Young conservatives discuss the state of American politics

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Young conservatives discuss the state of American politics

Up-and-coming conservatives Charlie Kirk and Daniel Horowitz discuss politics on college campuses and the future of conservatism on 'Life, Liberty & Levin.'

This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," April 15, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARK LEVIN, HOST: Hello, America. I am Mark Levin. This is "Life, Liberty & Levin" and I have two great guests tonight, Charlie Kirk and Daniel Horowitz.

First of all, let me say hello to each of you. It's a pleasure.

CHARLIE KIRK, TURNING POINT USA: Great to be here.

LEVIN: Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, a national student movement dedicated to identifying, organizing and empowering young people, more about the principles of free markets and living in government, thank goodness.

You started Turning Point USA one day after you graduated from high school.

KIRK: That's correct.

LEVIN: So, you're how old?

KIRK: Twenty four.

LEVIN: Wow, you don't look a day over 23, you know.

KIRK: That's what they -- they say I am getting too old for this stuff.

LEVIN: And you have a presence in over 1,000 college campuses and high schools across the country.

KIRK: That's correct.

LEVIN: And Daniel Horowitz, you work with "Conservative Review" that I am associated with. You are, I think our most popular writer there, certainly one of them. You are the senior editor there. You host a nationally syndicated podcast, "The Conservative Conscience."

A lot of people know you, you appear on radio and TV a lot, as does Charlie talking about immigration, budgets and so forth and so on.

You are considered one of our really sharp thinkers out there and I wanted to have you both and go on and talk about what's going on in this country because I am very concerned about so much of what's going on.

First, Charlie, let me start with you. Our college campuses, they seem to be the last holdout of this columnist philosophy in terms of free speech, freedom of association, speakers, the violence, the safe spaces, the triggering -- all of these phrases I never heard of before. What's going on?

KIRK: Wow, a lot. Also, I think the greatest threat to Western civilization is what is going on in our college campuses today and I can tell you I have been doing this for six years now. I started this right out of high school.

The suppression of free speech, the absolute attack on the idea of America, the outward neo-Marxist believes from the professors, the faculty and the student activists, it makes you feel as if you are entering a different country.

Now, what's most stunning about this is, I have been doing this like I said for six years. I have visited hundreds of campuses across the country, not once have I seen a conservative student or a faculty member try and shout down a liberal when they come on campus.

Yet, almost daily, and myself included, I experience this all the time. When I come on campus, there are leftist activists petitioning for me not to be allowed to speak, they are trying to defund conservative student groups on campus.

So, it is really happening here. It's not just that the liberal is the predominant political viewpoint on campus. It's that they want to be the only viewpoint on campus, and put simply, the college left hates the idea that there are other ideas.

They want a total monopoly on the conversation because they are threatened by the mere existence of a pro-free market, pro-conservative world view because they know when that does actually happen, students hear both sides and they come somewhere in the middle and they are threatened by that.

And you have seen what I like to call the islands of totalitarianism which our college campuses be rather effective in indoctrinating next generation, and if we do not properly reeducate and enlighten that next generation, we are going to have a country that is completely and totally unrecognizable.

LEVIN: Is part of the problem the tenure and these professors who are radical leftists, they get tenure, they cannot be removed. They cannot really be challenged and so you don't have this competition of thought among even professors?

KIRK: That is correct. And you actually look at the two different kind of personality archetypes.

A conservative, we are going to try to go through college as quickly as possible, go into business or finance and make a life for ourselves.

A liberal, they actually love college. They love the fact that it's kind of a luxury vacation. There's very little responsibility and unlimited freedom. They don't leave, they become professors because they enjoy that kind of culture.

So, it makes sense that they go into academia and the answer is yes, these tenure laws are outdated. There is no checks and balances to be able to remove these radical professors. And even more so, there is no ideological or intellectual diversity.

You know, what's most interesting to me is have you for example at University of California Berkeley, they have fulltime staff members that are dedicated to the idea of racial and ethnic diversity.

But as soon as you raise your hand and talk about intellectual or ideological or political or religious diversity, they say, "Oh, no, no, no, we don't really stand much for that. We only need to have racial and ethnic diversity," and so, we need to be able to have the free flow of ideas reenter our college campuses, and I find on college campuses, the most intolerant people are those people that preach tolerance.

