How Young Men Elected Trump: Charlie Kirk’s Interview on Man Rampant Show

You were, were you self consciously building an organization or were you just you and your card table?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it was card table. I mean, I had to learn what credit and debit was. I had to learn how to write a check. I mean, I tell this to young entrepreneurs all the time, that it’s okay if you don’t even know what you’re doing. In fact, it’s actually better if you don’t know what you’re doing because then there’s nothing to unlearn. And that’s really important, by the way.

And college teaches you all this rubbish and this nonsense that you have to deprogram. And so I had this passion. And I had not just a passion. I tell this young people the time, don’t just follow your passion. Follow your passion and your skill. So those two things. So you have to find something you’re good at that you enjoy doing. Because if you just follow your passion, you can end up doing something you’re honestly not very good at.

And by the way, the Bible tells us, do not follow your heart. That bad idea. Do not follow your heart. Do not do that. Multiple warnings, do not do that.

And so as an entrepreneur, I started to learn, oh, this is what a 501c3 organization is. This is what a 501c4 organization is. I can have employees. That’s amazing. I mean, you start to learn this stuff. And I have a lot of energy. I always try to find problems and solve them. And God just puts so many people in our life at the right time where they were ultra generous, where they didn’t have to be, and they poured into us where it would have just defied human reason.

The Ground Game Strategy

DOUGLAS WILSON: So there’s several aspects to this. You obviously believe in hard work. Visiting all the campuses. You can’t just dial it in. Right. You’ve got to go, you’ve got to talk to people, engage with people out of obedience?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Okay, so there’s that aspect of it also. Tell me about turning points, ground game. Is that something you’re committed to? Knocking on doors, talking to people? What’s your philosophy of the ground game?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. And so especially I live in Arizona. I love Arizona. It’s a great state. If you’re ever there, come on by our headquarters. We’d love to have you. We were really bothered by what happened in the 2020 election that Donald Trump didn’t get the electoral votes from Arizona.

So we said, hey, can we do the ground game better? So we hired well over 1000 full time people on the ground in Arizona to do what we call ballot chasing, which is the grassroots, grittiness, hustle work of politics. And it ended up working. Donald Trump won Arizona by nearly 200,000 votes.

We moved younger voters in a great direction, but this just wasn’t young voters. It was also knocking on doors and chasing ballots of unaffiliated, low propensity voters. Welders, electricians, carpenters, firefighters, police officers.

And this is going to be a through line of our conversation. We did something that the media thought was insane. In fact, if you ever have spare time, you could look at all the articles attacking Turning Point about a year ago, making fun of our strategy. You know what our strategy was? We’re going to win by finding millions of young men that have never voted before.

And the media said that’s insane. Roe versus Wade was just repealed. It’s the year of the woman. Women are going to rise up in big numbers. We’re like, eh, actually we think men are going to shock the world because we. And how did I know that? It’s because I don’t just view things through looking at data and looking at charts. That’s helpful.

I actually go to college campuses and talk to thousands of people and I can see how they’re processing information. I can see as I’m dialoguing and I started to realize, see who shows up, see who shows up and see why they’re showing up and what they’re saying and how they’re communicating.

And what I realized very quickly we were a little ahead of the curve is my goodness, there is a course correction of young men that want to resist and reject the hyper feminine, dare I say, toxically feminine culture that has taken over American society.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Go ahead, go ahead and say that.

CHARLIE KIRK: No, yes, toxically feminine and no, this is that you’re that kind of pastor. I forgot, got to remember, I got to remind myself.

And so we seized on that in the best possible way. And understand of course at its core is a spiritual problem. And spiritual problems manifest themselves into cultural problems that then become political problems. So it’s a three pronged issue. But of course at the core it’s spiritual.

And so my critics say, “Oh Charlie, you know, politics, waste of time. You should only talk about the Gospel.” Look, the gospel is the most important thing. But you know how many people we have led to Christ by first talking politics because the law is a school teacher to Christ, as it says in Galatians 3. The law can show you towards Christ. It’s a guardian of Christ’s message. And I see this happen every day on campuses.

And so there’s something very profound happening. It’s actually accelerating. It’s not slowing down. Young men are becoming more and more conservative. They’re more and more hungry and thirsty to get involved in the local church. We could talk about young women because they present an opportunity. Let me put that mildly. But I do believe women will follow if men lead.

Confrontational Truth vs. Winsomeness

DOUGLAS WILSON: Okay, so in this. When you go out to these campuses, you said earlier that conservatives were not presented. Part of your motivation was that conservatives were not presenting the message in a way that was attractive or compelling.

CHARLIE KIRK: Right.

DOUGLAS WILSON: But your style is confrontational.

CHARLIE KIRK: Right.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Is there something. And mainstream or conservative Inc. believes in PR, believes in winsomeness, which translates into giving away the store.

CHARLIE KIRK: Right.

DOUGLAS WILSON: How can you. How do you combine what’s clearly an effective and winsome strategy that is simultaneously confrontational?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yet how do you do that? It’s a great question. Look, I fail at this all the time. I try to be better at it than not, which is how do I have love and truth on a college campus, have an open mic for kids that need to hear it?

And the honest truth is I try to do as Jesus did in the public square, which is to show mercy where appropriate, but also have uncompromising truth standards.

And so the old way of doing things on campuses, and this is where it’s so wrong, and I can’t believe I. For a short period of time, I used to believe it, and then I dismissed it, which is that, okay, kids are liberal, therefore we have to go present a more liberal message to them and water down our beliefs.

In reality, what they enjoy more than anything else is the most provocative truth claim that you could say is like, men can’t give birth. Like, whoa. You get 2,000 people into an auditorium for saying that. Right.

What I’m getting at is that I’ll give you an issue that I am a. I’m an unapologetic advocate of, despite the fact that I’m in the political minority, which is to fight for the unborn. I am resolutely pro life in every possible circumstance. And that’s not popular.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Right.

The Power of Uncompromising Truth

CHARLIE KIRK: But the crowds we draw around, that is amazing. And so I think to myself, I don’t know if I would actually get as much attention if I was just kind of like an uncompromising squish. They’re like, “Well, I think it’s just a woman’s, you know, my body, my choice.” That’s actually not that interesting because they could hear that from their local professor, right?

What all of a sudden gets their attention, like, “Did you just say that there should be no exceptions for abortion? Tell me more. Step up to the mic, tell me why you’re wrong.” And then all of a sudden we can use the Socratic method to ask questions. When does life begin? What is the process of human development? By what moral standard are you appealing to? What is good? What is evil? You know, what is right? Why is it bodily autonomy? What is the size level, development, environment or degree dependency of a baby? Matter of its moral worth.

And like, I’ve never heard this before and I don’t want to try to brag too much on what we’ve kind of stumbled into here, but I think this is the direction that online content and young people are demanding less. Kind of just like being in a studio reading a teleprompter and get out in the streets, find the best ideas, let them kind of confront each other and let anybody say anything they want at any time. And it’s been an amazing success. Praise the Lord.

Converting to Real Christianity

DOUGLAS WILSON: C.S. Lewis observed somewhere, I forget where, that when unbelievers or atheists become Christians, they almost never become liberal Christians. Right?

CHARLIE KIRK: That’s true.

