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Sept. 6, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:06:52
Candace Owens | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 97
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It's not good for us when you have a culture and music which glorifies baby mama.
We have a culture problem in black America.
I think the best way to fix it is for everybody to stop debating about it.
Everyone stop the hand-holding and let black Americans get to work.
Democratic presidential nominees have received, on average, 90% of the vote from black Americans for the last six decades.
These candidates have run and continue to run on race-specific handout programs like Affirmative Action and now slavery reparations to supposedly save the black community from racism embedded deep within American society.
The work of improving black lives has largely been stripped from black Americans by liberal politicians and thought leaders telling black Americans they're victims of America.
That is what inspired Candace Owens into a political career.
Candace had always thought she was a Democrat.
That is, until the media's dishonesty during the 2016 election woke her up.
Since coming out as conservative, she speaks on black culture, the victimhood promulgated within it, and a society weaponizing race for political power.
In 2018, she founded Blexit, a movement encouraging black and minority communities to jump ship from the Democratic Party.
Candace, who finds herself frequently canceled on Twitter, recently posted a video criticizing the propping up of George Floyd as a hero.
That video went viral and resulted in an onslaught of attacks.
We'll get into that controversy here.
We'll also discuss Kansas' own traumatic experience of being treated as a victim by the NAACP and other organizations that hindered rather than helped her.
what Cardi B's interviewing Joe Biden says about the way Democrats see the black vote, and a whole lot more.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
Just a reminder, we will be doing some bonus questions at the end with Candace Owens.
The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
Go over to dailywire.com, become a member, you'll have access to all of the full conversations with every single one of our amazing guests.
Candace Owens, thanks so much for joining the show.
Thanks for having me.
So first of all, everybody should go pick up a copy or pre-order a copy of Blackout, which comes out very shortly, sure to be an enormous bestseller.
Congratulations on the book.
Also, congratulations on, you told me this, so I'm not giving anything away.
You're pregnant?
Yes.
That is an amazing thing.
That is a life-changing thing.
How do you feel about that?
I'm excited.
I mean, I'm really excited for that next chapter of my life.
And I would say in terms of my political life, the stakes feel a bit higher in terms of where America's going to go.
So let's start with where America is right now.
We're watching, as we speak, major riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
We've seen major riots in Seattle.
We've seen major riots in Portland, in L.A., in Washington, D.C., in New York City, in Chicago.
Virtually every major city, all Democratic governed, has broken into extraordinary levels of rioting and looting.
The media have informed us that all of this is apparently A good thing.
This is changing America in a positive way.
Barack Obama suggested at the DNC that the protesters are really doing something wonderful and the media have conflated the protesters with the rioters and with the looters.
So I want to get your overall opinions first of all on the Black Lives Matter movement.
Because it seems to me that Black Lives Matter can mean three separate things and there's been an attempt to conflate all of them.
One, the inarguable proposition that black people matter.
Second, The idea that Black Lives Matter as an organization is good, which seems crazy.
And third, that America is systemically racist and evil.
And I've yet to see exactly how the Black Lives Matter movement, which seems to stand for both the organization and the idea that America is evil.
How is that making America better?
Do you believe that what's going on right now in America and has been going on since the death of George Floyd has made America better in any way?
I mean, I think I've kind of made myself a staunch adversary of the Black Lives Matter movement.
It is the antithesis of everything that I believe in as an American, first and foremost.
And no, yeah, they're operating under the guise of something that's common sense.
Black lives matter.
And they're doing nothing to prove or to show that black lives matter to them because they don't care about black lives.
We know that all across America, in major cities. Black crime rate has gone up, black homicide rate has gone up, black people are dying because of Black Lives Matter activism.
People burning down and looting black neighborhoods, taking away black jobs. So I hate everything to do with Black Lives Matter and I have used my platform and my voice to speak out against what is ultimately a big lie. This is all built upon the idea that black Americans are being gunned, unarmed We're just peacefully doing our business and a police officer sees us and they come up to us and they want to shoot us and they want to kill us.
And that's a lie.
If you are genuinely concerned about black lives, if I was going to be fearful in America, I would be more afraid of a black person, a black male, a black perpetrator than I would be of a white person or a white police officer.
Going by the statistics.
We kill our own people way faster than any other person.
I actually say this, and it's controversial.
If you are truly, sincerely a white supremacist in America, the best thing you could do is do nothing and let black America tend to itself.
Because what we do to ourselves, when left unattended to ourselves, is way worse when you look at the statistics than allowing any other group to come in and try to do anything to us.
And that's including, of course, police officers who are not killing black Americans for no reason.
So in a second I'm going to ask you about the extent to which racism still shapes life in America because it remains this key issue in American politics and the stats tend to be rather split on all of this.
I'm going to get your answer on racism in America in one second first.
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Okay, so the main pitch, it seems, of the Democratic Party these days is that America is systemically racist.
According to the 1619 Project, America was rooted in racism.
America is a 400-year story of nothing but the foundations of racism being carried out in every aspect of American life.
So, how much do you think that racism is actually an obstacle to black Americans living today?
Not in 1960 when Jim Crow, not in 1860 when slavery was a thing, but today in 2020 America.
It's not at all an obstacle to black Americans today.
It is just there is no systemic racism, there is no law, there is nothing that says that I can't do something as a black person that you can do.
So it's completely, completely false.
What we're really talking about is the fact that people want to absolve themselves of personal responsibility and we're being helped.
If there's anything that's systemic in white, in America today, it's white guilt.
And that's the biggest problem that we have in America today is white guilt.
It's been institutionalized, it's been politicized, politicians, white people feeling bad for themselves, and therefore allowing people, allowing black people and white people alike, you know, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, to run around and act like toddlers, right?
So there's an emotional immaturity that is happening in black America and has spawned from the education system which shapes you from the time that you are in kindergarten to believe that because you're black you can't in America.
When you keep telling a child over and over again they can't because they won't, right?
They will begin to believe in their own futility.
And this is the thing that I try to conquer, right?
I try to go out there, I try to speak, and I try to say the problem, if you want to talk about anything systemic, it's that white people keep allowing this false narrative to be perpetuated and won't allow black Americans to get up onto their own two feet.
And that really stems from, I would say, the mid-1960s, where black America sort of took a shift away from the peaceful civil rights into this more, you know, hardcore militant black civil rights of burning down your neighborhoods and looting and rioting because they didn't want to take steps to be personally responsible.
What do you make of the argument?
I know that you covered some in your book, Blackout.
The argument that was made by LBJ and still made by Democrats today, that one of the big problems is that historic racism is built into the system such that people are starting from behind the eight ball.
That if you look at the broad history of the United States, that black Americans were discriminated against for the vast majority of America's history, really only alleviated legally in the 1960s and 1970s.
And even beyond then, there were informal structures of racism.
And therefore, that black Americans are starting off inherently behind sort of the starting line.
LBJ suggested, for example, that it would not be proper to simply remove all barriers to entry.
You're still leaving people who are so far behind that they can never catch up.
And that just wouldn't be appropriate to say, OK, now you're free to live your lives when they've already been systematically deprived of resources that other people have had in the United States.
Look, nobody will debate the fact that black Americans were oppressed in America for a The problem is that, and you're talking about LBJ's Howard University speech, where he said, you know, we need to fix this.
Fair.
We need to give black people full freedom.
We're getting rid of Jim Crow.
Great, great.
All of these things.
And then he did the worst thing ever.
Which is he assigned white guilt to everybody and said, but it's not enough to just give them their freedoms.
You know, we all have to get involved and we have to do this and we have to do that.
What I can say to you is that there is no group that has ever lagged behind another group that has gotten ahead with handouts.
You have to at some point do the hard work, right?
So let's say I've been illiterate because I grew up in a black America where I wasn't allowed to read.
