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Aug. 1, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:20
Sunset in the Golden State - Ep 2: Skid Row
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Time Text
*music* *music*
These are some of the amazing paradoxes in California that I'm fascinated to explore.
California has incredible wealth, incredible potential, incredible debt.
California has the highest income inequality in America.
In fact, if California were its own country, it would be the 19th highest income inequality country in the world, ahead even of places like Guatemala.
So if you look over here, we've got this incredibly wealthy city.
Power, finance, Financial institutions with extraordinary wealth.
Look down a little bit.
There are tent cities.
We're going to go and explore those tent cities and talk to the mayor of Skid Row.
Find out what is going on down there.
Hey.
Welcome to Skate Rope.
Thank you very much. It's my first time.
The modern-day Skid Row.
It started in the mid-70s when they created the Skid Row containment zone policy.
And that was created by the politicians to basically corral the homeless and mentally ill energy.
And there is, sorry to interrupt, but there seems to be kind of a battle between the Chamber of Commerce and the people who run the businesses and the real estate developers and the people who have nowhere to go, right?
Absolutely. And so that's part of the problem.
And so they blame we, the people of Skid Row, they blame us for the problem.
But again, Skid Row was created.
There was never a point in time where homeless folks, there was this super secret homeless summit where all the homeless people got together and said, shh, we're going to take over, you know, this service.
So then Governor Ronald Reagan in the mid-70s, you know, they were, you know, he defunded the state-funded mental Same thing happened up in Canada, too, and they just disgorged everyone onto the street, right?
And so when that happened, the well-to-do folks in Beverly Hills and the West Side, they said, we don't want them coming to our neighborhoods and our communities, our families, our kids, our schools, our churches.
And so that's why they say we pay a lot of campaign contributions, a lot of donations to the politicians.
Do something about it. And that's when they created the Skid Row Containment Zone Policy.
And they said, well, you can do whatever you want to do in this area, just don't spread out across the city.
And so LAPD, Los Angeles Police Department, is the first line of defense in terms of enforcing that containment zone policy.
And so that's pretty much where we are to this day.
And LAPD still polices hard here.
And now with the downtown revitalization, they don't call it gentrification, they call it downtown revitalization.
And so it's the G word.
Oh, that's faux pas.
So through the downtown revitalization, they've had an increase of residency and there's increased interest on all of the downtown real estate.
And so with Skid Row being prime real estate, they're really trying to do everything they can to disseminate homelessness across the city.
And so in November of 2016, You know, the voters passed measure HHH, which created $1.2 billion to house, create some form of housing.
I was outspoken against HHH because for $1.2 billion, we should be able to house more than 10,000 people.
The numbers are floating around and blowing my mind.
Like $600 million for something coming up.
They got $2 billion floating around.
And it's like, it seems like I'm just doing the math in my head.
Like, how can it be that you can't take care of people for that amount of money?
Well, you know, well, the thing is, is, you know, the politicians, they give in to the developers that are developed.
The construction has to happen to build the housing.
And so, you know, they say each unit averages about, the cost is $450,000.
Like, for that much, we can buy a loft and house people.
But all the majority of the funding gets eaten up in construction costs.
You mean construction costs?
Right, exactly.
I got some construction for you.
Why we're laughing is actually no laughing matter.
And so then with Measure HHH, we the people said, no, no, we need oversight on every...
This is taxpayer funding.
We need oversight on this.
And so the politicians at City Hall, they put together an HHH oversight committee, and then they loaded that committee with all of their allies and cronies.
And so the oversight is virtually null and void.
And so they can just pretty much do whatever they want to do.
And so the CAO, the chief administrative officer for the city of Los Angeles, did an audit and came out with a report in January of 2018.
And he said they're on pace where they initially said for $1.2 billion they would house 10,000 people.
Now the CAO's report said right now the city of Los Angeles is on pace, after two years, on pace to build 6,000 units.
And then as we go in, so it's a 10-year plan.
It's going to whittle down, right? And it's going to whittle down from there.
But by that time it happens, this pot of politicians, they'll be going to turn, dial, move on to other political careers.
And then the new guys will come in.
And that's not much of the need.
That's not much compared to the need, right?
Not at all. Hey, Brian. How you doing, brother?
Oh, yeah. Now, you lived here for a while, right?
I still do, yes. No, but I mean, you lived here before you became an activist.
You were homeless here?
