BREAKING: Kevin McCarthy Is First Ousted House Speaker in History. PLUS: Coleman Hughes on TED’s Suppression of His Talk Over False “Racism” Accusations | SYSTEM UPDATE #154
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight we have very breaking news, maybe a couple of hours old at most.
Kevin McCarthy becomes the first ever house speaker.
The first in U.S.
history removed by a vote of the House of Representatives.
Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz yesterday filed a so-called motion to vacate against McCarthy, which automatically requires the full House to vote on whether to remove the Speaker of the House.
No such motion has ever previously succeeded until today, when the House voted in favor of Gaetz's resolution by a vote of 216 to 210.
All 208 Democrats voted to remove McCarthy, which is not a surprise.
He's a Republican House Speaker and they're Democrats.
And then when seven other House Republicans, in addition to Gates, voted in favor of the motion, McCarthy was instantly, immediately removed as of the conclusion of the vote.
Four House Republicans along with four House Democrats did not vote.
The House session was gaveled closed by one of McCarthy's closest lieutenants, Congressman Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who is automatically anointed Acting Speaker now that McCarthy is removed.
He is definitely not expected to remain in that position.
There will be a new House Speaker chosen.
Now, although McCarthy's removal shocked Washington, again, it's the first time it has ever happened in U.S.
history, this move has been a long time coming.
McCarthy barely was elected Speaker back in January.
He was elected only on the 15th ballot, the most protracted battle for Speaker of the House in 164 years.
And it was back then, Matt Gaetz, who led a slightly larger group of populist and conservative House members, back then it was around 20 or so against McCarthy, who refused to vote for McCarthy unless they, and until they, extracted a wide range of concessions that made power in the House much more dispersed and equitable than it had been in years, since the days of Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi, both of whom, as Speaker, consolidated previously unprecedented power in the Speakership.
But unlike the Democratic Party, which just this week AOC proudly boasted was, quote, running like a well-oiled machine, meaning a party that marches in unanimous lockstep, there is substantial and intense internal debate and dissent within the Republican Party we have been pointing out for a long time.
And that internal conflict never really went away after McCarthy was finally elected Speaker in January and the anger toward him, and really more broadly toward the establishment way of doing business in Washington, exploded over the last several weeks within the conservative wing of the House Republican Caucus as McCarthy approved massive spending and debt measures with the Biden White House to avoid a government shutdown and then negotiated a secret deal with House Democrats and Senate Democrats
To ensure ongoing funding for the war in Ukraine after Republicans showed that they had a majority of their caucus, roughly half, who refused to vote for more funding.
All of this came to a head with today's vote.
We'll break down and analyze this breaking news tonight because it illustrates so many of the key dynamics and currents and conflicts in Washington.
Then, Coleman Hughes is one of the most thoughtful and independent-minded analysts of a wide range of political debates, including race and race relations in the United States.
It is presumably for that reason that the TED Foundation invited him to give a TED Talk on that subject earlier this year.
On April 19th, Hughes delivered his TED Talk in Vancouver, Canada, and it focused on what he called the need to strive for colorblindness in all political and social endeavors.
He argued, in other words, against the prevailing Western liberal view that racial preferences must be afforded in order to cure race-based inequality.
Instead, he argued we should do everything possible to avoid judging one another based on race, and if any programs are needed to cure inequality, it makes much more sense, he said, to use class rather than race as the relevant metric.
Now, unsurprisingly, a group of TED employees, who are overwhelmingly progressive and liberal, objected to Coleman Hughes's speech, even going so far as to label it and him racist and demanding that it not be published.
Instead of telling those employees that the whole purpose of TED and its TED Talks is to spur civil and substantive debate by offering a wide range of views on the most sensitive topics, TED instead immediately began engaging in all sorts of bizarre maneuvers in order to suppress Hughes' speech, TED instead immediately began engaging in all sorts of bizarre maneuvers in order to suppress Hughes' speech, including by first requiring him to participate in a debate with those who disagree with him as a precondition to
Now, instead of obeying those commands, Hughes instead went public with his objections in an article entitled, quote, "Why is TED scared of colorblindness?" After publication of his article, Ted's chief official, the British entrepreneur Chris Anderson, who has been with Ted for almost 20 years or slightly over 20 years, engaged in a series of exchanges on Twitter in which he made some remarkable concessions about how Ted functions and how liberal discourse more broadly operates.
Well, examine this controversy for what it reveals about what is and is not permitted to be expressed in liberal discourse and how even a group founded to foster debates is crippled now from allowing to sending views and we'll speak to Hughes about his experience and his views this entire event.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Kevin McCarthy became the first ever Speaker of the House to be removed by a vote of the House.
He was removed earlier today, just a couple of hours ago, by a vote of 216 to 210.
That total was 8 House Republicans, including the leader of the resolution, Matt Gaetz of Florida, joining with all 208 House Democrats who voted.
208 House Democrats plus 8 House Republicans equals 216.
And only 210 House members, all Republicans, voted to keep Kevin McCarthy.
So, as a result, the minute that session was gaveled closed, And McCarthy had to suffer the indignity of watching his top lieutenant, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who did more than anybody probably to engineer McCarthy's election to the House Speakership back in January, had to watch him become the temporary House Speaker and gavel close the session in which his close ally was removed.
McCarthy is no longer Speaker of the House.
The House has no permanent Speaker.
It has McHenry who is serving as, instead, an interim Speaker or a temporary Speaker until the new permanent one is chosen.
Now, as shocking as it is, and obviously people can debate whether or not they think Kevin McCarthy should have been removed or not, I don't I'm not surprised that there are all sorts of different views.
Obviously, the vast, vast majority of the House Republican Caucus voted to keep Kevin McCarthy in that you can't say they're all establishment hacks or people who want to continue with the system as is.
It included people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a bunch of other Trump supporters, people long considered to be on the right.
Who voted to keep Kevin McCarthy and at the same time among the eight House Republicans who voted to get rid of him are people not generally considered to be on the far right including Nancy Mace of North Carolina.
Who often incurred Trump's anger to the point where he supported her primary challenger this last year.
But then when she won, despite her primary challenger being supported by Trump, he congratulated her.
He has a lot of respect for her.
As well as Congressman Ken Buck of Colorado, who I think is one of the most thoughtful and studious members of the House Republican Caucus.
He is a leading voice on antitrust.
Both of them have been on my show before.
They're both very constrained and thoughtful.
Certainly moderate in their comportment.
So it's not as though these people are the kind who want to just go around blowing things up.
And yet, what's amazing to me is not that there's a difference of opinion on this, but that some people are enraged.
In fact, a lot of people are enraged that Kevin McCarthy is no longer House Speaker.
Imagine being indignant over the fact that someone as kind of unnotable and mediocre and banal as Kevin McCarthy can't get to be House Speaker anymore.
What possibly could motivate someone to be so invested in the idea of Kevin McCarthy?
And yet, there are some people who are.
To start off, let me just show you how it is that his close school attendant, his little minion, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, gaveled the session closed.
Watch this.
We're just gonna pull that up.
That's some real rage.
Let's watch that again.
I mean, that almost requires some anger management classes.