I'm not going to learn to read by you pretending I can read.
Eventually I'm going to have to learn to read myself.
And this is sort of when all of these programs that are meant to instill equality Which are fundamentally racist in and of themselves, right?
Like allowing more black people to get into schools, which hurts black America.
These affirmative action practices, which was started by LBJ and this initiative for white people to feel guilty enough to just allow black people to be given accolades and scholarships that they don't deserve.
It has harmed black America over time, because at the end of the day, you know the information or you don't.
You can do it or you cannot.
And here's a great example.
Look at the areas in which black Americans actually excel in.
What are the areas we excel in?
Sports, right?
Did LeBron James become LeBron James because every time he scored a basket, we pretended it was four points?
Of course he didn't.
He did it because he did the hard work.
He went after school every day, whatever it was, he practiced his game, and LeBron James became LeBron James because he did the work and he put in the work.
So the areas that we excel in, you know, disprove the idea that the areas that we lag behind, we're going to get ahead by somehow just being given handouts.
We have to do the work.
This is a point Shelby Steele has made specifically with regard to basketball, suggesting that you don't say to a kid who's unable to dribble, well, you know, if we give you this handout or that handout, you're going to learn to dribble.
We say, okay, now you need to learn to dribble.
Right.
And that is the only way that anybody gets ahead of any color or at any point in American life.
So how did you personally make the transition?
Because you didn't always believe this stuff.
In fact, when would you say that you became more conservative on these issues?
What's actually funny is that I've always been conservative.
I just didn't know that I was a conservative, and I think this is what a lot of black Americans suffer from.
We're raised quite conservatively, and I was definitely raised staunchly conservatively in my grandfather's household, but I didn't care about politics.
I was ignorant about politics.
So I went through the public school system, and if you come out of the public school system out the other side, and you actually learn, if you actually study, you walk out, you get your degree, and you know, you know what?
Republicans are racist, conservatives are racist, and at every point that we've ever gotten ahead, it's because of Democrats.
I mean, even LBJ.
I mean, it's amazing.
They make it seem like he was this wonderful president for Black America because he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
He was forced to sign it in 1964.
You know, he stepped in, he became president because JFK got killed, and there were massive riots all around.
The entire time he was in Senate, For 20 years, he voted against every initiative to help black Americans.
He was a staunch racist.
He used the N-word all the time, you know, when he was in the White House.
And yet they've rewritten history and it's disappeared.
So we learned that LBJ was a hero.
So I wasn't politically inclined at all.
I had never voted.
But if you had asked me, you stopped me on the street, and you said, are you a Democrat or Republican, I would have said Democrat.
And it would have been because of the reasons that I just listed.
So I started paying attention in politics when Donald Trump came down the escalator, which is quite hilariously, because I thought this man should never be the president of the United States ever, right?
So I don't care where you were in America.
I mean, I was on your side with this.
Like, no, not this guy.
I thought that he was just too boisterous, too New York.
And also, he was the guy who says you're fired, too cultural to be the president of the United States.
I didn't believe that he was the right person for the job, especially coming off of Obama, the smooth talker.
But then something weird started happening, where this guy who I thought should not be the president of the United States, rather than saying he shouldn't be the president of the United States because he's not qualified, the media started saying he shouldn't be the president of the United States because he's a racist, a sexist, a homophobe.
I'm thinking, wait a second.
This guy has been loved.
You know, in the media, they loved this guy.
I mean, in every hip hop song I listened to growing up, they wanted to be like Trump.
You want to end up at Mar-a-Lago.
He was a symbol of status and of wealth.
So I asked myself an important question and that question was, is it plausible that black Americans are now being, and racism is being used as a theme to turn black Americans into single issue voters?
And the answer is yes.
And I started researching and I fell in love with Thomas Sowell.
I mean, it really was a story of falling in love with Thomas Sowell and his books.
And he knocked me into reality.
And you really, you really can't unsee it.
You can't unsee it after you, once you learn the knowledge of how we've been used as single issue voters, you can't unsee it.
So Republicans have been struggling, obviously, for decades to try and make inroads in the black community.
Shockingly, some of the polls show that Trump is actually making some inroads in the black community, which is a complete, obviously, surprise to many of the pollsters and to many of the mainstream media.
What do you think is the best way for Republicans to speak to members of the black community?
Because it seems that they've tried a bunch of different angles.
All of them seem to fail.
Many of them seem to be very apologetic in tone.
There's this feeling like, okay, we have to make excuses for what we are saying.
It's always seemed to me that if you talk to black people the same way you talk to everybody else, because black people are like everybody else, that seems like the best way to do it.
Right.
But I think you have more expertise on this than I do.
Yeah.
How should Republicans talk to members of the black community?
So what I've noticed with Republicans is that they're suffering from PTSD.
You guys get called racists so much that you're fearful, right?
And I'm saying you guys, I'm kind of looping you into all of this, but they're fearful to say anything, even if it's true.
Everyone kind of tiptoes out.
I always describe it as like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the munchkins come out.
Like, you know, even though your instincts, you're like, you know, George Floyd, this doesn't sound right.
Republicans will wait and wait until somebody else is at first because you've been called racist for absolutely nothing for years.
And the reason why Trump was able to make inroads is because he's rude, right?
And here's the thing.
Black America needed someone cultural.
He needed someone who didn't care, who wasn't going to apologize, who was going to say what he meant and not apologize for it because it was simply true.
when he gave that infamous speech and said, Black America, what do you have to lose?
And he listed all of these ways that Black American communities are suffering.
And the media calls him a racist.
He never apologized for it.
He never said, I could have said that better, or I should have been more sensitive.
He simply said it, and he left it there.
And that is actually, that should be a call to action for all Republicans.
Don't apologize.
If it's true, it's true.
If you haven't been called racist yet in 2020, I've been called racist, you know?
I've been called anti-black.
So I think that that is the most important lesson, is just be courageous, because at the end of the day, silence is not winning us.
What I always say about the right, which is really interesting, is that the right is playing by rules that were established by the left, and the left is playing by no rules.
Right?
We have to start fighting.
And I worry that there's not enough voices that are willing to just simply say the truth, let it linger, and not worry about the names that they're being called.
So, speaking of having the courage to step into waters where angels fear to tread, you obviously cut this video in the aftermath of the George Floyd death, in which you went through specifically his criminal record, and you talked about not really the situation surrounding George Floyd's death, which now as it turns out, new details suggest it's a lot more complex than the original narrative.
You talked specifically about the attempts to elevate George Floyd into a sort of moral paragon, which obviously is something that the culture has done, it's what the media have done, And you see this fairly routinely, is the attempt to suggest that people who, at the very best, until the moment they were shot by police, had led difficult lives, are in fact people who ought to be emulated or who are free of any moral stain.
We're seeing it more recently with Jacob Blake, who's being elevated into a loving father of three, as opposed to a person who had an open warrant for both domestic violence and sexual assault in the third degree, and who resisted arrest.
What prompted you to make that statement, and why do you think so many people in the media have been willing to simply cover up the reality of who criminal suspects are in interactions with the police?
You know, when I started looking into who he was, and I had no question he was going to have a rap sheet, I knew obviously the police had not stopped this man for no reason, and I knew that it couldn't have escalated that situation unless he somehow was resisting arrest, despite having no knowledge of that.
When I did look into him and I found his rap sheet, And I'm sitting here thinking that they've elevated him to such a level that they're burying him in a gold casket.
Like, a gold casket!
Dr. Ben Carson will not be buried in a gold casket.
Larry Elder will not be buried in a gold casket.
You know, all of these Condoleezza Rice will not be buried in a gold casket.
But this person, who spent nine prison stints, nine prison and jail stints, which is remarkable, actually.
If there's any Guinness Book of Records, look at that.
