The Charlie Kirk Show - Charlie Kirk vs. Bernie Sanders' Fmr Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray—Debate Night by Turning Point USA

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, happy Saturday.

00:00:01.000 It's my debate with Brianna Gray Joy.

00:00:04.000 Is America systemically racist?

00:00:05.000 What can we do about that?

00:00:07.000 Well, she was the former press secretary for Bernie Sanders, and we have a pretty, let's say, heated conversation at times.

00:00:13.000 It's pretty respectable.

00:00:14.000 She does a lot of talking.

00:00:15.000 I do a lot of listening.

00:00:16.000 I ask some questions.

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00:01:32.000 Here we go.

00:01:33.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:35.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:01:37.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:41.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:44.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:45.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:46.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

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00:01:54.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:02:03.000 That's why we are here.

00:02:06.000 Welcome to another episode of Debate Night.

00:02:09.000 We're joined by founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, and former press secretary to Bernie Sanders, journalist and co-host of Bad Faith Podcast, Brianna Joy Gray.

00:02:19.000 Tonight's topic is systemic racism in America.

00:02:22.000 I'll start with you, Brianna.

00:02:23.000 Can you start with your opening statements, please?

00:02:26.000 Sure.

00:02:26.000 Well, thank you, Charlie, for the invitation.

00:02:28.000 I'm glad to be here.

00:02:30.000 Look, there are a lot of things that people struggle with in this country every day.

00:02:36.000 40% of Americans, even before this pandemic and the economic crisis that has accompanied it, couldn't respond to a $400 emergency.

00:02:44.000 If we think of what that means, and we think of all of the emergencies that can come up that exceed $400 in cost, whether it's making rent, whether it's a medical bill, whether it's bailing someone out of jail, you can imagine a lot of circumstances that are really life-changing if you can't come up with that $400.

00:03:00.000 And I think I just wanted to start by saying that because sometimes I think the conversations that we have, especially kind of in our professional context on the internet, where there's a lot of different incentives to talk about a lot of different things, sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

00:03:14.000 And so why I think conversations about systemic racism are ultimately important is because it's one factor among the many, the tapestries of things that are causing people not to be able to fully maximize their ability in our society.

00:03:31.000 And I think people across the political spectrum talk a lot about freedom.

00:03:34.000 It's one of our founding ideals as Americans.

00:03:38.000 But I think often we talk about the freedom to do what we want affirmatively and not the freedoms from not, you know, the restrictions that come when you aren't able to have your basic needs met.

00:03:50.000 You know, have your basic housing needs, basic food needs, basic education needs, the things that you need to succeed.

00:03:55.000 And for some quadrant, some cohort of Americans, systemic racism has been a barrier.

00:04:01.000 And we need to talk about systemic racism because in a lot of people's imaginations, racism exists as a bad guy in a Klanshood and these kind of stereotypes, very explicitly denying people service, explicitly denying people a right to use a bathroom, the kind of racism that we understand from the 1960s.

00:04:19.000 What we understand exists today is the aftershocks of a lot of those systems that were in place, not just interpersonal racism that existed at the time, but also the laws on the books that had real effects in terms of how people were able to grow and aggregate wealth at that time, and which has implications for the generations that have come since.

00:04:40.000 So if you think about someone like myself, who's a relatively young person whose parents were born before the civil rights era, were born in the civil rights era before civil rights were secured for black Americans in this country.

00:04:51.000 We're not talking about something long, long ago and far, far away.

00:04:54.000 We're talking about laws in the books that prevented my relatives who served in wars from getting the same benefits in terms of low-interest GI loans to buy property that other Americans, that white Americans got.

00:05:05.000 And that has a trickle-down effect in terms of how much wealth has been amassed by my community as compared to others.

00:05:12.000 And I think it's not about blaming people.

00:05:14.000 It's not about hierarchies of oppression.

00:05:16.000 It's just about understanding that this is how the world was and snapping our fingers and getting rid of those prohibitive laws isn't going to change the effects of those prohibitive laws unless we do so affirmatively.

00:05:28.000 Thank you, Brianna.

00:05:30.000 Can we move on to Charlie?

00:05:32.000 Yeah, I'll make it short.

00:05:33.000 I don't think systemic racism exists.

00:05:35.000 So the burden proofs on you. 0.95

00:05:38.000 There's racism, individual racist, disgusting, reprehensible. 0.94

00:05:41.000 We'll agree on that.

00:05:43.000 But the systems themselves are not racist.

00:05:46.000 There's nothing that I can do that you can't do.

00:05:48.000 You went to Harvard.

00:05:49.000 It's pretty awesome.

00:05:50.000 I didn't.

00:05:51.000 So that's not a racist country.

00:05:53.000 So yeah, the burden's on you to prove it.

00:05:57.000 Charlie, is it your belief that if there is one example of something, that an anomalous example proves the rule?

00:06:06.000 No, not always, but can you name one example?

00:06:08.000 Of systemic racism?

00:06:09.000 Yeah.

00:06:10.000 So what did you think about the example I brought up in my opening remarks?

00:06:14.000 The example of housing discrimination and redlining.

00:06:18.000 You know Thomas Sowell's treatise on redlining?

00:06:20.000 I don't.

00:06:21.000 Yeah, you should read it.

00:06:22.000 What does it say?

00:06:23.000 Are you able to tell me?

00:06:24.000 Yes, it's actually right here.

00:06:25.000 He said, redlining, do you know that whites were turned down for mortgages more than Asians?

00:06:31.000 I'm unclear what relevance that was.

00:06:33.000 It wasn't racially based.

00:06:35.000 The redlining myth, according to Thomas Sowell, which I'm sure you believe in, says, quote, nor did either the mainstream media or political leaders ever mention the fact that black-owned banks turned down black mortgage loan applicants at least as often as white-owned banks did.

00:06:47.000 Why were blacks turning down their own people? 0.97

00:06:49.000 I don't know what you're talking about.

00:06:51.000 I'm talking about...

00:06:52.000 Actually, you don't, because this is...

00:06:53.000 Well, Charlie, I would like to be very specific here.

00:06:56.000 I'm talking about the same thing.

00:06:56.000 I was just very specific.

00:06:58.000 So I'm talking about the GI bill, which allowed people who had served in our wars, including a lot of black Americans, to come back and get to the U.S. You're talking about redlining, right? 0.97

00:07:07.000 So this is redlining.

00:07:08.000 This is connected to redlining.

00:07:09.000 No, no, no, no, which one do you want to talk about?

00:07:10.000 GI bill or redlining?

00:07:11.000 If you allow me to explain, this is connected to redlining.

00:07:14.000 I guess you don't understand that, but I'm happy to explain it to you right now if you just let me get this out.

00:07:18.000 I promise you it won't be, it'll be worth the effort.

00:07:22.000 The GI bill gave low-interest loans to people who had served in the war, right?

00:07:27.000 And those loans were issued by, they were federally backed loans.

00:07:30.000 So the banks would issue to people at a low interest rate so that they could buy homes and generate what we now understand to be the basis of middle-class wealth in this country.

00:07:38.000 What ended up happening was the process of redlining was that banks said, oh, we're only going to issue loans for you to buy in certain neighborhoods.

00:07:47.000 Right, black banks.

00:07:48.000 All banks. 0.91

00:07:49.000 Right, so why did black banks do that?

00:07:51.000 The overwhelming majority of issuers in the US.

00:07:53.000 You got to answer the question.

00:07:54.000 Why did black banks do that? 0.93

00:07:55.000 I will answer your question, but what I'm talking about is the overwhelming majority of issuers.

00:08:00.000 Just like today, even more so back then, the overwhelming majority of issuers were white-owned banks.

00:08:06.000 And those banks redlined communities where they said, we will not issue to people who live in these communities.

00:08:11.000 Now, what ended up happening, what that meant for black people, was because of what's called a restrictive covenant, which meant that in the law, in the covenant that attached the land for a lease, many of them precluded black people from buying in those neighborhoods.

00:08:24.000 So basically, what happened was banks would only lend to people and give those low-interest loans to people who were allowed to live in white neighborhoods, which meant that systematically, systemically, black people were not allowed, weren't able to take advantage of that same low-interest loan program that enabled so many white people who, ordinarily, would not have been able to afford a house because they fought and served in our wars to do so. 0.66

00:08:48.000 Now, how many black banks are in America?

00:08:51.000 And how many black banks were in America?

00:08:52.000 Well, if there's even one example, that's the question.

00:08:54.000 No, because the blanks were blacks were discriminating against themselves, and whites were being discriminated more than Asian Americans.

00:08:59.000 This is what's so fascinating.

00:09:00.000 Let me answer this question.

00:09:01.000 Why wasn't that?

00:09:02.000 Did you want me to answer your question about this? 0.98

00:09:06.000 Very black, black. 0.99

00:09:06.000 I'm happy to. 0.99

00:09:07.000 Let the record reflect that. 0.98

00:09:08.000 I'm happy to answer your question about black boners. 0.97

00:09:11.000 My point is that answer the question. 0.96

00:09:15.000 Before we started this conversation, Charlie, you assured me that it would not be pugilistic.

00:09:20.000 I'm asking you to answer a question, and you're not doing that.

00:09:23.000 The question is: how many black banks are in America at the time issuing those kinds of loans?

00:09:29.000 Charlie, at the end of the day.

00:09:30.000 So you're not answering.

00:09:31.000 No, that's not.

00:09:31.000 I got it.

00:09:31.000 That's fine.

00:09:32.000 Answer my question to you, which came first.

00:09:35.000 It's probably a low percentage, but Thomas Sowell's scholarship, which is a lot more extensive than yours.

00:09:39.000 Logical fallacy.

00:09:40.000 Just because you can find one counterexample.

00:09:42.000 Do you know who Thomas Sowell is?

00:09:44.000 Of course I do.

00:09:44.000 He's a black conservative public intellectual who a lot of people want to be a Nobel laureate for his research on this.

00:09:50.000 Charlie, I'm a big deal.

00:09:51.000 If you want to have a debate with Thomas Sowell or if Thomas Sowell wants to have a debate with me, I'd be happy to do that.

00:09:57.000 But I think that we two here can sit here as people with the ability to reason.

00:10:01.000 No, I agree.

00:10:02.000 But I'm going to trust Soule more than you.

00:10:04.000 I'm sorry.

00:10:05.000 It's like, because he actually lived through this.

00:10:06.000 Well, why did you ask me here if you weren't interested in me explaining to you my perspective on the world?

00:10:11.000 You would at least have some responses, which you don't.

00:10:13.000 That's fine.

00:10:14.000 Well, no, you don't.

