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June 16, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:04:51
Larry Wilmore | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 55
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Time Text
When I was growing up, people would say I wasn't black enough, you know, or that I don't talk black.
And I said, well, I'm talking and I'm black.
Ergo.
Maybe brothers shouldn't say ergo.
I don't know.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
I'm excited to welcome to the show Larry Wilmore, who you will remember from the nightly show on Comedy Central and also the Larry Wilmore podcast, Black on the Air.
He's also the creator of shows including Black-ish, the co-creator of Insecure on HBO.
We'll get to all of that in just a moment.
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Larry, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Ben.
It's nice to be here.
I gotta say, I'm super excited about having you because, you know, it's rare to have somebody who, I know we don't share politics on some of these matters, and it'll be interesting to discuss that, but it's really important, I think, to have these Interesting and civil conversations, and I really dig it, dude.
I couldn't agree more and thanks for agreeing to be on my podcast, too.
Yeah, for sure.
I'm really looking forward to it.
I think it's kind of like a prisoner exchange.
We're both walking across that bridge.
That's right.
I mean, we'll see how this goes.
We may shoot the prisoner still.
I mean, who knows?
There were prisoners for a reason.
A lot of people don't acknowledge that part of it.
So I want to start by asking you for folks who, well first I have to start with an apology.
So I will say that back in 2016, I saw one of your bits on The Nightly Show and it pissed me off.
And I said that, and I said that- Do you remember which one it was?
I'm trying to remember now.
Oh you probably shouldn't.
Yeah, you can find it on YouTube I'm sure.
And I said something about you not being funny and it's not true.
Facts don't care about my feelings, as it turns out.
Wow, so nice of you.
But Ben, it's okay if it didn't make you laugh though.
That's right.
Is it?
It absolutely is.
Okay, so I'm not racist if it didn't make me?
Well, racist is a whole different issue.
Yes, it's racist if you don't laugh.
Okay, I just want to make sure.
Yeah, but you're not racist if you don't think I'm funny.
Okay.
Well, I do think you're funny, so that's the good news.
Well, thanks man.
I appreciate it.
So let's start with this.
I mean, for folks who don't know how you got into the Hollywood business and kind of where you come from, what's your background?
Well, my background, it's funny, a lot of people ask how I got into comedy, and I say, really, I got into showbiz so I could get comedy out of me.
Like, I was cracking jokes in school, you know, making people laugh and that sort of thing, and I had a pivotal moment when I was in college trying to figure out what I wanted to do, because at that time, my parents were divorced, and, you know, my mom raised six kids, and I was a really good student, and the kind of promise for me, it seemed like, to go the academic route and really You know, go more traditional route to have something solid, as they say, to fall back.
And I had a lot of pressure for that because, I mean, we really didn't have any money or anything in that type of thing.
But I knew I really loved showbiz and comedy and that kind of stuff.
But I really didn't know what that was at the time.
And I came from a big sports neighborhood, too, and there were a lot of people that played professional sports.
And I saw that it was possible to go from this to that, you know, into something.
But in college, I sold bookstore to go.
I had an amazing summer where I went into a lot of people's houses.
And I saw so many people that seemed like they were unhappy with their choices.
And I thought, you know, Larry, at the end of the day, just do what makes you happy.
And I decided to just go into showbiz.
And I started as a stand-up comedian and as an actor.
And the reason why I liked stand-up comedy was because I got to write my own material and you got to perform.
And acting was very frustrating because you had to wait for auditions all the time and that kind of stuff.
But I always had kind of an entrepreneurial attitude towards my act.
I always felt that it's my business and I'm going to run my business in that type of way.
And I've always kept that attitude, and I've always shifted over the years, but I always liked making people laugh.
That was the first love.
And I've done different things along the way that kind of express it in a different way.
For instance, when I was a stand-up comic, I would do stand-up comedy and make people laugh that way.
But after a while, I noticed that I wasn't getting cast in roles because I didn't fit a certain Hollywood type.
That was what they called the urban type.
There was a movie called Hollywood Shuffle.
You're a little too young to remember that.
But Keenan Ivory Wayans and Robert Townsend made a movie about being in Hollywood and getting typecast and that kind of stuff.
And they wanted the actors to be more like merphonic like Eddie Murphy or streetwise and that type of thing.
And I was kind of a, you know, political comic.
I did satirical things.
I did silly jokes.
My act was a hodgepodge of things.
But it wasn't what you would call a street act, you know.
And by that I meant I mean like seeming like you come from the ghetto, that's your point of view, you know, you have that language.
I didn't sound like that so it was hard for me to get into doors of people that were hiring then because it seemed like Hollywood was focusing on that.
So I decided to become a writer at that point and kind of take control of my career.
So I kind of transitioned from being just a stand-up comic to writing on TV shows in Hollywood and that really started my long career of writing and producing.
So my evil little plan was to one day create my own TV show, and it ended up happening too.
So what do you think Hollywood's relationship is with black folks?
Because obviously you talk a little bit about that right there.
Absolutely.
How do you think that's changed over time?
I don't think we have the time to go through all of that.
Hollywood has had an interesting relationship with black people.
I don't know how far we can go back, but in my time, let's say there was the black ceiling, let's call it.
And what that is, it's hard to describe.
There are a lot of different ways that Hollywood likes to pigeonhole you.
And I always said that the color that Hollywood likes the most is green.
As long as you can make green, the pigeonholing goes away and they just want you to do more of that.
But one of the resistances that I found as a writer was there was an opinion in Hollywood that if you're a black writer, you weren't as good as the white writers.
And this was an opinion that I've kind of fought against over the years by trying to create shows and opportunities for people.
I've been on the board of directors for the Writers Guild and I've seen it firsthand.
Now that's an opinion that is not, you know, it wasn't held by Hollywood alone but it was certainly an opinion in there that as a writer who was black we had to fight that type of thing, you know.
So, you know, Hollywood has always had a, you know, that kind of relationship, I guess.
Well, now, obviously, you've got a couple of successful shows on the air, and they deal largely with racial matters in a pretty complex way, in a really interesting way.
I'm more familiar with Black-ish than I am with Insecure.
Now, Black-ish I didn't co-create, but I did help launch it.
I produced the pilot with Kenyam.
And help run part of the first season.
So, I mean, the shows that you are involved with, I think at least heavily, are shows that do have kind of an interesting take on black identity that's I think different from a lot of what Hollywood has been pushing for years.
So I wanted to ask you about that.
When you talk about race in America and sort of where we stand at this point, I mean, it's a broad question, but where do you think we stand in America on race?
It seems to me, I can give you my theory, which is I think we were better off Well, racial polarization is a very specific term, you know, as opposed to racism or racial relations or that type of thing.
as far as racial polarization in the country.
But, you know, I'd love to get your take on it.
Well, racial polarization is a very specific term, you know, as opposed to racism or racial relations or that type of thing.
I think racial polarization can be attributed to more racial issues are in our face, in everyone's face, as opposed to just in our face, maybe.
You know, I think a lot of, I think what caused a lot of issues to come up are smartphones, believe it or not.