DOUGLAS WILSON: They think something like, “If I’m going to do something crazy, I’m going to go to the deep end. I’m going to go to Christians, the kind of Christianity where they actually believe things.” And Eugene Genovese, who was a Marxist writer who became a Christian later said that during his atheist days, he said, “Whenever I was in the presence of a liberal Christian, I always had that deep, assured feeling that I was in the presence of a fellow unbeliever.”

So if I’m going to ditch my unbelief, why would I move to a murky form? If I’m going to be a Christian, I want to be a Christian Christian. And you’ve seen that play out like the stark claims of Christ.

The Failure of Secular Institutions

CHARLIE KIRK: Absolutely. And I just, we are seeing more interest for the gospel, more interest for spiritual things, because think about the world that so many of these kids at University of Idaho or Washington State were raised into just the last four years. Every secular institution failed them and some religious, by the way, but every major power center has lied to them about almost everything that’s involved them from COVID to the vaccine to mask mandates to the economy, to speech, to gender norms, to sexuality.

So you have the most depressed, suicidal, alcohol addicted generation history that is also the most secular. Something here doesn’t necessarily fit. So all of a sudden there’s this group of us, and I include you in this pastor, and I’m a big admirer of yours that is speaking truth all of a sudden into this broken culture and they’re like, “I’ve never heard that. That makes sense.” Because non stop they get this nonsense on campus and you have to wonder like, why do they fight so hard?

There were tons of protests today, but there were even more supporters. Understand we had nearly 3,000 kids there today at Washington State University. Don’t believe me, it was anyone there, by the way, did anyone? Did any, you double dippers? We got super fans. But it was a big crowd. Wouldn’t you agree, guys? It was really big.

And so that’s funny, there were protesters there the whole time. Fine. Why are they so threatened by me coming up there for three hours open mic? So let me get this straight. Washington State University gets them for four years. I might get some of them for three hours because they know that I, in three hours can undo the damage of four years of garbage with one sentence, one question, one truth claim. And that’s why they have to try so hard to not let me speak. Right.

DOUGLAS WILSON: They are threatened by not just truth claims, but by truth claims that are true.

CHARLIE KIRK: Of course. Yes.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Big advantage.

CHARLIE KIRK: Claims of truth, I should say.

The Most Volatile Topics on Campus

DOUGLAS WILSON: Yeah, yeah. So is abortion the most volatile topic? What is the…

CHARLIE KIRK: I would say. Yeah. And this is also where I differentiate from the old way of reaching out to young people. And I fell victim to this for a very short period of time and I snapped out of it, which is only talk about economics. Don’t talk about the cultural stuff. They actually want to hear about the cultural stuff.

No one is telling these people to save themselves for marriage. No one is rejecting the premise that you shouldn’t actually, like, abortion is not like a normal thing. And I say, and it pains me to say this, but some of these kids on these campuses, they think like getting abortion is like getting a haircut. It’s not a joke. There is zero teaching of the severity and the complexity and the inhumanity and the butchery of what goes into this action. And it’s not like they’re like, “Oh yeah, it’s no different than like a cosmetic plastic surgery.” Right.

And so abortion is probably the most frequent topic I get, but the one where there is like a pathological, like they get very upset is transgenderism. And that’s, I have, I’m deeply uncompromising on that one as well, where I believe God created man and God created women and period, that’s it, end of story. That if you have gender dysphoria, it’s a brain problem, not a body problem. We should not have these treatments for anybody, period. Especially not minors.

And I think personally the medical establishment has not earned our trust to have any treatment for anybody of any age for this period. Whether you’re 25 or whether you’re 30. I think there should be a full suspension of “gender affirming care” for people in this country.

So all that to say transgenderism gets them very worked up. And then almost inevitably they will then come because I will say things like, “It’s a blessing to be here, God bless you.” You know, so eventually they’re like, “Wait a second, are you like one of those Christians?” And then, yeah.

Which by the way, I was telling pastor here, I think I win the award for the greatest podcast contrast in a 24 hour period. You guys ready for this? So tonight I’m in Moscow, Idaho with Pastor Douglas Wilson. Last night I was in Los Angeles doing two hours with Bill Maher while, and I kid you not, it was probably the hardest podcast I’ve ever done. Not just because he is wickedly smart. Like, he is very smart, objectively. No, I was impressed by his capacity to understand things from a very, very militantly atheist perspective.

He was smoking weed the entire time. And I don’t like fragrances. Okay. Let alone cigarette smoke or vaping. So I’ve never smoked marijuana, but now I guess I can might say I like second hand smoked marijuana. So here I am, like, he’s, we’re trying to debate the Council of Nicaea and I’m like, “I kind of feel kind of funny right now.” And so excuse me while I abstain tonight. Pastor, I’ve had enough.

But anyway, I’m saying it’s the greatest contrast one could ever imagine, right? From Bill Maher to Douglas Wilson. It’s like, that’s really something. But all that to say the Bill Maher discussion or the campus discussion is all about like, whoa, the spiritual matters. And again, what happens politically is just a manifestation of a spiritual and we must be unafraid to engage in spiritual.

Gender Dynamics in Campus Pushback

DOUGLAS WILSON: So I’d like to get to that point in a minute. But just a quick demographic question. When you get pushback on transgenderism, does most of it come from guys or girls?

CHARLIE KIRK: Girls. Yeah. That’s a great question. It’s 90% women. Yeah. Which is like, I’m sorry to interrupt. Should not make any sense, because they’re actually the greatest victims of it. Right.

DOUGLAS WILSON: And then on. But when you look at the transgender world, someone who’s grounded in the Christian worldview and what the Bible teaches about human sexuality and humanity, these people are broken puppies. They’re just. They’re just. They’ve been lied to and starved for spiritual truth, and they’ve sort of come to the end of the road. And I think there’s a maternal instinct that kicks in where the women…

CHARLIE KIRK: That’s interesting.

DOUGLAS WILSON: The women feel like to oppose transgenderism is like kicking puppies, and you need to feel sorry for them. I think it’s that we’ve been here in Moscow, we’ve been talking about the toxic empathy or untethered empathy, and I think that that’s what this is. The women have been trained to be empathetic. No judgment. You cannot make judgments because that is pharisaical or legalistic or harsh, critical. And so they just don’t want to do it. And the women have bought into that propaganda more heavily than the men have.

Women as Norm Enforcers

CHARLIE KIRK: I’ve never heard anyone say that. That’s super smart. And I think that’s right. I would add to that. I would add to that. Women are norm enforcers. They always have been. Women look at what the consensus of the times are, and they’re very good at enforcing whatever the norm is. By the way, when Christianity was the dominant view of America, it was women that were enforcing that. So the women were the ones that were the backbone of American Christianity, especially on the hyper, local, rural level all throughout the country. And that deserves to be credited.

Women just generally are far more agreeable than they are disagreeable. And when it comes to transgenderism, there is high social cost, which women do not like, risking social capital as it is for opposing transgenderism. It’s a very, very high social cost. You get isolated. You could not be part of the tribe. Women are far less likely to not want to be part of a community than men. Just as a fact.

I think the maternal instinct is right. In addition, though, transgenderism is the logical endpoint of feminism, if you understand feminism. Feminism is this idea of no distinctions between male and female sexuality. The first claim of Gloria Steinman in the Feminine Mystique is essentially that, like Men can do everything. Women can do everything that men do. And I need to be liberated from this oppression of being a homemaker. Right? I must be liberated above this.

