Okay everybody, I just sat down with J.D.
Vance, hopefully the next Vice President of the United States in North Carolina. You have to go vote, get your friends to do the same. We need to make it too big to rig and swamp the polls.
I'm telling you, it's gonna be tight, tight, tight, tight. So you gotta do the work, get your people out, own your circle. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Become a member, members.charliekirk.com. That is members.charliekirk.com. Email us as always, 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.
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I want to thank High Point University for helping put this together. We wanted to have an intimate town hall with you guys, the next generation. You know, there's a lot of talk about different groups that are going to determine and decide this election. Younger voters make up, Gen Z makes up one out of six of all voters this election. And you guys are inheriting a country that has a lot of problems. In fact, you guys are the first generation since George Washington. To have it worse off than your parents. There's a lot of problems happening with Gen Z.
Most depressed generation, most anxious generation, most suicidal generation, least likely to own homes, least likely to have families. We have to fix it. And obviously, you know where my loyalty lies, which is that President Trump will make this country great again with the help of J.D.
Vance, of course. And you guys get an amazing opportunity to hear from him personally, ask questions from him. I've known J.D.
for a while. He has an only in America story. He served the country in the Marine Corps, was born in absolute poverty and worked his way up. It's unbelievable.
And J.D. Vance lives the American dream because he wants you guys to be able to live the American dream. And the American dream is not something that we should send off to far distant lands.
The American dream is something that we need to make sure is guaranteed to every person that works hard and plays by the rules and loves this country. And we are just a couple of days out from this critical election, guys, and this state will help determine the future of our country. And so those who haven't voted, get your friends out to vote. And we're just gonna have a lot of fun today hearing from a thoughtful and sincerely good person. So join me in welcoming the next vice president of the United States, J.D.
Vance, everybody. Thank you all. Thanks, Charlie. It's good to be here. And thank you again to High Point. You know, we were scrambling to try to find a venue and we found one.
And who would have known that college campuses aren't the easiest place to find find spaces to do events. But J.D., great to see you. I don't want to spoil the lead here, but I will say a lot of people are probably wondering, you were on Joe Rogan yesterday.
So a lot of people were like, I was. Yeah. Yeah. We did almost four hours with Joe Rogan. That's called the introduction. Yeah, that's right. We covered almost every imaginable topic and it's supposed to drop around one o'clock today. So the episode will be out today. You guys will have to listen.
Tell me what you think. So you're traveling the country. You're in three states today, meeting with voters.
And here in North Carolina, I believe it's one hundred and twenty plus universities, colleges or community colleges. It's it's very it's populated with Gen Z and voters that care about their own future, owning homes, so on and so forth. What are you hearing from voters and what is your opening message to younger voters that are not sure how to think about this election? Yeah, well, first of all, I think younger voters in some ways have the most to lose or the most to gain from getting this election either right or wrong, because, you know, one of the things that worries me when I hear Kamala Harris speak is I hear a person who doesn't have strong or sincere views about what she actually wants to do. Set to the side any policy disagreement you might have with Kamala Harris. And I have a lot. And set to the side, by the way, a policy disagreements you might have with a person like Barack Obama.
And I have a lot there. What I would say for Barack Obama, but I would not say for Kamala Harris, is that he actually has beliefs and thoughts in his head for how he wants to govern the United States of America. And I hate to say that. I don't think you can say this about Kamala Harris. Now, the problem there is that that person becomes an empty vessel for whatever the prevailing ideas that are governing in Washington, D.C. are. And what are the prevailing ideas that are governing in Washington, D.C. that affect young people disproportionately? Number one, that we should use our young people as cannon fodder for foreign military misadventures that are, frankly, going to get a lot of your peers killed unless we have a smarter foreign policy. I think you guys have a lot to lose because we are on the precipice of many broad regional wars, potentially even a world war. Do you want a person like Kamala Harris negotiating in private rooms with people like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?
Or do you want a guy like Donald Trump actually sticking up for the United States of America? I think the answer to that question is obvious. The second prevailing idea in Washington, D.C. is that we should let in millions upon millions of illegal immigrants who compete against young Americans for important jobs, who undercut the wages of American workers. And it's American workers of every color, every background.
But we have to recognize that when you let in millions upon millions of illegal aliens, it really severely undercuts the wages of people, especially people who are entering the workforce, which is true of every person in this room. And the final thing I'll say, Charlie, is if you look at the biggest drivers of why, why are homes unaffordable in the United States of America right now? Why have housing prices gone up by 45 percent in the state of North Carolina, but by similar levels in all of the major battleground states or even higher levels? The answer is that, one, we're not building enough homes.
Right. And if you look at Donald Trump's regulatory policies versus Kamala Harris's regulatory policies, yes, if Donald Trump is president, we will build far more homes than we would if Kamala Harris is the president. But it's important to recognize that no matter how many homes you build, if you allow an unlimited wave of illegal immigrants to come into the United States of America, those people are going to end up owning the houses or living in the houses that ought by right go to American citizens. And this is something you see, whether you look at it at a locality by locality level, if you look at it at a national level, when you let in way too many illegal immigrants, the price of housing shoots through the roof. So the question young people have to ask is, do I want to have a job where I earn a good day's wage for a good day's work? Because if so, you've got to vote for Donald Trump.
