Dr. Jordan B. Peterson engages in conversation with Charlie Kirk—author, speaker, and founder and CEO of Turning Point USA. They delve into Kirk’s emergence as a leading voice in the Conservative movement, his choice to bypass traditional higher education, and the early indicators of ideological bias in academia. The discussion also addresses how the university system has not only tilted toward the hyper-feminine but has transformed into a large-scale scam. Additionally, they examine academia’s departure from timeless questions of good and evil, faith, and foundational philosophy, to a focus on Marxist economics and cultural capture. Charlie Kirk is the Founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rallying, organizing, and empowering students to advocate for principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government. With a presence on more than 3,500 high school and college campuses in all 50 states, and supported by over 350 full-time staff members, Turning Point USA stands as the nation’s largest and fastest-growing conservative youth activist organization. In addition to Turning Point USA’s on-campus presence, it also operates a massive online outreach initiative that garners billions of video views annually and reaches millions of Americans every day with conservative, pro-America content. In addition to his role at Turning Point USA, Charlie also serves as the CEO and founder of Turning Point Action, a related entity operating under a 501(c)(4) status. Turning Point Action’s mission is to embolden the conservative base through grassroots activism and to provide voters with the necessary resources to elect true conservative leaders. Turning Point Action has earned recognition as one of the leading grassroots forces in the country today. This episode was filmed on March, 19th, 2025. | Links | For Charlie Kirk: On X https://x.com/charliekirk11/ On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfaIu2jO-fppCQV_lchCRIQ Turning Point USA website https://www.tpusa.com/ Read “Right Wing Revolution” https://45books.com/products/right-wing-revolution-pre-order
Chapter 1: What sparked Charlie Kirk's early political advocacy?
Looking back from your position of wisdom, what do you have to say to the American public about your cookie advocacy?
I should have been advocating for, you know, reduction in hamburger or steak prices. The funny undercurrent of that is that's kind of what started my political advocacy. I know.
It appeared to me that you were of that American evangelical stripe. When I met you, I thought, okay, so that's Charlie's cauldron, the matrix out of which he emerged. Maybe cauldron's not the right metaphor. But I'm curious. political rebellion took a conservative form.
Yes, the non-political, non-historical literature that we were being assigned was what I call pre-woke, very much anti-colonialist, anti-Western, that we are the contaminants on the world, that we are polluting other tribes.
Thank you.
Hello, everybody. I'm talking to Charlie Kirk, and Charlie came out of nowhere 10 years ago and built the world's most influential organization of young conservatives, and he did that from scratch. He did that by going to universities pretty much single-handedly, setting up card tables, offering to discuss and debate
all the issues that weren't being discussed and debated in these places set up for exactly that reason. And iterating as he grew, establishing conservative
clubs on campuses all across the United States, building a grassroots organization, learning how to debate despite the fact that he hadn't gone to college and actually playing the role on campus colleges that the professors in the classes were supposed to play. And so why watch my discussion with Charlie? Well, to learn who he is, to listen to how he did this. You know, he had a
vision and calling and he found his way and made it spectacularly successful while he was still very young and has ended up playing a very significant cultural role, transformative role that is by no means over.
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Chapter 2: How did Charlie Kirk start Turning Point USA?
And that's not so uncommon as you know in your own life by watching your pathway to failure. So, but given that there are people who are unfortunate, you'd think that the appropriate tack would be to determine who in history served the most effectively. And I just can't see anyone you could possibly point to more effectively, who did that more effectively than Wilberforce ever.
And so you would think that instead of erecting monuments to Lenin, the leftists would erect monuments to Wilberforce, but not only do they not do that, no one knows who the hell he was.
It is one of the greatest memory holing of a hero in Western history. I completely agree. Why is it? My hypothesis is he's Christian. is that you cannot highlight a man of faith who did something with such valor and such significance. It is at odds with almost every other fundamental narrative that they must try to present.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. I think that's right, that it is fundamentally, but that begs another question. And that would be why, given that Wilberforce was clearly a force for the good that Obama, for example, would have been pushing, right? by which I mean movement towards a polity where there was no racial or ethnic prejudice.