LEVIN: Daniel Horowitz, country is going broke among other reasons, funding colleges and universities, funding public education across the board. We seem to be subsidizing the left, the left's ideology to our own detriment, isn't that correct?

DANIEL HOROWITZ, CONSERVATIVE REVIEW: You know, as a long-time critic of the Republican Party from the right, what I have noticed is that, we often die on their hills, not on our hills, on our ideology and I'll speak to what Charlie was saying, I think it was very important, younger people in colleges, they are faced with a dynamic now, when they go out into the world, they have endless student debt, and endless costs from health care.

Health care is very expensive and naturally, if they're not offered a competing set of ideas, the free stuff is going to be very enticing. But no one ever explains to them how the government has created an insurance health care conglomerate cartel, an education cartel, that has basically inflated the cost of those services commensurate with those very subsidies we don't offer and instead the Republican Party tends to shy away from that, tends to agree with what the Democrats are offering.

As you always say, they operate within their contours, within their paradigm, and as such, the American people and certainly, the younger generation, they are going to be attracted to those that offer it with a happy face rather than those who offer the same ideas with a sour face.

LEVIN: What is the answer with these various oligopolies, educational oligopolies. How do conservatives or even non-leftists, how do they get involved in administration, in education because it seems like a close shot pretty much?

HOROWITZ: It is, but if you look everywhere at a closed shop, there's a reason for it. The market didn't dictate it. There is always a government intervention. If we got the government out of education, then we'd have the free flow of ideas and health care is very evident.

A lot of young people look at the system and say, "This is too expensive." We are being gouged, therefore, we need socialized medicine. But someone needs to get up there and say government through Medicare and Medicaid? By the way, Medicaid is 75 percent run by insurance companies.

They get all their market's share through government subsidies and use that to gouge the consumer. So, I think the way to promote free markets is to show how we don't own the existing policies. They are not the result of free markets, they're the result of big government policies and only the free market policies could deconstruct that, but we've got to make the case, and unfortunately we're not seeing that too much from either party.

LEVIN: How do we make the case in colleges and universities if we're not given the platform to make the case?

KIRK: You know, despite all the horror that's happening on our college campuses, I've never been more optimistic about the future of this country. And I will tell you why, and I visit these campuses. We have a record amount of college chapter inquiries and request through our organization, Turning Point USA. I'll show up to give a campus lecture, standing room only, selling out tickets like you wouldn't imagine, but I also look at some of the other speakers out there.

Someone who used to be an obscure social psychologist from Canada, Jordan Peterson now has the number one best-selling book on Amazon for weeks straight and getting millions of views on YouTube everyday and he talks about things that shouldn't be controversial. He'll say, there are only two genders. Oh my goodness, that's considered hate speech now on college campuses.

He'll say, men are better at some things and women are better at some things. Shocking statement. But how are we going to win? We are going to win because the left, who I consider to be an enemy of democracy, an enemy of freedom, an enemy of the Constitution or Republic, the enemies of freedom always overshoot their target. Always. If history tells us anything.

And because of that, decent minded people in the middle will gravitate towards better ideas, better principles and freedoms and that's why you see people between the ages of 16 and 20, right now, are much more for conservative side, that kind of Generation Z, every study shows that they are going way more conservative than the generation before them.

So, how do we fix it? We fix it with better ideas, better arguments and we are going to be the decent, fair-minded champions of liberty and freedom for a generation that feels completely lost in this sea of post modernism and neo-Marxism.

LEVIN: Do we find those better ideas in the party structure? In the Republican Party? What does the Republican Party stand for today?

HOROWITZ: You know, I think if we're going to continue doing the same thing over and over again, we're going to define the definition of insanity. It's been three decades since Reagan and we've lost our way. We've really not found any home in the Republican Party.

The reality is, Republicans take a look at what Charlie sees on the college campuses and they say, "Oh, my gosh, this is so scary, the young generation doesn't believe in conservatism. We need to go and move further to the left."

But again, they're always going to vote for the authentic thing that it's not so much that the young generation is irrevocably liberal, it's that they're attracted to the strongest players on the block. So, you need to offer new ideas. How are you going to find them?

