Time for a Turning Point: Setting a Course Toward Free Markets and Limited Government for Future Generations

By Charlie Kirk and Brent Hamachek

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk shares a vision for America’s future embracing first principles, free markets, and small government. Kirk provides a roadmap on how to return to a free America, with an emphasis on reaching our youth and engaging them in the process.

During the 2016 Presidential election cycle, it has become clear that there is growing frustration on the part of many Americans with the general direction of the nation. There has been an abandonment of the principles of free markets and limited government upon which America was founded. We didn't get to this point over just the last eight years and it’s going to take more than one or two election cycles to reverse it.

In Time for a Turning Point Charlie Kirk shows exactly what needs to be done and how it needs to be done to restore America's freedom. This is a book of hope, not despair—book of action, not condolences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Post Hill Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781682612484

Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk is the founder and president of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest-growing conservative youth activist organization in the country with over 250,000 student members, over 150 full-time staff, and a presence on over 1,500 high school and college campuses nationwide. Charlie is also the chairman of Students for Trump, which aims to activate one million new college voters on campuses in battleground states in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month, and according to Axios, his is one of the top 10 most engaged Twitter handles in the world. He is also the host of The Charlie Kirk Show, which regularly ranks among the top news shows on Apple podcast charts.

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A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Published at Smashwords

Time for a Turning Point:

Setting a Course Towards Free Markets and Limited Government

for Future Generations

© 2016 by Charlie Kirk with Brent Hamachek

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-68261-247-7

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-248-4

Cover Design by Paul Romanowski

Jacket Photographs by Jill Jensen

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Post Hill Press

275 Madison Avenue, 14th Floor

New York, NY 10016

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Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

To my parents, for believing in me

when the world said this couldn’t be done.

From Charlie

To Andrea, Sarah, Katy, and all children they may have.

It is for you we write, and it is for you Charlie fights.

From Brent

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: Why I Write, Why I Fight

PART ONE: SETTING OUR PREMISES

Chapter 1: Stopping by a Starbucks on a Snowy Afternoon

Chapter 2: Back to America’s Future

Chapter 3: Big Government Sucks!

PART TWO: THE PIECES WE NEED TO JOIN

Chapter 4: The Timelessness of First Principles

Chapter 5: The Effectiveness of Free Markets

Chapter 6: The Fairness of Free Markets

PART THREE: FORCE EQUALS MASS TIMES ACCELERATION

Chapter 7: Harnessing the Energy of Youth

Chapter 8: Taking Back our Campuses

Chapter 9: The Power of Bandwidth: Delivering Our Messages

PART FOUR: OBSTACLES WE NEED TO OVERCOME

Chapter 10: Ending the Game of Loans

Chapter 11: Ending the Game between Team Right and Team Left

EPILOGUE: Musings from my Homeric Travels During Interesting Political Times

PROLOGUE

WHY I WRITE, WHY I FIGHT

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

—EDMUND BURKE

Writing a book as a 22-year-old is a very humbling experience.

I’m so focused each and every day on the work and mission of Turning Point USA, the campus-based activist organization I founded, that I really don’t ever stop to consider my age. I don’t feel particularly young or old. That said, when I started to consider writing a book, it did make me wonder about the audacity (admission here that Barack Obama has made me cringe slightly at the use of that word) of the task and to wonder just how often in history other young people have attempted to impact the world with the written word.

So I turned to Google, that wonderful company born of a still relatively free market that has managed to turn a nonsensical company name into one of the most frequently used verbs in our language, and I googled famous authors under age 23. Google showed me that there were roughly 289 million search results and I, being like so many other millennials and always in a hurry, selected the first suggestion on the first page: 23 Writers who were famous by the age of 23.

There were a few things that surprised me. First, I had no idea that Mary Shelley was only 20 years old when she finished the manuscript for Frankenstein. (How could such a young mind have such a tortured view of medical science without exposure to Obamacare?) Second, imagine that at the tender age of only 20 Helen Keller had already experienced and overcome so much adversity in her life that she could write an autobiography. The third thing that struck me is that aside from Shelley and Keller, there were not many names on the list I recognized.

So this is not something that is done frequently by people my age.

