The Ben Shapiro Show - Not Everything Is About Race | Coleman Hughes

00:00:00.000 Though we have different experiences, we do live in an objective reality.

00:00:04.000 There is such a thing as truth.

00:00:06.000 There is such a thing as facts.

00:00:08.000 And those facts can't depend on the fact that you're you and I'm me.

00:00:12.000 So we have to be able to have a conversation where we can disagree with each other, where no one by default trumps anyone else just by virtue of your skin color or your identity.

00:00:24.000 And that's the only way that we can actually have a conversation.

00:00:29.000 Today we welcome Coleman Hughes, a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist known for his work in the fields of race, politics, and culture.

00:00:36.000 Hughes has quickly become one of the most influential young thinkers in America, earning him widespread recognition, including being named to Forbes' 30 under 30 list in the media category in 2021.

00:00:45.000 Former fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal, his writings have been featured in publications ranging from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Spectator and National Review.

00:00:55.000 In 2019, Hughes testified before the United States Congress during a hearing on reparations, where he eloquently argued against the idea, citing concerns about its potential divisiveness and ineffectiveness.

00:01:04.000 This testimony further cemented his position as a significant voice in the national conversation on race.

00:01:10.000 In February 2024, Hughes published his latest book, The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America.

00:01:15.000 In this book, Hughes advocates for a colorblind approach to politics and culture, challenging contemporary anti-racist movements that he believes perpetuate division and resentment.

00:01:25.000 He argues that we need to get out of the business of racial classification and rethink the long-run consequences of race-thinking and race-based policy.

00:01:32.000 Today, we cover a wide range of topics, including Hughes' viral appearance on The View, where he discussed race relations in America and the failures of Marxism when applied to race.

00:01:40.000 We also delve into the history of race-based riots, implications of the George Floyd case, Hughes' own experiences with racism in his life, and so much more.

00:01:48.000 Coleman Hughes' commitment to fostering dialogue and his fearless approach to contentious issues make him a truly compelling figure in today's intellectual landscape.

00:01:55.000 Plus, he's an excellent guest on today's Sunday special.

00:02:09.000 Really appreciate the time.

00:02:10.000 My pleasure.

00:02:11.000 So why don't we start where everybody's been starting with you, I'm sure, the last couple of weeks, and that is that interview on The View, which has always been my lifelong dream.

00:02:19.000 I've been begging to go on The View for legitimately years at this point, and they will never have me on to my chagrin and dismay.

00:02:25.000 But they did have you on, at which point Sonny Hostin declared that you were a charlatan and apparently a Republican operative, which seems kind of shocking since my understanding is that you have not voted Republican in any presidential election thus far.

00:02:37.000 Why don't you take us through what actually that experience was like in person?

00:02:42.000 Yeah, so The View is not my audience.

00:02:46.000 I was excited to be able to reach a kind of listener that would never normally listen to my podcast or buy my book, so I was excited to go on.

00:02:54.000 And one of their producers warned me that Sunny Hostin was going to come after me rather hard, and I didn't know who she was.

00:03:02.000 So I had no expectations.

00:03:05.000 I just had, you know, the typical level of anxiety going into a major TV appearance.

00:03:11.000 And what happened is that I had a pretty normal exchange with Whoopi Goldberg.

00:03:15.000 We disagreed respectfully.

00:03:17.000 But Sunny Hostin, you know, she claimed to have read my book twice, which was clearly not true because she had no idea what was in the book, obviously.

00:03:25.000 And She had an agenda to come after me from a particular angle that she didn't realize wasn't going to land. 0.98

00:03:34.000 She thought this was going to be some kind of knock-down blow to say that I've been co-opted by the right as if there's Koch Brothers money being funneled into my bank account to get me to say what I'm saying, whereas the truth is that I just believe what I'm saying.

00:03:48.000 And I've done a lot of research on this topic.

00:03:50.000 I feel strongly about it.

00:03:52.000 In terms of politics, I consider myself a moderate and an independent.

00:03:56.000 I've only voted twice because I'm 28 years old, both times for Democrats, but I'm open to voting for Republicans.

00:04:03.000 And so her critique had nowhere to land.

00:04:06.000 And the reason I think it went viral, and this is what I've gathered from people coming up to me telling me, You know, in some cases on the street coming up to me saying I saw you on The View is that so often on daytime television, on cable news, you see performative energy meeting performative energy.

00:04:24.000 It's basically all theater.

00:04:27.000 And you rarely see someone come with a kind of performative, canned attack, but the other person just respond kind of calmly with facts.

00:04:39.000 And that's what I did there, and I think that was so jarring to people that the moment went viral.

00:04:45.000 So, I mean, let's talk about that on a personal emotional level.

00:04:48.000 So obviously I've been in situations very similar where I'm under attack from, you know, people who disagree with me and it is very difficult to stay emotionally sort of calm and placid when you're being accused of things that obviously are untrue.

00:05:02.000 So how did you handle that?

00:05:03.000 Was that difficult or was it more just puzzlement as to what was going on?

00:05:07.000 No, I guess it ended up really well.

00:05:09.000 Obviously, I'm a normal human being.

00:05:11.000 I have anxiety.

00:05:12.000 I have, you know, my heart rate gets up in moments like that.

00:05:16.000 But really, The way I try to approach it is to actually listen to what she's saying, right?

00:05:24.000 Even someone who hates you, even someone who is, you know, a clown and someone who's bad faith, they might make a good point. 0.96

00:05:30.000 So I always just try to listen to people, actually understand what they're saying, and then respond to it on the merits.

00:05:37.000 And if you do that, and if you're very researched and very prepared, there's really not much to be afraid of.

00:05:44.000 So to switch to the topic of your book, which obviously is related to the interview, one of the reasons I think that Sonny Hostin assumed that you were a member of the right is because you're making an argument that very often is associated with the right, mainly because the left has abandoned what used to be its own argument with regard to race.

00:06:00.000 The left's argument for most of my childhood, actually, and most of my teenage years with regard to race, was the old MLK argument, which is that you're supposed to see people as individuals without reference, primarily, to their racial group.

00:06:13.000 That was a piece of information that typically could only be used for ill and was very rarely used for good.

00:06:20.000 And then it seems like the left has shifted away from that MLK message and now has embraced much more racial politics As a mechanism for electoral and political success.

00:06:31.000 So why don't you talk a little bit about that.

00:06:32.000 Why do you think that, first of all, what is the argument that you're making?

00:06:35.000 And why do you think it is that this has now become more associated with quote-unquote the right even though it was never historically a right-wing argument?

00:06:41.000 Yeah, my childhood mirrored yours in that sense.

00:06:44.000 I grew up in a liberal town.

00:06:45.000 I think I met one Republican my whole life as a kid.

00:06:49.000 And everyone took for granted that Martin Luther King's famous speech and his now cliched phrase, judge people by the content of their characters, not the color of their skin.

00:07:00.000 Everyone took that for granted as the obvious way to think about race.

00:07:06.000 It was a liberal position.

00:07:08.000 It was associated with the civil rights movement.

00:07:10.000 However, there's always been a fringe among academics, elite intellectuals, the critical race theory fringe, which since the 70s and 80s has said that actually the civil rights movement was wrong.

