Johnny C. Taylor critiques identity politics as stifling minority voices while advocating for judging individuals by character rather than immutable traits. He highlights the shifting demographics of HBCUs, warns against erasing historical context regarding Confederate monuments, and challenges the assumption that reducing incarceration solves systemic root causes. Taylor also addresses the irony of DACA versus struggles for Black descendants, notes the lack of a singular modern African American leader, and supports an independent approach to national security. Transitioning to his new role at SHRM, he predicts higher education's collapse due to demographic shifts, urging a move toward skills-based credentialing and lifelong learning over traditional degrees. Ultimately, Taylor calls for "intestinal courage" to engage in difficult conversations, arguing that rational debate offers a path to rebuild America beyond partisan vilification. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the themes we consistently talk about here at the Rubin Report is why it's important
to judge people as individuals and not as a collective.
You as an individual are much more than your immutable characteristics, be it your skin color, your religion, or your sexuality.
To judge you on those characteristics is actually what the essence of prejudice really is.
Prejudice, of course, means to prejudge.
So if you look at a black person, or a Muslim person, or a gay person, and think that you know what they think, or more importantly, how they should think, based on those characteristics, then you are actually the one who's being prejudiced.
Sadly, many of the people who accuse others of bigotry and racism these days are often the people who practice this brand of prejudice the most without even realizing that they're doing so.
Just look at some of the things that my friends Larry Elder, Majid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are called by the so-called tolerant side.
When you look at a group of people and you think you know what they should think or what's best for them based on those outward characteristics, and not what's going on in their own minds, you not only lock people into your preconceived notions of what they are, but stifle the voices of the minorities within these minorities.
This is why the voices of black conservatives and gay Muslims, for example, are so relevant and interesting today.
If you really listen to these minorities within the minorities, you will judge these people on their thoughts, their logic and their reason, instead of simply how they look or who they love.
In a way, the very existence of these free thinkers within these minority communities flips identity politics on its head, showing the flaws of this postmodern, intersectional way of thinking.
Just see how quickly those who preach identity politics turn on black or Latino people who have conservative political beliefs, or how easily they dismiss gays or women who dare talk about how poorly they're treated in Islamic societies.
Identity politics only works if you believe that the most important quality about each of us are the attributes which we are born with, thus cannot change, rather than the ideas which we come to learn.
I view this twisted ideology as a true existential danger for the tolerant and liberal, albeit flawed, country that America is.
Martin Luther King Jr.' 's desire for his children to be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin is being undermined by the very people who purport to be the tolerant ones.
We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty today and joining me is the CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, Johnny C. Taylor.
The organization represents nearly 300,000 students who attend the 47 historical black colleges in America today.
I heard Johnny speak at an event in Dallas a couple months ago and was blown away by his passion, his commitment to educating young people, and his desire to move past identity politics.
We're going to talk about politics, race, and much more.
Has the role of the black college changed as we've become a more fair and just society?
That's just one of the many questions I'll ask Johnny, and I'll only judge him by the
content of his answers, not the color of his skin.
We're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty today and joining me is the president
and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, the only national organization representing
the nearly 300,000 students attending America's 47 historically black colleges.
I gotta tell you, man, and I just did tell you, but now I'll repeat it since the cameras are on.
We've been doing this thing with Learn Liberty for a little over a year or so, and they've sent us some great authors and professors and thinkers.
I've never requested anyone.
You, sir, are the first person I requested because I saw you speak a couple months back at a conference for academics, had to do a lot about free speech and liberty and all sorts of things, and you gave the keynote address on the final night, and I thought, this guy, is possibly the most passionate speaker I've ever seen in my life.
Yeah, I feel that too, and we kind of hit that a little bit before.
I gotta do it all over right now.
Tell me a little bit more about your resume, before we get to what you've been doing these last couple years, because yeah, you just mentioned some of that stuff.
I mean, you've got a pretty prime, your LinkedIn's gotta be pretty fat.
I mean, that thing lasts on what, like eight pages or something?
Sat on a plane one day, met a, I did not know at the time, a billionaire, Wayne Huizenga, who had this small little business called Blockbuster that he was building.
I went in as the third lawyer on staff and literally went through this huge acquisition spree.
And you know, you remember, Blockbuster was on every corner.
So I did that.
Viacom bought us.