Do I want to raise a family in an environment or just build a life in an environment where I can afford to buy a home? Because if you'd like to do that, the only person is Donald J. Trump. Kamala Harris's policies are going to produce more war, more poverty, higher housing prices and lower wages for American workers. You guys have more to lose than anybody, because if we let the American dream, as Charlie said in his introduction, if we let the American dream disappear in the United States of America, the consequences are going to fall hardest on the people in this room. That's well said.
And so let's dive deeper into part of it. Less and less young people believe it's even possible to restore the American dream. And it needs to be a rebirth of optimism that our best days can be ahead. President Donald Trump has laid out an amazing agenda, starting with, of course, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, drill, baby, drill, no tax on Social Security, largest middle class tax cut and increasing the pool of homes. Talk more about how we just need to reinvigorate the psyche of a younger generation that has just sometimes checked out, has become largely cynical about their future.
Yeah. Well, I think the way to reinvigorate America is to do it substantively and to do it with real ideas that are going to improve the lives of our citizens, not with these ridiculous slogans. I mean, you know, you ask Kamala Harris a question, even in a softball interview, and I'll say this for Kamala Harris, I think that every time she answers one of these questions, we pick up about 50,000 or 100,000 votes because it'll say, what is your specific? What is your specific plan to lower the price of groceries? What's your specific plan to make the American dream of homeownership more affordable? And she'll say, well, I grew up in a middle class family. OK, I grew up in a working class family and I, you know, that's not a solution to the problems that the country is facing.
It's important to talk about your background so people know who you are, but it's also important to talk about the details. And what I think that President Trump is fundamentally proposing is he's trying to make it easier to invest and build things in the United States of America, whether that's a home, a family, a business. He's trying to make it harder to offshore and ship the American dream to other countries.
That's fundamentally, if you look at his tax policy, his tax policy, and again, he can talk about the details better than anybody, but you look at his tax policy. It's about if you work, if you build a life, if you're creating a company or working in a business in the United States of America, we are going to make it easier for you to be rewarded for your hard work. If you're shipping jobs overseas, we're going to make it harder for you to do that. And we're going to penalize you for doing that if you're trying to build a home, if you're trying to unleash American energy, we're going to make those things easier for you.
I mean, there are very, very specific things that you can do, I think, to invigorate the American dream and to invigorate the American population. But if you don't have a real plan for how to get this country back on track, people know when they're being lied to. And I think that a lot of people who listen to Kamala Harris, even people who might agree with her ideologically, who might consider themselves more left of center, if you listen to Kamala Harris, pay attention to what she says, she has no plan to make your life better. That's why she's spending all this time talking about Donald Trump and calling her fellow Americans Nazis and garbage. Kamala Harris is way more interested in Donald Trump's past than she is your future. And we need a president who knows that the way to get the country back on track is to govern it effectively, to give people a specific sense of what that vision looks like, and then to implement that vision and let Americans do what they do best, which is build a good life for themselves. That's what has to change. And that's what's so different about Kamala Harris's present leadership versus the change that Donald J. Trump is offering.
He's telling you what he's going to do for you. She's talking about what he did four years ago. So last question here before we get to some questions. I want to talk about this unique moment of who is coalescing behind President Trump and also who is lining up behind Kamala Harris. First on Kamala Harris, you see these warmongers that have sent young men and women like this in this room to unnecessary no-win wars, such as Liz Cheney, you know, John Bolton, Leon Panetta. But on President Trump's side, you're part of this kind of Avengers team.
Sure. And you got Vivek Ramaswamy, you got Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy. You have two people that formally ran for the presidency as Democrats, the former co-chair of the Democrat Party. You have the most successful entrepreneur of the modern era, Elon Musk. Can you talk about this realignment?
Because for people that might be more center left, I think it's important to realize two people that ran for the presidency as Democrats are now enthusiastically behind Donald Trump. Yeah. So if you guys go back to 2003, I was a junior. Well, sorry, I was a senior in high school in 2003.
I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 2003. And most of you, my assumption is most of you were either not even alive then or were very, very young. And I wish that I could go back in time and tell myself from the perspective of 2003 that if Dick Cheney is in control, if a person with the last name of Cheney is in control of American foreign policy, it is a damn shame. And a lot of bad things are going to happen because of it, because you guys are now, even though you weren't alive then, I can tell you my old 18 year old self is coming forward into the future and telling you guys when a Cheney is telling you how you should live your lives and how you should vote. You should run in the other direction.
And that is what you have an opportunity to do. I didn't know at the time that a Cheney in charge of American foreign policy would lead to a lot of innocent Americans and also other people losing their lives. I didn't know that it would lead to disastrous foreign policy. You guys now know that. So vote like you know it and don't reward the party of Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney and Kamala Harris, reward the party of Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk and Donald J. Trump, because they're the ones who are going to accomplish peace and prosperity for all of you in this room, but for all of your peers, too.
