from the colleges and universities. Far too often I hear one big thing in Republican circles a lot, ‘Well Charlie, the Democrats mean well, we want the same thing, we just have different ways of getting there. Whose heard this before? Who’s maybe said this before?
The Democrats do not want what we want anymore. In the 1960s and 70s I think in JFK versus Nixon they both had some contempt for communism. I think they both loved America. I think they both wanted to see a stronger nation, they just had different ways of getting there in the 1960 presidential election. Jimmy Carter versus Reagan in the 1980 presidential election? One was an unbelievably weak person and the other was a strong leader that revitalized our country. I think they both loved our country. We know Reagan did and I don’t think Carter hated America.
The New Democrat Party Doesn’t Mean Well
The Democrat party does not want what we want anymore. They don’t. Never again should we say, ‘Well we want the same thing, we just have different ways of getting there.’
They want to take us in a completely different direction. They don’t mean well. When you send billions of dollars to Iran in the middle of the night in the form of cash you don’t mean well. When you don’t stand with Israel, you don’t mean well. You somehow think it’s alright to penalize a Christian baker in Colorado because he doesn’t want to make a cake that’s against his religious beliefs, you don’t mean well. When you vote to have the freedom to execute a newborn child that survives an abortion, you don’t mean well. When you vote to give Planned Parenthood, an abortion factory, $500 million a year, you don’t mean well. When you support the deep platform against conservatives on Facebook, Google and Twitter, you don’t mean well. When you run one of the most disgraceful hearings I’ve seen in recent memory with a convicted felon liar while the president is negotiating de-nuclearization, you don’t mean well. They hate Donald Trump much more than you love America. Folks this is not the Democratic Party of the 60s 70s and 80s. They don’t mean well!
That sickens me to say that. But the problem we are facing on the American left is one that could truly corrode the fabric and soul of this great country. Culture is defined by three big buckets: It’s family first, then it’s academia and then it’s media. And all three are directly related.
Culture War
What we have now, I believe, is that we are entering the greatest cultural war since probably over 150 years. It’s not even the cultural war we had in the 80s and 90s where we talked about Judeo-Christian values. It’s the simple question of what is America? Who are we? If you ask the Democrat party, ask Kamala Harris. She announces for President and she says we are a racist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic country. So I say, boy, that’s sounds like a horrible place. Why would you want to be president of a place like that? Why the hell are you running for president?
We are the most benevolent, creative, altruistic, forward thinking, productive country to ever exist. The question we must ask is, ‘Is the world a better place because of America?’ Of course! Of course it is! South Korea exists because of America. The Nazis were defeated because of America. Western society exists because of us. We fall, the world falls, it’s that simple.
So we have a choice. The choice is, do we succumb to these forces that believe identity politics as their religion? They believe in victimology over anything else, that somehow the victimhood should be rewarded and heralded. I believe that we should be victors not victims. That’s the story of America and always has been. It doesn’t matter where you come from, it doesn’t matter what’s happened to you. You can come here and make a better life for yourself.
Should we be a country that wants to feel good instead of doing good like the American left believes in? Do we want a country that wants everybody to look different but think the same like the American left embraces? The easy answer to all of us in this room is, of course we don’t.
There is only one institution that we have to confront head on. That is the key reason why we are seeing what we are seeing. That’s the universities and the colleges. Single-handedly. And yes it goes into the high schools and yes it goes into the textbooks. But, the real battlefield is the colleges. There is no place more important. If you look back to the 30s, where the Marxist ideology stems from, there was the Frankfurt school in Germany. You could study the exact playbook that is being implemented here in our very own country.
So that’s what I’m dedicating my life to. I travel the country nonstop and I’m on the road 345 days a year. I speak on over 100 college campuses. We have active chapters in all 50 states. Like I said we are present on 1400 high school and college chapters across the country. We have a very, very big digital and social media footprint, but we’re not doing nearly enough. We’re not.
Colleges: Hate Mills
One of the things that really bothers me and I don’t want to call anybody out in this room, but why on earth are conservatives still giving money to their alma mater? Unless you went to Hillsdale or Liberty, then I get that. Chances are most conservative donors haven’t.
But I look at Harvard. Harvard has a $58 billion endowment. That’s the GDP of like Bulgaria. And they still get millions and millions of dollars in gifts every week. To do what? To support the destruction of their country that allowed their success to be possible.
Have you ever looked at who gives the money to the universities? I encourage you to walk around if you’re ever in the Bay Area. Go walk around Stanford. Go walk and see whose names are on these buildings. These are conservatives. Conservatives have voluntarily given hundreds of billions of dollars in the last 20 years to the left so they can indoctrinate their grandkids to hate the country they were able to be successful in.
