Larry Elder challenges the "regressive left" and systemic racism narratives, arguing that welfare policies and absent fathers drive poverty rather than government discrimination. He asserts police are reluctant to use force against Black suspects due to prosecution fears and defends free speech for controversial figures like Richard Spencer. Elder accuses mainstream media of colluding with the DNC to suppress Trump's inauguration crowd size and falsely claim he removed MLK's bust, labeling their coverage "fake news." He predicts the next four years will hinge on economic performance rather than cultural wars, suggesting Trump's confrontational style effectively counters establishment attacks. [Automatically generated summary]
You're not gonna believe this, but we have to talk about the regressive left today.
I've actually been trying to get away from discussing the regressive left lately, and instead talk about the ideas of classical liberalism which I believe in, but current events keep dragging me back.
I see on social media that people are using the phrase regressive left a bit less lately, and replacing it with terms like bigotier, the control left, or the illiberal left.
Whatever name you use for this well-meaning yet painfully misguided set of ideas is largely irrelevant.
We needed this phrase to identify this backwards ideology which puts groups before people, and sometimes you need a label to get people to understand an idea.
The portion of the left which is no longer progressive, meaning for progress, but regressive, meaning going backwards, has been identified, and now we're clearly bringing people to the side of reason.
All of you who talk about this with friends and family, who use the regressive left hashtag on Twitter, and share these videos are part of this political awakening.
Yes, it seems like these backwards ideas are getting stronger in some circles, but at the same time, finally, for the first time in a long time, those of us who are liberal and open to new ideas are coming together and being heard.
Whether or not you like Trump, his win was a huge rejection of the identity politics of the left.
But don't take my word for that, Bernie Sanders said it himself.
The only thing which can replace the regressive dissent of the left is a return to true liberalism.
A liberalism which defends free speech and expression, a liberalism that is for liberty and rights of the individual, and most importantly a liberalism that is one for human liberty.
I now believe that this regressive ideology is the biggest threat to freedom and western civilization that exists today.
With the rise of Trump and the constant comparisons they make of him to Hitler, the left now has the perfect boogeyman to use to excuse anything.
If your opponent is a vile racist, then you can use violence and any means necessary to stop him.
The regressive left has already begun using violence as a tactic and I fear that that's just getting started.
If you're only now getting up to speed on what the regressive left is, allow me to recap quickly.
The regressive, control, liberal left, whatever you want to call it, is a group of people who place identity, usually based on immutable characteristics, in a pecking order of social importance such as race, gender, and religion, where victimhood is the highest virtue to be had.
This oppression olympics allows groups to compete for who is the most oppressed Thus the most virtuous.
And if someone isn't as oppressed as you, then you have full authority to oppress them accordingly.
So Black Lives Matter can protest a gay rights march in Toronto.
White gay men can be banned from leading LGBT organizations on college campuses.
Pro-life women can be kicked out of women's rights marches and so on.
This backwards ideology, which demands we judge each other not on the content of our character, but on the color of our skin or some other baked-in trait, puts the collective ahead of the individual.
It loves all of its minority groups to behave as monoliths, so if you're a true individual, meaning you don't subscribe to the ideas that the group think has attributed to you based on those immutable characteristics, you must be cast out.
Many of the guests on my show have suffered from this backwards backlash.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maajid Nawaz, Sarah Hader, and Ali Rizvi all have felt abandoned by the left because they speak out about the problems within Islam.
They dare to fight for a more tolerant, more truly progressive Islam in tune with the modern society and basic liberal values, and for that they're labeled bigots or worse.
The Southern Poverty Law Center even labeled Majid as an anti-Muslim extremist.
In reality, Majid is a former Islamist who has devoted his life to trying to reform Islam from the inside, to try to reconcile his faith with the modern world, fighting for gays and atheists and women and any other free thinkers living under theocratic rule.
For this, he is called a porch monkey and other vile names by supposed progressives, while at the same time he is admired by many on the right for being outspoken.
This is the absolute height of absurdity.
But it all makes sense when you value groups over individuals.
The individual must be sacrificed at the altar of the collective.
So when any of these people dare speak out and call for true tolerance, they find their tolerance met with intolerance.
The left loves diversity in skin color, not diversity in thought.
Of course, this regressive ideology isn't just tied to Islam at all.
My guest this week is Larry Elder, a black conservative who has had every label and smear thrown at him.
Again, like with the previous guests I just mentioned, these slurs come from people on the left who would rather silence and dismiss their opponents than actually engage them in an honest way.
People often ask me which interview I've done that's changed my views the most, and I almost always say that it was the first time I sat down with Larry Elder.
He challenged my views on systemic racism, as well as the need for a strong family, and was one of the people that helped sell me on why small government is important.
If you haven't seen the video, we'll post the link right down below.
Larry challenged me, and I wasn't ready, so I can't say that it was my best moment on camera, but I listened and learned, and just as importantly, we didn't edit any of it out.
So I'm looking forward to picking up where Larry and I left off.
And as for where we left off, this is where I feel there might be nothing left for me on the modern American left.
You all know most of my positions on important issues.
I'm for free speech, even for white supremacist Richard Spencer to speak and not get punched in the face as happened just a couple days ago.
