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March 9, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza

01:14:09

A CONVERSATION WITH BILL AYERS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep42

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	Coming up, a wide-ranging conversation with activist and former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.
	We get into Antifa and Black Lives Matter and digital censorship and all the issues swirling today.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
	I hope you enjoy this special edition of it.
	Please hit the subscribe button and also the notifications button.
	If you're listening on Apple, please rate me five stars.
	And please share information about the podcast with others, people who you think might be interested in listening or watching.
	I'd appreciate it very much.
	The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	This is a special edition of the podcast.
	Which I'm calling A Conversation with Bill Ayers.
	The whole show, the whole hour is devoted to kind of an in-depth with a radical, a leftist, someone who used to be at one time a domestic terrorist, a founder of the Weather Underground.
	These are people who bombed the Pentagon and they put a bomb at the U.S. Capitol in 1971.
	These were very bad guys.
	And Bill Ayers continues to be a leftist and a radical.
	He's a big supporter of Black Lives Matter.
	He's very involved in radical causes.
	And he has been for many years now a teacher, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
	And he's talked about how he sees even his teaching as a continuation of his radical and revolutionary pursuits.
	I came across Bill Ayers in a funny way.
	I'd approached him about interviewing him for one of my earlier movies, America.
	And he goes, Odinesh, I don't really know if I can trust you to edit me fairly.
	But he agreed to do an in-person public debate.
	And we did two of them.
	One at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
	And one at Dartmouth some years later.
	And then I also appeared with him in a kind of showdown on the Megyn Kelly show on Fox.
	So this was my early dealing with Bill Ayers.
	I also, interestingly enough, met Debbie, my wife, through Bill Ayers in a weird way.
	She found a bunch of videos of Bill Ayers in Venezuela, talking about, oh, we need to import the Venezuelan Marxist education system into America.
	And Debbie was like, ah...
	And then she had remembered she saw me on the Megyn Kelly show debating Bill Ayers.
	So she sent me those videos.
	And that's how I reached out to Debbie.
	That's kind of how we met, oddly enough.
	So we owe Bill Ayers, I guess, a certain debt of gratitude.
	In any event, we are living at a time when political debate, let alone debate, like across the spectrum, from the two ends of the spectrum, has become very rare.
	We don't see people who disagree engaging, talking about their differences.
	So I thought it would be interesting, not in a combative way, but in a civil way, just to bring on Bill Ayers, if he would agree, and he did agree, engage with him, ask him a bunch of questions about things ranging from Black Lives Matter to Antifa to teaching to...
	How you become a radical, how you believe what you do, the role of the state, all the issues swirling around us today.
	And hear them out.
	Hear them out in part because we need to, quote, know our enemy.
	We need to know what we're up against.
	We need to know how the radical mind works.
	We need to know how a guy like Bill Ayers thinks, what makes him tick.
	We'll actually be more effective in knowing what we believe if we can see up close How the other side sees the world.
	So I very much believe in this notion of engagement and of debate.
	I've spent a good bit of my visits to campus debating one-on-one with students or debating professors or prominent figures in public life.
	Many of you know I've also debated leading atheists.
	So it's in the spirit of this type of exchange.
	I didn't want to bring on Billy Ayers to beat up on him or humiliate him.
	I brought him on to sort of show A window into the radical mind, maybe get some insight into groups like Black Lives Matter, which Bill Ayers is very closely involved in, and at the end of the day to let Bill Ayers hear what he probably doesn't hear all too often, our side of the story.
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	Well, I would have to say a political adversary, someone on the opposite end of the spectrum, on the far end of the spectrum.
	So this is a debate with opposites, but maybe a debate in which there will still be some common ground.
	We're going to find out.
	Bill Ayers, welcome to the podcast, and thank you for doing this.
	As you know, these kinds of conversations don't happen too often, and I promised you not a debate, but a conversation.
	Let's dive right into it.
	We're both here in America.
	We have very different backgrounds.
	You grew up, I would say, in the America of the 1950s.
	Perhaps I came to America in the late 1970s.
	And we must experience America a very different way because we seem to have ended up on two ends of the ideological spectrum.
	So let me start by asking you this question.
	Where do you think ideology comes from?
	You know, when I was at Dartmouth, I was thinking to myself, how did I quote, people ask me, how did you become a conservative?
	And I think to myself, it's not so much that I became a conservative, it's It's that I recognize that I always was.
	So for me, my set of beliefs was less a matter of converting to something and just more a matter of realizing that this is who I am.
	And my question to you to start off is this.
	If you think of yourself as radical, were you intrinsically a radical, always a radical?
	Do you have a radical disposition?
	Or is there something about the America you grew up in that radicalized you?
	Maybe all of the above, but, you know, I don't embrace ideology as a kind of way of thinking, but I do think that when you said you discovered you were a conservative, it was deep inside you, I think that's true for me as well.
	I was raised in a very, very ruling class family in Chicago.
	My father was the chairman of Commonwealth Edison, the electric monopoly.
	He served on every board you could imagine from You know, war manufacturers to the opera and the orchestra, the Chicago Symphony.
	So he was a very powerful person in Chicago.
	I was the middle of five kids.
	I grew up in the 50s, as you said, and I grew up in a...
	Time when everyone was sleeping the deep American sleep of denial.
	And I also grew up at a time when the civil rights movement was setting the moral agenda for the country.
	So that was something.
	But let me go back to my father and my mother, two people who not only did I always love, but my father lived with us the last several years of his life and died in our home.
	He had Alzheimer's.
	So did my mother.
	So, you know, we were close.
	And I learned from them some very important lessons.
	I learned that every human being is of incalculable value.
	That was a lesson that was deeply ingrained in me.
	Every person is valuable.
	And I took that to heart.
	And I took it to heart at a moment when the Black Freedom Movement was kind of defining the contours of political struggle at the time.
	And I joined up.
	And I never looked back.
	I felt happy to do that.
	So when you think of your father, let's start there.
	You identified him, I think correctly, as a member of the ruling class.
	You'd have to say the capitalist class.
	When you think to yourself about overthrowing the ruling class, which I guess is part of the agenda of any radical, to establish a more egalitarian society, I mean, do you want to overthrow what your father represented?
	You seem to say at the same time that you learned a lot from him.
	He obviously wasn't a bad guy.
	He taught you the value of human dignity.
	So what about this great distinction between the ruling class and the proletarian class?
	Is it really an illusion?
	Well, you brought that up.
	I'm not sure that I brought that up.
	When you said I'm a radical, I agree.
	I'm a radical. I take radical to be somebody who goes to the root.
	So for me... Opposing the war in Vietnam was a very formative experience for me.
