Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's obviously a massive honor to be here at Turning Point USA. It's even more of an honor to follow Erica Kirk, a heroic figure and a true American patriot. I really believe that the best way to judge a goodness of a man is to see the goodness of his wife and his children. And on that measure, Charlie was unsurpassed.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of truth in the conservative movement?
Erica and her children are in all of our hearts. And of course, this is an incredibly bittersweet moment. It's absolutely bitter because of the murder of our friend Charlie Kirk, an irreplaceable human being.
I knew Charlie from the time he was 18 years old, and I watched him build himself into one of the most powerful exponents of conservatism in America, one of the most powerful coalition builders in American history. But it's also sweet to see the number of people who continue to remember Charlie each and every day and to carry on his mission.
Well, today, I want to talk about the future of the country. And the future of this country, this amazing country, relies on the future of the conservative movement. It relies on what TPUSA defines as its core mission, freedom, free markets, and limited government. And most of all, Most of all, the future of this country relies on truth.
This country relies on truth because victory, true, real, lasting victory cannot be achieved without truth. Victory without truth is victory for a lie, and that is no victory at all. And unity without truth is no unity. It is merely solidarity and falsehood. You see, we live in a chaotic time, in a time when lots of people are asking lots of legitimate questions about the conservative movement.
What ought we to think about the relationship between free markets and traditional virtue? How should we craft a pragmatic foreign policy that spreads our interests and upholds our ideals? What governmental means are appropriate to achieve political ends? All of these questions aren't new, of course.
They've been asked for as long as human beings have been talking about politics, thousands of years. And over the course of this conference, you'll hear a lot of opinions on a lot of these questions. I have my own perspectives on them, of course. You can hear them every single day on my show. My fundamental values have been the same for 25 years. Peace through strength on foreign policy.
Traditional values on social policy. Free markets with regards to economics. But today, I want to talk about something even more important. How to discern those attempting to speak truth from frauds and grifters. Because something is new. An informational environment rife with both opportunity and chaos.
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Chapter 3: How do grifters and frauds threaten conservatism?
Opportunity because the legacy media gatekeepers are no longer in charge of what we see and what we hear. And chaos because an anarchic informational environment means we actually have to be smart in how we assess the information and arguments that we hear. Why does that matter? Well, because today the conservative movement is in serious danger.
It is in danger not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder.
The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing enervation and grievance. These people are frauds and they are grifters and they do not deserve your time.
And they are something worse than that. A danger to the only movement capable of stopping the left from wrecking the country wholesale. So today, I want to discuss five obligations that people who speak to you on matters of importance have to you. I want to speak to you about our duties. Our first duty is truth. We owe you the truth. That means we should not mislead you.
It means we shouldn't hide the ball. We shouldn't be deliberately obscure about what we're telling you. We have an obligation to clarity and to honesty. This means that we actually have to be clear in the language that we use. We should not traffic in generality. We should not say things like, they shot Charlie, without specifying whom we mean by they.
The person who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk, and whom all the evidence points at, all of it, is a gay, trans-loving furry. If we are going to target ideological movements, we should talk about the fact that the radical trans movement treats all those who oppose it as existential threats.
Or, if we're going to talk about the Democratic Party making room for the radical trans movement and echoing its inflammatory rhetoric, well, we should talk about that. Those are specific problems, and they require specific responses. When people say they shot Charlie, however, they are instead trafficking in vagary that results in increased hatred without proposing any effective response.
They are fostering despair and rage, and that makes things worse. We must also be honest about what people say and do, regardless of what that means coalitionally. It is the job of politicians to build coalitions. It's the job of those of us who try to shape public opinion to hold politicians to account, and to hold them accountable to our values.
We must not let fear of audience deter us from telling the truth. We must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth. So, for example, If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk,
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Chapter 4: How can one discern truth from misinformation?
But he won't, because that might undermine the empty speculation. None of this means there aren't actual real conspiracies in the world. Of course there are. But actual conspiracies require actual evidence. Yes, there was a Russiagate conspiracy, and we know the names of the people involved and what they did.