You know, people were able to videotape many things and social media, people were able to share more things than normally we could share.
And I think more people became aware of things that were happening and at the same time, people could express themselves in ways that they normally couldn't express.
You know, whether it was through anger or through hyperbole or whatever it was, you know.
And I think that's had more to do with it.
I don't think the racial situation in America has changed over the last ten years.
I think people are more aware of how it expresses itself.
Like for instance, I'll give you an example.
Like, many people think the relationship with blacks and police have gotten worse, and I will argue that what has gotten more apparent is people's ability to see what it is.
Because many, I think many people in America, when they see a story, a bad story about blacks and police, they look at it as a story, and for the merits of that story, and who's right and who's wrong, and most people kind of view it in that box, which is a fair way to view it.
Blacks don't look at it as a story.
They see it as another chapter in the book, in the large book of the history of police abuse on black people.
So whether that's fair or not, it's kind of how it's viewed.
So many times when an incident between blacks and police gets reported, and by the way, many of them are reported now than they were before.
I don't know if the number has gotten larger or smaller.
It's hard to know that, but I do think the reportage of it has gotten larger, so it makes it seem like the number is larger.
And that's a whole different issue, right?
Because now when blacks get to see more of that, to them, it's almost like confirmation bias, you know?
It's confirming this long story that you already know about.
So that's how kind of the different experiences, I think, occur and why people kind of have a disconnect sometimes in not being able to relate to what the actual black experience in America is in relationship to cops.
And I say that As a child of someone who's in law enforcement.
My father was a probation officer at L.A.
County Sheriff's.
You know, and, like, I don't have any animosity towards police or that type of thing, but I am keenly aware of that relationship.
Well, I mean, speaking about that particularly, I think that this would be an interesting area to talk about.
It's so serious to talk to a comedy writer.
I know, so, you know what?
Should we get back to it?
No, no, no.
I'll talk about anything.
Yeah, let's do some of the serious stuff and then I want to get to the comedy world.
Whatever you want.
There's a lot there, but, you know, with relation to that, you know, My view is that when President Obama came into office, and you're a big exponent of President Obama's obviously, when he came into office I felt like, even for me, I opposed him, I didn't want him to be President of the United States, I didn't think he was qualified, his politics were not my politics, but one of the things that I felt, and I think most Americans felt, was that this could have been a moment of reconciliation.
That was one of the messages he seemed to be promoting for good or ill in 2008, 2009 when he was running for office.
And then instead it seemed like he would change.
Yeah, exactly.
And then he sort of reverted in 2012 particularly to a more polarizing rhetoric with regard to sort of these incidents.
And now I'm thinking a little forward to Ferguson and Baltimore.
And trying to take specific instances and anecdotes and then try to draw a broad narrative from those instances and anecdotes.
So you contrasted a moment ago the view that many people in the United States have of a police incident.
You look at it in isolation and you see how it goes down with the kind of broader black view of, okay, this confirms priors about what the relationship is.
It's about the relationship.
Right, exactly.
And I wonder if the country would be better off not to discount the narrative completely, because obviously there is that history there, but would we be better off on an anecdotal basis actually looking at the facts of the case and trying to do that in isolation to a certain extent?
Well, would we be better off is an interesting question.
There's a lot of would we be better off doing what, I don't know, you know.
I think by a case-by-case basis is the best way to look at it and see how we should judge a certain thing.
I'll give you an example.
I particularly thought that Obama was out of line getting involved in that whole Henry Gates thing.
To me, stop it, Obama.
Come on.
Henry Gates got locked out of his house.
You do not need to have beer with anybody.
What are you proving?
I even mocked it on The Daily Show at the time because I thought it was ridiculous.
That is not about repairing anything.
Whatever that was, it was a mistake, whatever it was.
But nobody's trying to lock Henry Gates up or that type of thing.
At least I didn't think so.
Or at least what happened with Henry Gates to me doesn't talk about a current problem in America.
That to me is one incident that happened that is more anecdotal.
Now, the Trayvon Martin thing was a different case.
The Trayvon Martin thing was very problematic on many different levels.
And I was fascinated that sides were taken that were our typical political ideological sides.
I'm like, how is this happening?
Why is this a political situation?
I really couldn't understand that.
I did feel Obama may have overstepped when he said, if I had a son, it would have been like Trayvon.
But I didn't think his emotions there and his intent was overstepping, you know, because it was an event that was polarizing America and America was discussing.
So, you know, as the head of the country, I didn't think he was out of line in discussing that, you know.
But that to me is another one of those incidents that black people related to differently.
No question.
When that came down there were polls and the polls were fascinating where it was like a huge majority of black folks thought this was a racist killing and basically white folks thought that it was, that most of the polls said we need more information to come in and then the Obama DOJ obviously came out and said that it was not, at least there was no evidence that it was a racist killing.
The media coverage was in my view very skewed in one direction in that particular debate.
Well, and for blacks, we don't need media coverage and all that stuff, you know.
It's hard to explain sometimes because we just have a different experience of it from the beginning.
And one of the things that's toughest for me when I see these things, especially as a father now, is that the fact that he is not an adult and that he's a minor gets thrown out right away.
And blacks for many years in history, it didn't matter what age you were, you were treated just like you were an adult, you know.
And, you know, and treated like you're some animal or that type of thing or something to be feared.
And it felt to me that Trayvon Martin, and I don't know much about the kid really about his life or anything, but that immediately he was automatically to be feared more even than this other person who had a gun.
Like, this kid with skittles was to be feared more than this guy who had a gun.
And that is the type of stuff that makes my head explode.
And how can you have a gun and you're afraid of this person that is unarmed, you know?
Those type of situations, I think, makes people's head explode around that type of thing.
So in a second I want to ask you about, you know, the 2016 White House Press Correspondents Dinner that you did.
Because obviously that was a real hot button.
I made everybody mad in that.
Yeah, you did.
You succeeded.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So I want to talk about the White House Correspondents Dinner.
I have a feeling that when you and I talk on your podcast, the Trayvon stuff may come up a little bit more.
Oh, it's possible.
But it is interesting.
It's a really interesting topic, but I know we only have an hour, so I want to move through some material.
So the White House Correspondents Dinner event, there were a couple things that jumped out at me that I wanted to ask you about.
So the first one was, obviously, the big comment was you saying that Barack Obama was your N-word.
Now, what everybody jumped on in the media was the use of the N-word.
That I found entirely non-controversial to the extent that it seemed like you were making a joke.
A joke, I assume, is a joke.
I do want to get your kind of general take on it.
Because you've written a bunch of comedy skits, basically, about the use of the N-word and when it's appropriate and when it's not.
You wrote in your book about when it's appropriate and when it's not.
The whole deconstruction of that.
In fact, John Oliver and I did a whole piece of that on The Daily Show.
Right.
There was a councilman who wanted to ban it, and we just tortured him.
But what's interesting is that, and I even had a black person ask me not long ago.
He said, do you ever get any follow-up when you call the president the N-word?
You know, I'm doing an impression of him right now.