Nine prison and jail stints before you turn 40 is actually the most impressive thing he's ever done in his entire life.
Elevated, and you have little black kids that are wearing shirts.
Merle's being painted of him, calling him a hero, former Vice President Joe Biden saying that they're gonna speak at his funeral.
This is crazy.
And it's indicative of where we're at in black culture, where this is what we constantly do.
We elevate people that should not be elevated, and we downgrade people that should be elevated, right?
So Condoleezza Rice, Uncle Tom, Larry Elder, Coon.
Dr. Ben Carson?
Stupid.
That's my favorite one.
A literal neurosurgeon is stupid, right?
And this is a problem with black culture.
And until we have the courage to go into it and say this is wrong, you can disagree with whether or not Derek Chauvin should be on his, you know, have been on his neck for that long and disregard the fact that he was high on fentanyl and high on methamphetamine in his system at the time of the arrest.
But you should also disagree with elevating this person to the level of a hero.
And I just felt it was weighing on me for days.
Just watching people spin this man into a hero.
And I said, I have to say something because this is a lie.
And I don't care about the peer pressure.
I don't care about, you know, you should just be quiet because let his family grieve.
Four day funeral.
I mean, none of us, we're never going to get that.
None of us are going to get that.
And we've lived our lives, apparently, a lot more nobly than he did.
So, speaking of that, number one, why do you think that everybody reacted the way they did?
People were very, very, very upset about all of this.
And there is sort of an unspoken rule that after somebody dies, you sort of let the dead be buried, but obviously you went after him on a character level.
I mean, you talked about who he was as a character.
Why do you think it was important to do that?
And also, why do you think It is that there is this phenomenon in American life where certain people are elevated.
Even Barack Obama seems to have been denigrated in the American public mind since his presidency.
When he was elected, it was a historic moment.
Now, the fact that he was elected twice as a black president with an overwhelming majority is not in any way a proof that America is not racist.
We just have to ignore that happened.
We have to pretend that it's extraordinarily historic that Kamala Harris has now been selected as a VP candidate, even though we just had a black president five minutes ago.
Right, right.
You know, I would say what the left has realized is that racist sort of represents an Achilles heel in America, meaning that they know that they stroke this one issue because they've done such a good job of programming people to believe that it's still ever-present, and it's not.
It's just not.
That they can inspire riots, they can inspire protests, and they can inspire upheaval, and that's what they want ahead of an election cycle.
Uh, somehow they're pinning all this stuff in the back of conservatives.
It makes no sense.
Uh, you know, and, and you have corporations that are, you know, capitulating to this ridiculous narrative.
And it just, it just becomes way for them to seize control and can seize power, um, by reducing black Americans to emotional toddlers.
And that's what we're seeing.
You know, we're seeing a toddler response to things, not waiting to get more information, just saying black versus white.
And it's remarkable if you look at the actual headlines, right?
We know that you're more likely as a white person to be killed by a black person the other way around.
But when a black, when a white person is killed by a black person, the headline doesn't mention race, right?
It's five-year-old got shot by a man in Chicago.
But the second that they can look at the race and say, oh look, a white person did something bad to a black person, the media just completely gets in on that and just race, race, race, race, race, race, race.
And again, I think it's just a tool of manipulation because if you can get somebody to react emotionally and not rationally, you can control them.
They're yours.
And I've always just tried to be the person that says, look, pause, reflect, think rationally and wait to get all the details and don't see yourself.
I certainly don't see myself as black first.
I see myself as American first.
I don't see myself as a woman first.
I see myself as an American first.
And we just need to get black America to a more emotionally mature spot than they are.
And it's difficult when I said, you know, as I said earlier, when you have systemic white guilt, It's very difficult to expect black Americans to react rationally rather than emotionally.
So in the aftermath of your George Floyd video, famously Dave Chappelle went after you in his comedy special, and you handled it with real aplomb.
I mean, you just kind of laughed it off and pointed out he's a cultural figure, he can say whatever he wants.
It can't be fun to be attacked by Dave Chappelle in the way that you were attacked by Dave Chappelle.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about that, and what exactly did Chappelle get wrong about George Floyd?
You know, I saw it, and first off, I didn't actually find it to be funny, right?
But I do believe that humor is a safe space.
And the bigger thing, when I look at a perspective of that, I say, they're already silencing comedians.
I don't want to be one of those people.
Even though I find this to be, you know, denigrating, degrading, disrespectful, I don't really think that it's right for me to say to a comedian, you can't say what you want.
But there was absolutely nothing funny about the entire 20 minutes of his speech.
You know, he didn't seem to be in an emotionally good spot, if I'm being honest with you.
And I think that he just took the bait on the media.
I actually kind of thought, which is interesting, if you watch Dave Chappelle's old skit, he's gone after the left a lot and he's been threatened to be cancelled and they all, you know, they have something bad to say about it because he tells the truth.
And I felt like he was just giving them what they wanted and attacked me.
And then I had sort of the big girl perspective that here is probably, you know, the most well-renowned, well-renowned comedian.
Uh, at least in America, probably abroad, and my name is being said out of his mouth, so people who don't know me are going to look me up, and they're going to see my views, and some people are going to be brought over to the side and realize, okay, what she said was not really that big of a deal, you know?
She kind of told the truth, and that's kind of what I'm after.
I kind of try to look at the big picture, um, and not be so selfish and egotistical when I, like, see somebody attack me.
Just, you know, it's meaningless.
So in a second, I want to ask you about that perspective because one of the themes that runs throughout your book is this theme of anti-victimhood.
This idea that you're not a victim, you have agency in your own life.
I want to ask where that came from in your personal life, what's your sort of history with that, and why victimhood is so attractive to so many people on all sides of the aisle and of all colors.
It's a really rich political vein for people to mine.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so one of the themes that you focus in a lot in Blackout is the theme that victimhood and speaking about victimhood and believing yourself to be a victim is actually extraordinarily crippling.
You have some personal stories about your sort of realization that wallowing in victimhood was a terrible idea and actually crippling for your future.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, so I mean, people, I don't know if people in the political sphere know this, but when I was in high school, I went through what was classified as a hate crime, and I talk about that in the book, what happened, you know, who the perpetrators were, and how the media sort of, when I was in high school, took a narrative away from me because they were just like, this is perfect, we have a politician's son, called her the N-word, and we can stick a label of her as, you know, as a victim, and this person, as a racist.
And very young people involved, 14 years old, 14 years old being called a racist, me being called a victim, before I really decided on who I wanted to be in life.
And so I got to, you know, experience what it's like.
What does it feel like being a victim?
What do you earn from being a victim?
We've all been victimized.
I could mine your life and tell you you've been a victim before, I've been a victim before, various things, you know, it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't need to be about race, it can be about anything, you can be a victim.
But what is it about staying a victim is what the left is after, right?
Like being, this is like the ultimate achievement, like this is it, you've achieved the elixir of life, be a victim.
That is so harmful and so cancerous to people.
We are, human beings are meant to triumph.
We're meant to get over things.
It actually makes you stronger no matter what you go through.
If you champion those experiences and develop a good perspective about those experiences you become a stronger individual.
When I accepted this victim narrative I suffered with anorexia for four years.
I was absolutely miserable.
I was a mean person.
I wasn't happy.
Right?
But when I suddenly had my aha moment and realized I was a child and a narrative was taken from me, not only from me, but from these kids and people didn't know what had happened.
They just loved the race thing.
I realized that, wow, this is completely toxic and it transformed my life.
And it wasn't the way my grandparents raised me.
They never raised me to see myself as a victim.
My grandfather grew up on a sharecropping farm, picking cotton and laying out tobacco to dry when he was five years old.
He's never once complained, never once told me I can't do something because of the color of my skin.
I think it's insulting to his legacy, for me to live in this America, to run around saying that I'm a victim.
