Marianne Williamson joins Dave Rubin to discuss her moral movement against systemic inequality, proposing $200–$500 billion in reparations over 20 years to address 350 years of institutionalized violence. They debate trickle-down economics versus wealth redistribution, universal healthcare, and immigration, with Williamson framing her campaign as a constitutional return to "we, the people" against a media industrial complex. While Rubin expresses skepticism on government intervention, they conclude by clarifying Williamson's campaign website and acknowledging the need for broader dialogue beyond traditional political gatekeepers. [Automatically generated summary]
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Joining me today is an author and Democratic presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson.
I sense it's going to be a bit of a love fest, because that seems to be your thing.
But you already made my day, because right before we started, you turned to my guys and you said, am I as pretty as Dave?
And I feel like I've got all the quote that I need out of you going forward.
Okay, so let's just dive right in.
So, truth be told, I did not know a tremendous amount about you before the debate of a couple weeks ago.
So let's just do a couple minutes on who you are and what got you to that stage, and then we're going to dive into all the issues and talk about love and healing crystals and everything else.
And in 1983, I began lecturing here in Los Angeles at a place called the Philosophical Research Society
on a set of books called A Course in Miracles.
A Course in Miracles is not a religion.
There's no dogma, there's no doctrine.
It has been described by some people as a self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy.
It's a book about forgiveness and love, and it's based on universal spiritual themes
of all the great religious teachings.
of the world, how to be more loving, how to be more forgiving, mercy, compassion, showing up in
the world as a more loving person and how that heals everything. Right after I began lecturing
over there, the AIDS crisis emerged full-blown and Los Angeles was particularly hard hit.
So, it took a while for Western medicine to have much hope to offer.
Not that they weren't trying, but this was a terrible, deadly disease that had, they kept playing cards and playing cards.
It took a while.
And also, the institutionalized religious identities also, working through whatever they were having to work through, I don't know, were quite silent for a long time.
So, here was this woman, then a young woman, at that time, over in Los Feliz, talking about a God who loves you no matter what, and the miracles that happen when love is present.
So, gay men in Los Angeles, in a very real way, gave me my career.
Because it became a thing, with the AIDS crisis, that this one center, now Louise Hay was also, this was the time when Louise Hay was doing her So, there was a lot of showing up for emotional, psychological, and spiritual support to sufferers within the AIDS community at that time.
I wrote my first book.
Also, we started an organization here in Los Angeles.
We started an organization to give non-medical support services, both here and in New York, called the Centers for Living.
And then one of the programs of the Los Angeles Center for Living, was and still is Project Angel Food, which delivered free
meals to homebound people with AIDS.
And today, that organization still exists and it has served over 11 million meals.
And I say that to point out that my work as someone talking and writing about spiritual
topics has never been separated from showing up in very real practical ways as a non-profit
activist, etc.
Whether it has to do with people with life-challenging illnesses or people living in poverty or people I've always been very dirt under my fingernails with my spiritual work because to me there is no religious or spiritual practice that gives any of us a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings.
So if I was talking to that version of yourself and was to say, you know, in about 35 some odd years, you're going to be on stage running for president of the United States.
And at the first debate, you're kind of going to be the one that most people are talking about.
I'm having a conversation that other candidates are not having.
Now, first of all, let me say, all the candidates are really lovely people, and I don't feel I'm running against anyone.
I'm running with a lot of really good people.
But I am having a conversation that is different than those whose careers have been entrenched in the political establishment for decades.
Because I'm not prosecuting a case against Donald Trump, but I am prosecuting a case against the system that produced him.
And I challenge the idea that only those people whose careers have been entrenched in the system that drove us into this ditch are the only people qualified to lead us out of this ditch.
You know, Slavery didn't end because the political establishment woke up one day and said, let's end slavery.
The abolitionist movement actually began with the early evangelicals and the early Quakers.
The people stepped in, and that's what began the path to abolition.
