Giancarlo Sopo and Glenn Beck dissect the erosion of classical liberalism, tracing Sopo's shift from Democratic orthodoxy to centrism after witnessing campus intolerance. They critique the Democratic Socialists of America's anti-capitalist agenda while advocating for Swiss-style healthcare decentralization and local immigration vetting over federal bureaucracy. The conversation exposes how media echo chambers fuel polarization, proposing term limits and jungle primaries to restore rational discourse. Ultimately, they argue that abandoning ideological rigidity for pragmatic solutions like apprenticeships and common-sense drug policies is essential to healing a fractured nation. [Automatically generated summary]
I feel a little, I mean, not just because of my size, but I feel a little like Horton.
And I don't know if you are a spec or a who.
You know, Horton, here's a who, the story.
Yeah.
Dr. Seuss.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So are you just an individual Democrat that has common sense?
Or do you represent, are there a lot of you?
Are there more people like you?
Yeah.
You know, it's so crazy.
I measure my political ideology every couple of months just to kind of see, hey, have I changed on something?
Right.
And I have not changed.
And it's, this is just who I've always been.
And I think there was a point last year where I saw Dave Rubin's Why I Left the Left video, and I saw him point out a lot of things that I wasn't really like, like conscious of, like the stuff that was going off on, like, going on on college campuses.
Like I had heard about that kind of stuff, but I always thought, those are like isolated incidents.
It's like, it's sort of like a distraction.
It's really not happening.
And so when I started reading more about it and I started becoming more like keenly aware of everything that was going on, I was like, hey, there's a lot of problem on my side too.
And, you know, I went to a Catholic school, so I'd always remembered the verse in the Bible about taking the log out of your own eye before you look at the spec and your brothers.
And I started thinking about what are some things on my side that we could also improve upon.
And it just really became apparent to me that there was a movement within the Democratic Party.
I don't know when it happened.
And I don't want to say just like within the party as an institution, just like in general, like on the left.
I don't know when it happened, but where like we kind of went from like championing like free speech on free speech on college campuses, like places like Berkeley and like those protests to just becoming like kind of like shouting that down.
And that's not who I am.
That's not what I believe in.
My parents fled like a country where that was like the norm.
And I'm not saying that the U.S. is going to become like Cuba or anything like that, but it just kind of seemed really weird to me, everything that was going on here.
So I started speaking out.
As you've started to speak out, have you found more Democrats like you?
Yeah, yeah.
I've had people tweet at me, but it's funny, like most of the people who follow me, when I just kind of like read their profile, they're conservatives.
Yeah.
That's kind of, I was hoping that you weren't a spec, but you were a who.
And there's a whole little village there of a whole bunch of people like you.
There might be.
There might be.
So in 2008, I mean, you're on the Democratic Platform Committee?
So in 2008, I was working for a congressional campaign in Miami.
And I was, I had been organizing before that Hispanics for Obama.
Probably like one of the first people in the country to do that, like in early 2007, when nobody knew who this guy was, and so I was named to the Dnc's uh platform drafting committee as the youth representative, because I was like 23, 24 years old at the time and um, i'm yeah, it was.
Beyond Stereotypical Labels00:13:12
It was like a really cool experience I.
I got to meet like people like Jenny Napolitano, Susan Rice, uh Duval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, and like serve on this committee with them and it was a, it was a fascinating experience for a 24-year-old.
Yeah, you must have hated me watching, watching me, because you must have hated me.
So, so it's funny.
So it's funny you mention that.
So uh I, I clearly remember I had a uh back then.
I used to drive a white Gmc Jimmy from 1995 uh, with like an old beat up radio and I would only get uh am.
So whenever, whenever you would come on, i'd be like oh, it's the crazy guy.
We'd turn it off, and it's strange is that we've kind of become friends now.
Yeah yeah, someone I really have a lot of respect for.
Likewise, you know because um, it just it when you're able to put like political differences aside and just speak to people, you realize we have a lot more in common than what than where we disagree, that sometimes these, these differences that we have in our culture are being peddled by interest groups and they're and they're like manufactured, almost like manufactured controversies.
Some of it's there's some differences are very legitimate right, like um I I don't know, for example, how you feel about the nature of social programs, whether we should have them or anything like that.
I happen to think that they could do a lot of good in society to help people um, just because i'm seeing my mom as a social worker growing up, and so forth.
But I think, like a lot of these points, there's a lot of, there's a lot more common ground, I think, than What people realize.
But because of the way the media is structured vis-a-vis the political parties, institutions, and the people who fund them, it's like they're constantly tearing the country apart.
And I think it's like very unhealthy.
And I think we've got to come to a point where we, yeah, we're able to have these disagreements, but bring people together.
So let's take social programs here for a second.
The problem is that a conservative is a conservative will say about a person that wants a bigger social platform through the government, you're a socialist or you're a communist.
And the Democrat will say, you hate children.
And neither of those are true.
Right.
I mean, one of the reasons why I joined the church that I did is by their fruits you shall know them.
It is, I think it's the second largest welfare organization in the world.
Right.
But they don't brag about it.
Yeah.
And they don't, but I believe that's the way it should be.
I give freely give 10% for those kinds of things.
Good tiding.
Right.
And so there's all kinds of things we can do.
And government does play a role.
But we're not only calling each other names that are not true in many cases, sometimes they are, but it's gotten so bad.
We now won't even really truly give the other person the benefit of the doubt to listen.
You're not a monster.
You know what I mean?
Show me you're not a monster.
Right, right.
Yeah.
So it's funny.
So like, it's funny you say that because like last night I put something on my personal Facebook page, like the one I just have with like people I know in real life.
People I know in real life.
Yeah, I don't accept people anymore who I've never met because you never know.
So I published something about Brett Kavanaugh.
I was like, look, I may or may not disagree with this man's judicial philosophy.
You know what the problem is?
I haven't had a chance to even hear about his judicial philosophy because we've been hearing about secret white power signs.
And then it went from there to, I forgot what was the next controversy.
And then now it's like all a sexual assault and then like running a gang rape cartel.
And I'm like, you know, I was like, I may or may not disagree with this man's judicial philosophy.
And frankly, I have to be candid about the things that I know and the things that I don't know.
I don't know enough about law to tell you whether I disagree with this man's judicial philosophy.
I could say I disagree with him on these issues, but in terms of his judicial philosophy, it's not what I do for a living.
You know, I'm not a constitutional scholar.
So, but now we've gotten to the point where I have to personally destroy people.
So I put up this thing on my Facebook about, hey, you know, this is where I'm at on this.
I think the charges may or not be true.
I didn't see them myself, but I think the evidence isn't there.
And I had like people who I know write to me, like, I like had like some exchanges with those people, say, I don't know that we can be friends anymore.
And I was like, for what?
You know, like, these are people who I've known for years, not like close friends or anything, but just like acquaintances tell me, like, I don't think we could like be friends anymore.
Like, you've changed.
I'm like, I haven't changed.
I'm just like, I applied the same standard that I'm applying for Brett Kavanaugh, applied it to Roy Moore, and I went to like a different conclusion with him.
Here, I can't conclude that the man did these terrible things that he's accused of.
When I look at Brett Kavanaugh, I don't think he was Biff Tannen in high school.
I think he was George McFly.
You know, maybe.
Yes.
But I don't know.
Yeah, I have no idea.
You were here in the studio when I had an interview with who I thought was the BBC.
Yeah.
Because I said yes to the BBC.
I would have never said yes to CNN International because I have spent five years trying everything I know to try to break through to people on the other side in the media and say, do not do this.
Don't do this.
Look, there's you're making things worse.
And this interviewer said to me, I want to read, because you can judge people by what they read, what they write on Twitter.
And I'm thinking, what have I written on Twitter recently?
She said, this came out from you just a few days ago.
And I'm paraphrasing.
It said, I believe the American people are fair.
And they don't want to condemn Brett Kavanaugh or Professor Ford because there's not enough evidence and they just don't want to be put into that position.
And if the Democrats jam this down people's throats, there will be a backlash at the voting poll.
She said to me, so are you saying Democrats aren't Americans?
I don't know how you could reach that conclusion based off what you wrote.
I follow you on Twitter.
So I'm like, yeah, I think there are people on both sides that I think are trying to break through to the other side.
And there are these like these vested interests that are preventing that from happening.
Right.
So there are people who also have other podcasts on my side of the aisle who they would never allow you to go on their show.
Because if you go on their show and you sound like a normal, rational person that you are, they can no longer turn around and tell their supporters, oh, this guy is a crazy conservative loon.