And I'm still a card carrying liberal by the way.
I'm for gay marriage, I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-legalization of marijuana, I'm against the death penalty, and the list goes on.
At the same time though, I'm against this oppression Olympics, I'm against safe spaces and trigger warnings, I'm against labeling all my opponents bigots and racists, and I'm against deplatforming speakers, especially at colleges where ideas are meant to be challenged and debated.
I'm also for states' rights, for following the Constitution, and most importantly for having a limited government that gets out of the way so that you can live your life to the fullest.
I've said a few times on the show that defending my liberal principles has become a conservative position.
Interestingly, I've also heard conservatives like Andrew Klavan and Dennis Prager say that they are conservatives because they really are liberals.
This is where we might get lost in the definition of liberal in the modern sense versus classical liberal.
So if you're still confused about that, check out a video I did a couple weeks ago called Why I'm a Liberal.
We'll put a link to it right down below.
The point is that if the issues I care about most, free speech, rights of the individual, and limited government designed to maximize liberty, now have almost nothing to do with the modern left.
My positions basically haven't changed, but I've watched as my team has gone off the deep end.
The battle of ideas always gets to a tipping point, and I sense that we're closing in on one right now.
If we can't rein in this madness on the left, then Donald Trump will be all too happy to show them his authoritarian side.
Both sides are ramping up for a showdown.
So, while I absolutely believe that the new center, filled with liberals, conservatives and libertarians and others, is rapidly growing, maybe I've lost the left and maybe that's okay.
But to end this direct message, I now kick this back to you guys.
If you're liberal, is there anything left for you on the left?
Or are you left out?
Is it now the conservative position to truly be liberal?
Let me know in the comments right down below and we'll see if there's anything left to discuss.
Well, I am looking forward to this because I mentioned at the top of the show that I don't know that any guest that I've ever had on challenged me directly as much as you did and actually managed to change some of my feelings.
Well, I had a lot of good feedback from the interview, and people complimented me, but I said the compliments should go to you, because you were asking questions, and unlike a lot of interviewers, you really cared about the answer.
You listened, then you responded.
And so, I think that's what made the interview so great.
For you to sit down with a liberal, and I think last time we literally didn't know each other.
I think maybe we had met for 10 seconds before you sat in the chair.
You sit down with a liberal, and I think that you were ready to go.
So when I said something about systemic racism, like you were ready to pounce, and you did, and my guys said to me after, we had only been doing the show for a few months, you know, do you want to edit that part out?
Because there's a part where you really kind of catch me in like a moment where I don't know, and we'll link to it right down below.
I want people to see this.
I think it's important.
How hard is it for you to sit down with liberals, generally speaking, and have an honest conversation?
If it's an open-minded liberal who really cares about what you have to say, it's pretty easy.
If it isn't, if it's somebody who's already decided what they've decided and believe that liberals, that conservatives are mean people, rotten people, cold people, anti-science people, then we're going to be in for a bumpy night.
Okay, so let's, I want to just recap a couple of the things we talked about last time for people that haven't seen it, and then we'll get to all the new stuff.
So real quick, just tell me a little bit about your political evolution.
Well, it wasn't so much an evolution as it was kind of like a series of things that happened to me, people that I've met, books that I've read, and that all together you added up and I ended up being a conservative.
My father was always a Republican, my mom a Democrat, and so at the kitchen table they would fight all the time about politics.
And when I was younger I sided with my mom, I think partially because it was just my mom, and when I got older I began to side with my father, much to my mother's consternation.
Well, I remember vividly during Watergate, my dad was defending Richard Nixon, which I thought was indefensible.
I thought what Richard Nixon was accused of doing was suborning perjury and getting other people to lie was deeply wrong.
My dad thought it was trivial.
My dad felt that Richard Nixon Had not done anything to enrich himself, that national security was not jeopardized, nobody died.
Why would you impeach a president over the fact that he was trying to cover up a break-in to the Watergate?
That was my dad's position.
My mom's position, of course, was that Richard Nixon was a crook and a liar.
Fast forward, the polls show that most Americans now believe that Richard Nixon should not have resigned over what he did and feel that what Hillary did was far worse and she did not have to resign.
What it says about us is that when it's a Republican in office, somebody like Richard Nixon that people did not like, there's one level of scrutiny and one level of judgment.
When it's a Democrat, somebody like Clinton or like Obama, there's a whole different thing.
For Obama to say with a straight face that I've not had a major scandal, are you kidding me?
What was Fast and Furious?
What was Hillary's email server?
What was denying the non-profit applications of conservatives with the IRS?
You can have your doctor, you can keep your doctor, and Obama reiterated that line after it was obvious from the regs that you couldn't necessarily keep your doctor or you couldn't necessarily keep your plan.
For you to say that you're going to bend the cost curve down, people are going to be no worse off, they're going to save money, and you don't save the money, when you know full well that you can't keep your doctor, if you want to keep your doctor, and to say it anyway, that to me, as far as I'm concerned, is a scandal.
Pulling out all the troops out of Iraq over the advice of his entire national security team.
Hillary wanted him to keep a stay-behind force.