And so fundamentally, transgenderism is the climax of that. After 50 years, it’s like, “Okay, you say everyone’s the same, then fine, men can become women and women can become men, because there’s nothing actually intuitively or instinctively different between the sexes.”

Worship Upstream from Culture

DOUGLAS WILSON: So you’ve alluded to this a couple times, but not in these words. The late Andrew Breitbart said that politics is downstream from culture. And then we’ve taught for a number of years now, and culture is downstream from worship. You become like what you worship. And because evangelical worship in North America is anemic and compromised, and it’s like a room full of cotton candy. It’s like there’s not much weight to it, not much gravitas.

And so that kind of worship has led to the corruptions in the culture that we see. So worship is upstream from culture, culture is upstream from politics. And you can’t go down to Congress and say, vote for this or do that or do the other thing when the juggernaut of a continent full of anemic worship and compromised, corrupted culture is behind the. This measure, whatever it is pushing. Would you agree with that?

The Forgotten Sabbath Commandment

CHARLIE KIRK: Yes. I mean, as deep as you want. I mean, what we worship in the west are the pagan gods of old that have just largely been repurposed. And I mean, I know you do a great job of this because I read your book Christendom, and I also, I love. I am a canon plus subscriber as well, which is honoring a Sabbath. It’s actually my next book, all about the Sabbath. I think it’s the most forgotten commandment by the Western Christianity by far, and it is designed primarily for worship.

And so you think about it, we basically eliminated honoring the Sabbath. It says very clearly, “For six days you shall work, and for the seventh day you shall rest.” Very clearly, the seventh day is designed for worshiping God who created the heavens and the earth. Beresheet. It literally is for that purpose.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Right. And we are up a creek when we go to talk to unbelievers about their violations of this commandment or that commitment.

CHARLIE KIRK: Bingo.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Because they say, “Well, what about you guys?”

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, you guys are working on Sunday or working on whatever day. I mean, you consider to be the seventh day. I’m not legalistic about that at all. I will say, though, that most crit here. If you can’t pass the Sabbath test, you are in violation of the Sabbath. It’s very simple. If I walk into your home on the Sabbath, can I tell, or does it look like every other day? Holy means separate in Hebrew. And we’re supposed to keep the Sabbath day holy. And if the Sabbath is not different than the other six days, then you are violating the Sabbath.

The Sabbath and Modern Culture

DOUGLAS WILSON: My dad was born in 1927. He said when he was a boy in Nebraska, on the Lord’s day, on the first day of the week, the stores would like the pharmacies would rotate which pharmacy stayed open.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yep.

DOUGLAS WILSON: And the grocery stores would. The town would shut down. Hardware store would be closed, clothing store would be closed. The necessity stores, pharmacy, grocery store, that sort of thing. They would rotate who stayed open. And that was just part of the culture.

When I was in the Navy in the 1970s, I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, and there was a referendum in Virginia in the 70s trying to get rid of the Sabbath laws. The blue laws. The blue laws, which were still on the books and still enforced in the 1970s. And we’ve gone from… Jesus said that man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man. And we have got bought into this frenetic 24/7 pace where you need amphetamines to keep going after a while.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. And so a couple again. I could literally talk for an hour on the Sabbath. It’s a passionate topic of mine. Or the Shabbat, if you prefer.

Look, the Hebrew word for work is malaka, which is a very specific word. You are only supposed to do that for six days. The only difference between Deuteronomy and Exodus, where they repeat the Ten Commandments, is the Sabbath. When Moses repeats the ten Commandments in the book of Deuteronomy, he says, “Of course, for six days you shall work. For the seventh day you shall rest.” And then he says, “For you are no longer slaves in Egypt.”

Only slaves work seven days. I know a lot of rich slaves. Yeah, I know a lot of people that are slaves to their work or slaves to their stuff. In fact, the Romans used to make fun of the Jews. They’re like, “Why would they take a day off? Why would they rest? Who are these people?” Well, they’re still around. And a lot Romans are not. Pretty good preservation tool.

But look, I will just also say, in a modern culture, truly honoring the Sabbath, how I honor. I turn off my phone completely for 36 hours. I do the traditional Jewish Sabbath to my own liking, whatever. From Friday night to Sunday Morning. And I could tell you it’s really hard and it is. You have to almost fight your flesh to do it. To not want to return an email, to not want to return a text message.

And because in some ways you’re worshiping with your time, you’re saying that I’m sanctifying this space. It is a standing appointment with our Creator, saying that you matter so much. I’m going to give 1/7 of my week to you in glory and worship. So I completely agree with that. And the modern church unfortunately does not even worship the God that you and I would consider to be the God of the heavens and the earth. It’s a broken, fragmented American Christian church.

Political Independence and Influence

DOUGLAS WILSON: How do you answer the charge that you have been co-opted by a politician, the politician Trump or the Republican Party? Or do you go around making Republicans happy?

CHARLIE KIRK: Look, I oppose a lot of Republicans. For example, I’ve spoken out about against both of your U.S. senators in the state of which I would like to see primaries happen. So no, I do not operate just to try to make Republicans happy. You guys deserve better senators. Let me tell you right now, you guys deserve better senators. The fact that there’s not outspread applause because you guys are like, look at this.

So no one can criticize me, just to kind of carry the water of the Republican Party, okay? But I can tell you right now, you have two warmongering senators here in this state that sent a lot of money to Ukraine and didn’t do anything to try to close the southern border when Biden was president anyway. Besides that, they’re great people.

DOUGLAS WILSON: So other than that, how is the play?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, exactly. So the charge, I just needed to say that. But look, Jesus is always number one in my life. That’s very important. I will bring what I know to be true into the political domain. And I believe we as Christians are called to be counselors to the king, to be counselor to the politician as Daniel was or Mordecai, that if I can influence for moral and righteous or good purposes.

I mean, it was pretty awesome when I was able to, in the early days of this administration, advocate to President Trump. “Hey, I really think you should pardon all these pro lifers that are in jail right now for The Face act,” that was awesome. Now I don’t deserve credit. To be perfectly clear, I don’t deserve credit for that. But it was really confirming that all that advocacy gave me proximity to a man with a pen that was able to get all these amazing pro life warriors out of prison. It was pretty awesome. When JD asked me, “Hey, should I speak at the March for Life?” I said, “Absolutely.”

DOUGLAS WILSON: Right.

CHARLIE KIRK: So just little things like that where I can use the proximity that the Lord has given me to try to push for things that I believe are pleasing to the Lord.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Little things that are actually enormous things.

CHARLIE KIRK: No, of course, but by little I mean that they add up. Meaning that they are daily decisions that need to be made. Another one where, again, I don’t deserve credit. But I was pushing. I said, “Guys, Stephen Miller and all,” again, they deserve the credit. They did it. But I was a voice. “We need an executive order prohibiting gender affirming care for minors. We need an executive order saying only men and female sports.”

And so I, amongst many other great voices, are trying to be that counselor to the king, counselor to the President that I believe is a biblical role.

