Speaker 1: I'm going to play something very interesting for you today. It's delusional. It's
deranged, it's backwards as much of the American right wing is. But it opens up a very interesting
conversation. A Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, who happens to be black,
and this is very relevant to what we're going to hear from him. He is in favor of reparations,
but not the kind you might think of. What Mark Robinson says he wants for reparations
is black people should give white people reparations as a thank you for ending slavery.
Yes. Now, I know you're saying. Wait, but, David, that doesn't make sense for so many different
reasons, of course. But let's first listen to what he had to say in its full ridiculous glory,
and then we will talk about it. Speaker 4: So the people that we're
talking about, reparations in this country, they want reparations. And I remember I made
this particular liberal so angry at me because I told them right to their
face. Nobody owes you anything for slavery. If you want to tell the truth about it, it is you who
owns Edgehill. Whoa, whoa. Why do you? Because somebody in those fields took strikes for you.
Somebody after those fields were ended in slavery was ended. Somebody had to walk through Jim Crow
for you. Somebody fought wars and died for you. Somebody lived left dead because they didn't have
what you have, and they did it for you. Hmm. There are people in their graves right now
and they are there because they were willing to stand up and fight for you.
Those folks on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Carry an American flags. Take that Colin Kaepernick.
Living in a society that he could scarcely acknowledge. Something he has never know.
Living with a bigotry that none of us can imagine. Right. Carried American flags on
that bridge. And when they were hit upside the head with nightsticks and shot with water
hoses and knocked to the ground, they got up and put those flags up and kept marching.
Speaker 1: All right. So I guess he's saying not only do black people today
owe white people reparations, they also know earlier black folks who are no longer alive
reparations, which is weird. So this is this is unreal stuff. And this is what happens when
you just become a contrarian for the sake of contrarianism. Now, I think that there are
perfectly reasonable critiques about reparations, and we've talked about them before. You can come
down on either side as far as reparations go. But the idea that black people owe white people money
for freeing them from slavery, ignoring that they were the ones enslaving the black folks
to begin with is really something else. It's like asking for praise, for putting out a fire that you
started. And the other important thing to remember is that many white people, including the slave
owners, didn't want to end slavery. He's sort of pretending like, listen, white people ended
slavery, so you should thank them. No, no, no, no. A whole bunch of white people did not want to end
slavery, and they lost the Civil War over that. It's a wacky argument to make. And by the way,
even after slavery was legally abolished, we still saw black folks facing segregation of all kinds,
discrimination, oppression in the form of Jim Crow laws, systemic racism. And so much of that legacy
that we followed through hundreds of years. This is really wild, and I'll be totally honest with
you. I don't even know if Robinson genuinely believes this. This is the virus, the mind
virus of Contrarianism of. If anybody on the left is suggesting X, then I need to make clear that
the opposite of X is actually what we need. I don't know whether this is going to win him
the governorship or what, but it is unreal to see them saying these things out loud. And what's even
crazier is people in the crowd who decide to clap for it. This country has fallen very, very far.