Katie Pavlich and Candace Owens on why they are conservative

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Katie Pavlich and Candace Owens on why they are conservative

Candace Owens and Katie Pavlich join 'Life, Liberty & Levin' to discuss their backgrounds and factors that led them to conservatism.

This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," August 26, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARK LEVIN, HOST: Hello America. I'm Mark Levin. This is "Life, Liberty & Levin." We have two great guests. Katie Pavlich, how are you?

KATIE PAVLICH, CONSERVATIVE COMMENTATOR AND AUTHOR: Nice to see you, Mark. Thank you so much.

LEVIN: Candace Owens, how are you?

CANDACE OWENS, TURNING POINT USA: Very good to see you.

LEVIN: Two of the very great, young, smart, intellectual conservatives who I wanted on the program. Katie Pavlich, in 2010, you earned your Bachelor of Arts degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Arizona. After completing your degree in 2010, you moved to Washington, DC. You became news editor for townhall.com, contributing editor Town Hall Magazine, Fox News Channel contributor and now, an alternate co-host for "The Five." You are ubiquitous, as are you Candace.

Candace, you're known for your commentary. You are the director of Urban Engagement at the conservative advocacy group Turning Point, USA. You are pursuing undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Rhode Island. You left school, you said, "That's enough." You launched socialautopsy.com in 2016, a website, where you were exposing bullies and so forth.

Now, this is very interesting to me, you really come from different backgrounds. You're both conservatives, is that correct?

PAVLICH: Correct.

OWENS: Correct.

LEVIN: And you came at it from a completely different direction. This is something I think about all the time, how to appeal to people, how do we reach out to people, people from different communities, people from different backgrounds because I personally think conservatism is the glue that holds society together. Why are you a conservative?

PAVLICH: Well, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, the facts of life are conservative, and I think that's really just part of who I am. I grew up in a conservative household, my parents were small business owners, so it really just was kind of part of who we were. They never sat us down and said, "This is the left believes, this is what the right believes, Republicans, Democrats," it was just more of a conversation piece and I wrote a letter to Bill Clinton when I was six years old about taxes and how it was unfair that he was taking our money and we didn't get to spend his money. He wrote back with a junior argument about paying fair shares, and all that kind of thing, so that's when it really started.

But I'm a daughter of the American revolution, my grandpa fought in World War II, I have lots of family members who were in the military, and it really just was part of growing up for me. I didn't realize until high school that the man wearing a cowboy hat on the poster in our garage was actually Ronald Reagan, so my parents just - it was how we were, I grew up on five acres of land in Flagstaff, Arizona and we really just lived a conservative lifestyle. Personal responsibility, being self-sufficient, being responsible for our own actions and own futures and pursuits, so that's why I'm a conservative. Really, it's just is part of who I am.

LEVIN: Candace, you didn't grow up that way?

OWENS: I did not.

LEVIN: You've become a fairly recent conservative.

OWENS: That is true.

LEVIN: How did you reach that point?

OWENS: Well, I like to say now that the reason I'm conservative is because I used to be a liberal, and I learned a lot. Obviously growing up in a black household, there's a lot of emphasis placed on black people today being liberals, being Democrats, it's pretty much programmed into us via the public school system that that is the only option for us because Republicans, of course, are racist, and they want to harm the black community.

And I had a different experience in life realizing that everything my life seemed to be going wrong. I was blaming the world for everything that was going wrong. There was no personal responsibility because a lot of these liberal movements you are essentially taught that there is always someone else that you can blame, and you're pointing the finger at everybody else, you're not looking internally to fix things and you'll find that things will continue to go wrong.

So during the 2016 election cycle, I was watching our wonderful President take a run for the White House, and the conversation was very strange, the rhetoric that the media was using was extremely aggressive. They were trying to convince me that he was a racist, that he was a sexist, that he was a misogynist. At at one point he was incestuous, they started that horrible story about Ivanka Trump and at one point that he was a rapist. I said this is very strange.

I grew up in a household listening to hip-hop music. Trump was glorified in a lot of the music, in a lot of those songs, and all of a sudden they wanted me to believe he was a racist. So, I had to ask myself in that moment, is it plausible that racism is being used as a theme to turn black people into single issue voters. And the answer to that question is, of course, yes.

LEVIN: What does conservatism mean to you?