So I really, really do credit my grandfather and the experiences that he championed, my grandmother and the experiences that she championed when there actually was systemic oppression against black Americans for making me feel too ashamed to grab onto this victim narrative when it comes to race.
My ancestors didn't live through what they lived through so I could run around and cry about being black.
So you mentioned earlier that one of your great intellectual influences was Thomas Sowell.
Many people have asked me if I could pick one person in America to be president, who would it be?
I've always said Sowell.
Who are some of your other intellectual influences?
People who really sort of changed how you think about these issues and others.
Yeah, Larry Elder, I know he's been on the show, he's become a mentor to me.
Sometimes if I don't understand something because I wasn't alive for it and I'll be like, what happened with this case?
I pick up the phone and I call him.
He's been wonderful.
Shelby Steele and Thomas Solby, my top three in terms of black authors that have sort of slapped me into reality, but non-black people.
Milton Friedman, right? So it's not enough. When I first got into politics, I had an idea and an itch, right? Like, you know, something's not right here. But it's not enough to just be somebody who has a feeling. You can't just keep going out there saying black people don't have to be Democrats. You need to do the research. Why are you a conservative, right? What do you stand on?
Why do you believe in free markets and capitalism? Where does Western civilization come from?
So there have been so many authors along the way that I had to sort of go back and learn something.
I had learned all throughout public school, but it was a miseducation, not an actual education.
So I had to spend years studying, reading books, and seeing everything that I had missed about Western civilization and what makes it so great.
A great starting book that I always recommend people read is How the West Was Won.
By Rodney Stark, it's a great book to kind of just get you kind of grounded in, you know, what is Western civilization and why are people pretending to hate it?
And to make you feel prideful and to make you feel proud.
And I think I am so proud to be an American.
I'm proud of the story of my ancestors.
I'm proud that I did not have to live through that.
And I'm challenging and inspiring other black Americans to realize that we are, if you are a black American living in America today, you are a part of the most privileged black Americans that have ever walked the face of the planet.
And yet you are also a part of the whiniest, right?
The whiniest and the most upset black people that have ever walked the face of the planet.
And that's problematic.
Something's not right there.
So let's talk a little bit about one of the critiques that's been made of your take on black America.
So you've used language before where you've suggested that people need to get off the ideological plantation, for example, and there's been a critique that basically says, you know, you talk a lot about black agency.
Are you depriving people of agency when you suggest that they've been indoctrinated by the educational system or when you suggest that they have been sort of told what to think, they've been lied to?
Are you suggesting that people aren't freely choosing what it is that they've chosen politically, or do you really believe that it's really not a question of agency, it's a question of misinformation?
Yeah, it's a question of misinformation, and people always get me wrong.
They think that I say things to be theatrical when I say the democratic plantation, and people go, you shouldn't say that, you shouldn't liken it to slavery.
No, actually, if you sit down and you study the model of American slavery and I say Democrat plantation because at the starting point of the Civil War all Democrats had slaves. There were no Republicans that held a slave, that owned a slave and when you look at the model of it right what was what was necessary? Illiteracy. Black Americans are not allowed to learn how to read. Look across America today.
You can go into inner cities.
Here in Los Angeles, you've got black Americans.
75% of black boys can't pass a basic literacy exam.
Major cities like Baltimore, across five schools, they couldn't find a single black child that was proficient in reading or writing.
So we are actually seeing, through the education system, pollution, the dumbing down of all Americans, right?
But especially black Americans.
And when you dumb down black Americans, that means that they start to look like they're getting their education from culture, right?
And that's problematic.
Father absence, huge issue.
We know you actually were the person that woke me up on that.
I watched an old video of yours on Black Lives Matter where you talked about, you know, 23% single motherhood rate in the 1960s, 74% at the time that you shot that.
I think it's 77% as we're sitting here right now.
And what was important to maintaining slavery?
Making sure the family was broken down.
They were constantly trading slaves.
If you read Frederick Douglass's book, His autobiography, in the first chapter, he talks about how he felt nothing when his mother died, felt nothing when he was taken away from his sisters, because that was important to maintaining the slave mentality.
So, in my book, I have a book on slavery, and I really spell out, when I say Democrat plantations, I mean it.
It's been updated, it's been modified, but we are very much still living on the plantation, doing the work for Democrats, and getting nothing back.
Right?
Voting for them in 93% margins is, to me, that's a form of slavery.
We're doing the work for you, and we're getting nothing back.
Our communities don't get fixed, our children don't get brighter.
So I'm a lot more thoughtful than people give me credit for.
It sounds like a flamethrower, like I'm just a flamethrower, but I've thought deeply about these topics, and I believe what I say.
So let's talk about some of the cultural influences that you're speaking about.
So obviously, there's the culture of politics, which is very much based in race.
Politicians have an awful lot of hay to make out of suggesting that people are racist.
Kamala Harris is, I think, the greatest example of this I have ever seen in modern American politics, literally calling Joe Biden a racist, and then one year later, suggesting that she called him a racist because they're in the middle of a debate, which is about as transparent a move as I can possibly imagine.
So you have the culture of politics, you have the culture of Hollywood, in which movies are constantly suggesting that black Americans are victims.
Recently, there was a movie on Netflix I was watching with my wife, in which there was a literal speech by Jamie Foxx about how America was built to keep black women down.
And then there is the culture of music.
And I want to go through each one of these with you.
So in terms of the cultural policies, we've gone through that a little bit.
When you look at how Hollywood addresses race, what are the problems that you see there?
Because obviously this is mostly a bunch of white executives who are attempting to, I think, be sympathetic or empathetic to what they think black Americans believe or want to hear or feel.
What do you think about Hollywood's messages on race?
Yeah, well, first and foremost, the Democrats control Hollywood.
You're not allowed to be a conservative, a vocal conservative, and still keep your job, right?
I mean, if you're a vocal conservative and you come out and you say something, you're cancelled, you're gone, you're out of here.
And to me, it's become a huge propaganda machine.
And as I mentioned earlier, when you have black Americans who are not educated, black Americans like these black boys who can't pass a basic literacy exam, Well, where are they getting their information from?
That means they're watching movies, they're watching TV.
Hollywood becomes the teachers, right?
And I think that the Democrats have understood this for a very long time.
And one of the biggest mistakes that conservatives made was giving up the culture war.
The culture war is so important because so many people are not going to pick up a book But they are going to watch SNL.
They're going to watch an SNL skit and they're going to accept that to be some truth.
You know, that this must be what's going on because they're making fun of conservatives on Saturday Night Live.
This must be what everybody thinks because it's made it to the big screen.
So everybody must be feeling this.
We all agree on this.
That, to me, is simple propaganda.
So let's talk about the culture of music.
So we have some agreements and we have some disagreements on the culture of music, famously.
So when it comes to the culture of music that is consumed in the black community, obviously rap is at the top of the list.
There's obviously a huge gap between the high forms of art that have been created by members of the black community and the rap culture of today.
I mean, it's a pretty broad range between Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and, say, Cardi B, who's now, I guess, interviewing former vice president of the United States.
What do you make of rap culture?
Because you have sort of a split opinion on rap culture a little bit.
Like on the one hand, you seem to recognize some of the downsides of the messages being purveyed.
On the other hand, you've suggested that there are some sort of differential messages in there that might be useful.
Right. So I mean, there are definitely a minority of rappers who are rapping about things that are actually important.
And I grew up listening to Jay-Z.
I don't like Jay-Z anymore because of his politics and I think he's being used and he's become a puppet.
but growing up listening to his music actually did something different for me when I was a hopeless, impoverished person listening to his music and he talks about how he made his way out.
He wasn't talking about killing a bunch of people, he was talking about business.
And his Black Album, he really talks about how he would not allow industry to use him, how he understood what his worth was.