Since so many supporters of my activities like to metaphorically equate the work we are doing with a war to restore American First Principles, I thought I would again turn to Google and google famous young military leaders. I’m not for a minute positing that my efforts compare to those of a soldier in battle, but I thought the perspective would be interesting.

Alexander the Great, tutored by Aristotle and the seated King of Macedonia in 336 BC at the age of 20, was setting out on his first military campaign by the age of 21. When she was only 17, St. Joan of Arc led the French in driving back the English from Orleans in 1429. In 44 BC, 18-year-old Gaius Octavius, later to be Caesar Augustus, led an army of 3,000 into Rome and drove out Caesar’s assassins.

Three great young leaders, two of whom met with fates that could easily cause me to reconsider my efforts if I felt the war to restore America were other than a metaphor.

Finally, I decided to search famous young political leaders, since my efforts seem to make me most comfortably fit into that category. Surprisingly there were not a lot of meaningful results. I did learn that Egypt’s famous boy-king Tutankhamun likely died as the result of sustaining severe traumatic injuries at the age of 19.

So there are numerous well-known names, many tragic endings, and some incredible accomplishments that have become the stuff of legends and sainthoods. But I’m not any of those people.

I’m just a 22-year-old who loves individual freedom.

I am writing this book as a young man who quite deliberately has chosen to commit my still early life to fighting to restore, perhaps finish building, an America that was envisioned by our Founding Fathers. It is disheartening to think that even the term Founding Fathers has fallen into a state of disrespect in recent times. The derogatory acronym DWEMS (dead white European males), which became popular in my parents’ youth, is now replaced by more direct and caustic terms like racist, supremacist, and imperialist when discussing Jefferson, Madison, and Washington.

Those Founding Fathers, as an aside, do provide remarkable insight into the power of youth when it is joined together. Many of those Founders were quite young when the Declaration was signed in 1776. Hamilton (21), Burr (20 ), Monroe (18), Stuart (20), Madison (25), Ross (24 ), Lafayette (18) were all in the age range of today’s college undergrad or postgrad student. Even an old man like Jefferson (33 in 1776) would qualify today as a millennial.

An entire generation of American youth is being taught to distance themselves from these people and America’s beginnings. They are being taught that what was written in the Constitution isn’t really what the Founding Fathers meant, or certainly isn’t what they would have meant if they knew all the things we know today. The arrogance and condescension with which the idealists of 1776 are viewed in the early 21st century makes me angry, makes me saddened, makes me want to fight back. The quotation from Edmund Burke that began this chapter is one that hung on the wall of an 8th grade classroom of mine and one that I have made part of my core values ever since.

With the hostility to the people and principles of America’s Founding comes hostility to capitalism and free markets. If somebody comes to the conclusion that individual liberty is synonymous with oppression, then the next logical conclusion for them to draw is that economic liberty is tantamount to indenturing the masses. The people who have had a strong philosophical influence on me (Hayek, Mises, Bastiat, Friedman) have led me to believe otherwise. There may not be a simpler sentence that better reflects an incontrovertible truth than the one used by Milton Friedman and others that there is no political freedom without economic freedom.

This deep and abiding belief in free markets and individual liberty is what drove me to start Turning Point USA immediately upon my graduation from high school, and what is now driving me to write this book. I don’t for a minute believe that my commitment to these systems and values is any greater than was the commitment of great defenders of liberty who came before me. I do, however, recognize and feel an obligation to continue their fight using my energy, my passion, and my insight. I also intend on using the weapons of my time. Imagine what the oft-quoted quipmaster Benjamin Franklin could have done with Twitter!

One of the challenges I faced in approaching this project was how to separate myself and my own opinions and ideas from the activities and the mission statement of Turning Point. After all, this book hits the market as an offering of Charlie Kirk, not as a Turning Point USA issues pamphlet. After struggling with the concept, I finally realized that I cannot separate myself from Turning Point, because Turning Point and I share the identical goals. What Turning Point has become is the stronger, bigger, and faster version of everything that I have wanted to be.

