October 16, 2025 • 14 mins
The Vice President of Policy for the Heartland Institute, Justin Haskins, shared his thoughts on the loss of Charlie Kirk, plus the important development in voting in America.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome morning friends. Welcome, it is another Tuesday here on
the Morning Show with Preston Scott. Great to be with you.
He is Jose. I am Preston, and this is the
vice president of the Heartland Institute and senior fellow Justin Haskins. Hey, friend,
(00:25):
how are you.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I'm doing well, doing very well.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
How are you awesome? Tell me about the new title
and the new responsibilities.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, that's very exciting. I've been at the Heartland and
Student National free Market thing tank for over a decade now,
and very recently the leadership here asked me to step
up and start serving in a higher role. WHI I'll
be running public policy for the organization and working on
government relations projects across the country and helping do innovative
(00:57):
new research projects. And the left should be worried, the
left should be worried. I'm coming for all of them.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
So I love it.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
You know. Our good friend doctor Bob McClure, president of
the James Madison Institute, says on this program almost every
time we visit that good policy is good politics. That
if you get it reversed, you have a debacle. You
can't let the politics define the policy. I take it
you are of the same mindset that good policy is
(01:29):
the fundamental baseline through which governance has to take shape.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yes, a politician is only as good as the policies
that they actually put into place. And people have learned
not the hard way over many, many decades of watching
what goes on in Washington, DC and state capitals. So
I am actually not a big believer in politicians. I'm
(01:55):
a big believer in policies. Sometimes really bad politicians put
good policies into place, and vice versa. So the focus
should always be policy. That's the thing that actually impacts people.
Politics makes for good television, and you know, it makes
for good discussion and everything and it and it does
have an impact obviously because it affects policy. But at
(02:18):
the end of the day, if you're rooting for someone
just because they have the right letter next to their name,
then you're not paying attention. The reality is, if you
want America to be a freer, more prosperous place, you
need to focus on good policy, not on politics.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Justin you know, to paraphrase Woody from Toy Story, politics
poisons the water hole. And I really think that, you know,
I reflected on this while I was thinking about our
visit today, it was one month ago you and I.
You and I traditionally have our visits on the second
(02:55):
Tuesday of the month. One month ago, on the second
Tuesday of the month, Charlie Kirk had one day left
to live. And to bring those points together, we are
seeing now how politics poisons, how politics has caused a
devolution in social discourse and in civil dialogue and debate.
(03:19):
And I'm not quite sure how to recover from it.
But I'd love to get your thoughts on Charlie and
what's happened.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, obviously, what happened with Charlie Kirk was horrifically tragic,
and in a lot of ways, one of the most
tragic parts about it was that it really isn't all
that surprising that this happened because of the problem we've
had with politics and discourse in this country. The last
(03:51):
continues to believe that the right, regular people on the
right are fascists and Nazis and evil, and that they're
going to lock kids in cages, and that they're going
to do the most horrific things imaginable, and that they're
coming for regular people in a fascistic way. Like they're Nazis,
(04:13):
And because they use that language over and over and
over again, some people have come to believe it. Millions
of people, they really do believe it. And the right,
some parts of the right, use very similar language about
the left, And the reality is that in the vast
majority of cases, there is a lot more going on
here than that. Now. I have some really serious problems
(04:36):
with how authoritarian in certain respects the left has become,
especially when it comes to free speech and other things.
There's been a real problem there, I believe. But the
fact of the matter is there is we have not
come anywhere near close a level where people should be
shooting other people in the streets. That is just absolutely insane.
(04:59):
It's being than by false perceptions that both sides have
of the other side because of politics. If we stayed
focused on the actual issues, not only would we get
more things done and live in a better country, but
I think the temperature in the room probably would come
down a bit. But the reality is politicians are capitalizing
(05:20):
on the situation. They're capitalizing on social media, they're capitalizing
on the twenty four hour, seven day a week news
media in order to score political points. And the best
way to do that for them is to drive hatred
of the other side. It helps with fundraising, it helps
with them getting re elected over and over and over again,
and it keeps the focus off of our things actually
(05:41):
getting better. And because of that, until people wake up
and realize that's the situation and that you shouldn't pay
so much attention to those kinds, that the rhetoric, and
you should spend more time focusing on what are the
actual solutions here, forget about the rhetoric. Until that happens,
we're going to continue to see this escalating. And unfortunately,
(06:02):
I don't think Charlie Kirk is going to be the
last person who's going to lose his life because of politics.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
We have talked justin even even today about the fact
and the difference that when there's violence political or otherwise,
if it's acted out by people quote on the right
side of the aisle, we never celebrate that, We don't
rejoice over that, and it, to me is one of
the big distinctions between the two sides of where we
(06:31):
are ideologically in our country right now. So let me
ask you the question I have asked everybody in the
week's subsequent to Charlie's assassination. What was worse that Charlie
Kirk was killed or that we have millions of people
celebrating it.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Oh, it's one that they're people celebrating it, and I
think it's because it is a better indicator of how
broken our society is. That that's really the issue. There's
always situations where you could have, even the most you know,
United country, you could have an assassination where someone gets killed.