He is incredibly enraged.
And then you have other people who are clearly using very kind of unhinged rhetoric about the fact that Kevin McCarthy was removed.
We have, for example, let's take a look at this tweet from a reporter from Huffington Post.
Let's pull that tweet up.
We obviously had to put this together very quickly, earlier today, because this news just happened.
So here is from Igor Bobich, who I believe is a reporter with the Huffington Post, at least at one point he was.
He's with one of those indistinguishable liberal digital sites, and he wrote the following, quote, Senator John Cornyn of Texas calls the efforts to oust Kevin McCarthy, quote, disgraceful.
Quote, we saw a similar thing happen to Boehner, Ryan, and now McCarthy.
I'm sure the next speaker is going to be subjected to the same terrorist attacks.
Terrorist attacks is how Senator Cornyn described this legislative maneuver to remove Kevin McCarthy.
You can tell he's obviously enraged.
And then when somebody questioned whether that was really appropriate language to use, Here's Chad Hastie saying, wait, did John Cornyn really call this quote, a terrorist attack?
He doubled down on that rhetoric and he said, a handful of house members just want to blow up the institution and themselves in the process.
Sad.
Now, earlier, Today, a different reporter, I don't know if they're from Politico or Huffington Post or wherever, Sahil Kapoor, maybe he's with CNN.
Again, these are all indistinguishable to me.
This is how he described the vote that took place just a couple of hours ago in the House.
Quote, six House Republicans have now voted to overthrow Speaker McCarthy.
Overthrow!
Speaker McCarthy.
That was how he did it.
As though these House Republicans who are voting on who should be the Speaker of the House are like CIA operatives clandestinely attempting to remove the government of a foreign country, overthrow the House Speaker.
So you see, these people are very upset.
And the thing is, people like Sahil Kapoor on any other day of the week, any other day of the year, hate Kevin McCarthy.
Kevin McCarthy is a Republican.
He's identified as a conservative.
That's how he was able to attract conservative votes when he became House Speaker.
You kind of have to appeal to all the factions in the House.
And yet, he's so upset, Sahil Kapoor is.
He's as upset as John Cornyn.
Who called it a terrorist attack.
Sahil Kapoor is calling this a coup, basically.
An attempt to overthrow Kevin McCarthy as though he has some rightful possession of the House Speakership.
And I think in this conflict are some really interesting dynamics about not just what drove this vote, but is driving our politics generally, namely the question of whether or not people Who are invested in politics, regard our status quo or prevailing institutions of authority or the prevailing ideology in Washington as being fundamentally, inherently legitimate and worthy of preservation.
Or whether you believe that that prevailing order, that prevailing ideology in Washington, this bipartisan consensus, the way of doing business in Washington, ought to be dismantled subverted undermined i don't really think this vote was so much about kevin mccarthy because again why would anybody get worked up one way or the other about kevin mccarthy
he's just this gray indistinguishable politician but he represents symbolically a system that a lot of people either are extremely enraged about and want to destroy or whether they really want to preserve the status quo and get angry at anybody who undermines and subverts it to the point that they call them terrorists as john cornyn said are trying to overthrow the rightful the I don't want to overgeneralize.
the hierarchy of power that even somebody like this reporter who, as I said, hates Kevin McCarthy and the Republican Party is just so upset at any kind of instability.
They just want to preserve the status quo.
I think that's the most relevant distinction or dichotomy in politics, much more so than left versus right or conservative versus liberal.
And I think that's the relevant metric in what drove Kevin McCarthy's ouster.
Now, I don't want to overgeneralize.
There are obviously a lot of people, again, the vast, vast majority of the House Republican caucus voted to keep Kevin McCarthy.
And that includes people like, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Paul Goezer, who I don't think anyone can accuse of being so invested in the establishment or wanting to preserve the system.
I think it's important to recognize that anytime politicians act, and that includes even your favorites, they're thinking about their own self-interest all the time.
And so one reason Kevin McCarthy can command such loyalty, even though he's such a uninspiring figure, to put that mildly, is because there's a whole structure of power in the House that is designed to ensure loyalty to the Speaker.
So he gets to dole out every chair of every committee, and these people become very powerful, these chairs of committees.
That includes Jim Jordan, And a bunch of other people like that, who know that their power in Washington and in Congress and their stature depends upon the Speaker.
And as long as Kevin McCarthy is Speaker, the people who are now the chairs of these committees get their way.
So they don't want to change.
And then underneath these speakers are a bunch of chairs of subcommittees, or ranking members, or people who are very, who get empowered in other ways through their proximity to power.
And so even though a lot of the people who voted for Kevin McCarthy in general might have an anti-establishment ideology, a lot of them are simply voting for what advances their own self-interest or their own center of power, which might not even be a bad thing.
If you're a politician, you should want power.
If you don't have power as a politician, you can't get anything done.
So all I'm saying is that although I think the prevailing dynamic here, and in politics generally, Is the question of whether someone is pro or anti-establishment, whether or not somebody wants stability or instability.
Obviously there are some exceptions in terms of people who voted against Kevin McCarthy and even the people who voted for him.
Like I said, neither Ken Buck nor Nancy Mays to me are people eager to destabilize the system.
But I do think, on the whole, that has driven the impediments put in Kevin McCarthy's path from the moment that he thought he was Divinely entitled to the speakership after the Republicans took over and he was next in line?
As well as all of the conflict that has led to this moment today when he became the first ever Speaker of the House removed.
Now, just to give you a sense for how significant this is, here you see the current front page of the New York Times and they are blasting and blaring this headline.
Now they have political reasons to do so.
They want to show that the Republicans are in all kinds of disarray, but it is a historic moment.
House votes to remove McCarthy as Speaker.
And then, of course, here you see this idiotic formulation, which is as predictable as it is dumb, that the far-right GOP faction throws the House into chaos.
They can't understand anything without reference to right versus left dichotomies, even though so often it doesn't apply.
Yesterday and tomorrow, the same New York Times will call Kevin McCarthy hard-right or far-right.
That's just a label they assign to anybody who does something they dislike at any given moment.
Here's the roll call vote, and here you see everybody voted in accordance with their party except for these eight House Republicans.
So there are some people on this list who generally get described as being right-wing or far-right, like Matt Rosendale of Montana, and obviously Matt Gaetz of Florida, Andy Biggs of Arizona, people like that.
But then there are some who are generally considered more moderate.
This is not a far-right versus moderate Republican conflict.
So here you see Nancy Mace, who, as I said, has often incurred Trump's rage, and even Ken Buck.
And I would perhaps put Bob Good into that category as well.
And then here you see The Democrats, just all of them automatically voted yes.
So every single Democrat voted yes to remove Kevin McCarthy.
Again, there were four House Republicans and four House Democrats.
Two of the House Democrats, for example, who didn't vote include Cori Bush and Nancy Pelosi.
And then there were a couple of House Republicans, at least among the four who didn't vote or who voted, who just abstained because they likely supported Kevin McCarthy's removal.
So they didn't want to give him a They want to give a no vote, but they also want to give a yes vote.
So he just abstained and in reality that helped Kevin McCarthy.
