645: My Effing First Amendment
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- Quick warning to everybody who's listening to this podcast version of our show, there are some words that we have unbeeped. If you don't wanna hear that, maybe you're listening with kids, you can get a beeped version at our website, thisamericanlife.org. - Zoe Chase? - Yes, Ira Glass. - You brought some tape to play? - Yeah, I brought some tape from this trip that I was on recently. - Zoe Chase is one of the producers of our program. It's This American Live from WBEZ, Chicago. - So on this trip, I was in an interesting room. - Couple of ground rules. There will be no safe spaces, no trigger warnings, no microaggressions, we are gonna have, we're gonna have some honest discussion here. - We're in a huge auditorium surrounded by more than 2,000 conservative college students. It's a bunch of young people in sports coats and ties and dresses and heels. - And the media has said, oh, there's no young conservatives out there. You have to be liberal if you're in college. And every single one of you here today, from all 50 states, by the way, are here to tell the media colleges and the elites that our generation will not embrace socialism. - This is Charlie Kirk. And this room is at a big conference he's throwing. Charlie Kirk's organization is called Turning Point USA. Kind of a pumped up version of the college Republicans is how I describe it. And they recruit and train conservative students to be conservative activists on their campuses. Charlie, he's 24, he's preppy. He still technically lives in his parents' house outside Chicago. - Technically means. - Means that's his domicile. But he's on the road one of the 300 days out of the year. He founded this group something like five years ago. They have a ton of money from conservative donors. This year they're gonna have a budget close to $14 to $15 million. Someone close to the organization told me. Took place in a really fancy hotel right near Mar-a-Lago, actually. The son of the president of the United States,
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