Same with giving women the right to vote.
The political establishment didn't wake up one day and say, let's give women the right to vote.
With the women's suffrage movement, it was an example of the people stepping in, which then led the political establishment to make changes.
So in a weird way, does it seem like we're sort of absurdly focused on politics all the time instead of actually what you're talking about, which is more a movement of the people that isn't, it's not necessarily political per se.
It wasn't the political establishment that caused it.
It was the moral stance articulated by Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.
And that is my point regarding what is needed today.
It was the people stepping in with what Martin Luther King called a coalition of conscience.
That then caused a change.
So when you ask me what do I make of my polling higher than certain really cool people, lovely people, who are entrenched within the political establishment, my point is that the change that is emerging from the bottom of things today, the deepest change, the deepest journey that is welling up within people, is not necessarily coming from the same status quo that created the problem.
It's coming from within people who want to see an interruption in the political status quo.
So when you ask me what I make of this, it's what's happening.
It's what needs to happen.
The people need to step in.
We have been living for the last 40 years under what is, I believe, an illusion that I trickle down economics where All that a corporation has to do is exercise fiduciary responsibility towards its stockholders, even if that's at the expense of other stakeholders like workers or the community or the environment, without any sense of moral or ethical responsibility to anything beyond that fiduciary responsibility.
We were sold on that, on the assumption that all this money would trickle down from the stockholder class, it would lift all boats.
Well, after 40 years, I think it's fair to say the jury is in.
And not only has this economic theory that has so corrupted our government and hijacked our moral system, it has not lifted all boats.
It has left millions of people without even a life vest.
It has led to the largest wealth inequality since 1929.
It has led us to the point where 1% of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90% and 40% of Americans in the richest country in the world live with chronic economic anxiety.
Millions and millions of Americans for whom there is daily tension and anxiety.
What will happen if I get sick?
What will happen if one of my children gets sick?
How will I send my kids to college?
How will I pay off these college loans?
And Dave, no one can soar living with that kind of tension.
It's debilitating.
It's emotionally and psychologically debilitating.
When we are in that place, we can't create, we can't produce.
Could you be doing this that is your life's work, which is obviously successful, which is obviously a conduit for the expression of your creativity and your enthusiasm?
Could you be doing this?
If you were crippled by constant worry about how you're gonna just make it, 40% of all Americans who I believe have just as much talent as you and me, Dave.
Just as much who are shackled in ways that you're not supposed to be shackled by material conditions in the richest country in the world.
Rather, that situation that I'm describing is the result of specific political policies, which over the last 40 years have represented a pattern by which major resources of this government have been placed in the hands of a very few.
At the expense of the many.
Now, you and I both know, if you make it into the club in America, no place better than this.
But what's happened in America is that not enough people can make it into the club.
And that bodes ill for all of us because the American, the whole concept of American democracy is that this should be a space of possibility where anybody, if they work hard enough, can have a chance.
Okay, so you gave me a lot there and I want to dive into some of the economic parts of that in a little bit.
But you said something, when I knew I wanted to have you on the show, was during the debate you said something that I thought this is actually completely unheard of for a Democrat, at least in 2019, to say.
You said, I do not believe that the average American is racist.
And yet, it seems, if you watch mainstream media, we are just caught in you're racist, you're racist, you're a bigot, you're a fascist, you're a homophobe, you're a transphobe, this endless game.
And unfortunately, and I say this as someone that was, you know, that I still consider myself liberal, but I'm a lifetime Democrat, really, at least until the last two or so years, a lot of that's coming out of the left and from the Democrats, this labeling of everyone as racist.
Well, I hear you and you're leaving out a very important factor, which is that the President, at least based on his tweets and his comments, is.
So I agree with you that a smug, self-righteous, intolerant left-winger is no less dangerous to the emotional fabric of our country Then I smug, self-righteous, intolerant right winger.
And some of the shutdown, you shut up, you didn't say the right thing, comes from the left as much as the right these days.
