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Feb. 16, 2025 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas
58:37
Truth Matters With Cornell West And Robert P. George
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Welcome to Making Sense of the Madness.
We've got a great show lined up for you today.
We've got Robert P. George on the right and Cornel West on the left.
The book is Truth Matters, a dialogue on fruitful disagreement in an age of division.
Really looking forward to this one because I probably disagree with both of these gentlemen on a multitude of issues and I hope to have that fruitful discussion right here.
Buckle up and get ready to make sense of the madness.
And we are back.
We are joined by both Cornell and Robert.
First of all, I want to say thank you to both you gentlemen for coming in.
You know, I'm 45 years young.
I'd say that I've been pretty politically astute the last 25-plus years, and I've been politically homeless.
I've got to be honest with you.
I really despise most...
Politicians on most issues.
There's a handful of people that I've respected over the years, say on the left, the Dennis Kucinichs of the world, Mike Gravel back in the day, and certainly on the right, the Ron Pauls of the world, his son Rand, I have a great deal of respect for.
And other than that, I mean, maybe I can name a dozen people in politics that I really do think.
Are saying what they mean.
But at the same time, I don't even think we get those discussions anymore.
Cornell, I know I've seen you over the years.
Geez, before real time, I think, when it was politically incorrect on Comedy Central, you were doing panel shows all the way back then.
And it was a much different vibe, not only in the 90s, but even 10, 15 years ago.
And I hope that we can get back to that.
Where we can have these kind of open discussions.
So let's start with you, Robert.
Why did you decide to write this book with Cornell?
And then I want to get Cornell's take on that.
Well, Brother Cornell and I have been teaching together and writing together and speaking together and working together since about 2005. We began teaching undergraduate seminars at Princeton.
On great books and great ideas and great thinkers from Sophocles to Plato to St. Augustine, then all the way up into modern times with John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, John Dewey, C.S. Lewis.
And over the course of that 20-year period, we developed a very strong friendship, more than a friendship, a genuine brotherhood.
We became, for all intents and purposes, members of each other's families.
And I learned so much.
From our teaching together, from our working together, came to have such admiration for Cornell's integrity, his devotion to truth, his willingness to be open to engagement, criticism, challenge.
Try to emulate that myself.
And so after 20 years, we decided we should try to publish something together.
We published articles together in newspapers and other forums, but we thought we'd try to put together a book.
That captured the spirit of our dialogues and tried to model, especially for young people, people like our students or our own children, to model the kind of engagement, robust but civil engagement, that we think the country so desperately needs if we're to overcome the very, very serious problems that the country has.
The polarization is a symptom of the problems, but there are underlying problems like not caring about the truth.
Caring about what your tribe needs or your tribe wants or your tribal ideologies and not about the truth.
Lining up with whatever your party or your tribe or your group wants you to do.
That's undermining what I think we could call the spirit of Republican democracy.
So Cornell and I are just doing our best and this book is one way we're trying to do it.
To make a contribution to the public wheel.
I think that your network or channel is called Patriot TV. I really think this kind of thing is the highest form of patriotism.
Cornell?
Well, one, I want to thank you, Brother Jason, for having us.
And anytime I have a chance to spend time with Brother Robbie, it puts a smile on my face.
His blessed mothers, they're having a funeral just in a couple of days and so on.
My thoughts and prayers are with my dear brother, but it's true.
For 20 years, we have had a good time reveling in each other's humanity.
And the deep love that we have for each other, of course, is much deeper than our ideological and political differences.
Now, I give my brother the right to be wrong.
He gives me the right to be wrong.
We wrestle with our differences.
But when it comes to someone who exemplifies a...
And integrity and honesty, saying what he means and meaning what he says.
So much of the culture these days is not just a joyless quest for pleasure, but it's a lot of posing and posturing.
People just saying things in order to make money or pursue their career or grab the next opportunity rather than really be Socratic and say something that they have deep, deep convictions, something they're willing to live for and die for.
And that's what I've been able to have with Brother Robbie, and it's been a beautiful 20-year brotherhood.
So when we talk about the...
Go ahead, Robert.
Yeah, I was going to say, you know, people who are in the public eye, and Cornell is very much in the public eye, people who are in the public eye very often get focused and preoccupied about Their brand, what they call their brand.
And what I've loved about these 20 years with Brother Cornell is I have gotten to know a man very much in the public eye who is not worried about his brand.
Cornell would never not say something he believed or say something he didn't believe in order to protect or promote his brand.
And in this day and age, Brother Jason, that is a breath of fresh air.
So, I mean, I love that.
Well, I think in any day and age.
That's what I mean.
Right?