PAVLICH: Conservatism to me is limited government, liberty and sticking to the Constitution and realizing that government is not the solution to almost anything, that your community, your family is the solution to everything. Going back to the beginning of the country, we rejected this communal way style of living, going back to the pilgrims coming here.

But being conservative is really just about making your own decisions, deciding on your own future being and responsible when you fail, learning from those failures and being able to move on and be successful in your own right not having to depend on other people to make your success for you.

Obviously, you go through life and you have partnerships and bosses who promote you and give you opportunity, but it's really up to you to take those opportunities and pursue them in a way that makes the you successful.

LEVIN: What does conservatism mean to you?

OWENS: Well, if you look at the inverse, liberalism to me means bondage and conservatism means freedom, the freedom to choose, the freedom to have responsibility to go after things in life. It's the founding principles of this country, and any person who comes to this country with the clothing on their back and make something of themselves.

I learned conservatism through my grandfather, I didn't know that was the name. I didn't know these were conservative principles. Starting his life on a share cropping farm. Working tremendously hard. Five years old picking cotton and laying tobacco out to dry on a farm, and today he now owns that farm. That was the American dream, and we lost that, we gave that up as government got bigger and the individual got smaller.

LEVIN: And this is all quite important from a philosophical perspective. You just related it to your own family. Is conservatism about individualism?

PAVLICH: Absolutely.

LEVIN: Is conservatism about a circle of liberty that surrounds each individual? That government must never penetrate? Is this an appealing idea among young people today and college campuses today. I mean, when I was a young guy, a little while ago, and I would go to college campuses, I have to say I was fighting, I was in the minority all the time, because the professors weren't any different, they were collectivists, they were tenured, some of them were Marxist and it all sounded so cool.

And we had to fight this, and I thought the people who fought it with me were actually smarter ones. Is that what's going on today or is it worse in our colleges today?

PAVLICH: Well, I know that parents get really nervous about sending their kids to college because they're concerned about the indoctrination, but for me, going to a liberal university and having that combative role with professors both in the political science department and the journalism department really solidified my principles as a conservative and why I am the way I am.

I was challenged every day and had to defend myself and come up with another side of the argument that was valid, and when it comes to other students, I was leading the charge to try and bring conservative speakers and fighting the administration because they were infringing on our free speech rights by charging these ridiculous security fees, and so I would say the campus environment maybe hasn't changed, it is pretty bad. I speak on college campuses a couple of times a semester and there is no room for any kind of thought outside of the Marxism, outside of the socialism.

But what I learned is that the students may buy into that, but when you actually ask them what socialism means, they can't define it. And when you start pointing things out like each and every one of you are wearing a different pair of shoes and each and every one of you have a different style backpack or a different style iPod or different phone case and it seems really simple, but the fact is that they are individuals on every single level of their life, and socialism and communism and Marxism don't allow them to do that.

But you can never blame students especially for something they've never been told. And so I feel like it's my obligation to go to these college campuses and to simply present the other side of an argument of an idea that they're not getting inside of their classrooms. And often times, I always ask people who disagree with me to come.

I tell whatever group that is hosting, or invite the college Democrats, invite the college socialists, invite people to come and listen, invite your professors who have been saying these horrible things about my speech already even though they have never met me or know who I am or even know what I'm going to talk about, and they may come in disagreeing with me and may leave disagreeing with me, but the rewarding thing is when students come up to afterwards and say, "Look, I walked in here disagreeing with you, I still disagree with you, but at least, I know where you're coming from." And even better is when they say, "I totally disagreed with you, but now I agree with you and now I'm going to tell ten of my friends exactly what I learned here tonight."

LEVIN: And you are a journalism major.

PAVLICH: I was, yes.

LEVIN: You took journalism courses, that was your major.

OWEN: Correct.

LEVIN: Was it hard left? Were they indoctrinating people? Is that why journalists in this country are so - almost to a person, there's few exception - speak, sound, make the same noises on TV and radio?

OWENS: That's correct. It definitely is indoctrination, and I will say this, it's much worse today than when I was in school, and we're talking about just a difference of five years. What I have observed on college campuses this year ...

LEVIN: And you are on college campuses often.

OWENS: Yes, we do college campus tours, it's terrifying. It's actually terrifying. There is this idea that it's virtuous. You can't speak as a conservative on campus without being boycott, without being protested, without students lining up and playing music loudly so that they can drown out the sound of your voices.

