this "after words" interview with vivek ramaswamy along with all prior episodes on our website, booktv.org. just click on the "after words" tab to the top of the page. "after words" is also available as a podcast. i am stephanie trussell, the pleasure of introducing charles love. charles love is executive director of seeking excellent dashe of unser, seeking educational excellence, a nonprofit whose mission is to empower dissident students to reach their full potential. he is the host of the charles love showhe on am560 the answer, cohost of cut the bull podcast. charles is a a scholar at the6 unites contributing writer at "city journal" and the author of now three books, the latest "race crazy" comes out on tuesday. he has been on his work has been featured in the "new york post," real clear politics, "newsweek" and on the rush limbaugh show. he has appeared on fox news, newsmax and various radio programs, podcasts and local tv shows. he writes frequently on race, politics, current events and cultural issues and is passionate about solutions rather than political partisan bickering. it is my pleasure to introduce charles love. [applause] djust this because i know some say it needs to be louder and i apologize in advance because i speak a little fast. is that better? yeah, i'm a quick talker. i'll try to be slower, but i want to be able to allow you to ask questions and speak at the end. so what i want to do here today is talk about the book why i wrote it what it's about who the target audience is and let you ask some questions and talk about that in the end. but before i talk about the book, i want to talk about how i ended up here. so i like many of you were just a regular guy going about my life seeing what was happening, but not really so concerned with it. and i wrote my first book as stephanie mentioned. i wrote three books, but the first one was just more like starting off as a collection of notes. it was after obama had won and my friends were talking a lot about politics and they hadn't done that before but what they were saying and i kind of like a history book this didn't really make sense. so i wrote the book. it's called logic the truth about blacks in the republican party, but it wasn't really an endorsement of the republican party because i wasn't a republican at the time then i was and now i'm not again we'll get to that but so but i wrote it because i said if you are a liberal or you have liberal ideals and you want to vote for democrats because they align with your beliefs you should do that is with this country is about but i didn't understand why they were believing this boogeyman view of republicans like they were out lurking corners in the out to get you so i kind of wrote that to debunk some myths that they were believing and you know sharing amongst themselves about republicans, but then i just went back to my life. i didn't do anything else and then i noticed the culture was shifting in a dramatic fashion, and i said somebody no one's really talking about this the way i think it should be talked about and so i said i got a busy life and wife and kids and a job like anyone else so if i'm gonna do this i need to be saying something that other people aren't saying so i wrote my last book we want equality how the fight for equality gave way to preference and the point was we used to have legitimate fights and the best proof that things are better now is that people are manufacturing fights. right, so i i take the things that they say and then i would say but is it true and a different approach that i take too, which is really important. i like many conservatives right about what the left does that i disagree with so i'll say they say this and this is wrong and i do the same thing, but i don't do it in an attack mode, but beyond that i have a second argument where i say, let's give them their argument. so let's assume you're right. so now you can't debate me because i'm not seeing you wrong. so we both agree that always erases or the country is, you know, robin black people. whatever they're doing police are hunting down black men. so let's assume that's true. and that's just simply ask is what you're doing going to lead to a solution. it's that simple right? so even if you're right, we're still in trouble because you're not doing anything. you're not focused on a solution. you don't talk about a solution. and so that was the point of the book. so i was fortunate after writing a book meeting some people at five sixty got a radio show and i was the odd man out i was talking about cultural when everybody else on the station was talking politics, right and they're like, well, why are you talking about this? i'm i say it's important. we all hear that politics is downstream from culture, but we're only talking about the downstream right? so i just kept going about my business pushing on and you know, it was fine until 2020. so now george floyd's killed things, you know erupt and it's an election year and it's very partisan. so everybody's even doubling down on the political talk and here i am talking about the culture and when i wrote that book, i think i wrote it in 17. it came out in 18 and i was saying this culture is going to shift further to the left and it's going to be incredibly toxic and about races probably in about five or six years is what i thought and to george thing just kind of accelerated it. so i got an opportunity. i had moved to new york. and so i love to show i was on here and i was like, oh, let's see what i do next and sean thompson who you all know had the opportunity to sit in for steve cortes because he went to work for trump. so i took over his show the liberty hour now if you ever listen to his show his show is all constitution and politics, you know cigar in one hand and the constitution in the other hand, so i was like, it'd be great to do that. i was doing 13 weeks leading up to the election. the election year i said, but i like, you know, i'm building