The Democrats who abstained, rather, who abstained helped Kevin McCarthy and that included Nancy Pelosi, notably, as well as Cori Bush.
The Republicans who abstained basically undermined Kevin McCarthy even though he didn't want to vote yes.
So the only votes you really need to recall are these eight yes votes from the House Republican Caucus.
Those made the difference and I don't think you can characterize those either as being a far right versus moderate dichotomy.
That's the only framework that media outlets and paid political and professional pundits can understand, even though increasingly it has nothing to do with what happened here.
Now, the question is then, what did happen here?
Why did Kevin McCarthy get removed?
So here is Matt Gaetz, who you see him surrounded by a throng of journalists.
He's obviously the most relevant person in Congress at the moment.
At least as of today, whether you agree with him or not, he removed the House Speaker.
Almost single-handedly.
And here he is explaining why he did what he did.
Why should he want the job after this just happened?
That's a question for him, I guess, not me.
He said he's uninterested.
He's already said he's uninterested.
I haven't heard him say that.
What has he said to you?
Well, here's what I would say.
I think a lot of members are going to reflect on their thinking after this historic moment.
I think anything that people have said before the McCarthy ouster is probably bearing less weight than the way people may be thinking about these questions after the McCarthy ouster.
So this had a lot to do with who was going to be the next speaker.
It is possible Kevin McCarthy could become speaker again.
But in order for that to happen, I assume he would have to make even more concessions to Matt Gaetz and to this group who voted no.
But if you listen to the people who voted no, or rather who voted to remove Kevin McCarthy, they're essentially citing two or three different reasons, all in common.
Number one is that McCarthy reached an agreement with the Biden White House and House and Senate Democrats about six weeks ago to extend the debt ceiling to keep government spending at $2.2 trillion per year of a deficit spending and $30-something trillion in debt.
And a lot of them are simply saying, who voted to remove Kevin McCarthy, we just cannot continue this system any longer.
We're going to go bankrupt.
We're going to drown in debt.
We're borrowing all this money we're spending from China.
It's just unsustainable.
And it's just time to draw the line and say we're not going to support the continuation of this way of doing business any longer.
Ukraine also played a significant role in what happened because the Efforts to avert a government shutdown over the last week were successful because, it was widely reported, Matt Gaetz entered into a secret agreement with Congressional and Senate Democrats to ensure a continuation of funding for Ukraine.
There were several votes last week.
To try and ensure that funding for Ukraine would be included in the bill that got passed to keep the government running.
And there were just not enough votes in the House Republican Caucus.
Roughly half of the House Republican Caucus is now voting no on further funding for the war in Ukraine.
And there was no funding included for the war in Ukraine in this measure to keep the government running.
Now, the reality is the Biden White House already has about $5 billion already authorized that it hasn't used, that it continues to draw down, but they are eager to get another $24 billion.
That's the amount they demanded for more funding in Ukraine.
And they told Zelensky and everybody in Kiev, oh, don't worry, we have a secret deal to ensure that more spending is coming.
They made a secret deal with Kevin McCarthy and a lot of the people who voted to remove him are enraged.
McCarthy, knowing there weren't enough votes to keep funding the war in Ukraine, nonetheless did a side deal with the Democrats.
Which is why the Democrats were cackling even as they were accusing the Republicans of being traitors and giving Putin a gift because they knew this funding was coming because of the deal that Kevin McCarthy negotiated.
And then finally there's just kind of a trust issue that they say Kevin McCarthy lies constantly and says whatever he needs to say at any given moment and that you can't trust him.
So for that reason it's worth changing as well.
Here is the former Congressman Justin Amash who came on our show during the Protracted fight over whether to make Kevin McCarthy speaker.
And he gave a lot of insight into why a lot of the reforms that were being demanded by those holdouts, led back then as well by Matt Gaetz, were reforms that the House desperately needs.
That basically there's no power any longer in the hands of individual Congress members.
It's all consolidated in the speakership as a result of the very kind of tyrannical rule of first Paul Ryan and then Nancy Pelosi who consolidated even more power.
And here's what Congressman Amash said.
Again, it's hard to call him far right or whatever the term is.
He voted, in fact, to impeach President Trump.
He left the Republican Party and became an independent in objection to some of the things Trump did.
And here's what he said, quote, Kevin McCarthy has been ousted as Speaker.
Nobody knows how this will play out in the short run, but it's a huge positive for the institution and the American people in the long run.
The Speaker of the House must be held accountable.
Now, In case you're interested in some schadenfreude, and who among us isn't, here's what Kevin McCarthy tweeted yesterday after Matt Gaetz filed the motion to vacate.
Bring it on, he tweeted.
And then on the weekend he went on to meet the press and he essentially was boasting of the fact that he was going to win.
I want to play something that Speaker McCarthy said.
Actually, that's the wrong video.
That was my fault.
I clicked this.
He went on Meet the Press and he basically gave a version, or on one of the Sunday shows, and he gave a version of this tweet in which he said, I don't care that Matt Gaetz wants to file a motion to vacate.
He's been threatening to do that for a long time, and I know I'm going to win, so let's just get this vote over with so I can get on with being Speaker.
I thought we had that, but it appears we don't.
But that's what Kevin McCarthy said, so that was kind of the defiant tone that he was striking.
Now, here is a speech that Matt Gaetz gave today, which I think gives a much better sense for the arguments he was amassing in favor of removing Kevin McCarthy.
Let's listen.
Mr. Speaker, my friend from Oklahoma says that my colleagues and I who don't support Kevin McCarthy would plunge the House and the country into chaos.
Chaos is Speaker McCarthy.
Chaos is somebody who we cannot trust with their word.
The one thing that the White House, House Democrats, and many of us on the conservative side of the Republican caucus would argue is that the thing we have in common, Kevin McCarthy said something to all of us at one point or another that he didn't really mean and never intended to live up to.
I don't think voting against Kevin McCarthy is chaos.
I think $33 trillion in debt is chaos.
I think that facing a $2.2 trillion annual deficit is chaos.
I think that not passing single-subject spending bills is chaos.
I think the fact that we have been governed in this country since the mid-90s by continuing resolution and omnibus is chaos.
And the way to liberate ourselves from that is a series of reforms to this body that I would hope would outlast Speaker McCarthy's time here, would outlast my time here, and would outlast either of our majorities.
Reforms that I have heard some of the most conservative members of this body fight for, and some of the reforms that we've been battling for that I've even heard those in the Democrat caucus say would be worthy and helpful to the House.
Okay, so there you have the case against Kevin McCarthy.
And again, I think that it is, although somewhat personal, also very ideological in the sense that there is a real politics behind this idea that Kevin McCarthy is just not the person to lead the House.
Let's look at this book that was written by Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy called Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders.
And this is very much the lineage of Kevin McCarthy's politics.
Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, for those of you who don't remember Eric Cantor was this conservative from Virginia who was touted as this young House leader, and he lost his Republican primary to someone who ran from the populist right, and he was out of Congress.
And Paul Ryan, of course, is now on the board of Fox News, which fired Tucker Carlson, and was somebody who ran as Mitt Romney's running mate.