These things were actually important lessons about business.
business and it came in a lyrical form and it was good, right? I would say Kanye West, he's never really written about like go out, grab a gat and just kill people. But unfortunately today that's the majority of what rap has become, right?
And it came in a lyrical form and it was good, right?
I would say Kanye West, he's never really written about go out, grab a gat and just kill people.
But unfortunately today that's the majority of what rap has become, right?
And so I completely agree with your assessment about Cardi B.
And so I completely agree with your assessment about Cardi B. It is one of the biggest insults. If black Americans are not insulted by the fact that Joe Biden, who has been hiding in his basement for the entire year made an appearance and came out because he was going to do an interview with Cardi B, do we have nothing better to offer? I mean, this would be akin to Donald Trump saying, I'm going to give no interviews, but he came up and he decided to give an interview to Justin Bieber, right?
It is one of the biggest insults.
I mean, which I actually, Justin Bieber, I'm sorry, I know you're a Christian man, I don't want to put you in the same boat as Cardi B. But it would be absurd.
White America would go, what is this?
Why are you being interviewed by Justin Bieber?
And it's because you're pandering.
Right?
You're pandering.
You look at Cardi B's Instagram, you see she has millions of followers, and you think, okay, this is an illiterate person, and if I appeal to this illiterate person, and she does a Like, she literally did.
In the middle of this interview, they think she's cool, she's hip, just by sitting here and taking this interview, black people vote for me.
It's basically saying, black people, you are stupid, you are dumb, and you're so foolish.
I mean, do you think, what if she just said in the middle of the interview, Joe Biden, can you name one Cardi B album?
No, Joe Biden, do me a favor, just one Cardi B lyric.
He couldn't do it, of course he's not, because he's being handled and they're saying, black people like this person, this is what they're into, and so here you go, talk to her.
Same thing with Hillary Clinton, when she went to the breakfast club and she said she had hot sauce in her bag, right?
She didn't know what Beyonce's song came from.
One of her handlers said, say this, right?
Probably got the questions ahead of time, say this, say you keep hot sauce in your bag, right now Beyonce's song is trending and it's hot sauce in my bag swag.
And she looked like a fish out of water and said it.
It is demeaning.
It is pandering.
It is ridiculous, okay?
And she asked pointedly ridiculous questions.
I want lower taxes, but I want universal health care for all.
She had no idea what she was doing, and yet both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden made the time to sit with her because they believe black people are stupid.
And black people that thought, yay, that's a win.
No, it's not a win.
It shows you that they still believe that you are so stupid that they couldn't find many of the amazing intellectual black people that we have in the world to sit down with and ask them tough questions.
An interview with Condoleezza Rice, right?
An interview with Larry Elder.
You know, even if you want somebody that is a Democrat, that's fine.
There are way more intellectual black Democrats you could have sat down with that you chose an illiterate rapper, because that's what she is.
She's illiterate.
Well, I mean, I would have paid money to hear Joe Biden's rendition of, what else?
As a popular rap artist myself, whose remix slaps significantly harder than the original, I can honestly say that Joe Biden's rendition, I would have paid good money for.
So I need to ask you about the Kanye issue.
So famously, you had a little bit of a tete-a-tete on Twitter when Kanye came out and he was supporting President Trump.
And I said, live by the Kanye, die by the Kanye, which is mainly me saying, you know, Kanye takes a lot of positions on a lot of different issues.
And you got a little bit upset about that, it seemed, on Twitter.
So what do you think is the proper relationship between celebrity and politics?
Because I am a strict down the line, I think that celebrities have no place in politics unless they actually know what they are talking about on any sort of deep level.
I understand the impact of celebrity, I understand, but I object to it.
Right.
But you have, I think, a more nuanced version of that.
So what's your view on celebrity and politics?
Yeah, you know, with Kanye, I think what I was upset with was that so many people were just dismissing him and calling him crazy.
And it's just not fair.
I mean, I think, I like Kanye, Kanye's a friend, and Kanye is a person that is a billionaire.
And I don't, I would not take someone, you know, to be like, he's richer than both you and I sitting here combined, right?
I'm assuming, I don't know, maybe you're a billionaire.
And people keep taking him lightly, and it's been his entire life.
Kanye was not coming out and telling people how to vote.
He never said, vote for this person.
He never said, do this.
He never said, listen to me, follow me.
He simply said, I support the president.
And I'm tired of people bullying me, telling me that I can't wear a MAGA hat.
And that was such an important message, especially for black Americans.
And maybe I was emotional in my response, because it is so hard.
You try being a black conservative, amidst Black Lives Matter, and go out and say, I support the president.
And you will see how you get treated, right?
You, it's easy.
You get called racist.
With us, there is a It's ferocious.
They want you gone.
I mean, they will accuse you of anything.
They want you gone.
You get death threats.
You get all these horrible things.
And here's a guy that's just saying, I'm no longer going to lie about who I support.
Not, if you don't support him, you're a racist.
I mean, we know his wife is not a Trump supporter, despite the fact that she works for them.
And I thought, this is productive.
It's a good thing for someone to say, I'm comfortable saying that I'm black and I'm a conservative in the cultural realm, especially because we know most black Americans have their eyes fixed culturally.
That it just sent a huge signal that it's okay to break away from the hive mentality.
Now, if Kanye was out there saying, I'd like to inform policy because I'm Kanye West, I'd like to go in, I will now be conducting the interviews, I'll sit down with candidates and make sure that what they're doing is great, I would have said, I have a problem with that, right?
Because that's ridiculous to assume that because you're a cultural figure, you somehow are now smart enough to be asking political questions.
It's pointedly ridiculous.
So that was the nuance.
He wasn't doing anything that I found to be harmful.
He just was saying, I support the president.
So I actually agree with that.
I think that it's actually a very important thing that Kanye West put on a MAGA hat and basically said, It's fine.
I'm allowed to wear a MAGA hat.
As someone who's been called a Jewish Nazi for being a Republican, I certainly understand the perspective of being inside a minority group where it is considered verboten to be on a different side of the political aisle.
So I'm very glad that happened.
I mean, speaking of which, you know, you talk about sort of policy influences.
One of the areas in which Kanye and Kim actually did have a policy influence is on criminal justice reform.
I know that you were an advocate also, I believe, of criminal justice reform.
I had some difficulty with the criminal justice reform bill that the Trump administration pushed, mainly because I was not of the opinion the criminal justice system is inherently racist.
I think there's a case to be made that we should cut back on the drug war because I think that there are a lot of people in jail for- Ridiculous.
I agree.
for silly crimes or crimes that at least they were in jail for too long for.
But overall I'm not of the opinion that people are being incarcerated for no reason or that mass incarceration is a serious problem.
So where are you on criminal justice reform?
And do you think that that is an effective version of outreach to black Americans?
I don't think there's a dichotomy here.
I think you can believe in criminal justice reform without subscribing to the idea that black people are being put into jail for no reason.
I don't believe, I believe both.
I do not believe that black Americans are being put into prison for no reason.
But I do believe that some of the harsher sentencing that happened, you know, when Bill Clinton became president, three strikes you're out, even if it's three small things, three strikes you're out, we're wrong.
And a lot of people were still serving prison sentences because of that.
So I think, you know, it's good to take a look at the criminal justice system.
I don't think it's great, and I'm someone who grew up with uncles that were in and out of prison.
I know for a fact, when you get a kid when they're young and they're in the system, if you can help them get out, when they leave, they get $50 and a bus ticket, right?
What do you expect someone who's been in prison for a year, you give them $50 and a bus ticket to do in their life, right?
They usually go back to crime because they have nothing.
And so their way of trying to get ahead is to steal, to rob, do these things.
What I loved about what they were doing was creating these transition programs, which were so desperately needed, because you don't want somebody who's desperate dropped back into your community.