These people, they want to take away your rights and so forth, right?
So there's all these vested interests.
And I think it happens on both sides, just to be totally fair, to prevent people from talking to one another because we've created these echo chambers because there are powerful financial interests there, but it's just also, that's how these people keep the game going.
And it's extremely frustrating because you are siloing the country apart.
So like, you know, and I get this all the time.
When in 2016, when I had a job back then that required me to move to Virginia for a few months for work, I lived in a county that went 74% for Donald Trump.
My wife is very obviously not an American, just by looking at her and by talking to her.
She's biracial.
And when you speak to her, at the time she was just learning English.
And they could not have been nicer to us.
And this is like in rural Virginia.
Our neighbors were Trump supporters.
They could not have been nicer to us.
They weren't asking her weird questions about her immigration status or anything like that.
They thought that it was cool that she was Cuban, actually.
They would ask us all sorts of like questions.
They wanted to try ethnic food.
And we're not that different.
And there are these caricatures that people have propped up, right?
Just like people in San Francisco may not be as tolerant as we think they are, right?
Or they may not be as crazy as some people on the right make them out to be.
The exception of the people who are pooping in the streets.
Yes, that seems kind of weird.
Pooperoni.
Yeah, like my best friend from high school lives in San Francisco, normal guy.
What's amazing is people are normal pretty much anywhere.
Yeah.
Pretty much anywhere.
And I think, you know, I've been trying to find our unum.
And our unum, I think, is the Bill of Rights.
That's what, that's what brought us here.
We were escaping someplace that was violating something in our Bill of Rights.
Yeah.
And that's why people came from all over the world.
And we don't know it.
So people can't defend them.
They don't know what they even mean anymore.
And we've lost that.
And so we're talking about these little teeny things that are so stupid.
They're so stupid.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, these gigantic pillars are starting to crumble.
And it's the pillars.
It's the Bill of Rights that we have to protect because that's what brought us together.
You can believe in anything.
And I'm going to be totally fine with you if you're not trying to tell me how I have to live my life.
Yeah.
You don't violate the Bill of Rights and you'll stand for the Bill of Rights for the people that you don't like.
Yeah. We're good. Yeah.
And that's where I've always been, right?
That's what like those were the kinds of things that I would that I would say around my house when I was like in my in like my mid-20s and my family would think I was a communist, you know, just for saying, oh yeah, I think those kids are perfectly fine to protest the Iraq war, you know, and I think it's okay to question the Iraq war.
You know, so like I was not very political in high school.
And then when I turned 18 at the, at the, when I just to register to get my driver's license, I think it was like 17 or something like that.
And you had to start filling out your voter registration form.
They asked me what party you want to put down.
I said, I don't know.
My grandfather's a Republican.
I'll just put down Republican.
And that's, you know, and then, but I've never voted Republican.
And then I switched, like formerly switched parties for like around 2004 for that election when I became like politically conscious.
And I was like, you know, it's really weird that these guys are questioning your patriotism just for opposing the Iraq war.
Nothing more patriotic than opposition to a government stance.
I mean, again, one of the things we were founded on.
Yeah.
So then I so then I started then becoming much more active in politics.
And the things that I've always stood for, which is like tolerance and acceptance and listening to one another, those values are right now, they are under assault.
People like to look at a lot at the right.
And I think a lot of things that President Trump says are terrible that I obviously disagree with.
But those values are also coming under assault from the left.
And I have a serious problem with that because nobody is talking about it.
The only people who are talking about it are people like you, people like Ben Shapiro, people like Dave Rubin.
And you guys are being ostracized just like they're looking at you like you guys are crazy for even like mentioning this stuff.
I hate using the term mainstream media because it's almost like it's like a conservative like buzzword.
But yeah, sure, like the mainstream media refuses to talk about this stuff.
And it's extremely frustrating for someone like me because I think these are like traditional liberal values and maybe like classical liberal.
They're classical liberal.
Yeah.
They're not like left-wing values or even like right-wing.
Just like, you know, it's like the traditional classical liberal value to have tolerance and acceptance for other people.
And you can do your thing.
I do my thing.
Don't try to encroach on me.
And I'll leave you alone.
That is stereotypical American used to be.
Stereotypical American classic liberal values.
Che Guevara Stories00:05:03
Yeah.
And I grew up in a very traditional home.
My parents were like Reagan conservatives almost.
My mom's never been very political, but growing up, she had a picture of herself with Ronald Reagan at an event in Miami.
And my dad, who was a Bay of Pigs guy, he was like, you know, he was with the cause.
What do you mean, Bay of Pigs guy?
He was in the Bay of Pigs.
On which side?
On our side.
On our side.
He went in.
Because your grandparents were in Cuba?
Yeah.
So on my dad's side of the family, my grandfather was a psychiatrist in the Cuban Navy pre-Castro with Batista.
Not a, you know, just a, he's just a doctor, right?
So they arrest everyone who was in the Batista military, right?
My grandfather was one of them.
And he dies in prison within three months of like March 1959, right?
Then my father gets arrested and gets released through some family connection.
And then they all come to Miami.
And then about a year later, they start organizing the Bay of Pigs invasion.
And he goes into Cuba six weeks before the invasion to do intel for the cause and set information back.
Obviously, he doesn't succeed.
He almost gets caught because he accidentally ordered gasoline and you said the word dollars instead of pesos.
And then he sneaks into, I believe it was the Venezuelan embassy at the time, which obviously you couldn't do now.
But he sneaks into the Venezuelan embassy as a delivery boy.
And he's like there for like almost like six months in the embassy.
Then he gets taken out.
So very traumatic.
And then my mom's side, almost like the opposite story.
My grandparents were living in the United States and then they moved back to Cuba because my great-grandmother got really sick and my grandparents had to go take care of her.
And then after a few years that they were on the island and things started getting bad, they wanted to come back, but by then it was impossible because my grandparents had American children and the Cuban government under Castro was like not letting him leave the island and there were like these long wait lists.
And so they ended up being stuck in the country for about like 20 years.
So what did you know about Che growing up?
What did they know about Jay and Castro?
So it's funny.
Cuban-American kids who grew up in Miami were taught like three things.
Jesus, Santa Claus, and Federal Castro is a bad guy.
Those are like the first three things you learn.
So yeah, so that was always very present, right?
Like I, you know, it wouldn't, it would never happen, but like no kid would ever go back into like his Cuban parents' household with like a Che shirt, for example.
It just like would never, like, your parents would disown your family.
Explained who Che was for people who are wearing Che shirts.
Yeah, sure.
So Che Guevara was an Argentine, I think it was like a medical school dropout who was a revolutionary who met Fidel Castro at a party in Mexico.
And then those guys, you know, like formed like a little group that went back to Cuba and invaded the island.
I don't know, invasion because it's their own company, but you know, you know, yeah.
So they go back to Cuba and they start the Cuban Revolution.
And his role in all of that, once the revolution comes into power, this is a guy who has like no financial education whatsoever, but he was like the head of banking for the country.
And then, but he was also like the Castro's executioner.
So he was executing people without trial at a prison called La Cabana.
And a horrible racist.
Yeah.
He hated homosexual, killed homosexual.
I mean, he was just everything that anyone who is wearing a Che t-shirt thinks they're for, he's against.
Yeah.
So I've heard stories from Cubans who live on the island of how like Che Guevara would, you know, would go somewhere and then find like, like round up men who he considered effeminate and tell them, you guys either start acting like men or I'll execute you.
So stuff like that was happening left and right.
So that's the, that's how my family grew up.
So like anything that smelled like communism, my parents were like, like adamly against it, particularly my dad, who is just like, because of his, his own father died as a political prisoner.
They told, up to this day, we have no idea how my grandfather died.
They just told my grandmother, oh, he committed suicide.
You know, which is like always what they would tell people.
So we're not really sure even how my grandfather died.
I never met him, obviously.
Norway Border Club00:08:17
And so with having that really present in my mind and growing up in a community where you have so many Venezuelans, so many Argentines, so many Nicaraguans, you're very conscious of what socialism is and what it's not and what these words democratic socialism, what that is and what it's not.
It's really hard.
It's Norway.
No, it's not.
It's not Norway.
It's just like Norway.
Yeah, right.
I wish Venezuela was just like Norway.
So that coupled with all this intolerance on college campuses, like this embrace of democratic socialism and the fact that like Bernie Sanders is apparently now the intellectual heavyweight of the Democratic Party.
I was like, this is insane.
This is not what I signed up for.
I signed up for, you know, hey, we're like the tolerant people who are okay with gay people getting married and who we are, you know, we're forced social programs to help the poor.