The left is very smart. If they were given a choice, ‘Would you rather control politics in the short term or culture in the long term?’ ‘They’d say, oh, we’ll control culture, are you kidding us?’
Do you know why abortion on demand is permissible? It’s because they control the media, they control Hollywood and they control filmmaking so they control where the minds are formed.
We do control the U.S. Senate, thank God. We do have a 5/4 majority in the Supreme Court, thank goodness. We stood by Justice Kavanaugh during one of the most disgraceful public character assassinations in American history. Thank goodness! But it was close. 50 to 48. The Democrat party 20 years ago would have confirmed Brett Kavanaugh, It would have been 80 votes altogether in the Senate. Not anymore, because the political nature is a byproduct of the cultural reality. As the great Andrew Breitbart said, and he passed away seven years ago yesterday, ’Politics is downstream from culture.’
Protect the Electoral College!
President Trump I believe will win reelection decisively. I believe that. Which segues, thank goodness, to the Electoral College. Without the Electoral College we’d be in a lot of trouble. It is some of the brilliance of our founding fathers to make sure we wouldn’t have tyranny of the majority, and tyranny of the urban centers and the elites. The Electoral College is one of the greatest mechanisms that they created for decentralization of power and true representation of the electorate. Absolutely brilliant!
And they’re going after it, by the way. That will be a key pillar of the Democrat party, to abolish the Electoral College. You want to talk about Idaho having 0 to no voice? That would happen basically in an instant if they get rid of the Electoral College.
Road Blocks to Free Speech
So it’s a cultural war. The good news is, the optimism is, when students are exposed to our ideas they gravitate to them in record numbers. Here’s how you know we can win. We’re not winning, we’re not. But we can win, and we are making progress. If our ideas were so bad, colleges would not do everything they could to make sure I couldn’t speak on their college campuses. If our ideas were so bad they wouldn’t show up with 200 paid protesters to try to demagogue and call Candace Owens, who is a black woman, a white supremacist. I still can’t figure out how that one works.
If our ideas were so bad, they wouldn’t try to defund our Turning Point USA groups all the way across the country. If our ideas were so bad they wouldn’t come with reporters trying to misrepresent everything that we say. The reason is that they know that true debate, dialogue and discussion are a true threat to them. They don’t want a marketplace of ideas, they want a monopoly.
When students are exposed to ’Well, maybe that socialism thing has been tried before 100 times in the last hundred years and has wrecked every country, every civilization, every culture it has come into contact with. Maybe we should not embrace something we already have a tremendous amount of data and evidence behind.’ When students are exposed to these facts and these ideas they say ‘Oh, I haven’t heard that before, tell me more.’
See, the left is very smart but they’re very sinister. So you must remember this. So they prevent these ideas from being heard at all. And that’s where we come in. We are able to liberate students. They say ‘These exist?’ We explain that we are the greatest nation state and the greatest experiment in the history of the world. Free-market capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than ever before.
The Trump Difference
Since President Trump in January 2017, we now have the lowest ever black unemployment, the lowest ever Hispanic unemployment, the lowest ever female unemployment rate, the lowest ever disability unemployment rate and we’re energy independent basically for the first time ever so we don’t have to get oil from places like Saudi Arabia or Russia anymore. Yes we did move the embassy in Jerusalem and no it did not cause conflict in the entire region. Yes, we did delete the Iran deal where we sent $150 billion for sanction relief to a country that hates our guts and funds terrorism all across the world. And yes, the Korean War is coming to an end because of peace through strength style diplomacy and direct style conversation that only a billionaire, non-politician from Manhattan could negotiate in defiance to the experts that couldn’t get a meeting over the last 50 years. I repeat, they couldn’t get a meeting over the last 50 years!
Yes we can achieve 4% economic growth again. Yes, cutting 22 regulations for every new regulation works. Yes, the lowest ever youth unemployment means that every single college student that’s hearing this message means that they have a better chance for a higher wage and a better life.
Try to tell me exactly, Democrats, what you’re resisting? What do you disagree with in that long line of success? That’s just a taste of it, just a taste. And the reason they hate him, is because he was never supposed to be president. They were so close, they were so close,
I’m an evangelical Christian, and I truly believe that was a God thing that he won. I truly believe, and the media attacks me all the time. They say ‘how dare you say that!’ Basically they say ‘You believe in God?’ It’s like an amazing thing. In Manhattan, God is not a popular thing.
Devine Intervention?