In any day and age when somebody is genuine.
And look, that's what I think we need more of.
There are so many people out there that want the hot take that will go along with the story to get the clicks, etc.
And to me...
Truth is really important, and that's why I've never been able to play team baseball in politics and call myself a liberal or a conservative.
I mean, you pin me to the wall, and I'll say that I'm a constitutionalist.
And quite frankly, I don't think that we really have or have had a constitutional republic anywhere near what the founding fathers wanted with that perfectly imperfect document.
In other words, they set the path to have women vote.
To have, obviously, black people were not three-fifths a person, etc.
But we haven't really had anything that has constitutionally changed, and yet we've created this executive within an executive, I would call it.
Some call it the deep state, but I'm hoping we're going to start to get transparency with this administration.
Sometimes truth is tough.
And I think that we would all agree that the declassification of the MLK, JFK, and RFK documents are a step in the right direction.
What are both of your thoughts on that?
I mean, I've been waiting for these documents literally my whole life after I've realized that we were lied to about them in my teenage years, right?
And here I am.
I'm on the brink of 50. And a lot of these things are still hidden.
So I'd love to get your takes on those documents and that declassification.
I just think it's always good to promote transparency, but it has to be across the board.
I mean, you can imagine what the papers would say in the history of U.S. coups in Iran and Guatemala and Brazil and Dominican Republic and in so many other places.
We have to have a transparency across the board to be very honest and candid.
About what has been done in the name of the American people that we understand to be deep violation, not just of rights, but a violation of human dignity, and I would say even sanctity as a Christian.
And yourself, Robert?
Yeah, there are times, they are not all that frequent or common, but there are times when government secrecy is necessary.
What happens, of course, is the need for government secrecy, the legitimate need for government secrecy, creates the possibility of abuse.
And we've had an enormous amount of abuse, and as Cornell says, it's across the board, where things that were done in the name of the American people are hidden from the American people for bad reasons.
Now, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You don't want to say that government can never maintain confidentiality or secrecy, because sometimes you really do need it.
But it's actually not all that often.
And if we're going to have a Republican democracy, that is a government by the people, where the people ultimately are responsible for the decisions, you can't illegitimately hide what's being done in the name of the people.
So I applaud the release of this information.
It might have been that during the Cold War there was information that was very sensitive pertaining, let's say, to the Kennedy or the JFK assassination.
It might have been necessary to protect that information for some period of time.
The Soviet Union's gone.
It has been gone for several decades.
The Cold War is over.
We won.
There's no need to maintain that information as secret.
Well, I would also say this.
In order to have the type of republic you speak of, you have to have accountability.
And we haven't had criminal accountability for the types of crimes that Mr. West was talking about, I would say, since the Iran-Contra affair.
And even then, it was slaps on the wrist.
A lot of these guys were commuted or pardoned after the fact.
Oliver North, who was made the face of this thing.
I mean, he got radio shows and TV deals and book deals and became a millionaire.
Not really the way to curb that behavior.
And, you know, George Bush, who really had a larger part and role, even Lee Hamilton, who, you know, Warren commissioned.
Iran-Contra 9-11 Commission after the fact said he had a larger role.
He became the President of the United States and then his son for eight years where much of his administration was in that administration as well.
So again, the accountability factor really has not been there.
How do we get that accountability factor?
Because number one, I think the three assassinations are great.
I would have loved to see Malcolm X in there as well.
They've also talked about other areas of interest.
Well, go down the line of what Dr. West just said.
Talk about Iran-Contra.
And I want to take it all the way to 9-11.
I had Giuliani on this program in October, and he flat out said, declassify it all.
He's open to all the conspiracies now that what's been done to him.
So I'd love to get your take, not only on the broader declassification I think we need, but real criminal accountability.
When it's been exercised and how far that should go?
Because we haven't seen it in decades in this country.
Am I wrong?
I think you're absolutely right.
And keep in mind, when I was talking about Iran, I was talking about the early 50s, you know, the cool, the early 50s.
Oh, I know you're talking about...
You knew.
You knew.
I just want to clarify for the audience that.
Sure.
I mean, one...
That Robbie and I, you know, we come out of the Socratic legacy of Athens and the prophetic legacy of Jerusalem, which means that we have a larger picture of what it means to be human.
And see, I would argue that the human species, you know, we're very wretched species, you know, that the history of our species is one very much of forms of domination and subjugation and oppression and as well as hatred.
And envy and resentment.
We have these wonderful moments or attempts to create some interruptions of this history.
And that's really what constitutional republics or democratic efforts are politically.
And of course, personally, we try to break them with a grin and a touch and a loving relationship and some friendship and so forth.
