Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti join Joe Rogan to critique media’s scripted polarization, where $4T corporate bailouts during COVID-19 ignored small businesses and workers. Saagar defends law-and-order responses to 2020 riots, citing studies showing nonviolent protests succeed while looting backfires, but warns against Trump’s "terrorist" rhetoric. Krystal counters with systemic dehumanization, advocating UBI and healthcare, while Rogan questions why stimulus checks stopped after one round. Both expose elite disinterest in economic despair—like declining marriage rates—and corporate exploitation of racial tensions, from Amazon’s protest support to Shell’s 1619 Project sponsorship, revealing a fractured system where identity politics distracts from structural failures. [Automatically generated summary]
Like, it's never been harder to actually just do that thing.
And I can't say, I mean, we don't get it right all the time.
But the whole idea was to try to have this conversation between kind of the new left and the new right that wasn't happening anywhere in a way that was valuing people's humanity, that was trying to deal in the land of the honest, not cheerleading a team or the other, but actually trying to like be straightforward about what we think and evaluating the facts as we find them.
And I mean, I have to say, like, you have somewhat created that space where that can happen.
I think the reason it works is because we both kind of came up in quasi-traditional background, right?
Like Crystal came from the MSNBC world.
Like I was a White House correspondent.
Like I worked with a lot of these traditional reporters.
And like, you know, I would do Fox News and all these other things.
And it's just, it's always so frustrating when you're on TV.
You get three and a half minutes to talk, right?
Like I once did a segment on, you know, nationalism, which was two and a half minutes with three people on a panel.
Like, how are you supposed to get your point across?
And so when you're doing that and you see like, you can make an entire career in D.C. just sticking to the party line, no matter what these people believe.
And you just spit out the talkers that they literally send you.
I mean, you know, it's not easy to sort of be out there on your own, you know, and I don't want to paint just sort of trying to be honest as a more noble act than it actually is.
But it's very safe if you're within the party structure, if you're saying the things that they want you to say.
There's a whole system set up for that.
There's a career system set up for that.
There's a system of protection.
So you're allowed to be dramatically wrong on things like the Iraq war or things like the financial crisis if you're wrong in the approved ways, right?
If you're wrong in the non-approved ways, then you can get destroyed, canceled, all of those things.
So it's a lot safer to stay within the bounds.
And look, like we're living that in real time right now.
And I want to, I mean, picking up, you're like, why do you do it?
If you do it, you hop on establishment campaign to establishment campaign, campaign cycle's over, you go work at a think tank, which is all your former buddies from the campaign.
Then you go and you do the talking points.
You will always have a job.
You will never suffer.
You'll never, even if nobody likes what you have to say, even if Republican voters or Democratic voters have rejected your message, six out of seven popular vote elections, doesn't matter because the money is there.
And the people who have the money have an interest in propping up that infrastructure.
So when you get your talking points, you know that if you say them, you're in X's good graces.
And then that person has to hire you.
They'll throw you a consulting contract.
They'll throw you this.
They'll put your name forward whenever it's time to staff up an administration.
That's how the system of the grift in the city actually works.
And that's how they keep dissenting voices in their own party down.
Because how do you even get on TV?
Or how do you even become an authoritative voice in your party?
You need credentials, right?
Everything is credentialism.
Well, how do you get those credentials?
They control who enters the programs and they control who they push.
They control who they push forward.
And so that's how they try to keep people who have dissenting opinions out.
And it's like we said, it's because of the space that you opened up where nobody knew that somebody wanted to listen to a guy talk about chimps for three hours.
But can I say also, it's not just that like direct career griff trajectory.
It's also that we're at this point in the nation's history, which again has never been more obvious than right now, where the stakes feel really existential.
And, you know, and that's that's a real thing.
I mean, before Trump's election, there was this Flight 93 essay where the argument was: look, if you're a social conservative, if you're not sure that this Trump guy is for you, this election is existential.
You have to grab the controls or else our way of life is going to die.
Now, I don't agree with that assessment.
I think that is hyperbolic.
I think it's over the top.
You know, the conservative way of life is going to continue in their churches and people can do what they want to do.
But that was a legitimate sense among the Trump base.
And of course, we see it with the Democrats and the left right now.
And I would say at this moment, it has probably never been more true in terms of that existential nature as we see the president calling for potentially military activation in American cities.
And we see him using tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protesters.
So the fact that the stakes feel so existential on both sides make it very, very difficult to engage in a way that is thoughtful, honest, non-hyperbolic, and where everyone's not just basically mad at you all the time.
So before that, for about a year before that, I'd been co-hosting with another guy, great guy, Buck Sexton, and we had sort of a more standard left-right dynamic.
You got to really have some time to think it over before you get there.
So, yeah, so when Buck wanted to focus on his radio show, and one of the expectations of The Hill, which is the corporate news brand that sponsors us, is that this would be a left-right show.
But I thought, let's do a left-right show in a way that no one has done before, where normally the consensus, the sort of left-right consensus is like this.
We're all moderates, we're all corporatives, we believe in unity, we believe in like low taxes, we believe in free trade deals.
That's the in wars and those sorts of things.
That's the sort of standard bipartisan consensus that you're allowed to have.
So we thought, what if we did it in a different left-right dynamic where we actually have more overlap on some of these economic issues and the dissent is around more of the cultural issues and what does that look like?
Because that's actually more representative of where the two parties are headed.
If you look at where young people are, it's also more representative of where more Americans are.
I mean, you know, Sager says, and I think this is true, there is very little representation and has been historically at least for people who are like economically more left and culturally more right.
All of the elite conversation is this very like economically liberal, but on social cultural issues, economically more conservative, like balance the budget and low taxes and stuff, but on social cultural issues, more liberal is more the elite conversation that is commonly happening on cable news, even though that's reflective of like teeny tiny portion of the wisdom of America.
That's 10% of the population, and they all live in like New York City, LA, San Francisco.
It's like the like America is, I would say, cult pretty culturally right, not like super right, but like center right.
And economically, you could say cultural left.
I mean, a little bit left.
It depends on how you define those things.
But one of the, I mean, the ethos of the show, Crystal actually said this, I think, to the Times, was what if we hated each other less and the elites more?
Yeah, I mean, because he'd filled in before, and I mean, you know, when you have guests on, when you work with someone, especially in a media space, you get a vibe right away.
And you can tell right away, you know, number one, is this person like ready to hold the chair, ready to do this thing?
Do they have the sort of fully formed, coherent ideas or things they want to explore that's going to make sense?
So just on that like surface level, is that going to work?
But you also get a real vibe for not even where are you ideologically, but are you willing to be honest when your team is fucking up?
And look, everyone looks at cable news, even if you are, you know, a kind of standard down-the-line Democrat or a standard Trump Republican.
No one believes that these people are really shooting straight with them.
Everyone sees the partisan cheerleading that is going on in the normal cable news networks.
And so it was very easy to see right away that Saga was a person who was willing to, you know, to be honest where his own team was concerned.
And to me, that was kind of the most important piece.
Like, which is that it's when you're talking to somebody or on cable or just even in an argument, it's just standard talking about, and you can catch them in one of those like hip-hop whatabout-isms.
It's just so frustrating.
It's just, and it's so unproductive.
And that's this thing I hated the most about, you know, my time when I was in the White House press corps.
It was very much just like the quote, you could predict every single question before the briefing even began.
Every single one.
And it just used to drive me nuts because you'd see these people and they care a lot more about getting cable news contracts and all that than they ever do, like actually asking legitimate questions or like real questions about what you think of this program or whatever.
It's all, I mean, just standard issue crap.
And like, it was like every single day.
And with Crystal, it was like, find like somebody is willing to call out the problems on their side.
And I was willing to do the same thing.
I kind of have always been like that.
And that's where we were like, we have something here.
And, you know, I mean, and then it just started to take off.
I mean, it was like we just put it out into the ether.
And all of a sudden, it just started like catching.
So you know what was the first thing that really caught was we did an interview with Andrew Yang.
And I've actually known, I've known Andrew for a long time.
Great guy.
Just, you know, say, like, trying to be honest, trying to like really figure things out.
And his answer may not always be my answer, but I feel like he's really trying to figure it out and come to a good place and see the best in people also.
And so we did this long form interview with him where, I mean, there was nothing crazy about it.
We just actually asked him policy-focused, substantive questions for, I don't know, 30 minutes.
Yeah, and then it wasn't, and that they weren't stupid.
I mean, that's the thing, too, at that point in his campaign from everybody basically except you, he was getting these really stupid questions about like, oh, is it just white nationalists who are supporting you?
I think some of that has to do with this quality of posting things on social media, like this 140-character, now 280-character quality of Twitter, where you're just kind of condensing things and this reductionist view of stuff and then just put it out there.
Tweeting is one of the worst ways to get out information, right?
It's one of the worst ways to have a dialogue because especially when you're defining something or someone.
And I feel the same way about sometimes occasionally about really self-righteous blogs and they write an evil blog about someone.
That person doesn't get a chance to respond.
You know, you're just sort of saying it out there, your perception of that person.
And you can make all these horrible distortions, whether it's about Andrew Yang or Tulsi Gabbard or whoever.
You can make these horrible distortions and then someone reads it and you're putting out this distorted, unchallenged perception of someone.
Whereas if you were having a conversation with either them or someone who has a more rational point of view, they could say, well, that's not really true because she actually said this.
We're constantly trying to draw lines around who are the good people and who are the bad people.
And where's that bright line and which side of the line are you on?
And you're not allowed to associate with the people on the bad line.
And I think social media obviously exacerbates all of that and makes it a million times worse, no doubt about it, because it's also simplistic.
It's also like sensationalist driven.
It's all like keys into your sort of like basic instincts and your adrenaline and your dopamine response and all of that.
But there's also been a sort of strategy from the political and media elites in the country where if you pit people against each other, and this is something Matt Taibbi, who's one of the biggest people who's a great guy.
And his thesis is essentially that once the Cold War ended and we didn't have Russia to be the bad guy, that the new ratings innovation was to make each other the bad guys.
And what does that do?
First of all, it's great for ratings because you got an easy villain on Fox.
It's people like me on MSNBC.
It's people like Sager, right?
It's easy villains, easy ratings.
You can find stories all day long that support that narrative, no problem.
But it also saves any sort of accountability from the people that are in power.
Because if, you know, people who are out there in the country, if the voters are the problem, if they are bad, if they are evil, if they are deplorable, then it's not the fault of the people in power that things are going wrong.
It's not their fault that these terrible, evil, sexist, racist, horrible people voted the wrong way.
It's those people's fault.
And so it saves them from ever having to do any self-reflection or make any adjustments in what they're doing.
And I think it's a big part of why we are where we are.
Yeah, I mean, that's just such a huge part of the show, which is just trying to draw compassion for people, trying to understand what motivates 65 million, I don't know what the numbers, I think it's 60, something million, to pull the lever for Trump.
What happened there?
Right.
And that's just something that the media has not spent any introspection trying to understand what would compel a person to do that.