So I've spent my time as a lawyer As an HR executive and then ultimately once Viacom bought us and worked for Sumner at Viacom, Sumner Redstone, and then my last corporate gig was running a business, a subsidiary for Barry Diller in New York.
So I literally have had all the back office functions and then ran frontline operator running a business for Barry and then came to TMCF in 2010 as the CEO.
We provide scholarships for the absolutely most talented students.
So this is not sort of a social services feel-good for kids who didn't get a shot K-12.
These are the brightest kids who frankly just have money problems they need.
So scholarships that are need and merit-based.
Then, capacity building.
We've talked with our schools a lot about, there was a time when HBCUs, captive market, if you were black and you wanted to go to college, you attended a black college.
Well, everything changed.
Be careful what you pray for.
We asked for diversity, we got it.
We asked for integration, we got it.
And so now, black students have options.
And so black colleges, the historically black colleges have got to step up.
So the second thing is to build their capacity to be attractive.
The third thing that we do is governmental affairs.
I mean a lot of advocacy and policy work to make sure that we're not making emotional decisions.
We want to do what is good for our communities and what's good for this country.
Those are really the three things that we focus on as a fund and that's the work that we do.
And the thing that most of the folks frankly don't realize is Historically black colleges are not EBCUs.
They're not exclusively black colleges.
In fact, four, currently four of our member schools are majority white.
How much battling is there over what it means to be historically black versus currently diverse?
Because I would imagine you've got, you know, ideas and academics and administrators who are probably pretty entrenched in keeping things, just looking at it by numbers, not necessarily diversity of thought and all that.
It's ugly and it's interesting because I'm surprised, and I know we'll talk about some of this, but I'm surprised that the number, you'd like to think millennials, you know, we think millennials and we group them in and they're open and they're diverse and they're, well, I was surprised.
We've had some students, really, not faculty, not alumni, but students, 18 and 19 year olds, They take great issue with the fact that the institutions are more diverse than they were.
They wanted to come to an all-black institution.
And when they get there and realize that we have international students and white students and Hispanic students, they really push back.
Well, first of all, you explain to them that HBCU is not EBCU.
You start with that.
You also then explain, I find myself oftentimes when I'm talking to them saying, Let me just put yourself in this situation.
So just recently, one of our campuses, a group of students were really upset because, in fact, it was all over the national news.
Students came on the campus of Howard University wearing the Make America Great Again t-shirts, right?
And I said, now, I just, one of the student leaders, I pulled to the side, I said, I want you just for a second to ask me, how do you think this will play out?
A group of black students, right after Obama's elected, go visit Liberty University's campus.
They have on the wonderful Obama t-shirts where they're proud of this new president, and they were literally run off of campus.
They were threatened.
They were harassed.
How do you think that will go over?
And so, what I find myself doing is just literally put yourself in that situation and tell me why this is that different.
And then you get that pause, that moment.
By the way, that's what motivates me to do my work, because that's the way you influence sort of the narrative and how these young people think.
You have to just stop and say, I get how you feel right now emotionally about this, but for just a second, let's flip the script and tell me how this works.
And you're smart, you're bright.
Tell me how this works out.
That's really part of what motivates me to do the work.
Because everybody seems hysterical over emotional stuff.
I can understand it.
If I was black and I wanted to go to a historically black college and I got there and I thought it was gonna be 80% black and I got there and I was like, wait a minute, I'm actually still a minority here.
The emotional part, I can understand it being like, this doesn't feel right to me.
But then when you hear that, and you go, well, things actually are changing, integration is changing, this is all good.
This is exactly what we said we wanted, is the opportunity to choose, kind of.
That's what, I can tell you, that's what my great-grandparents, that's what my, in fact, Thurgood Marshall himself, Folks don't realize this.
Thurgood Marshall didn't choose to go to Howard University Law School.
Thurgood Marshall, fact of the matter, applied to the University of Maryland, was denied admission to that law school, and went to Howard because it was the college for black students, the law school for black students.
And so you just have to think about it.
He then subsequently brought lawsuits to actually stop that very thing.
Again, this wasn't anti-HBCU.
The message was, I want to be able to choose, irrespective of my skin color, where I go to school.
So all of us should have predicted that we would be right where we are today.
And what I find is the young folks just don't understand the history.
And then the older people refuse to tell the honest history.
