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00:02:06.000Welcome to another episode of Debate Night.
00:02:09.000We'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.
00:02:19.000Tonight's topic is systemic racism in America.
00:02:30.000Look, there are a lot of things that people struggle with in this country every day.
00:02:36.00040% of Americans, even before this pandemic and the economic crisis that has accompanied it, couldn't respond to a $400 emergency.
00:02:44.000If 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.
00:03:00.000And 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.
00:03:14.000And 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.
00:03:31.000And I think people across the political spectrum talk a lot about freedom.
00:03:34.000It's one of our founding ideals as Americans.
00:03:38.000But 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.
00:03:50.000You know, have your basic housing needs, basic food needs, basic education needs, the things that you need to succeed.
00:03:55.000And for some quadrant, some cohort of Americans, systemic racism has been a barrier.
00:04:01.000And 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.
00:04:19.000What 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.
00:04:40.000So 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.
00:04:51.000We're not talking about something long, long ago and far, far away.
00:04:54.000We'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.
00:05:05.000And that has a trickle-down effect in terms of how much wealth has been amassed by my community as compared to others.
00:05:12.000And I think it's not about blaming people.
00:05:14.000It's not about hierarchies of oppression.
00:05:16.000It'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.
00:06:35.000The 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.
00:06:47.000Why were blacks turning down their own people?
00:06:49.000I don't know what you're talking about.
00:06:58.000So 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?
00:07:11.000If you allow me to explain, this is connected to redlining.
00:07:14.000I 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.
00:07:18.000I promise you it won't be, it'll be worth the effort.
00:07:22.000The GI bill gave low-interest loans to people who had served in the war, right?
00:07:27.000And those loans were issued by, they were federally backed loans.
00:07:30.000So 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.
00:07:38.000What 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.
00:07:55.000I will answer your question, but what I'm talking about is the overwhelming majority of issuers.
00:08:00.000Just like today, even more so back then, the overwhelming majority of issuers were white-owned banks.
00:08:06.000And those banks redlined communities where they said, we will not issue to people who live in these communities.
00:08:11.000Now, 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.
00:08:24.000So 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.
00:08:48.000Now, how many black banks are in America?
00:08:51.000And how many black banks were in America?
00:08:52.000Well, if there's even one example, that's the question.
00:08:54.000No, because the blanks were blacks were discriminating against themselves, and whites were being discriminated more than Asian Americans.
00:10:20.000Which 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.
00:10:31.000There 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.
00:10:53.000Did 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?
00:12:23.000Only 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.
00:12:31.000Do you believe that during Reconstruction there was no racism?
00:12:38.000In all due respect, you accused me of interrupting you and not asking the question, answering the question.
00:12:43.000How 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?
00:12:50.000Do I think it actually had to be a problem?
00:13:15.000I would be happy to come here and not talk about race.
00:13:17.000In 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.
00:14:05.000Look, I think we should probably start by talking about the word systemic, what the word systemic means.
00:14:10.000It 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.
00:14:23.000Those 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.
00:14:34.000I could not hire you because I don't like your shirt and there's nothing the law can do about that.
00:14:39.000But of course, that would exist, but we wouldn't call that systemic oppression, even if we would call that wrong.
00:14:44.000What 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.
00:14:56.000And 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.
00:15:14.000And it's not about someone necessarily sitting around nefariously saying, oh, I'm going to get you sucker.
00:15:19.000But 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.
00:15:29.000And 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.
00:15:44.000Now, 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.
00:15:52.000This is an interesting thing to think about.
00:15:54.000Here's one that isn't explicitly about racial bias.
00:15:56.000It's about class bias that's built into our criminal justice system.
00:16:00.000We 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.
00:16:08.000And your bail amount is tethered to, and some, it bears some relationship to the nature of the crime.
00:16:13.000Sometimes you're not going to be released regardless because you're considered to be too dangerous.
00:16:16.000But many, many, many people are released based on an amount of money.
00:16:20.000And 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.
00:16:28.000And 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.
00:16:35.000So we have a two-tiered system that we can say wasn't designed to hurt poor people.
00:16:40.000It wasn't designed to hurt people who are disproportionately poor, who are black and Latino.
00:16:45.000It 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.
00:16:54.000And 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.
00:17:02.000So yes, do I think that systems like that exist?
00:17:39.000Your 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.
00:17:53.000I'm just saying, no, like the world is full of people.
00:17:56.000Your 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.
00:18:14.000That's not exactly what I would focus my political career on.
00:18:16.000It's not what I focus my political career on.
00:18:18.000You didn't ask me here to discuss what I focus my political career on.