	And I think I was on the right side of history in that.
	And I opposed it vigorously and with all my body and soul.
	But what I wanted to do as a radical was get to the root of why are we always at war?
	Why is America a Spartan society?
	And so a radical goes to the root.
	So yes, in that sense, I'm a radical.
	My father was, you know, part of the 1950s ruling class, you know, in this country.
	He paid his income tax was 70% of his income.
	You know, that was a different day.
	And he was a, you know, he was an Eisenhower kind of Republican.
	He actually voted for Roosevelt and then evolved the way people do and voted for Eisenhower.
	And he was off at a cabinet position in the Eisenhower administration.
	So, yes, he was very much of the ruling class.
	Do I think that that class should be weakened, overthrown?
	Yes, I think that we ought to have a more egalitarian society.
	Why? Because I think every human being is of incalculable value.
	But how does one follow from the other?
	In other words, let's think about it this way.
	Every human being can be of incalculable value, but you can raise people who are downtrodden, let's call it, without necessarily pulling down people who are on the top.
	Or do you see it as more of a zero-sum situation where if someone gains, somebody else has to lose?
	Well, I think the world that we're living in right now is absolutely structured that way so that we live through a year of pandemic and the people in the top 1% of income earners You know, quadrupled, you know, multiplied their wealth by magnitudes that are unimaginable, where most people suffered.
	So yes, I think that in that sense, we ought to, for example, tax the rich.
	I should have worn my tax the rich t-shirt.
	I don't think there's anything inhuman or mean-spirited about saying we ought to tax the rich.
	Who do you want to tax? The poor?
	And the problem is this, Dinesh.
	You end up, if you say every human being is of incalculable value, And you say there are 12 million American children going hungry in the richest country in the world.
	There are millions upon millions of homeless people.
	How is that possible in the richest country in the world?
	It's because we don't value our fellow human beings.
	When we come back, we're going to dive more into the roots of the pandemic, the roots of homelessness, and why, according to Bill Ayers, America isn't working all that well.
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	Rockauto.com So Bill, my take on the pandemic is this, and that is that we have and should have an entrepreneurial society.
	It's a society based on innovation and creativity.
	But what happened with the pandemic was you have a government edict that locks things down.
	Now, when the government locks things down, they don't lock everything down.
	They allow certain types of businesses to flourish. Right?
	So Target can flourish. Target wasn't doing that well as a company until the government, quote, in my view, bailed it out by saying, Hey, listen, we're going to shut down all your competition.
	Everybody go to Target. We're going to shut down all your competition.
	everybody go to Walmart. So the reason that these companies have made gargantuan amounts of money in the pandemic is not because the market produced that result, but it was a government-engineered result. The government essentially put shackles on certain companies, particularly smaller businesses, and it paved the way for larger businesses. Now, I mean, isn't this that simply a factual statement of the matter? So they should tax
	Walmart, correct?
	They should shut everybody down equally, correct?
	Well, obviously, if they shut everybody down, there'd be no place to get your groceries, right?
	There'd be no place to do any kind of shopping at all.
	How would you even function if there was no commerce occurring in the United States at all?
	The government would have to provide it directly, or they'd have to let you get it from...
	My point is that when you have a government-controlled economy...
	And you can't deny that COVID is, we've seen a degree of government control over not just our economy, but our ordinary lives, to a degree unprecedented before COVID. It's almost been a wartime economy.
	But you can't then say that the government has been a neutral actor.
	The government has been very active in helping some people and hurting others.
	So you thought that all the Trump initiatives were wrong.
	You said they shut down the small competition to Walmart.
	Yeah, I think that Trump, quite honestly, Trump panicked when the news of the virus came out.
	Now I understand because you don't know what it's going to be like.
	But it seems to me, I mean, this is my fallback position on everything, and that is, we should trust people to use freedom well.
	And so, let's take, for example, we don't have laws that tell people, if it's really cold outside, you must wear a heavy coat.
	Why? Because people go out there, they go, oh, it's kind of cold, I better go get my coat.
	We don't have laws that tell you, don't jump off a bridge.
	Why? Because you know, if I jump off a bridge, I'm going to end up in a mush.
	Right? So my point is, if you tell people there's a virus, it's a very dangerous virus, it's not the flu, it's more contagious, you can get it, and if you do, you're going to end up in a hospital with a big contraption attached to you.
	Most people are going to go, you know what?
	I'm going to play it really safe because I don't want to lose my job, I don't want to be stuck at home, I don't want to be very sick, I don't want to die.
	Do you disagree that that's human nature to make sensible decisions about our lives?
	And if we get proper information...
	We can do it. I think people do make sensible decisions about their lives, and I think one of the great problems of what we're living through is that people do not get accurate or honest information.
	So you're saying that shutting things down, things like mask mandates, you're opposed to mask mandates, right?
	You're saying we don't have a law against jumping off the bridge because just people won't do it.
	Well, let me point out two laws we do have, and you tell me why they're wrong, or three maybe.
	So one is you have to stop at a stop sign.
	That violates my freedom to drive wherever the hell I want and go through the stop sign.
	We also in every state have a law that you're not allowed to defecate in the street.
	Now sometimes you're late to get home, you really have to go, but you're not actually allowed, and it's an inconvenience.
	I would rather just pee in the street, but you're not allowed to.
	It's against the law. Is that an infringement of your freedom?
	Well, first of all, you said a couple of the key terms.
	You said it's an inconvenience.
	And what you're saying by the word inconvenience is it is a very minor infringement of your liberty to say to you, hey, listen, you have...
	Hold on. As is wearing a mask.
	One second. You have the urge to go to the bathroom and so on.
	So I'm not...
	I wear a mask. I'm actually very careful about wearing a mask.
	I wear a mask most of the time. Debbie wears a mask everywhere.
	That's because your target makes you.
	Well, a little bit, but we're both pretty cautious about it, and we have been, and we haven't gotten COVID. Now, what I'm trying to say is that in America, and this is also true around the world, you have something called social experimentation.
	In Europe, for example, Sweden never had a shutdown, right?
	They basically decided we'll move more quickly to herd immunity, and they've got just as good doctors as they've got, let's say, in England.
	Look at America. Florida has actually opened up early.
	Texas has just opened up now.
	A bunch of other states like Arizona are opening up as well.
	Here's my point. Would you explain to me why you've got massive mask enforcement in New York and California and I presume Illinois.
	You have no mask enforcement in Florida at all.
	Not to say that stores can't require you to wear a mask, but the state is not doing it.
	So here's my question. Why does Florida have lower death rates, lower incidence rates, less problems with coronavirus right now than New York and California, which have been in draconian full lockdown?