But so much of the history of who we are as a species is very, very bleak.
So this is not a rationalization of the lack of transparency.
It just means you need that much more courage.
You need that much more determination, that much more integrity.
And you can never do it on your own.
You have to create cultures and civic infrastructures that kind of reinforce and cultivate the capacity to think for yourself critically, to love no matter what, to laugh for yourself.
We got to take a break.
The book is Truth Matters, A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division.
You can get it over on Amazon.
When we come back, I want to talk about misinformation, disinformation, censorship, social media, and so much more.
We're going to come back with more Making Sense of the Madness after this.
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. .
And we are back.
So let's talk about what's been going on, not only within social media, but I would say our culture.
I hate the term cancel culture because it's not real to me.
We've seen the demonization of viewpoints and individuals for saying controversial things for a very long time.
However...
When we are talking about the social media arena, it was the first time that you would see massive deplatforming and outright censorship, really unapologetic.
I don't think we fixed that.
Again, I like the idea, just like I like the idea that the cartels are now terrorists, that the government's not going to be involved in censorship anymore.
I'm not sure what that means.
Are we rolling back the Smith-Month Modernization Act?
Are we now going to actually look at Missouri versus Biden, which was the most promising case that a state Supreme Court came in and said, look, this is obvious collusion for censorship between the Biden administration and big tech.
Our Supreme Court didn't even look at it.
They said no standing.
Shows how ignorant I am.
I thought after the state Supreme Court ruled on it, they'd actually have to look at the evidence.
No, I guess not.
You know, when I see free speech, and I think this is a problem with the conservatives, they want to champion a guy like Elon Musk.
I think Elon Musk, who's the number one defense contractor, is actually a pretty dangerous guy.
And by the way, I'm not so sure there's really free speech there.
They still algorithmically suppress people.
They pick winners and losers just like everybody else.
They have former Defense Department, FBI working there as well.
So there's narrative management.
Where are we with free speech in this country, with big tech and with big government?
I'll throw it to either of you.
Well, first, let's begin by admitting that people can use social media, other platforms, public platforms, to promote ideas that are false.
Some of those false ideas are dangerous.
As a result of coming to believe some of those false ideas, people can end up doing bad, even tragic things.
So enormous harm can come as a result of people being free to say things that are untrue, including things they know to be untrue.
All right, we've got that on the table.
We're not going to pretend that doesn't exist.
Got real danger.
But we also know that people can do bad things.
People can make bad decisions.
Governments can make bad decisions.
Policies can go tragically awry as a result of speech being suppressed in formal or informal ways.
John Stuart Mill talks about some of those informal ways in his great essay on liberty, Chapter 2 of Freedom of Thought and Discussion.
That's a text Cornell and I teach in our seminars.
So now we have the question, what is the lesser danger?
And I believe, and Cornell believes, that the lesser danger is to allow and protect free speech.
That's not a guarantee.
If we allow the marketplace of ideas to function, it doesn't give us a guarantee that the results will be good.
You can still have very bad consequences.
But it's a good bet.
It's a much better bet than authorizing censorship.
Because in whose hands do we give that power of censorship?
Do we vest that power of censorship?
You show me the human being that is trustworthy.
I wouldn't want myself to be trusted with the power to censor other people's speech because I think it's bad or false or dangerous.
And I certainly don't trust politicians.
Any politicians.
I don't trust any party.
I don't trust any ideological movement, including those with which I'm more sympathetic.
So the best bet, it's not a guarantee, but the best bet is to protect freedom of speech.
I'll just close by saying, Cornell and I have written about this in a piece that you can find online.
It was published in 2017, and it's called Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression.
Please, those of you, your viewers and hearers who are interested, Look up our piece, Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression, where we explain why we think going with free speech is in fact the way to go and going with censorship is a terrible, terrible mistake.
What are your thoughts on this, Cornell?
Because I also feel like there are varying degrees of censorship, right?
There's the outright deplatforming.
There's the quote-unquote shadow banning.
There's an inability to have a meritocracy to monetize your content, etc.
I think these are all things that certainly need to be addressed.
You know, a lot of people want to say, well, they're private companies.
I mean, is YouTube a private company?
You know, Google, its parent company, and Alphabet above it.
First of all, pretty much started by the Defense Department.
Initial funding, National Library Initiative, DARPA. NASA, after that, funded by In-Q-Tel.
They bring in somebody like Eric Schmidt.
I mean, Schmidt to this day works with the Defense Department, the National Security Apparatus.
He's a steering member on Bilderberg.
They just brought Stoltenberg in as a steering member there.
These are powerful people.
You know what I mean?
I mean, they just announced.
