Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 4/14/23: Krystal Reacts To Leaker Arrest, Jen Psaki Insists She's A Real Journalist, VA Teacher Shot By Student, Krystal and Kyle Interview Norman Finkelstein

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

This week Krystal reacts in the moment to the Pentagon leaker being arrested, Jen Psaki makes the argument that she's a real journalist, a Teacher recovers from being shot by her 6 year old student, and Krystal and Kyle do a full length interview with writer and American political activist Norman Finkelstein on a range of topics.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let the brick in the background. But there is a big piece of breaking news that we wanted to share with you as quickly as we possibly could. If we could put this up on the screen from the New York Times, they have named the alleged leaker of that trove of highly classified documents, many of which had to do with the U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. These were initially posted to a Discord server and then eventually leaked to the wider Internet. So what the New York Times says here, and I'll just read directly from their report and then give you a little bit of my thoughts on the other side.

Leader of online group where secret documents leaked is Air National Guardsman. Federal investigators are searching for the person who shared top secret documents that revealed government secrets about the Ukraine war. online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. According to interviews and documents reviewed by the New York Times, the National Guardsman, whose name is Jack Texera, oversaw a private online group called Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, what they describe as racist online memes and video games. Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Texera about the leak of the government documents. One official said that he might have information relevant to the investigation. And of course, federal investigators have been

searching for this individual who was named in the group. I think they called him the OG. The Washington Post had some reporting that we brought to you on Breaking Points this morning, where they had interviewed one of the other members of this group, a teenager who had to get permission from his parents to speak to the post, that individual was kept anonymous. But he indicated that, you know, the person who leaked, who he referred to as OG, that he was either in the military or worked on a military base. He talked about how his views, he would describe them as sort of generally anti-government. He name-checked Ruby Bridge and Waco as some sort of inspirations for his general right-wing anti-government. He name-checked Ruby Bridge and Waco as some sort of inspirations for his general right-wing anti-government views. According to that young man, young teenager,

he didn't model himself as a sort of whistleblower. He more was posting these documents because he wanted to show to the group how important he was, I guess, within the military and what he had access to. And then, of course, was sort of clumsy in some of the photographs that he took. There was some stuff in the background that the Times, the Washington Post and other outlets were able to use in part of their effort to find whoever this leaguer was. So listen, is it newsworthy who this person is? Sure. Is it interesting, you know, what their background is, how this all unfolded? Absolutely not denying that. But as we talked about this morning, it also is extraordinary that these news outlets,

they seem to have focused most of their journalistic resources, not on uncovering the many other documents and secrets that he posted that no news outlet to our knowledge has access to, or even in digging to some of the stories that we were able to bring you exclusively on Breaking Point simply because the mainstream press didn't cover them. But they seem to have focused most of their journalistic resources on hunting down this individual and effectively doing the work of the U.S. government. On MSNBC, you know, they immediately brought on David Ignatius, who used the cherry picked pieces that were reported in the mainstream press to call for a more hawkish approach towards Ukraine.

And they brought on their own in-house security expert, who is a former CIA, to say that, the top priority was to, quote, catch the traitor. So The Washington Post and The New York Times assisting in finding this individual, at least apparently based on the information that The New York Times was able to obtain. They said that, you know, some of the details that were in the background, they were able to match to details of the interior of his childhood home that had been posted on social media and family photographs. Let me also give you a little bit of reaction. They were able to talk to his mother, whose name Dawn, speaking outside her home in Massachusetts on Thursday. They say she confirmed that her son was a member of their National Guard, said he had recently been working overnight shifts at a base on Cape Cod, and in the last few days he had changed his phone number.

She said probably a wise move. Again, federal investigators not confirming that they have identified this person as a leaker, but saying that they are interested in speaking with him. And then the last piece of this report is there have been questions about who exactly had access to these very sensitive materials. And according to The Times, not immediately clear if a young Air National Guardsman in his position would have had direct access to such highly sensitive briefings. So still a question of how he obtained the documents. So basically, that's what we know right now, guys. New York Times, Washington Post, they did the work of the of the federal government, making sure they tracked down the leaker and wish now they would spend some more time digging into the documents and the important implications thereof. More for you later, guys. MSNBC's Jen Psaki, formerly of the Biden White House, had an interesting new interview

where she claimed she is not a state propagandist. She actually sees herself as a journalist. Let's take a listen to that. Do you consider yourself a journalist? I do. Because how do you define being a journalist? Now I'm going to ask you this question. I don't know. I mean, I was once told it was an out of work newspaper man. Well, here's how I think about it. I mean, first of all, journalism has changed dramatically. Semaphore is an example of that, right? And even when I was in

the White House working in government, it really was already all on a spectrum. It wasn't just the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, and then everything else wasn't considered part of journalism. It's all a big, broad scope of things. And so to me, journalism is providing information to the public, helping make things clear, explaining things, having conversations with people people want to learn more about. And so I think there is a broad expansion of what that is. That is a very selective definition, which is technically true, but also involves not having government actors be involved in said process. I actually think Ken Vogel reacted to it. He said, I look forward to Jen Psaki's exposés about any of her former colleagues and funding of democratic apparatus. That's what

actual journalism looks like. Otherwise, you're just a partisan hack who is regurgitating something in a media info system. Do not confuse yourself with the other. Well, she does something very clever there as the very effective propagandist that she actually is, which she seeks to like butter up Ben and the Semaphore audience. Not that I think he's buying it. And the Semaphore audience by being, look at all of these platforms. Of course, the whole range and spectrum, this is all journalism, which exempts any scrutiny of the individual people who are conducting the work at these platforms.

And, yeah, if you are only focused on your, quote-unquote, journalism to serve one side, like one portion, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, your former boss, your former colleagues, et cetera, that's continuing to be a partisan operative, basically continuing the role that you had at the White House just now on a supposed news outlet platform. Yeah. I mean, listen, the baseline of journalism, you have to be willing to hold power to account, whether it's whatever party it's in, wherever you are looking. And she obviously fails that test or at least has so far. So if ken's hopes come true and we see the exposes from jen saki exposing the corruption or whatever within the biden administration then we will change our tune here that's bullshit like it's just not gonna happen we all know it's not gonna happen because we know where our bread is buttered yes this is not

someone that you know some people go from journalism into a white house back into the world of journalism that's already incredibly suspect but this is someone who was a political operative her whole career. That is what she does. She is a political operative on behalf of the Democratic Party. There is no reason to think that she is not still filling that key role over at MSNBC now. 100%, absolutely correct. There's a horrific story. I don't know if you guys follow this. On Newport News, Virginia, where a six-year-old brought a gun to school and shot his teacher. You know, my first thought was like, oh, man, six years old. Like, he probably didn't really know what he was doing. history of violent, aggressive, threatening behavior at the school to the point where he was actually required to have a parent with him every single day at school.