It is an amazing thing. If you think about this, Tulsi Gabbard probably ended Kamala Harris's presidential run in 2020. Remember, Kamala didn't make it to the primary in 2020 because Tulsi Gabbard observed rightly that Kamala Harris had built her entire career off of throwing a lot of innocent people in prison. And that was it for Kamala Harris. Well, now who's Tulsi Gabbard supporting?
She was on the stage with me last night in Pennsylvania. And by the way, Charlie, if you talk about your all time political trades, I love the fact that we traded Liz Cheney for Tulsi Gabbard. That is a hell of a good thing, something I'm very happy about. But but you ask yourself, you know, because it's a big change, right? I mean, Bobby Kennedy was a lifelong Democrat, and now he's supporting Donald J. Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, a lifelong Democrat, is now a Republican supporting Donald J. Trump.
You know, what has changed? And I think it goes back to basic common sense. OK, we are now the party of common sense, of not letting in unlimited waves of illegal immigration, of having schools that educate rather than indoctrinate children, of having a common sense foreign policy that's more built around peace and diplomacy and American strength than American weakness and war and chaos. We're the common sense party. And that is really the realignment that's happened. You don't have to agree with me on every issue. You don't have to agree with Donald J. Trump on every issue. But if you think that what's going on in the present moment in the United States of America is just a little too crazy and a little too weird to use the Democrats' favorite word of this cycle, then you have an opportunity to throw the bums out and give the American people the change that they need.
Now, here's here's another final observation I'll make. I mean, you know, I'm joined today by a very dear friend, and he told me that he just took his kids out of school. Now, I imagine that most of the young people here, probably all of you, don't have children yet, but a lot of you will one day. And do you want to raise your families in a country where you can send your kids to school and have confidence they're going to get a good education? I think that should be the right of every American child and every American parent is we give a good education to the children who grow up in the United States of America.
And I'm just telling you, a friend of mine, a guy I trust very dearly, he just pulled his kids out of school because he doesn't believe that under Kamala Harris's leadership, his kids are getting the education they deserve. Again, you have an opportunity to change that. Vote for Donald J. Trump in six days or before. Don't wait until the IRS closes in. Give Tax Network USA a call. It's free. Talk with one of their strategists and see how they can help.
Imagine putting this nightmare behind you. Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit TNUSA.com slash Charlie. That is TNUSA.com slash Charlie. Tax Network USA gives a preferred direct line to the IRS. They understand how to solve your problem.
TNUSA.com slash Charlie. Hi, my name is Julia. I would just like to say, Senator Vance and Mr. Kirk, thank you for being here today. Senator Vance, my question for you today is specifically how will you improve the economy in a way that benefits 20 year olds, young 20 year olds such as myself? Julia, thanks so much for the question.
And I want to start out by saying I grew up in a working class family. I'm kidding. Kidding. Now, you asked for specifics.
So let me let me give you a few specifics. OK, so right now, the American tax code is designed in a way that rewards investment overseas and in some ways penalizes investment in the United States. What does that mean? That means fewer factories, fewer businesses, fewer non factory businesses, whether it's manufacturing or non manufacturing, are being built in the United States of America. That means we have less technological innovation in the United States of America. And that means our workers aren't earning the higher wages that we want in the United States of America.
If you go back to the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, workers were getting consistent pay increases year over year from about 1980 on, workers didn't get really a solid pay increase for 40 years. The one exception, the four year exception was when Donald J. Trump was president from 2017 to 2020 because he made it easier to build things in the United States of America. And he frankly made it harder to build things overseas. That's the number one thing is to change the tax code. And you hear this word tariff a lot. OK, tariff is thrown around a lot.
You know, the Kamala Harris campaign says that it's a tax. Well, here's what a tariff actually does. Say, for example, that you're an American business and you're deciding whether to build a company or expand a company in China or in the United States of America. Now, what China has going for it is that you can pay literal slave laborers at three dollars a day where in America, and I think this is a good thing. You've got to pay people a middle class wage. Now, why is that a good thing?
Because I want all of you to earn good wages for a good day's work. But if you're going to encourage investment in the United States of America, you've got to penalize the companies who choose to make their things in China. And the only way to penalize them is what's called a tariff. If they try to bring something that was manufactured by those Chinese slave laborers back into our country, we're going to slap a big fat tariff and say, you've got to pay a penalty to get that stuff back into our country. That's how we protect protect the middle class jobs of our citizens. And that's how we make it easier to invest in the United States of America.
There's a second thing. Charlie already said this, but I'm going to repeat it because it's very important. Think about the biggest driver of cost increases. I don't want you just to earn a good wage.
I also want you to be able to afford to buy things with the money and with the hard-earned dollars that you earn. OK, so why are costs getting so high? It's complicated. But the biggest single driver is energy.