When I was in school, you were encouraged to be a little bit of a provocateur.
Always respectfully.
No one wanted you to go out and hurt someone's feelings.
But we were encouraged in law school, for example, to look at things from all different sorts of perspectives.
I was given a case once where you'd have to represent the plaintiff and then turn around and go against that plaintiff.
You know, defend him.
We've just lost that in education now.
And I gotta tell you, more and more I'm talking to students who say, you know, I feel a certain way, but I know that if I either uttered those, my thoughts, even in a question format in the classroom, I'd be attacked by my professor.
It would impact my participation in class, grade, that portion of my grade.
unidentified
Also, and more importantly... What do you say to kids when they say that?
I say, you know, perhaps you're at the wrong school.
I said, you've got to vote with your feet.
College is not about, it's supposed to be a time to explore and to grow.
If you already knew what you needed to know to sort of live in life and be successful, then you don't need to spend five or six years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If you are the same person that you walked in the door at the end of your freshman year, then you were cheated.
And I tell them, you should challenge the institution to give you a better education.
And sometimes The way you get better is to have to confront ideas that you don't necessarily embrace.
You don't understand them.
One situation that sort of comes up, and I think it helps my students a lot, understand where I come from.
I said, you know, listen, I was an employment lawyer early in my career.
And at that time, there was a big question, for example, around whether or not Gay, lesbian, sexual orientation was covered under Title VII.
Okay?
Big question.
Gender and sex was clear.
If you were being discriminated against on the basis of something else, on sort of sexual orientation, that wasn't covered.
I actually brought those cases and made those arguments.
I defended them, that it was not the intent of the Congress, and this was ridiculous, etc.
That gender is something that's innate, you're born that way, and well, gay and lesbian, maybe not so much.
You start sitting down and getting to know people who are different than you are, or that your family is, or that you, you just, you began to evolve and it challenges your own notions of what is right and what is wrong.
And maybe you conclude there is no right or wrong here.
This is just life and we're evolving as a human species, kind of.
Even I've had to do that.
And there's so many instances of that in my own life.
And so when you begin to have conversations in the context of the classroom with students, you see the growth.
That's the beauty.
That should be the beauty of it.
Instead, what I'm seeing more and more, David, is they're actually retarding the growth of the students.
You're not encouraged to think.
You come in thinking a certain way.
Your professors want you to think a certain way.
Your institution wants you to think a certain way.
But here's the problem.
The real problem is then you go to work and you have to confront the reality of, you know, you're not protected in this bubble.
You've got to live and work next to people who don't look like you.
And frankly, that's a challenge.
That's something that people talk about a lot when they talk about black colleges.
The only, I don't question the relevancy of HBCUs.
I think that's a dumb argument.
It's a dumb question.
There is a fair question that is posed if you have gone to a black elementary school, middle school, grew up in a black community, and then you went to a black college.
The first meaningful interaction that you have with people who are not black is in the workplace.
You're going to be at a disadvantage, just practically speaking, and so it has some downside.
Tons of upside, by the way.
Being a majority and a minority community, black colleges give you a very special and nurturing environment to grow in.
Is that just the natural evolution of the way humans are?
That if you have a legit grievance, you may need a different place?
Or for Thurgood Marshall, who did not get accepted to the Maryland Law School.
So he needed a place to go to.
Completely legit in that time and place.
But that eventually, if equality works, because the arc does bend towards justice, that eventually you slowly need these things less.
It doesn't mean that there's no use for them, but a lot of people are sort of addicted to that original pain or instance or whatever you want to call it.
And that's not limited to black people or any group of people.
It's just that you get used to it.
And this notion that we were to create... Remember, even the concept of affirmative action.
It was supposed to be remedial.
It was not supposed to go on forever, right?
But what happens is if you get used to it, and it's a benefit that inures to you and people who look like you, it's really tough to one day say, okay, that's done.
I have a seven-year-old daughter, and there's a point at which she's going to come off of Daddy's credit card, and she's going to fight me if it's 18, if it's 28, if it's 38.
The day that I decide you now have to leave the nest and figure this out yourself, If it's 38, can I move in with you?
I mean, come on now, what are we talking about?
But you're right, you're onto something.
Think about just in real life.
The thing that I'm intrigued by is I could not wait until I turned 18 so that I could leave my nest, my mama and my daddy's house, and go and start creating my own.