But there was no parent at school that day. A variety of people had warned. They thought that he had a gun with him on that day. The school said they searched his backpack. They didn't find it. And then they didn't take any further action. And he ends up shooting his teacher. Well, now we have an update in the case, which is the mother of that six-year-old child has now been indicted. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. Mother charged in case of Virginia's six-year-old who shot teacher at school. She's been criminally charged in connection with the case. Deja Taylor, 25, of Newport News, is facing one count of felony child neglect and one misdemeanor count of recklessly leaving a firearm so as to endanger a child. The weapon the boy used in the incident belonged to the mother, Taylor, authorities have said. They went on to say the Newport News Commonwealth's attorney

has asked a judge to impanel a special grand jury to continue to investigate any security issues that might have contributed to the shooting, suggesting the conduct of administrators or others who allegedly failed to act after being warned the boy had a weapon would be further scrutinized. In addition to this, the teacher who was gravely wounded just spoke out in a recent interview. She is also taking action against the school for failing to protect her, protect other students and deal appropriately with this situation. Let's take a listen a little of what she had to say. Once the firearm went off and then I felt something, that shock itself that I had been shot. You knew you had been shot.

Yeah. That was pretty shocking itself. But I just wanted to get my babies out of there. What did the kids do, say? They were screaming. I think they knew as well that they had to get out of there, but they were extremely frightened and screaming. The police chief said after that you had ensured that the kids got to a safe place, said your actions were heroic. Do you remember what were the next things that you did? That's still kind of a blur. Got them out and I went to get help for myself. I knew, well, I didn't know at the time that my lung had collapsed, but I started not being able to breathe very raspy breaths and my vision started going out.

I remember I went to the office and I just passed out. Zwirner's attorney, Diane Toscano, filed a notice of intent to sue school administrators, arguing that the Richnick administration failed to take action after it was warned three separate times that the boy had a gun with him the day that Zwirner was shot. And it's not only that. Let's put this Washington Post piece up on the screen. So on that day, there seemed to have been failures to heed the warnings. This is from the Washington Post. They say how Richnick Elementary failed to stop a six-year-old from shooting his teacher. They say Abigail Zwirner, that's the teacher, was frustrated. It was January 4th. A six-year-old in her first grade class at Richneck

Elementary School had stolen her phone, slammed it to the floor, apparently upset over a schedule change, according to text messages that Zwirner sent to a friend. Administrators, she wrote, were faulting her for the situation. The six-year-old took my phone and smashed it on the ground, Zwirner wrote in a text message obtained by the Washington Post, and the administration is blaming me. Two days later, the six-year-old told classmates at recess he was going to shoot Zwirner, showed them a gun and its clip tucked into his jacket pocket, and threatened to kill them if they told anyone, according to an attorney for the family of a student who witnessed the threat,

that afternoon the six-year-old did as he promised, firing a bullet through Zerner's upraised hand and into her chest as she was midway through teaching a lesson. In addition, there were previous incidents that have been reported where he strangled someone, where a girl that fell on the playground or a dress came up, he was touching her inappropriately, throwing furniture, using furniture to bar the... I mean, this kid was a menace.

I mean, I don't know what was going on with him. And the parents were supposed to be there at school, and no one was there on that day. Well, look, no six-year-old is born like that. You learn it from... They don't get this behavior out of nowhere. Now, I don't doubt that the kid is disturbed as hell. Maybe. But, you. They don't get this behavior out of nowhere. Now, I don't doubt that the kid is disturbed as hell.

Maybe. Yeah. But, you know, you also get disturbed a certain way and almost certainly, like, a lot, especially when you hear

about, like, really small children doing stuff that's really inappropriate. They almost always get it from home. So, anyway, and that's based on

longstanding amounts of research in terms of child behavioral patterns. Also, clearly, I think it's exactly the right charge to go after the mother because they're going after

for reckless endangerment, for recklessly not handling a weapon properly. This is a six year old child. Like at the end of the day, it's like your responsibility to care for all, any gun owner, it is driven into your head. It's like the safety of this firearm, everything that happens to it is your responsibility as the owner of this gun. And if you don't take responsibility for that, you will suffer the

consequences. She deserves 100% to suffer the consequences for what happened here. And also the school, you're right. I mean, clearly they didn't take action in this way that they needed to, and they should have either had suspension or gone to great lengths to get in contact with the parents of the child to see why exactly this was happening, refer for some sort of behavioral therapy or something. So, yeah, it's a mess all the way around. Yeah, I agree with you, though. Charges of the mother here are entirely appropriate. I'm glad to see it.

Yeah, she absolutely deserves to be held accountable for what she did. All right, guys, we'll see you soon. Very excited to be joined by Norman Finkelstein. He has authored a new book called I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It, Heretical Thoughts on Identity, Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom. Let's get to it. Professor, welcome. Great to have you. Thanks so much for having me. You were my obsession during the Bernie campaign. Well, that is easy there, fella. Very flattering. Don't hit on my lady. Thank you. I'm speaking to the intellectual and political obsession. I thought you were

on the ball and you were the best during that period. It was very invigorating, energizing to watch your commentary during that period. And I should give the formal recognition. Of course, when I first heard your name, I thought, okay, she's got to be a flight crystal. You judged me prematurely, sir. That's correct. That's correct. And I started to watch the program. I started to tell everybody, you really have to watch Crystal Ball. She's just

the best. Well, thank you. That's unbelievably flattering. I really, it means a lot to me, coming from such an intellect as yourself. And the birding campaign is actually a good place to start with. Like, what do you make of his two successive campaigns? What do you make of the relative success of those campaigns, given the, you know, utter decimation of the left in, you know, most of my political lifetime? And what do you think are the particular rocks that it crashed into? Well, that's actually a big question. I'm going to try to summarize it briefly, and then you can pursue any line that seems relevant to you. The most important thing, excuse me, the most important aspect of the Bernie campaign, in my opinion,

is that it brought to the surface a political possibility that rarely, with rare exceptions, anybody thought was really a plausible political campaign. And I say almost rarely with bare exceptions. That includes Bernie Sanders. When Bernie Sanders went out in 2016, his expectation was he was just going to do some stump speeches for his socialist agenda and then retire back into his home. And then he was totally shocked, as he said many times, that suddenly, like mushrooms after a rain, the huge numbers of people started to show up. And so what Bernie Sanders' campaign demonstrated was that there's this huge potential out there for building a

class-based or class-struggled political campaign and agenda. Bernie did a lot of, I should say, firstly about Bernie himself. As many people said, Bernie for 50 years has been saying the same thing. And of course, there was a lot of truth to that. The thing was, it's not that Bernie caught up with the Times. It was that the Times caught up with Bernie Sanders. That is to say, in the 1970s, the Bernie-style politics had very relatively little resonance in the United States for the simple reason that the economy for most people, I would say for the overwhelming majority of people, the economy was functioning. Functioning meant that each generation had a reasonable expectation that it would live a better life than the generation that

preceded it. And so Bernie espoused a socialist, a quasi-socialist agenda, but the times were not yet right for it. And if you go back to my generation, even in the Marxist writings of the time, you'll be surprised. I know you majored in economics, but I don't know how much you know about the history of Marxism in general or in the U.S. In the United States, the main writings in the 1960s about Marxism by the Marxist left were about Marx's concept of alienation, meaning alienated from your job. The assumption was you would have a job. The assumption was you would have a nine to five job, five days a week, 40 hours a week. You would get a pension. You would get vacation and self-work. That was the assumption. For our generation, the problem was most people felt

alienated from their job. Most people felt unfulfilled by their job. Most people were looking for meaningful work. So at that point, people turned back to what was called the young Marx. The contrast was between the young Marx and the mature Marx. The young Marx talked about alienation, alienation. So it resonated. But the Marx that talked about capitalist crises, the Marx that talked about the polarization of wealth, that had very, very little resonance. Now, beginning in the 1980s, over a very long term, but nonetheless beginning in the Reagan era, a stagnation in wages set in, and simultaneously, a polarization of wealth. And so come 2020, when Bernie sets out on the campaign trail, suddenly those tendencies, which began in the early 1980s, those tendencies had reached a critical point, critical mass, and people started resonating to the Bernie campaign.

