Charlie Kirk vs. Bernie Sanders' Fmr Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray—Debate Night by Turning Point USA
Charlie welcome Bernie Sanders' fmr. Press Secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, for a debate night, sponsored by Turning Point USA. Briahna and Charlie debate whether or not America is a systemically racist country. In what begins as a fairly heated debate, Charlie and Briahna discuss red-lining, prison populations, disparities vs. discriminations, and does America have a two-tiered justice system. How much are the wealth disparities between white and black communities owed to racism or to other issues like two parent households and other variables? What about black-only graduations or black-only dorms? What is the proper way to view the Founding Fathers? Should they be viewed by their flaws? Or should they be viewed by their progress made against sins such as slavery? In a sometimes heated but always substantive discussion between two diametrically opposed debaters, this is a must listen to discussion that strikes at the very heart of some of America's most painful and important issues. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Turning Point USA Giveaway00:02:19
Hey everybody, happy Saturday.
It's my debate with Brianna Gray Joy.
Is America systemically racist?
What can we do about that?
Well, she was the former press secretary for Bernie Sanders, and we have a pretty, let's say, heated conversation at times.
It's pretty respectable.
She does a lot of talking.
I do a lot of listening.
I ask some questions.
You can email me your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
Support the Charlie Kirk show at charliekirk.com/slash support.
That's charliekirk.com/slash support.
And participate in our giveaway of the conservative response to the great reset, tpusa.com.
I wrote it personally.
Help us out at Turning Point USA.
It helps us financially.
You get something in return.
With all the grassroots activists we have, high school and college kids, tpusa.com.
Go there, big pop-up, give 10 bucks, get the copy of the Great Reset, the conservative response to the great reset by Klaus Schwab, Gates, and all of that.
There's no advertisers in this episode.
So it's just all made possible thanks to first Turning Point USA that produced this episode, and then those of you that support our show at charliekirk.com/slash support.
So that's tpusa.com.
If you've never supported Turning Point USA Today, I'd like to challenge you and ask you to please do that and you get something in return, even if it's five bucks or ten bucks.
America is a freer and better country thanks to the work that our students are doing every single day at Turning Point USA.
TPUSA is the battleship for American liberty and freedom in the trenches.
And so if that means something to you, go there, make a donation.
Make sure it's through the portal, though.
So tpusa.com, you have to follow the links.
When it pops up, press get the book, give a gift of any amount.
We'd love to send you a copy of the conservative response to the great reset.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Welcome to another episode of Debate Night.
We're joined by founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, and former press secretary to Bernie Sanders, journalist and co-host of Bad Faith Podcast, Brianna Joy Gray.
Black Banks and Redlining00:11:22
Tonight's topic is systemic racism in America.
I'll start with you, Brianna.
Can you start with your opening statements, please?
Sure.
Well, thank you, Charlie, for the invitation.
I'm glad to be here.
Look, there are a lot of things that people struggle with in this country every day.
40% of Americans, even before this pandemic and the economic crisis that has accompanied it, couldn't respond to a $400 emergency.
If we think of what that means, and we think of all of the emergencies that can come up that exceed $400 in cost, whether it's making rent, whether it's a medical bill, whether it's bailing someone out of jail, you can imagine a lot of circumstances that are really life-changing if you can't come up with that $400.
And I think I just wanted to start by saying that because sometimes I think the conversations that we have, especially kind of in our professional context on the internet, where there's a lot of different incentives to talk about a lot of different things, sometimes miss the forest for the trees.
And so why I think conversations about systemic racism are ultimately important is because it's one factor among the many, the tapestries of things that are causing people not to be able to fully maximize their ability in our society.
And I think people across the political spectrum talk a lot about freedom.
It's one of our founding ideals as Americans.
But I think often we talk about the freedom to do what we want affirmatively and not the freedoms from not, you know, the restrictions that come when you aren't able to have your basic needs met.
You know, have your basic housing needs, basic food needs, basic education needs, the things that you need to succeed.
And for some quadrant, some cohort of Americans, systemic racism has been a barrier.
And we need to talk about systemic racism because in a lot of people's imaginations, racism exists as a bad guy in a Klanshood and these kind of stereotypes, very explicitly denying people service, explicitly denying people a right to use a bathroom, the kind of racism that we understand from the 1960s.
What we understand exists today is the aftershocks of a lot of those systems that were in place, not just interpersonal racism that existed at the time, but also the laws on the books that had real effects in terms of how people were able to grow and aggregate wealth at that time, and which has implications for the generations that have come since.
So if you think about someone like myself, who's a relatively young person whose parents were born before the civil rights era, were born in the civil rights era before civil rights were secured for black Americans in this country.
We're not talking about something long, long ago and far, far away.
We're talking about laws in the books that prevented my relatives who served in wars from getting the same benefits in terms of low-interest GI loans to buy property that other Americans, that white Americans got.
And that has a trickle-down effect in terms of how much wealth has been amassed by my community as compared to others.
And I think it's not about blaming people.
It's not about hierarchies of oppression.
It's just about understanding that this is how the world was and snapping our fingers and getting rid of those prohibitive laws isn't going to change the effects of those prohibitive laws unless we do so affirmatively.
Charlie, is it your belief that if there is one example of something, that an anomalous example proves the rule?
No, not always, but can you name one example?
Of systemic racism?
Yeah.
So what did you think about the example I brought up in my opening remarks?
The example of housing discrimination and redlining.
You know Thomas Sowell's treatise on redlining?
I don't.
Yeah, you should read it.
What does it say?
Are you able to tell me?
Yes, it's actually right here.
He said, redlining, do you know that whites were turned down for mortgages more than Asians?
I'm unclear what relevance that was.
It wasn't racially based.
The redlining myth, according to Thomas Sowell, which I'm sure you believe in, says, quote, nor did either the mainstream media or political leaders ever mention the fact that black-owned banks turned down black mortgage loan applicants at least as often as white-owned banks did.
Why were blacks turning down their own people?
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm talking about...
Actually, you don't, because this is...
Well, Charlie, I would like to be very specific here.
I'm talking about the same thing.
I was just very specific.
So I'm talking about the GI bill, which allowed people who had served in our wars, including a lot of black Americans, to come back and get to the U.S. You're talking about redlining, right?
So this is redlining.
This is connected to redlining.
No, no, no, no, which one do you want to talk about?
GI bill or redlining?
If you allow me to explain, this is connected to redlining.
I guess you don't understand that, but I'm happy to explain it to you right now if you just let me get this out.
I promise you it won't be, it'll be worth the effort.
The GI bill gave low-interest loans to people who had served in the war, right?
And those loans were issued by, they were federally backed loans.
So the banks would issue to people at a low interest rate so that they could buy homes and generate what we now understand to be the basis of middle-class wealth in this country.
What ended up happening was the process of redlining was that banks said, oh, we're only going to issue loans for you to buy in certain neighborhoods.
Right, black banks.
All banks.
Right, so why did black banks do that?
The overwhelming majority of issuers in the US.
You got to answer the question.
Why did black banks do that?
I will answer your question, but what I'm talking about is the overwhelming majority of issuers.
Just like today, even more so back then, the overwhelming majority of issuers were white-owned banks.
And those banks redlined communities where they said, we will not issue to people who live in these communities.
Now, what ended up happening, what that meant for black people, was because of what's called a restrictive covenant, which meant that in the law, in the covenant that attached the land for a lease, many of them precluded black people from buying in those neighborhoods.
So basically, what happened was banks would only lend to people and give those low-interest loans to people who were allowed to live in white neighborhoods, which meant that systematically, systemically, black people were not allowed, weren't able to take advantage of that same low-interest loan program that enabled so many white people who, ordinarily, would not have been able to afford a house because they fought and served in our wars to do so.
Now, how many black banks are in America?
And how many black banks were in America?
Well, if there's even one example, that's the question.
No, because the blanks were blacks were discriminating against themselves, and whites were being discriminated more than Asian Americans.
This is what's so fascinating.
Let me answer this question.
Why wasn't that?
