Newt talks with Charlie Kirk, Founder and CEO of Turning Point USA. They discuss his new book "Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West." Kirk argues that the woke ideology has infiltrated every aspect of American society and presents a significant threat to the United States. He outlines steps to counter this ideology. Kirk also discusses the importance of early voting in the upcoming election. He discusses the key issues for young Americans in the upcoming election. They include the importance of home ownership, marriage, and having a family. Kirk also highlights the role of Turning Point USA’s efforts to get out the vote.
On this episode of News World. In his new book Right Wing Revolution, How to Beat the Woke and Save the West, Turning Point USA founder and CEO Charlie Kirk drags Wochism out of the shadows and details the exact steps needed to stop its toxic spread. Wocism has already seeped into every aspect of American society. Now, Charlie looks to inform and prepare every reader for the coming confrontation against one of the most existential threats the United States has ever faced. Here to discuss his new book, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Charlie Kirk. He is the CEO of Turning Point USA and the host of The Charlie Kirk Show. Charlie, welcome and thank you for joining me again on New World.
Honor to be here, mister speaker. Thank you for having me.
Well. You know you've had such a huge impact in so many different ways. I'm curious what led you to decide to write this book.
It's a great question. In some ways, we're living through the beginning stages of what I would hope would happen, which is post COVID. We have seen two major elements that are creating a lot of political distrust and societal unraveling all across the Western world, which is cheap money and mass migration, and those two things, when they are abused, create almost a revolutionary impulse. And my fear, mister Speaker, is that because of the lack of home ownership, because of the lack of property ownership with our nation's youth in particular, that they're going to be clamoring for a left wing revolution at some point. However, thankfully we're seeing in parts of France, we're seeing in parts of Germany, parts of Netherlands, Belgium, we saw it in Argentina and El Salvador, that there's actually a need or a cry amongst the working men and women of the West to course correct, to go back to the type of country that we had in the late eighties and early nineties, where home ownership was not something that was out of grasp for most young people, where getting married and having children was an achievable thing for most people in the West. And so I talk about in this book the threat of who the woke are, what do they believe, what do they represent? And then I make an argument that we need to as American patriots be very clear about the type of country we want to live in, but also understand that the tactics that we need to employ some people would label as revolutionary. We are up against a woke force. And I tell everybody what the woke is. It's a mixture of nihilism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and Marxism together and the woke they're basically a group of people that complain until they control. So they complain relentlessly about alleged injustices until they control that institution. And what I argue in the book is that they're very beatable. However, it takes an attitude shift. Donald Trump helped start a lot of this attitude shift in the conservative movement, and we lay out the blueprint in the book.
You've done something pretty remarkable and creating Turning Point USA, which is now in more than thirty five hundred high school and college campuses in all fifty states. You had a huge donor base of two hundred and seventy five thousand people. It's astonishing the reach you've built. What do you think led Turning Point USA to take off and become such a significant organization.
Well, I'm a very religious person. So first, glory be to God that he blessed our organization in this movement the way he has, and so I give credit and praise to him. Secondly, mister speaker, it was the right place, right time. It was lightning in a bottle. We were growing back in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, but until Donald Trump came, we did not really have the impact or the size of the infrastructure that we have now. And to his great credit and to Don Junior's credit, they believed in us, and we went from a small organization to a prominent organization in a very short period of time. And President Trump deserves a huge amount of credit and gratitude from me because he hosted us in the White House numerous times. He would introduce us to top donors, he would bless the organization, and he would always see the need for a robust counter youth movement from what we were seeing on college campuses. Now, I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, mister speaker, but poll after poll shows that younger voters very well might favor Donald Trump for the first time a Republican since nineteen eighty eight. I mean, you've been doing this for quite some time, mister speaker, When have we ever been able to say that younger voters are even in contention in the modern era. It's unthinkable. And I don't take credit for that at Turning Point USA or Turning Point Action, but I'll say that we definitely have helped play a role in organizing and messaging and reaching tens of millions of people on social media every single day, and we start to lead that trend of younger people to think differently when it comes to political matters. Look how far we've come as a movement in twelve years twelve years ago, during the height of the Obama era, when I got my plolitical start and we started Turning Point USA, it was basically a standardized talking point that young people are liberal, They're always going to be that way, and there's really no point in changing it. Just try to lose less. Now we're thinking about potentially winning the youth vote again. I don't know if that's going to happen or not, but it's an incredible decade long journey. And so the final thing I'll say is this is that the woke have become the politically correct enforcers. It is not cool to be woke. It is not socially acceptable to be woke. It is actually now more cool to be rebellious. You have more young social media icons like Logan Paul and Amber Rows, people with tens of millions of followers on social media that are embracing Donald Trump. When Donald Trump shows up at a UFC fighting match, it's almost indecipherable from a MAGA rally. And so it's lightning in a bottle, right place, right time. And we've worked very hard of the last twelve years to help create this movement and we hope that we can celebrate in November a big success, but a lot of work still yet to be done because.