00:10:15.000 Charlie, if we're going to move forward, we're going to have to get back past this basic logical fallacy that you keep encouraging.

00:10:19.000 Which one is that?

00:10:20.000 Which is that if one counterexample of a thing that satisfies your argument exists in the world, you seem to think that the gestalt of human existence doesn't matter.

00:10:31.000 There are hardly any black banks in America today, Charlie, but you think that the existence of one black bank in 1963, who, according to you, based on ephemera, discriminated against a black person, undermines undermines the entire reality of a white banking system that systemically did not issue loans.

00:10:52.000 Let me ask you another question.

00:10:53.000 Did you know, Charlie, that in 1947, there were 3,200 VA guaranteed loans in a random state, let's say Mississippi, and only two of them were issued to non-white borrowers?

00:11:03.000 But it's not just the South.

00:11:04.000 Let me ask you a question, though.

00:11:05.000 In New York and New Jersey, there were 67,000 of these loans, and only 100 of those 60,000 went to non-white borrowers.

00:11:11.000 Why do you think that was, Charlie?

00:11:13.000 Well, so let me ask you a question.

00:11:14.000 First of all, of course, it's partially racism, partially structural in the sense not that it's a problem.

00:11:18.000 Okay, so we have structured racism.

00:11:20.000 So I don't understand what the argument is.

00:11:21.000 No, it's not.

00:11:22.000 It's also because that blacks did not have their own capital accounts. 0.99

00:11:26.000 It's also because of this. 0.76

00:11:26.000 No. 0.76

00:11:27.000 It's not.

00:11:28.000 That's why we're talking about the GIS.

00:11:28.000 It's the GI.

00:11:30.000 Let me ask you, why is it that black incomes increased while redlining was also prevalent? 0.61

00:11:34.000 Black incomes increased faster than white income.

00:11:36.000 What does income have to do with everything?

00:11:38.000 No, Charlie.

00:11:39.000 When redlining was so terrible, why were blacks getting richer than whites in the 40s? 0.87

00:11:43.000 Why were blacks getting richer than the whites? 1.00

00:11:43.000 Well, answer the question. 1.00

00:11:45.000 You don't understand.

00:11:46.000 You don't understand, it seems, like, what redlining is.

00:11:49.000 No, I do.

00:11:50.000 No, Charlie, your ability to buy a house is not core, it's not the same thing as your ability to earn a higher income.

00:11:56.000 Your grandparents are harmed by redlining, is that right? 0.96

00:11:59.000 My great-great-great-grandparents.

00:12:00.000 So, how'd you get to Harvard if it was so awful?

00:12:03.000 Because if systemic racism is real, you went to the best school in the world.

00:12:07.000 Like, that doesn't make any sense.

00:12:09.000 You're saying that because racism exists, sorry, because I went to Harvard, racism can't exist.

00:12:13.000 No, I'm asking this very simple question.

00:12:15.000 If redlining was so detrimental, how did you get to government?

00:12:17.000 What is the relevance?

00:12:18.000 Don't dodge the relevance of the rest of the rest of the world.

00:12:19.000 No, it's very relevant.

00:12:20.000 Obviously, you're arguing against your own story.

00:12:22.000 No, I'm not.

00:12:23.000 Only in America as unra, only in a country as unraced as America could someone like you, who says it's so racist and redlining, also go to Harvard, the best school on the planet.

00:12:31.000 Do you believe that during Reconstruction there was no racism?

00:12:33.000 Do you believe that before that?

00:12:34.000 How many acres did slaves get in the Civil War? 0.99

00:12:37.000 19 million people.

00:12:38.000 In all due respect, you accused me of interrupting you and not asking the question, answering the question.

00:12:43.000 How many do you believe there was racism prior to the end of the civil rights movement and prior to basically during Reconstruction after the end of that?

00:12:50.000 Do I think it actually had to be a problem?

00:12:50.000 Of course there was.

00:12:52.000 Do you know that there were black people who went to Harvard during that period?

00:12:55.000 Do you think that racism didn't exist because black people didn't go to the corner? 0.99

00:12:58.000 That black people went to Harvard during that period?

00:13:00.000 The argument is that America is less racist.

00:13:03.000 You're the one that's focusing on race. 0.57

00:13:05.000 I'm not.

00:13:05.000 No, Charlie, you asked me to have a conversation about race, but I am no racial expert.

00:13:09.000 I'm a leftist who talks about socialism.

00:13:11.000 You're getting way too worked out.

00:13:12.000 No, Charlie, don't also do that.

00:13:14.000 Look, you are.

00:13:15.000 I would be happy to come here and not talk about race.

00:13:17.000 In fact, my whole career in writing is talking about a lot of racial overreaches on the left, critiquing the way that identity politics is used to have hierarchies of oppression in a way that ignores class as a key metric that cuts through communities.

00:13:32.000 That's my whole thing.

00:13:33.000 Why you asked me to come here and talk about race is a decision on you.

00:13:36.000 Please don't put that on me.

00:13:37.000 You believe in a mythology.

00:13:38.000 You believe in something that's akin to Zeus or Hercules.

00:13:38.000 That's why.

00:13:42.000 I mean, you believe in something that doesn't exist and never will, which is systemic racism.

00:13:45.000 You're living proof at how unracist America is.

00:13:47.000 And apparently, so is W.E. Du Bois.

00:13:50.000 Moving to the first question, since we didn't get to it, Brianna, is America systemically racist?

00:13:56.000 There you go.

00:14:00.000 There's systemic racism, of course, in America.

00:14:03.000 There's systemic poverty.

00:14:04.000 There's a lot of.

00:14:05.000 Look, I think we should probably start by talking about the word systemic, what the word systemic means.

00:14:10.000 It means that we're not any longer talking about the realm of this person was mean to me, this person didn't give me a job because they didn't like the cut of my jib, or they didn't like that I was a woman, or they didn't hire me because I was pregnant, or any number of things that go on in people's lives.

00:14:23.000 Those kind of one-off instances of oppression, discrimination, of course, exist for people who are members of protected classes and people who aren't members of protected classes.

00:14:34.000 I could not hire you because I don't like your shirt and there's nothing the law can do about that.

00:14:39.000 But of course, that would exist, but we wouldn't call that systemic oppression, even if we would call that wrong.

00:14:44.000 What we mean when we say systemic is that we have institutions in our country, whether it's something like our institution of laws, whether it's our prison system, whether it's our education system.

00:14:56.000 And because we're human beings and because we're flawed as we're putting together these systems, because there's always room to perfect the systems that we have made by our own human fallible design, there are often the same kind of biases and interests that we have are baked into those systems. 0.89

00:15:14.000 And it's not about someone necessarily sitting around nefariously saying, oh, I'm going to get you sucker.

00:15:19.000 But the reality is when you look at the way the world is designed, and outcomes aren't always indicative of a problem, but sometimes they are. 0.97

00:15:29.000 And so when you see something like, for instance, regardless of the race of the perpetrator, regardless of the race of the criminal, you are four times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white versus that the victim is black. 0.71

00:15:44.000 Now, this is, regardless if the person who did the killing was white or black, if you kill a white person, you're more likely to get the death penalty than a black person. 0.62

00:15:52.000 This is an interesting thing to think about. 0.68

00:15:54.000 Here's one that isn't explicitly about racial bias.

00:15:56.000 It's about class bias that's built into our criminal justice system.

00:16:00.000 We have a system that says if you get arrested and charged with a crime, but not convicted, innocent until proven guilty, many people are able to get out on bail.

00:16:08.000 And your bail amount is tethered to, and some, it bears some relationship to the nature of the crime.

00:16:13.000 Sometimes you're not going to be released regardless because you're considered to be too dangerous.

00:16:16.000 But many, many, many people are released based on an amount of money.

00:16:20.000 And the people who wait outside their bail set, the people who wait outside of prison happen to be people who can come up with $500.

00:16:28.000 And the people who wait inside of prison, even for minor offenses like hopping to turnstile or something like that, are the people whose family couldn't come up with those small amounts.

00:16:35.000 So we have a two-tiered system that we can say wasn't designed to hurt poor people.

00:16:40.000 It wasn't designed to hurt people who are disproportionately poor, who are black and Latino.

00:16:44.000 But it has the effect.

00:16:45.000 It has the effect of saying, you get to be out of jail depending on whether or not your parents or your boyfriend or your friend or whomever happens to have $500.

00:16:54.000 And some people would say that's evidence that the system was poorly designed to really take into account the real life realities of the world.

00:17:02.000 So yes, do I think that systems like that exist?

00:17:04.000 Obviously they do.

00:17:05.000 I'll let you react.

00:17:06.000 So is America systemically racist?

00:17:08.000 No, we're the least racist nation ever to exist.

00:17:11.000 Well, those things aren't also mutually racist.

00:17:13.000 We're not systemically racist.

00:17:13.000 Well, both are true.

00:17:15.000 Another logical fallacy, Charlie.

00:17:16.000 I'm saying two independent true things.

00:17:18.000 So America is not systemically racist.

00:17:20.000 Also, we're the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world.

00:17:24.000 Can you say two true things in a row?

00:17:26.000 I'm not sure.

00:17:27.000 I'd have to.

00:17:28.000 Go back to Harvard.

00:17:29.000 Yeah.

00:17:30.000 Do you have a little chip on your shoulder about Harvard Bank?

00:17:32.000 No, I'm impressed because it's like you're this amazing contradiction.

00:17:36.000 It's like we have to talk about systems of crisis.

00:17:38.000 It's a contradiction.

00:17:39.000 Your whole life, it's like you focus on systemic racism, and yet you should be talking about empowerment and prosperity, and you should be talking about how awesome this country is.

00:17:49.000 Have you heard of Alger?

00:17:51.000 Yeah, you're all about it.

00:17:53.000 I'm just saying, no, like the world is full of people.

00:17:56.000 Your whole political philosophy, I would think, would be one about gratitude and uplifting people, not about like identifying these mythological systems because of like some weird statistic because you say, well, someone who has a death penalty, like they kill a white victim versus a black victim, like that.

00:18:14.000 That's not exactly what I would focus my political career on.

00:18:16.000 It's not what I focus my political career on.

00:18:18.000 You didn't ask me here to discuss what I focus my political career on.

00:18:20.000 I would love to talk about class issues in America, but that's not the topic of this.

00:18:23.000 Well, I mean, I think that's actually more helpful and interesting.

00:18:25.000 My whole thing on the race thing is it's a distraction against our real problems in our country. 1.00

00:18:29.000 We're not a racist country.

00:18:30.000 The systems aren't racist.

