| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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American jobs to overseas. | |
| They're not American jobs anymore. | ||
| The change has to happen differently. | ||
| And with a nuanced understanding, it's just going to be a hot mess. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And Ross, in New Jersey, is our last call for this show. | ||
| Thanks to everybody who watched. | ||
| We'll be back again tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| Have a great day, everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Today, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee considers the nominations of former Senator David Perdue to be ambassador to the People's Republic of China and former Fox News contributor Monica Crowley to be chief of protocol with the rank of ambassador. | |
| You can watch the confirmation hearing live at 10.30 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| The cherry blossoms are in season, and we're marking the occasion with our cherry blossom sale going on right now at c-spanshop.org, our online store. | ||
| Save up to 25% on our entire cherry blossom collection of t-shirts, sweatshirts, and drinkwear. | ||
| Scan the code or visit c-spanshop.org during our cherry blossom sale. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| We're talking about the Trump administration's efforts on DEI programs. | ||
| Mike, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amy, it's a pleasure to be on with you. | |
| So in the first few weeks of office, President Trump has really focused on educational and cultural institutions. | ||
| We'll talk cultural first. | ||
| So the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, the zoo. | ||
| Why do you think there's such a focus on those institutions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
In his first day in office, the first thing he did, that first executive order that he issued, had a DEI component, an anti-DEI component. | |
| And then the second one did as well. | ||
| The second day, he had another executive order on DEI. | ||
| The president has been very focused on battling DEI, and for very good reasons. | ||
| I should say right off the top that there's nothing wrong. | ||
| And in fact, I embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion. | ||
| If these words meant what they're supposed to mean, they have been changed in the woke vernacular into almost the opposite. | ||
| Equity sounds the same as equality, but it's the opposite of equality. | ||
| It says the government and the private sector must treat Americans differently because of their race. | ||
| Inclusion means that you cannot wear a Jesus t-shirt to a museum or a mall, etc. | ||
| So there are very good reasons why we should battle DEI, and the president has focused on that from the very start. | ||
| So you don't have a problem with equity meaning Men and women having equal chance at a job as far as the disabled having access. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no, no. | |
| I mean, no, of course not. | ||
| It's inclusion meaning language codes that I'm against. | ||
| It's when kids wear a hat that is pro-life to the Smithsonian and they guard to the Smithsonian and say, no, that is not an inclusive hat. | ||
| You have to leave. | ||
| That has happened. | ||
| That is an example. | ||
| That's policy at the Smithsonian? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, I think they apologized afterward, but it's an example of how, I think, I'm not sure, I think, but I'm not saying that's policy, but that's an example of how inclusion is used and has been used in universities, places of work, et cetera, and in the federal government to mean that if you use certain words that are deemed non-inclusive, you're going to be canceled, banned, or you can't use them, et cetera. | |
| So let's talk about the cultural institutions. | ||
| Tell me about what the issues are with the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, the National Zoo. | ||
| What needs to change there, in your opinion? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the Smithsonian is, as you know, the largest complex. | |
| It's over 20 museums, research centers. | ||
| I think if you count them all, it's like over 40, the National Zoo. | ||
| It's under Secretary Lonnie Bunch. | ||
| It has become very, very woke. | ||
| It had a portal, which now, when you go to it, it sent you somewhere else, but had a portal called Talking About Race. | ||
| And it had these eight foundational principles, which included things like whiteness as an ideology, it discussed systems of oppression, these eight principles, these eight principal subjects. | ||
| It discussed systems of white supremacy. | ||
| Things that, you know, this idea of whiteness as an ideology was started by a Marxist called Noel Ignatiev. | ||
| These are very culturally Marxist principles. | ||
| So I'm afraid that under Lonnie Bunch and under the curators who prepare the exhibits at the Smithsonian, they used this national treasure as an instrument to what they themselves call decolonizing America. | ||
| That is very troublesome, and I can give you other examples. | ||
| You know, how Secretary Bunch said that one of the missions of the Smithsonian was to legitimize the 1619 project. | ||
