Read the full transcript of CEO of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show episode titled “How Debt Has Radicalized Young America and Why Boomers Deserve the Blame”, July 22, 2025.
The Origins of Russiagate
TUCKER CARLSON: So it looks like we’re finally going to get the details of Russiagate. What was that? It seemed manufactured at the time. It seemed fake. It was confusing. Where did this come from? All of a sudden, out of nowhere, we all hate Russia, and Trump is a Russian agent, something that no one had ever said before. And then it just saturated the media, and it was the only topic for a couple years, and no one ever kind of went back to examine how. How do you create a story out of nothing and then convince Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times to write about it every day? I think we’re going to find out now.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, great to be here, Tucker. Yeah, I hope so.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s great to see you. You know, as I get older, my manners just evaporate.
CHARLIE KIRK: This is Frost Nixon, you know, it’s straight in. Sorry, it’s the first question. So why’d you burn the tapes? Why didn’t you burn the tapes? Yeah. Great to be here, Tucker. Yes. I would go even a step further, because the war right now happening between Russia, Ukraine, and the west, support of it, actually was an extension of Russiagate.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, thank you for saying that.
The Unintended Consequences of Anti-Russia Sentiment
CHARLIE KIRK: Because part of one of the unintended consequences of Russiagate. Unintended, I think, actually intended, but unintended from our perspective, because we were so focused on the Trump component, was how it desensitized the Democrat Party to hate Russia. If you think about it, Donald Trump was the worst villain ever in the history of the world, according to the Democrat Party. So they needed to have an explanation as to how this guy won.
Because, of course, it can’t be the fact that they de-industrialized Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, flooded the country with a bunch of illegals, and allowed opioids into the country. There must be another reason. So they tried Cambridge Analytica first. Do you remember? That was the first attempt.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
CHARLIE KIRK: The Cambridge Analytica thing, that was Donald Trump’s ability to get in the back end of Facebook. That’s why he won. But that didn’t really satisfy the Democrats. And so simultaneously, we know this because the Russia narrative came ex nihilo. It came out of nowhere.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the way it felt. I was completely confused.
CHARLIE KIRK: And Tulsi is getting to the bottom of it. I’m not going to pretend to know all the details, what she’s working on. And I’ve been cheering her on, sending her text messages, saying, you go, Tulsi, you go. Because it’s so wrong what happened to President Trump, and so wrong what happened to our country.
But when you think about it, it desensitized the entire Democrat Party to then have a very negative view of Russia, even beyond a normative Western view of Russia, as if Donald Trump is an attaché of the Kremlin. And if you hate Trump, you therefore must also hate Putin and Russia. So fast forward to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. You had the entire Democrat Party and the base of the Democrat Party that used to be anti-war, that used to be where the Ben and Jerry’s guy was. You had him on your show. It was great.
But the rank and file kind of had a subdued response at best to the financing of the Russian Ukrainian war, largely because of Russiagate, because so many base members of the Democrat Party and the activists were led to believe that Donald Trump only became president because of the assistance of the Kremlin.
The Religious Component of Anti-Russian Sentiment
TUCKER CARLSON: So smart. And can I just add one parenthetical note, that a lot of them were pro Russia when it was Soviet.
CHARLIE KIRK: Correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: Because the Soviet Union was above all, anti-Christian. And then when the country became Orthodox again, it was easy to hate it again.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes. And if you, I mean, you know this, you helped lead the, I don’t want to say even anti-war, just the skepticism from the west viewpoint that why are we sending all this money to Ukraine? Is it good for us? That used to be a left wing thing. That used to always be driven from the base of the Democrat Party and from AOC to Elizabeth Warren to Bernie Sanders. They were largely silent on the amount of money that we sent to Ukraine.
So why? Is it because they started to love war? No, it’s because Putin became an acceptable villain for the Democrat Party because they made the archetype of villain and the archetype of Putin and Trump to be kind of one and the same. That all goes back to Russiagate. It goes back to the lie of the dirty dossier. It goes back to how our intel agencies were then used inwardly against us.
And that has really been the story the last 30 to 40 years. And you deserve a lot of credit for covering this, which is our intel services are supposed to gather intelligence and defend the homeland and to keep us domestically safe. But it turns out they’re actually more about picking winners and losers in American elections and the will of popular sovereignty.
So I hope that we get to the bottom of this because we are still dealing with the real world ramifications. You have to wonder how many Ukrainians and Russians, by the way, because people are dying on both sides of this war that are made in the image of God are unnecessarily dead because of what our intel services did in 2016 and 2017.
The Path to War with Russia
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t think that can be said enough.
And I think the reason they didn’t is because they had just spent the last three years hearing about how Putin was the worst person in the world. He was our main enemy. Not the Chinese, actually, not the Indians, not anybody else. No, it was Russia. So do you expect that people will be held accountable for it?
Obama’s Role and the Insurance Policy
CHARLIE KIRK: I sure hope so. I mean, look, I don’t know what’s in the details. I don’t know what’s in the documents. We kind of have a little bit of a teaser. We saw last week what Tulsi said. She said there’s more coming. And basically, what we learned last week, for everyone that was hopefully enjoying your summer, not glued to your phone nonstop over the weekend, we learned that Obama personally ordered an intel report. It’s hey, was it true that Russia was behind this election?
And from my understanding, the report said, no, Russia was not behind this election, did not manipulate votes. Trump was not elected because of Russia. This was in December of 2016 in a private, classified intel briefing that is now declassified, thanks to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
What is even more chilling, though, which goes back to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and James Comey, is how the FBI and the CIA seem to be working on the same page, the FBI was almost doing the domestic bidding of the CIA. And you have to wonder how much of this Russiagate situation was the insurance policy that Peter Strzok famously put in his text messages. Remember, he was going back and forth with his lover, Lisa Page, where he was saying, hey, don’t worry, we have an insurance policy.
You have to wonder, what exactly was that? And my contention is that that was the Russiagate situation, that they had this dossier paid for by the Democrat Party with Clinton funds to then illegally be able to spy on the Trump campaign as an extension of that, create this entire narrative. And, you know, part of what also needs to be said is how much of Trump’s first term was stolen from President Trump and the mandate of the people because of Russia.
The Stolen First Term
You know, it’s very funny. I was thinking about where was I and where were we as a country back in July of 2017, six months into Trump’s term, back in Trump’s first term, we had Jeff Sessions basically completely sidelined because of his, you know, I have to recuse myself and honestly, an unnecessary recusal. I think that he never should have recused himself. We had Bob Mueller.
TUCKER CARLSON: But let me just say that whatever you think of what Sessions did or why he did it or whatever, I’m probably the only person willing to give him credit for, you know, a good faith mistake, I think was a mistake.
CHARLIE KIRK: He was also great on crime, by the way. Sessions was actually really good on violent crime.
TUCKER CARLSON: But everyone, separate issue, but yeah, beats up on Jeff Sessions. I know Jeff Sessions very well. Jeff Sessions is no liberal. Jeff Sessions is a really decent man. Jeff Sessions made a big mistake, in my opinion, by recusing himself. But he didn’t do it to sabotage Trump. He was the first senator to endorse Trump. He loved Trump. So whatever. The whole thing was a tragedy. But my point is, wherever you stand on that, it separated the President from his Attorney General.
CHARLIE KIRK: And then Rod Rosenstein was running the entire DOJ. You know what I mean? That true Trumper, Rod Rosenstein. Right. So we had Rod Rosenstein, Pride of Baltimore. Yes, right. Exactly. As good as it gets. So Trump was without a Department of Justice with his first term at this point.
Basically, we had Bob Mueller lurching back under the surface, coming back from, you know, they brought him out of retirement and he was kind of in a Biden state at that, without, remember his interview. Didn’t know where he was or what was going on.
TUCKER CARLSON: Poor man. Yeah.
The Technocratic State Model
CHARLIE KIRK: I just have a side note. We’re learning kind of how the modern technocratic Democrat Party works, which is bring an old guy with an amazing biography.
TUCKER CARLSON: By DC Standards, who happens to have dementia.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, just put him in the chair. And then all of these 30 something lawyers that went to Yale and Harvard will do all the work. It’s kind of how a technocratic state works.
But anyway, think about where we were in Trump’s first term, which I think is really important, and how we’re in a profoundly better position we are today. The first year of the Trump presidency and then year two or three were largely stolen by this whole Russiagate situation, is that President Trump was constantly on defense. He was constantly having to defend himself. He had Mueller looking into Manafort, looking into Cohen, looking into all of his close associates, which of course the report came out and showed no collusion and all stemming from a lie.
And that’s the kicker. So to answer your question, I hope people start to go to jail. We need perp walks, we need handcuffs, we need mass arrests because you’re not allowed to steal precious time of a presidency away from the American people that otherwise would have been spent on governing.
TUCKER CARLSON: You have such a good memory. One of the advantages of.
CHARLIE KIRK: And we did no prep on this 31.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, no, not at all. I just threw it in seconds before I’m impressed.
The Threat of Unaccountable Government
TUCKER CARLSON: And I now I’m remembering everything you said and you’re absolutely everything you said I think is correct. I also think it’s just important to know that federal intel and law enforcement agencies are not allowed to form their own separate unaccountable government and run affairs of state. That’s a nightmare scenario that puts you in a dictatorship, totally insulated from the public. I mean, voters have no way to control that. That’s not a Democracy, that’s a dictatorship, and that’s where we are. And I just feel it’s important to expose that and to punish those responsible.
The Real Power Behind Government
CHARLIE KIRK: Without a doubt. And this is now the big fight in front of Trump, too, and everyone knows it. We ran on it. We said it. And I think we’re now going to get massive action in that direction from hopefully, Kash and Dan and Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, the whole gang, they’re focused on this, and I think they’re looking for the right place to strike, which is who actually runs this government.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: The first term, we were kind of under this very naive idea that the people run the government.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s what I thought.
CHARLIE KIRK: And then we were like, well, it’s the lobbyists. And it’s… And you’re right. Yes. Remember, it’s the lobbyists. It’s K Street. Right. It’s K Street. It’s like, yeah, okay.
TUCKER CARLSON: But… So true.
CHARLIE KIRK: But now… But after, I think seven or eight years and it’s taken time, we’re finally back to where a lot of the Hillsdale crowd has been and Dr. Arnn has been to his great credit. It’s the administrative state and the intel agencies. Yes. It’s this fourth branch of government that the founders never created, they never designed, there was no intent for. And that fourth branch of government is unaccountable, has unknown biographies of people that are running it, and they’re there for unlimited amounts of time. There’s no term limits. They’re not elected, and they’re unelected.
Congressional Oversight Failures
TUCKER CARLSON: There are… And I don’t want to put you in uncomfortable situations. You don’t need to comment on this. Just brief aside. But we actually have civilian control, the control of elected leaders over those agencies. The president, of course, but also members of Congress.
CHARLIE KIRK: We have the intelligence boards, too.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. And we have something called the Senate Intel Committee.
CHARLIE KIRK: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: And the person leading that… You don’t have to comment on this. I think it’s… I think Tom Cotton’s one of the most sinister people in the US Government. It’s like your job is to make sure the CIA doesn’t form its own separate, unaccountable government, and yet he’s all in on CIA, where his wife used to work, like he is serving CIA. And what about his constituents in Arkansas? What about the rest of us? Why isn’t the guy in charge of keeping the CIA’s behavior within constitutional bounds accountable to the president? Why isn’t he doing that? And I just find it enormous. And I know that there are lots of good things about Tom Cotton. He’s a nice guy, he’s very smart.
CHARLIE KIRK: But, like, what the hell?
TUCKER CARLSON: Why does no one say that?
CHARLIE KIRK: And let me say this also. There is… There are whispers that this next bill is going to be passed. Whatever, like, perfunctory bill they have to pass is going to try to neuter DNI is that they want to try to wall off.
TUCKER CARLSON: CIA wants Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Kent, and the other people. The Director of National Intelligence, and that whole apparatus, which was created after nine eleven.
CHARLIE KIRK: Which is hilarious because it was created by the worst people.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: And now it’s actually a center. It’s a central nervous system for us to look under the hood. And they know it.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
CHARLIE KIRK: And so, again, I don’t know all the details of this. I just… Someone texted me yesterday, and they said, hey, we have to make sure that Tulsi does not get basically, you know, neutered in this whole process, that it just kind of becomes a ceremony.
TUCKER CARLSON: She’s the one person you shouldn’t… DOGE.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, in fact, Tulsi, and this is very important. The intel agencies by far have the least proportional civilian control versus careers. That’s exactly right.
TUCKER CARLSON: CIA has, like, three or four, and…
CHARLIE KIRK: Ratcliffe is, you know, fighting for his life there. And it’s like, who runs? You know, you have all these unknown amounts of people and what are they doing? And it’s a black box budget. And I believe that all roads lead back to the intel agencies on all this stuff. And so… But Tulsi is now getting under the hood. This revelation of Russiagate is massive.
The Russiagate Revelation
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s huge. I know.
CHARLIE KIRK: And God bless her for doing this. And I know the President cares about it personally, as he should, because how much of his life and his energy was just spent defending against a fabrication? Not a fabrication of the Chinese Communist Party, by the way. Not a fabrication of our adversaries, a fabrication of our own government. That’s what makes this so sinister, is that our own government was turned against the duly elected president. So here we are now, in the year of our Lord 2025. Who’s running the United States government?
TUCKER CARLSON: Great question.
CHARLIE KIRK: And President Trump, he is now the hunter. He was the hunted back in the first term. I know what the grassroots want. I know what President Trump wants. We need perp walks, we need arrests. We need accountability. And if we do not smash the administrative state and the deep state in the coming six to 12 months, then we’re actually not going to… We’re not going to bring this entire intelligence apparatus to heal. We have to lance the boil because it’s gone so out of control.
