Jon Stewart on George Floyd Protests, Enacting Change | Joe Rogan

It seems like trying to enact change is so difficult that when actual change happens, it's one of the reasons why it happens in such a big way. It's like there were so many people bounding at the wall and pounding at this wall that when boom, when the George Floyd protests broke through, then all of a sudden it's, we've got real change. Let's take down these fucking statues and light everything on fire and there's this feeling of change and of chaos that is also representative of the fact that it takes so long to turn our cultural battleship. It's like to actually get a real turn. It's so hard. It's so everything stays the same no matter how mad people get. That turn, even at that point, that's still the easy part. Yes. The term is the easy part. Like this shit's not going to get fixed by HBO Max pulling on with the win. It's fine. When you pull a movie, nobody was planning on watching on a streaming service. Nobody can find. We're still at the symbolic stage. We're still doing the shit that is symbolic when, and this is where leadership becomes such a crucial component. You have this great awakening of energy. It has to be channeled into something lasting and meaningful. We have to diagnose the real problem underlying this moment so that we don't make a mistake in just changing the window dressing and the gilding on the buildings. This has to be foundational in a way that will create something lasting. That's the hard part. It seems like the shift is big enough that something is going to happen in that regard. It just seems like this shift is nothing like anything we've ever seen in our lifetime. It's worldwide, which is really crazy. The George Floyd deaths sparked all these protests worldwide, which has really never happened before with anything that really has taken place in America. It just seems like there was also a lot of frustration during the bailout period of the COVID crisis that all these corporations were getting so much money. The people got one $1,200 check, and then there was no more talk. You don't know where the money ... There's really no accountability even for where that money went. That's a great point, Joe, because that's ... That's what I'm talking about by structural change. I feel like in this moment, this horrible crime and murder sparked something, but what's underlying that is not just the racial inequality and the inequities, but this whole idea of we build our society economically from the top down. Ask the shit that's got to change. We have to ... When you're in a pandemic, right, and tens of thousand people are dying, and then we say to ourselves, all right, well, who are the essential workers? Who are the ones that are the fabric of our society and culture that keep the wheels turning and the trains running? Who are those people? Well, it turns out they're the most poorly compensated people in our society. Yeah. Because we flipped the paradigm. For some reason since the 80s, the investor class has gotten ... The break in the working class has gotten minimized. We've devalued work while overvaluing investment. It's such a good point. I don't think we can have the structural change until we flip that, like fuck, man. When people talk about freedom and liberty, what's more for freedom and liberty than not having your health insurance tied to your job? What kind of freedom do you have to make decisions in your life when you fear that if I take a chance, if I go for something, if I try and change my lot in life, my kids will no longer be covered by ... All the things that we built up to accept, I think we have to turn it over, and it has to lean. People should be able to have a ... You should be able to work a job and not be poor. You should be able to work a job and not need food stamps. That's where we're fucked. We spent ... How much in this pandemic? Three trillion dollars? Something like that? Four trillion? Something along those lines. Who knows if 100 million of it went to Coca-Cola? We have no idea. But you got 80 bus drivers in New York who were dead because they had to keep going in the middle of a pandemic. I think you're making a really good point about what's essential as well when we found out what the essential workers are, people who work at supermarkets, people who build homes, all these essential jobs. And can't afford to bunker down. Can't afford to. You're putting yourself in ... You know, it's funny. I was talking ... A friend of mine named DT, he was really grievously wounded in war, right? And we were talking about coronavirus, and I was like, I feel like I'm in fucking danger when I go out. And he was, yeah, welcome to being down range. You know what I mean? That's not something that we as Americans would ever consider our lives. We're really sheltered in a lot of ways to what a vast majority of the world faces, but also what a vast majority of our own citizens face in terms of having lives that they feel are built on sand, as opposed to granite. And so his point was like, yeah, that's what it feels like when you're in a war, but I signed up for that, but like bus drivers and grocery store workers, they had to fucking decide like, I need this money more than I need to protect my life and maybe the health of my family. What a terrible position to have to be in. And unprecedented, and we're ill prepared for it. And it really did highlight what's essential though, which is ... Back to your point about this idea of income equality. People will balk at that, like, hey, this is a game. If you want to figure it out, figure out how to make more money, invest and do this and become a banker and you fucked up and you wanted to be an artist or you fucked up and you wanted to be a carpenter, you should have been a whatever. But what they don't understand or don't consider is when shit hits the fan like it did with the COVID crisis, you recognize like, hey, all that stuff is nonsense if someone doesn't take out the garbage. All that stuff is nonsense if you don't have healthcare. All that stuff is not ... None of that money means anything if the fabric of society deteriorates to a point where literally everybody has to stay in their home and you can't work and that's what happened. And it really flipped the whole thing on its head because we had to consider survival. We had to really consider survival instead of just existence. We were saying, oh my God, we have to protect ourselves from this viral attack. And what it makes you realize is how much money it takes to ante up to the American way of life. What I mean by that is like if you just want to buy into play a hand, what's your ante? Well, now they say you got to go to college. So you're talking about a $200,000 ante to get in the fucking game. Right, to get a job when you get out where you're not going to make a fraction of that every year so you're going to be behind the eight ball for the rest of your life. Right. And so when you think about black people not being able to build equity and wealth through generations of government policy that excluded them from whether it's the Homestead Act or the Federal Housing Administration or the GI Bill, all these government interventions, socialism, if you will, entitlements, if you will, were made to help white families build equity, right, over generations. Black people were explicitly excluded from that. So add that on top of the amount of money that you're going and you start to see the hole that we've dug for people. Yeah. And if we don't address that hole, I don't care how many fucking comedy sketches we pull and how many things go like we're not doing anything. Yeah, we haven't addressed the hole that exists from being 150 years removed from slavery, which is crazy. It's