In order to be able to deliver a message wrapped in individual liberty to the American marketplace of ideas, I needed a vehicle and I needed help. Turning Point is exactly that. While Turning Point uses Facebook as one of its tools, there is a sense in which Turning Point is its own Facebook. It has brought millions of young people together in a way that allowed them to find each other, to share their hopes, fears, and aspirations, and to then join with one another to act.

Because there were people like me out there before the organization was formed, you could say I didn’t start Turning Point; I found it and made it available to others.

Of course, that may be a little too abstract. The simple truth is I did start Turning Point in June of 2012 and since then I have been joined by students and supported by donors from all around the country. We have been tirelessly fighting against the well-oiled machinery of Team Left and we have been taking them on aggressively at every turn. We fight them with their own tactics and we fight them with new ones they haven’t before seen. Mostly what we are trying to do is to move away from the apologies and counterpunches commonly associated with Team Right and hit preemptively and hit hard. I hope this book strikes one of those heavy blows by encouraging readers to join the battle on our side.

One of the more effective weapons, if not the most effective, that the other side has deployed is its use and control of language and speech. In the history of warfare, one of the most revolutionary inventions was that of the crossbow. While it’s associated with medieval Europe, it was actually invented in ancient China, perhaps as far back as 2000 B.C. The Chinese were so certain of its profound power that they went to great lengths to keep it from enemies, and some evidence exists to suggest that they even considered unilaterally disarming from it. They knew it had incredible destructive capabilities.

Language control and political correctness have become the modern-day crossbow for Team Left and they are wielding their weaponry without conscience.

I want to better define the phenomenon we call political correctness. The term has become so widely used that it is now almost impossible to go through an entire day, unless you are home sick with the TV off and your smartphone in airplane mode, without hearing it being used. Everybody knows that it means that there are only certain things you are allowed to say or do without them being considered inappropriate. But what does that really mean and who is considering them inappropriate?

When you cut through it, political correctness is nothing more than self-censorship. It is forcing people to voluntarily stop behaving or speaking in certain ways. The driver for this becomes two base emotions: guilt and fear. Political correctness causes people to self-censor because they feel guilty about what they are about to say or do and they are afraid that they will lose something if they say or do it. The emotions of guilt and fear are such powerful drivers of behavior that people will stop themselves without even asking the question, Who am I actually offending?

Almost without exception the answer to the question is that you aren’t offending any significant number of the people ostensibly being protected by the censored speech. What you are really doing is pushing back against some small, collectivist group that is seeking some sort of privilege or protection and does not want an honest, open discussion of the matter.

It doesn’t matter what the topic is, the people who are determined to substitute collective decisions in the stead of individual freedom use the political correctness crossbow to set the acceptable terms of discourse. They do this so that people like me sound as though we are uncaring, insensitive, and downright evil to the untrained and otherwise overwhelmed public ear. If we discuss reasonable controls on immigration, we are xenophobic; if we are financially successful we are one-percenters; if we suggest that people should pay for their own discretionary choices in birth control, we are waging a war on women (Jonah Goldberg has done excellent work on this in his book The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas). It has become very uncomfortable and in some cases dangerous to academic, business, or public careers to use straightforward language to discuss straightforward issues.

Evidence of this reached the level of full satire in December of 2015 when filmmaker Ami Horowitz went on the campus of Yale University and asked students if they would sign a petition to repeal the First Amendment. The video, which is available on YouTube (another product of the free market), shows students enthusiastically wanting to sign and demonstrates just how Orwellian modern-day America has become.

I encountered efforts to suppress and control speech as far back as my high school classrooms, and Turning Point has encountered it on nearly every campus. Political correctness is a weapon that causes committed people who know better to voluntarily surrender. It is worse than being hypnotized, where it is claimed you cannot direct a person to do something injurious to himself or herself. All across America, on campuses and in offices, political correctness is getting freedom-loving citizens to take off their clothes, act like a chicken, and jump out of a 12-story window. I have no intention of surrendering our language to Team Left and I have every intention of doing what is necessary to recapture what has been lost. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear the word liberal and know that it once again means somebody who values individual freedom and not somebody who wants to take away your 20 oz. soda?