Conservative Movement Evolution

DOUGLAS WILSON: So back if we rewind in the history of North American conservatism. William Buckley, when he was just out of Yale, wrote “God and Man at Yale” and sort of wound up launching the modern conservative resurgence that culminated in the election of Reagan.

CHARLIE KIRK: Right.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Okay. Part of that project was the fusionist project of Meyer of Hawks, antitarianism, neoconservatism.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah.

DOUGLAS WILSON: So you had three major strands bundled up together in this fusionist project.

CHARLIE KIRK: The.

DOUGLAS WILSON: The hawks wanted to defeat Russia in the cold Soviet Union in the Cold War, and the culture warriors wanted. Were concerned about the morality. And then the free market guys wanted less regulations and all of that. I’m sure you’re up against some of the similar currents. If you looked at Turning Point, what kind? It’s obviously a conservative activist organization. Is it one of those strands or another one? Or is it a neo fusionist project? Or is it more eclectic than that?

Turning Point’s Philosophy and Anti-Neoconservatism

CHARLIE KIRK: It’s probably eclectic because, look, we’re a membership organization and then a lot of what Turning Point espouses are my beliefs. So I’ll tell you what I believe. And then it kind of goes downstream from there, which is I’m first and foremost a Christian and I need to just repeat that.

I believe that we want a strong country. I’m resolutely America first. I think that it is against our own best interests to continue to engage in these neo imperialist wars. So I’m not a neoconservative at all. I think that our own borders matter a lot more than the borders of a foreign country. And I think it’s a long past time that our leaders would start to prioritize the well being of our own citizens, not those of foreign nations. Not that crazy of a concept.

So you can call that a nationalist, you can call that a conservative or whatever. Where I am involved in a very serious and spirited battle, which goes to my prior comment about your senators, is that I think neoconservatism has no place in the Republican party and that’s where a lot of people get upset.

So what is neoconservatism? That’s not even hawkish stuff. Neoconservatism is beyond that. Neoconservatism is a form of Marxism, literally. It’s a branch of Trotskyism, which is to believe that America exists primarily as a global empire. To go and try and tell other countries what to do and how to do it. We’re going to invade the world and then we will invite the world that America is a colony and will be a series of colonies.

We reject this because neoconservatism prioritizes GDP over God. Neoconservatism prioritizes mass migration over the well being of native born Americans. Neoconservatism will say that by all means necessary, we must use force. And around every corner there’s a dragon waiting to destroy us. We need to have war with Russia, war with Iran. We need to be saber rattling around every corner.

And I ask people, has that worked the last 20 years? George W. Bush is a perfect example of a neoconservative, okay, that is he’s basically him and Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney is central casting. The Iraq war I think was a disaster. I think it was a total mistake. It never should have happened. The war in Afghanistan was, I think prosecuted incorrectly. Never should have been a long nation building, change the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan war.

So in that fusionism, I look at those kids on a college campus and I think to them, I think to myself, they deserve better than leaders that are trying to get them closer to an unnecessarily, unnecessary third world war while simultaneously not embracing this idea that the American Foreign Policy Project has at its best of the last 20 years been overly aggressive, at its worst, actually sowed the seeds of our own demise.

Look at Ilhan Omar, who we don’t like, who’s in Congress. How did she come? She’s a perfect example of neoconservatism. We get involved in Somalia because of the Somalian civil war. We invade them, we feel bad, so we bring a bunch of Somalians into our country because we’re told we must have mass migration. So one is a prerequisite to the other.

And so the Republican Party has a lot of different views on big issues. But neoconservatism at its core, where they are trying to stoke conflict where it shouldn’t exist, where they care more about foreign nations other than our own.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Would you say the DNA of, as you’re defining neoconservative, the DNA of it is globalist.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yes, that is a great. Another term for it. It’s one that looks at the great American empire, Gay Gae, that its spheres of influence goes all the way from Ukraine. Hold on, timeout, time out. We have very distinct borders. Why don’t you start caring about it?

Here’s the problem with neoconservatism. Neoconservatism is highly obsessed with the enrichment of the capital class and is completely ignoring of the well being of its own citizens. You see this best on display when you have homeless people that are vets that can’t get care. You see this on display of mass drug overdoses and we have to be lectured that the greatest enemy to America is Vladimir Putin.

I’m sorry, that’s not the greatest enemy to America by any means necessary. I don’t like Vladimir Putin. I don’t think he’s good. But a much bigger problem than Vladimir Putin is the American left that has ignored and left people behind or public sector teacher unions.

Military Action vs. Nation Building

DOUGLAS WILSON: So here would be a, I think an important distinction in this. I concur with what you’re saying there. Would you make a distinction, as I would, between the use of the U.S. military in nation building exercises, which would be Iraq, Afghanistan. You’re right. As opposed to what President Trump is currently doing to the Houthis.

So the Houthis are attacking shipping going through the Red Sea and we’ve said we’re not going to try to build anything in Yemen. We’re blowing things up until they stop shooting at the ships. Would you say? Yeah, that’s an area where I differ with Trump or do you see that a distinction between sort of an aggressive, short, defensive action like that versus nation building projects?

The Complexities of Foreign Policy and Domestic Priorities

CHARLIE KIRK: I totally see what Trump’s doing there. I don’t know enough about it to have a strong opinion. I don’t know the complexities. I think that we should exercise caution when meddling in other countries’ affairs. But I’ll just be very honest with you. Something that I’m against: I don’t think we should bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. I just don’t. I think it would be a huge mistake. It’s an act of war against a major country.

You go to war with Persia, it will bring your country down. The American people did not rise up in major numbers because we want war with Iran. That was never part of the deal. It was never like, “Hey America first, comma, we’re going to go do a bunch of targeted strikes on the mainland of Iran.” So that’s just where I would say that would be a catastrophic mistake.

But beyond that, I just want to make sure that we are clear about why we believe this. We have so many pressing problems at home, and our leaders are internationally obsessed and they are domestically ignorant. They don’t care to know that we have a suicide problem with our nation’s young people. They don’t care to know that we are having a fertility crisis in the West. So again, they ignore the problems.

The neoconservative solution to every problem is what the religion of neoconservatism beyond invasion is: mass migration. Bring as many people into the country as you possibly can, regardless if they can’t assimilate or they can’t have cultural cohesion because one plays into the other. Why? Because they don’t believe in nationality. That’s the important point. They are globalist.

They’ll say, “Oh come on, why can’t you bring a bunch of people in from Somalia? Why can’t you bring a bunch of people from Gaza? Why can’t you bring a bunch of people from Syria in?” And we know that you cannot bring people from the third world. You bring in the third world, you become the third world.

DOUGLAS WILSON: I’d be willing to bring people in from Gaza if we put them in Martha’s Vineyard.

CHARLIE KIRK: And they won’t be received there, that’s for sure. But no, it says very clearly in the scriptures, “Demand the welfare of the nation that you are in, because your welfare is your nation’s welfare.” Jeremiah 29:7. And so I think we far overreached.

I know that as I speak for our nation’s young people, I have known, just so you understand my passionate perspective on this, from my earliest memory, we have been a nation at war. One of my earliest memories is 9/11 and we had a no-win war in Iraq and a no-win war in Afghanistan. And now we’re heavily involved in no-win war with Russia and Ukraine. And I just asked myself, could that $8 trillion have been better spent? What did we get for that? I think that philosophy at its core is one that is globalist, not nationalistic.