Been so successful in reaching out to young people. What would you say to the average candidate or the average access what are the three most important messages for young Americans.
It's a great question, mister speaker. I'll keep it easy. They're the three ms, and it is mortgage, mating, and marriage, those three things. So I'll go one, two, three, And by the way, in the nineteen nineties, when you were a terrific speaker, young people, you never just have to think about these three things. It was if you did the right things, these would be in your grasp. So let's first start with getting a mortgage when Donald Trump was president and he left the presidency. According to zillo dot com, these are not Charlie Kirks numbers at zillo dot com. In order to buy a single family home, the average income required to buy a single family home with seventy one thousand dollars a year. Now when Joe Biden is president, it's one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars a year. So unless your income has gone up fifty thousand dollars a year more in the last three and a half years, you're not able to purchase a home in this country. That is creating a huge amount of generational and political rift where candidates for office Republicans need to be clear that I want to make it easier for you to be able to own a home. Now. I'm a free market capitalist, missus speaker, and I know you are too, but I think that we need to have a robust public policy discussion about whether or not it's a good thing that one in four home purchases in this country are done by investors, and a large percentage of those investors are foreign and Chinese investors that are coming in and scooping up single family homes. I don't think American family should have to compete against a Chinese billionaire who wants to buy a nine hundred thousand dollars home in Scottsdale to rent it back to an American family. I think that violates the social contract. So that's number one. Number two marriage marriage rates are declining in the West. That is less political, it's just more of kind of social and cultural commentary that we need to encourage more people to get married. And then finally, the fertility rates, fertility rates having children. It's the lowest it has been in American history. The number one reason why married couples in the West are saying they are not having children too expensive. And this is inflation. And this is why inflation is a driver for why people are not having children. They say groceries are too much, childcare is too much, gasoline is too much, so on and so forth. So the three ms make it easier to get a mortgage, get married, and mating. The Democrat Party has made it harder for those three things. In fact, they're against those three things far too often, and we are seeing in the data gen X, millennial and gen Z voters when presented with those three issues, they vote Republican or they tilt Republican at almost a seventy five percent clip.
One of the places, Ien know where you have shift, and I agree with you one hundred percent. He is on moving towards early voting, which I think is extraordinarily important. I've been thrilled that you've been a leader in this. What would you walk folks through your own thinking, how you got to this conclusion and what do you think we should be doing about it?