00:07:24.000 They didn't go far enough.

00:07:25.000 And we have to think about race all the time.

00:07:28.000 American society is fundamentally racist.

00:07:30.000 The institutions are shot through with racism.

00:07:33.000 So we have to burn it all down and build it back up again.

00:07:37.000 Well, Kimberly Crenshaw is one of the big leaders of that movement, and the whole movement defined itself in opposition to colorblindness.

00:07:47.000 And what they did was very clever.

00:07:49.000 They wrote a completely false history of colorblindness.

00:07:52.000 They said that colorblindness was invented by conservatives in the 70s and reactionaries that didn't like the civil rights movement and wanted to reverse it.

00:08:01.000 So they basically invented this Trojan horse of colorblindness.

00:08:05.000 And so that they could sort of get racism in through the back door.

00:08:11.000 It's totally false.

00:08:12.000 And chapter two of my book is all about this.

00:08:14.000 I go back to the 1860s, to this guy named Wendell Phillips, who was one of the most important abolitionists.

00:08:21.000 Uh, and he believed Black people should have full rights right after the Civil War, so he was the more radical wing of the abolitionist movement, and he's the first person to push the idea and the word colorblindness.

00:08:33.000 He actually asked for a colorblind government, is how he put it in 1865.

00:08:37.000 So I go from there, and it's a straight line all the way through the Civil Rights Movement, Where one of the central demands of the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement was a colorblind, race-neutral regime of government.

00:08:51.000 This was at the core of the Civil Rights Movement.

00:08:54.000 And so what happened is in the late 60s and 70s, liberals abandoned this idea during the race riots, very similar to what happened during George Floyd, where you had every politician trying to outdo the other to show how much they cared about racism and implementing race-based policies everywhere from, you know, Microsoft to like a local town ordinance.

00:09:16.000 Liberals abandoned colorblindness.

00:09:20.000 And starting in 2013, this trend really accelerates.

00:09:24.000 The trend accelerates because everyone has a smartphone starting around 2013.

00:09:28.000 Smartphone with a camera and social media.

00:09:31.000 And so we get this narrative, false narrative.

00:09:34.000 People are seeing videos in their social media feeds of unarmed black Americans getting shot by cops.

00:09:41.000 And they're being told that this is a daily reality and that this never happens to white people, both of which are false.

00:09:47.000 But people believe it.

00:09:49.000 And that leaves an opening in people's minds for these fringe theories, critical race theory, to seep into the public.

00:09:56.000 And that's been called, Matt Iglesias called it the Great Awokening.

00:10:00.000 It was, I think, what many of us experienced starting in 2013, where suddenly everyone is talking about white privilege, systemic racism, how whiteness is evil, how black people are inherently morally superior.

00:10:11.000 And we get the whole complex of racial tensions and BLM that we've seen over the past about 11 years. 0.81

00:10:20.000 How much of that do you think is tied into the presidency of Barack Obama?

00:10:24.000 Because when he took office in 2009, he came into office with a basic argument, which was that we were aiming toward the post-racial society, and that he and his person was emblematic of that move in sort of the post-racial society.

00:10:38.000 There wasn't black America, there wasn't white America, there was just America. 0.96

00:10:40.000 No red states, no blue states, just the United States.

00:10:43.000 And then circa about 2012, probably with the Trayvon Martin case, you started to see the president start to inject himself in some of these issues in a lot more loud fashion.

00:10:52.000 There was the Henry Louis Gates incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he suggested that the police officer had acted stupidly in targeting Henry Louis Gates over his race.

00:11:01.000 It turned out it was a little bit more of a complex situation than that.

00:11:04.000 And he started sounding off a lot more loudly about these issues.

00:11:07.000 And for a lot of Americans, it was kind of an abrupt reversal.

00:11:11.000 And I think that abrupt reversal sort of carried on into 2013 and then in 2014 with the Ferguson riots in which the president again said people aren't making things like this up, even though the Ferguson case actually was largely made up in terms of the original hands-up-don't-shoot narrative and all of this.

00:11:25.000 Yeah, so you're exactly right about Barack Obama's trajectory.

00:11:28.000 His first term, he sounded a lot like me.

00:11:31.000 I mean, if you go back to his speech on race in 2008, it almost looks like something I would write. 0.96

00:11:39.000 By 2013, he was already drinking the Kool-Aid on BLM and so forth.

00:11:45.000 So my view is he didn't cause that trend.

00:11:47.000 He rode the political winds, essentially.

00:11:51.000 The trend was because of social media and camera-enabled smartphones.

00:11:56.000 That changed the political winds of the country fundamentally.

00:12:00.000 And Barack Obama was like a weathervane.

00:12:02.000 He felt he could no longer get away with the kind of old school mentality that he had in 2008.

00:12:10.000 So he rode the winds in the direction of identity politics, but he didn't cause it.

00:12:14.000 So when you look at sort of the roots of the radical fringe of the civil rights movement that you're talking about, that was calling for a rejiggering of America based on group, instead of based on individual and sort of the post-racial society, that crosses streams very heavily with Marxist thought.

00:12:32.000 There are a lot of people who have suggested, I think correctly, that basically what happened in the late 60s, early 70s, is that many of the arguments that had historically been made about class And did not work in the United States, because America is pretty obviously not a class-based society, unlike, say, many elements of Europe historically, where classes were basically baked into the cake, where you had a house of lords, for example, people with historic wealth.

00:12:55.000 You never had that in the United States.

00:12:56.000 de Tocqueville talks about the idea that the United States was shockingly middle class, that there really was no boundary between the middle class and the upper class, and that people could move freely within the classes.

00:13:06.000 And so the failure of Marxism in the United States, a class-based system, was transmuted into a race-based system, where instead of making the argument that people were inherently a part of a lower economic strata, the argument was that if one group, racially, was disproportionately a member of a lower economic strata, that is because society was racist, as opposed to being classist.

00:13:27.000 And so they grafted many of the Marxist arguments into a much more fragile area for the United States historically, which is race.

00:13:34.000 I think that's right.

00:13:35.000 I think if you go back and read a lot of the critical race theorists, they were very much steeped in Marxism.

00:13:40.000 They all swam in those waters.

00:13:43.000 They all admired Marx and the litany of scholars who came out of the Marxist school.

00:13:50.000 But they were dissatisfied with one aspect of Marx, which is that Marx didn't care about race.

00:13:55.000 I mean, he was a bit of a racist and an anti-Semite himself, but in his philosophy, he didn't focus very much on race, and they didn't like that.

00:14:02.000 So they added race to a broadly Marxist framework of looking at the world.

00:14:08.000 And those are the waters out of which critical race theory was born.

00:14:12.000 Now, there's another similarity to Marxism.

00:14:16.000 Which is, when you look at Ibram Kendi's school of thought, Ibram Kendi believes that if black people are 13% of the American population, black people should be 13% of everything.

00:14:28.000 That is, 13% of people in the bad parts of society, prisons, You know, being punished and juvenile detention, so forth.

00:14:38.000 13% of wealth, 13% of every profession, 13% of professors, 13% of people in the media, and so forth, on down the list.