00:18:20.000I would love to talk about class issues in America, but that's not the topic of this.
00:18:23.000Well, I mean, I think that's actually more helpful and interesting.
00:18:25.000My whole thing on the race thing is it's a distraction against our real problems in our country.
00:18:41.000So I let you talk a couple minutes uninterrupted.
00:18:43.000I 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.
00:18:51.000And so I'm going to push back on that.
00:18:53.000Well, you asked me if there was systemic race.
00:19:47.000We live in a country where no longer can people support themselves on a single income.
00:19:52.000And 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.
00:20:02.000And 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.
00:20:14.000Well, I think we should be asking ourselves why there aren't more two-parent households in the black community.
00:20:19.000And if you look at what single parenthood is correlated to, one of the biggest correlations is to poverty.
00:20:26.000So you're three times less likely to get married if you are poor.
00:20:30.000And 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.
00:20:44.000So we're talking about a bunch of people who are in poverty.
00:20:47.000The average middle, a yearly income for someone who's earning a $7.50 minimum wage is something like in the teens, $15,000.
00:20:57.000And 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.
00:21:10.000Of course, it's going to disincentivize certain kinds of behavior.
00:21:13.000Your answer is to say, let's get rid of the social benefits altogether.
00:21:16.000My 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.
00:21:26.000No, 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.
00:21:50.000I 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.
00:22:02.000So 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.
00:22:16.000So 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.
00:22:45.000She 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.
00:23:02.000As a progressive, my focus is to say, what are the biggest determinants of unequal health treatment in this country?
00:23:07.000A 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.
00:23:19.000They tend to move around a lot and not see the same physicians on a repeat basis.
00:23:23.000A lot of things that result in them having lower standards of care.
00:23:26.000And 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.
00:23:36.000And I don't really see that as the government's role.
00:23:38.000What 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.
00:23:45.000But 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.
00:24:00.000So 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.
00:24:17.000I'll say it's largely irrelevant, but I'll agree that it should be de-emphasized.
00:24:20.000So 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?
00:24:31.000Well, 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.
00:24:37.000It's education, healthcare, crime, all of the affordable housing.
00:24:42.000It'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.
00:24:53.000And then you have the liberal chattering class saying, oh, it's somehow racist because it's not a specifically targeted racist policy.
00:24:59.000Now, there are some things that exist in the world that I think are explicitly racist in nature.
00:25:05.000Certain very specific kinds of discrimination, I'd say redressing, redlining is an instance.
00:25:10.000I've heard you talk before compassionately about what happened to Japanese people during internment.
00:25:16.000And I think it was right and proper to offer them reparations as a consequence.
00:25:20.000That has never obviously happened in the context of black Americans.
00:25:25.000With 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.
00:25:55.000Americans are more productive than ever and working harder than ever, pulling more shifts.
00:25:58.000And we even have everybody in the workforce now, as we said, people can't afford to have a parent staying at home.
00:26:05.000And even with all of that, people can't afford the basic kinds of emergencies, and that's a problem.
00:26:47.000So we have to kind of build a, I would like to build a consensus That this overemphasis on these things is wrong.
00:26:52.000My 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.
00:27:04.000I think you have to defeat it and destroy it.
00:27:11.000Yeah, 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.
00:27:20.000But the reason why I don't put my political focus on it isn't because I think it's not worthwhile.
00:27:24.000If 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.
00:27:59.000If 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.
00:28:31.000So I think the American left is very much having that conversation.
00:28:34.000I 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.
00:28:43.000Again, I won't agree on the systemic racism thing.
00:28:45.000But 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.
00:28:53.000Like, 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.
00:29:03.000Would you agree in the last couple years?
00:29:18.000I 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.
00:29:35.000And 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.
00:29:53.000Like they know in their head racism bad.
00:29:55.000And 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.
00:30:05.000It's white liberals who have this very superficial understanding of racism.
00:30:13.000So I read Robin D'Angelo's book with the idea of eviscerating it in an article.
00:30:19.000And honestly, it was so milquetoast in like a nothing burger that I didn't even have the energy to write about it.
00:30:25.000Because 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.
00:30:35.000But it has nothing to do with social justice.
00:30:37.000It has nothing to do with the George Floyd protests.
00:30:41.000It has nothing to do with criminal justice reform.
00:30:42.000It 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.
00:30:49.000I'm an upper middle-class black person.
00:30:50.000No, 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.
00:30:56.000Like, I'm not a big fan of like Amazon running our entire country, like all this sort of stuff.
00:31:01.000But 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.
00:31:12.000It 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.
00:32:20.000But 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.
