This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," July 12, 2020. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
MARK LEVIN, FOX NEWS HOST: Hello, America, I'm Mark Levin. This is LIFE LIBERTY & LEVIN.
It is a great honor to have Dr. Thomas Sowell on the program, a man I have followed my entire career, my entire life -- actually, as a teenager, I hate to date you, Dr. Sowell, but you've had an enormous influence on me and so many other people. Welcome.
We appreciate you being here, particularly in these times.
DR. THOMAS SOWELL, SENIOR FELLOW, HOOVER INSTITUTION AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY: Thank you.
LEVIN: First of all, you've written a fabulous book, very prescient, actually and very relevant into what's going on today.
Charter schools and their enemies, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies." We're going to spend some significant time on this.
But before we do, I know that the people who watch this program are very curious on your take on the events that are taking place, the nation's direction, what's going on in our inner cities and so forth.
What is your general view? What is your general take?
SOWELL: Well, I must say, even though I'm regarded as pessimistic, I was never pessimistic enough to think that things would generate to the point where they are now.
We are adult human beings talking about getting rid of the police, where they're talking about reducing the number of police, reducing the resources put into police work at a time when murder rates have been skyrocketing over what they were just a year ago in 2019.
I never dreamed we'd come to this point. It just seems such utter madness, and what is frightening is how many people in responsible positions are caving in to every demand that is made, repeating any kind of nonsense that you're supposed to repeat.
I do believe that we may well be -- we may well reach a point of no return. I hope that of course, that will never happen. But there is such a thing as a point of no return.
The Roman Empire overcame and many problems in its long history, but eventually it reached the point where it simply could no longer continue on.
And much of that was from within not just the Barbarians attacking from outside.
LEVIN: You make a great point. You know, I seem to recall and I remember it's in one of my books, in 1819, a letter back and forth between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. And Jefferson says, you know, I've been thinking about Rome, and I've been thinking about America.
And he said, the Romans could never have come up with any kind of government to save itself or save its people because the people lost their virtue.
He said, whether it's Cicero or Cato or any of the others, he said, but the United States is different. Well, I'm here to tell you, Dr. Sowell, if we lose our virtue, and what we see in the streets right now, I don't think we can describe it as a virtue and what we hear in the academia, what we see on media, and what we hear from the Democrats and so forth, there is no kind of government that can protect us from ourselves, isn't that correct?
SOWELL: Absolutely. I just read today's "Wall Street Journal," how some people who conducted a study and defended themselves against critics until Heather Mac Donald, quoted the study and then they said, she had misused it, and they didn't say how she misused it. But there are so many people who are just caving in.
At one time, I was proud of the University of Chicago, how they handled themselves back in the 1960s, when so many other major universities were caving in to all kinds of absurd demands. But just within the past year, the University of Chicago has suddenly decided they're going to do away with requiring SAT or other admissions tests for admission.
And all that can mean is that they want to be able to mix and match people do for demographic appearances, rather than for the academic situation. And that's no benefit to students who are admitted without the same qualifications as other students.
I saw this back in the 1960s when I was teaching at Cornell. I learned that half the black students at Cornell were on academic probation. I immediately went over to the administration building to look at the test scores of black students. It turns out the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile, which means they were not merely qualified, they were better than three quarters of all American students who took that test.
Why then were they having academic problems? Because at the Cornell Liberal Arts College at that time, the average student was at the 99th percentile. Those black students would have been so much better off somewhere else where the work is taught at a pace and in a manner that was something that they could easily handle and graduate, and in many cases, would be on Dean's List.
But they put them in with the top one percent. The amount of reading you had to do at Cornell at that time, the amount of math that there was presupposed -- all of that went into making it harder for them to learn things that they could easily have learned at some other university.
LEVIN: You hear this phrase systemic racism, systemic oppression. You hear it on our college campuses. You hear it from very wealthy and fabulously famous sports stars. You hear it from media types. You hear it -- first of all, what does that mean? And whatever it means, is it true?
SOWELL: It really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one test hypotheses. It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels during the Age of the Nazis, in which he is supposed to have said that people will believe any lie if it's repeated long enough and loud enough, and that's what we're getting.
I don't think -- it's one of many words that I don't think even the people who use it have any clear idea what they're saying. The purpose is served by having other people caving in.