And I'm seeing, some of it for economic reasons, but just everyone's sort of staying at home.
It's a very different world.
that we live in right now, and I'm intrigued by it.
Yeah, I was mentioning to you before also that I just went to George Washington's estate, and you can go to the slave quarters and they do a daily memorial and all that, and they talk about the men living here, the women living here.
They sometimes only got to interact for minutes in a day and all sorts of stuff.
Speaking of history, I wasn't planning on going here, but as long as we're talking about this, what do you make of all the monument stuff happening right now?
Because I just read one this week that at Christ Church, and I think it's in Alexandria, they're taking down the monument.
I think it's just a plaque, actually.
And I guess there was also a plaque to Robert E. Lee.
That upset some people, so they said, all right, we're gonna take down George Washington's as well.
George Washington, there's no doubt, he did own slaves.
He freed as many as he legally could when he died.
Not all of them were, because some of them were technically, I think, owned by Martha, Her family or something like that.
But as I said, they do a great memorial to them.
These people were all complex people who were writing laws to free people while they owned people.
But frankly, you know, there are a couple of aha moments for me.
First of all, We don't like to acknowledge this, but black people own slaves in America too.
That's real.
The litmus test is, if you own slaves, somehow we should erase from history or put you into a museum in a little box so that only people who visit museums will learn about you.
But to your point, if you take this to its, I think, illogical end, We then go through and parse every person's history, and we find the one thing they did that we didn't like.
Which, by the way, at that time, at that point in the world, may have been totally the norm.
I'm not arguing it was good or bad, I'm just saying it was the way people lived, and it was what was the moire, the folkway, whatever, of the time.
I struggle with this.
I think you put everything into context.
When I ride through and I see a Confederate statue, I was laughing, I was in Old Town Alexandria the other day, I have passed this particular... Which one is it?
It's the one that's sitting right in...it's just past, I don't know the street, past King Street, I think it is.
There's a statue of this guy on a horse.
I've passed it a number of times and thought, hmm, that's interesting.
I've also...I live in Washington, D.C.
on Capitol Hill, and there are all sorts of these statues that, frankly, Charles Barkley, who I don't quote very often, Come on, do a Barkley impression.
I can't quite put it down, but he said something which was really provocative.
He said, frankly, most African American people aren't thinking about that damn monument.
I mean, it's just, we have real issues.
Facing our community.
And the idea that we have now gotten preoccupied with these monuments is bizarre to me, and frankly, and more disturbing to me, is that it's divisive.
Anytime you start peeling apart people's history, all of this is sort of the history of the country, the good and the bad.
And I think that's the beauty of telling the story.
And when I talk to students about it, because I've had this conversation with some of our students, and I said, do you think, you know, all of us, if we go back into our history, you're going to find out that your grandparents weren't perfect people.
You know, the grandfather who beat on your grandmother, who cheated on your grandmother, the grandmother who, well, let's say back in the day decided not to have a kid, just had a kid out of wedlock and decided to give him to an aunt and never acknowledged that that kid was hers.
And the notion that somehow you've literally made this person's life less important because of a decision that happened.
I mean, all of us are growing on this journey called life.
And I just think we've gotten too serious about it.
And it's also, frankly, divided the country, a country that is way too divided right now.
I mean, I've never seen, I think of Martin Luther King, Lincoln, Thurgood Marshall, they have to be like sitting back somewhere looking at this saying, oh my god, I can't believe once we pulled the rules down, changed the laws, became a more open and free society, none of us could have thunk that this is where we'd end up.
But then you can't turn around and say, oh, public schools are wonderful, they're great for everyone, when, but no, the reality is they're good enough for your children.
Those are some of the moments when we have to stop and just pause and say, You know, it's gotten crazy.
That's the point.
I mean, I'm so frustrated with it right now because we're picking apart people's lives.
And the reality is none of us would want someone to do the same thing on an individual level with me.
You want to pick my life apart?
You can come out and say I'm a horrible person.
Ignore the fact that I have a beautiful seven-year-old daughter, that my parents are wonderful, that I'm a good son.
But you want to focus on the one or two decisions that perhaps I would have made.
And frankly, I would have done them differently if I were 48.
But I'm not.
I was 18.
We're just in an interesting spot.