And Kevin McCarthy was always considered part of that crowd.
And I think it's so important, if you go and look at the kind of Republican conservative chattering class and the Republican media, and these figures like John Corden and Newt Gingrich, who's extremely angry, too, about Kevin McCarthy being removed as Speaker, I think you do find a very about Kevin McCarthy being removed as Speaker, I think you do find a very
Political dynamic, which is, in general, and I see the same dichotomy being the dichotomy between people who support President Trump within the Republican Party and people who support Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
In general, the people who support DeSantis are the same people who are angry at Kevin McCarthy's removal.
And those are kind of traditional Republicans and again there's exceptions, I'm talking generally here, but I do think it's a useful generalization that in general that group of people, the Republican punditry, the Republican Activist groups, the Republican donors, the large donors for sure, that are backing Ron DeSantis or looking for an alternative to Trump are the same kinds of people who are enraged over the removal of Kevin McCarthy.
They're people who generally prefer the establishment ideology and way of doing business in the Republican Party.
They're people who are completely fine with With figures like Dick Cheney and George Bush and Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and John McCain.
These are the kinds of Republicans they like.
These traditional conservative Republicans who all were very comfortable in the pre-Trump era of the Republican Party.
And then you have The people accusing them of that are not wrong.
which loathes and despises both the people who have been the guardians of status quo politics in the Republican Party as well as the Washington establishment in general.
And I do think there is an element of wanting to see it burn.
The people accusing them of that are not wrong.
The question is, is it better to want to see the swamp and the Washington establishment burn, or is it better to keep it shielded, to keep it preserved, to keep it stabilized?
and continuing to operate as it always has.
And I very much think, again with exceptions, that that is the relevant breakdown.
Not just on the question of whether Kevin McCarthy should be the House Speaker.
I think that was a proxy for these broader questions that are determining in a lot of ways who people are supporting in the Republican primary.
Either Donald Trump or Vivek Ramaswamy on the one hand or Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or Mike Pence.
On the other, I think you see that division very much there between more established Republicans and more anti-establishment Republicans.
And when I say anti-establishment, I mean the Republican establishment as well, which obviously Trump ran against in 2016.
Now, here's just to show you the video of Kevin McCarthy.
It was Face the Nation, just like it's impossible to distinguish.
There is a lot to get to with you.
I want to start, though, on the news this morning from Congressman Matt Gaetz, who says he's going to seek a motion to vacate.
And here's what he said, Kevin McCarthy.
This is just yesterday or on Sunday, rather, when he was asked about Matt Gaetz's attempt to remove him.
Yeah, there is a lot to get to with you.
I want to start, though, on the news this morning from Congressman Matt Gaetz, who says he's going to seek a motion to vacate.
He's going to try to oust you, a speaker of the House.
He's tried to do that from the moment I ran for office.
Well, this time he says he's going to keep going.
May not get there before the 15th ballot, but it took 15 for Kevin McCarthy.
He says he's coming for you.
Can you survive?
Yes, I'll survive.
You know, this is personal with Matt.
Matt voted against the most conservative ability to protect our border, secure our borders.
He's more interested in securing TV interviews than doing something.
He wanted to push us into a shutdown, even threatening his own district with all the military people there who would not be paid.
Only because he wants to take this motion.
So be it.
Bring it on.
Let's get over with it.
And let's start governing.
If he's upset because he tried to push us into shutdown, and I made sure government didn't shut down, then let's have that fight.
No, that's actually false, what Kevin McCarthy said.
Matt Gaetz was saying if we do have to have a government shutdown, we should nonetheless vote to ensure that our members of our military are getting paid, veterans are getting paid.
In fact, this is one of the main reasons why people are so angry with this prevailing system.
Which isn't really Kevin McCarthy's fault in the sense that he created it, but he has continued it, which is the fact that there's no voting.
There's no single issue voting.
There's no voting on whether you want to fund this program or fund that program.
So you can vote no on one and vote yes on the other.
They're given this multi-thousand page budget every year and they're told you either vote yes and fund everything in the government or the whole thing comes crashing down and the government shuts down if you vote no.
And they're put against that wall every single year.
It's the same deliberate exploitation of this kind of shutdown politics where they're forced to fund everything, including all of these wars.
And then they're accused, if they don't vote yes, like Kevin McCarthy just did, of, oh, he wants to deprive the veterans in his own district of health benefits.
It's such an exploitative lie, an obvious exploitative lie.
In fact, Matt Gage was saying, let's vote right now on funding these military programs and veteran programs.
So, this is the politics that they're doing, this is the politics they've been doing well before Kevin McCarthy through Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi, and this is what a lot of people, this is what Justin Amash was talking about, this is definitely what Nancy Mace has been talking about, this is what Matt Gaetz has been talking about in voting to remove Kevin McCarthy is, this system is just unsustainable, both because of not only what it's doing, but how it's doing it.
On the question of what Kevin McCarthy is, I've talked about this before.
This is when I didn't really have a strong opinion of Kevin McCarthy until this happened.
Right before the 2022 midterm election, when polls already were showing an erosion of support for the war in Ukraine and people growing restless over the fact that we were just sending tens of billions of dollars of unaccountable, unsupervised funds to Kiev in a country that has long been regarded as the most corrupt in Europe.
And we've since learned The White House and the Pentagon know that a lot of that money is disappearing into the ether as it did in Afghanistan.
Kevin McCarthy was so desperate to become Speaker, which required winning the 2022 election, that he pretended to believe that we have to start putting constraints on our spending in Ukraine.
Because he knew he had to say that to get Republicans to come out and also because he was hoping that once the Republicans won the majority he would easily be made House Speaker.
And he was saying this both to win the House majority by deceiving voters into believing he was going to put constraints on Ukraine war spending, but also To deceive his own members whose vote he knew he would need and would only get if he pretended to be someone resisting endless war spending by the Biden White House in Ukraine.
So on October 18, 2022, just a week and a half or so before the 2022 midterm election from AP, there you see the headline Kevin McCarthy quote, no blank check for Ukraine if GOP wins majority.
He was saying the days of blank checks for Ukraine are coming to an end if we win.
Quote, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy warned Tuesday that Republicans will not write a quote blank check for Ukraine if they win back the House majority, reflecting his party's growing skepticism about financial support for Kiev as it battles Russia's invasion.
I think people are going to be sitting in a recession and they're not going to write a blank check to Ukraine, McCarthy told Punchbowl News.
They just won't do it.
It's not a free blank check.
The comments from McCarthy, who is in line to become the Speaker if Republicans win the House, raise fresh questions about the resiliency of America's support for Ukraine as a growing number of Republicans, particularly those aligned with Donald Trump's America First approach, question the need for federal spending abroad at a time of high record inflation at home.
We reported on Kevin McCarthy's comments when he said them.
I knew why he was saying them.
I definitely did not believe that he meant it.
I was skeptical about that.
And then, once Kevin McCarthy succeeded in having the Republicans win a majority in the House, and finally got enough votes after that long, protracted battle we described earlier to become House Speaker, he dispatched one of his closest lieutenants in the House, who he made Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Michael McFaul, who went on
This is actually Meet the Press and basically said that Kevin McCarthy didn't really mean any of those things that he said before the election and that in fact he is a adamant supporter of the war in Ukraine.
