Be True To Your Beliefs, and Succeed: A Chat with Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy

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That's noblegoldinvestments.com, the only gold company I trust. Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show. So we have a special project at Turning Point USA, where we train and encourage student leaders to run for student body president. And we just recently had them at a conversation with speaker Kevin McCarthy in DC, and this was our conversation. Speaker McCarthy showed them around the United States House of Representatives.

He was a great host. And instead of the typical political chat, he talked about leadership and the advice that he had for our young student leaders. If you guys want to support Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.

That's tpusa.com. Get engaged and get involved. I think you guys will really enjoy this conversation. It might be a little different than what you are expecting. This is much more about student empowerment and leadership.

And honestly, you look at what Turning Point USA has been able to do over the last 11 years. It is remarkable. And thank you for supporting it and enjoy this conversation. Email us freedom at charliekirk.com. Buckle up, everybody.

Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.

Brought to you by the loan experts I trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandtodd.com. Good morning, everybody. Great to be here, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you for hosting us. Thank you. You know, under the last House of Representatives, I couldn't get the speaker to host all of our students. Why?

It's a lot different. Well, I haven't seen you since you were chosen as speaker. Congratulations.

Thank you. And instead of kind of doing a typical boring policy talk, I want to talk about stuff that every single one of our student leaders can resonate with. Mr. Speaker, as we were talking about, these are student body presidents, vice presidents, and prospective ones running kind of mini campaigns all across the country. And so, Mr. Speaker, I think it would be helpful if you tell your story from the chip on your shoulder you probably had from getting denied that congressional internship to now being Speaker of the House of the United States Representative. First of all, thank you very much for being here.

Thank you for what you're doing on campus and don't give up. So I'm going to tell you a story that's a little different. So everybody from California?

All right. So I'm from a town called Bakersfield. Not a very big town. It's in the Central Valley. It's agriculture. It's oil.

It's the shanty town in the Grapes of Wrath, if you ever read the book. I was born into a family of Democrats, but I've never been a Democrat. So anyone ever challenges me on my conservative beliefs, I'm more conservative than you because I rejected what I heard at home to seek something else out. So my family has never had well. My father had two jobs.

He was a fireman and he moved furniture on his days off. I'm the youngest in the family. I didn't excel at school, so I couldn't get a college scholarship. I thought I deserved an athletic scholarship, but nobody else did.

OK. So I went to junior college, but my family instilled in me a work ethic. So I'm going to junior college. I go to this liquor store. You'll figure out why I go to this liquor store.

They'll sell me beer underage. OK. I'm not saying I bought it.

I'm just saying. But the guy who owns the liquor store has a car dealer's license. So I tell him one day, I'll give you 100 bucks if you will take me to L.A., which two hours away, to get me into the car dealership where it's with the fairgrounds where all the car dealers would bring their trade ins. But you have to be a dealer to come in. So I would go there and I would buy and sell cars and I would flip them to pay my way through college. Now, it was illegal, but I didn't know it why I was doing it.

OK. I was just being an entrepreneur. So what do you do when you go to junior college? You go away, visit your buddies who are away at college. My best friend was a running back of Stanford. My other buddy was SC. My other buddy was San Diego State. So this weekend I'm going to go to San Diego State to visit my buddies. Anybody from San Diego State?

Yeah, they lived over on Campanella. All right. So as I go to the grocery store because I want to cash a check so I have some money. This is long before you even thought of.

This is 1985. The lottery just started in California. It was only the scratch off.

It just started the day before. So as I cashed the check, I buy a lottery ticket and I won the lottery. Now it's before you can raise a billion dollars. The most you can win in 85 was $5,000. But think about what $5,000 was in 1985. This was this was before Biden inflation.

This was $5,000. OK, so put yourself in my boat. You're 20 years old. It's Friday night. You just won $5,000 and you're spending the weekend 10 minutes from Tijuana with your buddies. OK, so I come back and take my folks to dinner. I get my brother and sister each 100 bucks and I take the majority of the rest of money.

I put it all in one stock because I love to take risk. I make 30 percent of my money in six weeks. The semester comes. I decided to take a break from school. I go out and I try to buy a subway, but no one's going to sell me one because I'm only 20 years old. The other thing you learn about me is I never give up. I don't care what it is.