I know that's what you're talking about, but it disturbs me.
It disturbs me in some very significant ways that I'm raising a child in this world, in this country in particular, that's not the country I envisioned it would be.
Do you think there's any chance that it actually is the country, but it's just the level of noise has gotten so out of control?
So when we think about, you know, I talk a lot about social media and how Twitter is affecting everybody and the way we all cater news to ourselves and all that stuff.
But then I took all of August offline.
I shut down, I was working on my book, I disappeared for a while.
And when I spent more time just, I mean, I talk to people for a living, but outside of this room, just talking to random people, I think most people do buy everything that you just said there.
And I don't think that people are necessarily as hysterical as maybe we feel they are.
Do you think that's possible?
Or is that I'm just trying to give a real silver lining to this thing?
Because as much as we can't just put the media over in a little box.
Particularly, it used to be traditional media, but now it's social media.
And so when you add all of that, it really does influence the narrative.
It influences what people think it means to live in America.
And I do think we're in a very different place now.
You're right.
Every person in the world doesn't know what's going on.
Manafort gets charged today.
The vast majority of Americans don't know or care.
It's people who watch the news and who read and who think about this and, you know, where it matters.
The vast majority of Americans are like, I'm trying to keep the lights on, I want to put my kid in school, and I want a decent life and retire with some decent savings in the bank.
That's more practical.
So I think you're right, but the influencers, people like me and you, maybe not like the two of us because the reality is, The more liberal media has just put it out there so far, progressively.
They're really crafting the narrative and the message, and it's something that we have to pause.
My grandmother one day, I'll never forget it, she said, they wouldn't allow this in Whitetown.
They would never put up with this in White Town.
She was so bothered.
So she became committed.
She called, demanded police.
She demanded that you remove these people from our community.
And so, fast forward, you just want to release them all back to our community?
And I said this to one of the attendees.
I said, here's a problem.
That sounds great, and it's great for you because they're not coming back to your community.
That's why this isn't your problem.
If you release 50% of these people, where do you think they're coming?
They're not coming to suburbia.
They're going to show back up in the communities and continue terrorizing and negatively impacting the community.
So on that front, I tell that story to say, you know, listen, I am passionate about it.
And I am bothered.
I appreciate well-intended people thinking that just releasing half the people who are currently incarcerated into our communities is a good thing.
But they don't think about the impact of that.
When my kid can't go out and play in the streets for being shot, my daughter has to walk past these scantily clad women who are selling themselves and she begins to think that's normal.
That's not the world.
And you may call that a non-violent offender.
But it's not non-violent.
It's actually more violent because it's working into the psyche of these young people.
It's not that scary because, by the way, my only point is it doesn't have to be mom or dad.
It has to be someone.
It could be a school teacher that helped infuse morals and the sense of right and wrong into that kid.
But we've got to go back.
We can't just wake up and say, okay, now you've got a 19-year-old who has a long criminal history, no regard for anyone or anything, and say, we just think he or she should not be incarcerated.
Then pray tell, what are you going to do about that?
Okay, came from a bad place, didn't have the proper support, potentially in jail for doing drugs, not even selling them.
So the idea is, okay, you want to get this person out of jail, even if it's just an economic thing.
You don't want to have the system spending money on that.
But now you put them out there, you still have some responsibility, I think, that the system or whatever you want to call it has some responsibility to make sure that now you just don't toss this back into the mix of what got them there in the first place.
You know, DACA is, on its surface, it's an easy, it should be an easy, but when I've come, talking about the complexity of it and the nuances.
So, increasingly, our students on HBCU campuses are raising They have real beef with this, is the way they describe it.
One of the students put it, and it made me pause, because I was like, that's an easy one.
You're not going to send 12 million people home.
These kids were brought here by their parents.
They didn't have a choice.
If I tell my daughter we're going somewhere, she's going, right?
So that's what it is.
So I get it.
And then one of the young women put it best.
She said, you know, think about the, she called it, she said, the irony of this is that America is all rallying around providing not only the ability for these students to enroll in school, but oftentimes full scholarships for these students, the DACA students.
While, she said, and here I am, the legal descendant of slaves.
We were forced to come here, and I have to figure out how to pay for my education.
And so there's this tension, this real tension, and they have to whisper it.
So I asked her, I said, well, why don't you just talk about that in class?
And she said, oh, I would be killed.