Well, one thing is, I agree with you, we need a convention of the states. If you expect Washington to fix itself, I think we have enough examples, it's never going to happen ever. They control -- Republicans control all three branches of government. They control roughly 30 state governments and we're not seeing any new ideas.

We need to fix it from without. We need citizens task forces to come up with new ideas, new grassroots organizations but ultimately, it has got to come from without because sadly, I don't think this duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats is serving anyone correctly and to the extent, younger voters are more attracted to new ideas, I think it will be through a new movement, not a tainted Republican Party that comes with a lot of baggage.

LEVIN: How do we do what Daniel is talking about? Which is a lot of work. Convention of states, that is, the state legislatures, send delegates, they get together, they have a meeting, which they used to do all the time and then they can propose amendments to the Constitution to hone in the Federal government. That's a big task. I am all for it. I've written all about it, but in the meantime, the meantime can be years.

Do you want to give the playing field up to the Democratic Party where they control the House, the Senate and the Presidency? Even now if they control the House and the Senate, the current President will be stopped immediately in his tracks. What are your thoughts?

KIRK: So, look, what I am focusing my life on is both a short and long- term objective. The short-term objective is to try to change the cancerous culture on college campuses, which if we don't get that right, our culture will be completely unrecognizable.

And in the great words of Andrew Breitbart, politics flows downstream from culture and culture, the first component of culture is education, and we have 1,800 major college campuses across the country, where post modernism and neo-Marxism is run amok.

And so, I am focused on changing that culture, but beyond that, how do we change it politically? The activists that we, at Turning Point USA are training every single day, the thousands of young people that we're empowering, they need to run for office because they're principled, because they understand the ideas, and more than anything else, more than a lot of the current Republican officials, they have fought the left head-on.

They have seen who they really are because on the college campuses, if you want to see at its most primal form what drives a leftist towards action? It's really, they don't care for the poor, they hate the rich. It's not that they have a benevolent view of the world, they want to destroy everything. They want to watch the world burn.

So, because of that, we have a group of young people, more than a group, a movement of young people that we need to empower, equip and train to run for local, state and Federal office and they will be the next principled -- they will be the next Mike Lee's, the next Thomas Massie's.

I mean, why don't we have a goal to say, "Let's we have 15 Mike Lee, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz's by the next elections." That's ambitious because there's people on both parties that don't want that by the way, so that's how we begin to fix it but that undercurrent is so important.

LEVIN: Is that enough?

HOROWITZ: The problem is, it's kind of like sending diamonds into a landfill. We've tried a lot of that. I was just dealing with several primaries throughout the country where the other side will use their superior forces, their endless special interest funding to run on our issues, paint the conservative guys as the rhinos, as the liberals and confuse the voters and we're really not having a lot of success in primaries.

I mean, you know, we were together in 2014, you were early on endorsing a lot of challengers. I helped recruit a lot of them, and it's very, very difficult. I think it needs to start with some of the sitting members. You have a Freedom Caucus, you have a couple of conservatives in the Senate. We need a new contract with America.

We need a new taxpayer and consumer Bill of Rights where like Charlie said, we're not just against the other side and hate the other side where we affirmatively stand for certain ideas. We stand for Federalism, for localism. We stand for free markets, and I think if we would do that, we would offer voters another, a new idea, a set of ideas even within the Republican ballot line so you don't have the ballot access issue where you're going to give control to the Democrats, they are still going to run as Republicans, but it has got to start with the sitting Republicans.

LEVIN: Ladies and gentlemen, you can join me every single night on LevinTV as part of CRTV, Conservative Review TV during the week. That's LevinTV, give us a call 844-LEVIN-TV. That's 844-LEVIN-TV.

Welcome back. All right, let's talk about free markets. You push free markets in our colleges and universities. Amazon is under attack. Facebook is under attack. Twitter is under attack. They're all left-wing. Let's admit it. Conservatives having difficulty dealing with all of them. Should the government get involved and regulate these entities?

KIRK: Well, first I think -- first and foremost, Amazon in particular, very few people know that they're on the verge of signing one of the largest Department of Defense contracts in our history, $100 billion Cloud contract for Amazon web services over ten years which would be -- I mean, that would be subsidizing the entire Amazon empire.

