Dr. Cornel West Says Donald Trump is a Gangster | Joe Rogan

I've called up Brother Donald Trump a gangster over and over again and I say that because there's a gangster inside of me. I got to reconquer it every day. So I know gangsters when I see them. And gangster is not a subjective expression. It's an objective condition. If you grab on a woman's parts, that's gangster. You're stealing somebody's oil in another country, that's gangster. You're lying. These people have said that America's garbage. Quit lying. That's gangster. They got a critique of America. You did too, an American carnage in your inauguration. You said, oh, you're talking about the four sisters in Congress saying, well, evil Jews? No. They hadn't said evil Jews. They said evil doings of Israel. Every nation state has done some evil things. If there's a Palestinian state, which I hope there is, they're going to do some evil things. Every nation state has to be accountable. U.S., Ethiopia, Guatemala, Israel, China, and so forth and so on. And every nation state has been associated with certain forms of barbarism. We know that. But there's some good things, some wonderful things about Israel, some wonderful things about Palestinians and formations creating a state. There's wonderful things about America. I mean, a lot of people say, even Brother Trump, oh, they hate America. No. They love American comics. They love American music. You ask Sister Talib, you ask Sister Priestley, y'all love Aretha? Aretha Franklin means the world to me. What about Mary J? Mary J means the world. Mary J and Aretha are as American as Donald Trump, even more in some ways, because they've been here long because there have people been there 10 generations. Donald Trump's grandfather just arrived, his mother straight from Scotland, precious Mary Ann. 1930 she arrived, right? And so in that sense, you say, wait, wait, wait, wait, quit lying. Let's just be honest and candid, just like the comics. Let's just be honest and candid and recognize, because what is the definition of comedy? It is first drama, which is conflict emotionally felt and critically reflected upon, but it's that conflict that's rooted in incongruity. Things don't fit. So that's the possibility of hypocrisy, right? And we know hypocrisy is the tribute of vice to virtue, so that there are standards and you fall short, so you can laugh at it. Now when it's really deep comedy, it's talking about the human condition. See, that's a deeper thing. Now see, that's where you get Chekhov and Shakespeare and Joyce and the Blues, because deep comedy is the recognition of limits and incongruity at the highest levels of the mind, heart and soul. That's a different thing. So I mean, you can start with comedy with the clowns who walk around slipping on bananas or the sophisticated professor who doesn't realize that he got a banana hanging out the back of his pocket when he's lecturing with the students. Everybody laughing, he don't know what's going on. Well, that's bodily based comedy, you know, farts and bananas and so forth. It's important. But high comedy is the highest levels of human dignity, love, thought, music, mathematics, metaphysics, and then recognize all of those are incongruous. They're broken. They're fractured. There's dramatic conflict of incongruity at the highest levels of who we are as a species. That's deep stuff. That is deep stuff. Oh, Lord, Lord. And one of the most fundamental questions of Western civilization is, how come Socrates never cries and Jesus never laughs? Now, that's the question Thomas More was wrestling with in the Tower of London before he was executed in his dialogues on tribulation. Socrates never sheds a tear. What does that mean? The founder of philosophy in the modern West has a love of wisdom, but he never loves people because it's impossible to love human beings and not shed tears. You go to your mama's funeral and you're not shedding tears and you're committed to the Socratic ideal of self-mastery and self-control. You need to get off the crack pipe. Get off. Show her the depths of your love for her through being outside of your self-mastery. The tears will flow. Yes. It's the other way. It's like your daughter, this precious thing that you got when we walk in for your daughter. When she graduates, you and your wife are going to have tears of joy. That ain't the moment for self-mastery. That's not the moment to be Socratic. And so when Socrates is dying, his wife walks in Xanthippe and she's crying. He said, get her away. I can't stand tears. So that's a problem. That's a problem. You see, I come from Blackpool. We start with tears. All the mess we had to come to terms with. You know what I mean? Cries and so forth. And the Hebrew scripture begins with the cries of oppressed people too, right? But then Jesus never laughs. Oh, now see, that's a deep one. That is a deep one. That's GK. Chesterton. Chesterton said, Jesus turns over the tables of the money changes. He does not conceal his rage. Crucial. Jesus does weep. That's one of the most profound verses in the Christian Bible, right? Jesus wept. Yeah. Unlike Socrates. Why did Jesus weep? He wept for Jerusalem. He wept for Lazarus. He wept for his friends. But Jesus hides and conceals his mirth. That's what Chesterton says. Is there any laughter in the Bible? Well, Isaac means laughter. When you think of the joke of an older Sarah giving birth to a young person in an older age and so forth. But it's hard to catch Jesus laughing. None of the synoptic gospels have Jesus laughing. Some people thought they discerned a grin somewhere because he turned wine into water. He probably had a little grin on it. A subtle grin. A little subtle grin. Exactly. But you can never get the full scale and variety of the human condition in any one tradition. I think one of the beauties of what you're saying here, one of the beautiful things about what you're saying here is the complexity of human beings. And when you're dealing with the situation between these girls that call themselves the squad and Donald Trump, and you deal with these very simplistic things like these chants of send her back or lock her up or they hate America or, you know, this simplifying things is so attractive to some people and so attractive during political discourse, right? During these times when you're trying to rally up a campaign and get the audience behind you, this is when these simplistic things resonate. But as a human being, we know that things like, I don't subscribe to this idea that human beings are good or bad. I think there's- Go either way. Yeah. I'm sure. Like the way Donald Trump loves his family, I'm sure there's love in that guy. I'm sure there is. I mean, he's had some relations to his mother and his brothers and sisters that