Now, we're not speaking about anything controversial at Turning Point USA. We believe in free markets and capitalism, the founding principles of this country and the students hate that. And they don't hate that as Katie mentioned, they don't hate that because they've formed these ideas. They hate that because they have been indoctrinated to hate that.

So, I say that college campuses are literal liberal indoctrination camps and that is why I understood, especially in terms of we wanting to wake up black America which is my highest priority, that that was an extremely important vertical to hit. It is how I ended up as a liberal. It is how I ended up thinking that perhaps socialist principles could save the world.

The most important battle we are facing in this country today and what conservatives did wrong was handing over the school systems to the left, allowing them to take that over and it is the most important battle that we are fighting today.

LEVIN: This is a great point. I mean, it essentially is a monopoly, an ideological monopoly and this what we're told academic freedom and free speech, at least, again, when I was going to colleges, even though I was a minority from a philosophical perspective, they would hear you out.

We had a few conservative professors. There's less and less of that. So we have this ideological monopoly, let's call it that on our college campuses even though there's thousand of them. There's a few exceptions, like Hillsdale College and Grove College and a few others, but they're the exceptions, what do we do about it?

PAVLICH: I would say we need more conservative professors, but that is not the easiest feat in the world.

LEVIN: I would say this, because the faculty, it is incestuous, that means the faculty, they pick from their own schools, they pick people who have their own ideology. I mean, I've been looking into this myself, how do we break the back of this monopoly?

PAVLICH: Well, I think that we have to look at the fact that taxpayers are funding these government institutions, so we call them public schools, they are really government institutions especially when it comes to universities, they are constantly going to their state legislatures and asking for more money for less productive work and less results.

The universities on the public level, the government level are not responsible for anything that they put out. So they don't care if you go for four years, five years, six years as long as you are paying them money, they don't care if you get a degree in sociology, they actually probably prefer that. But there's no results, they're not trying to get people a job.

So how do we change that? First, you talk to your state legislatures about how the universities are taking all of your tax money and they're not actually producing any real world results of students who can then go get real jobs instead of being $100,000.00 in debt over a women's study program.

LEVIN: Just pull back the funding?

PAVLICH: Pull back some of the funding, look at what they're spending their money on. When I was in college, I would go on a radio show every single Thursday and expose what was inside the universities, inside my classroom, what my professors were saying inside the classroom. What they were spending money on. I remember, they built a fake border wall across campus and they were preventing students ...

LEVIN: Somebody built a wall.

PAVLICH: ... that were preventing students from getting to class and those are the things that student fees are going towards, that's what parents are paying for, that's what taxpayers are footing the bill for, and so exposing that from the inside out is important because an alumni can look at it and say, "I'm no longer going to give my money to these universities. I'm going to give to conservative organizations instead that are actually making a difference on campus."

Suing universities is key, too. Because they think they're not going to be held accountable by anybody, but when they're infringing on the rights of students, organizations like Fire have sued on behalf of students, ADF has also sued to say, "Look, you think you can bully students out of their First Amendment rights by bringing conservatives speakers here to simply offer a different point of view? We're not going to put up with that anymore. Their constitutional rights apply on campus and off campus."

LEVIN: When we come back, I want to know what you think, too, what we should do about this ideological monopoly on our college campuses. I think these are great ideas, great things that are going on, but I think it is the biggest problem we face when it comes to young people in this country.

Don't forget, folks, to join us almost every week night on Levin TV. Go to crtv.com/mark. crtv.com/mark and join us or give us a call at 844-LEVIN- TV. 844-LEVIN-TV, and by the way, notice how patriotic our guests are. Red white, blue, and they did not plan it.

OWENS: We did not plan it.

LEVIN: I'll be right back.

Katie Pavlich, Candace Owens. I want to start with you, again. The ideological monopoly on college campuses, do you have any ideas on how to break up this up?

OWENS: I can't tell you how many events I've attended and I have had adults come up to me and say, "Thank you so much for what you're doing at Turning Point USA. I don't even recognize the school that I went to, oh and by the way, I donated to them and I wrote them a one million dollar check."

I say, "Excuse me? You wrote them a one million dollar check, you don't recognize the school?" So what Katie is hitting at is correct, you're funding the problem, and you're not funding the solution. Part of it is also empowering the students. These student government races are so important. These presidencies on campus, they control a large budget and they determine who gets to come speak, and they can block speakers.