This book will in part be an attempt to reclaim language and push the reset button, more effectively than Hilary Clinton, on the nature of the debate. There will be examples throughout the book of efforts that have been made to silence Turning Point USA on campuses, in social media, on television, and in living rooms. The stories you will find in these pages may or may not surprise you but I certainly hope that they motivate you. Opponents of ours hope that by limiting what we say and controlling how we are able to say it they will minimize our presence and our impact.

But they are mistaken. Neither I nor Turning Point is going anywhere and we are not going to change our message.

One of the key things I did not want to do when I started this project is to make it just another book about how messed up America is and how the hour of (reader, please insert your favorite end of day’s prophecy source) is upon us. Everyone knows that things are bad and everyone is writing the book that tells us just how bad they are. I will spend some time on the current challenges we face and still a bit less on how we got here. Both are necessary in order to frame the situation and set our premises. Primarily, however, I want to create something that shows a vision of an America that I can see us being able to reach in my lifetime. Now, refer back to the beginning of this chapter. I’m only in my early 20s and I am assuming, perhaps naïvely, that I will live an actuarially normal life. I have more than 50 years remaining. This is going to be a long game. The challenges that America faces were not created just over the last several years under the Obama administration (although it certainly could seem that way).

In addition to sharing the vision of what I see for America, I want to show people the path that will get us there. Now, reasonable people can differ over the path that could or should be taken and I am the first to agree that there may be more than one workable path. That said, having watched the impact that Turning Point has had on college campuses in the past three-plus years with young people, the awareness we are creating, the conversions we are generating, the voters we are registering, I do believe that what I will offer you in these pages is viable.

One of the basic questions my collaborating partner asked me about this book before starting was, did I want it to be a work that was primarily a) philosophical b) factual or c) tactical? In other words, was this a book about what I think, what’s the current situation, or what do we do about it? I found that to be an interesting way to approach the project. In the end, while it contains all three, and while I hope you agree with my suggested tactics, I truly hope you come away sharing my vision for an America that is just a bit further on up the road. If I succeed in that, then maybe someone out there smarter than I am can come along and help get us there faster and surer.

The reference made earlier to this being a long game is true. This means that for some people who aren’t millennials there is a call to action you will hear that is one of the most difficult to answer. It is that call which asks of your time, treasure, and talent in order to pursue something which is going to be so challenging to obtain that you might not see it in your lifetime. Now, despite his historical prominence, and despite being played by a young and dashing Charlton Heston, very few people voluntarily sign up to be Moses, knowing in advance they likely won’t see the Promised Land. What I’m counting on, indeed what I know, is that there are still many Americans who believe enough in the ideas of commitment and sacrifice that they will engage in order to make this country a better place for their children and many generations of children to come.

One of the most, if not the most, incredible stories of American courage (and there are many) that has made an impression on me is that of Operation Overlord and the June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy by the Allies. First-day casualty estimates come in around 10,000 soldiers, but what I can’t ever quite imagine is before those doors opened on the landing craft, what was going through the minds of the soldiers up front. They had to know, all of them, they were likely about to die. Their incredible bravery and sacrifice, made so that others could live, is hard for someone like me to fully appreciate. I’ve lived a life largely in peace, certainly without threat to my own physical existence. When someone compliments me on my courage in starting Turning Point, I thank them graciously but think to myself: Courage?

That said, there are some parallels. Our liberty is once again under attack, only this time from an insidious infestation of people who want us to lay down our liberty at the feet of some ill-defined, always corrosive, greater good. Whether it’s from the chaos coming from Obamacare, the bullets in a neglected and welfare-dependent urban neighborhood, or life on the streets brought upon by no jobs to be found, people’s lives are in jeopardy. We all need to be able to step off that proverbial boat and fight and be thankful that we don’t have to step off a literal boat in order to restore our freedom.

Yet.

So let me set some specific expectations for what we are going to do inside the cover of this book, be it virtual, skinned, or cloth-bound.

First, I want to make you familiar with Turning Point USA, the 501I(3) grassroots, campus-based organization I started back in June of 2012. While this isn’t a book about Turning Point per se, it is a book entirely about Turning Point, as there isn’t anything I envision for getting America from where it is to where it needs to be that doesn’t require the people and the apparatus it provides.