Yeah, it's an entire chapter of our book, chapter where I tell the story, mister speaker of I was a believer in a once correct but now outdated belief that everybody should vote on election day, and that's a great ideal. I don't think we should ever lose that ideal, but it is far from a reality, and that will result in us being displaced from power. In twenty twenty, we fell forty one thousand vote short, and we did not really embrace mail in voting at all, and there were a lot of problems with that election, a lot of problems. We did not do a good enough job. And by we, I mean me, especially adjusting twenty twenty to twenty twenty two. And one of the reasons why it was the red wave that never happened and it was like a red sizzle, was that the Democrats were able to use their apparatus to chase ballots, register voters, harvest ballots, and engage in voting month, where we were just engaging in voting day. So we have twelve hours to vote, they have thirty five days to vote and to collect ballots. And so it was with the Carry Lake Governor's race in Arizona, I think Kerry Lake should be governor of Arizona if we would have done a better job, and Carrie Lake hopefully will become a Senator. I went to my voting location on voting day in Scottsdale, Arizona. I live in Arizona, and I went to vote and it was a two hour waiting line, and there were machine tabulation failures. There was all sorts of issues. I thought to myself, what if these people would have voted early, we would have no lines. The turnout issue would have been completely different. So that's the first element, and so out of that drove necessity for change. In January of twenty twenty three, mister Speaker, Nearly a year and a half ago, when we saw that Trump was going to be the nominee, we made a prediction. We said, We're not going to involve ourselves in the primary very much. Instead, we are going to build America's first and biggest and largest ballot chasing army, where we are going to have the first of its kind of the conservative movement that will go out and build relationships, register voters, and chase ballots. Ballot chasing it's not ballot harvesting because it's not legal in Arizona, Wisconsin or Georgia, but it is building relationships with people months and months ahead of time, getting them on the voting roll, and encourage them to vote an early voting month. Specifically, by the way, low propensity voters not exactly four out of four voters, but you're one out of four, even you're zero out of four voters. So these are net new voters. So we have hundreds of full time people right now on the ground doing this work in Arizona, Wisconsin. I will say the numbers are already speaking for itself. In twenty twenty in Arizona, Republicans enjoyed a one hundred and ten thousand voter registration advantage over Democrats. That's one hundred and ten thousand more registered Republicans than Democrats. Now, four years later, there are two hundred and forty thousand more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state of Arizona, a new increase of one hundred and thirty thousand. So Arizona is getting redder, not bluer. Now I'm not taking only credit for that, but we do have hundreds of people in the streets registering voters every day, which is obviously playing a big difference, registering thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of new voters. Now, one final thing I'll say, mister speaker, and it is a cautionary tale. And I hope you'll bring this message on all of your interviews because you have a very, very big following. The best news of the twenty twenty four election is also the most dangerous news for the first time in my lifetime, in your lifetime. The less likely you are to vote, the more likely you are to support the Republican candidate Donald Trump. The lower propensity you are, the more likely you are to vote. That is amazing news, but it's also terrifying. That means that we might win the public debate, we might actually win a majority, But if that does not materialize into ballots in boxes and voting centers, then we're actually going to underperform the polls. We do not yet have an apparatus in the Republican Party, and we're trying to build it very quickly to capitalize and translate low propensity energy into election day results. So I'll throw it back to you, mister speaker. I could talk about this topic all day long. We're in the weeds of it and we're in complete agreement.
This is a very important transition. I was delighted when President Trump adopted your message and began talking about early voting, and it's exactly what you said. We are right at the edge of a Trump coalition replacing the Roosevelt coalition for the first time since nineteen thirty two. I mean, it's an amazing moment of history if it happens, and it will only happen if people vote, and you're exactly on target. But let me ask you, though in your book you advocate for a right wing revolution, something which having been part of the Reagan Revolution and then done my part in nineteen ninety four with the Contract I believe in. But I think it's helpful to explain to people what kind of revolution you're describing and why that's the right language for the mess we're in.