Yeah, absolutely. So my whole thing was, I'm a first-generation West Coast hip-hop pioneer, so when rap music started in L.A., I'm one of the founding fathers.
I actually brought a mixtape of my work.
Oh, no. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
No, and so, but I traveled halfway around the world.
Matter of fact, I'm leaving. I'm going to Germany first thing in the morning.
And so, but that's because of my activism.
There's part of the Berlin Film Festival.
We need to come out. There's some workshops, panels, kind of some TED Talks, kinds of things.
And they want me to speak about the conditions and other things to a lot of aspiring filmmakers and folks that have projects to help.
Help the world understand exactly the truth of what's really going on, just like you are.
So, you know, it's unfortunate I have to be the bad guy, but I have to tell the truth.
Because, you know, historically, there's always been one perspective, one side of the story.
And I always say there's two sides to every story.
When it comes to skid row and homelessness, people don't hear the other side of the story.
I take it upon myself to speak out, you know, anywhere, any way, shape, or form.
To put the truth out there so when people are more aware, now we can come to the table and make the real solutions or hold the people accountable, especially these nonprofit poverty pimps.
Los Angeles Police Department is in on the tube.
Their annual budget is now $2 billion to fight crime.
Now, if they cut the budget in half, if they cut crime in half, they're not going to cut their budget in half.
So LAPD lets crime happen so they can justify the numbers.
We need more money.
So they're all getting paychecks as long as homelessness continues to exist.
So there's no impetus, there's no reason for them to actually end it, because you'll put them out of front, obviously.
Let me ask you this. So, we were just, like, when we were driving up here, I was thinking about, like, all the things, almost all the layers I'd have to crash through in my life to end up living on the street.
Sure. Now, I hate to sort of say, can you reduce it to, like, one thing?
Because everybody here has their own story, and you had your own story, too, right?
Sure. So, is it...
The way I see it in my head is, you know, I think most of the people here probably had really terrible childhoods.
A lot of them probably had suffered through a lot.
A lot of dysfunctional families.
A lot of maybe some missed opportunities, some drug use, some mental illness issues and so on.
And a lot of people, the unforeseen, untalked about demographics is people suffering from extreme poverty.
They just find economically, the trickle-down economics has not trickled all the way down to the people on the bottom of life's totem pole.
And so for them, they can't afford to pay these rising rents here in California, in Los Angeles, so a lot of them come to Skid Row because it's affordable.
Well, I was reading about how... They're not mentally ill, they're not drug addicts, they're just poor.
And I was reading about how...
They used to have a metric for measuring poverty that didn't take into account the cost of living.
The cost of living in California is mental, right?
And so now it's like over 20% of the population in California is considered below the poverty line.
Now here, that's another layer or two down, right?
Right. No, it's beyond 50%.
Here it's closer to 80%.
Thank you. So, me traveling halfway around the world, my conscience kicked in, and I'm born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, so I wanted to go back to my community,
as poor as it is, and give back and be a positive role model, lead by example, and then maybe some of my other allies and folks in the entertainment industry and athletes across the United States would do the same thing in their communities.
So when I went to my community, The gang culture is just too prevalent, too dominant, and I couldn't make any traction.
So out of that, one of the youngsters said, I see you got a good heart.
You really mean people well.
You should go to Skid Row.
This is not going to work here.
And so I'm thinking, Skid Row, no, I don't know anything about homelessness.
And so I came to Skid Row, walked through.
Oh, no, let me go back.
I don't know anything.
So I realized that I didn't know anything about homelessness.
What did it really take to lead the people or speak on behalf of or whatever?
And so... I reduced myself intensely to a state of homelessness in South Central Los Angeles so I could kind of get my feet, get my bearings, you know, understand about the schedule of homelessness.
And so then finally I came here.
And, you know, we have been here 12 years just trying to do all I can.
So I initially came to plug into the system that's already in place with the non-profits and the politicians, and then come to find out it's the poverty pimping.
And so I said, yeah, no, that's not the case of what we want to do.
So now we have to speak out against the system, basically.
The system is flawed by design.
It is almost like you've got an enclosed sense of people, almost like livestock or like cattle that you can profit from, like you're farming them or something, right?
Yes, almost people are a commodity right here in downtown Los Angeles.
It's the entertainment capital of the world.
Well, that's the crazy thing about California is this income disparity is nuts, right?
It's worse than Mexico. Oh, it's horrendous.
And so it's interesting. It used to be a three-class system, the upper class, the middle class, and the lower class.