were not ones of sheer manipulation and domination. There's no doubt as a human being, it's important to keep track of his humanity. But at the same time, what happens is the dominant patterns of behavior. This is what worries me about Brother Trump, especially the fact that he's head of the American empire and head of the government, you see, that when you have dominant patterns of behavior that are completely unaccountable. See, for so long, he's been able to get away with things with no accountability at all. That's what makes him a kind of a Peter Pan-like figure. Up until he became president. Rich, he grew powerful, but he hasn't grown up. But even as president, he hasn't grown up. People had thought that he would grow into the office. No, he just hasn't grown up. He uniquely tried to manipulate the office position to change to be what he is. And I think people love that. There's certain people that resonates with them. They think that's so attractive. They love it. Well, I think they love it in the sense that... The first thing that Trump was able to do was to expose the pre-packaged commodities that we call politicians. That he came across as somebody who was just himself. Yes. You see, just gangster that he is. Yeah. And he'd just tell the truth. Oh, I was a close friend of Hillary's. I was been at the same weddings and so forth, because that's how the elites circulate in American empire. But then when they discovered, lo and behold, now he's posing himself as some kind of oppositional figure and yet he's tied to big money, tied to big military. When he gets in, he brings in the old school militarist people. He's still dropping bombs on the nine countries that have been dropping bombs for the last number of years. Tax cuts sound exactly the same than Mitch McConnell and others wanted. We thought we had something different here, you see. And it has to do with the... Well, when it's a larger story. We have to be honest about this. We live in both a very fragile and precious experiment in democracy and we live in an empire that is experiencing profound decline, decay and deterioration, simultaneous. See, because from the very beginning, the United States was really, in some ways, much more tied to gold and resources and land. And so this very crucial democratic experiment is predicated on the monstrous crime against indigenous peoples that we've never come to terms with. So you get a lot of neoliberal chatter about America's original slave, slavery, that's a lie. The original sin was we had to decide whether we were going to coexist with indigenous peoples or dominate them. And the decision was, for the most part, genocidal effect in terms of domination. So it's a settler colonial society, a colony of Britain, you see. Then we enslaved the Africans who become the basis of our economy. And the vast majority of profits made were actually tied to slavery. That's why so many of the presidents, first presidents in America were slaveholders and the chief justice of the Supreme Court were slaveholders and so forth. That doesn't mean that certain democratic practices were not being enacted, but it was enacted for white brothers with property. The white brothers who had no property, they couldn't vote at all. The women, of course, couldn't vote until 1920. So they had domestic households in which they had to find some sense of fulfillment. That's what history of patriarchy and misogyny in part are connected. And then tremendous efforts come to expanding it, expanding it. And this is why, even when Brother Trump talks about socialism, he doesn't realize the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy, who was a socialist. The song American the Beautiful, which is one of the most beautiful songs. Ray Charles singing that song, it takes you to a different place. I mean, he's seeing things that we can't see, and you know he's blind. You know what I mean? American the Beautiful. Elizabeth Lee Bates, socialist, professor Wellesley, who was our greatest poet, Walt Whitman, deep ties to socialism, who was our greatest philosopher, John Dewey, democratic socialist his whole life. Helen Keller, deaf, mute, blind, graduate of Radcliffe, socialist. Ryan Hole Niebuhr, the greatest Christian thinker of the 20th century, democratic socialist, moral man and immoral society. John Luther King, Jr., democratic, so Ella Baker, democratic socialism is as American as apple pie. But with the communist and the communist threat and the Soviet Union and all of its repression and regimentation and violation of liberties and killing of the culots and so forth, in the American mind, socialism becomes associated with communism. So you saw Brother Lindsay the other day, right? Yes. He looked like a cartoonist version of Joseph McCarthy. They're all communists. They're all communists. And you see, what happens is in a neo-fascist discourse is true anywhere around the world. If you can define a community as pure and then characterize those on the outside who are threatening as impure and then view yourself as those coming to the rescue to preserve the purity, it can be based on race, it can be based on religion, it can be based on politics, preserve that purity. We saw it in the 50s with the hysteria. The communists were what? Smith Act. They're deported or they're taken to jail. I mean, the first city council went from Harlem. Benjamin Davis went to jail because he was a communist, you see, because they were the impure. Now communism needs to be radically called into question in terms of its dominating forms like the Soviet Union and China on the mile and so forth and so on. But at the same time, when you look at Karl Marx and his critique of capitalism, he says prior to Lenin, prior to Stalin, prior to... He says capitalism is tied to this obsession with profit that puts profit before people and it will generate oligopolies in which there will be grotesque levels of wealth inequality and the only way that poor and working people will be able to gain access to any resources through organizing and mobilizing. Now you can accept that Marxist insight without being a Marxist. He's just telling the truth. Do you think that socialism just hasn't been implemented correctly? Is that what you think? Because like the argument has always been show me a socialist economy or socialist government that ever worked. Right. But there's so many people that find the idea of socialism attractive because it combines this idea of a community with a nation and that we're all tied together and we obviously have some socialist aspects to our civilization in terms of like utilities and... Militaries. The military. We're not going to outsource the military. Firefighters. Firefighters. Police. There has to be some kind of governmental control.