So it's about that as well, making sure that the students' conservative principles are being won on campus, also through the student body. So that's something that we also do at Turning Point USA, and look, actually being willing to stand up on those college campuses and share and talk about your principles, despite all of the noise is also incredibly important.

So, it is a monopoly, but I do see a difference. We started as a very small organization, now we're on about 1,300 college campuses across the United States, so that's in all 50 states as well.

LEVIN: What do you think about this rigged faculty recruitment system? I mean, given all the money, public moneys that go into these universities and colleges, particularly state money. Shouldn't states treat this like they do other issues with respect to antitrust and so forth? What is this tenure after one year or two years and you have a Stalinist-style professor who just blabs for the next 30 years and puts in two days' worth of work.

And so, this whole thing needs to be exposed, how they do it, how little work they do, how it's incestuous and these state legislatures need to start getting involved in what's going on, as you point out, these government colleges and universities. I mean, we're paying for them, it not like they are these independent private institutions, are they?

PAVLICH: Well, and the thing is that leftist professors have the freedom until they get tenure to say what they want, to indoctrinate students in their classrooms where there's a very limited number of libertarian or conservative professors have to stay quiet until they get tenured protection.

So I had one professor in college who was a libertarian, and he basically had to keep it a secret because he wasn't tenured yet and he kept saying, "Once I get tenured, I can be more open in my classroom about things the things that I believe, but for now, I can't be." So tenure is certainly a huge problem.

The other big question that I have for leftists on college campuses who are constantly preaching about diversity and yet they are not interested at all in a diversity of ideas in the classroom. The majority of professors just like the majority of journalists in this country are leftists and yet, they don't have any concern over the lack of diversity when it comes to differences in ideas.

OWENS: So you see, they want everybody to look different but think the same on college campuses. That's the goal, that's the mission. Everyone should look different but think the same, and so they create an illusion that there is diversity when in fact, there is none and we see that every single day at Turning Point.

So, look, I am optimistic though because what we're allowed to do now is not just about being on campuses. It's a social media battle, too. This is a cultural war we're fighting. So these students when they are in class, they are not paying attention, they're on their phones, on they're on Twitter, they're on Facebook, they're on Instagram.

I think that that's actually where we make the most impact. So being on these college campuses, capturing what's actually happening when we sit in a chair and talk about American principles, capturing that reaction and then students at home say, "Wow, when I go to college campus what do I want to be? Do I want to be a liberal or do I want to be I want to be a conservative? Do I want to be that individual that's standing up shrieking and yelling and quite literally shrieking and yelling blood curdling screams because somebody wants to simply speak or do I want to be someone that's a little more sophisticated?"

So I think that that is something that - to put a more optimistic tone to this that we are winning, we are winning this cultural war. If we aren't winning this cultural war, we wouldn't have our amazing President in office right now.

PAVLICH: And I would add to that, too. There's more access to information now than there ever has been. Every single student on a college campus has a cell phone and they are capable of accessing YouTube, accessing your show, accessing PragerU and seeing all of the things that are not being told inside their college campuses and really getting an education outside of their Marxist leftist professors who only want them to see things from one point of view.

One other thing that I do want to mention about college campuses and the way they treat students, they always have this handbook about the Code of Conduct, right, and how you're not supposed to behave and how you're not supposed to discriminate against a whole list of different groups.

Political ideology is not listed in there, and it should be because conservatives students are regularly discriminated against for their viewpoints and they pay the consequences for it because their professors expect a certain point of view, not just ideologically in the classroom, but in their work, in their papers, in the things that they say. The things that they're submitting towards their degree program, and yet they're allowed to discriminate in that way, and I don't really understand based on being consistent with their policies why that wouldn't be in there.

OWENS: They have entire groups that discriminate. They have, up in Colorado, a group that's called Students Against White Supremacy and they target Turning Point students, they accost them in bathrooms, they yell at them and they call them white supremacists simply because they believe in free markets and capitalism. This is a sort of thing that is happening on college campuses across the United States.

LEVIN: Do you see this bleeding into the media? I mean, have you watched CNN and MSNBC and some of these other platforms. The hosts and not just those, the nature of the guests they invite or their regular contributors, I saw you, I think it was on MSNBC with this fellow Dyson.