I will give you that.
And it's dangerous and it's wrong.
However, this president says things and is involved in it right now, which by any measure are racist comments.
Well, do you find it sort of almost impossible to have any kind of political conversation that doesn't get whittled down to this?
Because that sort of seems like where we're at.
I don't even really know who's talking about policy anymore, or really what I would rather talk about all day long, which is how much government is needed to do anything, which I think would be a rich place to have a discussion.
I don't know, I think it's more complicated than that.
I think we need to walk and chew gum at the same time.
On one hand, I certainly understand what you mean about how the public square is a place where it's almost impossible to have a conversation these days.
Although, you just need to not be on Twitter too much.
There are places that just make that worse.
That's not the place for intelligent political conversation.
However, I'm a Jew.
And I remember the first time I went to Yad Vashem.
Now, when you said what we also need to be thinking about, I do too.
Including the fact that, you know, now we're going through this business, well, the President said this about these Congresswomen, and now these Congresswomen, and what is the Democratic Party going to say about these Congresswomen?
Where I do think this is enough is enough has to do with the fact that the deeper levels of systemic racism, and there is systemic racism in this country, ways in which social policy, economic policy, criminal policy is tinged by obvious racial prejudice.
White people and black people use drugs at the same rate.
But a black person is liable to get a far harsher sentence for the same drug offense.
So there is racial disparity throughout our criminal sentencing.
Another example is there are millions of American children who go to school every day in schools that don't even have the adequate school supplies with which to teach a child to read.
And if a child cannot learn to read by the age of eight, then the chances of high school graduation are drastically diminished and the chances of incarceration are drastically increased.
These children live, many of them in what's called America's domestic war zones.
Where psychologists say the PTSD of a returning veteran from Afghanistan or Iraq is no more severe than the PTSD of these children.
Now, these children, this is how it works in America.
We primarily base our educational funding on property taxes.
And since there's higher poverty among black children, that means that if you were a child growing up in a nice neighborhood in America, You have a very good chance of a high quality public school education.
But public school education should not be better for the rich than for the poor.
So because most of these poverty ridden neighborhoods are neighborhoods inhabited by people of color, not that poverty is only people of color, even though among people of color you have a higher rate of poverty, Poverty itself is a huge and almost ubiquitous reality in America, among white people too.
So, when you see things like this, for instance, as president, I wish to see this change.
I wish to see every school in America a palace of learning, culture and the arts.
There has been described, there's a term that was first coined by Marian Wright Edelman, cradle to prison pipeline.
And when you look at the sentencing of black people and people of color in our prison system, absolutely to deny that there was not a terrible racial injustice going on underneath there is just to willfully deny the fact.
So there's this video going around today, although I think it's from January, where you were giving a speech and you had the white people in the audience basically go up to the black people in the crowd and they kind of put their hand on them and then you read a, it almost was like a sermon really, it was your speech and you talked about white supremacy and you talked about reparations and all of these things.
So for me watching it, as someone that I despise identity politics, I think it's the root of almost everything that is wrong right now, which is why I'm struggling so much with what I would say is my former team, let's say.
There was a certain collective guilt to what you were saying that was really troubling to me.
I was really struggling when I was watching it.
Not that your intentions were not good, you know what I mean?
But that the idea of these sort of guilt-ridden white people, many of whom probably, well, certainly none of the women in that room owned slaves, and probably many of them never came from descendants of slaves, nor would I think that you're guilty for your father's sins, much less your great-grandfather's sins, etc.
There was a certain collective guilt to it that struck me as scary.
And in Judaism, there is the concept of Yom Kippur, which is the Day of Atonement.
And in Alcoholics Anonymous, you have to take a fearless moral inventory and admit the exact nature of your character defects.
Whether it's an individual or a nation, you can't have the future you want unless you're willing to clean up the past.
Now, nobody is saying, I mean, my grandparents came from Russia two generations ago.
