August 14, 2024 • 52 mins
In this episode, Clark Taylor and Hobart explore the dynamic political landscape of August 2024, post-Olympics, and the potential end of Donald Trump's career. The discussion delves into the controversial idea of northern states seceding if Trump wins, examining the structural imbalances in the U.S. political system.
They analyze the Electoral College, the Senate's disproportionate representation, and the historical context of the Three-Fifths Compromise. The conversation touches on potential solutions, including proportional representation and restructuring the Senate.
Shifting to lighter topics, the hosts discuss the representation of Black culture in the Olympics, the significance of athletes like Simone Biles and LeBron James, and the marketing strategies of NBC. They also ponder the inclusion of breakdancing in the Olympics, highlighting the story of Rachel Gunn, a 36-year-old white academic from Australia.
This episode provides a thought-provoking blend of political analysis and cultural commentary, offering listeners a comprehensive view of current events and their broader implications.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey, Clark. How are you doing? I'm good, Hobart. What are we talking about today?
This is a rambling to the bramble. Yes, it is.
I'm Clark Taylor. And I guess a couple of things are happening.
We're in the middle of August 2024, and the Olympics have just ended,
and Donald Trump's career might be just ending.
(00:22):
Who knows? I mean, all sorts of stuff is going on.
I had a couple of ideas. I had one idea. You had one idea.
My idea was, if Trump wins, should the North succeed from the Union?
And I'm basing that on the notion
(00:43):
that the attempts by a minority of folks who have inordinate power because of
the way the Constitution was written and the way that the unequal distribution
of power between small states and big states exists,
both in the Electoral College and in the United States Senate,
(01:05):
whether or not in order to protect basic rights in the event of a Trump victory,
it might be necessary to succeed, maybe to make people think about rewriting the Constitution.
Now, that was your take on the Chemerinsky. You sent me a Chemerinsky interview.
I've got his book on request. I sent him a book on Chemerinsky,
(01:27):
the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
He's written a new book about a constitutional crisis.
And how we are in a bind in which we can't seem to get out of the political
overwhelming, the structural.
Yeah, and he holds that the electoral college is the main thing he would change,
(01:50):
that and the Senate count.
But the senators, I kind of get that in an old school Roman Republic sort of
way. I get the idea that they want to have these highfalutin people that in
some ways are above the plebeian fray, you know.
And so I get the Senate. I don't get why the Electoral College is limited to,
(02:13):
and I looked this up the other day and I've forgotten what it's called.
There's a specific term for giving all or nothing.
It's the all or nothing thing about the Electoral College. That's the fail.
Like, I don't like the Electoral College. I wish they'd get rid of it and go
to some more a more democratic design.
(02:35):
But that said, it seems to me you could.
Parcel out the electoral votes based on the votes within a state instead of
the all or nothing thing,
because what that does in my head is it just limits us to these six or seven swing states.
(02:55):
Yeah, the problem with that is, I mean, if you were to do that with the Electoral
College, that's the same thing as a popular vote.
All it would be is representing the popular vote through a proportional representation
of the population in the Electoral College. Yeah, which is the point.
Which is a point. So you don't even need the Electoral College if you were to
have a proportional Electoral College.
(03:15):
And in the Senate, what was the idea originally?
When the Constitution was written, it was a compromise because it was replacing
the Articles of Confederation, in which each state was literally almost like
a country and had tremendous power,
and the only thing they had in common was the common defense.
(03:36):
And now you've got a situation where they had to come up with some sort of compromise
so that those states that would be losing power when forming a United States,
that they would still have an ordinate power.
Those are primarily the slave-holding states. states, and the states with smaller
(03:58):
populations, but that was important to maintain their sense of power and equality.
In a world that was not as interconnected and where governance was much more
local, that made a certain amount of sense. But think about the Senate.
California has 68 times the population of Wyoming. 68 times the population.
(04:26):
Why should Wyoming have two senators and California have two senators?
What does that do in terms of, I mean, so those senators represent the states,
but why should the interest of a state of 500,000 be represented nationally
as an equal interest to a state of 25, 30 million people?
(04:49):
Okay, so I would throw – just to play devil's advocate because I agree with
the math, but also what – if you're just talking population,
right, you're just talking population,
what does, say, the financial meaning – you know, the large sections of government land,
(05:10):
natural resources, that kind of thing.
Might that be a part of the argument why they deserve to have two senators?
The argument would be that the minds don't vote. Land is land.
And the way things are, there's no restriction, for instance,
(05:31):
on ownership of land by state.
There's no restriction of the economy of one state or another.
They're all really vastly interconnected.
And even internationally connected. So in terms of the interest of a state,
the only interest the state really has is the interest of its people.
(05:54):
Everything else is an entity that has no specific jurisdictional connection to a state.
Okay. So then let me ask another question in an entirely different direction.
What is the solution to the two Senate? So you want to eliminate the Senate
or just kind of fold it into the Congress?
(06:15):
There are different ways of approaching this. We're getting down to the nitty-gritty.
I was going to talk from 10,000 feet up, but now that we're down there,
you could still have a group of people who serve for longer terms and who have
a more distanced purview,
(06:38):
sort of like the House of Lords.
But the way in which you put this group together still should be representational,
more closely aligned to the interest of the people and the people they serve.
You could have a group that, for instance, is selected from former members of
(07:01):
the House or have that as a prerequisite.
And you could have some other means of selecting the Senate other than direct
election, but then restrict the powers of the Senate, which is what they do with the House of Lords.
The House of Lords is not an elected body, but their role is exclusively advisory.
(07:25):
They can't initiate legislation, nor can they ratify it.
Nor can they really ratify it. Explain to me the filibuster argument that's
going on right now. That was part of Chemerinsky's thing.
This is where my brain, as much as I've studied the American government and
history, You know, sometimes things, they'll hit me and I'll go,
(07:47):
you know, what the hell are they even talking about? Talk about the nitty gritty, right?
So what, that's one of the big stroke items they talk about.
What is the filibuster? What does it mean?
Well, a filibuster is a means in which you postpone the vote on a particular piece of legislation.
(08:09):
I mean, I get it. The idea is that there are parliamentary rules that allow
a person to speak endlessly and prevent the passage of a thing.
You know, like in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where he talks for 24 hours.
You don't have to speak endlessly anymore. Right, right.
You just declare a filibuster. That was a way in which you could postpone a
(08:35):
vote long enough to have maybe people change their mind on the issue.
Show up on your horseback.
And you talk and talk and talk and postpone a vote.
But now we don't have a talking filibuster.
We literally have a way in which you can just put a hold on a vote.
And you have to have a certain number of people who vote to break that hold to resume debate.
(09:03):
And so you can literally, rather than win by 50% plus one,
you now have to win by two-thirds.
Right, which you can't get anymore.
(09:25):
We don't have two-thirds of anything. No, certainly not in the 50-50 Congress.
Not the sort of Congress we have now. Not during our lifetimes, if ever, yeah.
And I would throw in the caveat from my, you know, comedian's point of view
that this is all by design.
That most of what we see in the power world of DC is specifically designed to
(09:50):
either stymie the operations of government or, you know...
Well, it is now. Write it to us. It is now. 60 out of 100 members of the Senate.
In 1975, the Senate reduced the
number of votes required for cloture from two-thirds to... What's cloture?
But you still need... Cloture allowed two-thirds of the majority to end the filibuster.
(10:12):
So, to end the filibuster, that's cloture.
Okay, gotcha. Thank you. And it was two-thirds. It's now 60 of the 100 members
of the Senate required to end cloture.
And it's possible that that's how the Republicans ended up with all these wingnuts,
because they thought, hey, if we get 10 or 15, you know, base-led kind of Tea Party blocks,
(10:35):
they could go in there and we could append them to any thing that we want to.
But they, of course, did the opposite. Well, I mean, that wasn't their strategy.
I think that's just the way it's worked out.
There's a caucus of people who are not interested in compromise.
And as long as they're there, they can take their position of leverage and either
(10:59):
prevent torture or literally kill legislation by not having it fully debated
and voted on on the floor.
Now, there's an additional factor in all of this, which is what Chmierinski was talking about.
And the new book, by the way, is called No Democracy Lasts Forever,
(11:21):
How the Constitution Threatens the United States.
He says that when we have the opportunity to...
To have a Supreme Court justice appointed at the end of Obama's term that McConnell, Mitch McConnell,
prevented a vote from happening for more than a year, which was unprecedented.
(11:48):
You know, even at the end of other presidential terms when the president has
been a lame duck and they've appointed a Supreme Court justice, it's gone through.
And so the idea of throwing out
that norm and preventing a sitting president from at least having a hearing
(12:08):
on a proposed justice is an indication that we're using the leverages of political
power in order to thwart constitutional power.
