The Ben Shapiro Show - September 06, 2020


Candace Owens | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 97

Topics
life insurance elevating criminal suspects education system rap culture black conservatives white guilt permeating culture corporate America victim mentality social media
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Guests
Candace Owens
Mentioned
Donald Trump Joe Biden Kanye West Cardi B George Floyd Larry Elder Candace Owens Dave Chappelle Sam Harris Thomas Sewell LeBron James Helix Sleep Charlie The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Condoleezza Rice Shelby Steele Turning Point Barack Obama Hitler Hillary Clinton and 36 more
The Problem With Politics | Ep. 1089 Everything Is On Fire | Ep. 1090

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 6 minutes

Words per minute

235.21

Word count

15,728

Sentence count

1,062

Harmful content

Misogyny

16

sentences flagged

Toxicity

116

sentences flagged

Hate speech

63

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Candace Owens joins The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special with host Ben Shapiro to discuss why she left the Democratic Party, why she believes Black Lives Matter is a racist organization, and why she thinks the Black community should stop being treated as a victim by the NAACP, the media, and other groups that demonize the black community, and much, much more. Ben Shapiro is a Fox News contributor and host of the conservative podcast "The Weekly Standard" and is a frequent contributor to conservative publications. He is also the author of the bestselling book, Blackout, a memoir about her experience growing up in a racist family, and how she overcame the trauma of growing up as the daughter of a police officer who was falsely accused of being a criminal in order to become a political activist. Ben is a regular contributor to the Daily Wire and has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NPR, and NPR, among other media outlets. His work has been widely praised by conservative critics, and he is considered a leading voice in the anti-racist and anti-colonialist movements in the culture and culture, including Black culture and the Black diaspora, and is one of the most influential Black voices in the country. media voices in America today. Join the conversation by using the hashtag , and find Ben on social media using on and . to join the conversation in the comments below. Thanks for listening and sharing the podcast! ! Thank you for listening for supporting Ben Shapiro's efforts to make this podcast possible. and spreading the word out there! Ben's words help us all around the world! - Thank you Ben Shapiro and the podcast - Your support is so much appreciated! -- Thank you, Ben Shapiro, the host of The Ben Show & the Anchor -- The Daily Wire is a podcast that helps us make it bigger, bigger, better, and more important than you can be heard on the airwaves and everywhere else. -- Our logo and social media is bigger than you get a better chance to reach more people, everywhere else in the world. - thank you, more of your voice matters more than you hear us on the podcast, too, thank you for helping us get a chance to be heard more of Ben's voice out there on the world more than just listening to us, too!

