Transcription
And so that we've undergone this political transformation, and on the other side of it, we do have a much different America. And the question is, now that we really do have like these large groups of different races in the country, can there be a brand new political order that's based on understanding?
It's really about power. That's ultimately what it comes down to. This is the crossroads we're at as a country, Nick. And a non-trivial percentage of people that are out there, young people on the left and the right, see this as entirely a power game to be fought along ideological and specifically identitarian lines. And I don't want them to turn into shock troops that burn the country to the ground or ignite in reaction some kind of heinous civil war.
Hey there friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. John Pola here, and well, for the past several weeks, I have been talking about the past and what it means for the future. Talking about our different revolutions, um, the French Revolution versus the American Revolution. The sort of radical utopian Jacobins of the French Revolution and some of the corollaries we see in our current politics, especially on the left, from similar types of characters. And I came across a couple things this week that frankly have scrambled my brain a little bit, and that I think are worth diving into because in so many ways, I feel like right now, I have a certain sense of existential dread. And it's partly because it does feel like we are in a French Revolution-type moment.
For starters, the American Revolution in 1776 was essentially something geared at trying to preserve the society and to repel what was essentially now a foreign power. The French Revolution was something very different. It wanted to remake the society and fundamentally reform and transform the society from within. And that is what we're facing now. And how to think about that, and how that can go wrong, like the French Revolution did, is something that's been on my mind.
And it is not just folks on the left who are in a revolutionary state of mind. A shocking number of young Trump voters support socialist policies. A Democrat socialist president in 2028, and even UN supervision of America, according to a new poll from Rasmussen Reports and Justin Haskins. The stuff in here is incredible. 76% of young voters agree that major industries like healthcare, energy, and big tech should be nationalized to give more control and equity to the people, including a strong majority of young Republicans, over 70%. 53% would like to see a Democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election, including a huge amount, 35% of those who said they voted for Trump in 2024. 55% said they would support a law that would confiscate Americans' excess wealth.
"It's interesting what constitutes excess. When when does your wealth become excess, and who determines that?" Including things like second homes, luxury cars, private boats, in order to help young people buy a home for the first time. Absolutely horrible stuff. There was even Trump voters. Only 33% of them said no when offered a list of options of what to set an income cap at. So even Trump voters in the 18 to 39-year-old bracket want incomes capped. That's pretty socialistic.
And so the trend, in my opinion, isn't that these people who voted for Trump are more conservative or more capitalistic or any of that. They basically want the system burned down because we aren't offering a better situation for them or speaking their language. There is a massive gap taking place between our elites of all sorts and our young people and working-class people and normal people. I'm both horrified by this, and I also understand it. There's a lot of discontent. There is a lot of things in our society that feel fundamentally rigged and unfair, and actually are fundamentally rigged and unfair.
And one aspect of this, and one outgrowth of it, is that for the past, let's say, 15 years in particular, our sons, boys like my son, have been getting told crazy stuff. They've entered middle school in an era of both MeToo and sort of woke identity politics, and been told that this is not their time. Our boys are getting bombarded by this every which way, but especially in school, but not just school, also in the workplace, also in the broader culture. Now, there's been a shift, but as this Rasmussen report points out, that that shift might be more temporary than we would like for those of us that are happy that some of this woke reign of terror has seemingly come to at least a temporary end.
One of the outcomes of this assault on our boys is the rise of voices and the mainstreaming of voices that frankly adopt the identity war mindset. And one of them is Nick Fuentes. Now, if you haven't heard of Nick Fuentes, 'cause, you know, my audience looks a little like me, sort of older dads. He's a young guy who is a rising voice on the right, and he's starting to be replatformed now that the censorship industrial complex has ebbed a little bit. And he was just this week, just a couple days ago, on Dave Smith's podcast, and the thing already has a million views. It was instantly a gigantic hit. Nick is a voice of these young men, and I think we ignore that at our peril as a body politic, but also as parents and as fathers, because you should know the kinds of voices that your kids are paying attention to.
