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That's f l a v a r dotcom rogan and use the j r e offer. My guests today are the host of Rising. It's on the Hill on YouTube. It's a fantastic show that I watch all the time. And one of my favorite political shows, they're very unbiased and very intelligent and I really enjoy talking to them. I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Please give it up for Krystal and Soga government podcast.

The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day job. Podcast by night all day. Here we go. We're rolling. What's up? Good to see you guys.

This is so weird to meet somebody when you watch a lot of the YouTube content or TV and then then you're like, you're real.

I could touch your hands. That's how I feel about you.

Let's yeah. We all feel about each other that way. It's very odd. It is. And I get to. I love you guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, same we feel the same for sure.

You guys are honest. I mean we're talking about that earlier. Like it's so rare that someone is just calling it like it is like what you see.

And obviously guys don't agree on everything and you know, no one does. But right. We all have varying opinions. But you say what you feel and that is so valuable today.

It's so unusual. It's such a weird partisan time.

It is a weird partisan time. Like, it's never been harder to actually just do that thing. And I can't say I mean, we don't get it right all the time, but the whole idea was to try to have this conversation between kind of the new left and the new right that wasn't happening in anywhere in a way that was valuing people's humanity, that was trying to deal in the land of the honest, not cheerleading a team or the other, but actually trying to, like, be straightforward about what we think and evaluating the facts as we find them.

And I mean, I have to say, like, you have somewhat created that space where that can happen. So I think we're in part indebted to you.

Oh, absolutely. And, you know, it's crazy. I think the reason it works is because we both kind of came up in quasi traditional background. Right. Like Crystal came from the MSNBC world, like I was a White House correspondent. Like I worked with a lot of these traditional reporters and like, you know, I would do Fox News and all these other things. And it's just it's always so frustrating. When you're on TV, you get three and a half minutes to talk.

Right. Like I once did a segment on nationalism, which was two, two and a half minutes with three people on two on a panel like how are you supposed to get your point across? And so when you're when you're doing that and you see like so you can make an entire career in D.C. just sticking to the party line, no matter what these people believe. And you just spit out the talkers and they literally send you they send you talking points.

They just say, oh, is that good policy or what is that like?

What is what are you talking about? Like, you get a sheet, you would like to discuss what like what message of the day.

Here's the message of the day here. You're talking points, top line. There you go.

And you turn on Fox News, you can hear it come out of the voice, literally word for word. Turn on MSNBC. You can hear it word for word from the Biden campaign to their surrogates. It's all plan, man. Like it's all from nobody actually thinks for themself. And that when we came together, like we were hosting the show, that's what set us apart. I mean, I think that's why it's caught on.

What's the incentive like? Is it the incentive access money for you to stay with the party line with? It's a lot safer.

I mean, you know, it's not easy to sort of be out there on your own, you know, and I don't want to just sort of trying to be honest as more noble act than it actually is. But it's very safe if you're within the party structure, if you're saying the things that they want you to say, there's a whole system set up for that. There's a career system set up for that. There's a system of protection. So you're allowed to be dramatically wrong on things like the Iraq war or things like the financial crisis.

If you're wrong in the approved ways, right. If you're wrong in the non-approved ways, then you can get destroyed, canceled all of those things. So it's a lot safer to stay within the bounds and look like we're living that in real time right now.

My God, it's never been just with how fraught, you know, you have pandemic or people are dying, you have Great Depression. So it's like the Spanish flu and the Great Depression. And then you layer on top of that. Like all the chaos of the 60s, the lines have never been more drawn, at least in the time that we've been doing the show, as they are right now. And so it's it is a it's not an easy dynamic to navigate because most of the country is just completely coming apart.

Yeah.

And I want to I mean, picking up, you're like, why do you do it?

If you do it, you hop on establishment campaign to establishment campaign campaign cycles over. You go to work at a think tank, which is all your former buddies from the campaign. Then you go and you do the talking points. You will always have a job. You will never suffer.

You'll never even if nobody likes what you have to say, even if Republican voters or Democratic voters have rejected your message, six out of seven popular vote elections doesn't matter because the money is there and the people who have the money have an interest in propping up that infrastructure. So when you get your talking points, you know that if you say them, you're an X is good graces and then that person has to hire you. They'll throw you a consulting contract, they'll throw you this, they'll put your name forward whenever it's time to staff up and administration.

That's how the system of the grift in the city actually works. And that's how they keep dissenting voices in their own party down. Because how do you how do you even get on TV or how do you even become an authoritative voice in your party? You need credentials, right? Everything is credentialism. Well, how do you get those credentials? They control who enters the programs and they control who they push. They control who they push forward. And so that's how they try to keep people who have dissenting opinions out.

And it's like we said, it's because of the space that you opened up where nobody knew that somebody wanted to listen to a guy, talk about chimps for three hours and millions, millions of people.

Did you know that? Yeah, you do that. And like that happened, that created a space where it's like, no, no, no.

There's a lot of people who are fed up with this shit.

But can I say also, it's not just that like direct career GRIF trajectory. It's also that we're at this point in the nation's history, which, again, has never been more obvious than right now, where the stakes feel really existential. And, you know, and that's that's a real thing. I mean, before Trump's election, there was this Flight 93 essay where the argument was, look, if you're a social conservative, if you're. Not sure that this Trump guy is for you, this election is existential.

You have to grab the controls or else our way of life is going to die. Now, I don't agree with that assessment. I think that is hyperbolic. I think it's over the top. You know, the conservative way of life is going to continue in their churches and people can do what they want to do.

But that's that was a legitimate sense among the Trump base. And, of course, we see it with the Democrats on the left right now. And I would say at this moment, it has probably never been more true in terms of that existential nature as we see the president calling for potentially military activation in American cities and we see him using tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protesters. So the fact that the stakes feel so existential on both sides make it very, very difficult to engage in a way that is thoughtful, honest, non hyperbolic, and where everyone's not just basically mad at you all the time.

How did you guys start your show? Well, I mean, it's a crazy story. So Crystal was cohosting previously and this is before kind of the show was on YouTube and I think fair to say, was more like standard.

Yeah, sort of more of a standard left right kind of dynamic. We didn't have this was just one to two years.

So I started on two and took on the show last year, about exactly a year ago.

Yeah. So before that, for about a year before that, I'd been cohosting another guy, great guy, Buck Sexton, and we had sort of a more standard left right dynamic. Sounds like a porn star.

And Buck Sexton. Yeah.

Yeah, kind of, Larry. Anyway, but I used to fill in for Buck Wright when he was gone.

And Chris and I like we I mean, we found like we would click on certain issues.

Right. Like especially these are things you see on the show, like on economics, on the indictment of the economic system about even on Trulock. I'm not a Trump toady. Right. Like, I'm not if they give me the talking points, like if I say something, if I think something is good, I'll say it's good and everything good, something is bad, then it's bad and it gets me into trouble. It gets crystal into trouble to define trouble.

I mean, you know, people are pissed off at what you say. They'll tweet like, how dare you? Do you read that stuff? Yeah, I read it. That's the primary reason why I single one. I probably shouldn't.

I would read more of it. It's not that I haven't like, smarter to not read, I just don't like have kids Manhattanite. That actually helps a lot of great satellite internet and it's really hard. It's actually great. So yeah that's right. I recommend it to kids too.

Helps if you're trying to upload something, it's virtually impossible. You know, you're fox, you have to drive to the Starbucks is twenty minutes away. So forget about uploading something really ridiculous, you know, all the way cancels out at times out for the best. I really have some time to think it over before. So. So yeah. So when Buck wanted to focus on his radio show and you know, one of the one of the expectations of the Hill, which is, you know, the corporate news brand that sponsors us, is that this would be a left right show.

But I thought let's do a left right show in a way that no one has done before, where normally the consensus, the sort of left right consensus is like this.

We're all moderates, we're all corporatists.

We believe in unity. We believe in like low taxes. We believe in free trade deals. That's the in wars and those sorts of things. That's the sort of standard bipartisan consensus that you're allowed to have. So we thought, what if we did it in a different Left-Right dynamic where we actually have more overlap on some of these economic issues and the dissent is around more of the cultural issues and and what does that look like?

Because that's actually more representative of where the two parties are headed.

Right. If you look at where young people are, it's also more representative of where more Americans are. I mean, you know, soccer season, I think this is true. There is very little representation and has been historically, at least for people who are like economically more left and culturally more right. All of the elite conversation is this very like economically liberal, but on social cultural issues, economically more conservative like balance the budget and low taxes and stuff.

But on social cultural issues, more liberal is more the elite conversation that is commonly happening on cable news, even though that's reflective of like teeny tiny portion of America.

That's 10 percent of the population. And they all live in like New York City, L.A., San Francisco. It's like the like America is, I would say, pretty culturally.

Right. Not like super ripe, like center right. And economically, you could say cultural left. I mean, a little bit left. It depends on how you define those things. But one of the I mean, the ethos of the show, Hill actually said this, I think to the Times was what if we hated each other less and the elites more?

And I think that that that's simplistic. But that no, Howie, that's kind of how we boil it down.

And I just have a I'm sorry to interrupt. And before you started working together. Yeah, we talked. Down. How do you feel about this? How do you feel about that?

Yeah, I mean, we because you'd filled in before and, you know, I mean, you know, when you have gassen when you work with someone, especially in a media space, you get up, you get a vibe right away and you can tell right away, you know, no one. Is this person, like, ready to hold the chair, ready to do this thing? Do they have the sort of fully formed, coherent ideas or things they want to explore?

That's going to make sense. So just on that, like, surface level is not going to work. But you also get a real vibe for not even where are you ideologically. But are you willing to be honest when your team is fucking up and look, everyone looks at cable news, even if you are, you know, a kind of standard down the line Democrat or a standard Trump Republican, no one believes that these people are really shooting straight with that.

And everyone sees the partisan cheerleading that is going on in the normal cable news networks.

And so it was very easy to see right away that Sara was a person who was willing to, you know, to be honest, where his own team was concerned. And to me, that was kind of the most important piece.

Yeah, I mean, the same. Right. Like which is that it's when you're talking to somebody or on cable or just even in an argument, it's just standard talking about you and you can catch them in one of those like him. What about ASMs. It's just so frustrating. It's just and it's so unproductive. And that's the thing I hated the most about, you know, my time when I was in the White House press corps. It was very much just like the you could predict every single question before the briefing even began, every single one.

And it just used to drive me nuts because you'd see these people and they care a lot more about getting cable news contracts and all that than they ever do, like actually asking legitimate or like real questions about what you think of this program or what it's all I mean, just to standard issue crap and like it was like every single day and with Crystal was like somebody is willing to call out the problems on their side.

And I was willing to do the same thing. I kind of always been like that. And that's that's where we were like, we have something here and, you know, I mean and then it just started to take off.

I mean, it was like we just put it out into the ether and all of a sudden it just started like catching it, just so you know, then you'll actually relate.

The first thing that really caught was we did an interview with Andrew. Yeah. Yeah. And I've actually known I've known Andrew for a long time and a great guy just, you know, like trying to be honest and, like, really figure things out. And his answer may not always be my answer, but I feel like he's really trying to figure it out and come to a good place and see the best in people. Yes.

And so we did this long form interview with him where I mean, there was nothing crazy about it. We just actually asked him policy focused, substantive questions for, I don't know, thirty minutes.

Yes, I think I was like thirty minutes and it blew up people and people loved it. And we were like, whoa, this is and I'm talking I mean before that we were getting like hundred views.

Oh yeah. I mean I when I looked at some new stuff, I thought, oh my God, we got a thousand views on that one. Right. And then and we post this Andrew Yang video and it's just like blows up.

And we thought, wow, this is really, really interesting. Well, it's because of the questions we asked.

It was like you were asking them about not just Dubai, which is what he's known for, about like Medicare for all and all that. And I was asking about legalizing the drug legalization.

I asked him of the China trade deal and about, you know, intellectual property and tariffs. And people loved that.

We just asked that we're willing to ask.

Yeah, yeah. And then it wasn't and that they weren't stupid. I mean, that's the thing to do at that point is campaign from everybody, basically, except you. It was getting these really stupid questions about like, oh, is it just white nationalists who are supporting you? And, you know, I'm really curious. Yeah.

Oh, such a white nationalist picked up Yang as like a meme thing. Like, they were like, I don't even really remember what the context was, but I mean, he obviously disavowed it, but people were picking it up.

Look, why are all these white nationalist supporters? So they're obviously trolling, dude.

Like, that's what the whole thing is crazy, though, that you can get in trouble for the people that like you, like you can if you're a public figure. Yeah.

You have no control over that. Like, how could he know that this white nationalist could even have him on the radar?

But it's and it's not even that like you see this with any candidate who comes from outside the sort of established channels. I mean, you see the same thing with with Tulsi. You saw the same thing with Bernie.

You saw the same thing in some ways with Trump is like they use who is supporting you. They find like the worst person that's supporting you. And then they use that to dismiss the whole thing. Like that way, they don't have to engage with your arguments or your policy ideas or who you are, what you're doing as a person. It's like this person associated with you is bad, ergo you are bad. Ergo, we don't have to deal with that at all.

I think some of that has to do with this this this quality of posting things on social media like this 140 character, now 280 character quality of Twitter where you're just kind of condensing things into this reductionist. View of stuff and then just put it out there. Oh, he's racist. Oh, he's sexist. Oh, he's supported by white nationalist. So and then that's the narrative. Stick with it. There's no nuance. Run and think about that.

Right. The cos the the just like the sheer amount of arrogance it takes to just sum up somebody in like 280 characters and just be like this person is a racist.

I think they don't even acknowledge the I mean do they know what it means to call somebody that right.

I don't think it's a real statement. It's just like you're saying it right. But it's one person talking to the ether, right? There's no one saying like says who. So hand-wringing is not a fucking white nationalist. Like, what are you talking about, man? Like, you need someone in front of you going, what the fuck are you talking about? Like he oh, he knows those guys are supporting him and so he's going out of his way to court them.

So you're saying. Right, right. Stupid. But no one gets to say that to them. So they get to put those tweeting is one of the worst ways to get the information right. It's one of the worst ways to have a dialogue, because especially when you're defining something or someone. And I feel the same way about sometimes occasionally about really self-righteous blogs. And they write an evil blog about someone. The person doesn't get a chance to respond.

Right. So you're just sort of saying it out there, your perception of that person. And you can make all these horrible distortions, whether it's about Andrew Young or Tulsi Gabbard or whoever. Yeah, you can make these horrible distortions and then someone reads it and you're putting out this distorted, unchallenged perception of someone. Whereas if you were having a conversation with either of them or someone who, you know, who is a more rational point of view, they could say, well, that's not really true because she actually said this.

This is what she meant. And this is the greater context, the conversation.

We're constantly trying to draw lines around, like, who are the good people and who are the bad people?

And like, where's that bright line and which side of the line are you on? And you're not allowed to associate with the people on the bad line.

Yeah, and I think, like, social media obviously exacerbates all of that.

Makes it a million times worse, no doubt about it, because it's all so simplistic. It's also like sensationalist, driven. It's all like keys into your sort of like basic instincts and your adrenaline and your dopamine response and all of that.

But there's also been a sort of strategy from, you know, the the political and media elites in the country where if you pit people against each other and this is something Matt Taibbi, who's we had great guy you on here. He's fantastic. He's got this great book, Haitink. And his thesis is essentially that once the Cold War ended and we didn't have Russia to be the bad guy, that the new ratings innovation was to make each other the bad guys.

And what does that do? First of all, it's great for ratings because you got an easy villain on Fox. It's people like me on MSNBC. It's people like Soga, right. Is they're easy villains, easy ratings. You can find stories all day long that support that narrative, no problem.

But it also saves any sort of accountability from the people that are in power, because if you know people who are out there in the country, if the voters are the problem, if they are bad, if they are evil, if they are deplorable, then it's not the fault of the people in power that things are going wrong.

It's not their fault that these terrible, evil, sexist, racist, horrible people voted the wrong way. It's those people's fault. And so it saves them from ever having to do any self reflection or make any adjustments in what they're doing. And I think it's a big part of why we are where we are.

Yeah, I mean, that's just such a huge part of the show, which is just trying to draw compassion for people trying to understand what motivates 65. I don't know the numbers. I think it's something million to pull the lever for Trump.

What happened there? Right. And that's just something that the media has not spent any introspection trying to understand. What would compel a person to do that? What would compel a person to vote for Bernie Sanders?

It's I mean, they're like, oh, Bernie, bro, is this all why? I mean, if you look at the data, which we talked about on our show constantly, it's just absolutely false.

