In this episode, we sit down with the hosts of and to talk about how they came to be, why they started the show, and what it takes to be honest in the modern media world. We also talk about why it s important to be candid, and why you should be honest no matter who you are or what you're trying to get across. And of course, there's a little bit of politics at the end of the episode, which is always a fun part of the conversation, and a lot of laughs along the way! Thank you so much for tuning in, and we hope you have a great rest of your week! -Jon Sorrentino and Alex Blumberg Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD, tyops, and tyops. We do not own the rights to either of these songs used in this episode. credit goes to original artists and artists, but we do have a song written and produced by them as well. Thank you for any amount you can manage to make it out there. - Thank you to our sponsors. We are working on a new ad for our new ad, and thank you for all the support we've gotten so far this year. We appreciate all the love and support, we really appreciate it. , we really do appreciate all of the love, support, support and support. you all are amazing. We really appreciate you. -- thank you, thank you. We can t do this. Jon Sorrental - Jon and Alex, Alex, Sarah, Crystal, and Sarah, and the rest of our team. Sarah, Sarah Jon, Kristy, and all of our support. Jon and Sarah . Jon and Crystal Alex, Thank you Jon, Rachel, and Rachel Sarah & Rachel . Thank you, Sarah and Rachel. . We love you all so much, we love you, we appreciate you all of you. -Jon and Rachel, Thank You, Rachel - Sarah, Kristian, and Kristian & Rachel, & Rachel. - Thankyou, Rachel & Rachel . - Rachel, Caitlyn Kristian , Rachel, Rachel , and Rachel (and Rachel, etc., etc., & Sarah, etc, etc. - Thanks for listening and supporting us all, Thank yay!
00:00:50.000Like, it's never been harder to actually just do that thing.
00:00:53.000And I can't say, I mean, we don't get it right all the time.
00:00:56.000But the whole idea was to try to have this conversation between kind of the new left and the new right that wasn't happening anywhere in a way that was...
00:01:05.000Valuing people's humanity that was trying to deal in the land of the honest, not cheerleading a team or the other, but actually trying to, like, be straightforward about what we think and evaluating the facts as we find them.
00:01:16.000And I mean, I have to say, like, you have somewhat created that space where that can happen.
00:01:20.000So I think we're in part indebted to you.
00:01:25.000I think the reason it works is because we both kind of came up in quasi traditional background, right?
00:01:30.000Like Crystal came from the MSNBC world.
00:01:32.000Like I was a White House correspondent.
00:01:34.000Like I worked with a lot of these traditional reporters and like, you know, I would do Fox News and all these other things.
00:01:39.000And it's just it's always so frustrating when you're on TV. You get three and a half minutes to talk, right?
00:01:44.000Like I once did a segment on nationalism, which was two and a half minutes with three people on a on a panel.
00:01:50.000Like, how are you supposed to get your point across?
00:01:52.000And so when you're doing that and you see like, so you can make an entire career in D.C. just sticking to the party line no matter what these people believe and you just spit out the talkers that they literally send you.
00:02:44.000I mean, you know, it's not easy to sort of be out there on your own, you know, and I don't want to paint just sort of trying to be honest as a more noble act than it actually is.
00:02:54.000It's very safe if you're within the party structure.
00:02:57.000If you're saying the things that they want you to say, there's a whole system set up for that.
00:03:01.000There's a career system set up for that.
00:03:12.000If you're wrong in the approved ways, right?
00:03:15.000If you're wrong in the non-approved ways, then you can get destroyed, canceled, all of those things.
00:03:21.000So it's a lot safer to stay within the bounds.
00:03:24.000And look, we're living that in real time right now.
00:03:28.000It's never been just with how fraught you have.
00:04:00.000And I want to, I mean, picking up, you're like, why do you do it?
00:04:02.000If you do it, you hop on establishment campaign to establishment campaign, campaign cycles over, you go work at a think tank, which is all your former buddies from the campaign.
00:04:11.000Then you go and you do the talking points.
00:04:16.000Even if nobody likes what you have to say, even if Republican voters or Democratic voters have rejected your message, six out of seven popular vote elections, Doesn't matter, because the money is there.
00:04:26.000And the people who have the money have an interest in propping up that infrastructure.
00:04:30.000So when you get your talking points, you know that if you say them, you're an ex's good graces.
00:05:28.000But can I say also, it's not just that, like, direct career griff trajectory.
00:05:33.000It's also that we're at this point in the nation's history, which again, has never been more obvious than right now, where the stakes feel really existential.
00:05:42.000And, you know, and that's a real thing.
00:05:45.000Before Trump's election, there was this Flight 93 essay where the argument was, look, if you're a social conservative, if you're not sure that this Trump guy is for you, this election is existential.
00:05:57.000You have to grab the controls or else our way of life is going to die.
00:06:01.000Now, I don't agree with that assessment.
00:06:06.000You know, the conservative way of life is going to continue in their churches and people can do what they want to do.
00:06:11.000But that was a legitimate sense among the Trump base.
00:06:16.000And of course, we see it with the Democrats on the left right now.
00:06:19.000And I would say at this moment, it has probably never been more true in terms of that existential nature, as we see, you know, the president calling for potentially military activation in American cities, and we see him You know, using tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protesters.
00:06:35.000So the fact that the stakes feel so existential on both sides make it very, very difficult to engage in a way that is thoughtful, honest, non-hyperbolic, and where everyone's not just basically mad at you all the time.
00:07:14.000So before that, for about a year before that, I'd been co-hosting another great guy, Buck Sexton, and we had sort of a more standard left-right dynamic.
00:08:25.000You have to drive to the Starbucks, which is 20 minutes away.
00:08:29.000So if you're thinking about uploading something really ridiculous, you know, all the way, it cancels out, it times out, and you're like, it's probably for the best.
00:08:36.000You've got to really have some time to, like, think it over before you get there.
00:08:39.000So, yeah, so when Buck wanted to focus on his radio show, and, you know, one of the expectations of The Hill, which is, you know, the corporate news brand that sponsors us, is that this would be a left-right show.
00:08:53.000But I thought, let's do a left-right show in a way that no one has done before, where normally the consensus, the sort of left-right consensus is like this.
00:09:10.000That's in wars and those sorts of things.
00:09:12.000That's the sort of standard bipartisan consensus that you're allowed to have.
00:09:17.000So we thought, what if we did it in a different left-right dynamic where we actually have more overlap on some of these economic issues and the dissent is around more of the cultural issues and what does that look like?
00:09:30.000Because that's actually more representative of where the two parties are headed.
00:09:36.000If you look at where young people are, it's also more representative of where more Americans are.
00:09:41.000I mean, you know, Sagar says, and I think this is true, there is very little representation and has been historically at least for people who are like economically more left and culturally more right.
00:09:55.000All of the elite conversation is this very, like, economically liberal, but on social cultural issues, economically more conservative, like balance the budget and low taxes and stuff, but on social cultural issues, more liberal is more the elite conversation that is commonly happening on cable news,
00:10:13.000even though that's reflective of, like, teeny tiny portion of the system of America.
00:10:34.000It depends on how you define those things.
00:10:36.000But one of the, I mean, the ethos of the show, Crystal actually said this, I think, to the Times, was what if we hated each other less and the elites more?
00:10:59.000Because he'd filled in before, when you have guests on, when you work with someone, especially in a media space, you get a vibe right away.
00:11:08.000And you can tell right away, number one is this person working.
00:11:35.000And look, everyone looks at cable news, even if you are, you know, a kind of standard down the line Democrat or a standard Trump Republican, no one believes that these people are really shooting straight with them.
00:11:47.000Everyone sees the partisan cheerleading that is going on in the normal cable news networks.
00:11:52.000And so it was very easy to see right away that Saga was a person who was willing to You know, to be honest, where his own team was concerned.
00:12:02.000And to me, that was kind of the most important piece.
00:12:19.000And that's this thing I hated the most about.
00:12:21.000My time when I was in the White House press corps, it was very much just like you could predict every single question before the briefing even began.
00:12:30.000And it just used to drive me nuts because you'd see these people and they care a lot more about getting cable news contracts and all that than they ever do.
00:12:37.000Like actually asking legitimate – or like real questions about what you think of this program or whatever.
00:12:42.000It's all – I mean just standard issue crap and it was like every single day.
00:12:48.000And with Crystal, it was like somebody is willing to call out.
00:13:18.000Just, you know, like trying to be honest, trying to like really figure things out.
00:13:22.000And his answer may not always be my answer, but I feel like he's really trying to figure it out and come to a good place and see the best in people also.
00:14:27.000At that point, his campaign from everybody basically except you, he was getting these really stupid questions about like, oh, is it just white nationalists who are supporting you?
00:14:40.000White nationalists picked up Yang as like a meme thing.
00:14:43.000Like they were like, I don't even really remember what the context was, but I mean, he obviously disavowed it, but people were picking it up.
00:14:49.000Like, why are all these white nationalists supporting?
00:14:51.000It's like they're obviously trolling, dude.
00:14:53.000Like, that's what the whole thing is about.
00:14:54.000Isn't that crazy, though, that you can get in trouble for the people that like you?
00:15:37.000I think some of that has to do with this quality of posting things on social media, like this 140 character, now 280 character quality of Twitter, where you're just kind of condensing things, and this reductionist view of stuff,
00:16:44.000This is stupid, but no one gets to say that to them, so they get to put those...
00:16:48.000Tweeting is one of the worst ways to get out information, right?
00:16:53.000It's one of the worst ways to have a dialogue, because especially when you're defining something or someone, and I feel the same way about sometimes, occasionally about really self-righteous blogs, when they write an evil blog about someone, that person doesn't get a chance to respond.
00:17:06.000You're just sort of saying it out there, your perception of that person, and you can make all these horrible distortions, whether it's about Andrew Yang or Tulsi Gabbard or whoever.
00:17:15.000You can make these horrible distortions and then someone reads it and you're putting out this distorted, unchallenged perception of someone.
00:17:24.000Whereas if you were having a conversation with either them or someone who has a more rational point of view, they could say, well, that's not really true, because she actually said this, and this is what she meant, and this is the greater context of the conversation.
00:17:37.000We're constantly trying to draw lines around, like, who are the good people and who are the bad people, and like, where's that bright line, and which side of the line are you on, and you're not allowed to associate with the people on the bad line.
00:17:51.000I think, like, social media obviously exacerbates all of that and makes it a million times worse, no doubt about it, because it's all so simplistic.