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It's not good for us when you have a culture and music which glorifies baby mama. 0.99
00:00:05.000 We have a culture problem in black America. 0.97
00:00:06.000 I think the best way to fix it is for everybody to stop debating about it. 0.50
00:00:10.000 Everyone stop the hand-holding and let black Americans get to work. 0.98
00:00:14.000 Democratic presidential nominees have received, on average, 90% of the vote from black Americans for the last six decades.
00:00:21.000 These candidates have run and continue to run on race-specific handout programs like Affirmative Action and now slavery reparations to supposedly save the black community from racism embedded deep within American society.
00:00:34.000 The work of improving black lives has largely been stripped from black Americans by liberal politicians and thought leaders telling black Americans they're victims of America.
00:00:42.000 That is what inspired Candace Owens into a political career. 0.99
00:00:46.000 Candace had always thought she was a Democrat. 0.86
00:00:48.000 That is, until the media's dishonesty during the 2016 election woke her up. 0.74
00:00:52.000 Since coming out as conservative, she speaks on black culture, the victimhood promulgated within it, and a society weaponizing race for political power. 0.99
00:01:00.000 In 2018, she founded Blexit, a movement encouraging black and minority communities to jump ship from the Democratic Party.
00:01:06.000 Candace, who finds herself frequently canceled on Twitter, recently posted a video criticizing the propping up of George Floyd as a hero.
00:01:13.000 That video went viral and resulted in an onslaught of attacks.
00:01:17.000 We'll get into that controversy here.
00:01:19.000 We'll also discuss Kansas' own traumatic experience of being treated as a victim by the NAACP and other organizations that hindered rather than helped her.
00:01:27.000 what Cardi B's interviewing Joe Biden says about the way Democrats see the black vote, and a whole lot more.
00:01:42.000 Hey, hey, and welcome.
00:01:43.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
00:01:45.000 Just a reminder, we will be doing some bonus questions at the end with Candace Owens. 1.00
00:01:48.000 The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
00:01:52.000 Go over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every single one of our amazing guests.
00:01:58.000 Candace Owens, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:02:00.000 Thanks for having me.
00:02:01.000 So first of all, everybody should go pick up a copy or pre-order a copy of Blackout, which comes out very shortly, sure to be an enormous bestseller.
00:02:08.000 Congratulations on the book.
00:02:09.000 Also, congratulations on, you told me this, so I'm not giving anything away.
00:02:11.000 You're pregnant? 1.00
00:02:12.000 Yes.
00:02:12.000 That is an amazing thing.
00:02:13.000 That is a life-changing thing.
00:02:14.000 How do you feel about that?
00:02:15.000 I'm excited.
00:02:16.000 I mean, I'm really excited for that next chapter of my life.
00:02:19.000 And I would say in terms of my political life, the stakes feel a bit higher in terms of where America's going to go.
00:02:25.000 So let's start with where America is right now.
00:02:27.000 We're watching, as we speak, major riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
00:02:31.000 We've seen major riots in Seattle.
00:02:32.000 We've seen major riots in Portland, in L.A., in Washington, D.C., in New York City, in Chicago.
00:02:36.000 Virtually every major city, all Democratic governed, has broken into extraordinary levels of rioting and looting.
00:02:43.000 The media have informed us that all of this is apparently A good thing.
00:02:46.000 This is changing America in a positive way.
00:02:49.000 Barack Obama suggested at the DNC that the protesters are really doing something wonderful and the media have conflated the protesters with the rioters and with the looters.
00:02:56.000 So I want to get your overall opinions first of all on the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:02:59.000 Because it seems to me that Black Lives Matter can mean three separate things and there's been an attempt to conflate all of them.
00:03:05.000 One, the inarguable proposition that black people matter. 1.00
00:03:07.000 Second, The idea that Black Lives Matter as an organization is good, which seems crazy. 0.98
00:03:11.000 And third, that America is systemically racist and evil.
00:03:14.000 And I've yet to see exactly how the Black Lives Matter movement, which seems to stand for both the organization and the idea that America is evil.
00:03:21.000 How is that making America better?
00:03:23.000 Do you believe that what's going on right now in America and has been going on since the death of George Floyd has made America better in any way?
00:03:28.000 I mean, I think I've kind of made myself a staunch adversary of the Black Lives Matter movement. 0.97
00:03:32.000 It is the antithesis of everything that I believe in as an American, first and foremost.
00:03:37.000 And no, yeah, they're operating under the guise of something that's common sense.
00:03:41.000 Black lives matter.
00:03:42.000 And they're doing nothing to prove or to show that black lives matter to them because they don't care about black lives. 0.98
00:03:47.000 We know that all across America, in major cities. Black crime rate has gone up, black homicide rate has gone up, black people are dying because of Black Lives Matter activism. 0.95
00:03:57.000 People burning down and looting black neighborhoods, taking away black jobs. So I hate everything to do with Black Lives Matter and I have used my platform and my voice to speak out against what is ultimately a big lie. This is all built upon the idea that black Americans are being gunned, unarmed We're just peacefully doing our business and a police officer sees us and they come up to us and they want to shoot us and they want to kill us. 0.99
00:04:20.000 And that's a lie. 0.99
00:04:21.000 If you are genuinely concerned about black lives, if I was going to be fearful in America, I would be more afraid of a black person, a black male, a black perpetrator than I would be of a white person or a white police officer. 0.96
00:04:32.000 Going by the statistics. 0.98
00:04:33.000 We kill our own people way faster than any other person.
00:04:37.000 I actually say this, and it's controversial. 0.97
00:04:39.000 If you are truly, sincerely a white supremacist in America, the best thing you could do is do nothing and let black America tend to itself. 0.93
00:04:46.000 Because what we do to ourselves, when left unattended to ourselves, is way worse when you look at the statistics than allowing any other group to come in and try to do anything to us. 0.97
00:04:57.000 And that's including, of course, police officers who are not killing black Americans for no reason.
00:05:01.000 So in a second I'm going to ask you about the extent to which racism still shapes life in America because it remains this key issue in American politics and the stats tend to be rather split on all of this.
00:05:11.000 I'm going to get your answer on racism in America in one second first.
00:05:15.000 I have life insurance.
00:05:16.000 I have life insurance because I am a responsible human being and I want to make sure that my family is taken care of if, God forbid, I plot.
00:05:22.000 If an anvil falls on my head, at least I know that my family is not going to be lacking in the money department.
00:05:27.000 You should have life insurance, too, if you've got a family, anybody who is dependent on your income.
00:05:31.000 With everything going on right now, a lot of people are asking whether you can even buy life insurance.
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00:06:33.000 Okay, so the main pitch, it seems, of the Democratic Party these days is that America is systemically racist.
00:06:39.000 According to the 1619 Project, America was rooted in racism.
00:06:42.000 America is a 400-year story of nothing but the foundations of racism being carried out in every aspect of American life.
00:06:50.000 So, how much do you think that racism is actually an obstacle to black Americans living today?
00:06:55.000 Not in 1960 when Jim Crow, not in 1860 when slavery was a thing, but today in 2020 America.
00:07:00.000 It's not at all an obstacle to black Americans today.
00:07:03.000 It is just there is no systemic racism, there is no law, there is nothing that says that I can't do something as a black person that you can do.
00:07:10.000 So it's completely, completely false.
00:07:12.000 What we're really talking about is the fact that people want to absolve themselves of personal responsibility and we're being helped.
00:07:17.000 If there's anything that's systemic in white, in America today, it's white guilt.
00:07:21.000 And that's the biggest problem that we have in America today is white guilt.
00:07:23.000 It's been institutionalized, it's been politicized, politicians, white people feeling bad for themselves, and therefore allowing people, allowing black people and white people alike, you know, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, to run around and act like toddlers, right? 0.61
00:07:35.000 So there's an emotional immaturity that is happening in black America and has spawned from the education system which shapes you from the time that you are in kindergarten to believe that because you're black you can't in America. 0.96
00:07:46.000 When you keep telling a child over and over again they can't because they won't, right?
00:07:50.000 They will begin to believe in their own futility.
00:07:54.000 And this is the thing that I try to conquer, right? 0.56
00:07:56.000 I try to go out there, I try to speak, and I try to say the problem, if you want to talk about anything systemic, it's that white people keep allowing this false narrative to be perpetuated and won't allow black Americans to get up onto their own two feet.
00:08:07.000 And that really stems from, I would say, the mid-1960s, where black America sort of took a shift away from the peaceful civil rights into this more, you know, hardcore militant black civil rights of burning down your neighborhoods and looting and rioting because they didn't want to take steps to be personally responsible. 0.86
00:08:24.000 What do you make of the argument?
00:08:25.000 I know that you covered some in your book, Blackout.
00:08:28.000 The argument that was made by LBJ and still made by Democrats today, that one of the big problems is that historic racism is built into the system such that people are starting from behind the eight ball.
00:08:38.000 That if you look at the broad history of the United States, that black Americans were discriminated against for the vast majority of America's history, really only alleviated legally in the 1960s and 1970s.
00:08:48.000 And even beyond then, there were informal structures of racism.
00:08:51.000 And therefore, that black Americans are starting off inherently behind sort of the starting line. 0.88
00:08:57.000 LBJ suggested, for example, that it would not be proper to simply remove all barriers to entry.
00:09:02.000 You're still leaving people who are so far behind that they can never catch up.
00:09:05.000 And that just wouldn't be appropriate to say, OK, now you're free to live your lives when they've already been systematically deprived of resources that other people have had in the United States.
00:09:12.000 Look, nobody will debate the fact that black Americans were oppressed in America for a The problem is that, and you're talking about LBJ's Howard University speech, where he said, you know, we need to fix this.
00:09:21.000 Fair.
00:09:22.000 We need to give black people full freedom.
00:09:23.000 We're getting rid of Jim Crow. 1.00
00:09:24.000 Great, great.
00:09:25.000 All of these things.
00:09:25.000 And then he did the worst thing ever.
00:09:27.000 Which is he assigned white guilt to everybody and said, but it's not enough to just give them their freedoms.
00:09:32.000 You know, we all have to get involved and we have to do this and we have to do that.
00:09:36.000 What I can say to you is that there is no group that has ever lagged behind another group that has gotten ahead with handouts.
00:09:41.000 You have to at some point do the hard work, right?
00:09:44.000 So let's say I've been illiterate because I grew up in a black America where I wasn't allowed to read. 0.87
00:09:48.000 I'm not going to learn to read by you pretending I can read.
00:09:51.000 Eventually I'm going to have to learn to read myself.
00:09:53.000 And this is sort of when all of these programs that are meant to instill equality Which are fundamentally racist in and of themselves, right?
00:09:59.000 Like allowing more black people to get into schools, which hurts black America. 0.97
00:10:03.000 These affirmative action practices, which was started by LBJ and this initiative for white people to feel guilty enough to just allow black people to be given accolades and scholarships that they don't deserve.
00:10:14.000 It has harmed black America over time, because at the end of the day, you know the information or you don't. 0.96
00:10:18.000 You can do it or you cannot.
00:10:20.000 And here's a great example.
00:10:21.000 Look at the areas in which black Americans actually excel in.
00:10:24.000 What are the areas we excel in?
00:10:25.000 Sports, right?
00:10:26.000 Did LeBron James become LeBron James because every time he scored a basket, we pretended it was four points?