LEVIN: And you know, Dr. Sowell, I noticed most people who use that phrase don't live in the communities that they claim to be supporting and defending.
Some of them have left those communities never to return, except on Thanksgiving to hand out turkeys. Others throw their money into these communities for a school or so forth, but they don't live there. They don't send their kids to school there. They live among the quote-unquote, "systemically racist," I suppose. And isn't this part of the problem with the Marxist left, they're absolute hypocrites.
They claim they want equality for all. They claim that there will be the withering away of the state, the police departments, reimagine law enforcement and so forth and so on. And yet, every time you look at a Marxist state, it is an authoritarian top down centralized police state, is it not?
SOWELL: Absolutely. And trying to get away from social class differences. They create their own nomenclature, who have their own stores that they alone can shop in, their own medical facilities, their own everything.
LEVIN: I want to know if you agree with me or not, you don't have to, obviously. I see the 1860 election and the 1864 election as the two most important elections in American history. And now I see 2020 as one of the most important elections in history.
Even apart from the candidates, were talking about the 1776 Project versus the 1619 Project, and you can see where the Democrats have tied into the 1619 Project, and many of the Republicans are trying to defend the founding in the 1776 Project. Do you see it that way?
SOWELL: Well, what I see is that if the election goes to Biden, that there's a good chance that the Democrats will then control all three -- two branches of Congress and the White House, and considering the kinds of things that they are proposing, that could well be the point of no return for this country.
LEVIN: Yes, that's why I consider this election different than a lot of elections. I mean, I feel like we're right on the edge.
Now, you've written this fantastic book, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies" which is in kind with the kind of books that you write, the kind of thinking you've had your entire life when I used to watch you on "Firing Line" with Bill Buckley. I used to watch it with the great Milton Friedman and others.
And it's this. You believe in liberty. You believe in competition. You believe in choice. You believe in ideas. You don't believe in physical impediments, whether it's skin or religion, or whatever it is.
In other words, you believe in the American dream and you view charter schools as part of the potential for liberating our inner cities, for getting poor kids educated. And I want to get into that in more detail with you.
But why is this so hard to do in our inner cities? To give poor mostly minority kids and their parents, opportunities to go to schools other than the government building that happens to be right down the block?
SOWELL: Well, it's because you have a very powerful vested interest in the public school -- traditional public school system as it is, and charter schools are the greatest threat to that.
I was frankly surprised at the difference -- at the magnitude of the difference between students who are being educated in charter schools and those who are being educated in traditional public schools in the very same neighborhood, and in the very same building.
I mean -- and so I have a huge amount of data in the book based on that particular situation. Cases where the charter school and the traditional public school for that neighborhood are in the very same building and they have some of the same -- very same grades, so you can compare how the third graders in one school did against the third graders on the other, both of them, 90-plus percent minority students, both of them from low-income families and all the rest of it.
And when I did that, I found that, for example, in Mathematics, something like yes, exactly, in fact, 10 percent of the children educated in the traditional public schools in the building pass the Mathematics test, compared to 68 percent of the charter school students in the very same building.
Now, I didn't expect that level of disparity, but there it was. There it was for more than a hundred schools that I looked at in New York, containing more than 23,000 students.
LEVIN: When we return, Dr. Sowell, I want to ask you why are charter schools and the whole, so successful when it comes to their students and government-run public schools, so less successful. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. Dr. Thomas Sowell, your excellent book "Charter Schools and Their Enemies." Why are charter schools and really non- government schools much more successful than these government schools? I mean, these government schools get a ton of money. They get all the attention from the political elites. They get all the support that they could possibly need, in my opinion, whereas charter schools and others they're like -- they're like the stepchild, if you will. What's your take on that?
SOWELL: Well, first of all, they operate under completely different incentives and constraints. Your traditional public schools really are a world of their own, unlike most other institutions.
Most institutions, whether they're sports or medical institutions, or churches, automobile dealerships, whatever, they can only survive as institutions to the extent that they can attract the clientele. Traditional public schools don't have that problem.
Compulsory attendance laws automatically supply them with a clientele, whether the clientele wants to be there or not. And giving each school -- this school -- its own monopoly in its own geographic area means that they don't even have to compete among themselves.
And competition is enormously important because human beings are so fallible. If you insulate people from paying the price of being wrong, you're going to get a lot of wrong things done.