It took a while for those tendencies to unfold. But once they had, Bernie, as I said, his main importance, in my opinion, was he brought to the surface a class-based agenda, which now its time had come. I would say Bernie was quite sharp, acute, in having clearly defined—and these are not easy things. I've been reading a lot of the old Marxist literature from the beginning of the 20th century, and one thing that's very striking when you read the literature is the difficulty in defining a political slogan. Now, it may seem to you perfectly obvious what a political slogan should be at any particular moment. But in fact, that's one of the most difficult things in politics, to define the right slogan for the right moment, which will advance the cause. And Bernie, it took him time,

but he came up with the right slogans. It was very simple. It was Medicare for all, abolish student tuition, abolish student debt, a Green New Deal. And I think those four were the main. There was one other, but it just slipped my mind. It was hugely successful. Now, I don't want to take up all your time, even though I said that question was broad. I want to just get to the second part, namely what went wrong. I think, first of all, we ought not to forget, and you, Crystal, will know better than anybody else, because I watched you religiously during the Bernie campaign. You, more than anyone else, will know how close Bernie came in 2020. I think that's all completely forgotten. Yeah, that's so true.

Up until South Carolina, it looked like he was going to win. People like James Carville and Chris Matthews, they were decomposing on screen in real time. They were becoming positively hysterical at the prospect of this Bernie victory. So were it not for South Carolina, now I don't think South Carolina was inevitable. Remember, and I'm telling you things I know you know, in the last week before that South Carolina primary, polls were showing that Bernie would win in South Carolina. It was at that point that the screws were turned on Jim Clyburn, who up to that point said he would sit out recommending, endorsing anyone in the South Carolina primary. The screws were turned on him. He endorsed Biden. And at that point, the exit polls right after the primary showed that 60 percent of blacks were influenced by that Clyburn endorsement. And then, as you know, right afterwards, Obama entered the scene,

turned the screws on Pete Buttigieg and probably also Amy Klobuchar, and so to speak, the rest is history. Had Bernie won in South Carolina, and as I said, it was kind of just a fluke that he lost. Had he won, then it was clear he would win Super Tuesday and he had the nomination in his bag. And then you can go on to say, I think he probably would have destroyed Trump in the debates. And instead of between 2016 and 2020, we sat through a Donald Trump presidency, it was pretty close that we would have sat through a Bernie Sanders presidency. Now, I recognize that the moment he got the nomination, the whole ruling elite would have coordinated, collaborated to stop Bernie. And that would have been a very big hurdle to pass.

But the prospects were quite good for the Bernie campaign. Now, let me just get to the last part, what went wrong. In my opinion, the main thing that went wrong is Bernie did not follow through on what he promised. Bernie was repeatedly asked during the campaign a simple question, Mr. Sanders, how can you possibly believe that you can get your agenda through Congress? And that was obviously a reasonable question. And Bernie always answered the same way. I thought his response was reasonable. He said, of course, I can't get my agenda through Congress the way Congress is currently structured.

The only way I can get it through is I bring masses of people into the street, that you have to organize, educate people, and bring them out into the street, just like during the civil rights movement. You have to commit civil disobedience. You have to be willing to go to jail. I think the young people, those who turned up for those 25,000-person rallies in all the major cities, I think the young people would have done it. Their future is at stake. They were ready for that. They were primed for that. But what happened? Once Bernie lost the campaign, he became what he had been for 40 years. He became the gadfly in Congress again. He had to make the idea of bringing young people into the streets, or people in general, but in particular young people into the streets, because he knew Biden

would then say, what the hell are you doing? What are you doing with your revolution? This is Congress. What are you talking about? And so he had to make a choice between trying to influence as much as possible Biden behind closed doors or using his platform in Congress with a Biden presidency to bring masses of people into the street and try to push through a radical agenda. He chose the first. And from there on in, I think it was pretty much a disaster. And I think I'm deeply, deeply disappointed in Bernie now, sometimes to the point of real visceral anger, the way he's conducted himself, say, on the question of Ukraine, saying things like, I trust Biden.

Why would you trust Biden? Can you tell me something about his career in foreign policy that would cause you to trust him on foreign policy? What? Was he so great in the war in Vietnam? Was he great in the war in Iraq? Is his judgment so good? Was he great on Blinken? And the fact that now Biden, excuse me,

Bernie dismisses anybody who criticizes him. He says, quote, who's paying you? What, you have to be paid to be critical of the war in Ukraine? You have to be paid for saying, hey, sending over $100 billion to Ukraine without no checks, no balances, no oversight, there might be a problem there? You have to be paid to say, you have to be paid to think that, well, maybe a lot of people who are quite conservative normally, like John Mearsheimer over at University of Chicago or Jeffrey Sachs.

Okay, Jeffrey Sachs is a liberal, but many people who are quite conservative say the United States provoked the war. Let me ask you this. Let me, hey, Norm, let me cut you off there. Let me ask you this. Why couldn't Bernie have done both of those things? So, for example, one of the arguments I made is that when push came to shove, and it looked like Bernie was going to drop out, he sat down with Joe Biden,

and it looked like he did a hostage video where he was endorsing Joe and saying, Joe, do you support Medicaid? Do you support $15 minimum wage? And Biden was like, yeah, oh, yeah, Bernie, I support $15 minimum wage. It seemed very contrived, very fake. But why couldn't he have basically tried to have the ear of Joe Biden, talk to him reasonably, say, look, here are my demands. If you want my endorsement, this is what you have to do. Here's like a list of executive orders or whatever, and give Joe Biden a chance. And then if he doesn't follow through, that's when you effectively call your people up to put some bodies in the streets. I feel like it's a little bit of a