And it's in that way that you can begin to understand and actually even respond. Right. And that's actually the thing I love the most about the show is sometimes I have friends, you know, like on the right, and they'll say something about the like the left thinks this like no man, like I left coast.

I'm like, that's not what she says. Her response is X, Y and Z. I'm sure the same thing happens with Crystal, which is that, you know, as you said with Twitter condensing our rhetoric and our politics to two hundred and eighty characters and trying to condense hyper complex and multifaceted ideas and multifaceted discussions and deep conversations down to that level helps nobody.

And actually all it does is help split people apart for a pretty explicit reason, which is that part of the things that we talk about on the show is the reason why, you know, the elites, the cultural elites right and left, kind of want everybody split because they don't want people to have the uncomfortable conversation around how the economy is structured.

They don't every day that we talk you some cultural debate in the country is every day that we're not talking about how many million people in this country are unemployed right now about the political choice, the political choice, and some of the things I talk a lot on the show about to allow people to be forced off their payroll and to go on to unemployment, to allow businesses to fail, to allow people to suffer when we have the explicit choice of allowing them to keep their payroll.

I mean, this is something we've been focused on so much because the implications of that, when you're also making the explicit choice in order to cap the amount of money that goes to a small business program when you're doing, you know, big checks in order to corporations, to the airlines, which are firing people anyway, despite the fact that they got like 50 billion dollars, you don't have a conversation about that, that they will never want to have that one because they want people to hate each other more.

Yeah, I think there's something about using social media that also facilitates mental illness. And this is what I want.

I mean, look, we all have varying degrees of health, right? Some days you run down, some days you feel great. Some days you're coming down with a cold. Some days you're in bed with the flu. We all very I think that there's something about the kind of interactions that people are having when they're arguing with shit on Twitter that you could make a real I think you could draw a graph on human beings, on their mental health.

And how much are you using social media and how many interactions are you having where you're arguing with people or how do you feel?

Well, it's funny, Joe, that that actually happened to me. As I look, I spent all day on Twitter. I absolutely shouldn't literally hours. And when you did an interview, I stop I stop myself from getting into tweet.

I stop myself from getting into most Twitter fights.

Please stay off of it. The few days after this podcast comes out, fuckin tsunami is coming. Your way is coming. But I did.

I took like a vacation right before I started taking over the show. I spent like ten days off to it.

And that's when the Mueller report came out. And I, I was like, I'm not no Twitter. And I just read it in the paper where I actually went, found the link, read the whole.

It was amazing. Yeah, it was for me. I was like, right. I mean, I had all these, like, nuanced thoughts like this.

I was like, oh, well, the motherboard, you know, the shows this oh, this person was full of shit the whole time.

But you don't need to go out there and tweet it. Whereas if I had been in my office or anything like this idiot, you know, it was it was great.

And I, I should probably go back to that. I've incorporated some of it.

I broke my phone once on vacation. Yeah, I was in Hawaii. And, you know, if you want to order a phone, it took like I ordered it from Apple, took like three days to get there, something like that.

So for four days, no phone. Right. And it was amazing. Yeah, it was amazing.

I was like, I feel so much more relaxed. No, I mean, it's like shit. They're like Skinnerian, like a reflex device. I don't know where to skin are, like the push the lever and get rewarded. Yeah.

And I mean you see it with like I see it with my kids too. If I let them have the device too much they get all irritated and agitated.

Truly. Yeah.

Because it's the it is the exact same neural pathways, those like dopamine response systems as with any addiction, I mean it's you have engineers who are making their living trying to figure out how to program your brain to not ever get off Twitter and not ever get off whatever it is that you're obsessed with on your phone or your device. And like that's what you're up against. So humble about.

I just have so many friends that have that problem. Like sometimes I'll text them and then I'll get back a green bubble. And I'm like, did you switch to Android? No, switch to flip phone weened myself.

I mean, that like I mean, we don't have good broadband access where we live and it's sort of a pain in the ass sometimes.

But it actually is like on the weekend, I'm sure it's great. I have like I have to be off of it. I'm forced to and I wouldn't have the willpower to do that myself. And it is it actually really is great.

You know, my one of my friends, JD Vance, he wrote this book, Hillbilly Allergy.

And one of the things he talks about is he's like, you know, we have our best scientists, neuroscientists and all these other people in the world trying to figure out how to make you and I spend more micro in milliseconds and kids on their phones than trying to change the world or invent medicine like that is kind of the profit incentive, right, for so many of these things?

That's something I mean, this is a big, like new right conversation, actually. Like Senator Josh Holly introduced legislation. I mean, you got to take a lot of shit for it because they're like he's trying to be the product manager of the Internet. But like, there's something there, right?

There's something there's something about how these systems are designed and the people who are working to try and spend you to make all this time on the phone.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's that's not great. Where the surgeon general on our show and he's like, I'm pretty concerned about not only is it not great, but it's also really difficult to avoid.

Oh, yeah. Like once you get to doing it, it's a harder kick than sugar.

It's it's right up there with caffeine and nicotine makes you feel like you're really doing something.

It makes you feel like you're really. This tweet, this one is going to be the one that really, you know, and you watch the numbers go up and it makes you feel like you are engaged in some sort of, like, minor battle, getting these minor victory.

Go to Sam Tripolis Instagram page and pulled out thing that he said. White people feel like when they vertue signal it is an amazing photograph.

This this take this to me epitomizes and embodies the feeling that I get when I see silly people tweet things like Scalisi from Game of Thrones and she's being carried by all these.

Oh that's good.

That is. Yeah that's that's, it's this thing where people just I mean Vertue Signal is a fucking fantastic phrase because it really is what it is now. It's just perfect. And, you know, it's a little overused, but I like it. I'm going to keep using it.

Well, it's an important term, too, because it explains a lot of like the ineffectiveness of our politics, like it's all rhetorical.

It's all like rhetorically signaling which side you're on and the sort of illusion of disagreement in Washington when actually, you know, they're unanimously passed things like this, four trillion dollars for big business and push everybody mass unemployment.

And my favorite example on that is there was a like a 10 year birthday party for AIG, which is, you know, the big insurance guy that we bailed out in 2008 in the committee room for the House Ways and Means, which is the committee in charge of taxing in the United States. So in the committee room, they held a birthday party for the company that they bailed out.

Democrats and Republicans all showed up, that they had special fucking specialty cocktails at this thing. What kind of specialty? I don't even know.

It was like, oh, I don't even know what I was.

I was I was like, this is only in the committee room, in the very room to decide where they decided to bail these companies out to the tune of billions to enduring Wall Street and so much more Daptone birthday party.

Well, it's never been more out in the open.

We were trying to figure out how Nancy Pelosi made all her money, where her husband. Right is. I think. I think is. I think so. How does he make his money? I don't know.

It has to be something her dad was like shenanigans going on, Baltimore mayor or something, I don't know.

But with just the amount of money that's involved in these decisions, the amount of money that's involved in, you know, in influence and sharing influence and and getting people to like your perspective.

And then the really gross thing is when they leave office, when politicians, particularly president, leaves office and then they get these fantastic paydays and just speak, here's what anybody really want to pay to hear Hillary Clinton speak.

Just fucking imagine being the type of person that's like I got some fucking hot 1500 tickets to hear over 50 grand. Right.

My example of this we covered recently the former US ambassador to China, Max Baucus.

He was on also Senate Banking Commission is now on the board for Alibaba, which is one of the biggest Chinese companies. And then in the middle of all this stuff around Chinese tariffs and, you know, the coronavirus and all that stuff is out there on CNN and on Chinese state media being like Trump is Hitler, like do what he's doing.

And I'm like, he was the ambassador to China and now being paid by one of the largest Chinese companies. I mean, which, you know, in China, there's no such thing really as a private business government.

And it's like it's just the it's out in the open.

I mean, Obama's another great example. Obama's, I think, is a former NSC director for cybersecurity, went to go work for ZTE, which is a Chinese technology. I mean, for cybersecurity, when you go lobby is now a lobbyist on behalf of ZTE. It's naked.

We were we were tied back during Ukraine gate when we were talking about Hunter Biden earning these big paychecks on this Ukrainian.

He deserved it. Natural gas. He's a natural gas expert. So, I mean, my grandmother is nothing.

No money. No, no, I'm not saying that this is illegal, but that's like exactly the point that we have Congressman Ted Lieu on his Democrat from California. And we're like, you know, is this OK? It's like people sit on boards, they earn money.

This is just because this is they really think about it that way. This is just the way that the town operates. And it's, you know, it's easy to look at these individual examples and be disgusted by them. But the bottom line is it's a much deeper problem than that. We covered a poll recently that was actually done by the Hill and Haversacks.

People's are their number one political issue was corruption like beyond climate change or health care or whatever. The one the number one thing that they were most concerned about was political corruption. And you look at what is happening in the country right now and the fact that our institutions have no credibility, that there's no expectation that you could affect change through traditional channels.

I mean, that feeds into exactly the rage that's exploding across the country we covered before coronavirus. Right. And forty million plus Americans unemployed and hundreds of.

One hundred thousand plus dead and before riots broke out and before George Floyd was killed and before all of that, we covered this poll where 40 percent of Americans, I think 43 percent said when they think of our cultural and social institutions, they just want to burn it all down 40 percent.

Like what does that mean in a context of a democracy?

How did they all come to that phrase?

Was it like, do you agree with what they were like? You agree with this phrase? That seems a little odd, isn't it? Because most people are just so stupid.

They say they agree with it. But think about what are the options. I would like to see what the other choice is. The other thing, think another the politicians, you know, give your money and ask no questions. Or it is good to be skeptical polling, but it is good to be skeptical.

Yeah, but on the other hand, when you consider the fact that the largest pool of citizens in the country aren't Trump voters or Hillary voters or Biden voters or whatever, they're nonvoters.

Yeah, these people have said, look, this isn't worth it. This doesn't reflect my this is not going to mean jack shit for me in my life. And if you look at that number and then you consider what you see happening across the country where people, again, they feel like they have are so disgusted with what's going on and they're restless and masked and like have had all of their normal tools of being numbed with infotainment and sugar and all those things in sport sort of taken away from them.

You start to understand what we're seeing.

It's a really a perfect storm. I mean, completely we've never experienced anything like this before. And it's fascinating to see how the thin veneer of civilization can be chipped through.

And you just see the really deep pool of despair that's underneath. It is.

There's so much madness going on in the streets today and it's so hard to get a bead on how this is all playing out, like how it's all being organized, how these cops feel like they can just shoot people with rubber bullets and tear gas out in the open, sort of everybody when people are I mean, you know, wanting the death of a guy who was murdered by a bad cop.

And where it's on, I mean, that's so bizarre. And CNN, we're watching live peaceful protesters, reporters getting shot, reporters getting shot, getting arrested. Yes. And and to think, oh, it's just rubber bullets.

I mean, have you seen these wounds? It's like this is tear gas, rubber bullets, flash bang grenades, people losing out on that was just photojournalism.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's you know, she's actually a friend of mine, Linda. She really lost her eye. Yeah. Yeah. Blind in that eyes. Horrific and just a beat on her because she's she's actually a really important voice. She came to prominence because she wrote a piece about the struggle that she had experienced as a low income working class person, like just really raw and honest.

And that went viral. And she from that was able to write a book and become a journalist.

So she's one of the few journalist voices who actually has any connectivity to what regular people go through day to day. So, you know, I mean, it's just like awful to see that sort of thing happening to her and to so many others. Yeah.

And I mean, one of the things I always appreciate about your commentary was about about talking about human violence and like the propensity to violence and how thin kind of the veneer of social order and so much of like what that is and what it actually means to live in a society where whenever you see something like that breakdown and I've just been thinking about that so much like in the context of what we see right now, because, I mean, it's also crazy, like to see footage of people just like they feel like they can just loot with impunity.

Right. I mean, last night in New York City, it's total destruction.

I mean, there's there's at least a giant failure on de Blasio s part. Right. He's incorporating this ancient strategy of letting people burn out. This is a this is a strategy that they employed in the 1960s. In effect, Giuliani was just talking about this in an interview. The difference between the when when he ran New York City, you could say what you want about Giuliani. But one thing he did do is he made it safer. He made New York City a safer place to be.

But probably, you know, low crime rates did go down across the country and all cities, though, not just in New York during that time.

That's good.

But in New York particularly, it was a crime ridden city and it went down while he was there, I'm sure across the country it helped as well.

But what happened in New York City was he's letting these people loot. Yeah. He's telling the cops to stand down.

So these businesses that are all supporting the mayor are supporting the tax with taxes, supporting the police officers. They're watching their businesses get smashed and looted. Fifth Avenue is destroyed. Yeah, Sixth Avenue destroyed hundreds and hundreds of buildings with smashed windows and all their products gone.

And then you see but then you also see, like, you know, police SUVs driving into protesters and tear gassing indiscriminately.

So to me, it's not a question, but there's a big deal harder or more aggressive policing. It's the tactics that may make no sense.

Here's where I disagree. Protesters should be allowed to protest, right? There's a giant difference between what those people are doing when they're saying this is outrageous, we need change, we need a radical overhaul of the the system. Right. Because there's too many corrupt cops.

Let those people do what they're doing, but they're not looting so that the looters are different people.

This is different. This has been the hardest thing for Chris to cover.

Like, it's funny because we're coming on here and we were like and we know all the attention is and it's like this there is nothing else that where the battle lines are so drawn, where, frankly, there's probably the biggest difference in our philosophy on this. Because I agree with you, Joe. I mean, I think and I've told this aggressor, which is that the beacon was sent out when that Minneapolis mayor let that target go and they let those affordable housing complexes burn and they let the police burn.

That was it. And it was just all across the city. And this was an intentional choice. This is out of political correctness there.

Like, we don't want to deploy the police because that would seem like we're impugning upon these protesters and we know where. And they allowed I mean, they allowed this target and this and it just went and it caught fire.

And that's why, like, as he said, look, if people want people should be able to protest in this country and if they're a piece of shit cops who kick them in the face. You know, I've seen terrible videos, some of these things, some of the things that they're doing awful. But you can't allow looting.

You can't allow these businesses. I mean, and this is the thing I want to enforce.

I mean, these look people are like, oh, it's just property, but sometimes it's corporate property, but sometimes this is a whole guy's life. You think that guy has insurance. But, you know, here's the thing. And why where there's such hypocrisy, not from Sagra he's been consistent on this, but from the right in general is like the response of coronavirus. Let 40 percent of small businesses on fire. They didn't give a fuck. Right.

They didn't care. It's opportunistic caring about it now, mostly from the right.

And there's also look, if you think about if you think about rule of law, right. You think about law and order and how do you get to a place where I disagree with you? I don't think it is all different people. It's very easy to be like, oh, it's L.A., far outside agitators or whatever. I don't think that's all true.

There are certainly criminals who are opportunistically using the breakdown of the moment to to loot, to vandalize, to do whatever that they're going to do.

But I think what is harder to reckon with is that you have actually, quote unquote, ordinary, typically law abiding people who feel like the moment has broken down to that the extent that they would also engage in those kinds of acts, that's a harder thing to deal with.

But when you think about the moment that we're living in, like the rules and the laws that have been set have never been that far from like that, disconnected from what is moral and what is just if you look at four trillion to corporations and everyone else, mass unemployment and small businesses destroyed with when you look at the fact that of those officers who murdered George Floyd, only one of them has been charged.

The other three are still free. They haven't been arrested. They have been charged. They have been anything. And meanwhile, you've got four thousand protesters. You've got journalists on TV who are being charged. And if you go back even farther than that, like the financial collapse and you're allowed, if you're rich, to collapse the entire economy with zero consequence.

And so, again, this isn't like morally justifying things that are morally unjustifiable, which is what you're talking about.

But you also have to understand that that doesn't happen in a vacuum. There is a systemic breakdown of the legitimacy of rule of law and law and order that leads to not just outside agitators or white nationalist or Russia or anti or whoever it is that people are pretending that this is doing all of this to where you have regular citizens who are like, fuck this, I am going to be out there among them.

I'm going to be defacing. I walk in DC, I walk by the Department of the Treasury and it's got Black Lives Matter scrawled on it right there, intentionally going in the high end parts of town like this is actually, in many cases, very political and very specific. I think that's a harder thing to have to reckon with that that dividing line between these are the good law abiding ones and these are the bad ones. And let's just crack down on the bad ones.

That line has become very blurry and that's why it's such an incredibly hard situation.

I agree with a lot of what you said, but when we're talking about protesters and the cops shooting and attacking protesters, you're really talking about people just standing there protesting. Yeah, what I'm talking about is people actually in the act of looting when they cross that line, there's no justification for smashing into someone's business and stealing their goods. I understand that people are upset that four trillion dollars went to these corporations. I think the logic from the right about this was if you fund the corporations and keep them running, they'll employ these people and keep the society running as smoothly as possible during this unprecedented pandemic.

