Who Is Charlie Kirk Quotes

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.

Protecting individual liberty from the tyrannical forces of government is the idea our nation was built upon. It is the only way to protect the individual’s rights, the family, local churches and schools, and other groups who can’t fight back themselves. Be skeptical of everything, especially your government. Ask questions, fight for your rights, and never surrender.

That viciousness—the sense of a revolution as a sort of purifying fire—is a zeal rarely seen in US history or British history, unless one counts the current fervor of the left’s so-called social justice warriors, who do sometimes beat, egg, or Molotov-cocktail their political enemies, though for now they more often just strive to purge their enemies from social media platforms and campus speaking engagements.

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” —AYN RAND

She also defended law enforcement officials who got convictions by withholding evidence or falsifying confessions. It is terrifying to think that about an eighth of the US prison population lives in a state with such a coldly bureaucratic conception of justice. (She may have had coldly careerist notions about sex back in the ’90s as well, since she notoriously slept with San Francisco assembly speaker Willie Brown, who was still married at the time, as he appointed her to a series of well-paid city positions.)

Ask yourself whether you can distinguish between the foreign policies of Hillary Clinton and the late John McCain. Both advocated toppling governments around the world. Both backed the Iraq War. Both were aghast at the election of Donald Trump, who had said for decades that wars are a terrible waste of lives and money.

Donald Trump has always been a builder, from hotels to casinos to golf courses—Barack Obama was a community organizer who gave impressive speeches. However, one of the least eloquent points that President Obama made during a speech was his infamous line “You didn’t build that.” It’s no surprise that President Trump understands that businesses and growth are good for the economy and create jobs, while President Obama focused on the government as the solution.

Cicero came from a wealthy family, and through his oratory became what we might now dub a major media star in ancient Rome. He could have enjoyed a life of luxury and avoided conflict but regarded his foray into politics, necessitated by his sense of civic duty, as his greatest achievement. He spent much of that political career combating conspiracies to overthrow the republic, in a fashion that might well be dismissed as paranoid by the complacent elitists of our own day. His fears were proven tragically correct, though, as Julius Caesar (sometimes talked about now as if he were the very pinnacle of Roman achievement but in truth a dictator who was the death knell of the Republic) pushed Rome in the direction of empire. Cicero himself ended up executed by government soldiers, his head and hands later displayed on Rome’s central public speaking platform, a final taunt to Mark Antony—one of Caesar’s allies, and after Caesar’s assassination, part of Rome’s ruling triumvirate.

Trump’s battle, then, is not just a squabble with a few well-meaning, present-day liberal critics. He represents a centuries-long struggle within Western civilization between the hope of freedom and self-rule by the common people and the continual assertion of aristocratic privilege by those who think they know better and thus should have power. As long as Trump opposes those deeply entrenched forces, who not so secretly view America’s Founding Fathers with almost as much suspicion and contempt as they view Trump, it will not matter how impressive his practical achievements in the economic or foreign policy realms are: They will still be denigrated and cast in a bad light because he is a threat to their own rule.

When Trump-hating media star and CNN hostess/comedienne/filth-purveyor Kathy Griffin held up a fake bloodied Donald Trump head in a photo (subsequently being let go by CNN because of it), she may have been closer to the Rome-like truth than she realized—not because Trump is a dictator deserving death but because he, like Cicero, is targeted by powerful forces who mistake themselves for the Republic’s protectors but are in fact in the process of destroying it.

As Politico put it, describing their own 2014 review of Trump’s predecessor, “The Obama administration has hired more than 70 previously registered lobbyists . . . and watched many officials circle through that revolving door, as Obama’s lobbying policy was weakened by major loopholes and a loss of focus over time. What’s more, the current laws around lobbying, which the administration measures were built on, simply ignore many instances observers would regard as lobbying—and the White House never pressed for changes to those laws.” Now look at the panic once an outsider—who did not regard the culture of Washington with cautious respect—came along. You’d think Trump was a horde of invading Vandals from the way the media, politicians, and D.C. interest groups reacted to his election.

Obviously and thankfully, Hillary Clinton never became president, but all of the achievements described above are real—and are the handiwork of the person who became president on January 20, 2017: Donald J. Trump. (Many of these items come from the Washington Examiner’s tally of Trump successes.)

Most of Washington can’t comprehend how this could have happened. They’re as perplexed by his achievements as they are by his giant crowds. They think they know what competence looks like: a four-hundred-dollar haircut and consultants telling you how not to make news. Never be funny. Take yourself too seriously for that. Meet as often as possible with other leaders who also have spent their careers trying not to generate headlines. Where average Americans see in Trump an effort to restore greatness through opportunity and prosperity, the elite see someone alarming. If you can succeed in politics without the help of hundreds of lawyers, lobbyists, and reporters propping you up, an awful lot of members of the elite could be on the verge of losing their jobs.

do not go out of my way to make enemies—and I have great respect for the long line of conservative thinkers who have made my tentative contribution to politics possible—but sometimes the most vicious opposition to me, to Turning Point USA, and to Trump himself has come from the right, not the left. The left, after all, has an exciting new enemy to fight in the Trump era. Many on the pre-Trump right need to rethink their lives and ask if they still have a purpose. Most do, but some have to confess they were going about things entirely the wrong way, maybe even enjoying the endless stalemate between right and left, not really holding out any realistic hope of winning or causing change.

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?

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.