Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, described immigration as America’s “biggest issue” in a Thursday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
“I think the biggest issue in America is immigration, and without this president, we would not even be talking about it,” said Kirk. “He’s stayed so disciplined on it. He did not waver, and he really stayed in a way that said, ‘Here’s the issue, and here’s a solution to it.'”
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Kirk credited the late Andrew Breitbart with demonstrating how social media platforms can be used to “put [the left] on defense.”
“Andrew Breitbart exposed this in the new digital era right around 2008 and 2009 where the left just used the same mob mentality that they used in the 60s and 70s, and the 30s and 40s,” stated Kirk. “They brought it digitally and they brought it online. What we’ve tried to do [at Turning Point USA], and the lesson I learned from Andrew is, these public forums — allegedly public forums, I have to qualify that — Google or Twitter or Facebook, if used properly, you can put forth arguments and put them on defense.”
Conservatives and the broader right tend to have a more difficult time organizing for political action than those on the left, assessed Kirk.
“Going back to the philosophical roots of why the left is a mob,” claimed Kirk:
They don’t think as individuals. They inherently think as a collective. … They will sacrifice their individuality on behalf of what’s good for the collective. … Sometimes a little bit of cohesion isn’t bad, and that’s the argument for conservative populism. If we’re 53 million individuals, it’s really hard to get something done with excitement behind a cohesive message or brand, and that lends power to the elites when you don’t have that grassroots accountability via populism, which I think Trump has done super well. That’s why I love the rallies and why he stays in touch with the everyday folks.
Kirk credited President Donald Trump with a national political realignment across the partisan divide.
“The Republican Party over the last thirty years, minus Reagan, was a party that catered to a cluster of a couple thousand elites centralized in the West Coast and the East Coast,” assessed Kirk. “And now the Republican Party owns the American middle class.”
Marlow interjected, “And the working class. Democrats are the party of the super-elite.”
Kirk added, “And the permanently poor.”
Breitbart News, said Kirk, is providing “an incredible amount of intellectual ammunition” and “compelling arguments” against left-wing orthodoxy and consensus.
Marlow noted the rising sense of urgency among conservatives regarding politically driven censorship and content management deployed by social media companies
“Big tech cronyism has finally gone mainstream this year at CPAC, and this is one that we’ve been hammering,” declared Marlow.
Kirk responded, “And that shows the influence of Breitbart because it’s now into the ether and the CPAC mainstream. … This has been brewing in the conservative movement for years.”
“You personally, I think, have been able to navigate the treacherous waters of big tech,” said Marlow. “But this is a massive problem for your business model, for my business model, that there are these platforms controlled almost 100 percent by left-wing globalists who are looking to come up with excuses to shut us down.
Kirk said:
It’s almost an oligarchy, and they have no transparency. There’s no accountability structure. I believe markets improve people’s lives … but with that being said — I look at big tech — they benefit a lot from government deals, many of them, including Google and Amazon, whether it be cloud server deal or government contracts. What’s going to prevent Google from completely altering our societies if they want to, whether it be through behavioral technologies, search engine manipulation, data-mining? It’s rather horrifying stuff. … Now there’s a non-government entity that may have more power than the IRS.
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
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