And in particular, you're going to get institutions being run for the benefit of those who run the institution rather than the clientele this would be designed for it to help.
In the case of the charter schools, it's like so many other businesses or institutions. They get a client that -- no one is assigned to go to a charter school because of compulsory attendance laws. Their students are all volunteers. All their parents who volunteer them.
And so the charter school must produce what will keep the students coming in, or else they go out of business. And given those conditions, you attract an entirely different kind of person to the teaching profession elsewhere.
In the traditional public schools, the teachers are practically impossible to fire no matter how bad they are. In the charter schools, if the teachers can't teach the kids, nobody cares how many degrees they have, or what teachers college or any of that stuff.
LEVIN: So there is enormous institutional opposition to charter schools, to competition. It comes I guess, from the teachers union, which is enormously powerful, which is a campaign funding source for local, state and Federal Democrats.
And so they basically collude, I take it to prevent the option of charter schools and other options being available particularly in the inner cities, and the parents in the inner cities, what would they like to do? Would they like to send their kids to charter schools?
SOWELL: In New York City, for example, there are 50,000 students in traditional public schools, but on waiting list to get into charter schools.
Now, if those 50,000 students were able to transfer as they want and each child in New York City, the state spends more than $20,000 a year on them, and so if you do the arithmetic that comes out to more than a billion dollars a year that would move from the traditional public school to the charter school, if the students were able to transfer.
And so obviously, job number one for the teachers union, and also for the officials of the traditional public schools is to prevent those students from transferring even though they have a legal right to.
And one of the ways of doing that is simply have a fixed number of charter schools set up beyond which they cannot go. And so we were in this situation last year where the federal government gave the Success Academy Charter Schools, more than $9 million.
And ordinarily, they just go ahead and expand another end to other buildings and so on. But because they're up against this arbitrary number, they can't do much.
Among the other ways in many cities, especially where the population is going down over the years, there are vacant schools completely vacant and they have been vacant for years and the local authorities prevent the charter schools reusing those vacant building, because if they were able to have more classrooms, they'd be able to take students off their waiting list and students and more important to them, the money would move to the charter school.
LEVIN: Now, this is incredible to me. You have President Trump who calls this a Civil Rights issue, school choice. And he's been talking about this for a long time, and he's made efforts to expand it. And they funded efforts to expand it through grants and so forth.
Then you have the Democratic Party that is absolutely against this. You have Barack Obama, the first African-American President, and what's one of the first things he does? He puts the kibosh on school choice. He opposes school choice.
Is this a Civil Rights issue? Or are Democrats going to get away with this constant monopoly control of our school systems?
SOWELL: Again, it depends on -- just recently, Joe Biden said to the teachers unions that we need to go to the President. Teachers will be the number one priority in the schools, which is an extraordinary statement when you think about it. Children are supposed to be the number one priority.
If you have situations where the main thing is that teachers have ironclad tenure on the job, and there are all kinds of horror stories that can be told, if we have the time. They have no incentive. They get paid, regardless of whether their students learn or not.
In the charter schools, particularly the successful ones, teachers who get good results from the students move up and the ones who don't, move out.
LEVIN: Do you think -- you know, I'm not generally a fan of antitrust laws, but do you think they should be applied to public sector unions? Because I'm thinking they should. I mean, if they're going to be applied throughout our society, on the business and corporate side of things.
You know, if one toaster company wants to buy another toaster company, it has to be reviewed by the Department of Justice and the antitrust division.
And yet when it comes to the teaching of our children, we've got this iron- fisted control over the school systems and I'm not sure how else we can we can break through?
I mean, as you quote Biden, the teachers unions have the run of the place.
SOWELL: Yes. Unfortunately, I'm not a legal authority, but I believe some years ago, there was a law. I mean, maybe a century or more ago that said that the unions are not for legal purposes.
LEVIN: That's right.
SOWELL: Conspiracy and restraint of trade. And so that way, it is not going to go, but if they would just make the charter schools have equal treatment. That is when there are students, you provide classrooms for them.
In New York City for example, just in recent years, shows that there are 212 public schools that are half empty, and yet the charter school people are having a terrible time to get into those places, because all kinds of roadblocks are put up.
In some parts of the country, empty school houses have been demolished to make sure that charter schools can't get in there.