00:10:32.000 Of course he didn't.
00:10:33.000 He did it because he did the hard work.
00:10:34.000 He went after school every day, whatever it was, he practiced his game, and LeBron James became LeBron James because he did the work and he put in the work.
00:10:41.000 So the areas that we excel in, you know, disprove the idea that the areas that we lag behind, we're going to get ahead by somehow just being given handouts.
00:10:48.000 We have to do the work.
00:10:50.000 This is a point Shelby Steele has made specifically with regard to basketball, suggesting that you don't say to a kid who's unable to dribble, well, you know, if we give you this handout or that handout, you're going to learn to dribble.
00:10:58.000 We say, okay, now you need to learn to dribble.
00:11:00.000 Right.
00:11:00.000 And that is the only way that anybody gets ahead of any color or at any point in American life.
00:11:04.000 So how did you personally make the transition?
00:11:06.000 Because you didn't always believe this stuff.
00:11:08.000 In fact, when would you say that you became more conservative on these issues?
00:11:12.000 What's actually funny is that I've always been conservative.
00:11:14.000 I just didn't know that I was a conservative, and I think this is what a lot of black Americans suffer from.
00:11:19.000 We're raised quite conservatively, and I was definitely raised staunchly conservatively in my grandfather's household, but I didn't care about politics. 0.68
00:11:26.000 I was ignorant about politics.
00:11:28.000 So I went through the public school system, and if you come out of the public school system out the other side, and you actually learn, if you actually study, you walk out, you get your degree, and you know, you know what? 0.97
00:11:38.000 Republicans are racist, conservatives are racist, and at every point that we've ever gotten ahead, it's because of Democrats.
00:11:44.000 I mean, even LBJ. 0.99
00:11:45.000 I mean, it's amazing.
00:11:46.000 They make it seem like he was this wonderful president for Black America because he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
00:11:52.000 He was forced to sign it in 1964.
00:11:53.000 You know, he stepped in, he became president because JFK got killed, and there were massive riots all around.
00:11:58.000 The entire time he was in Senate, For 20 years, he voted against every initiative to help black Americans. 0.93
00:12:03.000 He was a staunch racist. 0.62
00:12:04.000 He used the N-word all the time, you know, when he was in the White House.
00:12:07.000 And yet they've rewritten history and it's disappeared.
00:12:10.000 So we learned that LBJ was a hero.
00:12:11.000 So I wasn't politically inclined at all.
00:12:13.000 I had never voted.
00:12:14.000 But if you had asked me, you stopped me on the street, and you said, are you a Democrat or Republican, I would have said Democrat.
00:12:19.000 And it would have been because of the reasons that I just listed.
00:12:22.000 So I started paying attention in politics when Donald Trump came down the escalator, which is quite hilariously, because I thought this man should never be the president of the United States ever, right?
00:12:30.000 So I don't care where you were in America.
00:12:31.000 I mean, I was on your side with this.
00:12:33.000 Like, no, not this guy.
00:12:34.000 I thought that he was just too boisterous, too New York.
00:12:38.000 And also, he was the guy who says you're fired, too cultural to be the president of the United States. 0.81
00:12:42.000 I didn't believe that he was the right person for the job, especially coming off of Obama, the smooth talker. 0.97
00:12:47.000 But then something weird started happening, where this guy who I thought should not be the president of the United States, rather than saying he shouldn't be the president of the United States because he's not qualified, the media started saying he shouldn't be the president of the United States because he's a racist, a sexist, a homophobe. 0.94
00:13:00.000 I'm thinking, wait a second. 0.57
00:13:02.000 This guy has been loved.
00:13:03.000 You know, in the media, they loved this guy.
00:13:05.000 I mean, in every hip hop song I listened to growing up, they wanted to be like Trump.
00:13:09.000 You want to end up at Mar-a-Lago.
00:13:10.000 He was a symbol of status and of wealth.
00:13:12.000 So I asked myself an important question and that question was, is it plausible that black Americans are now being, and racism is being used as a theme to turn black Americans into single issue voters?
00:13:21.000 And the answer is yes.
00:13:22.000 And I started researching and I fell in love with Thomas Sowell.
00:13:25.000 I mean, it really was a story of falling in love with Thomas Sowell and his books.
00:13:29.000 And he knocked me into reality.
00:13:31.000 And you really, you really can't unsee it.
00:13:33.000 You can't unsee it after you, once you learn the knowledge of how we've been used as single issue voters, you can't unsee it.
00:13:39.000 So Republicans have been struggling, obviously, for decades to try and make inroads in the black community.
00:13:43.000 Shockingly, some of the polls show that Trump is actually making some inroads in the black community, which is a complete, obviously, surprise to many of the pollsters and to many of the mainstream media.
00:13:51.000 What do you think is the best way for Republicans to speak to members of the black community?
00:13:56.000 Because it seems that they've tried a bunch of different angles.
00:13:58.000 All of them seem to fail.
00:13:59.000 Many of them seem to be very apologetic in tone.
00:14:02.000 There's this feeling like, okay, we have to make excuses for what we are saying.
00:14:06.000 It's always seemed to me that if you talk to black people the same way you talk to everybody else, because black people are like everybody else, that seems like the best way to do it. 0.99
00:14:11.000 Right.
00:14:12.000 But I think you have more expertise on this than I do.
00:14:14.000 Yeah.
00:14:14.000 How should Republicans talk to members of the black community?
00:14:17.000 So what I've noticed with Republicans is that they're suffering from PTSD.
00:14:20.000 You guys get called racists so much that you're fearful, right?
00:14:23.000 And I'm saying you guys, I'm kind of looping you into all of this, but they're fearful to say anything, even if it's true.
00:14:28.000 Everyone kind of tiptoes out.
00:14:30.000 I always describe it as like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the munchkins come out. 0.98
00:14:32.000 Like, you know, even though your instincts, you're like, you know, George Floyd, this doesn't sound right.
00:14:36.000 Republicans will wait and wait until somebody else is at first because you've been called racist for absolutely nothing for years.
00:14:43.000 And the reason why Trump was able to make inroads is because he's rude, right?
00:14:46.000 And here's the thing. 0.95
00:14:47.000 Black America needed someone cultural.
00:14:49.000 He needed someone who didn't care, who wasn't going to apologize, who was going to say what he meant and not apologize for it because it was simply true.
00:14:54.000 when he gave that infamous speech and said, Black America, what do you have to lose?
00:14:57.000 And he listed all of these ways that Black American communities are suffering.
00:15:00.000 And the media calls him a racist.
00:15:01.000 He never apologized for it.
00:15:02.000 He never said, I could have said that better, or I should have been more sensitive.
00:15:06.000 He simply said it, and he left it there.
00:15:08.000 And that is actually, that should be a call to action for all Republicans.
00:15:11.000 Don't apologize.
00:15:12.000 If it's true, it's true.
00:15:13.000 If you haven't been called racist yet in 2020, I've been called racist, you know? 0.64
00:15:18.000 I've been called anti-black.
00:15:19.000 So I think that that is the most important lesson, is just be courageous, because at the end of the day, silence is not winning us.
00:15:25.000 What I always say about the right, which is really interesting, is that the right is playing by rules that were established by the left, and the left is playing by no rules.
00:15:32.000 Right?
00:15:33.000 We have to start fighting.
00:15:34.000 And I worry that there's not enough voices that are willing to just simply say the truth, let it linger, and not worry about the names that they're being called.
00:15:44.000 So, speaking of having the courage to step into waters where angels fear to tread, you obviously cut this video in the aftermath of the George Floyd death, in which you went through specifically his criminal record, and you talked about not really the situation surrounding George Floyd's death, which now as it turns out, new details suggest it's a lot more complex than the original narrative.
00:16:02.000 You talked specifically about the attempts to elevate George Floyd into a sort of moral paragon, which obviously is something that the culture has done, it's what the media have done, And you see this fairly routinely, is the attempt to suggest that people who, at the very best, until the moment they were shot by police, had led difficult lives, are in fact people who ought to be emulated or who are free of any moral stain.
00:16:24.000 We're seeing it more recently with Jacob Blake, who's being elevated into a loving father of three, as opposed to a person who had an open warrant for both domestic violence and sexual assault in the third degree, and who resisted arrest.
00:16:34.000 What prompted you to make that statement, and why do you think so many people in the media have been willing to simply cover up the reality of who criminal suspects are in interactions with the police?
00:16:46.000 You know, when I started looking into who he was, and I had no question he was going to have a rap sheet, I knew obviously the police had not stopped this man for no reason, and I knew that it couldn't have escalated that situation unless he somehow was resisting arrest, despite having no knowledge of that.
00:16:59.000 When I did look into him and I found his rap sheet, And I'm sitting here thinking that they've elevated him to such a level that they're burying him in a gold casket.
00:17:07.000 Like, a gold casket!
00:17:08.000 Dr. Ben Carson will not be buried in a gold casket.
00:17:09.000 Larry Elder will not be buried in a gold casket.
00:17:12.000 You know, all of these Condoleezza Rice will not be buried in a gold casket. 0.98
00:17:15.000 But this person, who spent nine prison stints, nine prison and jail stints, which is remarkable, actually.
00:17:21.000 If there's any Guinness Book of Records, look at that.
00:17:23.000 Nine prison and jail stints before you turn 40 is actually the most impressive thing he's ever done in his entire life.
00:17:28.000 Elevated, and you have little black kids that are wearing shirts. 0.71
00:17:31.000 Merle's being painted of him, calling him a hero, former Vice President Joe Biden saying that they're gonna speak at his funeral.
00:17:38.000 This is crazy.
00:17:39.000 And it's indicative of where we're at in black culture, where this is what we constantly do.
00:17:44.000 We elevate people that should not be elevated, and we downgrade people that should be elevated, right?
00:17:48.000 So Condoleezza Rice, Uncle Tom, Larry Elder, Coon. 1.00
00:17:52.000 Dr. Ben Carson? 1.00
00:17:53.000 Stupid. 1.00
00:17:53.000 That's my favorite one. 1.00
00:17:54.000 A literal neurosurgeon is stupid, right? 1.00
00:17:57.000 And this is a problem with black culture. 1.00
00:17:59.000 And until we have the courage to go into it and say this is wrong, you can disagree with whether or not Derek Chauvin should be on his, you know, have been on his neck for that long and disregard the fact that he was high on fentanyl and high on methamphetamine in his system at the time of the arrest.
00:18:13.000 But you should also disagree with elevating this person to the level of a hero.
00:18:16.000 And I just felt it was weighing on me for days.
00:18:19.000 Just watching people spin this man into a hero.
00:18:21.000 And I said, I have to say something because this is a lie.
00:18:24.000 And I don't care about the peer pressure.
00:18:26.000 I don't care about, you know, you should just be quiet because let his family grieve.
00:18:30.000 Four day funeral.
00:18:32.000 I mean, none of us, we're never going to get that.
00:18:33.000 None of us are going to get that.
00:18:35.000 And we've lived our lives, apparently, a lot more nobly than he did.
00:18:39.000 So, speaking of that, number one, why do you think that everybody reacted the way they did?
00:18:43.000 People were very, very, very upset about all of this.
00:18:45.000 And there is sort of an unspoken rule that after somebody dies, you sort of let the dead be buried, but obviously you went after him on a character level.
00:18:54.000 I mean, you talked about who he was as a character.
00:18:56.000 Why do you think it was important to do that?
00:18:57.000 And also, why do you think It is that there is this phenomenon in American life where certain people are elevated.
00:19:02.000 Even Barack Obama seems to have been denigrated in the American public mind since his presidency.
00:19:07.000 When he was elected, it was a historic moment.
00:19:08.000 Now, the fact that he was elected twice as a black president with an overwhelming majority is not in any way a proof that America is not racist.
00:19:15.000 We just have to ignore that happened.