Yes I believe the election of Donald Trump was because of millions of people praying for divine intervention. I believe he is one of the most prayed for presidents in American history. I really do. Everywhere I go I hear people, they say ‘I pray for Donald Trump on my hands and knees for hours.’ And don’t stop! Because prayer is not just a therapeutic thing, it is a conversation with the Almighty where if enough people… what does the Scripture say? ‘Two or more gather my name I am with them.’ And if enough Christians and enough believers continue to plead to God to give us more time to try to stop this scourge of darkness in our country then maybe one of the most unlikely of all leaders, Donald Trump could continue to protect the greatest, most moral nation ever to exist. Who by the way, has been the greatest friend of Christians and evangelicals in American history, without a shadow of a doubt.
He is the most pro-life president in American history cutting the funding of Planned Parenthood and rescinding the Mexico City policy. Speaking at the March for life, saying unequivocally, in defiance of the Democrat party, we will not be a country that will ever support post birth abortion. You saw what that Democrat governor of Virginia said. What he did 30 years ago with that blackface was reprehensible. But what was really reprehensible is how he described so calmly, on the radio station, where he said a baby will be delivered and the baby will be relaxed and then a decision will be made about what to do. Any honest journalist would say “Gov. Northam, what exactly is the decision that needs to be made there?” What we’re trying to say is that there needs to be a conscious decision between life and death.
I understand that there are a lot of positions on abortion, but there needs to be consensus that once a child is a sentient being outside the womb it deserves the same protection as any other person in a civil society. Every single Democrat running for president voted against protecting those children! It is infanticide.
And so the mission is not easy here. It is going to be a decades long battle against the left.
Some Things I Have Learned About the Left
Stop giving them the benefit of good intentions, I mentioned that earlier. They want to destroy everything they come in contact with. Everything! The left destroys everything they touch. They tried to destroy the NFL, they almost did, seriously. They destroyed popular culture. Late-night comedy is no longer funny, it is now political hate with applause. People don’t laugh, it’s just applause. It’s former comedians now ‘play-acting’ as political pundits. They’re not even good at it. Long lost are the days of Jay Leno who used to be an equal opportunity offender.
The left is trying to destroy the American church. They are trying everything they can to infiltrate many sorts of denominations on the Protestant side. You can see the direction that they’re taking. The left has totally destroyed the school system, we talked about that earlier. They destroyed our inner cities, you want to talk about moral dis-service? What the left has done to the black community in this country is one of the greatest moral disgraces that I can possibly think of. Make no mistake. They own this!
You want to see American ghettos? I’ll show you Democrats in charge. Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Oakland: All Democrat city councils, all Democrat mayors, all Democrat congress people. The last Republican mayor of Chicago? 1931. They own this. They are a force of destruction.
The Difference Between Liberals and Leftists
It’s important to remember that there’s a difference between liberals and leftists. Liberals are an endangered species. I can think of one, Alan Dershowitz, that’s it. And even he’s probably becoming more conservative lately.
A leftist: A leftists is someone who first and foremost thinks about hating something rather than being thankful for something. That’s what a leftists is.
They’re angry they live in America not thankful they live in America. They’d rather see less rich people than more rich people come out of poverty. For them, it’s much more about hating the rich rather than helping the poor. These people are driven by envy and greed and destruction. Everything they do is about burning down institutions.
We don’t have a perfect history, but we do have a great one!
Look carefully at the language of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC). She says we live in a horrible country. She says we live in a country with such past sins, that we really can’t get past it until we truly re-define who we are as a people. Boy, that’s dangerous language. That’s the stuff of the Russian Revolution folks. I don’t say that lightly. Read the history, read the language.
‘You know,’ AOC says ‘When was America ever great?’ – How about Iwo Jima? That was pretty great! When we came into the European theater and defeated Nazi Germany? That was pretty great! About when the Berlin wall fell and we defeated communism? That was really great! That wasn’t that long ago, 25, 30 years ago. People forget. We had a first-person example of the ideology now of the American left juxtaposed with freedom, free markets and free enterprise. And we didn’t defeat it by firing missiles or shooting rifles, we defeated it through economic productivity, better ideas, values, defense of the nation state and an unequivocal defense of Western society. It took one good president to turn it all around.
Two Presidents Making a Difference
In 1979 we were not on pace to destroy the Soviet Union, we were plagued by stagflation with the president who said you better get used to being mediocre. Our enemies laughed and scoffed at us, American hostages were taken in Iran and there was no such thing as strength. It took one man who ran an unconventional campaign and won a surprise election in 1980. A man they called reckless. Sound familiar? They said he was kooky. Sound familiar? They said he didn’t know what he was doing. Sound familiar? They said he took too much personal time at his residence. Sound familiar? They said he couldn’t negotiate overseas. But he walked away at Reykjavik against Gorbachev, because he said ‘I’m not giving up the Strategic Defense Initiative. I’m walking away from this deal.’ That, was the breaking point against the Soviet Union. When he walked away in Reykjavik, all of a sudden the Soviet Union said ‘I don’t know, I don’t know anymore.’ Then, that was the beginning of the end for one of the great evils of the 20th Century. And then under HW Bush the wall finally fell and I think we were pretty great at that moment.