| I don't know if you recall the 1619 project by the New York Times, riddled with inaccuracies, libeled the United States, said a starting point was not the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but when I think 19 Angolans arrived in Jamestown aboard a Portuguese ship in 1619, that was supposed to be the start of our country, excuse me. | ||
| So historians have pointed out all the inaccuracies of this. | ||
| Well, Lonnie Bunch said, we want the Smithsonian to be associated with the 1619 project, and we want to legitimize it. | ||
| That's just one example, Mimi. | ||
| So first you said woke. | ||
| If you could just define what you believe woke means. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not what I believe. | |
| It's the definition of woke, and I'll give it to you. | ||
| It's a term taken from African-American slang. | ||
| It's supposed to mean being awake and being very, very alive to how marginalized people, so-called, have been oppressed in this country, how everything should be looked at through the lens of oppressors versus the oppressed. | ||
| All of the human experience has to be looked at through this lens. | ||
| That's, again, I hate to say it, but it's the truth. | ||
| Again, from the first page of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in 1848. | ||
| That is what woke means, is being awake to these so-called injustices that are perpetrated on a daily basis in the United States. | ||
| I wasn't born in this country. | ||
| I have been a foreign correspondent for many years. | ||
| I was used to a gloop-trotting correspondent. | ||
| I was described as such in a recent article. | ||
| I have lived at least a year in seven countries. | ||
| I traveled with the Mujahideen. | ||
| This is by no means an oppressive society. | ||
| There is no systemic racism. | ||
| There are racists, ugly racists that exist in the United States, just like they exist in France and Peru, where I was recently, or China. | ||
| But the idea of systemic racism implies that we need a systemic overhaul. | ||
| That is what WooC means. | ||
| All right, let's just remind people if they'd like to ask a question, make a comment for our guest, Mike Gonzalez of Heritage Foundation. | ||
| You can do so. | ||
| Our lines are Republicans, 202748-8001. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents can call us on 202-748-8002. | ||
| You mentioned Lonnie Bunch, the head of the Smithsonian. | ||
| I'll just show here what he has said. | ||
| He says, We remain steadfast in our mission to bring history, science, education, research, and the arts to all Americans. | ||
| We will continue to showcase world-class exhibits, collections, and objects rooted in expertise and accuracy. | ||
| We will continue to employ our internal review processes, which keep us accountable to the public. | ||
| When we err, we adjust, pivot, and learn as needed. | ||
| As always, our work will be shaped by the best scholarship, free of partisanship, to help the American public better understand our nation's history, challenges, and triumphs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he will be pivoting soon because President Trump just this week issued an executive order ordering his vice president, JD Vance, who is on the board of the board of directors at the Smithsonian, to make sure that the Smithsonian has no exhibit that portrays America as something that it is not, that smears our history, which is bad things happened in our history, | |
| awful things, tragic things, slavery, Jim Crow. | ||
| Everybody should be aware of that. | ||
| Nobody's talking about not discussing that. | ||
| But America has also a glorious history. | ||
| Hundreds of millions, no, tens of millions of immigrants have come here since the 1840s for a reason. | ||
| This is a great beacon of hope. | ||
| For sure, but how should that part of history, the slavery, the Jim Crow that you just said, how should that be? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It should be discussed openly. | |
| This is what happened. | ||
| This is what happened, how it happened. | ||
| You know, we had centuries of slavery, just like every other country, slavery is mentioned in the Bible. | ||
| We had a senator, Tim Kaine of Virginia, saying that we invented slavery. | ||
| No, we did not. | ||
| But we practiced slavery as did Brazil, my native island of Cuba, everywhere in the Caribbean, every country in the world has practiced it. | ||
| But we have to be open with that. | ||
| We have to be open with Jim Crow. | ||
| We have to be open with the lynchings. | ||
| We have to describe these things as they happened. | ||
| They're part of our history. | ||
| So, Mike, I just want to show you this headline from the AP that says, Critics see Trump's attacks on the black Smithsonian, this is the Museum of African American History, as an effort to sanitize racism in U.S. history. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and I don't think that's what he's trying to do. | |
| I think what he's trying to do is just take back the ground, claw back the ground that has been lost to the cultural left over the last decade, if not decades, in which Statues have been toppled, in which our founding fathers have been described not by the great things they did, but by their failings, that our history has been smeared. | ||
| And I think there's an effort that Trump is, by the way, a symptom. | ||
| The country began to go in that direction in 2021. | ||
| I traveled to like 30 cities in 2021, an equal number of cities in 2022. | ||
| People across the country were in an uprising against this woke ideology that began to be implemented in 2020. | ||