What would compel a person to vote for a Bernie Sanders?
I mean, you know, they're like, oh, Bernie Bros, it's all white.
I mean, if you look at the data, which we talked about on our show constantly, it's just absolutely false.
And it's in that way that you can begin to understand and actually even respond, right?
And that's actually the thing I love the most about the show is sometimes I have friends, you know, like on the right, and they'll say something about the left, like the left thinks this.
I'd be like, no, man, like, I have a left co-host.
I'm like, that's not what she says.
Her response is X, Y, and Z. I'm sure the same thing happens with Crystal, which is that, you know, as you said, with Twitter, condensing our rhetoric and our politics to 280 characters and trying to condense hyper-complex and multifaceted ideas and multifaceted discussions and deep conversations down to that level helps nobody.
And actually, all it does is help split people apart for a pretty explicit reason, which is that part of the things that we talk about on the show is the reason why, you know, the elites, the cultural elites, right and left, kind of want everybody split is because they don't want people to have the uncomfortable conversation around how the economy is structured.
They don't, every day that we talk, we have some cultural debate in the country, is every day that we're not talking about how many million people in this country are unemployed right now, about the political choice, the political choice, and something I talk a lot on the show about, to allow people to be forced off their payroll and to go on to unemployment, to allow businesses to fail, to allow people to suffer when we have the explicit choice of allowing them to keep their payroll.
I mean, this is something we've been focused on so much because the implications of that, when you're also making the explicit choice in order to, you know, cap the amount of money that goes to a small business program, when you're doing big checks in order to corporations or to the airlines, which are firing people anyway, despite the fact that they got like $50 billion.
You don't have a conversation about that.
They will never want to have that one because they want people to hate each other more.
I think there's something about using social media that also facilitates mental illness.
And this is what I mean.
We all have varying degrees of health, right?
Some days you run down.
Some days you feel great.
Some days you're coming down with a cold.
Some days you're in bed with the flu.
We all vary.
I think that there's something about the kind of interactions that people are having when they're arguing with shit on Twitter that you could make a real, I think you could draw a graph on human beings, on their mental health.
Because it is the exact same neural pathways, those like dopamine response systems as with any addiction.
I mean, it's, you have engineers who are making their living trying to figure out how to program your brain to not ever get off Twitter and not ever get off whatever it is that you're obsessed with on your phone or your device.
One of my friends, J.D. Vance, he wrote this book, Heel Biliology.
And one of the things he talks about is he's like, you know, we have our best scientists, neuroscientists, and all these other people in the world trying to figure out how to make you and I spend more micro and milliseconds and kids on their phones than trying to change the world or invent medicine.
Like that is kind of the profit incentive, right, for so many of these things.
It makes you feel like you're really doing something, too.
It does.
It makes you feel like you're really like, oh, this tweet.
This one's going to be the one that really, you know, and you watch the numbers go up and it makes you feel like you are engaged in some sort of like minor battle of winning these minor victories.
Well, it's an important term, too, because it explains a lot of the ineffectiveness of our politics.
Like, it's all rhetorical.
It's all like rhetorically signaling which side you're on and the sort of illusion of disagreement in Washington when actually, you know, they're unanimously passed things like this $4 trillion for big business and push everybody mass unemployment for the masses.
My favorite example on that is there was a like a 10-year birthday party for AIG, which is the big insurance channel that we bailed out in 2008, in the committee room for the House Ways and Means, which is the committee in charge of taxing in the United States.
So in the committee room, they held a birthday party for the company that they bailed out.
Democrats and Republicans all showed up, man.
They had special, it's fucking specialty cocktails at this thing.
In the committee room, in the very room to decide where they decided to bail these companies out to the tune of billions, you know, during Wall Street and so much more.
But just the amount of money that's involved in these decisions, the amount of money that's involved in influence and sharing influence and getting people to like your perspective.
And then the really gross thing is when they leave office, when politicians, particularly the president, leave office and then they get these fantastic paydays to just speak.
Does anybody really want to pay to hear Hillary Clinton speak?
Just fucking imagine being the type of person that's like, I got some fucking hot $1,500 tickets to hear all of it.
The former U.S. ambassador to China, Max Baucus, he was on, you know, also Senate Kibanka Commission, is now on the board for Alibaba, which is one of the biggest Chinese companies.
And then, in the middle of all this stuff around Chinese tariffs and the coronavirus and all that stuff, he is out there on CNN and on Chinese state media being like, Trump is Hitler, like, do what he's doing.
And I'm like, he was the ambassador to China.
And now he's getting paid by one of the largest Chinese companies.
I mean, which, you know, in China, there's no such thing really as private business.
The government.
And it's like, it's just the, it's out in the open.
I mean, Obama's, another great example.
Obama's, I think, is a former NSC director for cybersecurity went to go work for ZTE, which is a Chinese technology company.
I mean, for cybersecurity, went to go lobby, is now a lobbyist on behalf of ZTE.
We were talking back, you know, during Ukraine gate when we were talking about, you know, Hunter Biden earning these big paychecks on this Ukrainian natural gas.
No one is saying This is illegal, but that's like exactly the point.
So, we have Congressman Ted Liu on, he's a Democrat from California, and we're like, you know, is this okay?
He's like, people sit on boards, they earn money.
This is just because this is, they really think about it that way.
This is just the way that the town operates.
And it's, you know, it's easy to look at these individual examples and be disgusted by them.
But the bottom line is it's a much deeper problem than that.
We covered a poll recently that was actually done by the Hill and Harris X. People said their number one political issue was corruption.
Like beyond climate change or healthcare or whatever, the number one thing that they were most concerned about was political corruption.
And you look at what is happening in the country right now and the fact that our institutions have no credibility, that there's no expectation that you could affect change through traditional channels.
I mean, that feeds into exactly the rage that's exploding across the country.
We covered before coronavirus, right?
And 40 million plus Americans unemployed and hundreds of hundred thousand plus dead, and before riots broke down and before George Floyd was killed and before all of that, we covered this poll where 40% of Americans, I think it's 43%, said when they think of our cultural and social institutions, they just want to burn it all down.
40%.
Like, what does that mean in a context of a democracy?
But on the other hand, when you consider the fact that the largest pool of citizens in the country aren't Trump voters or Hillary voters or Biden voters or whatever, they're non-voters.
And these people have said, like, this isn't worth it.
This doesn't reflect my, this is not going to mean jack shit for me in my life.
And if you look at that number and then you consider what you see happening across the country where people, again, they feel like they have are so disgusted with what's going on and they're restless and masked and like have had all of their normal tools of being numbed with infotainment and sugar and all those things and sports sort of taken away from them.
We've never experienced anything like this before, and it's fascinating to see how the thin veneer of civilization can be chipped through.
And you just see the really deep pool of despair that's underneath it.
There's so much madness going on in the streets today.
And it's so hard to get a bead on how this is all playing out, like how it's all being organized, how these cops feel like they can just shoot people with rubber bullets and tear gas out in the open in front of everybody.
When people are, I mean, you know, mourning the death of a guy who was murdered by a bad cop.
And just a bead on her because she's actually a really important voice.
She came to prominence because she wrote a piece about the struggle that she had experienced as a low-income working-class person, like just really raw and honest.
And that went viral.
And she, from that, was able to write a book and become a journalist.
So she's one of the few journalist voices Who actually has any connectivity to what regular people go through day to day?
So, you know, I mean, it's just like awful to see that sort of thing happening to her and to so many others.
Yeah, and I mean, Joe, one of the things I always appreciate about your commentary was about talking about human violence and like the propensity to violence and how thin kind of the veneer of social order and so much of like what that is and what it actually means to like live in a society where whenever you see something like that break down.
And I've just been thinking about that so much like in the context of what we see right now.
Because I mean, it's also crazy like to see footage of people just like they feel like they can just loot with impunity, right?
I mean, you're like last night in New York City, it's total destruction.
But in New York, particularly, it was a crime-ridden city, and it went down while he was there.
I'm sure across the country it helped as well.
But what happened in New York City was he's letting these people loot.
He's telling the cops to stand down.
So these businesses that are all supporting the mayor, supporting the tax with taxes, supporting the police officers, they're watching their businesses get smashed and looted.
Fifth Avenue is destroyed.
Sixth Avenue destroyed.
Hundreds and hundreds of buildings with smashed windows and all their products gone.
This has been the hardest thing for Crystal and I to cover.
Like, it's funny because we were coming on here and we were like, and we know all the attention is coming.
And it's like this, there is nothing else where the battle lines are so drawn, where, frankly, there's probably the biggest difference in our philosophy on this.
Because I agree with you, Joe.
I mean, I think, and I've told this to Crystal, which is that the beacon was sent out.
When that Minneapolis mayor let that target go and they let those affordable housing complexes burn and they let the policing burn, that was it.
And it was just all across the city.
And this was an intentional choice.
This was out of political correctness.
They're like, we don't want to deploy the police because that would seem like we're impugning upon these protesters.
And they allowed, I mean, they allowed this target, and it just went and it caught fire.
And that's why, like, as you said, look, if people want, people should be able to protest in this country.
And if they're a piece of shit cops who kick them in the face, you know, I've seen terrible videos, some of these things, some of the things that they're doing, awful.
But you can't allow looting.
You can allow these businesses.
I mean, and this is the thing I want to emphasize.
I mean, these, look, people are like, oh, you know, it's just property.
But sometimes it's corporate property, but sometimes this is a whole guy's life.
But you know, here's the thing and why that, where there's such hypocrisy, not from Sagar, who's been consistent on this, but from the right in general, is like the response to coronavirus lit 40% of small businesses on fire.
They didn't give a fuck.
They didn't care.
It's opportunistic caring about it now, mostly from the right.
And there's also, look, if you think about, if you think about rule of law, right, you think about law and order and how do you get to a place where I disagree with you.
I don't think it is all different people.
It's very easy to be like, oh, it's all Antifa or outside agitators or whatever.
I don't think that's all true.
There are certainly criminals who are opportunistically using the breakdown of the moment to, you know, to loot, to vandalize, to do whatever that they're going to do.
But I think what is harder to reckon with is that you have actually quote unquote ordinary, typically law-abiding people who feel like the moment has broken down to the extent that they would also engage in those kinds of acts.
That's a harder thing to deal with.
But when you think about the moment that we're living in, like the rules and the laws that have been set have never been that far from like that disconnected from what is moral and what is just.
If you look at 4 trillion to corporations and everyone else, mass unemployment and small businesses destroyed, when you look at the fact that of those officers who murdered George Floyd, only one of them has been charged.
The other three are still free.
They haven't been arrested.
They haven't been charged.
They haven't been anything.
And meanwhile, you've got 4,000 protesters.
You've got journalists on TV who are being charged.
And if you go back even farther than that, like the financial collapse, you're allowed, if you're rich, to collapse the entire economy with zero consequence.
And so again, this isn't like morally justifying things that are morally unjustifiable, which is what you're talking about.
But you also have to understand that that doesn't happen in a vacuum.