The Electoral Revolution Against Endless War

DOUGLAS WILSON: One of the tenets of this electoral revolution that just happened in the 2020 election was no to endless war.

CHARLIE KIRK: So there’s…

DOUGLAS WILSON: Trump clearly believes in a strong military, but he also believes that there’s bloat, excess, and all kinds of dirty deeds going on in Pentagon contracts. So he’s… It’s an odd… He’s not a pacifist. Not a pacifist, by no means, but he’s not a nation builder either. And so when we say no to endless war, we’re saying no to the globalist enterprise, no to the idea that we are somehow the savior of the world.

CHARLIE KIRK: Correct.

Immigration and the Failure of Evangelical Leadership

DOUGLAS WILSON: Right. So on immigration, there are evangelical leaders who used to have a lot more authority to speak maybe seven or eight years ago than they do now. The New York Times, when they wanted to talk to an evangelical, would call up Russ Moore or David French or someone like that and say, “What’s the evangelical take on this?” And the evangelical elite was also in favor of open borders and very loose immigration policy.

The illustration I’ve used for this is, imagine a Christian couple with a couple kids of their own, and they take in two foster kids, and they’re doing very well with the four, and everybody’s thriving and happy. And then one day, a short bus from the state shows up with 28 extra foster kids, and they dump off 28 more foster kids. And the father objects.

And then one of the evangelical leaders says, “I think that you’re not showing an ethic of hospitality here. Christians should love their neighbors. Christians should be open to foster children.” And he could say, “Well, I was open to them, and I was taking good care of the two, which I thought we could do. I was loving my own two. I was loving these foster kids. But if you drop off those 28, I’m not going to be loving anybody.”

The 28 are going to lose. The two foster kids are going to lose, and my own kids are going to lose. You have just crippled me. You’ve not made… You’ve not been charitable. You’ve made charity impossible. So the issue is not whether someone could legally immigrate from another country. The issue is chaos.

The Case for Immigration Moratorium

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. And I would go even a step further, which is that you don’t have to have any immigration. I know that sounds like a radical view. You actually don’t have to. We have gone through plenty of periods in this country’s history. We had almost no immigration from the 1920s to the 1960s.

I think that immigration, the sales point for immigration, is always one of the following. “Well, they won’t do the jobs that we’ll do.” Okay, well, with mass robotics or AI, that’s not going to be true anymore, by the way. How insulting to the American people. I think that American people with a fair wage would actually do a lot of these jobs if their wages weren’t always being undercut.

So the other thing they say is, “Well, diversity is our strength.” No, it’s not. Actually, diversity is not a strength. Show me any country that has mass importation of foreigners and gets stronger, ever. In fact, Moses specifically warned against this in the end of Deuteronomy.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Deuteronomy 28.

CHARLIE KIRK: Exactly. Where he says they will become your masters, there is a cautionary tale there.

DOUGLAS WILSON: “They will be the head, you will be the tail.”

CHARLIE KIRK: Yes. And so, as we care about the nation, I think there is this kind of guilt complex that seeps into evangelicalism, which is that, “Well, everyone says America’s awful and we’re going to atone to our sins by allowing everybody that wants to come in here at all times,” while they’re actually not loving their neighbor, they’re importing a foreigner. That’s two totally different things.

They’re very slow to actually go help their neighbor who’s an American, but somehow they want to go bring in a Honduran or a Vietnamese, which, again, if you have a good heart for that, terrific, that’s fine. But a fact is this: America is collapsing because we are a nation of strangers. We speak different languages, we have different origin stories, we have different cultural backgrounds.

One that I think we can all agree on as Christians, we should look at Europe with shock and with awe and say that Islam is incompatible with Western civilization. That is mass migration. You’re not going to convert the Muslims in big numbers to Christianity. They’re going to want to convert you. And they have a lot more kids than we do, by the way. A lot. The number one birth name in London, in Birmingham, in Edinburgh, is Muhammad.

They seek to conquer and to grow and to explode their influence. And they’re very good at it because Islam… we, as Christians, we kind of dance around like, “Is there a political doctrine for Christianity or not?” Islam makes no apology that it is a nakedly political ideology that’s disguised as a religion. They make no apology. It’s well within their teaching that we come here to institute a government of a certain structure which eventually will be Sharia law. And we’re inviting that into our country. It is slow motion suicide.

And the final point they’ll say is, “Well, the west is not having enough children.” Oh, really? Well, maybe if we didn’t have a million abortions every single year, we wouldn’t need mass migration. Maybe if we didn’t have kids that are on the pill with birth control, we wouldn’t need to import massive amounts of third worlders into our country.

So look, I’m of the opinion that we should have a full pause on immigration, both legal and illegal. We have way too many people in this country right now. We have a public services issue, we have a wage issue, we have a crime issue. And call me radical, but again, I think the American citizen should always come first. A government is constituted to fulfill its mandate to its people. It stops at its borders. And its failure to do that has really led to the rise of Donald Trump.

Young Men and Institutional Collapse

DOUGLAS WILSON: I wanted to circle back to something you touched on earlier and develop it maybe a little bit more. You mentioned all the men who have started to show up at your events.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yes.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Young men have been moving steadily to the right, becoming more conservative. A lot of them are… The world that they’ve inherited just isn’t working for them. You mentioned all the major institutions. Name one institution in American life that hasn’t thoroughly discredited itself in the last 10 years.

CHARLIE KIRK: All of them completely.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Media, military, including the church. Including the church. So young men who want to be taught, instructed and led are, “Where do I go? Where do I go?” And so they’re showing up at your events and there are a lot of them.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yes.

The Dark Side of Male Disillusionment

DOUGLAS WILSON: One downside, one challenge. With everything that happens, there’s always going to be a temptation that accompanies it. And one of them here is that a lot of these young men are so disillusioned with everything that they have gone into some pretty dark corners of the Internet and have started to listen to Jew hate conspiracy theories. And of course, we have the joke, “I’m going to need some new conspiracy theories because all of mine are coming true.”

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, that’s right. You don’t want these ones.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Right. Yeah, there are some conspiracy theories that are really dank, they’re really bad. And then there are the conspiracy theories that are people who just have eyes in their head. And they don’t believe the lies that are coming out of their television set.

CHARLIE KIRK: Correct.

DOUGLAS WILSON: So make that distinction. But some of these men are pretty… are broken, bleeding, hurting, and they are hostile to everything. And so your support for Israel, for example, will animate them. You will probably get feedback and that sort. Just aside from the specific answer to the question, one of them might ask, how would you address sort of the root cause of this young male rootlessness, fatherlessness that is resulting in adoption of some really bad political theologies?

Why Young Men Are Rebelling

CHARLIE KIRK: It’s a great question. So I get asked frequently, “Why are men rebelling in such great numbers?” There’s a lot of answers, but one that is almost never mentioned. And I think I was the first one to present this. Young men do not like taking orders from women. They don’t, period. If you want to get young men to rebel, have them have a bunch of women barking at them, especially crazy liberal women.

DOUGLAS WILSON: And you ladies afterwards, don’t ask your guy if that’s true.

