Turning Point USA founder and Executive Director Charlie Kirk told Breitbart News that President Donald Trump “recognizes the importance of the culture war” and that when the president sees his supporters — as well as constitutional liberties — under attack, he “has an obligation to have their backs.” Kirk offered his remarks in a Saturday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Matt Boyle.

“What the president did this week is so historic,” said Charlie Kirk, “The signing of an executive order that any institution of higher learning that does not protect the First Amendment rights of their students will — have their federal funding in jeopardy. This is long overdue.”

Kirk had also noted that while the president may have had a “great week,” his successes had not been efficiently reported on by the mainstream media — a mainstream press that seemed to only be focused on the Mueller report.

“If you think [the left] is going to stop — you’re wrong,” added Kirk with regards to the Mueller report, “They’re going to say this not adequate enough — Why? Because he’s defending this country from leftist forces. They know that he is the greatest firewall from the left that we’ve ever had, and they’re going to stop, and that’s why we have to have his back.”

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With regards to the president’s executive order, Kirk believes “the straw that broke the camel’s back” on prompting the president to take action was after conservative activist Hayden Williams was punched in the face at the University of California Berkeley while recruiting students for the school’s Turning Point USA student group.

Kirk added that president Trump “recognizes the importance of the culture war.”

“The president takes this seriously,” said Kirk, “and he understands that his movement is actually growing, and that when it’s under attack by the left, he has an obligation to have their backs, and God bless this president for engaging in that cultural conversation and backing it up real policies.”

The Turning Point USA founder offered additional remarks on the culture war of today.

As the great Andrew Breitbart used to say, ‘politics flows downstream from culture.’ Everyone involved in conservative politics should say that every day, because we should be involved in conservative culture, not conservative politics. Politics is just a byproduct of the winners and losers of the culture war. How is culture determined? Through media, family, church, and college campuses. That’s how culture is determined. At Turning Point USA, we really hyper-focus on the college campuses — and something that Breitbart has done such a good job of covering is the suppression of free speech, the suppression of expression on college campuses, where these intellectual tyrants have created these islands of totalitarianism on these college campuses to suppress different opinions.

In another interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily, Kirk had mentioned “the cartel of the colleges.” Boyle asked him to elaborate on what he meant by that.

It’s no different than an inside-out relationship with any crony deal that we see between supposed private industry and government. It’s this, really, festered union between big government and “big universities,” and so, what you have is a handful of colleges that hide behind their — phony certification that was given by the Department of Education. They receive ridiculous amounts of money in subsidized student loans, they receive billions of dollars in grants from the federal government, and they continue to raise their tuition rates, they continue to raise their fees, with no recourse whatsoever. Not to mention, they’re teaching ideology and they’re teaching philosophy that is fundamentally destructive to our country — Essentially, we’re having a generation borrow money they don’t have to study things that don’t matter to find jobs that don’t exist — it empowers this cartel to be able to advance anti-Western, anti-capitalistic, and anti-conservative values and causes — Where do you think AOC got all of her ideology from? She got it from the universities.

“This cartel only gets more and more powerful thanks to this ridiculous construct of funding that we have designed,” added Kirk, “And so this executive order challenges that cartel. I love seeing that.”

Kirk also noted that the next executive order he would like to see would be one that goes after “big tech.”

“People don’t realize the power that Google has over our country,” said Kirk, referencing a report on Friday by Breitbart News, which covered new research from psychologist and search engine expert Dr. Robert Epstein that shows biased Google searches had a measurable impact on the 2018 midterm elections in favor of Democrat candidates.

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