(07:13):
It's just a crazy person goes and kills someone. It
doesn't necessarily mean anything about where society is as a whole.
But in this particular case, the celebration of it is
sort of or even just in a lot of cases,
not celebrating but just saying, well, you know, he shouldn't
have gotten killed, but you know, he kind of deserved it.
That kind of attitude is just it's indictive of where
(07:38):
we're at as a country. And again, I think it's
indictive of where the left is when they hear the
rhetoric over and over and over again that Charlie Kirk
was a fascist, he was a you know, Nazi sympathizer,
he was a white supremacist, he was you know, these
are the kinds of things that were said about him
over and over and over again. None of it was
even remotely true, but that kind of language for people
(08:01):
who aren't really paying attention or who are sort of
radical in their views, it made things even more radicalized
and turned the temperature up in the room for really
what the past two decades. This has been going on now,
and I think you have a whole generation of people
who are now voting age, you know, millennials and gen
(08:24):
Z who really do have extremely radical views. And I
think that problem is not going to go away overnight,
and it's a massive, massive one because as more younger,
as younger people take over a greater share of the electorate,
things are going to get uglier over time because the
(08:47):
differences between the average millennial conservative and average millennial liberal,
and the average gen Z conservative and the average gen
Z millennial gen Z liberal are so extreme now, so extreme,
and their positions are so diametrically opposed to each other
that the conflict and is just going to be exacerbated.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
I want to get your reaction to a story we
talked about yesterday, and I'm not sure it's getting a
whole lot of attention, but big picture. What is the
impact of dominion voting systems now being owned by an
American who is vowing that it's going to be one
hundred percent American owned, operated and audited.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, this is a great story because even it's sort
of everyone should be in favor of this. It's sort
of like, even if you don't think there are any
problems with the voting machines, and there are reasons to
think that there are issues with voting machines, even if
you don't believe that, though, wouldn't you rather have someone
who wants to be very transparent and regularly ought at
(09:54):
them and make sure that there isn't anything going on
behind the scenes and opening all of that up to
the public so everyone can have trust in them. Because
that's fundamentally regardless of whether an election is full of
problems or not, when it comes to devoting machines, if
people believe that there's a problem, then it taints the
(10:14):
outcome of the election, regardless of whether there was one
or not. Right, And so this is a really good thing.
Regardless of whether you think voting machines were a huge problem,
and obviously a lot of people think that, but regardless
of whether you think that this is great because we
need more transparency so that people have greater trust in
our elections, because that's a huge problem right now.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
I want to bring up another issue, and that is
the government shut down and the I'm getting a lot
of email from people saying, how is it possible that
in a government shut down, the people that will never
be affected are the people responsible for the shutdown?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
I e.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Congress justin how is it possible that we are in
a place where they get paid but a bunch of
other people aren't.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Well. I've been asking myself that question for a long time.
I mean, we have these government shutdowns or threats of
government shutdowns every year. Every year this is something like
this happens or almost happens, sometimes multiple times in a year,
and at the end of the day, the elites who
are making the rules are going to be taken care of,
(11:22):
and it's everybody else who hangs in the balance. And
it's completely insane. And all of the stems from the
fact that they just can't pass regular budgets like every
other functioning organization in the world. Why is that because
they ultimately are playing politics and they're not doing the
right thing for people, and until the voters stand up
(11:43):
and say, we're just gonna you need to pass an
actual budget. Get together and pass an actual budget, do
it every single year, or you're gone until that happens,
and until we have a sustainable path for you know,
reducing the national debt and things like that, which is
also a huge part of this conversation. This is going
(12:03):
to continue to happen forever, and politicians fees on the
so called crisis that they're manufacturing to accomplish other goals
that have nothing to do with making people's lives better
or not. And that's the problem. This is just a
big political game that happens every single year, sometimes multiple
times a year, and it's the voters who are allowing
it to happen and have to stand up and say
(12:24):
we're done with this.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
That circles back to my long standing complaint that we
just don't have adequate messaging on the right to inform
people that we don't have to do it this way.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
No we don't, we don't have to do it this way.