That's the club that I joined.
Now it's become like a club for like the professionally offended and the socialists.
And I'm, you know, that's, I don't want anything to do with that.
You know, it was very interesting.
I watched both conventions in 2016 with my wife, who is like. fresh pair of eyes, knows nothing about American politics.
She had only been in this country for a few months.
And she saw the Republican convention and she was like, wow, this is really bizarre.
You know, this is really strange.
You know, it's funny.
I've been told my entire life that America is like this imperialist power and they're talking about, the Republicans are talking about like America's military has been depleted.
This is like, I'm shocked.
And then she, she saw the Democratic convention and she was like, okay, oh, these people are, yeah, they're really nice, but why do they speak to Hispanics as though they're like victims or something?
And I was like, I started thinking about that.
I was like, you know what?
You're right.
Like, I know I'm Hispanic.
I'm like as American as you are, Glenn, I guess.
I was born and raised here, but I'm also fully fluent in Spanish.
I don't need someone to speak to me like I'm a victim all the time.
I hate like, who was it?
Elizabeth Warren was giving a speech about, you know, one of the dangers of having a conservative justice on the Supreme Court is that he would, a conservative justice would hurt people of color.
Okay.
First off, I don't know what color she's talking about because I'm like pale, almost as pale as you are.
Okay.
If I go out in the sun, I get like bright pink.
But okay, fine.
And then she's, you know, she's, and then I'm like thinking, well, I might, like, I might have a judicial philosophical difference with this guy or some ideological difference or political difference, whatever.
Right.
But I don't feel like a victim.
Like what she's implying with her comments is that like we're losers, that we need people to take care of us, like get extra care for us because we're like small and in danger or something.
And that's not how I feel at all.
I feel like I live in the best country in the world.
I could do anything here.
There's nothing that like what my family went through in Cuba and what like my friends' families go went through in places that are not Cuba, but even places like Brazil or whatever.
We have it, Latinos have it here better than in any Latin American country in the world.
That's why we have a border problem.
Yeah.
I mean, we have a border problem because people want to come here because, I mean, I went down to, for my 50th birthday, my wife did a surprise party and I think we were in Puerto Vallarta.
And we spent time, you know, in with the locals, not in all of the crap touristy places.
Yeah.
And talking to people.
Yeah.
There's no way they feel there's no way to change their station.
You know, they want something different from their for their children, but they don't have the money or the ability to get their children out.
You know, it, it, I, I, I say this to conservatives all the time.
If you were in the same situation, if you were there, you were, your children had no prospects, you had drug lords all around, that was the prevailing way to get out.
You know, you, as a parent, would look at the country up north that was saying, you know, we really don't take this seriously.
Yeah.
You know, you cross the border.
It's no big deal.
Of course, you would come.
Yeah, of course.
Of course, you would come.
Yeah.
You would be crazy not to.
Yeah.
That's like, imagine like Disney World had like free admission for a day.
Everyone would just like go.
You would go.
Everybody would go.
And you, and how could you blame them?
Yeah.
It's free.
Go.
And that's what, that's what America is.
Like, so I was, and I think, I think we, you know, we've talked about this before, but I was in Havana in March to visit a friend of mine was getting married.
And I stayed with my family who's like, they live in the suburbs of the city.
And we, the fan, the fan in my room broke in the middle of the night.
And so the next morning we went to buy a fan.
Glenn, it took us an hour to buy a fan, right?
Which half, like half of that, half that hour was just like waiting in line and waiting for the lady to bring it out from the back of the store because you obviously just can't grab the one that's there on display.
And then the other half an hour is dismantling the fan, writing down the serial numbers, and then filling out three forms for acquisition of private property.
Oh my gosh.
So people go through that so many times in a day that of course they're not going to worry about spreading democracy in Cuba because they're just worried about the day-to-days, right?
Like, you know, their quotidian problems that they all have.
So like multiply it by like 11 million people on that island.
Now imagine that also like in a place like Guatemala where you have gangs like threatening to kill your kid.
Yeah.
So what people go through in Latin America is horrible.
And what I tell my conservative friends all the time is like, hey, these people, like the like, like Latin Americans, they naturally share a lot of like American values, right?
Religious people, families at the center of everything.
And they work hard.
We should welcome these people into our country and find a logical pathway forward.
It is, amen.
It is the Americans, quite honestly, like me, that are so removed.
My family came back.
I don't even know when, but I know that I had relatives in the Civil War.
Wow.
So for generations we've been here.
So I'm just like, I don't know.
It's great here.
Why do you fix every place else?
And so we don't see it.
And it's stunning to me.
The three, the last three people I've talked to on this podcast, as we've recorded them, all three I have found fascinating and inspiring.
And the last three have been first generation Americans because they see it differently.
They see, don't squander what you have.
This is great.
We got a good thing going on here.
We do.
Yeah, this is like a really amazing place.
I don't know if you're keeping track, like what's happening in Brazil with their elections.
Like their conservative candidate just got stabbed into the chest a few weeks ago.
Argentina's currency is another dispute again.
Yeah.
Venezuela, I can't.
These is probably not the way to go for a healing.
But as we, my charity is trying to get to Venezuela to help people to get in, it's almost impossible.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's just not happening.
Yeah.
Safety Net Misconceptions00:07:25
As we're trying to do this, I'm wondering, where are all of the Hollywood people?
Where are all of the Democratic socialists that told us this was going to be fantastic?
Again, socialism fails.
And may I ask you this?
Sure.
Did conservatives, do we do ourselves a disservice because we have conflated a welfare program and a safety net with socialism?
Yeah, for sure.
So I'll give you a perfect example of this.
Right now it's going on in the Florida governor's race, right?
I don't know how you feel about Andrew Gillum, but he's the Democratic nominee for governor of my state.
He's being called a socialist by his opponent's campaign, which is Ron DeSantis.
Andrew Gillum is not a socialist.
Andrew Gillum is your garden variety liberal.
His big socialist idea, air quotes, is that he wants to raise, Florida does not have a state income tax just like Texas.
We have a corporate tax that's like 5% or something.
He wants to raise it to 7% to pay for higher salaries for teachers or something along those lines, right?
That's his big socialist proposal, right?
That's not a socialist proposal, right?
That's just like, he's like, he wants to pay these people, these government workers more and he has to raise these revenues.
So I think it's extremely counterproductive for, and I wrote a story about this.
I was like, I think it's extremely counterproductive for Republicans and conservatives to call any kind of tax increase or any social program socialism, because there are people within the ranks on the left who want to push actual socialism, and you're conflating just your guarded variety of liberals with those people.
You're conflating a safety net with socialism.
Explain what socialism is and why you're passionate about it.
Not only your background, but your wife.
Yeah, so I've always understood socialism as being the acquisition of the means of production by the state, control of the means of production, where, and I can tell you how I've seen it play out, right?
Where people work for the state or where private property is no longer private.
It's owned collectively, or where companies are turned essentially into like massive co-ops, if you will, right?
So it's like a hybrid.
Philosophers debate the definition of socialism all the time, but essentially that's in the ballpark of where it is.
Would you say that public schools, the way they are run, where they are controlled by the state, really owned by the state, that that is a socialist program or not a socialist program?
Well, look, does it meet the strict definition of some socialist characteristics?
Sure.
But I think what most people would argue is say, we cannot have a society where some children go without education because they can't pay for it.
So we need to create this, you know, there are some things that the government has to do because the private sector can either not do them or it cannot do them as efficiently.
In terms of educating everyone, everyone.
So if you want to have an entire, like if you want to guarantee that every single kid in this country goes to a school, the government can do that, right?
So that would be like the response to that, right?
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
So Venezuela is socialist.
Yeah.
Democratic socialism that actually started in South America.
Did it not?
Isn't democratic socialism.
So my understanding is that, so democratic socialism is an offspring of like Marxist theory that evolved in Germany at the end of the 19th century.
Right.
And then throughout the early 20th century and then halfway through the mid-20th century, they realized that like this revolution of the proletariat was not a good thing.
So they wanted Marxist socialist ideas in terms of the ownership of the means of production, but they wanted it done in a way that was democratic, if you will, through the ballot box inserted, as opposed to a rifle.
Democratic national socialism would be Nazis.
They voted for Adolf Hitler.
And it was a socialist state.
But it wasn't the ownership of all businesses and all private property.
And it wasn't international like communist Russia.
Do I understand this?
Yeah, that's my understanding as well.