Let me pick up on that, Joe, because what it is, is that you're right, that. Was the philosophy, but it's often a mistaken one and that there is actually a better option, which is what we talk about so much and what Crystal said, which is you're right from the right, there's a lot of concern trolling around small businesses when, let's be honest, they allowed a cap to the White House.

I mean, advisers or Senate Republicans allowed a cap to be put on the paycheck protection program, which was for small businesses. They allowed that to go capped and allowed it to go dry and had political fights about it. There was always been an option to put. You know, this is a right left thing. Senator Josh Holloway, Senator Cory Gardner, and I think it's Congresswoman Pamela Gipple. They have plans to put Americans on their payroll to have the federal government subsidize that payroll up until until the end of this Great Depression.

And in that way, you keep businesses together, right? You keep businesses. You have they have the paycheck protection program. You have the workers. They want to go on unemployment or anything. And you can scale that up. And no business has to go out.

They don't have to fail. They don't have to do all this. So for me, this process, 40 million, 40 million unemployed, we had an intentional government policy of unemployment. That was our policy was like, let's have millions mass where you lose your health insurance.

What would you rather them do if you have a pandemic that look, what it turned out to be was a big difference from what we thought it was going to be.

Yeah, it was very different we thought was going to kill 10 percent of the people we thought was going to be a devastating pandemic that was going to sweep through the country. And all our friends were going to die, as we thought. Right. Turns out to not be the case. We're lucky. Well, in some ways when you ask that.

But when they were trying to figure out a way to mitigate this situation, yeah. They decided we're going to shut down society. Right. Because we want to protect lives over money. Right. What would you have done?

Well, the alternative look, there was always going to be pain, there's no doubt about that. And you can't legislate away from that. But other countries did a much better and they spent less money where they essentially nationalized payroll. So people stay attached to their jobs, but they don't they aren't going in. It is still shut down. What countries did that Denmark did? It's much smaller countries, right? Yeah, certainly.

But actually, in terms of their percentage GDP and all that, I mean, yeah, it could have been could have been done much, much, but they did it for the airlines. So the airline bailout, which was custom written, includes a provision that you have to keep your workers. And so we're going to give you this money and basically backstop payroll. And so, look, I mean, they're messing around. And then as soon as this ends, they want to still lay people off.

But if you backstop the payroll and essentially nationalize it, especially in our country where your health insurance is tied to your job. So now not only do you have people are unemployed, but they're losing their health insurance during a pandemic that just compounds everything and is absolutely unconscionable. Meanwhile, you know, bailouts of big corporations got custom written legislation for themselves. And 40 percent of small businesses told the Chamber of Commerce that they will be closing their doors at the next six in terms of the cost.

I'm fairly certain the Parmelia Paul won over three months with 600 billion. So, yeah, it's a lot of money. But, you know, three you know, two point three trillion was the first one extra couple hundred billion for the paycheck protection program in the scale of what we did, and especially to include the four trillion with the Federal Reserve.

The money. Well, that the problem.

Yeah, money is not this is an issue of political will. Is this something that could have been agreed upon by both parties? Is there something that could have gone through?

No. By the corporate by the corporate left and the corporate right? No way.

So what would you have done? So if you had a magic wand and you were the president, like, how do you how do you mitigate this?

How do you this is my biggest frustration with the White House, which is that you have this populist president who, like, actually understands like very much why he got elected.

But you have so many of the people she's really crystallizing, like she's got a lot movement, a lot of movement, but she has all these people who work for him from kind of the old regime basically was allowed to staff up.

And those are the people who were like, let's cap the paycheck protection program who are like, hey, you know, we just passed this two point three trillion dollar plan or this bill. Let's wait and see how it goes as the unemployment numbers begin to take up mass small business failure, all these other things. And that's the fundamental tension of the Trump administration, is that there was no like there were no professional populists, so to speak.

Right. Like there was no professional apparatus of people on the right who actually held and understood why Donald Trump is present in the states.

And this is like this is what gets back to what I talked about earlier, about the incentive structure, about that system, the think tank, the revolving door that is an effort to maintain power over the policy sphere, because if you control that, it doesn't matter what the people think.

Yeah, it matters what happens. Here's here's why.

Because, I mean, look, he's the president and he makes his own choices. And if he understood like that, there was this need to go more economically left and do it, then he could he could do it. But the reality is he spent his whole of his political capital, his first term, like giving away tax cuts to corporations. Same thing any other Republican would have done. So that's why I sort of roll my eyes. I don't think he cares about anything outside of, like, winning the day's news cycle.

I really don't think he gives the. Just about anything other than that, you know, I mean, see, this is this is the thing, though. I mean, I've met Trumpy, I've interviewed him a couple of times, four or five to four times, I think. And what does he like?

Exactly what you see, exactly what you see on TV? Same guy. Do you feel like you got.

Through the layers to talk to a human know, because he's always on there, that they know that he's over.

You know, my favorite thing I ever asked Trump, I was like, what are people going to remember for 100 years? And he's a veterans choice.

And I was like, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, that's probably not it. I'm like, sitting there. I occurred with me with Trump, like I'm in the Oval.

And like, you're like, man, that's like Kissinger was sitting like, man, JFK picture like Eisenhower.

I don't think he thinks about any of that. What did he mean by veterans choice? That he chose the veterans to know that he was taking care of veterans through like a veterans health care?

He just started rattling off like why he would, you know, like all his basically like the talking points and like Weisgerber. But I realize I'm like Trump lives completely in the moment and he doesn't really have that. Like, he doesn't really think about things in that historical context.

Well, this is kind of faster in the briefings. He pays attention if his name is brought up to throw his name in there every now and again.

Just to a look, it's so odd to do the same thing we are getting this morning.

He's like, I feel like we deserve him. He's like, we fast for him, we deserve him. And he's the perfect president all this time.

Think I think about I think you're so right. And to to make it like a not a partisan thing.

Our politics are so shallow, hollow theater, cable news based there like Twitter politics. And you can see it not just with Trump, who's like the ultimate incarnation of that, but during this pandemic. Andrew Cuomo is like the celebrity governor. Democrats are like, God, we got to get him in there. He's amazing.

He's doing New York had the worst outbreak of any state and that's not all on him, but it is partly on him. How is it on him, though?

Because the dynamics of the city. And so let me tell you a couple of things. Yes, in part, yes. But also they shut down later. Right. Than other places like Washington, like California, which had a much lower outbreak.

He mandated that nursing homes take back in 43 percent of coronavirus deaths are nursing homes. So this is a nursing home pandemic mandated that they take back in recovering covid patients. And he happens that he got a million dollar plus campaign check for his reelection through affiliated committee before he got re-elected. And so he also put Major to put into place a liability for all their executives. So if they don't do a good job, they can't be held liable. And that, data shows, is correlated with increased covid death and infection rates because they know that they're not going to be held responsible.

So there's a lower threshold there.

So there were very specific decisions that were really bad and fueled the worst outbreak in the entire country. But because you can get on TV and give a commanding press conference, that's all people really care about. He's got like 80 percent approval ratings. Yeah.

Has he spoken about the recovering covid patients being readmitted to the nursing homes?

Not much, because his brother spoke on. CNN is primetime anchor Chris Cuomo. And they do these ridiculous interviews where they, like, joke around about how big his nose is rather than asking questions like that. And look, it'd be one thing if you were going to have your brother on once or twice, like, I get it, fine.

But no night after night after night, it's the show of the two brothers chumming it up while people are dying. This is a politician who supposed to be held to account.

That is supposed to be your role is fucking around with his brother joking about the size of their nose in the swab. Well, there are like literally thousands of elderly people who died because explicitly because of this decision.

Now, we're not saying knew the decision, but like there needs to be some, like, scrutiny and accountability of that. Nobody at CNN wants to touch it because Chris Cuomo is anchor. Nobody at MSNBC wants to touch it because he's the biggest Democrat and they all live in New York and they all probably have dinner with each other. And, of course, I mean, people on the right are talking about it because he's a Democrat. But there's no I mean, outside of Crystal and a few others on the left and on the right, they're total hypocrites, too.

Fox News picks it up with this like liability story and how he gets this through. Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell's proposing the same thing at a national level and they're like, OK with that. So, I mean, this gets back to the sort of central concept of the show, which is, oh, we don't do that shit.

Yeah. If it's a Democrat, we're going to you know, we're like, you fucked up on this thing. Like, let's talk about it. If it's Republican, we're going to do the same thing. And that's the way I mean, at a basic level, that's the way it's supposed to be. And it's a big, big problem, again, going back to this moment that we're living in because no one trusts anyone for good reason.

Even if you are an MSNBC watcher and you know it and you love it and you love Rachel Maddow and whatever, you know, you're getting spun, you know that they're picking certain stories that are going to like pique your interest.

And they're ignoring everything that the end of every the lesson of every single news story cannot be. Ergo, Trump is bad.

Like that cannot be the conclusion of literally every news story. And over on Fox News, the end conclusion of every news story. Kathy Urgo, Democrats. Are evil and un-American, right, ever? We all know this no, people are not that stupid. No, they're not. And I couldn't agree more. And that's one of the things I find very refreshing about your show, is that you guys don't exhibit that kind of partisanship. You just say what you think and you think people are fucking up.

You say it, they try. You have no idea. Like I said, how much pushback we get from the institution. Just stop reading.

Yeah, no, but I mean, these are people are like, oh, no, these are like Xianjun. No powerful people. My number is six.

So I you saw what you said about the boss joking around about that. Yeah. Just keep moving.

Should you get random checks from people that are just like that when you change it every six months? That's a good strategy.

Yeah, I have one old one, the check every four or five days. Yeah. And then my phone that I connect with, with friends is just that fucking thing moves around smart, very wise.

I just think that you have to develop strategies to protect your consciousness.

You know, you really do well, especially at your level. And I can imagine it's it's unmanageable. So I don't manage it.

You just opt out altogether. Just keep moving, keep moving, stay busy, stay busy and don't take yourself seriously and just keep moving.

Yes. Yeah.

I feel like there's a real movement towards what you guys are doing, though. I feel like it's the future because I feel like people are fed up with that Chris Cuomo shit. They're fed up with that Rachel Maddow shit. And no disrespect to either one of those those people. But like I was, was Chris Cuomo is doing something to the day.

And I was watching him was basically justifying riots. Yeah. And I was like, oh, man. Did someone write this for you? Is this how you really feel? Did you think this out?

Because this I think all I could get from that is Trump needs to be removed from office. So let's come up with some sort of a reason why he's responsible for these riots. And these riots are good and these riots have been historically done when people feel powerless and weak. Right. That's all true. Look, it's it's a terrible position to be a young person right now. And this is what you see when you're seeing looting. You see a lot of these fucking young white kids that have probably not a political thought in their fucking dopey heads and they're just running to get free Nike's.

And that's really what's going on. Yeah, I've watched about 100 videos of people looting I might have seen for black people saw this white kid stealing sneakers.

It's kind of amazing. Right? And this is I mean, this is what really gets me, which is that this is a George Floyds family has come out and said, please stop violence.

Cutie's I mean, how many times you see that?

Well, you remember Rodney King was like, please, can we all get along right and watch him personally?

And I think I think that's like that piece understanding who and why it is important to understanding what to do. Right. Because if it's just what I have seen hasn't just been, you know, in terms of looting, I don't know specifically, but I think it's very easy to say, oh, it's just this type of person is just that type of person. And to take out of it any of the sort of like more radical, not just smashing up stores in that kind of stuff, but like graffiti and more defying curfews and those sorts of things.

And so if if you view the problem as just like violent protest, like the problem is violent protesters, we have to deal with that, then that merits one response. And that's the direction that Trump is going in. It's like call in the military, which I think is fucking scary, like calling in active duty military in every city in the country like we saw with the protesters who got the tear gas and the rubber bullets in front of the White House or peacefully protest.

I mean, that shit to me is scary. And frankly, the fact that Democrats and quote unquote, journalists on TV have acted like the world is ending every time Trump does anything, when he does do something like invoke the Insurrection Act and say, we're looking at sending the military into American cities, there is no more language of this is unprecedented.

This is outrageous. This is different than what we've seen in the past left because they've burned that. I want to think that that Trump has ever they have. That's exactly the case, because I do think that this is a very different and very dangerous and volatile moment. But if you think that the protests are about the the structure of a system that doesn't allow any redress for problems that people have been peacefully protesting about for a long fucking time, and not a thing has been done.

If you think the protests are about, you know, a political system that will offer you the, quote, unquote, choice of Donald Trump, who is like the Central Park five dude and redlining with his daddy and denying black people housing and Charlottesville's find people on both sides versus Joe Biden, who wrote the 94 crime bill, is unrepentant for it was justifying it with Charlamagne just recently and saying Hillary's wrong to apologize for it, et cetera, et cetera, who as part of this whole thing went out and said, you know, police shouldn't be shooting people in the heart.

Instead, they should shoot. In the leg, like train them to do that, like when you look at those two choices, you know what kind of choices? Yeah, that's right.

If you understand that as the legitimate part of the protest, then your response is going to be very different than it's just like, oh, these are bad people. These are people who should as terrorists, we have to crack down on them. Let's call in the military. That should ultimately never works because look at 19 years in Afghanistan, what have we learned? Yeah, you can take the ground. You can't hold it. You can't hold a society together with an aggressive, militarized response that's not going to work over time.

So if that's your only strategy, just like, OK, then what? Then what are you going to do? Or we have curfews at 1:00 p.m. every day, are going to military, is holding down American cities every day because you have a significant chunk of the population that will no longer consent.

So I think that I think on this particular one, this is probably where we disagree the most because and she pointed this out, which is that to me, it's about the restoration of law and order.

And look, I mean, this is why you saw these Scient joy read, right? I mean, these people were putting out conspiracy theories, that action. So if what here's what happened. I don't know what that is.

So what began with the timeline, which is that the timeline was, you know, at first the Minneapolis, the target got looted. You know, the affordable housing complex went down. Everybody decided, OK, violence, looting, everything is fine. So they're basically justifying it on cable. Then what happened is a second night happened, a lot more violence and protests weren't police and firefighters were invisible.

So Minnesota authorities started lying about how actually every single person arrested was out of state.

Not true.

Local news went and they found the mayor, the St. Paul mayor said on camera and said every one of the people that was arrested was did not have a Minnesota address.

That was a blatant fucking 80 percent of them were from the town. And here's.

So why why is it that. Because then they start laundering through Joy Reid at MSNBC that it's actually a bunch of Russians and white nationalists. Why were the I shit you not you can see all. How is that lady still on TV, especially with her blog post.

But the real this was I got to get to that's the thing again, if you are wrong in the right way, that it's OK.

The reason I'm bringing up Reed is because the legitimacy for the use of force for these people, it only applies if it's Russians or white nationalists, you're allowed to crack down on that.

Whereas so look, on the military front, let's think about our history.

Eisenhower, nineteen fifty seven calls in 101st Airborne Division in order to forcibly integrate Little Rock High School to stop to allow the Little Rock nine to enter that school because a white supremacist violent mob and the local authorities could not be trusted to do so. I think that's a legitimate use. Nineteen sixty seven. If LBJ calls in the military to race riots in Detroit, I think that's legitimate. Rodney King, George H.W. Bush calls in the Marines in order to restore order, you have to restore and crack down on the people.

We're talking about these criminals, a lot of them are sociopathic criminals, just taking advantage of the situation. And from that point forward, we have to move and act within the political system. Now, Crystal seems to think, I think, that acting within the political system is just not a choice at this point.

But I disagree because, I mean, even if you're on the left, like Joe Biden out today saying he endorses this Hakeem Jeffries bill on banning police chokehold.

Right. And why but why is anyone paying attention right now? But I don't think it comes up. I just I just I do not support I'm not talking about violence. And by the way, majority of violence I've been saying has been coming from the cops and there's never as much focus. The example of, you know, I could certainly disagree.

I mean, I've seen some stuff, too, and I'm justifying anything, but I've also seen some unconscionable tactics from the police 100 percent. And there's no focus any time on that. I've seen the police inciting and creating the dangerous situation. Do I have any confidence that given what we saw on TV with the military police coming in and tear gassing and rubber bullets, but peaceful populations that this is going to they're going to go come in as peacekeepers in these cities?

Absolutely not. If you bring the military and you were starting a war, you're not ending violence. You're escalating violence. And that's the thing.

Let me ask you this, how you stop the looters? Yeah, I think local law enforcement, I mean, they're not doing that.

If the cities aren't up to it, fine. They can call in the National Guard, but.