So, Amazon in particular, the President's instincts are actually spot-on here. Amazon loses money basically in every vertical of the company except Amazon web services. They use government subsidies. They use preferential treatment to the US Postal Service. They are masters at using tax loopholes not to mention Jeff Bezos himself owns the "Washington Post" and uses that as battering ram over politicians here in DC every day because no one wants an unflattering article in the "Washington Post."

So, should there be an FTC complaint against them for monopolization? As a free market guy, I hesitate to say that, but first and foremost, let's stop subsidizing this.

LEVIN: Let me ask you a question, what are they monopolizing exactly?

KIRK: Well, I mean some people would make the argument, some people that they are monopolizing online retail transactions. So, the argument would be, if ExxonMobil for example controlled 42 percent of all domestic oil kind of transactions...

LEVIN: How about if the domestic steel industry controlled 70 percent of steel production?

KIRK: Right, that's correct. I mean, we can arbitrarily put forth monopolization of things towards all of these different categories. My argument would be, as a free market guy, let's focus on the government contracts first and foremost. They should not get preferential subsidies or corporate handouts, especially the one from the Department of Defense, $100 billion over ten years, and the President should absolutely veto and nix that completely and immediately.

LEVIN: What about Facebook?

KIRK: Facebook is quite interesting. Here's what I can't figure out about Facebook. Barack Obama did even more than what Cambridge Analytica did in 2012. The Barack Obama campaign. They compromised the privacy of over 25 million Americans. In fact, they bragged about it.

"The New York Times" wrote a very flattering piece saying that the Obama campaign was technologically sophisticated and cutting edge to be able to use Facebook as a way to run a modern-day campaign.

Zuckerberg didn't apologize after that. Zuckerberg didn't testify in front of Congress. Make no mistake, the only reason why Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress and why Facebook is under attack is because some of the data might have been used to help a Republican get elected President of the United States.

It nothing to do with privacy. It has nothing to do with internet rights or freedoms and has everything to do with Democrats that are upset that their big tech monolith might have been used to aid a conservative candidate.

LEVIN: Should they be regulated?

KIRK: No, I don't necessarily think so. I think they should be treated as a public forum though. That is an important distinction constitutionally and for the courts because they're not a content provider. They need to be treated as a public forum which Google pretends they are, that they censor YouTube videos like (inaudible)...

(CROSSTALK)

LEVIN: It's a private company, so how do you treat that as a public forum?

KIRK: Well, so that's the distinction. Is that if they want -- so Google, for example, pretends they're a public forum because they allow different voices and different opinions to be heard. The distinction is, Facebook is not actually not in the content creation space, they aggregate other people's content.

And so are they a public forum or are they a public company? They could still be a private company and operate as a, "public forum" and they get into the space of censoring different voices. A conservative far more likely to get censored on Facebook than anyone else which represents a huge threat to the First Amendment.

LEVIN: So then, don't use Facebook.

KIRK: Well, that's the issue though. They have 2.1 billion active users.

LEVIN: They have 2.1 and one less.

KIRK: That's correct. It would take a lot of cultural realignment for us stop using Instagram which is owned by Facebook. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook and Facebook in general. I get a lot of my followers and a lot of my engagement and a lot of my kind of you know, force multiplication through Facebook, so it's kind of the devil you have to use in some sense, which I don't necessarily think government regulation is the best way to go about it though.

LEVIN: Amazon, Facebook, what's your take?

HOROWITZ: Well, in fact, when it comes to government regulations, sometimes they are a more potent weapon for the incumbent powers within a market than subsidies are. Because they use them to box out competition.

So, I don't think they would work. But I am kind of black and white when it comes to this. There's something called private property that I think a lot of us have forgotten about. When it comes to a person's private property, I have the right to use my company, my livelihood for what I want, and you have the right to either patronize it or start your own thing.

What we have done is, we have done the exact opposite. Basically, Federal courts are giving random plaintiffs standing to sue President Trump for blocking them on Twitter. Now Trump's own Twitter account he could use any way he wants.

Twitter, likewise, could offer a Twitter account to anyone they want or deny it to anyone including the President. They could deny it to me. It's incumbent upon conservatives, I think to start their own platform.

I know it's very difficult, but unlike health care where 60 percent of the incumbent insurance cartel organizations, 60 percent of their revenue comes from government funding, government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, in this case, it is a free market, it's just difficult to break into.