So the democratic socialist of Latin America would be someone like Hugo Chavez, who's passed away in 2013, who is someone who said, okay, first off, when he ran for office, he just ran as a normal progressive.
He actually, there was a great interview with him and Jorge Ramos where they asked him, oh, are you going to nationalize anything?
Nope.
Are you going to only be in office for five years?
In fact, I'll leave sooner.
And then, are you going to shut down any media stations?
No, of course not.
Once he's in office, though, he starts slowly but surely nationalizing certain industries, expropriating assets, putting things under state control to make it impossible for his opponents to organize against him.
You can't run an ad on a certain TV station because it's now been confiscated by the state.
All the transportation workers are now unionized through a public union that he controls, right?
So he started doing this slowly but surely, and he consolidated his power.
And now you have this disaster, which Venezuela is always going to have problems because it was a very oil-dependent economy.
It was not a diversified economy.
So Venezuela was going to have a problem anyway, like in the 2000s when like early late 2010s, yeah, when oil crashed, right?
But their centralized power and the like the fact that everything was like so centrally planned like it made the country like unable to react to that in a way that was like faster and more pragmatic.
And also the fact that Chavez set these absurd oil production quotas because he thought he could run the oil industry by himself and he fired all of the workers for the state-owned PDVSA, which is the state oil enterprise.
He fired all these people, replaced them with his own goons, basically, to run an oil company, and they ruined the oil reserves of the country.
So yes, Venezuela was going to have financial problems.
Yes, sure.
but he made it a lot worse.
People will say, and again, where is Hollywood?
Where is Sean Penn and everybody that went down and said, oh, look at Hugo Chavez?
They will always say, they always do.
Well, yes, it just didn't work this time because this guy went bad.
Venezuela Oil Reserves00:14:26
Right, right.
Yeah, they said the same thing about Castro.
And Stalin and Lenin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, so there is like this tendency, I think, to confuse intent, right, with outcomes, right?
Where you judge people by what they say they want to do instead of like the outcomes that they achieve.
And I think that's what that's like a logical fallacy that's very prevalent in some circles on the left.
Because somebody says, oh, I want to cure hunger and I want to cure poverty or whatever.
All the empirical evidence shows that there is no better instrument for doing that than the free enterprise system, than capitalism, right?
Yet they fall in love with these socialist dictators because they speak of, I don't know what's like more romantic and more emotions.
And I think, I don't know how we connected from this to like Brett Kavanaugh, but I think that's like part of what's happening now is that like where people are being or care more about their like their emotions than about just like facts.
Emotions matter, obviously, but they should be like informed by facts.
I might not like Brett Kavanaugh, I might not like some of the things that he says or whatever, but I have to guide myself based on the facts.
And I think that's, there's a huge problem with that now on the left, which is weird because it's always like always characterized themselves as, oh, we're like the enlightened party.
We're the science-driven people.
But in reality, there is a huge gap developing right now on my side of the aisle.
And I'm trying to push people to think, rethink this a little bit more.
And I don't know how much success I'm having, but I'm trying to pull people toward a radical center.
When I first came across you, you were, I think you wrote an op-ed or an essay, right?
For Quillette, yeah.
Yeah, for Quillette, which I think is a great website.
Yeah.
And you wrote about, no, no.
Democrats, democratic socialism is not what you think it is.
It's not what they say it is.
Yeah.
Tell me, when you see, when you see somebody like, what's her name?
Ocasio?
Ocasio.
Cortez.
People here.
It's a great message.
It's a great message.
I just want people to be taken care of.
We just want things to be more equal.
You know, we just, we want things to be more fair and we're going to take care of people.
I cringe when I hear her.
Yeah.
So what happened was that on the night of her election, I'd already been having these debates with like my friends and like text message wars for months and probably alienated half of them.
So when she got elected, or when she won the primary rather, and I heard her, oh, I'm a Democratic socialist.
And I was like, and I saw the media coverage of what this word meant.
I was like, this is totally wrong.
It's not a misnomer.
This is just a complete fabrication.
They're ascribing a definition to this term that is inconsistent with what it truly is.
And it's not just like, well, Americans use the word liberal in a different way than they do in Europe.
It wasn't that.
It's that she was actually associated with.
By the way, that was the progressives that changed that.
Yes.
I just want to make sure we're very well aware it was a Democratic president that changed that.
So there was a piece run by the Washington Post by Elizabeth Brunig on this is what democratic socialism is.
And she did like this whole video explainer for it.
And it was essentially, yeah, Democratic Socialism is Canada, the UK, and Norway, and Denmark or something.
It's like, this is not what this is.
So I really started doing some research into this group, the Democratic Socialists of America, and what they believe in.
And I was like, holy S-word.
You know, like, this is like what my parents fled.
This is what people in Latin America flee.
What's the difference between them and Canada?
Between the Democratic Socialists of America and the Canadians want a free market system.
They just want some government health care along with that.
But they like their free market system and they have actually a certain level of privatization in their healthcare sector, right?
These people, they like the Scandinavian social safety then programs, but then they want to go much farther with regards to the actual economy.
That bagel shop down the street, government-owned or turned into a co-op, right?
Amazon, broken up and owned by the state.
General Electric, the same.
That's what these people think.
It's not, I'm not making this up.
Look at their website.
Look at their speeches.
That's what they believe.
It's an end of capitalism.
Right.
And to their credit, the hardcore leaders of that organization are very transparent about that.
The thing is that they say it in magazines like Jacobin and they go to other outlets, but this never gets reported in the media.
It's like almost like, oh, no, we don't want people to find out that we have crazy people on our social media.
Well, they will say, because I ran into this with Black Lives Matter.
Yeah.
I'm dead set against Black Lives Matter.
If you read their manifesto, if you go to their website and you see what they're actually for, no thank you.
Okay.
However, the people that are marching in the streets, many of them have never been to the website.
They don't agree with all of that stuff.
When we had a shooting of a police officer here in Dallas, I had some of them come into the studio afterwards because when that shooting happened, we, my crew, was covering the march.
When the shots rang out, people that were marching hid behind a car with my crew and they were trapped together for about 30 minutes.
Well, you kind of learn a little about something with each other.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And so we had this opportunity to say, wait a minute, you're not.
So you don't, you don't want a separate state.
You don't want any of that stuff.
No.
And they were just going because Black Lives Matter was the only one that was listening and saying, hey, there's a problem in the community.
Yeah.
But their goals weren't the same.
So are Democrats kind of in that situation to where they're turning a blind eye to who's actually what the what the leadership is actually wanting?
And they say, ah, well, we don't want that.
This is good.
I think what Democrats see is that democratic socialism gets certain segments of the young, like young voters excited.
And they're like, yeah, we're going to go along with that.
We'll just ride this wave.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
And I think it's absolutely insane because these people are like hardcore believers.
I'm not saying that every member of DSA is a Leninist or something like that, you know, but these people are, if you look at the documents of the organization and the vision of America that they see, it's scary stuff.
So when I saw this, I was like, holy cow, people need to know about this.
And at the time, I had maybe like 400 Twitter followers.
I was like, nobody's going to pay any attention to what I'm saying.
So I started talking to some friends about it, kind of bouncing some ideas off.
And I thought, hey, why don't I go speak to like some economists in Norway?
So I just started reaching out to different economists at like different universities.
And I encountered a consulting firm in Oslo that advises companies.
I was like, who better to ask than these guys?
So I emailed the managing partner and I said, hey, can I run a survey with all of your economists?
And I'm going to ask them these questions.
And he was like, you wrote back to me like five minutes later.
Yeah, sure, no problem.
So I ended up interviewing a dozen Norwegian economists and I laid out to them, not my own words, copy-pasted it from a liberal website from Vox.
I said, this is what DSA believes.
How does this jive with your country's economic system?
And also, can you talk to me a little bit about, explain to me how Norwegian economics works?
And 11 out of 12 of those people told me this is far left and fringe in our country, what these people are proposing for the United States.
What'd the 12th say?
The 12th said, these are, some views are mainstream, others are a little kooky.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But 11 out of 12.
But none of them said, yeah, this is what we have.
No, no, no.
And then I asked them, okay, I gave them like different categories.
How would you describe Norway's economy?
Most said it was a mixed economy.
Right.
And then I asked them, okay, pick between these two, socialist or capitalists.
I think it was like also 11 out of 12 said, yes, we're a capitalist country.
Norway is clearly a capitalist country.
They found oil off their shores, I think, like in 1969 or something, and they've done very well for themselves.
They set up a state enterprise to manage that oil sector.
But it's a capitalist country.
You can start a business in Oslo.
It's easy.