There is a systemic breakdown of the legitimacy of rule of law and law and order that leads to not just outside agitators or white nationalists or Russia or Antifa or whoever it is that people are pretending that this is doing all of this, to where you have regular citizens who are like, fuck this.
I am going to be out there among them.
I'm going to be defacing.
I walk, you know, in D.C., I walk by the Department of the Treasury and it's got Black Lives Matter scrawled on it, right?
They're intentionally going to the high-end parts of town.
Like, this is actually, in many cases, very political and very specific.
I think that's a harder thing to have to reckon with that dividing line between these are the good law-abiding ones and these are the bad ones.
And let's just crack down on the bad ones.
That line has become very blurry, and that's why it's such an incredibly hard situation.
But when we're talking about protesters and the cops shooting and attacking protesters, you're really talking about people just standing there protesting.
What I'm talking about is people actually in the act of looting.
When they cross that line, there's no justification.
It's criminal behavior for smashing into someone's business and stealing their goods.
I understand that people are upset that $4 trillion went to these corporations.
I think the logic from the right about this was if you fund the corporations and keep them running, they'll employ these people and keep the society running as smoothly as possible during this unprecedented pandemic.
Let me pick up on that, Joe, because what it is is that you're right, that was the philosophy, but it's often a mistaken one.
And that there is actually a better option, which is what we talk about so much.
And what Crystal said, which is, you're right, from the right, there's a lot of concern trolling around small businesses when, let's be honest, they allowed a cap to the White House, I mean advisors, Senate Republicans allowed a cap to be put on the Paycheck Protection Program, which was for small businesses.
They allowed that to go capped and allowed it to go dry and had political fights about it.
There has always been an option to put, you know, this is a right-left thing, Senator Josh Hawley, Senator Corey Gardner, and I think it's Congresswoman Pramila Jayapol.
They have plans to put Americans on their payroll, to have the federal government subsidize that payroll up until the end of this Great Depression.
And in that way, you keep businesses together, right?
You keep businesses, they have the paycheck protection program, you have the workers, they don't have to go on unemployment or anything, and you can scale that up and no business has to go out.
What would you rather them do if you have a pandemic that, look, what it turned out to be was a big difference from what we thought it was going to be.
It was very different.
We thought it was going to kill 10% of the people.
We thought it was going to be a devastating pandemic that was going to sweep through the country and all our friends were going to die.
That's what we thought.
Turns out to not be the case.
We're lucky.
Well, in some ways.
But hold on a second.
When they were trying to figure out a way to mitigate this situation, they decided we're going to shut down society because we want to protect lives over money.
So the airline bailout, which was custom written, included a provision that you have to keep your workers.
And so we're going to give you this money and basically backstop payroll.
And so, look, I mean, they're messing around.
And then as soon as this ends, they want to still lay people off.
But if you backstop the payroll and essentially nationalize it, especially in our country where your health insurance is tied to your job, so now not only do we have people who are unemployed, but they're losing their health insurance during a pandemic, that just compounds everything and is absolutely unconscionable.
Meanwhile, you know, lots of big corporations got like custom written legislation for themselves.
And 40% of small businesses told the Chamber of Commerce that they will be closing their doors in the next six months.
This is my biggest frustration with the White House, which is that you have this populist president who actually understands very much why he got elected.
But he has all these people who work for him from kind of the old regime.
Basically, he was allowed to staff up.
And those are the people who were like, let's cap the paycheck protection program.
Who were like, hey, you know, we just passed this $2.3 trillion plan or this will.
Let's wait and see how it goes as the, you know, the unemployment numbers begin to tick up, mass small business failure, all these other things.
And that's the fundamental tension of the Trump administration is that there was no, like, there were no professional populists, so to speak, right?
Like, there was no professional apparatus of people on the right who actually held and understood why Donald Trump is president of the United States.
And this is like, this is what gets back to what I talked about earlier: about the incentive structure, about that system, the think tank, the revolving door.
That is an effort to maintain power over the policy sphere.
Because if you control that, it doesn't matter what the people think.
Because, I mean, look, he's the president and he makes his own choices.
And if he understood that there was this need to go more economically left and do it, then he could do it.
But the reality is he spent his whole, most of his political capital in his first term, like giving away tax cuts to corporations, same thing any other Republican would have done.
So that's why I sort of roll my eyes.
I don't think he cares about anything outside of winning the day's news cycle.
I really don't think he gives a shit about anything other than that.
No, that he was taking care of veterans through like a veteran.
So there was like a healthcare rattling off like why he would, you know, like all his basically like the talking points and like why he's great.
But I realize, I'm like, Trump lives completely in the moment and he doesn't really have that like, he doesn't really think about things in that historical context.
And to make it like a not a partisan thing, our politics are so shallow, hollow, theater, cable news-based.
They're like Twitter politics.
And you can see it not just with Trump, who's like the ultimate incarnation of that, but during this pandemic, Andrew Cuomo is like this celebrity governor.
Democrats are like, God, we got to get him in there.
Not much because his brother on CNN is primetime anchor Chris Cuomo and they do these ridiculous interviews where they like joke around about how big his nose is rather than asking questions like that.
And look, it'd be one thing if you were going to have your brother on once or twice.
Like I get it, fine, you know.
But no, night after night after night, it's the show of the two brothers chumming it up while people are dying.
This is a politician who's supposed to be held to account.
He's fucking around with his brother, joking about the size of their nose in the swab, where there are like literally thousands of elderly people who died because explicitly because of this decision.
Now, we're not saying he knew of the decision, but like there needs to be some like scrutiny and accountability of that.
Nobody at CNN wants to touch it because Chris Cuomo's the anchor.
And I think that's like that piece, understanding who and why is important to understanding what to do, right?
Because if it's just what I have seen hasn't just been, you know, in terms of looting, I don't know specifically, but I think it's very easy to say, oh, it's just this type of person.
It's just that type of person.
And to take out of it any of the sort of like more radical, not just smashing up stores and that kind of stuff, but like graffiti and more, you know, defying curfews and those sorts of things.
And so if you view the problem as just like violent protest, like the problem is violent protesters, we have to deal with that.
Then that merits one response.
And that's the direction that Trump is going in his like call in the military, which I think is fucking scary, like calling in active duty military in every city in the country, like we saw with the protesters who got, you know, the tear gas and the rubber bullets in front of the White House who are peacefully protesting.
I mean, that shit to me is scary.
And frankly, the fact that Democrats and quote-unquote journalists on TV have acted like the world is ending every time Trump does anything, when he does do something like invoke the Insurrection Act and say,
we're looking at sending the military into American cities, there is no more language of this is unprecedented, this is outrageous, this is, you know, different than what we've seen in the past left because they've burned that up on every single thing that Trump has ever done.
They have cried that's exactly the case.
Because I do think that this is a very different and very dangerous and volatile moment.
But if you think that the protests are about the structure of a system that doesn't allow any redress for problems that people have been peacefully protesting about for a long fucking time and not a thing has been done.
If you think the protests are about a political system that would offer you the quote unquote choice of Donald Trump, who's like the Central Park V dude and redlining with his daddy and denying black people housing and Charlottesville's fine people on both sides versus Joe Biden who wrote the 94 crime bill, is unrepentant for it, was justifying with Charlemagne just recently and saying Hillary's wrong to apologize for it, et cetera, et cetera.
Who as part of this whole thing went out and said, you know, police shouldn't be shooting people in the heart.
Instead, they should shoot them in the leg.
Like train them to do that.
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Like when you look at those two choices and you go, what kind of a fucking choice is this?
If you understand that as the legitimate part of the protest, then your response is going to be very different than it's just like, oh, these are bad people.
These are people we should deem as terrorists.
We have to crack down on them.
Let's call in the military.
That shit ultimately never works because look at 19 years in Afghanistan.
What have we learned?
Yeah, you can take the ground.
You can't hold it.
You can't hold a society together with an aggressive militarized response.
That's not going to work over time.
So if that's your only strategy, it's like, okay, then what?
Then what are you going to do?
Are we going to have curfews at 1 p.m. every day?
Are you going to have militaries holding down American cities every day?
Because you have a significant chunk of the population that will no longer consent.
So I think that, I think on this particular one, this is probably where we disagree the most because, and she pointed this out, which is that to me, it's about the restoration of law and order.
And look, I mean, this is why you saw these Joy Reid, right?
I mean, these people were putting out conspiracy theories that actually, so here's what happened.
So we'll begin with the timeline, which is that the timeline was, you know, at first the Minneapolis, the Target got looted, you know, the affordable housing complex went down.
Everybody decided, okay, violence, looting, everything is fine.
So they're basically justifying it on cable.
Then what happened is a second night happened.
A lot more violence and protests weren't, police and firefighters weren't visible.
So Minnesota authorities started lying about how actually every single person arrested was out of state.
Local news went and they found the St. Paul mayor came back on camera and said every one of the people that was arrested did not have a Minnesota address.
The reason I'm bringing up Reed is because the legitimacy for the use of force for these people, it only applies if it's Russians or white nationalists.
You're allowed to crack down on that.
Whereas, so look, on the military front, let's think about our history.
Eisenhower, 1957, calls in the 101st Airborne Division in order to forcibly integrate Little Rock High School to stop, to allow the Little Rock 9 to enter that school because a white supremacist, violent mob and the local authorities could not be trusted to do so.
I think that's a legitimate use.
1967, LBJ calls in the military to quell race riots in Detroit.
I think that's legitimate.
Rodney King, George H.W. Bush, calls in the Marines in order to restore order.
You have to restore and crack down exactly on the people we're talking about, these criminals.
A lot of them are sociopathic criminals, just taking advantage of the situation.
And from that forward, we have to move and act within the political system.
Now, Crystal seems to think, I think, that acting within the political system is just not a choice at this point.
But I disagree.
Because, I mean, even if you're on the left, like Joe Biden out today saying he endorses this Hakeem Jeffries bill on banning police chokeholds.
I've seen the police inciting and creating the dangerous situation.
Do I have any confidence that given what we saw on TV with the military police coming in and tear gassing and rubber bullets, peaceful populations, that this is going to, they're going to come in as peacekeepers in these cities?
Absolutely not.
If you bring the military in, you are starting a war.
Think about the context of, if you saw this happening in another country, right?
It's hard to look at our own country through, you know, neutral lens.
If you looked at a foreign country and you heard that their president was bringing in the military to quash protesters, would you be like, oh, this is going to go great?
That's why we don't have the military do local law enforcement.
I mean, one of the big problems of local law enforcement has actually been the militarization, which occurred after 9-11, which occurred under Barack Obama as well.
When you roll tanks into American streets and you treat the citizens like this is a war, you escalate the violence.
So my point is, if you are opposed to the violence, sending in the military is exactly the wrong thing to do.
See, I think this is the issue, which is that when people like you and I who are against police violence, who are against and acknowledge this action, we have a solution.
These people should be fired and there should be inquiries on that.
All that Trump is doing right now by calling for the military and training us into a war zone is escalating the violence and radicalizing it.