We know Hillary Clinton and Fusion GPS and James Comey and Loretta Lynch and Adam Schiff. We know all of those people. Yes, there was a COVID-19 conspiracy. We know that Anthony Fauci worked to shut down alternative solutions from people like Jay Bhattacharya.
But when people posit a conspiracy and then provide you no evidence, they are doing you a fundamental disservice, and they are making you stupider in the process. Finally, because it is our job to make the lives of our audience better, that's really our job, is to give you more information to make your lives better, we have a duty to propose solutions
That's why we have to talk about our problems in order to find the solutions. That's what politics was supposed to be about, after all, finding solutions to our common problems. If we speak endlessly about the problems we face, without ever positing a solution other than wrecking the system or centralizing power in a cult-like figure, we are not finding solutions.
We are merely making problems worse. Just asking questions, positing vague conspiracies, raving like Alex Jones about the secret confederacies that control your life, none of it makes your life better. None of it. In fact, it makes your life markedly worse. That's because if you truly come to believe that nothing in your life is in your control, you can't even take control of your own life.
You despair of your ability to change your own circumstances, and then you fail. And you must not fail. Because here is the most fundamental truth of all in the United States. For all of its problems, many of which, a huge number of which, are real and serious, the United States is still the greatest country in the history of planet Earth. We have the greatest constitution ever devised by man.
We have the greatest founding philosophy ever put to paper in the Declaration of Independence. In this country, you can make of yourself what you will. And if there are true obstacles standing in your way, we can all work together to remove them. That, by the way, is the essence of conservatism. That we live in a world created by God with a logic and a rationale.
That we, as human beings, were created in God's image, as it says in the book of Genesis, with creative capacity and the power to choose. And that in a free country of limited government and defined powers, with property rights and equality under law, our destiny is in our hands. And that we all have a duty to make the most of that historic opportunity.
Anyone, anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is lying to you. And they are making your life worse in the process. Now that lie may feel good in the moment. It may excuse us from taking the corrective action we can take on a personal level to fix our lives. It might give us someone else to blame for our own failures. But in the end, the lie kills.
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Chapter 5: What five obligations do speakers have towards their audience?
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Hi, my name is Jenna. I'm one of the co-presidents of the Turning Point Chapter at JMU. I have a question. How do you balance telling the truth with delivery and speaking to people who disagree with you?
So I think obviously the truth comes first. We ought to be polite, but the truth comes first. And if you can tell the truth in a polite way, that's the best way to do it. But sometimes people perceive truth as impolite, and that's just the way of the world. You know, I rather famously have said that facts don't care about your feelings. That happens to be true.
When you engage in a conversation, I've said this to a lot of people, when you engage in a conversation, it's very important to sort of determine the end of the conversation. If it's going to be impossible to tell somebody the truth in a productive way, you probably shouldn't engage in that kind of conversation, and you should make that judgment ahead of time.
Truth always has to take precedence over politeness if the two come into conflict, particularly if you're talking publicly, as we all do for a living. I'm not talking about you're talking to your, you know, kid, and they bring you a macaroni painting, and they're like, is it good or not? And you're like, no, this is terrible, and you stuff it in the trash.
It is terrible, but, you know, say that it's good, and then later you kind of put the, I understand. But when we're talking about politics and policy, obviously the truth has to come first, because if we can't agree on fundamental facts, there's no possibility for solutions.
Thank you for being here, Ben. You cited during your speech truth as the most important tenet of American conservatism. Why therefore did you call irrelevant the Israeli attack in 1967 on the USS Liberty, which left dozens of American servicemen dead and hundreds wounded?
So what I actually said is that if we're looking at modern Israeli-American relations, looking at an attack that happened mistakenly by multiple Navy reports, multiple Israeli reports, and all available evidence, and using that attack in order to undermine today's relations between Israel and America, that's irrelevant.
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