Did you want me to answer your question about this?
I'm happy to.
Very black, black.
Let the record reflect that.
I'm happy to answer your question about black boners.
My point is that answer the question.
Before we started this conversation, Charlie, you assured me that it would not be pugilistic.
I'm asking you to answer a question, and you're not doing that.
The question is: how many black banks are in America at the time issuing those kinds of loans?
Charlie, at the end of the day.
So you're not answering.
I got it.
That's fine.
No, that's not.
Answer my question to you, which came first.
It's probably a low percentage, but Thomas Sowell's scholarship, which is a lot more extensive than yours.
Logical fallacy.
Just because you can find one counterexample.
Do you know who Thomas Sowell is?
Of course I do.
He's a black conservative public intellectual who a lot of people want to be a Nobel laureate for his research on this.
Charlie, I'm a big deal.
If you want to have a debate with Thomas Sowell or if Thomas Sowell wants to have a debate with me, I'd be happy to do that.
But I think that we two here can sit here as people with the ability to reason.
No, I agree.
But I'm going to trust Soule more than you.
I'm sorry.
It's like, because he actually lived through this.
Well, why did you ask me here if you weren't interested in me explaining to you my perspective on the world?
You would at least have some responses, which you don't.
That's fine.
Well, no, you don't.
Charlie, if we're going to move forward, we're going to have to get back past this basic logical fallacy that you keep encouraging.
Which one is that?
Which is that if one counterexample of a thing that satisfies your argument exists in the world, you seem to think that the gestalt of human existence doesn't matter.
There are hardly any black banks in America today, Charlie, but you think that the existence of one black bank in 1963, who, according to you, based on ephemera, discriminated against a black person, undermines undermines the entire reality of a white banking system that systemically did not issue loans.
Let me ask you another question.
Did you know, Charlie, that in 1947, there were 3,200 VA guaranteed loans in a random state, let's say Mississippi, and only two of them were issued to non-white borrowers?
But it's not just the South.
Let me ask you a question, though.
In New York and New Jersey, there were 67,000 of these loans, and only 100 of those 60,000 went to non-white borrowers.
Why do you think that was, Charlie?
Well, so let me ask you a question.
First of all, of course, it's partially racism, partially structural in the sense not that it's a problem.
Okay, so we have structured racism.
So I don't understand what the argument is.
No, it's not.
It's also because that blacks did not have their own capital accounts.
No.
It's also because of this.
It's not.
It's the GI.
That's why we're talking about the GIS.
Let me ask you, why is it that black incomes increased while redlining was also prevalent?
Black incomes increased faster than white income.
What does income have to do with everything?
No, Charlie.
When redlining was so terrible, why were blacks getting richer than whites in the 40s?
Well, answer the question.
Why were blacks getting richer than the whites?
You don't understand.
You don't understand, it seems, like, what redlining is.
No, I do.
No, Charlie, your ability to buy a house is not core, it's not the same thing as your ability to earn a higher income.
Your grandparents are harmed by redlining, is that right?
My great-great-great-grandparents.
So, how'd you get to Harvard if it was so awful?
Because if systemic racism is real, you went to the best school in the world.
Like, that doesn't make any sense.
You're saying that because racism exists, sorry, because I went to Harvard, racism can't exist.
No, I'm asking this very simple question.
If redlining was so detrimental, how did you get to government?
What is the relevance?
Don't dodge the relevance of the rest of the rest of the world.
No, it's very relevant.
Obviously, you're arguing against your own story.
No, I'm not.
Only in America as unra, only in a country as unraced as America could someone like you, who says it's so racist and redlining, also go to Harvard, the best school on the planet.
Do you believe that during Reconstruction there was no racism?
Do you believe that before that?
How many acres did slaves get in the Civil War?
19 million people.
In all due respect, you accused me of interrupting you and not asking the question, answering the question.
How many do you believe there was racism prior to the end of the civil rights movement and prior to basically during Reconstruction after the end of that?
Of course there was.
Do I think it actually had to be a problem?
Do you know that there were black people who went to Harvard during that period?
Do you think that racism didn't exist because black people didn't go to the corner?
That black people went to Harvard during that period?
The argument is that America is less racist.
You're the one that's focusing on race.
I'm not.
No, Charlie, you asked me to have a conversation about race, but I am no racial expert.
I'm a leftist who talks about socialism.
You're getting way too worked out.
No, Charlie, don't also do that.
Look, you are.
I would be happy to come here and not talk about race.
In fact, my whole career in writing is talking about a lot of racial overreaches on the left, critiquing the way that identity politics is used to have hierarchies of oppression in a way that ignores class as a key metric that cuts through communities.
That's my whole thing.
Why you asked me to come here and talk about race is a decision on you.
Please don't put that on me.
You believe in a mythology.
That's why.
You believe in something that's akin to Zeus or Hercules.
Systemic Racism in Healthcare00:09:53
I mean, you believe in something that doesn't exist and never will, which is systemic racism.
You're living proof at how unracist America is.
And apparently, so is W.E. Du Bois.
Moving to the first question, since we didn't get to it, Brianna, is America systemically racist?
There you go.
There's systemic racism, of course, in America.
There's systemic poverty.
There's a lot of.
Look, I think we should probably start by talking about the word systemic, what the word systemic means.
It means that we're not any longer talking about the realm of this person was mean to me, this person didn't give me a job because they didn't like the cut of my jib, or they didn't like that I was a woman, or they didn't hire me because I was pregnant, or any number of things that go on in people's lives.
Those kind of one-off instances of oppression, discrimination, of course, exist for people who are members of protected classes and people who aren't members of protected classes.
I could not hire you because I don't like your shirt and there's nothing the law can do about that.
But of course, that would exist, but we wouldn't call that systemic oppression, even if we would call that wrong.
What we mean when we say systemic is that we have institutions in our country, whether it's something like our institution of laws, whether it's our prison system, whether it's our education system.
And because we're human beings and because we're flawed as we're putting together these systems, because there's always room to perfect the systems that we have made by our own human fallible design, there are often the same kind of biases and interests that we have are baked into those systems.
And it's not about someone necessarily sitting around nefariously saying, oh, I'm going to get you sucker.
But the reality is when you look at the way the world is designed, and outcomes aren't always indicative of a problem, but sometimes they are.
And so when you see something like, for instance, regardless of the race of the perpetrator, regardless of the race of the criminal, you are four times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white versus that the victim is black.
Now, this is, regardless if the person who did the killing was white or black, if you kill a white person, you're more likely to get the death penalty than a black person.
This is an interesting thing to think about.
Here's one that isn't explicitly about racial bias.
It's about class bias that's built into our criminal justice system.
We have a system that says if you get arrested and charged with a crime, but not convicted, innocent until proven guilty, many people are able to get out on bail.
And your bail amount is tethered to, and some, it bears some relationship to the nature of the crime.
Sometimes you're not going to be released regardless because you're considered to be too dangerous.
But many, many, many people are released based on an amount of money.
And the people who wait outside their bail set, the people who wait outside of prison happen to be people who can come up with $500.
And the people who wait inside of prison, even for minor offenses like hopping to turnstile or something like that, are the people whose family couldn't come up with those small amounts.
So we have a two-tiered system that we can say wasn't designed to hurt poor people.
It wasn't designed to hurt people who are disproportionately poor, who are black and Latino.
But it has the effect.
It has the effect of saying, you get to be out of jail depending on whether or not your parents or your boyfriend or your friend or whomever happens to have $500.
And some people would say that's evidence that the system was poorly designed to really take into account the real life realities of the world.
So yes, do I think that systems like that exist?
Obviously they do.
I'll let you react.
So is America systemically racist?
No, we're the least racist nation ever to exist.
Well, those things aren't also mutually racist.
Well, both are true.
We're not systemically racist.
Another logical fallacy, Charlie.
I'm saying two independent true things.
So America is not systemically racist.
Also, we're the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world.
Can you say two true things in a row?
I'm not sure.
I'd have to.
Go back to Harvard.
Yeah.