	They have not been in draconian full lockdown, but I can't answer your question.
	Are you saying that they've not been in lockdown enough?
	You'd lock them down even more?
	No, I'm not saying that at all.
	You said they were in draconian lockdown.
	They weren't. Florida had several spikes when they opened up in an incautious way.
	Here's what could have happened, Dinesh.
	What could have happened is, early on, instead of pretending that it was a myth, instead of spreading propaganda that there was nothing to it, massive That response could have been personal protective equipment.
	That could have happened right away.
	Everyone could have had a mask and the leaders of our country could have said, wear your mask.
	Let me show you how this is important.
	And that would have stopped it. Without question, you wouldn't have had the lockdown.
	Here's what I think is revealing about the pandemic.
	And I think the pandemic is enormously illuminating.
	There are many things that are interesting and illuminating about it.
	In my world of education, we've been told for 30 years that there's no money to improve the schools.
	That we must do testing.
	Without testing, we wouldn't know how to live.
	The sky would fall.
	We went a year without high-stakes standardized testing.
	It was fine. So I think the pandemic illuminates things.
	It illuminates the fact that we don't have a health system.
	I think that's really important.
	And I think that's something people ought to come out of the pandemic insisting upon.
	Another thing it illuminated around this question of government bailouts, why did the airlines get bailed out?
	Why did they get billions of dollars from me?
	I don't share in their profits when they get profits.
	Why do I have to share in the pain?
	One last point about the pandemic.
	You know, you talk about, you know, kind of entrepreneurial, you know, the government controlled economy.
	We have had a government controlled economy for a long, long time.
	The control favors some against others.
	So for example, research on vaccines is done by the government.
	I pay for that. Who makes the profit?
	Pfizer. That's unfair.
	Look, both on the airlines and on the research on viruses, we find a strange point of agreement between us because I don't believe that there should be these bailouts.
	Now, I understand that if the government's going to lock you down, the government bears some responsibility for doing that, and they've got to take some measures to help people when they are the ones, in a sense, causing the lockdown in the first place.
	I'm not all that hard.
	You know, you talk about propaganda, and we should have been getting the message out early.
	I'm even not that harsh on Fauci on this, because I think when Fauci said, you don't need a mask, there weren't enough masks for people.
	They hadn't yet gotten into the mass production of masks.
	And so he was like, oh, no, no, you don't really need a mask.
	And then the moment the mask became available, everybody should wear a mask.
	So to some degree, politicians are accommodating the circumstances.
	Anyway, we need to take a break.
	When we come back, we're going to do a little bit of a pivot and talk perhaps about Antifa.
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	We're back in conversation with Bill Ayers.
	And Bill, of course, you were the co-founder of the Weather Underground.
	I suppose some people would say looking back, that was the sort of, not the original, but perhaps a prototype of domestic terrorism.
	We're talking a lot these days about domestic terrorism.
	We hear about domestic terrorism on January 6th.
	We hear about domestic terrorism on the part of Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
	I want to get into this a little bit with you.
	First of all, let me just ask you straight out.
	Are you one of the co-founders of one of the Antifa groups?
	I've seen online that you are co-founder of Refuse Fascism, one of the sort of Antifa-type groups.
	But I believe we've talked before and you said, no, you're not.
	So just to clarify, are you involved with Antifa in any way?
	When you say Antifa, I'm not sure what you mean.
	But no, I'm not a founder of any organization that I'm not a founder of any organization in the last 50 years, but when you say Antifa, you mean that's short for anti-fascist?
	Well, I mean, surely you don't take Biden's position that Antifa is merely an idea.
	I see lots of people on the street in black costumes with batons.
	And so in other words, Antifa is clearly at least a network of organizations, is it not?
	It may well be. It may well be a network of organizations.
	I'm not sure. But I think that Antifa, when people say Antifa, they could also say, are you a member of feminism?
	I mean, it's that kind of loose, unstructured.
	It's not an organization. Who's the leader of it?
	Where is it from? There is no such thing.
	So I think that it's a boogeyman that's been kind of raised up.
	But if you look at, for example, the U.S. intelligence services, they are very clear that the real danger is from paramilitary right-wing groups, not from some left-wing imagined thing, feminism or antifa, no.
	Well, first of all, I mean, feminism isn't imagined.
	There was a national organization of women.
	There were multiple feminist organizations.
	There were multiple feminist leaders, Gloria Steinem and so on.
	There was an Equal Rights Amendment being actively promoted by people who called themselves feminists.
	So, similarly with Antifa, I mean, when you have...
	Chapters around the country, the Rose City, Antifa.
	In other words, there are Antifa websites.
	There are Antifa calls to action.
	There are people who show up looking the same.
	There are bricks strategically placed for them to throw through windows.
	I mean, are you denying that this is even occurring?
	Who are all the people who took over Seattle and established an autonomous zone, if not Antifa?
	Who did it? Who's storming the Portland courthouse every day?
	Who's setting fires in Portland on a daily basis?
	I mean, the mayor's talked about it.
	He's talked about being in danger.
	His apartment was vandalized.
	He's now taking a tougher stance.
	All these people are being arrested and released.
	They obviously belong to some organization, unless you're saying that spontaneous groups of people are just showing up in all these cities.
	I mean, there was a massive Antifa presence in D.C., Well, around the time of Trump's inauguration, who are all those people who are smashing things, breaking the Starbucks windows, accosting all the people who came out of the inaugural parties?
	Are you saying this is a fiction?
	Oh, during the inaugural.
	No, I remember that during the inaugural.
	I was there. Yeah, I was part of that demonstration.
	Absolutely. And I was so happy to be there.
	The Women's March, yes. I don't know anything about the organizations you're referring to.
	I do know that there may be websites.
	There are websites for all kinds of things.
	But there is an actual organized right-wing presence.
	You can name the leaders.
	You can name the organizations.
	You said, for example, in feminism, there's now, there's Gloria Steinem.
	You can't say that about Antifa because it's a loose network of some people.
	But it's a tiny, tiny phenomenon compared to What the FBI calls the greatest threat of domestic terrorism today, and that is organized right-wing militias.
	You don't agree with that? I don't see any evidence of it.
	It's not that I don't agree with it.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	January 6th was not evidence of it?
	Let's look, for example.
	We have seen, we saw January 6th.
	On January 6th, number one, you have a bunch of people, a crowd, apparently with very little security resistance, marching into the Capitol, right?
	They march toward the Capitol and then they get into the Capitol, but they don't have to launch any kind of military operation to do that.
	If you or I tried to go to the White House or the Capitol, we'd never get in.
	Evidently, these guys basically moseyed on in.
	Now, during that day, there was only one shot, hold on, there was one shot fired, the shot that went into Ashley Babbitt.