So for example, and I know this sounds hokey, but this is true.
If he had come out last night and instead of having the military police shooting tear gas and rubber bullets and flashbang grenades and crushing these protesters, if he had come out with that same cast character as Bill Barr and whoever else was with him and taken a knee for eight minutes and 45 seconds, the amount of time that George Floyd had that knee on his neck until he died.
Then, if he had instead of saying, I'm going to send the military in and crush these protesters, and by the way, he's deeming them terrorists, right?
Our fellow citizens, he's saying these are terrorists.
If he had instead offered actual, like, no one's going to solve this problem overnight, but you can offer a few pieces of legislation that are at least an olive branch.
Then you start to de-escalate rather than radicalizing, rather than going the police-state, military-state way, which never ends well.
I go back to our history, Joe, because we have done this before.
MLK, and D.C. called in 13,000 troops in order to.
No, no, no, of course.
But I'm saying it has, like, use, again, like, the military does enforce law whenever these local authorities refuse to do it.
And look, in the immediate term, like, first of all, I mean, I don't think the left would have given him any credit whatsoever if he did, you know, do any of what was just suggested there.
But second, which is that this is just the fundamental difference, conservative and liberal disposition, which is that there are some bad people out there who you can show them as much compassion as you want.
They're still going to loot and fall.
They're still going to loot.
They're still going to criminalize.
There's no such thing as like de-escalation in the most near term when people are actively, as you said, looting the streets of New York.
And so if the governor of the state of New York refuses to call these, if these states and these, like I said, police.
This is the thing about the Minnesota, the Minnesota police and all of that, which is that they refused out of political correctness in order to crack down immediately upon people who were the very small group of people who are violent criminals.
That's what allowed this thing to go national.
And now people are, and this is, it's part of our history.
We have done it before.
And again, look, after the El Paso shooting, I heard all from the left all this, we need the FBI in order to crack down on the, and I agree.
I think that these violent white supremacist organizations should be taken down.
And if they're out there marching and they're committing violence, they should absolutely be knocked out.
And this is the point, which is where I pointed to, why they started to blame Russians and white nationalists, because they realized this was going against them.
They only view it as legitimate whenever they're using force to quash a side, which is not, which is, that they agree with, and that they don't do it whenever it's a political cause they do.
Which is that the one second is this is selective application of justice.
And this is exactly what they're worried about, which is that I have a better idea.
You enforce the rule of law and law and order against violent white supremacists and against violent looting criminals who take advantage of a legitimate protest against the horrific death of Johnson.
And so I think that's part of where the breakdown in our views occurs.
Because I think it's fantasy.
I think it's fantasy to imagine that you could trust this president to deploy force in a responsible way.
And we've already seen that.
Like that's not, it's not a debatable point because we've already seen him abuse that force with peaceful protesters.
And by the way, the First Amendment is also a sacred right that is part of why I love this country that should be protected, which is being overwhelmingly quashed by force right now in this country by bad policing, by this president and what he did with those peaceful protesters.
And the idea that bringing the military in is going to de-escalate is going to solve the problem.
I think that's just a fantasy.
Look, I don't know that, you know, I don't know that the response to the Rodney King riots or to the 68 riots is really the thing to emulate either.
And the question again is not, is it good to loot?
Is it good to, of course not.
No one is saying that.
My question is what then?
Let's say you bring in them and you quash them like you put what then?
What then?
And that's the case is there's no plan for how do we, we've had these debates, we've had these marches, we've had the outrage, we've had all of it, and it never ever changes.
And so you've got a lot of people out there doing shit that they shouldn't be doing, but they feel like finally y'all are paying attention.
But you know, statistically it is history in the country.
But I'm not just talking about police brutality because I see the policing issue as existing within a much larger problem, which is a society that dehumanizes, which is a society that is cruel.
I mean, it's sort of like what we're talking about on social media, the good people and the bad people.
And we've divided society into like the worthy people who are treated like human beings, people like us, whoever needs cater to it and are like emotionally coddled and all of that.
And people who are treated like less than, and those people are disproportionately black and brown.
But that's the underclass of America.
That is more what I'm talking to.
And the policing system that we have is to protect this group and to police that group.
And that's the part that has not changed.
I mean, we see, we see the vast inequality.
We see the people who are now laid off, who don't have hope in their life that things are going to be better for their kids than it is for them.
And that's the piece that I'm talking about.
So yeah, bring in the military, quash them, put a gun to their head, you know, put a curfew at 1 p.m., lock down the country.
You might solve the problem of looting the Gucci outlet, right?
But what then?
Where do you go from there?
And that's the part.
And on the piece with Trump and like he's doing the same thing in terms of saying, oh, this is all Antifa and they're all terrorists.
And that justifies these kinds of actions.
And to me, that is what is truly scary.
Because if you really were saying, let's just go after the bad ones and you had someone that you really trust, okay, maybe that's one thing.
But that you're trying to paint everyone who is involved in these protests as essentially other, as essentially terrorists, that to me is what is terrifying right now.
Well, I think he actually addressed it, saying that there's people that are protesting that have a legitimate concern and that this is a real issue and the real problem that happened.
And he wants people to stop the lawless behavior where it has nothing to do with George Floyd.
They're just smashing windows and stealing things.
On a split screen with, like, he's saying those words, on a split screen with military police cracking down on regular, peaceful, 100% peaceful protesters.
When you see this guy who did this as George Floyd, you realize this guy's had a decade of complaints against him that are similar, shooting people, assaulting people.
Because that county prosecutor did not file a charge against George Floyd, the cop who killed George Floyd, immediately.
And that is what sparked the initial protest.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that protest.
But then the line became, let's justify the rioting and the looting.
Let's tell you, we're not necessarily okay with it, but it's part of a broader systemic critique.
And then, of course, America revolted against that.
Right now, the polling just came out right before we're here.
58% of Americans say they support using the military to supplement police force.
This, you know, I mean, I'm a populist.
One of the things I think about so much more in my politics, 50-plus-1 solutions.
What are 50-plus-1 solutions that we can get to on economics, that we can get to about our immigration system, about trade, about the way we order our society?
And I'm against the elites who push down upon the majority and use their corporate influence in order to pass against that.
58% of Americans right now are asking, or basically completely support using the military in order to supplement police effort because they understand that what is happening right now is unconscionable.
And even let's take a purely working class issue of this, which is that I saw a video of a crying elderly American black, elderly black American woman talking about these protesters burned down my grocery store.
They burned down everywhere I shop.
She even said, I would rather be where George is right now, talking about George Floyd because of what happened to her.
I mean, we have seen these homeless, a homeless man in Austin whose mattress was just needlessly burned by these criminals just to taunt him.
We've seen business owners who have been beaten, savagely beaten by looting criminals with no police presence.
That is not, this shows you that the establishment of law and order and keeping law and order is a benefit, is one of the ways that we protect the most vulnerable in our population.
And the most vulnerable in our population are working class Americans.
They're the ones who have to clean this shit up, by the way.
Like I drove through D.C., I ride my scooter going around there through the, and I see all these working classes with the, you know, they have to take the glass, they have to put the boards up.
Who are the people who are not being able to go to work right now after we just had the worst economic crisis or still in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression?
So justification of rioting and looting and the destruction of the small businesses and not having a way in order to deal with that is anti-working class.
But beyond that, Crystal asked a great question, which is, okay, so after, what do we do?
And this is where you're right, which is the right does not agree.
But no, 50% of black Americans right now do not have a job in this country because of the explicit choice made by Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans not to adopt the payroll program that we are right now.
It's never been at a better time in America to go and to look at that payroll protection program.
And I really encourage people in order to go in to look at that proposal because I don't think it's gotten nearly enough attention.
And not enough Republicans and Democrats are being pressed on whether they support something like that.
So here's my solution.
Yeah, we have the, you know, we restore order in America.
And then we need to make sure that people are taken care of, not through just distributed non-unemployment benefits, but through actually having, putting these businesses, making them whole through a paycheck protection program, using the Hawley plan in order to do 80% of American workers' payroll so they can go back and remain intact.
And then we can scale that up with the reopening.
Because I think you were talking about this here on the podcast.
Like these restaurants, right, like restaurant businesses, even in the best of times, 100% capacity, it's fucking hard to run a restaurant, right?
I mean, Mitch McDonald's already like, we're not coming back.
We're not doing anything else.
I mean, and that's really where we're stuck.
Like, I'm not trying to justify, like, that sort of stuff is absolutely unconscionable, like smashing up someone's small business that they've worked on, absolutely unacceptable.
Violence, anyone against each other, absolutely unacceptable.
I don't want to ignore the fact that much of the violence I have seen has come from cops, which is why I think bringing in the military only increases the level of violence.
But that's where things are so stuck.
I think Dr. Cornell West, who I know you had on, I loved that program, by the way, that you did with him.
I love him.
He said, we are living in a, America's a failed social experiment, is failed to provide for the economic health and dignity needs of its citizens.
And so, yes, figure out how to deal with the violent elements and get it peaceful, et cetera.
But the idea that you're going to crack down and take the pressure off and then the change is going to happen, that's not going to happen.
And it's why we are truly stuck, because you have such a large percent of the population which does feel that nihilistic, which does feel like the choice is on the battle, you know, go vote.
Like President Obama used to always say, don't boo, vote.
Like they've been doing that and it hasn't really changed their material outcomes for their life.
That's a part of the show that I think we more or less agree on is like how little choice is offered to people in terms of actually improving their material well-being and having their interests looked out for by Washington, D.C. And so, yeah, when you push people that far where 40% say burn it all down, you are asking for exactly the Tinderbox that we're seeing right now.
One thing I do think, though, is that that nihilism that I see from so much of that element of the left in particular, like Cornell Wet, the failed social experiment, it just ignores like that extraordinary things can happen through political change.
And even if they do want political change, look, a friend of our show, Zed Jelani, I mean, he cited these studies coming out of 1968 where you can see explicitly that nonviolent protests dramatically increased support for the civil rights movement and that whenever it would turn violent, that it would turn against them.
And that in one study in particular showed that it led to the election of Richard Nixon, which is something that I still don't think.
I feel like what Cornell West is saying, one of the reasons why it resonates is if they have so much money for the bailouts, they have so much money to take care of people during COVID, for these corporations, so much money to deal with this.
Why didn't they invest that money in fixing all these problems that have happened in these inner cities that have had a long, deep history of economic problems?
I mean, you know, I lived in Kentucky and Appalachia.
Like, Make it universal so everybody buys in.
But that's exactly, I mean, we had this whole Democratic primary and every debate, it was like, well, how are you going to pay for it?
But then the moment that the stock market crashed, it was like, here's $4 trillion.
Good luck.
And so it just exposes, that's part of the moment that we have to understand.
So it just exposes the fact that all of this idea that we can't do anything to help you, and I'm so sorry, and there's not money, and that the system is fundamentally fair.