Do you have a little chip on your shoulder about Harvard Bank?
No, I'm impressed because it's like you're this amazing contradiction.
It's like we have to talk about systems of crisis.
It's a contradiction.
Your whole life, it's like you focus on systemic racism, and yet you should be talking about empowerment and prosperity, and you should be talking about how awesome this country is.
Have you heard of Alger?
Yeah, you're all about it.
I'm just saying, no, like the world is full of people.
Your whole political philosophy, I would think, would be one about gratitude and uplifting people, not about like identifying these mythological systems because of like some weird statistic because you say, well, someone who has a death penalty, like they kill a white victim versus a black victim, like that.
That's not exactly what I would focus my political career on.
It's not what I focus my political career on.
You didn't ask me here to discuss what I focus my political career on.
I would love to talk about class issues in America, but that's not the topic of this.
Well, I mean, I think that's actually more helpful and interesting.
My whole thing on the race thing is it's a distraction against our real problems in our country.
We're not a racist country.
The systems aren't racist.
Why did you design this debate this way?
Because we should be talking about otherwise.
This is your terms.
So I let you talk a couple minutes uninterrupted.
I would have loved to have done kind of like this cooperative eulogy of race politics in America, but you are saying that the systems are racist.
And so I'm going to push back on that.
Well, you asked me if there was systemic race.
You didn't ask me.
That's fine.
You didn't ask me if there were opportunities in America for black people.
You didn't ask me a single thing about how actually I have achieved what I've achieved in this country.
You didn't ask me what I do love about America.
You didn't ask me why I choose to live here, even though I spent much of my life abroad elsewhere.
You asked me questions to point it to, you asked me, what is my critique of America?
So I gave it to you.
If you want to talk about all the beautiful things I love about springtime in Washington, D.C., I'm happy to talk about it.
We can go a little deeper, but there's just no evidence America has any form of systemic racism.
Again, I'll leave it to you to prove the point.
Charlie.
Yes.
Moving on to the next question.
How much does the two-parent household affect social disparities in America?
Quite a lot.
I agree.
Okay.
You agree?
I mean, I could go through some numbers, but yeah, I think that's...
It's obviously true, right?
We live in a country where no longer can people support themselves on a single income.
And every metric in the world you want to look at says there's an advantage to having two parents in the household, not just for the income benefits, but for the social benefits of having that as well.
Can I ask a question, though?
And I don't mean this combative or adversarially, but like, just do you think that's a better indicator of outcomes in, let's just say, the black community. than discrimination or racism.
Well, I think we should be asking ourselves why there aren't more two-parent households in the black community.
And if you look at what single parenthood is correlated to, one of the biggest correlations is to poverty.
So you're three times less likely to get married if you are poor.
And I know that you've talked about this in the past, and I think that there's a real there there about the ways that how we structure social programs have really disincentivized people if your partner is a low-income earner from getting with that low-income earner.
So we're talking about a bunch of people who are in poverty.
The average middle, a yearly income for someone who's earning a $7.50 minimum wage is something like in the teens, $15,000.
It's under $20,000.
And if you are receiving an average of approximately $20,000 in social benefits, that will be taken away because we designed our social system to say you only get these benefits if you remain single.
I totally agree with that.
Of course, it's going to disincentivize certain kinds of behavior.
Your answer is to say, let's get rid of the social benefits altogether.
My solution would be to redesign the program so you don't penalize people from getting married and having an opportunity to grow their wealth and get off the ground and having a slightly higher threshold for where those benefits are.
No, I actually have more of a newer view on this conservative view where I think we should help people have children in monogamous relationships, financially or otherwise.
But no, I totally agree.
I think you and I could talk about class a lot and I would love to do that.
But let me ask you a question.
Do you think the hyper-focus of race international conversation detracts from having that kind of class-based discussion?
Sometimes.
I think that there is a way to talk about race that is painfully superficial and which focuses on the grievances of frankly elite minorities more than the substantive issues.
I'm just curious.
So for example, during the campaign cycle, there was a real spurt of attention directed toward the issue of the maternal wealth, sorry, the maternal health gap.
So the maternal mortality gap in this country means that black babies have really high mortality rates that are comparable, frankly, to some much less developed countries in the world.
And people were concerned about that.
And the story got highlighted in some part because Serena Williams had a very high-risk pregnancy and almost died.
She was complaining about pain and the doctors were ignoring her.
And she ended up having, I think, some kind of deep vein frontrosis or some kind of blood clot, basically.
I'm not a doctor.
She had some kind of blood clot that if she hadn't really been forceful about it and gotten it checked out and if she weren't as powerful and rich and privileged as she is, she probably would have died like many women in this country do die, disproportionately black women in this country do die.
And it's a real problem, right?
As a progressive, my focus is to say, what are the biggest determinants of unequal health treatment in this country?
A big one is that we have a two-tiered system and people who are on our poverty program, Medicaid, tend to not be seen by high-quality doctors.
They tend to be ignored.
They tend to move around a lot and not see the same physicians on a repeat basis.
A lot of things that result in them having lower standards of care.
And my solution would be to say, well, I would love to sit here and give doctors diversity training and magically convince them to not be racist and pay more attention to Serena Williams or whatever.
White Liberals and BLM00:15:34
I don't really see that happening.
And I don't really see that as the government's role.
What we can do is make sure that everybody has a universal same healthcare system so that doctors aren't disproportionately treating poor patients worse off.
But the thing about Serena Williams is to say there are the kinds of issues that get talked about in national attention are those race issues that affect affluent black people, in addition to everybody else, but affluent black people.
So what you get is a kind of elite race discourse that's all about, oh, can you touch my hair and whether or not diversity and inclusion should exist in my law firm and all of this kind of stuff, which isn't necessarily irrelevant, but it is enormously besides the fault to the overall majority of Americans.
I'll decide to generally agree.
I'll say it's largely irrelevant, but I'll agree that it should be de-emphasized.
So like, name a couple things you think that need to be, like, what are non-elite blacks experiencing that are not being talked about by the top tiers of the left?
Well, if you ask them, if you look at polls and what they prioritize during, let's say, a presidential cycle, it's always the same things that white people are prioritizing.
It's education, healthcare, crime, all of the affordable housing.
It's the same stuff, which is why it's so frustrating when you work like I did for a candidate like Bernie Sanders that has a progressive platform that's meaningfully geared to addressing all of those concerns.
And then you have the liberal chattering class saying, oh, it's somehow racist because it's not a specifically targeted racist policy.
Now, there are some things that exist in the world that I think are explicitly racist in nature.
Certain very specific kinds of discrimination, I'd say redressing, redlining is an instance.
I've heard you talk before compassionately about what happened to Japanese people during internment.
And I think it was right and proper to offer them reparations as a consequence.
That has never obviously happened in the context of black Americans.
Not totally.
With that stuff aside, I think when we have such an intense class disparity in this country, when you have productivity going up enormously from the times in the 1950s and 60s where we got a much, where workers got such a bigger piece in the pie, when you have back in the 50s and 60s, the average worker earning 1 to 30, having a 1 to 30 ratio between them and CEO pay, and today it being 1 to 300 plus, you know, we have a problem there because it's not that Americans are getting lazy.
Americans are more productive than ever and working harder than ever, pulling more shifts.
And we even have everybody in the workforce now, as we said, people can't afford to have a parent staying at home.
And even with all of that, people can't afford the basic kinds of emergencies, and that's a problem.
Yeah, so just a quick correction.
We did do a reparation program after Civil War.
It was like 19 million acres given to black Americans like the size of South Carolina.
But I'm actually more interested in what we could substantively dive in here.
Like, I agree.
I'm tired of talking about race all the time.
I really am, I'll be honest.
And what interests you about it?
It interests that someone could defend something so fervently that doesn't exist and look to a, again, like a mythological narrative.
Why does it matter?
On some level, are you feeding into the kind of superficial system?
Well, but it's everywhere.
You agree it's everywhere.
It's in corporations, it's in the military.
The CRT is in the classrooms.
It's in colleges.