00:17:58.000It's all so, like, sensationalist-driven.
00:18:00.000It's all, like, keys into your sort of, like, basic instincts and your adrenaline and your dopamine response and all of that.
00:18:09.000A sort of strategy from the political and media elites in the country where if you pit people against each other, and this is something Matt Taibbi, who's a great guy, you had him on here.
00:18:26.000And his thesis is essentially that once the Cold War ended and we didn't have Russia to be the bad guy, that the new ratings innovation was to make each other the bad guys.
00:18:47.000You can find stories all day long that support that narrative no problem.
00:18:51.000But it also saves any sort of accountability from the people that are in power.
00:18:57.000Because if, you know, people who are out there in the country, if the voters are the problem, if they are bad, if they are evil, if they are deplorable, then it's not the fault of the people in power that things are going wrong.
00:19:11.000It's not their fault that these terrible, evil, sexist, racist, horrible people voted the wrong way.
00:19:27.000I mean, that's just such a huge part of the show, which is just trying to draw compassion for people, trying to understand what motivates 65. I don't know the numbers.
00:19:35.000I think it's 60 something million to pull the lever for Trump.
00:20:02.000And that's actually the thing I love the most about the show is sometimes I have friends, you know, like on the right and they'll say something about the, like, the left thinks this.
00:20:08.000I'll be like, no, man, like, I have a left co-host.
00:20:12.000Her response is X, Y, and Z. I'm sure the same thing happens with Crystal, which is that, you know, as you said, with Twitter, condensing our rhetoric and our politics to 280 characters and trying to condense Hyper complex and multifaceted ideas and multifaceted discussions and deep conversations down to that level helps nobody.
00:20:33.000And actually, all it does is help split people apart for a pretty explicit reason, which is that part of the things that we talk about on the show is the reason why, you know, the elites, the cultural elites right and left kind of want everybody split is because they don't want people to have the uncomfortable conversation.
00:20:50.000… Around how the economy is structured.
00:20:52.000They don't – every day that we talk – we have some cultural debate in the country is every day that we're not talking about how many million people in this country are unemployed right now, about the political choice.
00:21:05.000The political choice is something I talk a lot on the show about, to allow people to be forced off their payroll and to go on to unemployment, to allow businesses to fail, to allow people to suffer when we have the explicit choice.
00:21:19.000Of allowing them to keep their payroll.
00:21:21.000I mean this is something we've been focused on so much because the implications of that when you're also making the explicit choice in order to cap the amount of money that goes to a small business program, when you're doing big checks in order to the airlines which are firing people anyway despite the fact that they got like $50 billion.
00:21:42.000You don't have a conversation about that.
00:21:44.000They will never want to have that one because they want people to hate each other more.
00:22:08.000I think that there's something about the kind of interactions that people are having when they're arguing with shit on Twitter that you could make a real...
00:22:17.000I think you could draw a graph on human beings, on their mental health.
00:24:09.000Making their living trying to figure out how to program your brain to not ever get off Twitter and not ever get off whatever it is that you're obsessed with on your phone or your device.
00:24:50.000You know, one of my friends, J.D. Vance, he wrote this book, Hillbilly Elegy, and one of the things he talks about is he's like, you know, we have our best scientists, neuroscientists, and all these other people in the world trying to figure out how to make you and I spend more micro and milliseconds and kids on their phones than trying to change the world or invent medicine.
00:25:08.000Like, that is kind of the profit incentive, right, for so many of these things.
00:25:23.000There's something about how these systems are designed and the people who are working to try and spend you to make all this time on the phone.
00:25:50.000It makes you feel like you're really like, oh, this tweet, this one's going to be the one that really, you know, and you watch the numbers go up and it makes you feel like you are engaged in some sort of like minor battle of winning these minor victories.
00:26:03.000Go to Sam Tripoli's Instagram page and pull that thing that he said, what white people feel like when they virtue signal.
00:26:55.000It's all, like, rhetorically signaling which side you're on and the sort of illusion of disagreement in Washington when actually, you know, they're unanimously passed things like this $4 trillion for big business and push everybody mass unemployment for the masses.
00:27:10.000My favorite example on that is there was a 10-year birthday party for AIG, which is the big insurance that we bailed out in 2008, in the committee room for the House Ways and Means, which is the committee in charge of taxing in the United States.
00:27:26.000So in the committee room, they held a birthday party for the company that they bailed out.
00:27:31.000Democrats and Republicans all showed up, man.
00:27:33.000They had fucking specialty cocktails at this thing.
00:27:36.000Like, what kind of specialty cocktails?
00:27:43.000In the committee room, in the very room to decide, where they decided to bail these companies out to the tune of billions, you know, during Wall Street and so much more.
00:28:08.000But just the amount of money that's involved in these decisions, the amount of money that's involved in influence and sharing influence and getting people to like your perspective.
00:28:21.000And then the really gross thing is when they leave office, when politicians, particularly the president, leaves office and then they get these fantastic paydays to just speak.
00:28:29.000Would anybody really want to pay to hear Hillary Clinton speak?
00:28:33.000Just fucking imagine being the type of person that's like, I got some fucking hot $1,500 tickets to hear Old Hill.
00:28:41.000My favorite example of this we covered recently, the former U.S. ambassador to China, Max Baucus, he was also on the Senate Banking Commission, is now on the board for Alibaba, which is one of the biggest Chinese companies.
00:28:54.000And then, in the middle of all this stuff around Chinese tariffs and the coronavirus and all that stuff, is out there on CNN and on Chinese state media, being like, Trump is Hitler, like, do what he's doing.
00:29:04.000And I'm like, he was the ambassador to China!
00:29:07.000And now he's getting paid by one of the largest Chinese companies!
00:29:10.000I mean, which, you know, in China, there's no such thing really as private business.
00:29:14.000And it's like, it's just the, it's out in the open.
00:29:17.000I mean, Obama's, another great example, Obama's, I think, is a former NSC director for cybersecurity, went to go work for ZTE, which is a Chinese technology, I mean, for cybersecurity, went to go lobby, is now a lobbyist on behalf of ZTE. It's naked.
00:29:33.000We were talking back, you know, during Ukrainegate when we were talking about, you know, Hunter Biden earning these big paychecks on this Ukrainian.
00:29:59.000This is just because they really think about it that way.
00:30:02.000This is just the way that the town operates.
00:30:05.000And it's easy to look at these individual examples and be disgusted by them.
00:30:10.000But the bottom line is it's a much deeper problem than that.
00:30:14.000We covered a poll recently that was actually done by The Hill and Harris X. People said their number one political issue was corruption.
00:30:21.000Like, beyond climate change or healthcare or whatever, the number one thing that they were most concerned about was political corruption.
00:30:28.000And you look at what is happening in the country right now and the fact that our institutions have no credibility, that there's no expectation that you could affect change through traditional channels, I mean, that feeds into exactly the rage that's exploding across the country.
00:30:47.000And 40 million plus Americans unemployed and hundreds of, you know, 100,000 plus dead and before riots broke down and before George Floyd was killed and before all of that, we covered this poll where 40 percent of Americans, I think it's 43 percent,
00:31:04.000said when they think of our cultural and social institutions, they just want to burn it all down.
00:31:40.000But on the other hand, when you consider the fact that the largest pool of citizens in the country aren't Trump voters or Hillary voters or Biden voters or whatever, they're non-voters.
00:31:50.000These people have said, like, this isn't worth it.
00:31:53.000This is not going to mean jack shit for me in my life.
00:31:57.000And if you look at that number, and then you consider what you see happening across the country, where people, again, they feel like they are so disgusted with what's going on, and they're restless and masked and, like, have had all of their normal tools of Being numbed with infotainment and sugar and all those things and sports sort of taken away from them,
00:32:19.000you start to understand what we're seeing.
00:32:24.000We've never experienced anything like this before and it's fascinating to see how the thin veneer of civilization can be chipped through And you just see the really deep pool of despair that's underneath it.
00:32:36.000There's so much madness going on in the streets today.
00:32:39.000And it's so hard to get a bead on how this is all playing out, like how it's all being organized, how these cops feel like they can just shoot people with rubber bullets and tear gas out in the open in front of everybody.
00:33:23.000And just a beat on her because she's actually a really important voice.
00:33:28.000She came to prominence because she wrote a piece about the struggle that she had experienced as a low-income, working-class person, like just really raw and honest.
00:33:38.000And that went viral and she, from that, was able to write a book and become a journalist.
00:33:44.000So she's one of the few journalists Journalist voices who actually has any connectivity to what regular people go through day to day.
00:33:53.000So, you know, I mean, it's just like awful to see that sort of thing happening to her and to so many others.
00:33:59.000And I mean, Joe, one of the things I always appreciate about your commentary was about about talking about human violence.
00:34:06.000And like the propensity to violence and how thin kind of the veneer of social order and so much of like what that is and what it actually means to like live in a society where whenever you see something like that break down.
00:34:17.000And I've just been thinking about that so much like in the context of what we see right now because I mean it's also crazy like to see footage of people just like they feel like they can just loot with impunity.
00:35:17.000So these businesses that are all supporting the mayor, supporting with taxes, supporting the police officers, they're watching their businesses get smashed and looted.
00:35:54.000There's a giant difference between what those people are doing when they're saying, this is outrageous, we need change, we need a radical overhaul of the system because there's too many corrupt cops.
00:36:04.000Let those people do what they're doing.
00:36:10.000This has been the hardest thing for Crystal and I to cover.
00:36:13.000Like, it's funny because we were coming on here and we were like, and we know all the attention is coming.
00:36:18.000And it's like this, there is nothing else that where the battle lines are so drawn where, frankly, there's probably the biggest difference in our philosophy on this.
00:36:29.000And I've told this to Chris, which is that the beacon was sent out when that Minneapolis mayor let that target go and they let those affordable housing complexes burn and they let the policing burn.
00:36:44.000This was out of political correctness.
00:36:45.000They're like, we don't want to deploy the police because that would seem like we're impugning upon these protesters and we're nowhere.
00:36:52.000And they allowed I mean, they allowed this target in this and it just went And it caught fire.
00:36:57.000And that's why, like, as he said, look, if people want, people should be able to protest in this country.
00:37:02.000And if they're a piece of shit cops who kick them in the face, you know, I've seen terrible videos, some of these things, some of the things that they're doing, awful.
00:37:22.000But you know, here's the thing where there's such hypocrisy, not from Sagar, who's been consistent on this, but from the right in general, is like the response to coronavirus lit 40% of small businesses on fire.