| And they elected Trump for that reason. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You ready to talk to callers? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Let's start with Miyoshi in Beverly Hills, California, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Thank you so very much for taking my call. | ||
| A couple days ago, CNN, I'm sorry, C-SPAN posted saying, Sasha, what do you think about DI? | ||
| And I didn't get a chance to call it, but there was a lot of comments that it's reverse racism. | ||
| But I wanted to point out who pointed that phrase and where we first heard it. | ||
| It was the southern slave owners. | ||
| They did not want free blacks to have 40 acres in a mule, but at the same time, they took $300 for each slave that was set free. | ||
| It's been over 150 years since slavery supposedly ended. | ||
| There's all of this discussion about let the best person be hired for the job. | ||
| So my question is: when is that going to occur? | ||
| Because historically, you guys have been an epic failure. | ||
| It appears to be that it's purely selfishness. | ||
| There is no sharing. | ||
| It appears to be as long as a certain group retains its entitlement and its privilege, everybody else just takes a back seat. | ||
| And then, one more quick question: for the president to be the like the czar of what should be equitable and you can blackmail to force universities and museums to roll back their DEI initiatives or whatever. | ||
| Why doesn't he set the example by hiring in his own cabinet qualified experienced people? | ||
| Because that is not what we see. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Miyoshi, thank you very much. | |
| In fact, I'm going to use what you just said as a talking point. | ||
| I did not know that the provenance of reverse racism, it is an awful phrase. | ||
| I never use it. | ||
| Racism is racism. | ||
| There is no reverse racism. | ||
| Racism against anybody, against anyone, it should be abhorrent to us and it's illegal. | ||
| As to the second question, how do we ensure that we have a level playing field? | ||
| Well, you enforce the laws that we have. | ||
| We have very strong civil rights laws. | ||
| You have to enforce it. | ||
| We have to pursue people who violate them. | ||
| As to the question that you said, why should the president be the czar of what is equitable or not, he shouldn't be. | ||
| The men and women who wrote the 14th Amendment or who wrote Title VI or Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, they're the ones who described what is equitable or not. | ||
| And they were very clear in saying that race cannot be used in any decision that determines whether somebody is hired or promoted, et cetera. | ||
| And anyone who does that, either in a place of employment or in a place of education, is violating the Civil Rights Act and that anybody who uses race in the law is violating the 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. | ||
| So no, the president is just executing what the Congress has already passed. | ||
| President Trump on Truth Social from February 7th posted that he would be ushering in, quote, our vision for a golden age in arts and culture. | ||
| What do you want to see as, how would you define that golden age? | ||
| What do you think we're going to be seeing in the arts and culture in this country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't know. | |
| I haven't read as much into that. | ||
| I can tell you what past golden ages have been. | ||
| The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s was a golden age in which you had an explosion of writing, you had an explosion of jazz, you had an explosion of art that happened that it took place that was centered in Harlem. | ||
| In many cases, people who were the children of former slaves who had had this creative outburst, that was a golden age. | ||
| We had a golden age of Hollywood. | ||
| We had great Westerns, especially the first Westerns that we had that were informed by people who have been real cowboys in the West. | ||
| Tom Mix became somebody who worked in Hollywood. | ||
| So I think that I see that, for example, the Tom Ford films as a golden age. | ||
| We've had many golden ages, but the 1920s come to mind the rising consumerism, the rise of the American art form. | ||
| And I'll just show the truth post that I was mentioning from President Trump. | ||
| It says, at my direction, we're going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. great again. | ||
| I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the chairman, who do not share our vision for a golden age in arts and culture. | ||
| We will soon announce a new board with an amazing chairman, Donald J. Trump. | ||
| I wonder, Mike, if you think that going forward, all presidents of the United States should chair the Kennedy Center. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I really have no thoughts on the matter. | |
| I mean, I want to see what's going to happen. | ||
| I like good art. | ||
| I like the opera. | ||
| I haven't been to the Kennedy Center that much lately. | ||
| I don't like the building, by the way. | ||
| I call it the Kim Jong-un Palace of Peace. | ||
| You know, it looks like something that belongs to North Korea to me. | ||
| But I like going there. | ||
| I like the performances. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's talk to Nelson in Hollywood, Florida, Republican line. | ||
| Hi, Nelson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mr. Gonzalez. | |