For a lot of people that you talk to, you know, these are like, I'm not, I'm not saying they they were black people growing up in the Jim Crow South, but they really were. They really did come up under a system that was overtly bigoted against them where it was like, hey, it is, it is the law of the land that you will be denied opportunities. We're looking to put women and people of color and everything except you, straight white man. We're looking everything else. Your university hates your guts. Uh, Hollywood hates your guts. The media, the political class. And I get it's a big ask after all of that, when you get, you know, the leg up to go, "Can you be cool now?"
"And so I understand where that's a tough thing, you know, to ask. At the same time, I do think, as you mentioned, we're not going to live in a white ethnostate. The the 1960s, we can't go back to 1965 and undo the immigration act. And this is going to be a multi-racial society of some sort. And we ought to think about like, okay, how do we move forward in a way that's conducive to peace and prosperity, which is kind of what we all on some level want."
"Yeah, it's, it's a difficult question because I guess it comes down to multi-racialism itself, because we do live in a different America. There was, I'm told, the consensus in the '90s and the early 2000s where, uh, people described race relations as generally good. Um, and, you know, we could talk about why that is. Is I mean, people say that that's only after there was this intense anti-crime intervention, the crime bill, and Giuliani, and stop and frisk, and all that. Um, you know, but people say things were pretty good."
There's a bunch of points here. The one is a question: Can we have a multicultural society and have it work? And we have told ourselves, certainly our elite institutions have been telling us, that this is the nature of America. And I broadly actually agree with that, that we have been a multicultural society for a pretty long time. We are maybe the only truly successful multi-racial, multicultural society. The only other one I can think of in this hemisphere, in the New World, so to speak, is Brazil. And Brazil is a basket case. So, we're it. If it's going to work, it's going to work here. It might only work here.
But what's he talking about with the '90s? Well, he's echoing something that I say here all the time, which is the late '90s was indeed the peak of Western civilization. And when it comes to race relations, the late '90s and the early 2000s really were a peak. This is the Gallup poll on race relations that Nick is talking about, and that I have referenced on a couple of occasions. And it asks the question, "Would you say relations between white and black people are very good, somewhat good, somewhat bad, or very bad?" And this graph here is of those who said it was either good or very good. And as you can see, entering the 21st century, black and white people were pretty close to each other, and a supermajority said good or very good. Whites were 70%, as high as 75%. Black Americans were 70% to say 62%. There's a dip here in 2007, 55%, but then it kind of comes back and 61% again, supermajority, a bill that could actually pass the Senate without filibustering. And then it takes this horrible turn starting in 2013. And I'm going to come back to that. But this really was the halcyon days of the late '90s and the early 2000s.
But one of the other things, as I've been going back to the '90s, is that there were stuff going on in the '90s that echoes a lot of recent times. The '90s and early 2000s in some ways were like this sort of mini version, like little, in little fractal repetition, of our times today. End of the kind of cycle of history that has repeated several times in America.
"There are 3,000 National Guardsmen on duty in the city of Los Angeles. I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order."
In April of 1992, President George H.W. Bush federalized the California National Guard to help local law enforcement regain control in Los Angeles during the LA riots. The unrest stemmed from the police beating of Rodney King, which was caught on camera. The officers involved were acquitted, and there were fires, looting, and destruction throughout the city.
Sound familiar, right? You've got Donald Trump sending the National Guard into California, Chicago, and Portland, in some ways under more coherent circumstances, because he's claiming he's protecting federal buildings, as opposed to just doing local law enforcement. But, uh, but here we are.
Nearly 10,000 National Guard troops were deployed. In six days, more than 60 people died, more than 2,000 people were injured, and damages were estimated at over $1 billion. This was the, uh, BLM riots 1.0, you could say. Actually, no, 1.0 would technically be the '60s, but this one was closer to the BLM riots and actually had more justification with Rodney King than the BLM riots. But I digress.
"Why are we the victims? I mean, my parents are good Christians. I mean, we've been through so much, and to go through this, I mean, everything, 22 years down the drain."
"Many Koreans who yesterday were the shopkeepers of South Central Los Angeles today have lost the businesses they took years to create."
"What can I say? You know, are you going to have any word to say? Just look, come back, John." George Hang woke this morning to find his mini-mall burnt to the ground. A loss of a million and a half dollars and a lifetime of dreams and effort. 41 Korean businesses in South Central have been torched, dozens looted. In this overwhelmingly black and Hispanic area, Koreans own many of the small businesses. They're insular. They employ their own. They keep to themselves. Blacks say that's the problem.