Listen to what this was said after Kevin McCarthy got what he wanted.
I want to play something that Speaker McCarthy said because it seemed to at least shift a perception of where he is on the issue of Ukraine.
Let me play it.
I think what's happening in Ukraine is an atrocity, and I think Ukraine, not just Ukraine, the world has to win there.
What Russia has done is wrong.
In a phrase that I use at Blank Check, I use that for anything.
I look at every dollar of taxpayers that we would use, but the one thing I know that in Ukraine we have to win, because it also would save Taiwan at the same time.
So he gets elected and not two months later or three months later, he's saying, oh, when I use the word, the phrase blank check, it doesn't actually mean anything.
I apply that to everything.
I don't mean anything by that.
I mean that I agree with the Biden White House.
We have to do everything possible to win the war in Ukraine.
So why would you trust somebody who goes and makes statements about one of the most important foreign policy debates our country faces, which is the war in Ukraine, to win an election, to win two elections, the midterm election and become House Speaker, and then turn around two months later and basically say, I didn't mean anything I said.
Here's what Congressman McFaul said on Kevin McCarthy's behalf.
Are you reassured now and should the Ukrainians, should President Zelensky be reassured that House Republicans are not going to stand in the way of more aid to Ukraine?
Yeah, I traveled with Kevin, Speaker McCarthy, to Poland, Romania.
He's always believed that this felt this way.
When you were over here, Chuck, when you talked to... Did you hear that?
By the way, this is Michael McCall, not Michael McFaul, who is the Obama, former Obama ambassador to Russia, who's at least as deranged when it comes to support for Ukraine.
But did you hear what he just said?
Chuck Todd said, are you now reassured?
Should the Ukrainians be reassured that Kevin McCarthy actually supports Biden's war policies in Ukraine?
And Michael McFaul said, oh, Kevin McCarthy always was a vehement supporter of the war in Ukraine.
This is Michael McFaul, who I believe either just visited Kiev or was in Kiev when he was giving this interview.
So they're essentially admitting they didn't mean anything by it.
They just said that to win the election.
This felt this way when you're over here, check when you talk to and I've talked to the prime ministers in the presence of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
What's happening in Ukraine will determine what happens in Taiwan in the Pacific.
I think the prime minister of Japan going down to Ukraine to signal their support.
And he said himself what happens in Ukraine today will happen in the Far East tomorrow.
I believe the best deterrence to Chairman Xi is a failure for Putin in Ukraine.
So look, if that's the kind of Republican you like, a Republican who agrees with the Biden White House and with neoconservatives, And who exploits the issue with China.
He's wearing, I don't know if you noticed, a lapel pin that has a merger of the U.S.
and Taiwanese flag on his lapel.
So he's essentially saying that we have to fight forever in the war in Ukraine, because if we don't it'll strengthen China, even though nothing has strengthened China more than the war in Ukraine.
It has driven Russia into their arms.
It has fostered all kinds of resentment around the world about what we're doing in Ukraine and just in general, how redolent that is of how we use our military force to dominate the world.
And that has driven more and more countries toward bricks.
That China led alternative alliance to the G20 and to NATO.
China marched into the Middle East right under our noses while we were obsessed with Ukraine and forged a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Nothing has helped China more than the war in Ukraine, and nothing will help it the more we pour resources into that war with no end in sight.
But this is the House Republican leadership.
This is the leadership Kevin McCarthy represents and has built.
And the idea that somehow that we can't afford as a country to lose these people's power and stature is preposterous to me, to put that mildly.
Now, I do think And I referenced at the beginning that one of the key distinctions that we have to understand is the difference between how the Republican Party functions and how the Democratic Party functions.
Over and over, without very many exceptions, the Democratic Party votes unanimously, including on the war in Ukraine.
It is amazing that all throughout the war in almost every country outside the U.S.
and Western Europe, there is substantial left-wing opposition to the U.S.
position on Ukraine.
In Brazil, for example, the left-wing leader of Brazil, Lula da Silva, has long said he assigns equal blame to Russia and to NATO and Ukraine.
That's the same view that the president of Mexico has, that left-wing parties all over the world have, and yet there's not one member of the Democratic Caucus, not one, That is willing to vote no and dissent from the war in Ukraine.
It is a party that marches in lockstep to the point that Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who was elected to Congress in 2018 on a pledge echoing Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign to wage a war on the Democratic Party establishment, is now boasting about the fact That there's no dissent within the Republican Party.
Just this weekend she tweeted, quote, the Democratic Caucus has been operating like a well-oiled machine.
And she's proud of that.
That's not a critique.
The Republican Caucus has been operating like a Roomba stuck on an extension cord.
So she is delighted about how little dissent there is within the Republican Party.
Just to make one last point and then I want to get to our segment on Coleman Hughes and the TED Talk.
I'm really interested to hear from him and what he has to say.
Remember that Matt Gaetz has hanging over his head that scandal that was launched three years ago.
When the New York Times got a leak about an investigation from the Biden Justice Department that he was being investigated for, among other things, hiring underage prostitutes.
In particular, he was accused of having hired a 17-year-old prostitute and encouraged her to cross state lines in order to be with him and his political associate.
The Biden Justice Department investigated this for two years.
and ultimately concluded that they had no evidence that would justify indicting him.
So he was never indicted, let alone convicted.
And yet, because he's such a thorn in the side of House Republicans, they opened an ethics committee investigation or inquiry into these allegations, and they are now leaking to the press, including Fox News, that if Matt Gaetz succeeds in removing Kevin McCarthy as speaker, they that if Matt Gaetz succeeds in removing Kevin McCarthy as speaker, they will expel Matt Gaetz or use this ethics investigation to It's retribution.
Here from Fox News, and one of the reporters is dating one of the members of the House Republican caucus who voted for Kevin McCarthy today, so it's reliable information.
You see here, Gates' ouster of McCarthy draws attention to his ethics issues.
That's actually from the New York Times today.
So the New York Times is also I'm reporting this that Representative Matt Gaetz is facing a House Committee inquiry into allegations of sexual misconduct and misuse of funds.
Representative Kevin McCarthy has argued Mr. Gaetz's move against his speakership is payback.
So they're trying to imply that Matt Gaetz wanted to remove Kevin McCarthy as payback for this investigation.
That doesn't explain the seven other House Republicans who joined him in voting to remove Kevin McCarthy.
They don't have health ethics investigations and I seriously doubt that Nancy Mace or Ken Buck is angry enough that Matt Gaetz is being investigated that they're willing to remove Kevin McCarthy over it.
Here from Fox News though, is a more explicit threat.
House GOP members seek to expel Gaetz amid renewed threat to vacate House Speaker McCarthy.
They're linking it causally.
They're saying if Gates succeeds in removing McCarthy, they will then use that House ethics investigation to punish Matt Gates, which I don't think is the purpose of a House ethics investigation.
Here is a Fox reporter, Jackie Heinrich, who wrote that story.
Here's how she described the story in the tweet she posted over the weekend.