00:18:31.000 Why did you design this debate this way?

00:18:33.000 Because we should be talking about otherwise.

00:18:37.000 This is your terms.

00:18:41.000 So I let you talk a couple minutes uninterrupted.

00:18:43.000 I would have loved to have done kind of like this cooperative eulogy of race politics in America, but you are saying that the systems are racist.

00:18:51.000 And so I'm going to push back on that.

00:18:53.000 Well, you asked me if there was systemic race.

00:18:54.000 You didn't ask me.

00:18:55.000 That's fine.

00:18:56.000 You didn't ask me if there were opportunities in America for black people.

00:18:58.000 You didn't ask me a single thing about how actually I have achieved what I've achieved in this country.

00:19:04.000 You didn't ask me what I do love about America.

00:19:06.000 You didn't ask me why I choose to live here, even though I spent much of my life abroad elsewhere.

00:19:12.000 You asked me questions to point it to, you asked me, what is my critique of America?

00:19:16.000 So I gave it to you.

00:19:17.000 If you want to talk about all the beautiful things I love about springtime in Washington, D.C., I'm happy to talk about it.

00:19:21.000 We can go a little deeper, but there's just no evidence America has any form of systemic racism.

00:19:25.000 Again, I'll leave it to you to prove the point.

00:19:28.000 Charlie.

00:19:29.000 Yes.

00:19:30.000 Moving on to the next question.

00:19:33.000 How much does the two-parent household affect social disparities in America?

00:19:38.000 Quite a lot.

00:19:39.000 I agree.

00:19:41.000 Okay.

00:19:42.000 You agree?

00:19:43.000 I mean, I could go through some numbers, but yeah, I think that's...

00:19:45.000 It's obviously true, right?

00:19:47.000 We live in a country where no longer can people support themselves on a single income.

00:19:52.000 And every metric in the world you want to look at says there's an advantage to having two parents in the household, not just for the income benefits, but for the social benefits of having that as well.

00:20:01.000 Can I ask a question, though?

00:20:02.000 And I don't mean this combative or adversarially, but like, just do you think that's a better indicator of outcomes in, let's just say, the black community. than discrimination or racism.

00:20:14.000 Well, I think we should be asking ourselves why there aren't more two-parent households in the black community.

00:20:19.000 And if you look at what single parenthood is correlated to, one of the biggest correlations is to poverty.

00:20:26.000 So you're three times less likely to get married if you are poor.

00:20:30.000 And I know that you've talked about this in the past, and I think that there's a real there there about the ways that how we structure social programs have really disincentivized people if your partner is a low-income earner from getting with that low-income earner.

00:20:44.000 So we're talking about a bunch of people who are in poverty.

00:20:47.000 The average middle, a yearly income for someone who's earning a $7.50 minimum wage is something like in the teens, $15,000.

00:20:55.000 It's under $20,000.

00:20:57.000 And if you are receiving an average of approximately $20,000 in social benefits, that will be taken away because we designed our social system to say you only get these benefits if you remain single.

00:21:09.000 I totally agree with that.

00:21:10.000 Of course, it's going to disincentivize certain kinds of behavior.

00:21:13.000 Your answer is to say, let's get rid of the social benefits altogether.

00:21:16.000 My solution would be to redesign the program so you don't penalize people from getting married and having an opportunity to grow their wealth and get off the ground and having a slightly higher threshold for where those benefits are.

00:21:26.000 No, I actually have more of a newer view on this conservative view where I think we should help people have children in monogamous relationships, financially or otherwise.

00:21:36.000 But no, I totally agree.

00:21:37.000 I think you and I could talk about class a lot and I would love to do that.

00:21:42.000 But let me ask you a question.

00:21:43.000 Do you think the hyper-focus of race international conversation detracts from having that kind of class-based discussion?

00:21:49.000 Sometimes.

00:21:50.000 I think that there is a way to talk about race that is painfully superficial and which focuses on the grievances of frankly elite minorities more than the substantive issues.

00:22:01.000 I'm just curious.

00:22:02.000 So for example, during the campaign cycle, there was a real spurt of attention directed toward the issue of the maternal wealth, sorry, the maternal health gap.

00:22:16.000 So the maternal mortality gap in this country means that black babies have really high mortality rates that are comparable, frankly, to some much less developed countries in the world.

00:22:28.000 And people were concerned about that.

00:22:29.000 And the story got highlighted in some part because Serena Williams had a very high-risk pregnancy and almost died.

00:22:36.000 She was complaining about pain and the doctors were ignoring her.

00:22:39.000 And she ended up having, I think, some kind of deep vein frontrosis or some kind of blood clot, basically.

00:22:44.000 I'm not a doctor.

00:22:45.000 She had some kind of blood clot that if she hadn't really been forceful about it and gotten it checked out and if she weren't as powerful and rich and privileged as she is, she probably would have died like many women in this country do die, disproportionately black women in this country do die. 1.00

00:22:59.000 And it's a real problem, right?

00:23:02.000 As a progressive, my focus is to say, what are the biggest determinants of unequal health treatment in this country?

00:23:07.000 A big one is that we have a two-tiered system and people who are on our poverty program, Medicaid, tend to not be seen by high-quality doctors.

00:23:17.000 They tend to be ignored.

00:23:19.000 They tend to move around a lot and not see the same physicians on a repeat basis.

00:23:23.000 A lot of things that result in them having lower standards of care.

00:23:26.000 And my solution would be to say, well, I would love to sit here and give doctors diversity training and magically convince them to not be racist and pay more attention to Serena Williams or whatever.

00:23:35.000 I don't really see that happening.

00:23:36.000 And I don't really see that as the government's role.

00:23:38.000 What we can do is make sure that everybody has a universal same healthcare system so that doctors aren't disproportionately treating poor patients worse off.

00:23:45.000 But the thing about Serena Williams is to say there are the kinds of issues that get talked about in national attention are those race issues that affect affluent black people, in addition to everybody else, but affluent black people.

00:24:00.000 So what you get is a kind of elite race discourse that's all about, oh, can you touch my hair and whether or not diversity and inclusion should exist in my law firm and all of this kind of stuff, which isn't necessarily irrelevant, but it is enormously besides the fault to the overall majority of Americans.

00:24:16.000 I'll decide to generally agree.

00:24:17.000 I'll say it's largely irrelevant, but I'll agree that it should be de-emphasized.

00:24:20.000 So like, name a couple things you think that need to be, like, what are non-elite blacks experiencing that are not being talked about by the top tiers of the left?

00:24:31.000 Well, if you ask them, if you look at polls and what they prioritize during, let's say, a presidential cycle, it's always the same things that white people are prioritizing.

00:24:37.000 It's education, healthcare, crime, all of the affordable housing.

00:24:42.000 It's the same stuff, which is why it's so frustrating when you work like I did for a candidate like Bernie Sanders that has a progressive platform that's meaningfully geared to addressing all of those concerns.

00:24:53.000 And then you have the liberal chattering class saying, oh, it's somehow racist because it's not a specifically targeted racist policy.

00:24:59.000 Now, there are some things that exist in the world that I think are explicitly racist in nature.

00:25:05.000 Certain very specific kinds of discrimination, I'd say redressing, redlining is an instance.

00:25:10.000 I've heard you talk before compassionately about what happened to Japanese people during internment.

00:25:16.000 And I think it was right and proper to offer them reparations as a consequence.

00:25:20.000 That has never obviously happened in the context of black Americans.

00:25:24.000 Not totally.

00:25:25.000 With that stuff aside, I think when we have such an intense class disparity in this country, when you have productivity going up enormously from the times in the 1950s and 60s where we got a much, where workers got such a bigger piece in the pie, when you have back in the 50s and 60s, the average worker earning 1 to 30, having a 1 to 30 ratio between them and CEO pay, and today it being 1 to 300 plus, you know, we have a problem there because it's not that Americans are getting lazy.

00:25:55.000 Americans are more productive than ever and working harder than ever, pulling more shifts.

00:25:58.000 And we even have everybody in the workforce now, as we said, people can't afford to have a parent staying at home.

00:26:05.000 And even with all of that, people can't afford the basic kinds of emergencies, and that's a problem.

00:26:10.000 Yeah, so just a quick correction.

00:26:13.000 We did do a reparation program after Civil War.

00:26:15.000 It was like 19 million acres given to black Americans like the size of South Carolina.

00:26:18.000 But I'm actually more interested in what we could substantively dive in here.

00:26:22.000 Like, I agree.

00:26:23.000 I'm tired of talking about race all the time.

00:26:25.000 I really am, I'll be honest.

00:26:26.000 And what interests you about it?

00:26:28.000 It interests that someone could defend something so fervently that doesn't exist and look to a, again, like a mythological narrative.

00:26:37.000 Why does it matter?

00:26:37.000 On some level, are you feeding into the kind of superficial system?

00:26:40.000 Well, but it's everywhere.

00:26:41.000 You agree it's everywhere.

00:26:42.000 It's in corporations, it's in the military.

00:26:44.000 The CRT is in the classrooms.

00:26:46.000 It's in colleges.

00:26:47.000 So we have to kind of build a, I would like to build a consensus That this overemphasis on these things is wrong.

00:26:52.000 My approach, when I see people talking about something in a way that seems to be bolstering clicks or like a political narrative, I simply use my platform to redirect and talk about things that are a different view.

00:27:04.000 I think you have to defeat it and destroy it.

00:27:07.000 So, I don't know.

00:27:09.000 I think that it raises a conversation.

00:27:10.000 It's a tactical issue.

00:27:11.000 Yeah, but I think it raises a cottage industry of people who are talking about the existence of something that, frankly, so we obviously disagree that systemic racism exists.

00:27:20.000 But the reason why I don't put my political focus on it isn't because I think it's not worthwhile.

00:27:24.000 If there were a policy, a program, something someone could show me that showed they could get rid of systemic racism, that there was a class that some doctor could take that would make him treat Serena Williams' pain in the same way that he would treat a white patient's pain.

00:27:39.000 I would say, great, let's do that.

00:27:40.000 What's the problem?

00:27:42.000 But that's not the way the world works.

00:27:42.000 Great.

00:27:44.000 And many of these kinds of programs have shown to be very ineffective and a waste of money.

00:27:49.000 And what we do know is all of the things that do work.

00:27:51.000 Okay, to your point about the way social policies are constructed in a way that disincentivizes people from getting married.

00:27:57.000 I could not agree.

00:27:58.000 We could address that.

00:27:59.000 If you want to talk about housing policy, there's also ways in which certain kinds of public housing generate more of an interest in people settling down as opposed to high-rise apartments where people don't have their own.