"I'm not surprised that the Koreans got targeted because their prices are high, their attitude is wrong, and they just don't seem to have any respect for the black community."
Can't we all just get along? Isn't new. Uh, and it does raise the question, how did we get from this to a state of relative peace by the end of the decade? Well, there's a lot of reasons, and some of it is the return of law and order, which basically everyone, especially poor people in black communities, ultimately would prefer. You don't want to send your kids out to school and have them get shot. That doesn't work that great. Uh, so despite the Rodney King beating, despite the tensions between black communities and the police, the fact of the matter is, this was actually the high water mark at this moment for crime in the United States. And what came next drove crime down to all-time lows to the point where when I moved to New York City in 1999, the place is clean. The place is super safe. It's actually like the safest biggest city in the country. And there's a Republican mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who's broadly liked. It's like another reality looking back 25 years ago.
But there were other echoes of our modern times in the '90s and signs that the '90s was sort of healing itself because political correctness was also rampant in the '90s. It was also the first wave of political correctness, but we solved it the old-fashioned way by laughing at it.
"It's a whole new ball game on campus these days. And they call it PC."
"PC."
"Politically correct. And it's not just politics. It's everything. It's what you eat, it's what you wear, and it's what you say. And if you don't watch yourself, you can get in a buttload of trouble."
"Hey, Sam. Isn't that the guy that you used to..."
"Yeah. You went out with a white male. I was a freshman."
"Fresh person. Please."
"Please."
"See, all this stuff, all this stuff was happening in the '90s. But we did mock it."
"You know, this place is kind of insane. Wait till you meet the cause heads."
"The what?"
"These, Tom, are your cause heads. They find a world-threatening issue and stick with it for about a week."
"What's up?"
"What up?"
"What happened to the ozone layer?"
"It was last week." [Applause]
"I'm a black man. There's no justice for me here in America. I should be at the front of the line."
"Yeah, well, I'm gay and subject to ridicule and discrimination wherever I go."
"Women are oppressed throughout the world. Give it a rest."
My first job was actually at MTV. And even MTV had fun making fun of political correctness on college campuses in response to the release of PCU. Hi, I'm Tabitha Saurin with MTV News. Political correctness has gone from being a catchphrase to a sometimes tyrannical mandate on a lot of college campuses. And now there's a movie about it called PCU. Juliet Honen took some real life students from UCLA to review the film. First time I came to UCLA, like, I couldn't believe how many groups there were. I saw, I saw just an ad the other day for the Pacific Asian Islanders Gay Lesbian Association. And I said, "Oh my god, only in LA."
Only in LA. That all went national, but for a time, we beat it back to the point where, well, frankly, this was a time when people like Jimmy Kimmel were actually funny. Tonight on Politically Incorrect with Phil Mah. Then they are the co-hosts of The Man Show, premiering June 16th on Comedy Central. Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel. Boys, how are you, man? How are you? Even then, Adam was the funnier of the two. But this was the thing. We went through a mini version of all of this stuff 25 years ago and came out the other end feeling pretty good about America, feeling like the future had possibilities. There wasn't a lot of desire to burn the country to the ground. Not on the left, not on the right, only on the whack job left. But there was indeed a whack job left. The critical theory left. The people that were driving the early version of this political correctness, this radical intersectionality that tells our young boys, especially our young white boys, that they're the source of all of our problems and radicalizes them. And you can see a future president celebrating this radicalism firsthand in 1990.
And I remember that the black law students had organized an orientation for the first-year students. And one of the persons who spoke at that orientation was Professor Bell. And I remember him sauntering up to the front and not giving us a lecture, but engaging us in a conversation and speaking the truth and telling us that he, too, learned at this place that I have carried with me ever since. Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derek Bell. Open up your hearts and your minds to Derek Bell.
Who is Derek Bell? Well, this was the man behind critical race theory. Derek Bell, and others, Kimberly Crenshaw, and others, they were the ones that really laid the foundation for the kind of supercharged identity politics that still permeates our campuses to this literal very day and has radicalized our sons and pushed them into the hands of a lot of different voices that wouldn't be my favorite choice, like Nick Fuentes. People who are embracing identity politics themselves, white identity politics.