Quote, House GOP members are seeking to quickly expel Gates if the ethics report comes back with findings of guilt.
Following threats to vacate McCarthy, one of them tells me, quote, no one can stand him at this point.
A smart guy without morals.
So, again, if this is the Republican Party that you feel desperate to cling to, the party of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy and Michael McCaul, doing side deals with the Democrats to fund the war in Ukraine, Violating the agreements that Kevin McCarthy made about how votes would be conducted to become a speaker and then expecting to remain speaker?
By all means, you should be as indignant as John Cornyn and these reporters from NBC News and the Huffington Post who are outraged at the instability brought to our precious political system.
But if you're somebody who thinks that this establishment, this bipartisan, uniparty establishment, needs further dismantling and weakening and reform, Then I can't imagine being angry at all, let alone calling it a terrorist attack and an overthrow, that someone like Kevin McCarthy lost his speakership.
Coleman Hughes is a former fellow of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
He is also host of the podcast, Conversations with Coleman.
It's a podcast on which I appeared maybe a year ago for one of the more interesting discussions I've had in my career as a journalist about race and class and a variety of other issues.
The podcast is a forum for open discussions on a lot of the most pressing social and political questions.
That is what Coleman does is he delves into some of the most sensitive and difficult debates.
He has an upcoming book called The End of Race Politics, Arguments for a Colorblind America, in which he argues in favor of a colorblind approach to race, and that was the topic of a TED Talk he was invited to give that he did deliver on April 19th in Vancouver, and it has become the source of a lot of controversy because of the anger within TED by some of the employees toward the speech he gave and efforts to either impede the speech or dilute it or now suppress its reach.
So we're delighted to have Coleman with us.
Coleman, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us tonight.
We're thrilled to have you on our program.
My pleasure, Glenn.
So let's just get into the kind of generalities of this event and let's kind of just lay the factual foundation for what happened before extracting meaning from it, because I think a lot of these details are so crucial.
And it's, I don't know, I find it, as somebody who gave a TED Talk in 2014 and went through the same process you did, although with much different results, Honestly, I'm kind of amazed at just how explicit this is.
So let's start just with the story of how you got invited to give a TED Talk and what was said to you at the time about what it would be and how you would give it and what you would talk about.
So many months before the TED Conference, Chris Anderson reached out to me to see if I wanted to give a TED Talk.
And I had been to two previous TEDs, so I was familiar with the community.
And I had this new book coming out, so I figured I will write basically a short summary of my book, and that will be my TED Talk.
So as you know, having given a TED Talk, you edit it with the team, you get feedback, and every single word gets fact-checked and cleared with their team before you step on stage.
So I went through that process in the months leading up.
As you say, on April 19th, I gave the TED Talk, and Really, you know, I would go so far as to say 99% of the audience, you know, it went down fine.
Whether or not they agreed with every point, they were not visibly upset and they didn't want to censor me.
There was just a very, very small slice of the audience that I could see was kind of upset.
And over the course of the next weeks, I learned from Chris that TED staff was so upset that they wanted to not release my talk altogether.
So Coleman, let me show a couple of excerpts of the talk.
The interesting thing is, when I gave my TED Talk, it was 2014, it was at the height of the Snowden story.
Everything about the Snowden reporting that we did was incredibly controversial.
I gave a speech about why people should not accept the view that you should want the government spying on you if you're not somebody who's a terrorist or a pedophile, why you should care about privacy even if you're not a criminal.
I was questioned afterward the way you were, which is a not universal feature of a TED Talk, but they do do that sometimes.
They send someone on stage to ask you a couple of questions.
He asked a couple of adversarial questions.
Clearly, a lot of people in the audience agreed with me.
I'm sure some didn't, but there was never any suggestion that I should have any of these safeguards or conditions on the publication of my speech.
It was published the way all the speeches were, despite it being controversial.
Instead of talking about the speech, let me just show the audience a couple of excerpts from the speech.
And this is really, I think these excerpts are highly representative of the argument that you made.
I think a lot of people are going to be surprised that it was controversial at all, let alone so controversial that people acted to suppress it.
So let's take a look.
I want to do a quick exercise.
Close your eyes.
I want you to picture your best friend.
Think about what specifically you love about them.
What trait makes them them?
Now open your eyes.
I don't know what each of you came up with, but I'm pretty sure I know what you didn't come up with.
I'm pretty sure none of you thought, what makes Jim Jim is the fact that he's six foot two and a redhead.
I'm guessing you chose their inner qualities.
Their sense of humor, their generosity, their intelligence.
Qualities they would have no matter what they looked like.
There's one more quality I'm pretty sure you didn't choose.
Their race.
Of all the things you could list about somebody, their race is just about the least interesting you could name.
Right down there with height and hair color.
Sure, race can be good source material for jokes at a comedy club, but in the real world, a person's race doesn't tell you whether they're kind or selfish, whether their beliefs are right or wrong, whether they'll become your best friend or your worst enemy.
But over the past 10 years, our societies have become more and more fixated on racial identity.
We've all been invited to reflect on our inner whiteness or inner blackness as if these racial essences define who we are.
Meanwhile, American society has experienced the greatest crisis in race relations in a generation.
Gallup has been asking Americans how they feel about race relations, and this chart is the result.
So as you can see, between 2001 and 2013, most Americans felt good about race relations.
Then both lines take a nosedive.
It's no exaggeration to call this one of the greatest crises of our time.
And clearly, we need new ways of thinking about race if we're going to reverse this trend.
So today, I'm going to offer an old idea, but it's an idea that's been widely misunderstood.
You've probably heard it before.
It's called colorblindness.
What do I mean by colorblindness?
After all, we all see race.
We can't help it.
And what's more, race can influence how we're treated and how we treat other people.
So in that sense, nobody is truly colorblind.
But to interpret the word... Okay, so I wanted to give a pretty good, like, excerpt so that people can understand what the speech was.
I think it's crucial to the story.
And I want to ask you this.
It's so paradoxical, this idea of colorblindness, because in so many ways, this is what we're all taught that we're supposed to believe.
Maybe not all of us, but most of us.
It's what I think, aspirationally, society tells us we're supposed to strive toward.
We have a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, whose most famous speech encouraged us to see each other and judge each other based on the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
I assume though that you understood this speech would be controversial despite this message that we're all kind of encouraged to believe.
So why is a speech like this so controversial when what you're essentially saying is let's not judge each other through the metric of race?
So, the paradox with colorblindness is that it's very popular among the public at large, if you poll it or if you just talk to Joe Schmo on the street from any walk of society, but it's very unpopular with elites.
So, you know, it's broadly popular within the Democratic base, broadly.
But if you're on a college campus or in corporate America, you've been taught that colorblindness is a dirty word.
If you're reading Robin DiAngelo or Ibram Kendi or anyone from the kind of DEI public speaking circuit, you would have been taught that colorblindness is as bad as Nazism.
So this is the disconnect.
This is why what I'm saying can seem totally banal and at the same time cause a meltdown at a place like TED.
So I referenced Martin Luther King.
It's kind of the cliched reference, because everybody understands and everybody knows his speech.
And so people commonly cite it in defense of colorblindness.