00:14:49.000 This is an idea very similar to the kind of Marxist diagnosis of society that led communist countries to ruin.

00:14:59.000 on almost every continent throughout the 20th century.

00:15:02.000 So that's the other similarity to Marxism, is the false dream of equal outcomes.

00:15:11.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.

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00:16:23.000 Well, one of the things that's been fascinating to watch inside the Democratic Party is the embrace of this by people who are pretty openly Marxist.

00:16:29.000 Bernie Sanders in 2016 runs, and he meets with shocking levels of popularity inside the Democratic Party, running on a class-based platform.

00:16:38.000 And then he basically gets shellacked for not being racialist enough.

00:16:42.000 And by 2020, he's now mirroring many of the arguments of Black Lives Matter, specifically in an attempt to sort of fill in that gap.

00:16:50.000 How much do you think the Democratic Party has been captured by this?

00:16:53.000 Is it possible for the Democratic Party to self-correct here?

00:16:57.000 Well, I hope that I can be, you know, I can be part of the solution here.

00:17:01.000 I mean, the fact that I was received so well by the Views audience.

00:17:06.000 I mean, that's the other part that was interesting.

00:17:09.000 That audience is mostly Democrat, if not completely Democrat, and they were clapping.

00:17:14.000 For me, despite the fact I was getting attacked by Sonny Hostin.

00:17:17.000 So I think people confuse the positions of the Democrat elites and Democrat leadership with the position of rank-and-file Democrat voters.

00:17:25.000 Rank-and-file Democrat voters often believe in colorblind policy and believe in my message that where we do have, where the government does have a legitimate interest in helping the poor, And the disadvantaged, if they want to do that, and if it works, they should do it on the basis of income, not on the basis of race, right?

00:17:45.000 If you're going to tell me you're going to help pay for the college tuition of someone whose parents make $30,000 a year, that makes sense to me, and you don't need to pay for the tuition of someone whose parents make half a million dollars a year.

00:17:58.000 Those sorts of income-based policies don't receive very much backlash if they work, when they work well.

00:18:06.000 So, to the extent that the Democrats can go back to that kind of message, I think they'll have more success electorally and they'll have a better profile of public policies.

00:18:15.000 Unfortunately, I think the Democrats are far too easily swayable by the activist fringe.

00:18:22.000 The easiest way to see this is with the word Latinx.

00:18:25.000 I mean, many people have made this point, but the word Latinx makes no sense with the Spanish language.

00:18:31.000 Almost no Hispanic people have heard of it.

00:18:33.000 Yet, you heard it coming out of the mouths of Elizabeth Warren and even Joe Biden.

00:18:38.000 When Pew finally did a poll and asked American Hispanics, do you like this word Latinx, 96% said either never heard of it or I don't like it.

00:18:49.000 Now, I could have told you that, but it's basically that 4%.

00:18:55.000 That 4% Who are who comprise the subculture in the bubble of Democrat elites and are often unable to get outside that bubble and realize that they have a totally different set of values, different way of speaking, different language than the voters that they need to reach.

00:19:15.000 It does feel like an insular clique, and this isn't true for just one party, but it's certainly true in this matter for the Democratic Party.

00:19:21.000 There's an insular clique that uses the language or uses sort of faith-based, skin-in-the-game attempts to demonstrate cultural solidarity with this ideology.

00:19:32.000 And so you mentioned Latinx, or another example would be using pronouns in your bio, which, you know, unless you are a trans-identifying person, is completely irrelevant and everybody will just assume that you are.

00:19:42.000 Exactly what you appear to be.

00:19:44.000 When it comes to some of the racial arguments, I think there's some of this going on as well.

00:19:49.000 One of the things that's occurred to me over the years, and I've said it many times, is that the Black Lives Matter movement has historically picked victims who are actually not the greatest examples of victims.

00:19:59.000 There are, in fact, black men who have been shot.

00:20:02.000 Unjustifiably by the police.

00:20:04.000 And those are never the ones who are famous.

00:20:06.000 It is always the black men who are in, at the very least, controversial situations with the cops, who are then made iconic by the Black Lives Matter movement.

00:20:14.000 And the only reason to do that, presumably, would be as a show of faith.

00:20:17.000 That if you're willing to say that this, too, is an example of systemic American racism, well then you're part of the club.

00:20:22.000 So Michael Brown is a great example of this.

00:20:24.000 Obviously, Hands Up, Don't Shoot was completely a lie, start to finish.

00:20:27.000 And Michael Brown ends up being an icon of the movement to the point where hands up don't shoot becomes the thing that people are saying years later.

00:20:34.000 People are still paying homage to the image of Michael Brown being an innocent victim of the police despite the fact that the federal government under Eric Holder found that that was not in fact the case.

00:20:44.000 You've written pretty extensively about the George Floyd situation.

00:20:48.000 Where there's basically two major questions.

00:20:50.000 One is there was never even the accusation that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd based on his race.

00:20:55.000 That accusation was never even made in court.

00:20:56.000 There was no evidence even presented to that effect.

00:20:58.000 And then there's the secondary question, which is whether Derek Chauvin actually even murdered George Floyd or whether George Floyd experienced some form of cardiac arrest based on the fact that he was saying he couldn't breathe before he even, he couldn't breathe even before they had him on the ground outside the car.

00:21:14.000 What do you make of the attempt to choose particular victims as opposed to others?

00:21:19.000 Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right.

00:21:20.000 I mean, so a case like Philando Castile was just kind of straightforward, absolute tragedy that almost nobody who looked at it really disagreed with it and not for any significant period of time.

00:21:32.000 But that became a footnote in the Black Lives Matter story relative to these other examples, like Michael Brown, who, you know, I mean, the officer, I'm not sure the officer could have done anything different in that scenario unless he was a super cop.

00:21:50.000 And of course, George Floyd, which, you know, changed the world, and which people, you know, people were so deeply pressured to take the line that he was murdered.

00:22:03.000 That people have ignored all the counter evidence at trial.

00:22:07.000 So I've been writing about this recently.

00:22:11.000 Essentially, so let's just first talk about the ways in which the trial was unfair.

00:22:16.000 And this is something I don't think anyone has even really tried to disagree with me about, right?

00:22:20.000 You had one jury member who was wearing a shirt that said, get your knee off our necks before the trial, okay?

00:22:28.000 Before the trial, they attended a march commemorating Dr. King, where George Floyd's family members spoke, and he was wearing a shirt that said, Get Your Knee Off Our Necks.

00:22:37.000 And then he was selected to be in a jury about a trial about whether a knee on the neck constituted murder.

00:22:43.000 Okay, so you went to law school, right, Ben?

00:22:47.000 I did.

00:22:47.000 If you get this as a hypothetical, with the names removed, how many people in class are saying that that jury's objective?

00:22:55.000 Zero.

00:22:55.000 I mean, obviously, that is a peremptory challenge immediately that is upheld by the court.

00:23:00.000 Okay, so then add to that the fact that you have, in their interviews, you have several jurors, seated jurors and unseated jurors, saying that they were afraid for their safety if the trial were to come out one way.

00:23:12.000 We all know what that means.

00:23:13.000 If it were to be an acquittal, the whole city was going to go up in flames.