	Nobody else fired a shot.
	It was fired by a Capitol Police officer, and it killed a Trump supporter, right?
	Now, it was alleged for a while by the New York Times that Officer Brian Sicknick had been murdered by Trump supporters.
	He was hit on the head with a fire extinguisher.
	Now it turns out that's not true.
	So the bottom line of it is you've got...
	I would call it an occupation.
	But let me ask you this, Bill.
	I mean, it's kind of funny. You seem to be agitated about it.
	You've seen countless occupations.
	I've been to colleges where groups of people march into the dean's office.
	They take over the office.
	They kick over the guy's waste paper basket.
	They knock over his paintings and they do some damage.
	But they don't kill him.
	They don't burn him. They don't set the place on fire.
	So at a time when we've been seeing Antifa, Black Lives Matter...
	Burning things, setting fire to churches.
	I mean, people have died.
	You've had murders. You've had policemen been brutalized.
	How can you be indignant about January 6th?
	I'm genuinely baffled that you think that was a big deal.
	What was the big deal about it?
	The big deal about it was, and this is true of all tactics, you're making a mistake when you substitute a tactic for a strategy.
	So, the tactic of insurrection...
	I'm not opposed to the tactic of insurrection, always.
	In fact, I support the American insurrection against the British.
	I support the insurrection of Haiti against the French.
	I think those were great insurrections.
	The insurrection of Hitler, no, not so much.
	I don't support that. I don't support the insurrection in New Orleans when they overthrew a multiracial democracy when Reconstruction was happening.
	So it all matters in the content.
	So what was the insurrection of January 6th?
	It was explicitly, quite statedly, an attempt to stop a very formal procedure which would have ratified a vote that these folks disagreed with.
	It was led by white supremacists.
	Its purpose was white supremacy and to overthrow a legitimate election.
	That's what they were there for.
	There's no question about it.
	Stop the steal. That's the big lie.
	Just like the Jews caused, you know, caused Germany to lose World War I. It's a big lie.
	It's a stab in the back kind of propaganda effort.
	That's why I am indignant about January 6th.
	Why were they there on January 6th?
	Because that's the moment that they formally sign off on something that already happened.
	Now, you can't possibly believe the big lie that the election was stolen.
	You're not that ideologically blinded, are you?
	Well, we're going to come right back and dive right into this.
	Are there good insurrections and bad insurrections?
	What were the people in January 6th all about?
	And what has the left been all about in the months preceding?
	We'll be right back. What I really like about Mike Lindell is he's not only a great entrepreneur and creator of great products, he's also an incredible marketer of those products.
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	So, Bill, you asked me a direct question, which I want to dive right into.
	Namely, do I believe the election was stolen?
	And the answer is, I don't know.
	But let me tell you, let me tell you, well, you're...
	Wait a minute. You know what?
	You don't know either. This is a bit like life after death.
	I say that there may be life after death.
	You're like, there is no life after death.
	I'm like, Bill, you don't know and I don't know.
	Okay. No, no, no. All right.
	So let's come to the election.
	Here's the point about the election.
	This was, you have to admit...
	A very strangely conducted election.
	It was an election under COVID. No?
	I don't admit it, no.
	You don't admit it? You don't agree that all kinds of states adopted new rules for mass mail-in voting that did not exist before?
	You don't agree that counties and states modified the rules that the legislature had made previously?
	One question at a time.
	Okay. Do you agree that this was not a normal election in terms of the way people voted?
	You mean the method of voting?
	No, I mean that under normal elections, there's an election day.
	By and large, most people show up.
	Hold on to vote.
	There are absentee voters, but by and large, absentee votes have typically been a small percentage of the overall vote.
	Everybody knows from the past that absentee votes have a lot of fraud, but because they're a tiny portion of the overall vote, it's never been a major issue.
	This time, we had mass mail-in balloting.
	And we had ballot counting in some cases occurring after election day.
	And we had also election commissions in swing states modifying the rules of the state legislatures because they claimed it's an epidemic.
	So all I'm saying is it was not a normal election.
	And you seem to be indignant over what most people would consider to be a simple fact.
	No, it's absolutely not a simple fact.
	The election was conducted the way elections are conducted.
	That is, the states had control.
	Republican states, like Georgia, said that it was done with integrity.
	There are many states, you say mostly we don't do mail-in ballots.
	Trump has always voted by mail-in ballot.
	Mail-in ballots are completely common.
	And early voting is completely common.
	There are states where all they do is mail-in ballots.
	So the idea that somehow they're more fraudulent.
	Here's the bottom line on this, Dinesh.
	It's a big lie.
	It's circulating. But every time the public relations folks, you and Rudy Giuliani and anybody else gets in front of a camera, they say, there's fraud.
	We don't know. How would we prove it?
	Well, there's a way to prove it.
	You go into court. That's one way.
	And interestingly, every time Rudolph Giuliani was in court, Every time he was in court and was asked, was there election fraud?
	He says, no, I'm not charging fraud.
	Right. Because in court, you're held accountable for your big lie.
	Out here, you can blow your steam off any way you want to.
	And you do. That's kind of your job.
	But that doesn't make it true.
	So you say, I don't know and you don't know.
	How would one find out?
	Well, Trump, Trump, Trump.
	It created an election integrity commission.
	It ran out of gas within four weeks because there is no great problem with election fraud.
	But as long as you can kind of keep planting that doubt, keep the big lie going, you can imagine kind of suppressing the vote, which is exactly the strategy that the Republican Party for certain is pursuing.
	I think suppressing the vote is a catastrophe.
	I cut my political teeth on registering people to vote.
	I think everyone should vote.
	And I'm interested to know what your plan is to make sure everyone votes, not just who we can keep from voting, but what's your plan for making sure everybody votes?
	Everybody who's a citizen gets to vote.
	That is, people in prison, homeless people, they should vote.
	Why don't they have the vote?
	Well, they do have the vote.
	Why do you mean, why don't they have the vote?
	Who's stopping a homeless guy from voting?
	If they can't put down an address, they can't register to vote.
	We ought to have universal registration.
	Ballots ought to be taken to people, and everyone should vote.
	That's my position. Now, you don't agree with that.
	And actually, all the efforts around, oh, there might have been fraud.
	There's a doubt. It's all nonsense, and it was proven every time they went into court and had to say, was there fraud?
	Every time the Republican lawyer said there was no fraud.
	And the election commission that Chris Kobach Chair went out of business because there is no fraud of a massive scale, as you're implying.
	Well, let me tell you why I'm not so sure.
	What would prove it?
	I have to ask you, what would prove to you that it was true?
	Because if you say there's no evidence, how would you find the evidence?