Yeah. Absolutely, And actually the Reagan Revolution and the Contract for America largely inspired the language choice for this. And I want to be very clear when I say revolution, I'm not talking about a French revolution or Russian revolution. That's what my critics say. I mean, that's self evident for anyone that follows my work, But I think it's an appropriate term because we're seeing a change in the status quo. It is a recentering of the country, and it becomes with a couple non negotiable, irrefutable political principles, which is, we are not going to put up with rising crime and defunding the police. That's number one. We're going to build a coalition that does not put up with that. Number two, we believe in the parent adult child distinction, that we're not going to allow our children to be preyed upon in our school system, and that we are not going to allow this graphic curriculum that transcends income and racial lines. And the third and fourth element of this, which I think is very important, it plays consistent with Donald Trump's message of America. First, is that we want leaders that care much more about the well being of the forgotten man and woman of this nation than some sort of ideological abstraction that some central planner in DC or some bureaucrat might be floating. So the revolution is really very similar. It harmonizes with that of the nineteen eighties or nineteen nineties. I'll go back to how I started. It is a rejection and a repudiation of mass migration and cheap money. Otherwise saying that immigration and inflation the two eyes which are polling at the top levels of the top issues in concern to the twenty twenty four election, they must be soundly rejected and then reformed. And so the north star of the revolutionary movement that we talk about here in right wing revolution is that step one, we must defeat the people that have done this, which is the woke the Marxists. And then number two, we must build a country that we can all recognize. I would actually love a country, mister speaker, that I grew up in where politics was not the most important thing all the time, where you could have a Democrat neighbor and you could go to dinner with that person. I missed that country. I mean that sincerely. This book is not a hyper partisan book in the way that people might think, where we want to salt the earth with our enemies, as some people on the left would say. No, Instead, we want to get back to a decent and ordinary America where the radical fringes of the left are put back into San Francisco and New York where they belong, and they're no longer within all of our institutions. So I think that answers your question mainly and mostly. But the West will not be saved by its own It's going to take decisive action from millions of patriots across the country.
If you have a fascinating phrase, you say that the political battle in America isn't just a battle over policy, but it's an advertising battle. Walk us through what you mean by it.
I talked about this in great detail in the book, which is that if it was just a policy discussion, we would win every single election. Our policies are better, and we know that by the way, based on the movement of people in the States. People are leaving California, people are leaving Illinois. They're going to Arizona, they're going to Texas, they're going to Florida. However, in the policy debate, it becomes an advertising campaign, and Democrats are just better at this. They run Hollywood, they run the social media campaigns, and we are starting to get better at this as conservatives. We're becoming far more competitive on social media. We're becoming far more competitive on digital media. And the advertising campaign that the Democrats have launched is one that is starting to wane in its effect. And this is why they hate Donald Trump. Is there anybody better at marketing or advertising in the modern era than Donald Trump? Of course not. His message penetrates communities that have never heard it before. He's building a new coalition, and so we talk about this in the book in a couple instances. They hate Donald Trump because he has brought mass marketing media to the Republican Party that otherwise we are never able to do that. And this is why you're seeing this new multiracial, multi generational coalition being built of Blacks, Hispanics, white working class Asians that Republicans never would have stood a chance to do that. The worry and the concern though, is that we might actually be losing some higher propensity voters in the baby boomer demographics. So we have to do a little bit better in those demographics, and we talk about that in the book as well. If we're able to do a little bit better with baby boomers than polling suggests and run up the score in the rural parts of the country as well as build this new coalition that is, as you say, had a new Roosevelt coalition that could put the Democrat Party extinct almost permanently.
What do you think has to be done to win back or to reassure the more higher propensity voters who are currently worried about Trump.
It's a great question. I'm sure you see it in the polling too. I get a lot of hate mail on my radio show because whenever I say baby boomers, they think I'm insulting all baby boomers. I'm not. There are some very wonderful baby boomers out there. Here's my current hypothesis, mister speaker, and I'd love your thoughts on it. It's that baby boomer senior citizen voters, time and time again will vote for the status quo. They do not necessarily want upheaval or revolutionary change. They want to vote for a small sea conservative option. The way that Joe Biden is presenting himself and the propaganda television advertisements is actually as a small sea conservative vote for me. I'll keep everything the same, I'm not going to have upheaval. And Donald Trump he's the guy that's going to change everything, and he's the chaos candidate. And so my opinionion is that the way to win them back is to demonstrate that Joe Biden is the chaos candidate, that Donald Trump is actually stability of no new wars and stopping the invasion. And we see this in some of the polling where older voters who are higher propensity, their concerns of Trump is that he's not presidential. He's always full of drama. You've heard it many many times. And so we need to now play offense and show that the border is obviously not secure and that is full of upheaval. When I am around our core turning point group of students are eight thousand in Detroit that we have. They want upheaval, they think the country's not working for them, They want change in DC. They want to drain the swamp. When I speak at the villages, for example, which I love the villages, it's a different message. They want calmness and serenity and they want predictability. And so I think we must understand that Biden's messaging has been, of course deceitful and treacherous, but he's trying to make himself seem as a small c conservative camp and Donald Trump is the upheaval. You are not going to change a seventy five year old individual's view of the world. They're not going to want revolutionary change. They want their social security, protective medicare protected, understandably, but also we must make Donald Trump seem as the stable candid, which he is, and Joe Biden as the frenetic one.