And I said, well, I didn't call him the N-word, you know, I didn't say, you know, and the president's a N-word, you know, like I didn't say that.
I'm cleaning it up for Ben's... For my sensibilities, I appreciate it.
I'm cleaning it up for you right now.
I said, you know, it was partly a joke, but it actually was a tribute in many ways.
And this is the part that a lot of people didn't understand, but the people who got it really understood.
I wanted to have a moment with Obama.
That was kind of past a joke.
And the moment started when I was talking about, because I'm the same age as Obama, and he's done a little bit better, but what are you going to do?
You know, you're going to do that old president thing.
Whatever.
But when we were, you know, when we were born, we were born into a segregated world, you know, both of us, you know.
And when I was a kid, a black man couldn't be the quarterback of a football team.
I mean, that was just reality.
You know, white people said, no way we're going to follow a black person, you know, in almost any aspect of time.
Couldn't be the quarterback of a football team.
And for me, the emotional weight of the fact that a black man could now be the leader of the free world was almost overwhelming.
In fact, when I wrote that, I was almost crying, you know, just the realization of that journey, knowing that that was his actual journey.
And so I wanted to express that to him.
And then the colloquial way that I wanted to do it was to kind kind of have a private public moment.
In acting, we call that public solitude, you know, where it was kind of almost a personal cultural moment to that, and I knew it was going to be controversial, and I almost didn't do it.
And I tried to talk myself out of it, and the people I told said, no, Larry, you have to do it.
I'm like, what are you guys trying to do to me?
So I was concerned about it, actually, but I thought, you know what?
Go ahead and do it.
And I have to tell you, man, during the correspondence there, I absolutely was keenly aware that the whole room had turned on me, you know, that it wasn't going well.
And it's a tough room, but still.
I did a joke in the beginning that didn't go too well.
And you could just feel, as a comic, you can feel when a room turns on you, where they're not giving you the benefit of thinking that you're funny.
Now they're giving you the benefit of, no, Emma, if you've got to prove that to us, we're just going to see.
And I think I said something horrible about Wolf Blitzer.
I loved that part.
That was my favorite part.
And to me, I'm thinking, great, the Wolf Blitzer joke lost the room.
Great.
But that was the other thing.
I didn't mind going after CNN and MSNBC.
In fact, I was probably the lightest on Fox News, you know.
I actually had kind of a fun joke about Megyn Kelly, you know, about her, I think, calling her Becky with the good hair or something like that, you know.
So, you could feel it, that they just were not having this at all.
So, in the middle of that, I swear to you, I'm thinking, you know what, screw this, I'm going to do this.
I almost skipped over it, but in the middle of it, I did it, and Obama immediately got up, and he kind of embraced me, and I was like, phew, you know, I think that he liked it.
I wasn't sure, you know, I'm still not sure how the First Lady thought about it, but both the black intelligentsia, I'll say, I call it the black karate, I have a harsher word, but I won't say that right now.
A more inappropriate term.
Really came out against me.
People like April Ryan, I think CNN, some people on there.
I think Van Jones said, I would never be on a show with Larry Wilmer, so some people were saying that stuff.
Van and I have since appeared together.
Maybe older establishment black people and many people on the left, too, just really slammed it and did not like it at all.
But a lot of younger people, and I, because I got a lot of attention, of course, online, loved it and saw it as, they said, that was the blackest thing I've ever seen, what some people said.
And some people saw it as just really saying something that no one ever says and saying it in a way that they understood, you know.
And they appreciated the fact that I went after everybody.
And the other part, you know, and I thought I really bombed afterwards.
I thought, oh, my career is over.
Everything is wrong, you know.
And then, you know, much after that, I just, you know, didn't worry about it too much.
But Obama brought me up in his speech to Howard University, which was very nice.
By the way, Obama was very nice about it.
He was very kind because he didn't have to be.
You know, the president can easily throw people under the bus, hardly doing anything at all.
And he went out of his way to say, and as Larry Wilmore said, I was watching TV, he says, as Larry Wilmore said, I'm like, is he going to say the N-word or what?
He said, you know, when I was born, a black man couldn't be a quarterback, so he just said the N-word.
I was like, oh, okay.
I was like, hmm, would I have wanted him to say that?
But he was very nice about it.
I mean, so the part of the routine that I critiqued, I remember doing this on my show, was the part where you talked about you didn't care about his policy as long as he's still black, he's still good with you.
Yes, exactly.
And that was the part where I said, you know, if that is the actual perspective, then I got a problem with that, obviously, because, you know, if you're just talking about he's black, therefore, like, I don't even think you believe that, obviously.
I don't think that if Herman Cain had been running in 2008, you probably wouldn't have voted for Herman Cain.
No, but I would have voted for Colin Powell in 2000.
In fact, I wanted to support Colin Powell in 2000, but I also like Colin Powell.
But here's what I mean.
Obviously, part of it is a joke.
Now, because I'm a Democrat, I am predisposed to voting for a Democrat.
So all he needed to be was black in that moment for me in terms of the qualified Democrats.
So that's the threshold, not that any black person, that's the part for humor.
Right.
Of course, not to have to lecture you about a joke or anything like that.
And I'm not here to like grill you on your jokes right now.
No, I know, I know.
But yeah, some people take it completely literal and think, well, the black pizza man can be president as long as he's black, Larry will vote for him.
But to me, what the meaning is behind the joke is how much that really meant to me in that moment.
And that Obama didn't have to overprove everything.
That was enough for me for that election.
But then the rest of the joke that I said, and I don't know if I said it that night, I said, now the next brother, he's going to have to prove something to me.
That was always the second part of that joke.
I don't know if I said it that night.
But yeah, the joke speaks more to how I really feel historically about Obama's election.
So that says less about Obama than it does sort of how you believe America has treated the possibility of a black president, it sounds like.
I think people would have voted for Colin Powell.
I agree with you.
If he had run in 2000, he would have been president.
In 2000, they would have voted for him.
I think his wife was afraid of it.
And I think people were exhausted by the Clinton years a bit.
If Condoleezza Rice ran for president today, she could be president.
I don't know.
I don't know if she has the political talent to do it.
I think, you know, she has the heft to do it.
But the presidency, as we've learned, my observation of it, it takes so much political talent to cut through all the people.
But, you know, you never know.
So one of the things that you've written extensively about on your shows, you do talk a lot about black identity.
I mean, your show's called Black on the Air.
So that raises some really interesting questions about how should Americans view black identity?
Like, when I think Jewish identity, I know that breaks down in several different ways.
The one that people usually use is Jewish ethnicity, which is one I actually don't care about.
As a religious Jew, I don't care if you're Jewish ethnically.
I don't care whether you eat matzo balls or something.
As a religious Jew, I care about the religious aspect.
But when it comes to black identity, how does that break down?
It seems like a lot of the shows that you've worked on sort of struggle with, is there such a thing as black enough or not black enough?
Well, it is a multi-layered question because it's something that is a question that blacks have within themselves, too.
My parents are from Chicago and they experience a lot of different types of of racial incidents and racism or whatever, but a lot of it comes from within the black community.