The system has never been fundamentally fair, but people have tried their best to make it as fair as possible while supporting the special interest group that put them into power, while trying to keep up with the demands of their constituents.
One of my favorite things I talk about is what Crystal and I really want to try and do, or especially for me, is I want to make it the cynical choice in order to do the right thing.
That's the hardest game in politics, because that's what the special interest did, right?
Like it's the cynical choice in order to pass the subsidy or do the bailout for X and not for Y because you know you're going to get a job out on the other side or you know that you're going to benefit politically.
That's what we need to do.
We need to make it so that it's the cynical choice to show up for working class people.
And right now, I mean, that's one of the things I really took note of, which this Holly plan I'm talking about.
Corey Gardner from Colorado is the most vulnerable Republican in the United States Senate.
And he signed on to that plan.
Now, he's running for reelection.
He was vulnerable before all of this even happened.
And that's what you can try and capitalize on.
You can show people, even if they're the most cynical actor.
I don't know anything about Corey.
I don't know why he signed on.
I just want to make it clear.
But if you can make it so that it's the cynical choice to try and show up.
Now, that is an extraordinarily hard thing to do.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if I don't talk about every single day about how the system is rigged and the political system in particular and who owns who.
But this is part of what I think we're on to about what the heterodox kind of space, which is that there is an extraordinary support for efforts like this.
And if you can show these politicians, if you do something like this, you will get praise from Crystal and Soccer.
You will get an electoral benefit.
You will have the media.
This is the key is you need to build alternative ecosystems, centers of power, which are able to elevate that so that they know that they have somebody who's going to have their back.
Because right now, if you go, you know, the standard line, you're always going to have right or the left to back you up in a time of crisis.
You'll have the money.
People will fundraise.
You have to show people that by doing the right thing, that that's where the best politics are.
And that's what we focus on in terms of the economic solutions and so much of what we advocate for on the show is to show people, like I said, 50 plus one solutions exist.
There is political opportunism to be had by just doing the right thing.
This was Trump, I mean, Trump's like innovation more than anything was running against standard GOP ideology in the 2016 primary, running on trade, saying, no, maybe trade's not always a good thing.
Running hard on immigration, which is something GOP voters have always wanted.
Those two issues in particular went completely against Paul Ryan and so much of what they were advocating for.
But you could never say it because if you said it, not going to get on Fox.
If you said it, you're not going to be in leadership.
The Republicans aren't going to fundraise money for you.
The think tank scholars are going to write fake studies and fake papers about how you're a liar.
That's exactly what he exposed that there's opportunity to be had there.
What we got to do is build up media and alternative organizations which show people that there is a way to be cynical.
There's a way to, because people are cynical, politicians in particular.
There is a way to act in your own self-interest and to do the right thing.
And I think that that's why I've look at it as much more of a, I don't look at it in that nihilistic way.
I look at it in a much more positive way, which is that this did happen.
I mean, something broke through.
And I don't think it's been perfect, but it's something which we can capitalize on and build over decades because I think God knows, I mean, people need it right now.
It's the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Well, I think where you and I agree is that law and order needs to be reestablished.
And one of the reasons why I think that it needs to be reestablished is there's a fire of consciousness.
And this fire is you're allowed to loot and smash and steal.
And people are doing that now.
And I don't think they're doing it in the memory of George Floyd.
And I think you've got to put that fire out because once you allow people to do it like De Blasio did in New York City and force the police to stand back, people know they can get away with it.
I've seen some horrific things, people running over people with cars and smashing into buildings.
And it's fucking madness.
When madness happens, you have to crack down.
You have to do something about it.
That's where I support whether it's the National Guard or if the police have the resources, use the police.
But something has to be done.
When you're saying like President Trump de-escalating on television, that is not going to do a goddamn thing about those kids smashing windows.
It's not going to change their attitude.
They're not watching the news.
They're not paying attention.
They know they have a very simplistic perspective.
George Floyd, this is bad.
Black Lives Matter.
Chaos.
Smash that window.
Take that shit.
They're not going to say, hey, you know, when Trump got on his knees, I was going to loot Gucci, but I'm not going to do that anymore.
There's economic despair from three months of not working is unprecedented.
You've never had a time where through no fault of your own, you are broke.
You can't pay for food.
You can't pay your mortgage.
You can't pay your rent.
You're fucked.
And there's no jobs to be had.
It's not like there's anything these kids can go out and do to better their position.
The amount of jobs that existed just three months ago, it's drastically reduced.
So their opportunities, which are already slimmed to none, you know, we're talking about people getting out of college in 2020, how bad their economic opportunities are before all this in comparison to the money.
And so my view is if you bring in the military, first of all, I find it, I find all of, I think we are getting far too comfortable.
And this is partly part of the perfect storm with the pandemic.
Like we've become very comfortable with all these extreme limitations on our actions, behavior, wearing the masks in public, which creates a level of anonymity.
Like all of that goes into this.
So when we have a curfew imposed of 1 p.m. or 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., we're just good to go with that.
But that should be taken in and of itself very seriously as an infringement on First Amendment rights.
So my point is that if you bring in the military, it is frightening in terms of our liberties, our ability to protest, our First Amendment rights, which are incredibly important.
And I think ultimately only leads to additional violence.
Look, that's a huge part of this whole thing, which is that there's just upper middle class white liberalism and their inability.
I mean, just there's a whole element of white guilt and so much more.
There's an entire industrial complex set up to make white people and upper middle class white people in particular feel uncomfortable condemning looting and violence in this particular scenario.
Even though everybody agrees with you, Joe.
I mean, pretty much everybody is like, yeah, protests are fine.
95% of people in this country would agree with something like that.
And so that's why I think that that, I mean, look, that shows you that there is, again, a political way to be forged here, which is like, like you said, nobody thinks that this is, nobody was defending George Floyd.
No one.
I mean, like, rush limb on Sean.
I saw this whole thing about Sean Hannity.
He was like, you know, the mark as a martial artist, like putting his on the neck.
It's like, I feel like the NFL, it's more prevalent, and I think that the impacts are more devastating.
When I watch those huge super athletes running at full clip and slamming into each other, it's a fucking car accident.
And it's a car accident multiple times a week.
And these guys are doing, well, they were taking those big hits and training as well.
But there was a study on football players that found that between they tested high school all the way up to NFL and they said there was some staggering number of people that had CTE, including high school kids.
What has been interesting is that these riots have not just been in the poor neighborhood or in the black neighborhood.
I mean, they have been all, I think that's part of why people are so freaked out, they've been sort of intentionally in the wealthy parts of town is part of what makes it so unsettling for everyone across the board.
And so, you know, look, my only point is, you know, yes, looting, bad, violence, bad, absolutely all of that.
But you can't imagine that the military is an answer to the situation that led to this.
I don't know what the answer is, but when people see the chaos and the randomness of it all, that's what's really frightening.
When people saw what was happening happening in Minneapolis as a direct result of a bad cop killing a man that was handcuffed and not a threat whatsoever, then people say, okay, I get these people.
But then when you see them smashing windows in Beverly Hills, you're like, what the fuck does this have to do with George Floyd?
I mean, but a lot of those young people, though, I mean, look, what has their life been?
And they're graduating from high school.
They're graduating from college.
They know very well what the cost is and what the rent is and what it looks like for them and their life going forward.
And that's exactly where that hopelessness and nihilism comes from.
And that's what really scares me is there's this idea.
I mean, like, I know it's easy to say, but it really is true.
We've never seen anything like this moment we're living through with mass unemployment, Great Depression, with pandemic, with these polarized politics where nobody feels like any hope of getting anything really accomplished through Washington.
You add to it the chaos in the streets.
And then there's no sign that this is all just going to snap back to normal.
From March when they shut down New York City, they shut down Los Angeles first.
And then it was like, holy fuck, we're locked down at home.
But we were worried about a disease.
And, you know, I was actually encouraged during the early days because it seemed like people, although scared, were at least, it seemed like they were being nicer to each other.
And all the bullshit on Twitter seemed to have subsided because people were dealing with a real live pandemic and they were really worried about their own life and the lives of their loved ones.
Then, as time dragged on, as the pandemic was going into the second month and people were really desperate and out of work, economic despair kicks in, anxiety kicks in, and then people got shittier than ever.
People were mean and you said something to me in 1984, you fuckhead.
Well, and this is part of the problem with the way that the coalitions have broken down between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is basically the Republican Party has this affluent portion that they cater to.
And then they have white working class that they sort of culturally signal to.
And the Democratic Party has an affluent portion, like the pussy hat, like Women's March type, suburban affluent white women.
Like that's who they cater to along with sort of business interests and Silicon Valley interests.
And then they culturally pander and signal to the black and brown working class.
And the incentive is always to keep everybody divided.
Because if you actually had like a multiracial working class put together, then that's where the real power would be.
So it's, you know, it's, you have two parties basically that don't are very much invested in things staying as they are.
Look, riots in the streets, pandemic, mass unemployment in the stock market goes up.
I mean, if you look at that, this is where I want to try and reclaim some level of positivity that's coming out of this thing, which is that, look, I mean, we are in the middle.
It's only in these huge moments that you have an opportunity to actually do something.
There's that great Lenin quote, which is like something about in a week, 10 years can happen.
10 years can feel like a week, and then in a week, 10 years worth of change can happen.
And I think that this is why I'm more optimistic from the right than the left.
I mean, the left just made this kind of explicit decision to kill the Bernie Sanders movement, realign around the white upper middle class suburbanites.
Like Joe Biden is doing yoga events, like literally yoga events for women.
But on the right, things are still very up in the air, right?
Like you still have people who are like people like Holly who are like opposing things.
Trump is kind of the populist president.
And I mean, look, I have my, I have a podcast called The Realignment with my friend Marshall Koslov.
Like, this is literally what we try and do.
And like, we're working on a few more interesting things here.
But like, what we try and do on the podcast is work through what are the actual policy positions that like a populist right would look like.
Like a new trading relationship with China.
Everyone's like, oh, decoupling.
Like, we've got to stop doing trade with China.
What does that actually mean?
Or like on immigration?
Like, what does it actually mean to like restrict immigration in America?
Like, what levels?
Like, how does it even affect wages?
Like, I would say yes.
And that's something that a lot of people have tried very hard to prove otherwise.
But it's about working with, it's about you can realign the Republican Party to not just have the white working class, but you can have significant portions of the black and brown, people of color, all working class Americans.
That is a huge winning coalition for the rights in order to move forward.
It only requires them to, I wouldn't say move left on economics, but to move back to where, you know, to the center on economics, away from this more libertarian-minded right.
unidentified
And to stop using racist rhetoric and that's why the left can't do it, is because it's always, they're always going to call you a racist.
I was more depressed, I guess, during the phase of the pandemic when it just seemed like everyone was crushed and everyone was apathetic and everybody was just like in their basement or in their apartment wondering how they're going to make rent next month.
Or they were one of those frontline workers who was out on the front lines making $7.25 to risk their life at CVS or whatever it was.