Think about this. If a truck driver is paying 45 percent more for diesel, then the groceries that truck driver delivers to the grocery store are going to become way more expensive. We're talking about housing. If the guy who's delivering the lumber to the job site is paying 40 percent more for gasoline, then all of us are going to be paying more for the houses that are built with those delivered materials. So how do you get energy costs lower? You drill, baby, drill. That is the fundamental principle of Donald Trump's economic policy.
Now, what does that mean? That means you reduce regulations on the energy sector. You build pipelines so that we can get energy from one place to another very easily. You make it easier to unleash our great energy economy. And you're going to create a lot of good jobs in the energy sector. But you're also going to make it so that, Julia, you and your friends pay less when you go to the grocery store or when you go and buy clothes or when you go and buy a house. Everything becomes cheaper if we unleash the American energy economy.
And that's why it's a critical piece of Donald Trump's economic plan. Hi, I'm Rowan. Hey, Rowan, how are you? Nice to meet you. Again, I just want to say thank you both, Senator and Mr. Kirk, for being here today.
We're really grateful that you decided to come spend some time in High Point. As far as my question goes, we know that many voters in our generation have expressed concerns about our financial futures amidst the current housing crisis. We've seen a lot of stricter zoning building regulations, especially from local governments, especially from Democrats. And it's definitely been very detrimental to our housing system. What specifically do you see in policies changing that will help to ensure that we can one day own homes?
Yeah, thank you for the question, Rowan. And, you know, one, just to go back to the energy costs, that's a big driver of housing costs. So lowering energy costs is going to help us lower the cost of housing. The second thing is you're right that a lot of these local regulations put in place by governments, local governments, primarily Democrats, make it harder to build housing. But there's a lot that we can do on the federal level to reduce regulations and make it easier to build houses in the first place.
We want to do those things. And frankly, we probably want to make it harder for those local governments to restrict the supply of housing. So, again, all of you guys can actually afford to buy a home or at least to rent a home at a reasonable rate when you guys are at the point when you want to do that. And then the final thing that I'll say, Rowan, is you need to pursue the kind of tax policy that allows people to invest in building in the United States of America. And again, that's something that we've really gone in the wrong direction on the last few years is you've got to ask yourself, if you invest in the United States and you make a fair amount of money and we want people who invest to be able to make money, are you paying a bigger tax on that than if you invest overseas? And if the answer is yes, then we're penalizing people who are building houses and other things in the United States of America.
We've got to change that. And between reducing the regulations, reducing the energy costs, and I'll go back to reducing illegal aliens who are competing with Americans for scarce homes, I think we can actually make the American dream of home ownership more available and more affordable again. The way that I think about this is the country is in so many ways in such a good spot, right?
I mean, you guys are talented, you're smart, you guys are going to develop skills in the workforce you don't even realize that you have. We've got the most incredible resources, the best natural resources of any country in the entire world. We are ready to unleash a golden age of American prosperity. But only if we fix the broken leadership in Washington. That's what we're going to do. That's what we all get an opportunity to do in five, six short days.
Thank you. Really quick, I just want to make sure that Kamala's awful plan is highlighted. She wants to $25,000 per person, which sounds good for a home. What will that do to housing prices almost immediately?
I think that's important to compare and contrast. Yeah, so if you don't increase the supply of houses and then you continue to allow illegal aliens to compete against American citizens for those houses, what you will necessarily do is you give $25,000, you're going to increase the cost of housing by $25,000. So again, this is fundamentally the difference between the Kamala Harris approach and the Donald Trump approach.
Donald Trump is trying to make it easier to build and invest and to create things in our country. Kamala Harris is trying to pass out free money to cover over the fact that her own policies are why housing is so expensive. And Charlie, it's not just if you look at the details of her plan, she's not just saying she's going to give $25,000 to American citizens. She's also saying she's going to give $25,000 a lot of times to people who aren't even in the country legally to begin with. So you're probably going to, you know, even if her plan is implemented, which I'm skeptical, but even if it's implemented, your housing prices are going to go up by $35,000, $40,000, $50,000, and then you get a $25,000 check in the mail.
Have you won or lost in that equation? Meanwhile, if Donald J. Trump's plan gets implemented, you're going to be paying less for housing to the tune of $25,000, $45,000, $50,000. That's how you win and that's how you make American housing more affordable. Yeah. And she won't even send a $25,000 check.
It's like a tax incentive, which every realtor would just say every house is more expensive. All right. Yes, ma'am. I'm a senior at High Point University, graduating in May. Congratulations.
Thank you. I'm starting to look at my options on where to move and work after college. My question is, how will you and President Trump fix the amount of illegal immigrants in this country, specifically relating to the safety of young women like myself, thinking about moving to New York City after school? Sure, sure.
Well, it's a very good question, Paige. First of all, don't move to New York City until after the election. That's, you know, vote in North Carolina and then you can move somewhere else afterwards.
We really need your vote here in North Carolina. I mean, honestly, Paige, I wish I could give you a different answer, but I'd be very worried about moving to some of these, you know, one party states and one party cities. Because if you look at the levels of violent crime, especially assaults, muggings, things like that, they're moving in the wrong direction.