And I can tell you, they are deeply fearful of this movement. They know that we are aware. They know that we are noticing things, that we’re seeing patterns, that we know how powerful the intel agencies have become. And so that’s why I think Russiagate really matters, is that it’s a way to hold them accountable, to see how dark and honestly, demonic their activities have become, and hopefully an opportunity to… to fulfill a mandate that President Trump ran on, and I still know, believes to this day, which is to bring… bring the deep state, to hopefully smash it, or the very least bring it back into balance.
Two Types of Deep State
TUCKER CARLSON: And the deep state is the intelligence…
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, that’s the shadow government. Right. It’s not the deep state. Look, it’s not the education… If I could chime in, there’s two types of deep state, right? There’s the Department of Education deep state. They just… They just slow things down. That’s their only… They leak and they delay.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right?
CHARLIE KIRK: That’s it. That’s the deep state of the Department of Labor. So they, oh, you’re getting some sort of executive order we don’t like. We’re going to leak it to the Washington Post. We’re not going to do what you tell us. We’re just going to delay and we’re going to last. Okay, fine. We can deal with leaking and delaying, the third of which, though, which the Department of Labor is not doing. They’re not configuring their agency against the sovereign.
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
CHARLIE KIRK: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re probably not killing anyone.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, exactly. So the intel agencies, in its, you know, in its inherited composition from Joe Biden and how it’s been for the last 40 years, leaking and delaying, they’re like… That’s child’s play. Okay? We’re going to go do dirty dossiers. We’re going to spy. We’re going to employ feds. We’re going to use special agents, double agents. We’re going to use Five Eyes. We’re going to rely on our foreign partners to spy on Americans domestically, because we can’t do that. And they’ll share the intelligence.
And so a lot of focus kind of goes on… let’s just say the lazy slop of the people at the Department of Interior. Okay, fine, we can clean that up. God, you know, God bless the people that want to do that. But if we do not focus the energy of this movement on the administrative state, then we are going to have elections in name only. And I know the president understands this because he lived through a thwarted first term. Largely because of the intel agencies and what we would like to call the shadow government.
The July 13th Mystery
TUCKER CARLSON: Trump had 97 charges against him. All in…
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes. And we still don’t know what happened on July 13th.
TUCKER CARLSON: And we certainly don’t at Butler. That’s exactly… Why don’t we know that? Do you know?
CHARLIE KIRK: I don’t. I don’t know. And I know that we have the right… We could not have better people in those positions at the top, like, you know, Dan Bongino. Well, I could speak very highly of his integrity.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I love Dan.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: And so I’m going to… They need to act on this.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yep.
TUCKER CARLSON: And I don’t have much more to say than that. But I don’t know.
CHARLIE KIRK: FBI needs to…
TUCKER CARLSON: And specifically the FBI on that.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. And the FBI is stonewalling. And it’s not Bongino, it’s not Kash Patel. It’s… That I know of. I don’t know, actually, but I know that they’re stonewalling on that. And I think it’s very weird. They still can’t get into Crooks’ devices.
TUCKER CARLSON: The whole thing is so bizarre, really.
CHARLIE KIRK: Because they can read my text messages.
TUCKER CARLSON: I noticed they can read your Signal messages.
CHARLIE KIRK: And they have…
TUCKER CARLSON: Which is even worse than text messages.
CHARLIE KIRK: I haven’t even shot anybody.
TUCKER CARLSON: I… I will… You’re not Dick Cheney. I will… I will go a step… I try to not spend too much time on July 13th.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, I agree.
TUCKER CARLSON: Bad for my brain. I totally agree. It’s so weird. It’s so bizarre. I like spending time with my wife and my kids and I try to have a very focused subset of issues that I get passionate about. So I feel things that I can’t get to answers on will drive me endlessly insane. So I want one day to find out what happened on July 13. Because by only the grace of God and by a millimeter, is Trump alive and is Trump president if he can…
CHARLIE KIRK: Murder presidential candidates, it’s not a democracy, obviously, so…
TUCKER CARLSON: And get away with it.
CHARLIE KIRK: And get away with it. Right. But they just can’t get into his devices. I mean, he had no social media profile.
TUCKER CARLSON: How did he get on the roof and how was it unguarded? And then it was two days before the Republican National Convention. It felt again, if you were to kind of go in a dark place, which again, this is all speculation. It felt like, well, this is our last… This is our last chance before he’s the nominee.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yep.
TUCKER CARLSON: Because you know what happens once you’re the nominee? You get Secret Service protection.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yep.
TUCKER CARLSON: And this is an unknown element of this. Literally, as soon as you get to become the nomination by bylaws of Secret Service, whatever, you get equal presidential protection. So he had a bunch of like DHS hangovers, you know, no offense to the people that were protecting him on the day of Butler, some of which did a great job, some of which are not people I would necessarily, you know, go to war with. No, just, you know, more… more of the TSA agent mold than the Secret Service agent mold. And again, that’s not a criticism of them.
So if you want to get like really dark and go in that direction, you have to ask those questions. But I try not to focus too much on Butler because I think it actually, it leads you in a place where you ask more questions than we have answers.
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The Economic Reality Facing Young Americans
TUCKER CARLSON: You are, I think, well, you are more in touch with young voters than any other single person in American politics. Certainly on the Republican side, you’re way more effective than the RNC, though I think they have a bigger budget than you.
CHARLIE KIRK: We got along great with him.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not quite sure what that. Well, then I don’t want to cause you problems. I have no idea what you do.
CHARLIE KIRK: Back when Ronna was running things we did not get, we were very vocal about getting rid of Ronna McRomney. But I think you’re the most effective.
TUCKER CARLSON: Republican organizer, certainly among young people. You are. And you deal with them and you wade into the crowd and you go to college campuses and you debate people and you have a tactile sense, I think, of what younger voters care about. And so I’ll just ask you the obvious question. What do they care about?
CHARLIE KIRK: So there’s a race against the clock that’s happening right now. And I think President Trump is uniquely suited to fix it. He has to fix it, which is, can we reorder the economic reality of under 30s before dark political radicalization sets in?
TUCKER CARLSON: The economic reality. Correct. There’s a topic that’s never broached.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, here we go.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, but it’s just interesting. Before you. It’s interesting. That’s your first answer. The economics, I have always noticed, and I am insulated from a lot of that stuff, I’ll admit. I don’t really notice.
CHARLIE KIRK: I would be otherwise if I didn’t spend as much time, because we do very well. We’re in the top income bracket.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I just noticed no one talks about it, so I think that’s weird. People used to talk about economics. They don’t anymore. So you think that that’s. Economics is the number one issue for young people. Oh, if we don’t address it, we go to dark places. What does that mean?
Political Radicalization as Economic Distress Signal
CHARLIE KIRK: So a couple things. Number one, the rise of Mamdani should be a. It’s a coming attraction of what is coming next. Zoran Mamdani, the Muslim communist that is running for mayor in New York City, who obviously there’s a whole rabbit hole we can go down there. He just looks kind of be like central casting and, you know, his ideas are terrible. He wants the city to run the grocery stores, all that.
But I think everyone’s kind of not everyone, but most people are missing the point of really what this is. This is yet another distress signal by young people to say, hey, if you’re not going to fix our life economically. We’re going to get very radical politically.
Now let’s take a step back. President Trump won the youth vote in many states across the country, in many battleground states. Now, Tucker, 12, 13 years ago, when I started Turning Point, if you would have told me that a Republican running for the presidency would be winning the youth vote in Michigan and in Arizona, I’d say no way. It’s an incomprehensible accomplishment of what President Trump was able to do.
One of the reasons he was able to win younger voters and younger men, especially in big numbers, is that they were trying to get their leaders attention. They said, hey, this guy, Donald Trump, he is pledging to go fix our economic anxiety. He is loud. He is going to get your attention. Donald Trump was a distress signal by a lot of young people, especially young men, that were stuck in a credit centric renter economy. And again, this is what is the rise of Mamdani. It’s just another iteration of this, only.
TUCKER CARLSON: From the left, which is a credit centric renter economy.
The Housing Crisis and Generational Wealth Gap
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes. Which is the way that we need to focus, that we need to kind of frame this. And conservatives, I think I know why, are just so unwilling to have this conversation. And I’m not even to get into what we should do about it. I think I have some good ideas. Trust me, I’m not a socialist. I’m a market guy. I like capitalism. I think markets are good. I think entrepreneurship is good.
But we need to kind of paint this picture first because I think so many, I know this for certain, so many people in D.C. have no idea what I’m talking about when I bring this up to them. And secondly, a lot of people over 50 think this is a foreign concept. And they think, quite honestly, this is just the complaining of young people that don’t want to work.
So let me kind of paint this picture. It is harder than ever to own a home. We know this. But how much harder? Back when my parents had to go own a home, the price of a home. How old are your parents? They’re early 70s, so late 60s, early 70s. So baby boomers.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
CHARLIE KIRK: And so. And great parents, by the way, phenomenal upbringing, great values. So back when they wanted to go buy a home in their beginning income years, you know, 1970s, 1980s, home prices were on average about three times the average income in America. They are now seven times the average income in America.
Rents have gone up, inflation adjusted, from about $900 a month to now about $1,500 a month. Inflation Adjusted, inflation adjusted. The age of a first time home buyer in 2008 was 30 years old. It is now 38 years old. First time home buyer. So when we have a picture of a first time home buyer, and that’s scary, you think of, you know, kind of a toddler in one arm, a dog, you’re trying to figure it out. 38 years old.
So what is causing this? Well, number one, I don’t want to get too Ron Paul libertarian, but the Federal Reserve pumping in cheap money post 2008 has just been a catastrophe. We have spent too much money, borrowed too much money, we have deteriorated our currency and the purchasing power every generation is getting weaker. So your dollar is actually going, it’s going, it’s going less and less as far as it has year over year.
So then what is the consequence of this? So you have a generation that is renting a lot more than it’s owning. So when you do not own something, why would you defend it? And so you find then political radicalization start to seep in because an entire generation is getting routinely cynical year over year as their net worth either stays at zero or goes into negative.
Now my question for every Republican senator and congressman watching this, if you do not know these four letters then you are not doing your job. BNPL, do you know what that means?
TUCKER CARLSON: No clue.
The Buy Now, Pay Later Crisis
CHARLIE KIRK: Buy now, pay later. Buy now, pay later is how 60% according to surveys of Generation Z is paying for things month to month. They’re not credit cards, so they’re not. This is not regulated by credit bureaus. It’s not regulated with credit checks. It’s basically anything from Amazon to Instacart. Groceries, clothing, furniture, you can finance anything. It’s BNPL. It’s run by three main Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay. And essentially you’re 21, 22 years old, you, you can split a pizza into four payments. Sounds great, right? This is the modern tech economy.
TUCKER CARLSON: Buy a pizza on credit.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes, you, right now. You can go to Instacart right now and either through Klarna, Affirm or Afterpay. Those are the three big actors. These are non credit regulated bureaus.
CHARLIE KIRK: Two of them are foreign companies just to reclaim. One is a Swedish company and one is an Australian company. I did a deep dive into this.
TUCKER CARLSON: You can buy a pizza on credit.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes, you can buy almost anything on credit. Concert tickets. You can buy. So when I’m a big sports fan, I’m a huge Chicago Cubs fan. You know, it’s just fun. I grew up in Chicago. When I go to buy tickets at Wrigley Field, they say, you know, finance this over the next three years. Using Klarna? Actually, yes. Concert tickets, Taylor Swift tickets. I mean, so what you have is a workaround.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the collateral?
CHARLIE KIRK: There’s no credit score. So it’s just you. It’s your Social Security. They’re collateralizing you. So it’s very high risk for the quote, unquote lender. But they have the late fees and the penalties make these companies eventually whole because they know they got you. And again, this is not regulated by traditional credit bureaus. So the federal government has not really weighted in on this yet. And again, you could just. Your younger folks can affirm everything I’m saying, Right? I mean, am I correct? I’m not making any of this up. It’s BNPL. So when I sit down with a.
TUCKER CARLSON: Republican senator, I never think of myself as out of it or not in touch or whatever. I flatter myself that I’ve got my thumb on the pulse of the country. I am shocked. I’ve heard people refer to this. I didn’t realize you could, you can buy a pizza on credit. Someone needs so.
Predatory Lending Targeting Young Americans
CHARLIE KIRK: But here’s, here’s the kicker and your groceries. The belief is that Gen Z is doing this to live above their means. Some, most are actually doing this to meet their means.
TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s, that’s the definition of predatory.
CHARLIE KIRK: Right. And so again, this is not structurally healthy debt. So there’s, there’s an argument for debt if you have a mortgage, because the whole system is kind of rigged towards mortgages. Of course it is. You could deduct the interest, the asset price goes up.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s hard to get off the mortgage addiction. I did it.
CHARLIE KIRK: But there’s an argument for it.
TUCKER CARLSON: You take your lumps if you don’t have a mortgage.
CHARLIE KIRK: And I think there’s an argument that’s actually an okay, and yeah, you could reconcilable type of debt.
TUCKER CARLSON: I know smart people have mortgages.
CHARLIE KIRK: If you, if you are in investment banking and you have student loan debt and that student loan certificate, you know, that credential got you the investment bank. Okay, you bet on yourself. Maybe. I stress file again. I’m very anti college, as you know. There’s really no place where you can make an argument that financing your Whole Foods order is good for you.