So we have to kind of build a, I would like to build a consensus That this overemphasis on these things is wrong.
My approach, when I see people talking about something in a way that seems to be bolstering clicks or like a political narrative, I simply use my platform to redirect and talk about things that are a different view.
I think you have to defeat it and destroy it.
So, I don't know.
I think that it raises a conversation.
It's a tactical issue.
Yeah, but I think it raises a cottage industry of people who are talking about the existence of something that, frankly, so we obviously disagree that systemic racism exists.
But the reason why I don't put my political focus on it isn't because I think it's not worthwhile.
If there were a policy, a program, something someone could show me that showed they could get rid of systemic racism, that there was a class that some doctor could take that would make him treat Serena Williams' pain in the same way that he would treat a white patient's pain.
I would say, great, let's do that.
What's the problem?
Great.
But that's not the way the world works.
And many of these kinds of programs have shown to be very ineffective and a waste of money.
And what we do know is all of the things that do work.
Okay, to your point about the way social policies are constructed in a way that disincentivizes people from getting married.
I could not agree.
We could address that.
If you want to talk about housing policy, there's also ways in which certain kinds of public housing generate more of an interest in people settling down as opposed to high-rise apartments where people don't have their own.
They choose to exist.
Exactly.
Their own little plots to garden in our front yard, a sense of ownership and community.
I would love to be having those conversations.
So I guess, I mean, just more of a curiosity.
Why is the American left not having that conversation?
Well, the American, so we are having a semantic conversation now.
I'm asking you to do that.
That is true, though.
But I call them left.
I want to just distinguish between leftists and liberals.
I make that distinction all the time.
So I think the American left is very much having that conversation.
I think that liberals, we would agree in our critique, that they're having a very superficial conversation that has bogged down a lot of this cultural tax.
Let me give you an example.
Again, I won't agree on the systemic racism thing.
But if you're like, regardless of how we analyze things, we should make it easier, not harder, through our government programs to stay married to a single person.
Like, why is that not something that at least in the information I consume, I don't see as a, I mean, like, there was a huge emphasis on the systemic racism narrative.
Would you agree in the last couple years?
Like, Robin D'Angelo can be.
I'm not saying you agree at that stuff.
But why is that?
Why is that?
Is it just like white liberals that are...
Yeah, it's white liberals.
Can you expand?
I'm just curious, can you expand on that?
Like, I think it's super interesting.
I was watching some of your videos, you know, interviewing kids on college campuses, and I was struck by how, and I don't mean this to attack any of them, but what a poor job they're able to do in articulating why racism exists and racism is wrong.
And so I understand why you have the perspective going up against those folks who can't, who seem to crumble at the idea that black people commit more crimes, a disproportionate amount of crimes.
Like they're which they do.
Yeah, of course.
And they know that racism is bad.
Like they know in their head racism bad.
And so they come to these conversations not wanting to concede a ground that they think is racism, but they don't actually understand what racism is.
It's white liberals who have this very superficial understanding of racism.
I'm sorry.
No, I totally agree.
That's fostered by some of these people like now.
Now, I don't actually have a problem.
So I read Robin D'Angelo's book with the idea of eviscerating it in an article.
And honestly, it was so milquetoast in like a nothing burger that I didn't even have the energy to write about it.
Because the thing is, there's a time and a place for a certain kind of a conversation for a white person who's in an office place who feels like they don't know how to talk to black people and they should read those books and that's fine.
But it has nothing to do with social justice.
It has nothing to do with the George Floyd protests.
It has nothing to do with criminal justice reform.
It has nothing to do with anything other than interpersonal relationships between upper middle class white people and upper middle class black people, which is fine.
I'm an upper middle-class black person.
No, I know, but like, but I mean, in some ways, I mean, you and I could probably agree on a lot of the class stuff.
Like, I'm not a big fan of like Amazon running our entire country, like all this sort of stuff.
But do you think that race is used as kind of like the race conversation, whether it be like corporate America giving a bunch of money to BLM, like BLM dominating the conversation, it's just like not helpful in some ways.
It just puts aside some of these other kinds of, like when you say that it's harder than ever to have children in America, like you're singing my song.
Like, I totally agree.
Yeah.
So, yeah, the co-option, the corporatization of these issues is a big problem on the left.
The BLM national organization, I just had the reporter who wrote the big expose about how much money has gone on.
Mansions everywhere on my show.
It's a real issue.
I often think there are a lot of sincere, good-natured people who are not part of the BLM national organization.
A lot of people who got their money stolen, frankly, because they sincerely believed in criminal justice reform.
And those, I think it's important to disaggregate.
But this is the problem.
It's so easy to co-opt these movements because all of these banks slap a BLM sign on their window.
All of the corporations slap the sign.
The signs on the windows are no more than an insurance policy that says, please don't break my window.
It's not about a sincere commitment to any kind of college.
It's like ripe over Passover back in the Bible where they put the blood of the lamb.
Yes, I mean, it is.
That's what you just said.
I mean, like, yeah.
It is like that.
And that's not to say that I don't believe in the underlying cause.
I do.
But the point of the matter is when you commodify things like this, when it's about giving to a national organization, the original BLM, back in the day, I remember in 2016, I was very frustrated because one of the then leaders, DeRay McKesson, came out and endorsed Hillary Clinton.
I was an anonymous lawyer at this point.
I wasn't working for anybody.
He was the woke shirt guy.
He was the first guy.
Oh, I'm not.
I don't remember that.
And I was frustrated because at the time, BLM, I don't know if it was the same institution as the national organization, but the BLM website, as far as I could tell, had a list of policy priorities that largely dovetailed with what Bernie Sanders was running on at the time.
And it was very frustrating to me that this organization that was supposed to have these ethical, moral, political commitments would endorse someone like Hillary Clinton, who I had no respect for politically or otherwise.
That website is gone.
All of that is gone.
And the people who understood that systems have to be, aren't just about like magically snapping your fingers and saying race isn't bad.
It's about understanding that if you just give everybody healthcare, if you make sure everybody has housing, then a lot of the worst effects of racism, of systemic racism, are no longer relevant.
Those people got pushed to the sideline.
And it became about this TikTok mansion in LA or Hollywood, whatever it was.
And that's creator space.
And all of that.
And so I agree with you that this is why so much of these kinds of conversations frustrate me.
A class conversation is less difficult to co-opt.
Now, there are people who are trying to.
But look, I mean, and I know we want to get to another question, but my other thought, I mean, like the class conversation I'll have all day long, the race thing I just find to be so unhelpful.
I mean, you could tell by our first kind of, it's just not good.
It's like, it's a non-starter, right?
But if you talk about things that are race agnostic, regardless of your feelings and my feelings, that's actually a tangible thing that I could see could either help people.
Now, I don't believe in expanding government welfare, Section 8 housing, and all that.
But if you're talking about incentivizing people to stay married for someone to bring fathers in the home, I think it's helpful.
Anyway, Marina, do you want to get to the next question?
For Breonna, do you believe that white people are being discriminated against today?
Hmm.
I mean, look, I'm an old head about some of this stuff.
The kids are taking this in a different direction.
I think a lot of the kids today, they don't believe in that sort of thing.
They believe in, they don't believe in sex-only education, sex-segregated education.
You know, my mother went to a girls' school, you know, Jane Addams in Cleveland, Ohio, and she said that was a really good experience for her.
That there's research that says it's confidence building for girls to be not competing with boys in their math class and these kinds of things.
You know, a lot of people were frustrated about the integration of Boy Scouts, et cetera, et cetera.
I was.
And there's another school of thought that says, you know, if the problem fundamentally is that girls, you know, aren't able to have space in the classroom, can we get that as root instead of having to perpetuate segregation, sex segregation in this case, in order to do it?
And I'm not a sociologist, and I can't say what the best way to do it.
What I will say is this: I think there is a difference, intent matters.
And I think that historically, the reason for having race-segregated housing, having a black dorm, for instance, which, by the way, even though there were often black houses and stuff, they were also integrated.
It wasn't, you know, all black people went off to it.