00:23:18.000 They knew that their names were going to come out some months after the trial.

00:23:22.000 And if you are associated with the acquittal of perhaps the least popular defendant in American history, certainly in modern American history, you know, understandably you fear for your family.

00:23:36.000 Okay, so there's that.

00:23:39.000 There's the fact that the jury wasn't sequestered in one of the most talked about trials in modern American history.

00:23:45.000 There's the fact that everyone knew the city of Minneapolis, which had been traumatized, historically traumatized by the riots of the past year, would go up in riots again if he was acquitted, yet the trial wasn't moved.

00:23:57.000 Every judgment call that a judge could make to make it fairer went in the wrong direction.

00:24:02.000 Okay, so putting all that to the side, actually looking at the facts of what happened, You had two different theories of what killed George Floyd.

00:24:11.000 You had the positional asphyxia theory and the adrenaline surge theory.

00:24:15.000 The positional asphyxia theory was that Chauvin had so much weight on his neck and back that he couldn't take full breaths.

00:24:21.000 Floyd couldn't take full breaths and he died in exactly the way you would imagine.

00:24:27.000 You know, asphyxia.

00:24:28.000 He literally couldn't breathe.

00:24:29.000 He couldn't expand his lungs because there was so much weight on his back.

00:24:32.000 That was the prosecution's theory and they had Dr. Tobin back it up.

00:24:37.000 Not a crazy theory, it's possible.

00:24:40.000 Then there was the theory of the guy who did the actual autopsy, Dr. Andrew Baker from Hennepin County.

00:24:47.000 His theory was totally different.

00:24:48.000 It had nothing to do with getting full breaths, nothing to do with positional asphyxia.

00:24:52.000 He believed that George Floyd had an adrenaline surge because of the whole altercation.

00:24:59.000 Physically struggling for minutes and minutes on end and what happens is your body surges with stress hormones, which asks your heart to beat faster.

00:25:09.000 The problem was George Floyd, he had a very enlarged heart.

00:25:13.000 He had severe a hypertensive artery sclerosis, which means his arteries were constricted, one 90% constricted, one was 75% constricted, very severe.

00:25:27.000 He also had fentanyl in his system, a significant amount of fentanyl in his system and trace amounts of methamphetamine and other drugs.

00:25:35.000 And you put all this together and his heart could not respond to the demands of the adrenaline asking it to beat faster. So that was Dr.

00:25:44.000 Baker's theory. Also not a crazy theory.

00:25:46.000 Very much possible. Now these were both plausible theories.

00:25:50.000 Nothing ruled either one out.

00:25:52.000 And if you're a jury and you have two theories, one of which implicates the defendant and one

00:25:58.000 of which doesn't, you were supposed to acquit because that's reasonable doubt.

00:26:03.000 It could be the case that Chauvin killed him because of the weight.

00:26:07.000 It could also be the case that he died because the struggle his heart gave out as a result of the adrenaline brought on by the whole situation, in which case Chauvin didn't kill him.

00:26:16.000 So that right there, that should have been reasonable doubt on all three charges.

00:26:22.000 But of course, you know, this was one of the least fair trials that I've ever seen.

00:26:29.000 And so that's my view of what should have happened.

00:26:32.000 I'm not saying Chauvin was a good cop.

00:26:33.000 I'm not saying he handled the situation well.

00:26:35.000 I'm not saying he shouldn't have been disciplined in some way for that arrest.

00:26:40.000 But there was certainly reasonable doubt on the criminal charges.

00:26:45.000 What did you make of, obviously, Radley Balko came after you pretty hard over all of this.

00:26:49.000 What did you make of his critiques of your speaking out about all of this?

00:26:52.000 Yeah, so his critiques on the point of the autopsy were uniformly wrong.

00:26:59.000 I think where he did make some good points was on the training.

00:27:02.000 So for example, they were trained to be aware of positional asphyxia, right?

00:27:10.000 They were trained to be aware of this and they were trained to roll them into the side recovery position as opposed to staying on their back.

00:27:18.000 What Balko doesn't talk about is the fact that they were also trained on a bunch of other stuff, which is more favorable to Chauvin's defense.

00:27:26.000 For example, they were trained that if someone is talking, then they're breathing.

00:27:31.000 That's in their training, okay?

00:27:32.000 Floyd was talking for five minutes.

00:27:34.000 In fact, he was yelling.

00:27:36.000 So if you train officers to be aware that people often lie to get out of arrests, which is true, and you say, no matter what they say, if they're talking, then they're breathing.

00:27:46.000 And then you see a guy that's breathing for five minutes and who claimed to be claustrophobic even though he was just sitting in a car, locked car, voluntarily.

00:27:57.000 Obviously, you know, it's very possible that officers are going to think, he's fine, he's talking.

00:28:02.000 This is my training.

00:28:03.000 My training is that if they're talking, they're fine.

00:28:05.000 They were also trained that there are situations in which you can stay on a suspect in the prone position, not rolling them over if the situation isn't code four, meaning there's a, for instance, there's a hostile crowd or something like that.

00:28:18.000 And they were very worried about the crowd encroaching and attacking.

00:28:22.000 And obviously hindsight is 20-20.

00:28:23.000 We know that Floyd died and that their attention should have been fully focused on him.

00:28:29.000 But you don't judge officers with 20-20 hindsight.

00:28:31.000 You judge them based on what was reasonable at the time.

00:28:33.000 So I think there's a lot of counter evidence, even on what Chauvin was trained, that make it more defensible, or more understandable, given what he was trained to do.

00:28:44.000 So let's talk about some of the myths that you talk about in your book with regard to race and racial justice.

00:28:51.000 So obviously, you know, there are those of us who are advocates of the idea that justice, that there should never be a modifier to justice.

00:28:57.000 There's just justice.

00:28:58.000 There's no such thing as social justice or racial justice.

00:29:00.000 There is just what is just or unjust.

00:29:02.000 In a particular circumstance, in the minute you add a modifier, you actually move into the realm of injustice.

00:29:06.000 As soon as you say social justice, you're doing so at the detriment of individual justice.

00:29:10.000 If you say racial justice, then what you're doing so is at the detriment to the individual and the circumstances because you're obviously substituting another priority for that priority.

00:29:20.000 You go through a series of myths in the book about race.

00:29:23.000 Why don't we go through some of those myths right now so that you can sort of fill in the audience on what those myths are.

00:29:27.000 The most obvious one is one that Thomas Sowell has spent a lot of time on, is the myth that disparity equals discrimination.

00:29:34.000 That just because things don't end up the way that Ibram X. Kendi wants, where 13% of every industry is black, this means that the industry is discriminating against the group that is disproportionately either underrepresented or overrepresented in that industry.

00:29:49.000 Yes, so let me start here with that.

00:29:51.000 People often mistake me for saying that racism doesn't exist.

00:29:56.000 It's one of the most common criticisms I get.

00:29:58.000 I think it's one of the most common criticisms Sowell has gotten as well.

00:30:02.000 It's absolutely not what we're saying.

00:30:04.000 Racism does exist.

00:30:05.000 In the literature, there is racism against minorities in the labor market.

00:30:10.000 Sowell, you know, having grown up in the 1930s in the Jim Crow South, is highly aware that racism exists.