But you actually have talked about the fact that this idea didn't obviously originate in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement.
It has a much deeper history.
And the irony is that nowadays, this view is considered right wing or far right.
When that's not its history.
Talk about the history of this concept of colorblindness and where it actually came from and how it evolved.
Yeah, so the earliest use of the word colorblind that I know of is from Wendell Phillips, who was the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society after William Lloyd Garrison.
So this is the president of probably the most important anti-slavery society during the 1860s.
What he said was that the goal of the anti-slavery movement ultimately is a colorblind government, a government which cannot distinguish the races of its citizens in its laws and policies.
So this concept of colorblindness is a direct outgrowth, not of American conservatism or even really liberalism per se, but of the radical wing of the abolitionist party.
And you can draw a straight through line right from Wendell Phillips to people like Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph to the NAACP during the Brown v. Boer days and the civil rights movement, early Thurgood Marshall.
All of them were united in this value and goal of a colorblind public policy.
Right down to Martin Luther King, who in his book, Why We Can't Wait, and anyone can read this, you know, just read his plan for what we should do about the legacy of slavery.
His ultimate suggestion is we have to have class-based policy rather than race-based policy and attack poverty on a race-neutral basis.
This is exactly what my position is.
And, you know, the ironic part of this is that what Ted is signaling by saying that my views are out of bounds is that Martin Luther King's views were out of bounds.
Like you said, it's a cliche to say so, but it's actually true.
Yeah.
Let me ask, Coleman, because, you know, unfortunately, I am somebody who is extremely connected to and immersed in elite political discourse.
And so, of course, I understood and could have easily predicted that your speech would be controversial, even though the part of my brain and my experience that is also based in, you know, just ordinary culture is kind of still shocked that it is.
I mean, I am kind of consciously aware of this disconnect.
Nonetheless, even though I knew that your speech would be controversial, and in my view, that's the reason to have gone and given it.
If it doesn't provoke thought and disagreement, it really wouldn't be worth anything if it were just a kind of string of banalities and cliches that everybody agrees with.
There's no point in going to give a talk like that.
What did surprise me, though, honestly, and again, because I went through TED and because this is an organization explicitly created to foster debate and to air a wide range of views, is that this controversy morphed into An actual attempt to block your speech from being published within TED itself.
This is a story you told.
We referenced this earlier in the show in this article in the Free Press on September 23rd.
Why is TED scared of colorblindness?
But talk about what happened after the day of this speech that made you start to realize that there was a genuine possibility that your speech would not be published, or if it was published, it would be published with a lot of impediments.
Yeah, so if people want the fullest version of their story, they can read the article, but I'll give it in a nutshell here.
Chris emailed me saying that... And just to be clear, Chris is Chris Anderson, who is one of the earliest and now the leader of the TED Foundation that runs TED Talk.
That's right.
So he emailed me saying, there's a bunch of blowback and people are saying we shouldn't post your talk at all.
Would you be, you know, would you be willing to participate in a debate about this subject and then release it as one big combined video with my talk connected to a debate?
And I said, well, no, I don't want to do this because I think that would dilute the product.
And I think, you know, the talk should live on its own like every other TED Talk would.
Later, we can talk about doing a debate.
I'm always happy to debate.
I just think they should be totally separate products.
And they kept pushing and pushing and pushing over a series of phone calls.
Have media strategies.
Then they said, OK, let's release them separately, but on the same day.
And again, I said that this would dilute both of them.
Why can't we just separate them?
So eventually, at the end of a long period of negotiation, which was that they would release and promote my TED Talk normally.
Two weeks later, they'd release this debate with myself and Jamel Bowie, who is a New York Times columnist.
So they released the talk.
Two weeks later, the debate was released.
And so mentally, I had put this behind me until Tim Urban, who is a blogger who's given the most TED Talk of all time on YouTube, noticed that my TED Talk had just an implausibly low number of views on TED's website.
Right.
And he posted this on Twitter and argued that Ted was deliberately under-promoting my talk.
So when I saw that, I checked, and sure enough, if you looked at the five TED Talks released just before and after me to hold the variable of time constant, they all had between 460,000 and 800,000 views.
That was the full range.
My talk had 73,000.
So it had about 16% of the next lowest talk of those released around it, which is just totally implausible.
Not only that, they actually didn't post my talk to YouTube at all until somebody noticed it and pointed it out to me and I reached out to them and said, Hey, what's going on here?
And then they said, Oh, okay, okay.
We'll put it on YouTube.
and they didn't repost it to the to their ted talks daily podcast either and uh in some total what they what they did was essentially sandbag and deliberately not promote my talk which i felt was a breach of our deal so that's when i i wrote for the free press about what happened right so in response to that article in the free press and i do really encourage everybody go to read it
there's a lot of other details including the fact that they ended up consulting an outside social scientist who essentially told them he didn't think that your speech or your argument was supported by the relevant data and the relevant research and And again, Coleman, I mean, when I did my TED Talk, and I've seen a lot of other TED Talks that have been, in my view at least, more controversial than yours, I actually had to go the day before and I had to deliver the entire talk in front of them.
Everybody did who was a speaker.
And they made us promise, I think even signing a pledge, that the actual talk we would give would heed word for word to the speech or the version of the speech we showed them.
So there was a lot of vetting beforehand.
In response to this article that you wrote, kind of detailing the steps they took, first threatening not to publish this speech and then the kind of different ways that they were going to dilute it, Chris Anderson went and said the following, quote, first thing to say is that Coleman's piece is a reasonably accurate description of what happened.
So they're confirming that what you, the version that you laid out is essentially how it in fact took place.
And then he added, quote, in a nutshell, we invited him to TED to give a talk we knew would be controversial, but the talk ended up causing more upset than we foresaw.
So there was some pressure from some on our team not to post it.
We overrode that.
And then he added, quote, many others heard it as a dangerous undermining your speech as a dangerous undermining in the fight for progress in race relations.
So, yes, there was controversy when people on your own team feel like their identity is being attacked.
It's right to take pause.
And we concluded that some of the essential issues raised by Coleman's talk needed wider discussion, hence the decision to supplement the talk with a debate.
This is what I kind of want to ask you.
Again, I'm sure that you understood that your speech or your view on race is controversial.
You've debated it with people before.
You've heard people reacting to it before and criticizing you for it.
You've testified in Congress about very similar issues next to people who don't agree with you, including, I believe, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
So you're aware that this view is by no means accepted by everybody.
But was it surprising to you the extent to which they were going to essentially get out of even publishing this speech, at least as a standalone speech, if not publishing it at all?
Was that surprising to you?
What was surprising to me is not that certain people were upset by my talk.
I think, you know, and you will know this, in this profession you're always ready for people to be upset and emotional at what you have to say, especially if you have a controversial perspective.
What I was surprised by was the fact that Chris, you know, personally, you know, I know him, we were friendly, really, brought me in, saw every word of my talk, as did the fact-checking team, as did the curation team, and then only cited that there may be some quote-unquote problems with my talk because people were upset.