I don't believe that, you know, I personally, I didn't own slaves.
That's not what we're talking about when you're talking about national atonement and national amends.
For instance, I want to tell you something else that I think a lot of Americans don't realize.
In 1988, Ronald Reagan signed the American Civil Liberties Act, and everybody who had been a prisoner, a surviving prisoner, of the Japanese internment camps in World War II were given between $20,000 and $22,000.
And also, if you started slavery in 1619 and you had two and a half years, two and a half centuries, and then at the end there were four to five million enslaved people, do you realize generation after generation how many millions of people we're talking about?
Well, I'm not diminishing that, but you can also talk about the extermination of six million people and the amount of people that never lived because of that, that would be alive.
Or your ancestors from Russia who were never given anything and came here.
The fact that Germany paid reparations... Germany has done full-on mea culpa.
Germany has done full-on mea culpa.
Nothing short of full-on mea culpa.
Plus reparations, plus a guarantee that every generation, theretofore, would receive full Holocaust education.
That's kind of my point.
They cleaned it up.
And the fact that it doesn't mean that they can make the Holocaust not have happened, but it has had a tremendous moral, psychological, and emotional effect reconciling Germany with the Jews of Germany and the rest of Europe.
That's what reparations do.
It is just like in a personal relationship.
All that a nation is, is a group of people.
So, the same psychological and emotional and spiritual principles that prevail within the journey of an individual prevail within the journey of a nation.
If you or I wronged each other, somebody was going to need to apologize in order for us to clean it up.
It's a difference between taking guilt and responsibility.
There's a difference.
If you have a company that takes over another company, you inherit their assets and you inherit their debts.
And so, America inherited the debts of the South.
And also, there was a lot of, listen, systemic racism that wasn't just in the South either.
You know, after World War II, the German chancellors and prime ministers, there was a lot of apologizing that went on.
In my book, Illuminata, I talk about this.
And you know something else?
There was a pope around three popes ago, I think his name was John Paul.
I get some of the Johns and the Pauls mixed up, but it was John Paul.
And in the last few years before he died, he uttered these really amazing encyclicals, and he went around apologizing.
He apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for the Inquisition, and he apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for all kinds of amazing things.
Because I've been in this conversation long enough to know, no matter what number I utter, some are gonna say it's too much, some are gonna say it's too little.
Let's just, first of all, say, four to five million slaves, or enslaved people, because people are very sensitive about the terminology today, at the end of the Civil War. If every enslaved family of
four, formerly enslaved family of four, was given 40 acres and a mule, and you looked at that 40
acres in terms of today's acreage, in today's math, it would be trillions of dollars. Okay.
What I am proposing is between 200 to 500 billion to be dispersed over a period of 20 years.
Now, let's look at this in perspective.
We spend 750 billion in one year on our military expenditures.
So I'm saying 200 to 500 dispersed over 20 years.
And what I'm proposing is a is a council of black leaders.
A reparations council, as it were.
There are people, Professor Sandy Darity at Duke University, Ta-Nehisi Coates, there are many people who have done scholarly work on this subject for a very long time.
What I'm proposing is that the stipulation of the U.S.
government would be that the money be spent on projects of economic and educational renewal.
Now, within that stipulation, the U.S.
government will be turning over a lot of money.
We certainly have a right to have some like what it's for, but within that stipulation of projects of economic and educational renewal, it would be up to this reparations council, which obviously needs to be very carefully chosen, to decide how during that 20-year period the money is to be dispersed.
We need to stop cutting the taxes of the very richest among us.
We need to repeal that 2017 tax cut that was a $2 trillion tax cut.
They gave 83 cents of every dollar to the very richest earners and corporations under this illusion, this canard about trickle-down economics, even though there's no basis anywhere this is actually going to stimulate the economy.
I would put back in the middle-class tax cuts.
Then you stop these incredible and immoral corporate subsidies.