	Well, let me just start by talking about why I think this was an anomalous situation.
	And I've been in America now for, what, 12 presidential elections, so I can recognize if something is not normal.
	So there are two things that jump out at me that are extremely abnormal.
	And the first one is the stopping of the count on Election Day, which occurred simultaneously in all the swing states and only in the swing states.
	Now, this is an oddity. It's not true.
	It is true. It is true.
	It is true. A minute ago, you said that votes were coming in after Election Day.
	Yes, they were later counted.
	No, I meant the stopping of the count.
	What I'm saying is all the guys in the rooms counting.
	So you've been through many election days and they usually keep going and then they tell you what the count is.
	But if the count suddenly stops, that's odd.
	You have to admit that's odd. And here's number two.
	Trump was running ahead of all the...
	Trump was the most popular guy on the Republican ticket.
	In fact, he was leading Republicans to victory in state after state after state.
	Now notice what happened in the election.
	Republicans do very well down the ticket.
	They gain seats in the House.
	All the polls said the opposite.
	All the polls basic...
	Think of it. Every swing district, every area that was a toss-up, No Republican in the House lost his seat in the entire country.
	So are you telling me that Trump was the only anomaly?
	All these people came in and they voted for the Republicans, down the ticket, but then they decided, you know what?
	We like all the Republicans, but we also like Biden.
	I mean, what is the probability of that, Bill?
	You weren't born yesterday.
	So these are reasons why normal people like me go, you know what?
	I smell a rat.
	Wait a minute. Number one, you're not a normal person.
	Well, neither are you.
	Don't make a big claim.
	I didn't claim it. But number two, you're throwing sand up in the air.
	But actually, you know that Trump lost by six million votes.
	You know that. He lost by six million votes in the popular vote.
	You must know that. When it came to certifying the elections in Georgia, for example, two Republicans, both right-wing Republicans, said, we are being attacked for fraud.
	There is no fraud. That's not true.
	So how could I imagine the anomaly you just described?
	I can imagine a lot of ways.
	Trump is both wildly popular with some people and deeply loathed by others.
	And so the people who loathed him may well have voted for a Republican down the ticket and against him.
	That's not hard to imagine.
	Well, Bill, I mean, of course that's possible.
	I'm not saying it's not possible Trump lost.
	I mean, I agree that there were people who are Republican who are anti-Trump.
	Many. And I think it's possible that there were suburban housewives who voted against him.
	So we're not denying a possibility.
	I think what, on the election issue, I would say this.
	My big disappointment is simply this, that the Supreme Court did not adjudicate it, did not take a look at it.
	It couldn't be a matter of greater importance.
	I know it's a Republican Supreme Court.
	I know what you're about to say. Why didn't they?
	I think it's because they were a little too timid or cowardly to get in the middle of an election struggle.
	Anyway, we'll be right...
	They got in the middle of Bush gore without any problem.
	That is true. That is true.
	We'll be right back and we're going to talk more about the insurgencies on the left.
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	We're back with Bill Ayers.
	We're talking about insurgencies of the left and the right and who poses a greater danger to the American fabric.
	Now, Bill, let's turn to...
	We talked a little bit about Antifa.
	I want to talk a little bit more now about Black Lives Matter.
	It seems to me that that's where your heart is.
	I mean, you talked about fighting for the civil rights movement.
	I think... When Debbie and I met you and your wife, you were wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt.
	So you're a Black Lives Matter guy.
	Let me remind you of one thing, Dinesh.
	When you and I had a debate in Ann Arbor, I was wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt.
	That must be five or six years ago, more than that.
	Oh, right. Sorry, I guess I was confusing that when we met in Chicago.
	I wear them more than one day.
	I might have worn it today.
	But what I remember about that discussion is the first question from the floor was from a woman, and she said, I'm a Christian, and I object to your T-shirt.
	It says Black Lives Matter.
	And I said, you don't think Black Lives Matter?
	And she said, no, I think all lives matter.
	And I said, I agree with that, and that's what this implies.
	It would be as if in Germany in 1935 you wore a t-shirt that said Jewish lives matter.
	It's not more humane to say, don't forget German lives matter too.
	That's assumed. Black lives matter, Jewish lives matter are the lives that are in question.
	That's why I wore the shirt.
	Yeah, and of course I agree that Black Lives Matter, as indeed all lives matter.
	Now, it has been the case where people have objected to the idea that, say, blue lives matter, which is to say cops' lives matter, and...
	Part of what we see in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations is the sort of belief that sort of the cops are bad.
	Not just this cop or that cop.
	Because let's visit for a moment.
	The George Floyd trial is going underway.
	Derek Chauvin is just getting underway now.
	Let me ask you this.
	One way to look at what happened was, look, here's a really bad cop or a couple of bad cops.
	Who did a really bad thing to George Floyd.
	And those cops need to be held accountable.
	That's a whole different thing than saying, listen, the cops are racist.
	And cops here in general would include, of course, black and Latino cops.
	In fact, there was a Latino and I believe an Asian in the group involved with George Floyd.
	So here's what I want to get at.
	What do you have against the cops?
	You've got these working class guys who sign up to do a job.
	They're ethnically a diverse group.
	They don't make the laws.
	They're in charge of applying the laws and administering them effectively.
	Why do you think that they're bad as a group and do you want to defund the police and if so, why?
	Well, you put a lot of information on me that I never said to you.
	No, I'm asking. I'm only asking.
	Yeah. I agree with you that cops typically are working class guys who've been recruited into this institution.
	That's true. But it's also true that the police...
	It's not a question of an individual bad apple.
	It's a bad system that has many, many good apples in it.
	And that's the way I would think about it.
	So, for example, in...
	Let's take New Haven, Connecticut.
	New Haven, Connecticut, the police make massive arrests in a community about a mile and a half from Yale for drug paraphernalia, for drug possession.
	They don't make that many arrests at Yale itself, and yet it's known that drug possession and drug use at Yale is as prevalent as drug use two miles away.
	Why is that?
	Why is it enforced one place and not another place?
	That's the institutional part.
	It's not a thing of good apples or bad apples.
	It's a thing about how the institution functions.
	So it's well known that the law in its majesty forbids both poor and rich from sleeping under the bridges and begging for coins on the street.
	Both poor and rich are covered by the majesty of the law.
	The problem with that is that it's a law made for the rich precisely because it targets some people.
	That's the situation we live in.
	So your other question was, do I think we should defund the police?
	Defund the police is a wonderfully popular slogan that basically says, let's have moral budgeting in a city like Chicago.
	We have a third of our budget going to the police.
	And every time you look around, that budget increases.
	And every time you look around, there's more policing.