false choice to say he either could choose one or choose the other. I think he could have done both. I think you could have effectively tried to navigate within the system. And then if you don't get the results by wheeling and dealing and talking to Joe and making agreements, if you can't get the result, then you put the bodies in the streets. Don't you view that third option as a real possibility? It depends. Look, I'm not a mind reader. I'm like, sure, I read't believe I'm body language readers to figure out what's going on in people's heads. My assumption is that if that had been a real option for Bernie Sanders, and since he kept referring to our revolution, and he titled his book on the campaign Our Revolution, and he titled his book on the campaign Our Revolution, and he raised young people in particular, their expectations very high. I have to assume that unless he was a liar, which I find completely implausible, I have to assume that he weighed in his mind the possibility of bringing people into the street and how President Biden would react to that. And President Biden, he's a man

who works in Congress. He's a person who has a very conventional approach to politics. He has obviously his allegiances to elites. And I think Bernie reached a conclusion, but I can't prove it. I just say based on what one can deduce from his track record that he was an honest guy, he was a decent guy, and he is an honest guy and a decent guy, but he didn't think there was that third option. Otherwise, I can't for the life of me figure out why he didn't exercise that third option, especially since in the course of the campaign, he kept saying, that's what I'm going to do. In order to push through my agenda, I'm going to bring people into the streets. Now, you could say that was all rhetoric, that was all talk, he never intended to do it. Okay, that's a possibility. But assuming, as I do,

that he was speaking in good faith, my view was that he must have, you know, got that, to use the expression I used earlier during our pre-conversation, he must have gotten that vibe, and he knows Biden. You know, Biden's a personal family friend, as you know. He got that vibe. This is not going to work with Biden. And so he did. You know, Bernie has quite impressive levels of energy. And I'm sure behind the scenes, he's doing everything he can to sway Biden. But in my view, that's very limited. It's very limited what you can do. There's a expression. And then it was like every week they would shoot some other critical piece of it into the in the head until Joe Manchin just says, no, we're going to kill the whole thing. And then everyone is delighted when you get anything through the Inflation Reduction Act. But I think we've seen very clearly the limits of the tactics that have been chosen for whatever reason they've been chosen. I want to get to some of the core of your book here.

And, you know, there's been this whole discussion lately. You mentioned you're on with Breonna Joy Gray, partly sparked by a viral incident on her show where someone who was on the program to talk about how the left and their wokeism is destroying has come to be this sort of umbrella term for the right wing to dispatch with anything that they don't like. You know, they blamed the Silicon Valley bank collapse on wokeism because they had like a gay person on the board or something like that. So I wonder if you could contrast the right wing obsession and use of the word woke and their own critique of identity politics with the critique of identity politics that you have? Well, I watched that incident, or at least I watched the reruns of that incident with Breonna Joy Gray. In my opinion, she probably did act in good faith. It wasn't a gotcha moment. Oh, no. She was just trying to define the term. It was a very simple, straightforward question.

I've seen her try to do that multiple times with multiple guests, too, who people bring up wokeness. She's like, just tell me first what you mean by wokeness. That's totally sincere. Yeah. Brianna Joy Gray is a former corporate lawyer, so she knows defining terms is the first aspect of conversation or briefs. You have to define the terms. Okay. When that incident happened, it did cause me to reflect because a lot of the book was written in the manner of self-discovery. I can't say I came into the book with a big concept and I was going to lay out the argument that had already been pre-formulated in my mind. I worked through the argument as I was writing the book.

And so when that question came up, I had to ask myself, what do I mean by wokeism? Because I do use the term. Maybe the far right uses it also. But you'll remember in my generation, it was the left that coined the term political correctness or PC. It was a kind of self-mockery. But then that PC was appropriated by the right. In this case, even if the right uses the term wokeism, I'm perfectly at ease with it. But what do I mean by it? I would say wokeism is basically three things. Number one, wokeism is the attempt by the Democratic Party to create a new base with the mass defection

exiting of the white working class. In my generation, the base of the Democratic Party were white workers. It was the trade unions, which were the real core of the Democratic Party, and the white working class in general, which had prospered in administrations beginning with FDR, the New Deal. And so they were quite loyal, very loyal, not quite loyal, very loyal to the Democratic Party, even to the point my brother tells a story that my father, who was a factory worker, my father once whispered into my brother, my elder brother's ear, he said, always vote Democrat. Republicans are for rich people or Democrats are for working people.

That was the sine qua non of the Democratic Party, that the white working class, well, that changed. And it changed actually quite quickly. If you ever have the chance, you should sit down and go and Google Mario Cuomo, the father of Andrew Cuomo, Mario Cuomo, 1984 Democratic Party convention. And Cuomo's speech, which was very famous, was actually elegantly written and elegantly delivered, was that this whole pay-in to the working class, the white working class, and that the Republicans were the party of the rich, the leisure class. Well, that's obviously changed. There's been mass defections of the white working class from the Democratic class. Well, that's obviously changed. There's been mass defections of the white working

class from the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party had to create a new base, and the base it chose was the identity politics base. If you look at the, I watched closely on YouTube the Democratic Party convention in 2016 and 2020. And if you watch it, the working class is just barely mentioned. The only one who mentions the working class is AOC, I think the second day of the convention. And that was about it. It was all taken up with various identities, biological identities was the core. And you saw it with Biden. He said he chooses a black female vice presidential candidate.

He then says I'm going to nominate a black female Supreme Court justice. Then he chooses a black female lesbian press secretary. That's where they're going. Though Biden is an interesting case. He's a more ambiguous case because clearly from the last State of the Union address, he's clearly trying to pitch his campaign, his next campaign, to try to win over some of that white working class. So the first aspect of wealth politics is the replacement of the white working class by the identity politics class, or groups, not class, groups.

And number two, woke politics is the Democratic Party instrumentalizing identity politics in order to derail any class struggle or class-based campaign. And that's not speculative. That's not speculative. That's not theoretical. That's factual. So if you take the high priests and high priestesses of identity politics, there is Ta-Nehisi Coates attacking Bernie Sanders for being, quote, weak on the black reparations question. Then you have Angela Davis saying that Bernie is weak in conceptualizing racism. Then you have Kimberly Crenshaw telling the New York Times

that the real action is not with these old white Jewish schmucks like Bernie Sanders. The real action is the corporations. It's Amazon, which now is honoring Black Lives Matter. Oh, my God. And it's honoring gay pride. That's where the revolutionary action now is, says Kimberly Crenshaw. And then you saw this very strange phenomenon, not strange I should say, but very indicative phenomenon. The New York Times is now the most woke institution on God's earth. The characteristics, the salient characteristics of New York Times during those campaign years were number one, hyper, hyper woke, and number two, hyper, hyper anti-Bernie. As you recall, Crystal, with the first half of the second campaign,

Bernie was whited out of the Times. And then when he gained too much momentum, despite the whiting out, then they start to go at him with a vengeance. Now, that to me is a very telling fact. The most woke institution in the United States was also the most anti-Bernie institution. Then you go to MSNBC, another hyper-woke media outlet, which is also hyper-anti-Bernie, much more anti-Bernie, incidentally, than Fox News, which gave him a very warm, kind reception. You had Joy Reid, as I mentioned earlier, bringing on a body language reader to prove that Bernie is a congenital liar. Then you have hyper, hyper woke the view. And who's the hyper, hyper, hyper presence on the

view? It's Whoopi Goldberg. And what does Whoopi do? She snarls at Bernie. when are you getting out of this race already? That was the moment of truth. All of these super woke radicals, the moment of truth, they all joined the Democratic Party to stop the Bernie locomotive. And that's number two. The identity politics has been weaponized to stop dead in its tracks a class-based politics. And number three, wokeness is a very convenient way for rich white liberals to have their cake and eat it.