00:37:34.000It's opportunistic caring about it now, mostly from the right.
00:37:38.000And there's also – look, if you think about rule of law, right, you think about law and order, and how do you get to a place where – I disagree with you.
00:37:47.000I don't think it is all different people.
00:37:49.000It's very easy to be like, oh, it's all Antifa or outside agitators or whatever.
00:37:54.000There are certainly – Criminals who are opportunistically using the breakdown of the moment to loot, to vandalize, to do whatever that they're going to do.
00:38:05.000But I think what is harder to reckon with is that you have actually...
00:38:11.000Quote, unquote, ordinary, typically law-abiding people who feel like the moment has broken down to the extent that they would also engage in those kinds of acts.
00:38:25.000But when you think about the moment that we're living in, like, the rules and the laws that have been set have never been that far from, like, that disconnected from what is moral and what is just.
00:38:38.000If you look at $4 trillion to corporations and everyone else, mass unemployment and small businesses destroyed.
00:38:45.000When you look at the fact that of those officers who murdered George Floyd, only one of them has been charged.
00:38:56.000And meanwhile, you've got, you know, 4000 protesters.
00:38:59.000You've got journalists on TV who are being charged.
00:39:02.000If you go back even farther than that, like the financial collapse and you're allowed if you're rich to collapse the entire economy with zero consequence.
00:39:11.000And so, again, this isn't like morally justifying things that are morally unjustifiable, which is what you're talking about.
00:39:19.000But you also have to understand that that doesn't happen in a vacuum.
00:39:22.000There is a systemic breakdown of the legitimacy of rule of law and law and order that leads to not just outside agitators or white nationalists or Russia or Antifa or whoever it is that people are pretending that this is doing all of this to where you have regular citizens who are like,
00:39:46.000In D.C., I walk by the Department of the Treasury, and it's got Black Lives Matter scrawled on it, right?
00:39:51.000They're intentionally going to the high-end parts of town.
00:39:53.000This is actually, in many cases, very political and very specific.
00:39:58.000I think that's a harder thing to have to reckon with, that that dividing line between these are the good law-abiding ones and these are the bad ones, and let's just crack down on the bad ones.
00:40:08.000That line has become very blurry, and that's why it's such an incredibly hard situation.
00:40:14.000But when we're talking about protesters and the cops shooting and attacking protesters, you're really talking about people just standing there protesting.
00:40:21.000What I'm talking about is people actually in the act of looting, when they cross that line.
00:40:26.000There's no justification for smashing into someone's business and stealing their goods.
00:40:30.000I understand that people are upset that $4 trillion went to these corporations.
00:40:35.000I think the logic from the right about this was if you fund the corporations and keep them running, they'll employ these people and keep the society running as smoothly as possible during this unprecedented pandemic.
00:40:48.000Let me pick up on that, Joe, because what it is is that...
00:40:51.000That was the philosophy, but it's often a mistaken one.
00:40:53.000And that there is actually a better option, which is what we talk about so much.
00:40:56.000And what Crystal said, which is, you're right, from the right, there's a lot of concern trolling around small businesses when, let's be honest, they allowed a cap to the White House.
00:41:06.000I mean, advisors or Senate Republicans allowed a cap to be put on the Paycheck Protection Program.
00:41:12.000They allowed that to go capped and allowed it to go dry and had political fights about it.
00:41:16.000There was always been an option to put, you know, this is a right-left thing, Senator Josh Hawley, Senator Cory Gardner, and I think it's Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.
00:41:24.000They have plans to put Americans on their payroll, to have the federal government subsidize that payroll up until the end of this Great Depression.
00:41:31.000And in that way, You keep businesses together, right?
00:41:54.000It was like, let's have millions mass unemployment where you lose your health insurance as well.
00:41:58.000What would you rather them do if you have a pandemic that, look, what it turned out to be was a big difference from what we thought it was going to be.
00:42:19.000When they were trying to figure out a way to mitigate this situation, they decided we're going to shut down society because we want to protect lives over money.
00:42:57.000So the airline bailout, which was custom written, included a provision that you have to keep your workers.
00:43:04.000And so we're going to give you this money and basically backstop payroll.
00:43:06.000And so, look, I mean, they're messing around and then as soon as this ends, they want us to lay people off.
00:43:11.000But if you backstop the payroll and essentially nationalize it, especially in our country where your health insurance is tied to your job.
00:43:19.000So now not only do we have people who are unemployed, but they're losing their health insurance during a pandemic that just compounds everything and is absolutely uncautionable.
00:43:29.000Meanwhile, you know, lots of big corporations got like custom written legislation for themselves.
00:43:34.000And 40% of small businesses told the Chamber of Commerce that they will be closing their doors in the next six months.
00:43:39.000In terms of the cost, I'm fairly certain that Pramila Jayapal won over three months with $600 billion.
00:44:12.000This is my biggest frustration with the White House, which is that you have this populist president who actually understands very much why he got elected.
00:44:37.000Who were like, let's cap the Paycheck Protection Program, who were like, hey, you know, we just passed this $2.3 trillion plan or this bill.
00:44:44.000Let's wait and see how it goes as the, you know, the unemployment numbers begin to take up, mass small business failure, all these other things.
00:44:52.000And that's the fundamental tension of the Trump administration is that there was no, like, there were no professional populists, so to speak, right?
00:45:00.000Like there was no professional apparatus of people on the right.
00:45:27.000Because, I mean, look, he's the president and he makes his own choices.
00:45:31.000And if he understood, like, that there was this need to go more economically left and do it, then he could do it.
00:45:37.000But the reality is he spent most of his political capital in his first term, like, giving away tax cuts to corporations, same thing any other Republican would have done.
00:48:10.000Mandated that they take back in recovering COVID patients.
00:48:14.000And he happens that he got a million-dollar-plus campaign check for his re-election through an affiliated committee before he got re-elected.
00:48:24.000And so he also made sure to put into place a liability for all their executives so that if they don't do a good job, they can't be held liable.
00:48:33.000And that, data shows, is correlated with increased liability.
00:48:37.000COVID, death, and infection rates because they know that they're not going to be held responsible.
00:48:56.000Has he spoken about the recovering COVID patients being readmitted to the nursing homes?
00:49:01.000Not much because his brother on CNN is primetime anchor Chris Cuomo and they do these ridiculous interviews where they like joke around about how big his nose is rather than asking.
00:49:49.000Because he's the biggest Democrat, and they all live in New York, and they all probably have dinner with each other.
00:49:53.000And, of course, I mean, people on the right are talking about it because he's a Democrat.
00:49:56.000But, like, there's no, I mean, outside of Crystal and a few others on the left, you weren't going to And on the right, they're total hypocrites, too.
00:50:02.000Fox News picks it up with this, like, liability story and how he gets this through.
00:50:05.000Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell's proposing the same thing at a national level, and they're like, A-OK with that.
00:50:10.000So, I mean, this gets back to the sort of central concept of the show.
00:52:45.000All I could get from that is Trump needs to be removed from office, so let's come up with some sort of a reason why he's responsible for these riots, and these riots are good, and these riots have been historically done when people feel powerless.
00:53:41.000And I think that's like that piece, understanding Who and why is important to understanding what to do, right?
00:53:50.000Because if it's just – what I have seen hasn't just been, you know, in terms of looting, I don't know specifically, but I think it's very easy to say, oh, it's just this type of person.
00:54:03.000And to take out of it any of the sort of like more radical, not just smashing up stores and that kind of stuff, but like graffiti and more, you know, defying curfews and those sorts of things.
00:54:16.000And so if you view the problem as just like violent protestors, like the problem is violent protestors, we have to deal with that, then that merits one response.
00:54:24.000And that's the direction that Trump is going in is like calling the military, which I think is fucking scary, like calling in active duty military in every city in the country, like we saw with the protestors who got, you know, the tear gas and the rubber bullets in front of the White House who peacefully protest.
00:54:38.000I mean, that shit to me is scary and frankly, The fact that Democrats and quote unquote journalists on TV have acted like the world is ending every time Trump does anything, when he does do something like invoke the Insurrection Act and say we're looking at sending the military into American cities,
00:55:01.000there is no more language of this is unprecedented, this is outrageous, this is, you know, I think?
00:55:25.000The structure of a system that doesn't allow any redress for, you know, problems that people have been peacefully protesting about for a long fucking time and not a thing has been done.
00:55:35.000If you think the protests are about, you know, a political system that will offer you the quote unquote choice of Donald Trump, who's like the Central Park Five dude and redlining with his daddy and denying black people housing and Charlottesville's fine people on both sides versus Joe Biden,
00:55:50.000who wrote the 94 crime bill, is unrepentant for it.
00:55:54.000It was justifying with Charlemagne just recently and saying Hillary's wrong, apologize for it, etc., etc., who, as part of this whole thing, went out and said, you know, police shouldn't be shooting people in the heart.
00:56:04.000Instead, they should shoot them in the leg.
00:56:12.000If you understand that as the legitimate part of the protest, then your response is going to be very different than it's just like, oh, these are bad people.
00:56:20.000These are people we should deem as terrorists.
00:56:46.000Are you going to have militaries holding down American cities every day?
00:56:49.000Because you have a significant chunk of the population that will no longer consent.
00:56:54.000So I think that, I think on this particular one, this is probably where we disagree the most because, and she pointed this out, which is that, to me, it's about the restoration of law and order.
00:57:05.000And look, I mean, this is why you saw these, Joy Reid, right?
00:57:09.000I mean, these people were putting out conspiracy theories that actually, so here's what happened.
00:57:15.000So we'll begin with the timeline, which is that the timeline was, you know, at first the Minneapolis, the Target got looted, you know, the affordable housing complex went down.
00:57:23.000Everybody decided, okay, violence, looting, everything is fine.
00:57:26.000So they're basically justifying it on cable.
00:57:28.000Then what happened is a second night happened, a lot more violence and protests weren't, police and firefighters weren't visible.
00:57:34.000So Minnesota authorities started lying about how...
00:57:38.000Actually, every single person arrested was out of state.
00:58:28.000So look, on the military front, let's think about our history.
00:58:32.000Eisenhower, 1957, calls in the 101st Airborne Division in order to forcibly integrate Little Rock High School to allow the Little Rock Nine to enter that school because a white supremacist violent mob and the local authorities could not be trusted to do so.
00:59:16.000Because, I mean, even if you're on the left, like Joe Biden out today saying he endorses this Hakeem Jeffries bill on banning police chokeholds.