TUCKER CARLSON: But to do that to young people who really. I mean, I’m 56 and I’m still terrible with money. I mean, it’s hard. It’s hard. And I don’t think, I’m not lazy and I don’t think I’m profligate, but I also think I’m easily fooled because I’m distracted. And if I was 21, imagine how much more unsophisticated I would be and how much more vulnerable to predatory behavior like that. And everything is so easy because everything is digital now. I mean, that’s an awful thing to do to young people.
CHARLIE KIRK: And it creates a subterranean debt market that a lot of these young people think this is how you pay for stuff. They haven’t been educated else otherwise they’re like, oh, yeah, I’ll just, you know, pay for that meal in five installments.
TUCKER CARLSON: What are the interest rates like?
CHARLIE KIRK: They can get very high. I don’t want to speak out of turn, but they can get to be double digits, right? And so that’s really where they get you, is the late fees.
TUCKER CARLSON: This is bonkers.
CHARLIE KIRK: And so it’s not, it’s not regulated by traditional APR. So this is a very, It’s a gray area. And I think people are finally waking up. So, hey, Republicans, can you tell me.
TUCKER CARLSON: The name of the three companies again.
CHARLIE KIRK: So it’s Affirm, Affirm, Affirm.
The Buy Now, Pay Later Economy
TUCKER CARLSON: Klarna, Klarna.
CHARLIE KIRK: Klarna. And Afterpay.
TUCKER CARLSON: Afterpay, which is the American one.
CHARLIE KIRK: I believe so, yes. But one of them was bought by Block and is operated by Square, which I believe is Klarna. I don’t want to speak out of turn here. One of them was. It’s still Australian run, but it’s run by Block. It might be Afterpay. Someone can fact check me on this.
But those are the three big actors, and they’ve kind of just gone below the surface. So we create all this economic anxiety by pumping the system with cheap money. Everything gets more expensive. Meanwhile, we have millions of young people that are financing their Coachella tickets, but it’s not through credit cards, because in credit cards, we have a very regimented, regulated system. I think the card of credit cards are a disaster, and we need to kind of figure that out. But this is a totally different thing.
And so what they’ve done is they’ve tried to create a loophole and federal regulators are slow, as they typically are, and they’re like, oh, no, this is not credit cards. This is something else. This is like a repayment thing. It’s like buy now, pay later. And it’s the opposite of what built the West. What built the west is work now, pay after. So you’re going to like, meaning, like, we will enjoy things later. That’s what built the West. This is like, enjoy things now and pay for it later.
The Two Sides of Economic Blame
TUCKER CARLSON: You know, what I don’t like about conservatives, and I am one, is that it would never occur to some of them that there are two sides to the story. It’s like immediately, you know, they blame the people who are buying Coachella tickets on credit, which I get. You shouldn’t buy Coachella tickets on credit or your pizza or your Whole Foods. I totally agree with that. That’s stupid.
But they never. It doesn’t occur to them that there’s another side, that the people loaning the money are taking advantage of the dumb people borrowing the money. They both are culpable. And by the way, I think the people with more power and more wisdom, probably more culpable, act morally than the people who are. But in other words, like, are we mad at the drug user or the drug dealer?
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, typically the dealer.
TUCKER CARLSON: But conservatives look at all economic arrangements and they never blame the dealer. And I don’t know what that is. Like, how about we’ll blame everybody? It’s bad.
CHARLIE KIRK: I think the reason, and it’s a tick within the conservative movement is that all of a sudden we’re Marxists if we do that. And I think that they’re. No, I’m not saying I don’t believe that. No, no. But you’re absolutely right. I think that I’m a racist if.
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t like mass immigration. Well, I don’t like mass immigration, but I’m not a racist. I don’t like this and I’m not a Marxist. Like, it’s just name calling to stop you from raising the question.
The Most Indebted Generation in History
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s thought terminating cliches is what it is. Right? It’s stop thinking it because we’re going to terminate your thought by calling you a Marxist or whatever. And do I think this should be illegal? I don’t know. Probably. I need to learn more about it. All I’m saying is I am here as a messenger of the next generation. I’m telling you this is bad.
This generation can’t own anything. They owe so much more money than generations prior. This is the most indebted generation in history. And I double checked that. Gen Z owes the most money in any history, any generation in history. So we wonder why then all of a sudden, hey, you want to go buy a home now at the age of 38, your credit score is destroyed, your spending habits are terrible. You don’t want to save and you don’t think you should save.
And you know what I hear from some of them is they say, well, why should I save? When what I saw around me is that you need to get into this economy and spend, spend, spend, because the savers got wrecked in 2008. Again, that’s an oversimplification, but there is economic nihilism that is set in to a lot of this next generation where they’re not participating in any of the upside right now, any of the upside of the last five years. In fact, they’re only seeing the downside. They’re seeing their apartments get smaller, their rents go up, their groceries get more expensive.
Now, mind you, I think President Trump is, again, he’s uniquely positioned to solve this. I think that his one big beautiful bill is going to help and I think growth will help this and lowering interest rates. But let me just say, though, why do I say it’s a race against the clock? And here’s why it should concern conservatives, because when I’m at dinner parties raising money, some of our donors are a little indifferent about this. They’ll have kind of like a hey, pull yourself up by the bootstraps attitude that’s hard to shake. I don’t have that attitude. I actually have a lot more compassion for the 23 year old that is working a double, double shift and can’t afford anything. But even if you don’t care about them, you’re not going to like the politics that comes next.
Why the Right Defends Money Lenders
TUCKER CARLSON: But how do we wind up on the side of the money lenders? I mean at no other time in history is usury considered a virtuous business at all. I know a million people in that business, finance we call it. But I don’t understand why they became immune from criticism. And that’s, I mean there are places where, you know, loaning. I borrowed a lot of money in my life and I’m grateful for it and all that, but I don’t think it’s virtuous and I don’t think we should say that it’s virtuous. And I don’t think the people who should do it, who do it should be above criticism. I don’t know why is the right participating in basically a cover up of a crime against people.
CHARLIE KIRK: From my perspective, why is the right so blind to the suffering of the young people that just gave you a Senate majority?
The Youth Vote and Economic Reality
CHARLIE KIRK: This is a generation that just put you in charge of all your committees. Young people, thank you. They should be saying thank you. Younger voters, you voted Republican in overwhelming numbers. That’s one of the reasons. Again, I like Dave McCormick a ton, so I’m not throwing him into this. But younger voters help put Dave McCormick as a U.S. senator. And I think he gets this more so than most. Donald Trump built this movement of younger voters that galvanized the nation.
Again, this is the untold story of the 2024 election is how Donald Trump won the youth vote in so many parts of the country. Okay, so what are they experiencing? They own nothing, they’re renting constantly and they’re involved in this scam of a credit based economy. Everything is based on credit. And so then what it does is it deteriorates your capacity to have equity. And so again, I’m not here to propose like a solution of all these different policy requirements. All I’m saying is how about some national attention for this?
TUCKER CARLSON: How about there’s going to be.
CHARLIE KIRK: Can we have a conversation about it?
TUCKER CARLSON: There’s going to be a policy solution imposed on the rest of us, which is just stealing your stuff.
Saving Markets from Venezuelan-Style Revolt
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, that’s the thing. So that’s this is where the continuum, whatever you want to call it, the spectrum, you know, whatever DC term we’re here in kind of. Again, I am a market guy. I like private property.
TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.
CHARLIE KIRK: I like trading. I like when I meet someone good at their craft and they’re a carpenter or they’re a small business owner. I actually want to save markets. And if we don’t do something about this, you’re going to get a Venezuelan style youth led revolt. And I am not exaggerating because what I see right here is with this next generation, younger voters, young men in particular, they’re going right, they hate all the cultural stuff, the trans stuff’s driving them crazy. The hyper feminization of the economy, which we should talk about because I want to talk about that. The whole, whole economy’s become feminized for the last couple decades and no one has the courage to really talk about it.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s not just female empowerment. It’s more than that.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, because we went from blue collar jobs to pink collar jobs.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, I don’t want to. I can’t wait, but I’m sorry, interrupt.
Political Radicalism and Economic Desperation
CHARLIE KIRK: We could talk about pink collar in a second because that’s super important because male unemployment is significantly higher than female unemployment. But let’s put a little button in that and just revisit in a second political radicalism. Political radicalism is a catalyst. Political radicalism does not come out of peace, prosperity, rising wages, stable families, church attendance, and happy people. Happy people, grateful people do not get behind Vladimir Lenin, and they certainly don’t get behind Chavez or Castro.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.
CHARLIE KIRK: People that own nothing, that feel like their property is diminishing, they don’t have property or their dollars diminishing in value, they start to look for alternatives. And so the political project in front of us, as conservatives should be, how do we actually deradicalize the country in the next couple of years? That’s my obsession. That’s why I say, I try not to think about all this other stuff because it just, you know, it’s such brain space. My number one obsession is I know what is coming next because nobody spends more time on college campuses than me. I hate to pull rank on that, but I spend 100 hours a semester on college campuses.
TUCKER CARLSON: And you’re getting no credits?
CHARLIE KIRK: No, I get no credits for that. I still don’t have a college degree.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I love that.
Listening to the Next Generation
CHARLIE KIRK: No, but I listen more. And that’s the thing. I know you. Hey, you know, people ask all the time, hey, why do you do these campus events? Why do you just give a speech? Because I listen as much as I talk and I put my microphone down. And these videos have been seen around the world and people have grown familiar, but almost all of them are like, Charlie, I don’t know what to do. Like trading crypto till 2am and kind of betting that the Green Bay Packers are going to win the Super Bowl. That’s not enough for me. Charlie, what can we do?
And one of the reasons they voted for Trump is they said, President Trump, please reorder this economy for us. Because it’s severely disordered. And so the Republican Party currently is focused on a lot of stuff. I get it, you have a lot of constituencies to serve. But we have participated, we being the body politic the last 20 years, especially the last 10, in a concerted effort of intergenerational theft. And if you don’t care, Maduro is just the beginning.
The Choice: Roosevelt or Chavez
TUCKER CARLSON: So someone, you know in the next 10 years is going to shut it down because the public doesn’t want this at all. They don’t want.
CHARLIE KIRK: Shut what down?
TUCKER CARLSON: Shut down. Just the parasite economy because it’s going to get shut down. This is. And everyone participating in it knows that they’re trying to steal as much as they can before it gets shut down. So the question is, is it shut down by Teddy Roosevelt or is it shut down by Hugo Chavez?
CHARLIE KIRK: And here’s the brilliance of Teddy Roosevelt. So there’s a lot of anti Roosevelt fervor on the right. There is, yeah, yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why?
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, not a lot I should say amongst the intellectuals, they’re the worst. Why do they dislike Teddy Roosevelt? So part of it, I get part of it is that he was the war craziness. Well actually it’s funny, he actually ended the Russo-Japanese war. I think he got a Nobel Prize for it if I’m not mistaken. Right, Yep. Did he get a Nobel Peace Prize?
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know.
Roosevelt’s Legacy and Economic Transition
CHARLIE KIRK: But anyway, he deserved one. It was a bloody war. Some would say that Roosevelt began the Progressive era. I think that’s an over description. I don’t want to get into that because I’m not that interested in that. What I’m interested in though is how Roosevelt was one of the few, we were one of the few powers to successfully manage the transition from the farms to the factories. And that’s hard when you think about it. You have your entire population that is moving into cities. That transition, if done incorrectly, creates a ruling class that is untouchable. So Roosevelt was like, actually I’m here to save capitalism, I’m here to save markets.
TUCKER CARLSON: And he did.
CHARLIE KIRK: And he did. And that is the enduring legacy of Roosevelt, obviously the national parks which my wife and I are enjoying right now, and untouched beauty, which I think is amazing. And just the fact that he was the hunter and outdoorsman and a man’s man and super masculine and all that was awesome. I don’t love the fact he ran for President in 1912 out of bitterness, but that’s a whole separate thing. He gave us Woodrow Wilson because of that.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s hard to decelerate for guys like that.
CHARLIE KIRK: I mean he’s, you know, I know the type.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I do too.
The Rooseveltian Approach to Governance
CHARLIE KIRK: But his legacy that I want us to… The Rooseveltian, whatever. I don’t think that’s the right term.
TUCKER CARLSON: You know, let’s coin it.
CHARLIE KIRK: Let’s coin the Rooseveltian energy or aura, to use a Gen Z term is, hey, don’t be ideological, have a prudential aim. What do we want? We want an ownership economy. Want people that feel invested, that have real equity. So how do we get there? Non ideologically because we actually want to preserve markets because we want a country. What I commonly say, are people listening to you.
TUCKER CARLSON: I hope people in charge are listening to you.
CHARLIE KIRK: I don’t. Well, the President listens to me. He’s amazing. People in Capitol Hill don’t listen to me.
TUCKER CARLSON: They need to listen to you. What you’re saying is true.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, thank you. And I again, I am. This is going to sound really cringe, but in some ways people have compared me to Paul Revere and it’s like I’m warning of something that is coming. The Bolsheviks are coming. The Bolsheviks are coming.
TUCKER CARLSON: I wrote a book on this and no one paid any attention.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, I did, but what?
TUCKER CARLSON: No, but I’m saying it’s gotten so much worse. Your explanation is so much more vivid than anything I came up with. And you have the credibility I did not have, which is someone who doesn’t have a college degree and is constantly on college campuses. I just hope they’re listening because this is the story.
CHARLIE KIRK: This is the biggest story happening that has not yet happened. And that’s what I always say is that it’s happening, but it hasn’t yet happened on the front page. And when it does, don’t be shocked when all of a sudden people are calling for a 75% wealth tax and they want a 50% tax on capital gains.