It was like having an athletic house or the international other kinds of things like that.
I'll let you finish your point.
But the point was that when you're a super minority in a space, it's nice to have someplace to go where you're not watching your P's and Q's, where you can feel like you have a sense of community the same way that international students might have a house.
And maybe, maybe we are past that.
Maybe we don't need that anymore.
HBCUs now are something like 30, 40% non-black.
They're very diverse now.
So I don't know.
I'm not to say that whether or not that is necessary today, but I will say there's a difference.
And I think you'd agree in saying, I want to have a space to be away from racism versus I want to keep you out of my institution because I think you're racially inferior to people.
I think they're sinister cousins of the same strain.
I mean, like, segregation is wrong.
But you believe in the Boy Scouts of America.
But that's not racial segregation, right?
So gender segregation is okay.
Because there's distinct differences between men and women, but there's not differences between the races.
Well, many people feel differently.
What are the differences between races?
There are all kinds of cultural differences that exist across cultures all over the world.
No, no, no, not cultural.
Race, like melanin content.
Well, yeah, well, in America, black Americans have our own culture.
Are there other black populations here?
Like race, like actually the DNA of somebody.
Right.
I understand what you're saying.
I'm saying there's no difference.
But the reality of those black dorms historically, and things are, part of why things are changing now is because we have a much more diverse black population than we've had historically with more recent immigrants coming into the picture.
Well, we're seeing more black dorms, like black-only dorms, right?
We're seeing like a kind of I don't know that to be true.
If you say that's something that's like I haven't been in college.
Let's say that they're 15 years.
Let's just say it's neutral.
Like there's, or I'll give you another example: Columbia University black-only graduation ceremony.
Yeah.
Lots of universities have that.
It's not black-only.
It's just an additional black.
It's just an additional colour.
Right, which I think is like racist and wrong and awful.
Okay.
But if there was a white-only graduation ceremony, how would you think about that?
Well, if there were like, I don't know, a Catholic ceremony or an Irish ceremony.
You can convert to Hillel ceremony.
I don't have an issue with the personally.
But Catholicism you can convert to.
Hillel you can convert to.
Irish.
Well, you could convert to Judaism.
But Irish is culture, right?
Which is not racial inherently.
There's a few people that aren't white that are Irish.
But this idea of this preference on melanin and DNA, like, isn't that really it?
It's like a dangerous direction.
Well, I can tell you, I didn't go to black graduation, but lots of my friends did.
And I would say that the people who went didn't do it because it was about DNA.
They did it because they felt a cultural kinship with the other black people in the class.
And you don't have to respect that culture as much as you see Irish people as having a distinct culture.
But I will tell you, black people feel very much like we have a cultural kinship to each other.
But just to be consistent, like a white-only graduation ceremony, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant graduation ceremony, morally, you'd be okay with.
If the WASPs feel culturally coherent and want to have a ceremony, then that's fine with me.
Okay, I would, I want to try to de-balkanize America, right?
Sure.
I think these kind of creation.
And not just the Boy Scouts.
But that's gender.
Gender differences are completely important for formative reasons, sociological reasons.
Do you think that it's wrong to have international houses at these universities?
Slavery and Founding Fathers00:11:12
I don't love it.
I'll be very honest.
I don't.
Okay, well, then that's consistent.
And that's...
I think that if you come to America, I want you to try to participate in our attempt to be a multiracial republic, right?
In the attempt.
Like, I don't love the idea of hyphen America.
I don't.
I don't like this idea of Chinese American, Iranian American, African-American.
I want to try, albeit clumsy, to strive towards the idea that I'm an American.
So I hear that, Charlie.
And if I could just say this, I think this is such a crucial point.
And I've had this conversation with Glenn Lowry and Andrew Sullivan.
And this always comes up.
Part of, I think, why some black people and other non-white people bristle a little bit at this idea that people like yourselves really want individuality and the ability to be your own person and not to be subsumed in stereotypes or groups or tribalism, is that the whole story, the whole narrative of advocating for yourself on the basis of your identity historically has been because by law, you weren't allowed to be an individual.
By the Constitution, you were three-fifths of a person.
By Jim Crow laws, you couldn't ride the same trains as whites or drink at the same water fountains.
By redlining, you weren't allowed, by law, to live in the same neighborhoods as whites, or you at least weren't going to be granted a loan to be able to live in the same neighborhoods as right.
And so many of those white neighborhoods had restrictive confidence in the Middle East that explicitly precluded black people from living in those neighborhoods.
And people wanted to be individuals.
People wanted to be able to live where they wanted to live, go to school where they wanted to live, go to the hospital they wanted to go to, marry who they wanted to marry.
And the literal laws of the United States of America said, no, you cannot do that.
And so people started to advocate, okay, I'm black and I don't have access to this privilege.
I'm Asian and I don't have access to this.
I'm Latino, I'm Chicano.
And we had all of these movements to get people to be able to be individuals.
So people bristle a little, I think, at this idea that the existence of advocacy along identity lines is to be balkanized.
It's quite the opposite.
It's to push back against the feeling, whether or not you agree that it persists, to push back against what people perceive to be barriers to them living their life fully as individuals.
Nine out of 13 states had abolished slavery by the Constitution.
Northwest Ordinance had all new territories were free.
And what do you take from that?
That America wasn't racist?
Not only that, we were the first country to abolish slavery, not just continue the practice of it.
I mean, every other nation had slavery, including today.
There's more slaves today than there were back then.
Fortunately, slavery is the norm.
Abolition is the exception.
And America led the way.
Charlie, you have to understand, you're not an unintelligent person.
You know that that's a logical fallacy.
Why?
If you and I both have kids and we both start beating our kids at the same time and we're ruthless abusive parents and you stop a year before I stop, that doesn't make us not ruthful, ruthless, abusive parents.
Wait, wait, what is the point of your argument?
Just because one state stopped before another state, just because America stopped before some other country, doesn't mean that the initial act of harm, the initial tort doesn't still stand.
I got to go.
So where in the Federalist Papers does it justify slavery?
Why does it matter?
Whether or not, no, that's the framework of our country.
No, that question is completely untethered from anything that we're talking about.
We're talking about the framework of the world.
Charlie, no, we're not.
Oh, okay.
Then what are we talking about?
No, we're not.
We're talking about whether there's systemic racism.
Okay, well, we're talking about the same thing.
The reality of systemic racism.
I could sit here and ask you, Charlie, do you know how many people came over in the transatlantic slave trade?
I could approximate about 1.8 million.
No, it's like 20 million.
Hold on.
20 million came as slaves?
20 million.
Hold on.
20 million.
20 million came over in the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas.
Brazil or America had more.
Brazil.
Brazil is the number one beneficiary recipient of.
Okay, so what did black slaves decide when they met with Abraham Lincoln when they were given an opportunity for their own country?
No, that's an interesting question, right?
They wanted to stay.
Charlie, it seems to me, and this is something I've noticed that you do often.
If you want to debate someone about the content of the Federalist Papers, you got me.
Because my morals, my politics, my values aren't rooted in the content of the Federalist Papers.
I would admit that.
And if that makes me a poor debate partner for you, I'm just completely.
It is the framework of our country.
Those are just words have no meaning, Charlie.
They do.
They designed the greatest civilization ever to exist.
And so if you're going to say the system is racist, then show me anywhere in the private journals of the founders them defending slavery.
I don't have to show you private journals.
Half the founding fathers own slaves.
They don't have to defend slaves.
Let's talk about Washington owns slaves.
Thomas Jefferson owns slaves.
Let's talk about Thomas Jefferson.
But Charlie, that's specific.
No, no, no, it's not.
It's very important.
I don't care to sit here.
I'm not here to malign and talk about founding fathers, whether they're good or bad, because that's not the reason.
The reality is, Charlie, people are mixed.
It's a mixed bag.
People can come up with a really amazing idea for a city on the hill and the prescription for a society of how it should be and also be deeply flawed individuals who made mistakes that it's our job to rectify because the founding fathers wrote in our constitution that we're pursuing a more perfect union, not fetishizing what they happen to write down at a constitutional convention over 250 years ago.