OWENS: A professor.

LEVIN: And obviously, you wouldn't take any of his stuff. He is a Georgetown University professor, I assume he's tenured and this guy is full of rage.

OWENS: Right.

LEVIN: And it's always white, black, white, black, and he's a popular guest on MSNBC, I assume he sometimes shows up on CNN, too. But he's not alone. So this narrative that's in the college campus in the classroom with these tenured professors is now being pushed into the general public through media platforms like MSNBC and CNN, is that right?

OWENS: That's correct, and what they want to do is divide and separate us and pretend that everything is racist and everything is sexist and making people go home and feeling that they have a right to be emotional and enraged and angry, and that's exactly why I do what I do, it's to present a different perspective that people haven't heard, a more realistic perspective what's actually going on.

I did not grow up in a racist country, okay, that's just false. And there are many students that believe when we start our events on college campus, I say, "How many of you believe that America is more of a racist country today than it was in the 1920s?" Hands will go up. They actually believe that they are living in a country that is more racist today than it was when our grandparents were coming up, than when we had Jim Crow laws, than it was when we had slavery. They say, it's just shifted, it's a different kind of racism.

PAVLICH: Well, I have to say that I've been waiting years for Michael Eric Dyson, Professor Dyson to meet his match, and I was so happy to see you take him on. Because for years, I've listened to him and watched him promote that garbage that he does on MSNBC and in his classrooms.

LEVIN: You're not the only one.

PAVLICH: Sure, right, but what I would say is ...

LEVIN: And it's not just an African-American professor, you can have white professors, whatever it is, it's the same narrative.

PAVLICH: But I would say, when they are pushing it out onto the airwaves outside of their bubble of the university, they are more exposed, people can see their arguments being made and realize that they don't stand up in the real world which is why these types of professors, only exist on college campuses, because they can't survive outside of that. Their arguments don't hold up, their principles don't hold up.

And yes, they are indoctrinating students, but the good news is that a lot of them get out of school and get into the real world and realize they were lied to, they wasted a whole lot of their money and that they are actually more conservative than they thought before.

LEVIN: It's interesting because we have problems getting them right here to talk to me. We'll be right back.

LAUREN GREEN, CORRESPONDENT, FOX NEWS: Live from "America's News Headquarters," I'm Lauren Green. A video game tournament at a Florida mall is the scene of America's latest deadly mass shooting. Two people were killed and 11 others injured at a Madden NFL 19 tournament at the Jacksonville Landing, a river front mall in the heart of downtown Jacksonville. The gunman identified as 24-year-old David Katz of Baltimore, also took his own life. Reports say that Katz was competing in the tournament and had lost.

A funeral was held today for Mollie Tibbetts, the 20-year-old college student who went missing in July. Her father, Rob Tibbetts asked the more than a thousand people at his daughter's funeral to remember her by celebrating something wonderful instead of focusing on the way she died. Mollie Tibbetts was abducted and stabbed to death while out on a run. Her killer faces life without parole. I'm Lauren Green, now back to "Life, Liberty & Levin."

LEVIN: Now Candace, you've mentioned President Trump a few times.

OWENS: I have.

LEVIN: In a very excited, positive way, tell me why?

OWENS: I absolutely love this President. I think what he did in this country was the most necessary thing by killing political correctness. We were losing this country and everybody was too politically correct to tell us that we were losing this country. He stood up on a platform and he started telling the truth.

And it was timely, because when you look at what's happening in Europe, I think that we would have suffered some of the same consequences that they're suffering, if we hadn't had somebody who was tough and willing to take the hits from the media.

LEVIN: In this respect, you're talking about immigration.

OWENS: I'm talking about immigration and other things, too. Standing on a platform and saying to black America, what do you have to lose? Having everybody in the media interpret that as racism when in fact, what's actually been happening to the black community is racist. The Democrat policies that have been inflicted in the black community are racist. When you talk about the welfare system, Lyndon B. Johnson in the proliferation of the welfare state and his great society act, right? Those are the things that were racist.

Trump was actually telling us, you guys are losing. So his courage and his strength is what I admire and the results that he's already brought to this country in the 18 months that he's been in office.

LEVIN: And I saw a recent poll where his popularity in the black community is not only rising, it's like 36%, that's higher than any other modern Republican president that I'm aware of.