And stack the court. Yeah, well, constitutional powers of the presidency.
It's not just stacking the court. It's actually choosing to weaken the president
(12:32):
when you want a particular political objective,
and on the other hand, strengthen the president as they have through the court
when they have another political objective.
And the strengthening of the president is the whole immunity thing that came
up recently in the court. Okay.
That leads us to your initial question then.
(12:54):
Yeah. Right. If Trump's been given all this power and he gets elected,
which I don't think is going to happen, and that's just an easy thing to say. Things happen quickly.
Right. The hypothetical of it is Trump.
I think, and this has been my agreement for a while, is that we're already in
a secessionary period that ever since the pot rules changed,
(13:17):
we are already in that secessionary period.
And I think it was the more liberal states, or at least the one more libertarian
states, who decided to allow pot laws to change.
And that led to kind of where we are, where all of a sudden a bunch of states
decided to change abortion laws. and then the crazy Supreme Court made their ruling.
(13:41):
So I think we're already there is my answer. Well, no, but I mean,
there's the effect of the resurgence of the power of the states and sending
stuff back to the states.
But that still doesn't affect, I mean, doesn't change the fact that there's
national policy And the national policies are reflective in potential for a national abortion ban,
(14:06):
for utilizing various other federal means to impose policies that would be generally
unpopular, but that are politically popular with a segment of the population.
And again, because of the disproportionate distribution of power through gerrymandering,
(14:27):
through the structure of the Senate, and even through the structure of the courts,
through a sort of a second generation gerrymandering.
In other words, if you have a group of people who can determine the judges and
these people themselves have subverted the system in order to have a political
(14:49):
power and put their thumb on the scale in that way,
then the only alternative for the rest of the population is to either rewrite
the rules, which is extraordinarily difficult.
We all know how difficult it is to pass an amendment to the Constitution.
To rewrite the rules, or to succeed, or at least to threaten to succeed,
(15:15):
which would lead to serious examination over developing political compromise.
The idea behind the Successionist movement at the time of the Civil War,
as I understand it, was not necessarily to have the South succeed,
but to use Succession as a point of leverage in order to mitigate efforts by
(15:37):
the federal government to change laws around slavery and tariffs and other issues as well.
And so, succession would be a hammer that the coast and the north could use
to try and prevent those people who, you know….
(15:58):
Taken more power to meet their ideological goals than represents the will of the people.
It may be the only recourse, particularly in a situation where if the House, the Senate,
the court, and the presidency were held by people who owe their power to a system that is unfair. fair.
(16:26):
So you're saying the North, when you say the North secede, you mean the blue states?
Yeah. Because South Dakota and North Dakota are going to be lockstep with Alabama.
Yeah, but I don't mean the geographical North, I mean the ideological North.
But in the Civil War period, we had literal boundary lines, North and South, that functioned.
(16:53):
Boundary lines are different, but they're still, even in the Civil War,
Tennessee was at North, was at South, you know?
Well, the border states. Kentucky, same thing.
And so it's not just the border states. And California was not in the North, but it was a Union state.
So it was classified as the North.
(17:14):
Yeah, well, they were trying to stop slavery from moving West.
That was one of the main things.
And then Dred Scott happened and it's like,
okay, well, we're going to just have to to fight over it because the supreme
court again coming into on on
the part of the oppressive class if you
want to call it that whatever oppressor class a slave owning
(17:36):
class anyway so secession
what would that look like you're i mean we're playing the hypotheticals so who
in in in the civil war in my mind funny how you you try to define it and it's
more difficult than you think because you just know that people shot at each
(17:56):
other across boundary lines.
But they had a president. They formed a confederacy.
They were, as the union called them, they called them, it was the rebellion.
They didn't call it the Civil War. They just called it the rebellious states, things like that.
It took time. It wasn't like one day they woke up in 1860 and it was all there.
(18:21):
There was a lot of discussion over many, many years and the beginning of communication
by people in the various states and in the planter class,
et cetera, as to how to do it and what it would look like and where to make the capital.
I think it would be the same sort of thing. I think it would be a bunch of people, legislators,
(18:44):
intellectuals, maybe local officials, mayors and governors, sitting around and
saying, well, let's collaborate on these issues.
And the first step would be like they would try and sue the federal government
as a block around certain constitutional issues.
Here's an example. that. Let's say they banned the mail order of birth control drugs,
(19:11):
and the various states
that wanted to continue to allow their citizens to acquire these pharmaceuticals
decided that they were going to first sue the federal government in order to
restore those mail order rights within the boundaries, at least, of their states.
(19:34):
Then, given, this is hypothetical, you know, they lose because they would allow the,
you know, the regulation of interstate commerce would mean that the commerce
clause would mean that it would have to happen in the other states as well.
So the attorney generals then decide to violate, support a violation of the
(19:58):
federal law and are not enforced,
well, you then have a situation where the federal government would have to come
in and try and enforce it in the states the way they did with civil rights when
the states' rights were in its head around that issue.
So let me get the... I'm just trying to... For the hypothetical,
(20:20):
the hypothetical is that the red states take over the government. Yeah.
And the blue states say, no, thank you.
Right. That we're not going to obey federal law. Right.
Okay. Go ahead. Okay. And they don't. And then the increasing sentiment in the blue states to just.
(20:46):
Not adhere to new federally restrictive law.
And the more that happens, the more you'll have a reaction.
So the red states and the people who control the federal government in order
to maintain their authority and power begin to prosecute,
(21:07):
begin the challenge, begin to declare that what is happening in the blue states is unconstitutional.
Then at a certain point you have the political will in the blue states to say,
well, then are we no longer, the agreement's broken, the social contract's broken,
the deal's no longer valid, goodbye.
(21:27):
And whether it happens with an individual state, it could even start with one or two little states.
It could be Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, saying that,
sorry, this is just a bridge too far.
And then we have a situation. This is not something that would happen immediately
(21:51):
after an election, but this is the sort of thing that in a handmaiden's tale
world would happen over 10,
20, 50 years.
So the way I see it, it's already happening.
It is literally already happening. And so we're kind of going through the motions
and discussions and law changes state by state as we go through,
(22:15):
not only because I do believe the states are going to,
refute the federal change to the statutes around abortion is I think Arizona's
getting ready to vote abortion rights back into their constitution.
So I think you're going to end up having a set of constitutions,
state constitutions, because everybody's got one.
Speaking of your earlier model, the Confederacy that created these several states, that's in place.
(22:42):
We have state legislatures and governor.
We have an executive in every state. So we have those, you know,
those powers, those autonomy, the state autonomy is pretty robust is my point.
And so California, frankly, would laugh at a federal government trying to put
a yoke on California, I believe.
(23:03):
They would laugh. But let me throw in the other caveat is that Texas would also
want to be independent. This This is the hilarious part.
Texas, to me, is more likely to say, hey, I see everything's kind of coming
unglued. We're going to go ahead and institute our republic again.
Even though they're pro-abortion or pro-anti-abortion, Texas is going to take
(23:26):
every chance it can get to be an independent republic.
I think you'd have this weird push and pull that's going on.
I would accept that the theory behind what's going on now is that Texans have
a lot of power as a red state in the coalition of red states.
They are, you know, maybe even the leading state. They would be the leading state in a...
(23:54):
In a red state coalition.
Now, I mean, this is just all high and pie in the sky stuff right now I'm talking.
What really prevents all this from happening and what might save the union is
the fact that no state is entirely red or no state is entirely blue.
(24:18):
And even in the redder states, there's a sizable enough blue and purple population
to moderate and have that dictatorship, that theocracy from emerging,
hopefully, in the United States.
Which is why if you had proportional voting from the Electoral College,
you could just eliminate all this straight up and everybody would say, well, that's fair.
(24:42):
Trump lost by 7 million votes. Yeah, real proportional representation in the
state legislatures, you know, which is where so much of the power resides.
Because you talk about gerrymandered Congress, gerrymandered state legislatures
are the front of the power of this dictatorship of the minority. earth.
(25:06):
So one person, one vote has never really been a popular notion in the slave states.
And one of the things that we didn't really talk about in our Ramblin' Through
the Brambles world is that this all started with the Three-Fifths Clause.
This all started with the need to have power adhere to the slave states,
(25:30):
even though they had a minority of whites in these states. Yeah.
Well, Well, here's the part that I think people miss when they talk about the Three-Fifths.
The problem with the Three-Fifths Clause was the census is there for two purposes.
One is to establish a basis of taxation, and the other one was to establish votes.
(25:52):
So the South had to figure out a way in which they could have used the slave population to,
Keep it high enough so that they had power in the electoral college and the
same number of representatives, but low enough so that the taxes didn't come excessively.
So they had to find the number that would work.