00:59:51.000I've seen the police inciting and creating the dangerous situation.
00:59:56.000Do I have any confidence that given what we saw on TV with the military police coming in and tear gassing and rubber bullets, peaceful populations, that they're going to come in as peacekeepers in these cities?
01:00:27.000But for the president to bring in the American military into cities across the country without local consent, I think is insane.
01:00:37.000But he's only saying that if they don't use the National Guard.
01:00:39.000Think about the context of if you saw this happening in another country, right?
01:00:43.000It's hard to like look at our own country through, you know, neutral lens.
01:00:48.000If you looked at a foreign country and you heard that their president was bringing in the military to quash protesters, would you be like, oh, this is going to go great?
01:01:21.000But we're in agreement, then, even using the National Guard.
01:01:23.000But the military isn't trained to do that.
01:01:25.000That's why we don't have the military do local law enforcement.
01:01:29.000I mean, one of the big problems of local law enforcement has actually been the militarization, which occurred in After 9-11, which occurred under Barack Obama as well, when you roll tanks into American streets and you treat the citizens like this is a war, you escalate the violence.
01:01:45.000So my point is, if you are opposed to the violence, sending in the military is exactly the wrong thing to do.
01:01:50.000Yes, people should have their property protected.
01:01:53.000But you're not saying what the right thing to do is.
01:02:00.000But the police are going to have to do the same thing that the National Guard would do.
01:02:05.000Arrest people for smashing windows and breaking into buildings.
01:02:08.000They just might not have the resources to handle something on the scale that you're seeing in Manhattan.
01:02:12.000See, I think this is the issue, which is that when people like you and I, who are against police violence, who are against and acknowledge this action, we have a solution.
01:02:21.000These people should be fired and there should be inquiries on that.
01:02:23.000But there's no solution that I hear from the left on how do you stop rioting and looting when the governor of the state of New York refuses to activate.
01:02:47.000So, for example, and I know this sounds hokey, but this is true.
01:02:50.000If he had come out last night and instead of having military police shooting tear gas and rubber bullets and flashbang grenades and crushing these protesters, if he had come out with that same cast of characters, Bill Barr and whoever else was with him, and taken a knee For 8 minutes and 45 seconds,
01:03:07.000the amount of time that, you know, George Floyd had that knee on his neck until he died.
01:03:13.000And then, if he had instead of saying, I'm going to send the military in and crush these protesters, and by the way, he's deeming them terrorists, right?
01:03:21.000Our fellow citizens, he's saying these are terrorists.
01:03:24.000If he had instead offered actual, like, no one's going to solve this problem overnight, but you can offer a few pieces of legislation that are at least an olive branch, then you start to de-escalate, rather than radicalizing, rather than going the police state, military state way, which never ends well.
01:04:15.000Like, first of all, I mean, I don't think the left would have given him any credit whatsoever if he did, you know, do any of what was just suggested there.
01:04:22.000But second, which is that this is just the fundamental difference, conservative and liberal disposition, which is that there are some bad people out there who you can show them as much compassion as you want.
01:04:35.000There's no such thing as like de-escalation in the in the most near term when people are actively, as you said, looting the streets of New York.
01:04:42.000And so if the governor of the state of New York refuses to call these – if these states and these – like I said, police departments – It's not the governor.
01:05:25.000I think that these violent white supremacist organizations should be taken down.
01:05:30.000And if they're out there marching and they're committing violence, they should absolutely be knocked down.
01:05:35.000And this is the point, which is where I pointed to, why they started to blame Russians and white nationalists because they realized this was going against them.
01:05:42.000They only view it as legitimate whenever they're using force to quash a side, which is that they agree with, and that they don't do it whenever it's a political cause they do.
01:05:51.000But see, I think the opposite thing is happening from the right, though.
01:05:57.000This is selective application of justice and this is exactly what they're worried about, which is that I have a better idea.
01:06:02.000You enforce the rule of law and law and order against violent white supremacists and against violent looting criminals who take advantage of a legitimate protest against the horrific death of George Floyd.
01:06:15.000And so I think that's part of where the breakdown in our views occurs because I think it's fantasy.
01:06:22.000I think it's fantasy to imagine that you could trust this president to deploy force in a responsible way and we've already seen that like that's not it's not a debatable point because we've already seen him abuse that force with peaceful protesters and by the way The First Amendment is also a sacred right that is part of why I love this country that should be protected,
01:06:46.000which is being overwhelmingly quashed by force right now in this country by bad policing, by, you know, this president and what he did with those peaceful protesters.
01:06:58.000And the idea that bringing the military in is going to de-escalate is going to solve the problem.
01:07:05.000Look, I don't know that, you know, I don't know that the response to the Rodney King riots or to the 68 riots is really the thing to emulate either.
01:07:12.000And the question again is not, is it good to lewd?
01:07:28.000There's no, there is no We've had these debates, we've had these marches, we've had the outrage, we've had all of it, and it never ever changes.
01:07:39.000And so you've got a lot of people out there doing shit that they shouldn't be doing, but they feel like finally y'all are paying attention.
01:07:45.000And that's an ugly place to be in the country.
01:07:49.000Statistically there's less people getting shot and killed by cops than ever before.
01:07:53.000Statistically, I believe that all these protests and all these people...
01:07:57.000But I'm not just talking about police brutality, because I see the policing issue as existing within a much larger problem, which is a society that dehumanizes.
01:08:09.000I mean, it's sort of like what we're talking about on social media, the good people and the bad people.
01:08:13.000And we've divided society into, like, the worthy people who are treated like human beings, people like us, whoever needs catered to it, and are, like, emotionally, like, coddled and all of that.
01:08:24.000And people who are treated like less than.
01:08:26.000And those people are disproportionately black and brown.
01:08:45.000We see the people who are now laid off, who don't have hope in their life that things are going to be better for their kids than it is for them.
01:08:54.000And that's the piece that I'm talking about.
01:08:57.000So yeah, bring in the military, quash them, put a gun to their head, you know, put a curfew at 1 p.m., lock down the country.
01:09:04.000You might solve the problem of looting the Gucci outlet, right?
01:09:13.000And on the piece with Trump, he's doing the same thing in terms of saying, oh, this is all Antifa, and they're all terrorists.
01:09:21.000And that justifies these kinds of actions.
01:09:23.000And to me, that is what is truly scary.
01:09:26.000Because if you really were saying, let's just go after the bad ones, and you had someone that you really trust, okay, maybe that's one thing.
01:09:32.000But that you're trying to paint everyone who is involved in these protests as essentially other, as essentially terrorists, that to me is what is terrifying right now.
01:09:40.000Well, I think he actually addressed it saying that there's people that are protesting that have a legitimate concern and that this is a real issue and there's a real problem that happened and he wants people to stop the lawless behavior where it has nothing to do with George Floyd.
01:09:54.000They're just smashing windows and stealing things.
01:10:16.000And I think that just the high profile nature of this should raise awareness.
01:10:20.000And hopefully these police administrators and the people that are in charge are going to get their shit together and get rid of these bad cops.
01:10:28.000When you see this guy who did this as George Floyd, you realize this guy's had a decade plus of complaints against him that are similar.
01:10:59.000Because that county prosecutor did not file a charge against George Floyd, the cop who killed George Floyd immediately, and that is what sparked the initial protest.
01:11:08.000There is absolutely nothing wrong with that protest.
01:11:10.000But then the line became, let's justify the rioting and the looting.
01:11:15.000Let's say we're not necessarily okay with it, but it's part of a broader systemic critique.
01:11:19.000And then, of course, America revolted against that.
01:11:22.000Right now, the polling just came out right before we were here, 58% of Americans say they support using the military to supplement police force.
01:11:28.000This, you know, I mean, I'm a populist.
01:11:30.000One of the things I think about so much more in my politics, 50 plus one solutions.
01:11:35.000What are 50 plus one solutions that we can get to on economics, that we can get to about our immigration system, about trade, about the way we order our society?
01:11:43.000And I'm against the elites who push down upon the majority and use their corporate influence in order to I'll talk about that.
01:11:50.00058% of Americans right now are basically completely support using the military in order to supplement police effort because they understand that what is happening right now is unconscionable.
01:12:02.000And even – let's take a purely working class issue of this, which is that I saw a video of a crying elderly American black – Elderly black American woman talking about these protesters burned down my grocery store.
01:12:16.000She even said, I would rather be where George is right now, talking about George Floyd, because of what happened to her.
01:12:21.000I mean, we have seen a homeless man in Austin whose mattress was just needlessly burned by these criminals just to taunt him.
01:12:30.000We've seen business owners who have been beaten.
01:12:34.000Savagely beaten by looting criminals with no police presence.
01:12:40.000This shows you that the establishment of law and order and keeping law and order is one of the ways that we protect the most vulnerable in our population.
01:12:49.000And the most vulnerable in our population are working class Americans.
01:12:53.000They're the ones who have to clean this shit up, by the way.
01:12:55.000I drove through D.C. I ride my scooter going around there.
01:13:00.000And I see all these working class Americans.
01:13:05.000Who are the people who are not being able to go to work right now?
01:13:08.000After we just had the worst economic crisis or still in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
01:13:15.000So justification of rioting and looting and the destruction of the small businesses and not having a way in order to deal with that is anti-working class.
01:13:24.000But beyond that, Crystal asked a great question, which is, okay, what do we do?
01:13:28.000And this is where you're right, which is the right does not agree.
01:13:34.000But no, 50% of black Americans right now do not have a job in this country because of the explicit choice made by Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans not to adopt the payroll program that we are right now.
01:13:44.000It's never been a better time in America to go and to look at that payroll production program.
01:13:52.000In order to go in to look at that proposal, because I don't think it's gotten nearly enough attention and not enough Republicans and Democrats are being pressed on whether they support something like that.
01:14:03.000Yeah, we have the, you know, we're store order in America.
01:14:06.000And then we need to make sure that people are taken care of, not through just distributed non unemployment benefits, but through actually having both putting these businesses, making them whole through a paycheck protection program.
01:14:19.000Using, you know, the Hawley Plan in order to do 80% of American workers' payroll so they can go back and remain intact.
01:14:25.000And then we can scale that up with the reopening.
01:14:28.000Because, Joe, I think you were talking about this here on the podcast.
01:14:30.000Like, these restaurants, right, like restaurant businesses, even in the best of times, 100% capacity, it's fucking hard to run a restaurant, right?