Isn't that what you have to say about our founding fathers?
So let me tell about Thomas Jefferson.
What is that?
Like, am I supposed to be afraid?
No, I'm just about Thomas Jefferson.
He was the first president to ban the importation of new slaves.
That's a good thing, right?
So let me ask you a question.
Does him doing that good thing relieve him of the moral obligation for doing the bad thing of owning slaves?
It makes it a lot more nuanced, doesn't it?
I'm the one that's making an argument for nuance here.
You're the one that's making an argument for we must only talk about the good things that happen in America.
People do more talking than me.
So let me tell you what I believe.
Okay, sure.
That we all have something in common.
You know what that is?
What's that?
We're born into a world we didn't create.
Of course.
And every founder came into a world where slater is everywhere.
By the time they died, it was.
It wasn't everywhere, but it was lots of places.
By the time they died, there was less slavery than ever before.
That's a really awesome thing.
Shouldn't we appreciate them?
I mean, I have a little bit of a different perspective as someone who was a descendant of the people who were very much still enslaved when they all died.
But I appreciate that you want to emphasize the good that they did.
And I think that's fine.
I also think it's fine that other people want to emphasize the bad that they did.
I don't understand why you have a commitment to, it seems, erasing that nuance by only talking about.
I'm properly factoring in the positives with the negatives.
So, for example, Thomas Jefferson in the original draft of the Declaration admonished King George for bringing slaves to America.
He advocated for the abolition of slavery in 1790.
The first ever anti-slavery convention was hosted by Ben Franklin in Philadelphia in 1775.
Before the founders, there was not a robust anti-slavery movement.
It was John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams, who led the abolition movement in America.
Why is this an argument?
Are we debating?
What exactly is the debate at this point?
At this point, I believe these were brilliant, heroic, and morally courageous men who deserve not to be remembered for their negatives, albeit we can factor those in, but the positives are that they and their commitment created the greatest civilization ever to exist.
People have to be remembered, hopefully, for something in short.
You should factor in.
Like I said, the factor needs to be appropriate.
And the factor should be.
And I respectfully wait having slaves, I think, a little bit more in the negative pile against the positive privilege.
Right, but they inherited that practice and then they got rid of it.
So they never defended it robustly in their literature.
They never ran on it.
Instead, they inherited an evil practice.
It is completely legitimate for you to wait owning humans as property less than I do in the grand scheme.
How about the people that got rid of the practice?
That's pretty awesome, right?
I don't know who you're talking about because slavery didn't end for another hundred years.
And one of the reasons why slavery didn't end for 100 years is because they did not properly foresee the cotton gin or John C. Calhoun.
Oops, I guess.
Well, because slavery was on its way out.
So you talk about the three-fifths compromise, which was actually an anti-slavery measure.
Yeah, I also had middle school history, but Charlie, that's not the point here.
Again, you're arguing with me as though I have an interest in saying in denying the historical record.
It is what it is.
I don't really care.
My point is that for the whole duration of American history, exactly your teaching of American history has been what's taught in textbooks.
Now, for the first time.
That's not true.
That's not true.
For the first time in the 80s and 90s, as a part of this, yes, I'm sorry, critical legal studies movement, people are starting to put some additional facts.
We had a lot of scholarship about Sally Henry's who didn't exist before.
People are interested in these other different aspects of these, let's call them, great men's lives.
And instead of being able to say, hey, you take the good with the bad, you take the bitter with the sweet, as what Carol King would say, there is a push nowadays to erase the historical narrative to only have the good stuff.
It doesn't hurt me.
I'm not triggered by the idea that some of these guys had some good ideas.
I promise you, it does nothing to me.
I don't mind.
You do admit that.
I don't.
Like, I just said it's not just a couple good ideas.
You are pushing back against, I think, the extreme moral failing that it is to own another human being.
Hold on a second.
I acknowledge it, but I also am trying to ask the question: before the American founders, who fought to end slavery on this planet?
Answer that question.
The American founders didn't fight to end slavery on this planet.
Sure, they did.
If you want to have a conversation about that.
They did.
That's not true.
Charlie, and if you want to have a conversation about the history of slavery and the entire globe dating back millennia, you should get a historian to come and talk to you.
No, but just that's an important point, though.
Let's focus on that.
Whoever tried to abolish it before the founders?
I promise you, if I Googled on my phone for two seconds, I could find a whole score of people who have tried to get rid of slavery across the world for millennia.
That's, come on, Charlie.
First of all, you wouldn't find much of it.
And guess what?
They weren't successful.
But also, it doesn't matter, Charlie.
Jeff.
I'm not debating you.
Madison Jay.
Well, it doesn't matter.
Okay, then we can move on then.
I'm just trying to close the point that I think it's...
It's a weird absurd obsession.
Okay, they did a good thing.
Let's concede they did a good thing.
Why is that so important to you?
Because they did.
It's a cover.
It's a distraction from the bad stuff, which you won't linger on for even a second.
I acknowledge the bad stuff.
You acknowledge the bad stuff.
You must judge a person in the times of which they are in.
They were geniuses, brilliant, worthy of our gratitude.
And the times that they were in were the abolitionists, the Quakers, who really did want to get rid of slavery.
John Quincy asked the original abolitionist.
And some of the founding fathers are better than others.
Ben Franklin, I have no quibbles with.
Charlie, this question's for you.
Immigration and Working People00:13:15
How do we get underprivileged people out of the projects?
Well, the question of how to get poor people rich isn't a mystery.
It's not by giving them stuff to do nothing.
It's improving their schools, which I'm sure we can agree on.
Rebuilding the family, entrepreneurship.
We know how to get poor people richer, and we do the opposite.
So I would agree with you that education is part of it, but I think that that's been a lot of myth-making as well.
I think that we turned away from a lot of those social safety nets that were really working in the earlier mid-part of the century in the 1990s, and instead said that the reason why everybody was failing is because they hadn't gone to college and gotten an education.
And what you saw was people rushing to take out an enormous amount of debt, to get degrees, many of which had little to no impact on people's earning potential and has saddled an entire generation, multiple generations, with college debt that they got because they're federally backed loans that because of Joe Biden, they could not discharge into bankruptcy, and it's led to an incredible crisis.
We used to invest in public education in this country, which we divested from as the civil rights movement meant that everybody had more access to these institutions.
And Reagan was a big part of that in defunding the California system that was the crown jewel of the state and frankly of the country in many ways in that era.
So I think education has been held up as a panacea by neoliberal politicians on both sides of the aisle to detract from their own political failures, to detract from the fact that they sent jobs overseas and supported NAFTA these trade policies that were really detrimental to working people in this country.
However, I also think that our public education system, K through 12, fails a lot of folks.
I think that when you have the kind of wealth disparities that we have in this country, many of which are rooted not in individuals' inability to work hard or try hard, I think working class people are some of the hardest working people you'll ever meet.
And I think that every indicia demonstrates that productivity has gone up since the 1950s and 1960s.
But who is getting the benefit of that productivity?
It's not working people anymore.
So when you have people, wealth disparities that are growing because working people aren't getting the share of their labor, you have increasing segregation, income, economic segregation in neighborhoods.
And when you then have schools that are funded by a tax base, you end up with a lot of disparities in our public education system.
So it's difficult because just throwing money at schools oftentimes doesn't work and it's a more complicated question.
But definitely that is a root of one of the issues.
And then another thing is I think we need to have full employment.
I think that you talk about paying people to do nothing.
I don't think that's the reality that we're facing.
There are a lot of jobs that need to get done.
We have a crumbling infrastructure.
We have a crumbling health care system.
We have a crumbling elder care system.
We have this enormous large aging population.
And there is a lot of work that people should be paid to do that aren't getting paid to do it.
The biggest kind of social welfare state in our country is our military, where we're paying a lot of people to be on the rolls.
And a lot of people enter the military because they can't afford health care, they can't afford education otherwise.