(26:18):
I'm three-fifths of a man. Yes, you are. You're three-fifths of a man today, Jeremiah.
Thank you for letting me vote for you.
I mean, the whole thing is an absurdity, you know, that these black people were
unable to vote even for themselves, even at a three-fifths level,
that there was everything, every three-fifths vote was against their own self.
(26:41):
And probably can't vote. Right. Thank you, Thomas Jefferson.
Thank you, George Washington. Thank you, James Madison. So.
On the lighter side, can we jump on the lighter side?
Sure. So this to me is fascinating and it has been since the earlier parts of the Olympics.
I noticed a real preponderance of black cultural effects going on around the Olympics.
(27:10):
And at first I thought, because I'm a longtime Olympics person,
I loved him when I was a kid.
I've always loved him. I went to the Superdome to see the Russian gymnasts.
They went on the road and they traveled around and jumped on things.
And I went to the Superdome to see them and it was packed.
Anyway, so there's Olympic fever. And I just noticed and maybe this was just
(27:30):
me projecting, I don't know, I don't want to presume, but with Snoop Dogg and and and.
And, you know, they had Kevin Hart and Kenan from Saturday Night Live.
I know a lot of it was just, was I seeing things?
Was this a mirage? Or was the Olympics really making an effort to bring in black viewership?
(27:57):
That's a life-threatening thing.
You're talking about NBC, not the Olympics.
NBC, of course. And Snoop Dogg's got a show coming on and everything.
Let's deal with the demographics.
They needed to try and make sure they have a younger audience,
because that's who they're marketing to. That's what they're advertising you to.
(28:19):
They can't fund the Olympics off of Ozempic.
And so they needed to be able to sell beer and chips and cars and all the sort
of stuff that aimed toward a younger demographic.
So what is a universal way to get a younger demographic?
(28:43):
And that is off of particularly a young male, young white male demographic.
And it sort of reminds me of the joke that got Ben Stiller in trouble.
Ben Stiller was talking about the Olympics, and he said, you know,
every young white Jewish boy wants to be a black athlete.
And the fact that that's sort of the iconography,
(29:09):
that the Olympics celebrates a certain, you know, a hipness and a certain physical
grace and all that stuff.
So that's associated to a large extent with black culture, particularly in the sports world.
So take a look at who they have carrying the flag. You've got LeBron and Simone Biles.
(29:33):
And, you know, I mean, what better representative of hipness and outstanding
grace, et cetera, than those two?
And this was, particularly Simone Biles, this was very much her Olympics.
Because she, like Kamala Harris, represents a new rebranding of black womanhood.
(29:58):
And it's just it's just timely.
Just very timely. So let me go deeper because I think we could – this is like huge to me.
And this is something that occurred to me. Are black people finally getting their moment?
I know that's a simplistic and extraordinarily reductive way to say it.
(30:21):
But at this day and age of TikTok and et cetera, we got to go to what's the
shortest way to say this. But I started to feel like, you know,
10 years ago, Snoop Dogg could not have been palling around with swimmers.
Oh, yeah. Snoop Dogg was a.
No, he couldn't have on TV. Yeah, you think Snoop Dogg could be,
(30:44):
but he wasn't. He was smoking weed and I saw Snoop Dogg plays.
It was Martha Stewart. He starred Martha Stewart. Okay, so 20 years.
Yeah, 20 years. I'll go 20. There's been an evolution so that Snoop Dogg is
now the cuddly, slappy white of a new generation. I like that.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like, when did he get – this is transitional to me.
(31:07):
It is. And LeBron James is nothing if not the hardest working competitor.
I don't think he should be on that court. I hate the idea that all these professional
athletes beat up on these poor people from Serbia and whatever,
although the best player is a Serbian.
Yeah, I know, because they have dodging. whatever that was the wrong thing but
you know ireland i mean pick your country serb sudan i mean anybody you know
(31:30):
anybody you know ethiopia so so i just think it's kind of laughable yeah.
Ethiopian runners you run across the mountain so i mean it balances out right
but i felt like so let's talk about this because i felt like you know this is
the one area of the this is my one one place where I can kind of voice these
(31:51):
nascent ideas in my head without sounding racist to myself or something.
I feel like there was a real, there's a real sense. It's like that.
That moment that that that moment
where everything kind of emerges at once in
a way i feel like the there's a
(32:12):
moment we're having with kamala i think there's such great relief that kamala
harris is is up for president that it's like a redux of the obama moment where
oh my god can we just get over something whatever it is we're getting over it
rip the band-aid off get this trump thing you know,
And so there's a fulsome moment, I think, happening.
(32:35):
And I don't know if I'm just being idealistic or appreciative or what,
but it seems designed to some extent in the Olympic coverage.
That's interesting that you would say it seems designed because everything is designed.
There are people who sit back with a calendar and they look at it and they say,
how can we influence the culture this day in order to sell these things?
(32:59):
And that's all their job is. You know, what was it named? Faith Popcorn?
Those people who developed the science in the advertising agency decades and
decades ago, saying that we've got to have a calendar of attention,
you know, and try and focus national attention around certain things at certain
(33:21):
times to try and have a confluence.
But we want people to think, match what's going on at that moment.
So just as a financial advisor who sits around saying that stocks ought to be,
you know, sort of, we should announce our earnings at this time of the year,
immediately after we found out that there's a Fed rate or, you know,
(33:45):
et cetera, that people look at a calendar,
look at what's going to happen, and think.
Try and shoehorn their vision into that space and make sure they have the attention
of people at that moment.
So, there are people at NBC who are saying, what are we trying to do?
We're trying to build, make sure that we have a young demographic.
(34:07):
So, we're going to try and really lean heavily on the people who put on the
Olympics to include sports like skateboarding and breakdancing.
We're going to lean very heavily on surfing. We're going to lean very You know,
this is not an accident. You know, this is marketing.
And then we're going to look at our host, and we're going to say,
(34:29):
you know, I'm sorry, Kathy Gifford is not going to cut it.
You know, I mean, that usual sports crew, you know, those folks,
Al Michaels, is just not going to get the demographic.
So how are we going to get the attention? And then what are the people who normally
don't? I mean, true sports nuts are going to watch anyway.
(34:51):
A real basketball fan is going to watch anyway.
So you're talking about everybody who's not in that immediate sports demographic.
You're talking about… Yeah, but they're only going to watch the basketball game.
They're not going to watch the rings or the diving.
Exactly. That's a special group of people. Exactly. So because of that,
you're going to have to find some way to encourage, because basketball's not on 24-7.
(35:14):
So you're going to have to find some way to get people to watch the other stuff.
And so you hype gymnastics, hype gymnastics and the opening and the closing
events, because that appeals to a broader demographic, men, women,
straight, gay, young, old.
You try and, you know, pull all of that together.
(35:35):
Then you look at who the messenger is.
And there's no question that you want to have a little, you know,
joy, lightness. So they have comedians.
Snoop is a comedian. Kevin Hart is a comedian.
They're the emcees. They perform the traditional role of an emcee.
(35:59):
They keep things moving. they they
provide yeah well i i'm just fascinated by
it the choice is because the mike turrico who's
fantastic and and you know he's a superstar at
what he does and so he was the lead guy right he's the bon conscious of this
of the olympics it probably will remain as such he's that good he at the opening
(36:22):
ceremony the whole opening thing with the all the rain and the on the sen And he also had Clarkson,
Kelly Clarkson, and Peyton Manning.
And it was the most uncomfortable grouping of people.
Peyton Manning could not care less about being there at all.
(36:44):
It's not his deal. He's not an Olympics guy.
He can appreciate athletics all day long, but he's not an Olympics guy.
So I think he felt like, okay, they gave me a million dollars to be here. I'm here. Great.
And then Kelly Clarkson was totally out of her element and kind of silly that she was there.
And Tirico had to keep taking over the narrative because they kept just kind of fumbling the ball.
(37:05):
He'd hand him the ball and they'd go, well, yeah, that sure is rain coming down.
Or I wish I had a Louis Vuitton bag, that weird trip to the Louis Vuitton factory.
It was like you say, there was a lot of people clamoring to get their selling points out.
But I want to focus on the idea of the black community.
(37:29):
Person, persona, personae, front and center at the Olympics.
And I'm just questioning, am I seeing black people more than there were if I take the numbers?
You know, Tirico was leading it. I'm trying to keep this at a rate.
I know you're talking about marketing and all that.