Don't you think to some extent Biden's cognitive decline, we can see him even with that group, because I mean, they see people who go through this kind of decline, So I think they see it as a human thing, not just a political thing. At least I get that impression that there are a lot of people who to say, you know, I think the last number I saw, sixty seven percent of the country doesn't think he could possibly make it through four more years those people.
I don't know if you can make it through four more months at the rate he's going right now, I don't know. I've seen mixed opinions on this. I think it's important the way we talk about it. If you want to win higher propensity older voters, we can't be cruel about it. I think that's very important because there very well might be a concern that some of those individuals might one day have to deal with that issue. And it's understandable. It's a sad state of affairs. But if we don't solve our higher propensity problem a little bit, I'm afraid we're not going to have enough low propensity to be able to turn out. That's my biggest concern. And I see it reflected in the polling. According to the Fox News poll, and I think it was kind of a bad poll, to be honest. There were some numbers that made no sense. For example, they had Joe Biden winning rural voters. That's not going to happen, okay, Joe Biden's not going to win the rural vote in this country. But it showed that Donald Trump was performing seventeen points worse with baby boomer voters than he did in twenty twenty. Now there's a lot of time to make up with that. I think the convention is going to help a lot. And here's the good news. Baby boomers are the easiest to bring home back into the Republican Donald Trump column of any voters at your disposal. Amazingly, younger voters and black voters and Hispanics are the hardest of all of them that are able to do it. And finally, I think there is some skepticism and on these amongst some baby boomer voters that Donald Trump being a convicted felon. I think we have to navigate that, mister speaker. We can't dismiss it. When I deal with younger voters, they couldn't care less, you know what. They say, I want to be able to own a home. Give me the felon. It's not even a thing. An eighty year old voter might say, Oh, well, you know, I was raised in a country where if you're a fellow, that's a big deal, and i'd love your thoughts on that. I don't know how quite yet to navigate that, To be perfectly honest, my.
Basic approach is to say there was a fake conviction, just as there's fake news, and that if I thought he was a genuine fellon, I'd be bothered. It was a fully rigged jury if you looked at the judges instructions. A good friend of mine, who is a very good lawyer and a very hardcore Trump person, said to me, if I'd been serving on the jury and the judge gave me those instructions, by definition, I would have voted guilty because the instructions basically set it up so that there was no way to get out of it except to say he's guilty. I think the entire process, you've had this absurdity that the Appeals Court in New York is upheld an open ended gag order. So the Biden campaign gets to run commercials attacking Trump as a felon. Biden gets to run around the country describing him as a fela. But Trump has a gag order. Now how's he going to go into a debate? Is he going to sit there and think, ge am I allowed to say this or not say this? This is insanity. So my basic position with most people is you have never seen a presidential candidate nominee of a party former president who has been under this kind of assault, and you've got to decide are you comfortable living in a country where they could do it to you? Because if they can do it to a billionaire former president, they can do it to you. And if you don't have to do it to you, you'd better stop them from doing it to him. That's my basic I mean, I find most people, once you put it in context, most people think that this whole thing is wrong. We the people, get to decide who the president is, not the judges and the lawyers. You've raised an important point. I do think we tend to forget, and I say, this is somebody who obviously is substantially older than most of your members. Different generations and different age groups have different rhythms and different approaches. So you get much more risk taking among the young, you get much more caution among the older. You've got to think through getting messages organized in a way that both groups can be comfortable. And that's one of the challenges for Trump right now.
He's actually doing better with the community that Republicans have always failed with, and now we might have to adjust a little bit and play into that caution. And that's where the VP selection comes in. That's where that whole conversation I think matters. But again, in some ways, usually the Republican race usually goes you have a base of the cautionary voters and you try to win over the younger. And now it's the opposite. I've never seen a campaign like it. Maybe you have, mister speaker, I've never seen that where in the final months you're trying to go back into the pickleball courts and bingo knights and senior citizen centers and try to shore them up.