His Secretary of Defense wanted a stay-behind force.
The CIA director wanted a stay-behind force.
The Joint Chiefs wanted a stay-behind force.
Our U.S.
Ambassador to Iraq advised Obama against pulling all the troops out.
He did it anyway, and the media gave him a pass for that.
And Ray Odierno, the So is that one of the situations where we're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't?
could have been dealt with. That to me is a massive scandal for which Obama got a
Okay, now we're talking about kind of the merits of the Iraq War, and whether or not we should have stayed or not stayed, and that's fine.
Look, I believe that as long as the American public did not have the will to stick it through, because what George W. Bush said was, we'll leave when Iraq can stand up.
As long as the American people did not have the will to do that, we shouldn't have gone.
But I'm surprised, I think George W. Bush is surprised, I think Dick Cheney is surprised, that over the advice of all the people that I just now mentioned, Obama pulled all the troops out anyway.
He envisioned a stay-behind force to make sure that Iraq would be stable.
I mean, we stayed in Germany, we stayed in Japan, we're still in South Korea.
So would your argument be basically that these scandals, these issues that you brought up, basically he got a pass because the media is sort of in on it with the Democrats?
We live in a country that's got 330 million people.
Roughly 8-10% of them believe Elvis is still alive.
Almost half of them believe if you send Elvis a letter, he'll get it.
Obviously there's racism.
There are individuals who don't like other people because of their race.
No question about it.
But are there corporations that have a policy of not hiring anybody?
Are there governmental agencies that have a policy of not hiring anybody?
The answer is no.
If you can tell me the company, IBM, Apple, that has a policy of not hiring black people,
tell me, or brown people, tell me who that company is and we can deal with it.
I don't know what people mean when they talk about institutional racism.
If this were the 50s, I would know what you're talking about.
When there was segregation that was legal segregation in the South, where you couldn't
marry somebody outside your race in certain states.
But that is no longer the case right now.
The racism that people talk about right now, in my opinion, is individual stuff, where
or some individual doesn't like you, or some individuals don't like you.
But is it something that is anything akin to what we experienced in the 50s and the 60s?
Absolutely not.
And I think it's insulting to people who have fought hard and died in the 50s and the 60s to get us to this point, to act like things are just the same.
When you have people like Eric Holder saying, as he did, When he was AG, we now have pernicious racism, which he said was every bit as bad as the old racism.
So again, this is you, you mentioned that in our conversation and really did, you know, you got me.
I said something, well, there's systemic racism.
And you said, well, what companies can I just, I just asked you for an example.
You got me.
And so I do agree with you.
There are racist people.
There are a certain amount of people that don't like black people, that don't like Jews, that don't like gays, et cetera.
We live in a free country.
You're allowed to not like people.
It may be odious and unpleasant, but you're allowed to.
You can't harm them, but- Correct.
But what do you do to stop the idea of what you're talking about, that things have changed for the better, and that there's a certain amount of people that want that oppression?
It's as bogus and as phony a movement as the notion that O.J.
Simpson is innocent from having killed two people.
It's a fraud.
Most cops simply want to do a good job and come home.
Most cops, frankly, are more hesitant to pull the trigger against a black suspect than a white suspect.
There have been a couple of studies that have shown that recently.
One of them was an economist from Harvard named Roland Fryer.
And he is apparently the youngest tenured professor in the history of Harvard.
And he's a tenured professor in the Department of Economics.
And he did a study to find out about police brutality.
He assumed he would find the opposite.
And he was shocked, he said, when he found out that most police officers
are more reluctant to use deadly force on a black suspect than a non-black suspect.
And the reason, in my opinion, is pretty obvious.
If you shoot a black person and there's any question whatsoever about it, you're going to be under the gun.
You're going to be possibly prosecuted, maybe lose your pension, maybe go to jail.
Cops are deathly afraid of being perceived as engaging in racial profiling.
There was a recent poll that just came out And it turns out 75% of cops say that they are more reluctant now to engage with citizens than before, before the Black Lives Matter movement.
When you see these cities, when you see Atlanta, and you see Chicago, and you see Ferguson, and all of these places that are usually under Democratic control, they usually have Democratic mayors.
The group think would tell you, wait a minute, Democrats are helping black people.
Yeah, does this all come down to education for you?
Because at the end of the day, if you can teach people properly about history, and if you can teach them properly about what the role of government is and all those things, that that's really how you untie this stuff from just the screeching people on both sides.
I think so, but it's also all about rationally connecting the dots.
Is it really true that a young black man is more likely to be pulled over by a cop than a young white man.
And if it is true, another question is why?
And you cannot have a meaningful discussion about any of this without talking about behavior.
I think maybe the last time we were here we talked about a National Institutes of Justice study.
That's the research arm of the DOJ.
They did a study that came out in 2013 called Traffic Stops and Race.
And it turns out that whether you're talking about driving without a license or driving while drunk or driving With a busted tailpipe or driving without a seatbelt or driving without a car seat in the back.
It turns out black motorists were more likely to commit those crimes than a white motorist.
And the study said that the differences in stopping have to do with differences in offending.
If you can't have a meaningful discussion, unless you have a meaningful discussion about behavior.