(37:50):
And I get that. I'm trying to, in other words,
I get that that may be the truth of it right
so what i'm asking is do
you think that because i thought the kevin hart thing was
ridiculous i i'm i've become less and
less enamored by kevin hart he he would sell satan
(38:11):
if if they if they gave him
10 million dollars he would literally say the devil's
not such a bad guy and he'd make it sound all funny and
then you know you know so try satan because
he's a kook you know whatever i mean thank you
for the 50 million dollars you just gave me he sells everything
the gambling the fan duel stuff
(38:32):
he had no business being there he has
no business being on stage doing comedy he has no business trying to be a young
representative because fan duel and the gambling world is is fastly they are
as hard as they can try to suck every dime out of every 10 year old they can
(38:53):
for the rest of their lives.
They're trying to addict an entire population of people to gambling and it's sick.
So that's my take on Kevin Hart.
I'll put it out there. I'm very disappointed in him as a star because he's mega
rich and he cannot get rich enough. And that is always sad to me.
(39:13):
Anyway, that's Kevin Hart. So I don't watch him except him.
I'm forced to too, because he's selling some ridiculous product to people to
suck money out of their lives.
So the black thing, the black thing of the Olympics.
Briefly, let's make this equal opportunity because I would say the same thing
(39:34):
about Ryan Reynolds. Ryan Reynolds. Yeah.
Yeah, but he's mint mobile and he's not selling. There's tons of white people.
The whole Peyton Manning, the whole Manning family has been selling Caesars and all that stuff.
I mean, they're all doing that. Hell, Patton Oswalt was dressed up as Caesar
(39:55):
for a minute on a TV screen selling gambling.
Yeah. The point I'm making is that people use celebrity to make a buck.
And I agree that it's particularly egregious that Kevin Hart is doing that.
But I think that has nothing to do with his being black. I think that just has
(40:17):
to do with his being another greedy celebrity and that there are a lot of greedy
celebrities in the world. Yes. Yeah, no question.
He was included in the Olympics. And Keenan, what?
I don't know why I can't think of his last name. He's a Saturday Night Live guy.
He's a friendly, jovial sort. He sells, you know, progressive insurance and stuff like that.
(40:42):
So I've been disappointed in all the SNL-ness, the SNL-ification of our cultural
lives, and they sell everything from, you know, soup to nuts.
And that didn't used to be that way, but they're all, they're all in that way.
Craven. Kenan Thompson.
(41:02):
Kenan Thompson. Who's just a brilliant guy.
And Kevin Hart. I mean, who, he's one of the funniest humans ever.
He, I think he's a brilliant comedian. He's just become over the top with that. Well, okay.
So, so you don't see what I'm, you're not seeing some kind of Olympics too black.
(41:24):
No, I don't see it too black. Like, I see Olympics using whoever can use,
you know, whoever's the person who's the best pitchman.
And so the best, you know, they went through the focus groups,
and these are the guys who won, right?
So, you know, I'm sure that if Meyer Rudolph had tested well,
(41:50):
or Kathy Griffin had tested well.
So these are the ones who matched their demographic based upon their analysis.
And they were selling the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary. It's an NBC show.
Right, right. And Snoop's on The Voice. He's moving to The Voice.
(42:13):
Right, right. And so they— Cross-promotion.
Yeah, there's tons of cross-promotion. I guess I was interested because there's
so many incredible black athletes whose moment in the sun and,
you know, and I'm fascinated by all of them. They're unbelievable people.
And it's such a stage that you can't prepare.
(42:35):
You can, you know, you have to practice for four years, eight hours a day for
30 seconds on a track. And if you slip coming out of the blocks,
if you trip over here or stumble over there, it's over. You're done.
I'm glad you brought up black athletes because I'm going to talk about a white
(42:56):
athlete who is participating in the latest of the quote-unquote,
What would you call it? Diverse sports. Because there are sports now that have
emerged from other cultures in ancient Greece.
And so a sport that's emerged from another culture, from black American culture, is breaking.
(43:19):
Speaking, which when I saw the Olympics, I thought, you know,
50 years ago on the street corner in Hollins, Queens, these kids had no idea
that this was going to be an Olympic event.
I mean, this is just like what they did on the street.
And so here's just as I'm sure we do know the resentment people had when Jesse
(43:46):
Owens or when black athletes began to win and compete in these so-called Greek and European events.
You can put the word compete before win because, you know what I'm saying?
The first thing, as soon as they were competing, they were winning.
Well, anyway. And that's true about all sports. Well, but that's,
(44:09):
again, the effect of racism.
There's no point in a black person and trying to be anything without being the
best in order to defend their right to be there in the first place.
So that's just an inherent advantage that black athletes or any excellent person in black life has.
(44:35):
Well said, well said. They prove themselves and they carry the weight of an
entire culture on their back.
So it's not just their success.
It's a success of everyone who is hoping that they have a chance to be lifted
out of the depths of oppression.
So having said that, let's talk about Ray Gunn.
(44:58):
You know, this woman from Australia, this academic, and she has gotten a lot
of attention because… 36-year-old white lady. 36-year-old white lady who got zeros.
Rachel Gunn from Australia got zeros in the breakdancing competition.
And she's an academic who studies hip-hop culture in Australia,
(45:22):
which is about as far away from Hollis, Queens, as you can imagine. Literally as far away.
Literally. That is literally as far as you can go.
You can go to Antarctica, but even that's probably closer. her.
And.
She...
She has to deal with the fact that this picture doesn't jive.
(45:49):
Just as Hitler couldn't see Jesse Owens, maybe a lot of people can't see or
understand what she is or what she's doing or the nature of what she's doing.
Did you just say Hitler can't see Jesse Owens?
That's what we're comparing Rekha to. Okay.
(46:11):
So the hitler of hip-hop is some judge
i mean i'm trying to go with your
comparison i know every
time you know every time you mention hitler's name you look
at it as an extreme but but the point i
gotcha the point i'm making okay and he would have voted against
jesse owens but there's i just saw it's
(46:32):
just just as an aside there's an interesting picture i saw in the the twitterverse
where you have the the guy who he beat for the long jump competition who was
a german aryan german actually went up him during the competition because owens had flayed had had,
technically was not about to make the finals he was not going to make the competition
(46:56):
and this german said you know here's an idea you have about hitting your mark
that'll help you and And not only did he get qualified,
obviously, but he won the gold medal and beat that guy.
Right, right, right. But they were friends and they hugged on the field.
And all of this was done in front of the Lenny Riefenstahl cameras while Hitler
(47:16):
sat up there and hated Jews or whatever.
Well, the point I'm making is this.
People have in their head certain expectations and prejudices that don't allow
them to expand their vision, what an individual can do as an individual.
(47:39):
And first of all, while there are women in breakdancing, and certainly extraordinary competition.
And it's to the testament of the Olympics that they supported and celebrated
that, that part of the problem was that there was an element of sexism in terms of the expectation.
(48:04):
Then the expectation that an older person, 36, would do this was a bit jarring to people.
And an Australian and an academic, it all sounded like it was built to be a joke.
But if you look at it, because it is basically an art, and it goes back to the
(48:29):
real origins of the Olympics, which was not just a celebration of athletics,
but a celebration of culture.
And if you go back and look at it from that perspective, then the performance
is a celebration of culture.
It's an acknowledgement of different perspectives and ways of performing.
It's jazz, I would argue. that everybody else was playing pop music and she
(48:57):
was doing performance art.
And there's a certain beauty in her getting the zeros because all of a sudden
it subverts the whole notion that this is about judging.
This is about performance and allowing everybody to have their own perspective
on the performance. And that's about art.
(49:22):
There's no question. You can say, who broke the tape first?
That's not about art. That's about a quantifiable measure of speed,
doing so many things at such and such a rate and accomplishing something first.
But if you were to judge running based on the form of the runners based on who's
(49:45):
running the best, the way that you incorporate some of that in the judging of gymnastics or swimming,
and diving in which you're acknowledging it's a factor.
And so she went to the extreme of the other way so let's look at breakdancing
(50:06):
as not being about the athletic skill connected to breakdancing,
but about the artistic value or the ability to make it as expressive and individualized and personal.
That's what I mean by jazz. It's like an improvised solo in jazz,
in which you really get to the heart of expression.
(50:27):
It reminds me of how people complained about Aretha Franklin or somebody singing the National Anthem.
When black women started singing the National Anthem and they stretched it out
and changed it and moved it, you started to hear the song differently.
You know, obviously Hendrix was maybe the first in some ways at Woodstock.
(50:48):
But when black people took the anthem in those seminal days,
those interesting days of cultural change,
and started to sing it differently, it had
a fascinating effect fact because there was a racist
backlash against this you know
perturbation of of this iconic
(51:11):
song that's supposed to be sung in this meter and in this sounds and all of
a sudden somebody's stretching it out and singing it differently and and then
but the but then the crowd started to really enjoy it you know you started to
say hey this is actually a moment to to feel something different about the country.
And it was a way to describe the country differently in a moment that everybody recognizes.
(51:36):
Everybody knows what that song is supposed to sound like.