We've got to take that initiative and I think, this is an example where we could be very consistent that on the one hand, you have the right to take your organization and make it as political as you want, on the other hand, I have the right with my private property to service what I want.

LEVIN: Do we trust the Federal government to referee?

HOROWITZ: Oh, no.

LEVIN: Speech?

HOROWITZ: It can only be worse. They can only make it worse. Like I said without...

LEVIN: Has is the Federal government ever properly refereed speech?

HOROWITZ: Never, never, I mean, because again those that already have market share and economies of scale will use the regulations to their advantage. So, I think you know, for conservatives, social media is a tough path to plow.

LEVIN: And isn't the truth -- let me just say this, the two of you may have to take it to the next segment. We don't know what the next technology is. We don't know what the next platforms are going to be. If you talked about Facebook 20 years ago, nobody would know what Facebook is or these other technologies and so forth, so there may be something out there, somebody out there, somebody sitting in their dorm room at Harvard at this time who is not Zuckerberg, but somebody else that comes up with something that makes it even kind of old-fashioned to be on Fcebook and so forth.

KIRK: So here's the -- you brought up the key point here. Be very careful. If there's a regulation that tries to regulate Facebook, I guarantee you Zuckerberg will have the best team of lobbyists that protects the company more than anything else so it prevents that next competitor from rising up. That is the story of regulation of America over the last 100 years.

HOROWITZ: Like the auto companies right now...

KIRK: Or Dodd-Frank.

HOROWITZ: Yes.

KIRK: It protects the incumbent.

HOROWITZ: It protects the incumbent, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the auto companies, notice Trump is now easing the cafe standards. I expect the auto companies to jump on board and say, this is great, let's abolish them, they are for it because they've already gained it out.

KIRK: And they have the trial lawyers, the regulators, the institutional knowledge and the capital to be able to comply with the cost of regulation.

LEVIN: Regulation is typically anti-competition, an anti-individual?

KIRK: That's right. Regulation is a tool for the incumbent company or business owner to use against the small little guy that does not have the same sort of resources to compete in the marketplace. And you saw that of the financial crisis as well Dodd-Frank, the big banks got bigger. They had no penalty to pay and the small local community banks got completely run over.

LEVIN: We'll be right back.

KELLY WRIGHT, CORRESPONDENT, FOX NEWS: Live from America's News Headquarters, I am Kelly Wright in New York.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush is in failing health. The 92-year-old wife of President George H.W. Bush and mother of President George W. Bush will no longer seek medical treatment and will instead focus on comfort care according to a family spokesperson.

The spokesman said she is surrounded by her family and appreciates the kind messages and prayers she's receiving.

Actor and former Marine Corps drill instructor R. Lee Ermey has passed away, his longtime manager and friend says Ermey died of pneumonia-related complications. Best known for role in the drill instructor in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" Ermey was one of Hollywood's go-to actors for military roles with more than 60 movie credits to his name. He was 74 years old.

I am Kelly Wright, now back to "Life, Liberty & Levin."

LEVIN: Welcome back. Charlie Kirk, Daniel Horowitz. Daniel, let me start with you, a question. There seems to be some conflicting ideas within the Republican Party, even within the conservative movement, when it comes to national security and foreign policy of the Rand Paul position who's more libertarian, somewhat protectionist in that regard or isolationist in that regard, I would argue, and then you have the Marco Rubio position which is almost hyper-interventionist and actually, those aren't the two positions, there are other positions more likely traditional Reagan position. Can you explain this?

HOROWITZ: You know, when we started Conservative Review, as you all know, we started out with a scorecard where we wouldn't just rate the members based on votes, but we would give a description of what they did on their committee assignments, what sort of legislation they proposed? And we had this discussion, well, how do you rate foreign policy and national security? It's not as definitive, you don't have doctrines that are just as clear cut like raising taxes, increase in spending, and we noted this false dichotomy that have in the Republican Party, and I think again, it's borne out of the lack of vision among some conservatives.

That while you have got the Bloods and Crips fighting each other, Daniel, which one are you for? What we need to do is identify our interests. What are our American interests? We need to do an audit of where we are involved in, why we're there.

If military a intervention, what do we hope to be in its place? Learn some of the lessons from Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and understand what is doable, what is not doable, cost/benefit analysis. Let's do all of this, I do firmly believe that at some point, as much as we hate Congress, you need the people's representatives involved.