That is to say, to show how radical they are, to show how cutting edge they are, without having to sacrifice any privilege, without having to pay any price. So everybody at Martha's Vineyard, they all want Angela Davis to speak there so they can show how down with the hood they are. They're rubbing shoulders with Angela Davis. If you go to the web, you see a lecture that Angela Davis gave at the University of South Carolina. I was curious because Angela Davis was a real inspiration for me in my youth. So I tuned it in. What's she saying now? She's introduced by this southern belle with this beautiful shock of blonde hair who is the second richest billionaire in South Carolina. And the second richest billionaire only half jokingly gives a talk about how she and Angela

have so much in common. Well, that's true. How she and Angela have so much in common. That's these woke people who get to pretend to be so radical and cutting edge without having to make any sacrifice. Now, you will not remember remember unless you have a memory reaching back to before conception in the most literal sense. There was a famous incident in the 1960s when the Black Panthers were being hounded by the government. Leonard Bernstein, who was a kind of Martha's Vineyard liberal, invites

the Black Panthers to his home. And all the famous people on the left, what we called back then the radical chic, attended this soiree at Bernstein's home. And then along came this journalist named Tom Wolfe. He attended the event. Wolfe was on the right end of the spectrum. And he wrote this absolutely scathing send-up of that soiree. And it really was so humiliating to those who attended, not least Mr. Bernstein. And I personally have to say, when you read Tom Wolfe's book, it's to use a word from your generation, it's really cringe, horrible.

Leonard Bernstein giving the high-fi to the Panthers. But you could say in defense of Bernstein, that was an unpopular thing to do. True, yeah. And it ended up getting him in trouble. But now when the rich and the famous in Martha's Vineyard, they hang out with Angela, is there any price paid? Is there any sacrifice? Now, you might say to me, okay, Norm, we're not martyrs. We on the left, we don't have any kind of desire to be nailed to the cross. So I don't accept your standard. To which I say, I don't agree. I think part of

being on the left has always been, until recently, it's always been willingness to make a sacrifice. I was just reading last night Rosa Luxembourg's letters. So Rosa Luxemburg, who was a titanic personality, probably the most impressive personality in the whole history of Marxist socialism, she spent many times in jail. And actually, she spent almost the whole of World War I in jail. And at one point, she's given the jail sentence, and she's out on her own recognizance, and some people say, you know, maybe, Rosa, you should jump bail and get the hell out of there, you know, because you've been in jail enough.

And she was a physically very frail woman. And she replied to one correspondent, if you allow me to just read, it's just one paragraph, that there are comrades who can assume I would flee Germany because of the prison sentence. I could be quite amused by that if it were not at the same time rather saddening. Dear young friend, she's talking to a young man, her correspondent. Dear young friend, I assure you that I would not flee even if I were threatened by the gallows. And that is so for the simple reason that I consider it absolutely necessary to accustom our party to the idea that sacrifices are part of a socialist work in life,

that they are simply a matter of course. You are right. Long live the struggle. That was the inspiration for my generation. And then when I see on the one hand all of these, you know, phony identity politics radicals. Judith Butler announces in 2020, as if it were the Paris Commune, as if it were the Bolshevik Revolution, as if it were the Chinese Revolution, as if it were the Civil Rights Movement,

she announces, I am here with changing my pronouns to they, them. You know, I was talking about the difference between how leftists have a critique of identity politics or wokeism versus the right wing critique. And oftentimes, you know, the way I see it is very similar to how you see it. You won't be surprised to learn, which is that this is sort of like a roadblock thrown up in the way of any sort of more fundamental or class based change. The right portrays it as actually in and of itself, this very radical transformation. And they like to claim that this is a next evolution of Marxism. They'll explicitly tie it in with Marxist thought. And I wonder what your view of Marxism. They'll explicitly tie it in with Marxist thought. And I wonder what

your view of that is. Well, the most obvious reason, it's not. Actually, it's just the reverse of Marxist thought. I don't want to make a fetish of Marxist thought. To be perfectly candid, and I see no reason why not to be perfectly candid, I've read very little of Marx in the last 30 years. I read voraciously as a young man, but I passed that stage for better or for worse, and I've read very little of it. But one thing you could say for certain, a Marx analysis always began, or an essential aspect of it was class. Now, Marxism was never indifferent or unaware of non-class issues. When you read the literature from back then, I'm talking about the late 19th to the mid part of the 20th century, there was a rich debate about what was called the woman question, what was called the Negro

question, what was called the Jewish question, what was called the Jewish question, within the Marxist movement or socialist movement, forget about Marx for now, socialist movement. There was always a recognition that there were certain questions, women, blacks, Jews, that was not reducible to class, that they had aspects that went past class, overflowed class. However, if you considered yourself a person of the left, there was a recognition that class was the fundamental political issue, not the only one, but the fundamental issue. Now you look at the identity politics. What identity politics did was it appropriated the questions, the woman question, the Negro question, the Jewish question, it appropriated the questions and lopped off the class. If you read Ibram X. Kendi, there are a couple of passing phrases,

a couple of passing phrases referring to class. If you read Robin DiAngelo, a couple of stray fragments pertaining to class. Class has been lopped off, except in one critical sense, and probably for the exponents of identity politics, the language of the 1%, they want that 1% to include a proportional representation of, for example, women, of African Americans. They want to have their seat at the ruling class table. That's the aspect of class which they're very cognizant of. And now to tell you something, Crystal and Kyle, it's actually a realistic expectation. Because of this huge chasm that's opened up between the so-called 99% and the 1% in terms of income, it's very possible for the ruling elites to bring in, absorb some numbers of these identities and basically pay them off in huge sums. I mean, we're talking about lots of money. Jeff Bezos, as you recall, he gave Obama $100 million. He gave Van Jones $100 million. Jack Dorsey gave Ibram X. Kendi $10 million. That's not small change. You know, in my day, there used to be a program, a drama series on TV, it was called The Millionaire. And the conceit of this weekly drama was, is this very, very rich philanthropist, as they're called. We call them, you know, capitalist pigs, but okay name was in the series. And he had this white envelope.

And the last scene in each of the weekly dramas, of this weekly drama series, he would take out the white envelope from the folder and give it to this recipient, this very decent recipient. And we watched that series and our hearts leapt. A million dollars. A million dollars. A million dollars was like going to Pluto and back. It was an inconceivable sum. Now, I admit for inflation, as I said, I know you've got your degree in economics, so I'll admit for inflation, but $100 million is something altogether different. Correct.