Everybody's heard it and tried to sing it in grade school. And all of a sudden,
somebody who's a real artist and a real capable singer sang it differently at
every ball game in a million different ways. It gets sung differently.
And nowadays, of course, it's recorded every time, no matter where you sing
it from small ballparks in Tennessee somewhere to, you know, the Super Bowl stage.
(52:02):
All right. Well, this has been a fun one. Yeah. I think we've covered a lot. Yeah.
Music.
Hey, Clark. How are you doing? I'm good, Hobart. What are we talking about today?
This is a rambling to the bramble. Yes, it is.
I'm Clark Taylor. And I guess a couple of things are happening.
We're in the middle of August 2024, and the Olympics have just ended,
and Donald Trump's career might be just ending.
(00:22):
Who knows? I mean, all sorts of stuff is going on.
I had a couple of ideas. I had one idea. You had one idea.
My idea was, if Trump wins, should the North succeed from the Union?
And I'm basing that on the notion
(00:43):
that the attempts by a minority of folks who have inordinate power because of
the way the Constitution was written and the way that the unequal distribution
of power between small states and big states exists,
both in the Electoral College and in the United States Senate,
(01:05):
whether or not in order to protect basic rights in the event of a Trump victory,
it might be necessary to succeed, maybe to make people think about rewriting the Constitution.
Now, that was your take on the Chemerinsky. You sent me a Chemerinsky interview.
I've got his book on request. I sent him a book on Chemerinsky,
(01:27):
the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
He's written a new book about a constitutional crisis.
And how we are in a bind in which we can't seem to get out of the political
overwhelming, the structural.
Yeah, and he holds that the electoral college is the main thing he would change,
(01:50):
that and the Senate count.
But the senators, I kind of get that in an old school Roman Republic sort of
way. I get the idea that they want to have these highfalutin people that in
some ways are above the plebeian fray, you know.
And so I get the Senate. I don't get why the Electoral College is limited to,
(02:13):
and I looked this up the other day and I've forgotten what it's called.
There's a specific term for giving all or nothing.
It's the all or nothing thing about the Electoral College. That's the fail.
Like, I don't like the Electoral College. I wish they'd get rid of it and go
to some more a more democratic design.
(02:35):
But that said, it seems to me you could.
Parcel out the electoral votes based on the votes within a state instead of
the all or nothing thing,
because what that does in my head is it just limits us to these six or seven swing states.
(02:55):
Yeah, the problem with that is, I mean, if you were to do that with the Electoral
College, that's the same thing as a popular vote.
All it would be is representing the popular vote through a proportional representation
of the population in the Electoral College. Yeah, which is the point.
Which is a point. So you don't even need the Electoral College if you were to
have a proportional Electoral College.
(03:15):
And in the Senate, what was the idea originally?
When the Constitution was written, it was a compromise because it was replacing
the Articles of Confederation, in which each state was literally almost like
a country and had tremendous power,
and the only thing they had in common was the common defense.
(03:36):
And now you've got a situation where they had to come up with some sort of compromise
so that those states that would be losing power when forming a United States,
that they would still have an ordinate power.
Those are primarily the slave-holding states. states, and the states with smaller
(03:58):
populations, but that was important to maintain their sense of power and equality.
In a world that was not as interconnected and where governance was much more
local, that made a certain amount of sense. But think about the Senate.
California has 68 times the population of Wyoming. 68 times the population.
(04:26):
Why should Wyoming have two senators and California have two senators?
What does that do in terms of, I mean, so those senators represent the states,
but why should the interest of a state of 500,000 be represented nationally
as an equal interest to a state of 25, 30 million people?
(04:49):
Okay, so I would throw – just to play devil's advocate because I agree with
the math, but also what – if you're just talking population,
right, you're just talking population,
what does, say, the financial meaning – you know, the large sections of government land,
(05:10):
natural resources, that kind of thing.
Might that be a part of the argument why they deserve to have two senators?
The argument would be that the minds don't vote. Land is land.
And the way things are, there's no restriction, for instance,
(05:31):
on ownership of land by state.
There's no restriction of the economy of one state or another.
They're all really vastly interconnected.
And even internationally connected. So in terms of the interest of a state,
the only interest the state really has is the interest of its people.
(05:54):
Everything else is an entity that has no specific jurisdictional connection to a state.
Okay. So then let me ask another question in an entirely different direction.
What is the solution to the two Senate? So you want to eliminate the Senate
or just kind of fold it into the Congress?
(06:15):
There are different ways of approaching this. We're getting down to the nitty-gritty.
I was going to talk from 10,000 feet up, but now that we're down there,
you could still have a group of people who serve for longer terms and who have
a more distanced purview,
(06:38):
sort of like the House of Lords.
But the way in which you put this group together still should be representational,
more closely aligned to the interest of the people and the people they serve.
You could have a group that, for instance, is selected from former members of
(07:01):
the House or have that as a prerequisite.
And you could have some other means of selecting the Senate other than direct
election, but then restrict the powers of the Senate, which is what they do with the House of Lords.
The House of Lords is not an elected body, but their role is exclusively advisory.
(07:25):
They can't initiate legislation, nor can they ratify it.
Nor can they really ratify it. Explain to me the filibuster argument that's
going on right now. That was part of Chemerinsky's thing.
This is where my brain, as much as I've studied the American government and
history, You know, sometimes things, they'll hit me and I'll go,
(07:47):
you know, what the hell are they even talking about? Talk about the nitty gritty, right?
So what, that's one of the big stroke items they talk about.
What is the filibuster? What does it mean?
Well, a filibuster is a means in which you postpone the vote on a particular piece of legislation.
(08:09):
I mean, I get it. The idea is that there are parliamentary rules that allow
a person to speak endlessly and prevent the passage of a thing.
You know, like in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where he talks for 24 hours.
You don't have to speak endlessly anymore. Right, right.
You just declare a filibuster. That was a way in which you could postpone a
(08:35):
vote long enough to have maybe people change their mind on the issue.
Show up on your horseback.
And you talk and talk and talk and postpone a vote.
But now we don't have a talking filibuster.
We literally have a way in which you can just put a hold on a vote.
And you have to have a certain number of people who vote to break that hold to resume debate.
(09:03):
And so you can literally, rather than win by 50% plus one,
you now have to win by two-thirds.
Right, which you can't get anymore.
(09:25):
We don't have two-thirds of anything. No, certainly not in the 50-50 Congress.
Not the sort of Congress we have now. Not during our lifetimes, if ever, yeah.
And I would throw in the caveat from my, you know, comedian's point of view
that this is all by design.
That most of what we see in the power world of DC is specifically designed to
(09:50):
either stymie the operations of government or, you know...
Well, it is now. Write it to us. It is now. 60 out of 100 members of the Senate.
In 1975, the Senate reduced the
number of votes required for cloture from two-thirds to... What's cloture?
But you still need... Cloture allowed two-thirds of the majority to end the filibuster.
(10:12):
So, to end the filibuster, that's cloture.
Okay, gotcha. Thank you. And it was two-thirds. It's now 60 of the 100 members
of the Senate required to end cloture.
And it's possible that that's how the Republicans ended up with all these wingnuts,
because they thought, hey, if we get 10 or 15, you know, base-led kind of Tea Party blocks,
(10:35):
they could go in there and we could append them to any thing that we want to.
But they, of course, did the opposite. Well, I mean, that wasn't their strategy.
I think that's just the way it's worked out.
There's a caucus of people who are not interested in compromise.
And as long as they're there, they can take their position of leverage and either
(10:59):
prevent torture or literally kill legislation by not having it fully debated
and voted on on the floor.
Now, there's an additional factor in all of this, which is what Chmierinski was talking about.
And the new book, by the way, is called No Democracy Lasts Forever,
(11:21):
How the Constitution Threatens the United States.
He says that when we have the opportunity to...
To have a Supreme Court justice appointed at the end of Obama's term that McConnell, Mitch McConnell,
prevented a vote from happening for more than a year, which was unprecedented.
(11:48):
You know, even at the end of other presidential terms when the president has
been a lame duck and they've appointed a Supreme Court justice, it's gone through.
And so the idea of throwing out
that norm and preventing a sitting president from at least having a hearing
(12:08):
on a proposed justice is an indication that we're using the leverages of political
power in order to thwart constitutional power.
And stack the court. Yeah, well, constitutional powers of the presidency.
It's not just stacking the court. It's actually choosing to weaken the president
(12:32):
when you want a particular political objective,
and on the other hand, strengthen the president as they have through the court
when they have another political objective.
And the strengthening of the president is the whole immunity thing that came
up recently in the court. Okay.
That leads us to your initial question then.
(12:54):
Yeah. Right. If Trump's been given all this power and he gets elected,
which I don't think is going to happen, and that's just an easy thing to say. Things happen quickly.