OWENS: You're getting me excited right now. I'm going to do a back flip. So, yes, that is exactly correct and despite - the word here is "despite," despite every single day, we have CNN, MSNBC, racist, racist, racist, trying to get black people in line. But here's the thing, results - producing results.

LEVIN: I literally - let me ask you, this Katie, I literally can't think of a single racist thing this President has done, and yet, they continue to call him racist, racist; and I think in part, it's to drag down his growing popularity, not just in the black community, the Latino community, his numbers are up as well. And this whole thing about him racist and he - and he is sympathetic to white supremacists and so forth. It's almost like a propaganda effort in the media, is it not?

PAVLICH: Well, first of all, he just deported a Nazi, so I don't that I don't think the white supremacist argument can hold up any longer as it was before. Of course it's a tactic, because the media, despite their claims of objectivity, they're run by the left and they're a bunch of leftists who truly believe that if you make the argument against conservatives or anyone you disagree with that they are racists, you end the argument and then they win. That's not working anymore.

Clearly based on the numbers, people are tuning out of, including minorities. I'm not a minority, but I would assume they find it pretty patronizing to think that anytime something is offered or there is a discussion about the situation inside certain communities that automatically, the people trying to solve a problem are racist. I think they are pretty sick and tired of problems not getting solved and these accusations and name calling continuing to move forward without results.

The left doesn't have any solutions as Candace said. For 50 years, they've been fighting the, quote, "war on poverty" with no results. It's the right and conservatives who are for school choice instead of protecting unions and allowing kids in minority schools across the country to change schools so they actually have a future and education.

And so for the President, he's walked the walk on that. He's been for school choice, he's talked about going into Chicago and trying to help with the situation there, and he's most importantly brought up the economy in a way that allows every single person, regardless of what your skin color is, what your gender is to succeed and that's what matters.

OWENS: And let me just say one thing here because it's really important that I say this. I don't want to mince words, the left believes that black people and Hispanic people are stupid. That is the truth. They believe we are stupid. That is why they overuse the term racism at every turn. This is the politicking of fear and it has worked in the past and is no longer working and they are frantic and so they keep using more aggressive terminology. White supremacy, white nationalism - hoping that they can strap us in using fear. Okay?

It's something that it gets me fired up, obviously, and it's upsetting to me because we've allowed this to happen. This is the reason that when Hillary Clinton was running, rather than going down into the cities and speaking to black people, she simply threw a Jay-Z and a Beyonce concert because she believes that black people are stupid, because we had a monolithic path and we were proving their point.

Voting in 90% margins for one party, we are proving their point and finally, I feel that we are on the brink of seeing that disrupted in this country.

LEVIN: Do you think white liberals - I'll talk like the left. Do you think white liberals, they said, "Look, we've served these communities. We've redistributed wealth. We've created this program and this program and this program and we have a few appointees over here and over here," that they believe they deserve the black vote and the Latino vote and shouldn't really have to work for it.

OWENS: Well, here's what you have. So when I talk about white liberals, there are two categories for me - evil and ignorant.

Ignorant are people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I don't believe that she's an evil person. I believe that she actually thinks that socialism can work. When you talk about people like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, they know that this doesn't work.

They completely understand their politics are not working, they know what's going on in Chicago, this is why they are silent when 71 black people are shot on the south side of Chicago two weeks ago; 60 black people shot on the south side of Chicago last week and none of them say anything because that's a Democrat-run city and that's what they intended to happen.

So, I feel strongly that white liberals that believe that they deserve the black vote fall into those two categories - ones that don't understand how much it's harmed the black community and ones that do and would like to keep up more or less the same tactics.

PAVLICH: I would say it's beyond that, that they think they deserve it. They believe they're entitled to it.

OWENS: Right.

PAVLICH: They believe that after providing things from the government that they are the ones who are actually saving these kinds of communities when the fact is, the majority of congressional districts across the country and the majority of cities that are the poorest with the most crime, they are run by Democrats for decades and yet they don't want to take any responsibility for the kinds of results that they have produced and then they wonder why when someone like Donald Trump comes along and says you have nothing to lose, why he would say that?

Well, it's because they have failed and they want to continue doing the same things to keep these communities down so they can continue to stay in power. That's what they want.

OWENS: That's correct.