Also, there's more poor white people in the country than there are poor black people.
But it's black people that complain about being disproportionately pulled over.
Half of all the homicides in this country involve black victims.
Almost all of the black victims were killed by other black people.
I don't know what that has to do with cops being racist.
It has to do with the fact that a disproportionately large percentage of crime is committed by a small percentage of people, usually males, usually young black males, often against their peers.
And that is because of the lack of fathers in the home.
I didn't say it, Obama said it.
A kid raised without a father is five times more likely to be poor, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in jail.
The number one problem facing this country is not bad cops, not Obamacare, it is the large number of children raised
without fathers.
That is a product of the welfare state.
Between 1890 and 1920, 1930, believe it or not, a black kid was slightly more likely to be born to mothers
and fathers married to each other than a white kid.
We know that there is a negative incentive because in 1996 when Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, welfare declined by over 50%, far steeper than anybody predicted.
It turned out there was a bunch of able-bodied people Yeah, do you think the intentions are good?
So when Lyndon Johnson pushes this, when the Democrats sign it, the Republicans who got on board, were their intentions, we're going to help people get out of poverty, or is there really something more nefarious going on?
FDR talked about the corrosive effect of government dependency when he launched the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson talked about getting people off of government dependencies and making them more self-sufficient by launching the War on Poverty.
Those were their stated goals, and I believe them.
But human nature is such that if you allow somebody an easy out, some people will take an easy out.
So basically we've said to a certain subset of people, and it I guess is a disproportionately amount of black people, we've said you can get a certain amount of government handouts.
And basically your argument is that this is now just leaving people in the status quo.
Because if you can get something, subsidized housing, whatever it is, food stamps, And you don't have to do anything, you'll just take it.
it. That's not a black characteristic, that's a characteristic of what any human might be.
Of human nature. And there was a poll taken in 1986 by the LA Times. They asked poor people
and non-poor people a bunch of questions. And one of them was, "Do you believe that
poor people have additional children to get additional money from welfare?"
The majority of non-poor people said no.
They probably thought it was insulting, if not racist.
64% of poor people said yes.
Also, they were asked this question, poor people were, do you believe that welfare is a crutch, a great dependency, or do you believe it's a means to get you to stand on your own two feet and go forward?
More of them said it was a crutch that created dependency than it was a means to get you on your own two feet and go forward.
Yeah, so basically guilt has a lot to do with this.
The guilt, sort of white liberal guilt in a way, has actually subjected black people to a, not all black people of course, but a certain subset of poorer black people to a set of circumstances that they almost can't get out of.
I think that's part of it, but also I think part of it is people that are comfortable and wealthy and well-educated look around to figure out how they can perfect the world.
And they forget that part of getting anywhere is overcoming obstacles and struggling.
And if you make things real comfortable for people, some people are going to take the easy way out.
So I think it's a kind of mindset, a kind of mentality.
Yeah, when did we get to that point where fighting for what's yours, fighting that no one should give you anything, that the government isn't supposed to give you anything, and no one should, that it is your life to live, it is your job as a human to pursue what makes you happy and take what you can.
That doesn't mean destroying everything around you, but finding what makes you happy.
I am a classical liberal in the John Stuart Mill sense of it.
Absolutely I am.
Somebody who believes in maximum personal freedom, but also you have to believe in maximum personal responsibility.
And that is to deal with the consequences of your choices.
And a lot of people don't want to do that.
They want to shield people from the vestiges of the world, of life, and when you do that, you also will create some other kind of reaction that will be worse.
My father used to say, when you try and get something for nothing, You often end up getting nothing for something.
I just went back to my childhood home in New York, and for the first time I did have, I think I saw a little more tangibly what you were talking about.
To go to my parents' house, to feel that it was the same place that I grew up in, the same community that I was part of, I visited family, friends, and some relatives that were nearby, and it did feel like it connected me to something that was important.
It's sort of an ephemeral thing, it's something that's not quite tangible, but something that's important that does, it lays your roots so to speak, and that you can sort of figure out who you are from that.
Is that really what you're talking about with the family, that it's not just that there's a breadwinner, but something else, something that's sort of bigger than that, that really can lay out what a life is supposed to be?
It's not just an additional check, as you pointed out.
It's also being a role model, watching your father get up, go to work when he doesn't feel like it, watching him live up to his responsibilities.
And, you know, the three arguably biggest leaders in this country, black leaders in this country, are Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan.
And all of them had difficult, if not... That's a trio, huh?
All of them had difficult, if not non-existent relationship with their own fathers.
Jesse Jackson's mother was a teenager who was impregnated by the married man who lived next door.
And when Jesse Jackson was raised in South Carolina, kids taunted him, Jesse ain't got no daddy, Jesse ain't got no daddy, because that's how rare it was in those days to be raised without a father.
Al Sharpton had a nice middle class life until his father abandoned the family and then down to the ghetto.
And in the case of Farrakhan, his mom was estranged from her husband, had a boyfriend, took back up with the husband, got pregnant, didn't want the boyfriend to know, and tried to abort Louis Farrakhan with a coat hanger.
So all three of these men, in my opinion, have deep psychological issues because of a lack of relationship with their own fathers.