00:28:10.000 They choose to exist.

00:28:11.000 Exactly.

00:28:11.000 Their own little plots to garden in our front yard, a sense of ownership and community.

00:28:15.000 I would love to be having those conversations.

00:28:16.000 So I guess, I mean, just more of a curiosity.

00:28:19.000 Why is the American left not having that conversation?

00:28:21.000 Well, the American, so we are having a semantic conversation now.

00:28:24.000 I'm asking you to do that.

00:28:25.000 That is true, though.

00:28:26.000 But I call them left.

00:28:27.000 I want to just distinguish between leftists and liberals.

00:28:29.000 I make that distinction all the time.

00:28:31.000 So I think the American left is very much having that conversation.

00:28:34.000 I think that liberals, we would agree in our critique, that they're having a very superficial conversation that has bogged down a lot of this cultural tax.

00:28:42.000 Let me give you an example.

00:28:43.000 Again, I won't agree on the systemic racism thing.

00:28:45.000 But if you're like, regardless of how we analyze things, we should make it easier, not harder, through our government programs to stay married to a single person.

00:28:53.000 Like, why is that not something that at least in the information I consume, I don't see as a, I mean, like, there was a huge emphasis on the systemic racism narrative.

00:29:03.000 Would you agree in the last couple years?

00:29:05.000 Like, Robin D'Angelo can be.

00:29:07.000 I'm not saying you agree at that stuff.

00:29:09.000 But why is that?

00:29:10.000 Why is that?

00:29:11.000 Is it just like white liberals that are...

00:29:12.000 Yeah, it's white liberals.

00:29:14.000 Can you expand?

00:29:14.000 I'm just curious, can you expand on that?

00:29:16.000 Like, I think it's super interesting.

00:29:18.000 I was watching some of your videos, you know, interviewing kids on college campuses, and I was struck by how, and I don't mean this to attack any of them, but what a poor job they're able to do in articulating why racism exists and racism is wrong.

00:29:35.000 And so I understand why you have the perspective going up against those folks who can't, who seem to crumble at the idea that black people commit more crimes, a disproportionate amount of crimes. 0.63

00:29:48.000 Like they're which they do. 0.91

00:29:50.000 Yeah, of course.

00:29:51.000 And they know that racism is bad.

00:29:53.000 Like they know in their head racism bad.

00:29:55.000 And so they come to these conversations not wanting to concede a ground that they think is racism, but they don't actually understand what racism is.

00:30:05.000 It's white liberals who have this very superficial understanding of racism.

00:30:08.000 No, I totally agree.

00:30:08.000 I'm sorry.

00:30:09.000 That's fostered by some of these people like now.

00:30:11.000 Now, I don't actually have a problem.

00:30:13.000 So I read Robin D'Angelo's book with the idea of eviscerating it in an article.

00:30:19.000 And honestly, it was so milquetoast in like a nothing burger that I didn't even have the energy to write about it.

00:30:25.000 Because the thing is, there's a time and a place for a certain kind of a conversation for a white person who's in an office place who feels like they don't know how to talk to black people and they should read those books and that's fine.

00:30:35.000 But it has nothing to do with social justice.

00:30:37.000 It has nothing to do with the George Floyd protests.

00:30:41.000 It has nothing to do with criminal justice reform.

00:30:42.000 It has nothing to do with anything other than interpersonal relationships between upper middle class white people and upper middle class black people, which is fine.

00:30:49.000 I'm an upper middle-class black person.

00:30:50.000 No, I know, but like, but I mean, in some ways, I mean, you and I could probably agree on a lot of the class stuff.

00:30:56.000 Like, I'm not a big fan of like Amazon running our entire country, like all this sort of stuff.

00:31:01.000 But do you think that race is used as kind of like the race conversation, whether it be like corporate America giving a bunch of money to BLM, like BLM dominating the conversation, it's just like not helpful in some ways.

00:31:12.000 It just puts aside some of these other kinds of, like when you say that it's harder than ever to have children in America, like you're singing my song.

00:31:19.000 Like, I totally agree.

00:31:21.000 So, yeah, the co-option, the corporatization of these issues is a big problem on the left.

00:31:21.000 Yeah.

00:31:28.000 The BLM national organization, I just had the reporter who wrote the big expose about how much money has gone on.

00:31:34.000 Mansions everywhere on my show.

00:31:37.000 It's a real issue.

00:31:39.000 I often think there are a lot of sincere, good-natured people who are not part of the BLM national organization.

00:31:44.000 A lot of people who got their money stolen, frankly, because they sincerely believed in criminal justice reform.

00:31:49.000 And those, I think it's important to disaggregate.

00:31:51.000 But this is the problem.

00:31:52.000 It's so easy to co-opt these movements because all of these banks slap a BLM sign on their window.

00:31:59.000 All of the corporations slap the sign.

00:32:01.000 The signs on the windows are no more than an insurance policy that says, please don't break my window.

00:32:06.000 It's not about a sincere commitment to any kind of college.

00:32:09.000 It's like ripe over Passover back in the Bible where they put the blood of the lamb. 0.95

00:32:13.000 Yes, I mean, it is.

00:32:14.000 That's what you just said.

00:32:15.000 I mean, like, yeah.

00:32:16.000 It is like that.

00:32:17.000 And that's not to say that I don't believe in the underlying cause.

00:32:19.000 I do.

00:32:20.000 But the point of the matter is when you commodify things like this, when it's about giving to a national organization, the original BLM, back in the day, I remember in 2016, I was very frustrated because one of the then leaders, DeRay McKesson, came out and endorsed Hillary Clinton.

00:32:35.000 I was an anonymous lawyer at this point.

00:32:37.000 I wasn't working for anybody.

00:32:37.000 He was the woke shirt guy.

00:32:38.000 He was the first guy.

00:32:39.000 Oh, I'm not.

00:32:40.000 I don't remember that.

00:32:41.000 And I was frustrated because at the time, BLM, I don't know if it was the same institution as the national organization, but the BLM website, as far as I could tell, had a list of policy priorities that largely dovetailed with what Bernie Sanders was running on at the time.

00:32:55.000 And it was very frustrating to me that this organization that was supposed to have these ethical, moral, political commitments would endorse someone like Hillary Clinton, who I had no respect for politically or otherwise.

00:33:06.000 That website is gone.

00:33:07.000 All of that is gone.

00:33:09.000 And the people who understood that systems have to be, aren't just about like magically snapping your fingers and saying race isn't bad.

00:33:17.000 It's about understanding that if you just give everybody healthcare, if you make sure everybody has housing, then a lot of the worst effects of racism, of systemic racism, are no longer relevant.

00:33:26.000 Those people got pushed to the sideline.

00:33:28.000 And it became about this TikTok mansion in LA or Hollywood, whatever it was.

00:33:33.000 And that's creator space.

00:33:35.000 And so I agree with you that this is why so much of these kinds of conversations frustrate me.

00:33:35.000 And all of that.

00:33:41.000 A class conversation is less difficult to co-opt.

00:33:45.000 Now, there are people who are trying to.

00:33:47.000 But look, I mean, and I know we want to get to another question, but my other thought, I mean, like the class conversation I'll have all day long, the race thing I just find to be so unhelpful. 1.00

00:33:56.000 I mean, you could tell by our first kind of, it's just not good.

00:33:59.000 It's like, it's a non-starter, right?

00:34:01.000 But if you talk about things that are race agnostic, regardless of your feelings and my feelings, that's actually a tangible thing that I could see could either help people.

00:34:09.000 Now, I don't believe in expanding government welfare, Section 8 housing, and all that.

00:34:12.000 But if you're talking about incentivizing people to stay married for someone to bring fathers in the home, I think it's helpful.

00:34:17.000 Anyway, Marina, do you want to get to the next question?

00:34:19.000 For Breonna, do you believe that white people are being discriminated against today?

00:34:24.000 Hmm.

00:34:25.000 I mean, look, I'm an old head about some of this stuff.

00:34:29.000 The kids are taking this in a different direction.

00:34:31.000 I think a lot of the kids today, they don't believe in that sort of thing.

00:34:35.000 They believe in, they don't believe in sex-only education, sex-segregated education.

00:34:40.000 You know, my mother went to a girls' school, you know, Jane Addams in Cleveland, Ohio, and she said that was a really good experience for her.

00:34:46.000 That there's research that says it's confidence building for girls to be not competing with boys in their math class and these kinds of things.

00:34:54.000 You know, a lot of people were frustrated about the integration of Boy Scouts, et cetera, et cetera.

00:34:59.000 I was.

00:35:00.000 And there's another school of thought that says, you know, if the problem fundamentally is that girls, you know, aren't able to have space in the classroom, can we get that as root instead of having to perpetuate segregation, sex segregation in this case, in order to do it?

00:35:17.000 And I'm not a sociologist, and I can't say what the best way to do it.

00:35:21.000 What I will say is this: I think there is a difference, intent matters.

00:35:25.000 And I think that historically, the reason for having race-segregated housing, having a black dorm, for instance, which, by the way, even though there were often black houses and stuff, they were also integrated.

00:35:39.000 It wasn't, you know, all black people went off to it.

00:35:41.000 It was like having an athletic house or the international other kinds of things like that.

00:35:45.000 I'll let you finish your point.

00:35:46.000 But the point was that when you're a super minority in a space, it's nice to have someplace to go where you're not watching your P's and Q's, where you can feel like you have a sense of community the same way that international students might have a house.

00:35:58.000 And maybe, maybe we are past that.

00:36:01.000 Maybe we don't need that anymore.

00:36:02.000 HBCUs now are something like 30, 40% non-black.

00:36:07.000 They're very diverse now.

00:36:08.000 So I don't know.

00:36:10.000 I'm not to say that whether or not that is necessary today, but I will say there's a difference.

00:36:16.000 And I think you'd agree in saying, I want to have a space to be away from racism versus I want to keep you out of my institution because I think you're racially inferior to people.

00:36:25.000 I think they're sinister cousins of the same strain.

00:36:29.000 I mean, like, segregation is wrong.

00:36:32.000 But you believe in the Boy Scouts of America.

00:36:33.000 But that's not racial segregation, right?

00:36:35.000 So gender segregation is okay. 0.99

00:36:37.000 Because there's distinct differences between men and women, but there's not differences between the races.

00:36:42.000 Well, many people feel differently.

00:36:44.000 What are the differences between races?

00:36:46.000 There are all kinds of cultural differences that exist across cultures all over the world.

00:36:50.000 No, no, no, not cultural.

00:36:51.000 Race, like melanin content.