TUCKER CARLSON: Totally. Right.
CHARLIE KIRK: And so what Roosevelt, just to complete the Roosevelt point is that when you know what you want and you can aim towards it, you can shed yourself of the bumper sticker logic.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
CHARLIE KIRK: And you can get towards something practical and prudent, real and beautiful. The best leaders in American history, the ones that are underrated, honestly, the Roosevelts and the Eisenhowers, they were non ideological.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: They were nationalistic. They were America first. They loved the country and they weren’t caring about whether or not they were fitting a mold of a think tank white paper.
TUCKER CARLSON: And TR was a sincere Christian. A sincere.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes. And I believe Eisenhower was as well. I can’t, I actually don’t know. So the statesmanship dilemma of today is can you either challenge or convince because it had yet one of the others, the ruling class, that this is necessary. And I don’t think convincing is going to work.
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
The Coming Crisis and National Unity
CHARLIE KIRK: So you have to challenge them. And hilariously, it’s actually the best thing for them because otherwise they’re coming for their mansions and they’re coming for their assets and they’re coming for their companies. And I don’t want to live in that country. I do not want to live in South Africa. I don’t want to live in a resentment, bitterness country where I have to drive around in armored cars all the time, and I can’t leave my house after 10pm.
TUCKER CARLSON: We don’t even know who lives here.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, that’s a whole other.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, but I’m just saying that makes it more volatile. So if there is a severe economic contraction. And of course, at some point there will be. You’re not going to have a Civilian Conservation Corps. Because the country’s inherently not united and citizens have nothing in common with each other. And who are my neighbors? They don’t even speak my language. They don’t know what the Civil War was. We’re not on the same page on any level. And they have expectations that are totally unrealistic because they were getting free stuff the second they got here. So man, you could have. This is an emergency, I think.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes. And it is a volcano waiting to explode. I mean, any one of your metaphors that you could put in. But we are a nation of strangers. The ties that bind us together are purely economic. If you think about it, it’s not language, it’s not culture, it’s not religion. It’s not shared history. It’s not any of that. We have. And this is the distinction. It’s the dichotomy. I ask Republican leaders all the time because voters get it. That’s the thing. Do you want to be a country or a colony? What do you mean? Tell me the difference, because I could tell you what a colony is. A colony is a place where everyone just kind of comes and they trade stuff and you have a good time and you kind of go in your own little corner, but you have nothing in common. It is the reverse colonization of America, which is the greatest of all ironies. Right. Because we tried to do the colonization thing, but we are colonizing ourselves. You think about it. Because we really don’t have much in common anymore. We’re kind of in our own little corner, and all that unites us is the dollar bill. And we’re told that that is the most important thing. Well, what happens when the dollar bill then shreds? You see, economic volatility is survivable if you’re a nation of neighbors.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: Because then you go to church and then you have commonality and you’re kind of bind together and you figure it out. Like the Great Depression, for example. We survived that because we were a different people demographically, we were different religiously. But when you’re a nation of strangers filled with third Worlders that don’t really understand what this country is about and they’re just here for free stuff. Socialism. Watch out. This again, I don’t want to use the term emergency. I’m not challenging on it only because I don’t want to do the Greta Thunberg thing where the sky is falling. You know what I mean? It just drives me crazy. The over catastrophization of American politics be addressed immediately. But it will become an emergency. It is a canary in the coal mine. It’s a harbinger, it is a sign, it’s a warning of things to come. That, if I get 10 minutes with somebody, I think I can convince them it’s kind of a problem. But then as a step further, it has all these other secondary problems and third and fourth tier problems like birth rate collapse and marriage issues and young men not participating in the labor force. And then you don’t have a civilization.
And so I guess that’s a long winded way to say that almost every politician when they run for office will give some sort of euphemism, some sort of thing. I’m doing this because of my kids. And they bring up their beautiful family up on stage. You’ve seen this, what, 500 times. Are you really doing this for your kids? Are you really doing this for the next generation? Because if you were, you wouldn’t be doing what you’re currently doing.
Economic Anxiety Among College Students
TUCKER CARLSON: This is just settling hard on me because you’ve confirmed and put a much finer point on a lot of things that I can intuit, I can smell and to some extent see. But. So when you talk to college kids, the first thing they bring up is money?
CHARLIE KIRK: No, not always. I mean, I shouldn’t say that. Sometimes it’s abortion, sometimes it’s trans, sometimes it’s foreign policy. But the undercurrent of anxiety is economic. I do get more economic questions than anything else for sure. But I don’t want to oversimplify, but let me also divide this into two different categories. So young women are doing much better in this economy than young men for the first time in the last 30 years. Young male unemployment’s around 7%. Young female unemployment’s around 4%. So we are seeing the creation of kind of the Lost Boys. They’re disappearing, they’re leaving the workforce. We don’t really know what they’re doing all day long. You and I can speculate, but they’re not. They’re not reading Montesquieu if you have a whole.
TUCKER CARLSON: Society organized around hating white men, should it shock us that they’re being destroyed?
CHARLIE KIRK: No. How.
TUCKER CARLSON: Is this an accident?
CHARLIE KIRK: No, it’s a deliberate intentional campaign. And so what I find, young men are flocking to our events and they want meaning and they want purpose. And some of this is values. I don’t want to say this is not all economics. I want to be very clear. But some of those, it’s.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re making me so radical that my first thought was make them a militia. Charlie.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, no, no, no.
TUCKER CARLSON: Harm them. No.
CHARLIE KIRK: I’m sorry, but disavow. No, disavow.
TUCKER CARLSON: You disavow that completely.
CHARLIE KIRK: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m the lunatic here, not you. You are very. You’ve got a future.
The Feminization of the Economy
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, okay, but so I mentioned this earlier. I want to dive into this. The entire economy has become hyper feminized. The education system has become hyper feminized. I’m sure you’ve heard those arguments. Well, I know that a lot of kids. Yeah, again, sit still. Do what you’re told. The hyper feminine books. But you think about what are the jobs that have had the greatest emphasis of the credentialing, which basically what college is. It’s just a massive credentialing exercise. They’re not the more masculine jobs that we need, which is like industrial engineering. They’re HR managers, they’re norm enforcers, they’re empathy driven, they’re sociologists or DEI officers. And so thankfully, we’re finally pushing back on DEI. But a young man doesn’t want to go be an HR manager. I mean, they would rather go to a WNBA game than be an HR manager.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, that’s a strong thing to say.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s a coin toss.
TUCKER CARLSON: But I don’t think they’re allowed to be HR managers, are they? No, but that’s a straight man.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, of course not. And so the entire economy, the push, the thrust the last decade has been, the growth has been in what we call pink collar jobs. Jobs that men would rather sit at home and kind of just be slovenly than be caught doing because it’s just so demeaning to how we as men are wired. They’re not about creation or risk taking or value proposition or boundary pushing. They’re kind of about, well, here are the rules and the norms and we must enforce them. By the way, there is a rule.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re mom jobs.
CHARLIE KIRK: Exactly. And you know why? They’re mom jobs. Because these women aren’t moms.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, now, now I think we just need a militia, but whatever. Okay, that’s. Sorry. Now this is.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, because you think about it.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I have thought about it, but I haven’t.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, but I’m putting.
TUCKER CARLSON: I haven’t thought about it as deeply.
CHARLIE KIRK: As you thought about it. Connecting the dots.
TUCKER CARLSON: You are connecting the dots because why.
CHARLIE KIRK: Are these, these women play mom at work because they don’t have kids at home.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s dark, man.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s true.
TUCKER CARLSON: So the effect is. I mean, the effect is obvious. And all of this comes from economics. So those of us, all of it.
Economic Realities and Family Formation
TUCKER CARLSON: Some extent I just noticed that living in a predominantly black city and then spending part of the year in an entirely white area that had been de-industrialized, you saw kind of similar. You saw lots of million differences. Well, there’s no violence in the all white area, for one thing, which I’m grateful for. Zero violence. But you did see similar family formation patterns where as the jobs for men disappeared, people stopped getting married.
CHARLIE KIRK: That’s right.
TUCKER CARLSON: And so what I thought was purely about values, like decent people get married when they have children.
CHARLIE KIRK: I totally agree with this. Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Turned out to be partly about values, but also the values were shaped by the economic realities. And women don’t want to marry men who make less than they do. So they didn’t get married.
CHARLIE KIRK: The same reason why women don’t like dating guys smaller than them.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: Because they know intuitively at some point they’re going to be pregnant and they’re going to be vulnerable and they want a man to be able to defend them.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
Gender Dynamics in Modern Society
CHARLIE KIRK: And again, women have an interesting way of communicating. They won’t put it as bluntly as I am right now. So let me just kind of put it all out there. Women deep down want to be protected and served, of course. And so they don’t want a guy that is earning less or that at some point they feel as if they’re going to have to provide for. Of course, that is very off putting.
So Scott Galloway, who’s a man of the left, he’s actually done some really good scholarship on this. He’s from NYU. He has a really important point that I think is necessary to hone in on. When women get disenchanted in the dating pool, they focus on friendships and work, which is totally true. They pour all their energy into either friendships or in work. We see that when men get disenchanted with the dating pool, they pull out from society basically all together. Because you know why? There’s a hint of embarrassment and shame. Not just a hint, more than a hint.
TUCKER CARLSON: The definition of shame. And so you can’t provide. You’ve failed.
CHARLIE KIRK: So women, they’re more likely to graduate college. They’re more likely to close on a home. They’re more economically secure. They’re also simultaneously, many of which are miserable. We know this. They’re the most incredibly addicted antidepressants and suicidal ideation. The numbers speak for themselves. The most miserable women of the west are those that are unmarried, without kids. The numbers know that. They speak it out. And again, this is materially true. We see this in our life.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the rate of diagnosed mental illness is off the chart.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. And I think part of that is just confirmation bias. I think we’re looking for more of it. So people think they have it more. But I will also say that people are. You and I both see it. They’re unhappier. This is an unhappier generation.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. And let me just be clear. I think most diagnosed mental illness is a total lie, which is legit, of course. You and I both real. But I mean, whatever. That’s a whole separate.
CHARLIE KIRK: That’s a whole separate.
TUCKER CARLSON: And I would refer everybody to Laura Delano, who was diagnosed with profound mental illness and recovered. I had a conversation with her earlier this summer that was one of the most. I’m still thinking about it. Let me just put it that way. It’s Laura Delano, as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
CHARLIE KIRK: I’ll have to check that out.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s worth it. It’s worth it. Anyway, sorry to interrupt.
The Need for Blue Collar Jobs
CHARLIE KIRK: No. And so the entire configuration of the west has been to put men down and to put women up. And so what are the consequences of that? Declining marriage rates, declining fertility rates, and then a disordered mess. So I keep on going back to that word, disordered, and that’s a very important word. We could use chaotic, or we could use bedlam. But that is what young people are feeling. They can’t always put it into words, but they’re like, Trump MAGA hat something’s wrong. Let’s go to the Charlie Kirk event. And they’re trying to piece this all together. They know something is just so off. They’re like, women don’t want to date me, and I don’t want to date them, and everything’s expensive and what’s going on here?
So the task in front of us as conservatives and we’re perfectly positioned for this because we’re not people of the left. We don’t seek the destroyer. To burn, we’re arsonists is to kind of reorder this, put it back together to say, okay, how do we go wrong? Too much emphasis on pink collar. So Larry Fink, who I’m not a fan of at all from BlackRock, he said something very interesting that no one decided in the mainstream media cover. He said there’s an urgent need right now for 500,000 electricians. 500,000 electricians.
So here’s a guy, the $10 trillion man, he’s one of the largest funds he controls, which by the way, he’s also purchasing single family homes which are pricing families out of buying homes. We’re going to get into that, I think in a second, which I want to talk about. But here he’s saying that there’s a need for 500,000 non college educated jobs. You’re trying to tell me that we don’t need more sociologists, we don’t need more communication majors. And then what about media studies? Yeah, exactly, media studies or North African lesbian poetry.
And so we peel back this a little bit. We realize that one of the other reasons why men are being checked out of this whole system is that parents and the whole momentum behind young men have pushed them into a feminized system when in reality would have been better for them to just not go to college in the first place and pursue just normal blue collar trades of which we have the greatest deficit in our country. But it goes, that part is all is very. This is not economics as much as social status. And you said this on your show once. It was a one sentence thing. I’ll never forget. And I’ve repeated it like 100 times. Upper Middle class suburban parents do not want to tell their friends their kids are working construction. Yeah, I don’t know if you even remember saying that, but.
The Destruction of Working Class Culture
TUCKER CARLSON: No, but I’ve seen, I work. I was forced to work construction by my father as a child and it totally changed my life and my outlook on everything. And I made lifelong friendships, literally lifelong. And I remember I didn’t force my own kids to work construction.
CHARLIE KIRK: To be honest, it’s not even a matter of course.
TUCKER CARLSON: Society changed so much.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, but it’s almost.
TUCKER CARLSON: When you destroyed the white working class, which they did on purpose because they hate them above all for some reason. When you destroy the white working class, then you have immigrants running everything at the bottom. And I’m not against immigrants. I like them, actually. But I’m not going to send my kids to work on a drywall crew where they’re the only English speakers. So there’s actually, it cuts off that whole. I worked in a factory. I worked at a gas station. I was a dishwasher in a restaurant. I worked construction. That’s what I did in the summer for high school and college. And I was from a rich family, but they made me do that and it totally changed my life.
But I wasn’t unusual in that I hitchhiked. They made me hitchhike too. My parents did. And that was pretty normal. And it wasn’t that long. It was the 80s. Now you can’t do that because no one else working those jobs has anything in common with your children.