And they're moving in the wrong direction in large part because we have let in massive amounts of illegal immigration into our country. And most of those people, thank God, are criminals, but a lot of them are, which is why we see increased levels of criminal behavior. You know, I was asked by a news reporter, one of the most shocking questions I've ever been asked, where she said, aren't you guys overstating the problem of gang activity among illegal aliens? Because only a handful of apartment complexes have been taken over by criminal gangs.
And my response was, are you hearing yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes. Well, Paige, I don't want you to move into a complex that's been taken over by a criminal gang.
And then some journalist is going to say, well, Paige, it's only a handful of apartment complexes, right? You've got to actually be able to enforce our borders. And specifically, there are three big things that Kamala Harris did that we're going to undo and accelerate so that we can actually get our border under control. The first and most important is Kamala Harris really cut down on deportations. If you know you can come into the country without ever being deported, you're going to keep on coming into the country illegally. So we have to reimplement deportations in the United States of America. The second is, and I've been to the border more times than our illustrious borders are, Kamala Harris. If you go to certain parts of the border, you will see slabs of border wall laying in the dirt, rusting because she stopped construction of the border wall. And the Border Patrol will tell you that where the border wall was constructed, you saw a massive decrease in the amount of illegal immigration. Let's just finish that border wall and cut down even more on illegal immigration. And then the third thing, Paige, and this gets a little bit into the details of immigration policy, but it really matters, is when a person comes to the United States and says that they're claiming asylum, what do you do with that person? Donald Trump's answer was they have to stay in Mexico while that claim is adjudicated. Kamala Harris' answer is we're going to let this person roam freely in the United States of America for 10, 15 years. That's called catch and release. We've got to stop catch and release. We do those three things. I think we'll cut down on violent crime and we'll make it easier for you to choose to live where you want to live.
But I hope you'll come and live in Ohio or stay in North Carolina and not go to New York City. Thanks, Paige. Yes, sir. Thank you very much for coming to meet us all, Senator Vance, and thank you for fitting us within your busy schedule. My name's Brett, and my question for you is many in my generation are concerned about a possible war with China, and more importantly with that, for us, a possible draft. And so with rising tensions within the South China Sea, border clashes between India and China, what is the Trump-Vance administration's plan to de-escalate from this rising crisis?
Yeah, Brett, it's a very important question. And look, this is the thing that I worry the most about for this generation is that if we don't get foreign policy right, a lot of people in your generation are going to pick up the pieces and fix the mistakes of the current generation of American leadership. And I don't want you to have to do that. I want you guys to build great lives. I want you to work in great careers.
I want you to start families. I want you to be able to live your dreams, not have to go and fight a war because Kamala Harris screwed up again, as she's been doing for the last three and a half years. And it's going to get a lot worse if we promote her to president of the United States. And, you know, our specific plan to de-escalate in the South China Sea is, you know, it's somebody said it, some smart strategist said the best way to stop a war is to prevent a war from starting in the first place. And this is what, you know, if you go back to Donald Trump's foreign policy, consider Europe. Russia invaded a sovereign nation when Barack Obama was president. Russia invaded a sovereign nation when George W. Bush was president. Russia invaded a sovereign nation during the Biden-Harris administration. The one time in the last two decades that Russia didn't invade a sovereign nation was when? Under the four-year administration of Donald J. Trump. Now, why was that? And people always say, especially my fellow Republicans, they always say, well, Donald Trump's foreign policy was strong. Well, it was strong, and that's definitely true, but that's only half of it. It was also smart because even though the media accused him and attacked him for it, he was willing to engage in diplomacy, sometimes even with very bad people, because you can't just talk to the good people when you're engaging in diplomacy.
You've got to talk to everybody. That's what real leadership looks like. Again, I was with Tulsi Gabbard yesterday, and she told me, and I didn't realize this, that there was a major threat from North Korea of an ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile, hitting Hawaii early in 2017. Well, that threat came from North Korea, and what did Donald Trump do?
Donald Trump went and talked to the leader of North Korea, even though all of the media said that he shouldn't, and guess how many threats against Hawaii were made after Donald Trump had that sit-down meeting? Zero, because sometimes you can't just be strong, you have to be smart, specifically in the South China Sea. The solution here to prevent war is to make it as costly as possible for the Chinese to invade Taiwan in the first place.
Everyone will tell you that if the Chinese establish territory in Taiwan, if they establish a beachhead in Taiwan, it becomes very hard and a lot of people get killed. So you prevent them from doing that, and the way you prevent them from doing that is to make sure they've got enough weapons to defend themselves. Again, prevention is the best way to stop a war. You know, an ounce of deterrence is worth a lot more than a pound of stupid foreign policy from Kamala Harris. So we've got to do the deterrence, and unfortunately we're just not doing that. Now, this is one of the more difficult questions that exists in American foreign policy is because Kamala Harris has been sending so many resources to Ukraine, we actually don't have enough to send to Taiwan. So by defending, by approaching the Russia-Ukraine situation in the way that we have, we've actually made it more likely that the Chinese will invade Taiwan, and we need to pursue a foreign policy that makes it less likely. And that's what's going to change when Donald Trump is president.