00:30:18.000 The argument, however, is that if racism were the main reason why people succeeded or failed, we would see a totally different landscape of success than, in fact, what we see.

00:30:31.000 So, for example, what we see is that Indian Americans, South Asian Americans face discrimination in the labor market, yet Indian Americans are the highest earning ethnic group.

00:30:43.000 However, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis earn far less than average.

00:30:48.000 Is it that one group is receiving more discrimination than the other?

00:30:52.000 Well, no.

00:30:53.000 Nigerian Americans do better than average, and whatever racism black people as a whole experience, Nigerians are also experiencing, and yet they do better than average.

00:31:02.000 You see different white ethnic groups.

00:31:05.000 uh make very different sums of money right if you look at russian americans as opposed to french americans you're talking about a difference of 80 cents on the dollar and i don't think anyone is discriminating against different ethnic white groups chinese americans earn something like it's like it's like 60 cents on the dollar between mong americans and chinese americans and you and i could not tell among american apart from a chinese american so what you see is that actually The vast majority of what determines whether a group is successful in America, modern America, are all the other things.

00:31:39.000 The human capital, the social capital, the skills you bring to the table, the level of education, not how much discrimination you face.

00:31:47.000 The discrimination seems in the literature not to matter very much to determining outcomes.

00:31:53.000 That's the argument.

00:31:55.000 What's happened is that you have a whole group of scholars, a whole portion of academy that believes that discrimination, that disparities are only caused by discrimination.

00:32:07.000 There's just no evidence for this belief.

00:32:09.000 If that were true, we would see a totally different landscape of disparities.

00:32:14.000 So when it comes to sort of a subset of that fallacy, or maybe an extension of that fallacy, there's an attempt very often to redirect from statistics where this is obviously true to statistics that are historically based.

00:32:26.000 So what you'll see is a movement from, you're talking about income statistics, which are very real because they're in the here and now, and so if one group has a lower income than another group, or one group has a Greater level of income mobility than another income group.

00:32:41.000 You can see how current policy shapes the income of these various groups and you can rule out whether discrimination is true or not.

00:32:49.000 And so, then there's a misdirect.

00:32:50.000 And the misdirect typically is to wealth in communities.

00:32:53.000 And because wealth, obviously, is going to contain vestiges of the past.

00:32:57.000 Obviously, if your grandfather was wealthy and your grandfather is wealthy because he engaged in racism or because your great-great-great-grandfather engaged in racism, you can carry that forward.

00:33:07.000 The attempt is to suggest that because there are vast wealth differentials in American life,

00:33:12.000 that those are either largely or entirely due to discrimination historically,

00:33:16.000 and that it's impossible to overcome those wealth differentials.

00:33:21.000 And what that means is that the way that wealth is typically built is through income.

00:33:24.000 So if you actually wish to fix that in the future, you need to change income trajectories, not wealth

00:33:28.000 distributions.

00:33:29.000 There's an attempt to say, for example, with regard to reparations.

00:33:33.000 Well, the way to fix the wealth disparities of the past is to simply redistribute the wealth that already exists among different racial groups in order to make up for discrimination of the past, without mentioning that if you don't change the income trajectories of the groups right now, the wealth differentials will just re-emerge incredibly quickly, no matter what level of redistributionism you use.

00:33:54.000 Yeah, there's also, I mean, so I think the wealth argument, they certainly have a stronger point to point out the ways in which black people were disadvantaged in the booming post-World War II housing market.

00:34:08.000 I think that's a good point.

00:34:09.000 I think it gets taken too far, however.

00:34:13.000 If you just look at the building of wealth among Asian Americans, the vast majority of whom arrived after 1965, after that glorious boom period, and arrived here with very little, coming from countries like China and so forth, which were largely still third world countries at that time. 0.50

00:34:35.000 And the extent that they've almost caught up in median wealth with white Americans just in the past 50 years is a testament to the fact that America is still the best place for someone who is poor to build wealth within two generations. 0.85

00:34:55.000 There's no place better for that on planet Earth right now.

00:35:02.000 I think you're certainly right to point out that this attitude which blames everything on the past, it's anti-scientific, it's just not the truth, and it's certainly not a helpful mindset in terms of encouraging people to do the healthy things that are going to get them to succeed in the only life that we do have.

00:35:24.000 There's very rarely an attempt to actually try to measure or create some sort of metric for how much has past discrimination contributed to current income trajectories, for example.

00:35:36.000 Somebody will say, okay, well there was racism for your parents and therefore there's an income trajectory now without attempting to actually measure to what extent that's true because it turns out that there's a vast panoply of answers from 0% to 100% and the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

00:35:49.000 But the arguments seem to be 0% or 100%, pick one. 0.93

00:35:54.000 And that, of course, is really stupid and also doesn't get you to anything like the 0.92

00:35:58.000 multifactorial analysis that's going to be necessary to correct the behavior. 0.97

00:36:01.000 When you pick the 100% analysis, which is what Ibram X. Kendi does in his intellectual ilk,

00:36:07.000 when they make the 100% argument that all disparities are attributable to either past

00:36:12.000 or current discrimination, that it's all discrimination, the reason it seems like

00:36:15.000 they're doing that is because they want to make then another false binary argument.

00:36:18.000 The false binary argument is if you argue the reverse, if you argue that the disparities

00:36:22.000 between groups are largely attributable at this point in time to individual decision-making

00:36:28.000 within groups being different, that people make different, if you pick any two groups in America,

00:36:34.000 Age groups, sex groups, like literally any groups in America, there will be disparities because individuals within those groups make different decisions.

00:36:41.000 You could take a random room around the United States, draw a line down the middle of it, and there will be disparities between the two groups on a wide variety of topics because the individuals are different in those two groups. 0.75

00:36:51.000 What he instead suggests in another false binary is he says, well, if you're saying, for example, that black Americans earn less than white Americans and it's not due to racism, then you must be suggesting That black Americans are inferior to white Americans. 0.96

00:37:05.000 Then you're a racist, right?

00:37:06.000 Because anti-racism would be trying to correct for all the discrimination. 0.98

00:37:10.000 If you say it's not discrimination, it must be because you believe that black people have lower IQs or because you believe that black people are genetically inferior to white people or something like that.

00:37:19.000 What do you make of that argument?

00:37:21.000 The truth is that groups differ on all kinds of cultural attributes, and we all know this.

00:37:28.000 Ethnic groups differ.

00:37:29.000 Groups of the same race differ culturally.

00:37:33.000 What we mean by the word multicultural society is that there are many cultures in one society.

00:37:41.000 If you believe that culture matters, which most people do, then you have to admit that culture matters plus cultures differ equals cultural differences matter.

00:37:54.000 And there's so many ways you could look at this that don't even involve the question of race.

00:37:59.000 Look at the historic differences between white Americans from the North and white Americans from the South on every outcome measure from income to crime to all sorts of cultural and values differences between two groups of the same race.

00:38:18.000 In my book, I cite a study of a sociologist who looked at different Black American groups in New York, Black Americans as opposed to Black Caribbeans, and found large cultural differences in terms of, you're looking at, you know, Black immigrants from places like Jamaica, who have a different, carry a different culture and have different outcomes as a result.