It's true on both sides. You have Joe Biden spending a lot of time in the black community because he's trying to rebuild his base, and you have Trump having to think a little bit about reaching out to older Americans who are normally the Republican base. But that's part of the turmoil of what we are. I'm probably biased because I was involved as a junior congressman in the Reagan campaign in nineteen eighty and it was a very very close election until two weeks before the election, but the race looked very close, and they had one debate, only one debate all year. Carter lied, I think more cleverly than Biden. But Carter lied pretty endlessly. Reagan came up and I'll be interesting to see if Trump can do something like this. But Reagan came up with a very simple there you go again, which he could say almost smiling. I mean, he wasn't hostile, he wasn't engaging, and I hope that it's very important for Trump not to get sucked into some kind of barroom brawl with Biden. So the country looked up and they thought, you know, Reagan's not scary. That was the key, because they tried to scare you can't give this guy nuclear weapons. I mean, you know, he's a movie actor who made movies with chimpanzees. What are you crazy? So the minute the country decided Reagan wasn't dangerous, the question became can I stand four more years of Carter? I think the problem for Biden in debating Trump and buying advertising no matter what, is when it's over, people go back to the grocery store and they walk in the grocery store and they go, I could not afford four more years of this, and they can't buy enough advertising to convince them that it's okay. I think that's why nan Biden has an almost impossible job.
I totally agree. And if Trump runs the type of race that I think he will, and Trump is a great finisher, this is a very important thing. In twenty twenty, Donald Trump closed almost a ten point polling gap in a three week period. In twenty sixteen, he did the same thing that guy locks in like a heat seeking missile from like October first to election day and he finishes. And you might remember in twenty twenty he did something like forty eight rallies in twenty five days. I mean, it's an unheard of herculean f who's full media dominance. If we want to get out low prop voters, if we want to win over baby boomers, Trump in that last thirty days, I can say this, he will finish better than by as long as we're within the margin of error, which we are, and we do the work in register voters. He locks in those last thirty days, and he plays his best ball when the pressure is on.
You know, it's really important to remember that a high propensity voter is somebody who has the habit of going out and voting. Usually somebody who's better educated, has a somewhat higher income, and historically for the last seventy to eighty years, Republicans have had more of people who are likely to automatically go vote. On the other hand, a low propensity voter is somebody who doesn't vote all that often and has to be motivated or organized to out and vote. Historically, in the Roosevelt coalition, those were Democrats. One of the great transitions of the last ten years is that more of the high propensity likely to vote people have sort of drifted away from the Republican Party towards the Democrats, and many, many more of the low propensity on likely to vote people have drifted away from the Democrats towards the Republicans. So it's a fascinating question about whether the appeal of Trump personally and the organizational ability that Trump is putting together can get folks who normally don't vote to show up and vote well. At the same time, can Trump in fact reach out and appeal to a little bit more of the folks who normally do vote, the high propensity voters. And on those two questions, I think ultimately the election will swing. I didn't realize until we're getting ready to chat today that you were the youngest speaker at the Republican National Convention in twenty sixteen. That was quite an honor, and you were the opening speaker in twenty twenty. I have a hunch we're probably going to hear you again this year.
Nothing's confirmed yet, but we'll see what happens.
I'm in the same vote, but I have a hunch I'm going to see you in Milwaukee.
I think, so, we'll see.
That's great, Listen, Charlie, I want to thank you for joining me. You have been an extraordinary leader in building Turning Point USI I mean it's really people who do aren't familiar with that. You really look as an amazing organization. Your new book, right Wing Revolution, how to Beat the Woke and Save the West is available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. And I want to let our listeners know they can find out more about your organization, Turning Point USA by visiting your website at TPUSA dot com. And I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us.
Thanks so much, mister speaker, Thank you.
Thank you to my guest Charlie Kirk. You can get a link to buy his new book, Right Wing Revolution on our show page at neut World. Dot com. Newt World is produced by game of three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at gingrid three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of news World can sign up for my three free weekly columns at gingristree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm new Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.