I don't believe that any airstrike, imminent strike needs an authorization, but if we're going to have troops for 15 years, the American people are rightfully wary.

LEVIN: What are you talking about in particular?

HOROWITZ: Afghanistan. Afghanistan.

LEVIN: Afghanistan.

HOROWITZ: There was an authorization but, I mean, there was an authorization of use of force in Japan too and it's 60 years later.

LEVIN: There have been very few declarations of war. I understand your point. There have been five. America is at "war" or in some battle more times than it's not, and so there's that argument whether we should or shouldn't, and I agree with it, it shouldn't be an ideological point, it should be a rational point, but that said, obviously, to get Congress involved, Congress needs to do something and Congress is a very slow body.

They don't even hold hearings on budgets. So, the balance, is it not, is if they're going to deliberate for three or four weeks or three or four days and the President thinks, "You know what, I've got to hit that spot right over there." Those guys are doing whatever they're doing, this creates the conflict.

HOROWITZ: Sure, but I mean, I think the question is we have about 4,000 ground troops in Syria, and they're kind of there indefinitely and you have the Sunni insurgency and then you have the Iranian hegemony backed by Hezbollah, by Assad and the Russians.

LEVIN: I agree, but and we troops in Germany. They have been there for decades.

HOROWITZ: Not engaged in combat.

LEVIN: But they're there potentially to be engaged in combat, right?

HOROWITZ: Sure.

LEVIN: What do we do?

HOROWITZ: Well, I mean, I think we're not going to reinvent the wheel in one generation where we go back to what was viewed as an offensive expeditionary back in George Washington's time, but I think there has to be some understanding of Yemen, Syria, Somalia. What are the players? What do we hope to get from it? Is it solvent?

I don't mind if we create a red line and say, "Hey, you used chemical warfare, we're going to strike those chemical weapons." But there is a broader question of is Syria as a whole a tenable situation with the Sunni insurgency and Assad.

LEVIN: Charlie.

KIRK: Quickly, in the Middle East, really, the two big players consolidating power are the Iranians and the Saudi Arabians and the Saudi Arabians have lots of different proxies throughout the Middle East.

And I think, we as a foreign policy in particular should be very careful to just think immediately Saudi Arabia always has our best interests at heart. I think that is a fallacy. Some people call them a frenemy. I would call them very close to an enemy. In fact, they do not have our best interests at heart despite the new guise that they have put on.

The Iranians are not our friends either, but we should not fight a Saudi Arabian proxy war just -- and have American blood...

(CROSSTALK)

KIRK: That is exactly right, so that is more of a religious conflict.

LEVIN: Are they building ICBMS for Saudi Arabia? Iran?

KIRK: Well...

LEVIN: Do they want nuclear warheads on ICBMS for Saudi Arabia?

(CROSSTALK)

KIRK: ... Israel, but no...

LEVIN: No, intercontinental ballistic missiles?

KIRK: No, of course not, they want them for America.

HOROWITZ: But the way to go after Iran is go after Iran, not go down the rat holes in Yemen for example where you have...

KIRK: I would agree.

HOROWITZ: ... the Al Qaeda and the Houthis. And we lost a Navy SEAL...

LEVIN: So, we should declare war on Iran?

HOROWITZ: Not, necessarily, no. I don't think that's...

(CROSSTALK)

HOROWITZ: : Well, I agree with you...

LEVIN: No, I am asking.

HOROWITZ: We went into the wrong country when we went after Iraq. I mean, I think you said that before, I think it would have been more prudent...

KIRK: Iraq was actually fighting Iran. I mean, Saddam was very anti-Iran and he was...

LEVIN: Yes, I came to the conclusion that we picked the wrong country because Iran is a threat us to. I believe that and I believe it today. I also don't believe we have to attack Iran directly, although one day we might. It just depends, and I think Barack Obama has put us in a position which backed us up against a wall because now we're arming essentially their nuclear plans.

That said, it doesn't mean I don't think we ought should be strategic and use proper tactics, and back other countries that may help us in the long run, you know? You look at all the wars we've been involved in, that's exactly what we've done.

