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June 17, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
10:36
Episode 44 - Kanye’s Message is Powerful and Dangerous in a Good Way
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Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time for a chalk talk, or a whiteboard talk, or coffee with Scott Adams.
Optional, but highly recommended.
So you're probably watching the backlash against Kanye West, who wakes up in the morning and tries to make the world a better place and the world craps down his throat.
For what?
Promoting love?
Promoting understanding?
Promoting love thy enemy?
Christian values?
Promoting free thought?
Sure, all of those things sound good.
But what about that bad analogy he made that one time about slavery?
Shouldn't we all hate him for that?
So he's being just eaten alive by the left.
If we're trying to be a positive force in the world, sure, he's trying to sell albums too.
He's in the business of making music and selling it.
I don't begrudge that, and you can't say that there's nothing about that that's in this story.
It's all very compatible.
But I do think his head's in the right place.
His heart's in the right place. He's trying to make the world a better place.
But there's an importance to what he's doing that I feel is being missed.
It's easy when there's a celebrity involved to get lost in the celebrity of it.
There's a bigger thing happening that I want to talk to you about.
And so, we go to the whiteboard.
So you've got Kanye. I put him sort of at the top and in the middle of this conversation because he is provocatively talking to both sides and tweeting individuals from both sides to make the point as clearly as possible.
So on the right, he's retweeted Candace Owens.
He retweeted me and people are associating me with the right, but I don't want to put my name up here because I'm not technically on the right.
But he's also tweeted Hawk Newsom and Emma Gonzalez clearly associated more with the politics of the left.
Now, here's what's important.
The left has the black vote kind of locked up.
You can depend on Democrats getting the vast majority of the black vote.
It almost doesn't matter who runs.
I suppose it would be different if there was an African-American candidate running for the Republican office.
But if we don't see that, the black vote is kind of locked in.
Now the trouble is that when your vote is locked in, It doesn't have influence.
Because if you're not at least threatening, if you're not at least threatening to go to the other side, you have no power.
Why would they give you anything if your vote is free?
So let me just wrap this up quickly because I'm going to have to run.
So the left, and let's say Hawk in particular, one of his big, maybe the biggest topic, he talks about police brutality.
The problem with that topic is that it's so polarizing.
The people on the right don't even agree on what are the statistics, what's the reality.
They're more about, hey, we care more about the police than the criminals.
He would say, well, I'm not even talking about criminals.
I'm talking about people who are not criminals who are being brutalized.
So this is a polarizing problem.
It's hard to solve because the two sides can't even quite talk the same language, agree what the statistics are, agree on the data, agree on what needs to be done.
It's a tough one. And, you know, you have to give credit to Hawk for taking on probably one of the toughest topics you could take on.
But, under the hood, getting much less attention are a whole bunch of topics that would be fairly relevant to the black community, In which the Republicans are not that far from the Democrats.
In other words, these are a whole bunch of things where the solution, at least under a Trump presidency, maybe not a regular, far-right, Republican kind of view, but under a Trump world, where it's more of a common-sense Republican approach, Probably all of these things can be worked on.
And in fact, there's a lot of work happening in these areas that you're going to learn about in the coming weeks.
I'll be talking about some of this stuff in the coming weeks because I have previews of things that you haven't seen yet.
So I've talked to individuals at the highest level who are doing things in this realm.
So if the left...
Allows that you can even have a conversation with the right.
The biggest risk is that all this stuff gets handled.
Not solved, but handled.
In other words, you could get lots of good results on a lot of things that matter a lot, So if these people who have a stranded vote on this side can at least open up the conversation with the side that has the power at the moment.
The side that's in power are the ones that can do the most.
So they're the ones that can help on these big things.
As a strategy, it would make sense to build some kind of trust, some success, get some wins under the belt, and then, if you've worked together successfully, suddenly this thing doesn't look like such a big problem.
Because the biggest problem with communication is trust.
If you don't trust what the other one is saying, You can't even hear them because you're translating it in your mind from, oh, you say you want to do that, but I think what you really mean is you're trying to grab power or whatever.
So build trust on the things that can work.
Then you've got some credibility to take with you to get to the hard stuff.
What Kanye has done has simply Opened up the question of whether you can be in this group and have a productive conversation with people over here without it turning into something unproductive.
And he's saying, hey, maybe think differently.
Alright? So this is the risk.
The risk is that a conversation between black citizens and the right who have the power and the resources and are completely interested.
You know, there's a lot of stuff happening.
You're going to find out about this soon.
There are a lot of places where they just agree.
They're not that far off.
Take the wins.
Then work on the hard stuff.
That's what I'd do. Kanye is making us think about this as possible.
It would unlock the power of the black vote so that once they are free...
I hate to say free because that's the wrong word in this context.
Once they feel the flexibility...
To vote for whoever will help them the most, who's got an idea?
Who can do the next thing for me?
I don't care who did the last thing.
I don't care that Republicans were great in the 60s.
Whatever. I don't care that Democrats were better a decade ago.
I don't care about that.
What are you going to do for me today?
Who's got the better idea?
The black vote determines who's president, usually.
Trump was an outlier.
But the black vote is going to be pretty decisive in a major election.
So Kanye is unlocking the way we think.
That's what he's trying to do.
And if he is successful in saying, it's okay to talk to these people.
It doesn't matter who they are.
It's okay to talk to them.
You can at least talk to them.
If he is successful in that message and is not eaten by his own side, if he sticks with it, he's unlocking a power in this country, in the black vote, that just doesn't exist.
It could exist.
It just doesn't. And Republicans are making a legitimate attempt, you'll see more coming from them soon, that's really going to change the equation.
So, Kanye, plus the fact that Republicans actually do want to make a difference, but they haven't yet, is a very dangerous trend and something to look at.
Dangerous in a good way, meaning dangerous in that it will change the politics of the country, so it might be not so good for the people who were invested in the old model, but it might be really good for the country.
So that's just my frame to put on this.
If you're looking at it as just, hey, this Kanye celebrity is making a lot of noise trying to sell some albums.
Well, that's true.
But there's a much bigger, cooler, useful thing that might be developing, which is the power of black voters.
It's within their ability to completely take it to another level of influence.
Alright, that's all I've got to say for now, and I've got to go do something else.
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