But they can hand out that money now because of this fantastic polarization of wealth in our society. They can hand out $100 million here, $10 million here, and then they just bring all these people on board. Does it rock the boat? Well, nobody or very few people bite the hand that feeds them. Why is Bezos giving out that money? You know why? It's called a life insurance policy. Because Bezos is smart enough to know at some point there's going to be

a national action by Amazon workers. It may not be this week. It may not be next week. It may not be next month, but it seems pretty much inevitable. And so I'll ask you to guess on which side will Obama be when there is a general strike of Amazon workers? On which side will Van Jones be? On which side will Ibram X. Kendi be? I think that's pretty obvious. Yeah. To sum your point up we you need organizational and structural change you don't want to like welcome a diverse flow of people into the top one percent

the point is to take power away from the top one percent and when you were talking it reminded me of uh msnbc i remember them celebrating the diversification of the military industrial complex where they were bragging that like this new CEO of Raytheon or whatever was a woman. And it was like all female leaders for the military industrial. And they were celebrating that fact as if that's anything to celebrate. It's like, we don't care about the faces you put on the death machine makers. We just don't want you to use the death machines to kill like your many babies. But to get back to one of the main points

you were talking about there, I feel like we're having two separate conversations. So on the one hand, there's the conversation about define woke. What is woke? What's a right-wing critique of wokeism versus a left-wing critique of wokeism? And then a lot of our conversation thus far

has been focused on identity politics, which I view as a slightly different thing. My definition of wokeism is authoritarianism in service of perceived social justice. So, for example, you got some conservative speaker going to give a speech on a college campus, Ben Shapiro, whoever it might be. And then you have a bunch of people who protest and say, you know, you're not going to give your speech here because you're a fascist or whatever. You sort of de-platform somebody. When I think of wokeness,, but at the same time this massive rise, hundreds of like anti-trans bills, for example, the burning, not burning, excuse me, the banning of books. There's been 800 books that have been banned in Texas, 600 books that have been banned in Florida. And so what you see there is I would categorize it as like a right wing version of wokeness. It's

like right wing authoritarianism where they're doing authoritarianism in service of their perceived social justice needs, right? Like they think it's social justice to get rid of the books they don't like, you know what I'm saying? So how do we balance, number one, doing a genuine left-wing critique of wokeness to say, hey guys, we should focus on class consciousness first and foremost. Like do that while also not feed into the framework of the right and like accidentally assist them in their totally disingenuous crusade against wokeness by which they define it as everything they don't like? Well, you know what, Kyle, that's an excellent question. And I don't think there's an easy answer to it. Obviously, morality evolves, social mores evolve,

and that there's going to inevitably be a resistance to what, in retrospect, was clearly a necessary evolution and transformation in social values and morals in general. I'm old enough to remember when up until 1973, homosexuality was defined by the American Psychological Association as a mental disorder. I'm old enough to remember that a woman who aspired to a large number of jobs, these are all memories which, you know, maybe for you, they sound strange, but they're vivid for me. In the employment sections of the newspapers, in the employment sections of the newspapers, the headings were women, men. There was no consciousness of that being odd or aberrant, let alone retrograde. There were specific jobs

allotted for on the employment page to women and to men. And I'm not going to bore you by going through the 10,000 ways in which our society has evolved. And I think the broad consensus is, with marginal exceptions, it has evolved for the better. So to the extent that what you call right-wing wokeism, or the right-wing denunciation of wokeism, is acting as an impediment to the positive transformation of our society, I, of course, agree it has to be resisted and fought. The problem, as I see it, is twofold. Number one, a lot of these questions that have come up are not clear-cut, in my opinion. If you examine closely, as I have, and I write about it some length in the book, if you examine the abortion question, I do not believe that the question of abortion is as clear-cut as liberals, woke people, the New York Times, Martha's Vineyard type would make it out to be.

And I do not believe it's correct to write off anybody who might have qualms on that question as being some right wing Yahoo religious fanatic or bigot. Well, certainly just to cut you off for a sec there, certainly there's some gray area, but there are some things that go way too far, correct? Like Mike Pence talking about a national abortion ban, you know, or some states, they just tried to ban the abortion pill, which would even hurt women who get miscarriages, for example. I agree with you that there's some gray area, but some positions are far too extreme, right? Like overturning Roe versus Wade, for example. Listen, I totally agree, but I wish that your opinion could be articulated in the form that acknowledges the gray areas

and not writing about everybody who disagrees with you as being some sort of antediluvian imbecile. Yeah, but I didn't do that. I didn't call them imbeciles. Similarly, I think there are legitimate questions about the trans issue. I'm going to speak about it in very broad terms. Now, let me be clear. Let me be clear. I am with Chairman Mao Zedong, who famously said in his report on the uprising in Hunan province, which I'm shocked that you don't know, that Chairman Mao wrote, no investigation, no right to speak. That is to say, to translate into current language, which I hope you can air in this program. If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, then shut the fuck up. So I admit I'm not knowledgeable

because I think it requires a deep knowledge of science, biology, and medicine to speak on these subjects like the trans phenomenon. But I find it deeply troubling when people who have no medical knowledge whatsoever, no scientific knowledge whatsoever, at most took high school biology, speak with such authority on these subjects as if anybody who disagrees has to be some sort of redneck or Yahoo. But those are the people trying to ban it, right? Those are the ones who are making claims that they have no idea what they're talking about. I think when I hear people speak authoritatively

about gender fluidity, about there aren't two sexes, or to listen to Amy Goodman speak about people who get pregnant, or listen to AOC say people who menstruate. Well, I think reasonable people can say that's as a ridiculous statement as saying there hasn't been climate change. It falls into the same lunatic. But hold on. Who's actually legislating?

Who's legislating this stuff? You have people trying to ban any sort of treatment up till age 26. That seems like it's an overstep. Some people might use some goofy language, but at least they're not trying to legislate, you know, trans people out of existence, whereas you do see that from the right. I was, for the moment, I'm not talking about the legislation, legislative issue. Yeah, that's what matters.

Well, but I'm talking about the public conversation, which dismisses, you refer to the authoritarian tendency among woke people, the real, I'm saying the liberal left woke, okay, not the right wing woke. You refer to authoritarian tendencies. And I think one of those authoritarian tendencies is to pretend as if these questions are black and white, transparent. If you don't agree with us, then you're some sort of Yahoo or Redneck. I don't think that's true. Now, I fully admit, because I lived through it, I lived through it, I fully admit that many beliefs which we took for granted when I was growing up, of which I illustrated just a couple a moment ago, those beliefs were completely overturned.