And so we have this whole internal infrastructure of people who are working, who serve a purpose, a purpose that I oftentimes don't agree with, but who are working because the government says this is a job that needs to be done and it puts them to work.
And that could very easily be done in a jobs guarantee program for all the other kinds of projects that need to be done in this country.
So I'm just curious, it's kind of a side note.
You want to talk about full employment.
What's your just stance on immigration?
Because you're bashing neoliberalism, right?
Which I totally agree with, which is adventurous foreign wars, shipping jobs overseas.
But the third part of neoliberalism is mass immigration.
What's your opinion on bringing in cheap labor to undercut native-born Americans?
Yeah, it's not good.
And so there's two ways you could go about this.
You could say we're going to restrict immigration, or you can say that people who are on American soil get the full rights and benefits and protections of American citizens, in which case there's no benefit to employers for using them as cheap labor to underscore, to undermine American laborers, right?
I think that sometimes Bernie gets hit for having in the past said that the social welfare state, you know, the social safety net that we're advocating for is compromised by free and open immigration.
It has been the case historically that it's conservatives that have advocated for more open immigration policies.
Totally right.
Right.
And Bernie got hit by some people for saying that.
Now, I think that the trade-off, the negative impact of immigration at the level that we have is grossly overstated.
But I do think it is politically irresponsible not to look at the impact on the very lowest tranche of American workers, where there is some impact, right?
And those are the people who are generating a lot of the angst about what's going on with immigration.
My solution to that would not be to vilify immigrants or to have draconian immigration policies, especially when so many people who are seeking to immigrate to America are doing so as a consequence from our foreign adventures that we both are critical of.
But to say, let's raise up the bottom and let's protect the American worker instead of pitting them against the interest of the US.
So you would say a mass amnesty would help the American worker?
Like legalizing the 15 million people that are here illegally?
It's a question, is it a moral right or will it help the American worker?
Well, I guess this plays into the poverty question, right?
Yeah, you're correct.
You're saying it's a zero-sum game and I'm saying it's not.
No, I'm asking.
My belief is that it's not a zero-sum game, that we have a huge, amassed huge wealth in this country.
It's the richest country in the history of the world.
Kudos, to your point, as Bernie Sanders always liked to say.
And that we have seen millionaires and billionaires, frankly, grow their wealth by 30% in the context of this economic crisis where everyone else has been lacking.
We have, however you feel about it substantively, it's a kind of incredible thing that someone exists in our country that has spare change and $44 billion to buy Twitter and make it private.
I mean, that's...
In principle, I agree with you.
I do.
I love the output.
So a lot of people are like, oh, progressives want to tax the rich because they hate rich people and they hate innovation and people worked hard for that money and all of that.
Or they think, oh, you're just going to give it to poor people who haven't worked as hard.
And, you know, I obviously disagree with those arguments.
But there's also a really strong pro-democracy rationale to taxing the rich.
Even you talk about the founding fathers.
The founding fathers were very wary of the corporation.
Part of our whole comment story was them being upset about America being treated like a clean state corporation.
And so when they created America and started to issue corporate charters, they wanted to make sure they were very limited in size and scope, the duration that they could exist.
There was an understanding that you had to be able to raise large amounts of money to build bridges and start cities and things like that.
But they were wary about the anti-democratic impact of people being able to aggregate those huge amounts of money so you could basically buy a society.
And what we have now with these people who aren't just billionaires, I mean, really keep this perspective.
I think it's like $30 million is like, if you convert dollars to seconds, it's like the difference between, you know, One minute versus like 30 years versus like 32,000 years.
I mean, when you get to the billion, it's the 32,000 years compared to the millions, which is minutes.
And when you have that much money, you can do a Bloomberg and you can buy your way onto the debate still.
And still fail.
You can buy.
And Win Guam.
Exactly.
And still fail in Win Guam.
But he wouldn't have failed if Bernie had made it through and won the Democratic primary, I believe that Bloomberg would have won as a third third party candidate.
You're onto something here that's interesting.
I would have a totally different prescription.
I'm part of it.
The immigration thing, we're just not going to agree on.
We're not.
I think draconian immigration is exactly what we need.
And Bernie hinted at that earlier in his career, which I totally think is right.
I don't think it's healthy that billionaires got super rich during the pandemic.
Why do you think they got so much richer?
Oh, I mean, you'd have to have Richard Wolf or one of these economists on to talk specifically about it.
Do you think it would be interesting?
Part of it is that the COVID relief bill was the largest upward, the first one, was the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.
Right, so a big government program.
You could see where I'm leading with this, right?
So is that these interventions?
I have no issue in being critical of the government.
The government is captured.
Oh, yeah, so totally.
And so, like, let's just talk totally realistic.
Do you think it's more likely to liberate the government, right, back to kind of social-type intervention that you think would actually benefit the people?
Or do you think it's more likely to try and try to restrict that government?
Because, I mean, let's be honest, whenever government intervenes around any of these policies that sound nice, they might be doing, who actually the oligarchy gets stronger, right?
I mean, I'm just talking very cynically, right?
I mean, you're asking me what I think is more likely, and I think the former is more likely.
Although I think even more likely than that is a more, I'm sorry, substantive kind of political revolution that gets us away from this two-party duopoly.
I don't think any of it's especially likely, but that is what I'm saying.
If you know if more Democrats talked like this and didn't do the woke stuff, Republicans would have a very difficult time.
Well, I'm not a Democrat, Charlie.
I'm not saying, I'm just thinking, I'm making a point, though.
Do you understand my point?
I understand it.
Because as soon as you get this woke stuff, the cultural stuff, people, for good reason, are like, I don't trust you.
Yeah, look, again, I think that there is, it is not the Democrats just talking about woke stuff.
I think it's Republicans who also, it's the duopoly.
It's two corporate parties that want people arguing about a trans swimmer or CRT or whatever it is instead of talking about that nobody's delivering.
Majorities of Americans won a $15 minimum wage.
60% of Floridians, even though they voted for Donald Trump, voted for a $15 minimum wage in that state.
And it was local Republicans who've been fighting against...
Legalize weed, too.
Right.
Like these are not, what Bernie always used to say, and I'm sorry to still be such an evangelist for the guy all of these years later, but what Bernie always used to say is that he's not, it's not a, it's not a radical prescription that he has for the country.
All of these policies that he was fighting for had majoritarian support.
And even lots of them had about 50% of Republicans, 49% of Republicans even supported Medicare for all.
We're talking a $15 minimum wage, man.
Charlie, $15 minimum wage, we haven't had a minimum wage raise since Bush was president.
If you're asking, do I think getting more money is popular?
I'm not going to disagree.
People always vote for more money.
Doesn't it strike you that we used to productivity is going up?
No, I agree.
And wages aren't going up.
Don't you think that if you're really going to be a populist?
Corporate oligarchy.
I agree.
And so why are we not hearing more Republicans talking about how we need to raise the minimum wage to keep up with productivity?
We have different solutions.
So here's an item.
And to keep up with inflation.
Here's a solution, right?
Instead of raising minimum wage, let's make everyone's wages go up by 8%, get rid of FICA, the FICA tax, right?
That's an 8% wage increase.
Would you agree with that?
I don't know.
Okay, well, when you get a paycheck, 8% of it goes to FICA.
Employer pays 8%.
It's just your...
First of all, that sounds like it's contingent on the size of your paycheck, which means that different people, depending on the size of the paycheck, will be getting a much different kind of a benefit for it.
But working people pay it at a much higher cost than, because as you know, when you're earning $20,000, $8 means more to you than if you're earning $200.
What's your argument against the minimum wage?
Why do you prefer?
Well, because, I mean, whether it be Seattle, Portland, or New York, it does disenfranchise low and minority income workers.
But those places that you just mentioned have voluntarily raised their minimum wages and they have had success in doing so.
I would disagree.
But people who live there would disagree.
The real minimum wage is zero when people don't have employment.
That's the real minimum wage.
And so if a local area wants to raise that minimum wage, I think that's the healthiest way to do that.
I do.
Federally, I'm against it.