The fact that people are in the streets, especially, of course, the people who are peaceful and who are enraged and who are actually taking matters into their own hands in that way.
I actually find that to be the most hopeful thing.
Imagine if someone's life could be casually snuffed out like George Floyd's was and there wasn't a reaction and there wasn't rage.
Like to me, that would be a profoundly more troubling state of affairs than frankly what we're seeing right now.
And when you see one like that, it just, there's a great video, and I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again, of a Flint sheriff from Flint, Michigan talking to these people and saying, look, I'm going to put the baton down.
But as a result of that approach, rather than crackdown, tear gas, rubber bullets, and this contentious us versus them and the, you know, and the militarization, all of that, that approach led to less violence.
I know people understand this in a war context, right?
Like free fires.
Like, that's why we have very strong rules of engagement.
Like, people understand that the way the psychology of taking on this can happen.
And that Minneapolis looting, that Target, it was a beacon.
It was a message to any of these shitheads that you're talking about.
Like, hey, we can get away with this.
And then night after night after night after night, that's how Fifth Avenue.
I mean, you saw, I'm sure, the same videos I did.
You had like organized gangs, like people with getaway cars, lookouts posted on the corner, all that.
Where's the NYPD?
I mean, that breakdown is a very precious thing.
And this is, you know, on the riots front.
I mean, look, Baltimore, 2015, they had these level of riots.
What happened?
Massive economic destruction.
But worse than that is that police and many of the others have took a much more risk-averse approach to the way that they were going in that community.
The community is screaming for police specifically for this reason, which is that in the aftermath, we know from many of these riots from the MLK times and after Baltimore, it caused massive economic destruction to these cities.
It is not a noble thing to allow this to continue.
It's actually your job as a city.
I mean, there's a whole movement.
I mean, underground, nobody wants to say this.
A lot of people don't want to live in cities now because of what happened.
First, we were all locked.
I live in an 800-square-foot apartment.
You know how fucking terrible it is to be locked down in an 800-square-foot apartment and like the only thing you do is like go to the grocery store and you can't go out to eat or do anything.
And now I've got shit like being blown up in the streets like a couple blocks from my house.
Like, I don't really know if that's the city life is all that enticing.
Remotely, you know, there's a good, good argument for that now, too.
So many people are realizing, I mean, maybe there's one good thing that's going to come out of this is that people won't be stuck in cubicles and maybe they can work from home more often.
I'm concerned for the future, but I think that there needs to be some national address that is about law enforcement and about the rules of engagement and about the way we treat people that are our citizens.
That's our community, especially with nonviolent crimes.
I mean, there's got to be some sort of gigantic change the way, and you were talking about there has been some change in Baltimore because of the riots that happened there.
And there's been a response.
And there has to be some sort of national response.
And, you know, one good, one thing to come out of it is there needs to be a better system for vetting people for law enforcement.
It can't just be you want the job.
Okay, can you do 10 chin-ups?
Right.
Do you have a criminal record?
Have you ever sold heroin?
No.
Okay, you're a cop.
It can't be that.
It's got to be very difficult to be a cop because it's one of the most difficult jobs.
It's an insanely difficult job.
It's crazy that some of the most difficult jobs that we have are the least paying.
The people who literally were all deemed essential now during the pandemic, like who literally allow the country to function, make the least of anyone and are treated like they aren't human.
I mean, that's the other thing.
Like they're fungible goods to be fired and disposed with and thrown onto the front lines in a pandemic and not given any protection.
Like that is the way that they are treated day to day.
You know, there's a lot of prison outbreaks, and they've found out that they're asymptomatic.
And contrary to the way, and actually I talked about this with Kyle Kalinsky.
He was saying, well, look at it this way, like those are the people that have the strong immune systems because they're constantly on top of each other.
Wash your hands, wear a mask, stay away from everybody, but not vitamin D. You know, when they're dealing with these people in New Orleans, and I think there's a study in Indonesia, a giant percentage, like more than 80% of the people that are in the ICU, have a vitamin D deficiency.
4% of the people in the ICU had sufficient levels of vitamin D. And how many people in general have a vitamin D deficient?
70% just in this country.
Not in California.
I don't know why I said that.
But I'm just trying to talk.
70% of people in this country have insufficient vitamin D, and 29% are deficient, meaning they're in dangerously low levels.
Now, when you add COVID to something like that, I think that speaks to one of the problems we're dealing with, this mortality rate, obesity, people with insulin resistance, people with real underlying health problems.
And you could say, you know, that, well, you know, we still have to protect those folks, and this is the reason why we locked down the country.
Okay, maybe.
But you didn't do anything about immunity.
You didn't tell anybody to do things differently.
There was no public service announcement telling people, hey, if you cut down on sugar and cut down on alcohol and take cigarettes out of your life, you have a radically increased chance of beating this fucking thing.
My friend Janet, who owns this fantastic restaurant in Venice, they just, Felix, they just told her out of nowhere you could reopen.
No preparation.
No preparation at all.
She was like, I need 10 days.
She goes, I got to fucking hire all these people back.
I have to set everything up.
All of a sudden, with no warning, they said, oh, we're just going to open.
I think because they're dealing with this unprecedented economic despair where someone's like, hey, you know, you've only had 2,000 deaths in the whole state.
There's 40 million fucking people.
How many people have died of heart attacks during that time?
More.
How many people have died of cancer?
More.
How many people have died of obesity and all the interrelated health problems that come with that?
A lot more.
There's a lot of fucking people dying.
2,000 is a good number.
It sucks that those 2,000 people died of this disease.
But you can't just shut down the whole country.
You can't shut down the economy because there is a direct correlation between a dip in the economy and an increase in deaths due to suicide, due to drug overdoses, due to all sorts of problems, even starvation.
Because going into the Great Recession, we lost a majority middle income jobs.
And coming out, we gained majority lower income jobs.
And that's when the gig economy crops up.
And so people are pushed even more to the edge than they were before and, you know, may not have health insurance, don't have savings, like are piecing it together with a couple different gig jobs.
And there's an author who calls it the precariat, that group of workers who, you know, they're piecing it together.
They don't have any sort of net below them.
And then you layer on top of that, like, that's a group of people who is either out on the front lines in the, you know, the processing plan or delivering the packages or doing the Uber Eats for lucky folks like us who can just order in, no problem, don't worry about it.
Or they lost their job altogether and are just like no certainty that it's ever going to come back.
How am I going to, how am I going to make rent this month?
Like a lot of rent forbearance is ending right now and nothing has been done to help them.
I mean, I think you have to do a UBI and you have to do some sort of mass federal jobs program to get people back, to get them back working, to get them back on their feet, to rebalance the playing field.
I also think that you have to have some sort of systemic policing reform like what you're talking about in terms of the training in terms of chokeholds being illegal in order for people to feel like there's some real progress.
Well, I don't think you should make chokeholds illegal.
I think if you're trying, if someone's trying to kill someone, someone's trying to stop someone, look, if you're a cop and you're in a fight for your life against someone who's done something horrible, you should be able to use jiu-jitsu.
And one of the best techniques in jiu-jitsu is choking people unconscious.
And it's not that dangerous.
It's not as dangerous as beating someone.
It's not as dangerous as head trauma.
What that guy did was just torture.
That's what he did.
It has nothing to do with utilizing a good martial art technique to subdue some sort of perpetrator.
Right, but pulling people over every day with PTSD leads to terrible choices.
I think there's a lot of these cops that have seen too much violence.
They've seen too much death.
I was actually talking to a friend of mine about it yesterday, and someone who she grew up with, who had, oh, sorry, it was a different friend he grew up with, had a friend who lives in a small town and 9,000 people and thought that where they lived was, you know, it was fine, normal place, and became a cop.
And over the course of 10 years of being a cop, has a completely jaded and fucked up attitude about human beings now because they've walked in on people with their brains blown out and stabbed to death and raped and just every fucking day they find some new reason to hate everyone and they're just broken.
And I think this is a thing that cops, and every time they pull somebody over, this could be the last day of their life.
This guy's got a tinted window, you know, and who knows what's going on inside this car?
It's an effect that has accumulated over time, too.
And to bring it back in the other direction and to have some sort of a positive relationship between the police officers and the communities that they serve.
One thing that my friend Immortal Technique brought up about that sheriff in Flint, he said Flint has a very unique relationship with the police and the people in the community because they're all dealing with that water problem.
They're all in it together.
And a lot of the people that are police officers there also live in the community.
I think people living in the community that they police is also In Los Angeles, that they're like back in the day, like a lot of the cops didn't actually live in LA, so it was very much like a trans.
There's a problem in New York City as well because it's so expensive, you know, too, that it makes it impossible for working class people to be able to live in the city that they are actually policing.
I mean, look, there's an ugly history around policing in America.
If you go back to a lot of the police departments in the South were put in place to enforce Jim Crow style laws.
I mean, there has been a long history of basically there being a community that is protected and a community that is policed.
And so those are deep problems to solve.
You're not going to solve them overnight.
You're not going to pick one piece of legislation that's going to fix it like that.
But I think if you have that context and that understanding, and that you're not just saying, oh, it's just this one bad person or that one bad person that we have a bigger structural issue, then you can start to move forward.
And people just need to feel like progress can be made.
I mean, I think that's one of the biggest problems in this moment: there's this sense of nothing is going to change.
Nothing has changed.
They had body cameras, they didn't have them on.
You know, they were being filmed and they didn't fucking care.
It didn't matter.
It didn't make a difference.
And so, if you can at least give people that sense that, no, the political system can work on your behalf, then you start to move in the right direction.
So on the riot, I'll start with the riots because I think my view is clear.
Reestablish law and order.
I agree with you.
You use that opportunity to seize upon, again, the 50-plus-one things.
What do we all learn through this pandemic?
It's pretty stupid that our corporate elites and our political elites allowed many of our most critical jobs and industries in order to go over to China.
That's an empirically stupid thing.
Reshoring American supply chains makes us safer in the long run, both from an economic perspective, from national security perspective, health perspective, et cetera.
Like the China thing is like a 90-10 issue.
And right now, I want to make sure I call this out, which is that there are elements in the White House, more corporate-friendly ones, who are trying to quash a buy-American order that was put forward within the Trump administration that doesn't even call for mandatory onshoring of medical supply chains, but just wants to use tax rebates and all that other stuff to encourage it over 10 years.
And I think it's pretty unconscionable that something like that, 90-10 issue, after something like this, hasn't been passed.
I think on trade, it's the same thing.
This is a broader question of so much of what we have.
It's not just China.
I mean, that's an overwhelming thing in our trading relationship, but it's like a great nation makes things for itself.
There's a great essay I read.
It was like, Make America Autarkic Again.
And autarky is like making everything here.
And I'm not saying that's, you know, all the libertarians are going to get very upset about me and start sending me comparative advantage memes.
But like, look, there is a real benefit to be able to make things in America.
And that if just because it's cheaper, the altar of globalization, the altar of cheap prices has made us make horrific political choices over the last four decades.