We don't have to play these games. And I think
sometimes we do need to allow the kamfermant to just
shut down for a while that's what it takes to
get a permanent deal in place, a permanent process that
prevents this from happening in the future. Just let it
get shut down and let's solve the problem permanently. Instead,
(12:57):
we're always worried about trying to win the next news
cycle instead of just do the right thing for the
long term good of the country.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
I'm curious if Congress wasn't paid during a lockdown, do
you think we'd have them a shutdown rather?
Speaker 2 (13:12):
No, No, I do not think that. I don't think
we would have I don't think so at all. No.
I think there are a lot of self interested people
in Washington, DC, not just the actual members of Congress themselves,
but their staff and other people who would make sure
that those these shutdowns don't happen.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
It just seems to me that there are just a
few members of Congress in both the House and the
Senate that this would be the perfect time to strike.
While the attention is on the shutdown and it grows
with every day the shutdown lasts to say we're going
to put forth legislation that Congress doesn't get paid in
a government shutdown, I think it would have an immense
(13:52):
impact on, if nothing else, the public perception of these things.
If they took advantage of this opportunity. But am I
asking too much?
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Well, they'll they'll be surely punished for doing that. They
will be retribution from leadership. That's kind of how these
things work. Is you know, if you hold if you
hold your own side accountable too too accountable, then you know,
you you risk losing out on committee spots, you risk
you risk losing funding in the next election. Uh, it's
(14:26):
you know, it's a dangerous game to do something like that.
But is that what should happen? Yeah, that's probably what
should happen because it would signal to the American people
what's really going on here.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
I love it. Justin, congrats on the on the bump
at Heartland Institute Vice President now policy and I can't
think of anybody better to put it all in the
hands of. So thanks very much for your time again,
Thank you, sir.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Take care all right.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Justin Haskins with us this morning here in the Morning
Show with Preston Scott
Welcome morning friends. Welcome, it is another Tuesday here on
the Morning Show with Preston Scott. Great to be with you.
He is Jose. I am Preston, and this is the
vice president of the Heartland Institute and senior fellow Justin Haskins. Hey, friend,
(00:25):
how are you.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I'm doing well, doing very well.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
How are you awesome? Tell me about the new title
and the new responsibilities.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, that's very exciting. I've been at the Heartland and
Student National free Market thing tank for over a decade now,
and very recently the leadership here asked me to step
up and start serving in a higher role. WHI I'll
be running public policy for the organization and working on
government relations projects across the country and helping do innovative
(00:57):
new research projects. And the left should be worried, the
left should be worried. I'm coming for all of them.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
So I love it.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
You know. Our good friend doctor Bob McClure, president of
the James Madison Institute, says on this program almost every
time we visit that good policy is good politics. That
if you get it reversed, you have a debacle. You
can't let the politics define the policy. I take it
you are of the same mindset that good policy is
(01:29):
the fundamental baseline through which governance has to take shape.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yes, a politician is only as good as the policies
that they actually put into place. And people have learned
not the hard way over many, many decades of watching
what goes on in Washington, DC and state capitals. So
I am actually not a big believer in politicians. I'm
(01:55):
a big believer in policies. Sometimes really bad politicians put
good policies into place, and vice versa. So the focus
should always be policy. That's the thing that actually impacts people.
Politics makes for good television, and you know, it makes
for good discussion and everything and it and it does
have an impact obviously because it affects policy. But at
(02:18):
the end of the day, if you're rooting for someone
just because they have the right letter next to their name,
then you're not paying attention. The reality is, if you
want America to be a freer, more prosperous place, you
need to focus on good policy, not on politics.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Justin you know, to paraphrase Woody from Toy Story, politics
poisons the water hole. And I really think that, you know,
I reflected on this while I was thinking about our
visit today, it was one month ago you and I.
You and I traditionally have our visits on the second
(02:55):
Tuesday of the month. One month ago, on the second
Tuesday of the month, Charlie Kirk had one day left
to live. And to bring those points together, we are
seeing now how politics poisons, how politics has caused a
devolution in social discourse and in civil dialogue and debate.