LEVIN: There just needs to be a way to bring a liberty agenda, you know, some kind of agenda into the inner cities that are controlled by these parties and controlled by these forces for half a century.
And you're right about the antitrust laws. The unions were specifically exempted. I just think they've got to update them to reality, what's going on in this country today.
When we return, it's it true, Dr. Sowell that we also have towns and states passing legislation to make it more and more difficult as a fundamental legal matter to have competition and charter schools. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
JACKIE IBANEZ, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: This is a Fox News Alert from New York. I'm Jackie Ibanez. Crews are still battling a massive fire on the USS Bonhomme Richard docked in San Diego. The fire now raging for over eight hours. We're being told all personnel have been evacuated from the vessel.
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And Florida setting a single day U.S. record with over 15,000 coronavirus cases. The brunt of pandemic coming from large cities like Miami, Orlando and West Palm Beach.
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LEVIN: Welcome back. Dr. Sowell, you know, we had at the turn of the last century, John Dewey and the radical progressives and they had an enormous impact on public education.
They said, you know, teaching basics, that's not it. You've got to teach the social impact, social activism, the effects of Math and Social Studies on the community, and you see the consequences of that over the last century -- and it's getting worse, it's not getting better, and he had enormous influence, as you know.
So my question to you is, charter schools versus government or public schools. Are charter schools more focused on getting kids to learn the basics in Literature, in English, in Mathematics and Science, as opposed to the public schools that are really into this social activism stuff?
SOWELL: Oh, yes, yes. And in fact, that's one of the things that the critics complain of. In California, there are some anti-charter school laws passed last year that will force the charter schools to essentially carry indoctrination courses. And the content of those courses will be specified.
In California, in recent years, they have already mandated that the charter schools teach what is called sex education. But what it really simply is, an indoctrination in what I thought to be the best attitudes or more advanced attitudes toward sex. And this has to be taught at an early age, in ways that are absolutely grotesque in some cases.
LEVIN: And how about patriotism? And by patriotism, I mean, basic allegiance to the country. I mean, you don't -- everybody doesn't have to agree on everything and everybody knows history is full of positives and negatives.
But I get the sense, particularly in the last several months, and I think a lot of the audience does, too, that a lot of the hostility towards the country, towards the founders, towards the founding documents and so forth, that the breeding grounds for this is in public education.
SOWELL: Absolutely. If you're serious about Mathematics, the English language and Science, things like that, you really cannot squander the time of schoolchildren on these other adventures in indoctrination, almost regardless of what the indoctrination is because especially with kids from low income areas where the parents may not have as much education as some other people in other parts of the society, these students need a real grounding.
And many of these charter schools, that's what they get. And we're now in - - and also they have to have behavioral standards. You can't teach about bedlam in the schools.
In California last year, they passed incredible laws which specify that students in the early grades cannot be suspended for disrupting classes or the activities of the school. And so what you're saying is you're licensing troublemaking and the reason for doing so is simply that this is one of many ways that charter schools can be kept from becoming so much better than the traditional public schools.
It would be a lot harder to raise the traditional public schools up to the level of charter schools, but it is a lot easier to bring the charter schools down to the level of traditional public schools.
LEVIN: Yes, let me ask you a broader question. I mean, it seems to me when we were raising our kids, too. You better damn well look at the textbooks that your kids have. You better look at the lesson plans. You better question them about what they're learning in the classroom when they go to these public schools, as parents, not just keep funding and funding and funding the increases for teachers and God knows what else goes on in these public classrooms.
In other words, parents need to be active, not active as captured activists on behalf of the school system, but active on behalf of their children and find out what the world is going on in these classrooms and make noise when they find out that their kids are being brainwashed. I don't see enough of that. Do you?
SOWELL: No, but again, I think competition would take care of a lot of that and among the things that parents who send their kids to charter schools say is, first of all that the kids are safer there, physically safer, and they learn good behavior and so on. And so you have to have all of those things. Then that will take care of itself.
Most of the parents are going to move their kids and when they are in these neighborhoods, wherever that's a real problem, they are going to move their kids out of the traditional public schools, which is why there are so many devious ways that are used to keep those kids from being able to transfer.
LEVIN: I think there needs to be a total rethinking of public education. And one of the areas as you point out, is competition, charter schools and other types of schools, private schools, parochial schools, voucher systems, whatever you can put into the system to give children opportunities and parents opportunities.