I mean, Russia is not our friend, is it? And yet, we allied with them in World War II to defeat another enemy. These things happen, but we are not going to resolve it here. I am just curious, there is this battle going on within the Republican Party, even the conservative movement on what to do in terms of foreign policy.

And when we come back, I want to ask you both this question: What is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party? Because other than appeasement, I can't quite figure it out. But I would be curious to know what you guys think.

Don't forget, you can join us every week night on LevinTV. Give us a call so you can join us, 844-LEVIN-TV, 844-LEVIN-TV on our network Conservative Review, CRTV. We'll be right back.

Welcome back. All right, Charlie Kirk, what is the Democratic foreign policy?

KIRK: If I had to put it simply, it's arm our enemies and put America in a jeopardizing position. If you look at the Iran deal, no one rationally can defend that unless you want to give money, power and an advantage to an entire country and region that wants us dead.

I mean, John Kerry and Barack Obama, and you've been vocal on the Iran deal and you went through the specifics, I mean, they have put us in a totally compromising position militarily, culturally and also geopolitically.

But you look even broader than that, the Democrats seem so determined and hell-bent to try to withdraw our presence from certain sectors across the world where we actually had success in keeping radical powers in check whether it be trying to advance the filibuster, put a lot of our military funding in jeopardy or conversations, so look, I think the Democratic Party is very simple. They want a globalist-type government. They don't believe America is the greatest country in the history of the world.

They don't believe America is exceptional, and you can see that through the now foreign policy discussions that used to be that politics ended on the water's edge, that doesn't exist anymore.

The Democrats now have a much more globalist world view where they think that these solutions can be solved in the UN or that America should not be better than any other country and they want to almost rid the world of the inequities through the lessening and weakening of our own stature and position, which is a horrible idea because we actually live in the most peaceful time in human history which is a direct corollary to America being the most dominant in human history.

The more ubiquitous American military presence is, we are actually more peaceful.

LEVIN: Does this also explain the position on immigration? No borders, lack of sovereignty and so forth, you are like one of the nation's great experts on this and you write about it all the time?

HOROWITZ: I was headed right there because immigration, we also focus on cultural, domestic policy but it's really foreign policy and national security at its core. In the early days, we didn't have a DHS, it was the State Department that actually ran our immigration policy because it was rooted in foreign policy.

I think, this is where you see the rise of the alt-left taking over the Democratic Party. I am not too old, but I am old enough to remember a time when I grew up in Maryland, the Governor was William Donald Schafer. He was a pretty liberal Democrat, but he always believed in a strong national security, traditional values and he got ran out of the party pretty late in his career because he was strong on immigration, and that just shows how far they've moved over.

What -- I think you referred to this often is the de-civilization agenda where, there are certain basic things that whether they stopped at water's edge or whether they're just natural law, family structure, a man-to-man, woman-to-woman, a marriage is a marriage and borders are borders, they are now questioning just the raw basics and what is so sad about immigration is that the open border doesn't just flood the country with a lot of low- skilled immigrants, a lot of crime, but the drug crisis that we have now.

If you look at any graph of what they call the opioid crisis, which they want to make a health care issue, it started in 2013. That's where the compassion and sympathy for these unaccompanied alien children comes full circle. A lot of them were drug mules, even those who weren't had to pay the drug smugglers to come in, and yet, you cannot implicate that agenda in any discussion over the drug crisis. Everything must yield because the ends justify the means.

LEVIN: Do you agree with this?

KIRK: Well, 100 percent. I visited the border last week and for three days, I spent extensive time. I like to say there is no border. It's a joke. In fact, I mean, there is literally a copper bar that you could just step over and walk into Mexico. This is in the Tucson sector, mind you, which is the number one sector of drug traffic in the country, and I talked to Border Patrol agents, I talked to some senior level Border Patrol agents and said, "How many of you actually support building a wall?" I said. Well, we polled our Border Patrol agents in all the different sectors, 95 percent supported building the wall. The other 5 percent didn't understand the question.

What we really have here is an attack on sovereignty, an attack on our country, and an attack on our very culture at its very core. A nation is defined by its border. You have a weak border, you have a weak country, but it's intentional.

I don't give the Democrats any sort of advantage on the argument. I don't give them the benefit of the doubt quite honestly. They want open borders. They want political and societal chaos. They want a globalist type agenda where America is not better than any other country where the Constitution is completely run amok because when have you 15 million illegal immigrants in this country, I like to call them foreign nationals, not illegal immigrants, then all of a sudden, the rule of law completely disappears.