Even back in the slave days, there was something called the paper bag test, where you couldn't be darker than the paper bag because the idea was to be white.
So the closer you looked like that, the better it was for you.
This was an idea that blacks had back then, too.
A lot of people forget about that.
So there's always been kind of an interest struggle.
I think Spike Lee talked about this a little in his school days, but I could be wrong about that, between what are called light skin blacks and darker skin blacks.
And there's a lot of opinions about that, you know, and those opinions are still in there somewhere, you know, some valid, some invalid, you know.
And black identity, I used to make jokes about this all the time, where I said, when I was growing up, People would say I wasn't black enough, or that I don't talk black.
And I said, well, I'm talking, and I'm black.
Ergo.
And I'm like, maybe brothers shouldn't say ergo.
Maybe that's what it is.
And in fact, I did a bit early in my stand-up career where I had this product called Blackaway, where you could put it in your mouth and it takes the black out of your voice.
So you could do job interviews on the phone and that kind of stuff.
Yeah, it's Blackaway.
Works right in the mouth.
Absolutely.
So I've always struggled with the idea of black identity myself.
I've never, like, sometimes what people think is black identity is a cultural thing, like, tied to how you speak, you know, the clothes you wear.
I mean, there are these questions about Obama early on in 2008.
It's ridiculous.
And I always said, Martin Luther King didn't say, yo, yo, yo, my, my, you know.
You didn't talk like that.
But, you know, he was black.
There's no mistake in that.
You know, so black identities had some cultural views about it that aren't quite accurate.
But people own that feeling that that's what blackness is.
Blackness to me means so many different things.
And it's been said more eloquently than I've ever said it by many poets and people long years, people from James Baldwin to Toni Morrison to all sorts of people, right?
So I think it has a meaning that is very much tied to the journey of black people in America.
And that's what makes being a black American different from being black anywhere else in the world, I think.
And it's hard to quantify from a specific culture point of view because there's not a direct line to a place, you know, and a place with a specific culture.
So I can't trace my ancestors back to a town in Italy where there's a specific culture that's Italian and that type of thing.
You know, blacks were kind of stripped of that.
So that's why there's a lot of discussion about what black identity is because, you know, it has different meanings for different people, you know.
I hope that kind of covers it.
It does.
And the reason that I asked... It's a little messy, is what it actually is.
And it's messy for blacks as well.
It's not a clean... Blacks don't always agree on it.
Like, my mother will not be called African-American.
She's just like, I'm not from Africa.
I'm from this country.
I'm like, you're right.
Well, the reason that I ask is because the question that I didn't ask at the beginning is, how racist is America?
Like, where are we on racism?
Oh, America is racist!
What's the scale from Thomas Jefferson to George Jefferson?
On the Jefferson scale, how racist is America?
Well, Andrew Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson.
Let's use the Jackson scale.
How racist?
I'd say sometimes it's closer to Andrew than Samuel L., I would say.
The reason I didn't ask that question at the beginning is because I think that the definition of racism sometimes seems fuzzy itself.
Sometimes I think there's stuff that everybody sort of clearly agrees is racist.
When people say black folks are inferior, you are a racist, we can all agree.
It's like that definition of pornography, I'll know it when I see it.
Right, exactly.
And this does make for some weird and awkward political conversations because very often somebody will make a point that they don't think is racist in any way and then immediately they are labeled a racist by people who may not be black, may be black.
And one of my views of the Trump phenomenon is that there was a whole swath of people in the middle of the country who had been told by the media that a lot of their critiques of America were based on race.
And they were sick of being lectured about that.
And here was Trump, and he just didn't give a shit.
God, I don't know.
And so I'll vote for him.
And so there was a lot of kickback to that.
So I guess the question is, you know, using your kind of, you know, Potter Stewart, I'll know when I see a definition of racism, how much racism do you think is still endemic to the United States?
God, I don't know.
I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not that type of, I have no way of quantifying that at all, you know.
Right, I'm not going to ask you percentages or something.
I mean, I guess the reason that it comes up in politics so much is because very often people look at, for example, wealth disparities between black folks and white folks.
And obviously some of that is the result of historic discrimination from slavery to Jim Crow.
And then you get politicians up there talking about slavery reparations and people say, well, I didn't enslave anybody.
And current wealth inequalities, income inequalities, forget wealth, income inequalities, Those seem largely driven by personal decisions, not by decisions made in the past.
Right.
Well, the black, let's call it bottom class.
To me, especially when you look at the urban areas, I'll use that term, in the cities where there's ghettos and that type of thing, to me it's a direct result of the Jim Crow laws and the segregation and redlining and that sort of stuff.
And there's two reasons.
And that sort of inability to be engaged in society is something that's been passed down for generations, unfortunately.
And to be able to participate in a way that is reflective of the way the rest of the society can, I'll say.
You know, and it's happened in two fronts, Ben, which is kind of interesting.
One front is the obvious one, you know, of how blacks were kept out of society in many different ways, you know, much of which can't be talked about too much because people either get tired of it or there's guilt or that sort of thing, but it is a reality in this country.
I remember a friend of mine showing me an old deed from a house he bought where it said you can't sell to blacks and Jews, by the way, you know, just putting Ben in there with me.
But that was written down.
You know, it's one thing for the collusion to be just, you know, something that people don't say, but it's another thing to see it written down.
And much of what was kept out of society was written down, was written into laws.
You know, Plessy v. Ferguson actually, you know, set up the whole separate but equal, which of course doesn't even make sense, you know.
The fact that you have to make it separate means you don't feel it's equal, you know.
Otherwise, why are you making it separate, you know?
So that was one aspect of it, you know.
Now, what's interesting is that many blacks still were able to thrive in that system.
You know, you had many doctors, you had, you know, professional people, people that started their own businesses, you know, people that were very successful.
The black middle class in the 50s was growing faster than the black middle class in the 60s or 70s.
The difference has been they lived in black communities, in almost strictly black communities.
Now, this is one of the ironies of desegregation.
Many of them moved out of those neighborhoods and out of those situations.
That leaves you with almost a permanent underclass in many of those situations.
So, you had kind of almost a combination of black flight and white flight that happened over the same course of time, which many resources and the ability to use your community, which by the way, people understand how important communities are in helping people, you know, get out of their situations, you know.
I mean, Hillary Clinton was made fun of for saying, You know, what is the village line?
It takes a village.
I can't even remember the village line.
What's the village line?
But it takes a village really has meaning that I think both sides agree with, but because it was a political statement, people took jabs at it.
But what it takes a village means is there's many important parts of the community that work in order to help people get out of situations.
One of them is the home, of course, but the extended community is very important as well.
And I think a lot of the black communities lost some of that support, unfortunately.
So it was almost a double attack. - So in a second, I wanna ask kind of your perspective on black Republicans, and whether they're ignoring that past or whether they just have a different perspective on how to get out of that going forward. - Sure, but can we take just a quick break for a quick word?
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Okay, so given your view that it's mostly kind of historic circumstance that has created the black...
That is partly responsible.