If you watch the speaker's race, you ever go back to the 1800s and see someone go 15 rounds? I will never give up. So I go and I open my own business. I open my own deli. I learn three lessons in all my business. I'm the first to work, last to leave, last to be paid. So my deli takes off. I'm doing really well. I want to open six more.

They try to screw me around. Somebody else offers to buy it. So I sell my deli because I want to finish my college. No one in my family had finished a four year degree. So now I sell my deli. I have enough money to pay my way through college. I don't have to work. So I'm going to college out of Cal State.

I open up the local paper, says be a summer intern in Washington, D.C. with my local congressman. I don't know this man, but I think he's really lucky to have me. Right. So I apply. You want to know what he did? He turned me down. You want to know the end of this story? I now sit as the speaker of the House in the congressional seat elected to that I could not get an internship for. Only in America could that happen.

But it only happens if you don't give up. This is summertime. Recommended reading. Now, I don't know if this woman's a liberal or conservative or not, but she wrote this book called Grit. She's a professor at Penn.

Her name's Angela Duckworth. She does studies. You know, the number one attribute to look at somebody if they'll be successful. It's not your intellect. It's not your well. It's not your education. It's whether you have perseverance.

You may be smart. You may come from a great area, but the first time you hit a wall, you quit. Then you decide you're a loser. If you hit a wall and you're not successful, that's just an experience. You only lose when you give up.

And I just have continued that model as I've gone through. Now, Mr. Speaker, that I've seen that throughout the years, I got to tell you, he earned that speakership. I mean, every event to every part of the country. Congressman McCarthy has been working, serving his constituents and outworking the competition. And so let's define these terms, grit, stamina, hustle for a lot of these students here when they're involved in student government politics.

It's not dissimilar, just on a smaller scale of the smear, the slander. You know, I'm sure many of you have stories of complaints being filed against you when you're running for student president, all sorts of stupid, silly stuff. I got to tell you, Mr. Speaker, if you think those battleground districts like Maya Flores are tough, try becoming student body president of, you know, Texas A&M. Where's our Texas A&M delegate? There we go.

I know we have Colorado State University, one of our best. You know, these are tough races. And so there's some similarity what you're dealing with here. Speak to some of the daily disciplines, the mentality, how you train your mind, your entire being to be able to have that kind of attitude of grit and hustle. First, you're proving you can do it right now because you run for office on campus. You're at a disadvantage to start out with, right? Because you're conservative. They try to make the rules tougher for you to even defile. Right. And then they try to discredit you on your beliefs and what you're doing.

So it's a good testing ground at the very beginning of where you go. You want to know my average week? We all studied, you know, the the five stages of grief, right? And denial, you lash out, you're angry, then the acceptance come and all that. Well, I have like the five D's for the press in D.C., right? Every Monday starts out with you can't pass the bill. Then Tuesday becomes doubt, right? We just heard from one of your members, you can't pass the rule. Wednesday comes, the headline is the biggest challenge to McCarthy's speakership this week. Thursday, I passed the bill. They said, well, that wasn't a big deal. And then Friday, they're disappointed.

It happens each and every week. And you know what I do? So in my office, I have a couple of different portraits. OK, I have a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

He's in black and white. First Republican president. You know, when the Democrats bring a bill to the floor and they want to remove a statue, I'm the first one to sign up for it because I'll promise you it's not a Republican. It's a Democrat you have to remove.

And so I go to the floor and I say, I'm all for this bill, but this bill doesn't go far enough. You need to change the name of your party. Because if you don't like the statue, if you don't like the person, what they stood for, that was your party.

You should change your name at the same time. We had to remove four portraits of speakers, all four Democrats. We had to remove statues here based upon their beliefs that was sent to us by a Democrat majority state legislature, accepted by a majority of Democrats in Congress. Abraham Lincoln and the basis of our party, of why it was created, that were conceived in liberty and that we're all equal. If Abraham Lincoln was never assassinated, we never would have had Jim Crow laws.

Those were Democrats that created that. Think of Abraham Lincoln when you want to think of grit. At 23, he loses a race for the legislature. He fails in business. His girlfriend dies at 26.

He has a nervous breakdown at 27. He gets elected to Congress for one term, but can't be re-nominated. He loses a race for speaker.

It's what I admire most about him. He loses a race for Senate. He fails in business again. He loses a race for VP. He loses a race for Senate again. Then he gets elected for president at age 52. And never once did he blame Buchanan when he's elected November 1860 sworn in March 1861, seven states leave the union. And the height of our greatest challenge to our to our Constitution was the Civil War. He builds the Intercontinental Railway.