You can't talk about that in class.
She said, but there's an underground sort of conversation about that doesn't seem fair.
If America has enough money to provide additional scholarship assistance to students, then shouldn't you take care of people like us, who were brought here?
Our parents were brought here, and we truly are.
And so I was like, wow, that's really, it was a really, I hadn't thought about it.
It made me pause.
There's also a recent article, I think it's the Chicago Times, where a guy wrote an editorial about Rahm Emanuel wants to spend one or two million dollars on providing IDs for undocumented immigrants.
And the black alderman had a meltdown.
I mean literally it's quoted all over the paper saying this is absurd and enough's enough.
We have Americans here, African-Americans in Chicago who need X, Y, and Z and instead you want to go spend a million.
So there's a tension.
America's at a really inflection point that's just not black or white or conservative and liberal.
Yeah, and it seems to me that obviously that conversation is good, and it's nice to hear that a student said something to you that made you re-evaluate, because that shows you practice what you preach, obviously.
That's right.
Who's the leader right now?
I know you probably get this one all the time, and I don't even like the question in a certain way, but who should Black America, whatever that is, it's so stupid talking about that stuff, but who should, in your opinion, should the black community be turning to to make some sense of this?
Because there's the usual cast of characters, and we can name all the ones that you don't like that are on MSNBC every day, and I don't like them either, so let's just forget those guys.
But are there some people that we should be looking at that, and I don't even mean just black America, but for people that really care, period, about freedom.
Martin Luther King was a leader, although, you know, he wasn't from industry, he didn't, you know, so, but still he represented, just he caught and captured the voice of the community.
I have to honestly say, and it's something that bothers me, I don't know who that person is.
And I'm not so sure that if you asked ten black people, nine of them would say, I'm not sure who that leader is.
Yeah, and it's so complex, because do you remember a couple years ago when Oprah said the thing about how, well, we just need these old racists to die?
Yeah, I remember that.
She was referencing some people's grandmothers and grandfathers, and I remember thinking, and I have no beef with Oprah, obviously.
My grandmother taught school for 46 years in Broward County, Florida.
And I remembered, she said something to me now, and I think the world of my grandmother, she's still alive, 93 years old, 94, she just had her birthday.
And I remembered going down to the University of Miami and I came home and I said, I think I've met someone.
And it was, she assumed it was a white woman because I'm at a majority institution, you know, Lily White, University of Miami.
And she said, son, I'd rather you bring a man home than a white woman.
Wow.
Now this is someone who I adore and I think the world of her.
But I had to stop and pause.
It stuck me.
I remember that.
I'd rather you bring a man home.
than a white woman. And I had to realize that a lot of folks hold these racial sort of things,
and they are products of their era. So when I see an older 90-year-old, 80-year-old white guy who
has and harbors some racial animus, I wasn't around then.
I can't really put that in context.
I'm not justifying it.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong.
But what I am saying, to your earlier point, is I love my grandmother.
And if you tried to attack my grandmother because she espoused that worldview, I would attack you.
Because I look at the totality of her contributions to this country and her racist tendencies I want a product of the era that she grew up in, but they are also a very, very small part of the full woman that I know.
I don't wanna go too far down the Trump thing, unless you wanna go there.
No, no, no, no.
Do you think that whatever's happening with him right now, and as you said, as we're taping this today, Manafort was indicted by the FBI.
It sounds like it's not even directly about the Trump campaign, that it's about some Ukraine stuff before, but we'll see where all that plays out.
But as a general rule, what do you make of what's happened?
Because to me, what I keep trying to say is, if you just let go of the tweets for a minute, you let go of the media hysteria, basically nothing bad has happened, basically.
So to me, the center basically is somewhat economically conservative in that you earn your money, you should keep it, and I also always argue that's the best way, if you hate Trump, the best way to limit government is to stop giving it so much money and power, right?
Because sometimes, you know what, you might get Bernie, And he can use a lot of power that you like, but then sometimes you're gonna get a guy you don't like, so let's just stop giving them so much power.
But in a weird way, does this all show that our system is working properly?
Yeah, you know, relating this to sort of where we started, as you're saying this, I'm thinking, you know, there's something interesting here.
If this identity politics stuff wins the day and they start taking down more monuments and we start judging Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the founders on the morals of today, it's not just that we'll remove them, but we'll actually, all of their good ideas, all of their good ideas will have to go away.