Then we will take a look together at an America I can see approximately 25 years from now. To experience it we will look through the eyes of Julio, a fictionalized character offered in stark libertarian contrast to Julia, she of WhiteHouse.gov, who taught us how to go through the day taking advantage of every possible government entitlement program in order to survive but never thrive.

Next, we will take a look at where we are starting from today. We will examine the size of government (federal, state, and local), the crisis in education, the collapsing of our health care system, and the culture of dependency that is being created and becoming pervasive. As previously mentioned, this book will not be a long litany of problems. Unfortunately, a short litany is mandatory so we can all be on the same page (or pages).

After that we turn to what is necessary to advance our fight to restore free markets and individual liberty. I will take you inside the heart and mind of today’s millennial and the up and coming youth to show you what they care about and how to motivate them. They are the foot soldiers of this movement. Nothing will be accomplished unless it matters to them and they become willing to fight. The messages and the media to be used will be described and, where appropriate, I will share examples about how our tactics will either mirror or surpass the tactics of the collectivist side. You will see that we are planning to cede them nothing and will contest them on every front.

Along the way the argument is going to get made for both the effectiveness and the justness of free market capitalism. For far too long someone wearing a T-shirt that says I’m a Proud Capitalist has been treated as if they were engaging in a public display of profanity. By the time you are done with this book, if nothing else, you will be able to morally and functionally defend capitalism from a college classroom to an Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. For this reason, in and of itself, it is worthwhile to keep reading.

I selected the collaborative author for this book, Brent Hamachek, because over the past two years he and I have worked together on an extraordinary amount of written material which has been published both personally and for Turning Point. We will draw from some of that material for use in this book because to most readers, it will be fresh and compelling and you will understand why it has been very effective in mobilizing people, both young and old, to join in the cause of First Principles restoration. Working together so closely on so much content has allowed us to share a thought process that would have been hard to create from scratch with anyone else. This has happened despite a 30-plus-year difference in our ages.

Now a note on what this book will not be. For anyone who hopes that this will be the moment in time when Charlie Kirk finally addresses social issues or national defense issues, I apologize. This will not be the book. My goal is to stick to the issues and the beliefs that drove me to start Turning Point. I can assure you that I consider these other matters and I have strong personal opinions and beliefs, but I am not yet ready to divert focus from my primary purpose. As I mentioned at the outset, I am young. Stay tuned.

This is very, very serious stuff that is going to be tackled in the pages that follow. Team Left takes this seriously. They fight with every weapon in their arsenal. Our team often seems to be fighting with forks and spoons against, well, crossbows. They see politics as a vocation, not as a hobby. If we don’t match their level of intensity and commitment, then we are doomed to fail. Please don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that all of our problems are going to work themselves out because everything is cyclical and the pendulum swings both ways. Everything isn’t cyclical; it is cause and effect. Right now, Team Left is doing most of the causing and enjoying a bountiful series of effects. As for the pendulum paradigm, I’d suggest that in terms of American liberty it looks a lot more like a guillotine.

As for those who think we need to focus on winning elections because otherwise we can’t make a difference, let me assure you that Team Left keeps winning and losing elections without ever taking their eye off the target, which is making a permanent, structural difference. To prove this, think about how many issues are debated today where the center position is one that only a decade or two ago would have been considered to be the far left position. While many Team Right members get excited about a big midterm sweep, or a majority of Republican governors in the 50 states, the other side has studied physics. They know the incredible force that is inertia. Like they say in football, when we get in the end zone we need to act like we’ve been there before. We can’t get so caught up in ephemeral celebration that we lose focus on how long a game this really is.

I want everyone who is reading this book to put it down at the end and feel invigorated, ready to answer a call to action. I don’t want them to put it down and turn to a life of binge drinking and bulk lottery ticket buying because they feel despair and hopelessness. That, by the way, doesn’t mean that the situation isn’t serious or that there isn’t an incredible amount of heavy lifting to do. It simply means that if you would be free people, if it’s worth fighting for, and you think I’m on to something, then please join me. Help me. I can’t help thinking of the famous words shouted by General La Rochejaquelein fighting against the first French Revolution: "Friends, if I advance, follow me! If I retreat, kill me! If I die, avenge