Can I just ask a follow-up? Is it an exaggeration to say that we are bumbling towards World War III? That might include a draft of some people in this room. I don't think that's an exaggeration at all. I think that we are sleepwalking ourselves into World War III, and if you go back to all of the really terrible world conflicts, they almost always come from incompetent leadership rather than evil leadership.
Right? It's people who just aren't smart and aren't thinking about, you know, if I do this thing, you can't just think about the immediate consequence. You've got to ask yourself, what is the second order and the third order consequence? If I send a lot of javelins and a lot of artillery shells to one country, does that mean that another country is not getting the resources necessary to prevent itself? If I spend a lot of money over here, do the Chinese perceive that we're weaker than we should be because we haven't spent that money on our own defense? These are the things that Donald J. Trump thinks about, and unfortunately, these are not the things that Kamala Harris thinks about. So do I think that we're at the greatest risk of a third World War in my lifetime, Charlie?
Absolutely, I do. And if there is a third World War, it is the people in this room who are going to be drafted and called upon to fight it. I don't want that. I do not want you guys to have to put on a uniform, not because you're patriotic and volunteer, but because your country forces you to because Kamala Harris has blundered us into another significant conflict. But the opportunity to stop that and to take the country in a new direction is this election. So get out there and vote for many reasons. But maybe the most important reason to get out there and vote is to prevent World War Three. So our team's been using this app, and again, I'm careful with these betting markets, but this is the one you guys got to look at.
It's called Kalshi, K-A-L-S-H-I. It's the first legal exchange where you can trade and bet on any event. For the first time in 100 years, they got approval to list markets to trade on the outcome of the upcoming election, making it legal to trade on the U.S. presidential election and see who's going to win, Trump or Kamala. They have markets on who will win each election, who will win swing states. They also have markets on inflation, interest rates, will the government shut down and more. What's really cool about this platform is you can trade on your opinions to make money or hedge risks that may impact you. Go to Kalshi.com slash Kirk, K-A-L-S-H-I dot com slash Kirk. Additionally, you can check market odds, which come from thousands of people trading.
These odds can be highly predictive, which is why these markets are referred to as prediction markets. Go to K-A-L-S-H-I dot com slash Kirk. That is K-A-L-S-H-I dot com slash Kirk. Hi, Senator Vance. My name is Hayes. I am vice president here of Turning Point USA. My question for you is, as a politician, how has your faith and ethics been tested?
And as we're going into the workforce, I mean, I'm a political science major. What advice do you have for when inevitably our faith and ethics are also tested or as our generation knows, does the nice guy always finish last? Sure. Well, no, Hayes, I don't think the nice guy always finishes last. But sometimes the nice guy also has to be tough.
Right. So remember that just because you're nice doesn't mean that you're weak. And remember that nice guys can also be tough. And I'd encourage or nice gals can also be tough.
And I'd encourage you guys to absolutely be kind and virtuous, be generous of spirit, but also always be a little tough. Right. Both of those things can be true and both of those things can be useful. You know, probably the first time that my my faith and my my ethics and my sense of my duty to the people of Ohio was tested was early on in my Senate term when there was this terrible train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. And you probably saw the images.
You can go and Google it. But basically there was a train derailment and it was a mistake. We maybe didn't know it at the time, but they set off a massive chemical explosion after the train derailment, which just, you know, basically it was like a chemical bomb went off in this small town in northeastern Ohio. And so I went and visited the town many times over the next few months. And one of the things that I kept on noticing is that the residents and they were normally the residents who were a little poorer, who didn't have as much money, who didn't have the same influence. They would come up to me and they would say, this thing is happening or that thing is happening in particular. They kept on telling me that even though they were being told that the creeks in the town were safe, they thought they saw evidence of chemical pollution in the creeks.
And that was on one of my first visits there. So I said, OK, you know, here's here's what I was being pressured to do. I was being pressured to ignore them, to basically say, oh, they're crazy people. They don't know what they're talking about. But some inner voice was saying, this is your job. Your job is to listen to people, sometimes the downtrodden that nobody else is listening to. So I said to my team, drive me to a creek.
I want to go see this for myself. And I stuck a stick in the water and it was like an oil sheen in a creek in East Palestine, Ohio. It was clearly not safe and it was clearly not healthy. And I realized in that moment that if you always listen to the media or you always listen to the people who have fancy credentials and look, all of you are college students here. You know, when you graduate, you will get a very fancy credential. Sometimes those fancy credentials are useful, but sometimes the people who use their credentials to silence their fellow citizens are just wrong. And part of your job as a future leader is going to be to listen to the people, even if they're not always the people that the media or somebody else tells you you should listen to. And what helped me in that moment, Hayes, is I kept on thinking about the grandmother who raised me.
And I'm sure that all of you have some person, some personal influence in your life who's kind of is a core part of you forming your conscience. I kept on saying, what would my grandmother do? Because what my grandmother would not do is if some poor person from East Palestine came up to me and said, Senator, I don't think the water is safe. She would not have said, go back to your car.