And that is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, they're so angry despite the fact that things have gotten so much better in terms of race relations in this country.
I mean, not to fully psychoanalyze them, but they're dealing with a personal pain that is extremely painful, for sure, and they can't let go of that pain, so now they're kind of projecting it In my opinion, again, I'm not a psychologist, but if I were, that's what I would say.
Do you think that, despite what you've said about President Obama, do you think that now that he's out of office, maybe he could step into the role that you'd like to see him in?
So instead of America turning to Jesse Jackson and Farrakhan and Sharpton, Maybe they can turn to you, but if not to Larry Elder, but if not to Larry Elder, that maybe Obama, when you disconnect it from politics, can actually talk about some of those things.
I mean, you addressed it a second ago.
You said he did mention the family and mentioned fathers and all that.
By the way, when people talk about a great deal to do on race, all they really mean is how black people feel about white people and vice versa.
They don't care about Hispanics, they don't care about Asians, they really care about the relationship between blacks and whites.
And Obama has, throughout his eight years, in my opinion, when he could have ignored the race card, or put it in perspective, picked it up.
Whether it's Cambridge Police, or whether it's Trayvon Martin, if I had a son he would look like Trayvon, whether it's invoking Ferguson.
Whether it's hiring somebody like Eric Holder who's lecturing the country on race and racism.
Obama, I think, believes that racism remains this huge, massive problem in America despite his election and despite his re-election.
And I don't.
And so I don't think he's going to say the right thing and do the right thing.
I think he's encouraged black people to think of themselves as victims.
As opposed to saying, look at me.
I busted my butt.
My parents made sure I had a good education.
I didn't make bad moral mistakes.
I got married before I had kids.
Follow my model and you'll be fine.
He has not said that at all.
What he said is, we have real problems in this country.
He embraced the Black Lives Matter movement.
I mentioned Trayvon Martin.
I mentioned some of the other things.
In my opinion, The reason that a lot of people voted for Obama was because they thought he was going to do exactly what you suggested, which is to heal us, put things in perspective.
Tell young black people they ought not be angry when they're pulled over by a cop.
All the cop is doing is his job.
Instead, he did the opposite.
So I'm not optimistic at all that he'll play that kind of role that you suggest.
So how much of this, I know you talk about fake news and I wanna get to that, but how much of this is
because the media is complicit in all this?
So for example, just this morning, I think the Oscar nominations were put out.
I haven't even seen them yet, but apparently there are more minorities this time.
I guess there are some more Latinos and Dev Patel and some more black people.
And for the last couple of years, there's been this Oscars so white thing.
To me, and I can only speak for myself, this is like, your eye is just off the ball.
You're just paying attention to the wrong thing where--
It's nice to have people nominated for these things, but they're irrelevant in the scheme of what's important.
What you should be caring about is education and all that.
But the media has made such an importance out of this that it's like it's getting the black community's eye off what's actually important, which would be education and family and some of the other stuff.
I have an actor friend and I said, why is this important to you?
And he said, because it provides role models and enhances the self-esteem of black people.
That's what he said.
I said, are you aware that black boys and black girls have higher self-esteem than white girls and white boys?
This has been tested for decades.
It's been the case for a long time.
And there are very, very few Asian actors and actresses, yet Asian Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and Korean Americans On a per capita basis make more money than virtually anybody else in this country.
So it's utterly irrelevant.
And for us to pay attention to this?
It's also not true.
If you look at the last 15 years or so, roughly 10% or so of the nominees for the major categories have been black people.
There have been a couple of years where there's been a shutout, but add it all up, it's about parity with population.
I don't mean this literal conversation right now, but just this thing, you know, so much of what you talk about has to unfortunately be framed around something that you don't even think is real.
You know what I mean?
It's something that you think should be put behind us, that actually is behind us, and yet you have to talk about it a lot.
Just on a personal note, how does that feel for you?
There are Cubans who are braving shark-infested waters to get here.
There are people from Central America coming up here.
Why do people come here?
Why do so many people want to come to America?
And it's because it is the land of the free and the home of the brave.
It is a place where you can go from nothing to something faster than at any time and anywhere in all of human history.
That's why we're here.
And to me, again, you are Yeah, I suspect I know your answer to this, but what do you make of all these people that now want to look back on history and label everyone racist from back then?
You know, I was at Monticello, which was Thomas Jefferson's home.
Yeah, I suspect I know your answer to this, but what do you make of all these people
that now wanna look back on history and label everyone racist from back then?
You know, I was at Monticello, which was Thomas Jefferson's home.
Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, who was sleeping with at least one slave,
I think several who they, by the way, at Monticello, I took the tour,
this was only about a year and a half ago, they fully owned up to everything.
They did not, I thought it was incredible what they did.
They said this man was writing the laws to free the slaves at the same time.
He was sleeping with his slaves, which I think you could probably make an argument was rape in a certain respect because they weren't equals, right?
Now, I'm not saying he's a rapist in the conventional sense, but I can see that argument being made.
But what about that concept that we're gonna look back, that what I think the left is now trying to do is look at all of our founding fathers and take them out of the, give our 2017 morality to them who lived very complex lives.