| My family is also from Cuba. | ||
| My wife came here as a refugee in 1970. | ||
| And everything you are saying about the United States is pretty much on target. | ||
| And what you're saying about DEI is also correct. | ||
| The DEI movement is established basically to try to make Americans feel guilty about those parts of American history that we're not proud of. | ||
| But we should be proud of America overall. | ||
| So I would like to thank you for coming on the air and expressing a little bit of the truth for a change rather than having someone come on and continue to bash the United States of America. | ||
| I went to college under the GI Bill. | ||
| I'm a combat wounded Vietnam veteran starting in 1970. | ||
| And while I was in college, there was a lot of negative talk about white people, especially white men, in this country. | ||
| It seemed like they were being blamed for just about every problem that existed at that time. | ||
| And that has continued to this day, much to the chagrin of myself and much to the chagrin of anybody who loves this country. | ||
| And I'd like to hear any further comments that you may have. | ||
| All right, Nelson. | ||
| Well, thanks a lot, Nelson. | ||
| And it may sound like a cliche, but from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your service, for keeping my family free. | ||
| I really appreciate it, and I appreciate your comments. | ||
| Look, and by the way, I think C-SPAN does a very good job. | ||
| Me, he does a very fair job. | ||
| And I think, see, I'm a big critic of NPR. | ||
| I just testified an NFPBS, I just testified last week at a hearing about why I think this should be defunded. | ||
| C-SPAN has done a stellar job since the beginning to try to keep as much as it shows that you can have a television network that can try to be objective. | ||
| And not take government funding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, okay. | |
| That's important. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very important. | |
| Yeah, right, created by cable, right? | ||
| Yes, funded by the cable and by your donations. | ||
| Russell in Yamasee, South Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I would love to start my comments by mentioning that even the Supreme Court nominations committee recognizes that what you have experienced in your history has a lot to do with what educational needs that you may require in order to be competitive in our current society. | |
| My father was subjected to vagrancy laws in Brunswick, Georgia, which actually made him drop out of school in third grade so he can work to feed his brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles. | ||
| And my point is, you have to look at history. | ||
| If you look at the, there was a gentleman from South Africa named Tom Forster, and the only reason he's relevant is because Tom Forster is from South Africa, and he mentioned that Christian nationalism, Nazism, and Christian nationalism and Nazism in Germany and fascism in the West are all the same thing. | ||
| Now, Elon Musk grew up under that system. | ||
| And what they're actually, the attack on the black African American Museum in Washington is what you're actually talking about because the gentleman you mentioned, he managed that program. | ||
| He's not over the entire Smithsonian. | ||
| You're talking about Lonnie Bunch. | ||
| Yes, originally that is true. | ||
| No, he is over. | ||
| He built that. | ||
| He's leading the Smithsonian now. | ||
| But yes, initially he was responsible for the African American Museum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So let's get a response. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, anything? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
| I mean, I do agree with the caller that your personal history has a huge impact on your outcomes. | ||
| And I think we need to look at that for all American individuals as much as we can. | ||
| We need to make sure that we have as many children as possible raised in a traditional family. | ||
| That shows the social sciences are rife with data that show that that is actually the channel to success to better outcomes. | ||
| And that is completely, all sides agree with us, whether it's the Heritage Foundation or Brookings. | ||
| As to the Smithsonian, you know, I'm an even bigger critic of the Latino Museum. | ||
| The Smithsonian Satino Museum, which hasn't been built yet but was approved mistakenly by Congress in the monstrosity that was the omnibus bill of December 2020, was $1.4 trillion, and they snuck that in, should be dissolved, should never be built. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because what it's going to do is try to instill grievances among the people that are called by the census Hispanic Americans, which is a very large group. | ||
| If you want to gather people like that, it's about 20% of the population. | ||
| So I'm an even bigger critic of the National Museum of the American Hispanic, called colloquially the Latino Museum. | ||
| This is a wonderful opportunity with this new executive order to make sure it never gets built, it gets defunded, and we rescind its creation. | ||
| Here's Clyde in Arvern, New York, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| The Heritage Foundation, you know, they're students of Atwater. | ||
| And Atwater had, you know, devised, which I don't know if a lot of people don't know who Atwater is, but he was a monster back in the political ages. | ||
