Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk told Republicans to stop laughing off 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Thursday, during a speech at CPAC, because “he could win” against President Donald Trump in the election.

“I hear people all the time they say, ‘How on Earth could a Bolshevik, could a bread line advocate, could a Marxist be leading the Democrat Primary?’ and I say, ‘Have you visited a college campus at all in the last twenty years?'” Kirk said. “What I see every day is students that are being taught that our country is racist, and bigoted, and homophobic, and backwards, and they’re being taught nothing but negatives about the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world.”

Kirk continued, “I push back when people say, ‘Well there’s no way that Bernie Sanders could become president of the United States.’ No, he could win.”

“I want every conservative activist in this room to get your laughs out of the way and get the mockery out of the way and then get deathly serious, because we should not do what the left did in 2016 and dismiss an outsider populist candidate from thinking that person can’t win the White House,” he explained, adding, “Because as the great Andrew Breitbart taught us, politics flows downstream from culture, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve been losing culture for the last twenty years.”

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