That they're removing their ban on AI weapon systems.
I'd argue they've been an AI weapon system since the beginning.
And by the way, I would say YouTube, which is the second largest search engine in the world after Google, and the largest platform for video out there, that's really the last rodeo for real tech upstarts.
People forget Google didn't start that.
Google competed with it with Google Video and then bought it for $8 billion.
After that, show me a tech startup, you know, Instagram, bought by Meta.
That's Peter Thiel.
All these names interact with one another.
And Peter Thiel, big investor in Rumble, supposedly the next big thing in free speech.
Where are we really, Cornell, when it comes to free speech?
Well, I think you laid it out with eloquence and with truth-telling, though, brother.
You know, truth is always bigger than any of us, so we're on the way to truth.
But you captured crucial dimensions of that truth.
See, for me, you know, free speech is, one, it's such a precious thing, but it presupposes something that's even more precious, which is trust.
And respect.
Even the great John Stuart Mill and his magnificent text on liberty.
Remember the first footnote says this does not apply to India.
They need despotism.
I'm not thinking about the kind of libertarian impulses and the Socratic energy of free speech there.
So every figure and every school of thought is going to have its own.
Blind spots and its own limitations.
So part of the fallibility and fallenness of who we are as human beings, on the one hand, leads precisely to your eloquent analysis, which is there's going to be mechanisms of censorship that are covert as well as overt, and we just have to be vigilant about that.
Now, John Stuart Mill was vigilant.
There's no doubt about that.
He just didn't go as far as he should have.
He read too much Macaulay, maybe.
Who is justifying a lot of that Indian despotism?
And we have to be mindful of our own limitations.
But again, we're perennially cutting against the grain, though, Brother Jason.
That's the thing, and that's the point I think that Brother Robbie and I are trying to make.
We're trying to bear witness to Socratic dialogue.
We bear witness to prophetic living in our own distinctive...
And I tell you, I wish you could see Brother Robbie in the classroom.
He is a masterful teacher trying to convey that to the young, precious students there at Princeton.
So when using the Socratic method of asking these questions and having dialogues, you know, when I'm talking to somebody that I know I'm going to have...
An overt disagreement with.
I always try to start with something that I know that we can at least relate to and come into the conversation with.
In this moment and with this administration and the political climate, and I want to start with you, Robert, if you were to reach out to somebody that obviously politically disagreed and was on the other side, where do you think that You know, position of agreement might start with this administration, you know, whether it's Trump himself, someone like RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, anti-war, etc.
Is there a talking point maybe you can bring somebody in right now?
Well, you want to see what premises you share and how deep the disagreement goes.
There may be fundamental premises that you're at odds about.
Sometimes our disagreements are disagreements about what follow from shared fundamental principles.
Other times, the disagreements about the fundamental principles.
Now, I would hope in any discussions that I would have with my fellow Americans, especially those who are exercising political power, who've achieved public office, whether people in the Biden administration or now people in the Trump administration, I would hope that they would share the belief that our basic constitutional principles are sound and good and therefore should provide our premises.
Maybe disagree, maybe profoundly disagree about the implications for concrete areas of life, concrete policies of those principles, but I would hope that we would agree on those principles.
Now, if we can get that agreement, is there in fact a right to freedom of speech?
Is the national government in fact a government of delegated and enumerated powers and not a government of general jurisdiction like states exercising police powers, plenary general powers?
Do we agree that under our Constitution, Article 1, Section 1, Sentence 1, all legislative power, not some, not most, not much, all legislative power is vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a House of Representatives and a Senate, which means that no actual legislative power is vested in either the executive branch or the judiciary.
If I can get agreement on that...
Then we can talk about where we are and whether those constitutional principles are being honored by the opposing party's policies and activities, actions, or your own party's policies and actions.
So that's how I would want to see the conversation conducted.
And I would want to go into that conversation, I try to go into that conversation, in a spirit of truth-seeking.
That means a spirit of...
Knowing that while I might want to advocate a certain position where I think they're wrong, I also need to be open to the possibility that I'm the one who's wrong, or at least partially wrong.
In other words, that I have not only something maybe to teach them, but something to learn from them.
If you argue in that spirit, you can get somewhere.
If you don't argue in that spirit, then, you know, what it is is a shouting match.
The decibel level may be lower or higher, but just basically talking at each other and not actually...
I would say even when you're in that dialogue, you have to be able to be honest with yourself and admit the L's.
You know, when I get something wrong, I'll be the first to say, hey, I got it wrong.
I didn't think they were going to install a dementia patient in 2020. I didn't think he was going to get through the primaries.
I mean, I saw Joe Biden up there.