And so that might help explain how and why, starting around 2013, race relations began to collapse under President Barack Obama. I did an entire video pointing this stuff out. Others have noted it as well, but, uh, the collapse of race relations was precipitous, and it was under President Obama. And it wasn't because President Obama was black, 'cause don't forget, he got reelected quite handily. It was because he was a critical theory guy. Fundamentally, this is what drove the politics of the post-Ferguson era, the era of Black Lives Matter, the radicalization that really found its peak in the 2020 through 2024 time period under, well, President Obama's vice president, now President Joe Biden. Horrible, horrible stuff. Total, total collapse.
In 2013, black adults, 66% said they thought race relations in this country were good to very good. By 2021, they were down to 33%, cut in half. Only a third, from two-thirds to one-third. This was a radical destruction of our multicultural society. This was something that was the backdrop for all of this identity psychopathy. And one of the most ironic things, I hadn't actually looked at this in a little bit. It looks like they have recently updated the data that shows this kind of amazing bounce back this year, 2025. Still not to the peaks, still not all the way back, but it's interesting that President Trump 2.0 is presiding over a rebound in perceived race relations between blacks and whites, among both white people and black people. That that is shocking to me. Actually, it's not that shocking, because President Trump actually got a larger share of the black vote than, well, any Republican in recent memory.
So, what does this all have to do with the French-like revolutionary moment that we seem to be in? The dangers being posed on both the radical left, the true Jacobins that I've talked about in prior videos, and even the young Trump voters who are both raising their hands for radical sort of socialistic policies, but also finding themselves embracing voices like Nick Fuentes. And not everything Nick Fuentes says is terrible. In fact, in this interview with Dave Smith, he comes across pretty reasonably, but he is a race identitarian. He loves to go after the Jews. He really fundamentally believes we need to be a white society. I'm not for that. I'm not for the embrace of white identity politics. I don't care about calling people woke, right? I think that's also a bunch of nonsense. But I, I think it's really telling, and frankly, a little troubling, to hear Nick Fuentes get mainstreamed the way that he is.
I say this as someone, for the record, who actually a couple years ago went to bat for him as part of a film festival that was kicking out a film that they initially accepted about Nick, because Nick has been through a lot of, he has had himself debanked, deplatformed, and put on a no-fly list without ever being charged with a crime. That is totalitarianism. That is outrageous. And this was in the aftermath of January 6th. Nick is a complicated character. What's happened to him is fundamentally un-American. And I've never met him, but I will say I did go to bat to try to stick up for him because a buddy of mine actually made this documentary about what happened to him after January 6th. So, I'm trying to grapple with these different voices in this movement, especially on the right, which is kind of where I broadly sit. And I think Nick, Nick's rise means something, and we have to take it seriously as parents and as a country. This is important stuff. This is actually the new mainstream of our discourse is podcasts like Dave Smith and Nick Fuentes.
How do we chart a course that can solve for this problem? This problem of living together in a multicultural, multi-racial society, something that humans don't have a great track record on. Don't have much of a track record at all in the long history of humans on this planet. Well, I think the efforts that have been made so far have run out of gas, and we need to try something new. Something new and old, actually.
So, speaking of old, the regime that we are currently under is still fundamentally the one that was kicked off by Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all.
[Music]
"It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice to which we're totally committed in our time. So will you join in the battle? We have the power to shape the civilization that we want."
"We have the power to shape the civilization that we want."
What happened here? This was the Civil Rights moment. This was the birth of the Civil Rights Act, which did several things that were necessary and important at the time. The most important of which was disbanding the Jim Crow laws. Segregation in the South in this country was indeed a reflection of popular beliefs. So it wasn't singularly a government phenomenon, but it was also a function of state and local laws, the Jim Crow laws.