00:38:40.000 These are two groups of the same race.

00:38:41.000 How can it be racist to say that the culture might be behind the outcome differences?

00:38:47.000 So, this is one of the biggest false arguments that people make.

00:38:55.000 smearing you as a racist for the common sense and highly empirically backed finding that culture matters.

00:39:03.000 If you raise people in a culture that strongly values education, where your parents are over your shoulders, encouraging you to do your homework and helping you do your homework from a very young age, reading you books when you're three years old, giving you a head start, teaching you to read before you get into kindergarten, In the modern world, where those skills matter, that culture is going to do better than a culture that is doing the opposite, where very few people are reading to their kids before kindergarten, for whatever reason.

00:39:34.000 And it's not racist to point out that that matters.

00:39:36.000 You know, one of the areas where, again, I think that the reason that you got so much ire from Sonny Hostin is because one of the things that you debunk here is a tool that is very frequently used, which you call the myth of superior knowledge.

00:39:47.000 This basic idea, which is that unless you're a member of the supposedly discriminated against group, you can't even define the terms that are being discussed.

00:39:56.000 And so if you are a white person and you talk about all of this stuff, then your opinion is of no consequence.

00:40:02.000 The problem for you, of course, is that you're not a white person. 0.67

00:40:04.000 And therefore, when you debunk the myth of superior knowledge, this makes you a sort of race traitor to the myth itself.

00:40:10.000 The myth itself requires a certain level of racial solidarity in support of the myth, because if there's somebody who walks out and says, well, I'm black and I don't support what you're saying, well, then that suggests, obviously, that there is no special knowledge held by black Americans about racism, at least in terms of its definition.

00:40:28.000 Right.

00:40:29.000 So I think what, yeah, what people do here is they take a kind of common sense truism and then they build it into a totally radical false belief.

00:40:37.000 The common sense truism is that you, Ben Shapiro, have some life experiences that I don't.

00:40:43.000 And I, Coleman Hughes, have some life experiences that you don't.

00:40:46.000 I'm, you know, I'm from North Jersey.

00:40:49.000 I'm from a family that is half black and half Puerto Rican.

00:40:53.000 I spent a lot of time in the Bronx with my family growing up, and I've been to Puerto Rico, and you grew up in LA, is that right?

00:40:59.000 Around there.

00:41:00.000 So there's a bunch of stuff, local knowledge, that you're going to have that I'm probably not going to have.

00:41:07.000 And there's a bunch of stuff from my life that is knowledge that I'm going to have that you're not going to have.

00:41:13.000 Now that's just always true as a virtue of all of us living our own kind of unique paths in life.

00:41:20.000 And what people, the people I call neo-racist in the book, what they do is they take that grain of truth and build it into a philosophy where I as a black person know certain truths about society that you couldn't possibly know and cannot refute me on no matter how much evidence you have. 0.58

00:41:39.000 So for example, if I say as a black person, because in my experience I know that I know that the reason that there's a disparity in police shootings is because the police are racist, as opposed to because they're encountering black criminals much more often than white criminals.

00:41:58.000 I just know that because I'm a black person.

00:42:00.000 And for you as a non-black guy, as a Jewish guy, to come at me with evidence or facts, I can just dismiss it because, well, of course you're going to say that. 1.00

00:42:09.000 It's easy for a white guy to say.

00:42:12.000 And in fact, I cite in the book this hilarious example where Thomas Sowell had a great book called Intellectuals in Society, and he made some of the points I'm making in this interview now.

00:42:24.000 And there was a famous review in the London School of Economics, I believe, where they dismissed him.

00:42:31.000 They said, oh, this Thomas Sowell guy, easy for a rich white man to say.

00:42:35.000 Now they didn't check to see that Thomas Sowell is the furthest thing from a rich white guy.

00:42:41.000 He is a black man that was born I think in 1933 in the Jim Crow South in a house without running water, or rather without hot water.

00:42:52.000 He moved to Harlem when he was 10 and in his teens at one point lived in a homeless shelter for teens.

00:43:00.000 So and yet he had come to the conclusion based on scholarship and evidence that racism didn't explain probably the majority of disparities that we were now seeing.

00:43:14.000 So this is all to say that Though we have different experiences, we do live in an objective reality.

00:43:23.000 There is such a thing as truth.

00:43:25.000 There is such a thing as facts.

00:43:26.000 And those facts can't depend on the fact that you're you and I'm me.

00:43:31.000 So we have to be able to have a conversation where we can disagree with each other, where no one by default trumps anyone else just by virtue of your skin color or your identity.

00:43:43.000 And that's the only way that we can actually have a conversation.

00:43:47.000 So, I mean, I can ask at this point on a personal level.

00:43:50.000 Obviously, you are, as you say, biracial, black and Puerto Rican.

00:43:55.000 And what have your experiences been with regard to racism in the United States?

00:44:01.000 I've experienced a few examples of racism.

00:44:03.000 I mean, I can give you the four or five times where I think I'm pretty sure I was treated differently as a result of my race.

00:44:13.000 So, okay, I'll give you two examples.

00:44:14.000 There was one time on Columbia's campus where I was wearing a wife beater.

00:44:20.000 I don't know if we call the t-shirts that anymore, and jeans.

00:44:25.000 And I went into some writing office, and there was this kind of cranky old administrator who didn't think I was a Columbia student, probably thought I was riffraff from Harlem or something, and didn't believe me when I said, I'm here to see the professor.

00:44:41.000 So that was literally, that was like one incident in all four or five years of college for me.

00:44:49.000 Okay, and it had no bearing on anything.

00:44:51.000 It was just annoying for about three minutes.

00:44:54.000 Okay?

00:44:55.000 I'll give you one other example.

00:44:57.000 The only other example that comes to mind post-18 years old is I was in Times Square and I bought something from, you know, some fast food joint and the security guard thought I was stealing on the way out.

00:45:13.000 And I got a little upset. 0.97

00:45:14.000 I was like, screw you. 0.99

00:45:16.000 I just paid for this. 1.00

00:45:17.000 Go talk to the person.

00:45:19.000 Now, the punchline is the security guard was African. 0.98

00:45:21.000 It was an African guy.

00:45:23.000 It was not a white guy who thought I was stealing.

00:45:25.000 And then 20 seconds later, he checked to see I bought it.

00:45:28.000 And then I went on my merry way.

00:45:30.000 So those are two examples where I'm pretty sure I probably would not have been suspected that way, were I white or Asian, say.

00:45:39.000 They had no bearing on my actual success.

00:45:42.000 I think that there is a kind of, in the black community, there is like a very deep focus on sharing these kind of stories where we were treated differently, building them into a narrative about how black people are still held back, and also ignoring, really dishonestly, all the ways in which American society has tried to give black people a leg up, right?

00:46:12.000 Many black Americans will share these kinds of stories I'm sharing, but if a white guy were to enter the room and say, actually, can I share a story?

00:46:20.000 There was one time where, you know, my manager told me, we really want to hire you or promote you.