You want somebody who goes, OK, we're going to help you find a job.
We're going to help you get on your two feet.
And that is what I loved and supported about the programming.
I do not at all believe that black Americans are being targeted by the criminal justice system at all.
I'm actually staunchly against that.
We commit more crimes.
So I want to talk to you in a second about some of the solutions that are on the table, because it seems like so much of our racial conversation is problem-focused and never solution-focused.
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Okay, so let's talk about the solutions versus problems orientation of American politics It seems fairly obvious at this point that a huge number of politicians have an awfully large stake in the racial conversation so long as no solutions are actually promulgated.
So Joe Biden, many Democrats, they keep throwing out the phrase systemic racism, specifically avoiding any sort of Specific definition.
If you say to them, what do you mean by systemic racism?
They literally will not explain it, because systemic racism technically means one of a couple things.
It could mean theoretically that there's an actual policy in place that is racist.
That's illegal.
It could theoretically mean that there are racists in the United States, which is obviously true and will be true in every society for all time, for past and future, because human beings are inherently sinful and flawed.
Or it could mean that historic practices have effects today But that doesn't necessarily mean that you get to implement policies that discriminate against one group in favor of another group.
So the third is inarguable, that history matters, but that doesn't necessarily create a solution.
It seems like anytime anybody pushes forward a solution, Democrats particularly and members of the media get very angry about the solutions that are being forwarded.
So to take a prime example, Senator Tim Scott put forward a national police reform bill and it was filibustered by Democrats.
Well, he was simultaneously called an Uncle Tom, which did trend during the RNC when he was speaking.
So let's talk about some of the solutions that you think should be on the table in the black community, which means actively labeling some of the problems that the black community is experiencing beyond sort of a miasmatic systemic racism.
Right.
I mean, I think the solution is for black Americans to fix the problems within our own community.
The solution is for white Americans to get out of the discussion because we have become the authors of our own problems.
The culture.
You've talked about culture so many times.
When I was growing up, my mom and my dad never checked to see if I did my homework.
It was not important for them to make sure that I was doing my homework.
Now, I naturally did.
I was good at school, so I liked it.
But it wasn't necessary because our culture is a bit different.
Now, when I went to my best friend's house, who happened to be Japanese, her father terrified me.
We got home we got after school.
He's like Kathy.
Her name is Kathy.
You sit down at the table right now.
You do your homework.
I mean, he didn't even want he was like astonished that she even brought somebody home because homework was so important.
So there's a cultural difference.
This is why nobody wants to talk about Asians because they're the ones that are doing the best in this country, right?
And they're doing the best financially.
Asian Americans are doing the best in this country.
Nobody talks about them.
It's because their culture is different.
They value different things.
Black values have to shift.
You want to talk about, oh, single father, single motherhood rate, why there's no fathers in the homes?
Well, it's not good for us when you have a culture and music which glorifies baby mama, right?
Baby mama, this amazing thing.
We have to get serious about education.
We need to stop criminalizing black Americans who want to get ahead.
For example, I was bullied in middle school by other black people because I spoke proper English.
Literally, that was my crime.
I spoke proper English, so they would say, you're acting white.
When you start to assign attributes that are considered whiteness, speaking proper English, caring about your schoolwork, these are things that black America makes fun of black Americans for.
Because they say, well that means that you're not black, unless you're speaking in colloquialisms.
Unless you're listening to dirty rap.
If you're not listening to Cardi B, you don't know her music.
So I've seen this growing up.
This has happened to me.
We have a culture problem in black America.
I think the best way to fix it is for everybody to stop debating about it.
Everyone stop the hand-holding and let black Americans get to work.
It is amazing how many white Americans seem to want to take control of this particular debate.
The entire anti-racist contingent led by Robin DiAngelo and her white fragility crew, they've attempted to regain control of racial issues in America, essentially by suggesting that black Americans cannot be expected to fix the system, that white Americans are the only ones who can fix the system since white Americans created the broken system.
In the first place, this call has been taken up.
by a wide variety of political figures who call for things like slavery reparations from the American government.
It was taken up by the National African American Museum of History and Culture, who literally suggested in full-on white supremacist fashion that things like punctuality and delayed gratification were white attributes.
So what do you say to white people who insist that, you know, they are so woke that they know better than somebody like Candace Owens what the black community needs?
I say you're racist.
I find that to be a fundamentally racist concept.
And I've had that attack.
White people that come to me and say, you don't understand, you don't understand.
I don't understand what it's like to be black in America.
I've done it my entire life.
I've never taken one day off on being black.
Not even an hour off.
I've done it my entire life.
And yet they feel they have the authority.
That white guilt has given them the authority to help me understand what it's like to be black, which is basically saying that unless I view myself as less than them, I can't be black.
Imagine that.
I'm saying to them, I view myself as your equal.
And that bothers them.
That really bothers them.
This idea that black Americans are suffering because of the color of their skin.
I mean, imagine a world where people think Malia and Sasha Obama are suffering.
That's what they're suggesting, because of the color of their skin.
But Malia and Sasha Obama should be given handouts in life about their suffering, and there are all these horrible things that they're going through because of the color of their skin.
No, that's not true.
Are there privileges that you can be afforded if you're rich?
Yeah, that's not because of the color of your skin.
It's called economic privilege.
We should all aspire to have economic privilege, right?
That's why I like free markets.
That's why I like capitalism.
We should all aspire to work harder, but it becomes impossible when we have this white guilt permeating throughout every aspect of American culture.
And that is what I just absolutely hate.
I want nothing to do with it.
We have to start changing it.
We have to start changing the conversation.
It starts with white Americans getting out of the conversation.
So getting white Americans out of the conversation, what are the discussions of race like within the black community in terms of, are there gradations and places of origin?
So the media have decided, for example, that black ought to be capitalized and the term white ought not be capitalized because the term black refers to people of a common ethnicity and origin despite the fact that people from Jamaica are not the same as people from Kenya who are not the same as people from South Africa or Zimbabwe or from the United States.
This is all one unified group of people.
White people, however, are merely defined in opposition to black Americans.
You see some of this in the treatment of Kamala Harris because there have been people like Thomas Chatterston Williams who have pointed out she's not actually an American descendant of slaves.
She's a descendant of American slaves, that she is half Jamaican and she's half Indian, and that if you're going to look at the demographics of Indian Americans, Indian Americans are actually the single richest subgroup in America right now, and so it's difficult to make the case that Indian Americans are subject to vicious, brute racism.
What are the discussions of race like within the black community or is it sort of irrelevant within the black community itself?
It's incredibly immature, you know, and I will say that over and over again.
It's incredibly immature and because they just have become so comfortable with being a victim because society has allowed it.
You've allowed the toddler to throw the tantrum so many times that this is the way that they think is the method to get what they want.
It's easy.
Being a victim is remarkably easy, right?
That's the easy path in life.
Life is hard.
You know, being responsible for yourself, waking up every day, going to work, taking responsibility when you do something wrong, that's the harder path.
Saying you're a victim and when you fail it's because of white people, the white boogeyman, that's very easy.
And so amongst black Americans it's very hostile when a black American like me ordains a thing for themselves.
And says, I don't accept this narrative, it's very hostile, it's angry, but it needs to happen.
You know, I did a speech at, not Howard University, another one of the HBCUs, and when I tell you, I stood up there for three hours and just took it.
Boo, yelling, I mean, just completely crazy.
It would never happen in an auditorium full of white people because they'll be a tiny bit more respectful than they were being that day.
But after the three hours of them just brutalizing me, at the end of it, they all kind of came up and said, you know, I want to take a picture with you.
And I respect you for standing your ground.
Let that happen.
Let that dialogue happen amongst black Americans.
Let them actually hear a black conservative perspective.