00:36:53.000 Well, yeah, well, in America, black Americans have our own culture.

00:36:57.000 Are there other black populations here?

00:36:59.000 Like race, like actually the DNA of somebody.

00:37:02.000 Right.

00:37:03.000 I understand what you're saying.

00:37:04.000 I'm saying there's no difference.

00:37:05.000 But the reality of those black dorms historically, and things are, part of why things are changing now is because we have a much more diverse black population than we've had historically with more recent immigrants coming into the picture.

00:37:15.000 Well, we're seeing more black dorms, like black-only dorms, right? 1.00

00:37:18.000 We're seeing like a kind of I don't know that to be true.

00:37:20.000 If you say that's something that's like I haven't been in college.

00:37:23.000 Let's say that they're 15 years.

00:37:25.000 Let's just say it's neutral.

00:37:26.000 Like there's, or I'll give you another example: Columbia University black-only graduation ceremony.

00:37:31.000 Yeah.

00:37:31.000 Lots of universities have that.

00:37:33.000 It's not black-only. 0.54

00:37:34.000 It's just an additional black. 0.90

00:37:35.000 It's just an additional colour. 0.98

00:37:36.000 Right, which I think is like racist and wrong and awful.

00:37:39.000 Okay.

00:37:41.000 But if there was a white-only graduation ceremony, how would you think about that?

00:37:44.000 Well, if there were like, I don't know, a Catholic ceremony or an Irish ceremony.

00:37:49.000 You can convert to Hillel ceremony. 0.60

00:37:52.000 I don't have an issue with the personally.

00:37:54.000 But Catholicism you can convert to.

00:37:55.000 Hillel you can convert to. 0.75

00:37:57.000 Irish.

00:37:59.000 Well, you could convert to Judaism.

00:38:01.000 But Irish is culture, right?

00:38:05.000 Which is not racial inherently.

00:38:07.000 There's a few people that aren't white that are Irish.

00:38:10.000 But this idea of this preference on melanin and DNA, like, isn't that really it?

00:38:14.000 It's like a dangerous direction.

00:38:17.000 Well, I can tell you, I didn't go to black graduation, but lots of my friends did.

00:38:21.000 And I would say that the people who went didn't do it because it was about DNA.

00:38:24.000 They did it because they felt a cultural kinship with the other black people in the class.

00:38:28.000 And you don't have to respect that culture as much as you see Irish people as having a distinct culture.

00:38:33.000 But I will tell you, black people feel very much like we have a cultural kinship to each other.

00:38:37.000 But just to be consistent, like a white-only graduation ceremony, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant graduation ceremony, morally, you'd be okay with. 0.54

00:38:45.000 If the WASPs feel culturally coherent and want to have a ceremony, then that's fine with me. 0.97

00:38:50.000 Okay, I would, I want to try to de-balkanize America, right? 0.99

00:38:55.000 Sure.

00:38:56.000 I think these kind of creation.

00:38:58.000 And not just the Boy Scouts.

00:38:59.000 But that's gender. 1.00

00:39:01.000 Gender differences are completely important for formative reasons, sociological reasons.

00:39:06.000 Do you think that it's wrong to have international houses at these universities?

00:39:09.000 I don't love it.

00:39:09.000 I'll be very honest.

00:39:10.000 I don't.

00:39:11.000 Okay, well, then that's consistent.

00:39:12.000 And that's...

00:39:13.000 I think that if you come to America, I want you to try to participate in our attempt to be a multiracial republic, right?

00:39:18.000 In the attempt.

00:39:19.000 Like, I don't love the idea of hyphen America.

00:39:22.000 I don't.

00:39:22.000 I don't like this idea of Chinese American, Iranian American, African-American.

00:39:26.000 I want to try, albeit clumsy, to strive towards the idea that I'm an American.

00:39:32.000 So I hear that, Charlie.

00:39:33.000 And if I could just say this, I think this is such a crucial point.

00:39:36.000 And I've had this conversation with Glenn Lowry and Andrew Sullivan.

00:39:41.000 And this always comes up.

00:39:43.000 Part of, I think, why some black people and other non-white people bristle a little bit at this idea that people like yourselves really want individuality and the ability to be your own person and not to be subsumed in stereotypes or groups or tribalism, is that the whole story, the whole narrative of advocating for yourself on the basis of your identity historically has been because by law, you weren't allowed to be an individual.

00:40:10.000 By the Constitution, you were three-fifths of a person.

00:40:14.000 By Jim Crow laws, you couldn't ride the same trains as whites or drink at the same water fountains.

00:40:19.000 By redlining, you weren't allowed, by law, to live in the same neighborhoods as whites, or you at least weren't going to be granted a loan to be able to live in the same neighborhoods as right. 0.93

00:40:27.000 And so many of those white neighborhoods had restrictive confidence in the Middle East that explicitly precluded black people from living in those neighborhoods.

00:40:34.000 And people wanted to be individuals.

00:40:36.000 People wanted to be able to live where they wanted to live, go to school where they wanted to live, go to the hospital they wanted to go to, marry who they wanted to marry.

00:40:44.000 And the literal laws of the United States of America said, no, you cannot do that.

00:40:48.000 And so people started to advocate, okay, I'm black and I don't have access to this privilege.

00:40:53.000 I'm Asian and I don't have access to this.

00:40:55.000 I'm Latino, I'm Chicano.

00:40:56.000 And we had all of these movements to get people to be able to be individuals.

00:41:00.000 So people bristle a little, I think, at this idea that the existence of advocacy along identity lines is to be balkanized.

00:41:08.000 It's quite the opposite.

00:41:09.000 It's to push back against the feeling, whether or not you agree that it persists, to push back against what people perceive to be barriers to them living their life fully as individuals.

00:41:18.000 Nine out of 13 states had abolished slavery by the Constitution.

00:41:22.000 Northwest Ordinance had all new territories were free.

00:41:25.000 And what do you take from that?

00:41:27.000 That America wasn't racist?

00:41:28.000 Not only that, we were the first country to abolish slavery, not just continue the practice of it.

00:41:33.000 I mean, every other nation had slavery, including today.

00:41:35.000 There's more slaves today than there were back then.

00:41:38.000 Fortunately, slavery is the norm. 1.00

00:41:39.000 Abolition is the exception. 0.70

00:41:40.000 And America led the way.

00:41:41.000 Charlie, you have to understand, you're not an unintelligent person.

00:41:45.000 You know that that's a logical fallacy.

00:41:47.000 Why?

00:41:47.000 If you and I both have kids and we both start beating our kids at the same time and we're ruthless abusive parents and you stop a year before I stop, that doesn't make us not ruthful, ruthless, abusive parents.

00:42:02.000 Wait, wait, what is the point of your argument?

00:42:05.000 Just because one state stopped before another state, just because America stopped before some other country, doesn't mean that the initial act of harm, the initial tort doesn't still stand.

00:42:14.000 I got to go.

00:42:15.000 So where in the Federalist Papers does it justify slavery?

00:42:17.000 Why does it matter?

00:42:19.000 Whether or not, no, that's the framework of our country.

00:42:21.000 No, that question is completely untethered from anything that we're talking about.

00:42:25.000 We're talking about the framework of the world.

00:42:26.000 Charlie, no, we're not.

00:42:29.000 Oh, okay.

00:42:30.000 Then what are we talking about?

00:42:30.000 No, we're not.

00:42:31.000 We're talking about whether there's systemic racism.

00:42:33.000 Okay, well, we're talking about the same thing.

00:42:34.000 The reality of systemic racism.

00:42:37.000 I could sit here and ask you, Charlie, do you know how many people came over in the transatlantic slave trade?

00:42:41.000 I could approximate about 1.8 million.

00:42:43.000 No, it's like 20 million.

00:42:44.000 Hold on.

00:42:45.000 20 million came as slaves?

00:42:46.000 20 million.

00:42:47.000 Hold on.

00:42:47.000 20 million.

00:42:48.000 20 million came over in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas.

00:42:51.000 Brazil or America had more.

00:42:53.000 Brazil.

00:42:54.000 Brazil is the number one beneficiary recipient of.

00:42:57.000 Okay, so what did black slaves decide when they met with Abraham Lincoln when they were given an opportunity for their own country?

00:43:01.000 No, that's an interesting question, right?

00:43:03.000 They wanted to stay.

00:43:05.000 Charlie, it seems to me, and this is something I've noticed that you do often.

00:43:10.000 If you want to debate someone about the content of the Federalist Papers, you got me.

00:43:16.000 Because my morals, my politics, my values aren't rooted in the content of the Federalist Papers.

00:43:22.000 I would admit that.

00:43:23.000 And if that makes me a poor debate partner for you, I'm just completely.

00:43:30.000 It is the framework of our country.

00:43:34.000 Those are just words have no meaning, Charlie.

00:43:37.000 They do.

00:43:37.000 They designed the greatest civilization ever to exist.

00:43:39.000 And so if you're going to say the system is racist, then show me anywhere in the private journals of the founders them defending slavery.

00:43:47.000 I don't have to show you private journals.

00:43:49.000 Half the founding fathers own slaves.

00:43:52.000 They don't have to defend slaves. 0.98

00:43:53.000 Let's talk about Washington owns slaves. 0.99

00:43:55.000 Thomas Jefferson owns slaves.

00:43:57.000 Let's talk about Thomas Jefferson.

00:43:58.000 But Charlie, that's specific.

00:43:59.000 No, no, no, it's not.

00:43:59.000 It's very important.

00:44:00.000 I don't care to sit here.

00:44:01.000 I'm not here to malign and talk about founding fathers, whether they're good or bad, because that's not the reason.

00:44:06.000 The reality is, Charlie, people are mixed. 0.96

00:44:09.000 It's a mixed bag.

00:44:10.000 People can come up with a really amazing idea for a city on the hill and the prescription for a society of how it should be and also be deeply flawed individuals who made mistakes that it's our job to rectify because the founding fathers wrote in our constitution that we're pursuing a more perfect union, not fetishizing what they happen to write down at a constitutional convention over 250 years ago.

00:44:32.000 Isn't that what you have to say about our founding fathers?

00:44:35.000 So let me tell about Thomas Jefferson.

00:44:37.000 What is that?

00:44:38.000 Like, am I supposed to be afraid?

00:44:41.000 No, I'm just about Thomas Jefferson.

00:44:43.000 He was the first president to ban the importation of new slaves.

00:44:45.000 That's a good thing, right?

00:44:46.000 So let me ask you a question.

00:44:48.000 Does him doing that good thing relieve him of the moral obligation for doing the bad thing of owning slaves?

00:44:57.000 It makes it a lot more nuanced, doesn't it?