Well, that's the military police for the president to bring in the American military into cities across the country without local consent. I think it's insane.

And he's only saying that if they don't use the National Guard, I think about the context of if you saw this happening in other countries. Right. It's it's hard to like look at our own country through neutral lens.

If you looked at a foreign country and you heard that their president was bringing in the military to quash protesters, would you be like, oh, this is going to go great?

No, hold on. Hold on.

He's not bringing in the military to squash protesters, bringing in the military. Stop. How how can you say that? But how can you say that when we. See, no TV, you shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful protesters. We're not supporting that, right? We're talking about what's going on in New York City. You stop people from breaking into law abiding people who do that.

Absolutely. That's what we're saying. So we're in agreement, the military police agreement.

Then even the National Guard isn't trained to do that. That isn't what the number that we don't have the military do, local law enforcement. I mean, one of the big problems of local law enforcement has actually been the militarization which occurred after 9/11, which occurred under Barack Obama as well. When you roll tanks into American streets and you treat the citizens like this is a war, you escalate the violence. So my point is, if you are opposed to the violence, sending in the military is exactly the wrong thing.

Yes, people and what people should have their property protected.

But you're you're not saying what the right thing to do is better policing, but that's not the right thing.

But the immediate police are going to have to do the same thing that the National Guard would do, arrest people for smashing windows and breaking the buildings. They just might not have the resources to handle something on the scale that you're seeing in Manhattan.

So you think this is where this is? This is the issue, which is that when people like you and I who are against police violence, who are against and acknowledge this action, we have a solution. These people should be fired and a shrinkers on that. Yes, but there's no solution that I hear from the left on. How do you stop rioting and looting when the governor of the state of New York refuses to act? I'll give you a solution.

OK, but there's money in the immediate term.

There's no solution to stop looting D You can deescalate the situation. All the Trump is doing right now by calling for the military and training is in a war zone is escalating the violence and how do you deal with it. So for example, and I know this sounds hokey, but this is true.

If he had come out last night and instead of having a military police shooting tear gas and rubber bullets and flash bang grenades and crushing these protesters, if he had come out with that same cast of characters belaboured whoever else was with him and taken a knee for eight minutes and forty five seconds, the amount of time that George Floyd had that knee on his neck until he decided to throw us, he can't do that.

And then if he had instead of saying, I'm going to send the military in and crush these protesters and by the way, he's deeming them terrorists. Right. Our fellow citizens, he's saying these are terrorists.

If he hadn't instead offered actual like no one's going to solve this problem overnight. But you can offer a few pieces of legislation that at least an olive branch, then you start to de-escalate rather than radicalizing rather than rather than going the police state military state way, which never ends. Well, I mean, give me an example over say, when does this ever end? Well.

OK, well, you never told them. We've never had this before. We've never had people smashing windows all down Manhattan. You look at Fifth Avenue is insane. Right now, it looks like a bomb went off and shattered every window within five blocks.

I go back to our history, Joe, because we have done this before. MLK and DC called in 13000 troops in order to the national.

No, of course.

But I'm saying it has like, again, like the military does enforce law whenever these local authorities refuse to do it.

And look, in the immediate term, like, first of all, I mean, I don't think the left would have given any credit whatsoever if he did do any of what was just suggested there. But second, which is that this is just the fundamental difference, conservative and liberal disposition, which is that there are some bad people out there who you can show them as much compassion as you want. They're still going to loot and they're still going to loot.

They're still going to criminalize. There's no such thing as like de-escalation in the in the most near term when people are actively, as you said, looting the streets of New York. And so if the governor of the state of New York refuses to call these if these states and these like I said, please stop the governor, it's the mayor.

So the mayor and I think the governor wants to remove the mass displace the mayor said fucking that.

This is the thing about the Minnesota the Minnesota police and all of that, which is that they refused out of political correctness in order to crack down immediately upon people who were the very small group of people who are violent criminals.

That's what allowed this thing to go national. And now people are and this is it's part of our history. We have done it before.

And again, look after the after the El Paso shooting, I heard from the left.

All of a sudden we need the FBI in order to crack down on this. And I agree. I think that these violent white supremacist organizations should be taken down. And if they're out there marching and they're committing violence, they should absolutely be knocked out. And this is the point, which is why I pointed to why they started to blame Russians and white nationalist cause they realized this is going against them. They only view it as legitimate whenever they're using force to quash a side, which is not which is that they agree with and that they don't do it whenever it's a political cause.

They do. But I don't think for one second this is that this is happening. Which is right, though, which is the one second is this is selective application of justice. And this is exactly what they're worried about, which is that I have a better idea. You enforce the rule of law and law and.

Against violent white supremacists and against violent looting criminals who take advantage of a legitimate protest against the horrific death of.

So I think that's part of where the breakdown in our views occurs, because I think it's fantasy. I think it's fantasy to imagine that you could trust this president to deploy force in a responsible way. And we've already seen that. Like, that's not it's not a debatable point because we've already seen him abuse that force with peaceful protesters. And by the way, the First Amendment is also a sacred right. That is part of why I love this country that should be protected, which is being overwhelmingly quashed by force right now in this country, by bad policing, by this president and what he did with those peaceful protesters.

And the idea that bringing the military in is going to de-escalate is going to solve the problem. I think that's just a fantasy. Look, I don't know that you know, I don't know that the response to the Rodney King riots or to the 68 riots is really the thing to emulate either. And the question, again, is not is it good to loot?

Is it good to?

Of course not. No one is saying that. My question is what then? Let's say you bring into the equation like you put what then? What then says there's no there is no plan for how do we've had these debates. We've had these marches, we've had the outrage. We've had all of it. And it never, ever changes. And so you've got a lot of people out there doing shit that they shouldn't be doing, but they feel like finally paying attention.

You know, statistically, it has to be in the country. Statistically, it is changing.

Statistically, there's less people getting shot and killed by cops than ever before that that statistically, I believe that all these programs, all these people are more similar.

But I'm not just talking about police brutality because I see the the policing issue as existing within a much larger problem, which is a society that dehumanizes, which is a society that is cruel. I mean, it's sort of like what we're talking about on on social media, good people in the bad people. And we've divided society in like the worthy people who are treated like human beings, people like us to have our needs catered to and are like emotionally like coddled and all of that.

And people who are treated like less than and those people are disproportionately black and brown. But that's the underclass of America. That is more when I'm talking to. And the policing system that we have is to protect this group and to police that group. And that's the part that has not changed. I mean, we see we see the vast inequality. We see the people who are now laid off, who don't have hope in their life that things are going to be better for their kids than it is for them.

And that's the piece that I'm talking about. So, yeah, bring in the military and put a gun to their head, you know, put a curfew at one p.m., lock down the country. You might solve the problem of looting the Gucci outlet. Right. But what then? Where do you go from there? And that's the part. And on the on the peace with with Trump in there, like he's doing the same thing in terms of saying, oh, this is all antifa and they're all terrorists.

And that justifies these kinds of actions. And to me, that is what is truly scary, because if you really were saying, let's just go after the bad ones and you had someone that you really and maybe that's one thing, but that you're trying to paint everyone who is involved in these protests as essentially other as essentially terrorists, that to me is what is terrifying.

Well, I think he actually addressed it, saying that there's people that are protesting that have a legitimate concern and that this is a real issue.

And the real problem that happened and he wants people to stop the lawless behavior right here has nothing to do with George Floyd, that he's smashing windows and stealing things on a split screen with like he's saying those words on a split screen with military police cracking down on regular, peaceful, one hundred percent peaceful protesters like how you and I are in agreement with peaceful protesting.

Yeah, we all in agreement. Yeah. Peaceful protest should take place. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I think it's a great thing. And I think that just the high profile nature of this should raise awareness. And hopefully these police administrators and the people that are in charge are going to get their shit together and get rid of these bad cops. Right.

When you see this guy who did this is George Floyd, you realize this guy's had a decade and that's the complaints against him that are similar, shooting people, assaulting people.

You know, this is let's let's think about this, too, which is that from the very beginning, I think the left has blown this so badly.

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump all universally agreed that what happened to George Floyd was that that cop was a criminal.

I've never seen one person saying that exactly. And yet immediately it devolves into approach and protest fine because that county prosecutor did not file a charge against George Floyd, the cop.

Who killed George Floyd immediately, and that is what sparked the initial protest. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that protest. But then the line became less justify the rioting and the looting. Let's say we're we're not necessarily OK with it, but as part of a broader systemic critique. And then, of course, America revolted against that right now at the polling just came out right before here. Fifty eight percent of Americans say they support using the military to supplement police force.

This, you know, I mean, I'm a populist. One of the things I think about so much more in my politics, 50 plus one solutions, what are 50 plus one solutions that we can get to on economics that we can get to about our immigration system, about trade, about the way we order our society. And I'm against the elites who push down upon the majority and use their corporate influence in order to pass against that.

Fifty eight percent of Americans right now are asking are basically completely support using the military in order to supplement police effort because they understand that what is happening right now is unconscionable.

And even let's take a purely working class issue of this, which is that I saw a video of a crying elderly American, black, elderly, black American woman talking about these protesters burned down my grocery store.

They burned down everywhere, a shop.

She even said I would rather be where George is right now talking about George Floyd because of what happened to her.

I mean, we have seen these homeless, a homeless man in Austin whose mattress was just needlessly burned by these criminals just to taunt him, just as we've seen, and business owners who have been beaten, savagely, beaten by looting criminals with no police presence, that is, that this shows you that establishment of law and order and keeping law and order is a benefit is one of the ways that we protect the most vulnerable in our population and the most vulnerable in our population are working class Americans.

They're the ones have to clean this shit up, by the way, like I drove through, you know, D.C. was I ride my scooter going around there through the and I see all these working class America with the you know, they have to take the glass.

They have to put the boards up.

Who are the people who are not being able to go to work right now after we just had the worst economic crisis are still in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. So justification of rioting and looting and the destruction of the small businesses and not having a way in order to deal with that is anti working class. But beyond that, Crystal asks a great question, which is, OK, so after what do we do?

And this is where you're right, which is the right does not agree.

The right, the right just wants to stop it down and that's that. But no.

Fifty percent of black Americans right now do not have a job in this country because of the explicit choice made by Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans not to adopt the payroll program that we are right now. It's never been a better time in America to go and to look at that payroll protection program.

And I really encourage people in order to go and to look at that proposal, because I don't think it's gotten nearly enough attention and not enough. Republicans and Democrats are being pressed on whether they support something like that. So here's my solution.

Yeah, we have you know, we restore order in America and then we need to make sure that people are taking care of, not through just distributed non unemployment benefits, but through actually having putting these businesses, making them whole through a paycheck protection program, using the holiday plan in order to do 80 percent of American workers payroll so they can go back and remain intact.

And then we can scale that up with the reopening.

Because I think you were talking with us here on the podcast, like these restaurants, right?

Like restaurant businesses, even in the best of times, 100 percent capacity. It's fucking hard to run a restaurant. Right.

And think about it with very limited. The problem is that it's not going to happen. I mean, Mitch is our Mitch McConnell's already like we're not coming back. We're not doing anything else. I mean, that. And that's really where we're stuck.

Like, I'm not trying to justify like that. That sort of stuff is absolutely unconscionable, like smashing up someone's small business that they've worked on, absolutely unacceptable violence. Anyone against each other, absolutely unacceptable. I don't want to ignore the fact that much of the violence I have seen has come from cops, which is why I think bringing in the military only increases the level of violence. But that's where things are so stuck.

I think Dr. Cornel West, who I know you had on I love that program, by the way, that you did with love him.

I mean, he said we are living in America is a failed social experiment, is failed to provide for the economic health and dignity needs of its citizens. And so, yes, figure out how to deal with the violent elements and yet at peaceful, et cetera. But the idea that you're going to crack down and take the pressure off and then the change is going to happen, that's not going to happen. And it's why we are truly stuck, because you have such a large percent of the population, which does feel that nihilistic, which does feel like the choices on the ballot go vote like President Obama is always they don't boo vote like they've been doing that.

And it hasn't really changed their material outcomes for their life. That's a part of the show that I think we more or less.

Agree on is like how little choice is offered to people in terms of actually improving their material well-being and having their interests looked out for by Washington, D.C. And so, yeah, when you push people that far with 40 percent say burn it all down. It's it's you are asking for exactly the tinder box that we're seeing right now, 40 percent of people willing to answer polls.

How? What kind of people think of the porked more three answers. It's like I'd like you to fill out this poll.

Most people like I'm busy. Yeah, right. I have shit to do.

But the people that like to get myself very interested in this one thing.

One thing I do think, though, is that that nihilism that I see some so much of that element of the left in particular, like Cornell, what the failed social experiment, it just ignores like that extraordinary things can happen through political change.

And even if they do want political change, look, a friend of our show, Z Jillani, I mean, he side of these studies coming out of nineteen sixty eight where you can see explicitly that nonviolent protest, dramatically increased support for the civil rights movement, and that whenever it would turn violent, that it would turn against them, and that in one study in particular showed that it led to the election of Richard Nixon, which is something I don't think that the protesters are violent.

This is where they met the violence, like the the association of the violence, the protest movement.

I think it's just opportunists that are I think there's a giant percentage of what's going on is opportunists taking advantage of this movement and the chaos. I totally agree with you. I feel like what Cornel West is saying, one of the reasons why it resonates is if they have so much money for the bailouts, they have so much money to take care of people during covid for these corporations, so much money to deal with this. Why didn't they invest that money in fixing all these problems that have happened in these inner cities that have had a long, deep history of economic problems and not just inner city?

Yes. I mean, you know, I lived in Kentucky and Appalachia like. Sure. Like make it universal so everybody buys in. But that's exactly I we had this whole Democratic primary and every debate, it was like, well, how are you going to pay for it? But then the moment that the stock market crashed, it was like, here's four trillion dollars. Good, sadly.

So it just exposes that's that's part of the moment that we have to understand that it just exposes the fact that all of this idea that we can't do anything to help you and I'm so sorry and there's not money and that the system is fundamentally fair, has been completely exposed as a lie.

The system has never been fundamentally fair, but people have tried their best to make it as fair as possible while supporting the special interest group that put them into power while trying to keep up with the demands of their constituents.

It's a mess. One of my favorite things I talk about is what Chris and I really want to try and do, or especially for me is I want to make it the cynical choice in order to do the right thing. That's the hardest game in politics, because that's what the special interests are, right? Like, it's the cynical choice in order to pass the subsidy or do the bailout for X and not for Y because, you know, you're going to get a job out on the other side or you know that you're going to benefit politically.

That's what we need to do. We need to make it so that it's the cynical choice to show up for working class people. And right now, I mean, that's one of the things I really took note of this Holly plan I'm talking about.

Cory Gardner from Colorado is the most vulnerable Republican in the United States Senate, and he signed on to that plan.

Now he's running for reelection.

He was he was vulnerable for all of us even happened. And that's that's what you can try and capitalize on. You can show people, even if they're the most cynical act. I don't know anything about Cory.

I don't know why Senate. I just want to make it clear. But like, if you can make it so that it's the cynical choice to try and show up. Now, that is an extraordinarily hard thing to do. That is, I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if I don't talk about every single day about how the system is rigged and the political system in particular and who owns who. But this is part of what I think we're on to.

About what like what the heterodox kind of space, which is that there is an extraordinary support for efforts like this.

And if you can show these politicians, if you do something like this, you will get praise from Kristol and soccer. You will get an electoral benefit, you will have the media. This is the case. You need to build alternative ecosystem centers of power which are able to elevate that so that they know that they have somebody who's going to have their back. Because right now, if you go, you know, the standard line are always going to have right or the left to back you up in a time of crisis.

You'll have the money. People will fundraise to you have to show people that by doing the right thing, that that's where the best politics are. And that's what we focus on in terms of the economic solutions.

And so much of what we advocate for on the show is to show people, like I said, 50 plus one solutions exist. There is political opportunism to be had by just doing the right thing. This was Trump. I mean, Trump's like innovation more than anything, was running against standard GOP ideology in the 2016 primary run running.

On trade, saying, no, maybe trade is not always a good thing, running hard on immigration, which is something GOP voters have always wanted, those two issues in particular went completely against Paul Ryan and so much of what they were advocating for.

But you could never say it because if you said it not to on Fox, if you didn't if you said it, you're not going to be in leadership. The you know, the Republicans are going to fund raise money for you. Think tank scholars are going to write fake studies and fake papers about how you're a liar. That's exactly what he exposed, that there's opportunity to be had there.

What we got to do is build up media and alternative organizations which show people that there is a cynic. There is a way to be cynical. There's a way to because people are cynical people, politicians in particular.