01:14:47.000Like, I'm not trying to justify that sort of stuff is absolutely unconscionable.
01:14:51.000Like, smashing up someone's small business that they've worked on, absolutely unacceptable.
01:14:55.000Violence, anyone against each other, absolutely unacceptable.
01:14:58.000I don't want to ignore the fact that much of the violence I have seen has come from cops, which is why I think bringing in the military only increases the level of violence.
01:15:15.000He said, America is a failed social experiment.
01:15:20.000It has failed to provide for the economic, health, and And dignity needs of its citizens.
01:15:27.000And so, yes, figure out how to deal with the violent elements and get it peaceful, etc.
01:15:34.000But the idea that you're going to crack down and take the pressure off and then the change is going to happen, that's not going to happen.
01:15:40.000And it's why we are truly stuck, because you have such a large percent of the population which does feel that nihilistic, which does feel like The choices on the ballot, you know, go vote.
01:15:52.000Like President Obama used to always say, don't vote, vote.
01:15:55.000Like they've been doing that and it hasn't really changed their material outcomes for their life.
01:16:01.000That's a part of the show that I think we more or less agree on is like how little choice is offered to people in terms of Actually improving their material well-being and having their interests looked out for by Washington, D.C. And so,
01:16:17.000yeah, when you push people that far where 40% say burn it all down, you are asking for exactly the tinderbox that we're seeing right now.
01:16:26.00040% of people are willing to answer polls.
01:16:39.000But the people that are like, oh, I'm very interested in this.
01:16:44.000One thing I do think, though, is that that nihilism that I see from so much of that element of the left in particular, like Cornel West, the failed social experiment, it just ignores like that extraordinary things can happen through political change.
01:16:56.000And even if they do want political change, look, a friend of our show, Zed Jelani, I mean, he cited these studies coming out of 1968, where you can see explicitly that nonviolent protests dramatically increase support for the civil rights movement.
01:17:09.000And that whenever it would turn violent, that it would turn against them.
01:17:12.000And that in one study in particular showed that it led to the election of Richard Nixon, which is something left to disagree on.
01:17:18.000But I don't think that the protesters are violent.
01:17:34.000I feel like what Cornel West is saying, one of the reasons why it resonates is if they have so much money for the bailouts, they have so much money to take care of people during COVID for these corporations, so much money to deal with this.
01:17:45.000Why didn't they invest that money in fixing all these problems that have happened in these inner cities that have had a long, deep history of economic problems?
01:17:58.000I mean, you know, I lived in Kentucky and Appalachia.
01:18:02.000Make it universal so everybody buys in.
01:18:05.000But that's exactly when we had this whole Democratic primary and every debate it was like, well, how are you going to pay for it?
01:18:11.000But then the moment that the stock market crashed, it was like, here's four trillion dollars, good luck.
01:18:15.000And so it just exposes, that's part of the moment that we have to understand, it just exposes the fact that all of this idea that we can't do anything to help you, and I'm so sorry, and there's not money, and that the system is fundamentally fair, has been completely exposed as a lie.
01:18:33.000The system has never been fundamentally fair, but people have tried their best to make it as fair as possible while supporting the special interest group that put them into power, while trying to keep up with the demands of their constituents.
01:18:50.000What Crystal and I really want to try and do or especially for me is I want to make it the cynical choice in order to do the right thing.
01:18:58.000That's the hardest game in politics because that's what the special interest did, right?
01:19:01.000Like it's the cynical choice in order to pass the subsidy or do the bailout for X and not for Y because you know you're going to get a job out on the other side or you know that you're going to benefit politically.
01:19:38.000I don't know why I just want to make it clear.
01:19:39.000But like, if you can make it so that It's the cynical choice to try and show up.
01:19:44.000Now, that is an extraordinarily hard thing to do.
01:19:47.000That is – I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if I don't talk about every single day about how the system is rigged and the political system in particular and who owns who.
01:19:55.000But this is part of what I think we're onto about what – like what the heterodox kind of space, which is that there is an extraordinary support for efforts like this.
01:20:05.000And if you can show these politicians, if you do something like this, you will get praise from Crystal and Sagar.
01:20:17.000You need to build alternative ecosystems, centers of power, which are able to elevate that so that they know that they have somebody who's going to have their back.
01:20:26.000Because right now, if you go the standard line, you're always going to have right or the left.
01:20:30.000To back you up in a time of crisis, you'll have the money.
01:20:34.000You have to show people that by doing the right thing that that's where the best politics are.
01:20:39.000That's what we focus on in terms of the economic solutions and so much of what we advocate for on the show is to show people like I said 50 plus one solutions exist.
01:20:49.000There is political opportunism to be had by just doing the right thing.
01:20:54.000I mean Trump's like innovation more than anything.
01:20:56.000Was running against standard GOP ideology in the 2016 primary, running on trade, saying, no, maybe trade's not always a good thing, running hard on immigration, which is something GOP voters have always wanted.
01:21:09.000Those two issues in particular went completely against Paul Ryan and so much of what they were advocating for, but you could never say it because if you said it, Not going to get on Fox.
01:21:19.000If you said it, you're not going to be in leadership.
01:21:22.000The Republicans aren't going to fundraise money for you.
01:21:25.000The think tank scholars are going to write fake studies and fake papers about how you're a liar.
01:21:29.000That's exactly what he exposed that there's opportunity to be had there.
01:21:33.000What we got to do is build up media and alternative organizations which show people that there is a – there is a way to be cynical.
01:21:41.000There is a way to – because people are cynical, politicians in particular.
01:21:44.000There is a way to act in your own self-interest and to do the right thing.
01:21:48.000And I think that that's why I've looked at it as much more of a – I don't look at it in that nihilistic way.
01:21:53.000I look at it in a much more positive way, which is that this did happen.
01:21:58.000And I don't think it's been perfect, but it's something which we can capitalize on and build over decades because I think God knows – I mean people need it right now.
01:22:09.000Well, I think where you and I agree is that law and order needs to be reestablished.
01:22:13.000And one of the reasons why I think that it needs to be reestablished is there's a fire of consciousness.
01:22:18.000And this fire is you're allowed to loot and smash and steal, and people are doing that now.
01:22:24.000I don't think they're doing it in the memory of George Floyd.
01:22:26.000And I think you've got to put that fire out.
01:22:28.000Because once you allow people to do it like de Blasio did in New York City and force the police to stand back, people know they can get away with it.
01:22:53.000When you're saying, like, President Trump de-escalating on television, that is not going to do a goddamn thing about those kids smashing windows.
01:23:00.000It's not going to change their attitude.
01:23:52.000The economic despair from three months of not working is unprecedented.
01:23:56.000You've never had a time where, through no fault of your own, you are broke, you can't pay for food, you can't pay your mortgage, you can't pay your rent, you're fucked, and there's no jobs to be had.
01:24:06.000It's not like there's anything these kids can go out and do to better their position.
01:24:10.000The amount of jobs that existed just three months ago, it's tremendous.
01:24:15.000So there are opportunities which are already slim to none.
01:24:18.000We're talking about people getting out of college in 2020, how bad their economic opportunities are before all this in comparison to the past.
01:24:28.000How about if you're coming out of high school and aren't going to go to college?
01:24:30.000I mean, most people don't go to college.
01:24:33.000That's the people you're seeing smashing windows.
01:24:36.000My only point is that the military is not a solution for that.
01:24:56.000But I think where we view it differently is that, in my view, the tactics, the aggressive tactics that the police have used have only made that worse.
01:25:46.000Frightening in terms of our liberties, our ability to protest, our First Amendment rights, which are incredibly important, and I think ultimately only leads to additional violence.
01:25:56.000Yeah, I think we're going around in circles here because I agree with you on all those things.
01:25:59.000And I am 100% in support of the people protesting, people that are walking on the street with signs about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.
01:26:55.000Look, that's a huge part of this whole thing, which is that there's just upper middle class white liberalism and their inability – I mean just as a whole element of white guilt and so much more.
01:27:04.000There's an entire industrial complex set up to make white people and upper middle class white people in particular feel uncomfortable condemning looting and violence in this particular scenario.
01:27:15.000Even though everybody agrees with you, Joe.
01:27:17.000I mean, pretty much everybody is like, yeah, protests are fine.
01:28:48.000I feel like the NFL, it's more prevalent, and I think that the impacts are more devastating.
01:28:55.000When I watch those huge super athletes running at full clip and slamming into each other, it's a fucking car accident.
01:29:02.000And it's a car accident multiple times a week.
01:29:04.000And these guys are doing, well, they were taking those big hits in training as well.
01:29:09.000But there was a study on football players that found that between, they tested high school or All the way up to NFL, and they said there was some staggering number of people that had CTE, including high school kids.
01:30:10.000Did you see that guy, it's an ESPN reporter or something, Chris Palmer, who was like cheering on looting and rioting, and then like right after, someone was like, Our neighboring gated community is being targeted.
01:30:30.000So many of these people would be freaked out, call the police if any of this thing ever happened.
01:30:35.000But if it happens in an affordable housing complex in Minneapolis, What has been interesting is that these riots have not just been in the poor neighborhood or in the black neighborhood.
01:30:47.000I think that's part of why people are so freaked out is they've been sort of intentionally in the wealthy parts of town is part of what makes it so unsettling for everyone across the board.
01:30:59.000And so, you know, look, my only point is Yes, looting, bad, violence, bad, absolutely all of that.
01:31:08.000But you can't imagine that the military is an answer to the situation that led to this moment.
01:31:13.000I don't know what the answer is, but when people see the chaos and the randomness of it all, that's what's really frightening.
01:31:19.000When people saw what was happening in Minneapolis as a direct result of a bad cop killing a man that was handcuffed and not a threat whatsoever, then people say, okay, I get these people.
01:31:31.000But then when you see them smashing windows in Beverly Hills, you're like, what the fuck does this have to do with George Floyd?
01:33:08.000She was talking about some papers that she found that she wrote when she was 24. And she was like, I was reading, I was like, holy fuck, like, I was so dumb.
01:33:47.000I mean, but a lot of those young people, though, I mean, look, what has their life been?
01:33:52.000And they're graduating from high school, they're graduating from They know very well what the cost is and what the rent is and what it looks like for them in their life going forward.
01:34:01.000And that's exactly where that hopelessness and nihilism comes from.
01:34:05.000And that's what really scares me is there's this idea.
01:34:10.000I know it's easy to say, but it really is true.