That gives, to me, one of the bigger reasons why it looks different than any other part of society.
You know, part was the separation and the part was the other separation, you know.
I mean, so how do you view black Republicans then?
So I know obviously a lot of black Republicans.
Those are the circles in which I move.
And their view from, I don't want to sum up everybody's view, but it seems like their view is basically the same as a lot of Republicans view, which is, okay, so given all these historical circumstances, you now have a group of people who are living in poverty.
It's not unique to black America to live in poverty.
You have a lot of impoverished white folks in Appalachia.
And the chief ways of getting out of poverty are you go to high school, you finish high school.
You don't have babies out of wedlock.
You don't commit a crime.
You go get a job.
And these are all things that presumably are within rational bounds.
Like you should be able to do this if you apply yourself.
So perhaps government is creating an incentive system that is actually creating too much of a safety net for making bad decisions, particularly in terms of single motherhood and the welfare programs, for example.
And so what actually needs to happen is more policing in inner cities to make sure that property rights are respected and businesses can move in and bring a tax base.
Perhaps what we need are stronger churches because we need more people who are encouraged to get married as opposed to having kids out of wedlock.
That seems to be the perspective of, you know, black Republicans like Larry Elder or Thomas Sowell or Do they also have a cure for Appalachia?
Same cure.
Same exact cure.
And yet, very often, if anybody sort of says this sort of stuff, then they are tarred with the not black enough, or if you're black, Republican, not black enough.
My black Republican friends get that a lot.
And if you're white, then if you say that, then you're racist because you're not taking into account history enough.
You know, notwithstanding all of the points that you made, which you are correct, those are the points said.
I wouldn't say black Republicans so much as I would say black conservatives, I think is more fair.
Yeah, that's fair.
Especially when you think of someone like Thomas Sowell or someone like that.
Right.
Shelby Steele, some of these people who have written very eloquently about some of these things, you know.
I always look at things from the historical point of view as well.
It used to be the other way around then, which is interesting.
I was working for Whoopi Goldberg once on a show, and she used to have parties at her house, Scrabble parties, that type of thing.
And I used to kick some butt, let me just say.
But Whoopi is a real collector of things, and there's this book called, I think it's called The Negro Handbook, and it was like from 1911 or something like that.
And I was just looking through it and said, do you want that?
You can take it.
I'm like, oh, really?
Thanks.
And I took it.
And I found it fascinating because it was a snapshot of 1911 and the black experience in 1911.
And like one thing that was devastating was like it listed the number of lynchings that year.
I was like, oof, just to have in a book listing the number, like this was something that was recorded, you know, I mean, and to have that book speaking to you now is like, oh, you know, and it's almost like it's a matter of fact type of thing, you know, which is fascinating, but it had everything in there from black doctors and people that were doing things.
But there was this one letter that I found very interesting, and it was a letter to black Americans imploring them not to give all their support to one party, and that they felt that this was a problem, and that party was the Republican Party.
And it was almost the same exact speech that a black conservative would make now to Democratic Party.
And it's interesting that black political behavior is one of the more interesting, hard-to-figure-out things that me, even as a political junkie and people who watch it, can't always put my finger on why.
Obviously, Republican Lincoln freeing the slaves makes sense.
Blacks are going to be Republicans coming out of that for a long time.
But I think blacks have been very Oh, what's the right word?
Maybe collective in how they've approached politics, almost like it's a team game in many ways, I think might be a fair way to put it.
And if you look at the, I would say the 30s with Roosevelt was the first crack in that Republican armor and with blacks kind of testing out the Democratic Party.
But the Democratic Party was very racist in those days in terms of being overtly racist.
Right.
You know, with your Dixiecrats and some of those people.
They weren't kidding around, you know.
So that was a lot for blacks to say they were Democrats in those days.
By the way, political parties were, I think, more big-tentish in those days, too.
You had conservative Republicans, but you had moderate Republicans.
You actually had liberal Republicans in those days.
You had those Dixie Democrats.
You had progressive Democrats.
Both parties actually had a lot of different factions in them that don't quite exist today.
And depending on the time period, I think certain factions have more power or more influence depending on the time period.
Like the Republicans were very progressive during Teddy Roosevelt's time and were very big business during Calvin Coolidge.
Very few short years later.
I'm not saying that they're contradictory, but it's where the emphasis is being placed.
So it was the 1950s.
It's interesting.
1950s was the last time that Republicans may have had a majority support in the black community.
Remember Eisenhower was the one who sent the troops to, was it Arkansas?
Yeah.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, Little Rock.
Even though I think Truman desegregated the army.
The military, correct.
I believe so, yeah.
But, it wasn't considered a bad thing to be a Republican.
Martin Luther King's father was a Republican, in fact, you know.
But, I believe it was the Kennedy-Nixon election, and then it was the Johnson administration that got the Blacks, if you look at this as a team sport, you know, that Black people said, wait, I don't think the Lakers are doing it over here, I'm going to go to the Clippers, you know.
And the Black people, I think, in large parts, switched teams based on what happened politically in the 1960s.
And I think if you look at history, it takes a long time to change people's minds on those things.
I think it really does.
And even though some of the anecdotal opinions on it and some of the observations on it aren't wrong, People don't quite operate that way, I think, when you look at human nature and the specific experience of black people in America.
That's the best way I can describe that.
So for me, I don't have an observation, and I try to look at these things differently, that one side is right or wrong in that, because there's a lot of things that are completely true in that.
And by the way, many black people, socially for many years, have been conservative.
Right.
Prop 8 only passed in California because Barack Obama was on the ballot.
Correct.
They're one of the few groups that are arguably more conservative but who vote liberal.
That's right.
In terms of a group of people.
So I really think it comes down to more of a team thing.
Now, having said that, You get people who bristle when you're on the wrong team.
And I think that's where a lot of that comes from, you know, is the best way that I can put it.
I feel a lot of it is silly personally.
But I understand it because I've been called those things myself, you know, for different reasons.
So I know how that feels, you know, and that sort of thing.
So I want to talk about the comedy side now.
Sure, absolutely.
Wait, this hasn't been funny?
Guys!
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Can we go to another commercial?
No?
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We're out of commercials?
Sorry.
But there are more coming.
We have to monetize you to the fullest possible extent.
But let's talk about the comedic world.
So I'm going to give you the conservative critique of the comedic world.
Yes, I've heard some of your critiques.
I'm sure you have.
So I did one just a couple of days ago on Stephen Colbert.
Can I ask you a question real quick?
Why do you have a conservative critique on comedy?
Like, why is there a conservative critique?
I think when you hear the critique, you'll understand.
I'm like, what does that have to do with anything?
The critique is that today's comedy has become politically one-sided.
That's the conservative critique.
But if you look at Late Night, what you're seeing is Jimmy Kimmel, who I will say I have used the term woke pope to describe him, that he is the pope of woke politics.
He did start on The Man Show, but he's come a long way since his roots.
Since he was doing bouncing boobs with Adam Carolla.
And then you've got Jimmy Fallon, who's basically been excoriated for the great sin of touching Donald Trump's hair.