There is a way to act in your own self-interest and to do the right thing. And I think that that's why I've looked at it as much more of a I don't look at it than that nihilistic way. I look at it in a much more positive way, which is that this did happen.

I mean, something broke through. And I'm not I don't think it's been perfect, but it's something which we can capitalize on and build over decades because I think God knows, I mean, people need it right now. It's the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Well, I think where you and I agree is that law and order needs to be re-established. And one of the reasons why I think that it needs to be re-established is there's a fire of consciousness. And this fire is you're allowed to loot and smash and steal. And people are doing that now. And I don't think they're doing it in the memory of George Floyd. And I think you've got to put that fire out, because once you allow people to do it, like de Blasio did in New York City and force the police to stand back, people know they can get away with it.

I've seen some horrific things, people running over, people with cars and smashing into buildings. And it's fucking madness. When madness happens, you have to crack down. You have to do something about it. That's where I support whether it's the National Guard or if the police have the resources, use the police. But something has to be done. When you're saying, like President Trump deescalating on television, that is not going to do a goddamn thing about those kids smashing windows.

It's not going to change their attitude. They're not watching the news. They're not paying attention. They know they have a very simplistic perspective. George Floyd, this is bad. Black Lives Matter. Chaos smashed that window. Take that shit. They're not going to say, hey, you know, when Trump got on his knees, I was going to loot Gucci, but I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not thinking like that. There's fake bullshit on both sides.

Yeah, but he's got to do something to stop the fire. You've got to put that fire out, then deescalate. But first, the fire has to stop because it's an obvious mob mentality thing because no one's ever seen this before. No one's ever there was a Santa Monica was the guy running around with a gun pointing it at people. People are driving into fucking people and knocking them over. It's crazy. It is not something that anyone expected seven days ago.

And and it is a sign of like a breakdown of a society. It's like there's a storm.

There's no time to spare from three months of not working is unprecedented. You've never had a time where through no fault of your own, you are broke. You can't pay for food, you can't pay your mortgage, you can't pay your rent, you're fucked. And there's no jobs to be had. It's not like there's anything these kids can go out and do to better their position. The amount of jobs that existed just three months ago, it's drastically reduced.

So their opportunities, which are already slim to none, have you know, we're talking about people getting out of college in twenty twenty that how bad their economic opportunities are before all this in comparison to the.

How about if you're coming out of high school. Yes. And aren't going to go to college. I mean, most people don't go to college. Right.

And so the people think smashingly my only point is that the military is not a solution.

What is the solution, though? Well, the solution is to actually do something about the material condition ultimately.

But right now, the solution about the fire, how do you put out the fire? Because there's a fire when these people are smashing windows all down 5th Avenue.

That's a fire. Right. But I've got to I think where we view it differently is that, in my view, the tactics, the aggressive tactics that the police have used have only made that worse. No, no, we agree on that. Right.

So my view is, if you bring in the military, first of all, I find it I find all of I think we are getting far too comfortable. And this is partly part of the perfect storm with the pandemic. Like, we've become very comfortable with all these extreme limitations on our actions, behavior, wearing the masks and public, which creates a level of anonymity like all of that goes into this. So when when we have a curfew imposed of one p.m. or five p.m. or six p.m., we're just good to go with that.

But that should be taken in and of itself very seriously as an infringement on First Amendment rights. I agree. So my point is that if you bring in the military, it is frightening in terms of our liberties, our ability to protest our First Amendment rights, which are incredibly important and I think ultimately only leads to additional violence.

Yeah, I think we're going around in circles here because I agree with you on all those things. And I am 100 percent in support of the people protesting people that are. Walking down the street with signs about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, I'm 100 percent in favor of that. It's the looting. So how do you stop the looting? You've got to do something to stop the looting.

If you don't stop the looting, it is going to fucking continue, stop tear gassing protesters and start focusing on things.

I don't think so, because they started to tear gassing protesters after the looting. After all, that shit got crazy. That's when they started cracking down on the protest. I think it's a mistake because I don't think they're connected. I think the people that are doing all the looting and the smashing are not the people that are peacefully protesting. And there's a ton of videos of people who were screaming. There's a video of this girl who's yelling at these these girls in front of a Starbucks that are spray painting Black Lives Matter.

It's an African-American girl.

And these white girls, she's like, why the fuck are you doing? Because I think they're going to blame us. They're going to say, I mean, that she's white.

That look, that's a huge part of this whole thing, which is that there's just upper middle class white liberalism and their inability I mean, just there's a whole element of white guilt and so much more.

There's an entire industrial industrial complex set up to make white people an upper middle class. White people in particular feel uncomfortable condemning looting and violence in this particular scenario.

Even though everybody agrees with you, Joe, I mean, pretty much everybody is like, yeah, protests are fine, looting is bad, protests have been great. And what happened to George Floyd was fucked up. That's like one, two, three.

Ninety five percent of people in this in this country would agree with something like that.

And so that's why I think that that I mean, look, that shows you that there is, again, a political way to be forged here, which is like like you said, nobody thinks that this nobody was defending George Floyd. No one. I mean, like Rush Limbaugh. And I saw this whole thing with Sean Hannity was like, you know, the as martial artists like putting his his hold on the neck.

Right. He stop. Right. Don't say that. Don't say he's martial arts. So he said, as much as I know, I shouldn't have brought that up. Have you taken defensive? Yeah. No, I should have known better talk to you now. Why are you calling me a basketball player?

I mean, I've played basketball a couple of times. You have seen these like I've been studying for seven years offensively.

What would you recommend for if kids want to get into jujitsu jujitsu because there's no head trauma or very little.

There is. There is like a thing and it's something I for sure.

I just have a mild functional. Wow. Yeah. If you've been hit in the head a bunch of times, you most likely have it. I mean, from the time I was fifteen I was twenty one twenty two. I was hit in the head almost every day but there's no getting around it. You're going to get some form of brain damage.

How come there's not like a backlash against it, like with the NFL?

Well there is. I mean it's more internal. It's like I feel like the NFL, it's it's more prevalent. And I think that the impacts are more devastating when I watch those huge super athletes running at full clip and slamming into each other.

It's a fucking car accident. Right. And it's a car accident multiple times a week. And these guys are doing well. They were taking those big hits and training as well. But there was a study on football players that found that between they tested high school all the way up to NFL. And they said there was some staggering number of people that had CTE, including high school kids. Wow. Like if you had a son, would you let him play?

No fucking way. But I'd let them fight. Let them fight. I teach them how to fight correctly. I would say, look, if you want to do this, this is dangerous as fuck, but you can do it in this great benefit in knowing how to fight. There's a giant benefit if someone's trying to assault you and they don't know how to fight and you do. It's huge.

Isn't there a UFC fighter who is going who is like helping out with some of the looting?

Sorry, John Jones. Yeah, he was a great asset to John Jones, grabbed these fucking dipshit kids that were about to spray paint. Just give me that holy fuck John Jones. And he took a fucking spray paint kids. And they just like you, sir. Sorry, they don't do fucking white kids and you just snatch their spray paint. But John's out there boarding up smashed windows. He's really trying to help you.

You see that guy that is the ESPN reporter, something Chris Palmer, who was like cheering on looting and rioting and then like like right after someone like our neighboring gated community is being targeted, y'all get the fuck away.

Just like he's like a perfect thing on Twitter, like the right.

And it's just look, that gets what I think I was like.

That's why white liberalism, this is like so many of these people would be freaked out, call the police if any of this thing ever happened.

But life happens in an in an affordable housing complex in Minneapolis.

Then we can you know, what has been interesting is that these riots have not just been in the poor neighborhood or in the black neighborhood. I mean, they have been I think that's part of why people are so freaked out is they've been sort of intentionally in the wealthy parts of town is part of what makes it so unsettling for everyone across the board. And so, you know, look, I my only point is. You know, yes, looting bad, violence bad, absolutely, all of that, but you can't imagine that the military is an answer to the situation.

I don't know what the answer is, but when people see the chaos and the randomness of it all, that's what's really frightening. When people saw what was happening, happening in Minneapolis as a direct result of a bad cop killing a man that was handcuffed and not a threat whatsoever, but then people say, OK, I get these people. But then when you see them smashing windows in Beverly Hills, you like, what the fuck does this have to do with George Floyd?

Like what is going on here and how how are you justifying this? And they're not.

But that's but that's the thing is it's not just a bad one. Bad cop or even just policing. Right? I mean, let's remember. Right. It wasn't just one bad guy there. Three other guys are standing 100 percent. That has nothing to do with Louis Vuitton.

Sure. But what I'm saying is that's why this spread across the country is because the grievances aren't specific.

That was the flashpoint, not the march.

Back to that one thing, marches and protests not smashing the windows of Target, you know, and they did they did a target right down the street from here. What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Just do nothing. It has to do with lawlessness, and that's do with people taking advantage of the situation and escalating.

Also, it's probably exciting. People, people people are locked up and bored.

Is fucking hell sudden they got something. Look, it is in many ways similar to war. And this is why because when people are they have a real cause. And when war is going on, there's a lot of people that I know that have served overseas. And one of the hardest kind of scary truths is that some of the best times of their life.

Yeah, and I have Sebastian Junger wrote a great book about it called Tribe. It's a fantastic book that really gets to the psychology of it. And, you know, this is a guy who was over there for long periods of time as a journalist.

When you are involved in this and you feel like you're fighting the good fight and you're like, fuck corporate America, well, you know, you're fucking 20 years old. You believe that shit. You know, my friend Bridget Fettucini, she's she's a brilliant writer and she's really hilarious. And she she was talking about some papers that she found that she wrote when she was twenty four. And she was like, I was reading this like, holy fuck.

Like I was so dumb. She was like she was like I was such a radical. She was like I was like aosis anyway. But I'm looking back at it now as a grown grown ass woman going The fuck was I doing. What was I thinking? I think that's what you're dealing with. A lot of these idealistic kids, they think they're going to tear it all down and burn to the ground, but they don't know where their fuck their cell phone comes from.

They don't know who makes their sneakers. They don't know what what it costs to keep the electricity on. They have no they have no shoe in the game. I don't know what I mean.

But a lot of a lot of those young people, though, I mean, look, what is their life bid? And they're graduating from high school, graduating from college. They know very well what the what the cost is and what the rent is and what it looks like for them in their life going forward. And that's exactly where that hopelessness and nihilism comes from. And that's what that's what really scares me, is there's this idea I mean, like I know it's easy to say, but it really is true.

We'd never seen anything like this moment we're living through with mass unemployment, Great Depression, with pandemic, with these polarized politics where nobody feels like any any hope of getting anything really accomplished through Washington. You add to it the chaos in the streets and then there's no sign that this is all just going to snap back to normal, which doesn't seem like it's going to snap back at all.

And this all happened like a snap.

That's what's really fucked up so quick because it seemed like, OK, things were getting sort of off the rails, off the rails, off the rails.

And then all of a sudden it's just well, from has accelerated from March when they shut down New York City, they shut down Los Angeles first. And then it was like, holy fuck, we're locked down at home. But we were worried about a disease. And, you know, I was actually encouraged during the early days because it seemed like people, although scared or at least it seemed like they were being nicer to each other. And all the bullshit on Twitter seemed to have subsided because people were dealing with a real live pandemic and they were really worried about their own life and the lives of their loved ones.

Then as time dragged on, as the pandemic was going into the second month and people were really desperate now to work in economic despair kicks in, anxiety kicks in, and then people got shittier than ever. People were mean. And you said something to me in nineteen eighty four. You fucking sorry, that was me. But it went up to a higher level than it was before. This was good because just the way the lockdown was all handled.

Right. Exactly.

It's like there was never any benchmarks, there was never any real understanding. And you know, it's funny because if you go back, we were one of the only people to be, like, sympathetic to the lockdown protesters.

We were like, hey, man, like somebody steals your job like all or somebody takes your job, says you can't work and all this, and then not necessarily giving you the economic benefits that you deserve. That was something that we were very compassionate about. I mean, like I'm not saying we agree at the. We didn't really know, but it was like extending that level of compassion to people who are put in that situation. I think it's really important and that's just something the media I mean, this is the thing we were just talking about before.

It's like Cronos over, right? Like nobody's talking about it. Or maybe it's not. I don't know.

But like, I haven't seen anybody on cable news be like these terrible people trying to bring, you know, like, shut the fuck up.

Know no one cares. No, it's over. It happened like that.

The the sense of threat and the story of the day shifted and changed that quickly. And yeah. I mean, where do we go from here? I think that's the thing that no one knows. And we have this presidential election looming in November and politics has never felt sort of more irrelevant and think it's really, really cynical because I don't think Joe Biden's got a solution to this.

And Joe Biden is fucking bailing out protesters.

Sure. Like if he's got a solution, he already forgot it. Well, and this is part of the problem with the the way that the coalitions have broken down between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is basically the Republican Party has this affluent portion that they cater to and then they have white working class that they sort of culturally signal to in the Democratic Party has an affluent portion like the Pussycat, like women's March type suburban affluent white women like that's who they cater to, along with sort of business interests and Silicon Valley interests.

And then they culturally pander and signal to black and brown working class. And the incentive is always to keep everybody divided, because if you actually had like a multiracial working class put together, then that's where the real power would be. So it's you know, it's you have two parties basically that don't are very much invested in things, staying as they are. Look, riots in the streets, pandemic, mass unemployment and the stock market goes up.

Right. I mean, that's that's where we are that the people who already have wealth and power and position benefit, no matter what happens. Right. If there's a pandemic, they benefit. If there's mass unemployment, they benefit from it.

Just show you the horseshit of what the stock market is, though, Chris. It's it's a graph of rich people's feeling I've always loved. That's a brilliant quote. And I don't want to take you randomly on Twitter, whoever it is, whoever wrote that. Brilliant. Thank you. That's true. That's the thing about it.

And they feel good.

I mean, if you look at that, this is where I want to try and reclaim some level of positivity that's coming out of this thing, which is that, look, I mean, we are in the it's only in these huge moments that you have an opportunity to actually do something like Great Lenin quote, which is like something about like a in a week, ten years can have ten years, can feel like a week.

And then in a week, ten years where that change can happen, I'm butchering it.

Somebody can look around and don't let a good crisis don't live in a crisis. But there is something brave, there's something to be said for that.

And I think that this is why I'm more optimistic from like the right than the left. I mean, the left has made this like a kind of explicit decision to like, you know, like kill the Bernie Sanders movement, realign around the white, the white, upper middle class suburbanites like Joe Biden is doing joga events like literally yoga events for women who pay like you're going to you're going to pay somebody to up.

I'll pay money to watch him do yoga. I don't know. He's not doing the yoga. It's like if that do touch his toes, I'll give him a thousand dollars. Right.

But on the right, like like things are still very like up in the air. Right.

Like you still have people who are like people like who are like opposing. Trump is kind of the populist president. And I mean, look, I have my I have a podcast called The Realignment with my friend Marshall, cos, like, this is literally what we try and do. And like we're working on a few more interesting things here.

But like what we try and do on the podcast is work through what are the actual policy positions that like a populist. Right. Would look like like a new trading relationship with China. Everyone's like, oh, decoupling. Like, we've got to stop doing trade with China. What does that actually mean? Or like on immigration, like what does it actually mean to, like, restrict immigration in America?

Like what levels? Like how does it does it even in fact, wages? Like I would say yes.

And that's something that a lot of people have tried very hard to prove otherwise.

But it's about working with it's about you can realign the Republican Party to not just have the white working class, but you can have significant portions of the black and brown people of color, all working class Americans.

That is a huge winning coalition for the right in order to move forward. It only requires them to, I wouldn't say move left on the on economics, but to move back to where, you know, to the center on economics, away from this more libertarian minded. Right.

And the right using racist rhetoric. Yeah, but that's that's that's that's why to do it is because it's always they're always going to call you racist.

They can't say they can't move. Right or they can't move right on cultural issues because to them they're like shibboleths.

Right. Like you have to have the cultural issues.

That's what stops it from what was the term you ship. It's like a biblical term, like it's like a, I don't know, West Wing episode once on.

Real talk right there. Shows our D.C. How are you? I was more depressed, I guess, during the phase of the pandemic when it just seemed like everyone was crushed and everyone was apathetic and everybody was just like in their basement or in their apartment wondering how they're going to make rent next month. Or they were one of those frontline workers who was out on the front lines making seven twenty five to risk their life that, you know, at CVS or whatever it was, the fact that people are in the streets, especially, of course, the people who are peaceful and who are enraged and who are actually taking matters into their own hands in that way.

Like, I actually find that to be the most hopeful thing. Like imagine if if someone's life could be casually snuffed out like George Floyds was and there wasn't a reaction and there wasn't rage. Like to me that would be a profoundly more troubling state of affairs.