LEVIN: Ladies and gentlemen, don't forget you can join us almost every week night on Levin TV, Levin TV. Here's what you do. Go to crtv.com/mark. crtv.com/mark or give us a call at 844-LEVIN-TV, 844-LEVIN- TV. We'll be right back.

Welcome back. Okay, feminism. I don't even know what feminism is anymore. What is feminism, Candace?

OWENS: You see we both just laughed when you said that word. That really tells you where we're at in this country.

LEVIN: And I don't self-identify as a feminist, but go ahead.

OWENS: What the left likes to do is they take words that once meant something and they use them as political tools to gain power. Feminism is a movement has been now been used by the left as a political tool to gain power. I'm a vocal non-feminist, I talk about that all the time. Feminism is toxic today. It's about, destructing family values, it's about telling women that there is somehow liberation in hating men and hating relationships when in fact, we understand that a child has the best chances of doing well in society if they have both a mother and a father present.

If you need to see the stats on that, look no further than the black community, if you want know why we're doing so bad, a lot of it has to do with a father absence, and I think that when you talk about how hypocritical the left can be, think about the way they treat Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, the way that they treat Ivanka Trump. They're mocked at and laughed at, they're called names, they're referred to in crude terms. Why? Because they don't do what the left wants, they don't say what the left wants. So it really lets you know that women under the guise of feminism are not free whatsoever.

PAVLICH: Feminism to me? Well, feminism today, modern feminism is this bogus idea that you have to be for all women, but the reality is that you have to be a leftist woman who believes in things like socialism, hating men, wearing pink hats on your head, protesting at every single turn.

LEVIN: Abortion.

PAVLICH: Yes, abortion, anytime, anywhere, for free. My second book, "Assault and Flattery" is all about this issue, I wrote it a couple of years ago after going to the DNC in 2012 and was listening to speech after speech about how conservatives had a war on women. I'm sure everybody remember the Mitt Romney binders full of women and I was sitting there and it was during a break and they played the seven-minute long tribute video to Ted Kennedy, and on the video, they stamped the words "Women's rights champion" across at a convention claiming to be fighting a war on women.

So this really got my idea to get started for my second book to combat this narrative that conservatives had a war on women, but it really gave me a bigger picture into where modern feminism actually comes from, and it comes from Marxism, it comes from socialism. It actually comes from Billy Ayers, they wrote a pamphlet called Prairie Fire and in it, they discussed how the nuclear family which is also based in Marxism is actually a jail for women and that they need to be broken out of it and they needed to take advantage of this new 60s feminist movement for political power.

And if you go back to the beginning of the feminist movement, the suffragettes, the first woman in Congress was a Republican, but you don't hear a whole lot about that. The suffragettes weren't about hating men, they were about equal opportunity, they weren't about just equality, they were about equal opportunity and yet, modern feminism today is completely the opposite and it's not about women being individuals, standing up on their own with their own lives being the purveyors of their own future, it's all about being in lockstep with the left or you don't count as a woman and you certainly don't count as a feminist.

LEVIN: Isn't this what the left does? It categorizes people, it gives them nomenclature, it projects their ideology on top of them and then demands compliance with it and then if anybody doesn't agree, this is feminism, this is the black community, this is the Hispanic community. You're whites, this are you people and so forth and so on.

Isn't it an attack on individualism on the ability to think for yourself and what made this country great in the first place?

OWENS: That is exactly why I hate movements that are rooted in victimhood because it's always going to be hijacked by the left because any movement that is rooted in victimhood, that's rooted in emotion, anything that is rooted in emotion is not rational. So when you think about viral movements like #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter, something that maybe wanted to start as a conversation between police officers and the black community, where it ended up being a full-on assault against the police community. It ended up being about hating police officers.

The #MeToo Movement which maybe it was started as meant to be a conversation between men and women ended up being about hating men and wanting to take down men that were in powerful positions. It's hard to be a non-feminist, as I am today. You constantly take attacks from people the left and people on the right that find comfort in these movements, but it's incredibly important that strong women, that understand what's happening and understand how harmful this can be to society stand up and speak out against it, and that's exactly what I do every single day.

PAVLICH: You know, when women asked for the right to vote and they're out protesting in the streets, they were standing up as individuals on their own. They weren't acting like victims. They wanted to lead their own lives with opportunity. They weren't falling into this victimhood of the reason they can't be successful is because the entire system is against us. They came and said, "No, we're equal. We want equal opportunity," and fought for it. But didn't fall into the grotesque, leftist, Marxist ideology that we see today with feminism.