And then you have... So Fallon isn't, he's not in the category that you're talking about.
No, he sort of moved political after that happened.
Specifically, I mean, he had to come out and he had to apologize for it and all this kind of stuff.
And then you have Colbert, who's obviously very loud and proud.
Right.
Very much to the left.
Sure.
Sure.
did a Bill O'Reilly routine to mock him, and all of that.
And so a lot of conservatives look at the comedic world and they say, "Why is this so one-sided?
Why isn't there..." They'll even look back fondly to Jay Leno and Johnny Carson and say, "At least these guys made jokes about both sides." And as a conservative, I can say that when I watch a lot of these shows, I feel the same way.
I look at them and I say, "No one made a joke about Barack Obama for eight years." Now that I agree with you.
I talked about this very recently, the Obama part.
And I felt that, first of all, white comedians, especially comedians, definitely on the left, were afraid of making the wrong joke about Obama.
And when they did make jokes about Obama, they were flattering jokes.
You know, like nobody really made real observational jokes about Obama.
That's why the impressions of Obama weren't that good, because nobody was making really good observations about him, you know.
And someone said, well, what about the angry translators?
They said, that is an observation on black culture, not really about Obama.
And it was flattering to Obama, though.
The whole thing was, Obama's so self-controlled, he's so poised.
Which is fine.
It was funny, but I mean... Yeah, but people were so precious with him, and I wish there was more of that, you know, because to me, that's part of a comedian's job.
Now, the other part of it, I believe we're in a cycle.
A lot of these things go in cycles, and I think what's popular now is that.
It's kind of maybe the Jon Stewart effect, because Jon was just very good at that.
But remember, when Jon did it, nobody was doing that.
You know, we did it on my show, The Nightly Show, going with that approach.
And John Oliver, certainly, in his show.
But, you know, I think these things go in cycles in the marketplace.
And I feel, you know, when you feel like you're on the outside of it, how come I can't be in on the joke?
But I don't think all of it is like that.
I think Saturday Night Live really tries its best to be fair in that way, you know, as much as they can.
And they've gotten criticized for some of that, you know.
And by fair, I mean really trying to poke holes at both sides, you know.
Um, but I think a lot of it is driven by the marketplace and what seems to be popular and that sort of thing.
As well as, that's what, you know, someone like Colbert, that's what he wants to do and that's what he wants to talk about as well.
So both of those things line up.
But the zeitgeist can be very picky.
The zeitgeist can turn on you in a moment.
So one thing I learned about showbiz, two years from now we may be having a different conversation.
It's like, what happened to all those political comedians?
And I wonder if the zeitgeist is moving against comedy generally.
So one of the things that I've noticed and commented on I saw Hannah Gadsby's special.
Not a fan.
And one of the things that I saw is the critics basically saying that Hannah Gadsby, she didn't make you laugh, but she made you think.
And it was a new kind of comedy.
And so it seemed as though she was moving for what on my show I call claptor.
It wasn't really for laughs.
It was more for, oh, that's amazing.
You know, and sort of sympathetic laughter as opposed to the laughter of recognition of a reality, which is usually the best kind of comedy in my under, an observant opinion.
It's tough to say, Ben, because many times these kind of critiques are resisting something as well, you know, because sometimes these critiques are, people want something to be like what they've seen already, you know.
And many times when you're doing something new, people don't like it because it's different, and it doesn't conform to rules that they like.
I'm happy with these rules.
Why are you doing something different?
And so I think a lot of critiques are born out of that.
To me, I'm like, who cares if she does something different?
Like, there's a lot of other comics out there, you know.
Oh no, listen, more power to her.
I'm happy for her that she's earning wealth and fame, all that's fine.
But the redefinition by critics of comedy itself, in order to meet somebody who they agree with politically, I find troubling, simply because it used to be that you would watch something that was either funny or it was not funny.
Like, I can acknowledge that Jon Stewart, who I disagree with politically, is a deeply funny human being.
I mean, he's really funny.
Right, but you may not laugh if you don't agree, and that's where the claptrap comes in.
Look, Tina Fey used this same term, by the way.
She was making her same observation years ago.
People, because they get laughs with that, those are laughs.
People do think it's funny.
Now you can say, yes, but it's agreeing funny, which is also true, but that's what they're doing.
I just wonder if we're moving away from a time when people can make even most kinds of jokes.
So Seinfeld refuses to go on college campuses now because he's afraid of being shouted down.
You make certain kind of jokes and YouTube will demonetize you.
It depends on the kind of joke.
The other night my wife and I made the mistake of watching Airplane again.
And Airplane is a very funny movie, but it's a time-bound movie.
Like, you watch it now, and you can watch it sort of in the privacy of your own home, looking around to make sure that nobody else is watching.
No, absolutely.
I did a show called The PJs years ago.
It was an animated show with Eddie Murphy.
It was like Claymation type of thing.
And we did a joke on there with this observation 20 years ago, where Thurgood, the head of the projects, he finds one of Richard Pryor's old albums.
And it's like, that N-word is crazy.
And he's like, and they're like, Super, can we play that?
He says, play it?
You can't even say this anymore!
You know, it's a joke.
So believe me, this is something that's been happening over a long period of time.
I mean, are you worried about that?
Because I... I've always been worried about that.
But I realized in some ways there's nothing I can do about it.
Look, I ran into this in the early 90s.
I told you a little bit about this on the phone, where another comic kind of shut me down not airing something because didn't agree with what I was saying.
And to me, that was like, how is she making assault on speech?
What's going on here?
Why are we being precious about this?
ABC just the other night aired their tribute to All in the Family and the Jeffersons.
And they actually bleeped a couple of words that weren't bleeped back in the day.
There's no way All in the Family makes the air today.
It's insane.
I mean, there's just no way.
It's insane.
So this cultural shift has been happening for a long time.
I blame it all on Alf.
Came on in the 80s, changed everything.
Damn Alf, he's an illegal immigrant.
Alf is responsible for most of America'sills.
Illegal alien.
Exactly.
There you go.
Build a wall.
He literally is an illegal alien.
So in a second, I want to ask you a little bit more about the comedic world.
And then I want to get to a tripartite distinction about politics I heard you make on your podcast that I think is really good.
Oh, cool.
Let me break down the 2020 race in a second.
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Right?
Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us, Box?
So they know that we sent you.
So, you know, going back to sort of this comedic distinction, one of the things that I find, you know, difficult is that it's also, it's reached into the issue of politics.
It crosses all boundaries.
It feels like two things have happened.
One, you can't have open conversations with people anymore because if you do, you might violate some unspoken rule, which means that you must be ousted.
From the Overton window.
And then observation number two is that our common spaces seem to have sort of disappeared.
Where we could sort of all agree before, okay, here was at least something that was funny, right?
We disagree on politics, but we can all go to this movie and this movie is just funny.
And there's nothing wrong with the movie just being funny.
But now we have to load it up with all of the proper messaging.
And if it doesn't carry the messaging, then it is retrograde.
Then it is ripped down for being retrograde.
And maybe it has to be silenced.