The Cultural Crisis Facing Young Men

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, but it’s. And so you think about it, you have a 17-year-old man, young man, I should say, where everything around him is falling apart. His friends are committing suicide, they’re all addicted to pornography. And then he all of a sudden shows up at age 18 at a college campus where some childless 45-year-old cat woman is telling him that he’s the problem because he’s toxically masculine.

And he’s like, “Forget this, I’m going to go find somewhere else where I’m at least validated as a man.” And again, you could say, “Oh, well, we have to teach men to be able to take orders from women.” That’s a state of nature, guys. It’s just that that’s not going to work.

You have to understand that young men in particular are trying to figure out how to become a man and not a boy. They’re trying to understand also how to deal with physical violence. That’s why young men without fathers are much more likely to engage in acts of violent crime, murder, arson, kidnapping, whatever, gang violence. Because they’ve never actually had a male figure to have them wrestle with the idea: what does good use of force actually mean? So they have totally distorted views.

And then even beyond that, the entire culture is hyper, hyper feminized. Now what do I mean by that? I mean, feminine qualities at its best would be an appeal to emotion. We have thrown reason out the window. And the entire, the current constitution of the postmodernist view is that the worst thing that you can be in America is a white, Anglo Saxon, Christian, heterosexual male, of which I am one. Right. So you’re looking at the chief villain.

And the only way you can atone for that is by becoming a liberal or transitioning to become a woman. And men are the problem. Men are the cancer. They’re a tumor that must be removed, and it has created mass cultural chaos.

DOUGLAS WILSON: And you have made all that list of that litany of things that you are one degree worse, ten degrees worse, because add to it apologetic, unapologetic, unapologetic.

CHARLIE KIRK: Christian.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Right?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yes.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Unapologetic for everything.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yes. That’s a whole list. And so that I’m the chief villain.

DOUGLAS WILSON: So I’m white. Sue me.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah.

DOUGLAS WILSON: So I’m head.

The Rebellion of Western Men

CHARLIE KIRK: Exactly. What am I supposed to do? Stop existing? And they’ll say, basically, some of them will be like, “Yes.” I mean, you think I’m kidding?

So the cultural paradigm right now is a rebellion of the men of the West. It’s happening in every major country where young men are finding podcasts like ours, they’re finding other information conduits that believe in nature, believe in God’s design, believe that men should have to stand up for the vulnerable, create a family, provide for the family, have to protect the weak, to fight the battles of society, to go on an adventure. This is very appealing to young men when they hear it.

And they’re not getting any of that. Instead, they get a… Well, the hero’s journey that they get is not the story of Abraham. It’s the story of, “Well, become a social justice warrior and get a degree in sociology and go become a social worker.” That’s your hero’s journey to go become a guidance counselor to help kids become trans. That’s how you redeem yourself.

And young men are like, “No, that’s against my soul. I’m called to go into the wilderness.” I mean, Abraham left, Abram left his dad’s house when he was like 70 or something, right? I mean, you would know. It’s pretty old. Every young boy wants that call to adventure to leave his father’s home and to go do something out in the wilderness to do something of the…

DOUGLAS WILSON: Wants to slay the dragon.

Trump as the Anti-Feminine Response

CHARLIE KIRK: Exactly. And again, I’m not the first one to diagnose this. Jordan Peterson’s been on this for quite a while. Right. What I’m getting at, though, is the political side is what people missed is that there’s a lot that you can call Donald Trump. No one has ever called him feminine in a toxically feminine world.

Again, all the media missed this and almost every cultural critic missed it. We didn’t. In a toxically feminine world, you have the absolute inverse of that, which is ultra masculine, never apologize. Red tie, big plane, super rich, supermodel wife. Right. “It’s going to be big and Mexico is going to pay for it and get more tariffs.” And it’s as bravado strong men as you can get.

And young men didn’t care that… It wasn’t even about policy. That’s what people don’t understand is that it was partially policy was like, “No, he is the middle finger to all of the screeching hall monitors that have told me I have to use certain pronouns that have told me that I’m bad for existing, that have penalized me for my existence.” And Trump is the big F-U to the feminist establishment that has not been challenged my entire life.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Right. And there you have a coaching analysis of the 2020 election.

CHARLIE KIRK: 2024. Yeah.

DOUGLAS WILSON: 2024.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, yeah. But I could go on forever.

DOUGLAS WILSON: But yeah. Well, thank you so much.

CHARLIE KIRK: Very good. Thank you.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Thank you.

CHARLIE KIRK: You want me to stay for questions or…

DOUGLAS WILSON: No, we’re going to stay. So if you have a question, line up at the mic here and then someone authoritative will cut it off when it’s time to be done.

Q&A Session

# Question About Gavin Newsom

CHARLIE KIRK: So I listened to your podcast interview with Gavin Newsom. Yeah, that’s right. And as a former Californian, I’m just curious, do you think he’s going to successfully pull this reinvention off?

No, I don’t. I mean, he’s going to try to be the Democrat nominee. I don’t profess to know Democrat politics. I will say, no joke, Bernie drew a huge crowd in Boise a couple days ago. I’m telling you, it’s 12,000 people. That’s not easy to do. We drew a big crowd to a Boise, but Boise state, not that big.

The Democrats are going to go through a very difficult chapter right now. I’ll pray for them and pray this chapter 11. Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. So I don’t know who the Democrat nominee is going to be. I’m not going to pretend. But I don’t think the Democrats will be able to be competitive in the battleground states if they still stay married to their mass migration trans zealotry, if they allow the purple haired jihadis to continue to run their party. I think they’re going to be uncompetitive in the swing states.

# Question About College Alternatives for Young Men

Yeah. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate you doing this. And I have a question kind of for you, and love to hear Pastor Wilson chime in on it as well. But I’ve heard Jordan Peterson say something to young men in particular, something along the lines of, “If you’re not going to college, you should do something as difficult or more difficult.” One of the big topics you’ve been speaking on at college campuses is the idea that college is a scam. Correct. What do you think the solution is for aimless young men who struggle to find a purpose? And if they don’t have a mission, should they go to college with the hopes of finding one through pursuing a degree? Or is college too dangerous of an environment for young men seeking purpose? What’s the alternative?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, I mean, look, this is a generalization. I can tell you this, though, that boys do not become men at college. They don’t. In fact, they stay boys. And one of the reasons why, generally, is that they get everything that they could possibly want and they don’t have to work for it.

This is why feminism is bad for everybody, men included. So the feminist shtick is they tell a bunch of young women, “Hey, have as much sex as you possibly can.” I know we got kids in the audience, but, you know, this is what it is. “Have as much sex as you possibly can.” And so the girls are like, “Oh, okay.” And so they do that.

So then the men don’t actually have to be impressive or work to get what they want, because all the women are free and easy on these campuses. And so they don’t have to grow up. They don’t have to shave, they don’t have to shower. They don’t have to stop doing weed. They don’t have to be impressive.

So in olden days, in order to even court a woman, you got to be a pretty impressive guy. You got to have your act together. And now all of a sudden, the women throw themselves all over the place. And so it’s a very simple supply and demand issue.

So I’m against college for a lot of different reasons. That’s one of them. I also just don’t think it makes you wiser at all. I mean, you might know more stuff, but wisdom is the knowledge of things that do not change. And studying of the great books and the great ideas. Now, there are exceptions. I’m sure there’s a great college up here in Idaho somewhere.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Yeah.