It's hard to hear a black conservative perspective when black conservatives are routinely drowned out by white voices, ironically, right?
Ironically, by these white voices pooh-poohing and saying how hard it is for us to be black.
But it's not hard for us to be black.
It's hard for us to be successful when you keep telling us it's hard for us to be black.
So you are one of the founders of Blexit, which was an attempt to get more black Americans to exit the Democratic Party.
And, you know, there's been similar attempts to get Jews to exit the Democratic Party, which is wild on success, unfortunately.
So what are the metrics that you're seeing in the black community?
Are you seeing a change in thinking inside the black community in terms of voting, in terms of how people think about politics?
Do you see any difference generationally in how people think about the various parties?
Yes, I mean, I think for the first time there has been a lot of chatter and a lot of debate in black America about politics in general.
And I think it's because of people like me, like Larry Elder, who have sort of laid out on the line and just said, this is what I believe.
I'm not editing that.
You know, in terms of Blexit, we're in 20 states now.
You know, we have chapter leaders and ambassadors all across the state that are in the community actually having these discussions and knocking on doors.
And I think, you know, at the height of this sort of racial unrest, there also is racial conversation.
And I will tell you, when I got started, I had no black fans.
It was, you're an Uncle Tom, you're a coon, you're a house negro, and that has completely transformed.
and I'm inundated with emails of people thanking me.
And the number one thing that they say, which I find to be incredible, is thank you for giving me my life back.
And that's an incredible statement because I feel that.
That's how I felt when I opened my eyes after I finished the first Thomas Soul book.
I wanted to just look at him and say, thank you for giving me my life back.
Now it's okay, I can go out and I can be great.
I don't see myself as less than.
Victimhood is a weight.
You're walking around with a weight on your back, and you don't realize you've been carrying that weight until you let it go.
And now I feel that I can sprint in my life, and I can go, and I can achieve things.
I know I can, because I know that I'm not being oppressed because of the color of my skin.
You know, that's what Blexit offers for our members all across the nation.
And the reason why we did it was to create an actual community, because I think when you're a black conservative, you can think you're alone.
And we wanted them to just see, you're actually not alone.
There are tons of us popping up all across the state, all across America, and I do credit Donald Trump with a lot of that because he just had the courage and the audacity to say it and not apologize.
President Trump, obviously.
President Trump, a very controversial racial figure.
A lot of people maintain, the media maintain constantly, that the president is a personal racist.
Simultaneously, they claim that Joe Biden is a great unifier on the issues of race.
You obviously have met with the president a bunch of times.
You know President Trump.
He's a man who says very awkward and off-putting things on a fairly regular basis on places like Twitter.
What do you make of the accusations that he is racist?
It's so ridiculous.
It is so ridiculous to call him racist.
I'll tell you, the only color that our president sees is green, and he's been that way his entire life.
The man likes money, he likes success, and he likes winning.
I see nothing wrong with that.
He's in the right place.
He's in America, right?
That shouldn't be controversial.
I admire his courage.
I agree with the assessment people see all the time.
I wish he would stop tweeting.
He's not eloquent.
We needed that.
We were dying.
Conservatives were dying because of political correctness.
We needed the exact opposite of political correctness to have this opportunity, small window of opportunity to get ahead and get out in front and I think we've done that and I think conservatives have seized that. This is the first time I think that we have seen so many conservative figures find success and people don't realize that that is attached to Donald Trump not backing down, not apologizing, it's giving more people the same kind of a spine. Do we need a President Donald Trump type character forever?
No.
You know what I mean?
I think after eight years, people will say, I'd like something a little bit more calm.
And that's fine.
But we needed him right now.
He came at just the right time.
So I'm a huge fan of him.
He's been amazing to me.
He's been amazing to my family.
And I support him in every single regard.
I think he's the man for the job right now.
And so meanwhile, Joe Biden, of course, has been cast alternatively as the foil to Kamala Harris, who's trying to keep her from, a little black girl like her, from going to an integrated public school.
And then simultaneously, the light bringer when it comes to all racial issues who can unify the country.
So what do you make of Joe Biden on the issue of race?
To be honest with you, I don't know where he's... I think he is mentally deteriorating.
I think, obviously, if you look at his Senate record, he was not the biggest supporter of black issues.
He liked segregation.
All that is true.
I don't think he knows where he is right now.
I find it, actually, if you want to be insulted by something, it should be that despite the fact that I disagree with Kamala Harris on virtually every policy she has, she is competent.
She's there, right?
The fact that she ran against him and lost and now is his VP, it's interesting because I genuinely think that he is being hidden right now.
Uh, because he's got some issues.
He's mentally deteriorating.
He doesn't know where he is, and half the time he's saying he's running for the Senate.
So, he's not, he's not a strong candidate.
There's, he just doesn't have the it factor.
When I say the it factor, it's about being conservative.
Donald Trump has this it factor about him.
Barack Obama had an it factor.
Bill Clinton has an it factor, right?
Whether you like, love him or hate him, these people had an it factor.
And they have an incredibly weak candidate right now.
I don't know what his policies are.
I genuinely, They said this morning, if you walked up to a Biden supporter and you said, tell me why you're supporting Biden and don't mention Donald Trump, what would they say?
Nothing.
I mean, the entire DNC literally was that just Donald Trump is a bad, very bad orange man who's orange and bad.
And maybe Hitler.
Maybe Hitler.
So who do you think wins?
I mean, right now, the polls show that Biden is up pretty heavily.
They seem to be narrowing a fair bit.
I think in large part due to the fact that the Democrats have decided to Who do you think ends up winning the election?
Trump wins, and I think it's going to be by a lot unless mail-in voting happens.
Mail-in voting makes me very nervous.
It's just something you can't get a handle on, but if the election goes forward and we can vote in person, Donald Trump is going to win.
I think it's going to be by a landslide.
So putting aside some of the formal politics, one of the things that frightens me most is the way that corporate America has embraced some of the victim mentality.
You've seen it in virtually every major, literally every day I receive emails from somebody at a major corporation who's being browbeaten to support the Black Lives Matter agenda, no matter how radical.
We saw just this week that the NBA declared that they were going to cancel games in protest.
It seems like corporate America has taken it upon themselves to mimic all of the most radical sentiments.
Where do you think that's coming from?
And do you think that there's a future for a unified country when even the most Apolitical aspects of American society are being politicized to this extent.
Yeah, you know, I would say corporate America is completely spineless.
We have seen in the rare examples where somebody actually stands up for their company and says, I'm not going to do that, they win.
Because one thing about the left is they have ADD, right?
So they're super angry about something one day, but then they forget why they're angry, because they need to be angry about something else the next day.
And we saw that with, I believe it was SoulCycle.
The owner of SoulCycle hosted dinner with Trump.
And then you had Chrissy Teigen.
I'm canceling my SoulCycle membership, which was one of the most out of touch, $400 a month membership.
Most people don't have that.
They can't join you on it.
on this boycott. But she did that and then you know what, she was angry about something else two days ago and nothing happened to SoulCycle. And they need to realize that that is what the left is. They want to see if you will capitulate, if you will do what they tell you to do, if you will get on your knees. And if you do it, they forever own you. That's the thing. They forever own you. Which is why I am so hesitant to ever apologize for things because all they want to do is expose a weak spot.
Once they have you, they have So don't apologize for things that you know are ridiculous, for being a company and saying, oh, well, they have 10 white executives and only one black executive, and suddenly you're revamping your entire company, you know, because Black Lives Matter says so.
Posting the black square is one of the most meaningless things that we've ever seen done all across America, but they all did it.
Racism healed.
I was having a peaceful day of no leftists on Instagram.
I was like, please, let's do this.
Please, guys, please be quiet.
But yeah, it's poignantly ridiculous.
And they can't keep it up.
That's the thing.