Then frankly, what we're seeing right now, you know, what's most troubling about that footage is that he knew he was being filmed, knew and and the bystanders are there saying, what are you like? Does he have a pulse? And it's so hands in his pockets just so casually.

And he's well, I don't think he knows him like this. Yeah, he had black gloves on. It looked like his hand was in his pocket. It's hard to tell. But the point is he was nonchalant about having his knee on this guy's neck. Also, he's in like a drain. So there's a divot there. So there's like an edge that's pressed against his neck. So he's got on one side. He's got a knee on his neck.

On the other side, he's got this cement drain.

The whole thing is horrific. I mean, the fact that those three cops just sat there and let him do that and didn't, I don't understand.

I mean, the only thing that man had been charged, that that doesn't mean it's outrageous. It also means that they probably do that shit all the time.

Well, listen, the unusual thing, we actually looked at the data and the reality is they do do that shit all the time.

And three fifths of the time that they use that particular hold to unconsciousness three fifths of the time is with African-American men.

They use that when they need on your neck to unconsciousness. I think it's I think it's chokehold is what a chokehold to unconsciousness is.

OK, there was kind of like over over five years, two hundred and forty five times to unconsciousness and three fifths of them were African-American men.

So, yeah, it's the catch the video itself and how casual it was and how standard it was. The guy passed a forged twenty dollar bill like that's it's insane. And so if people didn't because of covert.

Right. And if people didn't feel something from that moment and weren't in the streets. Right, that is what to me would be more troubling.

Well, it's one of the worst videos we've ever seen because it's like this prolon first of all, it's completely unjustified. Right? It's not like this guy is in a fight for his life against this guy. And there was no evidence at all that he was doing anything to merit any brutality. There was nothing. I mean, even he's talking he's like as they're leading him across the street, he's not resisting. He's not trying to run away.

I don't know how it got to the point where that guy was on his neck. But the fact that those other cops just sat there, it's like fucking what is happening.

And and, you know, this is probably going to tank Amy Klobuchar chance if we did all, which is kind of crazy because Biden had just vetted her for VP and then all of a sudden out of nowhere this happens. It turns out in 2006, that fucking cop was doing that shit way back then and she didn't do anything about it.

He said he had many, many civilian complaints against I can't I was like 17 or 19 different civilian complaints against them and nothing ever happened.

There's so many good cops out there. There's so many good cops. And when you see one like that, it's just there's a great video. And I've talked about this before, but I'll say it again of a Flint sheriff from Flint, Michigan, talking to these people and saying, look, I'm going to put the baton down. We're going to we're going to march with you.

But see, you know what the answer is? That is the answer to military because that that and what did that lead to, that deescalated that led to left?

You're right. It's like, oh, that's not looting. Right? That doesn't stop this while there's looting.

He's he's putting these peaceful protesters of that approach rather than crack down tear gas, rubber bullets, you know, punches us versus them and the, you know, the militarization, all of that that approach led to less violence.

I agree with you. But all that approach, the crackdown, tear gas happened after the looting. That's the that's the impetus for it. It's not like they saw these people protesting. They're just going to start shooting tear gas into the protest.

I've seen that.

But we saw the we saw here the first people we saw were burning down things in Minneapolis and they allowed that. And as I was talking about, that's that's really where it all took place.

Seeing people get away with shit like that. It's like, OK, now there's a fire of the mind. Yeah. And that fire needs to be put.

You know, people understand this in a war context, right? Like three fires. Like that's why we have very strong rules of like people understand. That the way the psychology of taking on this can happen and that that Minneapolis looting, that target, it was a beacon, it was a message. Any of these shitheads that you're talking about, hey, we can get away with this and then night after night after night after night, that's all.

I mean, you saw, I'm sure, the same videos I did.

You had like organized gangs, like people with car getaway cars, lookouts posted on the corner.

All that where where's the NYPD? Right. And that that is the good that breakdown is a very precious thing. And this is, you know, on the riots front, I mean, look, Baltimore, 20, 15, they had these level of riots. What happened?

Massive economic destruction.

But worse than that is that police and many of the others have took a much more risk averse approach to the way that they were going in that community, the community screaming for police specifically for this reason, which is that in the aftermath, we know from many of these rides, from the MLK Times and after Baltimore, it caused massive economic destruction to these cities. It is not a noble thing to allow this to continue. It's actually your job as a city.

I mean, there's a whole movement.

I mean, underground. Nobody wants to say this. A lot of people do want to live in cities now because of what happened. First of all, I live in an 800 square foot apartment. You don't fucking terrible it is to be locked down in an 800 square foot apartment. And the only thing you do is like go to the grocery store and you can't go out to eat or do anything. And now I've got shit like being blown up in the streets, like a couple of blocks from my house.

Like, I don't really know if that's the city. Life is all that enticing out there.

Crystal?

Yeah, I need to go get the Internet from the sky, but I think it is a lot of people were thinking that, which is that, hey, you know, fuck this.

Why am I paying all this rent to live in a soulless box and then maybe get, you know, my shit, get working remotely?

You know, there's there's a good, good argument for that. Now, to so many people realize I mean, maybe there's one good thing that's going to come out of this is that people won't be stuck in cubicles and maybe they can work from home more often.

I'm concerned for the future, but I think that there needs to be some national address that is about law enforcement and about the rules of engagement and about the way we treat people that are there are citizens. That's our community, especially with non-violent crimes, like a fucking fortune, forged life.

And that's where it come on. I mean, those individual cops should be held accountable 100 percent. And, you know, the fact that the three that just stood by like nothing has happened. They haven't been fired.

No, they were fired. They were part of it. But I mean, to me, that is just unconscionable. But it's it also speaks to the fact that it was casual, the fact that it was repeated, the fact that there were these complaints and nothing was ever done. It speaks to a larger systemic problem that the data backs up. And so part of, you know, the challenge of this moment is also the fact that we are essentially leaderless, like there is no trusted national there's no trust in our institutions, there's no trust in the media.

There's no trust invested in any sort of a national unifying figure. And so it's it's another reason why this moment is so incredibly fraught, because who would even give that address that anyone would really listen to?

Yeah, it's it's up to you, Joe. You've got to do it. That's that's why, you know, things are off the rails. They get the fear factor guy. He's going to handle everything. That's all. My problem with The Apprentice is the guy who did Celebrity Apprentice. It didn't work. That fear factor. He's going to he's going to help us through this. Yeah, he's really good at talking through things.

My dad was like a fear factor. He swears a lot. Right? That's what he's on. That's right. Yeah, that's right. A lot of shit.

I mean, there's there's got to be some sort of gigantic change the way. And you were talking about there has been some change in Baltimore because of the riots that happened there. And there's been a response and there has to be some sort of national response. And, you know, one good one thing to come out of it is there needs to be a better system for vetting people for law enforcement.

It can't just be. You want the job, OK? Can you do tension ups? Right. Do you have a criminal record of you ever sold heroin? No. OK, you're a cop. It can't be that it's going to be very difficult to be a cop because it's one of the most difficult jobs. It's an insanely difficult job. It's crazy that some of the most difficult jobs that we have are the least paying.

They pay the least like like a teacher, right?

They pay the sanitation workers, the people who literally they were all deemed essential during the pandemic, like who literally allow the country to function. Yes. Make the list of anyone and are treated like they aren't human. I mean, that's the other thing. Like they're fungible goods to be fired and disposed with and thrown onto the front lines in a pandemic and not given any protection like that is the way that they are treated day to day.

You know about the ones in New Orleans, right. The U.S. government on the show with the prison labor. They said, oh, we're going to replace you with slaves. Yeah, that's what they did get out. That's actually one thing we have in place. I haven't bogdanoff enough, which is hazard pay that that is something that I cannot believe that it hasn't gotten done. I mean, actually, Mitt Romney proposed twelve dollars extra per hour to any Patriot pay.

Mitt Romney is in a cult, but he's a very reasonable guy right outside of that.

Well, and think about like the workers in that pork processing. Yes. Massive outbreaks. But you know what's crazy?

A lot of those people are asymptomatic. It's really it's really weird. Yeah. Yeah. And also in prisons, you know, there's a lot of prison outbreaks and they found out that they're asymptomatic. And contrary to the way and actually I talked about this with Carl Kolinsky. He was saying, well, look at it this way, like those are the people that have a strong immune systems because they're constantly on top of each other.

And it's true. It could be. But it is. I mean, it's also that's also how it's spread through them. I mean, these people, I think high stress, terrible diet. You're locked in a cage, boy. How the fuck are these people? Asymptomatic. But this is a weird disease. And that's that's also part of the problem is that this is a novel coronavirus that gets me about it.

It's just I don't know what the fuck to believe about it. Right. Right. Like, there's all this in for me. Oh, this study has been debunked. Actually, no, Aniba. Everybody's got antibodies. No, nobody has antibodies.

What the antibody test doesn't cause the mortality rate is one percent point on one.

Like, I don't know what to trust. I mean, I think one of the things you brought up, which actually I thought was great point was like, why is nobody talking about immunity here? Like how to boost your immune system?

Not a single like Jamal, small towns where a man stay away from everybody, but not vitamin D, you know, when they're dealing with these people in New Orleans and there was a study in Indonesia, a giant percentage, like more than 80 percent of the people that are in the ICU have a vitamin D deficiency.

Yeah, four percent didn't write.

Four percent of the people in the ICU had sufficient levels of vitamin D, and how many people in general have a vitamin D to massive 70 percent.

And it just in this in this country, not not in California. I don't know why I said that, but I'm just trying to talk to 70 percent of people in this country have insufficient vitamin D and twenty nine percent are deficient, meaning they're in dangerously low levels. Now, when you add covid to something like that, I think that speaks to one of the problems we're dealing with, this mortality rate, obesity, people with insulin resistance, people with real underlying health problems.

And you could say, you know that, well, you know, we still have to protect those folks. And this is the reason why we locked down the country. OK, maybe.

But you didn't do anything about immunity. You didn't tell anybody to do things differently. There was no public service announcement telling people, hey, if you cut down on sugar and cut down on alcohol and take cigarettes out of your life, you have a radically increased chance of beating this fucking thing.

So how are we supposed to survive in quarantine without alcohol?

Alcohol we can't use we did during this, so it's crazy.

The liquor stores were deemed essential businesses and Alcoholics Anonymous was not. They shut down Alcoholics Anonymous, but they kept liquor stores open. I mean, I know how many people fell off the wagon during this time. A lot.

A lot, I'm sure if you're an anxious public. I saw some study about the the number of Americans who are showing signs of anxiety and depression during. Oh, yeah.

And I mean, it's completely you've been cut off from all of your coping mechanisms, basically. And if you've lost your job, you've lost, you know, a central point of meaning in your life and ability to provide for yourself and your family. It's it's unreal. And, you know, the fact that basically early on, who was it?

Was it Steny Hoyer in the House who was like, we'll come back and work some more?

If there's an emerging national embrace of national emergency, come back early. There's a pandemic in.

Millions of people lost their jobs. What are you talking? But that's been the blasé attitude because that's the premise.

Their career does not have to pay their money back. And the people say, Gavin Newsom, our our governor, one of the more ridiculous quotes, he said, if we keep our masks on, we can get back some of our freedoms.

You fuck you, motherfucker, like they really fucked with you in L.A., too, because first they were like three months.

Yeah. And then they just like to go. And I'm like, what did they learn something? My friend Janet, who owns this fantastic restaurant in Venice, they just Feliks they just told her out of nowhere you can reopen. But no, no preparation corporation.

That's what she said. I need ten days. She goes, I got to fucking hire all these people back. I set everything up right all of a sudden with no warning, they said, oh, we're just going to. But I think because they're dealing with this unprecedented economic despair where someone's like, hey, you know, you've only had two thousand deaths in the whole state. There's forty million fucking people. How many people have died of heart attacks during that time?

More. How many people died of cancer more? How many people died of obesity and all that related health? Problems that come with that a lot more, there's a lot of fucking people dying, twins, a good number.

It sucks that those two thousand people died of this disease. But you can't just shut down the whole country.

You can't shut down the economy because there is a direct correlation between a dip in the economy and an increase in deaths due to suicide, due to drug overdoses, due to all sorts of problems, even starvation that we've been living like that now for 10 years.

I mean, you know, since 2008, basically, like we had a wipe out of homeownership, actually, black homeownership wealth, black wealth and black homeownership under President Obama's presidency.

And it was during that time that, you know, when the economy was coming back, it was all underemployment. It was all like in the gig economy. It was all like in a way that just it was all not in a more secure way than it was before the crisis.

And that is actually part of why this makes this economic crisis so bad, because it even gets rid of those types of jobs, because going into the Great Recession, we lost a majority middle income jobs and coming out, we gained a majority lower income jobs. And that's when the gig economy crops up. And so people are pushed even more to the edge than they were before. And, you know, may not have health insurance, don't have savings or piece in it together with a couple different gig jobs.

And there's an author who calls it the precariat. That group of of workers who, you know, they're piecing it together. They don't have any sort of net below them. And then you layer on top of that, like that's a group of people who is either out on the front lines and the, you know, the processing plan or delivering the packages or doing the uber eats for lucky folks like us who can just order in. No problem, don't worry about it.

Or they lost their job altogether and are just like no certainty that it's ever going to come back. How am I going to how am I going to make rent this month? Like the the a lot of rent forbearance is ending right now and nothing has been done to help that.

And it's all going to be in full, total chaos after this rioting and no one knows what to happen. I want to ask both of you guys this, OK? If you had a magic wand, if you're the king of the world, how do we come out of this?

How to start with you?

What do you mean how do we all of it how do we come up with ideas?

How do we come in? This is what everybody's wondering right now. The big question everybody has right now is how does this end? How do we come out of the economic despair caused by the pandemic? How do we come out of the riots? How do we come out all of this?

I mean, I think you have to do a UBI and you have to do some sort of mass federal jobs program to get people back, to get them back working, to get them back on their feet to to rebalance the playing field. I think you have to do those two things. And I would also say universal health care.

How many of those twelve hundred dollar checks went out? Did only one side of them. One single one said, that's fucking preposterous. Yeah. One time that was it.

And then like, OK, but weren't they supposed to keep doing that? Well, no, that was never part of the thing.

That's hilarious. Yeah. So so how do we get out of this whole riot thing? I mean, I think these things go together. I also think that you have to have some some sort of systemic policing reform like what you're talking about in terms of the training, in terms of chokeholds being illegal in order to for people to feel like there are some real problems. Well, I don't think you should make chokeholds illegal.

I think if you're trying if someone's trying to kill someone, someone's trying to stop someone.

Look, if you're if you're a cop and you're in a fight for your life against someone who's done something horrible, you should be able to use jujitsu. And one of the best techniques in jujitsu is choking people unconscious. And it's not that dangerous. It's not as dangerous as beating someone. It's not as dangerous as head trauma. What that guy did was just torture. Yeah, that's what he did. It has nothing to do with utilizing a good martial art technique to subdue some sort of perpetrator.

Well, and here's the other piece. That is a whole other can of worms. But, you know, a lot of this policing has to do with the drug war. I mean, a lot of the militarization and the the racism within policing comes back to the the drug war in the way that we handle all of that for sure.

Yeah. But, you know, it has to do with PTSD as well.

I mean, I think there's a ton of cops out there running around with just unmanageable PTSD when he served in the military.

Yes. A lot of citizens out there who have PTSD for sure, but they're not pulling people over.

I think the they're getting pulled over by people over every day with PTSD leads to terrible choices. I think there's a lot of these cops that have seen too much violence. They've seen too much death. I was actually talking to a friend of mine about it yesterday and someone who she grew up with who had was different front he grew up with had a friend who lives in a small town of 9000 people and thought that where they lived was, you know, it was fine, normal place and became a cop.

And over the course of ten years of being a cop has a completely jaded and fucked up attitude. About human beings now, because they've walked in on people with their brains blown out, stabbed to death and raped, and just every fucking day they find some new reason to hate everyone and they're just broken. Yeah. And I think this is a thing that cops and every time they pull somebody over, this could be the last day of their life. This guy's got a tinted window, you know, and who knows what's going on inside this car.

Who knows if this is a fugitive? Who knows?

Well, and that's it. That's a deeper question about our society. It's not like that everywhere. I mean, it's not first of all, you don't have the level of violence everywhere that we have here. You don't have the level of cop to citizen animosity and violence that we have here. I mean, that's a that's a really deeper question about what we're doing in society to lead to those outcomes. I don't have all the answers. You're right.

Yeah, it is. It's a it's it's an effect that has accumulated over time to and to bring it back in the other direction and to have some sort of a positive relationship between the police officers and the communities they serve.