	Why isn't some of that money going to community mental health clinics, which were cut, going to the public schools, which were cut?
	So in Chicago, when Rahm Emanuel was mayor, And he closed 50 schools in the Black community and proposed a $95 million police academy at the same moment.
	That was a recipe for social suicide.
	That's what I'm against.
	Let's come back to Chicago in a minute, but let's start with Yale and New Haven, because it seems to me that what you're saying, and I completely agree with it, by the way, is that the laws don't apply equitably to everybody.
	You've got powerful institutions that are able to game the system.
	So you know and I know that the most...
	Powerful institution in Hanover, New Hampshire is Dartmouth College.
	The most powerful institution in New Haven is Yale.
	So Yale is able to establish a protective cordon and basically say, we'll have some campus policemen just making sure no one gets out of line, but otherwise we're going to let students do whatever they want.
	I noticed that drinking was pervasive at Dartmouth and protected by the college.
	Even though there were all kinds of state laws against drinking.
	So we know this is true. It's true in our society more generally, right?
	You have people like Nancy Pelosi who say things like, nobody should have a gun, whereas everywhere she goes there are 10 guys who are massively armed.
	Nobody should have a wall.
	She's got a massive wall around her estate.
	So what I'm getting at is, why is this the fault of the police?
	What I'm getting at is we're living in a society where people, and I think most of them, in fairness, are on the left side of the aisle, live by a set of rules that are not applicable to everybody else.
	And we know that, and I agree, that inequity, I would like to correct it.
	I'd like to go take down the wall around Nancy Pelosi's house and say, if walls don't work, let's not have yours.
	If guns are ineffective, you don't need any protection.
	But what you seem to be saying is you want protection for yourself, but you don't want the ordinary...
	You're saying that to me? No, I'm just talking about...
	You're talking to Nancy.
	I'm talking aloud on a broader point.
	And what I'm trying to say...
	But I want a wall. I don't want a wall.
	No, no, no. The point I'm trying to make is this.
	You seem to be saying that because Yale allows privileges to its students that do not apply, let's say, to the rest of New Haven, therefore...
	The cops are to blame.
	And I guess what I'm trying to say is...
	No, I didn't say that. No, Dinesh, you misunderstood.
	Okay. What I said is there are good apples and bad apples.
	I'm not disagreeing with you on that.
	I think these are working class guys who go to work and this is their job.
	Okay. The problem is the law enforcement system is really a targeted system against some people and in favor of other people.
	That's all I'm saying.
	And so I'm not saying that they should go and bust into the Yale dorms and arrest all the kids who are smoking a joint.
	No, I don't think that. But I think the fact that they've aimed their resources and their energy and their time at this community is, in fact, a racist system.
	When we come back, we're going to talk to Bill Ayers a little bit more about Chicago and about the death toll in that city.
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	We're back with Bill Ayers.
	Bill, as I reflect on what you're saying, it seems to me that our disagreement might be a little different than I had originally thought.
	Our disagreement is actually not about whether there are unfair rules, and I don't even think it's about the problem of racism.
	I agree with you that there is just as much racism as you fear in our society, but here's my point.
	I think we disagree about the source of it.
	In my view, the racism that we see, for example, in cities like Chicago is driven by a democratic machine that, in fact, was the inventor of racism originally, historically.
	This all comes out of the Democratic Party, by the way, being the longtime party of slavery.
	But after slavery ended, they needed a way to establish their control on the South and then later on cities.
	And so racism became an effective mechanism to do that.
	Now, the racism today takes a different shape than it did before.
	It's obviously not the racism of the 1930s when the Democrats were openly allied with white supremacy.
	But it is the racism of indifference.
	And so, for example, you say Black Lives Matter, but it seems like you only, or at least the Black Lives Matter group only jumps up and down when a white cop...
	Kills a black guy.
	It doesn't jump up or down when you have shootings, for example, that occur in Chicago.
	Many of them, every single day, very often black-on-black crime, but maybe not black-on-black crime.
	Maybe it's Latino-on-black crime.
	Maybe it's the other way around.
	My point is, why don't those black lives matter?
	And if they do, aren't police the solution to keeping those communities safe rather than the problem?
	First of all, no, the police are not the solution.
	The solution is mutual aid.
	The solution is building up, spending our resources on education, mental health, health care, you know, guarantees of income, jobs, and not spending our money on surveillance and armed conflict and policing.
	That's, you know, every government on earth, and you support this too, every government on earth, All they ever really do, fundamentally, is tax and spend.
	The only question we should be debating is tax who and spend on what?
	I want to tax the rich and spend on healthcare and education.
	Other people want to tax the middle class or the poor, the working people.
	And spend on militarization, surveillance, and jails.
	I don't want to spend on that. So that's where our debate ought to be.
	You also are confusing the fact that you tend to think I'm a Democrat.
	You often do this. There's no way that I'm any part of the Democratic Party or ever have been.
	I actually find them...
	I call them the Republicans or whatever, the Repulsicans and the Plutocrats.
	But I mean, you voted for Biden, right?
	Yeah. Absolutely not.
	Well, who did you vote for?
	How would you know? No, I don't know.
	That's why I'm asking you. On the side of the masses of people.
	So that's kind of a false target.
	But I also do agree, and I think you're making one other mistake.
	I'd be interested in your response to this.
	I think in our language, racism means two distinct things.
	It means bigoted backward prejudice, and it means systems of oppression historically based on color.
	And so the one, the racism that's bigoted backward stupidity, you know, the guy who owned the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling or Cliven Bundy, everybody can say, well, I'm not a racist because I'm not Cliven Bundy.
	That misses the whole point.
	What's your position on closing black schools and opening a police academy?
	That's structural racism.
	That's not using the N-word.
	That's the problem. And so you point out the deep history of the Democrats and what a bunch of racist bastards.
	They were all true. And then, of course, the Republican Party pivoted brilliantly in the 60s against Lyndon Johnson.
	And the Republican Party, as Nixon himself said, is becoming the party of white people.
	And that's what it's becoming.
	And very, very explicitly so.
	So I don't think you can kind of Just point to the deep history and say, look at the Democrats, how awful.
	That's all true. The Republicans were the people who opposed slavery.
	The radical Republicans were the people I admire most in kind of mainstream political history.
	But the Republican Party did a strict pivot around the Southern strategy and around Goldwater and then Reagan and then Nixon.
	Yeah, I don't think there was such a pivot at all.
	Nixon lost the Deep South.
	As you know, who won it?
	George Wallace won the Deep South in 68.
	So if there was some great Nixon Southern strategy, it clearly didn't work.
	It was a pivot. It didn't work for him, but it worked in subsequent years.
