So we've talked about this New York times poll that shows that in some key battleground
States, Donald Trump is doing way better against Elizabeth Warren than against Joe Biden or
then against Bernie Sanders.
And that's all great and we've already had a discussion about that, but there is another
storyline buried in the polling and it is about education and it is about race and it
exposes so much of what we've been saying for the last several years.
There are a whole bunch of ways that we can slice up the polling data for Donald Trump
versus his opponents.
We can look by age group, we can look by income.
We can look at all sorts of things, but take a look at this.
We're putting up data on the screen, which shows that Donald Trump is absolutely destroying
Biden, Bernie and Warren among voters who were white without a college education.
Okay. Trump won in 2016 over Hillary, Hillary by 26 over a among voters who are white and
lack of college education.
Trump is leading Biden and Bernie by 24 points each.
Right now among white voters who didn't go to college, Trump has crushing Warren by even
more by 26 among white voters without a college degree.
This is why Republicans don't want tuition free college.
They know the numbers.
This is why Republicans aren't actually doing anything to improve the circumstances for
minority voters because they are so overwhelmingly not with them, that it probably feels like
a worthless investment of time, resources, and money.
This is not rocket science.
Now, race is a component in the sense that black voters, Hispanic voters, other voters,
presumably other includes maybe biracial, Asian, native American, Trump gets destroyed
in every single one of those races.
Uh, among those demographic groups against Biden, Bernie and Warren.
But when you look at white voters with a college degree, Trump lost in 2016 to Hillary among
that group.
And Trump is losing to Biden, Bernie and Warren right now.
So there is a party that benefits drastically from keeping people uneducated.
What do you think their policy is going to be to education?
Don't teach critical thinking in middle school and high school.
Don't make it easier or more affordable for people to go to college.
Don't do tuition free.
College don't provide student loan relief.
And that is exactly what they're doing.
Now there's an analogy here to voter turnout.
Republicans do better when they suppress voter turnout in elections.
So what policies do they want?
They want to remove people from voter rolls.
They want to increase ID requirements.
They want to prevent people from being allowed to register on the same day of the election.
It's totally transparent.
If you're attention, which we have been, I was thinking, uh, there's this idea of 1984
versus brave new world.
These are two really important dystopian novels.
1984 of course by George Orwell, brave new world by Aldous Huxley.
It's very common that people will compare or lichen what's happening right now.
It's a 1984 but the late Neil postman wrote that very often when people say something
is like 1984 there's a better analogy to brave new world by Aldous Huxley and I believe that
that's what we're seeing right now.
And I'll give you an example or well feared or painted a picture of books being banned.
Aldous Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban books.
And that's the case right now because you have an entire political movement, the American
right-wing movement built around people who have no real interest in thinking or in books
or in reading or education or epistemology or critical thinking.
They don't need to ban the books because the people that they're appealing to aren't reading
any books.
Uh, and like Neil postman said or well feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned out in a sea of irrelevance or well feared.
We would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
I believe that what we are seeing right now is much more along the lines of the picture
painted by Aldous Huxley in brave new world in this particular sense then by George Orwell
in 1984.
It is really scary stuff and you need only look at the numbers to understand where the
policy comes from that we are seeing among the modern Republican party.
Disgusting.
But somehow we've got to fight it and 2020 and that election is just the very small first
step.
It's an important first step.
But it is a comparatively small one.
Given what we're up against.