CHARLIE KIRK: That’s right.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re not from here.
CHARLIE KIRK: They’re strangers.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: And on top of that, there is a belief by upper middle class America that those are the dirtier lower class jobs. Don’t do that.
TUCKER CARLSON: They don’t even speak English. So it’s like not even a thing.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s a barrier to entry.
TUCKER CARLSON: Have to send your kid to work at a clothing store in Martha’s Vineyard. Because if you want to work. I’m serious, if you want a working class job, what else is there? You know what I mean?
CHARLIE KIRK: I know exactly.
TUCKER CARLSON: When I worked in a kitchen in 1985, everybody in the kitchen had a criminal record. Every single one. But of course, every dishwasher has been to prison for something. Right? But they were all Americans and they all spoke English and you’d take a cigarette break with them and you could talk to them and they were part of your country and your culture. They were at the lower end. I’m from La Jolla, California. I’m with this guy, you know, he’s got tattoos on his neck and he’s done 15 years or something awful, but he was recognizable as an American. I’m not going to send my kids to a kitchen now. I’m sure they’re better. I’m sure the Hondurans are better people than the people I work with, but they’re not Americans.
The Threat of a Lost Generation
CHARLIE KIRK: That’s right. And so what does all this mean if these young men stay lost and they came out in huge numbers to vote for President Trump and we don’t give them purpose, the civilization will collapse. You cannot have a generation of young men just check out.
TUCKER CARLSON: So when Biden says the number one threat are straight white men, which he said about a million times. Or what are the white nationalism or Christian nationalism? He’s talking about young white men. That’s what he’s talking about.
CHARLIE KIRK: Me and the young men I represent.
TUCKER CARLSON: Bingo. Those are just dumb euphemism.
CHARLIE KIRK: This is one of the reasons why.
TUCKER CARLSON: But he’s afraid of them.
CHARLIE KIRK: Of course. Of course. I get it again, I hate this racialization stuff, but I do, too. They force the racialization card. For the record, I don’t look at people in terms of skin color, but when they start categorizing me and the young men that show up to my events as toxic because they breathe, you force the race card. So. But the power of young white men in this country, if they were motivated and purposeful. Yeah. Young white men helped us win a world war and get to the moon and split the atom.
TUCKER CARLSON: You better give them weed and fentanyl and benzodiazepines and DraftKings and porn just to kind of disable them so they don’t rise up and eat you. That’s what I would do. I’m just saying, if I were in charge of society, I’d be like, holy shit, I’m afraid of these guys.
The Protestant Spirit of America
CHARLIE KIRK: You’re so right. And I try to. So I listen to your show all the time, Tucker. When you say stuff like that, I try to challenge it. I’m like, is it really a centralized conspiracy? I’m like, no, it’s conspiracy. But then I’m like, I got nothing. But it’s like, you know, if you were trying to make the most. By the way, if you look at just the genetics of it, I’m Scots Irish, I’m very disagreeable, boundary pushing, you know, rebellious. I know my genetic type. And by the way, genetics matter. We should talk about genetics more. It’s not racist to say that. So my genetics come from all the way, you know, from Scotland, from the Maxwell clan, you know, fought alongside William Wallace. But if you took. If you want to kind of calm down, that kind of Appalachia fighting spirit, man, you would do what you’re doing right now.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a Protestant spirit. I mean, let’s just get really honest about it. The people who founded the country were Protestants. I’m as pro Catholic as anyone could be. My best friends are Catholic.
CHARLIE KIRK: I’m Calvinist, too.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not against Catholics at all. I love Catholics. However, this country is founded by Protestants because they think for themselves and they’re the legacy, you know, they’re the heirs of Martin Luther who took on, you know, the ancient, the 1500 year old church by himself.
CHARLIE KIRK: Totally.
TUCKER CARLSON: You know, they are people who believe they communicate directly with God, that their conscience is more important than federal law. And they’re really hard to deal with and so you have to destroy them first. And they did.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, they’re not done yet. There’s still a lot. And that’s.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I know some, I am one and.
The Challenge of Bringing Back Lost Young Men
CHARLIE KIRK: But by the way, even the young men that are currently lost, let’s bring them back in. And that’s what I’m saying. You can shed your addiction, you can give your life to Jesus, you can get your aim figured out, you can reorient your purpose again. Larry Fink is getting to something deeper. There’s actually going to be a massive blue collar need for all this AI stuff or whatever. Well, that’s the kicker. So that’s where everyone. I refuse to accept the premise that we need a bunch of H1B workers and a bunch of foreigners. Meanwhile, the men of this country are withering away in a basement because they’ve been told they’re toxic and terrible their entire lives.
TUCKER CARLSON: Life.
CHARLIE KIRK: And so anyway, I feel a moral obligation to fight for the young men that show up to my event. And you could tell they’re battered down. I mean they’ve been so suppressed by either the HR department or the pronoun policing or the hyper feminization of their classroom. And they’re like, I’m done. I’m not doing this. I’m going to go play video games, I’m going to check out and is that the right move? No, they should not do that. They should do what you and I do and get your life together. Don’t be a victim. But they do it because you beat down a group of people so much over so long period of time, they’re going to exit, they’re going to check out.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve just been trained to blame them though. It’s so wild in all of our society. I find it and I find it also atmosphere now. It’s what you. I don’t think a conversation has pissed me off as much as this one that I can remember.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, I hope I’m not pissing you off.
The Broader Pattern of Blaming Victims
TUCKER CARLSON: No, you’re just. What you’re saying is true and that’s why it’s upsetting me. But I’ll even say that about black people. I mean, I didn’t grow up in a black neighborhood. I have a few black friends, couple good black friends. But I’m not like the voice of black America. So it was easier for me to blame black people for all the huge problems, like the overwhelming problems of black America. But now I’m like, you know, and that’s some extent fair. I’m for blaming the victim sometimes, but I’m also for acknowledging that there are other forces and like economic forces really do matter, as noted before. And I just think it’s so interesting in the people I know and grew up around with politically, like, they will never mention how this happened in the first place. They’ll never blame the company. I don’t know how we got to this place. We have to defend the company. I’ve worked for companies.
CHARLIE KIRK: They’re horrible.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re anti Christian, they’re anti human, they’re greedy and, you know, they provide. They paid my kids tuition all those years. I’m grateful and all that, but they’re morally neutral at best. At best. So why are we defending them? I don’t get that.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, and at the very least, again, because we, you know, wealth is important. We don’t want to be a third world country. Right, but if we’re wealth. No, of course we want, we don’t want to be poor. That’s the, that should be like the operative. Don’t be poor. Yeah, but at the very least, we shouldn’t have a gut instinct to defend them like we defend companies as if we’re defending our children. I know they did nothing wrong. That’s so true. Harry did nothing wrong. Or, you know, it’s as if, like you don’t even know any of the facts. And immediately you’re on Exxon Mobil side. I never even. And on my own media. Immediately you’re on Nvidia’s side and you’re on. It’s like, wait, hold on. Let’s. At least, let’s have a presentation of what’s happened here.
TUCKER CARLSON: And what, how did that. You’re so much younger than I am, but you seem to have paid closer attention than I have or been onto this more than I am. How did that happen?
The Philosophical Roots of Corporate Defense
CHARLIE KIRK: I think it’s a philosophical inheritance from the Rockefeller Romney takeover of the Republican Party many years ago. Well before I was born. Yeah, that’s my best guess is that there was this anti Soviet, anti communist, anti Marxist belief that was kind of the connective tissue of what was Reagan’s rise in the 80s. And therefore, again, we exist on these ridiculous binaries at times, which is fine. Some things are binary, like sex is binary, male, female, Other things are not, which is, there’s a lot of steps in between, like anarcho capitalism and like oligarchy run capitalism, which what we have right now we have oligarchy run capitalism and Marxism. There’s a lot of steps on the continuum, right, from oligarchy run capitalism to that.
And so, but also we. If you look at the tax code, if you look at the whole configuration of the current system, which again credits President Trump for finally putting a working class tax cut, no tax on tips and no tax on overtime, finally workers get something. But the whole configuration of the tax code is really rigged towards the big incumbent actors and the top 1% or the Pareto principal. I know I sound like a left wing Elizabeth Warren person. I don’t care.
TUCKER CARLSON: Describe the problem it needs to remedy.
CHARLIE KIRK: But again, let me just kind of. The problem should not be how are we going to get the 1% to flourish? We shouldn’t penalize them. But the question should be how do we get the bottom 50% to have a little bit better life and their kids have a much better life and their grandkids to have an even better life than that. That’s the American project is intergenerational wealth building, is that you’re going to sacrifice a little bit, your kids will be better off.
The First Generation to Be Worse Off
And this is the kicker. Why is it that these students are showing up in massive numbers to my events? Why do they vote for Trump? This is a fact. It is the first time since George Washington that this generation has it worse off than their parents at the same age. It has not happened, not even during the Great Depression. It’s about the same. This generation is significantly worse off. And the problem, this is what no one mentions. We’re not poorer. So you look at all these problems, you would think like if you’re from Mars and you’re looking at all these numbers, you would think that the country’s gone through like an economic tailspin the last 15 years. Like, okay, your young people can’t afford homes and they’re putting groceries on credit and they’re killing themselves. They’re socially isolated and they’re addicted to benzodiazepines and Zoloft. It’s obvious you guys went through like a terrible economic catastrophe. Like you lost a war.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
CHARLIE KIRK: No. The stock market’s at record highs. Our companies are more valuable than ever. So wait, we’ve solved the tough stuff. We know how to create wealth, but we don’t know how to create it for the generation that needs it most. If you look at the economic conditions, you would think the other conditions surrounding it are like abject poverty. These are the problems that like third world nations have. I know our young people can’t afford stuff and they have to finance their basic necessities. And yet we’re the wealthiest nation in the history of the world on the planet. We have a $37 trillion GDP, we have the greatest companies, and we have all this stuff to brag about. And yet all of our problems would beg the question. And it’s like this inherent contradiction. We’re super wealthy on one side, like a powerhouse juggernaut, and we are like an economic nightmare on the other side. How did that happen? Answer. The wealth went to older people at the expense of the next generation.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s for sure.
CHARLIE KIRK: Every single economic growth decision of the last 30 years has been made. I am going to benefit. My baby boomer generation is going to benefit. And I don’t care if it hurts young people. And I’m not anti boomer. I get negative hate mail all the time because the boomers are super protective of their generation. As if I’m like attacking Presbyterians or something. They’re repulsive.
The Baby Boomer Problem
TUCKER CARLSON: They’ve always been repulsive. And I grew up in a world. I was born in 1969. The baby boom ended in 1965. So it was 65 or 64, whatever. It was. Just the post war generation ended mid-60s. I’m not a boomer. Thank Kevin. My father was not a boomer. He’s born in 1941. Totally different attitudes, right? He was born before the Second World War. Our entry into it. I was educated by them. They were my teachers. And they were the worst, the dumbest, most narcissistic, the shallowest. Every sentence had like nine cliches in it. They were all at Woodstock. They remember when Kennedy was shot. It was the day the music died. Like everything they said was like the Don McClain tuned. It didn’t make sense. It was just a series of evocative cliches strung together to create a feeling they were idiots. But above all, they were about themselves. I hated them then. I hate them now. In fourth grade, I remember saying to a buddy of mine, I hate these people. Our math teacher just told us I was at Woodstock. I was like, how many people were at Woodstock? Like everyone in America was at Woodstock. I thought it was 300,000 people. They’re the worst. They’re the ones who lecture us about the civil rights movement. For 40 years, as the actual supposed beneficiaries of the civil rights movement, black people declined. They didn’t care. They were only about feeling good about themselves. The only good thing they produced was, like, the music of 1972. Other than that, horrible people.
CHARLIE KIRK: Horrible.
TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well. And so. Yes. So I know.
TUCKER CARLSON: I grew up with that.
CHARLIE KIRK: That’s okay. Everyone can email Tucker your hate mail when it comes to testing.
TUCKER CARLSON: And by the way, if you are a baby boomer, take some. Take some responsibility for what you.
CHARLIE KIRK: That is. That is the kicker. That’s what I will say. You guys have had a great. You’ve had. You’ve had the greatest run. You’ve had what either. Brett, Eric Weinstein would call the ego, the embedded growth obligation. Right. Ego, meaning things just keep getting better, the market goes up, your house gets more valuable, and you guys are trying to squeeze the last of a lemon and you are leaving a crummy, unrecognizable serfdom in your wake.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course they are.
CHARLIE KIRK: And that is. It’s bad for you. It’s bad for your legacy. It’s bad for your nation.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re the ones who went right from protesting the Vietnam War to like, making all this money on Wall Street. Remember, Jerry Rubin was a yippee. I mean, this is before you were around.
CHARLIE KIRK: But like Sean Kerry went from, you know, the Vietnam. It’s the whole thing. It’s. It was all live action, role playing, rebellion. It’s LARPing is what it was.
TUCKER CARLSON: I would just exclude Anyone born between 1946 and 1964 from Ever holding any office. And I know a lot of them. I’m sure they’re nice people or whatever. We like Trump, but your genera. Oh, I forget what you’re. The whole generation is just rotten.
CHARLIE KIRK: But let’s extrapolate one part of it, which is that it’s definitely. That generation has not had a regard for leaving an economic.
TUCKER CARLSON: They don’t care about anyone but themselves. That’s the whole point.
CHARLIE KIRK: So if you. If you employ that belief into fiscal policy and monetary policy, this is what you get. An intergenerational war. Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Their grandchildren, who they don’t care about.