	And Ronald Reagan went and announced his candidacy right where the three martyrs of Mississippi were killed.
	That was not unintentional.
	The conversation about states' rights, that's not unintentional.
	That's pointing to a history.
	The defense of Confederate statues and the Confederate battle flag, that's not accidental.
	That's on purpose. Well, if it was racism that brought the Deep South into the Republican camp, it would have occurred in the 60s and 70s, which was the heyday of the civil rights movement.
	No, no, no. Let me tell you this.
	I think the reason the South moved into the Republican camp is because of the Reagan program.
	I mean, think about it. Anti-communism, patriotism, pro-life, family values, Christianity...
	So what I'm getting at is, are you saying that all of this is sort of a code for the racist agenda?
	I mean, that's just nonsense. Much of it was code for a racist agenda.
	How is family values code for a racist agenda?
	Well, family values in some sense is code because when Reagan talks about family values, for example, he's not talking about guarantees of income.
	No, he's just talking about the fact that it's nice for children to be raised by a mom and a dad.
	Of course, of course. And that's racist, according to you?
	I'm explaining to you why, Dinesh.
	Slow down. I'm explaining to you why.
	Because what he did, instead of saying family is a social problem, he said, as Margaret Thatcher said, there is no such thing as society.
	There's only the family.
	And family values mean you take care of your family.
	It doesn't mean that the government has any role in either economic strategy or employment or taking care of poor kids.
	So the strategy of Reagan, family values, was the strategy or the policy in terms of children was choose the right parents.
	You'll do fine. Choose the right parents.
	The fact that some kids don't choose the right parents, well, sorry, I said choose the right parents.
	That was my policy. Well, I know a lot about Reagan because I worked for him.
	And I think in 1980, Bill, Reagan said, I'm running on five things.
	I'm running on the idea of the individual, upward mobility.
	I'm running on the idea of the family.
	I'm running on the church.
	I'm running on the community, which is to say the local community.
	And then I'm running on patriotism, which is the country.
	So it was never family in isolation.
	It was family embedded in a larger social fabric.
	You're right. Reagan didn't want the federal government to do it.
	But that doesn't mean he didn't want the little leagues to do it, or he didn't want the church to do it, or he didn't want the social service agency to do it.
	He just didn't want it to be done in a centralized manner from Washington.
	We'll be right back to talk more with Bill Ayers.
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	We're back with Bill Ayers.
	And Bill, I want to give you a chance to say, to respond to what I said about Reagan.
	Well, you said that he had these five principles or bullet points in his platform.
	But what I would point to is the fact that Reagan actually is the beginning.
	Reagan and Thatcher both.
	They're the beginning of A dialectic in all of society is the me and the we, the individual and the society.
	That's always true.
	There's always a push and a pull.
	And what Reagan did is lurched dramatically towards the individual.
	So when you say the Little League should do things, the church should do things, but he was basically saying, you are on your own.
	You figure it out. Civil society has a role, but the government has no role.
	And that's why people came into the government, I suppose, like you, Who thought the government should be so small that it could be drowned in a bathtub.
	It's not just a question of government and policy.
	It's a question of what Pope Francis, in his New Year's message this year, called toxic individualism.
	Radical individualism.
	Everything is about you. Public safety?
	Get a gun. Public education?
	Go to a charter school. Public health?
	Take care of yourself. That's radical individualism that the Pope condemned.
	So my conservatism, and I would argue Reagan's, is more Tocquevillian, which is to say the belief that there are, between the individual and the federal government, innumerable layers of society.
	And one of the bad things about the left is what it does is it bulldozes those.
	By moving power to the center, And by compelling the private sphere to do things that the center wants.
	I mean, here's a really good example.
	You know, you spoke in a very derisive way about states' rights.
	And I agree, in the 1840s and 50s, states' rights was invoked on behalf of slavery.
	but you know that states' rights was actually invoked previously on behalf of many great...
	Jefferson was a believer in states' rights and not because of slavery.
	Jefferson wanted to limit the power of the federal government so that each state, whether Virginia or Massachusetts, could run its own business because Jefferson believed Virginia is an agricultural society, Massachusetts is a fishing port.
	Why on earth should we have a uniform set of rules that govern Massachusetts and Virginia in the same way?
	So I think that the kind of knowing chuckle that, ha ha ha, it must be about benefiting the Monticello plantation, reflects a total misunderstanding of the role of states for...
	So here's what I'm getting at.
	Tocqueville believed that a healthy society functions at multiple layers and the federal government does what it does, but only what it's supposed to do.
	I think Reagan was just arguing we've seen, you can't disagree, a massive inflation of federal power, starting with FDR through the present, if anything the federal government has gained at the expense of the other institutions of society.
	Wouldn't you agree? Well, I think that the federal government has amassed a lot of power.
	I think it's used that power mainly in the interest of the wealthy.
	And I think that what we ought to have, for example, to take one simple example, we ought to have federal policy on national health care.
	We ought to have national health system.
	And the idea that we don't and what we have is Medicare, which is this privatized, jerry-rigged, insane system.
	And you can see how it unravels right now in the midst of a pandemic.
	We don't have a national health care system.
	We ought to. And I think that is the role for federal government.
	But if you're against kind of federal, you know, if you're against overreach of federal power, let's abolish the Pentagon.
	That sucks up trillions of dollars over decades.
	Trillions! Let's abolish the Pentagon.
	That to me would be a real indication that you mean it when you say you want less federal power.
	Well, I mean, I believe we live in a dangerous world, don't you?
	And so the country, it's not that we're free.
	Just like we need cops on the street, I think we do need a Pentagon.
	Now, would I go on adventurous crusades and war campaigns?
	No. But remember that even under Reagan, you've been talking about Reagan.
	We've talked about Reagan a good bit.
	Reagan did not believe in the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes or go to war.
	Reagan was very reluctant to go to war.
	Even when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan with 100,000 troops, Reagan didn't send a single soldier over there.
	Reagan basically believed people should fight for their own freedom.
	And if they fight, we can help.
	But that's pretty much all we're going to do.
	I hear you saying you agree with me that we should close all foreign military bases.
	We won't close the Pentagon, but let's close those foreign military bases.
	Let's close hundreds of foreign military bases.
	And let's stop patrolling the world the way we are.
	Let's stop that. Trillions of dollars being wasted.
	And meanwhile, there's all this hand wringing about, are we going to spend a billion dollars here or there?
	We spent trillions, trillions in national defense.
	Let me ask you this. Do you agree?
	I mean, just to see if we can find a point of agreement.
	The U.S. Navy currently patrols all the sea lanes of the world.