But this whole notion that you hear all the time, well, the teachers aren't paid enough. Well, the school district doesn't have enough money. Well, we need to build new schools and everybody buys into this because they think that's going to improve quality of education. Maybe it's time for people in communities to say no, we demand choices. We demand alternatives.
And otherwise we believe in, you want to defund the cops? How about we start defunding the school systems unless they're responsive to us? What do you think about that?
SOWELL: I think it's a good idea. Well, we don't have to worry about that, for example, in supermarkets. The public doesn't have to worry about what the supermarket does or that supermarket does. They go to the supermarket that satisfies them, and that accomplishes the purpose.
So to find you know, the quality of it is kept up just by the competition. But the teachers and the institutions are so protected from any hint of competition, that this is why they can get away with running the institution for their benefit, rather than for the benefit of the students.
LEVIN: When we return, I want to ask you this question. We're talking mostly here about the inner cities. We're talking mostly here about minority students, not exclusively, but mostly. Is the continued opposition to allowing freedom of choice to go to better schools and get a better education in a safer environment, is that becoming a matter of bigotry? I'm just curious to know what you think about that.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. Fabulous new book, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies" by the great Dr. Thomas Sowell.
You might say, well, I don't have kids in school anymore. Well, you know I'm focused on this other thing. This is the key. Educating our children is the key. What they're learning, how they're learning, and where they're learning is the key.
Every parent and grandparent knows this to be the case, and unless we fix this and unless we really take an effort to reform this as a nation, the same thing is going to happen.
In fact, it's going to get worse and worse and worse generation to generation, which leads me to my question, Dr. Sowell, generation to generation, the same thing over and over again. Big government schools, centralization. The Democratic Party in bed with the unions. The unions feeding the Democratic Party and vice versa -- in order to break this.
Most of what we're talking about is happening in cities, and most of what we're talking about is happening in inner cities, poor areas, majority- minority areas. Can we call this bigotry?
SOWELL: I don't think it is so much ideological as it, it is just raw self-interest. In fact, some of the officials who tried to block and have succeeded in blocking charter schools were using vacant buildings that had been vacant for years.
I have said, you know, we can't be helping our competition. So you put the people who are in charge of the existing system in charge of making rules for charter schools, and then they make such rules as will prevent those students from being able to get into the charter school. They are focused.
There's the whole argument, you know, it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, the motto for charter schools is, if it ain't broke then break it because, you know, otherwise, the students leave.
LEVIN: Do you think this would be tolerated in other communities? You know, poor communities, people can't leave in many cases. They're immobile because of financial reasons and other reasons.
In other parts of the country, people get up and leave or they pick their home based on the school system and so forth. This is why I raise this issue. I watched the head of the AFT. She is a leftwing white woman.
I watch Joe Biden. He has become leftwing, a white guy. I see Nancy Pelosi and Schumer and all of these people and then I see leftists who are also black, who are part of this collusion with the unions. But still, if there's quote-unquote, "systemic racism," it seems to me and we agree that's nonsense, but it seems to me when you look at the inner cities, something systemic is going on.
Maybe it's not in their best interest, but it seems to be applicable mostly to one group of people, particularly black people.
SOWELL: Well, wherever the family income is high enough that people can afford private schools, the parents know that and the traditional public schools know that. And so there'll be some quality level maintained in those communities precisely because there is always the implicit threat that they're going to lose students, which means they're going to lose money, and they're going to lose the job.
So the circumstances are just radically different. And it's one of the reasons they have been fighting some ways to prevent black kids, for example, from going to parochial schools with government support.
It's not so much about religion. It's about the fact that the traditional Catholic parochial schools, many of them have low enough tuition that people of moderate income can afford with a little sacrifice to send their kids there. And so that produces competition and what they don't want above all else is competition.
LEVIN: And isn't this, what we see, really across the board or almost across the board with the left, that is, whether it's healthcare, no competition; whether it is other activities, no competition; whether it's schooling, no competition. Even when you get to universities and colleges of which there's obviously thousands, they demand adherence to an ideology. They demand adherence to a set of standards.
And free speech, freedom of association, depending on who is doing the speaking and who's doing the associating is supported or opposed. Isn't this a problem across the board when it comes to the left?
SOWELL: Oh, absolutely. And I in my career, I have seen it develop. I mean, when I went to teaching at Cornell in 1965, we had people of all kinds of persuasions, just in the economics department.