00:32:35.000I was an anonymous lawyer at this point.
00:32:41.000And 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.
00:32:55.000And 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.
00:33:09.000And the people who understood that systems have to be, aren't just about like magically snapping your fingers and saying race isn't bad.
00:33:17.000It'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.
00:33:26.000Those people got pushed to the sideline.
00:33:28.000And it became about this TikTok mansion in LA or Hollywood, whatever it was.
00:33:41.000A class conversation is less difficult to co-opt.
00:33:45.000Now, there are people who are trying to.
00:33:47.000But 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.
00:33:56.000I mean, you could tell by our first kind of, it's just not good.
00:34:01.000But 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.
00:34:09.000Now, I don't believe in expanding government welfare, Section 8 housing, and all that.
00:34:12.000But if you're talking about incentivizing people to stay married for someone to bring fathers in the home, I think it's helpful.
00:34:17.000Anyway, Marina, do you want to get to the next question?
00:34:19.000For Breonna, do you believe that white people are being discriminated against today?
00:34:25.000I mean, look, I'm an old head about some of this stuff.
00:34:29.000The kids are taking this in a different direction.
00:34:31.000I think a lot of the kids today, they don't believe in that sort of thing.
00:34:35.000They believe in, they don't believe in sex-only education, sex-segregated education.
00:34:40.000You 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.
00:34:46.000That 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.
00:34:54.000You know, a lot of people were frustrated about the integration of Boy Scouts, et cetera, et cetera.
00:35:00.000And 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?
00:35:17.000And I'm not a sociologist, and I can't say what the best way to do it.
00:35:21.000What I will say is this: I think there is a difference, intent matters.
00:35:25.000And 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.
00:35:39.000It wasn't, you know, all black people went off to it.
00:35:41.000It was like having an athletic house or the international other kinds of things like that.
00:35:46.000But 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.
00:36:10.000I'm not to say that whether or not that is necessary today, but I will say there's a difference.
00:36:16.000And 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.
00:36:25.000I think they're sinister cousins of the same strain.
00:37:05.000But 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.
00:37:15.000Well, we're seeing more black dorms, like black-only dorms, right?
00:37:18.000We're seeing like a kind of I don't know that to be true.
00:37:20.000If you say that's something that's like I haven't been in college.
00:38:17.000Well, I can tell you, I didn't go to black graduation, but lots of my friends did.
00:38:21.000And I would say that the people who went didn't do it because it was about DNA.
00:38:24.000They did it because they felt a cultural kinship with the other black people in the class.
00:38:28.000And you don't have to respect that culture as much as you see Irish people as having a distinct culture.
00:38:33.000But I will tell you, black people feel very much like we have a cultural kinship to each other.
00:38:37.000But just to be consistent, like a white-only graduation ceremony, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant graduation ceremony, morally, you'd be okay with.
00:38:45.000If the WASPs feel culturally coherent and want to have a ceremony, then that's fine with me.
00:38:50.000Okay, I would, I want to try to de-balkanize America, right?
00:39:43.000Part 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.
00:40:10.000By the Constitution, you were three-fifths of a person.
00:40:14.000By Jim Crow laws, you couldn't ride the same trains as whites or drink at the same water fountains.
00:40:19.000By 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.
00:40:27.000And so many of those white neighborhoods had restrictive confidence in the Middle East that explicitly precluded black people from living in those neighborhoods.
00:40:36.000People 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.
00:40:44.000And the literal laws of the United States of America said, no, you cannot do that.
00:40:48.000And so people started to advocate, okay, I'm black and I don't have access to this privilege.
00:40:53.000I'm Asian and I don't have access to this.
00:41:09.000It'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.
00:41:18.000Nine out of 13 states had abolished slavery by the Constitution.
00:41:22.000Northwest Ordinance had all new territories were free.
00:41:47.000If 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.
00:42:02.000Wait, wait, what is the point of your argument?
00:42:05.000Just 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.
00:44:10.000People 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.
00:44:32.000Isn't that what you have to say about our founding fathers?
00:44:35.000So let me tell about Thomas Jefferson.
00:45:29.000I 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.
00:45:36.000But I appreciate that you want to emphasize the good that they did.
00:46:23.000What exactly is the debate at this point?
00:46:25.000At 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.
00:46:44.000People have to be remembered, hopefully, for something in short.
00:47:57.000My point is that for the whole duration of American history, exactly your teaching of American history has been what's taught in textbooks.
00:48:08.000For 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.
00:48:15.000We had a lot of scholarship about Sally Henry's who didn't exist before.
00:48:17.000People are interested in these other different aspects of these, let's call them, great men's lives.