Maybe it's offensive to somebody.
And it feels like the conversation is becoming narrower I'm fine with people becoming more sensitive.
I mean, that I'm okay with.
But I guess more sensitive to others.
I don't think more sensitive to their own concerns.
Like me being more sensitive to something somebody else feels, I'm okay with that.
So long as it doesn't require me to speak falsehood.
Me being more sensitive to my own concerns, I mean, man up, get over it, like, be an adult.
To me, this is, you know, I didn't give you one of these leftist-tears-hotter-cold tumblers because I didn't want to insult you.
No, that's great.
No, it doesn't insult me.
Are you kidding me?
I wouldn't consider you a leftist.
I mean, the distinction I've made a thousand times is between leftist and liberal.
A liberal is somebody who disagrees with me on tax rates and government involvement, but also agrees that we have to have some interesting, wide-ranging conversation.
A leftist is somebody who wants to get me demonetized on YouTube.
I would be called a classic liberal, in my beliefs.
Yeah, so, you know, where do you think we're going?
I mean, is it possible to... Well, I don't know if I agree with your premise completely.
Like, for instance, if you look at a lot of the stuff Disney puts out, like, the Pixar movies I think are fantastic, you know?
And I don't think they're preaching, like, in that sort of way that you're talking about.
No, that's right.
You know, and I think they're made for the entire family.
In fact, it's kind of one of their missions, you know, to do that sort of thing.
Like, Toy Story, that last Toy Story, you know, that simple story of that kid going off to school, I mean, it broke my heart, you know?
And was so funny and all that kind of stuff, you know, things like The Incredibles.
Look at me, what am I, pushing Disney right now?
I just left this company, man.
No!
But I think there is a lot of content like that, but you're right when a lot of the noise goes to the other.
But I say that's what's in the zeitgeist right now, and that's why.
But as I said, the zeitgeist can be very picky.
But when something's getting attention, it's what we pay attention to the most, you know.
So now let's talk a little bit about President Trump.
So we've avoided the T word the entire podcast up to this point, mainly because I almost feel like... I know how much you love Trump.
You know, he's my jam.
That's the only thing I care about is President Trump.
Trump jam sounds disgusting, by the way, doesn't it?
It would be.
I can't get that image out of my head.
Kind of marmalade-y.
It's terrible.
Trump Jam would be very marmalade-y.
Thank you so much for that.
That sounds horrific, but now I can't stop thinking about it.
It's like don't think of an elephant.
Thank you for that.
So let's talk about President Trump.
So I did not vote, as you know, for President Trump in 2016.
I am much more likely, as I've said, to vote for President Trump in 2020.
Spoiler alert, I didn't and probably won't either.
Yeah.
So what do you make of sort of what brought Trump about?
And you've said that you think that Trump is going to get reelected in 2020.
It's my unfortunate prediction.
But I also predicted he'd be elected in the last election, unfortunately.
Well, your record on electing predictions is much better than mine.
I lost 10 grand on the last election.
I was very mad at my prediction, by the way.
I remember being shouted down on my own show about it.
But to me, it was part of what you were talking about earlier is what he was connecting to.
And I think what Trump does well is he sells his own brand.
And I thought he did that well, even though I think his brand is very messy.
Here's where Trump turned me off in the beginning, and I couldn't believe that he kept going.
It was in that first interview where he first slammed John McCain.
You know what I'm talking about?
Where he talked about, I like my heroes who aren't caught or something like that.
I could not believe he said that.
Especially, that is such a canceling thing for someone running for president, particularly a Republican.
You know, and I could not believe that the Republicans didn't cancel him for that, that he wasn't canceled.
And I was shocked by that.
And that moment alone meant a lot to me.
I said, something else is going on here.
If he's not canceled for that, what are we watching, you know?
And so I watched with kind of a different eye than just saying, he's horrible or he's not this or that.
You know, I was trying to watch it almost as a phenomena of something happening.
I remember the second thing was during the first debate, where the way that he, um, Let's say he dealt with Megyn Kelly, you know.
He was completely disrespectful.
He was throwing, you know, just bombs at her and everything.
The people who like him loved the fact that he would do that and would not be precious about that in any way.
And I saw that.
When he called Rosie O'Donnell a pig, I think he said that.
And when that got applause and not derision, I was like, okay, he's winning.
He is winning, you know.
And the way he systematically, almost like a You know, just someone with a surgical knife just took apart, like, from Jeb to Marco to those people was fascinating.
I couldn't believe it.
I wasn't sure.
I was hoping my prediction would be wrong that he still would not beat Hillary Clinton, who I felt was, as unlike as she was from both sides, was still a very formidable opponent, you know, which the fact that she won more actual votes than him even proves that point.
So, to me, I thought he tapped into many different things, and I've written about some of this, but I did think he tapped into an anger.
People have many different opinions of what people are angry about, but I'll just call it that people were angry, and that Trump represented them in a way that they felt other people weren't carrying the bucket for that anger, and that he would happily carry that bucket, whether it was the anger about immigration, whether it was about, you know, I don't know if they were angry about trade, but certainly about, you know, wages and that sort of thing.
I think they felt Trump was the only one who carried the bucket and meant it to.
That's what I saw in there.
Yeah, I mean, my take is that a lot of the Trump phenomenon was and continues to be a rebellion specifically to pop culture.
It's possible.
Because the left is so dominant in terms of culture that the right has responded by saying, we have no power in the cultural sphere, and so we're going to respond with the political sphere.
But if Trump's not a celebrity, he's not the president.
Right, the fact that he was a celebrity is the reason, because for a lot of Republicans, the idea that somebody who's a celebrity, even a D-rate celebrity, as Trump was by the time he ran, I mean in 2010 he's an A-rate celebrity, by 2016 he's a D-rate.
But for Republicans it was like, wow, a celebrity who's not crapping on us.
This is incredible.
And you got that feeling from a lot of people, like he was sort of the legitimation of them in the cultural sphere.
Here's where I'll disagree with you on that.
I don't think it's a bad observation as to why a lot of people like him, but I don't think it's why they voted for him.
I really think he came out in his first speech about immigration and the way he talked about how the country was being invaded and that he would build a wall.
And I think he borrowed a lot of that from Ann Coulter and from her book, but those are the magic phrases that energize people to vote for him, which I believe is different than liking somebody.
To actually vote for somebody, I believe, is different.
I don't disagree with you of why they like him, but I think why they voted for him started with that, and that policy.
And that, by the way, is his most divisive policy, even with his base.
And I talked about this a little bit when I said, when he said Mexico's going to pay for it, he was bullshitting when he says that.
But he's being completely honest when he talks about what he views as the problem in America that is being invaded.
And the people who relate to that statement are Not going anywhere in terms of being his base, and that's why they pulled that lever from my point of view.
I think the pop stuff, it's interesting, but I don't think that's why that base is strong.
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
I think it starts with immigration.
Certainly, there are a lot of folks who agree with you, including Ann Coulter, who says that if he doesn't build the wall, he's toast.
Completely.
They're willing to run away because of that issue, not because of trade.