| And this guy, he's a student of it. | ||
| You know, he's using words like DEI, TRT, all it. | ||
| He doesn't even know what woke means. | ||
| And they use these words like that because they're trigger words. | ||
| They're racial trigger words. | ||
| They're dog whistles. | ||
| Clyde, how would you define woke? | ||
| I asked him how he defines it, I asked our guests, how would you define it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every black person knows what woke means. | |
| Woke means to be aware. | ||
| Nothing more, nothing less. | ||
| And that means kick your head. | ||
| And again, in colloquial, it means keep your head on a swivel. | ||
| Watch everything and watch everybody. | ||
| And they co-opted that, our colloquial terms, and they're using it as a weapon. | ||
| And that's what this guy's doing. | ||
| And you mentioned, you meant, Clyde, you mentioned CRT, critical race theory. | ||
| How would you define that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's how this guy, James, first started with this thing, especially right after the George Floyd, whatchamacallit. | |
| CRT is not even being taught in public schools, junior highs, or nothing like that. | ||
| It's a theoretical course that's being taught in like law school and stuff like that. | ||
| And they took this guy, James, he co-opted that phrase. | ||
| And he even said himself, he's going to use this thing in order to bring like a excuse me. | ||
| It's okay, Clyde. | ||
| Let's go ahead and get our guest to respond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, Clyde, I've been at the Heritage Foundation for 16 years. | |
| I don't think I've ever heard anybody at the Heritage Foundation mention the name Lee Adwater. | ||
| I don't think he ever worked at the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| Seriously, I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| Definitely, when you said this guy is a student, if you meant me by this guy, I don't think I've ever read a single word that Lee Adwater wrote. | ||
| As to your definition of woke, yes, Clyde, as I said, it was taken from African-American usage, but it was not by this guy. | ||
| It was the left that then adopted it and used it in exactly the way I described it. | ||
| And I challenge you or anybody else to give me a better definition of what the left means by woke. | ||
| I didn't give you my definition of woke. | ||
| I gave you the less definition of woke. | ||
| So as to the last point, that critical race theory is relegated to law schools and it's not taught in K through 12 or colleges, that is just completely untrue. | ||
| That hasn't been the case in at least 20 years. | ||
| Yeah, about the end of the last century, people were saying, well, you know, CRT has been around for 11 years or 10 years and yet has been kept inside the cloistered walls of the university. | ||
| Yeah, then it jumped. | ||
| It jumped big time and it was used extensively by Richard Carranza first about 10 or 15 years ago, the superintendent of New York Public Schools, the largest public school system in the world. | ||
| Teach what exactly, Mike? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a revolutionary term, and it does exactly, it's the first cousin of DEI. | |
| It's a grandchild of critical theory, which is say we're going to define everything in society, even as Richard Delgado, one of his exponents said, even the ordinary things that happen in society as racist. | ||
| The individual himself is not, it doesn't matter whether the individual is racist. | ||
| It's everything we do in society, the Boy Scouts, the way we dress, everything is racist, systemically racist, and we need to overthrow this system. | ||
| And it is used, it is a lens that is being used in schools K through 12, in universities, very much so. | ||
| And I can demonstrate this. | ||
| Here's Mark, a Republican in Fort Washington, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I'm listening to your comments, and I agree with you that a lot of the adapted definitions to woke and DEI have been used as weapons, and that's not the way they should be used. | ||
| However, there is a history, and you did mention it earlier, and it did involve systemic racism, and it did involve exclusion. | ||
| The country has gotten better, the opportunities are better, and everybody can move on. | ||
| So I do agree with you on that. | ||
| But I think there is an effort to sort of erase a little bit of that. | ||
| I don't agree. | ||
| I think the both stories should be told. | ||
| But I think that there is an effort to sort of change the narrative a bit of, you know, but presenting all the information is not going to do a whole lot of good if it isn't done, isn't done in an open form. | ||
| So let's get a response. | ||
| You know, I wholeheartedly agree with the first half of what Mark said. | ||
| We did have systemic racism. | ||
| When a black person could not sit in the front of the bus in Alabama, that was systemic racism. | ||
| When somebody who owned the lunch counter in Tennessee could not serve a black couple even if he wanted to, that was systemic racism. | ||
| That was the system. | ||
| We did away with that. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| That was a huge and necessary step that we took in the United States to make sure the South complied with our laws. | ||
| So, yeah, no, I agree with that, Mark, and I think that that should be taught, and it is being taught. | ||
| And it's part and parcel of our history. |