And one of the reasons why, frankly, I actually, I asked, um, Bob Woodson, a longtime civil rights advocate and an older black conservative, a voice of the right from the '60s through to today, who, um, who was there on the front lines of the Civil Rights Act, but went a different way ideologically than a lot of his peers. And I asked him at the time, because we were doing some work together, I said, "Bob, it is weird that at the time, something north of 95% of black Americans vote for a single party. You can't really find that anywhere else. That is a more unified voting base than even like Berkeley, California. What is going on there?" He said, "Number one, an actual majority of black Americans at the time that we were having this conversation, work for the government in one form or another, uh, federal, state, local, social work, police, fire, etc. And so there is somewhat of a built-in pro-government bias in that fact. The second piece he said was that you have to understand that for black Americans, the federal government came to the rescue in the face of local laws. This is why, and this sounds sort of unfamiliar to modern ears, but this idea of states' rights, that we are all different states with different legal structures that have their own sovereignty and that, you know, the 10th Amendment says that any anything not explicitly enumerated for the federal government should be left to the states, that's federalism, states' rights, that was a dirty word because the states were imposing Jim Crow laws, segregation, and structural federal, formal legal racism. And it was actually the federal government that came to the rescue of that. I am for that. I am glad that that happened fundamentally. I'm glad that these local versions of government tyranny were broken. But the other pieces of the puzzle have outlived their usefulness, namely the construction of legal privileges for not just black people, but for women, and for an increasing list of protected classes. This has created our modern problems in a very real sense, legally, as a matter of the institutions of America.
When we talk about what kind of change do we need to bring about if we can have a new, healthy, prosperous society going forward, I think this is an area where we need to take a fresh look. Specifically, I think it is time to abolish all of this. I think it is time for us to embrace true equality for all, which is to say, end all forms of legal discrimination in America. That would require the dismantling of a lot of what is currently US labor law and the the structures of the Affirmative Action and Civil Rights Act that specifically discriminate in favor of certain groups and against disfavored groups, which has increasingly only meant white men. This is the engine of grievance of our time today.
And here's the thing, this structure, the structure of affirmative action, of equity, of trying to use the government to ensure equal outcomes, not just equal treatment, this, this was opposed by thinkers like Thomas Sowell going back to the 1980s, going back to the early days of this movement. And you can see him battle Francis Fox Piven, whose name is important, and I will come back to who she is exactly in a minute, but just hear out this exchange.
"People are born into this world in a given sector of a society, and many, many of them are born at the bottom of the society. The argument for, about equality of results, was an argument that was linked to equality of opportunity. People recognized that unless there was a degree of equality in a, a degree of enough food, enough security, access to education, unless these things were available to all children, then equality of opportunity was merely a mockery. That's why equality of results became an issue, and it became an issue for black people in the United States. And they expressed their concern, whatever the..."
"You expressed it. Damn it. Look, but no, they did not. They did not. They immaculate and then replied..."
"They expressed their will by their extraordinary participation in a protest movement that began in the late 1950s and didn't end until..."
"I have never. Intellectuals were not in that protest movement. You want me to answer you in that process?"
"You want me to answer?"
"I finished."
"Good. Black people have never supported, for example, affirmative action, policies, anything of that sort. Wherever polls have been taken, black opinion on such matters of should people be paid equally, or should there be this or that. Black people have never taken a position that you describe. So it is not a question of what black people chose to do. It's what you, you choose to put in the mouths of black people. It is what you choose to to project a very small handful of intellectuals have generated an enormous amount of noise. When I look at opinion polls, particularly if I look at opinion polls of blacks in the United States, most blacks in the United States do not take any strong position in favor of equality of results. In fact, most of the polls that I've seen of blacks put them, if you want to use this expression, uh, very well to the right of most intellectuals on most of these social issues. It is not the people who are stirring. It is a handful of intellectuals. The question is not absolute equality. It's a question of what concept of equality you're pursuing, whether you're getting it absolutely or to one degree or the other. Are you aiming at a concept of equality of opportunity at the outset, or are you aiming at a concept of equality of results?"
"I would go beyond the question of equality and and put it more generally that any process to ascribe any status to any group of people, equality, inferiority, superiority, must necessarily reduce freedom because whatever the government wishes to ascribe to any group, whatever, whatever place, to use the phrase that was very common in the South, that blacks should have their place. Whatever place the government is going to assign to people, that place will not coincide. Wait, that that place will not coincide either with with what all those people are doing or with how others perceive all those people, because there's too much diversity among human beings to maintain any system of ascribed status from the top is going to mean reducing people's freedom across the spectrum."