That's like inventing the Internet. He looks at the future at the same time, bringing us together. Reagan's portrait's in color and he's smiling. And if Reagan was here today, you know what Reagan would tell us? And you've got to remember this, not just in running for office and your school campuses, but writing what you believe in your classrooms. If you believe your principles bring people more freedom, don't be angry about it. Be happy. If you watch the 15 rounds of Speaker, did I ever get angry? Because I knew the outcome. If you're getting upset with something they're writing about you, don't be angry.

You write the history. You follow forward on your principles and the outcome will be different. If you stick to your principle, if you're happy, people want to associate with you. If you think being angry means you're more conservative, just means people don't want to hang out with you or come to Thanksgiving dinner.

Be true to your beliefs and you will succeed. If Lincoln was here, Lincoln would tell us this one thing, believe in the exceptionalism of America. And I watched too often the liberals, even in Congress, they are quick to criticize America and praise some other country. We're not perfect, but we strive to be a more perfect unit, but this is what Lincoln would tell you, believe in the exceptionalism of America.

You know why I think he would say that? The Gettysburg Address. Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated proposition that we're all equal. He goes on to say, but if we fail, government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from Earth.

Think about the moment he gave that. Thousands of brothers just died. Hundreds of thousands of brothers have been dying.

And he's sitting on a battlefield. We're not the strongest nation in the world. We're divided together. But he knows we will be the most powerful and sustain ourselves because government is of the people, by the people, for the people. But name me one other nation that's conceived in liberty and dedicate the proposition that we're all equal. There is not another nation in the world.

The closest would come Israel. We had the president of Israel here yesterday. One party gave you anti-Semitic comments. One party had members who wouldn't show up. One party had nine members vote against the resolution in support of the relation of Israel.

Israel has been only alive as a country for 75 years, and 11 minutes after they became a country, the first country to recognize it was America. We should never back away from where the Republican Party has been based or why we were created. Too often, the Democrats want to flip it on us because they're embarrassed of their history.

We should politely point it out to them every single day. We have nothing to apologize for. We know the country will be stronger and better with our principles. Why? Because you'll be freer, you'll be economically stronger, and the world will be safer. Because we're not going to pick and choose. We're going to allow you to unharness these government regulations that let you capture something greater. There's a reason why people crave to come to America.

And I can't quite understand from the Democrat point of view where they want to control everything about our lives, why they think that brings people more freedom. Strong cell is amazing. I got to tell you, the combination of NADH, CoQ10, and collagen is really something. You know, people ask me, they say, Charlie, how do you keep your energy up?

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StrongCell.com slash Charlie. Now, I personally love Lincoln for a couple of reasons. You know, he did not live an easy life, as you all know, Mr. Speaker. He had clinical depression. He actually had his head was kicked in by a horse and he was passed out overnight. And he had what today would be called bipolar clinical depression, lost a son at war, had a very interesting wife.

Let's just leave it at that, right? However, he was a man of great grit. And that's kind of the theme here, right? He saw the vision, knew what was right, persevered. He died a very unceremonious death, right? I mean, not far from here in Ford's theater. And yet we remember him as a man who was willing to cast the vision and as a leader that everybody thought, Lolia personally, I love he didn't go to college. He was a railroad lawyer, educated on the Bible and Shakespeare. So I've got in common with him, I guess.

But Mr. Speaker, I love that you're highlighting. Lincoln, because if there would have been the mainstream media and the equivalent of the time, they were nothing but negative, nothing. But this guy is never going to succeed. You know, you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which really is a question of justice, right? What is right?

How should we act? I encourage all of you guys to study the Lincoln-Douglas debates. One of the most beautiful dialogues.

It really is the Socrates debates repurpose in this question of who are we? And he was the founder of the Republican Party in Ripon, Wisconsin, that started as the anti-slavery party. And so it really is this beautiful picture of what would America be without a leader like Lincoln? But what would have happened if Lincoln would have given up? Mm hmm.

There's so many reasons to give up. So as speaker, I try all these new things, right? First thing I did was make members come to work, not vote proxy.

I opened the house back. Love that, by the way. This proxy thing is crazy. It's stupid. Do you get paid to stay home and give and give all your votes to me? If you're elected, someone's lending their voice to you for a certain time.