They are moving the goal posts intentionally. When you get rid of the rule of law, then you can have anarchy. And I believe that within the base of the Democratic Party in the left is a desire to want to completely de- civilize and destroy western civilization as we know it.

LEVIN: When we come back, this rule of law, where are we on the rule of law? What about our judges? Are they upholding the rule of law? We'll be right back.

All right, Daniel Horowitz, judges, we were just talking about immigration. Where do we stand with the judiciary in this country?

HOROWITZ: Your grandfather was the judicial supremacist. I mean, it has gotten 10 times worse since even when you wrote "Men in Black." We are at the point where judges do not recognize any clause of the Constitution. What's a state power they give to the Feds, what's the Fed power they give to the states? What's a real right, they read out of the Constitution. What is antithetical to an unalienable right? They read into the Constitution.

And moreover, they are now abusing the rules of standing to make anything a justiciable case, so everything Trump has done that often is not new territory, he merely gets rid of things that didn't exist in the country from 1789 until Barack Obama's last two years such as trans-genderism in the military, the contraception mandate.

A number of his EPA regulations, a lot of conservatives are very proud of his deregulation agenda. I've got news for you.

LEVIN: So, what's happened to all that?

HOROWITZ: The courts are enjoining them. Basically, the legal profession has created this rule where any left-wing, third-party group could get standing in a court to sue an abstract policy with no valid injuction fact and put a nationwide -- have a district judge put a nationwide...

LEVIN: There's thousands of thousands of district judges.

HOROWITZ: Almost a thousand and then put a nationwide injunction on...

LEVIN: And block the President's agenda. What's your take on this?

KIRK: When I was raised, I was told there are three branches of government. That is not true.

LEVIN: There's at least four, I think.

KIRK: There's a fourth branch of government and in fact, it's the most powerful. It's unaccountable, it's unelected and it's unknown, and that's the bureaucracies and included in that are these district court judges, and as you articulate very well, in the original draft of the Constitution, circuit court or district judge is found nowhere. There was a Supreme Court and that was it.

People need to understand that a majority of our laws and the power that is vested within our government is not between the Supreme Court, it is not between the legislative or the executive, it's between the bureaucracies and they are putting an unprecedented amount of pressure on our freedoms and liberties on a state, local and Federal level all across the country and again, they're unaudited, they are unaccountable and they are unknown.

We don't know their names. We can't get rid of them. We can't vote them out. This is something the Founding Fathers did not, I think even foresee in some ways because the bureaucracy has a life of its own. It's a multimillion person standing army against our freedom and liberty and one of the greatest threats to America we have today.

LEVIN: So with these unelected branches, the courts and much of the courts have been created by Congress and the administrative state also created by Congress, that legislate, that adjudicate and that execute, and they're outside the Constitutional system and outside our ability to reach them. All right, we'll be right back.

Welcome back. I am going to ask you what I've asked all my guest so far. The next 20 years in America, do you feel positive about it or not so positive? Charlie.

KIRK: Positive despite unprecedented odds, opposition from people that want to destroy this country. Never bet against America and don't bet against the American people. We have the enemies of freedom in our colleges, in our culture, in our media but with people like you and we have people like our organization and our student activists that are rising up and fighting every single day that are signaling the alarm and organizing for ideas that are timeless. I am optimistic because that's exactly it -- it's the idea. It's more than anything else, freedom will always win.

LEVIN: Daniel?

HOROWITZ: It's all in our hands. If you ask me about the next three or five years, I do unfortunately see a resurgent of the left, but over the next 20 years, the good news as Charlie has said, the left is overplaying their hand.

The country does not want what they want and I think that is the opportunity for younger conservatives to come in and offer something affirmative that speaks to people's hearts and their intellect and where they are and when they balance that against what they see in the left, I am confident in the long run, we will win out. But we've got to seize the opportunity.

LEVIN: You both are a little more confident than I am and that's okay. It doesn't really matter, I suppose. What matters is we keep fighting and keep advancing the cause and our ideas. I want to thank you. You've been terrific guests. And I want to thank you too, America and I will see you here next time. Thank you and God bless.

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