00:19:16.000 We have to pretend that it's extraordinarily historic that Kamala Harris has now been selected as a VP candidate, even though we just had a black president five minutes ago.
00:19:23.000 Right, right.
00:19:24.000 You know, I would say what the left has realized is that racist sort of represents an Achilles heel in America, meaning that they know that they stroke this one issue because they've done such a good job of programming people to believe that it's still ever-present, and it's not.
00:19:36.000 It's just not.
00:19:37.000 That they can inspire riots, they can inspire protests, and they can inspire upheaval, and that's what they want ahead of an election cycle.
00:19:43.000 Uh, somehow they're pinning all this stuff in the back of conservatives.
00:19:45.000 It makes no sense.
00:19:46.000 Uh, you know, and, and you have corporations that are, you know, capitulating to this ridiculous narrative. 0.98
00:19:51.000 And it just, it just becomes way for them to seize control and can seize power, um, by reducing black Americans to emotional toddlers. 0.98
00:19:58.000 And that's what we're seeing.
00:20:00.000 You know, we're seeing a toddler response to things, not waiting to get more information, just saying black versus white.
00:20:06.000 And it's remarkable if you look at the actual headlines, right? 0.96
00:20:09.000 We know that you're more likely as a white person to be killed by a black person the other way around. 0.97
00:20:14.000 But when a black, when a white person is killed by a black person, the headline doesn't mention race, right? 0.98
00:20:19.000 It's five-year-old got shot by a man in Chicago. 0.84
00:20:22.000 But the second that they can look at the race and say, oh look, a white person did something bad to a black person, the media just completely gets in on that and just race, race, race, race, race, race, race.
00:20:32.000 And again, I think it's just a tool of manipulation because if you can get somebody to react emotionally and not rationally, you can control them.
00:20:38.000 They're yours.
00:20:39.000 And I've always just tried to be the person that says, look, pause, reflect, think rationally and wait to get all the details and don't see yourself.
00:20:47.000 I certainly don't see myself as black first.
00:20:50.000 I see myself as American first.
00:20:52.000 I don't see myself as a woman first.
00:20:53.000 I see myself as an American first.
00:20:55.000 And we just need to get black America to a more emotionally mature spot than they are. 1.00
00:21:00.000 And it's difficult when I said, you know, as I said earlier, when you have systemic white guilt, It's very difficult to expect black Americans to react rationally rather than emotionally.
00:21:10.000 So in the aftermath of your George Floyd video, famously Dave Chappelle went after you in his comedy special, and you handled it with real aplomb.
00:21:16.000 I mean, you just kind of laughed it off and pointed out he's a cultural figure, he can say whatever he wants.
00:21:21.000 It can't be fun to be attacked by Dave Chappelle in the way that you were attacked by Dave Chappelle.
00:21:25.000 Maybe you can talk a little bit about that, and what exactly did Chappelle get wrong about George Floyd?
00:21:29.000 You know, I saw it, and first off, I didn't actually find it to be funny, right?
00:21:32.000 But I do believe that humor is a safe space.
00:21:35.000 And the bigger thing, when I look at a perspective of that, I say, they're already silencing comedians.
00:21:39.000 I don't want to be one of those people.
00:21:40.000 Even though I find this to be, you know, denigrating, degrading, disrespectful, I don't really think that it's right for me to say to a comedian, you can't say what you want.
00:21:48.000 But there was absolutely nothing funny about the entire 20 minutes of his speech.
00:21:52.000 You know, he didn't seem to be in an emotionally good spot, if I'm being honest with you.
00:21:55.000 And I think that he just took the bait on the media.
00:21:58.000 I actually kind of thought, which is interesting, if you watch Dave Chappelle's old skit, he's gone after the left a lot and he's been threatened to be cancelled and they all, you know, they have something bad to say about it because he tells the truth.
00:22:07.000 And I felt like he was just giving them what they wanted and attacked me.
00:22:11.000 And then I had sort of the big girl perspective that here is probably, you know, the most well-renowned, well-renowned comedian.
00:22:18.000 Uh, at least in America, probably abroad, and my name is being said out of his mouth, so people who don't know me are going to look me up, and they're going to see my views, and some people are going to be brought over to the side and realize, okay, what she said was not really that big of a deal, you know?
00:22:30.000 She kind of told the truth, and that's kind of what I'm after.
00:22:32.000 I kind of try to look at the big picture, um, and not be so selfish and egotistical when I, like, see somebody attack me.
00:22:38.000 Just, you know, it's meaningless.
00:22:39.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about that perspective because one of the themes that runs throughout your book is this theme of anti-victimhood.
00:22:45.000 This idea that you're not a victim, you have agency in your own life.
00:22:47.000 I want to ask where that came from in your personal life, what's your sort of history with that, and why victimhood is so attractive to so many people on all sides of the aisle and of all colors.
00:22:55.000 It's a really rich political vein for people to mine.
00:22:57.000 We'll get to that in just one second.
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00:24:13.000 Alrighty, so one of the themes that you focus in a lot in Blackout is the theme that victimhood and speaking about victimhood and believing yourself to be a victim is actually extraordinarily crippling.
00:24:23.000 You have some personal stories about your sort of realization that wallowing in victimhood was a terrible idea and actually crippling for your future.
00:24:31.000 Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
00:24:32.000 Yeah, so I mean, people, I don't know if people in the political sphere know this, but when I was in high school, I went through what was classified as a hate crime, and I talk about that in the book, what happened, you know, who the perpetrators were, and how the media sort of, when I was in high school, took a narrative away from me because they were just like, this is perfect, we have a politician's son, called her the N-word, and we can stick a label of her as, you know, as a victim, and this person, as a racist.
00:25:00.000 And very young people involved, 14 years old, 14 years old being called a racist, me being called a victim, before I really decided on who I wanted to be in life.
00:25:07.000 And so I got to, you know, experience what it's like.
00:25:10.000 What does it feel like being a victim?
00:25:11.000 What do you earn from being a victim?
00:25:13.000 We've all been victimized.
00:25:14.000 I could mine your life and tell you you've been a victim before, I've been a victim before, various things, you know, it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't need to be about race, it can be about anything, you can be a victim.
00:25:21.000 But what is it about staying a victim is what the left is after, right?
00:25:25.000 Like being, this is like the ultimate achievement, like this is it, you've achieved the elixir of life, be a victim.
00:25:30.000 That is so harmful and so cancerous to people.
00:25:33.000 We are, human beings are meant to triumph.
00:25:35.000 We're meant to get over things.
00:25:36.000 It actually makes you stronger no matter what you go through.
00:25:38.000 If you champion those experiences and develop a good perspective about those experiences you become a stronger individual.
00:25:44.000 When I accepted this victim narrative I suffered with anorexia for four years.
00:25:48.000 I was absolutely miserable.
00:25:49.000 I was a mean person.
00:25:50.000 I wasn't happy.
00:25:51.000 Right?
00:25:52.000 But when I suddenly had my aha moment and realized I was a child and a narrative was taken from me, not only from me, but from these kids and people didn't know what had happened.
00:26:00.000 They just loved the race thing.
00:26:03.000 I realized that, wow, this is completely toxic and it transformed my life.
00:26:07.000 And it wasn't the way my grandparents raised me.
00:26:09.000 They never raised me to see myself as a victim.
00:26:11.000 My grandfather grew up on a sharecropping farm, picking cotton and laying out tobacco to dry when he was five years old.
00:26:17.000 He's never once complained, never once told me I can't do something because of the color of my skin.
00:26:21.000 I think it's insulting to his legacy, for me to live in this America, to run around saying that I'm a victim.
00:26:28.000 So I really, really do credit my grandfather and the experiences that he championed, my grandmother and the experiences that she championed when there actually was systemic oppression against black Americans for making me feel too ashamed to grab onto this victim narrative when it comes to race.
00:26:42.000 My ancestors didn't live through what they lived through so I could run around and cry about being black.
00:26:47.000 So you mentioned earlier that one of your great intellectual influences was Thomas Sowell.
00:26:50.000 Many people have asked me if I could pick one person in America to be president, who would it be?
00:26:53.000 I've always said Sowell.
00:26:54.000 Who are some of your other intellectual influences?
00:26:56.000 People who really sort of changed how you think about these issues and others.
00:26:59.000 Yeah, Larry Elder, I know he's been on the show, he's become a mentor to me.
00:27:02.000 Sometimes if I don't understand something because I wasn't alive for it and I'll be like, what happened with this case?
00:27:07.000 I pick up the phone and I call him.
00:27:09.000 He's been wonderful.
00:27:10.000 Shelby Steele and Thomas Solby, my top three in terms of black authors that have sort of slapped me into reality, but non-black people. 1.00
00:27:17.000 Milton Friedman, right? So it's not enough. When I first got into politics, I had an idea and an itch, right? Like, you know, something's not right here. But it's not enough to just be somebody who has a feeling. You can't just keep going out there saying black people don't have to be Democrats. You need to do the research. Why are you a conservative, right? What do you stand on? 0.50
00:27:34.000 Why do you believe in free markets and capitalism? Where does Western civilization come from?
00:27:40.000 So there have been so many authors along the way that I had to sort of go back and learn something.
00:27:44.000 I had learned all throughout public school, but it was a miseducation, not an actual education.
00:27:49.000 So I had to spend years studying, reading books, and seeing everything that I had missed about Western civilization and what makes it so great.
00:27:58.000 A great starting book that I always recommend people read is How the West Was Won.
00:28:01.000 By Rodney Stark, it's a great book to kind of just get you kind of grounded in, you know, what is Western civilization and why are people pretending to hate it?
00:28:08.000 And to make you feel prideful and to make you feel proud.
00:28:12.000 And I think I am so proud to be an American.
00:28:15.000 I'm proud of the story of my ancestors.
00:28:17.000 I'm proud that I did not have to live through that.
00:28:19.000 And I'm challenging and inspiring other black Americans to realize that we are, if you are a black American living in America today, you are a part of the most privileged black Americans that have ever walked the face of the planet.
00:28:31.000 And yet you are also a part of the whiniest, right? 0.84
00:28:35.000 The whiniest and the most upset black people that have ever walked the face of the planet. 1.00
00:28:38.000 And that's problematic. 0.98
00:28:39.000 Something's not right there.
00:28:41.000 So let's talk a little bit about one of the critiques that's been made of your take on black America.
00:28:45.000 So you've used language before where you've suggested that people need to get off the ideological plantation, for example, and there's been a critique that basically says, you know, you talk a lot about black agency.
00:28:53.000 Are you depriving people of agency when you suggest that they've been indoctrinated by the educational system or when you suggest that they have been sort of told what to think, they've been lied to?
00:29:04.000 Are you suggesting that people aren't freely choosing what it is that they've chosen politically, or do you really believe that it's really not a question of agency, it's a question of misinformation?
00:29:12.000 Yeah, it's a question of misinformation, and people always get me wrong.
00:29:15.000 They think that I say things to be theatrical when I say the democratic plantation, and people go, you shouldn't say that, you shouldn't liken it to slavery.
00:29:22.000 No, actually, if you sit down and you study the model of American slavery and I say Democrat plantation because at the starting point of the Civil War all Democrats had slaves. There were no Republicans that held a slave, that owned a slave and when you look at the model of it right what was what was necessary? Illiteracy. Black Americans are not allowed to learn how to read. Look across America today. 0.99
00:29:41.000 You can go into inner cities.