Now it's going to a two-class system, the haves and the have-nots.
So there are a lot of people in the middle class, they don't really know that they're being converted to have-nots.
And this is just a microcosm of what's going on across America.
What did you get the most out of when you said you put yourself in a situation of voluntary?
Homelessness. What was it, like, the days, what are they like, and what is consuming your energy?
Because it's an exhausting life.
Absolutely. And so it was interesting because when I reduced myself to a state of homelessness, I didn't do it here in Skid Row first.
I did it near where I was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles.
And it's interesting when I blended in and connected with homeless folks that are on that side of town.
I didn't realize the streets and communities and neighborhoods that I would walk by and pass through on a daily basis, I never realized there's so many nooks and crannies that on everyday life we don't even see.
And so I was sleeping in abandoned warehouses, abandoned houses.
Abandoned houses, crack houses, drug houses, you know, because of cars, vehicles.
I'm thinking sleep like this, you know, like one eye.
One eye open, you know, yeah, exactly. Jumping.
Absolutely. But once you get into that lane, if you will, It's very difficult to get out.
Even here in Skid Row, a lot of people are moving, but they're on this treadmill.
They're moving, but they aren't going anywhere.
Because you've got no address that you can get a check.
You've got no clean clothes to get a job.
This is where you kind of get plowed under.
Absolutely. How many people do you think who are here Sure.
Sure.
What do you think the proportion is?
It's very, very small.
Smaller than what it should be.
The bar is set so low here in Skid Row.
And now it's my first order of business is to raise the bar.
We have to expect more from the nonprofits and social service providers.
For instance, say like a restaurant.
You know, if a restaurant has got the best food on the planet, there's going to be a line around the corner.
Everybody wants to go eat at this restaurant.
It's the same thing like the missions and the social service providers.
If they were provided the best service on the planet, people would be trying to bust the doors down to get in there.
So why aren't they doing that?
Well, the blame always goes on the people.
Oh, they don't know any better.
Well, maybe it's your service, or maybe it's your customer service, your people skills.
Maybe it's your product. Maybe it's just not that good.
And so then a lot of, like behind it, this is your rescue mission.
They have this side is for men, the other side is for women, and women with children.
And so a lot of people say, hey, they're anti-families because a man, woman, you know, father and mother and the children come, they have to actually separate.
And so it's kind of difficult for them to stabilize as a family because there's zero low-income family housing here in Skid Row.
So families are not, basically not encouraged, they're not welcome.
So they have to figure out on the other side of town.
You know, it's just a myriad.
It's a whole alphabet full of issues.
And it's like you can start on ABC on one end or XYZ or LMMOP. You know, pick a place.
And so as a community activist, I try to touch every letter in the alphabet.
Some, we get a little traction.
Some, you know, it's just zero traction.
We go on to the next level and try to touch it on the next pass.
Around, so it's very difficult.
I think it was 67 where they said, look, as long as you're not a danger to yourself or a danger to others, off you go.
And I'm so half and half about that, man.
Who makes that decision?
Yeah, and I mean, just because you can survive doesn't mean that you have a life.
And, you know, looking up and down, I mean, these tents, I mean, it's...
It's savage. And yet, at the same time, you don't want to necessarily give the government the power to say, okay, you go to the institution, you can stay out.
It's really, really tough.
But they had a system before they kicked everyone out.
Well, they try. Again, so there are a lot of protections with the nonprofit organizations.
You know, they need their commodities in place.
And so while they help one, two, or a few, they're not trying to help the masses.
And so that's where a lot gets lost in translation.
So we, the people of Skid Row, are left to fend for ourselves.
So imagine someone has got all their belongings in a shopping cart.
You know, you haven't paid.
How are you going to get a job? You can't go in a job with a shopping cart and say, I'm here to get high.
Sir, could you leave your stuff?
No, I'm not going to leave my stuff.
And if you leave it here on the sidewalk, by the time you come back, it's gone.
And then some people, they have like a safe place.
If they feel safe, these folks here feel safe sleeping in front of the mission.
They can go in and use the restroom.
They go in there to eat and come right back, and they have a buddy system.
Like, if you and I are in such tents, we're neighbors, so if you have to use a restroom, I'll watch our tents while you go, and then when you come back, then I go.
It's a buddy system, and so that's why you see them in blocks and sections.