Why did we give $26 billion, $26 billion alone to the fossil fuel companies last year?
Then you say the United States government will no longer not be able to negotiate with
big pharmaceutical companies for drug prices.
So you stop that.
And then you say to the billionaires in this country, 3 percent.
We get 3.
The government gets 3 percent.
And you say to those who have $500 million and more, 2 percent makes sense.
You know, I know billionaires who say, sounds right to me.
I know a billionaire who said to me, living in this town, who once said to me, my taxes are so low, it's obscene.
And I actually didn't wanna get totally caught up in the reparations thing, but we're here.
So let's say we do this.
What actually causes, then, the shift where, okay, we've had this council of black leaders, we've figured out how we're gonna pay for this thing, we pay, okay, people have this money.
What causes, then, the healing for people to say, okay, we're good to go?
Now we can move forward in a completely different way.
It's a very important question, and it's exactly the kind of conversation we need to be having.
If you just have, for instance, what some people call race-based policies, this provides economic restitution, but it doesn't address the underlying moral, psychological, and emotional issues.
Reparations carry an inherent mea culpa.
They carry an inherent acknowledgment of a wrong that has been done, a debt that is owed, and a willingness to pay it.
It has a psychological and emotional effect.
Dave, you know this as well as I do.
Everybody's watching this knows there's all this underlying racial tension in this country.
It's not spoken.
It's resentment.
It's almost like, in my lifetime, I've certainly seen the ways in which racial issues have
gotten better.
But at the same time, you see how certain things are unwinding, almost getting worse.
Do you worry that as someone that comes from sort of a spiritual healing side of this, that the collectivist portion on this, where we just sort of have an impasse, Do you worry that that sort of collectivist guilt makes people feel guilty about things that have nothing to do with them?
And what the damage that that could do to people that have literally nothing to do with it?
We don't have to talk about this within a slavery context or a Holocaust context, but just sort of collectivism as a general rule, that it makes people attach emotions to themselves that have nothing to do with them as an individual.
Between those policies and leftover guilt from the Holocaust, I'm not sure every German or every German scholar or German politician would agree with you about... Well, I don't think everyone would, but I think many would, that there was a certain guilt that led... Yeah, but how would you explain that so many other countries over there did it as well?
My life's still not what I want it to be, or this or that, or... Listen, you have to have a big enough number that you're not going to have a bunch of young people saying, yeah, well, you didn't give us enough.
I mean, that's why it has to be a big enough number.
You know, I've said to Professor Darity, when we've talked about it, okay, I'm president, I call Professor Darity, we talk about who should come to Camp David, because we're going to have a weekend and we're just going to talk this thing through.
Yeah, but doesn't that strike you as sort of that sort of identity politics thing that I'm talking about, where you're just handing people this nothing?
I'm not, you know, I always say, I talk about the same thing, whether I'm talking to rich people, poor people, English-speaking people, Spanish-speaking people, gay people, straight people, Jewish people, Christian people, Muslim people.
I'm talking to the American in all of us.
That's what matters now.
We need to have an American conversation.
Even when we talk about reparations, to me it's not a black agenda, it's an American agenda.
So I agree with you, that stuff's kind of silly and dumb.
There was that whole thing where Andrew Yang was saying his mic was cut, and then you thought... You know, there were a couple times I tried to get in there, and there was no sound in my mic.
Yeah, and I think when I did my thing about love, I saw Kirsten Gillibrand look at Kamala Harris like... You know, there have been a lot of funny memes about that, and I think some of it's justified.
I was on the floor laughing also.
I've never done this before.
But I don't regret the substance of anything I said.
I think a lot of people who left then also said, yeah, but when you actually look at what she said... Well, that's why I wanted to have you here, because I know we have some sort of fundamental differences on just sort of what the role of government is.
It's fairly obvious, but you're obviously a good person and all of those things.
But I thought, when you said the thing about love, Even though that, in a weird way, not in your sense, but for the average person, that has nothing to do with politics, sort of, right?