I mean, without Thomas Jefferson, the slaves do not get freed as quickly as they did.
Well, I think the idea of going back and airbrushing history and looking at history through the filter of today's morality is pretty silly.
I think all a state can be is just in its own time, and that's what we're trying to be and trying to do right now.
And people are right to call slavery America's original sin, but without a compromise you wouldn't have had an America.
And there were 750,000 people, both sides, who died in order to free the slaves.
And people don't really have an understanding of the scale of the sacrifice that people made.
750,000 people at a time when this country was just 10% the size of what it is.
So that's like 7.5 million people dying in order for there to be an outcome when slaves are freed.
And those are the people that died, not the ones who've been injured.
It was a horrific thing that America went through.
And on the other side comes the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, the Civil Rights Movement, and all the things that have happened since then.
But this was a country that went to war over this proposition.
What do you make of this intersectional thing that we have going on now?
And I think we saw a lot of it at the Women's March this past weekend, where there's a certain amount of people that are trying to conflate trans issues with black issues, and then Muslim issues with women's issues, and just this whole thing where, you know, I talk about all the time, this oppression Olympics, and now they're all tied together by this oppression, but they all have to kind of beat each other in oppression to be the winner.
It's what I call the victocrat culture, where everybody has a grievance, and everybody's making demand on the government to solve that grievance, when in fact, we have far more in common than we have apart, and we ought to celebrate our similarities, and we're not doing that.
I tweeted out that this guy has obviously bad ideas.
I've had family members on both sides of my family killed in the Holocaust, so I am not a Nazi sympathizer in any way.
But I have to defend his right to free speech without being punched because that's the whole point.
You can't just defend it when it's easy.
You gotta defend it when you don't want to.
But I saw a lot of people on the left, a lot of famous people, a lot of people with a lot of influence saying, no, it's okay to punch Nazis, which if you just follow their logic through, well, he could have killed him because you could accidentally kill somebody.
And then if it's okay to punch a random person because of their beliefs, can we blow up his car?
Is it okay for me to burn up a building because I'm unhappy with the way the police treat me?
Are riots perfectly okay?
Would it be okay if somebody walked up to John Lewis and punched him because they feel that John Lewis should have attended the Donald Trump Inaugural?
Where do we go with this?
Are you kidding me?
And believe me, it would have been a huge story if there had been somebody like John Lewis who had been punched, as opposed to this Spencer guy that the media doesn't care about and feels is loathsome.
I understand that.
But I would have thought there would have been a little more coverage of it, but there wasn't very much.
So I sense that a lot of people think, though, that white supremacy is back, that they feel that there was a link to Trump somehow.
I don't really see that link, but there was a link that somehow he unearthed this, and now Pepe the Frog, And Harambe the monkey and the white supremacists, they've been unearthed and now they feel it's okay.
So their only response is to hit back.
I would argue, which I think you would argue, which is you beat them with better ideas.
Let this idiot talk and guess what?
He's gonna show what a fraudulent bigot he actually is.
But do you think there's any resurgence of actual white supremacy?
And again, Donald Trump is a bad vehicle to do that with because if you look at some of his points of view, they're quite populist and quite left-wing.
He and Bernie Sanders were completing each other's sentences on free trade, and when Donald Trump had that interview with 60 Minutes and he was asked about same-sex marriage, he said it was settled law.
He could have said the same thing he said about abortion, which was, I'm going to put on a justice who ultimately would turn over Roe v. Wade.
He didn't say that, but that's what he wants to happen.
But he could have said that regarding gay marriage, because gay marriage is less settled law than abortion.
On gay marriage, he said to Steve Kroft, that issue's been settled.
Really?
He could have said, I'm going to put on justices that will look at the Constitution and will have all these issues go back to the state, like abortion.
But he didn't.
He said same-sex marriage is settled law, which was his way, in my opinion, of signaling to all of the people in the country, especially his critics, that I am okay with same-sex marriage.
And as I mentioned, on free trade, he and Bernie Sanders were identical.
And on infrastructure, He wants a trillion-dollar infrastructure investment.
Chuck Schumer just now said that he's okay with that.
When you have Chuck Schumer smiling, it seems to me you ought to be worried, but the point is these are left-wing kinds of things, and they felt that Obama's stimulus was too small.
Well, I think it has to do with just the way he speaks.
They're giddy over all of that.
So why Donald Trump is engendering all of this hostility when he has so many centrist,
Well, I think it has to do with just the way he speaks.
I think, you know, my concern about him from day one is I've said a thousand times on the show,
I don't know what his moral center is.
But I don't know that you know what a lot of these guys' moral center is
A lot of them speak a lot cleaner, so you think you know it, and then you don't know it.
You'd probably argue that about Obama.
But for Trump, I don't know what it is.
That being said, I think the answer to your question is, I think the left no longer has the ability to understand the difference between words and actions.
So they see his gruff language and some poorly phrased things, and that he speaks not that well, And then they think that translates into action, when in fact he actually did a lot of things that brought them more center.
I think it goes back to what we said earlier, and that's just a lack of critical thinking.