00:48:23.000And 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.
00:49:18.000Charlie, 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.
00:49:24.000No, but just that's an important point, though.
00:49:27.000Whoever tried to abolish it before the founders?
00:49:30.000I 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.
00:50:22.000How do we get underprivileged people out of the projects?
00:50:26.000Well, the question of how to get poor people rich isn't a mystery.
00:50:31.000It's not by giving them stuff to do nothing.
00:50:35.000It's improving their schools, which I'm sure we can agree on.
00:50:37.000Rebuilding the family, entrepreneurship.
00:50:41.000We know how to get poor people richer, and we do the opposite.
00:50:46.000So 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.
00:50:51.000I 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.
00:51:05.000And 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.
00:51:26.000We 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.
00:51:37.000And 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.
00:51:48.000So 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.
00:52:07.000However, I also think that our public education system, K through 12, fails a lot of folks.
00:52:15.000I 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.
00:52:29.000And I think that every indicia demonstrates that productivity has gone up since the 1950s and 1960s.
00:52:39.000But who is getting the benefit of that productivity?
00:52:45.000So 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.
00:52:57.000And 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.
00:53:03.000So it's difficult because just throwing money at schools oftentimes doesn't work and it's a more complicated question.
00:53:10.000But definitely that is a root of one of the issues.
00:53:13.000And then another thing is I think we need to have full employment.
00:53:16.000I think that you talk about paying people to do nothing.
00:53:20.000I don't think that's the reality that we're facing.
00:53:21.000There are a lot of jobs that need to get done.
00:53:25.000We have a crumbling health care system.
00:53:27.000We have a crumbling elder care system.
00:53:29.000We have this enormous large aging population.
00:53:31.000And there is a lot of work that people should be paid to do that aren't getting paid to do it.
00:53:35.000The 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.
00:53:44.000And a lot of people enter the military because they can't afford health care, they can't afford education otherwise.
00:53:48.000And 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.
00:53:59.000And 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.
00:54:07.000So I'm just curious, it's kind of a side note.
00:54:11.000You want to talk about full employment.
00:54:12.000What's your just stance on immigration?
00:54:34.000And so there's two ways you could go about this.
00:54:36.000You 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?
00:54:54.000I 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.
00:55:09.000It has been the case historically that it's conservatives that have advocated for more open immigration policies.
00:55:15.000And Bernie got hit by some people for saying that.
00:55:19.000Now, I think that the trade-off, the negative impact of immigration at the level that we have is grossly overstated.
00:55:29.000But 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?
00:55:39.000And those are the people who are generating a lot of the angst about what's going on with immigration.
00:55:44.000My 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.
00:55:57.000But 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.
00:56:04.000So you would say a mass amnesty would help the American worker?
00:56:08.000Like legalizing the 15 million people that are here illegally?
00:56:13.000It's a question, is it a moral right or will it help the American worker?
00:56:17.000Well, I guess this plays into the poverty question, right?
00:56:25.000My belief is that it's not a zero-sum game, that we have a huge, amassed huge wealth in this country.
00:56:31.000It's the richest country in the history of the world.
00:56:32.000Kudos, to your point, as Bernie Sanders always liked to say.
00:56:36.000And 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.
00:56:46.000We 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.
00:57:01.000So 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.
00:57:13.000Or they think, oh, you're just going to give it to poor people who haven't worked as hard.
00:57:15.000And, you know, I obviously disagree with those arguments.
00:57:18.000But there's also a really strong pro-democracy rationale to taxing the rich.
00:57:23.000Even you talk about the founding fathers.
00:57:25.000The founding fathers were very wary of the corporation.
00:57:28.000Part of our whole comment story was them being upset about America being treated like a clean state corporation.
00:57:37.000And 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.
00:57:46.000There 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.
00:57:51.000But 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.
00:57:59.000And what we have now with these people who aren't just billionaires, I mean, really keep this perspective.
00:58:04.000I 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.
00:58:19.000I mean, when you get to the billion, it's the 32,000 years compared to the millions, which is minutes.
00:58:24.000And when you have that much money, you can do a Bloomberg and you can buy your way onto the debate still.
00:58:34.000But 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.
00:58:41.000You're onto something here that's interesting.
00:58:44.000I would have a totally different prescription.
00:59:13.000Part 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.
00:59:31.000And so, like, let's just talk totally realistic.
00:59:34.000Do 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?
00:59:43.000Or do you think it's more likely to try and try to restrict that government?
00:59:47.000Because, 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?
00:59:56.000I mean, I'm just talking very cynically, right?
00:59:58.000I mean, you're asking me what I think is more likely, and I think the former is more likely.