I'm not interested in what you have to say. She would have said, listen to people, listen to people. Maybe sometimes they're going to be wrong, by the way.
But you still have to listen to them first. And that's maybe the most important lesson I've learned as a leader is the media. And you see this with Joe Biden. Joe Biden called half of America garbage for wanting to vote for Donald J. Trump.
Kamala Harris and her running mate have been calling people who support Trump Nazis and fascists. What is that ultimately about? It's about silencing people. It's about telling the American people you're not good enough to voice concern over the policies of Kamala Harris's leadership. My job is to listen to people, whether they vote for us or not. Our job as leaders is to listen to the people that we serve. And that is my promise.
And that's something that my faith has been very, very important in making sure happens. Thank you. Right here. Yes, ma'am. Hi, my name is Trinity and I'm a freshman here at High Point University. It's awesome to meet you guys. And nice to meet you, Trinity.
Thank you. My question to you is, with the increased cost associated with living and the debt the U.S. is racking up, how important do you believe it is to stick to a budget? And how well do you believe President Trump will stick to that budget?
It's a very good question, Trinity. And they're actually connected, right? These problems are connected because when the government spends more money than it takes in, then it has to print that money. And that printed money shows up as inflation. So the average North Carolina family is about twenty nine thousand dollars poorer because of Kamala Harris's inflation. Now, they didn't see that in an IRS bill, but they saw it in their groceries bill. They saw it in their rental bill.
They saw it in their car payments. That inflation is a hidden tax on American citizens. And it comes partially from when the government spends more money than it takes in. So what we have to do is we have to cut spending in this country. And there are a lot of very specific things that you can do to reduce the amount of money the federal government is spending. Look, there is so much stupid stuff that your government does with your tax dollars. We could get back to some very common sense fiscal principles very quickly. And you answered your question about whether Donald Trump is going to work for this.
Absolutely. Donald Trump is going to work for this because we know when we're elected, that one of our mandates is to lower the cost of living for our citizens. And you can't do that unless you take care of the ridiculous, out of control spending from the federal government.
And there are a few things that you can do. So, number one, people don't realize this, but the cost of illegal aliens to the United States of America is somewhere between 150 to 500 billion dollars per year. OK, and that's housing benefits, that's welfare benefits, that's Social Security and Medicare fraud. We can do a lot just by taking care of the immigration problem. We're also still spending a lot of money from the COVID era that we shouldn't be spending that the public health pandemic. Thank God it's over and we should never go back to some of the draconian measures that we took then.
But it's over now. We should not be spending money like a drunken sailor like we did back during the COVID era. So you do those two things. You can really, really lower the cost of living, but also get our long term budgetary picture on a more sustainable pathway. And as Charlie knows, like so many other issues, this one affects you more than it does me, right? Because all of you are going to outlive me, hopefully.
All of you are going to outlive me. You're going to be paying off the debt that we're incurring right now for a lot longer than any of our politicians. So when you see Kamala Harris's spending proposals, you ought to be asking yourself, is it worth the debt that I'm going to be paying off for the rest of my life?
Almost always the answer is no. We should vote for fiscal sanity, which is why Donald J. Trump needs to be our next president. Now, just a fun little wrinkle to that that I know everyone in the audience will enjoy. President Trump has blessed Doge, the department of government efficiency run by Elon Musk.
I mean, it's a little bit silly at the same time. Elon has a track record of cutting spending and finding waste. Can you just comment on that a little bit? The philosophy being that we haven't had a real good examination of federal budget, especially with new Biden spending. So here's I've been in the Senate for a couple of years. Here's how we do budgeting in the United States Senate and the United States House. And this is going to sound like an exaggeration.
It's not. We basically get right to the point where the government runs out of money. And then somebody says, OK, let's just pass a bill where we spend the exact same amount that we did last year, only with a few percent increase for inflation. And then everybody votes for it.
Not me, but most people vote for it. And that's how we do budgeting in the government. It's like if you're a household, you get right to the point where you're about to be delinquent on your credit card and your mortgage. And then you just say, all right, we're going to take out another credit card.
We don't have to worry about it for another year. But eventually you've got to worry about it, because eventually the line of credit runs dry. What Elon Musk is talking about is very simple, is taking people with a different perspective, a private sector perspective, and actually looking at the budget, saying, how much are we spending on this program? How much should we be spending? And doing that, asking that basic question for every line item in the federal budget. And I guarantee that when you do that, Charlie, you're going to find hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe even trillions of dollars of savings of your money that we're spending, not because we even said we need to spend this money. You may disagree with that decision, but it's not like a politician said we need to spend this money. We're spending it because we kicked the can down the road. And what Elon Musk and what a lot of us are talking about with this Department of Government Efficiency is actually going in and saying, all right, we're going to look at how much we're spending. We're going to compare it against how much we should be spending.
And we're going to actually rationalize and make sense of the federal budget for the first time in a very long time. I love that. Who is up?