CHARLIE KIRK: And so what I’m trying.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re on John’s island or wherever they are.
CHARLIE KIRK: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re on John’s island, but whatever.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, yeah. Amongst other places.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I like John’s Island. I’m just saying they’re in retirement.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re kind of psyched with what they have.
CHARLIE KIRK: And their stocks keep on going up.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And their grandson Dylan is like totally zoned out on prescription drugs and they don’t really care.
Defending the Current Generation
CHARLIE KIRK: Right. And, but, or if they are, to impart some wisdom. It’s, you know, when I was your age, we worked two jobs and I was able to put myself through college and we worked really hard. And I’m telling you, selfish people, this is. There. Are there lazy people in Gen Z? Of course. But honestly, the majority of young people I come in contact with, they’re working their tail off. This is not a stereotypical lazy generation. I’m sorry. Like they’re no lazier than some of the people I’ve seen in prior generations. I will die on that hill. I’ll defend this generation.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, but young girls, I’ve got a lot of them, like they’re always buzzing around doing something. They’re just self directed. But young men, I think that’s why everyone likes to hire women, because they’re self directed. You give them a task, they’ll do the task.
The Role of Faith in Young Men’s Lives
CHARLIE KIRK: They’re Microsoft 100%. Women are the best. And look what the scriptures tell us. And this is a very interesting thing. What did God say? He said it’s not good for man to be alone.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: But he wasn’t alone. He had God. What he’s saying is that it’s not good for man to be without a woman.
TUCKER CARLSON: Of course.
CHARLIE KIRK: So it’s not enough for man just to have God. I mean, some people don’t like this teaching, but it’s true. Adam had God. He had a relationship with God. If you look at almost every third world country where men don’t feel that they are able to have economic prosperity or any romantic future, you get either revolution, gang violence or complete disconnect or suicide. Or suicide, which is what we have. Right. So it’s the most suicidal generation in history.
Now I don’t want to paint like a totally negative picture because there is one really good trend and it’s not because of baby boomers and it’s not because of our leaders.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s that, I guess that.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, no, it’s men. Young, young men are going back to church. That is legit. That’s happening. Because honestly, it’s the only thing that they can find. It’s a life raft in this just tsunami of chaos and disorder.
So I get asked all the time, well, why are they going to the Catholic Church? Why are they going to Orthodox church more than the evangelical church? And I’m evangelical. I’ll say, well, first of all, they want something that has lasted. They want something that is ancient. And that is beautiful. Something that has stood the test of time. Something that’s not going to change. Something that’s all of a sudden not going to all of a sudden just flip around and have some sort of transgender story hour.
So that’s a really positive trend in the midst of all this. So that’s my great hope, is the spiritual hope that the young men that are lost and if any young man is listening to this right now, stop. Stop watching porn. Stop smoking weed. Stop drinking endlessly. Find yourself back to church. That will reorient your life.
TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.
CHARLIE KIRK: And do what the church tells you to do. Right. Find a woman, marry her, provide. Have more kids than you can afford. That’s my advice for young men. Yes. Don’t play the victim. Even though you legitimately can play the victim card on everything we’ve said, the mindset of a victim is parasitic to your soul.
TUCKER CARLSON: I completely agree. I completely agree. And you shouldn’t whine. You shouldn’t whine.
CHARLIE KIRK: Whining is bad, but that’s our job. And just to be clear. So people say, but, Charlie, you talk about this a lot from a whining standpoint. No, what I’m doing is I’m communicating to a very specific audience of people in charge that are ignoring this and they are ignoring what’s coming next. And that’s the whole context of conversation.
The Need for Accountability and Justice
TUCKER CARLSON: So I agree with you. I mean, every. I really hope that people are listening to you. People in charge.
CHARLIE KIRK: Thank you. I mean, the president does, to his great credit.
TUCKER CARLSON: It seems obvious that everything you’ve said is true. And I just want to say, for the ninth time, I really hope members of Congress will listen to what you’re saying. I think it’s the most important thing right now because we are in the last stages of what we had, and we’re moving towards something new. This isn’t working, and it’s not working for the people it has to work for, which is the next generation. They’re specifically the ones being hurt.
And so they’re going to be big, big, big changes, and people will be punished for what we’re going through right now. There’s no question about it, either from the right or from the left. And my concern is not preventing them from being punished. It’s making sure the right people are punished. It feels to me like the greatest injustices are when we’ve solved the crime, but we executed the wrong guy.
CHARLIE KIRK: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: And I just want to make certain that the predators are punished. The people taking advantage of desperate young people. The people who are getting rich from payday loans and from buy now, pay later for your pizza schemes. Those people should be crushed and not hardworking people. How do you make sure that punishment is allocated justly?
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. Well, first, this is why the right needs to administer it, because we would pursue justice where the left would probably pursue revenge.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: And revenge is bad.
TUCKER CARLSON: So good.
Lessons from the 2008 Financial Crisis
CHARLIE KIRK: But first, secondly, I hope you’re right. I hope that the people that are doing bad here, which is plenty, will be held accountable. But there’s no guarantee. No one went to jail after 2008. And I think that was a stain on our nation. I mean, I remember my family having to metaphorically and literally downsize after the 2008 financial crisis. I mean, that was a real turning point, if you will.
TUCKER CARLSON: I had to sell my house.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. And we didn’t. Praise God, But I remember we didn’t go out to eat for six months. It was a real trimming. And no one.
TUCKER CARLSON: And you remember that?
CHARLIE KIRK: Did you connect? I was a freshman in high school.
TUCKER CARLSON: And so you connected what was happening to your family to larger economic forces.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes. And a lot of millennials, which I’m a millennial. I’m in the younger and a millennial. I’m almost Gen Z has very similar stories as to mine, where they saw their parents have to downsize, trim vacations, cancel luxury items because of macroeconomic events.
And I think it’s still, to this day, a stain on our nation that no one went to jail for what happened in 2008. None of the bankers, none of the people were held accountable. And there’s a lot that went into that. Obviously, the federal government was heavily involved, but we did the worst possible thing, which is we actually created and we codified the bad behavior by making the incumbent Wall Street banks even more powerful through Dodd Frank. So it’s harder for small and community banks to compete. And then we flooded the zone with cheap money. We went to basically zero interest rates, which then depreciated the dollar, which only hurt the next generation even more.
So, look, I would have liked to have seen. It’s too late now. The statute of limitations is well passed, like perp walks for people. That helped wreck the economy back in 2008 and 2009, because there was plenty of material there. So there’s no guarantee that justice is coming. But I think this is different. I think this is far different.
Because remember what I said early on in 2008, the average first time home buyer was 30 years old. Now it’s 38. In 2008, you could have bought Apple stock for 6 bucks, 8 bucks. Now it’s like 180, $200 a share or something. I mean, asset prices have ballooned so dramatically and young people are so priced out of the entry point, let alone the completion point of the American dream, that I think you’re right that there will either be. This could be two way. This is kind of a sloppy way to say it, but it can either be a stormy the Bastille or Nuremberg. And Nuremberg is like orderly. And at least there’s some sort of justice component.
TUCKER CARLSON: With a Soviet judge in charge.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, sure, I mean, it’s not a perfect example, but the guy who did.
TUCKER CARLSON: The Stalin show trial should put him in charge.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it’s not perfect, but at least there is some. At least there was a pageantry to it that we’re trying to pursue justice. I don’t want revolution. My whole temperament is anti revolution.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, that’s such a smart point. Any legal proceeding is flawed. I don’t think you should put a Soviet judge in church. But I think any judge is just a man or person and you’re not going to get absolute justice in this life. That is absolutely right. But it needs to be. I think that’s the key point. Needs to be orderly and sensible and explain to the public there’s a reason for this.
The College Endowment Problem
CHARLIE KIRK: So another one is, I mean, again, one that we haven’t even touched on is are we ever. I think Trump is actually doing a great job at holding these colleges accountable. But is someone going to finally have to be on the hook for the amount of student loan debt this generation has? Can we seize and raid the endowments? I mean, these colleges are hedge funds with schools attached.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: They’re growing their endowments by hundreds percent and their enrollment by 3 to 4%. So their endowment is exploding and their enrollments are barely exploding. Not to mention all the other problems embedded there.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the medieval church. It needs reform.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. And so again, I’m not here presenting all the solutions. Smarter people than me can kind of come through with a buffet line of solutions. My biggest contention is why is no one even admitting this is a problem? And that’s what’s so bizarre.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why is that? So we began on that question. I don’t know the answer. What’s your guess?
Why Leaders Ignore the Problem
CHARLIE KIRK: I’m not doing one of those things where I ask the question rhetorically. I have guesses, the first of which is that it’s so bad they’re just ignoring it. And I really think that’s part of it, which is that Congress is so filled with septuagenarians and octogenarians that it’s so distant from their purview, they’re way too concerned to send more money to Ukraine or whatever. Their primary priority is that kind of representing the next generation, oh, those kids will kind of sort their way out. We had it tough too. Which they didn’t compared to what this generation has to go through.
But secondly, I also think that the left will eventually wake up to this. I’m telling you, they’re all a mess right now. They don’t know which way they’re going. But the Mamdani thing is a little bit of a trial balloon. They’re like, wow, that’s interesting. It’s getting younger people interested and involved. And just remember, Bernie Sanders won the Democrat primary in 2016, and he won it in 2020 if it wasn’t for the COVID lockdown. The base of the Democrat Party has been yelling about economic anxiety for 10 years before it was even nearly as bad as it is today.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re right.
CHARLIE KIRK: And so what we as conservatives need to be really concerned about a cautionary tale is a Democrat candidate or politician that says everything I’ve just said, that runs on basically resentment and bitter, driven politics. You own nothing because of these people. Let’s go take it. And that’s a little bit more sane on the trans stuff, the crime stuff and the border stuff.
The Threat of Left-Wing Economic Populism
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s exactly right. And that’s why I don’t think Gavin Newsom has a real shot, because he’s so transparently a tool of the ruling class.
CHARLIE KIRK: Totally.
TUCKER CARLSON: AOC obviously wants to run. She’s dumb. That makes her a better puppet for a kind of fake economic populism. I mean, she’s actually controlled by the banks and the neocons. But I don’t know, she’s. If you had one, a candidate on the left who was even sort of genuine. There’s kind of like a Tim Walz, who, without the creepy personal life, who wasn’t sending off kid toucher vibes like he is. Whoa. I’m not accusing of kid touching. I’m just saying he sends off those vibes.
CHARLIE KIRK: There’s an aura there that wouldn’t.
TUCKER CARLSON: Have dinner with him. But if you had a slightly more normal person who was an economic populist. Oh my gosh, that person would be emperor.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, I don’t know about emperor. And I don’t even know if they’ll. Again, they’re so off course on the trans stuff, the borders.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I agree.
CHARLIE KIRK: I totally agree. And they’re so married to those three things. But just all those things back. Something is going to come.
TUCKER CARLSON: And I wonder if they’re married to those things because I have always sort of wondered, what is that? There’s a lot at stake here. This is running the world. Okay. So you don’t just decide trans rights are central to your platform by accident. There’s smart people thinking about this and I’ve always wondered, was that a way to tame economic populism is the thing that the donors on both sides fear the most? By far. They need a little bit of it in order to stop the revolution from coming. As you have said, you need a Teddy Roosevelt.
CHARLIE KIRK: Actually, everybody needs it.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re too greedy and stupid to realize that. Short sighted. Exactly.
CHARLIE KIRK: So.
The Sanders Factor and Democratic Strategy
TUCKER CARLSON: But I always have wondered, what was the trans thing? Why if I’m running the Democratic Party, I’m a huge drone of the party. I don’t want, I mean, you know, the trans thing or whatever, but I don’t want to put that the center of my platform because that’s going to turn off all the normal people. I’m going to lose with that. It’s too bonkers. Maybe that was inserted into the dialogue on the left to really kind of stop the Sanders insurrection forever.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. I mean, that’s interesting.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, am I being too…
CHARLIE KIRK: No, I mean I always…
TUCKER CARLSON: Because Sanders is what they feared most.
CHARLIE KIRK: Sanders would have given any candidate, including Trump, more of a run for his money in 2016. I think Trump would have beat Sanders. But Sanders would have campaigned in Michigan. Oh, Sanders would have campaigned in Wisconsin.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
CHARLIE KIRK: And there’s a lot of crossover of Bernie Sanders, Trump voters that exists. Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, Sanders is a fraud or whatever you think of Bernie Sanders, a total fraud. However, a sincere Sanders I think would be unstoppable.
The Religious Element of Transgenderism
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. So I’m less interested in the biography or the person of where the Democrat Party is going.
TUCKER CARLSON: I agree.
CHARLIE KIRK: I’m much more interested in the movement that obviously is coming next. It’s just so it is manifesting, it’s bubbling up. And so we on the right, we should exist to de-radicalize, to create normalcy and order and a regular America, the good America that you and I miss.
And so as far as the trans stuff, look, there’s a lot of theories on this. Number one, I think that there’s an element of the Democrat Party that’s into really creepy, weird sex stuff. That and religious stuff. There is a religious element to the trans thing. I take dominion over my body.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. I’m God.
CHARLIE KIRK: Where, if you think about the Christian element, which is that we surrender our body to the Almighty, our body is a temple. Right. God made us in his image where the trans thing is. No, no, no. I make myself in my image. It’s diametrically against every one of the teachings of Christ and of those scriptures. It’s against the distinctions between what is holy and profane and what is good and evil, child and adult, are blurred in the trans thing, male and female.