01:00:01.000Although 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.
01:00:11.000I don't think any of it's especially likely, but that is what I'm saying.
01:00:15.000If you know if more Democrats talked like this and didn't do the woke stuff, Republicans would have a very difficult time.
01:00:26.000Because as soon as you get this woke stuff, the cultural stuff, people, for good reason, are like, I don't trust you.
01:00:32.000Yeah, look, again, I think that there is, it is not the Democrats just talking about woke stuff.
01:00:41.000I think it's Republicans who also, it's the duopoly.
01:00:43.000It'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.
01:00:54.000Majorities of Americans won a $15 minimum wage.
01:00:57.00060% of Floridians, even though they voted for Donald Trump, voted for a $15 minimum wage in that state.
01:01:03.000And it was local Republicans who've been fighting against...
01:01:07.000Like 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.
01:01:18.000All of these policies that he was fighting for had majoritarian support.
01:01:21.000And even lots of them had about 50% of Republicans, 49% of Republicans even supported Medicare for all.
01:01:28.000We're talking a $15 minimum wage, man.
01:01:29.000Charlie, $15 minimum wage, we haven't had a minimum wage raise since Bush was president.
01:01:34.000If you're asking, do I think getting more money is popular?
01:02:17.000First 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.
01:02:24.000But 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.
01:02:32.000What's your argument against the minimum wage?
01:03:01.000But 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.
01:03:11.000And 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.
01:03:26.000No, we're not even beginning to grasp it.
01:03:29.000And I think that's why Andrew Yang resonated with a lot of people.
01:03:32.000Look, there is this philosophical, fundamental philosophical difference.
01:03:38.000And it comes up in all these conversations.
01:03:40.000Do 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?
01:03:51.000And 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?
01:04:00.000And people who are more conservative in their orientation say yes.
01:04:03.000If 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.
01:04:18.000They're going to be sitting in their bedrooms playing Call of Duty and Experience.
01:04:23.000So you would disagree with that, right?
01:04:27.000One, like I said, that there's an enormous amount of work that needs to be done.
01:04:31.000And 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.
01:04:44.000I'm sorry, I don't mean to derail the conversation.
01:04:47.000But 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.
01:05:14.000But that also doesn't count petroleum.
01:05:15.000And 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.
01:05:32.000I'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.
01:05:39.000And I believe that we could be putting people to work on those jobs.
01:05:41.000But on the other hand, I also think, look, and people who know me and listen to my podcast know that I love Star Trek.
01:06:15.000And 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.
01:06:22.000That's not, it's supply chain is used as we ruin local economies by dumping like WFP grain.
01:06:28.000Like 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.
01:06:35.000So the idea that we could live in a post-care scarcity world is not so far off.
01:06:40.000And people like Andrew Yang talking about automation, I think, are really picking up on that reality.
01:06:46.000And so if that's the case, you can think, oh, that's scary.
01:06:49.000Automation means we're all going to be out of work because we're not going to get anything.
01:06:52.000If a robot can do my job and there's no alternative job, what am I going to do?
01:06:55.000Star 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.
01:07:05.000And 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.
01:07:38.000Let 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.
01:07:48.000Their human nature always came through.
01:07:50.000They 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.
01:08:25.000If 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.
01:08:33.000If we could give your closing arguments, I'll start with you, Brianna.
01:08:58.000If 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.
01:09:07.000I, you know, Donald Trump personally did the best thing for me that any politician has ever done in postponing my student loans.
01:09:14.000I'm not sure that Joe Biden would have done it if he had been president when the COVID started.
01:09:18.000And I'm happy to say those kinds of things out loud because they're true because people are nuanced.
01:09:29.000But that doesn't undermine my fundamental belief that there is value in every single human being as an individual.
01:09:37.000And 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.
01:09:50.000I don't think that you should stay in jail based on how much money you make or what's in your bank account.
01:09:54.000I don't think that you should be able to afford a cancer treatment depending on how much money you make.
01:09:58.000I 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.
01:10:05.000I think all of those things are unconscionable.
01:10:07.000So 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.
01:10:23.000Race is one of a million factors that goes into the society being the imperfect society that it is today.
01:10:33.000And 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.
01:11:13.000I think we actually had a great discussion kind of as we put that aside for a little bit.
01:11:17.000Yeah, look, I just think we'll have a different vision of kind of how lift people up.
01:11:21.000I 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.
01:11:33.000I'm just more of a student of history.
01:11:35.000But I think we agree that the way it is right now, there is this growing oligarchy.
01:11:40.000And 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.
01:11:47.000But that'll be another conversation for a different time.