He could barely speak.
No way I thought he was going to be the nominee.
There he was, and then he became the president.
Truth Matters, a dialogue on fruitful disagreement in an age of division is the book.
We've got to take a break.
We're going to come back.
When we do, I want to get into the topic of Guantanamo Bay because I think I'm going to have a difference of opinion.
And when we're talking about truth...
Should we have black sites where you are in a constitutional vacuum, whether or not you're a citizen of the United States initially or not?
We're going to come back, have that discussion.
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And we are back.
So, with this Trump administration, largely I like a lot of the domestic policy.
The foreign policy, yeesh.
I think there's some real issues there.
I want to see peace not only in Ukraine and Russia, but the Middle East.
I hope we're in that direction.
I don't know that we are.
Guantanamo Bay really became infamous after the initial strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, war on terror.
By 2008, everybody at the Democratic table in the primaries, from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden, to people that I think were genuine like Gravel, like Kucinich, not John Edwards so much, but everybody up there said we're closing Guantanamo Bay.
The Barack star as well.
Never happened.
Barack Obama slides in there, gets the Nobel Prize.
Everybody forgets about it.
I haven't forgot about it.
I'm not in love with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, any of these black sites.
And the idea that we're going to repurpose this for migrants, no matter how bad they may be criminals, kind of disturbs me.
I look at it as, look, if we're going to use this as a transfer station, great.
I don't want to see this become a prison forever.
I look at, for instance, 9-11, which I think has a lot of questions, and the people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other defendants that have been there now 20-plus years.
Whether or not they're citizens, is that due process?
Is that speedy?
Is that transparent to have military commission trials where maybe deals are suddenly going to be cut but the public is largely left in the dark?
What are both of your thoughts on Guantanamo Bay being repurposed and the idea of America having black sites writing about a book on truth?
Well, I mean, first you just have to get it.
Out in the public and try to have a serious and substantive conversation about it.
Now, man, you can imagine, I mean, it's a larger context for me because, I mean, when you're running an empire, you're going to have all kinds of different forms of barbarism that are shot through it.
That has to do with something outside of rule of law that has to do with losing sight of the humanity of folk.
It has to do with lying to your public intentionally and deliberately or lying covertly.
And it's not just Guantanamo.
We've talked before about overthrowing democratic regimes.
We've talked about war crimes that are shot through.
Barack Obama's got the Nobel Prize.
He's got seven wars going on simultaneously.
He's dropping 25,000 bombs a year, and yet he's a man of peace.
Well, I mean, this is precisely the kind of hypocrisy that needs to be called into question.
Now, when it comes to the President's administration, my God, we could go on and on in terms of its imperial mentality of Panama Canal and Gaza buying an annex in Canada.
We can go on.
It sounds like 19th century imperialism with its racist dimension and its predatory capitalist intention.
And you would have thought we'd outlived the 19th century imperial mentality, but it's come back.
But that's a larger discussion of Brother Jason.
What do you think when it comes to these sites?
Go ahead.
What do you think?
Yeah, so I asked myself, how does our Constitution work?
Why do we have the Constitution we have?
Why did people like Hamilton and Madison go for this system?
How's it supposed to protect liberty and prevent tyranny?
And the basic answer to that question is by limiting power, checking power.
And making power accountable to the people, those over whom and for whose sake, ostensibly, it is exercised.
And that makes me then very nervous and very suspicious of any effort to immunize the government from accountability, putting the government in a position where its power is not limited by the Constitution.
And that's my big worry about the Black Suns.
What's the whole point of them?
To create a situation where the U.S. government is acting, but without the strictures, the constitutional limitations on power being in place, ostensibly without the Constitution controlling the government.
I don't like a government not controlled by the Constitution.
It makes me very, very nervous.
So I want the government, wherever it operates, to be constrained by the principles of the Constitution for the very reasons that our Founding Fathers articulated.
The very one set forth in the Federalist Papers.
The very one set forth, for example, in Federalist No.
10. Well, I am in agreement.
And again, I want light shined on the darkness.
That's why I'm very opposed to this administrative move.
In fact, I'm opposed to having the Department of Homeland Security in the first place.
I mean, we had border security before that.
And I just look at that expansion and what that has become.
I mean, So much of it has been openly pointed at the American people, and you've created these pseudo-government agencies with almost no oversight via fusion centers over the last decade and a half as well.
I would say that's almost another discussion, but again, it really does intertwine with who ends up in quote-unquote Guantanamo Bay and these black sites.
Let's talk about another aspect of this administration that's worrisome.
You know, Cornell, you just mentioned the annexation of Canada and all these things.
I think a lot of that is rhetoric.