00:29:43.000 Here in Los Angeles, you've got black Americans. 0.98
00:29:45.000 75% of black boys can't pass a basic literacy exam. 0.87
00:29:49.000 Major cities like Baltimore, across five schools, they couldn't find a single black child that was proficient in reading or writing. 0.94
00:29:55.000 So we are actually seeing, through the education system, pollution, the dumbing down of all Americans, right? 0.78
00:30:00.000 But especially black Americans. 0.98
00:30:02.000 And when you dumb down black Americans, that means that they start to look like they're getting their education from culture, right? 0.99
00:30:06.000 And that's problematic. 0.99
00:30:08.000 Father absence, huge issue.
00:30:09.000 We know you actually were the person that woke me up on that.
00:30:12.000 I watched an old video of yours on Black Lives Matter where you talked about, you know, 23% single motherhood rate in the 1960s, 74% at the time that you shot that.
00:30:21.000 I think it's 77% as we're sitting here right now.
00:30:23.000 And what was important to maintaining slavery?
00:30:27.000 Making sure the family was broken down.
00:30:28.000 They were constantly trading slaves.
00:30:30.000 If you read Frederick Douglass's book, His autobiography, in the first chapter, he talks about how he felt nothing when his mother died, felt nothing when he was taken away from his sisters, because that was important to maintaining the slave mentality. 0.68
00:30:40.000 So, in my book, I have a book on slavery, and I really spell out, when I say Democrat plantations, I mean it.
00:30:46.000 It's been updated, it's been modified, but we are very much still living on the plantation, doing the work for Democrats, and getting nothing back.
00:30:53.000 Right?
00:30:53.000 Voting for them in 93% margins is, to me, that's a form of slavery.
00:30:56.000 We're doing the work for you, and we're getting nothing back.
00:30:59.000 Our communities don't get fixed, our children don't get brighter.
00:31:01.000 So I'm a lot more thoughtful than people give me credit for.
00:31:04.000 It sounds like a flamethrower, like I'm just a flamethrower, but I've thought deeply about these topics, and I believe what I say.
00:31:12.000 So let's talk about some of the cultural influences that you're speaking about.
00:31:15.000 So obviously, there's the culture of politics, which is very much based in race.
00:31:19.000 Politicians have an awful lot of hay to make out of suggesting that people are racist.
00:31:24.000 Kamala Harris is, I think, the greatest example of this I have ever seen in modern American politics, literally calling Joe Biden a racist, and then one year later, suggesting that she called him a racist because they're in the middle of a debate, which is about as transparent a move as I can possibly imagine.
00:31:38.000 So you have the culture of politics, you have the culture of Hollywood, in which movies are constantly suggesting that black Americans are victims.
00:31:45.000 Recently, there was a movie on Netflix I was watching with my wife, in which there was a literal speech by Jamie Foxx about how America was built to keep black women down.
00:31:52.000 And then there is the culture of music.
00:31:55.000 And I want to go through each one of these with you.
00:31:56.000 So in terms of the cultural policies, we've gone through that a little bit.
00:31:58.000 When you look at how Hollywood addresses race, what are the problems that you see there?
00:32:03.000 Because obviously this is mostly a bunch of white executives who are attempting to, I think, be sympathetic or empathetic to what they think black Americans believe or want to hear or feel.
00:32:12.000 What do you think about Hollywood's messages on race?
00:32:14.000 Yeah, well, first and foremost, the Democrats control Hollywood.
00:32:17.000 You're not allowed to be a conservative, a vocal conservative, and still keep your job, right?
00:32:21.000 I mean, if you're a vocal conservative and you come out and you say something, you're cancelled, you're gone, you're out of here.
00:32:25.000 And to me, it's become a huge propaganda machine. 0.94
00:32:29.000 And as I mentioned earlier, when you have black Americans who are not educated, black Americans like these black boys who can't pass a basic literacy exam, Well, where are they getting their information from? 1.00
00:32:39.000 That means they're watching movies, they're watching TV. 0.92
00:32:41.000 Hollywood becomes the teachers, right?
00:32:43.000 And I think that the Democrats have understood this for a very long time.
00:32:46.000 And one of the biggest mistakes that conservatives made was giving up the culture war.
00:32:50.000 The culture war is so important because so many people are not going to pick up a book But they are going to watch SNL.
00:32:55.000 They're going to watch an SNL skit and they're going to accept that to be some truth.
00:32:59.000 You know, that this must be what's going on because they're making fun of conservatives on Saturday Night Live.
00:33:03.000 This must be what everybody thinks because it's made it to the big screen.
00:33:07.000 So everybody must be feeling this.
00:33:08.000 We all agree on this.
00:33:09.000 That, to me, is simple propaganda.
00:33:11.000 So let's talk about the culture of music.
00:33:13.000 So we have some agreements and we have some disagreements on the culture of music, famously.
00:33:16.000 So when it comes to the culture of music that is consumed in the black community, obviously rap is at the top of the list.
00:33:24.000 There's obviously a huge gap between the high forms of art that have been created by members of the black community and the rap culture of today. 0.99
00:33:31.000 I mean, it's a pretty broad range between Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and, say, Cardi B, who's now, I guess, interviewing former vice president of the United States.
00:33:41.000 What do you make of rap culture?
00:33:44.000 Because you have sort of a split opinion on rap culture a little bit.
00:33:47.000 Like on the one hand, you seem to recognize some of the downsides of the messages being purveyed.
00:33:51.000 On the other hand, you've suggested that there are some sort of differential messages in there that might be useful.
00:33:55.000 Right. So I mean, there are definitely a minority of rappers who are rapping about things that are actually important.
00:34:01.000 And I grew up listening to Jay-Z.
00:34:03.000 I don't like Jay-Z anymore because of his politics and I think he's being used and he's become a puppet.
00:34:07.000 but growing up listening to his music actually did something different for me when I was a hopeless, impoverished person listening to his music and he talks about how he made his way out.
00:34:18.000 He wasn't talking about killing a bunch of people, he was talking about business.
00:34:22.000 And his Black Album, he really talks about how he would not allow industry to use him, how he understood what his worth was.
00:34:27.000 These things were actually important lessons about business.
00:34:30.000 business and it came in a lyrical form and it was good, right? I would say Kanye West, he's never really written about like go out, grab a gat and just kill people. But unfortunately today that's the majority of what rap has become, right? 0.55
00:34:31.000 And it came in a lyrical form and it was good, right? 0.71
00:34:35.000 I would say Kanye West, he's never really written about go out, grab a gat and just kill people.
00:34:39.000 But unfortunately today that's the majority of what rap has become, right?
00:34:43.000 And so I completely agree with your assessment about Cardi B. It is one of the biggest insults. If black Americans are not insulted by the fact that Joe Biden, who has been hiding in his basement for the entire year made an appearance and came out because he was going to do an interview with Cardi B, do we have nothing better to offer? I mean, this would be akin to Donald Trump saying, I'm going to give no interviews, but he came up and he decided to give an interview to Justin Bieber, right? 0.78
00:34:43.000 And so I completely agree with your assessment about Cardi B. 0.78
00:34:47.000 It is one of the biggest insults.
00:35:06.000 I mean, which I actually, Justin Bieber, I'm sorry, I know you're a Christian man, I don't want to put you in the same boat as Cardi B. But it would be absurd. 0.99
00:35:13.000 White America would go, what is this?
00:35:15.000 Why are you being interviewed by Justin Bieber?
00:35:17.000 And it's because you're pandering.
00:35:18.000 Right?
00:35:19.000 You're pandering.
00:35:19.000 You look at Cardi B's Instagram, you see she has millions of followers, and you think, okay, this is an illiterate person, and if I appeal to this illiterate person, and she does a Like, she literally did.
00:35:29.000 In the middle of this interview, they think she's cool, she's hip, just by sitting here and taking this interview, black people vote for me. 1.00
00:35:36.000 It's basically saying, black people, you are stupid, you are dumb, and you're so foolish. 1.00
00:35:40.000 I mean, do you think, what if she just said in the middle of the interview, Joe Biden, can you name one Cardi B album? 1.00
00:35:45.000 No, Joe Biden, do me a favor, just one Cardi B lyric.
00:35:48.000 He couldn't do it, of course he's not, because he's being handled and they're saying, black people like this person, this is what they're into, and so here you go, talk to her.
00:35:54.000 Same thing with Hillary Clinton, when she went to the breakfast club and she said she had hot sauce in her bag, right?
00:35:59.000 She didn't know what Beyonce's song came from.
00:36:01.000 One of her handlers said, say this, right?
00:36:04.000 Probably got the questions ahead of time, say this, say you keep hot sauce in your bag, right now Beyonce's song is trending and it's hot sauce in my bag swag.
00:36:10.000 And she looked like a fish out of water and said it. 0.60
00:36:12.000 It is demeaning.
00:36:13.000 It is pandering. 1.00
00:36:14.000 It is ridiculous, okay? 0.99
00:36:15.000 And she asked pointedly ridiculous questions. 0.94
00:36:18.000 I want lower taxes, but I want universal health care for all. 1.00
00:36:21.000 She had no idea what she was doing, and yet both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden made the time to sit with her because they believe black people are stupid. 1.00
00:36:28.000 And black people that thought, yay, that's a win. 1.00
00:36:30.000 It shows you that they still believe that you are so stupid that they couldn't find many of the amazing intellectual black people that we have in the world to sit down with and ask them tough questions. 1.00
00:36:30.000 No, it's not a win. 1.00
00:36:40.000 An interview with Condoleezza Rice, right?
00:36:42.000 An interview with Larry Elder.
00:36:43.000 You know, even if you want somebody that is a Democrat, that's fine. 0.95
00:36:46.000 There are way more intellectual black Democrats you could have sat down with that you chose an illiterate rapper, because that's what she is. 1.00
00:36:52.000 She's illiterate. 1.00
00:36:54.000 Well, I mean, I would have paid money to hear Joe Biden's rendition of, what else?
00:36:58.000 As a popular rap artist myself, whose remix slaps significantly harder than the original, I can honestly say that Joe Biden's rendition, I would have paid good money for.
00:37:08.000 So I need to ask you about the Kanye issue.
00:37:10.000 So famously, you had a little bit of a tete-a-tete on Twitter when Kanye came out and he was supporting President Trump.
00:37:17.000 And I said, live by the Kanye, die by the Kanye, which is mainly me saying, you know, Kanye takes a lot of positions on a lot of different issues.
00:37:23.000 And you got a little bit upset about that, it seemed, on Twitter.
00:37:26.000 So what do you think is the proper relationship between celebrity and politics?
00:37:29.000 Because I am a strict down the line, I think that celebrities have no place in politics unless they actually know what they are talking about on any sort of deep level.
00:37:37.000 I understand the impact of celebrity, I understand, but I object to it.
00:37:40.000 Right.
00:37:41.000 But you have, I think, a more nuanced version of that.
00:37:42.000 So what's your view on celebrity and politics?
00:37:44.000 Yeah, you know, with Kanye, I think what I was upset with was that so many people were just dismissing him and calling him crazy.
00:37:50.000 And it's just not fair.
00:37:51.000 I mean, I think, I like Kanye, Kanye's a friend, and Kanye is a person that is a billionaire.
00:37:58.000 And I don't, I would not take someone, you know, to be like, he's richer than both you and I sitting here combined, right?
00:38:03.000 I'm assuming, I don't know, maybe you're a billionaire.
00:38:06.000 And people keep taking him lightly, and it's been his entire life.
00:38:09.000 Kanye was not coming out and telling people how to vote.
00:38:11.000 He never said, vote for this person.
00:38:12.000 He never said, do this.
00:38:13.000 He never said, listen to me, follow me.
00:38:14.000 He simply said, I support the president.
00:38:16.000 And I'm tired of people bullying me, telling me that I can't wear a MAGA hat.
00:38:19.000 And that was such an important message, especially for black Americans.
00:38:23.000 And maybe I was emotional in my response, because it is so hard.
00:38:28.000 You try being a black conservative, amidst Black Lives Matter, and go out and say, I support the president. 0.92
00:38:34.000 And you will see how you get treated, right? 0.97