But it's very difficult when the Los Angeles Police Department comes down and enforces, you know, say to me, The tents can be up between the hours of 6 p.m.
to 9 a.m. I'm sorry, from 9 p.m.
to 6 a.m. At 6.01, technically you have to break the tents down.
And so the people are like, break them down and do what?
You can't stay here. You're considered loitering.
I mean, they can criminalize and just penalize people.
And so, you know, we say that homelessness is increasing.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, just high concentration of people.
So then LAPD, in 2006, created the Safe Recision Initiative.
You just have a lot of high concentration of people going in and out of jail.
So you don't see that people just held up.
But they're not going to jail for murder.
Whether it's jaywalking, they get a warrant because they didn't pay that ticket or appear in court.
So they're going in and out of jail.
When they come back, right back to the same conditions.
And it's pretty generous out here as far as I see, and I don't know how many of these people are sort of on the welfare rolls or welfare state kind of stuff.
Pretty generous compared to a lot of the states in the union.
Is that drawing more people in who says, okay, well, the weather's not too bad, the benefits are pretty good, which is further than to swell your population, right?
Absolutely, absolutely. And so, you know, it's very unfortunate.
Then when, you know, the announcement that, you know, 1.2 billion dollars to build homeless housing.
Now other cities in other states are saying, we don't have the money.
Go to LA and they'll take care of you over there.
So it's something that we call Greyhound therapy.
Just a one-way bus ticket to LA. Get out of there.
So then they announced publicly, we've reduced our homelessness.
We have no homelessness here.
It's just hot potato, right? That's all it is.
And so then it's like, where is the true impetus?
And then what's interesting, In speaking with some of the people that work for these non-profits, they're just saying, in order to get the funding, they have to qualify to the rules and regulations that come out of Washington, D.C., the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is HUD. And so HUD sets the parameters, and then they have to abide by those.
You can't get this funding and then just go branch off and do whatever you want to do, because otherwise they'll defund you or they'll cut you off and then The non-profits don't lose that funding.
And so it's kind of hard for us to be 3,000 miles away and say, oh, we need to go talk about this issue.
And then you come back, oh, now we need to go talk about another issue.
It's extremely difficult to address the rules and the policies and initiatives.
And then the local stuff.
You know, I mean, they pass policies all the time, and then it's a matter of whether, when LAPD enforces, when the city enforces, you know, they pick and choose, and it's just extremely difficult because there's no consistency.
So it keeps the people off balance so they don't feel stable enough or confident enough.
Not only are people homeless there, a lot of them are hopeless as well.
So we have to give them hope in order to get them up so they can believe in themselves and have the confidence to go fix their lives.
Extremely difficult. I always liked the idea, private charity, churches, communities, because as you say, if you are the poverty pimps, right, as you call them, very few people work very hard to put themselves out of a job, right?
And so to solve as much as you could, you can never solve 100% of it, but to solve as much as you could would be to go back next year and say, hey, no, man, we got 20% of people and so they got jobs and we don't need as much money next year and that's just not how bureaucracy kind of works, right?
Right. And even when they house people, they always quote about how many homeless people they house.
They never talk about how many homeless people they evicted, how many people they sit back out on the streets.
We don't hear that data.
Where's that data? And so the whole thing is just a circle.
They get housed and it's the only amount of time.
They wind up a lot of time.
And so, you know, there's a lot of different tactics that the landlords use.
So, you know, here it's time to pay my rent.
Oh, I'm busy. Come back later on.
I'm in the meeting or I'm doing paperwork.
You know, they stretch that thing out three days and I'm saying you got a three day notice and they're trying to evict you.
What are you evicting me for? I got my rent.
No, no, no. You got eviction now.
Now we have to go to court, eviction court, blah, blah, blah.
Then you get to the eviction court, and then they tell the judge, "Oh no, there's a problem tenant, we don't want to hang." And then you're on your way, and they get the department back, and they can lease to someone else. - What's going on with the health here, the healthcare here?
Some of the warnings we got, like typhus and things like that, it's rough, man.
Well, you know, typhus, to me, that whole thing is a farce.
Typhus happens year-round.
I had to reach out to the Department of Public Health.
I know the director, personally, Dr.
Barbara Farah. And I contacted her because they, in October, they said, oh, there's a typhus outbreak.
And then they said, you know, they created a typhus zone.
It said it's basically Skid Row and then two other blocks just outside of Skid Row.
So I contacted the Department of Public Health, and Dr.