You know, trade's hurting a lot of people that voted for Trump, you know, not because, not for how he appears on the world stage, which both sides have disagreements about that, and he's been blasted, you know, particularly by his own party, even right now, you know, people, you know, the Republican Party's upset over a lot of things he's done, especially with Mexico and these tariffs and everything.
But people aren't leaving him because of that.
The only reason why people would abandon him is over immigration and building the wall, which is fascinating to me.
So this brings me to the tripartite distinction that you sort of hit on a little bit there, but I wanted you to explicate it for folks who haven't heard your podcast, which you should go listen to, The Larry Wilmore Show.
Black on the air.
Black on the air.
There's your pitch.
Commercial.
But you made a distinction the other week that I thought was really good and fascinating because it does get to the heart of what is happening in politics generally, and that was this tripartite distinction between bullshitting Sure.
Yes, yes.
Right.
truth-telling, and you sort of rank presidents along these lines.
Yes, yes.
And I haven't heard the podcast yet where you rank the current candidates along those lines.
Yeah, I started with some of them.
But I have a feeling that that may carry into why you think he's going to win in 2020.
Yeah, so I was making a distinction.
I was using, I was talking about my Lakers and Magic Johnson.
I was so upset because I felt Magic, he talks about how much he loves the Lakers and all this stuff.
And then he was, he was telling us this lurid story of what happened behind the scenes, if he was backstabbed and how Genie isn't running the company right.
And then he tells us how much he loves the Lakers.
I'm like, And people are like, oh, it's so brave that Magic told the truth.
Magic didn't tell the truth.
Magic was being honest.
He was focusing on his feelings and, you know, how he felt about this situation and he was backstabbed and all this.
But the truth of the matter was Magic was there part time, you know, and that Rob Plinko wasn't wrong, you know, and that, you know, people should be upset about that.
You know, honesty was what he was focused on, and I think our society, because we're so in love with feelings these days, I think there's too much interest in people's feelings these days.
It's one of the things I've talked about for actually a long time.
And not enough in people's actions, you know?
And I'm one of those actions over feelings type persons and have been for a very long time.
But I think what honesty represents is how you feel about something, primarily honesty is about you.
A truth teller is different.
Telling the truth many times has nothing to do with you.
Might be completely against what you actually want or what you stand for, you know.
But the interest is in telling something outside of yourself that represents an actual thing, you know, the actual event or whatever it is.
And then both, I was making a political distinction.
I was talking about politics in particular, how people are actually trying to sell you something that really, you know, is all about whatever it is that they're trying to sell you or that type of thing.
You know, I can't remember the exact words that I use, but I was talking about politicians and how they occur.
And I was saying, Trump's base like him because they view that he is honest.
He's being honest to them.
And I said, and I agree with him, I believe Trump is an honest huckster.
I really do.
I think he is very honest in terms of wanting to sell the Trump brand, first of all.
He's very honest in how he feels about alien invasion, is how he puts it in the country.
I think he's an honest purveyor of that.
But he's not a truth teller.
He's not telling the truth about situations.
I don't know if Trump's ever told the truth about a situation, by the way.
But another one of his, let's call it gifts because I'll put these in the political realm, is his ability to bullshit.
He's very good about that.
Now, most people are used to politicians' bullshit because that's the tool they've used forever.
So the people that really love Trump don't necessarily like his bullshitting, you know.
And so, like, when Trump does talk about immigration, when he talks about, you know, rapists are coming here and blah, blah, blah, where he's being honest about how he really feels about it, that's what people connect to.
No one would say what Trump just said, you know, he's being so honest, right?
They applaud him because they feel no one would say that, and he's doing an act of honesty.
When he says Mexico paid for it, that's bulls**t, you know?
And that's the part that they're frustrated about.
Why does he say this?
You know, this is bulls**t. Because now he has to actually sell this thing that he was honest about, you know?
So I was kind of giving, I guess, him credit for that and making an observation between that and how it occurs.
Even though it feels like an oxymoron, I believe that's how it occurs in politicians.
And I was going through some of the lists of presidents and that who I felt, who were honest, who were more truth-tellers, you know, and I put bullsh** in there too.
Well, who do you think is capable of beating him on the Democratic side since you think that he's...
Well, I don't know if anybody has...
I mean, right now, I mean, we're so early.
Biden is the only one, possibly, I think, who has a chance, just because of name recognition, and as you say, because of popularity, because people know who you are.
I think that goes a long way in America.
Biden is primarily a bullshitter, though, from my point of view.
I don't know if he's very honest even and I think people discredit him for that.
I mean the whole plagiarism thing is an example of that.
And I believe he has been a bit of a truth teller sometimes but not enough to make that a distinguishing issue.
That's where he got in trouble with the crime bill and that sort of thing.
Even though he's been very political with that as well.
I think, you know.
But as we know, that's what politicians do.
That's kind of what they do best, is the bullshit part.
So that's why I think he probably is in the front right now.
But we'll see.
As we, as you know, I mean, this time during 2008, I mean, or 2007, whenever it was, Obama was so far, nobody thought Obama had a chance, you know, and even far into the debates.
Like, many black people weren't supporting Obama yet, because they thought he didn't have a chance.
It's when he took Iowa, where he got a lot of the black support, and felt that he had a chance.
That's one thing about these presidential elections I always find interesting, is that it can change so fast.
McCain!
McCain was right in Southwest!
Remember Airlines, you know?
In 2007, people thought he was out of it.
Remember Giuliani?
It was going to be Giuliani and Hillary at that point!
You know, and McCain had this surge that was unbelievable, you know, and became the frontrunner.
I mean, one of the things that's fascinating to watch, actually, in the Democratic polls is the huge share of the black vote that Biden is getting right now in the polling, which obviously is an after effect of Barack Obama.
Completely.
I agree with that completely.
And the fact that Kamala Harris is drawing flies and Cory Booker is drawing flies is pretty telling.
I think Cory Booker will continue to draw flies.
I don't know if the same thing is true about Kamala Harris.
Cory Booker, I mean, when you talk bullshit, Cory Booker may be made of it.
He's one of the chief ones.
He's one of the chief ones.
I agree with that.
But Kamala Harris is a sneaky one.
She's a sneaky bullshitter because she's very talented politically and I think she has an interesting career.
I don't know if she's running for president at the right time.
It may be premature for her in terms of strategy I'm talking about, not in terms of being able to do it because the field is so crowded and everything.
I don't know if she can cut through all that.
But I think she's much more talented than Corey, but she's a bit of a bullsh** too, you know?
But I think, you know, when you come from that, when you're a DA and that type of thing, I don't know.
It always feels like those kind of jobs, there's a little bit of that in there anyway, so.
So in a second, I want to ask you the final question, which will be, you know, what do you think the future of the country is, given all the problems that we've talked about and some of the lack of discourse, civil discourse that's happening right now?
If you want to hear Larry Wilmore's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
You have to give us your money to subscribe.
Head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation there.
Larry, I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for stopping by.
Oh, my pleasure.
Thanks, Ben.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
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