00:46:27.000 You're actually the best candidate for this job, but we need to get a black or Hispanic candidate, and I'm really sorry. 1.00

00:46:34.000 There's tons of white guys who have shared these kinds of stories, either on conservative podcasts, where it's safe to do so, or in memoirs, or over a drink.

00:46:45.000 But those stories would be laughed out of the room.

00:46:52.000 As Americans, we can all share our experiences of being treated differently as a result of our race and have a really good faith, honest conversation where no one's experiences are just dismissed as meaningless, but they're all integrated into this shared reality we're living in.

00:47:08.000 And we can talk to each other about them and rejigger society and teach our children the right way to treat people and so forth. 0.92

00:47:18.000 But the conversation, unfortunately, you know, from the left has been, white people shut up, listen to us black people. 0.94

00:47:27.000 And that can't be the template for interracial harmony. 0.93

00:47:33.000 So right now there's a lot of talk on the right particularly about the idea that maybe wokeness and DEI have hit their high watermark, that we're going to actually hit the other side of the hill very soon because things were so hot during the George Floyd era and the post Floyd kind of ruckus that was happening around the United States that now maybe there's the backlash is taking root and maybe there's going to be sort of a drawing away from the more extreme manifestations of all of this.

00:47:59.000 I'm kind of doubtful of that, only because it seems like it's so deeply embedded in so many of the elite institutions that you've been discussing at the very beginning.

00:48:05.000 And it manifests in a wide variety of ways, including, I think, some of the college protests that we're currently seeing over Gaza.

00:48:09.000 I mean, it's a much broader sort of rubric.

00:48:12.000 The DEI intersectionality rubric is obviously much broader than just black and white.

00:48:17.000 Obviously, it encompasses all sorts of purportedly Victimized groups and they're stacked up in a particular hierarchy and depending on whether they can form a coalition or not with other members of the victimized group against the pervasive, the so-called prevailing system, alliances form.

00:48:34.000 Do you think that we've hit the other end of woke and DEI or do you think that this is going to continue to be kind of a bubbling and burgeoning problem in society?

00:48:42.000 So I actually think both things are true.

00:48:44.000 I think wokeness and the DEI ideology, which casts white people as villains and blackness as goodness, inherent goodness, that peaked around 2020, 2021, perhaps into 2022.

00:49:00.000 And it has declined since then, but it's not going away.

00:49:04.000 It's declined and perhaps plateaued, but you're totally right to say it's so entrenched in so many institutions that it's not going to keep declining.

00:49:15.000 We're not going to hit the other side of the hill, as you said.

00:49:19.000 So it's both true, it peaked, but it's also here to stay at a certain threshold.

00:49:25.000 What it feels like to me is that the most acid forms of this thing burned everybody and somebody moved off the most acid forms, but then a slightly less acidic form has sort of diffused itself throughout the society and continues to diffuse itself even into the halls of power, so much so that what seems like a pretty easy win for the President of the United States, who campaigned as a moderate Democrat, you voted for him in 2020, that even he has to kind of pat it on the head. He refuses to sort of dissociate

00:49:54.000 from the ideology as a whole because he seems to believe that it's still politically valuable for

00:49:59.000 him to kind of wink and nod at the ideology while maybe sort of dissociating from its most

00:50:03.000 extreme manifestations.

00:50:04.000 Right. And I think in support of your point that we're not where we were before this whole

00:50:11.000 thing started, it's really useful to remind people just how good race relations were perceived in

00:50:18.000 in like 2012, right?

00:50:20.000 Before all of this started, before BLM, you literally had 60%, a clear majority of black Americans, polled by Pew saying that bias was not an issue they were facing.

00:50:31.000 Racial bias was not an issue they were facing, and that number had just been getting better and better every year since the 90s.

00:50:36.000 We were just, we were going on the path to a situation where the vast majority of black people felt good about the issue of racism, that it was not a big problem in their life.

00:50:46.000 You had a majority of black Americans and white Americans and Hispanic Americans all saying race relations were good.

00:50:53.000 in the year 2013.

00:50:54.000 Then it all plummeted.

00:50:55.000 So we're not back to those numbers.

00:50:57.000 We're not back to the pre-identity politics, pre-great awokening world.

00:51:03.000 We're just better than we were in 2020 and 2021.

00:51:07.000 So I guess the question becomes, how do we get back to a better world here?

00:51:10.000 Because what politics seems to have become in the United States is a series of reactionary ping-pongings where the woke react in a particular way and then people on the right react, not sometimes with the sort of individualistic Cool, you know, sort of MLK answer that we all used to grow up with, but they've reacted also in group fashion, because it turns out that when you're labeled a group, very often people start to find a group identity in being labeled a group.

00:51:37.000 So if the basic idea is that white Christian males are the bad guys, eventually what you might get is white Christian males considering themselves an actual interest group, which is something that historically, at least in the last 40 years, white Christian males have not.

00:51:50.000 They've considered themselves a series of individuals who live in communities.

00:51:53.000 But when you have a targeting of white Christian males as a group, it's not

00:51:58.000 too hard to see how people could start thinking of themselves as an actual put-upon group, and

00:52:03.000 that in turn reinforces the other side. And so you have this sort of weird pendulum of

00:52:08.000 swinging side to side as opposed to approaching the middle again. Yeah, we need people with the bravery to

00:52:13.000 opt out of the pendulum on both sides.

00:52:16.000 We need people on the left have to stop playing the game of black identity politics of accusing every everything they don't like of being racist of of doing what Sonny Hostin did to me on The View, and people on the right have to resist the urge to react to that by going in the other direction and saying, screw it, we're all doing identity politics, so let's do white identity politics. 0.55

00:52:42.000 We need people with the bravery to say no to all of that and get us out of this vicious cycle.

00:52:48.000 And remember that, you know, America is, you know, it's one of the greatest countries on earth.

00:52:54.000 It's where everyone around the world wants to come.

00:52:56.000 There's a reason that it's, there's a reason people want to come here because we have something great.

00:53:01.000 We have a great credo, a great philosophy, and that's a large part of the reason for our success.

00:53:07.000 So let's not abandon the American ideal of judging people as individuals.

00:53:14.000 Because we're having an emotional tribal response to realities, political realities, right now.

00:53:21.000 We'll get to more on this momentarily.

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00:54:30.000 So, now let's do the hard thing, which is to take all of this principled talk and bring it down to the level of crass politics.

00:54:35.000 So, we're facing an election in 2024 in which we have a series of wildly unpopular candidates facing one another.

00:54:44.000 The two main candidates in Joe Biden and Donald Trump obviously are below water in terms of approval rating.

00:54:49.000 They're running neck and neck largely because very few people are deeply enthusiastic about voting.

00:54:54.000 I mean, full disclosure, I've been very open about this.

00:54:56.000 I'm a supporter of President Trump.

00:54:57.000 I've raised money for President Trump.

00:54:59.000 I did not vote for him in 2016.

00:55:00.000 I did vote for him in 2020.

00:55:01.000 I'm voting for him in 2024 against Joe Biden.

00:55:04.000 You know, you suggested that you'd voted the last two presidential elections for the Democrats, for Hillary Clinton, and then for Joe Biden in 2020.

00:55:12.000 When you look at the field of candidates in 2024, what do you see?