(03:19):
And I'm not quite sure how to recover from it.
But I'd love to get your thoughts on Charlie and
what's happened.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah, obviously, what happened with Charlie Kirk was horrifically tragic,
and in a lot of ways, one of the most
tragic parts about it was that it really isn't all
that surprising that this happened because of the problem we've
had with politics and discourse in this country. The last
(03:51):
continues to believe that the right, regular people on the
right are fascists and Nazis and evil, and that they're
going to lock kids in cages, and that they're going
to do the most horrific things imaginable, and that they're
coming for regular people in a fascistic way. Like they're Nazis,
(04:13):
And because they use that language over and over and
over again, some people have come to believe it. Millions
of people, they really do believe it. And the right,
some parts of the right, use very similar language about
the left, And the reality is that in the vast
majority of cases, there is a lot more going on
here than that. Now. I have some really serious problems
(04:36):
with how authoritarian in certain respects the left has become,
especially when it comes to free speech and other things.
There's been a real problem there, I believe. But the
fact of the matter is there is we have not
come anywhere near close a level where people should be
shooting other people in the streets. That is just absolutely insane.
(04:59):
It's being than by false perceptions that both sides have
of the other side because of politics. If we stayed
focused on the actual issues, not only would we get
more things done and live in a better country, but
I think the temperature in the room probably would come
down a bit. But the reality is politicians are capitalizing
(05:20):
on the situation. They're capitalizing on social media, they're capitalizing
on the twenty four hour, seven day a week news
media in order to score political points. And the best
way to do that for them is to drive hatred
of the other side. It helps with fundraising, it helps
with them getting re elected over and over and over again,
and it keeps the focus off of our things actually
(05:41):
getting better. And because of that, until people wake up
and realize that's the situation and that you shouldn't pay
so much attention to those kinds, that the rhetoric, and
you should spend more time focusing on what are the
actual solutions here, forget about the rhetoric. Until that happens,
we're going to continue to see this escalating. And unfortunately,
(06:02):
I don't think Charlie Kirk is going to be the
last person who's going to lose his life because of politics.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
We have talked justin even even today about the fact
and the difference that when there's violence political or otherwise,
if it's acted out by people quote on the right
side of the aisle, we never celebrate that, We don't
rejoice over that, and it, to me is one of
the big distinctions between the two sides of where we
(06:31):
are ideologically in our country right now. So let me
ask you the question I have asked everybody in the
week's subsequent to Charlie's assassination. What was worse that Charlie
Kirk was killed or that we have millions of people
celebrating it.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Oh, it's one that they're people celebrating it, and I
think it's because it is a better indicator of how
broken our society is. That that's really the issue. There's
always situations where you could have, even the most you know,
United country, you could have an assassination where someone gets killed.
(07:13):
It's just a crazy person goes and kills someone. It
doesn't necessarily mean anything about where society is as a whole.
But in this particular case, the celebration of it is
sort of or even just in a lot of cases,
not celebrating but just saying, well, you know, he shouldn't
have gotten killed, but you know, he kind of deserved it.
That kind of attitude is just it's indictive of where
(07:38):
we're at as a country. And again, I think it's
indictive of where the left is when they hear the
rhetoric over and over and over again that Charlie Kirk
was a fascist, he was a you know, Nazi sympathizer,
he was a white supremacist, he was you know, these
are the kinds of things that were said about him
over and over and over again. None of it was
even remotely true, but that kind of language for people
(08:01):
who aren't really paying attention or who are sort of
radical in their views, it made things even more radicalized
and turned the temperature up in the room for really
what the past two decades. This has been going on now,
and I think you have a whole generation of people
who are now voting age, you know, millennials and gen
(08:24):
Z who really do have extremely radical views. And I
think that problem is not going to go away overnight,
and it's a massive, massive one because as more younger,
as younger people take over a greater share of the electorate,
things are going to get uglier over time because the
(08:47):
differences between the average millennial conservative and average millennial liberal,
and the average gen Z conservative and the average gen
Z millennial gen Z liberal are so extreme now, so extreme,
and their positions are so diametrically opposed to each other
that the conflict and is just going to be exacerbated.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
I want to get your reaction to a story we
talked about yesterday, and I'm not sure it's getting a
whole lot of attention, but big picture. What is the
impact of dominion voting systems now being owned by an
American who is vowing that it's going to be one
hundred percent American owned, operated and audited.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, this is a great story because even it's sort
of everyone should be in favor of this. It's sort
of like, even if you don't think there are any
problems with the voting machines, and there are reasons to
think that there are issues with voting machines, even if
you don't believe that, though, wouldn't you rather have someone
who wants to be very transparent and regularly ought at
(09:54):
them and make sure that there isn't anything going on
behind the scenes and opening all of that up to
the public so everyone can have trust in them. Because
that's fundamentally regardless of whether an election is full of
problems or not, when it comes to devoting machines, if
people believe that there's a problem, then it taints the
(10:14):
outcome of the election, regardless of whether there was one
or not. Right, And so this is a really good thing.