01:34:12.000We've never seen anything like this moment we're living through with mass unemployment, Great Depression, with pandemic, with these polarized politics where nobody feels like any hope of getting anything really accomplished through Washington.
01:34:24.000You add to it the chaos in the streets.
01:34:27.000And then there's no sign that this is all just going to snap back to normal anytime soon.
01:34:32.000It doesn't seem like it's going to snap back at all.
01:34:37.000So quick, because it seemed like, okay, things were getting sort of off the rails, off the rails, off the rails, and then all of a sudden, it's just...
01:34:47.000From March, when they shut down New York City, they shut down Los Angeles first, and then it was like, holy fuck, we're locked down at home.
01:34:54.000We were worried about a disease and, you know, I was actually encouraged during the early days because it seemed like people, although scared, or at least it seemed like they were being nicer to each other and all the bullshit on Twitter seemed to have subsided because people were dealing with a real live pandemic and they were really worried about their own life and the lives of their loved ones.
01:35:12.000Then, as time dragged on, as the pandemic was going into the second month and people were really desperate now to work, economic despair kicks in, anxiety kicks in, and then people got shittier than ever.
01:35:24.000People were mean and, you said something to me in 1984, you fuckhead!
01:35:50.000Somebody steals your job or somebody takes your job and says you can't work and all this and then not necessarily giving you the economic benefits that you deserve.
01:35:58.000That was something that we were very compassionate about.
01:36:54.000If he's got a solution, he already forgot it.
01:36:56.000And this is part of the problem with the way that the coalitions have broken down between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is basically the Republican Party has this We're good to go.
01:38:28.000I mean, if you look at- This is where I want to try and reclaim some level of positivity that's coming out of this thing, which is that, look, I mean, we are in the- It's only in these huge moments that you have an opportunity to actually do something.
01:38:42.000There's that, like, great Lennon quote, which is, like, something about, like, in a week, ten years can happen.
01:38:48.000Ten years can feel like a week, and then in a week, ten years worth of change can happen.
01:39:24.000But on the right, like, things are still very, like, up in the air, right?
01:39:28.000Like, you still have people who are, like, people like Holly who are, like, posing things.
01:39:31.000Trump is kind of the populist president.
01:39:34.000And, I mean, look, I have my, I have a podcast called The Realignment with my friend Marshall Kosloff.
01:39:39.000Like, this is literally what we try and do.
01:39:41.000We're working on a few more interesting things here, but what we try to do on the podcast is work through what are the actual policy positions that a populist right would look like, like a new trading relationship with China.
01:39:57.000Or like on immigration, like what does it actually mean to like restrict immigration in America?
01:40:01.000Like what levels, like how does it, does it even affect wages?
01:40:04.000Like I would say yes, and that's something that a lot of people have tried very hard to prove otherwise.
01:40:09.000But it's about working with, it's about, you can realign the Republican Party to not just have the white working class, but you can have Significant portions of the black and brown, people of color, all working class Americans.
01:40:22.000That is a huge winning coalition for the right in order to move forward.
01:40:26.000It only requires them to – I wouldn't say move left on economics but to move back to where – to the center on economics away from this more libertarian-minded right.
01:40:36.000And to stop using racist rhetoric and actions.
01:41:04.000I mean, I have to tell you, I was more depressed, I guess, during the phase of the pandemic when it just seemed like everyone was crushed and everyone was apathetic and everybody was just like in their basement or in their apartment wondering how they're going to make rent next month.
01:41:22.000Or they were one of those frontline workers who was out on the front lines making $7.25 to risk their life at CVS or whatever it was.
01:41:33.000The fact that people are in the streets, especially, of course, the people who are peaceful and who are enraged and who are actually taking matters into their own hands in that way, like, I actually find that to be the most hopeful thing.
01:41:50.000If someone's life could be casually snuffed out like George Floyd's was and there wasn't a reaction and there wasn't rage, like to me, that would be a profoundly more troubling state of affairs than frankly what we're seeing right now.
01:42:04.000You know what's most troubling about that footage is that he knew he was being filmed.
01:42:56.000We actually looked at the data and the reality is they do do that shit all the time and three-fifths of the time that they use that particular hold to unconsciousness three-fifths of the time is with African American men.
01:43:07.000They use that when they knee on your neck to unconsciousness?
01:44:22.000Which is kind of crazy, because Biden had just vetted her for VP, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this happens, and it turns out in 2006, that fucking cop was doing that shit way back then, and she didn't do anything about it.
01:44:34.000He had many, many civilian complaints against, I can't remember, it was like 17 or 19 different civilian complaints against him, and nothing ever happened.
01:44:44.000And when you see one like that, there's a great video, and I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again, of a Flint sheriff from Flint, Michigan, talking to these people and saying, look, I'm going to put the baton down.
01:45:09.000He's meeting these peaceful protesters.
01:45:12.000But as a result of that approach, rather than crack down tear gas, rubber bullets, you know, and this contentious us versus them and the militarization and all of that, that approach led to less violence.
01:45:25.000I agree with you, but all that approach, the crackdown tear gas, happened after the looting.
01:46:39.000But worse than that, Is that police and many of the others have took a much more risk-averse approach to the way that they were going in that community.
01:46:46.000The community is screaming for police, specifically for this reason, which is that in the aftermath, we know from many of these riots, from the MLK times and after Baltimore, it caused massive economic destruction to these cities.
01:46:59.000It is not a noble thing to allow this to continue.
01:47:35.000I think there's a lot of people who are thinking that, which is like, hey, you know, fuck this.
01:47:39.000Why am I paying all this rent to live in a soulless box and then maybe get, you know, maybe have my shit get broken.
01:47:45.000Also, working remotely, you know, there's a good argument for that now, too.
01:47:48.000So many people are realizing, I mean, maybe there's one good thing that's going to come out of this is that people won't be stuck in cubicles and maybe they can work from home more often.
01:47:56.000I'm concerned for the future, but I think that there needs to be some national address that is about law enforcement and about the rules of engagement and about the way we treat people that are our citizens.
01:48:12.000That's our community, especially with nonviolent crimes, like a fucking forged dollar bill.
01:48:32.000But, I mean, to me, that is just unconscionable.
01:48:34.000But it also speaks to the fact that it was casual, the fact that it was repeated, the fact that there were these complaints and nothing was ever done.
01:48:42.000It speaks to a larger systemic problem that the data backs up.
01:48:46.000And so part of, you know, the challenge of this moment is also the fact that we are essentially leaderless.
01:48:53.000Like, there's no trusted national, there's no trust in our institutions, there's no trust in the media, there's no trust invested in any sort of a national unifying figure.
01:49:04.000And so it's another reason why this moment is so incredibly fraught, because who would even give that address that anyone would really listen to?
01:50:33.000The people who literally, they were all deemed essential now during the pandemic, who literally allow the country to function, make the least of anyone.
01:50:44.000And are treated like they aren't human.
01:52:27.000I mean, I think one of the things you brought up, which actually I thought was a great point, I was like, why is nobody talking about immunity here?
01:52:31.000Like, how to boost your immune system?
01:52:33.000Not a single word from all these politicians.
01:52:36.000Wear a mask, stay away from everybody, but not vitamin D. When they're dealing with these people in New Orleans, and I think it was a study in Indonesia, a giant percentage, like more than 80% of the people that are in the ICU have a vitamin D deficiency.
01:53:08.00070% of people in this country have insufficient vitamin D and 29% are deficient, meaning they're in dangerously low levels.
01:53:17.000Now, when you add COVID to something like that, I think that speaks to one of the problems where we're dealing with this mortality rate, obesity, people with insulin resistance, people with real underlying health problems.
01:53:28.000And you could say, you know, that, well, you know, we still have to protect those folks and that this is the reason why we locked down the country.
01:53:36.000But you didn't do anything about immunity.
01:53:38.000You didn't tell anybody to do things differently.
01:53:40.000There was no public service announcement telling people, hey, if you cut down on sugar and cut down on alcohol and take cigarettes out of your life, you have a...
01:54:14.000I saw some study about the number of Americans who are showing signs of anxiety and depression during this time.
01:54:24.000You've been cut off from all of your coping mechanisms, basically, and if you've lost your job, you've lost a central point of meaning in your life and ability to provide for yourself and your family.
01:55:40.000All of a sudden, with no warning, they said, uh, we're just gonna open.
01:55:43.000I think because they're dealing with this unprecedented economic despair where someone's like, hey, you know, you've only had 2,000 deaths in the whole state.
01:56:08.000It sucks that those 2,000 people died of this disease.
01:56:11.000But you can't just shut down the whole country.
01:56:14.000You can't shut down the economy because there is a direct correlation between a dip in the economy and an increase in deaths due to suicide, due to drug overdoses, due to all sorts of problems.
01:57:35.000Out on the front lines in the processing plan or delivering the packages or doing the Uber Eats for lucky folks like us who can just order in, no problem, don't worry about it.
01:57:45.000Or they lost their job altogether and are just like, no certainty that it's ever going to come back.
01:57:52.000How am I going to make rent this month?
01:57:54.000A lot of rent forbearance is ending right now and nothing has been done to help them.
01:58:00.000And it's all going to be in full total chaos after this rioting and no one knows what to happen.
01:58:29.000I mean, I think you have to do a UBI and you have to do some sort of mass federal jobs program to get people back, to get them back working, to get them back on their feet, to rebalance the playing field.
01:58:43.000I think you have to do those two things.
01:58:45.000And I would also say universal health care.
01:58:46.000How many of those $1,200 checks went out?
01:59:01.000So how do we get out of this whole riot thing?
01:59:05.000I mean, I think these things go together.
01:59:08.000I also think that you have to have some sort of systemic policing reform like what you're talking about in terms of the training in terms of chokeholds being illegal in order for people to feel like there's some real progress.
01:59:21.000Well, I don't think you should make chokeholds illegal.
01:59:24.000I think if you're trying, if someone's trying to kill someone, someone's trying to stop someone, look, if you're a cop and you're in a fight for your life against someone who's done something horrible, you should be able to use jujitsu.
01:59:35.000And one of the best techniques in jujitsu is choking people unconscious.
02:00:37.000I was actually talking to a friend of mine about it yesterday.
02:00:40.000And someone who she grew up with who had—oh, sorry, it was a different friend.
02:00:45.000He grew up— Had a friend who lives in a small town of 9,000 people and thought that where they lived was, you know, it was fine, normal place and became a cop.
02:00:56.000And over the course of 10 years of being a cop has a completely jaded and fucked up attitude about human beings now because they've walked in on people with their brains blown out and stabbed to death and raped and just every fucking day they find some new reason to hate everyone and they're just broken.