00:45:00.000 I'm the one that's making an argument for nuance here.

00:45:02.000 You're the one that's making an argument for we must only talk about the good things that happen in America.

00:45:08.000 People do more talking than me.

00:45:09.000 So let me tell you what I believe.

00:45:10.000 Okay, sure.

00:45:11.000 That we all have something in common.

00:45:12.000 You know what that is?

00:45:13.000 What's that?

00:45:13.000 We're born into a world we didn't create.

00:45:16.000 Of course.

00:45:16.000 And every founder came into a world where slater is everywhere.

00:45:19.000 By the time they died, it was.

00:45:20.000 It wasn't everywhere, but it was lots of places.

00:45:23.000 By the time they died, there was less slavery than ever before.

00:45:25.000 That's a really awesome thing.

00:45:28.000 Shouldn't we appreciate them?

00:45:29.000 I mean, I have a little bit of a different perspective as someone who was a descendant of the people who were very much still enslaved when they all died.

00:45:36.000 But I appreciate that you want to emphasize the good that they did.

00:45:41.000 And I think that's fine.

00:45:41.000 I also think it's fine that other people want to emphasize the bad that they did.

00:45:45.000 I don't understand why you have a commitment to, it seems, erasing that nuance by only talking about.

00:45:53.000 I'm properly factoring in the positives with the negatives.

00:45:56.000 So, for example, Thomas Jefferson in the original draft of the Declaration admonished King George for bringing slaves to America.

00:46:03.000 He advocated for the abolition of slavery in 1790.

00:46:06.000 The first ever anti-slavery convention was hosted by Ben Franklin in Philadelphia in 1775.

00:46:11.000 Before the founders, there was not a robust anti-slavery movement.

00:46:16.000 It was John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams, who led the abolition movement in America.

00:46:21.000 Why is this an argument?

00:46:22.000 Are we debating?

00:46:23.000 What exactly is the debate at this point?

00:46:25.000 At this point, I believe these were brilliant, heroic, and morally courageous men who deserve not to be remembered for their negatives, albeit we can factor those in, but the positives are that they and their commitment created the greatest civilization ever to exist.

00:46:44.000 People have to be remembered, hopefully, for something in short.

00:46:47.000 You should factor in.

00:46:49.000 Like I said, the factor needs to be appropriate.

00:46:51.000 And the factor should be.

00:46:52.000 And I respectfully wait having slaves, I think, a little bit more in the negative pile against the positive privilege.

00:47:00.000 Right, but they inherited that practice and then they got rid of it. 0.99

00:47:02.000 So they never defended it robustly in their literature.

00:47:06.000 They never ran on it.

00:47:08.000 Instead, they inherited an evil practice.

00:47:10.000 It is completely legitimate for you to wait owning humans as property less than I do in the grand scheme.

00:47:17.000 How about the people that got rid of the practice?

00:47:19.000 That's pretty awesome, right?

00:47:23.000 I don't know who you're talking about because slavery didn't end for another hundred years.

00:47:30.000 And one of the reasons why slavery didn't end for 100 years is because they did not properly foresee the cotton gin or John C. Calhoun.

00:47:38.000 Oops, I guess.

00:47:39.000 Well, because slavery was on its way out.

00:47:40.000 So you talk about the three-fifths compromise, which was actually an anti-slavery measure.

00:47:44.000 Yeah, I also had middle school history, but Charlie, that's not the point here.

00:47:49.000 Again, you're arguing with me as though I have an interest in saying in denying the historical record.

00:47:54.000 It is what it is.

00:47:56.000 I don't really care.

00:47:57.000 My point is that for the whole duration of American history, exactly your teaching of American history has been what's taught in textbooks.

00:48:06.000 Now, for the first time.

00:48:07.000 That's not true.

00:48:08.000 For the first time in the 80s and 90s, as a part of this, yes, I'm sorry, critical legal studies movement, people are starting to put some additional facts.

00:48:15.000 We had a lot of scholarship about Sally Henry's who didn't exist before.

00:48:17.000 People are interested in these other different aspects of these, let's call them, great men's lives.

00:48:23.000 And instead of being able to say, hey, you take the good with the bad, you take the bitter with the sweet, as what Carol King would say, there is a push nowadays to erase the historical narrative to only have the good stuff.

00:48:34.000 It doesn't hurt me.

00:48:35.000 I'm not triggered by the idea that some of these guys had some good ideas.

00:48:40.000 I promise you, it does nothing to me.

00:48:42.000 I don't mind.

00:48:43.000 You do admit that.

00:48:44.000 I don't.

00:48:46.000 Like, I just said it's not just a couple good ideas.

00:48:50.000 You are pushing back against, I think, the extreme moral failing that it is to own another human being.

00:48:59.000 Hold on a second.

00:49:00.000 I acknowledge it, but I also am trying to ask the question: before the American founders, who fought to end slavery on this planet?

00:49:07.000 Answer that question.

00:49:11.000 The American founders didn't fight to end slavery on this planet.

00:49:15.000 Sure, they did.

00:49:15.000 If you want to have a conversation about that.

00:49:17.000 They did.

00:49:17.000 That's not true.

00:49:18.000 Charlie, and if you want to have a conversation about the history of slavery and the entire globe dating back millennia, you should get a historian to come and talk to you.

00:49:24.000 No, but just that's an important point, though.

00:49:26.000 Let's focus on that.

00:49:27.000 Whoever tried to abolish it before the founders?

00:49:30.000 I promise you, if I Googled on my phone for two seconds, I could find a whole score of people who have tried to get rid of slavery across the world for millennia.

00:49:36.000 That's, come on, Charlie.

00:49:37.000 First of all, you wouldn't find much of it.

00:49:39.000 And guess what?

00:49:40.000 They weren't successful.

00:49:41.000 But also, it doesn't matter, Charlie.

00:49:42.000 Jeff.

00:49:43.000 I'm not debating you.

00:49:44.000 Madison Jay.

00:49:45.000 Well, it doesn't matter.

00:49:46.000 Okay, then we can move on then.

00:49:47.000 I'm just trying to close the point that I think it's...

00:49:49.000 It's a weird absurd obsession.

00:49:51.000 Okay, they did a good thing.

00:49:53.000 Let's concede they did a good thing.

00:49:54.000 Why is that so important to you?

00:49:56.000 Because they did.

00:49:57.000 It's a cover.

00:49:57.000 It's a distraction from the bad stuff, which you won't linger on for even a second.

00:50:01.000 I acknowledge the bad stuff.

00:50:02.000 You acknowledge the bad stuff.

00:50:03.000 You must judge a person in the times of which they are in.

00:50:06.000 They were geniuses, brilliant, worthy of our gratitude.

00:50:09.000 And the times that they were in were the abolitionists, the Quakers, who really did want to get rid of slavery.

00:50:13.000 John Quincy asked the original abolitionist.

00:50:16.000 And some of the founding fathers are better than others.

00:50:18.000 Ben Franklin, I have no quibbles with.

00:50:20.000 Charlie, this question's for you.

00:50:22.000 How do we get underprivileged people out of the projects?

00:50:26.000 Well, the question of how to get poor people rich isn't a mystery.

00:50:31.000 It's not by giving them stuff to do nothing.

00:50:35.000 It's improving their schools, which I'm sure we can agree on.

00:50:37.000 Rebuilding the family, entrepreneurship.

00:50:41.000 We know how to get poor people richer, and we do the opposite.

00:50:46.000 So I would agree with you that education is part of it, but I think that that's been a lot of myth-making as well.

00:50:51.000 I think that we turned away from a lot of those social safety nets that were really working in the earlier mid-part of the century in the 1990s, and instead said that the reason why everybody was failing is because they hadn't gone to college and gotten an education.

00:51:05.000 And what you saw was people rushing to take out an enormous amount of debt, to get degrees, many of which had little to no impact on people's earning potential and has saddled an entire generation, multiple generations, with college debt that they got because they're federally backed loans that because of Joe Biden, they could not discharge into bankruptcy, and it's led to an incredible crisis.

00:51:26.000 We used to invest in public education in this country, which we divested from as the civil rights movement meant that everybody had more access to these institutions.

00:51:37.000 And Reagan was a big part of that in defunding the California system that was the crown jewel of the state and frankly of the country in many ways in that era.

00:51:48.000 So I think education has been held up as a panacea by neoliberal politicians on both sides of the aisle to detract from their own political failures, to detract from the fact that they sent jobs overseas and supported NAFTA these trade policies that were really detrimental to working people in this country.

00:52:07.000 However, I also think that our public education system, K through 12, fails a lot of folks.

00:52:15.000 I think that when you have the kind of wealth disparities that we have in this country, many of which are rooted not in individuals' inability to work hard or try hard, I think working class people are some of the hardest working people you'll ever meet.

00:52:29.000 And I think that every indicia demonstrates that productivity has gone up since the 1950s and 1960s.

00:52:39.000 But who is getting the benefit of that productivity?

00:52:42.000 It's not working people anymore. 0.99

00:52:45.000 So when you have people, wealth disparities that are growing because working people aren't getting the share of their labor, you have increasing segregation, income, economic segregation in neighborhoods.

00:52:57.000 And when you then have schools that are funded by a tax base, you end up with a lot of disparities in our public education system.

00:53:03.000 So it's difficult because just throwing money at schools oftentimes doesn't work and it's a more complicated question.

00:53:10.000 But definitely that is a root of one of the issues.

00:53:13.000 And then another thing is I think we need to have full employment.

00:53:16.000 I think that you talk about paying people to do nothing.

00:53:20.000 I don't think that's the reality that we're facing.

00:53:21.000 There are a lot of jobs that need to get done.

00:53:23.000 We have a crumbling infrastructure.

00:53:25.000 We have a crumbling health care system.

00:53:27.000 We have a crumbling elder care system.

00:53:29.000 We have this enormous large aging population.

00:53:31.000 And there is a lot of work that people should be paid to do that aren't getting paid to do it.

00:53:35.000 The biggest kind of social welfare state in our country is our military, where we're paying a lot of people to be on the rolls.

00:53:44.000 And a lot of people enter the military because they can't afford health care, they can't afford education otherwise.

00:53:48.000 And so we have this whole internal infrastructure of people who are working, who serve a purpose, a purpose that I oftentimes don't agree with, but who are working because the government says this is a job that needs to be done and it puts them to work.

00:53:59.000 And that could very easily be done in a jobs guarantee program for all the other kinds of projects that need to be done in this country.

00:54:07.000 So I'm just curious, it's kind of a side note.

00:54:11.000 You want to talk about full employment.