Not through your lens, but for the average person, it has nothing to do with politics.
But I thought, well, that makes more sense than anything else that I heard up here tonight.
In other words, when it comes to the negative emotions, nobody doubts the part negative emotions play in creating and determining political dynamics.
So does love.
What do you think the Civil Rights Movement was?
It was a spirit-centered movement of the heart.
So was the original abolitionist movement.
You told me that you don't have children, but you have people you love.
Is there anything in your life that would motivate you More than you're loving someone and when somebody needs help, what you would do for them because you love them?
People ask me, what is the politics of love?
It's not mysterious.
You see a hungry child, you feed them.
You see a child who's not educated, you feed them.
You see a sick person, you help them.
You see a poor person struggling unnecessarily, you help them.
And you see a planet which is rife with potential conflict, you wage peace.
You love your planet enough to no longer recklessly degrade it, and you love your planet enough to repair it.
You love your great-grandchildren, who you'll never even meet, enough to pass public policy that will not only serve you, but will serve other generations as well.
It's not such a mysterious thing.
Martin Luther King said, Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.
I'm talking about a powerful and intelligent and wise love, without which I think it's very questionable whether or not we will even survive the 21st century.
So do you think it's possible that sort of the road to hell is paved with good intentions here?
Because a lot of these things that you're talking about, so all the examples you just gave, I'm for those things.
I give money to poor people when I can, and I volunteer when I can, and things that I do at sort of the personal level.
But that it seems like a lot of the answers that are coming out from everybody on the Democratic side right now are just that the government Should do these things and I would me personally would always be leery of the government because the government is the people that put people in Slavery the government is the thing that that exterminated six million Jews, etc, etc So my preference would always be that we're always taking power away from the government.
We're giving the government less money We're so that it will spend less and do less things so that we can do all of those things in our personal lives And I wish I heard more out of from the Democrats about that sort of thing There is a healthy skepticism that anyone should feel, any American should feel, left or right, towards government overreach.
And leftists feel just as much as you do, it just tends to be in different places.
Okay.
Stay out of our bedroom, etc.
Okay.
So healthy skepticism about overreach by government.
But let's not kid ourselves, Dave.
The people we're talking about government doing less today aren't saying small government.
They're saying let's just give the money to corporate control.
So, whereas you're saying you don't want overreach by government, I'm saying what it has turned into in this country, its code, less overreach by government, has turned into huge overreach by corporate forces.
So, all the money that you're saying, well, I don't want the government to do that, all that money has just been marched over to short-term profit maximization for health insurance companies and big pharmaceutical companies and gun manufacturers and chemical companies and fossil fuel companies and defense contractors.
Their overreach, the overreach of this new matrix of corporate overlords, is to me to be feared just as much as overreach by government.
So you think that's something... And by the way, no amount, you talked about how you give, no amount of private charity, and we always need private charity, and government can't do everything, nor should government do everything, but no amount of private charity can compensate for a basic lack of social justice.
You know, you can give a million dollars and it's oh so wonderful, but basically because of our tax structure, billions are going to the same situation that makes it so difficult for that person, so that just dropping a million dollars into a charity, it helps, but it doesn't in any way change the fundamental pattern of injustice.
What do you make of the whole sort of game that you have to play to be part of this?
That you need some of those things to go viral, you sort of, you said the love thing and you didn't know what the reaction was going to be, and all of that, that has nothing to do with whatever our differences might be, it's irrelevant, it's like, that has nothing to do with the policy or the ideas, but just the game, to keep your name out there, make sure you get enough people to give you enough money so you can get to the next debate.
The problem, the enemy of America today, and it is an enemy, an opponent of our democratic institutions, is not a conservative mentality or a liberal mentality.
It's a corporatist mentality, where short-term profits for economics Overshadow everything there.
That's not a righteous conversation.
But when you keep referring today to our differences, that's healthy differences.