Yes, sir. Hi, I'm Grant. I'm a junior at High Point University. And my question for you is, as you know, college is more expensive than ever because of the economy.
And a loan will be double or triple of what it originally is. So what can the Trump administration do to keep the interest rates low, such as a cap on student loans? So students are not in years of debt.
Yes, sir. Very, very important question. And, you know, one of the things that we don't talk enough about is that while the student debt in this country has is at this point, I believe, about one point seven trillion dollars, you know, that university endowments and foundations have collected about one point seven trillion dollars of wealth. OK, so the very universities that sometimes and I don't think it's true of High Point University, but it's true of a lot of our colleges. They're putting students into a lifetime of debt servitude.
They're overcharging. Students are overpaying. And also the colleges aren't being honest about what the students are actually getting out of their education.
So I think that we need to do two things. Number one, we need real price transparency and also real transparency about what the benefits are of a college degree. When you go to college, your college should have to tell you, here's what you're going to get out of this particular degree. Here's what you're going to get out of this particular program of study. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I went to college. You should know what you're getting yourself into when you go to college. And that means that colleges have to be more honest about it.
Here's the second thing. We need to not have a lifetime of debt servitude follow around our students. And I want to contrast this because when Kamala Harris talks about this issue, she's basically talking about shifting the debt from one group of citizens to another. Having plumbers and electricians pay for the debt of college students, I think that's irrational and it's unfair because it's not the plumbers and the electricians who are at fault for this college debt crisis. It's very often the university administrators themselves who are not being honest with you guys about what you're getting out of college experience.
So here's one thing we should do. We should say that if you are accumulating a lot of college debt, that debt is not going to follow you around for the rest of your life. That's a simple policy choice that we've made and we're going to unmake it because if you incur a lot of debt and, you know, you get into a situation where you're in a tough financial position, you should not have the colleges able to collect on your debt, sometimes even garnishing your wages before you can actually get the paycheck that's coming to you. We've created a generation of debt servants.
That's got to change. And frankly, it means the colleges have to take accountability, not our fellow citizens. The colleges have got to take accountability for this college debt crisis they've created. So in closing, we have to wrap it up to kind of make the final argument here to younger voters across the country and here in North Carolina. As I mentioned, there is this unrecognized breakdown in the social contract.
We we do politics for many reasons, but basically we do it to make sure that your kids have a better life. Right. That's why we do what we do. And there has been generational theft that has occurred to this generation. And J.D., you're kind of in the middle here.
I hope you guys understand. This is the youngest vice presidential candidate, I think, in what, like 150 years? First millennial on a major party. First millennial. And I'm a millennial here. So we share a generation in that way. And so J.D.
has an ability to really see into what you guys are experiencing and understanding a lot of these problems. You guys have never lived. No one's ever lived through this before. And your parents say, oh, it was hard when we were younger. They had a much different set of circumstances than you guys did.
The likelihood of you renting and not owning is much more likely to rent, not own if things continue. So kind of summarize this all together, J.D., for a generation where the social contract has been broken and we must renew it. So my simple argument to all of you and to all of your generation is that you should be pissed off. And why should you be pissed off? You should be pissed off because you're the first generation in the history of the United States of America that is unlikely to be able to own a home, that is unlikely to be able to earn a wage on which you can raise a family, that is more likely to be indebted than you are to accumulate wealth. And the reason you should be pissed off is because it's come from a failed generation of American leadership.
The people who are older than me and older than you, they have failed you. They have created an economy where you're more likely to incur debt than you are to incur wealth. They've created a college debt crisis that follows you around for your entire life. They've created an economy where you can't earn wages that support a family.
They've created a housing market where it's nearly impossible for most Americans of your age to be able to buy a home. This was a policy choice. The failure that has fallen on your generation was a policy choice.
And we can make a different policy choice, but only if you guys get pissed off about the position you've been put in and vote for a change in leadership. That is fundamentally what Donald Trump, his entire lifetime, if you go back to the 1980s and the 1990s, Donald Trump was predicting that if we went down this road, it would lead to a generation of American young people who were paupers in their own country. And he was right about it.
And then he became president. And for four short years, he undid decades of damage. But you can't undo all the damage in one four year term.
You need longer. And that's what he's fundamentally asking you to do. Give him another four years to undo more of the damage of a failed generation of American career politicians.
But he cannot do it without your help. You guys get to make the determination. Are you angry? And are you voting for more of the same, more of the same broken promises, more of the same sloganeering politicians, more of the same failed bureaucrats? Or are you voting for the real change of Donald J. Trump's leadership? I'd encourage you vote for President Trump. Vote for me. Vote for a new direction in this country. You guys, of all people in the United States of America, you cannot reward the people who want to make you paupers in your own country.
I want you to be an owner of the United States of America because our country is going to be stronger if that's true. God bless you. Thank you. Thank you guys so much. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always. Freedom at CharlieKirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
Whisper: medium.en / 2024-11-01 06:05:48 / 2024-11-01 06:27:46 / 22