Turning Point USA founder speaks at USD

Farber Hall saw 120 students and community members–both conservative and liberal–for questions and answer program with conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Thursday.

Kirk founded Turning Point USA, an American conservative nonprofit organization, in 2012. Since its founding, the group has developed a professor watchlist with names of professors alleged to discriminate against conservative students in college classrooms.

USD College Republicans organized the discussion with Kirk, who travels all around the nation to various universities to talk about his personal beliefs as well as Turning Point USA.

Kirk opened the event by stating the three “big things he believes should not be political.” His first major belief was that “America is the greatest” country “to ever exist.”

“American exceptionalism is something that should be taught. We are the most benevolent, most creative country in the world,” he said. “I think the amount of anti-Americanism that is being taught on our campuses is really concerning.”

Although Kirk admits the flaws of America, he said it’s not about the mistakes, but rather how they recover from the mistakes.

“America is not the perfect country, we’ve made our mistakes. Every country makes mistakes,” Kirk said. “We had slavery, women couldn’t vote, but you define a country on how you identify and correct those mistakes.”

The second point Kirk said he believes is the constitution is the greatest political document ever written.

“The founding fathers did not write the constitution for the times, they wrote the constitution to withstand time,” he said. “First they said we admit the document isn’t going to be perfect. We have not actually found the absolute perfection, but we will protect them and it will be functional.”

Free enterprise capitalism is the most moral proven economic system in the world, Kirk said as his final main belief.

After stating his main beliefs, he opened the floor to questions. He said he welcomes disagreement in questions.

Question topics ranged from views on democratic presidential candidates, philosophy and the “three main revolutions.”

“There are three revolutions that have charted modern history: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian revolution,” Kirk said. “What I think is not appreciated enough in our college courses is how those ideas came to a head without a bullet ever being fired between the 1950s and 1991 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, where you had these two existing ideas and they are existing.”