Right. The hypothetical of it is Trump.
I think, and this has been my agreement for a while, is that we're already in
a secessionary period that ever since the pot rules changed,
(13:17):
we are already in that secessionary period.
And I think it was the more liberal states, or at least the one more libertarian
states, who decided to allow pot laws to change.
And that led to kind of where we are, where all of a sudden a bunch of states
decided to change abortion laws. and then the crazy Supreme Court made their ruling.
(13:41):
So I think we're already there is my answer. Well, no, but I mean,
there's the effect of the resurgence of the power of the states and sending
stuff back to the states.
But that still doesn't affect, I mean, doesn't change the fact that there's
national policy And the national policies are reflective in potential for a national abortion ban,
(14:06):
for utilizing various other federal means to impose policies that would be generally
unpopular, but that are politically popular with a segment of the population.
And again, because of the disproportionate distribution of power through gerrymandering,
(14:27):
through the structure of the Senate, and even through the structure of the courts,
through a sort of a second generation gerrymandering.
In other words, if you have a group of people who can determine the judges and
these people themselves have subverted the system in order to have a political
(14:49):
power and put their thumb on the scale in that way,
then the only alternative for the rest of the population is to either rewrite
the rules, which is extraordinarily difficult.
We all know how difficult it is to pass an amendment to the Constitution.
To rewrite the rules, or to succeed, or at least to threaten to succeed,
(15:15):
which would lead to serious examination over developing political compromise.
The idea behind the Successionist movement at the time of the Civil War,
as I understand it, was not necessarily to have the South succeed,
but to use Succession as a point of leverage in order to mitigate efforts by
(15:37):
the federal government to change laws around slavery and tariffs and other issues as well.
And so, succession would be a hammer that the coast and the north could use
to try and prevent those people who, you know….
(15:58):
Taken more power to meet their ideological goals than represents the will of the people.
It may be the only recourse, particularly in a situation where if the House, the Senate,
the court, and the presidency were held by people who owe their power to a system that is unfair. fair.
(16:26):
So you're saying the North, when you say the North secede, you mean the blue states?
Yeah. Because South Dakota and North Dakota are going to be lockstep with Alabama.
Yeah, but I don't mean the geographical North, I mean the ideological North.
But in the Civil War period, we had literal boundary lines, North and South, that functioned.
(16:53):
Boundary lines are different, but they're still, even in the Civil War,
Tennessee was at North, was at South, you know?
Well, the border states. Kentucky, same thing.
And so it's not just the border states. And California was not in the North, but it was a Union state.
So it was classified as the North.
(17:14):
Yeah, well, they were trying to stop slavery from moving West.
That was one of the main things.
And then Dred Scott happened and it's like,
okay, well, we're going to just have to to fight over it because the supreme
court again coming into on on
the part of the oppressive class if you
want to call it that whatever oppressor class a slave owning
(17:36):
class anyway so secession
what would that look like you're i mean we're playing the hypotheticals so who
in in in the civil war in my mind funny how you you try to define it and it's
more difficult than you think because you just know that people shot at each
(17:56):
other across boundary lines.
But they had a president. They formed a confederacy.
They were, as the union called them, they called them, it was the rebellion.
They didn't call it the Civil War. They just called it the rebellious states, things like that.
It took time. It wasn't like one day they woke up in 1860 and it was all there.
(18:21):
There was a lot of discussion over many, many years and the beginning of communication
by people in the various states and in the planter class,
et cetera, as to how to do it and what it would look like and where to make the capital.
I think it would be the same sort of thing. I think it would be a bunch of people, legislators,
(18:44):
intellectuals, maybe local officials, mayors and governors, sitting around and
saying, well, let's collaborate on these issues.
And the first step would be like they would try and sue the federal government
as a block around certain constitutional issues.
Here's an example. that. Let's say they banned the mail order of birth control drugs,
(19:11):
and the various states
that wanted to continue to allow their citizens to acquire these pharmaceuticals
decided that they were going to first sue the federal government in order to
restore those mail order rights within the boundaries, at least, of their states.
(19:34):
Then, given, this is hypothetical, you know, they lose because they would allow the,
you know, the regulation of interstate commerce would mean that the commerce
clause would mean that it would have to happen in the other states as well.
So the attorney generals then decide to violate, support a violation of the
(19:58):
federal law and are not enforced,
well, you then have a situation where the federal government would have to come
in and try and enforce it in the states the way they did with civil rights when
the states' rights were in its head around that issue.
So let me get the... I'm just trying to... For the hypothetical,
(20:20):
the hypothetical is that the red states take over the government. Yeah.
And the blue states say, no, thank you.
Right. That we're not going to obey federal law. Right.
Okay. Go ahead. Okay. And they don't. And then the increasing sentiment in the blue states to just.
(20:46):
Not adhere to new federally restrictive law.
And the more that happens, the more you'll have a reaction.
So the red states and the people who control the federal government in order
to maintain their authority and power begin to prosecute,
(21:07):
begin the challenge, begin to declare that what is happening in the blue states is unconstitutional.
Then at a certain point you have the political will in the blue states to say,
well, then are we no longer, the agreement's broken, the social contract's broken,
the deal's no longer valid, goodbye.
(21:27):
And whether it happens with an individual state, it could even start with one or two little states.
It could be Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, saying that,
sorry, this is just a bridge too far.
And then we have a situation. This is not something that would happen immediately
(21:51):
after an election, but this is the sort of thing that in a handmaiden's tale
world would happen over 10,
20, 50 years.
So the way I see it, it's already happening.
It is literally already happening. And so we're kind of going through the motions
and discussions and law changes state by state as we go through,
(22:15):
not only because I do believe the states are going to,
refute the federal change to the statutes around abortion is I think Arizona's
getting ready to vote abortion rights back into their constitution.
So I think you're going to end up having a set of constitutions,
state constitutions, because everybody's got one.
Speaking of your earlier model, the Confederacy that created these several states, that's in place.
(22:42):
We have state legislatures and governor.
We have an executive in every state. So we have those, you know,
those powers, those autonomy, the state autonomy is pretty robust is my point.
And so California, frankly, would laugh at a federal government trying to put
a yoke on California, I believe.
(23:03):
They would laugh. But let me throw in the other caveat is that Texas would also
want to be independent. This This is the hilarious part.
Texas, to me, is more likely to say, hey, I see everything's kind of coming
unglued. We're going to go ahead and institute our republic again.
Even though they're pro-abortion or pro-anti-abortion, Texas is going to take
(23:26):
every chance it can get to be an independent republic.
I think you'd have this weird push and pull that's going on.
I would accept that the theory behind what's going on now is that Texans have
a lot of power as a red state in the coalition of red states.
They are, you know, maybe even the leading state. They would be the leading state in a...
(23:54):
In a red state coalition.
Now, I mean, this is just all high and pie in the sky stuff right now I'm talking.
What really prevents all this from happening and what might save the union is
the fact that no state is entirely red or no state is entirely blue.
(24:18):
And even in the redder states, there's a sizable enough blue and purple population
to moderate and have that dictatorship, that theocracy from emerging,
hopefully, in the United States.
Which is why if you had proportional voting from the Electoral College,
you could just eliminate all this straight up and everybody would say, well, that's fair.
(24:42):
Trump lost by 7 million votes. Yeah, real proportional representation in the
state legislatures, you know, which is where so much of the power resides.
Because you talk about gerrymandered Congress, gerrymandered state legislatures
are the front of the power of this dictatorship of the minority. earth.
(25:06):
So one person, one vote has never really been a popular notion in the slave states.
And one of the things that we didn't really talk about in our Ramblin' Through
the Brambles world is that this all started with the Three-Fifths Clause.
This all started with the need to have power adhere to the slave states,
(25:30):
even though they had a minority of whites in these states. Yeah.
Well, Well, here's the part that I think people miss when they talk about the Three-Fifths.
The problem with the Three-Fifths Clause was the census is there for two purposes.
One is to establish a basis of taxation, and the other one was to establish votes.
(25:52):
So the South had to figure out a way in which they could have used the slave population to,
Keep it high enough so that they had power in the electoral college and the
same number of representatives, but low enough so that the taxes didn't come excessively.
So they had to find the number that would work.
(26:18):
I'm three-fifths of a man. Yes, you are. You're three-fifths of a man today, Jeremiah.
Thank you for letting me vote for you.
I mean, the whole thing is an absurdity, you know, that these black people were
unable to vote even for themselves, even at a three-fifths level,
that there was everything, every three-fifths vote was against their own self.
(26:41):
And probably can't vote. Right. Thank you, Thomas Jefferson.
Thank you, George Washington. Thank you, James Madison. So.