00:38:37.000 You get called racist.
00:38:37.000 You, it's easy.
00:38:38.000 With us, there is a It's ferocious.
00:38:41.000 They want you gone.
00:38:42.000 I mean, they will accuse you of anything.
00:38:44.000 They want you gone.
00:38:45.000 You get all these horrible things.
00:38:45.000 You get death threats.
00:38:46.000 And here's a guy that's just saying, I'm no longer going to lie about who I support. 0.98
00:38:50.000 Not, if you don't support him, you're a racist.
00:38:52.000 I mean, we know his wife is not a Trump supporter, despite the fact that she works for them.
00:38:56.000 And I thought, this is productive.
00:38:58.000 It's a good thing for someone to say, I'm comfortable saying that I'm black and I'm a conservative in the cultural realm, especially because we know most black Americans have their eyes fixed culturally.
00:39:06.000 That it just sent a huge signal that it's okay to break away from the hive mentality.
00:39:12.000 Now, if Kanye was out there saying, I'd like to inform policy because I'm Kanye West, I'd like to go in, I will now be conducting the interviews, I'll sit down with candidates and make sure that what they're doing is great, I would have said, I have a problem with that, right?
00:39:23.000 Because that's ridiculous to assume that because you're a cultural figure, you somehow are now smart enough to be asking political questions. 0.83
00:39:30.000 It's pointedly ridiculous. 0.94
00:39:31.000 So that was the nuance. 0.85
00:39:32.000 He wasn't doing anything that I found to be harmful.
00:39:35.000 He just was saying, I support the president.
00:39:36.000 So I actually agree with that.
00:39:37.000 I think that it's actually a very important thing that Kanye West put on a MAGA hat and basically said, It's fine.
00:39:42.000 I'm allowed to wear a MAGA hat.
00:39:44.000 As someone who's been called a Jewish Nazi for being a Republican, I certainly understand the perspective of being inside a minority group where it is considered verboten to be on a different side of the political aisle.
00:39:56.000 So I'm very glad that happened.
00:39:57.000 I mean, speaking of which, you know, you talk about sort of policy influences.
00:40:00.000 One of the areas in which Kanye and Kim actually did have a policy influence is on criminal justice reform.
00:40:05.000 I know that you were an advocate also, I believe, of criminal justice reform.
00:40:08.000 I had some difficulty with the criminal justice reform bill that the Trump administration pushed, mainly because I was not of the opinion the criminal justice system is inherently racist.
00:40:17.000 I think there's a case to be made that we should cut back on the drug war because I think that there are a lot of people in jail for- Ridiculous.
00:40:23.000 I agree. 0.96
00:40:23.000 for silly crimes or crimes that at least they were in jail for too long for. 0.96
00:40:28.000 But overall I'm not of the opinion that people are being incarcerated for no reason or that mass incarceration is a serious problem.
00:40:34.000 So where are you on criminal justice reform?
00:40:36.000 And do you think that that is an effective version of outreach to black Americans?
00:40:41.000 I don't think there's a dichotomy here.
00:40:43.000 I think you can believe in criminal justice reform without subscribing to the idea that black people are being put into jail for no reason.
00:40:50.000 I don't believe, I believe both. 0.87
00:40:52.000 I do not believe that black Americans are being put into prison for no reason.
00:40:55.000 But I do believe that some of the harsher sentencing that happened, you know, when Bill Clinton became president, three strikes you're out, even if it's three small things, three strikes you're out, we're wrong.
00:41:02.000 And a lot of people were still serving prison sentences because of that.
00:41:05.000 So I think, you know, it's good to take a look at the criminal justice system.
00:41:10.000 I don't think it's great, and I'm someone who grew up with uncles that were in and out of prison.
00:41:14.000 I know for a fact, when you get a kid when they're young and they're in the system, if you can help them get out, when they leave, they get $50 and a bus ticket, right?
00:41:23.000 What do you expect someone who's been in prison for a year, you give them $50 and a bus ticket to do in their life, right?
00:41:28.000 They usually go back to crime because they have nothing.
00:41:31.000 And so their way of trying to get ahead is to steal, to rob, do these things.
00:41:34.000 What I loved about what they were doing was creating these transition programs, which were so desperately needed, because you don't want somebody who's desperate dropped back into your community.
00:41:43.000 You want somebody who goes, OK, we're going to help you find a job.
00:41:46.000 We're going to help you get on your two feet.
00:41:48.000 And that is what I loved and supported about the programming.
00:41:50.000 I do not at all believe that black Americans are being targeted by the criminal justice system at all.
00:41:54.000 I'm actually staunchly against that.
00:41:56.000 We commit more crimes.
00:41:58.000 So I want to talk to you in a second about some of the solutions that are on the table, because it seems like so much of our racial conversation is problem-focused and never solution-focused.
00:42:07.000 Nobody ever wants to talk about the solutions, because that might actually get awkward.
00:42:10.000 So we'll get awkward about that in just one second.
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00:43:30.000 Okay, so let's talk about the solutions versus problems orientation of American politics It seems fairly obvious at this point that a huge number of politicians have an awfully large stake in the racial conversation so long as no solutions are actually promulgated.
00:43:43.000 So Joe Biden, many Democrats, they keep throwing out the phrase systemic racism, specifically avoiding any sort of Specific definition.
00:43:50.000 If you say to them, what do you mean by systemic racism?
00:43:52.000 They literally will not explain it, because systemic racism technically means one of a couple things.
00:43:56.000 It could mean theoretically that there's an actual policy in place that is racist.
00:43:59.000 That's illegal.
00:44:00.000 It could theoretically mean that there are racists in the United States, which is obviously true and will be true in every society for all time, for past and future, because human beings are inherently sinful and flawed.
00:44:09.000 Or it could mean that historic practices have effects today But that doesn't necessarily mean that you get to implement policies that discriminate against one group in favor of another group.
00:44:18.000 So the third is inarguable, that history matters, but that doesn't necessarily create a solution.
00:44:22.000 It seems like anytime anybody pushes forward a solution, Democrats particularly and members of the media get very angry about the solutions that are being forwarded.
00:44:29.000 So to take a prime example, Senator Tim Scott put forward a national police reform bill and it was filibustered by Democrats.
00:44:35.000 Well, he was simultaneously called an Uncle Tom, which did trend during the RNC when he was speaking.
00:44:39.000 So let's talk about some of the solutions that you think should be on the table in the black community, which means actively labeling some of the problems that the black community is experiencing beyond sort of a miasmatic systemic racism.
00:44:49.000 I mean, I think the solution is for black Americans to fix the problems within our own community.
00:44:49.000 Right.
00:44:53.000 The solution is for white Americans to get out of the discussion because we have become the authors of our own problems. 0.91
00:44:58.000 The culture.
00:44:59.000 You've talked about culture so many times.
00:45:01.000 When I was growing up, my mom and my dad never checked to see if I did my homework.
00:45:04.000 It was not important for them to make sure that I was doing my homework.
00:45:07.000 Now, I naturally did.
00:45:08.000 I was good at school, so I liked it.
00:45:10.000 But it wasn't necessary because our culture is a bit different.
00:45:12.000 Now, when I went to my best friend's house, who happened to be Japanese, her father terrified me.
00:45:16.000 We got home we got after school.
00:45:18.000 He's like Kathy.
00:45:19.000 Her name is Kathy.
00:45:19.000 You sit down at the table right now.
00:45:20.000 You do your homework.
00:45:21.000 I mean, he didn't even want he was like astonished that she even brought somebody home because homework was so important.
00:45:25.000 So there's a cultural difference.
00:45:26.000 This is why nobody wants to talk about Asians because they're the ones that are doing the best in this country, right? 1.00
00:45:31.000 And they're doing the best financially.
00:45:33.000 Asian Americans are doing the best in this country.
00:45:35.000 It's because their culture is different.
00:45:35.000 Nobody talks about them.
00:45:37.000 They value different things.
00:45:38.000 Black values have to shift. 0.99
00:45:40.000 You want to talk about, oh, single father, single motherhood rate, why there's no fathers in the homes?
00:45:45.000 Well, it's not good for us when you have a culture and music which glorifies baby mama, right?
00:45:52.000 Baby mama, this amazing thing.
00:45:54.000 We have to get serious about education.
00:45:56.000 We need to stop criminalizing black Americans who want to get ahead.
00:46:00.000 For example, I was bullied in middle school by other black people because I spoke proper English.
00:46:05.000 I spoke proper English, so they would say, you're acting white.
00:46:05.000 Literally, that was my crime.
00:46:08.000 When you start to assign attributes that are considered whiteness, speaking proper English, caring about your schoolwork, these are things that black America makes fun of black Americans for. 0.84
00:46:19.000 Because they say, well that means that you're not black, unless you're speaking in colloquialisms. 0.98
00:46:23.000 Unless you're listening to dirty rap. 0.93
00:46:25.000 If you're not listening to Cardi B, you don't know her music.
00:46:27.000 So I've seen this growing up.
00:46:29.000 This has happened to me.
00:46:30.000 We have a culture problem in black America. 0.97
00:46:31.000 I think the best way to fix it is for everybody to stop debating about it. 0.50
00:46:35.000 Everyone stop the hand-holding and let black Americans get to work. 0.98
00:46:39.000 It is amazing how many white Americans seem to want to take control of this particular debate.
00:46:42.000 The entire anti-racist contingent led by Robin DiAngelo and her white fragility crew, they've attempted to regain control of racial issues in America, essentially by suggesting that black Americans cannot be expected to fix the system, that white Americans are the only ones who can fix the system since white Americans created the broken system.
00:46:59.000 In the first place, this call has been taken up.
00:47:01.000 by a wide variety of political figures who call for things like slavery reparations from the American government.
00:47:07.000 It was taken up by the National African American Museum of History and Culture, who literally suggested in full-on white supremacist fashion that things like punctuality and delayed gratification were white attributes.
00:47:19.000 So what do you say to white people who insist that, you know, they are so woke that they know better than somebody like Candace Owens what the black community needs? 0.95
00:47:27.000 I say you're racist. 0.73
00:47:29.000 I find that to be a fundamentally racist concept.
00:47:31.000 And I've had that attack.
00:47:33.000 White people that come to me and say, you don't understand, you don't understand. 0.96
00:47:36.000 I don't understand what it's like to be black in America. 0.93
00:47:38.000 I've done it my entire life.
00:47:39.000 I've never taken one day off on being black.
00:47:41.000 Not even an hour off.
00:47:42.000 I've done it my entire life.
00:47:44.000 And yet they feel they have the authority.
00:47:47.000 That white guilt has given them the authority to help me understand what it's like to be black, which is basically saying that unless I view myself as less than them, I can't be black.
00:47:55.000 Imagine that.
00:47:56.000 I'm saying to them, I view myself as your equal.
00:47:58.000 And that bothers them.
00:47:59.000 That really bothers them. 0.86
00:48:00.000 This idea that black Americans are suffering because of the color of their skin.
00:48:03.000 I mean, imagine a world where people think Malia and Sasha Obama are suffering.
00:48:06.000 That's what they're suggesting, because of the color of their skin.
00:48:09.000 But Malia and Sasha Obama should be given handouts in life about their suffering, and there are all these horrible things that they're going through because of the color of their skin.
00:48:15.000 No, that's not true.
00:48:16.000 Are there privileges that you can be afforded if you're rich?
00:48:20.000 Yeah, that's not because of the color of your skin.
00:48:22.000 It's called economic privilege.
00:48:23.000 We should all aspire to have economic privilege, right?
00:48:26.000 That's why I like free markets.
00:48:27.000 That's why I like capitalism.
00:48:29.000 We should all aspire to work harder, but it becomes impossible when we have this white guilt permeating throughout every aspect of American culture. 0.80
00:48:38.000 And that is what I just absolutely hate.
00:48:40.000 I want nothing to do with it.