And going on that and praying towards that altar has made it so that we are less safe, less robust, less, I mean, socially, you know, to live in a town and to have a factory which is producing something and to feel pride in your work and get paid a good wage and to know that at the explicit decision of Congress in order to let China join the WTO,
or China joining the WTO, restoring permanent relationship, permanent normal trade relationship with China, and watching that factory go away like this.
You know why that went away.
And people made that choice because they said, fuck you, you're better off.
I think that you have to acknowledge that there's like a deeper rot in the society where the fundamental promise has been like, if you have cheaper stuff and you can buy more like cheap Chinese crap, you're going to be happy, right?
That's going to be the key to happiness.
And so everything has been used to justify those ends.
And it hasn't made us happy.
It hasn't made us satisfied.
It hasn't brought us any sort of spiritual nourishment or community.
And community is something that we have completely sort of dismissed with and dispatched with and devalued in the country as well.
So some of this is not like easy.
Here's a law you can pass and you're good to go.
But I think it does start with this fundamental idea, which comes back to kind of the core of our show, that human beings are worthy, that they have dignity, that they have rights that should be secured.
And if you can take that kind of FDR economic rights model and actually implement it into place where people feel that they are valued and seen and heard and have agency and power in the society, then you are not going to have to call in the military to American cities.
You're not going to end up with a situation like we see right now that's spiraling and spiraling and spiraling out of control.
That's another thing, you know, in terms of what I would do.
It's like we have to reorient our economic life and our economic policies in order to incentivize the building of communities and the building of institutions that exist outside of just the outside of just a direct check from the government or a direct check from your workforce.
It needs to be about, I mean, the way that America was, like, probably the most united we ever were was around like in the 1960s.
Now, look, I know everyone's going to, there were terrible things that happened.
They were exposed in the civil rights era and all that.
But, you know, broadly, what was it?
It was like unions.
It was about higher wages.
And it was about the strength of the American family.
And that's something that, I mean, every data we see, lowest marriage rate on record in 2018.
And what's the number one reason that people cited not being able to get married?
I think, look, I think we need to reorient our economic life in order to bolster the American family.
And this is something very much part of the new right movement.
There's this new organization called American Compass run by a friend of mine, Oren Cass.
He used to work for Mitt Romney.
And now what he's trying to do is move the GOP on these issues towards centering economic life, restoring economic conservatism from economic libertarianism.
And what I mean by that is free market fundamentalists, that the free market is always good.
Look, the free market, is it a good thing?
Once again, that we couldn't make ventilators in our country when we thought we needed them?
Like, was it a good thing that we couldn't manufacture our own medical supplies?
And then broadly, like in terms of the immediacy, what I would do, it's this payroll plan.
It's so critical that we restore Americans' payroll and that we try to make it so that these businesses don't become failed, distressed assets that get rolled up into these huge private equity conglomerates that buy them all off for cheap, that fucks over workers, it fucks businesses, and it just makes, and this, do you want to live in a highly in a world where there's no mom-and-pop businesses or no dive bars anymore?
I think, too, people will put up with a lot of shit and they will persist and they will invest in the community.
They will invest in their lives.
They'll invest in a productive civil society if they feel that they believe that life will get better for themselves and their kids.
And I really think that's kind of the core breakdown is that people no longer have that confidence that for their kids, they're going to be able to have it better than they had.
And when you lose that sense of hope, that's when things go off the rails.
Well, and it also, it so clearly highlights the people that are full of shit that are just supporting the fact that you're going to vote left no matter what.
And you hear this thing, like, I'm just voting for the cabinet.
I'm voting for one thing that I keep hearing over and over again is I'm voting for a woman's right to choose.
And I'm like, okay, I agree with the woman's right to choose, but is that the number one thing for running the country?
Is a person's ability to abort a baby?
Is that really what, because that really is what it boils down to.
And I'm not, you know, I'm not saying that lightly.
But it's very sad that we're in this position in 2020 that we have to say, I'm just voting for the cabinet.
And this was, Democrats made fun of Trump voters for being cultists last time around.
When Trump came out and said, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, they'd still vote for me in Rui.
I'm like, you're an idiot, right?
That's ridiculous.
A woman at the Nation Writer at the Nation just wrote this piece that she started off.
If Joe Biden boiled and ate babies, I would still vote for him.
Now, look, is she being hyperbolic?
Of course.
But the central concept of like, it doesn't matter what he does.
It doesn't matter.
I will justify it if it's just a hair's breadth better in my view than Trump.
And look, I mean, ultimately, maybe the election is that existential and maybe things are going off there that you're like, okay, well, at least Joe is going to be, you know, somewhat normal and do some sort of normal presidential things.
But that type of politics is deeply destructive.
Because if everything can be justified, if you're just like slightly better than the other side, this lesser two evils dynamic is a hell that you can never escape from.
Well, you're also voting for whoever his vice president is, who not only maybe will be the next Democratic nominee and then eight years of them, but also because of his decline, may have a lot more influence and power, maybe pulling the strings, depending on who it is.
And look, he's already said he wants to pick someone he's consulting with Wall Street as to who he should pick.
His donor class is like having a lot of say over who he should pick.
He's going to pick someone who's basically just like him ideologically.
So you're looking at maybe 12 years of essentially being like, well, I guess this is, I guess I'm voting for the cabinet because he voted for a while.
There's this like celebrity culture around politicians now.
It's kind of like we were talking about earlier, like Cuomo's, oh, he does a great press conference, and that's all that matters.
There's this Stacey Abrams, who's also been talking about for a vice presidential pick, she sort of created this brand image of being very much on the left, very progressive, a very different sort of politician.
But if you actually look at her record in Georgia, she was, you know, and this is not like maybe if you're a centrist, this is a good thing.
It's not my politics, but she was very centrist, corporate friendly.
That was the type of politician that she was.
And no one ever actually covers her record, which is kind of fundamentally disrespectful to her.
She's, you know, a very popular politician for a lot of good reasons, but it's also one of those things where when someone says something like new world order, you say just that phrase alone.
Like, that's a hot-button phrase for all the conspiracy people.
Well, and when you have people in Chicago, though.
When you have no one who's trusted in the media and when you have this sort of general societal breakdown in general, then that stuff flourishes more than it would in normal times.
But there's all those echo chambers of conspiracy theorists and left-wing people who are pundits and right-wing people.
These echo chambers are some of the most disturbing parts of interaction with people online because you can always find someone that agrees with you.
And, you know, if you're not a person that likes to challenge your thoughts and ideas, you can just bounce those fucking things around with all these other knuckleheads that believe the same shit you do.
unidentified
That's definitely been fact-checked to be out of context.
So you got to eliminate that compliance and you make it a mandate.
And then you do training, particularly in the city, I'll call them licensing departments, whether it's zoning, buildings, housing will be impacted by it, planning, certainly.
And you pick the people that run those agencies and the deputies that are pledging allegiance to the new world order and good governance.
And then I think you have the Inspector General that do some spot efforts.
I mean, maybe, yeah, I actually thought about this too, because look, I mean, the main reason, the main reason, like, Trump has such a solid hold on the right, like on the Republican base, so to speak, is because actually of the judges' thing, of the Supreme Court thing, which you were talking about, of selecting Mike Pence, who has a lot of credibility in the evangelical community.
So I think that, I mean, a lot of people were outraged.
I saw this.
This was a very right thing when that, you know, the St. John's Church, that church that you were seeing, that was set on fire.
Can you imagine being so insecure that you're the president of the United States?
Like you have a nuclear arsenal and full American military at your disposal and you're so insecure that you have to show your strength in that moment by walking across the park.
And reportedly he was upset because it had come out that they had like had to go down into the bunker on Friday or say at a Saturday night or whatever when there were protesters.
And so this was his way to reassert his manhood.
But I think that's why I say I don't think that he has like a real, I think he has instincts.
I don't think he has a real ideology.
I don't think he has like a goal or a mission or a project he's trying to accomplish.
I think he's just all id.
I think it's all just about like, how do I reclaim this news cycle?
How do I win the day?
I actually interviewed him back before he was an official candidate at the White House correspondence dinner.
I was doing like, I was like on the rope line doing like the celebrity interviews, like sticking a mic in people's face or whatever.
It was ridiculous.
But so he comes in, and this is at the time when everyone's like, oh, this is just a publicity son.
He's not going to run, right?
And he comes in with Milani.
It wasn't the one.
It was maybe the one after when Barack Obama made fun of him like that.
And so he comes up to me, and this is when I was at MSNBC.
And, you know, I wasn't like particularly prominent there.
I was one of four on a panel show.
And he locks eyes with me.
And he's like, Crystal, oh my God, it is so great to meet you.
Like even then, it was like, Ari and Abby and Torre, you guys are so great together on the cycle.
Like he knew the show.
He knew clearly he was already obsessed with cable news and all the ins and outs of cable news.
And he was generally like, oh my God, I can't believe I get to meet Crystal.
But I'm like, how do you know who I am?
I mean, it's just bizarre.
But it was such a little insight into his whole wiring.
And so he knows more than anyone, like, what is going to be provocative to these stupid talking heads on cable?
What is going to capture their attention?
What is going to be outrageous?
What's going to win the day?
And I don't think that there's much beyond that thinking of like, how do I win this news cycle?
He was citing like one of my friends, Michael Lind, who's like very, you know, like a nationalist on trade policy in the mid-2000s was like, Michael Lind is right about trade.
Like he was, he's clearly been thinking about this for a long time.
And on immigration in particular, I mean, I think that's another one where he's always kind of been there.
He's always had the instinct.
I mean, his real genius was looking at what did the base of the Republican Party actually want?
They want better trade deals and they want less immigration.
And for, you know, decades now, all the professional right has been able to give them is, well, cut your taxes.
That's a priority.
It'll never actually happen.
And then that is that, and then, but you still have to vote for us because we're good on abortion and we're good on gun control.
And that wasn't enough for a lot of people.
And you can see too, and this is what I meant about making it the cynical choice.
When you adjust your position on immigration and on trade, you win all of these Obama-Trump voters all throughout the Midwest and you become the president.
I mean, and even then, I'm not saying it was enough.
There's still a lot of more work to be done.
And I think he needs to realign more to the issues of what I'm talking about.
But to say that it's all just it is just, I mean, that's not his driving force.
Like if you see the way, having interacted with him and just like how he, how he reacts to certain things, there is a condensed ideology behind what he is.
Otherwise, he wouldn't have run the way he was.
He wouldn't have had those positions for such a long time on the core issues that actually matter to why he was elected.
And so the real issue, and I think the criticism, a valid criticism, is that he wasn't able to enact those political instincts into the actual staffing of the White House.
Because in the White House, personnel is policy.
And there's a great book called The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
It's about a history of LBJ.
It has four volumes and all that.
Robert A. Carrow, one of the best biographers of all time.
And he quotes a guy named Tommy Corcoran, who was FDR's kind of right-hand man.
He's like, what is a government?
Government's not one man.
Government is the first hundred men, first thousand.
They all have to be united in a common purpose in order to actually get shit done in a bureaucracy.