I recognize that. Remember, in my generation, I mean this literally, literally, L-I-T-E-R-A-L-L-Y, literally, you couldn't imagine gay marriage. It was not a concept that could even be conceived, let alone legislated. It was a concept that was not, you couldn't process an idea like that. may turn out to be uncontroversial in the future. However, I would enter this stipulation since you talked about the issue of legislating. In the 1920s, a century ago, all progressives and radicals, among all progressives and radicals, really bar none, you know what was all the rage? All the rage was eugenics. Eugenics, the scientific application to human breeding. And listen to this. You know who was the only one who opposed

this idea of eugenics? The only one. It was deeply religious Catholics and Christians who believed that every child was born in God's image and that we should be equally loving and caring of all of God's children. So eugenics was the cause of progressives and radicals, even under Supreme Court. As you might know, the famous case was Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Buck v. Where a woman was, they said her mother was mentally defective, and they said her children were mentally defective, and there was the issue of tying her tubes, not allowing her to have any more children, in the name of eugenics. On our Supreme Court, every judge, every judge, justice, every justice except one, every justice voted for tying her tubes, the famous verdict delivered by

Oliver, it was Buckley Bell, Buckley Bell. The famous verdict delivered by Oliver Wendell Holmes, which I suspect you've heard, you're aware of, was three generations of imbeciles are enough. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. That verdict was endorsed by the most liberal member of the court, Louis Brandeis. Yeah. Scientific racism was used by the right and the left. It was the common perspective at the time. And it was dead wrong. And by the way, that eugenics and scientific racism, it wasn't scientific at all, that helped birth the Nazi movement. So I take your point, but hold on. My point is the right does that cocksureness too on these social issues like trans things or whatever, and they legislate against whole

groups of people. Whereas on the left, yeah, they might have some goofy language sometimes, but at least they're saying live and let live. And they're not trying to pass legislation banning transphobes, for example, or banning, you know, outdated language. I don't see, I don't see a parody here. I see the right actually cracking down legislatively on whole groups of people. And I see the left sometimes being a little silly, dying their hair purple and using some silly language. I can't quite agree with you there, Kyle. Look, well, where am I wrong? Okay, I'm going to get to that, but I'm going to say I'm speaking in good faith because I can see you quite obviously are speaking in good faith. So I want to have an amicable exchange of opinions wokeism, there is a lot of taboos now on what you can and can't say.

There are a lot of taboos about uses of pronouns. There are a lot of taboos about what can. Now, that's legislated. Admittedly, it's legislated at a college level and not at a federal or state level, but there is a lot of stifling, suffocating speech discourse on college campuses right now. I for one, I'll be honest with you, I will not call a person they-them. I will not. I refuse.

You want me to call you by your name? Fine. But they-them, that's a bridge too far for me. I'm not going there. Now, I'm sure Crystal's thinking, well, you know, Norm, if you're around in another hundred years, which obviously you won't be, everybody might be referred to as they-them. Yeah, that's a possibility. And I say I have to be open to that possibility, but I'm not doing it. And there are a lot of things. There is a very serious, a very seriously stifling atmosphere on university and college campuses now. And I think it's disingenuous. And I'm not saying you're being disingenuous because you limited yourself to legislation.

Well, I think it's very disingenuous. Allow me. allow me. Sure. One last thing. During the Katonji Brown-Jackson hearing, at one point, Ted Cruz, who's a kind of, you know, psycho pervert, Ted Cruz picks up, he starts denouncing Ibrahim X. Kendi's book, Anti-Racism, you know, How to Raise an Anti-Racist Baby. And I'll tell you, I've gone through Abraham X. Kendi in my current book.

You'll note I devote 100 pages to his books. They're really comics, but let's call them books. I go through it line by line. I'm with Ted Cruz there. He's a complete idiot. He's an imbecile. I don't think that should be taught in college. I don't think it should be taught in grade school, high school, college. No, that to me, that to me is a complete corruption. It's a corruption of language.

It's a corruption of thought. And I'm old-fashioned enough to believe in brace yourself standards because I respect my students. You know what respect my students means? I want them to be able to compete on the level playing field out in the real world. I want them to have a chance in life. Go ahead, Crystal. And when you impose this garbage on them, you are diminishing their chances to compete out there in the real world.

So it's not my view that I'll just speak for myself. It's not my view that, you know, the woke vein on the left liberal side has been inconsequential or, you know, irrelevant. I think it's been incredibly, I think it has stifled dissent. I think everything you're speaking to there is real. But what I do get concerned about, especially recently, is that when there's only a discussion of the authoritarian tendencies on the left, it sort of masks some of the even more aggressive legislative authoritarian tactics on the right. And so that was the piece that I was interested in in teasing out here, because, you know, when you have and the other thing I would say is liberal tendencies dominate university spaces and a lot of news organizations. I don't think there's any doubt about that.

But I think there are similar codes of conduct and things you're allowed to say or not say and sort of, you know, authoritarian crackdowns and speech in conservative environments as well in right wing environments where they're, you know, for example, you can't acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election, you know, basic some basic facts. Some basic facts about things about COVID might be off limits. So I'm not sure that it's a phenomenon that's exclusively on the left either. It's just that the liberal control of universities is almost universal. Look, I agree with both of you. I don't want there to be any misconstrual at the end of this interview that you're not raising real issues and you're not making coaching solid points.

I agree with the both of you. Let me just then re let me then just state I wrote the book for the left. I wrote the book because I wanted to make a statement to the new generations about what's, you know, which way to go forward. Yeah. And I have enough experience from the 1960s where I did a lot of very stupid things. Well, let me actually, I want to ask you about that piece actually. So I just want to say, I didn't write the book about the right. And I don't even claim I was making a comprehensive picture. I was writing the book as a person of the left who's very concerned about certain tendencies, which rose to the surface in a very striking way during the two Bernie Sanders campaigns,

where I saw a lot of hope, a lot of promise, and I saw a lot of sabotage. And I saw a lot of sabotage. And I saw a lot of sabotage. And the book is about the sabotage. Well, the last thing I wanted to get from you, and then Kyle can close with whatever he wants, is are you actually hopeful because you do teach young people and interact with them all the time

and wanted to write the book or to sort of lay out some of the pitfalls that you see ahead? Are you hopeful that the Zoomers may actually take up the mantle of class politics? Because, I mean, their economic opportunities have been really stifled. You see, you know, you see pronouns and you see plenty of woke stuff in Gen Z as well, but you also see the Starbucks labor movement and you also see the Amazon labor union and you see support for candidates like Bernie Sanders. So what direction do you see that generation going in right now? Look, there's a lot of grounds for hope. I was in the 1960s and I passed through the Bernie campaign. I took the bus rides. As I said, every six months,

we went to Washington, joined the anti-war movement. Well, part of joining the Bernie campaign was I went on the buses out of state to knock on doors and try to recruit people to vote for Bernie. You know what struck me? What struck me was this new generation was much more serious than my own. First of all, on the buses in my generation, everybody's passing around the joints. And it was a highly sexualized atmosphere on the buses. Not this time. People were so sober. You know, those Bernie recruiters, half of whom were women, actually probably 60% were women.