Cultural and Political Reality
If you ask American youth about any of this in the last 20 or 30 years, they have no clue! Instead it’s this utter fixation on the 1950s and 60s, misrepresenting those periods of time, by the way, saying that somehow it was Republicans and conservatives that were the practitioners of the great sins of racism. When in reality the party of KKK, and the party of Jim Crow, and the party of plantations and the party of segregation is the Democrat party.
Republican Party was founded in 1860 as an anti-slavery party. It has been consistent through the ethos of the Republican Party that it be a party of freedom and individual thought and liberation.
It has been consistent to this day that the Democrat party be a party of control and dependency and anti-individualism. That line continues straight to this day. Only one side of the aisle today stood and applauded when we announced record low black unemployment figures. Every person in the Congress should have stood up and said this is a good thing for America. Why wouldn’t the left stand in the state of the union address two years in a row? Because the left needs people to need them.
When people’s lives get better leftist get highly irrelevant. When people start being self-sufficient the Democrat party becomes totally futile. For instance ‘You mean, I don’t need food stamps anymore?’ By the way, 5 million people got off food stamps since President Trump got inaugurated. 5 million people! The left needs people to need them. When people start getting their lives better and churches start growing in attendance and communities getting stronger and families staying together and single motherhood going down all of a sudden they don’t need the identity politics of hatred and division that the left tries to sew. They don’t need them anymore. In fact they walk away from it.
So the left has to do everything it possibly can to keep people poor, to keep them dependent and to keep them divided. I love that term unity. I love that. I believe the Democrats in the 60s and 70s some of them really wanted a united America. I do not believe the Democrats of today want a united America.
Barack Obama campaigned on the best intentions of Americans trying to be united. Remember when he said there are no blue states and no red states there are just United States of America? That’s a play on words on the Latin phrase e pluribus unum which means out of many one. It’s part of the American Trinity. The American Trinity is three things: e pluribus unum, in God we trust and liberty. Just like the Christian Trinity we have our own Trinity here. They won’t teach that in the universities. But it’s within all of us that believe in American values.
The left believes in great defiance of all three of those things. They don’t believe in God we trust, they believe in government we trust. They don’t believe out of many one, they believe in divide at all costs. They definitely don’t believe in liberty, they believe in serfdom. They believe in dependence. That’s their Trinity.
So here’s the good news. In the end, freedom almost always wins. I’m afraid that the conservative movement is way too naïve about what we’re facing. Way too naïve!
I see the contempt these people have for me, for Candace Owens, for Donald Trump and for anyone that stands for what we stand for in this room. I’m telling you I don’t hate anything as much as they hate us. I don’t, I really don’t. You saw it in a small microcosm at Berkeley when he smacked our activists in the face. You know what was so stunning about that video? No one tried to stop him. You know the video I’m talking about. You probably saw it on repeat. No students came in and said whoa, whoa, whoa that’s not cool. Now mind you he was tabling basically alone. He was walking away from his table confronted by this maniac and punched in the face. Where were the other students? The University of California Berkeley staff members said ‘This is a good thing. This is what we do when conservatives come on campus.’
So folks I’m telling you right now, they want the utter and complete destruction of everything that we hold near and dear. And we are, I believe in the spiritual war as well. These folks, I’m telling you, are driven by religious atheism. It’s a religion in and of itself. They evangelize more than Christians do. I joke around with an atheist by saying ‘Look you believe in no God, what’s the big deal here? Why do you care? Like you have what, 32 years six months left and then it’s all over. Why are you trying to convince me? I should be trying to convince you, I actually have a reason to try to convince you. I always tell them I don’t have enough faith to become an atheist. No, the one that really drives them nuts is when I say ‘Without God there would be no atheist.’
So, I love the emphasis on prayer here in Idaho, it’s so important. I love that because it’s part of the American Trinity ‘In God we trust.’ And there’s only one political party that booed God in their convention. The Democrat party booed God at their convention. Because darkness hates light and what they’re fighting for is just darkness. They are very, very sinister.
And so, I’m going to keep fighting and everyone in this room is going to keep fighting in places where conservatives have never won before. But do everything you possibly can to, of course, to help this president. And do what you can with young people in this country in understanding the threat. But realize from now into the next month and in the next year, that the forces that we’re up against here want to destroy this country from within with everything they possibly can. And I know for one, that I’m not going to let them do it till my dying breath. And all of you won’t either.
Thank you so much and God bless you.