One thing that my friend Immortal Technique brought up about that sheriff in Flint, he said Flint has a very unique relationship with with the police and the people in the community because they're all dealing with that water problem.

They're all in it together. And it's been a lot of the people that are police officers, they're also live in the community, which are they?

And their kids were poisoned, too.

Yes, I think people living in the community that the police is also that's a big problem here in Los Angeles, that they're like back in the day, like a lot of the cops that didn't actually live in L.A. So it was very much like a yeah, yeah.

They're all in Simi Valley. Don't go robbing a house in Simi Valley.

So out of those thin blue line American flags is a problem in New York City as well, because it's so expensive, you know, that it makes it impossible for some people to be able to live in the city that they are actually policing. I mean, look, there's a there's an ugly history around policing in America. If you go back to a lot of the police departments in the South were put in place to enforce Jim Crow style laws. I mean, there has been a long history of basically there being a community that is protected and a community that is policed.

And so those are deep problems to solve. You're not going to solve them overnight. You're not going to pick one piece of legislation that's going to fix it like that. But I think if you have that context and that understanding and that you're not just saying, oh, it's just this one bad person or that one bad person, that we have a bigger structural issue, then you can start to move forward.

And people people just need to feel like progress can be made. I mean, I think that's one of the biggest problems in this moment, is there's this sense of nothing is going to change. Nothing has changed. They had body cameras. They didn't have them on. You know, they were being filmed and they didn't fucking care. It didn't matter. It didn't make a difference. And so if you can at least give people that sense that know the political system can work on your behalf, then you start to move in the right direction.

Isn't it amazing that one person in one horrific act and one part of Minneapolis to start this explosion that lights the whole country on fire?

Unbelievable protests, their protests overseas to. Yes, Japan. Right. I mean, it's weird. In New Zealand, I saw protests in New Zealand style. Then there was a protest. Same question to you. How do you fix this?

So on the real start with the riots, because I think my view is clear. Reestablish law and order. I agree with you. Use that opportunity to seize upon, again, the 50 plus one things. What do we all learn through this pandemic?

It's pretty stupid that our corporate elites and our political elites allowed many of our most critical jobs and industries in order to go over to China. That's an empirically stupid thing. Yes, restoring American supply chains makes us safer in the long run, both from a, you know, an economic perspective, from national security perspective, health perspective, et cetera.

Like the China thing is like a 90 10 issue.

And right now I want to make sure I call this out, which is that there are elements in the White House, more corporate friendly ones, who are trying to quash a Buy American order that was put forward, you know, within the Trump administration that doesn't even call for mandatory like on shoring of medical supply chains.

But just like wants to use subs, you know, tax rebates and all that other stuff to encourage over 10 years. And I think it's pretty unconscionable that something like that 90 10 issue after something like this hasn't been passed. I think on trade, it's the same thing. This is a broader question of so much of what we have. It's not just China. I mean, it's an overwhelming thing in our trading relationship, but it's like a great nation makes things for itself.

There's a great essay. I read it. It was like Make America Autarchic again. And Autarchy is like making everything here. And I'm not saying that's, you know, all the libertarians are going to get very upset about me and start sending these comparative advantage, Meems.

But like, look, there is a real benefit to be able to make things in America and that if just because it's cheaper, the the altar of globalization, the altar of cheap prices, has made us make horrific political choices over the last four decades.

And going on that and praying towards that altar has made it so that we are less safe.

Less, less, robust, less, I mean, socially, you know, to to live in a town and to to have a factory which is producing something and to feel pride in your work and get paid a good wage and to know that at the explicit decision of Congress, in order to let China join the earth, China joining the WTO, restoring permanent normal trade relations, permanent normal trade relationship with China and watching that factory go away like this, you know why that went away and people made that choice?

Because they said, fuck you, you're better off. You have a cheaper TV.

They said not better. GDP will go up. GDP did grow and it did. And it was great for a few people.

I think that you have to acknowledge that there's like a deeper rot in the society where the fundamental promise has been like if you have cheaper stuff and you can buy more like cheap Chinese crap, you're going to be happy, right? That's going to be the key to happiness. And so everything has been used to justify those ends. And it hasn't made us happy. It hasn't made us satisfied. It hasn't brought us any sort of spiritual nourishment or community.

And community is something that we have completely sort of dismissed with and dispatch with and devalued in the country as well.

So some of this is not like easy. Here's a law you can pass and you're good to go. But I think it does start with this fundamental idea which comes back to kind of the core of our show, that human beings are worthy, that they have dignity, that they have rights that should be secured. And if you can take that kind of FDR economic rights model and actually implement it into place where people feel that they are valued and seen and heard and have agency and power in the society, then you are not going to have to call in the military to American cities.

You're not going to end up with a situation like we see right now that's spiraling and spiraling and spiraling out of control.

That's another thing.

You know, in terms of what I would do, it's like we have to we have to reorient our economic life and our economic policies in order to incentivize the building of communities and the building of institutions that exist outside of just the outside of just a direct check from the government or direct check from your workforce.

It needs to be about I mean, the way that America was like the probably the most united we ever were was around like in the 1960s. Look, I know everyone's going there were terrible things that happened. They were exposed in the civil rights era and all that. But, you know, broadly, what was it?

It was like unions. It was about higher wages and it was about the strength of the American family. And that's something that I mean, every data we see lowest marriage rate on record in twenty eighteen because. And what's the number one reason that people cited not being able to get married?

I wonder. So I think it's not it's to acknowledge. No man, people still want to get married. It's just that they can't afford to. Marriage is a luxury good. Now they're like, honey, I wish we could. Yeah. Just just get up and think about it.

I think, look, I think we need to reorient our economic life in order to bolster the American family. And this this this is something very much part of like the new right movement. There's this new organization called American Companies, run by a friend of mine, Warren Cass, who used to work for Mitt Romney. And now what he's trying to do is, you know, move the GOP on these issues towards centering economic like restoring like economic conservatism from economic libertarianism.

And what I mean by that is free market fundamentalists, that the free market is always good, look like the free market was it is a good thing once again that we couldn't make ventilator's in our country when we thought we needed them. Like, was it a good thing that we couldn't manufacture our own medical supplies? And then broadly, look, in terms of the immediacy, what I would do, it's this payroll plan.

It's so critical that we restore American's payroll and that we try to make it so that these businesses don't become failed distressed assets that get rolled up into these huge private equity conglomerates that buy them all off for cheap, that fucks over workers, it fucks businesses, and it just make this.

Do you want to live in a highly in a world where there's no mom and pop businesses are no dive bars anymore.

That's where we're headed. Right. Right. I have to make sure we prevent that.

I think to people will put up with a lot of shit and they will persist and they will invest in the community, invest in their lives. They'll invest a productive civil society. If they feel that they have they they believe that life will get better for themselves and their kids. And I really think that's kind of the core breakdown, is that people no longer have that confidence that for their kids, it's going to they're going to be able to have it better than they had.

And when you lose that sense of hope, that's when things go off the rails.

I think there's also a real problem with the selection in that you either are a pro Trump person, which you're happy that Trump's going to run again. But if you're a Democrat, you're really settling.

We all know you're. Really, really settling your make your skin way right now, Joe. I'm speaking to everyone who's on the left that has any suspension. Well, and it also you it so clearly highlights the people that are full of shit, that are just supporting the fact that, you know, you want you're going to vote left no matter what. And you hear this thing like I'm just voting for the Cabinet. I'm voting for the one thing that I keep hearing over and over again is I'm voting for a woman's right to choose.

And I'm like, OK, I agree with the woman's right to choose. But is that the number one thing for running the country is a person's ability to abort a baby? Is that really what that really is? What it boils down to? And I'm not you know, I'm not saying that lightly, but it's it's very sad that we're in this position in 2020 that we we have to say I'm just voting for the Cabinet.

I just want to vote left voting for the Supreme Court.

No matter who. It doesn't matter. Did you cross the board? We cut we covered the chamber.

There was a and this was Democrats made fun of Trump voters for being cultists. Last time around, Trump came out and said, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. They'd still vote for me. And Ruben, you're an idiot, right? That's ridiculous. A woman nature writer at The Nation just wrote this piece that she started off. If Joe Biden boiled and ate babies, I would still vote for him. Look, is she being hyperbolic? Of course.

But the central concept of like, it doesn't matter what he does, it doesn't matter. I will justify it if it's just a hair's breath, better, in my view, than Trump. And look, I mean, ultimately, maybe the election is that existential and maybe things are going off there, like, OK, well, at least Joe is going to be somewhat normal and it's not going to formal presidential things.

But that type of politics is deeply destructive because if if everything can be justified, if you're just like slightly better than the other side at this lesser of two evils dynamic is a hell that you can never escape from.

Isn't he 78? Yeah. So he'll be 86. Wait a second.

He's 78 or 77. I think he's 77. Yeah. Well, fuck you. Never lets the same shit happens here. That's the end of the line. I mean, Bernie was. Seventy eight U.S. attorneys seemed much more vibrant.

Well, that's for whatever reason. You know, his head is in the middle of his chest. Strange reason, but Biden just feels like he's falling apart.

And the idea that he's going to be here in eight years because this is the problem, you're voting for him not just for now, you're voting for him. If he wins, you're hoping you last two terms.

Well, so you're also you're also voting for whoever is vice president is who not only maybe will be the next Democratic nominee and then eight years of them, but also because of his decline, may have a lot more influence and power may be pulling the strings depending on who it is. And look, he's already said he wants to pick someone.

He's consulting with Wall Street as to who he should pick as donor class is like having a lot of say over who he should pay, is going to pick someone who's basically just like him ideologically. So you're looking at maybe 12 years of essentially being like, well, I guess this is I guess I'm voting for the cabinet for whoever is vice president is going to be like a Democratic.

It's going to be some sort of a Dick Cheney situation where I've heard that my favorite quote from Biden is he wants to make the Democratic Party a bridge to bridge.

Like, did he really say things like people like Pete? And I was like, whoa, I'm so comfortable right now.

That's the bridge I was ready to ride in the streets after Joe. Yeah, that I'm I don't know if he's a nice guy, but he just seems so plastic.

It seems so safe. Yes. It's just empty.

It's just about you say young guy too, which is part of the problem. You're thrusting someone into the national spotlight that was just a mayor and running while he was a mayor. That doesn't I don't understand that. When you're a mayor, isn't it really fucking important to take care of your city?

Well, and he wasn't doing well. How does that work?

One of the only people in the people in the primary who even covered how the city of South Bend itself felt about Projet.

There's this like celebrity culture around politicians now. It's kind of like we were talking about earlier, like Conomos. Oh, it does a great press conference. And that's all that matters. There's this Stacey Abrams, who's also been talking about for a vice presidential pick. She sort of created this brand image of being very much on the left, very progressive, a very different sort of politician. But if you actually look at her record in Georgia, she was you know, this is not like maybe if you're a centrist, this is a good thing.

It's not my politics. But she was very centrist, corporate friendly. That was the type of politician that she was. And no one ever actually covers her record, which kind of fundamentally disrespectful to her. She's a politician. She did things. She has a record. Instead, it's this like Kardashian type coverage checks all the diversity by.

That's exactly yeah, I was talking about the mayor of Chicago when I was there, I was like, she's a woman, she's black and she's gay. If she just was a transgender and a Muslim, she would have all of the Infinity Stones and she'd be the focus person that ever existed with dreadlocks would glow.

And she's got every box covered. And I've seen a video where she's talking about we interviewed people, we've been reading. She's been on the show.

There's a video where she's talking about the new world order. There's this video that's being passed around and conspiracy theory, Twitter, you know, she's I've not seen this. You know, the video, Jamie.

Jamie can find the video. I think Eddie Bravo put it on his Twitter page.

It says a lot or his Instagram page, but is essentially she was talking about picking leaders that will comply with the New World Order. I don't know what the context of what she was saying, but then it got passed around like, look, she's a new world order.

Shell got like all the tinfoil, that's all. Yeah, that's all these old world order. Shellie's Illuminati need five G. Yeah, cover your head. Fucking five G, man.

It's it's everywhere. Be careful. All right.

Yeah, she's she's, you know, a very popular politician for a lot of good reasons. But it's also one of those things where when someone says something like New World Order, you say just that phrase alone, like that's a hot button phrase for all the conspiracy people. Right.

Well, and when you have the coverage, Cogo, though, when you have no one who's trusted in the media and when you have this sort of general societal breakdown in general, then that stuff flourishes more than it would in normal times.

But it's obviously these echo chambers of conspiracy theorists and left wing people who are pundits and right wing people. These echo chambers are some of the most disturbing parts of interaction with people online, because you can always find someone that agrees with you. And, you know, if you're not a person that likes to challenge your thoughts and ideas, you can just bounce those fucking things around with all these other knuckleheads who believe the same shit you do. That's definitely it.

I found the clip and I just you. No, it's been fact checked to be out of context.

Of course. Of course it's out of context, shockingly. And of course, I just want to know what the hell she's saying.

Yes. Otherwise it doesn't work. So you got to eliminate that compliance and you make a mandate and then you do training, particularly in the call the licensing departments, whether it's zoning, buildings, housing or being impacted by planning. Certainly. And it's you and you pick the people who run those agencies. And the deputies are pledging allegiance to the new world order and good governance. And then I think you have the inspector general that's I go to I get what she was trying to say, I think, which is like a new era of city government.

Is that is that.

No, she's saying Lord Vader. She's saying I pledge allegiance to Lord Vader. Open your eyes. I'm just a shell is mandatory shell. Everyone get your five g c. He's covering for them as a member. What's a club? Bill Gates is the devil. Get your microchips.

Fuck you. Bill Gates is the bad guy. Now, how did that happen?

Did you see Trump standing from the church holding that Bible like is a dirty diaper?

He's was like, look, I got the Bible in my hand, took it all, went really well. That was great. Is hilarious.

First of all, they tear gas all the fucking protesters to get them off the street to clear the street out.

And then Trump walks across the street like there's never been a president so bold to walk like he's walking. So he walks across the streets, is boarded down church. It's hilarious. I mean, they probably had snipers all over the room. They did look. Yeah, it's a dirty diaper.

He's holding that thing like like, look, I've got my Bible, motherfucker. Read me one passage. Asked if it was his Bible.

He's like, it's a it's a Bible.

It's a Bible. Thank you, sir. I got it at a hotel.

I was staying. Yeah. I mean, what is that? Was you holding the Bible? That is the most ill conceived PR stunt that I've ever seen.

I mean, maybe I actually thought about this, too, because, look, I mean, the main reason the main reason, like Trump has such a solid hold on the on the right, like on the Republican base, so to speak, is because actually of the judges thing of the Supreme Court thing, which you were talking about, of selecting Mike Pence, who has a lot of credibility in the evangelical community. So I think that I mean, a lot of people were outraged.

I saw this this was a very, like right thing when that, you know, the St. John's Church, that church that you were seeing that was set on fire and so like it was set on fire. And there was a lot of people like, first of all, I think it was Brian Stelter over at CNN was like, actually, no, it's not on fire.

They delivered almost twenty saying on Twitter was Buckeye's adorable.

He's adorable little schill. He's something else.

But so, like, there was all that. And there look, there wasn't a lot of outrage around the fact that the church got so. On fire, so I get what he was signaling. Look, I agree, I told Chris this morning on the show tear gassing the protesters and then going out there for the Photoshop. I like that. I don't think it was the best move.

Can you imagine being so insecure that you're the president of the United States like you have nuclear arsenal and neglectful American military at your disposal, and you're so insecure that you have to show your strength in that moment by walking across the park?

And reportedly he was upset because it had come out that they had like had to go down into the bunker on Friday or Saturday, Saturday night or whatever, when there were protesters. And so this was his way to reassert his manhood.

But I think that's why I say I don't think that he has like a real I think he has instincts. I don't think he has a real ideology. I don't think he has like a goal or a mission or a project he's trying to accomplish. I think he's just all it. I think it's all just about like, how do I reclaim this news cycle? How do I win the day? I actually interviewed him back before he was an official candidate at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

I was doing like I was like on the rope line during, like, the celebrity interviews, like sticking a mic in people's faith or whatever. It was ridiculous.

So he comes in and this is at the time and everyone's like, oh, this just a publicity stunt.

He's not going to run. Right. And he comes in with Melania wasn't the one. It was maybe the one after when Barack Obama made in front of them like that. And so he comes up to me and this is when I was at MSNBC and, you know, I wasn't like particularly prominent there. It was one of four on a panel show.

And he locked eyes with me.

And he's like, Kristol Oh, my God, it's so great to meet you. Like, even then this was like Ari and Abby talk. You guys are so great together on the cycle. Like he knew the show. He knew clearly.