And if you go over to Denmark, it's probably easier to start a business in Copenhagen than in California.
Just kind of put that in perspective.
The licensing processes are much simpler.
It's easier to trade within that region.
So these are highly advanced capitalist countries that, yes, every Danish citizen from the time of birth to the time they die, they have government guaranteed health coverage.
That's, you know, Americans can debate whether we want to go that direction or do we want to do something like the Swiss do, which is, I don't know if like people realize this, but the Swiss have 100% universal health care.
Everyone's covered and it's entirely private, all through the private sector.
They have some subsidies to help the poor, and they have a couple of state hospitals, but there's no government insurance.
Everything is done through private insurance companies.
Why aren't we talking about that?
And I asked Democrats at the time, I was like, hey, what these guys have going on is pretty amazing.
And it would not destabilize our economy, and it would actually lower prices a bit, and it would cover everyone.
Why aren't we talking about, why are we having these pie-in-the-sky ideas to what would disrupt a sixth of our economy?
And nobody wants to talk about this stuff.
Are you familiar with what Portugal has done with the drug war?
No, I'm not.
I'm pretty sure it's Portugal.
Drug war.
Does the drug war work?
Here?
I don't think so.
I don't think so at all.
I mean, I think it's very clear it's not.
Yeah, I know, but it just doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
It clearly doesn't work.
Portugal got into such a bad place.
I think, I think 5% of the entire population was hooked on heroin.
Wow.
Okay.
I mean, it was devastating.
And they realized this clearly is not working.
So what they did is they legalized all the drugs.
And then they took, I think it was about half of the money and just did AA programs.
And then they did job training programs.
And they have completely rid themselves of the drug population.
Why aren't we talking about these things?
Why aren't we talking about I talked to Larry Sharp?
He's running.
He was a candidate for New Jersey.
New York Libertarian.
Yeah.
Yeah, governor.
He said, our infrastructure's going.
He said, so why don't we have the George Washington Bridge in New York City?
And I'm the biggest fan of George Washington.
Why isn't that the Staples Bridge?
Why don't we sell the naming rights to bridges?
Because you're on the air with traffic and you're hearing the Staples Bridge, the Staples Bridge, the Staples Bridge.
Who wouldn't want that for the traffic reports?
Of course that would work.
Why don't we think out of the box?
Yeah, I don't know.
I think there are too many entrenched interests and we get into these stupid ideological fights instead of almost like looking at common sense solutions.
Right.
And I think both sides are sometimes just very entrenched in their own cookie cutter approaches to things.
So like I said, the Democrats obviously they're the party of government.
They're the party that wants the things that government can work to people's benefits.
Right.
But we also have to face certain realities in terms of how our economy is structured and where we're at it.
You know, if we wanted to start all over from scratch, okay, fine.
But it would be much easier, for example, to transition this, our country's healthcare system to what they have in Switzerland than to what they have in the United Kingdom.
It's not even close.
The Swiss system, yeah, the Swiss system would just be like, you know, it would essentially be like Obamacare 2.0 or something like that.
You know, just like better, smarter regulations and then more generous subsidies for the poor.
And perhaps less regulation on state to state.
Yeah, exactly.
Because in the bigger the pool, the better it is.
Why are they containing it to states?
It's so stupid.
Yeah.
So like, you know, if you try to sign up right now for the Obamacare Exchange for Florida, you can choose from like two healthcare companies or something like that.
In Switzerland, you can choose from like many healthcare companies.
You have a lot of options.
And that helps bring costs down for people.
So smarter regulations, more in some places, less in others.
But we're not thinking outside the box because we just want to have these stupid debates.
And also, I just think people need to read more into case studies in terms of things that work outside of this country.
Healthcare Pool Size00:14:21
But who's covering that?
I mean, nobody can talk about it.
To go back to the interview I had with CNN International, you cannot have a rational conversation on television.
You can't, you can't have this conversation on TV.
They would have cut the microwave.
Yeah, I mean, it's just not.
We're into the weather now.
Yeah.
And it's, and it's, it's also because there's the conflict is what drives it.
I think people are done with conflict.
I really do.
I think people, the people I know are so tired of this.
There's, I've, I've often thought, have you ever been to Israel?
Uh, I have not, but I'm dying to.
Oh, yeah.
It's an eye-opening experience.
Very small, Jerusalem, very small, especially old Jerusalem.
And it's in quarters.
Yeah.
Okay.
And I'm walking down the street, if you will.
You know, it's an old street with the arches and everything else.
So I'm walking down the street and it's dirty and it's dingy and it's dark.
And then I pass an archway and I get about 20 feet in and it's clean and it's bright.
And I stop and I look behind me through the archway.
They are not the same place.
One is slum.
One is nice.
And I said to the guy who was walking with me, I said, what the hell happened here?
And he said, this is the Jewish quarter.
That's the Palestinian quarter.
Later, I go up on a hill and I'm looking.
Desert, green.
What's the difference?
Palestinian, Jewish.
Now, I'm sure there's multiple reasons, but there is also a group of people telling their people, you can do anything.
Do it.
This is your home.
And another group of people telling their group of people, it's because of them.
You'll never have anything.
We're convinced many times we'll have the same stuff, but we're being convinced that we can't do it or we have to get them before we do it.
We gotta get to get this load off of the top, all these politicians that are using us and dividing us and just start living.
Because I don't think that there is with an exception of the radicals on all sides, okay?
I don't think it's any different between a Jewish home and a Palestinian home.
Both parents want their children to be safe.
They just want to do their job.
They want to come home.
They want to have a brighter tomorrow.
They're not zealots that want to control everything.
They just want to be left alone.
Let me raise my kids.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of that stuff is, you know, you can learn a lot of those lessons here as well.
But there's one point actually where I actually have a lot of agreement with my conservative friends is that I think the role of the federal government has to reduce.
It's too important now.
Politics in D.C. shouldn't be this important.
The way this country was designed, my local mayor is supposed to be much more important to me than what's happening in Washington.
Yeah.
And I think we need to go back to this model, which the Swiss actually use, very decentralized model, because I cannot control what somebody in Mississippi is doing, right?
I shouldn't try to control them.
That's like their community.
It's like their area.
So long as we have, look, through federal intervention, I think we were able to address a lot of social injustices that were happening for centuries, right?
And affirm that everyone in this country is created equal, entitled to equal rights.
We've already done that.
We don't need to relitigate that.
I think we need to move now more toward a phase in this country where Washington starts taking a step back and where you let these things be settled in local communities.
We'll never do it.
We'll never do it.
Do you know how the Swiss handle their immigration?
You know, you told me.
Love this.
I think this is fantastic.
You don't go to the Swiss office.
You move in.
You have to come in the right way.
You move in.
You find a place to live.
You let the government know where you're living.
Then after I don't know how many years, your neighbors have to testify on your behalf that you would make a good addition to Switzerland.
So it encourages people to get to know each other.
It encourages people to be friendly.
And instead of going to some office that doesn't know you from Adam, your neighbors know who you are.
It's fantastic.
Yeah.
And I think we need to go more to these local community models, right?
The fact that everyone in this country has spent the last week and a half thinking that the world was going to end because half of the country thought that Brett Kavanaugh was going to, if he was going to get confirmed, the world, the country was going to end.
And it shouldn't matter that much.
Well, it's one of the reasons why I spent five years trying to say, especially the last three, look, I really thought Barack Obama was going to be detrimental.
I think the legacy Of what we've all done during the Obama years is this.
Okay.
So I think it was damaging, but we made it.
Yeah.
And the people that I know, and even me, was like, I don't know if we're going to make it.
I don't know if we're going to make it.
He scared the hell out of me.
Okay.
Same thing.
I mean, the march, the women's march, a tea party.
Now, different tactics.
Sure.
But you have half the country rising up.
No president should have this much power.
No president should ever scare us, ever.
We should be able to go, I don't care.
He's the president.
Big deal.
Yeah.
My son said to me, I don't remember what we were, we were talking about something.
And I said, you know, when we were a kid, blah, blah, blah.
And he said, the government let you do that?
That was terrifying to me.
What do you mean the government let us do that?
I never would have thought that way when I was a kid.
Yeah.
Government wouldn't have stopped you.
Yeah.
It was so I reread JFK's inaugural speech recently where he affirmed that the rights of men do not come from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.
Can you imagine?
I cannot imagine anybody from my party saying that nowadays.
That sounds like the most Republican thing that I could probably think of that, possibly think of.
I don't think JFK would have been allowed in the Democratic Party now.