The truth is, and we have to acknowledge this, is that on the right, after Trump's election, the RNC and all these professional right-wingers, this conservative establishment, they were the thousand.
And so that's why you get something like the tax cuts bill, the tax cuts and jobs act.
It's because a guy like Paul Ryan has been fantasizing about pushing that for such a long time.
He didn't agree with Trump on trade.
He blatantly disagree.
He didn't agree with Trump on immigration completely.
And these guys were masters.
Oh, Mr. President, you're going to get that, but you got to pass this tax cut first.
Oh, you'll get what you want in your spending, but you just got to put this in the spending bill first.
And they snookered.
Basically, they snookered him because Trump is, I mean, look, he was a political novice.
He didn't actually know about how policy was made in Washington, D.C. It's fucking complicated.
It matters a lot who the deputy secretary of commerce is.
Like, you and I aren't going to know that person's name.
Yeah, I still think that's letting him off the hook too much, though, because like, I mean, you see in this crisis, right?
If he may, he may have some instincts, he may have some ideological leanings.
And you're right, he's been talking about this, some of this stuff, especially on trade for a long time.
But when it came down to it, you know, he was the first people he called in the coronavirus crisis for economic response were corporate CEOs, Wall Street executives.
Like that's who we went to to get his advice.
That's who he trusted.
And that's how you end up, you know, floating ideas like we're going to have a capital gains tax cut as a response to crisis, or we're going to have a payroll tax cut, which, okay, if you have a range of responses, maybe that's part of it.
But when you've got 40 million people who aren't on a payroll anymore, that's not going to do a whole heck of a lot of good.
So I just don't see that there's any, maybe he has the ideology, but it doesn't really matter if you're not willing to push for it, if you're not willing.
And you see who's organized in the town because immediately, once this crisis hit, immediately the first trillion multi-trillion dollar bill gets passed very, very quickly with all the goodies for big business, the stuff that was custom written.
Everybody got their goodies.
There was a massive tax break for real estate developers that they tried to get into the corporate bailout that they had all ready to go.
Like those are the forces that are all completely organized, locked, and loaded, and ready to go in a crisis.
And so they basically won.
I mean, they rolled everyone.
They tied the little bit of paltry small business and worker stuff to the massive corporate piece and held the workers and the small businesses hostage and said, if you vote, don't vote for it, then you're voting against workers.
And it was all ready to go like that.
And that is what you were overcoming in the town, that sort of bipartisan.
And so even more to the point on that, which is that when you don't have, this is another kind of establishment always wins point is that when you don't have very firm beliefs, because like trade and immigration are two things with like hundreds of billions of dollars behind the neoliberal trade and immigration policy that we have right now in this country.
When you don't have that, a very well-formed ideology around how it should be, like you were saying on the environment or anything else, that is how they win because status quo always continues in DC unless you make the very concerted effort of like, no, you are not doing this anymore.
And I'm appointing your boss and your boss's boss and your boss's boss's boss's boss in order to make sure that you don't actually do that.
That's actually what the hardest way to fight back is you actually need a coherent ideology on every single one of these things.
But more important, you got to understand how government works.
And I think that so many people don't seem to grasp that it's not just like putting a guy in the Oval Office.
Like, look, by the time it's reached the Oval Office, it's so fucked, right, that 10 levels down, they would have made the decision.
So that's the power, right?
Like, you've got to make sure that what you want is being reflected 10 layers down in the bureaucracy.
And you look at the way, you know, like Russia gate and all this other stuff, and you can just see like how arrogant some of the people within the bureaucracy behave, just blatantly, you know, disregarding the will of a president or blatantly just thinking he's illegitimate, trying to delegitimize him.
And from that perspective, that's fucking scary because they're not even accountable to the person that we all voted for.
That is what I like, why conservatives have to care more about government.
That's something I, like, one of my pet causes is, look, like, we are living in a society where the culture is against you.
Like, we are living in a society where, you know, the cultural elite, the commanding heights of American culture, and you're living in a society where you don't have real power there.
And so, and you're also living in a society where you have corporate America.
Look at these protests right now.
Amazon supports the protests, right?
Like Amazon supports the protests.
Citibank CEO.
It's the people with the most accumulated capital in America are also on the side of this protest.
Why?
Because in my view, they use identity politics and racial politics.
They want to split the country along those lines.
Every single day that we're talking about identity politics and having debates about race, we're not talking about it.
And so, you know, for those, for people who are more or less doing well, as things are, right?
They've got their health insurance.
They've got a job where they're treated like a human being with humanity.
They can get their Uber Eats.
They can get whatever they want on demand, right?
Their way of virtue signaling is on identity issues.
And if you only confine the conversation on policing to like, let's deal with this, let's have more body cameras.
Like, if you keep it in that lane, that's very comfortable for them, right?
If you have a broader conversation about a society that, you know, has decimated unions, has decimated working class power, about who has power in the society and why, like, that's more of a threat to them.
So yes, for corporate brands, it's very comfortable to have like, let's have a diversity initiative.
It's less comfortable to say, no, no, let's actually value the worth of everyone.
Let's actually have a different set of power.
Let's actually not have corporations able to give unlimited money and buy off our politicians and then be able to go work on your boards, et cetera, et cetera.
Like that's a very non-threatening conversation.
That's how you end up with, was it Bank of America who sponsored the movement continues?
To be cynical, is there another reason why Amazon would support this protest that this is kind of the death of retail?
I mean, this is one of the final nails in the coffin of retail when you think about investing your money in a brick and mortar store with a glass window after all this horseshit.
Look, I won't cite who told me this was a very prominent person in the field of economics and was like, my conspiracy theory is that Jeff Bezos wants 10 to 15% unemployment because then what's the best job in the world, Joe, in a rural place?
You should be more cynical because that, I mean, look, how else do we get to a point where like the Shell Gas Company sponsors a 1619 project event with Nicole Hanna-Jones?
So the 1619 project, oh man, this is a real rabbit hole.
So this is like, this is the New York Times put out this thing, the 1619 project is the year that the first slaves were brought to America.
And it was about reforming the way that we talk about race and slavery in America.
And so the very first essay which she wrote, which is very controversial, is when she claimed that the reason for the American Revolution was because people wanted to keep their slaves, not because of, you know, control from England and all that.
What happened is that a bunch of very prominent historians or the American Revolution, the Civil War, and much more, panned the essay.
They said this thing needs to be corrected.
They corrected it.
Even then, she still won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, or for commentary, I want to say, for that specific essay, which was there.
And they partnered, I think, was with the Pulitzer Center in order to create curriculum that schools are now using to teach.
Now, this was attacked, the 1619 project, not at first by conservatives.
Of course, conservatives were pissed off.
It was attacked by the World Socialist website, by Trotskyites, by Marxists and socialists.
And the reason why is because they saw it for what I see it, which is that it's a cynical attempt in order to say America is an irredeemably racist nation, that that is the only single and most pressing problem that we have in our society.
And if you hold that frame, then you don't ask questions about corporate power in America.
You don't ask questions even of leaders.
A friend of our show, Zed Gilani, had a fantastic appearance on our show.
I really encourage everybody to go watch it, where he talks about if you look at the black community in America, which is what had the most pressing impact on their life economically and destroyed so much of their livelihood.
It was the foreclosures under Barack Obama, and it was the wipeout of black home ownership and black wealth.
That the 1619 project and the framework of politics, that that original sin, which of course is the original sin, is the be-all end-all for why we are where we are today, absolves current political leaders and recent political leaders, like Barack Obama himself, or like leaders in the city of Atlanta, or leaders in the city of Baltimore, and that it absolves public policy, which is non-racial.
And so when I say that, why does Shell Gas Company feel comfortable sponsoring an event in which the main message is that America is an irredeemably racist nation?
Because that is one more event which is being talked about in the political zeitgeist by the cultural elite, which is not talking about their own power in the marketplace.
And if you look at what is the predominant control in your life in America, it is about capital.
It's not about race.
It's about class.
Class, but class disproportionately affects people of color in America.
And so the way I look at it is that identity politics is so cynically grafted on by the billionaire and the corporate class.
There's a reason they're all super woke.
It's because they want it to be this way so that we don't talk about their power in our society.
And I think this was a very cynical, like the way this all happened is kind of crazy because it started out in the sociology departments in the 1970s of all of these crazy, you know, from the post in the 60s era.
They were, you know, in these sociology departments.
And they started cranking out all these absolutely crazy papers around feminism and identity politics, racial politics, all of that.
And then what happened is, is that corporate America and other cultural elites, first of all, were being indoctrinated in the university system.
They were going to go work at places like McKinsey and others, and they brought their racial politics and their identity politics with them.
But that there had to be a recognition from the top from people like Goldman Sachs.
If Goldman Sachs, if the pressure on them is to stop the way that they trade derivatives or to put a black person on their board while they continue to do the derivatives trading, they're going to choose that every single time.
So they want to direct the conversation in that direction.
It absolves them for the sins both towards the economically disenfranchised in America, but it's also a very cynical tool, which is that why is it that you see all these corporations tweeting out Black Lives Matter, Instagram, blackout, all that stuff?
How is it that you see like Nike, isn't this the great irony that Nike went and did the whole Colin Kaepernick thing, the ad campaign, and they still got all their shit looted in this most recent state in Chicago, right?
I mean, I think that's the perfect example of they try to cynically use identity politics in America, split people apart to protect their power.
And if we start to understand that it's a lot more about class in America than it is about race, I'm not saying that there is not racial problems in America, racism, that, you know, all of this, but that if you focus on these class issues, it's the best way to help people of people who are disenfranchised, who are disproportionately people of color, but to help everybody.
That's a much more, I just don't know how else we can live in a multifaceted, multifaceted nation like this, which is, you know, economically heterogeneous, ethnically, you know, so many people of different ethnicities, so many people of different religions, so many, I mean, I am the son of Indian immigrants.
I feel fully and completely American.
That's an amazing thing that didn't just happen.
It was the product of a result of very specific political choices that we made over time.
And it's moving towards that that we need to go towards.
And that's what, but by doing so, what you've talked about many times, about economic, not just distribution, but about the power, who has power in society, working class or not.
Which is the corporate America can use the identity politics in order to make sure the working class doesn't continue to have power.
And so you can't separate class and race because it's not an accident, of course, that black and brown people are disproportionately the lower income and poor and working class in society.
I mean, I see it much more simply, sort of like what you were saying.
It's virtuous.
This is like a branding exercise, right?
And there's this whole idea.
I always think it's hilarious on the right of like Facebook and Twitter are progressive or they're liberal companies or Amazon's a liberal company.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
Amazon treats their workers like shit.
They bust unions.
Like, this is not a left company, right?
But because they use those sort of branding tools and tweet out Black Lives Matter, which is no threat to them.
And in fact, as you're pointing out, may very much benefit their bottom line ultimately.
They get all the benefits of being for progress and being for this rising coalition in America without actually having to do anything that's going to benefit their bottom line.