Ferrer just sent me a letter last week.
And she said, we, the county, we didn't declare a typhus zone.
And so I said, could you send me the data?
So she sent the data. In 2018, there were only five cases of typhus in Skid Row that were reported.
The year before that, in 2017, there were less than five.
And so why is this typhus on focus here?
But then the rest of downtown in 2018, there were 12 cases reported in the rest of downtown, and 97 across L.A. County.
Dr. Farah also said...
That typhus is something.
It just happens. So in 2012, there was this reported Skid Row TB outbreak, tuberculosis.
And so I put together a town hall meeting.
I had the CDC fly out from Atlanta, had the top state medical officers fly down from Sacramento, and then plus along with the LA County Department of Public Health, there's an esteemed panel.
And so what they wound up saying was that There are only three classifications any time, you know, they give their reports.
The lowest one is outbreak, the next one is epidemic, and the top one is pandemic.
And so if there's an uptick in numbers, there were four cases last year, now there are eight at the same time this year.
You know, there's an increase in numbers, so they have to report that, and they classify it as outbreak.
But, you know, in Hollywood, we think, oh, it's an outbreak.
People are going to be dying off, dead bodies everywhere.
That's not what it is.
It's just a matter of their classification.
I told them, I said, why don't you add a fourth category and call it an uptick?
There's an increase and there's a slight uptick.
They said, no, we don't want to do that because people just totally ignore the uptick.
You know, if there's an increase, that means that people really need to, you know, Take care of their health.
So we figured because it's an outbreak, people react a lot stronger than they went to uptick.
So they didn't change it.
But it's not an outbreak in every sense of the word is what you and I may know.
Right, right. Okay. But you know, it's unfortunate.
I'm, as a Skate Run resident and Skate Run community leader, I'm the one that had to initiate all of that information.
Like, it's not widely known exactly what the system is.
And so it's like, yeah, they're kind of...
I mean, they're kind of, you know, pushing out these, you know, false narratives, these marketing schemes that, you know, and they're blaming Skid Row instead of so that the rest of downtown is still prime real estate.
So they don't say there's more cases outside of, you know, Skid Row that have typhus than inside of Skid Row.
They don't want to push that, the truth out there.
So they blame, they frame it.
Oh, it's, you know, typhus in Skid Row.
Right. Five cases in all of 2018?
Right. In a population of 100,000 plus?
Is that right? Well, no.
In Skid Row, and the numbers go up and down, but there's maybe 20,000, 25,000 homeless folks.
In Los Angeles County, it's a reported 60,000 reported.
We think the numbers are way much larger than that, but they try to keep it like a manageable number so that the masses won't panic.
Right, right. And the other topic, I guess, is criminality.
Drugs, gangs, rapes, prostitution.
I mean, how is that cooking through the community?
People are trying to survive.
Like I said, people suffer from extreme poverty.
And so now here's where it really gets interesting.
And I just started speaking on this because a lot of people don't understand this type of structure.
So here in Los Angeles, there's a public school system, Los Angeles Unified School District, LAUSD. They have only one type of school curriculum, and minorities, people of color, there's a disconnect.
The children don't identify with that curriculum, and so there needs to be customized curriculums or additional alternative curriculums so that the students can identify with the curriculum that they like.
That would be more indicative and inducive for them to learn better.
Fortunately, with the one, there's a disconnect, and so they're dropping out.
High school dropout rate is high, the middle school dropout rate is increasing.
And so when you drop out, you don't have a high school diploma or a GED, you can't get a job.
So you can't get a job, so now in order to survive, you need to, people turn to a life of crime just to survive.
And so when you do that, it's only a matter of time before you get in and out of handcuffs.
And, you know, that's where the system goes on from there.
So now you have, instead of helping the students with better options in terms of how to be successful in life, you know, they just all of a sudden get shepherded into this, hey brother, shepherded into the prison industrial complex.
So with those systems in place, you have one Partion of the population that are benefiting great, like the poverty pimps, the non-profits, the people that run the prisons and jails.
And then you have the other section of the population that are being criminalized.
And so that's what, you know, when you talk about the contrast in America, you have basically you have people, one entity that is profiting off of the demise of others.
Right. There's not balance.
And so then in that point, when you think about America, and they always talk about how America is, you know, it's all about equality.
You can't have equality in a capitalist society.
And so just like with these systems, people are capitalizing off the failures of others.
Well, okay, difference being, though, there's not really a free market situation when it's a bunch of government bureaucracies.