He was already cable news obsessed with cable news and all the ins and outs of cable news. And he was like, oh, my God, I can't believe I get to meet Krystal.

I'm like, how do you know who? I mean? It's just bizarre. But it was such a little insight into his whole wiring. And so he knows more than anyone like what is going to be provocative to these stupid talking heads on cable, what is going to capture their attention, what is going to be outrageous, what's going to win the day? And I don't think that there's much beyond that thinking of like, how do I win this news cycle?

How do I change the topic on this news cycle?

So there's certainly part of that. But the thing is that wouldn't explain why Trump has been skeptical of the global financial system since like 1978. Right.

Like there's that old clip of him on Oprah in like 1980, talking about talking about Japan and China. I mean, he's a he's even I heard this from a friend he was citing, like one of my friends, Michael Lind, who's like very, you know, a nationalist on trade policy in the mid 20s was like, Michael Lind is right about trade.

He was he's clearly been thinking about this for a long time.

And on immigration in particular, I mean, I think that's another one where he's always kind of been there. He's always had the instant I mean, his real genius was looking at what did the base of the Republican Party actually want. They want better trade deals and they want less immigration. And for decades now, all the professional right has been able to give them will cut your taxes. That's a priority. It'll never actually happen. And then that is.

And then but you still have to vote for us because we're good on abortion and we're good on gun control. And that wasn't enough for a lot of people. And you can see, too, and this is what I meant about making it the cynical choice.

When you adjust your position on immigration and on trade, you win all of these Obama Trump voters all throughout the Midwest and you become the president.

I mean, and even then, I'm not saying it was enough. There still is a lot more work to be done. I think it needs to realign more to the issues of what I'm talking about. But to say that it's all just aid is just I mean, that's not his his driving force. Like, if you see the way I'm having interacted with him and just like how he how he reacts to certain things, there isn't condensed ideology behind what he is.

Otherwise he wouldn't have run the way he was. He wouldn't have had those positions for such a long time on the core issues that actually matter to why he was elected. And so the real issue and I think the criticism of valid criticism is he wasn't able to enact those political instincts into the actual staffing of the White House because in the White House, personnel is policy.

And there's a great there's a great book called The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and it's about a history of LBJ is four volumes and all that.

Robert Caro, one of the best biographies of all time, and he quotes a guy named Tommy Corcoran who was FDR is kind of right hand man. He was like, what is a government government? Not one man. Government is the first hundred men, first thousand. They all have to be united in a common purpose in order to actually get shit done in a bureaucracy. The truth is, and we have to acknowledge this, is that on the right after Trump's election, the RNC and all these professional right wingers, this conservative establishment, they were the thousand.

And so that's why you get something like the tax cuts bill, the tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It's because a guy like Paul Ryan has been fantasizing about pushing that for such a long time. He's. I agree with Trump on trade, he blatantly disagree, he didn't agree with Trump on immigration completely and they were these guys were masters. Oh, Mr. Prizing, you're going to get that.

But you got to pass this tax cut for. Right?

Oh, you'll get what you want and you're spending. But you just got to put this in the spending bill first. And they snookered basically they snookered him because Trump is.

I mean, look, he was a political novice. He didn't actually know about how policy was made in Washington, D.C. It's fucking complicated. It matters a lot who the deputy secretary of commerce is like. You and I aren't going to know that person's name. That person certify certifies like steel tariffs.

Yeah. I still think that's letting him off the hook too much, though, because, like I mean, you see in this in this crisis. Right. If he may, he may have some instincts. He may have some ideological leanings. And you're right, he's been talking about this some of this stuff, especially on trade for a long time.

But when it came down to it, you know, he was the first people he called in the coronavirus crisis for economic response were corporate CEOs, Wall Street executives like that's who he went to to get his advice. That's who he trusted. And that's how you end up, you know, floating ideas like we're going to have a capital gains tax cut as a response to the crisis or we're going to have a payroll tax cut, which, OK, if you have a range of responses, maybe that's part of it.

But when you've got 40 million people who aren't on a payroll anymore, that's not going to do a whole heck of a lot of good. So I just don't see that there's any maybe he has the ideology, but doesn't really matter if you're not willing to push for if you're not and you see who's organized in the town, because immediately, once this crisis hit immediately, the first truly multitrillion dollar bill gets passed very, very quickly with all the goodies for big business, the stuff that was custom written every got their goodies.

There was a massive tax break for real estate developers that they tried to get into the corporate bailout, that they had all ready to go. Like those are the forces that are all completely organized, locked and loaded and ready to go in a crisis. And so they basically won. I mean, they rolled everyone. They tied the little bit of paltry small business and worker stuff to the massive corporate piece and held the workers and the small businesses hostage and said, if you vote, don't vote for it, then you're voting against workers.

And it was all ready to go like that.

And that is what you overcoming in the town, that sort of bipartisan ninety eight ninety eight oh, one person all voted for it all voted for it.

I think when you're talking about Trump and his history of understanding trade and business decisions, I think it's all stuff that benefited him. That's why he was concentrating on them. And I think now you're dealing with him spread so thin because now he has to deal with the environment. He has to deal with international politics. And there's so much and that's why you catch him. And I think what you said to the lives of the ID, I mean, I think that's very true.

And he's always in the moment, right? He's famously said he just lives off of his instincts. He trusts his instincts, which is great. But he had preparation when he was dealing with those things before, when he's talking about those things before he was president. That's why he had a deeper understanding of them, because they meant something to him. But now you're dealing with the entire broad spectrum of duties of being the president. And he says shit like inject people with Lysol and sic dogs on protesters, like he's saying nutty things.

Right. Agree with you. He's the strongman, right? He's always been the strongman. He's always been the you're fired guy.

Right. And he's still planning that type. Yes. So he's that guy now, but he's that guy with global thermonuclear consequences.

And so even more to the point on that, which is that when you don't have this is this is another kind of establishment always wins.

Point is that when you don't have very firm beliefs because like trade and immigration are two things are like hundreds of billions of dollars behind the neoliberal trade and immigration policy that we have right now in this country when you don't have that, a very well-formed ideology around how it should be like you were saying on the environment or anything else, that is how they win because that status quo always continues in D.C. unless you make a very concerted effort of like, no, you are not doing this anymore.

And I'm appointing your boss and your boss's boss and your boss's boss, boss's boss in order to make sure that you don't actually do that.

That's that's actually what the hardest way to fight back is. You actually need a coherent ideology on every single one of these things. But more important, you got to understand how government works. And I think that so many people don't seem to grasp that. It's not just like putting a guy in the Oval Office like, look, by the time it's reach the Oval Office, it's so fucked, right. That ten levels down, they would have made the decision.

So that's the power, right?

Like, you got to make sure that you're what you want is being reflected ten layers down in the bureaucracy. And you look at the way, you know, like Russia gate and all this other stuff, and you can just see, like, how arrogant some of the people within the bureaucracy behave, just blatantly disregarding the will of a president or blatantly just thinking he's illegitimate, trying to delegitimize him. And from that. Perspective, that's fucking scary because they're not even accountable to the person that we all voted for.

That is what what I like why why conservatives have to care more about government. That's something I like.

One of my pet causes is look like we are living in a society where the culture is against you, like we are living in a society where, you know, the cultural elite, the commanding heights of American culture, and you're living in a society where you don't have real power there. And so and you're also living a society where you have corporate America. Look at these protests right now. Amazon supports the protests, right? Like Amazon supports the protest.

Citibank CEO, it's it's the people with the most accumulated capital in America are also on the side of this protest. Why? Because in my view, they use identity politics and racial politics.

They want to split the country along those lines every single day that we're talking about identity politics and having debates about race.

But we're not talking about really want to split the country along the lines. I think they just want support for their company. So they think that it's a good PR move.

It's a good it's a brand. And here's the thing is and this goes back to the coalitions of the parties. Right? So the Democratic Party caters largely to these like white, affluent women. Basically, it's like the the base that they write.

I know the speech while I was affiliated with this base where I see Joe Biden do the Jogo the Joker base up.

And so, you know, for those for people who are more or less doing well as things are right. They've got their health insurance. They've got a job where they're treated like a human being with humanity. They can get their obreht. They can get whatever they want on demand. Right. Their way of of virtue signalling is on identity issues. And if you only confine the conversation on policing to like, let's deal with this, let's let's have more body cameras, like if you keep it in that lane, that's very comfortable for that.

Right.

If you have a broader conversation about a society that, you know, has decimated unions, has decimated working class power about who has power in the society and why, like that's more of a threat to them. So, yes, for corporate brands, it's very comfortable to have like let's have a diversity initiative. It's less comfortable to say, no, no, let's actually value the worth of everyone. Let's actually have a different set of let's actually not have corporations able to give unlimited and limited money and buy off our politicians and then be able to go work on your boards, et cetera, et cetera.

Like that's a very non-threatening conversation. That's how you end up with was a Bank of America sponsored. The movement continues. Yes, like a Black Lives Matter movement continues with DeRay McKesson is a prominent activist.

To be cynical, is there another reason why Amazon would support this protest? This is kind of the death of retail.

I mean, this is one of the final nail in the coffin of retail. So think about investing your money in a brick and mortar store with a glass window after all this horseshit.

Look, I won't cite who told me this was a very prominent person in the field of economics and was like, my conspiracy theory is that Jeff Bezos wants 10 to 15 percent unemployment because then what's the best job in the world, Joe?

In rural place, Amazon warehouse.

He's the guy dropping off those bricks who who's better delivering shit than Amazon. There you go. Yeah, but Amazon Prime delivering pallets. You shit.

You should be more cynical because that I mean, look, how else do we get to a point where, like the Shell gas company sponsors a 16 19 project event with Nicole Hannah Jones are around with that. So the 60 19 project.

Oh, man. Which is a real rabbit hole. So this is like this is The New York Times.

Put out this thing in sixteen nineteen projects, the year that the first slaves were brought to America. And it was about reforming the way that we talk about race and slavery in America. And so the the very first essay which she wrote, which is very controversial, is when she claimed that the reason for the American Revolution was because people wanted to keep their slaves, not because of control from England and all that. What happened is, is that a bunch of very prominent historians from the American Revolution, the Civil War and much more panned the essay.

They said this thing needs to be corrected. They corrected it. Even then, she still won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism or for commentary.

I want to say for that specific essay, which was which was there, and they partnered, I think it was with the Pulitzer Center in order to create curriculum that schools are now using to teach.

Now, this was attacked the 60 19 project, not at first by conservatives. Of course, conservatives were pissed off.

It was attacked by the world socialist Web site, by Trotskyites, by Marxists and socialists.

And the reason why is because they saw it for what I see it, which is that it's a cynical attempt in order to say America is an irredeemably racist nation, that that is the only single and most pressing problem that we have in our society. And if you hold that frame, then you don't ask questions about corporate power in America. You don't ask questions even of leaders. A friend of our show is that Giuliani had a fantastic appearance on our show.

I really encourage everybody to go watch it.

He talks about if you look at the black community in America, which is what had the most depressing impact on their life economically and destroyed so much of their livelihood, it was the foreclosures under Barack Obama and it was the wipe out of black homeownership and black wealth that that the 16 19 project and the framework of politics, that that original sin, which, of course is the original sin, is the be all end all for why we are where we are today absolves current political leaders and recent political leaders like Barack Obama himself or like leaders in the city of Atlanta or leaders in the city of Baltimore, and that it absolves public policy, which is non-racial.

And so when I say that, why does shale gas company feel comfortable sponsoring an event in which the main message is that is that America is an irredeemably racist nation because they that is one more event which is being talked about in the political zeitgeist by the cultural elite, which is not talking about their own power in the marketplace.

And if you look at who what is the the dominant control in your life in America?

It is about capital. It's not about race. It's about class class. But class disproportionately affects people of color in America.

And so the way I look at it is that identity politics is so cynically grafted on by the billionaire and the corporate class.

There's a reason they're all super woak. It's because they want it to be this way so that we don't talk about their power in our society.

And I think this was a very cynical like the way this all happened is kind of crazy because it started out in the sociology departments in the 1970s of all of these crazy, you know, from the post and the sixties era. They were, you know, in these sociology departments and they started cranking out all these absolutely crazy papers around, you know, feminism and identity politics, racial politics, all of that. And then what happened is, is that corporate America and other cultural elites, first of all, were being indoctrinated in the university system.

They were going to go work at places like McKinsey and others, and they brought their racial politics and their identity politics with them, but that there had to be recognition from the top, from people like Goldman Sachs.

If Goldman Sachs, if the pressure on them is to stop the way that they trade derivatives or to put a black person on their board while they continue to do the derivatives trading, they're going to choose that every single time. So they want to direct the conversation in that direction. It absolves them for the sins both towards the economically disenfranchised in America.

But it's also a very cynical tool, which is that why is it that you see all these corporations, you know, tweeting out Black Lives Matter, Instagram blackout, all that stuff, how is it that you see, like not, you know, Nike?

Isn't this the great irony that Nike, you know, went and did the whole Colin Kaepernick thing, the ad campaign, and they still got all their shit looted in this in this most recent in Chicago?

Right.

I mean, I think that is that's the perfect example of they try to cynically use identity politics in America, split people apart to protect their power. And if we start to understand that it's a lot more about class in America than it is about race, I'm not saying that there is not racial problems in American racism, that, you know all of this, but that if you focus on these class issues, it's the best way to help people, to people who are disenfranchised, who are disproportionately people of color, but to help everybody, that's a much more I just don't know how else we can live in a multifaceted, multifaceted nation like this, which is economically heterogeneous, ethnically people, you know, so many people of different ethnicities, so many people of different religions.

So maybe I mean, I am the son of Indian immigrants. I feel fully and completely American. That's an amazing thing. That didn't just happen is the product of a result of very specific political choices that we made over time. And it's moving towards that that we need to go towards. And that's but by doing so, what you've talked about many times about economic, not just distribution, but about the poor who has power in society, working class or not, which is the corporate America can use the identity politics in order to make sure the working class doesn't continue to have power.

And so you can't separate class and race because it's not an accident, of course, that black and brown people are disproportionately the lower income and poor and working class in society. I mean, I see it much more simply, sort of like what you were saying. It's it's not just it's like a branding exercise. Right.

And there's this whole idea. I always think it's hilarious on the right, like Facebook and Twitter are progressive or they're liberal companies or Amson, the liberal come in like, what are you talking about? Amazon treats their workers like shit. They bust you. And it's like this is not a left company. Right. But because they use this sort of branding tools and tweet out Black Lives Matter, which is no threat to them, and in fact, as you're pointing out, may very much benefit their bottom line.

Ultimately, they're sort of they get all the benefits of being for progress and being for this rising coalition in America without actually having to do anything that's going to benefit their bottom line. Yeah. Listen, we just did three hours, just flew by. What's so serious? Wow. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

I really appreciate you guys. I really appreciate your perspective. I really appreciate the fact that you guys are you're putting out your honest, informed opinions. And it really helps people like me that way. Too lazy to look the shit up on their own.

I don't have the time. I'm not interested that much. That's all right. That's our job. It is your job and you're great at it. You guys are awesome. And I love the fact that you disagree, but you do so intelligently and respectfully. And you you cut through all the nonsense that's on most of these political shows is there's just so much nonsense. And I think the world is sick of it. And I think that's one of the reasons why you guys are gaining in popularity.

Well, thank you, Joe.

I mean, means a lot. Yeah, seriously. I mean, we found out we're coming here is just so great. I've been listening to you for four years. I started buying elk meat because of you.

So give me a my girlfriend has a lot of problems. I bought some of that for stigmatic coffee. And thank you for everything.

Joe, you created the space for people like us in our politics and for us to thrive. And we can't ever underestimate that. I think that's why you are so popular.

And you've you've really invented the medium for a new discussion. It's a revolutionary age and media, and it's never been more exciting.

It's a complete accident. And I had no idea how I stumbled on to it. I just just keep doing it. But you guys are very valuable. I appreciate you very much.

Thank you. So thank you. Tell people how to get a hold of you on social media. Yes.

So subscribe at the Hill and our show is rising. And then I'm on Twitter at Crystal Ball, Instagram at Crystal Ball. And that's Crystal with a K, by the way. And there you go. That's the hill.

You can also so at E Sagal on Twitter, Sam on Instagram also you can go to rising dot substract dotcom or just have a list of all the links, everything you need to check out.

Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Everybody, thank you friends for tuning into the show. And thank you to flavor visit flavor dotcom slash Rogen and use a special j r e offer to surprise your dad with a bottle of whistle pig piggyback ride. It's fantastic whiskey and it will be tough for anybody else to top that gift. Head to flavor dotcom slash Rogen and use the j r e offer were also brought to you by the motherfucking cash.

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