The Michael Knowles Show - May 15, 2026


How Black People Created Democracy In 3 Mins


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

133.89041

Word count

470

Sentence count

30

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Alexandria Ocasio-cortez has just raised eyebrows after an appearance on Ilana Glazer s podcast in which she claimed that Black people created democracy in the United States. To which I m here to clear that up.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:27.920 The Democrats' most prominent congressman and leading presidential candidate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has just raised eyebrows after an appearance on Ilana Glazer's podcast in which she claimed that black people created democracy.
00:00:43.100 There are very few, like, real archetypes of what America is all about.
00:00:49.940 I think about the civil rights and voting rights movement and how black Americans really created democracy in this country. 0.92
00:00:58.540 That's exactly right. 0.53
00:00:59.620 Now, both of these women are known for their incisive, nuanced political analysis. 1.00
00:01:04.740 I vow to tweet once a week, vote for Hillary, yas, yas, yas.
00:01:09.960 So the objections to AOC's claim must stem from historical ignorance,
00:01:14.520 which is why I am here to clear up the confusion and explain how black people created democracy.
00:01:25.480 Most scholars credit the earliest attempts at democracy to ancient Greece,
00:01:29.560 specifically to Athenian leader Cleasthenes Jackson III.
00:01:33.160 It wasn't until the founding of America, however, that democracy really came into its own.
00:01:38.280 The Founding Brothers, led by Jamal Madison, wrote the U.S. Constitution, a document that would...
00:01:46.960 Hold on one second.
00:01:50.700 Huh.
00:01:53.180 I'm being told that everything I'm saying is both factually incorrect and at least mildly racist.
00:02:00.080 The good news, though, is that this message comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center,
00:02:04.920 which was kind enough to include this check for $100,000.
00:02:08.280 Okay, I've looked into it some more, and it turns out that AOC was really talking about
00:02:16.300 how black people created democracy in America because of the Civil Rights Movement of the
00:02:21.020 1960s.
00:02:22.100 Before that, black people apparently were not even allowed to vote.
00:02:26.360 Black Americans only gained the right to vote with the passage of the 15th Amendment in
00:02:31.320 1870, which was 100 years before the Civil Rights Movement. 1.00
00:02:38.280 So, in any case, the point is, at the very least, black people could not hold public 0.99
00:02:43.620 office. 1.00
00:02:44.620 Before the Civil Rights Movement, not a single black person was elected to Congress, except
00:02:49.520 for these guys. 0.98
00:02:52.520 So ... oh, that's still going. 0.99
00:02:56.040 Well, okay, maybe black people didn't exactly create democracy. 0.91
00:03:02.100 But AOC's point is that, in Tennessee at least, Republicans are removing the only black 0.96
00:03:07.240 representative, Steve Cohen,
00:03:09.340 who is actually not black
00:03:10.780 and the Republican that he beat 0.98
00:03:13.680 is black, so... 0.98
00:03:16.120 Hey, Michael. 0.76
00:03:17.000 Yeah.
00:03:17.540 We just got another letter
00:03:18.720 from the SPLC.
00:03:19.960 They said they'll send you
00:03:20.800 another 10 grand
00:03:21.540 if you say the N-word.
00:03:27.920 The more you knows.