But you do have my sympathy where the angst that is driving your push for a minimum wage increase is the ridiculous intervention from the government, the $7 trillion created a thin air.
And what I believe is the same sort of change of the Industrial Revolution we saw in the 1700s, late 1700s, early 1800s, we're living through right now, which is we have no idea the wealth or income effects that's going to happen from the hyper technologicalization of our society.
No, we're not even beginning to grasp it.
No, I think that's true.
And I think that's why Andrew Yang resonated with a lot of people.
Look, there is this philosophical, fundamental philosophical difference.
Star Trek Philosophy00:04:22
And it comes up in all these conversations.
Do you think that people fundamentally are inclined to sloth and idle hands are the devil's workshop and all of this stuff if they aren't toiling?
And do you think that you have to have a very narrowly prescribed idea of what it means to work to make people productive in a way that makes society satisfying?
And people who are more conservative in their orientation say yes.
If someone isn't, you know, got a pickaxe in their hand and making a brick into smaller pieces or doing somebody's taxes or digging a ditch or drilling for oil or whatever the kinds of jobs exist, then something bad is going to happen.
They're going to be sitting in their bedrooms playing Call of Duty and Experience.
So you would disagree with that, right?
And my feeling is twofold.
One, like I said, that there's an enormous amount of work that needs to be done.
And there is no paucity of jobs people need to do to actually make society better, including building out an enormous amount of infrastructure, including infrastructure that has us transitioning to clean fuels.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to derail the conversation.
Or make Elon Musk richer.
But I heard you in another conversation, you know, talk about how wrong it was for us to not be emphasizing natural gas and how we have endless natural gas reserves.
And I mean, that's not.
Seemingly endless, yeah.
I was curious about that to see if you were right, and I Googled it, and we have about 90 years left on natural gas.
That doesn't factor in efficiency gains, nor does it factor.
So what you think is going to be what?
90, 100, 120, 300.
30 250 or 300.
Right, but it's going to end.
But that also doesn't count petroleum.
And it also doesn't count what we live in is going to look like once we've burned all those fossil fuels and we now have to keep our air conditioning.
Just a couple thousand.
I'm happy to go on that detour.
Because we've raised the temperature on that.
But that's not that.
We're not going to find agreement on the climate.
That's not why I'm bringing it up.
I'm just bringing it up to say that there are things that need to be done to make the world a better place, to make America a better place, to make it a more perfect union.
And I believe that we could be putting people to work on those jobs.
But on the other hand, I also think, look, and people who know me and listen to my podcast know that I love Star Trek.
Okay, I do too.
And Star Trek's the most conservative thing ever written.
I disagree.
And here's why.
Gene Roddenberry unintentionally made the case for conservative.
Gene Roddenberry was a liberal socialist.
And I'll prove it to you, but you go first.
What I love about Star Trek is that it has a much more generous view of human nature.
And in Star Trek, they've gotten rid of want.
You know, you can turn on a replicator and you can make food.
No one needs to toil in those kinds of ways.
They've gotten rid of money.
And while that's obviously not where we live today, the reason we have famine is not because we can't grow enough food to feed the world's people.
That's not, it's supply chain is used as we ruin local economies by dumping like WFP grain.
Like there's a lot of things that are causing famine in the world, but it's not that we can't grow enough grain, grow enough tomatoes, grow enough food to feed people.
So the idea that we could live in a post-care scarcity world is not so far off.
And people like Andrew Yang talking about automation, I think, are really picking up on that reality.
And so if that's the case, you can think, oh, that's scary.
Automation means we're all going to be out of work because we're not going to get anything.
If a robot can do my job and there's no alternative job, what am I going to do?
Star Trek says other kinds of jobs and other purposes for humanity will emerge as we have machines that can fulfill the purposes that human beings used to have to do.
And the protagonist of Star Trek Next Generation, he is not like a warrior on a spaceship, like the way you get in some of these other kinds of stuff.
He's a thinker.
He's an archaeologist.
He's a space archaeologist.
John Luke Burke.
The most expensive, yeah, the most expensive, high-tech, most armed ship in the Federation is devoted to the cause of exploration.
And that was obviously Captain Kirk's credo as well.
And you can say that that's dumb or that's like cuck stuff.
No, I could.
I don't.
I actually see it totally.
I think that's beautiful.
I look forward to that work.
Let me tell you why he made the case for what we believe in: is that even though when you get rid of need, want, that they were still lying, cheating, and stealing, and they were still, they still had problems.
Their human nature always came through.
They had, even if you get rid of material want, Roddenberry wrote all throughout the series: whether it be, you know, Riker fighting with Picard, their human nature was still there.
Cancer Care and Wealth00:03:12
Right.
Well, first of all, I don't, I can't think of many instances of lying, cheating, and stealing.
Of course, they're human beings, and they have their frustrations and their jealousies and their entanglements.
Of course, that's it.
But no one's talking about getting rid of sin, Charlie.
No one's saying that human beings are perfect.
Humans are obviously deeply flawed.
But my belief isn't that people, it is work.
It is just pure toiling.
That people have to toil.
If people think they're going to start, unless people think they're going to starve to death and be unhomed because they have to work, they're going to be bad people.
If we could give your closing arguments, I'll start with you, Brianna.
Sure.
We went in a lot of different directions.
Yeah, we did, which is kind of nice.
And look, I have a more optimistic, I would say, view of humanity.
And I reason.
My politics aren't coming from a place of kind of like ingrained ideology.
I'm not a Democrat.
I'm not a Republican.
If you told me a Republican came up with a plan to address poverty and there was evidence that it worked, I would have absolutely no problem co-signing it.
I, you know, Donald Trump personally did the best thing for me that any politician has ever done in postponing my student loans.
I'm not sure that Joe Biden would have done it if he had been president when the COVID started.
And I'm happy to say those kinds of things out loud because they're true because people are nuanced.
There's good with the bad.
It's true of Trump.
It's true of Thomas Jefferson.
It's true of everybody, right?
It's true of me and it's true of you.
But that doesn't undermine my fundamental belief that there is value in every single human being as an individual.
And I want a policy program that respects that individuality, that doesn't say you have to jump through an X, Y, and Z hoop to eat, to have a home, and to have your basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs met, to get health care.
I don't think that you should stay in jail based on how much money you make or what's in your bank account.
I don't think that you should be able to afford a cancer treatment depending on how much money you make.
I think it's unconscionable that we live in a country where 50% of families in which there's a cancer diagnosis also have a medical bankruptcy.
I think all of those things are unconscionable.
So I reason from a place of what can we do, given that we are the richest country in the history of the world, where there's an enormous amount of wealth that is increasingly concentrated in the hands of very few, to make people's lives better, because it's not a matter of scarcity at this point that's making people's lives worse.
Race is one of a million factors that goes into the society being the imperfect society that it is today.
And I think that we have to be honest about the good and bad parts of our legacy if we have any hope in actually fulfilling the promise of the founders and in the Constitution of making this a more perfect union.
Thank you for being here.
And I agree with part of that.
I wish we could have got more into this, but we'll have to have you back.
I believe earned success is a moral good.
I wouldn't put putting to work or accruing wealth as something that weighs people down.
However, I do admit the current structure of our society certainly is weighed in favor of one class.
I'm glad to hear you say the race thing is one of a million factors.
Class Structure and Pessimism00:01:03
I think that's helpful.
I think we actually had a great discussion kind of as we put that aside for a little bit.
Yeah, look, I just think we'll have a different vision of kind of how lift people up.
I don't think we're close to a post-scarcity world, largely because the nature of the human being will always be trying to interfere with that.
I try to reject utopian promises.
You might call me a pessimist.
I'm just more of a student of history.
But I think we agree that the way it is right now, there is this growing oligarchy.
And it's going to be up to the kind of current power structures of the people, the people to challenge the power struggle, see what structures we do about it.
But that'll be another conversation for a different time.
So thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Charlie.
Brianna, Charlie, thank you for joining us tonight.
And we'll see you next debate night when Charlie takes on Ben Corollo from The Young Turks.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.