They won't, Even if you like a lot of those good ideas, you know what I mean?
They won't just magically keep some of the ideas.
You're going to actually remove all of those ideas, and then what are we left with?
But see, I don't, and why, maybe, but it's also equally lazy to think if I were, You know, I'm a millionaire.
I wouldn't want to give more of my money to someone else if I earned it, right?
Even if I bought a freaking lottery ticket.
You know, just basic.
Take some person who's from a fragile community and who's got limited resources, and you say to them, you won the lottery tomorrow, you won ten million dollars.
Five million of it goes to the federal government in your state.
How does that make you feel?
Bad!
That's lazy.
You don't have to think a lot to say, that's not a good result.
So I don't know why this is... I don't know that it's easy.
I think it's we have just pounded into people's heads that Taking that the rich people are bad, you're vilified for going to work every day and making some good decisions and some luck and some God and some fate, all of that in the totality, you're bad for having done well.
I mean, if my house burns down, I want a police department to show up.
I don't want to have to rely on my three neighbors with buckets to come... I mean, a fire department to show up.
So I think government, the infrastructure, is important of any society that will endure.
I do think that we've gotten too far, though, when you have just huge bureaucracy and departments designed to solve problems that, frankly, will solve themselves amongst people.
Yeah, but we've become completely dependent on it.
Is there any way to scale it back?
That's one of the questions I try to ask a lot of my more libertarian guests.
It seems like this thing has gotten so big, and when you factor it in with handouts and all of this stuff, that if you were ever to take it back, a lot of people think, well, you'd just be screwing over all the poor people, all that.
Then I have some people who come on and say, no, you just cut it tomorrow, and we see what happens.
Will charities come in?
Will churches and synagogues and mosques and all that, will they pick up the slack?
You know, if you cut the funding to Planned Parenthood, would Barbra Streisand and Rosie and the rest of them suddenly put some of their money towards that?
So was that his best line during the campaign, when he said, basically, to the black community, he was like, what do you got to lose?
Do you think it was an actual, it ended up being a good line?
Because it sounded off when I heard it, and then I've talked to a lot of people, and they kind of were like, yeah, all these Democratic-run cities, Chicago, Atlanta, Ferguson, that's where it's the worst.
So it's funny, I remembered, I know where I was at that moment when that happened, and I was with a group of my friends, and one of my friends, who is as liberal as they come, I've never said, I mean, he drips of it, and he said to me, It was this moment, like, when you eat something that's bitter at first, and then you're like, oh, that tastes good, ultimately.
And he said, he's on to something.
And that was when I knew that actually resonated.
Now, it didn't feel good at first.
I mean, I got it, check.
Because it was a little dismissive, and frankly, the African-American community is still enjoying the fact that we elected our first African-American president.
And frankly, so are a lot of Non-African Americans, right?
It was a big deal.
So they felt like it was a shot at Obama.
That was the issue.
If you had taken Obama out of the equation, having been the president, it was a totally reasonable statement to say whomever the guy was before He didn't meaningfully change your life.
I am prepared to do it.
What do you have to lose?
So I think if you took Obama out of it and the pride associated with him being a first, I think it was totally logical.
Ironically, I think you can make a great argument that the president himself, whether it's Obama or Trump or anybody else, shouldn't have that much power over your life.
Is it funny to you how everybody's sort of flipped their opinions on almost everything these days?
Because as you're saying that, I'm thinking if we just go back 20 minutes when we were talking about DACA, it's like, well, suddenly Democrats, because they didn't like what Trump was doing, were fighting for states' rights.
And it's like, yeah, I want you guys to fight for states' rights all the time, because then I'll start voting with you again.
Man, to me, that's like the most perfect example of how screwed up our system is, that a governor who is the executor of the state would be like, no, no, no, the thing that I'm supposed to do, you do.
Let's send it over there, that way I'm free in the clear.
That's like the worst, that's why people hate politicians.
And the idea that, you know, literally, he said a guy either pulled a gun or a knife on him or something, one of his fellow members in Congress, and it's just fascinating, literally, he said, but that's within the party.
Yeah, it's also funny because like, you know, you'll always hear all these media people and politicians be like, House of Cards is the most realistic show ever.