If Wilberforce is the poster boy for that sort of effort, which if you understand his life and you read about it, I can't see how you can conclude that. then why would the lefties forego that merely to oppose the fact that his motivation was fundamentally Christian? Because that points to something deeper, right? It points to the fact that the true war, so to speak, isn't political.
It's not left versus right. It's something deeper. And then if it is anti-Christian, Then why? Like, what does that mean? Like there's an enlightenment element there, right?
The enlightenment types, especially after the French Revolution, generated this narrative that science and religion were radically opposed, and that if you were on the side of religion, you were against clear, rational, logical thinking. And so you could imagine a stream of anti-Christian sentiment emerging on the rationalist side, right?
But it isn't obvious to me at all that the leftist types who don't talk about Wilberforce are anti-Christian because they're scientific rationalists.
Like, no. No way.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Charlie Kirk face in college activism?
Psychologists played a role in that in a major way too because you had Banaji and her crowd with the, what do they call that? The implicit association test forcing the idea of implicit bias. And social psychology is a very corrupt discipline and it has been, maybe from its onset, And it's stacked from top to bottom with careerists.
And it was social psychologists, for example, who denied that there was any such thing as left-wing authoritarianism until 2017. Right. That was something you didn't get to think if you were a social psychologist or even investigate. We cracked that. There was a couple of people working on it around 2016. The last bit of research I did was on left-wing authoritarianism.
And then everything, my lab blew up. You know, it just became impossible for me to continue. But... So that dovetailed with this insistence that people were looking at the world through a lens that was irremediably biased in terms of their privilege and their racial and ethnic identity. And it's tricky because people do have a tilt in the ethnocentric direction, right?
Because, well, how about because you favor your family, right? You tend to favor the local. You also tend to favor the non-novel.
And the familiar.
Well, exactly. And now there are exceptions to that. Well, you see this in the Old Testament accounts because sometimes the foreigner is the best thing that ever happened. So that would be like Jethro in the story of Moses, Moses' father-in-law.
And Midian.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then you have the alternative that would be like Jezebel, who's the foreign devil, so to speak. And so that's a paradox that's very difficult to understand. to properly navigate. Okay, so yeah, it's 2015, 2016, things went like seriously sideways.
And that's where, just to complete the point, my job on campus has became far more interesting because our organization shifted from primarily, you know, economic discussions of Marxism and capitalism to core cultural hotbed topics in 15, 16, 17, race, and then, of of course, the next layer, gender, transgenderism.
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Chapter 4: How has the landscape of college campuses changed?
Chapter 5: What role does masculinity play in contemporary society?
assume you could do first of all to know that that was a thing and then to have the goal to pursue it the second one i don't know i don't know where i got the goal to pursue it i will say bill montgomery being a mentor of mine was very uh encouraging okay okay okay so you had someone encouraging you yes um but but and you said he saw something in you yes and he was and he was an entrepreneur
Yes, and he never asked for anything from me, which was very unique. It wasn't like he was trying to have some agenda. He was 72 years old.
Chapter 6: How does the education system affect young men today?
So you had a mentor, which you desperately need as a young person, definitely, and someone who believes that you can do it.
And you think about it, you're 18 years old. You don't know how to cash checks. You don't know. You barely know how to put on a tie. Literally, I didn't know how to tie a tie for the first two years at Turning Point. Again, my parents are phenomenal, and they deserve a lot of credit.
But this was kind of beyond the upbringing where an external mentor comes in and kind of points you and says, hey, I think you're really good at this, found a skill, identified a skill, and kind of molded me in that direction.
You know that young male elephants go mad if there's no old male elephant to butt heads with them. That's very well documented.
That's very apropos for Republicans.
Yeah, right. Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, but it was, I'm a quick learner. I'm a quick study. And so I started to do research. I said, well, are there things such as external nonprofit political organizations? Oh. there's a 501c3 or there's a 501c4 and you can raise money. And so the first couple of months was me actually learning, what am I building? Am I building?
So you were training as an administrator and a manager then too.
I was everything for the first. Yeah, of course. I was CEO. I was janitor. I was, I was everything. Yeah. And so I had to make a decision. Of course, I asked for advice. Am I going to start a for-profit company? Am I doing a non, and I, we decided on nonprofit.
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