00:48:42.000 We have to start changing it.
00:48:43.000 We have to start changing the conversation.
00:48:44.000 It starts with white Americans getting out of the conversation.
00:48:47.000 So getting white Americans out of the conversation, what are the discussions of race like within the black community in terms of, are there gradations and places of origin?
00:48:56.000 So the media have decided, for example, that black ought to be capitalized and the term white ought not be capitalized because the term black refers to people of a common ethnicity and origin despite the fact that people from Jamaica are not the same as people from Kenya who are not the same as people from South Africa or Zimbabwe or from the United States.
00:49:12.000 This is all one unified group of people.
00:49:14.000 White people, however, are merely defined in opposition to black Americans.
00:49:18.000 You see some of this in the treatment of Kamala Harris because there have been people like Thomas Chatterston Williams who have pointed out she's not actually an American descendant of slaves.
00:49:25.000 She's a descendant of American slaves, that she is half Jamaican and she's half Indian, and that if you're going to look at the demographics of Indian Americans, Indian Americans are actually the single richest subgroup in America right now, and so it's difficult to make the case that Indian Americans are subject to vicious, brute racism.
00:49:39.000 What are the discussions of race like within the black community or is it sort of irrelevant within the black community itself?
00:49:44.000 It's incredibly immature, you know, and I will say that over and over again.
00:49:47.000 It's incredibly immature and because they just have become so comfortable with being a victim because society has allowed it.
00:49:53.000 You've allowed the toddler to throw the tantrum so many times that this is the way that they think is the method to get what they want.
00:49:57.000 It's easy.
00:49:58.000 Being a victim is remarkably easy, right?
00:49:59.000 That's the easy path in life.
00:50:00.000 Life is hard.
00:50:01.000 You know, being responsible for yourself, waking up every day, going to work, taking responsibility when you do something wrong, that's the harder path. 0.96
00:50:08.000 Saying you're a victim and when you fail it's because of white people, the white boogeyman, that's very easy. 0.99
00:50:13.000 And so amongst black Americans it's very hostile when a black American like me ordains a thing for themselves. 0.67
00:50:20.000 And says, I don't accept this narrative, it's very hostile, it's angry, but it needs to happen.
00:50:24.000 You know, I did a speech at, not Howard University, another one of the HBCUs, and when I tell you, I stood up there for three hours and just took it.
00:50:31.000 Boo, yelling, I mean, just completely crazy.
00:50:34.000 It would never happen in an auditorium full of white people because they'll be a tiny bit more respectful than they were being that day. 0.90
00:50:40.000 But after the three hours of them just brutalizing me, at the end of it, they all kind of came up and said, you know, I want to take a picture with you.
00:50:47.000 And I respect you for standing your ground.
00:50:49.000 Let that happen.
00:50:50.000 Let that dialogue happen amongst black Americans.
00:50:53.000 Let them actually hear a black conservative perspective. 0.88
00:50:55.000 It's hard to hear a black conservative perspective when black conservatives are routinely drowned out by white voices, ironically, right? 1.00
00:51:01.000 Ironically, by these white voices pooh-poohing and saying how hard it is for us to be black. 0.85
00:51:04.000 But it's not hard for us to be black. 0.83
00:51:06.000 It's hard for us to be successful when you keep telling us it's hard for us to be black.
00:51:09.000 So you are one of the founders of Blexit, which was an attempt to get more black Americans to exit the Democratic Party.
00:51:15.000 And, you know, there's been similar attempts to get Jews to exit the Democratic Party, which is wild on success, unfortunately. 0.96
00:51:22.000 So what are the metrics that you're seeing in the black community?
00:51:24.000 Are you seeing a change in thinking inside the black community in terms of voting, in terms of how people think about politics?
00:51:30.000 Do you see any difference generationally in how people think about the various parties?
00:51:33.000 Yes, I mean, I think for the first time there has been a lot of chatter and a lot of debate in black America about politics in general.
00:51:40.000 And I think it's because of people like me, like Larry Elder, who have sort of laid out on the line and just said, this is what I believe.
00:51:46.000 I'm not editing that.
00:51:47.000 You know, in terms of Blexit, we're in 20 states now.
00:51:49.000 You know, we have chapter leaders and ambassadors all across the state that are in the community actually having these discussions and knocking on doors.
00:51:55.000 And I think, you know, at the height of this sort of racial unrest, there also is racial conversation.
00:52:00.000 And I will tell you, when I got started, I had no black fans. 0.98
00:52:04.000 It was, you're an Uncle Tom, you're a coon, you're a house negro, and that has completely transformed. 1.00
00:52:08.000 and I'm inundated with emails of people thanking me. 0.79
00:52:11.000 And the number one thing that they say, which I find to be incredible, is thank you for giving me my life back.
00:52:16.000 And that's an incredible statement because I feel that.
00:52:19.000 That's how I felt when I opened my eyes after I finished the first Thomas Soul book.
00:52:23.000 I wanted to just look at him and say, thank you for giving me my life back.
00:52:26.000 Now it's okay, I can go out and I can be great.
00:52:30.000 I don't see myself as less than.
00:52:32.000 Victimhood is a weight.
00:52:33.000 You're walking around with a weight on your back, and you don't realize you've been carrying that weight until you let it go.
00:52:39.000 And now I feel that I can sprint in my life, and I can go, and I can achieve things.
00:52:42.000 I know I can, because I know that I'm not being oppressed because of the color of my skin.
00:52:46.000 You know, that's what Blexit offers for our members all across the nation.
00:52:51.000 And the reason why we did it was to create an actual community, because I think when you're a black conservative, you can think you're alone.
00:52:57.000 And we wanted them to just see, you're actually not alone.
00:52:59.000 There are tons of us popping up all across the state, all across America, and I do credit Donald Trump with a lot of that because he just had the courage and the audacity to say it and not apologize.
00:53:11.000 President Trump, obviously.
00:53:13.000 President Trump, a very controversial racial figure.
00:53:16.000 A lot of people maintain, the media maintain constantly, that the president is a personal racist.
00:53:22.000 Simultaneously, they claim that Joe Biden is a great unifier on the issues of race.
00:53:27.000 You obviously have met with the president a bunch of times.
00:53:29.000 You know President Trump.
00:53:31.000 He's a man who says very awkward and off-putting things on a fairly regular basis on places like Twitter.
00:53:36.000 What do you make of the accusations that he is racist? 0.99
00:53:39.000 It's so ridiculous. 0.99
00:53:40.000 It is so ridiculous to call him racist. 0.99
00:53:41.000 I'll tell you, the only color that our president sees is green, and he's been that way his entire life. 0.98
00:53:46.000 The man likes money, he likes success, and he likes winning.
00:53:48.000 I see nothing wrong with that.
00:53:50.000 He's in America, right? 0.78
00:53:50.000 He's in the right place. 0.78
00:53:52.000 That shouldn't be controversial.
00:53:55.000 I admire his courage.
00:53:56.000 I agree with the assessment people see all the time.
00:53:58.000 I wish he would stop tweeting.
00:53:59.000 He's not eloquent.
00:54:00.000 We needed that.
00:54:01.000 We were dying.
00:54:02.000 Conservatives were dying because of political correctness.
00:54:04.000 We needed the exact opposite of political correctness to have this opportunity, small window of opportunity to get ahead and get out in front and I think we've done that and I think conservatives have seized that. This is the first time I think that we have seen so many conservative figures find success and people don't realize that that is attached to Donald Trump not backing down, not apologizing, it's giving more people the same kind of a spine. Do we need a President Donald Trump type character forever?
00:54:29.000 No.
00:54:30.000 You know what I mean?
00:54:31.000 I think after eight years, people will say, I'd like something a little bit more calm.
00:54:35.000 And that's fine.
00:54:36.000 But we needed him right now.
00:54:37.000 He came at just the right time.
00:54:39.000 So I'm a huge fan of him.
00:54:40.000 He's been amazing to me.
00:54:41.000 He's been amazing to my family.
00:54:43.000 And I support him in every single regard.
00:54:45.000 I think he's the man for the job right now.
00:54:48.000 And so meanwhile, Joe Biden, of course, has been cast alternatively as the foil to Kamala Harris, who's trying to keep her from, a little black girl like her, from going to an integrated public school.
00:54:56.000 And then simultaneously, the light bringer when it comes to all racial issues who can unify the country.
00:55:00.000 So what do you make of Joe Biden on the issue of race?
00:55:03.000 To be honest with you, I don't know where he's... I think he is mentally deteriorating.
00:55:07.000 I think, obviously, if you look at his Senate record, he was not the biggest supporter of black issues. 0.95
00:55:12.000 He liked segregation.
00:55:13.000 All that is true.
00:55:14.000 I don't think he knows where he is right now.
00:55:16.000 I find it, actually, if you want to be insulted by something, it should be that despite the fact that I disagree with Kamala Harris on virtually every policy she has, she is competent.
00:55:24.000 She's there, right?
00:55:25.000 The fact that she ran against him and lost and now is his VP, it's interesting because I genuinely think that he is being hidden right now.
00:55:33.000 Uh, because he's got some issues.
00:55:34.000 He's mentally deteriorating.
00:55:35.000 He doesn't know where he is, and half the time he's saying he's running for the Senate.
00:55:38.000 So, he's not, he's not a strong candidate.
00:55:40.000 There's, he just doesn't have the it factor.
00:55:42.000 When I say the it factor, it's about being conservative.
00:55:44.000 Donald Trump has this it factor about him.
00:55:47.000 Barack Obama had an it factor.
00:55:48.000 Bill Clinton has an it factor, right?
00:55:50.000 Whether you like, love him or hate him, these people had an it factor.
00:55:52.000 And they have an incredibly weak candidate right now.
00:55:55.000 I don't know what his policies are.
00:55:56.000 I genuinely, They said this morning, if you walked up to a Biden supporter and you said, tell me why you're supporting Biden and don't mention Donald Trump, what would they say?
00:56:07.000 Nothing. 0.80
00:56:07.000 I mean, the entire DNC literally was that just Donald Trump is a bad, very bad orange man who's orange and bad. 0.80
00:56:12.000 And maybe Hitler. 0.99
00:56:14.000 Maybe Hitler. 0.93
00:56:16.000 So who do you think wins?
00:56:17.000 I mean, right now, the polls show that Biden is up pretty heavily.
00:56:20.000 They seem to be narrowing a fair bit.
00:56:22.000 I think in large part due to the fact that the Democrats have decided to Who do you think ends up winning the election?
00:56:32.000 Trump wins, and I think it's going to be by a lot unless mail-in voting happens.
00:56:36.000 Mail-in voting makes me very nervous.
00:56:38.000 It's just something you can't get a handle on, but if the election goes forward and we can vote in person, Donald Trump is going to win.
00:56:44.000 I think it's going to be by a landslide.
00:56:45.000 So putting aside some of the formal politics, one of the things that frightens me most is the way that corporate America has embraced some of the victim mentality.
00:56:52.000 You've seen it in virtually every major, literally every day I receive emails from somebody at a major corporation who's being browbeaten to support the Black Lives Matter agenda, no matter how radical.
00:57:01.000 We saw just this week that the NBA declared that they were going to cancel games in protest.
00:57:06.000 It seems like corporate America has taken it upon themselves to mimic all of the most radical sentiments.
00:57:11.000 Where do you think that's coming from?
00:57:12.000 And do you think that there's a future for a unified country when even the most Apolitical aspects of American society are being politicized to this extent.
00:57:19.000 Yeah, you know, I would say corporate America is completely spineless.
00:57:22.000 We have seen in the rare examples where somebody actually stands up for their company and says, I'm not going to do that, they win.
00:57:27.000 Because one thing about the left is they have ADD, right?
00:57:30.000 So they're super angry about something one day, but then they forget why they're angry, because they need to be angry about something else the next day.
00:57:35.000 And we saw that with, I believe it was SoulCycle.
00:57:37.000 The owner of SoulCycle hosted dinner with Trump.
00:57:39.000 And then you had Chrissy Teigen.