00:55:16.000 Yeah, so I see, I think, I forget who it was that said this, but there are two candidates that are defined by their weaknesses.

00:55:24.000 Biden's weakness, of course, is that he is not just old in terms of the number, but old in terms of how he speaks, how he walks.

00:55:34.000 Everything about him screams of someone you would not really let, you know, if that were your grandfather, you'd be telling him, you know, granddad, you got to stop driving.

00:55:44.000 Like, you know, he's at that stage.

00:55:48.000 And Democrats have been extremely tempted to just deny this, right?

00:55:53.000 But it's there for everyone to see.

00:55:55.000 Now, in the case of Trump, you have someone who tried to steal the election last time, who is not, again, not committing to a peaceful transfer of power necessarily.

00:56:06.000 And I think if he loses, he's probably going to do the same thing.

00:56:09.000 If he loses, it's not fair.

00:56:10.000 If he wins, it was fair.

00:56:13.000 You've got a lot of indictments, some of which I think are just like lawfare, but some of which are, you know, legitimate.

00:56:22.000 And just like more generally, you have someone whose level of chaos I don't think is compatible with being in the Oval Office, which has always been my biggest problem with him.

00:56:35.000 And so I think you have two candidates that are very much disliked.

00:56:38.000 You know, like I'm someone that would, I think, be a very winnable voter for a different Republican.

00:56:46.000 And then you've got RFK, who is, you know, very charismatic, at least to me, and tempting, but also untested and so forth.

00:56:54.000 So it's a it's a very depressing scenario right now.

00:56:58.000 And I don't I have no idea who I'm going to vote for or if I will vote.

00:57:03.000 And I think a lot of people feel that way.

00:57:05.000 So let's put it differently in terms of this.

00:57:07.000 What would have to change for each of the candidates that you just discussed to earn your vote?

00:57:12.000 So I think Trump could probably earn my vote by saying, look, I'm done.

00:57:17.000 I'm done pretending I won the last election.

00:57:21.000 I'm looking forward.

00:57:22.000 I want one more term and then I'm out. 0.80

00:57:24.000 Biden's a disaster. 0.65

00:57:25.000 He's too old.

00:57:28.000 Let's not relitigate the last election.

00:57:31.000 And to kind of come clean about For him to come clean about that would go a long way to restoring my confidence that he is looking forward and wanting to govern the country rather than wanting to settle scores with all the people that have been trying to persecute him.

00:57:49.000 And they have been trying to persecute him. 0.97

00:57:51.000 So I'm worried he's going to be a score-settling, bitter president because he's a small person and an egotistical person rather than be The best qualities about him, which is, you know, the guy that got the Abraham Accords, the guy that gets things done, the guy that's a strong president that can stand up to the other strong men of the world, the guy that can kind of be our bastard against the other bastards of the world. 0.96

00:58:17.000 I don't think he's going to do that, but that's how he could win my vote. 0.88

00:58:22.000 How Biden could win my vote is by getting up there in front of the media, doing hard interviews, Fielding all the questions, not disappearing, not doing like the lowest amount of public appearances and press conferences of any president in recent history, but showing us that he is cognitively sharp, that he's up there, he's home.

00:58:46.000 And that he is up to the task of governing for four more years.

00:58:51.000 So I don't think he's likely to do that either, because I don't think he can do it.

00:58:55.000 And I shudder to think at what he's going to look like three years from now.

00:58:59.000 Keep in mind, he's going to be president three years from now.

00:59:02.000 How much worse is he going to look then?

00:59:05.000 Um, you know, as for RFK, I think he could win my vote very easily with, you know, moderating a few of his opinions on kind of his attacks on our military.

00:59:18.000 I don't totally jibe with.

00:59:22.000 But, you know, yeah.

00:59:25.000 So that's what it looks like for me right now.

00:59:27.000 When it comes to policy, the argument that I've made with regard to the 2024 election is that many of the arguments that are made with regard to Trump about how he's a fascist or a tyrant or all of the rest of this sort of stuff, a lot of that is wildly exaggerated.

00:59:39.000 We already have a term of him and it wasn't that.

00:59:41.000 And meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, you have a president who really has used executive orders in truly unprecedented ways, who's used the, effectively used the administrations of government in ways that are pretty

00:59:54.000 extreme.

00:59:55.000 So in other words, it's sort of smart person tyranny as opposed to dumb talk.

01:00:00.000 And so one of the things that I've said before about President Trump is that if you were

01:00:03.000 to think of basically the, if you were to think about politics as a sort of coffee filter,

01:00:11.000 The filter that is American government has been more effective with Trump than it actually has been with Biden.

01:00:16.000 Because Biden appears to be more moderate in persona, this has meant that more poisons and toxins are getting through the filter of the coffee.

01:00:25.000 And with Trump, because they're kind of like rocks as opposed to toxins, they're actually getting filtered out in terms of actual political policy by the time the coffee hits your mug.

01:00:34.000 What do you make of that argument?

01:00:35.000 That may be true.

01:00:36.000 Yeah, that may be true.

01:00:37.000 I mean, I think all the institutions were on absolute high alert during Trump's four years because, to your point, the way Trump spoke in 2015 was deeply concerning.

01:00:53.000 Some of the things he was talking about doing Uh, we're highly concerning and, you know, and I know this is, like, I was worried he was a fascist, the way he was talking.

01:01:04.000 And then he had four years of governing like a typical Republican, and in fact, um, doing certain policies that were to the left of what even Obama would have done.

01:01:15.000 You know, there are certain policies he did with the First Step Act, for example, commuting sentences for federal prisoners, drug crimes, making funding for black colleges automatic rather than having to be re-upped every year.

01:01:28.000 Had Obama done that, I think Republicans would have accused him of playing identity politics.

01:01:33.000 So, Trump ended up governing very differently than he talked.

01:01:38.000 And I think that was, maybe that was obvious to some people who really kind of got Trump, but it was not obvious to me who didn't get Trump in 2016.

01:01:47.000 And so I'm certainly much less afraid of a Trump presidency now than I was in 2016, because I understand the vast gulf between what he says and what he does.

01:01:58.000 He talks in a stream-of-consciousness way, and so entertains ideas far crazier than what he would actually do.

01:02:07.000 So that's definitely true, and it may be true that because he talks so crazy, I think the institutions, the immune system of America reacts to him in a way that we react to no other president.

01:02:23.000 Yeah, so, I mean, the case that I've made to people is that if you want to prevent Trump from denying the election outcome, then he should win.

01:02:29.000 And then he wouldn't have to worry about it.

01:02:32.000 Well, Coleman, I really appreciate the time.

01:02:34.000 The book is wonderful.

01:02:35.000 People should pick it up right now.

01:02:36.000 The end of race politics.

01:02:38.000 And thanks for what you're doing.

01:02:39.000 Really appreciate it.

01:02:40.000 Thanks for having me, Ben.

01:02:54.000 Associate producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick.

01:02:56.000 Editing is by Chris Ridge.

01:02:58.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

01:03:00.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

01:03:02.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

01:03:05.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:03:07.000 Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

01:03:10.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

01:03:12.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

01:03:14.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:03:16.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 19, 2024

Not Everything Is About Race | Coleman Hughes

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