You have to use that voice for them. So I created Movie Night. How did I create Movie Night? I'm the speaker. I just created it.

We just had it this week. You know what the first movie I showed? Lincoln. I brought Doris Kearns Goodwin in. She wrote the book on Lincoln, right? We had a discussion beforehand and we watched Lincoln down here in the auditorium. If you watch the movie Lincoln, it's great, right? It's kind of a political one, too, because it's all about getting the 13th Amendment. You know where that 13th Amendment was debated?

On the floor we serve every day today. As a policymaker, as a member of Congress, to be able to see what transpired on the floor that day, to be able to walk on that every day, to know the challenge of what they went through and the push that Lincoln gave. I mean, it inspires you at the same time. We don't have that same challenge today, but we do have big challenges. And Lincoln would tell you this. It's easier as elected official to say no than to say yes. Something can always be better, but if you're moving it forward, what you're going to have challenges in your elected position, you move it forward, but then you take the grit to come back the next day for the next piece you didn't get.

That's the one thing I will tell you. If I admire something about the opposition, if you think of a Bernie Sanders, he never gives up, does he? He may not pass a bill, but he tries to move a lot of other people to socialism. We put a bill on the resolution on the floor this year opposing socialism. 100 Democrats couldn't vote for that. I would say Bernie has been successful.

They've taken over that party. That's a concern inside America today. So you stay with and you keep moving it forward. That's really what grit tells you.

That's a great segue to something I want to highlight. So many of these leaders are going to have power, influence, but they're going to be surrounded sometimes by other student senators, administration that don't see the world the way they do. So when do you strike a deal? When do you say no? What can you share from being an effective leader of negotiation? But also, there are certain lines or certain principles I will not violate. You always keep your principles, but your principles never say that you vote no every single time, because then what did you achieve?

You may not get a hundred percent, but what you have to look at is where you are. Always build a strategy. Think of the debt ceiling. Something that we have to do, but we take the majority. We have a five-seat. Schumer goes on all the Sunday shows.

You watch. We're going to break him. He's just going to have to raise the debt ceiling clean. So I sit down, I said, Mr. President, why don't we negotiate?

Why don't we talk? For 97 days, he said, I'm not going to talk to him. For 97 days, I was the cheerful conservative. I would come to the press every day and I would set the motion where I would talk to the press what I thought we should do. I haven't said I'd bring soft food to the White House if he wanted to be.

I think he was good. He only met with me once we passed our own bill. Now, is it enough for everybody? No, but it's the biggest cut in American history.

Two point one trillion. We got work requirements. The thing that the Democrats said was a red line they'd never go for. So what you have to deal with as you go through this is how far can you get? And in your mind ahead of time, you have to lay out what victory would be. And there's times you're going to have to walk away to get victory. You know, Reagan had this problem. In his second term, he went to Iceland to negotiate with Gorbachev for the reduction of nuclear weapons, and Reagan would tell you this peace without freedom is meaningless. Think about that for one moment. Peace without freedom is meaningless. It's human nature that we all crave peace, but you cannot attain it without having freedom.

So he's getting almost everything he wants. But Gorbachev asked Reagan for something else. He asked Reagan to end the S.D.I. program, which was not proven at the time. People made fun of.

They called it Star Wars. Reagan said, no, but I'll share it with you so the world will be safe. Gorbachev declines.

And he looks at everything that he's getting. But there's no freedom in that. So he got up and walked away. The elite media criticized him. But had Reagan not walked away at that moment, the Soviet Union would have never collapsed. You've never lived in a world where there are two Germanys with a Berlin Wall.

That's what I grew up. Those are moments at time with what was Reagan. Why was Reagan looking for the reduction in nuclear weapon? Because he wanted to break the Soviet Union. So in his mind, that was the goal.

And he knew that he drove them to a certain point. So you'll know in a negotiation where you're driving people to a certain point, but it's just like if you're negotiating, negotiating buying a car, what's the right price? When do you walk away?

You might have to walk away a couple of times to get the price that you want. But don't put yourself in a cul-de-sac that you can't get out of. Don't put you're now elected president, but everybody around you has a different philosophy. What you want to start doing is you want to start talking about it. You want to start listening. They may have a different philosophy, but they may agree with you on a couple issues that are a problem on how to fix it.