Maybe not, but I mean, we need to go back to, and I don't even know about, I don't even like using the word going back because I'm not, there were a lot of things that were happening in the 50s and the 60s.
They're terrible.
Yeah, they're absolutely terrible.
Move forward.
Yeah, we need to move to a place where we strip Washington of a lot of its power.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Do you think a lot of this growth in power in Washington is because of the procurement, like the power of federal procurement, and that's everyone's like pumping money into campaigns because of that?
Woodrow Wilson, during World War I, we started to have lobbyists.
Yeah.
And they set up a lobbyist system for the war for procurements.
After it was over, they all went home.
Then in the 1930s, they were like, wait a minute, why did we leave?
We could get money from the government.
And it just grew and grew and grew and grew.
It was so obscene to me in 2009, 2010, when I went down to Washington, D.C. and the country had stopped, but there were cranes littering the sky of D.C. What are you, what, what do they create?
Yeah.
What do they create?
What value are they bringing that's intrinsic value?
It's just paper.
Yeah.
And I think there's people, people are very cognizant of it.
Think of like when like local government wastes because they'll say, Oh, why did you know why did they put up all these fancy palm trees?
I didn't need this.
Um, but I think they're far less aware of it of like what happens in DC.
It's like pretty crazy, like like some of these contracts that go out for things where you think, oh my God, I didn't, I didn't realize that this was happening.
I think everything should be like SpaceX for the federal government.
Here's an X Prize.
Yeah, here's an X Prize.
I'd love to move to a system where we strip, and that's actually a place where I think even some of the people who are more on the progressive side of the left, that you can might find some common ground in terms of like common people.
I'm not talking about people in office who better the system.
They hate the cronyism too.
So I think that is one of the points where I think there has to be a strong campaign to fight cronyism in Washington because I think conservatives and progressives are concerned about inequality different ways.
One of the roots of inequality, I'm absolutely convinced of this, is inequality created through cronyism.
And that's like something where I think there should be a lot of common ground and people should be able to find agreement and move forward because we need to bring that power back to the people and keep it away from Washington.
These people can't do anything.
I mean, that's what our founders created.
You know, the one thing, there was a letter between Jefferson and Adams.
They were going back and forth.
And I don't remember which one said, this is after they became friends.
They're old.
It's like 18, 20.
And one of them said, you know, this is going to fail.
And the other one said, we didn't put enough Leviticus into it.
We didn't put enough of the old rules into it.
And the other one said, the voting, we should have put stakes.
And the idea, now we're gerrymandering, which is separating us.
And what their idea was, it's from the Bible, was everything is a square and you have, let's say, 300 people.
Those 300 people vote for someone in those 300 people.
That's the representative.
And it's not somebody who lives way across town.
It's those 300 people or whatever the number is.
And as if when it gets to 400, you split it in half, exactly in half in a square.
And if we would just do logical things like this, but nobody will because they have way too much power and way too much money to lose.
And I think that's one of the things.
I wanted hope and change.
I wanted change.
I wanted transparency.
We just never got it.
I want a draining of the swamp.
We're not getting it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think that was like one of the greatest points of frustration, I think, even with a lot of people on the left with the Obama presidency, which is that this transformation of government and the way government was supposed to work and make it more accountable to the people that that never really came to fruition.
I'm not saying it's Barack Obama's fault.
It'll just be the system.
I talked to somebody who was in the Obama administration, who shall remain nameless again, and said, I was there at the beginning.
And he said, you know, we were a different organization.
We knew how to win.
We didn't know how to govern.
He said, so when we came in, we had all of this change.
He said, but we were surrounded by all of the Clinton people.
He said, everybody who had run these things before were now running this.
Like Podesta, yeah.
Right.
And he said, we just got more of the same.
And he said, you know, two years into it, it's kind of like, okay, well, I guess, okay.
Yeah.
Well, because a lot of also like the idealist staffers who went in after like two years, like, all right, I'm, you know, when I, when I started this, I was like 26.
Now I'm 28.
I want to get married or something.
I'm going to go do something else.
Right.
Yeah.
But it was also, you know, they, they had, I think, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
I think one of the problems is term limits, you know, but I don't think term limits, you can't, we cannot focus on term limits just for Congress.
They focused on term limits for the president and didn't do Congress.
You have to talk about term limits for servants, you know, the State Department.
You should time out because there are these groups of people that gain power, so much power over, I've been here for 30 years.
I don't care who's in office.
Well, that's a problem.
I think, so my only concern with that would be a brain drain.
Yeah.
And there's a certain level of like institutional knowledge that comes that builds up after that.
But if it all staggers, yeah.
I mean, so yeah, I don't mean like every four years.
I mean, you have, I don't know, 12 years or six years or whatever it is.
And fourth by age or something.
Florida Term Limits00:02:32
Whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then the second concern that I would have is because you see this happening in Florida where we do have term limits in the state house and the state legislature, which is that it really builds up the institution that it builds up are the lobbyists.
Then that becomes the most powerful institution.
Now, I guess you could make that same claim now that, you know, the same argument that, well, look, are the lobbyists not powerful in D.C.?
So I guess there's like there are pros and cons, but conceptually, I'm not I'm not opposed to it.
I'm I would like to see how it works out.
So Jeff Flake, the word is that he compromised.
Now there's two ways to look at him.
He said, no, I want to, I really think it's right to do, you know, to have an extra week and then vote yes for Kavanaugh a week later.
Or I'm leaving.
I want to be a bipartisan lobbyist.
So I will vote with the Democrats for another week and then I will vote with the Republicans.
Okay.
I heard that on one of the broadcasts.
I mean, that's so cynical.
Might be true, might not be true.
I don't think anybody in Washington, if you serve, you're done.
George Washington set the example.
Yeah.
You do two terms and then you go home to farm.
Yeah.
You don't, you go back to your job.
You're not, you're not lobbying.
You're not doing any of that stuff.
Get out of here.
Yeah.
Well, you become like these swamp creatures that you still kind of like stick around and you have the constant revolving door and people who don't leave, they just never leave.
They're always there.
There's always that new contract to get this new gig that you're going to be promoting.
So I completely agree with you.
I think that the way that the parties are structured, I think that the way that these advocacy groups work now, it's by design.
By design, they are created to push people to extremes.
Fear and anger are the things that get people to move.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So can I go back to Florida for sure?
The candidate that just wants just a little more.
You told that story.
Abortion Debate Divide00:02:54
And then you told the story of Hugo Chavez.
Right.
And this is one problem that I think people have on the right and the left.
Okay.
On the right and the left, 70% of Americans believe that abortion should be rare and safe.
Safe rarely.
So 70% of the American people say, you know what?
After a certain very early time period, no abortion.
And there are those, me, and I can't say, I don't know where.
I don't know if it's, I don't know when I either.
So I struggle with that all the time.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
But I'm more on the none.
However, I've asked myself, could you say to your daughter after she's been raped, no, no, I couldn't.
I could say, honey, no matter how the child was created, it's still a child.
But I could not see if my daughter was just tortured by it.
How do you, I mean, you have to be hard.
I don't know how I would react in that situation.
The way that I've always approached the abortion, the abortion issue is that I agree with you.
I think there's a point in the pregnancy where I think everyone agrees that this is too much.
So there's a problem where conservatives are viewed as if you put a conservative on the court, he's going to take away, you know, TAM packs.
You know, it's just so extreme.
And there are those, nobody's going to take away, you know, birth control.
Right.
However, there would be some that would say, no, because it's life, I think life is at the moment of conception.
That's possible.
On the other side, you do have people.
Peter Singer is the most extreme who had to apologize for putting a time limit on it, but he believes you should be able to kill your child up until two years old.
It's until the partial birth abortion.
That is so extreme.
Most Americans are not there.
We get there because there are people, we were like, we were talking about the Democratic Socialists.
Gun control.
Education Degree Value00:15:17
Yep.
They do want every gun gone.
Not all of them.
But I can no longer tell who's lying and who's not.
So I'm not going to give you anything.
That's unworkable.
Right.
And I think that's, but I think that's a product of the way that Washington is designed Right now, because you have because of the interest groups, they keep pushing their respective allies and parties further and further to the extremes because they're just like entrenched and nobody wants to lose this battle because then they know like they see they see everything in terms of like incrementalism where it's not just a background check now.
Then this is gonna like, you know, if they do the background check, then they're gonna come away for the like come for the handguns.
I don't know that I have an answer to that in terms of how to fix that.
I saw Michael Porter from Harvard Business School put out this wonderful case study on how to fix politics.
He had some great ideas that I thought would be kind of interesting.
