Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James told host Alex Marlow on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily on Tuesday that we need to “win the opposition” to “grow the [conservative] movement.”

Marlow and James lamented the current toxic political environment, arguing that it makes it that much more difficult to debate America’s pressing issues.

James argued, “It’s become a debate of personalities, a debate about who we like and who we don’t like. At the end of the day, it should be a debate about ideas.”

James continued, “If we can’t as a nation demonstrate to the rest of the world to have profoundly different points of view, debate those ideas in a civil way, it’s not just a problem for the country; it’s a problem for the entire world.”

Marlow contended, “I think we’re building up a huge advantage on the right, learning how to communicate with the people on the left.”

The Heritage Foundation president argued that many young liberals have the right instincts to address societal issues; however, they just have the wrong answers and underlying philosophy.

James argued, “I think young people are searching for values and ideas. They feel passionately about the poor. They feel passionately about access to health care. They feel passionately about all of these issues. They just happen to be wrong about the ideas and the philosophy and the end result.”

James then revealed that she asked a class of interns at the Heritage Foundation if they came to the conservative think tank to “learn and get all of the tools to annihilate the competition.”

After a few of the Heritage interns raised their hands, James rebuked that argument, saying, “Here we want to teach you how to win the opposition. Our goal is to win more people to our side.”

Regarding the nation’s gun control debate, James said, “I love to see young people engaged, but I realized then how misinformed these people are and how I believe they were being manipulated by the anti-gun lobby in this country, who never miss an opportunity to seize upon a crisis to push their agenda.”

“I don’t think this entire conversation can devolve into an entire conversation that says, ‘Ban guns.’ It’s much more complicated than that,” James added.

The Heritage Foundation president concluded, “We as a nation don’t want to deal with the complexity. We don’t want to deal with these mental health issues.”

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.

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