Like, I like equality under the law.
Equality of outcome is a whole other thing.
But let me ask you this, though, because this is kind of the cultural thing you talked about earlier.
You know, the kids and the rap culture, it happens with the...
Hispanics to some degree with the barrio culture where suddenly working hard and learning and getting educated and so on is considered to be acting white or something like that.
It may even be considered to be bad or a rejection of your own community.
Does it become sort of hip to oppose that sort of education getting ahead thing?
Is that sort of an undertow that takes some kids down or is that not so strong?
There's a portion of it there.
A bigger, larger portion is the disdain for America, the system, because a lot of people felt like, well, this is the same country that enslaved my ancestors.
So why would I want to, I don't buy into that system.
I don't want to be a part of it.
I don't want to have anything to do with it.
And then they just walk away.
And so now there's this expectation that, oh, get a job, work.
Why? Work for you?
And then it's like slave wages, you know, it's not livable wages.
There's a difference between minimum wage and livable wages.
They're not paying livable wages.
And so, in essence, it's modern day slavery.
And that's the mindset that a lot of people, they don't want to work for slave masters.
Yeah, that is such a shadow cast over the West.
I mean, I get it and all that, but I'm also like, well, you know, the Christians in America and in Europe, they really did fight hard to end slavery worldwide, and it was a 20,000-year-old human institution, and we finally put a nail in that son-of-a-bitch's coffin, and it's like it's still casting its shadow and it's really frustrating how hard it is to escape that for so long. - Well the thing is because now that it's just blatant slavery, it's systemic oppression.
So you look at the different systems, just like what I mentioned with prison system, homeless system, educational system, it's systemic oppression.
It's basically, it's almost like the American decision makers and powers that be have decided who's going to survive and live well and who's not.
And unfortunately, there's a serious divide.
And, you know, it turns into be a racial divide at the end of the day.
And so that's where if there's going to be change, you know, it's got to, you know, even with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that allowed blacks to vote.
Who are we voting for?
Because at the end of the day, Republican and Democrat is still voting for this white-dominated system.
You know what they say? Where's the blacks?
Who's going to address black issues?
Hey, not just the issues, you know, one issue here, one issue there, but who's really trying to help, you know, improve the black community collectively?
You know, as a people, it's not happening.
And the way the system is set up right now that's in place, it's never going to happen.
And so in that regard, blacks do not, that's what we're going to show up at the polls.
And, you know, I don't understand how they say if there are 400 million people in America, and let's say, you know, you knock away 100 million for the kids and seeing the people that don't vote, you got a strong 250 million people that can vote, majority of them white Americans.
So in that regard, how does the black vote matter?
That's like Trump that's in office right now.
All he does is cater to his base.
If his base shows up at the polls, he's going to get re-elected.
Well, but, I mean, black unemployment is at an all-time low.
Hispanic unemployment is at an all-time low.
Anybody can play with numbers.
That doesn't mean it's true. I look in here in Skid Row.
I don't know what he's talking—I don't know what those—who are they talking about?
We don't even know who's counting the votes in this system.
When people show up to vote, all of a sudden you cast your vote, and then they go in the back rooms, and white people go in the back room, and they count, and they come out and say, this is who won.
Sometimes it's a black person every once in a while.
Not enough to address black issues.
Every once in a while, it's minority here, minority there.
But at the end of the day, it's still a white-controlled system.
There's no other race that's going to even fare well with that system.
In California, though, whites are a minority now, I think.
In terms of just the natural population, but as far as the issues, if you look at every position of power, whether it's in the private sector, whether it's in the public sector, it's controlled by white Americans, so that's never going to change.
I don't know. Not during our lifetime.
I will agree with you this, though, that the government is very, very keen on having an underclass of people who can't get ahead and who are really dependent upon the system.
that I agree with you.
There's some whites, there's a lot of blacks, and I'm sympathetic with that.
And the point is not that they care about the plight of people in Mexico or Central America.
That's obvious. They could care less.
What they care about are future voters who are the key to holding power in perpetuity so that they can oppress the people in California who would dare to think and live free.
Well, and there's this great lie about diversity.
And by diversity, what the left generally means is we welcome every race and ethnicity that can be guaranteed to vote for the left.
Because they're very interested in bringing in a wide variety of people who are going to prop up votes for the left because they can't convince Americans, so they just have to replace them.
California is clearly the canary.
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