He found, he analyzed the problem and he identified the problem.
I thought it was spot on.
Some of the solutions are kind of interesting, which is like maybe have like these jungle primaries throughout the country, which maybe help push people more toward the center.
I don't know if that works.
And a series of campaign finance reforms.
But is it a push to the center or is it a push to see?
Because I don't like it if people say to me, like they say to you, you've changed.
No, I haven't.
I haven't changed one principle.
Yeah.
Not one.
I just refuse to go over the cliff with the rest of humanity.
Right.
And people, some people will say, oh, you're running towards the center.
No, I'm not.
I am absolutely not.
The center used to be, and this is where I am, but this is no longer our center.
Our center used to be the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
We wouldn't be having these problems with the Supreme Court.
They've been made political.
The Constitution is not political.
It's not.
The Bill of Rights is not political.
So if you have somebody saying, no, I'm sorry, this is what the law says.
Period.
It's in violation of these rights.
Sometimes you have to rule for the freedom of speech with the Nazi.
Sorry.
Sometimes, you know, it goes the other way.
It should be the court should be when we have to split the baby in half.
You know what I mean?
When we have such a question, we're like, what?
I don't know.
The Supreme Court should be the, I don't know the answer to this question.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're not there.
Yeah.
And one of the most frustrating things that I, that I've seen on like on the left over these past 30, 40 years is that I saw Justice Scalia once give this talk where he said, look, if a pro-life group came to me and said, on a constitutional ground, we need to ban abortions across all 50 states, I would have to say no.
There's nothing in the Constitution that addresses that.
And I'd have to say the same to a liberal group if they wanted to, on a constitutional basis, have it across all 50 states.
So the founders left those types of questions up to the democratic process.
And they created a way for the Constitution to be amended.
What's incredibly frustrating is that nobody on my side is talking about this.
If you care so much about abortion rights, why don't you work, talk to your fellow citizens, convince them of your ideas, and pass a constitutional amendment.
Do you know that the founders wrote about abortion?
I was not aware of that now.
This will blow your mind.
Because this is, they were exactly where we are now, where you and I are now.
Can you kill the baby?
It's illegal after what they called the quickening, which is once the baby moves and the woman can feel the baby move, then you know it's a baby and it's moving.
So no, can't kill it after that.
If, you know, something happens beforehand, okay.
Yeah.
They discussed this and they came to that.
Isn't that where we are, where it's viable?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think most people would able, like, like I'm Catholic, right?
I have certain views in terms of like when life begins, right?
But I can't impose those views on other people.
That's, that's kind of where I'm at, where I'd say, you know, within that first trimester period, right?
You know, like, I can't convince someone.
I'm not saying I believe this, but I'm saying like you're very conservative, like a very conservative Catholic, I don't think can impose on somebody else, hey, you should not take that birth control pill.
Right.
Right?
Like, right.
So I think we need to create, these are the kinds of things, though, that I think the founders left up to the democratic process, right?
So you know, that was not a federal discussion.
Yeah.
That was a local discussion.
Yeah.
That was, what are we doing in our local, is this murder or is this not murder?
You know what I mean?
And I'm not saying they got it right, but they struggled with this exact same thing.
And they came to a place, once you know it's a baby, no.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think people of good conscience on both sides can come to different conclusions on that and agree to disagree and, you know, and battle out.
But I think we need to return to a system where that is done through the democratic process, not where we try to get ultra creative with how we interpret the Constitution.
If we need to amend the Constitution, that's a separate discussion.
Amen.
But we cannot pretend because then you start getting into these situations, which is what I've seen in Latin America, which is where I do most of my work now, where you see that the courts in Latin America have incredibly creative interpretations of the laws that are on the books, and there is zero consistency.
And what that creates is unpredictability because it's not just, we're not just talking about them about political matters, but we're talking about unpredictability in terms like how are contracts enforced, how are labor laws observed.
One of the reasons why we're so successful.
Yeah.
We're stable.
Americans are the in in Spanish, the word for boring is aurido.
Right.
So Americans are ahurrido, according to Latin America, because they see them as like very, yeah, like very simple and like, like they're not that creative with their laws, right?
Right.
And that's a great, that's a great thing about this country.
Yeah.
We need to return to that.
I, look, I'm not one of these guys who thinks that the U.S. is going to be like Venezuela.
I don't think the U.S. is going to be like Venezuela.
I think that's kind of crazy to think that the U.S. is going to end up like Venezuela.
But I can see us ending up, you know, somewhere like between like Argentina and Brazil in terms of like unpredictability in our laws and unpredictability in our markets.
And I think that would be disastrous for this country.
That's what both that's.
Can I ask you a question?
You can't see us turn into Venezuela.
Well, Venezuelans couldn't either, and you know that.
Yeah.
You don't see contention that we have now, say give it two years, and we're at each other's throats, and then the economy comes to a screeching halt and people are out of work and it's trouble.
You can't see that.
I could see that happening.
And I can see like a federal jobs program coming in.
Even though the Democratic socialists are like the hot new thing.
Yeah, what I could see.
So I could see that exact same situation and then some kind of like massive federal jobs program.
And then those federal workers start becoming like political pawns of whoever's like that president or who does this, right?
Which is exactly what happened in Buenos Aires in Argentina, where the economy tanked the president of the country, Christina Krishner.
She created all these federal jobs, blew up the country's government payrolls, and then she turned these government employees into political weapons to mobilize them constantly against her opposition.
That's very dangerous.
do not when I say I could see us kind of moving in that direction that's what I mean I'm not talking about the crazy currency stuff but I could kind of see us moving into that which is which then gets us to the crazy currency stuff I mean Yeah, which might, yeah.
You did the numbers on Democratic socialist proposals.
Yeah.
They do not add up.
I'm putting it like charitably, yes.
Yeah.
I mean, it's to the, in their own, in their estimates, it's what, a $40 trillion program?
Yeah.
So you had a great guy on your show, Brian Rydell.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing his last name correctly, who he crunched the numbers and they actually let him publish it in box.
Which I thought was amazing.
Yeah, he did not use any conservative or libertarian estimates.
He used the left and left of center estimates for what these programs would cost.
And even with those numbers, we're talking about like $40 trillion over the next decade.
And that's like a very charitable estimate for how much this stuff would cost, because in reality, it would cost a lot more.
I would like to huge asterisk on something that in terms of a view of mine that has changed because now that I'm thinking about this, it's on education.
On education, I've become much more conservative.
I struggled a lot with paying for school when I was younger.
It took me forever, ever to finish my undergrad because part because I was like easily distracted also because I was working, I was talented, and I was making a little bit of money.
And I was like, I'll take my time with this.
But look at how our university system is run.
It's insane.
It's grotesque.
If I right now walked into a bank and tried to get a $120,000 loan for Chevy Impala, they'd laugh at me.
They'd say, would you crazy?
That car's not worth that, right?
But you could walk, but you could, it doesn't matter whether you're majoring in nuclear engineering or in non-binary butterfly studies or something, you know, whatever, you'd get the same exact loan.
It's not tied to the value of the degree.
So you create these perverse incentives for the universities to keep pushing up their prices.
But what has created that?
So it's a couple of things.
This crazy notion that everyone needs a college degree, right?
Which is a social stigma that's really peddled a lot by politicians.
Guaranteed federal loans.
I have to be completely honest.
I think not everyone should go to college.
There should be alternatives.
Not every degree should take four years.
I worked as a publicist.
I have to be totally honest with you.
Maybe the stuff that I learned in my first year of college was useful because I took a lot of writing classes and I read a lot, but I haven't needed any of that stuff afterward, right?
So why did I need to pay for those three extra years?
What good, like, you know, I could have learned that stuff either through an online course or paying like $20 in Skillshare.
I have met, I personally believe in the apprentice program, but I have met more people that have come out of media studies who are just unhireable.
You don't know what reality is.
It's nothing like what you were just taught.
No thank you.
And I've seen people come in with a degree and I've seen people come in without a degree who are just doing it.
You know, they just figured it out.
I'd bet on these people every single time.
You spend a lot of time trying to undo some of the box thinking that you've been taught.
Yeah.
And do you know why I got my degree?
So I had a lot of my friends to push me.
And so that was, I'm glad I did it, right?
You know, I don't regret it.
But when I was applying for jobs, there was now like everything was automated.
And even for like just a mid-level communications PR manager kind of job, you now had to check off a box that would, you have to indicate whether you, yes, you did have a BA or no, you didn't have a BA.
If you didn't have a BA, it would throw out your resume.