And you want to explain things, so don't accept that they already know it. I had a chance to be speaker at one time, and I screwed up in the press. And we were in the majority.

I could have walked right in to get it. I had to win the majority again to be able to get it. I was leader for four years while Pelosi was speaker for four years. We came from the same state. I won five new seats in California. She didn't win one. We won five more in New York, in Arizona, in Oregon. We won in places people didn't think. We expanded the party to more women, more Hispanics at any time elected, the quality of the candidates.

So it was a little more precious that it was harder to attain, right? But what happened is there's a lot of people elected to Congress that didn't win on the first time. And I'd call them up right after the election. I'd tell them, did you lose? No, you didn't lose. You only lost if you don't run again.

The clock just ran out. So when you talk about negotiating with somebody, don't think it's over at that moment. Also, whenever you're negotiating, I wanted to get all of the IRS agents out, OK?

I said, I'm going to get I want to get rid of the 87 IRS agent. Well, the challenge is that's already in law. They already funded it.

So it's really hard for me to get with just Congress, right? But in the debt ceiling, they were going to they're going to spend this money over time, but they have it allocated on. So they're going to spend one point two billion this year.

So I was able to get all that. OK, so I got this year, no new IRS agent. But then I put them into another negotiation where I was able to get 20 billion into the future that they're going to spend on IRS because I cut so long. They want to repurpose that money.

OK. So now I set myself up for the next debate in appropriations. What do you think's better to use that money? IRS agents or border security? So at the same time I'm negotiating for the first one, I'm setting up for the negotiator next time.

Now I had to make a decision. There are some conservatives, well, you didn't get all of it. Well, it's pretty hard when they have the Senate and the presidency and they already have all the money. Just give it back to me. Well, I just got everything they're going to do this year, expand the majority, win the Senate and the presidency and take it all back next year and take 20 billion of the future already. So I made a decision.

I got a pretty good chunk of it right now and they can't start. And I set myself up to fight them in the next fight. And I think I put myself in a pretty good place to have that fight on our philosophy and where the American public is with them and make them lose another argument. So it's the timing of the debate and set yourself up for the next debate.

And the grit is whatever you don't get, if you feel you've got enough, you start the next day for the next fight and you set yourself up coming out of that to win again. Listen, as students begin heading back to school, do you think they'll be learning about the founding principles that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in history? Will they learn that our unalienable rights are God given and not granted by government?

Will they be given a full and honest account of our nation's history? The answer to all these questions is yes for students at Hillsdale College. And these days, in addition to teaching college students, Hillsdale has extended its teaching to K through 12 students and lifelong learners like you and me. If you're not doing so already, one of the best ways to start learning from my friends at Hillsdale is through in Primus, Hillsdale's free digest of liberty. My listeners can sign up for free at the special website, which is available for a limited time. It's at Charlie for Hillsdale dot com. I look forward to in Primus each month and you can, too. It's interesting, useful and free, the best and smartest in conservative constitutionalist thought. Find out more about Hillsdale and in Primus at Charlie for Hillsdale dot com.

They're an excellent college, America's greatest college, Charlie for Hillsdale dot com. So in closing here, Mr. Speaker, you have a we have a day today, a government to run. And I just want to make sure all of you know, first phone call to the speaker of the house. He said, yes, I want to meet with all you guys.

That's very hard to find. And he deserves and his team deserves a lot of thanks for hosting it. And you guys are going to have a beautiful tour. And you guys should say bye to the city. And it really means a lot.

It does. But I was wondering if you could end with a story of some variety of a time where you might have been at a low point or you felt like the world was caving. And I only say this because half of what we've dealt with with this project, Mr. Speaker, over seven years is dealing with students when in their own version of crisis. My world is falling apart. I'm on the front page of the student newspaper. I'm never going to get a job. I'm getting kicked out of my fraternity. I'm getting kicked out of my sorority. Is there a time that sticks out in your career that kind of harmonizes with that theme of lessons you can share as we close up?

You could pick any week in my life. I woke up today and playbook, write something that's not true. I've stopped reading playbook a long time ago.

It's all gossip, right? But but the modern time that you would know would be the speaker's race. Every morning I woke up with somebody saying something that was negative. Every morning I had to go to the floor and start out with Hakeem getting more votes than I did.