On the lighter side, can we jump on the lighter side?
Sure. So this to me is fascinating and it has been since the earlier parts of the Olympics.
I noticed a real preponderance of black cultural effects going on around the Olympics.
(27:10):
And at first I thought, because I'm a longtime Olympics person,
I loved him when I was a kid.
I've always loved him. I went to the Superdome to see the Russian gymnasts.
They went on the road and they traveled around and jumped on things.
And I went to the Superdome to see them and it was packed.
Anyway, so there's Olympic fever. And I just noticed and maybe this was just
(27:30):
me projecting, I don't know, I don't want to presume, but with Snoop Dogg and and and.
And, you know, they had Kevin Hart and Kenan from Saturday Night Live.
I know a lot of it was just, was I seeing things?
Was this a mirage? Or was the Olympics really making an effort to bring in black viewership?
(27:57):
That's a life-threatening thing.
You're talking about NBC, not the Olympics.
NBC, of course. And Snoop Dogg's got a show coming on and everything.
Let's deal with the demographics.
They needed to try and make sure they have a younger audience,
because that's who they're marketing to. That's what they're advertising you to.
(28:19):
They can't fund the Olympics off of Ozempic.
And so they needed to be able to sell beer and chips and cars and all the sort
of stuff that aimed toward a younger demographic.
So what is a universal way to get a younger demographic?
(28:43):
And that is off of particularly a young male, young white male demographic.
And it sort of reminds me of the joke that got Ben Stiller in trouble.
Ben Stiller was talking about the Olympics, and he said, you know,
every young white Jewish boy wants to be a black athlete.
And the fact that that's sort of the iconography,
(29:09):
that the Olympics celebrates a certain, you know, a hipness and a certain physical
grace and all that stuff.
So that's associated to a large extent with black culture, particularly in the sports world.
So take a look at who they have carrying the flag. You've got LeBron and Simone Biles.
(29:33):
And, you know, I mean, what better representative of hipness and outstanding
grace, et cetera, than those two?
And this was, particularly Simone Biles, this was very much her Olympics.
Because she, like Kamala Harris, represents a new rebranding of black womanhood.
(29:58):
And it's just it's just timely.
Just very timely. So let me go deeper because I think we could – this is like huge to me.
And this is something that occurred to me. Are black people finally getting their moment?
I know that's a simplistic and extraordinarily reductive way to say it.
(30:21):
But at this day and age of TikTok and et cetera, we got to go to what's the
shortest way to say this. But I started to feel like, you know,
10 years ago, Snoop Dogg could not have been palling around with swimmers.
Oh, yeah. Snoop Dogg was a.
No, he couldn't have on TV. Yeah, you think Snoop Dogg could be,
(30:44):
but he wasn't. He was smoking weed and I saw Snoop Dogg plays.
It was Martha Stewart. He starred Martha Stewart. Okay, so 20 years.
Yeah, 20 years. I'll go 20. There's been an evolution so that Snoop Dogg is
now the cuddly, slappy white of a new generation. I like that.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like, when did he get – this is transitional to me.
(31:07):
It is. And LeBron James is nothing if not the hardest working competitor.
I don't think he should be on that court. I hate the idea that all these professional
athletes beat up on these poor people from Serbia and whatever,
although the best player is a Serbian.
Yeah, I know, because they have dodging. whatever that was the wrong thing but
you know ireland i mean pick your country serb sudan i mean anybody you know
(31:30):
anybody you know ethiopia so so i just think it's kind of laughable yeah.
Ethiopian runners you run across the mountain so i mean it balances out right
but i felt like so let's talk about this because i felt like you know this is
the one area of the this is my one one place where I can kind of voice these
(31:51):
nascent ideas in my head without sounding racist to myself or something.
I feel like there was a real, there's a real sense. It's like that.
That moment that that that moment
where everything kind of emerges at once in
a way i feel like the there's a
(32:12):
moment we're having with kamala i think there's such great relief that kamala
harris is is up for president that it's like a redux of the obama moment where
oh my god can we just get over something whatever it is we're getting over it
rip the band-aid off get this trump thing you know,
And so there's a fulsome moment, I think, happening.
(32:35):
And I don't know if I'm just being idealistic or appreciative or what,
but it seems designed to some extent in the Olympic coverage.
That's interesting that you would say it seems designed because everything is designed.
There are people who sit back with a calendar and they look at it and they say,
how can we influence the culture this day in order to sell these things?
(32:59):
And that's all their job is. You know, what was it named? Faith Popcorn?
Those people who developed the science in the advertising agency decades and
decades ago, saying that we've got to have a calendar of attention,
you know, and try and focus national attention around certain things at certain
(33:21):
times to try and have a confluence.
But we want people to think, match what's going on at that moment.
So just as a financial advisor who sits around saying that stocks ought to be,
you know, sort of, we should announce our earnings at this time of the year,
immediately after we found out that there's a Fed rate or, you know,
(33:45):
et cetera, that people look at a calendar,
look at what's going to happen, and think.
Try and shoehorn their vision into that space and make sure they have the attention
of people at that moment.
So, there are people at NBC who are saying, what are we trying to do?
We're trying to build, make sure that we have a young demographic.
(34:07):
So, we're going to try and really lean heavily on the people who put on the
Olympics to include sports like skateboarding and breakdancing.
We're going to lean very heavily on surfing. We're going to lean very You know,
this is not an accident. You know, this is marketing.
And then we're going to look at our host, and we're going to say,
(34:29):
you know, I'm sorry, Kathy Gifford is not going to cut it.
You know, I mean, that usual sports crew, you know, those folks,
Al Michaels, is just not going to get the demographic.
So how are we going to get the attention? And then what are the people who normally
don't? I mean, true sports nuts are going to watch anyway.
(34:51):
A real basketball fan is going to watch anyway.
So you're talking about everybody who's not in that immediate sports demographic.
You're talking about… Yeah, but they're only going to watch the basketball game.
They're not going to watch the rings or the diving.
Exactly. That's a special group of people. Exactly. So because of that,
you're going to have to find some way to encourage, because basketball's not on 24-7.
(35:14):
So you're going to have to find some way to get people to watch the other stuff.
And so you hype gymnastics, hype gymnastics and the opening and the closing
events, because that appeals to a broader demographic, men, women,
straight, gay, young, old.
You try and, you know, pull all of that together.
(35:35):
Then you look at who the messenger is.
And there's no question that you want to have a little, you know,
joy, lightness. So they have comedians.
Snoop is a comedian. Kevin Hart is a comedian.
They're the emcees. They perform the traditional role of an emcee.
(35:59):
They keep things moving. they they
provide yeah well i i'm just fascinated by
it the choice is because the mike turrico who's
fantastic and and you know he's a superstar at
what he does and so he was the lead guy right he's the bon conscious of this
of the olympics it probably will remain as such he's that good he at the opening
(36:22):
ceremony the whole opening thing with the all the rain and the on the sen And he also had Clarkson,
Kelly Clarkson, and Peyton Manning.
And it was the most uncomfortable grouping of people.
Peyton Manning could not care less about being there at all.
(36:44):
It's not his deal. He's not an Olympics guy.
He can appreciate athletics all day long, but he's not an Olympics guy.
So I think he felt like, okay, they gave me a million dollars to be here. I'm here. Great.
And then Kelly Clarkson was totally out of her element and kind of silly that she was there.
And Tirico had to keep taking over the narrative because they kept just kind of fumbling the ball.
(37:05):
He'd hand him the ball and they'd go, well, yeah, that sure is rain coming down.
Or I wish I had a Louis Vuitton bag, that weird trip to the Louis Vuitton factory.
It was like you say, there was a lot of people clamoring to get their selling points out.
But I want to focus on the idea of the black community.
(37:29):
Person, persona, personae, front and center at the Olympics.
And I'm just questioning, am I seeing black people more than there were if I take the numbers?
You know, Tirico was leading it. I'm trying to keep this at a rate.
I know you're talking about marketing and all that.
(37:50):
And I get that. I'm trying to, in other words,
I get that that may be the truth of it right
so what i'm asking is do
you think that because i thought the kevin hart thing was
ridiculous i i'm i've become less and
less enamored by kevin hart he he would sell satan
(38:11):
if if they if they gave him
10 million dollars he would literally say the devil's
not such a bad guy and he'd make it sound all funny and
then you know you know so try satan because
he's a kook you know whatever i mean thank you
for the 50 million dollars you just gave me he sells everything
the gambling the fan duel stuff
(38:32):
he had no business being there he has
no business being on stage doing comedy he has no business trying to be a young
representative because fan duel and the gambling world is is fastly they are
as hard as they can try to suck every dime out of every 10 year old they can
(38:53):
for the rest of their lives.
They're trying to addict an entire population of people to gambling and it's sick.