And when I realized that was happening, I was like, all right, I need to be able to check off this box that I have a BA.
We are creating a system in this country where people who didn't, maybe for whatever reason, they couldn't study or they couldn't finish their education.
And we're telling them, you guys are worthless.
For jobs that do not require, if you look at the job itself, like what people are doing, you don't need a BA to do most professions out there.
I will tell you that I get hammered all the time.
You never went to college.
Well, no, I couldn't afford it.
I did go to one semester and it was a decent college.
It was Yale.
But no, don't have a degree.
Didn't study there.
Were you partying with Brett Kavanaugh?
That's the stories I can tell you.
However, when I went to interview for private schools for my children, I went and I talked to all the history teachers who are educated, who have their certificates.
I will tell you that one out of eight was qualified.
The others, I could just run circles around them.
They were unbelievably, unbelievably shallow in their knowledge.
Why?
Why does that certificate mean anything?
Why does it mean anything?
Yeah.
And I think that's an area of deep frustration that I have with my own party because all we talk about is let's pump more money into education.
I'm fine with you.
If you're talking about pumping more money into education, it's because like there are schools that are collapsing or something.
Okay, fine.
You can't have kids going to schools that are collapsing, right?
But if you make college free, it's done.
You would strip it out of its intrinsic value, right?
You would create an artificial value for degrees that aren't worth it.
People, like that's not a good route to go down.
I talked to somebody the other day who said, here's what should happen.
You should graduate from high school 16.
And then you could take a year or two and do what you want.
And if you want to go to school, you go to school and you go to college for what you want to do.
And maybe it's two years.
You know, if you want to be a doctor, it's four, six, or eight.
Yeah.
You know, you're a regular person, one, two years, depends on what you do.
Take the classes.
I'm okay with that.
Yeah.
And I, why does every degree have to take four years?
Moderate Republican Shift00:08:28
I don't understand.
No.
It seems to me like there are some vested interests that are being propped up there.
Are you optimistic?
I am naturally an optimist.
I know.
I'm an optimistic catastrophist.
Yeah, I'm naturally an optimist.
I am deeply concerned, though, about the tone in Washington.
I don't see this getting better anytime soon.
What do you see happening?
What does 2020 look like in America if nothing changes?
So you are going to have the, so somebody, for example, right?
Like when people ask me, who are the great Democrats?
Like, who are the Democrats that you like?
Because I punch left often.
I tell them, yeah, look, I think a guy like Bill Nelson, my senator, he's awesome, right?
I like Tim Kaine a lot.
Decent man.
But those guys would never, ever win a Democratic primary.
No.
So it's a battle between the intersectional identity politics and the socialist left.
And that's what's going to come.
And sometimes you have both.
Those two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
That's not the Democratic Party, though.
That's a different.
That's a whole different.
That's not what I signed up for.
That's like some kind of cult.
Did you see the Heartland study that came out?
A Democrat, don't remember where, a Democrat that's a lot like you paid for an independent study of the Heartland and then went to Capitol Hill and said, please, please, what are you doing?
Look at this poll.
Look at this research that we've done.
You are not the party of the heartland at all.
And at some point, the Heartland Democrat wakes up and goes, I'm not these people.
I am just not these people.
Yeah, the thing, though, is that those people, when you asked me, I forgot what was the term from Dr. Seuss if I was this or that.
I know a lot of people among my friends who think that the Democrats are going too far to the left, but they are terrified of the alternative because they see politics in binary terms.
So if there was, because this is my, I know Republicans in Washington, and I keep saying to them, go find yourself five Democrats.
Go find yourself five Democrats and you five and those five, you just stand up in the Congress or the well of the Senate and you say exactly what was said in 1863.
You people are not serious.
Either party, I'm done.
And walk out and hold a press conference and say, we are shedding our party because these people are not serious.
There's too many big problems.
In the 1850s, it was slavery.
And that is what created the Republican Party.
It was Democrats or Whigs and Democrats that came together.
Was it Whigs?
I can't remember, but it was the two of them coming together saying, this is disgusting.
You keep talking about changing slavery, but you don't want to.
You're just living with it.
You're just kicking it down the road.
Yeah.
Well, to take a page out of your book, people are addicted to outrage.
There is literally, I'll sit down with my friends and we'll talk.
Yeah, I think it's true.
Yeah, these people are going too far to the left.
But then they say, yeah, but look at Trump.
Look what Trump is doing.
Look at all this stuff.
So it becomes a binary choice, which I think our system in some ways is by design.
So I have a friend of mine who studied political science.
He's a professor at the University of Chicago who told me something I thought was very interesting the other day.
I was like, you know, why can't Michael Bloomberg, who's got all his money, just run as an independent candidate?
Why does he have to run with the Democrats?
And he says, because the way our system is designed, you're likely, yeah, you cannot, it's by design.
You cannot get a third party.
You're likelier to get four parties before you get three.
You're likelier to get like a moderate Republican and then a more conservative, you know, and then the same on the left.
I don't know that people care about this stuff.
So like there are these groups like No Labels and Third Way.
They're constantly owned by the extremes of both sides.
They're constantly pointed out, oh, these are rhinos or these guys are corporatists.
They're trying to play.
Look at someone like Corey Booker.
Look at what's happened to Corey Booker over these last few years.
I mean, Corey Booker came into Washington as like a guy who was like four charter schools and he was like this, like the new face of like centrist Democrats.
And it's just an absolute joke.
You don't think he's Spartacus?
I don't know if he's Spartacus now.
Yeah, I mean, like, I respect the senator.
I respect him as person, but like his political transformation, that's what I'm saying is a joke.
Like it's tough to take to take this stuff seriously.
And it's incredibly frustrating.
I'm just a regular guy.
I'm not, I have a job.
I have a wife that I go to every night.
I'm just a regular dude.
I have a salary, just like most of your listeners, right?
Like, as someone who's just like an observer kind of watching this and has like worked in politics, I cannot believe my eyes of what's going on.
And also, as someone who's like lived among Republicans before, because I've lived in, you know, I've lived in rural Virginia.
I could, I don't see the other side as like my enemy.
I'd see them as people who like, you know, disagree with me on a few issues, but like, hey, we just still have a couple of beers or whatever, you know?
And I, like, I find, I find the situation in Washington right now is so toxic.
And people are just disgusted by it, but they don't realize that their own side is also a part of the problem.
You know, and that's what, that's part of what I found so refreshing about your book, that you were able to talk about your role.
Also, a few years ago, you said, oh, look, I contributed to this.
I helped create this culture, right?
Now we need to fix it.
And I think we need more people who are willing to say that.
People have a lot to lose if you say that.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the purse strings, right?
Because there's no way I could have gotten away with saying this kind of stuff a few years ago because I was doing consulting work here and there.
And people would like, yeah, why would I risk?
I have friends who think exactly the same way that I do, but they work in government.
I can't tell you how many people have come to me and said, Glenn, I agree with you on this, this, and this.
I'm not going to say that.
I mean, I'm not crazy.
And that's government's gotten too big.
Yeah.
Because it should not, you should not be ever, you should not be afraid that you're not going, if you say this, you're not going to get this consulting contract.
It's like one thing, like somebody tries to come here to work for you.
And I'm not going to hire this guy because he's an a-hole.
Right.
But these are people who are like, it's like political fear, which is different, right?
These are people who are afraid to express like, and they're talking about things that are true, not personality differences.
It's just like, hey, the gender pay gap is not driven by sexism.
This is what it's driven by.
Nobody is willing to say that because they are too afraid of what's going to happen.
They're not going to get hired.
They're not going to work on the next campaign.
I know a guy.
I'm not going to mention this person's name who worked in, I'm not going to see him because it would be easier, I think, to narrow down.
He worked in a Democratic president's White House, who's worked at the highest levels of Democratic campaigns.
He cannot get hired now because he's a white man.
Because he went to go work somewhere and they told him that he was not culturally compatible with the organization after a few weeks.
And I like, I'm Latino.
White Man Hired00:01:01
I could play the brown card if I wanted to.
Although I'm not brown, I'm like really pale, like maybe wider than you are.
Can you stop saying that?
No, it's me.
I'm like, really, I burn up, you know.
I'm the marshmallow man.
So, like, but my friend cannot get hired.
And that's scary.
And this is someone who's like paid his dues, but he can't get one of these jobs in these organizations in DC because he doesn't fit like this new identity politics mold.
So let's end it here.
In my book, I talk about trying to find our Unum.
I say it's the Bill of Rights, but if we could just start there, judge me by the content of my character, not the color of my skin or my sex or anything else.