Regardless of whether you think voting machines were a huge problem,
and obviously a lot of people think that, but regardless
of whether you think that this is great because we
need more transparency so that people have greater trust in
our elections, because that's a huge problem right now.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
I want to bring up another issue, and that is
the government shut down and the I'm getting a lot
of email from people saying, how is it possible that
in a government shut down, the people that will never
be affected are the people responsible for the shutdown?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
I e.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Congress justin how is it possible that we are in
a place where they get paid but a bunch of
other people aren't.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Well. I've been asking myself that question for a long time.
I mean, we have these government shutdowns or threats of
government shutdowns every year. Every year this is something like
this happens or almost happens, sometimes multiple times in a year,
and at the end of the day, the elites who
are making the rules are going to be taken care of,
(11:22):
and it's everybody else who hangs in the balance. And
it's completely insane. And all of the stems from the
fact that they just can't pass regular budgets like every
other functioning organization in the world. Why is that because
they ultimately are playing politics and they're not doing the
right thing for people, and until the voters stand up
(11:43):
and say, we're just gonna you need to pass an
actual budget. Get together and pass an actual budget, do
it every single year, or you're gone until that happens,
and until we have a sustainable path for you know,
reducing the national debt and things like that, which is
also a huge part of this conversation. This is going
(12:03):
to continue to happen forever, and politicians fees on the
so called crisis that they're manufacturing to accomplish other goals
that have nothing to do with making people's lives better
or not. And that's the problem. This is just a
big political game that happens every single year, sometimes multiple
times a year, and it's the voters who are allowing
it to happen and have to stand up and say
(12:24):
we're done with this.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
That circles back to my long standing complaint that we
just don't have adequate messaging on the right to inform
people that we don't have to do it this way.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
No we don't, we don't have to do it this way.
We don't have to play these games. And I think
sometimes we do need to allow the kamfermant to just
shut down for a while that's what it takes to
get a permanent deal in place, a permanent process that
prevents this from happening in the future. Just let it
get shut down and let's solve the problem permanently. Instead,
(12:57):
we're always worried about trying to win the next news
cycle instead of just do the right thing for the
long term good of the country.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
I'm curious if Congress wasn't paid during a lockdown, do
you think we'd have them a shutdown rather?
Speaker 2 (13:12):
No, No, I do not think that. I don't think
we would have I don't think so at all. No.
I think there are a lot of self interested people
in Washington, DC, not just the actual members of Congress themselves,
but their staff and other people who would make sure
that those these shutdowns don't happen.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
It just seems to me that there are just a
few members of Congress in both the House and the
Senate that this would be the perfect time to strike.
While the attention is on the shutdown and it grows
with every day the shutdown lasts to say we're going
to put forth legislation that Congress doesn't get paid in
a government shutdown, I think it would have an immense
(13:52):
impact on, if nothing else, the public perception of these things.
If they took advantage of this opportunity. But am I
asking too much?
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Well, they'll they'll be surely punished for doing that. They
will be retribution from leadership. That's kind of how these
things work. Is you know, if you hold if you
hold your own side accountable too too accountable, then you know,
you you risk losing out on committee spots, you risk
you risk losing funding in the next election. Uh, it's
(14:26):
you know, it's a dangerous game to do something like that.
But is that what should happen? Yeah, that's probably what
should happen because it would signal to the American people
what's really going on here.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
I love it. Justin, congrats on the on the bump
at Heartland Institute Vice President now policy and I can't
think of anybody better to put it all in the
hands of. So thanks very much for your time again,
Thank you, sir.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Take care all right.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Justin Haskins with us this morning here in the Morning
Show with Preston Scott
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