So I think that there’s an irresistible temptation amongst the kind of dark base of the Democrat party which exists, that they just had to hold onto this because again, it’s the snake eating itself. Progress knows no limits. Right. So it goes from homosexual marriage to eventually gay adoption to then finally to transgenderism. But I think you’re getting onto something important from a corporate media standpoint. Do I think that Pride Month is emphasized more for a reason? Almost certainly because I think it’s a smokescreen grenade to make us kind of be unsure of where we’re going. So no one actually talks about economics.
Debt as Modern Slavery
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but we don’t have get out of debt money, I noticed.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, and if you want to be even more…
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t think we’re getting one either.
CHARLIE KIRK: Even more provocative, One of the 613 laws of Judaism and one of the more beautiful teachings is called the year of Jubilee, which is every 50 years is debt abolition and basically the rectifying of your financial situation. For the nation of Israel, it was in law every 50 years because the…
TUCKER CARLSON: Religion recognized, I think, as all religions do, the debt is slavery.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, it says that in Proverbs 7, 22, where it says basically, if you borrow money, you are slave. You are a slave to the lender. Of course, repeated all throughout the Torah, all throughout the Old and New Testament.
And so now here we are in a modern context again, A little bit of debt is justifiable. Mortgage, maybe. But when you… Another one that we even touched on that is crushing people. Democrats are starting to talk about this. More is medical debt. Oh, it is crushing people. They go to the ER for just, you know, broken leg and they have a $7,000 bill and they are just murdered by those bills for the rest of their life. And so you have medical debt, you have credit card debt, you have personal debt, you have student loan debt.
The Healthcare Obsession Problem
TUCKER CARLSON: There’s something kind of sad about the emphasis on healthcare too. I’m all for healing. I’ve been to the… I had appendicitis back surgery. I mean, I’ve been saved by surgeons and I am grateful. However, if the most important economic sector in a lot of parts of your country is healthcare, what is that exactly? Shouldn’t you be focused on producing life and not just like, say… And I say this as a middle aged person who’s past the age of producing life, but I think there’s something. It lacks energy. It’s too inward. Oh, what about my healthcare? Oh, shut up.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s also inherently bureaucratic.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, but it’s also like, shouldn’t you be. I don’t know.
CHARLIE KIRK: I just…
TUCKER CARLSON: I’ll tell you how I feel about my life. It’s getting older, you know, probably going to get physically decrepit at some time in the foreseeable future. That’s inevitable. That’s nature. I have that in common with every person who’s ever lived. I will die. And if you can’t accept that, if you’re a baby boomer and you think the point of living is to go on vacation, which they do because they’re selfish and stupid, I don’t know. That’s like, you’re missing life. Actually. The point of life is to produce new life and then help it thrive.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: There’s an energy there. Teddy Roosevelt died. I think he was younger than I am now when he died. Does anyone think Teddy Roosevelt didn’t live a life?
CHARLIE KIRK: He lived a very full life.
TUCKER CARLSON: He lived a life. And I don’t think Teddy Roosevelt in its final moments is like, oh, damn, I’ve been cheated. You know, if only I could get to Barbados. You know what I mean?
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: There’s something sad about. Everything is about maintaining an increasingly declining quality of life. Health care, health care, health care. What about building something? You know what I mean?
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Am I, I’m not…
Building vs. Maintaining
CHARLIE KIRK: No. I articulate. I hate it. It’s sad and it’s all. If you look at… Yes. The prior generations had a different moral view, which was far less about getting another 15 years on your life expectancy. It was about, how are my kids doing?
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
CHARLIE KIRK: So if you just look at it from pure economics, Again, I’m not a eugenicist.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do I have a mission? Am I making something?
CHARLIE KIRK: Exactly. And what are you leaving and right now. And again, I’m not here to make people feel bad. If you’re over the age of 70, you’re leaving a crappy country for your kids. Trump is fixing it. He’s working his tail off, but there’s structural stuff that he’s going to have to fight like hell.
TUCKER CARLSON: So stop talking about your illnesses. I don’t like that.
CHARLIE KIRK: Stop that.
TUCKER CARLSON: My father died at 84.
CHARLIE KIRK: He had a million illnesses. That is definitely…
TUCKER CARLSON: I never knew what they were. Cause you never mentioned them.
CHARLIE KIRK: But by the way, that’s very WASPy not to talk about…
TUCKER CARLSON: He was.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, not to talk about your health stuff, but 70 plus a tic is all your health stuff is the only dinner conversation. Right?
TUCKER CARLSON: Are you joking? I remember thinking my father would say when he got old, these old people, all they talk about is their health. It’s so boorish and self involved and boring.
A Christian Perspective on Mortality
CHARLIE KIRK: But it’s also, it’s also, if you think about it, it’s not very Christian.
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
CHARLIE KIRK: Because we’re just here temporarily. In the Christian view, there’s an afterlife for us, there’s the next life. Our bodies will actually resurrect. Christ, our Lord will come back and reign over this earth in the thousand year millennia. So we shouldn’t be overly fixated.
TUCKER CARLSON: But until that happens, they’re rotting.
CHARLIE KIRK: We’re all rotting, by the way.
TUCKER CARLSON: So just deal with it, accept it.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yes, exactly. You have an expiration date.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
CHARLIE KIRK: And God is in charge of that. So what do you do with that?
TUCKER CARLSON: Amen.
CHARLIE KIRK: And so if you look at the biblical figures, they weren’t overly interested in mastering the back nine, you know, at the Naples Country Club. No, it was do. God wants us in four words. Love God, love people. And we’ve done a very poor job of that in the West.
The Challenge of Political Reform
TUCKER CARLSON: I agree, I agree. Wow, Charlie, you really, really spun me up. So how do you get this message since… So we’ve had a conversation for an hour and a half, kind of on what I think, and you clearly think is the single biggest and least addressed issue going forward, which is how are we serving the next generation? But you also spend an awful lot of time in actual American politics and the mechanics of it, how do we get people elected? How do we get people out to vote, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Can you just be a little more precise. So you know every lawmaker, certainly Republican lawmaker. Why isn’t… what is so hard about what you just said for them to understand?
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, a lot of them only represent… They only represent their voters. Just as kind of an act. It’s not an actual thing that they do. I think of Lindsey Graham and look, Lindsey Graham. I’m sure if we had him here, he’d tell hilarious jokes.
TUCKER CARLSON: The most charming member of the Senate.
CHARLIE KIRK: I’m great, I’m sure. No, he is.
TUCKER CARLSON: He’s smart, he’s charming, but great guy.
CHARLIE KIRK: But does he represent the economic anxieties of a 24 year old welder in Columbia, South Carolina? No, I mean, of course not. But part of the problem is, and we’re trying to fix this at turning Point, action is actually the process of how difficult and how expensive it is to get good people elected in office. We haven’t figured it out, but we’re working on it. So we’re engaging in Republican primaries and across the country.
The Lindsey Graham Problem
TUCKER CARLSON: So Lindsey Graham’s primary. I think Lindsey Graham is up soon. I say this as someone who has enormous affection for Lindsey Graham personally, because he’s enormously likable. But he can’t get… If he gets reelected to the Senate, then it’s all fake. Obviously. He has zero interest in America. He only cares about hunky Ukrainian soldiers or whatever his trip is with them. He needs to lose just in order for this system to stay viable and real. How hard would it be? I’m going to do whatever I can to help him lose because he does need to spend time in retirement. How hard is that?
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s going to be very difficult.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why?
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, for a couple reasons. He’s going to have a ton of money. Probably have tens of millions of dollars to spend.
TUCKER CARLSON: Really?
CHARLIE KIRK: Oh, yeah. I mean, Senate leadership will most likely pour a lot of money behind Lindsey Graham. His numbers are underwater. But also it’s going to be… He’ll try to make a mess of things. There’ll be other candidates kind of thrown into the mix to try to split the vote. Remember, it’s a plurality, not a majority. I don’t think they have a runoff system in the South Carolina primary. I could be mistaken. I don’t want to speak out of turn there, but senators are really, really hard to come by that are decent. Mike Lee is a great example of a decent person in the US Senate. He is a great person. There’s not many of them that are actually decent and that Eric Schmidt’s a good man. I agree with you. Eric is a really good dude. Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Just as a person, he’s a…
CHARLIE KIRK: Cardinals fan, but besides that, you know, he’s a great person. But no, look, as far as how hard it is, this is why what we are doing, I think, is very exciting at Turning Point, but also simultaneously a threat to the Republican establishment is that we’re big. We’re not going anywhere, God willing. We’re loud, we’re young, we’re energetic, we’re principled, and we’re kind of new, right?
The Republican Party’s Generational Divide
TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.
CHARLIE KIRK: Because we’re not part of this whole neocon, you know, invade the world, invite the world, and we got to talk immigration, too, because that’s a whole component of this, because Amnesty is going to try to be pushed by some people soon. But we’re a different. We’re a different flavor. We represent a generation primarily that is mad, that is angry, but we want to channel that frustration into a prudent way because, again, we don’t want a revolution.
So we’re a threat to the established Republican order, and we kind of delight in that in more ways than one. So, look, we’re going to be involved. Other one that really involved in is Kentucky for Mitch McConnell’s empty Senate seat there, Nate Morris, who’s phenomenal, who’s actually running on an immigration moratorium, up against kind of two of McConnell’s lackeys there in the open Kentucky Senate race.
And here’s the thing. If we or anybody were able to take out Lindsey Graham, that will send a signal to the rest of the conference that will be such a definitive signal. And so look, we’re going to involve ourselves in many races. We’ll see if we do Lindsey Graham. We most likely will. We had Andre Bauer at our event. We’re also going to be really involved in stuff in Arizona because we got to kind of get some things sorted out there.
But more importantly is this, is that there. And this is the other structural problem. What we at Turning Point Action, specifically our political arm seek to do is try to make Republican voters back into alignment with their elected leaders, because there’s a misalignment that’s happening. And Trump was the one that exposed this alignment for the rats, for sure. He’s like, wow, you guys are totally not in alignment on your worldview. And I think Lindsey Graham is a perfect manifestation of that. That’s it.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not personal.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s not at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m so mean to Lindsey Graham, but it’s not personal. It’s just that the system is fake if Lindsey Graham keeps getting elected in one of the most conservative states, that’s all. And the system can’t be fake or else you have a revolution. And I don’t want a revolution.
So you did this. You’re very close to President Trump, I think, personally and politically. You did this amazing thing the other day where you tweeted out, amnesty’s coming, people are pushing amnesty. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want. But my sense is that the President was part of your intended audience. You just wanted people to know what was going on. And bless you for doing that. But I wasn’t exactly sure what you were talking about. Who is pushing amnesty and what form could it come in and how imminent is this threat?
The Amnesty Threat
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. And well, firstly, the President has said no amnesty, which is great to hear. And I’m glad he’s saying that he should keep on saying it, because he ran on that. And so I was not surprised when he said it. But he needs to say it.
But look at Maria Elvira Salazar, I think that’s her name, right? She came out the other day and she is pushing an amnesty bill through Congress. I have a text from a US Senator that you and I both respect. And he said, look, there’s whispers that are now becoming real conversations and chatter of amnesty.
And think of how sick and dark this is. We passed one big beautiful bill which is by far the greatest fortification of the southern border, the greatest deportation effort that we need. I mean, it’s legit investment to get the deportations that we voted for, and that the ink is not even yet dry of President Trump’s signature. And almost simultaneously, we’re hearing about amnesty.
And so look, Maria Elvira Salazar, she’s saying, well, if they’ve been here more than five years, it’s not a pathway to citizenship, it’s a pathway to dignity. Let me tell you exactly what would happen.
TUCKER CARLSON: How about get out?
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, of course, Hasta la vista. How about that? Right? And so, but let me be even more clear. We have no documentation of anybody that’s in this country. Undocumented is not the proper term, but it’s not totally incorrect. So all that someone would have to do, let’s say an ICE agent knocks on the door of somebody and they have deportation order, you are going home. All they’d have to say is, cinco años five years and they could end all deportation in real time.
So the person’s been there for three years and they’d have to Just say they’ve been there for five years, lie, go to some judge. That would take them four years to get in front of the judge and they’d hit the five year threshold. It’s effectively amnesty and a loophole workaround being pushed by Ms. Elvira Salazar.
And I don’t know what. She’s a Democrat, she’s a Republican, which. The whole thing doesn’t make any sense. First of all, she’s from a Cuban district. And why a Cuban district is so worried about mass illegal immigration is very bizarre to me. Unless she has a bunch of constituents that are doing visa overstays, because it’s not exactly like Southern border central there.
TUCKER CARLSON: I think she’s just a leftist.
CHARLIE KIRK: I don’t know what she is, but I’ll just. It’s very perplexing. Number two, though, we’re winning Hispanics in record numbers because we’re strong on the border, because we’re strong on deportations. She’s like, oh, if we don’t. If we don’t save this, if we don’t solve this problem, we’re going to lose Hispanics for a generation. We’re winning Hispanics because we’re hard on immigration. We’re winning also.
TUCKER CARLSON: What about everybody else?
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, how about, exactly. And then that goes to think the core essence of. What about the actual American people that have not been represented the last 50 years in your government?
TUCKER CARLSON: Your ancestors are here for the Civil War. Okay. That was, you know, whatever, 160 years ago. Seems like you should have a say in all this.
CHARLIE KIRK: My family came here in 1620. Alphonsus Kirk. We’ve been here for a while. 400 years.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So, I mean, it doesn’t. I don’t think you should get two votes or anything, but I also don’t think that we should ignore you on purpose.
CHARLIE KIRK: Which.
TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s like, what do you. Be quiet. Maria Salazar. Who are you, anyway? Stop.