I think most of us take that.
At the same time, I mean, I kind of laughed when I heard that.
Gulf of America.
Okay, he's a funny guy.
We got to give him that.
Like, he's a funny guy.
But at the same time...
Some of the rhetoric, if it proves true, I'd be all for.
I thought he was joking when he was talking about abolishing the IRS. I don't know that that's going to happen.
I think we're a long way off.
But please, let Ron Paul audit the Fed.
My God.
You can't get me there fast enough.
At the same time, with some of the rhetoric, when we're talking about freedom of speech and truth, etc., it is worrisome to me.
For instance, Trump in the past, on the campaign trail several times, said that he would criminalize burning the American flag.
You don't have to like it.
If it's my flag and not somebody else's property, I'm not breaking a law, I don't know that we need to make that law.
I don't know that we need to be deporting student visas based on their political beliefs on what's going on in the Middle East either.
It's those type of things that are extremely worrisome.
Even if you don't like speech, We're supposed to protect it in this country.
So when we are talking about the kind of political weather that's going around, there's a lot of talk about hate speech, especially involving rhetoric around the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, which apparently Palestine no longer exists with the stroke of Trump's pen.
Again, not in agreement with that.
I didn't love him giving the Golan Heights, which wasn't his to give, to Israel, etc.
I'm not in love with what's going on in Syria right now.
We know our Central Intelligence Agency has been there since Operation Timber Sycamore, and now all of a sudden a guy who was al-Qaeda al-Nusra and in U.S. custody at some point is leading that?
That's not suspicious?
So when we talk about the Middle East and protest and speech and burning the American flag as a criminal act...
What are both of your thoughts on that?
Does Trump go too far?
Is that against really what the essence of this country is supposed to be?
I think you have to protect free speech from any government.
So you need to protect free speech from any government because once people get power, the temptation to use it and to override those constitutional limitations on the exercise of power, including free speech, becomes very powerful for people.
You can see it with administrations on the left, you see it with administrations on the right.
It doesn't necessarily cut along ideological lines.
And a good example of this is the flag-burning issue.
So flag-burning historically was an offense in most states.
Most states made it against the law to desecrate the...
The American flag and in some cases the state flag.
Those statutes were declared to be unconstitutional in a case called Texas against Johnson.
Then there was an effort to create a national flag protection statute and that was struck down in a case a couple of years later called Eichmann v.
U.S. In those two cases, the most conservative member of the Supreme Court at the time The most progressive member of the court at the time,
John Paul Stevens, voted to uphold as constitutionally legitimate those restrictions on flag desecration in the face of a free speech challenge.
Now you would ordinarily, I suppose, if all you think about is tribalism and ideology, you would expect Scalia To be against flag burning and therefore in favor of flag burning prohibitions.
And Stephen's on the opposite side, but it came out just the reverse of that.
And what are your thoughts on this, Dr. West?
Yeah, I just think that, again, so much has to do with issues of character and integrity and honesty.
I mean, when I hear Trump, you know, calling for the Removal of precious Palestinians in Gaza and taking over their land and we'll own it.
I mean, there's two war crimes right there.
So it means there's no regard for international law.
You can't just take land that's not yours.
You can't just move populations.
As if there's no international law.
If international law means nothing, if rule of law means nothing, if the Constitution and its crucial separation of powers and checks and balances means nothing, then what are we dealing with here?
It seems to me it's authoritarian, if not thoroughgoing, crypto-neo-fascist mentality and sensibility.
There's been an imperial presidency for a long time.
I mean, Arthur Schlesinger wrote a book decades ago about the imperial presidency.
Democrats have used it.
Republicans have used it.
But at this point, it's spilling over, becoming even more than that.
And that's something that's worthy of our attention.
I know, Brother Jason, you so...
You're so good at these interviews.
I know you talked about these issues over and over and over and over again that we appreciate it.
But we just need to keep that focus on the underside as well as the sunny side.
Can I raise a point about the imperial presidency and the expansion over many decades, Democratic and Republican presidencies, of executive power?
The point I wanted to make about that is that it is the fruit of two things that work together for harm to undermine the constitutional principle and the separation of powers.
One of those is the usurpation of legislative authority under the Constitution by the executive.
That can be put at the feet, that can be attributed to, the blame can be cast on Presidents, Republican, and Democrat.
But we should think about the other one, the other side of that.
And that is the one people don't think about as much.
It's the abdication of legislative authority by the Congress.
The Founding Fathers thought that the leadership of Congress would be jealous to protect their institutional authority.
They'd be jealous to protect the power of their institutions against predations by the other branches of government, be it the judicial.
Or the executive.