CHARLIE KIRK: So that would be the exception. But I mean, I’ll just tell you, I mean like Washington State University, one of the first you guys saw it, that professor that came up, he’s a moron. Why would you spend money to learn from this guy? He has no… seriously, he’s an anthropology or whatever, sociology professor. He knows nothing. There’s nothing there. Okay, there’s no reason for you to go into debt to learn from this guy other than get the credential. And so there’s a lot that young men can do.

DOUGLAS WILSON: But the bottom line is I would say do hard things. And college should be hard.

CHARLIE KIRK: And it’s not.

DOUGLAS WILSON: And it’s not. And there are places where you could make it hard. You can make a point of it being difficult and challenging. You could double major in engineering. And you know something else is difficult. Men need a challenge. They need to work hard.

The problem is at state colleges they make you run the gauntlet of other gunk in order to get your engineering degree. So you have to be very selective and very picky. I have a friend who many years ago in his non-Christian days, was a sociology major and he got stoned out of his gourd and went and took his sociology final and he aced it and his conclusion was “I have got to change majors.” So he went into microbiology and was converted later. It was a success story.

But basically men need to work hard and they need a challenge and they should not be left… An 18-year-old guy should not be left up to his own devices to seek out that which is hard because they’re going to make the path of least resistance very, very easy for him. So I would say get counsel, parents, pastor, other people. But young men, if you’re between 17 and 22, do hard things. Basically ensure that it’s hard.

# Question About Local Political Battles

CHARLIE KIRK: Hey, straight from the front lines.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Absolutely.

CHARLIE KIRK: Thank you for coming to Moscow, Charlie.

DOUGLAS WILSON: My question is, I noticed your co-op drink there.

CHARLIE KIRK: TP USA works primarily on a national level. How can we fight local political battles? That’s actually a better question for Doug because I actually, I don’t do a lot of local political battles. I resist getting on my condo board because that, by the way, that’s vicious. Just real quick, I would be curious what your answer is.

DOUGLAS WILSON: So I would say that locally we said earlier that culture is downstream from worship. I would say at the local level you want to find a church that teaches the Bible, join it, throw yourself into the work of it, grow that community where the community becomes salt and light at a local level such that non-believers notice and then some of the controversies after that will start taking care of themselves.

# Question About Fighting Feminism as a Mother

CHARLIE KIRK: Well said. Hi. I have a question. As a mom, I’m asking you for practical advice about how we fight against feminism. And I don’t know how familiar you are with our community, but we have plenty of kids in our community. I have 10.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Wow.

CHARLIE KIRK: Are you my children?

DOUGLAS WILSON: No.

Separate Development Spaces for Boys

CHARLIE KIRK: That’s amazing. No, we have some. We have 5 adopted non-Mormon with 10 kids I’ve met in Idaho. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Yeah, in our little bubble it’s not all that uncommon, but amazing. So my kids are well taught about feminism and my sons and my daughters are. But for example, you mentioned women in or, sorry, men in sports. But you often don’t hear about women that push into the boy scouts or women and that’s coming from women. And so I guess that’s just a general question of what advice can you give me as a mom to try to make a difference, not even for my kids, but maybe other young people that are not just hearing lies.

Yeah. I don’t know if I have advice for you as a mom, but I’ll just say some general stuff that I think might be helpful is that first of all, I’m an Eagle Scout so I could tell you this is not hard. Boys need sex separate development spaces when they are trying to grow and mature. Every study shows this. And by the way, just it’s so self evident. You don’t need a study to show this that you have eight boys that are the age of 12. A single female that is in that circumstance changes the dynamic completely. Chaos, Chaos. Now it’s not even a female’s fault.

So this was studied, this was interesting. So they did a boy scout thing where there was a high rate of failure task. So it was about like climbing a rope basically. And it’s very hard and it requires teamwork and all this sort of stuff. So they did it with just boys. It was fine. When a boy would fail, they get him up again. They would encourage him. It was very team. There was no shame and failure.

When it was all boys, they introduced one female. They don’t want to take the risk because they want to impress the singular female. The entire dynamic of teamwork, of it’s all completely splintered and honestly it was. It’s incredibly damaging to young boys development to get rid of boys only spaces to become men. It’s an awful development. Girls in the Boy Scouts is one of the most disturbing developments in something that was once a good. The Boy Scouts are not. You should find. What is that other thing? The True north or Happy Trails or something.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Two or three. There’s trail.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. Trail life. Yeah.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Trail.

CHARLIE KIRK: Happy Trails. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. So. But not boys. The Boy Scouts is a disaster. It’s a husk of its former self. And that’s too bad because there’s former presidents and astronauts that were Eagle Scouts and myself, and it’s terrible.

But more than anything else, the root of the feminist lie that it comes in a Christianity when parents tell their kids that their daughters “You can do everything men can do.” And that’s B.S. it’s not true. You shouldn’t say that to your sons. You shouldn’t say it to your daughters. You should say, “You are uniquely gifted to do some things that men cannot do. And they’re uniquely gifted do some things that you cannot do.”

DOUGLAS WILSON: Amen.

CHARLIE KIRK: Thank you. Thank you, Charlie.

Apologetical Approaches

DOUGLAS WILSON: In some of your videos, when you’ve. Somebody’s asked you how do you actually know that the Bible is true or that God exists?

CHARLIE KIRK: Your response has been, well, if I’m dealing with a secularist, I will try.

DOUGLAS WILSON: To prove it using reason alone. And I know that Doug has a different approach.

CHARLIE KIRK: He has more of a. I don’t know if you’re familiar.

DOUGLAS WILSON: It’s a presuppositional or ventilian approach.

CHARLIE KIRK: I was hoping you guys could have.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Maybe an exchange about apologetical.

CHARLIE KIRK: So, I mean, I don’t even know if we’re different on it, but help. So let’s say you’re talking to Bill Maher and he says the Bible’s not true. How would the best way to respond?

DOUGLAS WILSON: I would ask him, what is.

CHARLIE KIRK: He said, this marijuana is true.

DOUGLAS WILSON: I would say, you’re sure of that. You’re high, you know.

CHARLIE KIRK: And he’ll say, oh, yeah, I am.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Yeah. One of the he mars Hitchens was where he gets off. He’s got a dumb piece of.

CHARLIE KIRK: He’s very slick.

DOUGLAS WILSON: He’s very slick and very witty, incredibly. And will win the crowd with the joke total when the. When the point he’s making is just totally lame.

CHARLIE KIRK: I completely agree. So that’s where I struggle. I struggled with the clever comedian and I’m pretty quick. But I mean, he’s.

DOUGLAS WILSON: He’s very quick.

CHARLIE KIRK: 50 years of comedy.

DOUGLAS WILSON: So what you do in this is say, let’s talk as though both sides have to give an account of what they believe is fundamentally true. Okay, so if he says, I don’t, he’s all, ultimately, he has to be a relativist. Atheists have to be relativist.

CHARLIE KIRK: And he somewhat acknowledges that.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Right. So how can you say that what I’m saying is false? You don’t know what’s true. You can’t call something crooked if you don’t know what straight is. Basically, people say “I’m an agnostic.” And I would say, well, let’s use the Latin word for that, which is ignoramus. Right.