That's why the comment by Gloria Steinem was so disgusting. She's a sack of shit. She always was. But to say that the women only went to the demonstrations for the boys, I mean, you have to be a real episode. You have to be, you know, in the old world, you have to be a real airhead to make a comment like that. She's an airhead. And so there was a lot of seriousness. During the George Floyd demonstrations, I went. I was the only one over 30, literally, literally the only one. Why? Because it was in the middle of COVID. So older people were afraid to go and join the crowds. I didn't give a damn. I went, I joined the crowd. I went every day to the point where some of the young people would say, are you here again? I said, I'm here every night. It was usually seven o'clock at Barclay Center in Brooklyn. We went. In any case,

what struck me was the naturalness, the authenticity of the relations between the white and black people who were demonstrators, between the white and black demonstrators. In my day, if you were white and you went to a demonstration in support of the Black Panthers or something like that, it was always tinged with the noblesse oblige because we really were privileged. We were white. It was a good era to live financially, economically. Or it was the radical chic, these white young women saying, my brothers and sisters, it was all just so crap. It was like Robin DiAngelo. But nowadays, because there has been a relative homogenization of the working class, relative

homogenization, whites are doing, white young people, if they're coming out of the public university system, they're doing one notch better than blacks economically. They're living together. That was unthinkable in my day. Nowadays, I talk to young people, their roommates, one roommate, if it's a white person, one roommate is black, one roommate is a lesbian, one roommate is this, that, or the other. It's difficult to find housing, so beggars can't be choosers. If you have three people and you need a fourth to make that month's rent, you're going to take anybody who comes along. They know each other personally. There's real warmth. As I said, one of the wonderful things about teaching now

in CUNY, the classes consist of all working class kids and first generation immigrant kids in the CUNY system. So it is really, it's the rainbow coalition in that class, you know, and the warmth, the solidarity, and it's natural. It's not like I'm putting on a show, look at me, look how liberal I am, which is my generation. It's authentic. It's real. It's real. It's deeply moving. And you see the progress. The progress, of course, came at the expense of the polarization of wealth in our society and the homogenization of the working class. But it's real. So there's every ground to be hopeful. And as I said, I think the young people were prepared for real sacrifices had Bernie tell them,

time to get arrested, time to, you know, not just talk the talk, but walk the walk. I think people were ready for it. I saw them board those buses to go out of town, which wasn't easy, you know. And if you're a young person nowadays, you're so short on time because you have two jobs and you have to take care of your parents and you know the whole thing. So on that grounds, as Breonna Joy Gray told me, and I kept the line when I was interviewed by her a few weeks ago, she said with a certain amount of pride, and the pride was deserved, she said, you know, Bernie won every demographic under 30. That is to say, male, female, Latino, black, every demographic under 30. That's the future. If you want to know what the future is,

look at that one stark fact. Bernie, the most uncharismatic candidate in history, a septuagenarian Jew from Brooklyn, he managed to galvanize all these young people on the class struggle platform and wins every demographic. So there's every reason to be hopeful and optimistic. But any movement needs two things. It needs leadership, and it needs organization. The Black Lives Matter turned into a disaster, a catastrophe, A, because it couldn't come up with the right slogan, and to fill the void, the most quote unquote radical, which means politically irrelevant slogan, defund the police. It filled the void, which was a disaster. It became clear over time what a

catastrophe it was. And second of all, the ruling class did what it always does. It bought off these leaders like Patrice Cullors and that type, gave them lots of who are hopeful and willing to put themselves on the line, make the sacrifices that Rosa Luxemburg talked about, it makes them cynical about politics. That's true. I think those are all great points. All right, Norm. I had a couple more questions, but we've run out of time, Norm. So thank you so much for joining us. Tell everybody where they can follow you and tell everybody where they can get your book. You can get my book from Sublation, S-U-B-L-A-T-I-O-N. Don't ask me what that means. I don't know. Sublation.com or from Amazon. And you just Google my name. I have a presence and you'll figure it out. If you can, at the end of the show, I'll send you a link to access the book. Otherwise, I want to say I totally enjoyed it. And I'm glad that both of you,

but Kyle in particular, at a certain point, articulated your real differences with me. I hope even if I didn't convince you that I conveyed the fact, I recognize those are real problems. I recognize the issues you raise are real. And I also recognize that a lot of my beliefs now may at some point prove to be behind the curve. I recognize that. On the other hand, I think we have to have a certain amount of humility, a certain amount of recognition that nobody has a monopoly on truth, and that we shouldn't go around carrying on as if these questions have been resolved once and for all. And if you disagree, then you're some sort of, you know, backward religious fanatic or whatever. I don't agree. That's how I was as a young man. And I realized, it's not that I grew up or I grew conservative. I realized, I maintain, I preserve my radical convictions and presumably will go to my grave with them.

But I realized I was wrong. I made errors. And you know what Muhammad Ali said, the boxer, he said, if you think the same thing at 40 that you think at 20, then you've wasted 20 years in your life. And there's something to be said about that. That life experience should at some point influence you in some ways. Otherwise, what's the point of life experience? But I never gave up my core beliefs. I remain exactly who I am in terms of my core beliefs on the side of the oppressed, on the side of the victims, on the side of the heart, down and out, on the side of the victims. That's who I was at 16. And that's who I'll be, you know, until my dying, to my last breath. I didn't pay the sacrifices. I didn't make the sacrifices that Rosa did when she got out of jail the last time during World War I.

When she was released, she was already an older woman. She was 47. By our standards, that would be like 57 or even more. She had, in the years in jail, she had a thick shock of hair. It all turned white. People were shocked when they saw her when she emerged from jail. She went right from the jail without missing a breath, without missing a beat. She went right into the revolution. There was a workers' uprising. People said, Rosa, be careful. They're hunting you down.

They're going to hunt you down. They're going to hunt you down. She said, they said, you need bodyguards. She said, I go where I tell other people to go. And, of course, she was hunted down. She was tortured. Her skull was smashed. She was then thrown into the O.C.

Her body was washed up three months ago. Those are the inspirations for me. And I didn't pay that kind of price. I didn't come close to paying that kind of price. I didn't come close to paying that kind of price. But I think I could say, without fear of being contradicted or accused of self-pity, I did pay a price for my beliefs. And I remain true to those beliefs that animated me as a youth, but with the caveat, I learned something from life. It didn't turn me into a reactionary, but I made errors. I was the type.

I remember it. I mean, it's not as if it's some foggy memory. I deplatformed many people on the right in college. We blocked the doors. We blocked the doors. Because in my day, we claimed that we knew the science. The science was Marxism-Leninism. And the science was the truth. And anyone who disagreed is some sort of bourgeois or petty bourgeois. I was part of that. I wasn't even a small part of that. I was a big part of that.

I was a Maoist. It was wrong. I made errors. And a large part of the book is trying to make sense of what I did right in my life. And also, you know, I have a page in the book just has the people who inspired me in life. Paul Robeson, Rosa Luxembourg, and a number of others. And also a page to a picture, these are pictures of Noam Chomsky and his wife who were very close to me for about 40 years, I would say. Yeah, it was about 30 years, 35 years. So a large part of the book is trying to convey what was good from my life's involvement in politics and what was problematic and what was dead wrong.

And to say, try to avoid making the mistakes I make. There is certainly a lot that we can get from the book. And we are incredibly grateful for your willingness to talk to us and also for the debate. So thank you so much, sir. Have a great day. So thank you so much, sir. Have a great day. Thank you both so much. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer

will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app,

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