The most important public intellectual of our times, from my perspective, Thomas Sowell, laying waste to the ideology of affirmative action, of and of unequal treatment by the law. His opponent there, the, uh, high-minded social signaling intellectual professor, was none other than Frances Fox Piven, of the rightfully maligned, by the, by some at least, by me, clouded Piven strategy. Let me just read this. This is from Wikipedia, or Wikipedia, depending on how you look at it these days. The clouded Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists. Those are basically the same thing at this point. All of sociology is a scam. Uh, Richard Clower and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to utilize militant anti-poverty groups to facilitate a political crisis by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and redistributing income through the federal government. One way you might imagine this could happen, let's say, is if you radically increased immigration at the same time that you tried to expand the use of welfare benefits to these new immigrants, many of whom are coming in having not contributed to the system in the first place. Just a thought. There's something similar going on there, one might say. And I am broadly more pro-immigration than most of the right-wing, actually most of the public in general, to be perfectly transparent on that. But it is interesting that Miss Piven really seemed to be perfectly fine and and interested in using people as tools to create political crises in the name of growing the state.
So let's come back to a question raised by Mr. Fuentes.
"And so that we've undergone this political transformation, and on the other side of it, we do have a much different America. And the question is, now that we really do have like these large groups of different races in the country, can there be a a brand new political order that's based on understanding?" And, uh, it, it comes down to the question of that in itself. And to me, all these little things that they were talking about 20 years ago or 10 years ago, representation, microaggressions, uh, opportunity, it's really about power. That's ultimately what it comes down to. This is the crossroads we're at as a country, Nick. And a non-trivial percentage of people that are out there, young people on the left and the right, see this as entirely a power game to be fought along ideological and specifically identitarian lines. For Nick, it's about putting white people back on top, or at least, um, understanding that race matters in ways that are not consistent with the way our founders understood it. Our founders, even though they owned slaves, had an understanding of an ideal, an American ideal, the fundamental American ideal articulated by slave-holding Thomas Jefferson. And that was this: The idea took form. Something new was expressed by men. A new and revolutionary doctrine, the greatest creative force in human relations. All men are created equal. All men are entitled to the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's the goal we set for ourselves. Defeat meant hanging. Victory meant a world in which Americans rule themselves. All men are created equal."
Now, this is false. All men are not created equal. All people are not created equal. We are a diverse, different creature. We have wildly different capabilities. And those capabilities end up expressing themselves in a modern context with the most unequal outcomes one can possibly imagine. An incredible basketball player can earn a multiple of my income. That is truly astonishing. And that's just the nature of the world we live in. That, that is the nature of a modern broad society where you have the potential to create value for millions of people with your work, with your effort. So unequal outcomes and inequality of material reality are facts. They are facts. And I think the only way we can ever make progress in this world is by being rooted in reality, in facts. We can't, you know, Ayn Rand has this, uh, this saying, "You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
And the entire ideology of critical race theory, of affirmative action, of a legal set of institutions designed to actively discriminate on the basis of your identity. These run counter to the facts of how people work and how people respond. I want to give a specific example of how this actually plays out for real, and why we need to get rid of all of this as one of the many reforms that America needs that could maybe even, as weird as this sounds, help deescalate our our explosive politics.
So when I was at MTV, actually at Spike a couple years later, I was a pretty caring manager. I got to have a reputation of of taking care of my team and of having a warm, good vibe, a good sense of community, a good sense of teamwork. My reward for that at one point was to be transferred a producer who happened to be female, who was kind of a disaster, and who bounced around between other teams, kind of wreaking havoc. And the question you have to ask yourself is, why did this happen? Why? If this person was such a problem that they got bounced off of two other teams, why weren't they fired? The answer is protected class status. She was a woman. We were in New York City. So she was in a protected class. This was not going to work for Viacom. A big company knows they're just going to get sued. So they move people around. They keep people in positions that they shouldn't be in way longer, which is not good for the company, but it's also not good for that person. Because when you're in a job that isn't a good fit and you're not good at it, staying in it isn't good for you. You should find something else. You should learn some hard lessons, improve your behavior perhaps. But that's not what happened. And it ended up falling on me ultimately, years later, to be the one to deliver the bad news. "I'm sorry, you're fired."