CHARLIE KIRK: When she does this ridiculous thing, she says, you know, we’re going to try to have this Solomonic compromise of splitting the baby. Which, by the way, it’s not even what happened in First Kings. It’s a whole separate issue. We could talk. It’s also.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why would you want to cut a baby in half, you freak?
CHARLIE KIRK: She literally said that on TV. I don’t know if you saw that clip.
TUCKER CARLSON: She’s obviously dark.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. But also, the fascination of the ruling class when it comes to amnesty is very, very sinister.
TUCKER CARLSON: And it’s like abortion. They just can’t give it up.
CHARLIE KIRK: It really is. And I’ve had amnesty pitched to me multiple times in every one of the ruling class havens. You can imagine. I never get amnesty pitched to me on either a college campus from like a worker or like in Columbus, Ohio, like when I go to a football game. No one’s pitching me amnesty.
TUCKER CARLSON: But they never want amnesty. There’s never amnesty for bank robbers or drug dealers or people convicted of hate crimes. I notice it’s only such a good point for illegal aliens.
CHARLIE KIRK: Such a good point.
TUCKER CARLSON: And why is that? Because they don’t like the people who live here and they want to change the population. That’s why.
The Great Replacement Reality
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s about mass demographic replacement, of course, because if you can’t win over the population or if you hate the population, which they do, then you need to replace that population. And again, this is the great replacement reality that is happening in real time.
And so we finally have this mandate. And God bless Stephen Miller, he’s fighting his heart out every single day to get this deportation effort underway. And the President ran on this, and the President has committed this, and the President is going to get this done unless these people in Congress try to get in his way, which is that we need to deport 20 million people.
This all goes full circle, by the way. Back to the young people conversation. It’s just the 2010 strategy. We need to build 10 million new homes and make sure private equity cannot buy them. And we need to deport 20 million people. We do those two things, we’re going to be a much better place. However we voted for it, we have a president office that wants to do it, that is doing it. And yet there are several congressional actors that are trying to undermine him right now.
TUCKER CARLSON: What about the pressure you keep hearing about from different sectors? Hospitality. I think that’s real ag. I don’t know. Is that real? I mean, who is pushing this other than the corporate titans?
CHARLIE KIRK: For sure, yeah. I mean, so the AG one is interesting because we’re told that we need to have mass immigration or else the crops will rot in the field. Which is interesting because I thought we’re going through like a moment of mass automation right now.
TUCKER CARLSON: I kind of thought that.
CHARLIE KIRK: So what’s the argument now for mass immigration if robotics is going to take over everything?
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, Elon just sent a video out this morning of a robot making popcorn. So if a robot can make popcorn, he can pick lettuce, I think.
CHARLIE KIRK: I would imagine so. Maybe it’s not about picking the crops. Maybe it’s about the fact they want to change the demographics of this country. Yeah, and so, but I mean, but secondly, the hospitality one, maybe. Guess. I guess, sure. How about this? Hire Americans and pay them more. There’s a 7% young male unemployment rate. Remember I said that earlier?
Wait a second. 7% unemployment used to be called a crisis in this country. That was during the Great Recession, remember We got up to 8 to 9% unemployment. So maybe we should go hire some of the young men that are on the sidelines of this economy and make this a nation again, not just an economic dumping ground for the third world.
The Demoralization Effect
TUCKER CARLSON: So you often hear people say, well, I would love to, but the native whites won’t work hard. Okay. I don’t know, there’s something about mass immigration that degrades the existing population. People get less impressive when their country’s invaded. I don’t know why that is.
CHARLIE KIRK: I’ve always noticed that UK is a great example.
TUCKER CARLSON: It is a great example. The Brits themselves, it’s like, I go to the UK, I have family there, I go there all my life I’ve gone there. And you see, you know, I was kind of like the Brits, they’re weird, but I sort of like them creepy kind of. But whatever. But they’ve gotten weirder and creepier over time. They’ve as it, as it’s become more Pakistani, the native born Brits, the white Brits have become way less impressive. I’m not imagining this or do you know what I’m talking about?
CHARLIE KIRK: But also the morale goes down. It’s almost like you’re a conquered nation and you know it. London was 95% white in the 1920s. It is now 29% white.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
CHARLIE KIRK: Now again, I don’t think whites are better than other people, whatever, but it’s just not London anymore.
TUCKER CARLSON: They’re the indigenous population.
CHARLIE KIRK: Exactly. And I thought we’re against mass replacement. That’s ethnic cleansing, isn’t it? Well, it’s literally ethnic cleansing. I mean, I thought, I mean, we’re, you know, lecture all the time about ethnic cleansing.
TUCKER CARLSON: It was happening in Tibet, which it has.
CHARLIE KIRK: Again, I’m not for that at wherever it is, I agree.
TUCKER CARLSON: But if you replace Tibetans with Han Chinese, no one’s like, they’re all Tibetans, they’re all Tibetans.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s like.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, no, no, no, it’s, it’s a strategy designed to replace the Tibetans.
CHARLIE KIRK: Again, if, if something fails when you change the people, it fails to be what it, it once was, of course.
TUCKER CARLSON: But it also, it has a dispiriting effect on the people being replaced. And they’re not what they were all of a sudden.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s hard to measure, but it’s so true.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so noticeable.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s noticeable. You feel it, you see it again. It’s not going to. This is what’s so important about conservatism in the new era. A lot of what drives us will not always show up on a chart or a graph because look, a lot of this I talked earlier is like numbers of, you know, homeownership. But something as simple as that is so true. Their morale is down. They believe. Goofy and weird stuff. They almost have this strange fetish in London that they like being conquered. Oh yeah. That they’re like enjoying the slow motion. Rapidly.
TUCKER CARLSON: Harder.
The Cultural Transformation of Western Nations
CHARLIE KIRK: No, seriously. This weird attitude. Like, yes, Islamist, you know, come into my country. Like, what?
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
CHARLIE KIRK: And it’s just, I don’t know what that is. But I will say this, I will make a hypothesis though.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the immigration, I think we would say. No, it is though.
CHARLIE KIRK: But now a secular nation completely. And so what does that mean when you don’t believe in a divine power? I mean, they’re super secular in the UK, then all of a sudden they need to have some sort of belief system. So their reason for being is that their master is some person from Afghanistan.
TUCKER CARLSON: Totally. Right.
CHARLIE KIRK: And again, I debated Oxford and Cambridge back in May. These are broken conquered cities. They’re completely unrecognizable. London especially is just gone. It’s a husk of its former self, as you would say. It’s a museum. It’s depressing. It brings down your soul. When I go walk through Piccadilly Square and there’s just more Muslims than native born whites, there’s something wrong about that. And that is a metamorphosis that you have to wonder, did you vote for this? Did you want this? Did you invite it?
The Paradox of Muslim Immigration
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the way it happened, it’s the scale of it. And what’s really interesting, what’s really a head trip, which I’d recommend to anyone, is going from London to Riyadh or London to Dubai or London to Doha. I’ve done all of that. And you’re in London and you’re like, man, we’ve got a huge problem with Muslims. And then you go to Doha or Riyadh or Abu Dhabi and you’re like, man, I love Muslims because they’re awesome.
CHARLIE KIRK: So how do you…
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t understand exactly what’s going on, but it has to do with… And let me just say point of fact, I’ve never been anti-Islam especially. It’s not my religion. I disagree, I think it’s wrong. But I’m not mad. And I’m not mad at Gulf Arabs. I think they’re amazing. They’re amazing. They couldn’t be more tolerant, open minded, kind, just great. I mean, things I don’t agree with, but in general they’re great.
And I have even said, you know, because you can say whatever you want in their countries because as long as you’re not attacking the leadership, they have free speech in a way that we don’t, which is really wild. But I’ve said at dinner, what is that? Why am I so happy here in, you know, pick the Gulf capital versus London and what is the deal with the Muslims in London or Cologne or Berlin or whatever? What is the difference? I’ve never gotten a straight answer, but I do think part of it is mass migration of any kind is a lot.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s a lot.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a lot. And it has bad effects on everyone involved. So the immigrants and the conquered.
CHARLIE KIRK: And also I think that there’s just a lot of third world Muslims.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, there’s also that, I mean…
CHARLIE KIRK: I mean Doha is a very industrial, you know, very well…
TUCKER CARLSON: There are 300,000 citizens.
CHARLIE KIRK: Right. Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Riyadh are very first world. But Karachi is not exactly.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, Karachi is pretty intense.
CHARLIE KIRK: Is it?
TUCKER CARLSON: I would say Karachi is pretty intense.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. I wouldn’t put Pakistanis up with…
TUCKER CARLSON: No. Though I’ve had amazing meals with people in Peshawar, Pakistan who are reading P.G. Wodehouse novels and are super smart and have all these languages and stuff. I don’t know, there’s something about immigration, the mass migration that degrades everybody involved. I just noticed it. This is not an ideology that I have. It’s just something I’ve picked up from traveling a lot.
America’s Immigration Challenge
CHARLIE KIRK: And you just become… So you have two options. I mean, and the UK has decided just to kind of just bend over and take it.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah.
CHARLIE KIRK: Which is just… You can fight it and resist.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they’ve been doing that for a long time.
CHARLIE KIRK: No, that’s kind of their whole shtick.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know. Post World War II.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, exactly. It’s just, that’s their whole thing. But in America, we’ve actually, we’re finally having a different attitude to mass immigration, which is we can now talk about it, we can question it, we can vote against it. The question is, can we remove it? And that again, that’s one of the biggest public policy challenges in front of us. Can we remove the 20, 30, 40 million people that have come here illegally? And what President Trump is embarking on doing is one of the hardest, most difficult things that we could possibly come back.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think it has a shot?
CHARLIE KIRK: I think we can get to 10 million this term. And that would be huge if you count self deportations for sure.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. Are we on track to do that?
CHARLIE KIRK: We have a million self deportations already guesstimated. And I could tell you anecdotally in Arizona, a construction project happening right down the street from where we live, they said that whole crew of laborers self deported, they hired Americans the next day, or at least people that were here legally. So there is anecdotal evidence of self deportation occurring. And the margin, at least under Eisenhower when he did mass deportations is 10 people self deported for every one forcible deportation. And so CNN just did a special of a guy and his family that’s self deporting from Pittsburgh. Adios.
So look, I think the goal needs to be 10 million this term. 10 million would be a massive accomplishment that would make the country a considerably and measurably better place.
Reforming the Refugee System
TUCKER CARLSON: Is there any effort or even conversation about getting the refugee system under control?
CHARLIE KIRK: Oh, without a doubt, yeah. I mean, I think that first of all it’s a scam.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why do we owe refugee status to anyone? No one’s ever explained that.
CHARLIE KIRK: I don’t know if we… Again, this is a really important point. Almost all of the excesses, mass migration, refugee is because the left has weaponized inherited Christian principles against us. So we as Christians, we have an open heartedness towards refugees. The scriptures say what we should do, that doesn’t mean that we should do that blindly. So what the left does is they take good hearted western Christian beliefs and they totally weaponize them for their remake of the body politic of America.
TUCKER CARLSON: Here’s what I find so unchristian about our refugee system, even before the left distorted it, or maybe they distorted it from the beginning, is Christian charity is the responsibility of the Christian. So all these Christian groups and Jewish groups and lots of different groups, but a lot of Christian groups, Catholic Charities, Lutheran social services, all these groups that use the gospel to justify bringing in families or individuals and then offload the cost onto taxpayers. It’s like, how does that work? How is it charity? If I take your money and give it to somebody, do I get credit in heaven for stealing your money and giving it away? I don’t think so.
CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. And also it says in the book of Deuteronomy, one of the last things Moses says, it’s his farewell address. Deuteronomy 28 off top of my head. Be careful who you allow within your gates, within the country, because they will soon become your masters. And boy, is that not…
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, we’re about to find out how true that is.
CHARLIE KIRK: Phenomenal truth from the scriptures, as always. But look, yes, I know the Trump administration and President Trump, they’re trying to strip refugee status of the 500,000 Haitians. I mean, that is just grotesque, I would say. And so I think every single one of them has to be returned back to Haiti, by the way. It’s this great contradiction. Haiti is a wonderful place that everyone should go visit, the left tells us, but they don’t want Haitians in their neighborhood. It’s like, okay, well which one is it exactly?
TUCKER CARLSON: Haiti is an amazing place. It’s the best place ever. It’s not a terrible nation at all. It’s incredible. Stephen Colbert actually goes on vacation there. But everybody in Haiti needs to get out immediately. No, that’s exactly terrible. And you have to pay for it.
CHARLIE KIRK: It’s so wonderful that they have to be allowed to leave to your community, but not my community.
Closing Thoughts
TUCKER CARLSON: So I just hope that this last two hours that every member of Congress sees it.
CHARLIE KIRK: You said.
TUCKER CARLSON: I was trying to keep up with your analysis, which is the sharpest I’ve ever heard on that subject. What is the crisis among young people? I think you described it better than anyone, and I really hope people listen to what you’re saying.
CHARLIE KIRK: Well, thank you. And I mean, we cover this on our show every day. People can follow the podcast, but thank you, Tucker, for your leadership on this. Look, there’s a lot of issues to cover, but this one is going to supersede every single one.
TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s right. Because it’s going to be President Mamdani and he’s not even a real socialist. He’s just a trans nonsense lifestyle liberal. All of them. You know what I mean?
CHARLIE KIRK: He’s a Marxist. Right?
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. If he was like a wobbly, at least I’d be like, respect. But no. Anyway, thank you.
CHARLIE KIRK: Thank you Tucker.
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