And it's like, well, there's an awful lot of murder and drug use and evil backdoor deals and you're just, you guys are all kind of telling us.
I'm going to run an organization called the Society for Human Resource Management, SHRM.
And it's the world's largest association dedicated to human resources.
It's a trade association for the profession.
of human resources professionals.
And, you know, so some have said, wow, that's kind of out there.
Well, no, it isn't for a couple of reasons.
First of all, I've been in higher ed for the last seven and a half years.
If you ask nine out of 10 college students, why did you go to college,
it's to get a good job, period.
So it's a very natural kind of thing.
There's no point of going if this doesn't turn into some way to provide.
The other thing, though, is it's a natural sort of evolution in my career.
I now understand higher ed.
Actually, I think I have a really good understanding of all of the education, so PK through 16.
We've now got to connect it.
There's not an article that comes out where employers say, the system is not giving me what I want.
The students who are graduating don't have the skills that we need and so they're frustrated because I'm paying taxes to pay for this system, education system, and what comes out on the other end.
The assembly line model is, right, really bad.
I pay for all of this and at the end of the car, I don't like it.
So I think this gives me an opportunity to take what I've done for the last seven and a half years, And now get industry, bring the two together, and say, let's figure out how to make this system work.
We're spending a lot of money as a country on education, and to what end?
So what are some of the ways you could shift education?
I mean, I think the basic premise is get people to listen, get people to really understand what they believe in, but is there something that's a little more concrete that you're gonna go in and be like, guys, this is what we gotta change.
Concretely bringing those education and industry together and say, let's figure this out.
We've got to rethink.
And talking about disruption, I predict that higher education in particular is going to be disrupted in a way as a business, as a sector, like nothing you've ever seen.
The pieces are all there for that right now because we see the schools that, a lot of the schools that have gone down the SJW route are really struggling.
The reality is there are fewer students graduating high school this year than last year and the year before.
So what we're seeing is a problem.
You're just not going to have the same number of bodies to come into that traditional college environment that we created with dorms and everything else.
So now our non-traditional student has to be our traditional student.
You come from the higher ed thing, you care so much about it, and yet you can also acknowledge that a certain amount of people, just because of the reality of economics, don't necessarily need all of that education.
It's the idea, we came out of the generation where you get your education, your bachelor's, your master's, your doctorate, whatever you get, and then you go into the workplace and do it for 30 years and you retire.
And now, because the economy is changing so much.
Every five to seven years, industries go away that we were taught to participate in.
They go away.
And so that's, I'm so excited about that.
Finally, you know, sort of related to that, America is browning and graying at once.
So underlying all of this is we've got to figure out how to get the system to appreciate a very different
America.
It's not black and white anymore.
It's brown, it's yellow, it's everything.
And how these workers, as they come out of college or whatever their educational backgrounds are, when they come into the workplace, how do we grow our economy?
And we've got to use people to do it, right?
And that's what I'm excited about.
SHRM and higher education and just trying to figure out how to tie that all together.
I feel like I gotta give you one more here that'll, all right, what would you say, what would you say then?
Well, thank you.
But what would you say then to the people, whether they're college students right now or whether they're middle-aged, whatever it is, that wanna get in the fight but are afraid because of all the silencing factors?
You gotta just go down and decide this is the pit, this is where I want to go.
And by the way, if that means transferring schools, if that means changing the people you spend time around, because, you know, that can be debilitating in some ways, then do it.
I mean, it's just the only way to do it.
The other thing is, I would encourage all Americans, we've got to listen more.
The most frustrating thing to me now is we're so busy talking, and frankly, talking over others, that we just won't pause and listen.
That's the beginning of changing the narrative, because as you're listening, you're going to, one, The other person will respect you now because you've listened to them.
And in the process, you actually might learn something.
You might say, you know, the world is a little different than I perceived it to be because I got it from someone else's perspective.
That's the beauty of diversity, by the way.
It's not just gender and race and national origin.
It's diverse perspectives.
How another person sees the world.
If we can get those two things down, first of all, listen, but then courage.
It takes a lot, frankly, for me to be right here.
The best thing in the world, if I aspire to be a congressman and a member of, you know, the CBC and da-da-da, there's a narrative that I'm supposed to follow.
And you've got to decide that that doesn't matter.
What's more important is that the American story a hundred years from now is a much better story because I was here.