This is not the only time I watched this happen inside Viacom, inside of Deep Blue Hunger Games New York, where this legal framework is at its sort of peak of its power because it's not just the federal laws, it's also the state and the city laws that make these privileges granted to people by the government in a discriminatory way on the basis of their identity. That is the perverse, destructive evil of this stuff.
When you treat people special by law, you add costs onto them that they don't even realize you're adding. You undermine their credibility as having earned their way. Number one, so you are, you become a diversity hire. That sucks. Nobody wants to be the diversity hire. Nobody wants to work hard, get into a job, and then have this cloud following them that they were maybe a diversity hire, or that they, they didn't earn it themselves. Nobody wants that, and we shouldn't force it upon them by law. Number two, when you make it more expensive to hire particular groups, you make it less likely that you will do so. That is a fact. That is a reality. All of the utopian schemes of the left can't escape that reality. All of that sucks. All of that has poisoned our workplaces. It's poisoned our politics. And it is building a movement of young people, including young white males, who have had enough. And I don't want them to turn into shock troops that burn the country to the ground or ignite in reaction some kind of heinous civil war. That's not good for us. That's not good for this American experiment.
And so I think it's time that we return to equal treatment under the law. Legal fairness for real. There's two ways to think about fairness. This is something I've explained to my son going back to when he was 10, because it's quite easy to understand. If the country is a game, there's two sets of rules you could have. One set of rules, equal outcomes, says that whatever you do, wherever you come from, we change the rules so that you will either get the same score, or maybe a particular team in advance, chosen in advance on the basis not of how they played, but who they are, will win. Most of us understand that that's fundamentally unfair. But that is what's called distributive justice. That is the, like, lefty academic term for that. That is affirmative action. That is the Civil Rights Act framework. The Title IX framework. Title IX is part of the Civil Rights Act. It should be abolished as well.
The other form of fairness is that we have an an equal impartial referee, and that that referee will apply equal rules to all the players, and may the best man or woman win. And most of us understand that when it's a game that is fair play. That's what fairness actually means. And when we play that kind of game, like as a sport, as a game, when we lose it, we understand. When we lose it, unless we're just a jerk, we can shake the hands of the other team and say, "Good game." We can have sportsmanship. We can have civility. I want that for this country more than anything else. As a father, as an American, the only way you can have civility and sportsmanship if we are all playing by the same rules.
That doesn't even mean equal opportunity. I'm not sure that is a linguistic thing that right-wingers say as opposed to equal outcomes, we want equal opportunity. There's no such thing as equal opportunity. That's never going to be a thing. Not fully. It shouldn't even be talked about that way. I think that that's a mistake. What we need is equal treatment. Equal treatment under the law. Everything else is going to be up to all of us to figure out. And if we had that, this society, kind of like the late '90s, would start to heal. It's not the only thing we need. We need lots of other reforms, big reforms. This needs to be expanded beyond just race and identity. We need to have equal treatment under the law for everything. Namely, there should be no companies that get special privileges. In fact, companies should get no privileges at all. There should be no subsidies for particular industries. There should be no corporate welfare. In fact, we should kill that first to be perfectly honest.
But if you take this principle of equality under the law seriously, it would radically restructure our society for the better. And in a time where there is more and more desire for radical change, this is the best one I can possibly offer you to consider. Take seriously what it would mean for the country, for every interaction we have, not just with the government, but with our own opportunities. Imagine a world where the government simply can't pick any winners or losers ever. Where it can't censor anyone for any reason ever. Where it can't play any kinds of favorites ever. I think there'd be a lot more sportsmanship and a lot more civility, and we might just avoid a French Revolution. I guess it would be three or 4.0, frankly, but an American French Revolution in the 21st century.
But let me know what you think. I know you will head out in the comments and, uh, have at me. Maybe you think I'm an absolute crazy right-wing lunatic that wants to eliminate the Civil Rights Act and all the rest of it. Let me know. Head over to dadsavesamerica.com where we've got lots of resources and, uh, and an opportunity to support this channel, become a subscriber. There's other stuff coming along with Zoom calls and other things that'll be happening later this year. And if you really love what we're doing and want to like, share it with the world, you can head over to our merch store. We'll put a link down below where you can buy t-shirts and mugs and, you know, help support us that way and get something in return. And of course, have a great weekend.
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