CHARLIE KIRK: Without knowledge.

DOUGLAS WILSON: And agnostic is either. An agnostic is either “I don’t know. I wish I did.” And that’s a seeker. There’s “I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t care.” Which is sort of the frat boy approach. Don’t bother me. And then “I don’t know.” There’s the dogmatic agnostic who says, “I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody can know.”

CHARLIE KIRK: That would be his position.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Right. And I say, do you know that? How do you know that? You’re telling me that there may or may not be a God, but if there’s a God, he is the kind of being who cannot be known by us. And I’d say, what Sunday school did you learn that in? You just made a claim about God. You just told me that God cannot reveal himself. How do you learn this great mystery about God and God’s inabilities? Right. So he. A dogmatic agnostic. It is assuming things from the Christian religion. He’s assuming the objectivity of truth.

CHARLIE KIRK: How does that usually go? I mean, does it. Where does that conversation usually lead?

DOUGLAS WILSON: It usually leads to people remembering they have an appointment.

CHARLIE KIRK: Or making a joke.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Or making a joke.

CHARLIE KIRK: You and I should have talked beforehand, but yeah, I think that’s the best way. I don’t know how successful would have been given his slippery nature, so. But inevitably it will get to an agreement that saying that there is. That you don’t know is actually a truth claim.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Correct.

CHARLIE KIRK: Got it. Okay. C.S.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Lewis says in Miracles, his book Miracles, you can argue with a man who says rice is unwholesome, but he says you don’t have to argue with a man who says rice is unwholesome. But I’m not saying this is true. The atheist has to say there are no absolutes.

CHARLIE KIRK: And then. Do you believe that? Absolutely.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Is that an absolute?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah. He would say the only absolute that he believes in is that we don’t know.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Okay, so where do you get that absolute?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, you can’t.

DOUGLAS WILSON: That’s a quip. He’s giving a witticism.

CHARLIE KIRK: Sure.

DOUGLAS WILSON: This is the only absolute. And I say, okay, well, let’s pursue that. Where’d you get that absolute? Why should I listen to you? You’re just meat, bones and protoplasm. You’re saying these things because your body chemistry is time. Chance acting on matter is making you say stuff. I have no reason to believe that there’s any correlation between what you’re saying and what’s actually happening in the world on your supposition. So let’s talk about Jesus.

CHARLIE KIRK: I tried. Thank you. That was very helpful.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Thank you.

Redeeming Higher Education

CHARLIE KIRK: So once you leave, how does that grow? Where does what happens leave? College.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Yeah.

CHARLIE KIRK: Once you’ve left the college and they’re left to their own devices, how does that. Hopefully I communicate with them in their devices. Right. So, well, that college, how does it convert from being a feminist institution into something truth forward. Got it. So how do we redeem colleges? Is part of the question. I guess. I don’t think they are redeemable. I don’t. I think they have to be metaphorically and. Yeah, let’s just say metaphorically. Burned to the ground.

DOUGLAS WILSON: So I got a visit from the FBI over a joke like that.

CHARLIE KIRK: Cash Patel will not be visiting my home anytime soon. Or Dan Bongino. I say metaphorically. Look, I don’t think colleges are redeemable. I think that they are without a doubt some of the most broken, secular, demonic, satanic influenced institutions in our country. And this idea that we’re going to somehow change the campuses, I think we got to build new, better ones. And I think people will flock to those. Yes, thank you.

Assisted Reproductive Technology

I had. It’s a three part question, but mostly, is there a place for assisted reproductive technology in Christian living? That’s the first part of my question. The second is IVF. Yes, IVF, surrogacy, kind of everything in that. And then would you, based on that answer, agree or disagree with the statement that any ART is commercialization of children? Surrogacy? Yeah, well, kind of any of it. And then my third part of the question is, does my pastor agree with you?

Okay. I did a whole shtick on IVF. I got a lot of problems with it. I don’t know if it should be illegal or legal. I would never do it. The discarding of human embryos is a serious problem. It’s a human rights violation. Let me tell you my I’m not going to tell you. You guys could talk about all the problems, but let me tell you why I struggle with it.

It is the. It is in intense, the opposite of an abortion clinic, because these are the people that want kids, not want to kill kids. That’s a. That’s. That’s. I struggle with that. Number two, infertility is shown to be the second most mentally trying thing a family can go through other than cancer. Have you ever dealt with it? Praise the Lord. Have not. Could be very, very difficult. Thirdly, I meet some of these IVF kids, and they’re wonderful. They’re incredible. I mean, they show up to my events and they’re like, “I’m a product of IVF.” So I got to kind of reconcile with that.

But the problems with it are very significant. Number one, it’s Brave New World, Aldous Huxley stuff. We can just make life in a laboratory. I have a big problem with that. I really do. Number two, the discarding of the human embryos. Number three, this idea that we’re going to. Oh, we’re going to try to put six up against the wall, and if two stick, great, you know, four lives get ruined.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Oof.

CHARLIE KIRK: I got a big problem with that as well. And it is the absolute inverse also of birth control. Birth control is sex without life. IVF is life without sex. And it comes from, I think, the same spirit that we do not need to actually consummate in order to have human life. So it’s the further deterioration of what sex is meant to be in the Bible.

With that being said, I don’t judge or, you know, think any less of Christians that use IVF. When I talk to them, they’re almost always in a state of desperation. So I pray for them. I personally would never do it, but be curious what Pastor has to say.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Yeah, I agree. The problems he outlined, I agree with all of those and sympathize with the reasons why people are attracted to it, but I think it’s just bad all the way through. So I believe it ought to be against the law. I think we painted ourselves into a corner. We are technologically sophisticated technological geniuses and ethical morons, and we ought not to be in this position, tinkering with things. It’s these people have never watched a science fiction movie.

CHARLIE KIRK: Gattaca, don’t you know what happens?

DOUGLAS WILSON: The spooky music happens right around here. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

CHARLIE KIRK: That’s right.

DOUGLAS WILSON: And I believe that we should not until we absolutely know and are centered and grounded on God’s word and surrogacy.

CHARLIE KIRK: I’m a hard no. That’s wombs for sale and almost surrogacy is almost always now done for commercial reasons of people that just don’t want to have more kids, but they want to have more kids. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Hi. You’ve touched on the topic before that Christians or even conservatives are often met with hatred or judgment for expressing or even acknowledging their beliefs.

Encouragement for Young Believers

DOUGLAS WILSON: So what would your encouragement or advice be to the young believers of my generation on owning, advocating and expressing our faith in a way that won’t push people away, but rather touch lives?

CHARLIE KIRK: “Blessed are those who are persecuted.” And so look, being persecuted is a blessing. I think the pastor might agree with this. If you aren’t currently being condemned, death threats, being trying to run out of town, you’re not fighting hard enough. I mean that.

I mean, look, you got to be boundary pushing. You have to be trying to. You could tell a lot of a man based on the enemies that you earn. So just look in James 1, it talks all about the blessed persecution. Jesus talked about it as well. And so just take heart in the Lord and it’ll make you a stronger believer and Christian.

DOUGLAS WILSON: Be bold, confess the faith, stand up for what you believe. And I’m afraid we have to cut it off there. So thank you again, Charlie Kirk.

CHARLIE KIRK: Oh, thank you guys so much.

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