But it turns out that it doesn't work that way.
When a Republican president is in power, Democrats will complain about the usurpations by the executive, but the Republicans will abdicate to the executive.
But what happens the minute you get a power shift?
Well, the party that used to complain about Usurpations of legislative power to the president will now abdicate power to the president.
It turns out that our partisan, tribal, ideological loyalties are stronger than our institutional loyalties.
And that's a real danger.
That's why I like guys like Thomas Massey, right?
Thomas Massey is one of the guys that really does point that out.
One of that handful of people that I think is genuine in there.
And I would also...
I would argue that we've created an executive within an executive over the years.
And that's kind of what I want to close on after this final break is, you know, what is fascism?
The term gets thrown around a lot.
And I would argue, you know, post-World War II with the actual military-industrial complex that gets built out of that and the companies that come out of it.
You can't really avoid that aspect of government and private corporations.
And we've had a fascistic aspect ever since then.
We're going to come back with more Making Sense of the Madness.
The book is Truth Matters, a dialogue on fruitful disagreement in an age of division.
Banger of an episode.
Final segment after this.
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And we are back.
So let's talk fascism.
Because I hear all the time Trump is a fascist, etc.
But, you know, I don't believe the guy, you know, thinks he's a fascist.
But at the same time, he's always been a businessman.
Now he's in politics.
Those things have severely merged.
You know, I don't love Zuckerberg and Bezos being up there.
Sam Altman, I think he's a dangerous guy.
We go on hours about Musk.
It's usually not what you see in the news.
But again, defense contractor, Neuralink, the spy satellite system, Blackjack gets launched from SpaceX.
Even Starlink is a Trojan horse civilian system.
Its highest concentration is in Ukraine.
It's there not only for the communications, but hooks into the Ghost and Sidewinders.
So we have this merger of the military-industrial complex.
Of technology and government, almost in a manner that we never have, at least publicly.
But that warning from Eisenhower is now, what, 70 years old?
You know, and I don't think he was wrong.
So I don't think any administrations has really been able to get out of this.
So when you talk about an imperial nation, Cornell, are we not inherently at this point, especially with the secrecy and the contracts, fascistic?
In many ways, and that's something we have to roll back.
And I would love to get your take also, Robert, on whether or not this country is partially fascistic.
Well, again, we're talking about degrees and gradations.
I mean, fascism is not an abstraction.
It comes in different forms.
It's in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal.
You could argue, of course, I mean, given slavery and Jim Crow, it was deep.
Deep forms of fascism in the very beginnings of the United States as it relates to black folk and indigenous peoples.
But it's a question of how broad the scope is for the kinds of liberties and mechanisms of accountability, because it's always juxtaposed with certain authoritarian forms.
Sheldon Wolin, our great colleague and my thesis advisor, talked about inverted totalitarianism way back in the 80s and 90s precisely.
Because of what you talked about, that 1961 speech by Dwight Eisenhower talking about the military-industrial complex and the ways in which it gets intertwined with government taking away liberties and satisfying the populace mainly with just carrots and material toys as opposed to their sense of being citizens who rule and are ruled.
So that it's a matter of degree and degradation, but it's ugly.
There's no doubt about it.
It's getting worse, I think.
And what are your thoughts, Robert?
Jason, I reject the idea that we're a fascistic or partially fascistic nation.
We have fundamental democratic, to use the language of our founders, they preferred the term Republican to Democrat.
Democracy, for them, had certain negative connotations.
But by Republican, they mean roughly what we mean today by Democratic.
That is...
Institutions that are in significant, important ways responsive to the people that those institutions are supposed to serve.
I'd also point out that having a military industrial complex is inevitable.
There will be, in a modern state like ours, in a dangerous world, a military industrial complex.
The question is...
Has the military industrial complex escaped Republican accountability, or if you prefer the word Democrat, Democratic accountability?
So there I'm resonating with what Cornell said a moment ago.
We really need the accountability.
The question is not, are we going to dismantle the military industrial complex?
I actually wouldn't want to do that.
Do I want that military industrial complex to be accountable?
Do I want it to be a certain kind of?
Military industrial complex, not a different kind of, an accountable one, not an unaccountable one.
Well, yes, I do.
I want it to be accountable.
So my worry is that the threat that the military industrial complex poses to constitutional accountability, and it's up to us in our own roles as citizens,
fulfilling that aspect of our vocations as citizens, to make sure that all governmental power And all private power that is entwined with and marshals and supports governmental power is accountable.
So we need to worry about things like monopoly and oligopoly, and not just in the military domain.
Those are legitimate, important concerns.
It's, again, a matter of accountability.