Believe it or not, I actually consider myself a liberal.
I consider myself an old school JFK liberal.
It's just that the things have been flipped in such a crazy way that I hear you, like the things that I'm laying out here, it sounds sort of, I know, and the labels are all nonsensical now.
The labels themselves don't help, and the Constitution didn't mention political parties, and George Washington warned us against them, and that's part of the labels and the filters.
As far as the dog and pony show, My experience, particularly as a candidate, is that there are two separate political universes.
One is the dog and pony show.
Who's up?
Who's down?
What the polls say?
How much money?
What the pundits say?
And then there's the real deal.
Particularly in the early primary states.
Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, where people know how much power they have.
Californians have that power now too because of the early voting that starts next February
3rd, but I don't think most Californians have really taken in what that means yet.
But when you're actually talking to people who know, the power doesn't lie in Steve
Karnacki.
The power lies in what we vote or what we caucus.
It's very profound.
And I feel an honor.
It's just an honor to be part of it.
And it's deeply meaningful.
And that's what politics should be.
Politics should be a deeply meaningful Conversation and a conduit for the higher aspirations of the American people.
The fact that it has been turned into something other than that is what you and I now need to change.
Well, you and I could certainly have a longer conversation about that.
First of all, I'm an optimist, and I am someone like you who has benefited from the high side of the marketplace
when it works and the American capitalism when it works.
I get the high side.
And I get that if you're in the club, this is the best place in the world to be.
We're living at a time, Dave, where not enough people can get into the club.
When you have 1% of Americans owning more wealth than the bottom 90%, what you've got is what I said before.
40% of Americans who can't even have a shot.
We talk about how the economy is good.
Who's the economy good for?
And we look at the low unemployment rates, but to realize how many people have to work two, three jobs a day just in order to pay the rent Just in order to pay the rent for a modest two-bedroom apartment.
There's a huge sea of unnecessary human suffering.
So I don't think I fail to see the good stuff.
But I believe it's our responsibility, particularly as people, particularly as people who have won, in ways that we have won, to concern ourselves with the benefit of all.
We can do better.
Look at the state of our planet.
Look at the state of our environmental crisis.
Look at the fact that we have 7,000 nuclear bombs in our own arsenal.
Look at the fact that we're talking about who has nuclear bombs, and we know that there
are people working every single day to get their hands on one, who are the worst people
who could possibly get their hands on one, and would seek to do us harm.
And the fact that even recently we almost had a military strike against Iran that was
stopped only 10 minutes before it was planned, we've got some very, very serious problems.
That's why I want a Department of Peace.
I want us to wage peace as assiduously and as effectively as we prepare for war.
I will tell you what I think he does deserve credit for.
In terms of Iran, no, it was the president who recklessly removed us from the Iran nuclear deal.
That is what led up to that.
The president taking us out of the Iran nuclear deal, out of a situation that was an international leveraging.
Where, by all indicators, Iran was, that we know of, that Iran was complying.
So now, they've said the other day that they're going to go on and enrich uranium beyond what the agreement called for, because we had pulled out?
No.
I cannot give the president any credit for what's happening with Iran.
The fact that he was about to do something so unbelievably reckless.
Because let me tell you something.
Given the size of the Iranian army alone, you think Iraq was a catastrophe?
Nothing compared to what war with Iran would look like.
So, obviously, some hero, we don't know exactly who it was, but we know someone within the higher echelons of either his administration, his national security apparatus, or the military, talked him out of it.
That we can be very thankful to this person, whoever they were.
The one place where I'll give some credit to the President.
Yeah, we don't have a healthcare system in this country.
We have a sickness care system.
What we do is we have a higher level of chronic illness than any of the other advanced countries.
And then what we talk about is who's going to pay for our healthcare.
What we really need to talk about is why are we so sick?
And if you're going to do that, then you have to look at our environmental policies.