So in other words, what surprised me was not that you can get a few people upset on this topic in the staff, what surprised me is that the leadership buckled After having brought me in and giving given me every every stamp of approval and Then like let me just say one more thing is that I think that there's two key mistakes here One is to validate the upset angry emotions of the staff and get to give that veto power, right?
obviously everyone's Adulterations and to air their opinion and there are plenty of venues at which you could complain about my talk and disagree with it publicly within the TED community and The mistake is to say that because you're angry, therefore your anger gives you veto power over what we are going to platform as an organization.
And then secondly, I think the big picture problem with Chris's response here is that he is firming if there's two equally reasonable parties here and he has to negotiate a compromise.
The people on the other side of TED should have only woke talks, and they believe that if you express the point of view Martin Luther King expressed in Why We Can't Wait, that you should be censored.
Those are not two equally reasonable sides, and if you're caught in the middle of that, you can't just negotiate between a crazy party and a sane party and get middle ground, because then you're just enabling the craziness of one side.
You have to show leadership and really shut down the people that don't share the values of free speech and viewpoint diversity.
Yeah, let me just know two things.
One is, as you convey it, and Chris confirmed it was true, when they first called you, they essentially said there's a group of employees, black employees inside TED who are upset by your speech, and they wanted to know if you would talk to them.
And you said, yes, I will, because you're somebody who devotes yourself on your podcast and the way you conduct yourself in public discourse to having dialogue with people who see the world differently than you do.
And then shortly thereafter, you learned, well, actually, they don't want to talk to you at all.
The other issue is, Ted has published TED Talks on this exact topic before.
They just published the other side of the side that you're on basically saying colorblindness is racist, colorblindness is insufficient.
So they have started the debate and no problems were found when they published those.
There was no efforts to say this can only be published if it has a person contesting it, They were in efforts to suppress it.
They just put it out there the way they did every other one, and so they're clearly, as you say, it's not the question of which view does Chris Anderson agree with.
The issue is, is he true to the organizational purpose of allowing a free and fair debate?
Clearly the answer is no.
Now, after that tweet that I read, and it generated a huge amount of anger, he wrote a second tweet.
I'm talking about long tweets.
Because he obviously knew that that tweet didn't get the job done.
And in the second tweet, where he went back to address the public anger, he said something I think is genuinely interesting.
I think this is very true.
I just don't hear people acknowledging it or admitting it.
This is what he said, quote, Pretty much every single media organization in America, if not the world, has found it challenging to navigate the last few years.
That certainly includes us.
The world's escalating political division, accelerated first by cable news then by social media, has put relentless pressure on organizations to move sharply left or sharply right.
Most of our content is non-political and that's the way it will stay, but when we have entered political waters, that content in recent years has indeed been more likely to use the language and ideas of progressives than conservatives.
Now, I absolutely think it's true that over the past few years, and he seems to be linking this to the George Floyd protest, maybe the Me Too movement.
When a lot of these changes happen, I would probably say the George Floyd protest and the Black Lives Matter protest, given that this is an issue about race.
He's essentially saying, ever since then, it's impossible to be an organization that is kind of neutral, that just is a platform for allowing debate.
You have to choose.
Either you're on the left or you're on the right.
And once you plant your flag, You can't allow the other side even to be heard.
And he's saying, and I think it's true of most organizations, we decided to plant our flag on the left, on the progressive side, and since Coleman's speech didn't get included in that side, that's the reason why we treated it differently.
What do you make of that concession on the part of the leader of TED that he feels like he can no longer be a platform for neutral discourse and has to declare himself either on the left or right and then dictate what views can be heard based on that?
Well, if he had said it as honestly as you summarized it, then in a way I would respect it, and we would all just know going forward that TED is an explicitly progressive organization, and everyone else would know to stay away.
What he has tried to do is walk a line such that he won't totally candidly admit to the extent to which Ted's staff is captured by the kind of progressive who does not believe in platforming the full range of ideas from across the political spectrum.
But hasn't, you know, instead continued to push the brand of Ted as a nonpartisan political organization dedicated to spreading ideas.
I mean, just last year at Ted, they had a pro-communism Ted Talk and a pro-capitalism Ted Talk in the same conference.
Now, I thought that was awesome.
I had a bunch of disagreements.
The idea that they could was the example of how organizations like TED should be able to have a big tent of ideas.
If he's now saying that they've given up on that hope, then that's very sad, but I certainly hope he's able to steer Ted in a direction, and that may involve really tough leadership decisions like firing people who don't share the values of the org.
I hope he's able to steer it in a better direction going forward.
Yeah, I mean, to be perfectly honest, I don't get the sense from his reaction, and I guess I was being kind of generous in my description of it.
I was reading maybe a little bit into it because I think I know what he's saying.
I don't really get the sense that he feels all that remorseful.
I think he's kind of justifying what they did rather than making amends for it, but hopefully I'm wrong.
Let me just ask you as the final question.
You have this book coming out.
Talk a little bit about when it's coming out, but let me ask you specifically about the distinction that you drew because in your speech you do say, It is true that there are systemic inequities in the United States.
There are people who grow up without opportunities to achieve the same as other people who grew up with a lot more opportunities.
It's not like you deny that there are these systemic inequalities.
Your point though is that if we're going to go and address them, That the best way to do that is by looking at class because that's really the predominant basis of what determines who's deprived and who's not, more so than race.
Can you talk a little bit about that distinction and why you fall on the class side and then just talk about how that pertains to your book and when the book is coming out?
Yeah, I fall on the class side because I think that class is a closer proxy for disadvantage than race.
And what I mean that if we're really talking about what we mean when we talk about growing up disadvantaged, class gets much closer to really encompassing all of the disadvantages that we're talking about, as opposed to simply race.
And by definition, if you have a class-based policy, if you have any class-based policy, like the earned income tax credit or need-based financial aid, in college, that policy is going to positively affect Black and Hispanic people than whites and Asians because Blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be poor and lower middle class.
So you simultaneously get a disproportionate benefit for people of color, But you also more precisely target what we're actually trying to solve for when we aim our policies at the disadvantage in the abstract.
Yeah, well, Coleman, I'm genuinely sorry you had to go through this.
I'm sure, honestly, it must have been frustrating.
Because I do, again, I think it's surprising to encounter this from a group that explicitly says that they're there to do the opposite.
But I'm really glad that you chose to speak up about it, to detail what happened, to force them to be accountable to it.
I think you performed an important public service.
And I really hope people will go watch your TED Talk.
I thought it was a great TED Talk, as well as read your article about what the reaction was, and I really appreciate your joining the show.
Before you go, I'm gonna force you to self-promote, so just tell people where they can find your podcast, which, as I said when I was on it, I really considered it one of the more fulfilling and nutritious conversations I've had about these topics over the past two decades or so, so just encourage people, or let people at least know where they can find you. - Yeah, well, I'm really or let people at least know where they can find you. - Yeah, well, I'm really I remember really enjoying that conversation, too.
So my podcast is called Conversations with Coleman, and you can get it wherever you listen to podcasts.
And my book will be coming out in February called The End of Race Politics.
All right, Coleman.
Thanks so much.
Great to speak with you.
I hope you have a great night.
Thanks, Glenn.
Bye.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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