02:01:15.000And I think this is a thing that cops, and every time they pull somebody over, this could be the last day of their life.
02:01:20.000This guy's got a tinted window, you know, and who knows what's going on inside this car?
02:01:47.000It's an effect that has accumulated over time, too.
02:01:52.000And to bring it back in the other direction, to have some sort of a positive relationship between the police officers and the communities that they serve.
02:02:01.000One thing that my friend Immortal Technique brought up about that sheriff in Flint He said, Flint has a very unique relationship with the police and the people in the community because they're all dealing with that water problem.
02:02:34.000Don't go robbing a house in Simi Valley.
02:02:36.000There's a lot of those thin blue line American flags hanging up.
02:02:39.000There's a problem in New York City as well because it's so expensive, you know, too, that it makes it impossible for working class people to be able to live in the city that they are actually policing.
02:02:49.000I mean, look, there's an ugly history around policing in America.
02:02:52.000If you go back to a lot of the police departments in the South were put in place to enforce Jim Crow style laws.
02:02:58.000I mean, there has been a long history of basically We're good to go.
02:03:31.000Problems in this moment is there's this sense of nothing is going to change.
02:03:44.000And so if you can at least give people that sense that, no, the political system can work on your behalf, then you start to move in the right direction.
02:03:53.000Isn't it amazing that one person in one horrific act in one part of Minneapolis can start this explosion that lights the whole country on fire?
02:04:25.000To seize upon, again, the 50 plus one things.
02:04:28.000What do we all learn through this pandemic?
02:04:30.000It's pretty stupid that our corporate elites and our political elites allowed many of our most critical jobs and industries in order to go over to China.
02:04:40.000Reshoring American supply chains makes us safer in the long run, both from an economic perspective, from national security perspective, health perspective, etc.
02:04:49.000The China thing is like a 90-10 issue.
02:04:51.000And right now, I want to make sure I call this out, which is that there are elements in the White House, more corporate-friendly ones, who are trying to quash a Buy American order that was put forward within the Trump administration that doesn't even call for mandatory on-shoring of medical supply chains.
02:05:07.000But just like wants to use, you know, tax rebates and all that other stuff to encourage over 10 years.
02:05:12.000And I think it's pretty unconscionable that something like that 90-10 issue after something like this hasn't been passed.
02:05:18.000I think on trade, it's the same thing.
02:05:20.000This is a broader question of so much of what we have.
02:05:30.000It was like, make America autarkic again.
02:05:32.000And autarky is like making everything here.
02:05:34.000I'm not saying that all the libertarians are going to get very upset about me and start sending me comparative advantage memes.
02:05:40.000But like look, there is a real benefit to be able to make things in America and that if – just because it's cheaper, the altar of globalization, the altar of cheap prices has made us make horrific political choices over the last four decades.
02:05:56.000And going on that and praying towards that altar has made it so that we are less safe, less robust, less – I mean socially, to live in a town and to have a factory which is producing something and to feel pride in your work and get paid a good wage and to know that at the explicit decision of Congress in order to let China join the – or China joining the WTO – Restoring permanent normal trade relationship with China and watching that factory go
02:07:16.000Here's a law you can pass and you're good to go.
02:07:19.000But I think it does start with this fundamental idea, which comes back to kind of the core of our show, that human beings are worthy, that they have dignity, that they have rights that should be secured.
02:07:35.000And if you can take that kind of FDR economic rights model and actually implement it into place where people feel that they are valued and seen and heard and have agency and power in the society, then you are not going to have to call in the military to American cities.
02:07:52.000You're not going to end up with a situation like we see right now that's spiraling and spiraling and spiraling out of control.
02:07:57.000That's another thing, you know, in terms of what I would do.
02:08:00.000It's like we have to we have to reorient our economic Life and our economic policies in order to incentivize the building of communities and the building of institutions that exist outside of just the – outside of just a direct check from the government or a direct check from your workforce.
02:08:17.000It needs to be about – I mean the way that America was – like probably the most united we ever were was around like in the 1960s.
02:08:24.000Now look, I know everyone's going to – there were terrible things that happened.
02:08:27.000They were exposed in the civil rights era and all that.
02:09:17.000And now what he's trying to do is move the GOP on these issues towards centering economic – restoring economic conservatism from economic libertarianism.
02:09:27.000And what I mean by that is free market fundamentalists, that the free market is always good.
02:09:32.000Look, like the free market, is it a good thing once again that we couldn't make ventilators in our country when we thought we needed them?
02:09:39.000Like, was it a good thing that we couldn't manufacture our own medical supplies?
02:09:42.000And then broadly, like, in terms of the immediacy, what I would do, it's this payroll plan.
02:09:47.000It's so critical that we restore Americans' payroll and that we try to make it so that these businesses don't become failed, distressed assets.
02:09:56.000That get rolled up into these huge private equity conglomerates that buy them all off for cheap.
02:10:15.000I think, too, people will put up with a lot of shit.
02:10:19.000And they will persist and they will invest in the community, they'll invest in their lives, they'll invest in a productive civil society if they feel that they have, they believe that life will get better for themselves and their kids.
02:10:32.000And I really think that's kind of the core breakdown, is that people no longer have that confidence, that for their kids, it's gonna, they're gonna be able to have it better than they had.
02:10:42.000And when you lose that sense of hope, that's when things go off the rails.
02:10:47.000I think there's also a real problem with this election in that you either are a pro-Trump person, which you're happy that Trump's going to run again.
02:10:56.000But if you're a Democrat, you're really settling.
02:11:10.000It so clearly highlights the people that are full of shit that are just supporting the fact that you're going to vote left no matter what.
02:11:21.000You hear this thing like, I'm just voting for the cabinet.
02:11:25.000One thing that I keep hearing over and over again is I'm voting for a woman's right to choose.
02:11:31.000I agree with the woman's right to choose, but is that the number one thing for running the country?
02:11:36.000Is a person's ability to abort a baby?
02:11:39.000Because that really is what it boils down to.
02:11:41.000And I'm not saying that lightly, but it's very sad that we're in this position in 2020. That we have to say, I'm just voting for the cabinet.
02:12:15.000A woman at The Nation, a writer at The Nation, just wrote this piece that she started off, if Joe Biden boiled and ate babies, I would still vote for him.
02:12:26.000But the central concept of like, it doesn't matter what he does, it doesn't matter, I will justify it if it's just a hair's breadth better in my view than Trump.
02:12:37.000And look, I mean, ultimately, maybe the election is that existential and maybe things are going off.
02:12:43.000You're like, OK, well, at least Joe is going to be somewhat normal and do some sort of normal presidential things.
02:12:49.000But that type of politics is deeply destructive because if everything can be justified, if you're just like slightly better than the other side, this lesser or two evils dynamic is a hell that you can never escape from.
02:13:35.000If he wins, you're hoping he lasts two terms.
02:13:38.000Well, you're also voting for whoever his vice president is.
02:13:43.000Who not only maybe, you know, will be the next Democratic nominee and then, you know, eight years of them, but also because of his decline may have a lot more influence and power, maybe pulling the strings depending on who it is.
02:13:56.000And look, he's already said he wants to pick someone he's consulting with Wall Street as to who he should pick.
02:14:01.000His donor class is like having a lot of say over who he should pick.
02:14:04.000He's going to pick someone who's basically just like him ideologically.
02:14:07.000So you're looking at maybe 12 years of essentially being like, well, I guess I'm voting for the cabinet.
02:14:14.000Whoever is vice president is going to be like a Democratic.
02:14:18.000It's going to be some sort of a Dick Cheney situation.
02:14:22.000My favorite quote from Biden is he wants to make the Democratic Party a bridge to Pete Buttigieg.
02:17:13.000She's a very popular politician for a lot of good reasons, but it's also one of those things where when someone says something like New World Order, you say just that phrase alone.
02:17:26.000That's a hot-button phrase for all the conspiracy people.
02:17:31.000When you have no one who's trusted in the media and when you have this sort of general societal breakdown in general, then that stuff flourishes more than it would in normal times.
02:17:40.000But there's all these echo chambers of conspiracy theorists and left-wing people who are pundits and right-wing people.
02:17:47.000These echo chambers are some of the most disturbing parts of interaction with people online because you can always find someone that agrees with you.
02:17:54.000And, you know, if you're not a person that likes to challenge your thoughts and ideas, you can just bounce those fucking things around with all these other knuckleheads that believe the same shit you do.
02:18:18.000So, you've got to eliminate that compliance, and you make a mandate.
02:18:22.000And then you do training, particularly in the city, I'll call them licensing departments, whether it's zoning, buildings, housing will be impacted by it, planning certainly.
02:18:36.000And you pick the people that run those agencies and the deputies that are pledging allusions to the new world order and good governance.
02:18:44.000And then I think you have the Inspector General doing some spot on it.
02:18:49.000I get what she was trying to say, I think.
02:18:51.000Which is like a new era of city government.
02:20:15.000Because, look, the main reason Trump has such a solid hold on Trump On the right, like on the Republican base, so to speak, is because actually of the judges thing, of the Supreme Court thing, which you were talking about, of selecting Mike Pence, who has a lot of credibility in the evangelical community.
02:20:32.000So I think that, I mean, a lot of people were outraged.
02:21:11.000Can you imagine being so insecure that you're the president of the United States?
02:21:15.000Like you have a nuclear arsenal and military at your disposal and you're so insecure that you have to show your strength in that moment by walking across the park.
02:21:27.000And reportedly he was upset because it had come out that they had like had to go down into the bunker on Friday or say at a Saturday night or whatever when there were protesters.
02:21:35.000And so this was his way to reassert his manhood.
02:21:39.000But I think That's why I say I don't think that he has like a real, I think he has instincts.
02:24:15.000But you still have to vote for us because we're good on abortion and we're good on gun control.
02:24:20.000And that wasn't enough for a lot of people.
02:24:22.000And you can see too, and this is what I meant about making it the cynical choice, when you adjust your position, On immigration and on trade, you win all of these Obama Trump voters all throughout the Midwest and you become the president.
02:24:36.000I mean – and even then – I'm not saying it was enough.
02:24:38.000There's still a lot more work to be done.
02:24:40.000I think it needs to realign more to the issues of what I'm talking about.
02:24:43.000But to say that it's all just, it is just, I mean, that's not his driving force.