We have an administration that has gutted the Clean Air Act, gutted the Clean Water Act, overturned the ban on pesticides that are absolutely scientifically proven to harm a developing child's brain.
Why?
Because our EPA, instead of actually acting as an environmental protection agency now, is headed by a former chemical company executive, and before that by a former oil company executive.
We have to talk about our food policies and the de-juicing of the FDA.
We have to talk about our agricultural policies.
We have to talk about our chemical policies.
Even our economic policies, given that so much stress underlies so much chronic illness.
So, absolutely.
And this is the thing.
Many Democrats What I want to see the Democrats do is more than just address the suffering, which they do more than not, and I respect that and I'm very grateful to be a Democrat for that reason.
But we need to do more than that.
We need to challenge the underlying forces that make all that suffering inevitable.
So we have to do more than provide health care.
As important as that is, and I want universal health care, and I stand for the public option in addition to the Obamacare, etc.
You say you're not a big government guy, but don't you see it as a function of government regulations, safety and health regulations, so there isn't this spewing of carcinogens in our air, spewing of carcinogens and toxins in our water?
Before 1973, if you were an undocumented person, you know what you did?
You walked over to the registry office.
This is a made-up thing.
This is what dictators do.
This is what authoritarian figures do.
He's found a group of powerless people, and he can scapegoat them and make them the enemy, when, in fact, the immigrant in the United States does as much for us as we do for the immigrant.
I mean, I think a lot of times they're just conflating the difference between coming illegally and legal immigrants, so that creates... Well, I think what we realize is at this point it is made so difficult for so many people.
Well, they're not legal, but what fault of it is...
It's not their fault that they're not.
And at a certain point, what are you going to do?
It's like, I was looking at a, last night, I think it was on Rachel Maddow, she was showing one of the debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and she, boy, she was saying it.
She was so prescient.
She was warning us.
Like Rachel Maddow said, don't tell us you weren't warned.
Well, I'm for it, and I realize there are some communities for whom it's too big a leap.
So I believe that the government should provide subsidies and compensatory measures in the meantime, because there are some neighborhoods and some communities in this country for which it would be too difficult.
But that definitely needs to be the goal, and in those cases, I want the government to compensate so that we can get there.
So if I wanted to hire somebody here, just a PA or somebody to fill water glasses and things, you would want the government to be able to tell me, to tell my company?
Well, that's why we're going to need a... You're not going to like this.
That's why we're going to need a universal basic income.
Because we have a tsunami of automation that's coming at us.
But we right now have a situation where the wages are, in certain industries, a person would have to work 144 hours a week in order to be able to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment.
You can't have people living at this level of horror.
A man said to me, I've been thinking about this for the last few weeks, He was talking about how, and he's a conservative Republican, lovely, lovely man, and he was talking about how he said, I presided over the, I think it was the meat packing industry in Iowa.
He said when men used to make $15, $18 an hour, $20 an hour, they made good livings, they raised their families.
He said I was here when immigrants came into this neighborhood who would do it for $6 an hour.
And I had to break the news to these guys, I'm sorry fellas.
They'll do it for six.
So it wasn't until after I left him that I thought, well, hello!
That's why you're supposed to have unions.
That's why it should have been.
That's why an attack on unions is such an attack on the ability of working people to thrive.
The problem there was not the fact that the immigrants came.
Not that I don't think they're a wonderful thing, by the way.
I think stones have power and all that, but no, I'm not that kind of... I don't have any judgment on it, but number one, I'm just not that kind of person.
Number two, I do think the memes, some of them are hilarious.
And number three, we all ought to think very deeply.
There's a reason why a certain group of people want me to be seen as wacky.
There is a political media industrial complex in this country.
And there's this assumption that that insider game should rule this country in a way.
That's not the U.S.
Constitution.
This country belongs to we, the people.
And I'm one of those people, and so are you.
And the founders looked to us and to all of your viewers to be making the decisions that will determine where this country goes.