00:54:12.000 What's your just stance on immigration?

00:54:15.000 Because you're bashing neoliberalism, right?

00:54:18.000 Which I totally agree with, which is adventurous foreign wars, shipping jobs overseas.

00:54:23.000 But the third part of neoliberalism is mass immigration.

00:54:26.000 What's your opinion on bringing in cheap labor to undercut native-born Americans?

00:54:32.000 Yeah, it's not good.

00:54:34.000 And so there's two ways you could go about this.

00:54:36.000 You could say we're going to restrict immigration, or you can say that people who are on American soil get the full rights and benefits and protections of American citizens, in which case there's no benefit to employers for using them as cheap labor to underscore, to undermine American laborers, right?

00:54:54.000 I think that sometimes Bernie gets hit for having in the past said that the social welfare state, you know, the social safety net that we're advocating for is compromised by free and open immigration.

00:55:09.000 It has been the case historically that it's conservatives that have advocated for more open immigration policies.

00:55:14.000 Totally right.

00:55:15.000 Right.

00:55:15.000 And Bernie got hit by some people for saying that.

00:55:19.000 Now, I think that the trade-off, the negative impact of immigration at the level that we have is grossly overstated.

00:55:29.000 But I do think it is politically irresponsible not to look at the impact on the very lowest tranche of American workers, where there is some impact, right?

00:55:39.000 And those are the people who are generating a lot of the angst about what's going on with immigration.

00:55:44.000 My solution to that would not be to vilify immigrants or to have draconian immigration policies, especially when so many people who are seeking to immigrate to America are doing so as a consequence from our foreign adventures that we both are critical of.

00:55:57.000 But to say, let's raise up the bottom and let's protect the American worker instead of pitting them against the interest of the US.

00:56:04.000 So you would say a mass amnesty would help the American worker?

00:56:08.000 Like legalizing the 15 million people that are here illegally?

00:56:13.000 It's a question, is it a moral right or will it help the American worker?

00:56:17.000 Well, I guess this plays into the poverty question, right?

00:56:20.000 Yeah, you're correct.

00:56:21.000 You're saying it's a zero-sum game and I'm saying it's not.

00:56:23.000 No, I'm asking.

00:56:25.000 My belief is that it's not a zero-sum game, that we have a huge, amassed huge wealth in this country.

00:56:31.000 It's the richest country in the history of the world.

00:56:32.000 Kudos, to your point, as Bernie Sanders always liked to say.

00:56:36.000 And that we have seen millionaires and billionaires, frankly, grow their wealth by 30% in the context of this economic crisis where everyone else has been lacking.

00:56:46.000 We have, however you feel about it substantively, it's a kind of incredible thing that someone exists in our country that has spare change and $44 billion to buy Twitter and make it private.

00:56:57.000 I mean, that's...

00:56:58.000 In principle, I agree with you.

00:57:00.000 I do.

00:57:01.000 I love the output.

00:57:01.000 So a lot of people are like, oh, progressives want to tax the rich because they hate rich people and they hate innovation and people worked hard for that money and all of that.

00:57:13.000 Or they think, oh, you're just going to give it to poor people who haven't worked as hard.

00:57:15.000 And, you know, I obviously disagree with those arguments.

00:57:18.000 But there's also a really strong pro-democracy rationale to taxing the rich.

00:57:23.000 Even you talk about the founding fathers.

00:57:25.000 The founding fathers were very wary of the corporation.

00:57:28.000 Part of our whole comment story was them being upset about America being treated like a clean state corporation.

00:57:37.000 And so when they created America and started to issue corporate charters, they wanted to make sure they were very limited in size and scope, the duration that they could exist.

00:57:46.000 There was an understanding that you had to be able to raise large amounts of money to build bridges and start cities and things like that.

00:57:51.000 But they were wary about the anti-democratic impact of people being able to aggregate those huge amounts of money so you could basically buy a society.

00:57:59.000 And what we have now with these people who aren't just billionaires, I mean, really keep this perspective.

00:58:04.000 I think it's like $30 million is like, if you convert dollars to seconds, it's like the difference between, you know, One minute versus like 30 years versus like 32,000 years.

00:58:19.000 I mean, when you get to the billion, it's the 32,000 years compared to the millions, which is minutes.

00:58:24.000 And when you have that much money, you can do a Bloomberg and you can buy your way onto the debate still.

00:58:29.000 And still fail.

00:58:30.000 You can buy.

00:58:31.000 And Win Guam.

00:58:32.000 Exactly.

00:58:33.000 And still fail in Win Guam.

00:58:34.000 But he wouldn't have failed if Bernie had made it through and won the Democratic primary, I believe that Bloomberg would have won as a third third party candidate.

00:58:41.000 You're onto something here that's interesting.

00:58:44.000 I would have a totally different prescription.

00:58:46.000 I'm part of it.

00:58:48.000 The immigration thing, we're just not going to agree on.

00:58:50.000 We're not.

00:58:50.000 I think draconian immigration is exactly what we need.

00:58:53.000 And Bernie hinted at that earlier in his career, which I totally think is right.

00:58:58.000 I don't think it's healthy that billionaires got super rich during the pandemic.

00:59:03.000 Why do you think they got so much richer?

00:59:06.000 Oh, I mean, you'd have to have Richard Wolf or one of these economists on to talk specifically about it.

00:59:12.000 Do you think it would be interesting?

00:59:13.000 Part of it is that the COVID relief bill was the largest upward, the first one, was the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.

00:59:20.000 Right, so a big government program.

00:59:22.000 You could see where I'm leading with this, right?

00:59:24.000 So is that these interventions?

00:59:26.000 I have no issue in being critical of the government.

00:59:28.000 The government is captured.

00:59:30.000 Oh, yeah, so totally.

00:59:31.000 And so, like, let's just talk totally realistic.

00:59:34.000 Do you think it's more likely to liberate the government, right, back to kind of social-type intervention that you think would actually benefit the people?

00:59:43.000 Or do you think it's more likely to try and try to restrict that government?

00:59:47.000 Because, I mean, let's be honest, whenever government intervenes around any of these policies that sound nice, they might be doing, who actually the oligarchy gets stronger, right?

00:59:56.000 I mean, I'm just talking very cynically, right?

00:59:58.000 I mean, you're asking me what I think is more likely, and I think the former is more likely.

01:00:01.000 Although I think even more likely than that is a more, I'm sorry, substantive kind of political revolution that gets us away from this two-party duopoly.

01:00:11.000 I don't think any of it's especially likely, but that is what I'm saying.

01:00:15.000 If you know if more Democrats talked like this and didn't do the woke stuff, Republicans would have a very difficult time.

01:00:21.000 Well, I'm not a Democrat, Charlie.

01:00:22.000 I'm not saying, I'm just thinking, I'm making a point, though.

01:00:25.000 Do you understand my point?

01:00:26.000 I understand it.

01:00:26.000 Because as soon as you get this woke stuff, the cultural stuff, people, for good reason, are like, I don't trust you.

01:00:32.000 Yeah, look, again, I think that there is, it is not the Democrats just talking about woke stuff.

01:00:41.000 I think it's Republicans who also, it's the duopoly.

01:00:43.000 It's two corporate parties that want people arguing about a trans swimmer or CRT or whatever it is instead of talking about that nobody's delivering.

01:00:54.000 Majorities of Americans won a $15 minimum wage.

01:00:57.000 60% of Floridians, even though they voted for Donald Trump, voted for a $15 minimum wage in that state.

01:01:03.000 And it was local Republicans who've been fighting against...

01:01:05.000 Legalize weed, too.

01:01:07.000 Right.

01:01:07.000 Like these are not, what Bernie always used to say, and I'm sorry to still be such an evangelist for the guy all of these years later, but what Bernie always used to say is that he's not, it's not a, it's not a radical prescription that he has for the country.

01:01:18.000 All of these policies that he was fighting for had majoritarian support.

01:01:21.000 And even lots of them had about 50% of Republicans, 49% of Republicans even supported Medicare for all.

01:01:28.000 We're talking a $15 minimum wage, man.

01:01:29.000 Charlie, $15 minimum wage, we haven't had a minimum wage raise since Bush was president.

01:01:34.000 If you're asking, do I think getting more money is popular?

01:01:37.000 I'm not going to disagree.

01:01:39.000 People always vote for more money.

01:01:40.000 Doesn't it strike you that we used to productivity is going up?

01:01:45.000 No, I agree.

01:01:46.000 And wages aren't going up.

01:01:48.000 Don't you think that if you're really going to be a populist?

01:01:50.000 Corporate oligarchy.

01:01:51.000 I agree.

01:01:51.000 And so why are we not hearing more Republicans talking about how we need to raise the minimum wage to keep up with productivity?

01:01:57.000 We have different solutions.

01:01:58.000 So here's an item.

01:01:58.000 And to keep up with inflation.

01:01:59.000 Here's a solution, right?

01:02:01.000 Instead of raising minimum wage, let's make everyone's wages go up by 8%, get rid of FICA, the FICA tax, right?

01:02:07.000 That's an 8% wage increase.

01:02:09.000 Would you agree with that?

01:02:10.000 I don't know.

01:02:11.000 Okay, well, when you get a paycheck, 8% of it goes to FICA.

01:02:15.000 Employer pays 8%.

01:02:16.000 It's just your...

01:02:17.000 First of all, that sounds like it's contingent on the size of your paycheck, which means that different people, depending on the size of the paycheck, will be getting a much different kind of a benefit for it.

01:02:24.000 But working people pay it at a much higher cost than, because as you know, when you're earning $20,000, $8 means more to you than if you're earning $200.

01:02:32.000 What's your argument against the minimum wage?

01:02:34.000 Why do you prefer?

01:02:35.000 Well, because, I mean, whether it be Seattle, Portland, or New York, it does disenfranchise low and minority income workers.

01:02:41.000 But those places that you just mentioned have voluntarily raised their minimum wages and they have had success in doing so.

01:02:47.000 I would disagree.

01:02:48.000 But people who live there would disagree.

01:02:49.000 The real minimum wage is zero when people don't have employment.

01:02:53.000 That's the real minimum wage. 0.78

01:02:55.000 And so if a local area wants to raise that minimum wage, I think that's the healthiest way to do that.

01:02:59.000 I do.

01:02:59.000 Federally, I'm against it.

01:03:01.000 But you do have my sympathy where the angst that is driving your push for a minimum wage increase is the ridiculous intervention from the government, the $7 trillion created a thin air.

01:03:11.000 And what I believe is the same sort of change of the Industrial Revolution we saw in the 1700s, late 1700s, early 1800s, we're living through right now, which is we have no idea the wealth or income effects that's going to happen from the hyper technologicalization of our society.