When we are talking about the military or intel domain, though, you know, right now, again, I think that what Trump has done Is amazing in the sense of taking away security clearances from people I think have been ghouls forever.
You know, I've never been a fan of John Brennan, pre-Trump, post-Trump, whatever.
I'm glad his security clearances are taken away.
Is that a step in the right direction of accountability, taking away the security clearances of people like Hayden, Clapper, etc.?
I mean, Hayden went up there and said they weren't spying on the American people.
Obviously, they were spying on the American people.
There's a large integration with that intel community and the arms industry, which is extremely profitable.
And when you make war profitable, like you said, and people have power, it's inevitable you're going to get corruption.
So I'd like to get your thoughts on that, Dr. West.
What do you think about Trump stripping these people of their security clearances?
I haven't really thought about that too much, though, brother, because it seems to me the real test is whether you're going to have accountability to your friends who you then give security clearances to.
It's easy to do it with a spirit of retribution and revenge.
The real moral challenge, the question of character, is whether you're going to do it for Musk and his friends or a whole host of others who you are going to provide private assets with.
No accountability whatsoever.
That, to me, is probably the crucial point.
And that's true for Democrats.
It's true for Republicans.
I think like you, Brother Jason, I tend to be highly, highly suspicious of politicians across the board.
Not just Democrats, Republicans.
Some of those independents that you're crazy about.
I've got some deep questions about them, too.
Myself as a politician, I've got some questions about myself.
That's why I need community's accountability to keep me right.
What are your thoughts on the stripping of security clearances, Robert?
Well, if I can quote that famous or infamous line from Malcolm X, the chickens are coming home to roost.
You know, my mother used to teach us, you know, if you tell a lie...
Don't think that that's going to be it.
You're going to tell the lie and then you can go back to being a moral person because you're going to have to tell another lie to cover up that lie and another lie to cover up that lie and it's all going to come undone in the end and you're going to do a lot of harm to yourself and everybody else in the process.
So it's better to tell the truth from the start.
What happened is a lot of people told a lot of lies.
Because they were out to get Trump.
Now, I've been a critic of Trump since he came down that golden escalator.
Cornell and I have been united in that in 2016. He got in trouble because he was a critic and refused to back Hillary Clinton, and he got accused of being a secret Trump supporter.
My case was the opposite because I refused to endorse Donald Trump and support Donald Trump, and I criticized him.
I was accused of being a secret Hillary Clinton.
A supporter.
And yet, even as a critic of Donald Trump, I have to acknowledge that there was a lot of lying by his enemies in an attempt to break him down and to defeat him.
Look at all the lies that were told by people in high authority about the Hunter Biden laptop.
The lies that were told about the origins of the COVID virus trying to stigmatize the idea that it was actually a lab leak and so forth.
Well, those chickens come home.
To roost.
And now Trump has got them discredited.
And he can use that now to his advantage.
Now, that doesn't mean that he and people connected with him aren't going to do the same thing to their enemies.
And if they do, those chickens will come home to roost in the end again.
But in the meantime, a lot of harm will be done.
Well, let me just say that is one of the things that made me more sympathetic to Trump, the whole Russiagate hoax.
You know, Robert Mueller was never your friend, but neither was Bill Barr.
Right?
So again, you've got to look at both sides of the equation.
We've only got about a minute and a half left.
Otherwise, I'd love to get into the pre-pardons.
I think they're extremely dangerous.
And again, not because it's one political side of the spectrum.
It's because you've never been charged with a crime and setting that precedent.
You might as well have made it Hunter Biden's birthday instead of 2014 and just said Ukraine corruption all over it.
In this final minute, 30 seconds each.
What would each of you like to leave the audience with?
That is very important.
To muster the courage to think critically for yourself.
To muster the courage to hope against the grain, but not false hope.
No false presumptions.
Hope means you're wrestling with despair.
And most important, the courage to love.
To love the quest for truth and beauty and goodness.
And I would even say the holy love of your neighbor.
But even as a Christian, Brother Jason, I believe in loving your enemies too, though, brother.
I want to say amen to everything that my dear brother Cornell said right there.
And let me add then one more thing.
For this precious experiment in ordered liberty in Republican government to continue to work, the only thing that will prevent it from failing is if we are engaged citizens of this Republican democracy.
We can't sit back and simply complain.
We can't sit back and despair.
We need to be actively engaged at every level.
The local level, the state level, and the national level.
We have run out of time.
Gentlemen, truth matters.
Thank you so much.
I couldn't agree more.
You have to look in the mirror.
Be your own hero.
Don't look to others.
You know the drill.
It's not about left or right to this guy.
It is always about right and wrong.
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