	And the reason that even commerce can occur, that ships can go from A to B safely without being boarded by Somali pirates or blown up by jihadists is partly because the US Navy keeps the sea lanes open.
	Do you think that the US Navy should not do that?
	Well, again, what you're getting into is you want to reduce systemic problems into a simple solution.
	So you want to say, if there's shootings in a poor community in Chicago, we have to pour the police in.
	Why don't we invest in jobs?
	Why is it that the world is so dangerous?
	Why is it that, for example, oil from the Middle East needs protecting?
	Well, it's got a lot to do with the history of us, not just us, but the West, I mean, even the immigration problem on the southern border could be addressed by more sane, sensible, and fair policy towards agriculture in the south.
	There's no question about it.
	And then we wouldn't need all the craziness that we have around the border.
	I want to talk about teaching, because I think you started out as a revolutionary, and I don't know if you would agree that you were a domestic terrorist.
	I think you'd have to say that if you were involved in bombing things, you were.
	No. Well, didn't you say in your book that you weren't sorry that you set off bombs?
	I know your wife has said in interviews that she is sorry.
	She said that the context was different.
	I wouldn't do it again.
	Maybe I'll give you a moment to address that.
	Do you think that you could envision a situation now where you would go bomb the Pentagon or the U.S. Capitol?
	Well, that's a ridiculous question.
	But the question of were we terrorists?
	No, we weren't because we were not using violence To try to compel a political position.
	That's not what we were doing. What were you trying to achieve?
	We were issuing a screaming cry against a genocidal war.
	The terrorists were the U.S. government.
	If you agree with a stable definition of terrorism, then an individual, a religious sect, a crazy group, or a government can be terrorists.
	Overwhelmingly, in the last 200 years, governments have been the terrorists.
	They're the ones who kill civilians and try to intimidate people through violence.
	Our government was the terrorists in 1965 to 75.
	We were conducting a terrorist war in Vietnam.
	Those of us who were trying to stop it did resort to extreme acts of vandalism, but that's not terrorism because we weren't trying to intimidate people or kill innocents.
	The United States was definitely trying to kill innocents.
	Let's turn to teaching, because you've devoted much of your life since then to being an educator, and I was struck by a statement that you made in one of your later books, This Is Not Fugitive Days, which is, by the way, your, this is your autobiography, and a very compelling read, I have to say. It's one of two memoirs.
	One of two memoirs. Memoirs of an Antimoraphy.
	Alright, you said in a later book, revolutionaries want to change the world, of course, and teachers, it turns out, want to change the world, too.
	And that struck me that in some ways you see your teaching mission as...
	It's continuous with your earlier revolutionary mission except in a new form.
	And would you agree that that is where radical activism is focused today in transforming the universities and the culture, in taking over the culture?
	Because it has, I would say, for the most part.
	In what ways taking over the culture?
	Well, to give you an idea, when I was a student at Dartmouth, for example, if you spoke out as a conservative, you would be in the minority, but you would be heard.
	There wouldn't be an effort to shut you down.
	And maybe we can close on this note.
	I want to ask you about, we've seen in our society now, part of this is COVID, but part of this is digital censorship.
	A real attack on civil liberties.
	And by civil liberties, I mean the ability to speak freely, whatever your point of view.
	It's harder to notice a deprivation of civil liberty when it's occurring to someone whose view you don't share.
	Because it's like, hey, it's having that guy.
	No one's going to censor me.
	But someone like me on social media right now is constantly facing a sort of Damocles over my head.
	And that is our new public square.
	So do you approve of this regime of...
	I would say mass digital censorship in which things like free speech which we could previously take for granted in this country are now becoming endangered I'm not sure that I see it, Dinesh, the way you do.
	I mean, you're speaking. Nobody's stopping you.
	You're saying what you want.
	Speakers come to campuses all the time.
	They should come to campuses.
	I myself have been shut down at the University of Wyoming, the University of Colorado, you know, the Chicago Public Library.
	I'm against it. I'm more or less a fundamentalist when it comes to being able to speak freely.
	But I think the whole nonsense about the cancel culture, oh my God, Dr.
	Seuss was canceled. That's just Flatly not true.
	And Josh Hawley has not been canceled.
	He's actually a big noise and he makes a big noise.
	He's going to run for president. So the idea that somehow he's been canceled.
	I'll tell you who was canceled.
	Colin Kaepernick was canceled.
	I mean, that was, you know, he was canceled because he made a statement about police brutality.
	So I'm against it.
	And that's why I wore my Colin Kaepernick jersey for years.
	Now the National Football League has suddenly become Oh, we're all for social justice, racial justice.
	And every corporation has.
	Now, you can't say that that's somehow the left doing something to the National Football League.
	That's a mass movement that's waking people up to the reality.
	And the National Football League is struggling, for example, to get in front of it.
	NASCAR taking off the Confederate flag.
	Who would have ever thought that was possible?
	Do you think that's somehow cancel culture?
	You think that's bad that somebody made them do it?
	The government didn't do anything.
	NASCAR did it to themselves.
	So that's okay, right?
	Yeah, I'm not talking about a company deciding, for example, not to fly a flag.
	I'm actually talking about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.
	And I'm talking about...
	Because of technology, this has now become our public square.
	I'm talking about the political debate that is essential to a democracy.
	Now, when I post on Twitter and Facebook, you may not agree with what I say, but I mean, I'm not posting pro-Hitler material.
	I'm not a fascist.
	So the idea that you have these Admittedly private institutions, but they've become so large that in a sense they control the public square and they became large on the basis of false pretenses.
	They said, we're going to be robust protectors of free speech and now they've put the clamp on us.
	So my point is simply this.
	Shouldn't there be some unity across the political spectrum to tell these guys, hey, back off, because a democracy needs the fuel of almost unfettered free speech in order to have a healthy debate and come closer to truth?
	Agree or disagree? Absolutely.
	Nobody elected Mark Zuckerberg.
	So I think you and I agree that these social media, which is way ahead of our ethical or political understanding of how they should work, they ought to be regulated by people who represent the masses of people, right? They ought to be regulated.
	Well, I don't know what the form of regulation is.
	I mean, you're right. I would repeal their Section 230 protection overnight.
	Absolutely. Absolutely. Without a doubt.
	They don't deserve any special kind of legal immunity.
	There's also an effort, for example, in Texas with Governor Abbott who says, listen, you know, if you ban anybody in Texas, we're going to fine you.
	So the point is you can have regulation at multiple levels.
	But yeah, I'm not in principle opposed to government regulation to free the public square as opposed to shut it down.
	And on that note, we're out of time.
	Billers, thank you very much for joining the podcast.
	It's been a lot of fun.
	Thanks for joining me. Great to see you.

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