When I left there, there was an orthodoxy that was put in there, and if you didn't agree with it, you were just out of luck in terms of your career.
I saw one wonderful young woman, courageous who stood up for the standards and the academic standards and behavioral standards. They not only fired her, they made it impossible for her to get another job anywhere else.
LEVIN: And this is happening in an extreme way right now as a result of last month with Antifa and Black Lives Matter. We see it happening across our culture and across our society.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. We're talking about the future of American education, and this fabulous new book by Dr. Sowell, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies." Now, Dr. Sowell, what are the dangers charter schools face as we go ahead?
SOWELL: All across the country, there are attempts to force charter schools to follow rules that will make it difficult, if not impossible for them to maintain the quality they are right now.
I've mentioned that in California where you simply cannot suspend students for doing things for which at one time would have been expelled.
And in New York, for example, I was painfully surprised to discover that the KIPP charter schools, which are the largest chain of charter schools in the country have gotten rid of their motto which says, be nice, you know, pay attention and so forth.
And that's considered politically incorrect, because it suggests that the problems of minority students is not systemic racism and things like that.
And so over the past year or so, they've been talking more and more in the language of the political left. They have fine schools in most cases, but the question is, how long can that continue? They don't understand the dangers when you allow internal changes and external obstacles to pile up because that means that even though charter schools may survive institutions, they may not survive as excellent institutions, which is what matters for the kids.
Something similar happened for very different reasons to a black high school, Dunbar High School in Washington, which for more than 70 years had outstanding educational outcomes. And they changed this one thing. They changed it to becoming a neighborhood school rather than a school that could draw upon students from all over the city.
And just that one fact caused them in a short period of time to go from a school where 81 percent -- this is an all-black school -- 81 percent of the students went on to college, which at that time, 1953 was higher -- a higher percentage than for any public high school black or white in the City of Washington.
Just by 1960, only 20 percent were going on to college. And today, it is one of the worst high schools in its ward. So it's not a matter of this charter schools surviving as institutions. It's the educational quality surviving and that's what the enemies of the charter schools are undermining.
LEVIN: It never surprises me the level of deviousness on the left and in the bureaucracy because what you're describing there is just destroying these institutions from within. If you can't beat them, then devour them.
SOWELL: Yes.
LEVIN: And you're right, that's very sinister. And it is a big problem.
Well, I want to thank you for writing this magnificent book, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies." I'm going to strongly encourage the audience to get a copy of this whether you have kids or not, whether you live in the inner cities or not. This lays out the case.
And I want to thank you also for a career that has influenced so, so many of us and the cause of liberty. I wouldn't be doing what I am today in part, if it wasn't for watching you and reading your books and all the things you've done for this country. So I want to thank you, Dr. Thomas Sowell.
SOWELL: Thank you very much.
LEVIN: All right. Take care of yourself. And we'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. You know, it amazes me, when I stand back and watch what goes on in this country. We'll have debates for days and days and days over the President's tax returns, which are utterly meaningless to the vast majority of the American people.
They're only meaningful to the media and the Democrats who want to use them to club him over the head. We see these other debates going on about what's needed in the inner cities and systemic racism.
We get to hear LeBron James comment on it and Hollywood actors and Don Lemon and media types who know nothing about it. Really, they're so disconnected. I'm sorry, it's true.
And then yet we have this issue of basic education, core education, learning arithmetic and literature, and English and Science and History -- the things that are needed to get along in society and to assimilate into this culture, and what do we have?
We have a Democratic Party and National Education Association and the American Federation for Teachers, this conglomerate of an effective monopoly that controls our cities basically controls all education, but particularly the cities where many people are too poor and they're stuck.
And they're told you're going to go to that government facility down the street, whether or not your kid is threatened, whether it is safe, whether they're getting educated, whether or not you like it.
In America, what we need is a liberty agenda. What we need is a constitutional agenda. What we need is a true two party system in our inner cities.
We need cops to protect our people. We need capitalism to create wealth. We need all the things that exist in the rest of the country that are applied to the inner cities that are run by the Democrats and their surrogates.
Joe Biden is running on Bernie Sanders' agenda. That's the anti-liberty, anti-choice agenda, the agenda of the iron fist. Think about it.
I'll see you next time on LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.
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