I think when there's an R at the end of your name, all of a sudden there are certain sets of views that people assume you have, and they go after those views.
on my SiriusXM show talking about how he was for gay marriage, this is about a little bit before it got passed, so about let's say three years ago, four years ago, talking about how he personally was for gay marriage even though his dad wasn't and that his dad said, you go out and tell people whatever you want.
So I thought that's actually a nice marker.
of sort of what a father should be.
Do you fear his authoritarian side at all?
Because as you said, small L libertarian, so you want the government to scale back.
I sense he is going, yeah, he's gonna lower taxes and they're already doing some stuff with regulations that you're probably for and that kind of stuff.
But do you sense there could be an authoritarian side, even controlling what businesses can do overseas and that kind of stuff, that you may not like?
I don't know that I would label them authoritarian.
I would label them as stupid.
For example, saying I'm going to put on a 30 or 40 percent tariff on goods that come in from this country if you've left the country and started a factory.
All you're doing is discriminating against cheap prices and hurting American consumers.
I, as a business person, have an obligation To maximize shareholder return.
And if my biggest cost is labor, and I can go somewhere else and build my widgets for less money, I have an obligation to do that.
And if I don't do that, my competitor will.
And for a business person like Donald Trump to tell another business person, I'm going to punish you for seeking profits, to me is outrageous.
I understand and support his idea that a lot of the reason people go overseas is because we have onerous regulations.
And high corporate tax.
Once you lower the regulations and lower the corporate taxation, and I as a CEO have made a calculation that I can make more money by putting my factory in a third world country, how dare you tax me for doing that?
Right, so you would basically argue that if you lowered the corporate tax rates, did everything you could to unregulate business here, you wouldn't need that tax on the overseas stuff, right?
Because you would be humming and purring nicely here.
Well, you wouldn't need to leave the country to set up a factory because you would stay here.
What we have right now are all these environmental rules and regulations designed to fight climate change.
We have a very high corporate tax rate, the highest in the industrialized world.
You deal with those kinds of things, and you'll take away the incentive that some CEOs have to move outside the country.
But assuming you take all those away, you lower the regulatory burdens that CEOs have to deal with, and they still want to put a factory somewhere, you have absolutely no right to stop them from doing that, in my opinion.
Do you think it's hilarious how we look at certain companies that do the exact same things as other companies?
Some are okay, some aren't.
So, for example, Trump made his ties in Mexico, which I kept saying all along, this isn't something you're getting him on.
He's proving the point.
He's proving the point that it's cheaper to do there.
Change the regulations and then he wouldn't have to.
At the same time, a company, and Trump was mocked relentlessly for doing that, right?
At the same time, Apple designs their stuff in Cupertino, as they say, and it's all made in China, and they hide all kinds of stuff tax-wise, but we're all walking around with iPhones.
How come some companies are able to... that's just the cool factor of Apple?
Okay, let's move over to fake news because this is so tied into what's happening with Trump.
The outrage machine, and then the fake news machine, all of this, you've been all over this.
I am just apoplectic about what's going on with this, because I see the mainstream media crumbling, I see online media growing, but I see risks in that too, because anybody can put on a tie and pretend they're somebody and get a desk, and that's, you know, it is what it is.
There have been lots of stories, in my opinion, that have been fake news stories.
One of them was when Obama was pushing Obamacare, he said over and over again that his mother, who was suffering from cancer as she lay dying in her hospital bed in Hawaii, He said it over and over and over again, a book came out by a woman named Janie Scott, who used to work with the New York Times, therefore it must be a good book, and she said that those bills were promptly paid.
The only quarrel was that Obama's mom had taken out a policy so that if she got sick she would be entitled to money.
The law is that if you have been diagnosed, and you try to take a policy out like that, we can challenge it, and that's what they challenged.
But regarding her medical bills, hospital bills, they were paid promptly, but he said it over and over and over again, and it helped to drive the narrative that if my mother got jacked over, and she has a PhD, and has a son from Harvard with a law degree, imagine what these insurance carriers will do to you.
It turns out completely not true.
Another fake news.
I think I said earlier, when Obama said during his many press conferences, I am most proud of the fact that I rescued the economy.
Really?
TARP was done by George W. Bush, the bailouts were done by George W. Bush, and many of the things that Obama has done, including stimulus, actually hurt the recovery, didn't help it.
Yet he says this over and over again with a straight face, and the failure of the media not to ask challenging questions when he raises that, to me, is fake news.
So I remember when that happened, and I remember thinking when Obama said it, Yes, they had set the date, but obviously Obama had plenty of political capital at the time.
The willingness to look the other way because it's a guy that you're pulling for.
When Obama came into office, he reneged on a deal that George W. Bush had negotiated.
He negotiated a deal with Poland and with the Czech Republic for them to get missile defense.
Russia didn't like it.
Obama thought that he could curry favor with Russia by reneging on the deal, and he did.
The failure of the media to bring this up and to bring up him saying him pushing the reset button and him saying to Medvedev when I get re-elected I'll have more flexibility.
The failure of the media to bring this up when they're hitting Donald Trump for being too cozy with Putin is another example of fake news.
First off, the main Twitter moment headline was saying that he was focusing on the numbers of people there.
That was just a small portion, and it was only because they kept asking him that same question.