LEVIN: We'll be right back.

Katie Pavlich, Mollie Tibbetts, 20 years old, minding her own business, out jogging, and she is hunted down by an illegal alien. Horrific. I mean, it's just a nightmare for the family, for the country, and then true to form, all of a sudden we're told this has nothing to do with illegal aliens and really this is one case and American citizens kill more people than illegal aliens. Why do we get into this debate? Was she not killed by an illegal alien?

PAVLICH: Well, the left doesn't want to admit that the water is wet, so of course, they're going to try and scapegoat the narrative and get it away from the fact that this person was in the country illegally. He committed a heinous crime. We don't know all the details about what exactly happened. We do know that she's dead and he led the police to her body.

The idea that the left always makes excuses when we hear this case, they say it's a single case. It's not a single case. Mollie Tibbetts is dead. There are hundreds of other cases and hundreds of angel families and thank God, President Trump is finally bringing some kind of publicity to them, he held an event at the White House a couple of months ago talking about the things that they go through because the media doesn't care when American families lose a child permanently.

we've heard a lot about child separation in the last couple of months. Mollie Tibbetts has been permanently removed from her family, and as I heard another angel mom say a couple of months ago at the White House, she said, "When I go visit my son because we are permanently separated, it's at his grave site and he's below the ground when I talk to him." And yet, there's no recognition of that at all. There's always an excuse for illegality in favor of illegal aliens instead of American citizens who go through this horrific thing almost every week. This is not an isolated case.

LEVIN: Candace?

OWENS: And it's not just the death. Let's talk about the drug problems, when we talk about heroin coming over the border, how many families - we have a heroin epidemic in this country. How many families are victims to that? They are living with that every single day.

And let's really talk about why the left does not want to acknowledge this. Why does the left want open borders? Why does the left want to abolish ICE? For votes. That's it. It's for power. It's all about power. They're willing to forego American children that are dying, they are willing to forego American children that have addiction. They are willing to forego anything as long as they can get votes.

And then know that if they can get that community and they can make them government dependent and they can make them all Democrats, they have a chance of winning back power in this country. That is the conversation that's not happening, and so it is devastating what happened to Mollie Tibbetts. It's something that kept me up all last night, really thinking about this and what her family is going through because we were seized by the story, the entire nation was seized by the story and then have this conclusion that is absolutely heart breaking because this is a death that could have and should have been avoided.

LEVIN: So, the President of the United States is trying to secure the border, trying to back ICE and the Border Patrol. We actually have a political party in this country that doesn't want to secure the border, that wants to abolish Federal law enforcement, ICE; people come here illegally into the interior of the country, that is their job to find them and remove them.

The Border Patrol is undermined by these individuals as well. My guess is this is what President Obama meant by fundamental transformation. We'll be right back.

Candace Owens, are you positive about the future of the county in the next five or ten years? Or not so much?

OWENS: I'm one 100% positive about the future of this country, especially once President Trump secures a second term. I am the eternal optimist in general and my life has been a tale of overcoming. We are blessed to live in this country and we are at a point where I might feel that things are getting worse and sometimes things do have to get worse before they get better.

And since we finally, at long last, have started having a real conversation about the things that are wrong, I can't help but feel optimistic about where this is going to lead to.

LEVIN: Katie Pavlich?

PAVLICH: I feel very optimistic about the future. There are days where I worry, of course however, America has always prevailed. It is the greatest country the world has ever known. I always have faith in America. We have been in very, very tough positions before. We fought a Civil War, we made it through; and I believe that the next five or ten years and the next 100 years will be some of the most amazing days that America has to go.

LEVIN: And we have to fight for it.

PAVLICH: Yes, absolutely.

OWENS: We can't take it for granted, but for sure.

LEVIN And defend what is ours.

PAVLICH: Yes, correct.

LEVIN: The institution and our liberty, and I must say, talking to you two, I feel much better.

PAVLICH: No pressure at all.

LEVIN It's been really great and I want to thank you very much.

PAVLICH: Thank you, Mark.

OWENS: Thank you so much having me.

LEVIN: It's a great honor. And check us out next time on "Life Liberty & Levin."

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