00:57:41.000 I'm canceling my SoulCycle membership, which was one of the most out of touch, $400 a month membership.
00:57:46.000 Most people don't have that.
00:57:47.000 They can't join you on it.
00:57:48.000 on this boycott. But she did that and then you know what, she was angry about something else two days ago and nothing happened to SoulCycle. And they need to realize that that is what the left is. They want to see if you will capitulate, if you will do what they tell you to do, if you will get on your knees. And if you do it, they forever own you. That's the thing. They forever own you. Which is why I am so hesitant to ever apologize for things because all they want to do is expose a weak spot.
00:58:11.000 Once they have you, they have So don't apologize for things that you know are ridiculous, for being a company and saying, oh, well, they have 10 white executives and only one black executive, and suddenly you're revamping your entire company, you know, because Black Lives Matter says so. 0.82
00:58:25.000 Posting the black square is one of the most meaningless things that we've ever seen done all across America, but they all did it. 1.00
00:58:30.000 Racism healed.
00:58:31.000 I was having a peaceful day of no leftists on Instagram.
00:58:35.000 I was like, please, let's do this.
00:58:37.000 Please, guys, please be quiet. 0.95
00:58:39.000 But yeah, it's poignantly ridiculous. 0.93
00:58:42.000 And they can't keep it up. 0.98
00:58:44.000 That's the thing.
00:58:45.000 It kind of goes against free markets and capitalism, because we're also competing globally.
00:58:50.000 If you really are hiring people on the basis of their anatomy, whether they're a woman or a man, and not based off of their skill set and the merit, it doesn't work long term.
00:58:59.000 You just can't.
00:59:00.000 It doesn't work long term. 0.99
00:59:00.000 This guy was really dumb, but he was Spanish, and we needed to hit the Spanish box. 0.99
00:59:04.000 So this is why we hired him. 1.00
00:59:06.000 It doesn't work.
00:59:07.000 So it falls apart.
00:59:08.000 And I think that eventually they will realize that they've made a dangerous mistake.
00:59:13.000 It's a slippery slope, and they're going to lose.
00:59:15.000 So you mentioned privilege there when you talk about Chrissy Teigen, and in your book you say at one point that liberalism is a system of remarkable privilege.
00:59:22.000 What do you mean by that when you say that?
00:59:24.000 Liberalism, this kind of liberalism that we're seeing today can only happen when we're all privileged.
00:59:29.000 Right?
00:59:30.000 How privileged do you have to be to be able to debate bathroom signs?
00:59:33.000 Like, to be able to say, this is my issue, I want them stripped, saying either man or woman, I need this sign to say any gender can go here.
00:59:39.000 I mean, do you think during the Great Depression that could have been a thing?
00:59:42.000 Like, do you really think when people are jumping out of buildings, losing all of their money and everything, that that would have been a thing?
00:59:47.000 If somebody had said at that time, listen, I know that we're all really poor, we have nowhere to live, but these bathroom signs.
00:59:52.000 Right? 0.93
00:59:53.000 Because we're doing this, in the end, these fights are getting more and more ridiculous, these battles are getting more ridiculous. 0.68
00:59:57.000 It really is a sign, a symptom, of just a remarkably privileged society.
01:00:02.000 Conservatism is about sense and sensibility.
01:00:04.000 Everybody is a conservative in times of hardship, right?
01:00:07.000 You save your money, you work hard, you're desperate to get a job, to do anything for a job, and that is what conservatism is all about.
01:00:13.000 It's about grit, it's about determination, and that is sort of the picture that our founding fathers foresaw when they created this country.
01:00:21.000 And then when we are privileged and everything works because of a conservative system, you end up with privilege.
01:00:26.000 You end up with liberalism.
01:00:27.000 You end up with leftism unleashed.
01:00:29.000 And that's what we're seeing today. 0.98
01:00:30.000 These kids are brats. 0.97
01:00:32.000 I mean, call it what it is. 0.96
01:00:33.000 Half the time when you see these kids getting arrested, I think they should arrest the parents, too.
01:00:36.000 Who raised this? Who did this? How did you turn out being a kid that put on a black mask and threw in a Molotov cocktail into somebody's business?
01:00:44.000 Right? And that really is, it's a symptom of the baby boomer generation, which I get into in my book, something that Shelby Steele helped me understand, because they were the first generation that won the argument against their parents because the media told them everything your parents did was wrong, because they were the Jim Crow generation, and now you are right, and you have the agency, and you know everything.
01:01:04.000 And it's something that we need to sort of just focus on and get people to realize that they're bratty, they're spoiled, they're overprivileged and that's really what's happening in America today.
01:01:12.000 So you mentioned social media there, and the Black Square posting, and all of the sort of virtue signaling that happens on social media, all the viciousness.
01:01:18.000 Twitter, obviously, is a place to dunk and be dunked upon, is the way that I've put it.
01:01:23.000 What do you think of social media?
01:01:24.000 You're obviously a very avid and excellent user of social media, to promulgate your points.
01:01:30.000 What do you think of social media?
01:01:32.000 Do you think it's been bad for the country, and is there any way to use it positively?
01:01:36.000 Social media's been terrible for the country.
01:01:37.000 I mean, it's like people are killing brain cells.
01:01:39.000 I mean, sometimes I cannot stand being on Instagram. 0.98
01:01:43.000 It's just like girls with their butts out. 1.00
01:01:44.000 I mean, it's just ridiculous. 1.00
01:01:45.000 Let's be honest. 1.00
01:01:46.000 It's made everybody a bit dumber. 0.99
01:01:48.000 But it's necessary evil. 0.99
01:01:49.000 This is where the left is fighting.
01:01:51.000 And I have to say that if it wasn't for social media, conservatives wouldn't be where we are.
01:01:55.000 We're winning there.
01:01:56.000 And the left knows it, right?
01:01:58.000 When it was just the TVs, they were winning.
01:01:59.000 They were dominant.
01:02:00.000 Everything was leftist, leftist.
01:02:02.000 Now you get people like Brian Seltzer who are uncomfortable.
01:02:05.000 About the fact that you have more followers than him.
01:02:07.000 I have more followers than him.
01:02:08.000 You know, because it downgrades when he gets up there and says racism is what's happening everywhere, and it's because of we're bad, we're white, and you and I can counter that narrative in one tweet.
01:02:16.000 You and I in one tweet can dwarf all of CNN's viewership.
01:02:19.000 That makes them uncomfortable, and we need that.
01:02:21.000 So it's actually in a weird way.
01:02:23.000 It's paradoxical.
01:02:25.000 It's necessary.
01:02:25.000 It's evil.
01:02:26.000 It was necessary evil, and it's actually a space that conservatives are winning in.
01:02:30.000 So let's talk about some of the work that you've been doing over at PragerU.
01:02:32.000 So you moved over from Turning Point USA to Prager University, what, a couple of years ago?
01:02:36.000 Yeah.
01:02:37.000 And PragerU, obviously, is sort of a sister company for Daily Wire.
01:02:39.000 We've worked very heavily with them in the past.
01:02:41.000 So what prompted you to decide to move over to PragerU, which was a real shift in what you were doing?
01:02:46.000 Yeah, so one of the things about Turning Point is it's such an important battle to say we're going to fight and win college campuses.
01:02:51.000 The first thing is I got into this because I wanted to change black hearts and black minds. 0.99
01:02:55.000 Can't really do that on college campuses because unfortunately most black Americans don't make it to college campuses. 0.96
01:03:00.000 So I felt like Charlie and I were sort of doing the same routine over and over again, but was I actually doing what I set out to do?
01:03:06.000 The second thing is that because Turning Point is a company that is focused on college campuses, everybody that works there is fresh out of college.
01:03:12.000 And I am a controversial person.
01:03:15.000 I say what I want to say.
01:03:16.000 And it isn't fair when I say, like, when the whole world collapsed and I say I don't support the Me Too movement.
01:03:20.000 I was the first person who came out and said, not doing this.
01:03:22.000 This is wrong.
01:03:23.000 And when everybody has a meltdown about it, I mean, Charlie was inundated with emails from people, you know, Turning Point girls that are on campus being like, I can't believe Candace supports rape. 0.99
01:03:33.000 Like, you have to see.
01:03:34.000 And I'm like, Charlie, I can't.
01:03:36.000 This is, you know, they're young, I get that, but I'm obviously not saying I support rape by saying that I don't support the Me Too movement.
01:03:42.000 So I kind of got too big, in a way, where I sort of felt like this isn't fair for Charlie to have to keep explaining to these younger people who are just kind of experimenting with conservatism.
01:03:52.000 And PragerU is obviously, when I say a more mature organization, I mean that they don't have a bunch of 20-year-olds that work there, and they're not a student organization.
01:04:01.000 They're making five-minute videos that are very focused.
01:04:03.000 They sort of understand a bit better the battle that we're in, and they stand by it.
01:04:06.000 I mean, PragerU, I'm getting accused of being literally Hitler.
01:04:09.000 This is a Jewish organization, and they stand by it, and it's just easier.
01:04:13.000 It's just a lot easier.
01:04:14.000 And I wanted to be put in long form, you know?
01:04:17.000 I mean, you've done the college campuses.
01:04:18.000 It's fun.
01:04:19.000 Ben Shapiro owns, you know, Candace Owens owns this.
01:04:22.000 But I was kind of looking for a bit more, a longer dialogue to have people on my show, and to learn.
01:04:26.000 I mean, I have people on my show that are much smarter than me, and I get to sit down there, and I get to sit there, and I get to learn in an hour.
01:04:33.000 Soak up all of Larry Elder, soak up Dennis Prager.
01:04:36.000 And so I was just sort of ready for the next step.
01:04:39.000 So how does your career match up to what you thought it was going to be 15 years ago?
01:04:43.000 Gosh, it is crazy.
01:04:45.000 It has been a blessing in every single regard.
01:04:48.000 I thank God for the platform that I have.
01:04:50.000 Of course, there are moments where, you know, I think, and I'm sure you understand this, when you go through a firestorm or you're getting death threats, the responsibility that you feel to your family, that's the hardest part.
01:05:00.000 And I never thought I would be here.
01:05:01.000 And that is why when people say to me, Candace, run for president or Candace do this, I no longer plan.
01:05:06.000 I just do what I'm good at.
01:05:08.000 You know, I think I work really hard.
01:05:10.000 I think I didn't want to be one of those people that's super flippant.
01:05:14.000 You know, one of those, I hate to say this, but conservative girls with a gun in their, you know, a gun in their shorts. 1.00
01:05:20.000 Like, I'm conservative.
01:05:22.000 I was like, you know, I want to learn.
01:05:25.000 I want to grow.
01:05:26.000 I want to be here for a long time.
01:05:27.000 I want to look back and say, she became a Larry Elder or a Thomas Sowell.
01:05:32.000 So I've been doing a lot of studying and I don't know where it's going to go.
01:05:35.000 And who knows, maybe it all ends tomorrow.
01:05:38.000 But I think I've been cancelled so many times and I can't be cancelled anymore.
01:05:42.000 So, you know, it's just, God has a plan for everybody.
01:05:45.000 And His plan is never for anyone to be a victim.
01:05:48.000 And I hope that my life teaches other people that.
01:05:50.000 So in a second, I'm going to ask you a few more questions, a few final questions about the future of the Republican Party, and where you think the Republican Party is going to go, and some personal questions.
01:05:59.000 But if you want to hear the answers to all of those fascinating questions, then you actually have to be a Daily Wire member.
01:06:05.000 Head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
01:06:10.000 Well, Candace Owens, thanks so much for stopping by.
01:06:11.000 Be sure to grab a copy of Candace's brand new book, Blackout.
01:06:14.000 Candace, thanks again, this was awesome.
01:06:16.000 Thank you, that was so fun.
01:06:17.000 Social distance, handshake.
01:06:20.000 Awesome.
01:06:21.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Mathis Glover.
01:06:32.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
01:06:34.000 Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
01:06:36.000 And our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.
01:06:38.000 Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.
01:06:40.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
01:06:42.000 Editing is by Jim Nickel.
01:06:43.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
01:06:45.000 Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
01:06:47.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
01:06:49.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.