So that's also fake news, right?
Where they just keep framing something a certain way.
Not just what is said, but that you can take an hour and a half thing and go, Well, this was the part that was important, when you know it actually wasn't the part.
Spicer not only quarreled with the idea that Trump's audience was larger than what the media reported, he also talked about the fact that a reporter from Time Magazine, not the Buck Tussle Gazette, Time Magazine, said that Donald Trump removed the bust of MLK from the Oval Office.
Now that to me is a major story, if it were true.
It is not true.
Time Magazine, a reporter for Time Magazine tweeted it and it went around the world.
Rather than focus on that fake news part, they talk about what Sean Spicer said about the crowd size, because that's something they could probably make an argument about.
But the MLK thing, they can't make an argument about that, so we haven't even talked about that.
And we found out because of WikiLeaks, David, how many of these reporters were in bed with the DNC, in bed with Hillary.
I mean, a New York Times reporter is doing a massive story on Hillary and gave her veto proof over quotes she doesn't like.
A power that she in fact used and took out a quote that she'd made about Sarah Palin.
Washington Post was doing a story on John Podesta and found out some conflict of interest regarding money and gave him a heads up and told him don't worry about it, we'll bury it in the story.
Staffers for Jake Tapper and for Wolf Blitzer of CNN contacted the DNC and said we're about ready to interview some Republicans, you have any questions for us?
Dana Milbank is a columnist with the Washington Post.
He did a story, a column called the 10 most outrageous things Donald Trump has ever said.
He contacted the DNC and said, I'm about ready to do this column on the 10 most outrageous things Donald Trump ever said.
You didn't even mention the most egregious one, in my opinion, which is the whole Donna Brazile thing, which is to me the heart, because that one is the heart of how corrupt But at least CNN fired her, but the DNC hired her as interim chair, even after she was outed as having conspired with Hillary to make sure that Bernie Sanders did not win.
I just went above it, that's why I mentioned that number, because I'm any idiot that could have as much influence.
But really, you could have a set, you could figure out how to do the social media game, and somehow, because of that, you got a little blue check too, now you're an authority on this stuff.
So that I do see as a major risk, that while I, Wanted the mainstream media to get the lashing it deserved.
The fact that it's now everyone's just picking their truth wherever they can find it is a huge problem.
It also means that the traditional establishment media can be gone around You can get your ideas out and nothing can stop you from communicating to people.
But you're right, it means that anybody can communicate and whether or not he or she is credible is left to you as a consumer to figure out.
Is there any way that you think Trump can reconcile this relationship with the media?
Because I think it's almost the most important thing right now, more important than the policies.
Because it's one thing to just rail against the media all the time.
Again, I don't like what the mainstream media has done, but do you think he can get to a point where he'll actually do some real sit-downs, do some real press conferences, and not do the same things?
Be willing to sit down with an interviewer, hopefully it'll be me, but maybe it'll be somebody else, and not demand the questions in advance.
Be better than all the reasons that you just said the Democrats Well, I don't think it's Donald Trump's job to curry favor with the media.
And as far as I'm concerned, he has very little risk.
He is disliked more than Reagan, more than George W. Bush.
In my opinion, they're out to get him.
And for him to have a more confrontational attitude towards the media, to me, makes perfect sense because there is no upside in him doing it any other way.
They're going to go after him like nobody's business.
They dislike him because of his attitude about immigration.
They think of him as a racist.
You think of him as a bigot, as a tyrant?
If that's your attitude, and you're not going to cut me any slack, why should I kiss your butt?
And so I have no problem with what Sean did.
Sean Spicer, his first informal press conference, when he blasted the media the way he did.
And it does turn out that Donald Trump's audience, which is the word he used to watch the Inaugural, was bigger than any audience in history, in part because of social media.
It also turns out, apparently, that when you look at the pictures of Obama's inaugural and Trump's, Trump's does look thinner, but my understanding is part of that is because of security measures.
There's certain places you can't stand anymore, certain places you can't go through anymore, so a lot of people couldn't get to the main area because of all these security requirements.
But you'd agree all that is just sideshow nonsense, right?
Like it's actually completely irrelevant whether, The amount of people I'm talking about, not the lying about it, but just whether there were X amount of people or Y, it's just irrelevant.
Do you think the media regrets, you know, it's hard to categorize all the media, but when they look back at the way they treated McCain, who now looks like the most moderate, Republican of all time, you know?
And they were times calling him racist.
And I think he has an adopted black daughter, if I'm not mistaken.
Or when they look at Romney and the binders of women and made it sound like he hates women.
In a way, they created Trump.
Because any Republican was going to get the cries of racism, was gonna get the cries of misogyny and the cries of xenophobia and homophobia and all that.
I think the media did help to create Donald Trump.
People resent the idea that the media has gone after Republicans in a way that they've not gone after Democrats.
And so there's a distrust.
And when Donald Trump talked about political correctness and how he was no longer going to be politically correct, A lot of people took that to mean I'm no longer going to think of myself as a racist, as a sexist, simply because I've got normal views and normal ideas that any other guy has.
And I think Donald Trump has given people like that a certain amount of comfort and credibility.