02:24:48.000Like if you see the way, having interacted with him and just like how he reacts to certain things, there is a condensed ideology behind what he is.
02:24:57.000Otherwise, he wouldn't have run the way he was.
02:24:59.000He wouldn't have had those positions for such a long time on the core issues that actually matter to why he was elected.
02:25:05.000And so the real issue, and I think the criticism, valid criticism, is he wasn't able to enact those political instincts We're good to go.
02:25:32.000Government is the first hundredman, first thousand.
02:25:34.000They all have to be united in a common purpose in order to actually get shit done in a bureaucracy.
02:25:40.000The truth is, and we have to acknowledge this, is that on the right after Trump's election, the RNC and all these professional right-wingers, this conservative establishment, they were the thousand.
02:25:50.000And so that's why you get something like the Tax Cuts Bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
02:25:55.000It's because a guy like Paul Ryan has been fantasizing about pushing that for such a long time.
02:27:09.000Or we're going to have a payroll tax cut, which, okay, if you have a range of responses, maybe that's part of it.
02:27:15.000But when you've got 40 million people who aren't on a payroll anymore, that's not going to do a whole heck of a lot of good.
02:27:20.000So I just don't see that there's any, maybe he has the ideology, but it doesn't really matter if you're not willing to push for it.
02:27:27.000And you see who's organized in the town, because immediately, once this crisis hit, Immediately, the first multi-trillion dollar bill gets passed very, very quickly with all the goodies for big business, the stuff that was custom written.
02:27:58.000They tied the little bit of paltry small business and worker stuff to the massive corporate piece and held the workers and the small businesses hostage and said, if you don't vote for it, then you're voting against workers.
02:28:22.000I think when you're talking about Trump and his history of understanding trade and business decisions, I think it's all stuff that benefited him.
02:28:32.000That's why he was concentrating on them.
02:28:34.000And I think now you're dealing with him spread so thin because now he has to deal with the environment.
02:28:39.000He has to deal with international politics.
02:28:56.000Which is great, but he had preparation when he was dealing with those things before, when he was talking about those things before he was president.
02:29:02.000That's why he had a deeper understanding of them, because they meant something to him.
02:29:05.000But now you're dealing with the entire broad spectrum of duties of being the president, and he says shit like inject people with Lysol and sick dogs on protesters.
02:29:25.000So he's that guy now, but he's that guy with global thermonuclear consequences.
02:29:31.000Aaron Ross Powell And so even more to the point on that which is that when you don't have – this is another kind of establishment always wins point is that when you don't have very firm beliefs – because like trade and immigration are two things with like hundreds of billions of dollars behind the neoliberal trade and immigration policy that we have right now in this country.
02:29:51.000Aaron Ross Powell In order to make sure that you don't actually do that.
02:30:15.000That's actually what the hardest way to fight back is you actually need a coherent ideology on every single one of these things.
02:30:21.000But more important, you got to understand how government works.
02:30:24.000And I think that so many people don't seem to grasp that it's not just like putting a guy in the Oval Office.
02:30:31.000Like, look, by the time it's reached the Oval Office, it's so fucked, right, that 10 levels down, they would have made the decision.
02:30:39.000Like, you got to make sure that what you want is being reflected 10 layers down in the bureaucracy.
02:30:45.000And you look at the way, you know, Like Russiagate and all this other stuff.
02:30:47.000And you can just see like how arrogant some of the people within the bureaucracy behave just blatantly disregarding the will of a president or blatantly just thinking he's illegitimate, trying to delegitimize him.
02:30:59.000And from that perspective, that's fucking scary because they're not even accountable to the person that we all voted for.
02:31:05.000That is what – like why conservatives have to care more about government.
02:31:10.000That's something I – like one of my pet causes is look like – We are living in a society where the culture is against you.
02:31:17.000Like, we are living in a society where, you know, the cultural elite, the commanding heights of American culture, and you're living in a society where you don't have real power there.
02:31:26.000And so, and you're also living in a society where you have corporate America.
02:32:22.000And so, you know, for people who are more or less doing well, as things are, right, they've got their health insurance, they've got a job where they're treated like a human being with humanity, they can get their Uber Eats, they can get whatever they want on demand, right,
02:32:37.000their way of virtue signaling is on identity issues.
02:32:42.000And if you only confine The conversation on policing to, like, let's deal with this.
02:32:51.000Like, if you keep it in that lane, that's very comfortable for them, right?
02:32:55.000If you have a broader conversation about a society that, you know, has decimated unions, has decimated working class power, about who has power in the society and why, like, that's more of a threat to them.
02:33:07.000For corporate brands, it's very comfortable to have, like, let's have a diversity initiative.
02:33:12.000It's less comfortable to say, no, no, let's actually value the worth of everyone.
02:33:16.000Let's actually have a different set of power.
02:33:19.000Let's actually not have corporations able to give unlimited money and buy off our politicians and then be able to go work on your boards, etc., etc.
02:33:26.000Like, that's a very non-threatening conversation.
02:33:28.000That's how you end up with, was it Bank of America who sponsored the movement continues?
02:33:55.000Look, I won't cite who told me this was a very prominent person in the field of economics and was like, my conspiracy theory is that Jeff Bezos wants 10-15% unemployment because then what's the best job in the world, Joe, in a rural place?
02:34:16.000Amazon Prime delivering pallets of bricks.
02:34:19.000You should be more cynical because that, I mean, look, how else do we get to a point where, like, the Shell Gas Company sponsors a 1619 Project event with Nicole Hannah-Jones?
02:34:29.000So the 1619 Project, oh man, this is a real rabbit hole.
02:34:32.000So this is like – this is the New York Times put out this thing.
02:34:35.000The 1619 Project is the year that the first slaves were brought to America and it was about reforming the way that we talk about race and slavery in America.
02:34:42.000So the very first essay which she wrote, which is very controversial, is when she claimed that the reason for the American Revolution was because people wanted to keep their slaves, not because of control from England and all that.
02:34:55.000What happened is that a bunch of very prominent historians of the American Revolution, the Civil War and much more panned the essay.
02:35:01.000They said this thing needs to be corrected.
02:35:32.000And the reason why is because they saw it for what I see it, which is that it's a cynical attempt in order to say America is an irredeemably racist nation, that that is the only single and most pressing problem that we have in our society.
02:35:45.000And if you hold that frame, then you don't ask questions about corporate power in America.
02:35:51.000You don't ask questions even of leaders.
02:35:53.000A friend of our show, Zed Jilani, had a fantastic appearance on our show.
02:35:57.000I really encourage everybody to go watch it, where he talks about If you look at the black community in America, which is what had the most pressing impact on their life economically and destroyed so much of their livelihood, it was the foreclosures under Barack Obama and it was the wipeout of black homeownership and black wealth that the 1619 Project and the framework of politics of that original sin,
02:36:22.000Is the be all end all for why we are where we are today absolves current political leaders and recent political leaders like Barack Obama himself or like leaders in the city of Atlanta or leaders in the city of Baltimore and that it absolves public policy which is non-racial.
02:36:38.000And so when I say that why does Shell Gas Company feel comfortable?
02:36:43.000Sponsoring an event in which the main message is that America is an irredeemably racist nation because that is one more event which is being talked about in the political zeitgeist by the cultural elite, which is not talking about their own power in the marketplace.
02:37:01.000The predominant control in your life in America, it is about capital.
02:37:09.000But class disproportionately affects people of color in America.
02:37:13.000And so the way I look at it is that identity politics is so cynically grafted on by the billionaire and the corporate class.
02:37:21.000There's a reason they're all super woke.
02:37:22.000It's because they want it to be this way so that we don't talk about their power in our society.
02:37:28.000I think this was a very – like the way this all happened is kind of crazy because it started out in the sociology departments in the 1970s of all of these crazy – from the post – from the 60s era.
02:37:42.000They were in these sociology departments and they started cranking out all these absolutely crazy papers around feminism and identity politics, racial politics, all of that.
02:37:52.000And then what happened is that corporate America and other cultural elites, first of all, were being indoctrinated in the university system.
02:37:58.000They were going to go work at places like McKinsey and others, and they brought their racial politics and their identity politics with them, but that there had to be a recognition from the top, from people like Goldman Sachs.
02:38:08.000If Goldman Sachs, if the pressure on them is to stop the way that they trade derivatives or to put a black person on their board while they continue to do the derivatives trading, They're going to choose that every single time.
02:38:20.000So they want to direct the conversation in that direction.
02:38:23.000It absolves them for the sins both towards the economically disenfranchised in America, but it's also a very cynical tool, which is that why is it that you see all these corporations tweeting out Black Lives Matter, Instagram blackout,
02:38:41.000Isn't this the great irony that Nike went and did the whole Colin Kaepernick thing, the ad campaign, and they still got all their shit looted in this most recent thing in Chicago, right?
02:38:53.000I mean, I think that's the perfect example of they try to cynically use identity politics in America, split people apart to protect their power, and if we start to understand That it's a lot more about class in America than it is about race.
02:39:06.000I'm not saying that there is not racial problems in America, racism, all of this, but that if you focus on these class issues, it's the best way to help people, people who are disenfranchised, who are disproportionately people of color, but to help everybody.
02:39:43.000It was the product of a result of very specific political choices that we made over time.
02:39:47.000And it's moving towards that that we need to go towards.
02:39:51.000But by doing so, what you've talked about many times, about economic, not just distribution, but about who has power in society, working class or not.
02:40:00.000Which is the corporate America can use the identity politics in order to make sure the working class doesn't continue to have power.
02:40:06.000And so you can't separate class and race because it's not an accident, of course, that black and brown people are disproportionately the lower income and poor and working class in society.
02:40:15.000I mean, I see it much more simply sort of like what you were saying.
02:40:23.000I always think it's hilarious on the right of like Facebook and Twitter are progressive or they're liberal companies or Amazon's a liberal company.
02:40:34.000Like, this is not a left company, right?
02:40:37.000Because they use those sort of branding tools and tweet out Black Lives Matter, which is no threat to them, and in fact, as you're pointing out, may very much benefit their bottom line ultimately.
02:40:48.000They get all the benefits of being for progress and being for this rising coalition in America without actually having to do anything that's going to benefit their bottom line.
02:41:27.000It is your job and you're great at it.
02:41:28.000You guys are awesome and I love the fact that you disagree but you do so intelligently and respectfully and you cut through all the nonsense that's on most of these political shows.
02:41:40.000There's just so much nonsense and I think the world's sick of it and I think that's one of the reasons why you guys are gaining in popularity.