So that's my take on Kevin Hart.
I'll put it out there. I'm very disappointed in him as a star because he's mega
rich and he cannot get rich enough. And that is always sad to me.
(39:13):
Anyway, that's Kevin Hart. So I don't watch him except him.
I'm forced to too, because he's selling some ridiculous product to people to
suck money out of their lives.
So the black thing, the black thing of the Olympics.
Briefly, let's make this equal opportunity because I would say the same thing
(39:34):
about Ryan Reynolds. Ryan Reynolds. Yeah.
Yeah, but he's mint mobile and he's not selling. There's tons of white people.
The whole Peyton Manning, the whole Manning family has been selling Caesars and all that stuff.
I mean, they're all doing that. Hell, Patton Oswalt was dressed up as Caesar
(39:55):
for a minute on a TV screen selling gambling.
Yeah. The point I'm making is that people use celebrity to make a buck.
And I agree that it's particularly egregious that Kevin Hart is doing that.
But I think that has nothing to do with his being black. I think that just has
(40:17):
to do with his being another greedy celebrity and that there are a lot of greedy
celebrities in the world. Yes. Yeah, no question.
He was included in the Olympics. And Keenan, what?
I don't know why I can't think of his last name. He's a Saturday Night Live guy.
He's a friendly, jovial sort. He sells, you know, progressive insurance and stuff like that.
(40:42):
So I've been disappointed in all the SNL-ness, the SNL-ification of our cultural
lives, and they sell everything from, you know, soup to nuts.
And that didn't used to be that way, but they're all, they're all in that way.
Craven. Kenan Thompson.
(41:02):
Kenan Thompson. Who's just a brilliant guy.
And Kevin Hart. I mean, who, he's one of the funniest humans ever.
He, I think he's a brilliant comedian. He's just become over the top with that. Well, okay.
So, so you don't see what I'm, you're not seeing some kind of Olympics too black.
(41:24):
No, I don't see it too black. Like, I see Olympics using whoever can use,
you know, whoever's the person who's the best pitchman.
And so the best, you know, they went through the focus groups,
and these are the guys who won, right?
So, you know, I'm sure that if Meyer Rudolph had tested well,
(41:50):
or Kathy Griffin had tested well.
So these are the ones who matched their demographic based upon their analysis.
And they were selling the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary. It's an NBC show.
Right, right. And Snoop's on The Voice. He's moving to The Voice.
(42:13):
Right, right. And so they— Cross-promotion.
Yeah, there's tons of cross-promotion. I guess I was interested because there's
so many incredible black athletes whose moment in the sun and,
you know, and I'm fascinated by all of them. They're unbelievable people.
And it's such a stage that you can't prepare.
(42:35):
You can, you know, you have to practice for four years, eight hours a day for
30 seconds on a track. And if you slip coming out of the blocks,
if you trip over here or stumble over there, it's over. You're done.
I'm glad you brought up black athletes because I'm going to talk about a white
(42:56):
athlete who is participating in the latest of the quote-unquote,
What would you call it? Diverse sports. Because there are sports now that have
emerged from other cultures in ancient Greece.
And so a sport that's emerged from another culture, from black American culture, is breaking.
(43:19):
Speaking, which when I saw the Olympics, I thought, you know,
50 years ago on the street corner in Hollins, Queens, these kids had no idea
that this was going to be an Olympic event.
I mean, this is just like what they did on the street.
And so here's just as I'm sure we do know the resentment people had when Jesse
(43:46):
Owens or when black athletes began to win and compete in these so-called Greek and European events.
You can put the word compete before win because, you know what I'm saying?
The first thing, as soon as they were competing, they were winning.
Well, anyway. And that's true about all sports. Well, but that's,
(44:09):
again, the effect of racism.
There's no point in a black person and trying to be anything without being the
best in order to defend their right to be there in the first place.
So that's just an inherent advantage that black athletes or any excellent person in black life has.
(44:35):
Well said, well said. They prove themselves and they carry the weight of an
entire culture on their back.
So it's not just their success.
It's a success of everyone who is hoping that they have a chance to be lifted
out of the depths of oppression.
So having said that, let's talk about Ray Gunn.
(44:58):
You know, this woman from Australia, this academic, and she has gotten a lot
of attention because… 36-year-old white lady. 36-year-old white lady who got zeros.
Rachel Gunn from Australia got zeros in the breakdancing competition.
And she's an academic who studies hip-hop culture in Australia,
(45:22):
which is about as far away from Hollis, Queens, as you can imagine. Literally as far away.
Literally. That is literally as far as you can go.
You can go to Antarctica, but even that's probably closer. her.
And.
She...
She has to deal with the fact that this picture doesn't jive.
(45:49):
Just as Hitler couldn't see Jesse Owens, maybe a lot of people can't see or
understand what she is or what she's doing or the nature of what she's doing.
Did you just say Hitler can't see Jesse Owens?
That's what we're comparing Rekha to. Okay.
(46:11):
So the hitler of hip-hop is some judge
i mean i'm trying to go with your
comparison i know every
time you know every time you mention hitler's name you look
at it as an extreme but but the point i
gotcha the point i'm making okay and he would have voted against
jesse owens but there's i just saw it's
(46:32):
just just as an aside there's an interesting picture i saw in the the twitterverse
where you have the the guy who he beat for the long jump competition who was
a german aryan german actually went up him during the competition because owens had flayed had had,
technically was not about to make the finals he was not going to make the competition
(46:56):
and this german said you know here's an idea you have about hitting your mark
that'll help you and And not only did he get qualified,
obviously, but he won the gold medal and beat that guy.
Right, right, right. But they were friends and they hugged on the field.
And all of this was done in front of the Lenny Riefenstahl cameras while Hitler
(47:16):
sat up there and hated Jews or whatever.
Well, the point I'm making is this.
People have in their head certain expectations and prejudices that don't allow
them to expand their vision, what an individual can do as an individual.
(47:39):
And first of all, while there are women in breakdancing, and certainly extraordinary competition.
And it's to the testament of the Olympics that they supported and celebrated
that, that part of the problem was that there was an element of sexism in terms of the expectation.
(48:04):
Then the expectation that an older person, 36, would do this was a bit jarring to people.
And an Australian and an academic, it all sounded like it was built to be a joke.
But if you look at it, because it is basically an art, and it goes back to the
(48:29):
real origins of the Olympics, which was not just a celebration of athletics,
but a celebration of culture.
And if you go back and look at it from that perspective, then the performance
is a celebration of culture.
It's an acknowledgement of different perspectives and ways of performing.
It's jazz, I would argue. that everybody else was playing pop music and she
(48:57):
was doing performance art.
And there's a certain beauty in her getting the zeros because all of a sudden
it subverts the whole notion that this is about judging.
This is about performance and allowing everybody to have their own perspective
on the performance. And that's about art.
(49:22):
There's no question. You can say, who broke the tape first?
That's not about art. That's about a quantifiable measure of speed,
doing so many things at such and such a rate and accomplishing something first.
But if you were to judge running based on the form of the runners based on who's
(49:45):
running the best, the way that you incorporate some of that in the judging of gymnastics or swimming,
and diving in which you're acknowledging it's a factor.
And so she went to the extreme of the other way so let's look at breakdancing
(50:06):
as not being about the athletic skill connected to breakdancing,
but about the artistic value or the ability to make it as expressive and individualized and personal.
That's what I mean by jazz. It's like an improvised solo in jazz,
in which you really get to the heart of expression.
(50:27):
It reminds me of how people complained about Aretha Franklin or somebody singing the National Anthem.
When black women started singing the National Anthem and they stretched it out
and changed it and moved it, you started to hear the song differently.
You know, obviously Hendrix was maybe the first in some ways at Woodstock.
(50:48):
But when black people took the anthem in those seminal days,
those interesting days of cultural change,
and started to sing it differently, it had
a fascinating effect fact because there was a racist
backlash against this you know
perturbation of of this iconic
(51:11):
song that's supposed to be sung in this meter and in this sounds and all of
a sudden somebody's stretching it out and singing it differently and and then
but the but then the crowd started to really enjoy it you know you started to
say hey this is actually a moment to to feel something different about the country.
And it was a way to describe the country differently in a moment that everybody recognizes.
(51:36):
Everybody knows what that song is supposed to sound like.
Everybody's heard it and tried to sing it in grade school. And all of a sudden,
somebody who's a real artist and a real capable singer sang it differently at
every ball game in a million different ways. It gets sung differently.
And nowadays, of course, it's recorded every time, no matter where you sing
it from small ballparks in Tennessee somewhere to, you know, the Super Bowl stage.
(52:02):
All right. Well, this has been a fun one. Yeah. I think we've covered a lot. Yeah.
Music.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.