not, that's a blink in time. It's nothing. And how crazy is it that like, and I always hear it from like the butt people, they're like the George Floyd thing. Yeah, that was terrible. But as soon as they say the bottom, like, no, no, but no, but he wasn't an angel. No, but you know, what doesn't matter? And when you're upset that people are pulling that Confederate statutes, like people have been begging for that since they got those things got put up in the 1920s to really lock in Jim Crow. Like those things aren't there. They're not memorials to the dead. They're hagiography to a war for slavery. Like we shot the movie down Southman. So I saw these monuments you would think they would say like, here's a statue of Robert Lee. This motherfucker to keep people slaves. And then we built this thing in the twenties to make black people kind of afraid so that they knew they couldn't do it. But it doesn't say that right. So this, this great man, like, of course people are going to pull them down because they've been begging for us to do something about it for 100 years. It's also the origins of those. A lot of those statues were actually put up during the civil rights movement and they're cheaply made. They were put up as a middle finger to the civil rights movement. No, no question. Yeah. But, but we need something like there has to be a process. You know, I always think about like what South Africa did. There has to be a painful lead process that allows us because I still think to this day, and I don't know how your experience with this is, but like, I still think there's a large swath of, you know, white people in society who feel like they blame black people for not being able to get out of this hole that we put them in or that the government put them in, but they think it's a problem of culture and virtue. Like, Hey man, if they would just pull the pants up and talk different, you know, they wouldn't have such a hard time. Hey, why don't you just work harder? It's a ridiculous perspective. And it's also not based on, you don't have a, it's not based on the fact that you're a, anyone who would think like that doesn't understand how human beings develop and grow. If you have someone, it's widespread, I would say. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a dangerous narrative whenever you blame people for their circumstances, if their circumstances are grossly out of their control and really severely limit their progress. And that exists also for, if you want to talk about coal mining populations in Kentucky, it's the same shit. It's people that we don't all start out at the same starting block. So all you pull yourself up by your own bootstrap motherfuckers, you're lucky you have arms. Okay. There's people out there born with no arms. Like we should all be thinking of ourselves in this country as a community, not as a bunch of people in competition with each other. We're all piling our money together every year. We throw our taxes into the mix to try to take care of the infrastructure and the government and the housing and all the, all the different things that get paid for by our taxes. We're a community, man. And we're not thinking like a community. We're thinking like a bunch of people that don't want other people to have the same shot in life. That's it. But I think you struck on something though, that's very important in all this. And that is a theory of limited resources. Like out of the conflict between what you would consider like the more nativist wing of American politics and the more progressive side is this idea of resource guarding. Yeah. We're going to, they're going to take, I work my fucking ass off. I play by the rules and they're going to take all my labor and they're going to burn into these people. And I do think we have to address that idea that like we're here to build equity. Let's all get together. And the project of this next generation is to build a stronger foundation, a granite bearing for everyone to stand on so that there's a few people standing on Mount Everest and everybody else is in sand and quicksand isn't the way that we run the society and think of these programs, not as entitlements, but investments in dignity of worksheet and start building that up. Well food stands and welfare start to go away. Yeah. Because we're building something more substantial. We built a great middle class in the fifties for white people. We have to do the same now for the country and, and, and also reassure, you know, people who are resentful of that, that they're not being left behind either, that nobody is saying and your lives are fucking cake. It's not like it's going to change your life that much either, man. This mentality that, oh, Bernie Sander, like when I was a supporter of Bernie Sanders when he was running, I got pushback from people that were like, uh, so you want to give your hard earned money more of it away to the government and you think the government is going to solve this. My, my perspective was if you just looked at it this way, if you could give, let's just get crazy. If you could give 25% more money to taxes, but the world would be 50% better, wouldn't you want to invest in that? Like I understand that people are check to check. I understand, but if people like me, people that earn a good amount of money are the ones who are going to be hit the hardest, if you wanted a better world, wouldn't you be willing to invest some of your money into that better world? And if that money goes to making sure that no one has to do this in the future and that we, we develop this better, these better communities in these places that have been fucked for decades, you don't want that. You don't want a better world for your children. You want, you don't want to save, what do you want to do? Die with all this money in the bank? Like it's crazy. It's a question of, you know, when you look at the greatest anti-poverty program we've ever put in place in social security. Now the flip side of that is what they'll say is that the problem with some of this is they don't trust the mechanism by which that money is going to be invested. Of course. Because they've been sold to some extent a little bit of a lie that, that this trickle down theory. So every administration that comes in is going to stimulate the economy. They all do it. We don't have a free market. The Fed right now is driving so much money into stocks. You're talking about zero interest rates, negative interest rates. They're driving everything away from bonds and savings so that the stock market, which for some reason we've come to look at like a pulse oximeter of the nation, which it's not. It's, you know, oh my God, we lost 300 DOWs today. Like we've come to look at it like it's our temperature. Yeah. So everybody's going to stimulate the economy. So what did, what, let's look at what Trump did. So $1.5 trillion tax cut, right? Overwhelmingly though, it went to people who already have a shit ton of money. And then we cut the corporate tax rate from a hundred, I think it was 35 down to 21, right? Supposedly they were going to reinvest it, but they mostly did buybacks. So they're increasing their investor wealth through that as well. So you're talking about trillions of dollars of stimulus, right? That are just going to that same theory. Take those trillion dollars and let's invest, let's stimulate the economy, but not from up there from down here. Let's take that and fucking Marshall plan our country and build it so that it's sturdy on the legs. You know, you know, you're a fighter sturdy on the legs. If you're not starting on the legs, you got nothing. My idea is we should get Dick Cheney involved and we should hire Halliburton to fix up the inner cities. We made all the places we bombed in Iraq.