https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nbw9ANxHEYc
your policies, at least in principle, could appeal to Republicans as well. And that might make you a unique candidate on the Democrat side. I guess I’m curious about why do you… So, there’s an analogy, I believe, between what’s happened to the universities and what’s happened to the Democrats. So, what I saw happen in the universities was that the administration took over the faculty. The faculty retreated in 3,000 microsteps, and the administration moved forward. And that happened over about a 25-year period until the administration had captured the universities completely. And then the DEI types took over the administration. And it looks to me like something analogous happened within the Democrats. Like, I worked with the Democrats for a long time in California, trying to help the Democrats… By DEI, you mean… Diversity, equity and inclusivity. OK. Yeah, the social justice warrior types within the universities. And so, what I saw among the Democrats that I worked with was that they were unable to draw a dividing line between the moderate types and the radicals. So, and this is something maybe I’ll push you about. So, for example, I went to Washington, I talked to a lot of Democrats, senators and congressmen, about what I saw happening in the broad public sphere, but also in the Democrat Party. And I asked them this question. When does the left go too far? And none of them were able to answer. And even though it’s completely obvious that the left can go too far, I mean, that’s one of the cardinal lessons of the 20th century. And I suggested that the left goes too far when it pushes equity. And all I got as a response from the Democrats, senators and congressmen like was, well, the people who say equity, they just mean equality of opportunity. And that’s not what they mean. They mean equality of outcome. And that’s not the same thing at all. And I saw in that inability to draw that distinction, part of the reason that the Democrats have shifted in the direction that you described, in the direction that seems to be opposed in many ways to the best interests of both the working class and the middle class, but also characterized by this incredible strain of illiberalism and corporate fascist collusion, the sort of thing that you document, for example, in the relationship between the power elites and big pharma. And so my sense on the Democrat side, I couldn’t shift the Democrats to the point, the ones that I was talking to, to the point where they would draw distinction between them and the radicals. It just didn’t seem possible. And so why do you think I don’t think the universities are salvageable, by the way. So why do you think the Democrats are salvageable? Well, I don’t think we have a choice. We have a two party system. And I, you know, I’m a lifelong Democrat. I feel like my party is being taken away from me in some ways by the, you know, the kind of ideologies, the extreme ideologies and really, you know, the departure of common sense that I think troubles you and a lot of, you know, the things that you think about. And, but I mean, why do I think it’s salvageable? Because I, I’m talking to people on the street. I, you know, there are so many people who have responded to my candidacy positively because they see it as returned to, you know, being a Kennedy Democrats, the, you know, the Democratic party that they loved and that they, you know, that they thought reflected their values, their ideologies and their best interests and the best interests of this country. And that was likely to build on an America that they can be proud of, that their children can be proud of that has moral authority around the world. And, you know, all the things that we’d like to see, I think most people would like to see, I think the Democratic party has been hijacked, as you say, by kind of some extreme ideologies and, and in some cases kind of irrational, I don’t know, thought patterns. And I think they kind of are, the idea of returning it to common sense is appealing to a lot of people. And I’m, I’m just, you know, I’m just thinking those things, but I, and they seem to be reflected both in my polling and in the kind of reaction I get from people on the street and on Twitter and, you know, so it’s a melange of things that makes me feel that way, but, you know, I could be wrong. Well, I mean, part of the reason that I was willing to work with the Democrats to begin with, and I did that for about five years, was because I thought, I think like you do, according to what you just said, that, well, you kind of have to work with the institutions that exist because those are the institutions that exist. And there seems to be some utility in trying to pull the Democrats, let’s say, back, back towards the center as much as that’s possible. But I found that I think we had some success in that regard, but it was in particular the, and I see this on the conservative side too, by the way, with the unwillingness to see, this is probably more true in Canada even, what is really at the core of this progressive ideology that stresses equity, for example, because equity is an unbelievably dangerous doctrine. And as far as I can tell, it’s indistinguishable from the sort of Marxist ideas that swept across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and China, for that matter, in the 20th century, and that still prevail, certainly in China. And it isn’t obvious to me at all that the Democrats have taken this with any degree of seriousness, and, you know, that’s producing all sorts of strange pathologies on the cultural front. You’ve documented a fair bit, and this brings us into another area that’s adjacent to that, I guess. You spent a lot of time, your last book, Letter to Liberals, I think I’ve got that title right, concentrated on the strange collusion that has occurred between the Democrats and Big Pharma. And this is also something I find completely inexplicable. Like, 20 years ago, if you would have said that in 2020, the leftist types and the liberals, including the Democrats, would be colluding with Big Pharma, people would have thought you were completely out of your mind, because for an endless amount of time, the number one corporate enemies of people who were liberal or on the left were Big Pharma and Big Energy. And so, how do you explain what happened in relationship to the liberal attitude towards Big Pharma during the COVID epidemic? Because I haven’t been able to sort that out at all. What do you think’s behind that? Well, I watched that happen kind of like a slow motion train wreck, and you’re right that traditionally pharmaceutical industries are, you know, it is a criminal enterprise, and, you know, I’m not saying that lightly. The four principal companies, Merck, Sanofi, Pfizer, and Glaxo, that produce, for example, all the vaccines in America, have paid $35 billion collectively over the last decade in criminal penalties and, you know, damages for lying to doctors, for defrauding regulators, for falsifying science, and for killing hundreds of thousands of people. I mean, the whole opioid crisis was engineered by the Sacklers and by the other big pharmaceutical companies along with corrupt FDA officials. And that is a crisis that now kills 100, this year it killed 106,000 American kids, twice the number of kids that died during the 20-year Vietnam War. Vioxx is another good example. That was another symptom of the corrupt collusion between Pharma and the regulatory agencies, and the capture of those agencies by that industry, which has become, the agencies themselves have become sock puppets for that industry, and they killed between 120,000, 500,000 people with a drug they marketed as a headache medicine and an arthritis medicine when they knew that it caused heart attacks, and they didn’t tell the public that. They concealed that from the public. So, you know, a lot of people would have said, oh, it caused heart attacks. Well, I’ll take an aspirin, but they weren’t allowed to make that choice because the Pharma and the collusion, with the collusion of the regulators, took that information, deprived the public of informed consent. Now, the question is, Democrats knew that. There’s more pharmaceutical lobbyists on Capitol Hill than there are congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justices combined more than any other industry. They give double in terms of lobbying what the next biggest industry gives, and, you know, it’s easy for them to own Congress still. There was an ideological resistance among Democrats until a decade ago, or really a decade. What happened was that during, Democrats are always starved for money, for campaign money, because Republicans can take money from dirty industries and from, you know, sort of people, disreputable people, you know, from whether it’s the oil industry, the tobacco industry, the NRA, or, you know, things that a lot of Democrats consider disreputable. And they have unlimited money. The Democrats, traditionally, could only get big money, reliable big money, from two sources. One was the labor unions, and the other was the trial lawyers. And they don’t have anywhere near the kind of money that, you know, these industries have to give away.