I had members who who they wouldn't be members of Congress if I didn't fund their races, vote against me and say stuff against me. And I had to sit there and smile and know in the end it would be different. So I come out of it.

But then I read the headlines after I went, oh, he's he's not going to survive the month. Right. Every challenge. I get invited to go to Israel to speak at the Knesset, the only second speaker ever to do it for their 75th anniversary. I go to Jordan, I go to Israel, I go to Egypt, I go to Italy and I come back. I go in to see the president of Egypt. You know what President Sisi says to me the first walk and walk of those memories?

I watched every single round. That was amazing. We take a tour of the pyramids, go down to see the Sphinx, the public's out there. I don't think they're cheering me. I walk into in America, I walk into a grocery store. This lady, she happens to be Hispanic, comes up and says, I like you. I said, well, thank you.

Thank you. You know, like I did some. But I'm not a Republican. You know why I like you? You didn't give up. You fought for me. When you're in the biggest of fights, do not ring Twitter, do not listen to your friends. When you want to fight for something, what will happen is at the end of the day, when it comes to politics, the only there's no other occupation in the world on a given day, you know how many people are for you and how many people are against you.

The only thing that equates this and on the same scale is a professional sport. Every given Sunday we know, right? There are Sundays they're on, there are Sundays they're not. Don't take that moment in time, but if you stick with it and you win, those people are all criticizing you. Remember this, when you win, the first people who call you are the people who are guilty who are against you. Your friends don't have to call you right away because they were always with you.

Walk all the way through. If you give up, that's a weakness. The other thing is, when you're in a battle and you're in a fight, there's people that are going to be really emotional. Like, oh my God, did you see what someone put out on Twitter?

You don't even know if it's a real account. They're trying to get in your head. If you get in any problem whatsoever and you want to know who to follow, you follow the person who keeps their head.

It's Kipling. When everybody else around you is losing yours, you keep yours. You know your compass, and if you know your principles, you won't get rattled. Winston Churchill always said, I don't care what they write about me because it's my intention to write the history.

And whatever in life, you will eventually go through the barrel. I respect anyone who's getting attacked, even if I don't like that person, I'll call them. Because I respect what they're going through. I know what they're writing is probably not true. Maybe that some of it's true, but most of it's not. Keep your head. You phase out the rest and you follow through and you remember this one thing. Why did you get in the fight to start out with? If you quit in the middle of the fight, you never really wanted to get in the fight to start with. So also remember that before you start the fight. If you're starting the fight for press, you're probably going to get crushed and not stay in it, because there's no real principle behind it. When you make that decision to start to go, go in your gut.

Another good book is it starts with why by Simon Sinek. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Your opposition, if you stay with it, will respect you in the end. Think for one moment to people who have a different belief than you, but really fight for their own principles.

You respect them, do you not? Those are normally the people if you have to make an agreement with, you can, because they're not going to change their principles. But they know their principles so they can make an agreement and you can trust them. I've always, if somebody's hardcore on the other side, you make an agreement. In today's world, we think one side has to win and the other side not just lose, but get crumbled. Both sides can win in agreement and you can keep both keep your principles and you can both go forward. Don't get it in your mindset that they have to have nothing.

No, that's part of an agreement. So don't get into a fight until you know in your gut this is a fight you want. And when you're in it, you don't give up and you follow it all the way through. Every day, I had to read a story on the speaker's race that no one has gone this long. You have to go back to pass the Civil War. Well, I said there's never been as strong a speaker as I have had, right? There's only been 55 speakers in the history of America. They said, oh my God, you had to give up so much. My rules package was the exact same thing prior to the speaker race than when I got out of it. The only thing I changed, it'd take five people to throw me out instead of one. Because I went through 50, it's harder for someone to throw me out now.

And I looked, one of the speakers only lasted one day, so I'm OK with that. I'm not going to be the shortest speaker. And you know the best thing about all that? I don't worry what somebody else says. I run the speakership the way I want to now.

I'm very comfortable in this world. So going through the battle when you get through it, it'll make you a better person. It'll make you a stronger person in your beliefs. And even if you don't win 100%, you know what you can do.

And otherwise, the opposition will be less likely to fight you again. Mr. Speaker, I can guarantee you this. In the next couple of years, you'll be swearing in somebody in this room as a member of Congress, because this is a room of game changers. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for being here. Thank you all. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us your thoughts. It's always freedom at CharlieKirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless. See you next time.