01:03:26.000 No, we're not even beginning to grasp it.

01:03:28.000 No, I think that's true.

01:03:29.000 And I think that's why Andrew Yang resonated with a lot of people.

01:03:32.000 Look, there is this philosophical, fundamental philosophical difference.

01:03:38.000 And it comes up in all these conversations.

01:03:40.000 Do you think that people fundamentally are inclined to sloth and idle hands are the devil's workshop and all of this stuff if they aren't toiling?

01:03:51.000 And do you think that you have to have a very narrowly prescribed idea of what it means to work to make people productive in a way that makes society satisfying?

01:04:00.000 And people who are more conservative in their orientation say yes.

01:04:03.000 If someone isn't, you know, got a pickaxe in their hand and making a brick into smaller pieces or doing somebody's taxes or digging a ditch or drilling for oil or whatever the kinds of jobs exist, then something bad is going to happen.

01:04:18.000 They're going to be sitting in their bedrooms playing Call of Duty and Experience.

01:04:23.000 So you would disagree with that, right?

01:04:25.000 And my feeling is twofold.

01:04:27.000 One, like I said, that there's an enormous amount of work that needs to be done.

01:04:31.000 And there is no paucity of jobs people need to do to actually make society better, including building out an enormous amount of infrastructure, including infrastructure that has us transitioning to clean fuels.

01:04:44.000 I'm sorry, I don't mean to derail the conversation.

01:04:46.000 Or make Elon Musk richer.

01:04:47.000 But I heard you in another conversation, you know, talk about how wrong it was for us to not be emphasizing natural gas and how we have endless natural gas reserves.

01:04:58.000 And I mean, that's not.

01:04:59.000 Seemingly endless, yeah.

01:05:01.000 I was curious about that to see if you were right, and I Googled it, and we have about 90 years left on natural gas.

01:05:06.000 That doesn't factor in efficiency gains, nor does it factor.

01:05:09.000 So what you think is going to be what?

01:05:10.000 90, 100, 120, 300.

01:05:11.000 30 250 or 300.

01:05:13.000 Right, but it's going to end.

01:05:14.000 But that also doesn't count petroleum.

01:05:15.000 And it also doesn't count what we live in is going to look like once we've burned all those fossil fuels and we now have to keep our air conditioning.

01:05:24.000 Just a couple thousand.

01:05:25.000 I'm happy to go on that detour.

01:05:26.000 Because we've raised the temperature on that.

01:05:29.000 But that's not that.

01:05:30.000 We're not going to find agreement on the climate.

01:05:31.000 That's not why I'm bringing it up.

01:05:32.000 I'm just bringing it up to say that there are things that need to be done to make the world a better place, to make America a better place, to make it a more perfect union.

01:05:39.000 And I believe that we could be putting people to work on those jobs.

01:05:41.000 But on the other hand, I also think, look, and people who know me and listen to my podcast know that I love Star Trek.

01:05:47.000 Okay, I do too.

01:05:48.000 And Star Trek's the most conservative thing ever written.

01:05:51.000 I disagree.

01:05:51.000 And here's why.

01:05:52.000 Gene Roddenberry unintentionally made the case for conservative.

01:05:55.000 Gene Roddenberry was a liberal socialist.

01:05:58.000 And I'll prove it to you, but you go first.

01:06:00.000 What I love about Star Trek is that it has a much more generous view of human nature.

01:06:05.000 And in Star Trek, they've gotten rid of want.

01:06:09.000 You know, you can turn on a replicator and you can make food.

01:06:11.000 No one needs to toil in those kinds of ways.

01:06:13.000 They've gotten rid of money.

01:06:15.000 And while that's obviously not where we live today, the reason we have famine is not because we can't grow enough food to feed the world's people.

01:06:22.000 That's not, it's supply chain is used as we ruin local economies by dumping like WFP grain. 0.99

01:06:28.000 Like there's a lot of things that are causing famine in the world, but it's not that we can't grow enough grain, grow enough tomatoes, grow enough food to feed people.

01:06:35.000 So the idea that we could live in a post-care scarcity world is not so far off.

01:06:40.000 And people like Andrew Yang talking about automation, I think, are really picking up on that reality.

01:06:46.000 And so if that's the case, you can think, oh, that's scary.

01:06:49.000 Automation means we're all going to be out of work because we're not going to get anything.

01:06:52.000 If a robot can do my job and there's no alternative job, what am I going to do?

01:06:55.000 Star Trek says other kinds of jobs and other purposes for humanity will emerge as we have machines that can fulfill the purposes that human beings used to have to do.

01:07:05.000 And the protagonist of Star Trek Next Generation, he is not like a warrior on a spaceship, like the way you get in some of these other kinds of stuff.

01:07:13.000 He's a thinker.

01:07:14.000 He's an archaeologist.

01:07:15.000 He's a space archaeologist.

01:07:17.000 John Luke Burke.

01:07:18.000 The most expensive, yeah, the most expensive, high-tech, most armed ship in the Federation is devoted to the cause of exploration.

01:07:26.000 And that was obviously Captain Kirk's credo as well. 0.98

01:07:29.000 And you can say that that's dumb or that's like cuck stuff. 0.99

01:07:33.000 No, I could. 0.99

01:07:34.000 I don't.

01:07:34.000 I actually see it totally.

01:07:36.000 I think that's beautiful.

01:07:37.000 I look forward to that work.

01:07:38.000 Let me tell you why he made the case for what we believe in: is that even though when you get rid of need, want, that they were still lying, cheating, and stealing, and they were still, they still had problems.

01:07:48.000 Their human nature always came through.

01:07:50.000 They had, even if you get rid of material want, Roddenberry wrote all throughout the series: whether it be, you know, Riker fighting with Picard, their human nature was still there.

01:08:01.000 Right.

01:08:01.000 Well, first of all, I don't, I can't think of many instances of lying, cheating, and stealing.

01:08:05.000 Of course, they're human beings, and they have their frustrations and their jealousies and their entanglements.

01:08:10.000 Of course, that's it.

01:08:12.000 But no one's talking about getting rid of sin, Charlie.

01:08:15.000 No one's saying that human beings are perfect.

01:08:16.000 Humans are obviously deeply flawed.

01:08:18.000 But my belief isn't that people, it is work.

01:08:22.000 It is just pure toiling.

01:08:24.000 That people have to toil.

01:08:25.000 If people think they're going to start, unless people think they're going to starve to death and be unhomed because they have to work, they're going to be bad people.

01:08:33.000 If we could give your closing arguments, I'll start with you, Brianna.

01:08:36.000 Sure.

01:08:37.000 We went in a lot of different directions.

01:08:39.000 Yeah, we did, which is kind of nice.

01:08:40.000 And look, I have a more optimistic, I would say, view of humanity.

01:08:50.000 And I reason.

01:08:51.000 My politics aren't coming from a place of kind of like ingrained ideology.

01:08:55.000 I'm not a Democrat.

01:08:56.000 I'm not a Republican.

01:08:58.000 If you told me a Republican came up with a plan to address poverty and there was evidence that it worked, I would have absolutely no problem co-signing it.

01:09:07.000 I, you know, Donald Trump personally did the best thing for me that any politician has ever done in postponing my student loans.

01:09:14.000 I'm not sure that Joe Biden would have done it if he had been president when the COVID started.

01:09:18.000 And I'm happy to say those kinds of things out loud because they're true because people are nuanced.

01:09:22.000 There's good with the bad.

01:09:23.000 It's true of Trump.

01:09:24.000 It's true of Thomas Jefferson.

01:09:25.000 It's true of everybody, right?

01:09:27.000 It's true of me and it's true of you.

01:09:29.000 But that doesn't undermine my fundamental belief that there is value in every single human being as an individual.

01:09:37.000 And I want a policy program that respects that individuality, that doesn't say you have to jump through an X, Y, and Z hoop to eat, to have a home, and to have your basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs met, to get health care.

01:09:50.000 I don't think that you should stay in jail based on how much money you make or what's in your bank account.

01:09:54.000 I don't think that you should be able to afford a cancer treatment depending on how much money you make.

01:09:58.000 I think it's unconscionable that we live in a country where 50% of families in which there's a cancer diagnosis also have a medical bankruptcy.

01:10:05.000 I think all of those things are unconscionable.

01:10:07.000 So I reason from a place of what can we do, given that we are the richest country in the history of the world, where there's an enormous amount of wealth that is increasingly concentrated in the hands of very few, to make people's lives better, because it's not a matter of scarcity at this point that's making people's lives worse.

01:10:23.000 Race is one of a million factors that goes into the society being the imperfect society that it is today. 0.52

01:10:33.000 And I think that we have to be honest about the good and bad parts of our legacy if we have any hope in actually fulfilling the promise of the founders and in the Constitution of making this a more perfect union.

01:10:49.000 Thank you for being here.

01:10:50.000 And I agree with part of that.

01:10:51.000 I wish we could have got more into this, but we'll have to have you back.

01:10:54.000 I believe earned success is a moral good.

01:10:57.000 I wouldn't put putting to work or accruing wealth as something that weighs people down.

01:11:04.000 However, I do admit the current structure of our society certainly is weighed in favor of one class.

01:11:10.000 I'm glad to hear you say the race thing is one of a million factors.

01:11:13.000 I think that's helpful.

01:11:13.000 I think we actually had a great discussion kind of as we put that aside for a little bit.

01:11:17.000 Yeah, look, I just think we'll have a different vision of kind of how lift people up.

01:11:21.000 I don't think we're close to a post-scarcity world, largely because the nature of the human being will always be trying to interfere with that.

01:11:29.000 I try to reject utopian promises.

01:11:32.000 You might call me a pessimist.

01:11:33.000 I'm just more of a student of history.

01:11:35.000 But I think we agree that the way it is right now, there is this growing oligarchy.

01:11:40.000 And it's going to be up to the kind of current power structures of the people, the people to challenge the power struggle, see what structures we do about it.

01:11:47.000 But that'll be another conversation for a different time.

01:11:49.000 So thank you.

01:11:50.000 Appreciate it.

01:11:50.000 Thank you, Charlie.

01:11:52.000 Brianna, Charlie, thank you for joining us tonight.

01:11:56.000 And we'll see you next debate night when Charlie takes on Ben Corollo from The Young Turks.

01:12:04.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

01:12:06.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:12:08.000 Thanks so much for listening.

01:12:12.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - May 21, 2022

Charlie Kirk vs. Bernie Sanders' Fmr Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray—Debate Night by Turning Point USA

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