It kind of goes against free markets and capitalism, because we're also competing globally.
If you really are hiring people on the basis of their anatomy, whether they're a woman or a man, and not based off of their skill set and the merit, it doesn't work long term.
You just can't.
It doesn't work long term.
This guy was really dumb, but he was Spanish, and we needed to hit the Spanish box.
So this is why we hired him.
It doesn't work.
So it falls apart.
And I think that eventually they will realize that they've made a dangerous mistake.
It's a slippery slope, and they're going to lose.
So you mentioned privilege there when you talk about Chrissy Teigen, and in your book you say at one point that liberalism is a system of remarkable privilege.
What do you mean by that when you say that?
Liberalism, this kind of liberalism that we're seeing today can only happen when we're all privileged.
Right?
How privileged do you have to be to be able to debate bathroom signs?
Like, to be able to say, this is my issue, I want them stripped, saying either man or woman, I need this sign to say any gender can go here.
I mean, do you think during the Great Depression that could have been a thing?
Like, do you really think when people are jumping out of buildings, losing all of their money and everything, that that would have been a thing?
If somebody had said at that time, listen, I know that we're all really poor, we have nowhere to live, but these bathroom signs.
Right?
Because we're doing this, in the end, these fights are getting more and more ridiculous, these battles are getting more ridiculous.
It really is a sign, a symptom, of just a remarkably privileged society.
Conservatism is about sense and sensibility.
Everybody is a conservative in times of hardship, right?
You save your money, you work hard, you're desperate to get a job, to do anything for a job, and that is what conservatism is all about.
It's about grit, it's about determination, and that is sort of the picture that our founding fathers foresaw when they created this country.
And then when we are privileged and everything works because of a conservative system, you end up with privilege.
You end up with liberalism.
You end up with leftism unleashed.
And that's what we're seeing today.
These kids are brats.
I mean, call it what it is.
Half the time when you see these kids getting arrested, I think they should arrest the parents, too.
Who raised this? Who did this? How did you turn out being a kid that put on a black mask and threw in a Molotov cocktail into somebody's business?
Right? And that really is, it's a symptom of the baby boomer generation, which I get into in my book, something that Shelby Steele helped me understand, because they were the first generation that won the argument against their parents because the media told them everything your parents did was wrong, because they were the Jim Crow generation, and now you are right, and you have the agency, and you know everything.
And it's something that we need to sort of just focus on and get people to realize that they're bratty, they're spoiled, they're overprivileged and that's really what's happening in America today.
So you mentioned social media there, and the Black Square posting, and all of the sort of virtue signaling that happens on social media, all the viciousness.
Twitter, obviously, is a place to dunk and be dunked upon, is the way that I've put it.
What do you think of social media?
You're obviously a very avid and excellent user of social media, to promulgate your points.
What do you think of social media?
Do you think it's been bad for the country, and is there any way to use it positively?
Social media's been terrible for the country.
I mean, it's like people are killing brain cells.
I mean, sometimes I cannot stand being on Instagram.
It's just like girls with their butts out.
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
Let's be honest.
It's made everybody a bit dumber.
But it's necessary evil.
This is where the left is fighting.
And I have to say that if it wasn't for social media, conservatives wouldn't be where we are.
We're winning there.
And the left knows it, right?
When it was just the TVs, they were winning.
They were dominant.
Everything was leftist, leftist.
Now you get people like Brian Seltzer who are uncomfortable.
About the fact that you have more followers than him.
I have more followers than him.
You know, because it downgrades when he gets up there and says racism is what's happening everywhere, and it's because of we're bad, we're white, and you and I can counter that narrative in one tweet.
You and I in one tweet can dwarf all of CNN's viewership.
That makes them uncomfortable, and we need that.
So it's actually in a weird way.
It's paradoxical.
It's necessary.
It's evil.
It was necessary evil, and it's actually a space that conservatives are winning in.
So let's talk about some of the work that you've been doing over at PragerU.
So you moved over from Turning Point USA to Prager University, what, a couple of years ago?
Yeah.
And PragerU, obviously, is sort of a sister company for Daily Wire.
We've worked very heavily with them in the past.
So what prompted you to decide to move over to PragerU, which was a real shift in what you were doing?
Yeah, so one of the things about Turning Point is it's such an important battle to say we're going to fight and win college campuses.
The first thing is I got into this because I wanted to change black hearts and black minds.
Can't really do that on college campuses because unfortunately most black Americans don't make it to college campuses.
So I felt like Charlie and I were sort of doing the same routine over and over again, but was I actually doing what I set out to do?
The second thing is that because Turning Point is a company that is focused on college campuses, everybody that works there is fresh out of college.
And I am a controversial person.
I say what I want to say.
And it isn't fair when I say, like, when the whole world collapsed and I say I don't support the Me Too movement.
I was the first person who came out and said, not doing this.
This is wrong.
And when everybody has a meltdown about it, I mean, Charlie was inundated with emails from people, you know, Turning Point girls that are on campus being like, I can't believe Candace supports rape.
Like, you have to see.
And I'm like, Charlie, I can't.
This is, you know, they're young, I get that, but I'm obviously not saying I support rape by saying that I don't support the Me Too movement.
So I kind of got too big, in a way, where I sort of felt like this isn't fair for Charlie to have to keep explaining to these younger people who are just kind of experimenting with conservatism.
And PragerU is obviously, when I say a more mature organization, I mean that they don't have a bunch of 20-year-olds that work there, and they're not a student organization.
They're making five-minute videos that are very focused.
They sort of understand a bit better the battle that we're in, and they stand by it.
I mean, PragerU, I'm getting accused of being literally Hitler.
This is a Jewish organization, and they stand by it, and it's just easier.
It's just a lot easier.
And I wanted to be put in long form, you know?
I mean, you've done the college campuses.
It's fun.
Ben Shapiro owns, you know, Candace Owens owns this.
But I was kind of looking for a bit more, a longer dialogue to have people on my show, and to learn.
I mean, I have people on my show that are much smarter than me, and I get to sit down there, and I get to sit there, and I get to learn in an hour.
Soak up all of Larry Elder, soak up Dennis Prager.
And so I was just sort of ready for the next step.
So how does your career match up to what you thought it was going to be 15 years ago?
Gosh, it is crazy.
It has been a blessing in every single regard.
I thank God for the platform that I have.
Of course, there are moments where, you know, I think, and I'm sure you understand this, when you go through a firestorm or you're getting death threats, the responsibility that you feel to your family, that's the hardest part.
And I never thought I would be here.
And that is why when people say to me, Candace, run for president or Candace do this, I no longer plan.
I just do what I'm good at.
You know, I think I work really hard.
I think I didn't want to be one of those people that's super flippant.
You know, one of those, I hate to say this, but conservative girls with a gun in their, you know, a gun in their shorts.
Like, I'm conservative.
I was like, you know, I want to learn.
I want to grow.
I want to be here for a long time.
I want to look back and say, she became a Larry Elder or a Thomas Sowell.
So I've been doing a lot of studying and I don't know where it's going to go.
And who knows, maybe it all ends tomorrow.
But I think I've been cancelled so many times and I can't be cancelled anymore.
So, you know, it's just, God has a plan for everybody.
And His plan is never for anyone to be a victim.
And I hope that my life teaches other people that.
So in a second, I'm going to ask you a few more questions, a few final questions about the future of the Republican Party, and where you think the Republican Party is going to go, and some personal questions.
But if you want to hear the answers to all of those fascinating questions, then you actually have to be a Daily Wire member.
Head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
Well, Candace Owens, thanks so much for stopping by.
Be sure to grab a copy of Candace's brand new book, Blackout.
Candace, thanks again, this was awesome.
Thank you, that was so fun.
Social distance, handshake.
Awesome.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
And our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.
Associate producer, Nick Sheehan.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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