my own idea when my approach i don't want to shift. what do you want me to do? they say well do the show the way you do the show. so here i am stepping in sean's highly partisan political shoes, and i'm talking about the culture. so people were calling in and like well, why are you talking about this race thing? we already know what to do. we got the blueprint either from the civil rights act and the movement right martin luther king's words or from the bible. you know, i love the my neighbor as i love myself solves a problem, but my argument was that that makes sense in its logical but you're not dealing with logic. so if you're not talking about race and they're talking about race you lose the race conversation. it's like politics. it's like the schools. it's like everything else if if you're a republican and you wonder why blacks agree with you on certain issues, but they don't vote for you. it's because you don't go to the black community and all they hear is the democrat in that community telling them what you believe and let me tell you it ain't good. right and you're not there to defend yourself. so i just kept going along with the culture and i said this is what's going to happen the other piece because seeking educational excellence. we work on education. so i had a lot of guests on talking about how we fixed the problems in education and we talked about an issue whether it's discipline, whether it's the curriculum whether the kids the country as a whole sliding behind the rest of the world and they would all say i say get to the end. it's about solutions. so what do we do and they all say school choice and i say wrong. and it's not because i'm not an advocate of two school. i am and what i said was what you're missing and this is where i become president. i said what you're missing. is that why you're in this fight and the other side's opposing you so it's a fight you're fighting to get school choice and we had to win in illinois. you have wins another places. you're gonna win all over the country. you're gonna say yay. we won this thing and you're gonna look up and find out that because you weren't paying attention to the culture. check this out. you're gonna laugh because this was two years ago where you're gonna find is that those vouchers you get to go to these better schools. you're going to be sending these this disadvantaged kids to schools that are just as bad at the schools. they were there to clean her they're safer, but they're teaching the same toxic ideology that you're trying to get them out of and look at what we're doing today. look at what the main argument is, and now i shouldn't say because it's rude, but i told you so so now what so, you know i wrote i was writing about what was going on. george floyd was killed. i wrote an article about this. i think i called it white woteness about white who felt seek for blacks and they're saying and they were speaking in extreme matters, and it doesn't mean that they're not issues in the black community. they're not racism and races out there who you know think whatever they think or some things in the system that needs to be changed, but they were all absolute. they were like all blacks are being hunted down all blacks are are being shot in the street. all blacks are in the criminal justice system and they're wrong. even if you think there's an issue, so i wrote this article and i was upset at the time. so i just started writing and this one just went viral and they picked it up and then the major newspapers picked it up and rush limbaugh. read it on the show. and so then i said, okay. what is missing? how do i address this? so that's where race crazy came from? i wanted to talk about what i call in the book the progressive racism movement and i always say don't put adjectives in front of the thing because when you put an adjective in front of it you change it right so you can't say social justice if you want justice you just want justice. why do you need social in front of it? it's justice when you put social in front of it's different, but this is kind of a play on that. i say progressive racism when really it's just racism, but i call it progressive because in their mind they do the same thing. so the races from 1840 said i am white blacks are inferior. so we must separate them and we all say that's racist. and the guy today says well whites are inherently bad. the whiteness is being centered everywhere and we need to break that up and we need to separate that us the country from that and we need whites to admit that their guilty and own this guilt from 50 years ago. so saying that they're genetically different is the same thing that the other people were saying. no, no, but it's different because our intent is different. we're doing it from a good place. so it's not racist. so i say okay fine. it's not racist. it's progressive racism. that's what it is and i figured the two best examples i can use would be blm and the 1619 project. and blm, i wrote about first and i took the same approach. i said blm is wrong. i write in the book about how it's a false premise are there issues? yes. are we being hunted down? no are the police just indiscriminately shooting black men. no, can you prove it? yes, are there black people in jail? yes, because you complain about mass incarceration. so i say, how'd they get there? because if the police wanted to hunt down the black man, the easiest ones to shoot would be the ones who break the law yet somehow they end up in jail. why are they shot before they get there? because no one's hunting them is simply not true. now if you want to fix the problem, this is why it's important because how you go about fixing a problem is dependent upon how bad you think the problem is if we think that yeah, we have a problem. it's not, you know taking over the whole country, but it needs to be addressed we can get heads in the room and we can think about what works and we can work on it, but if you think the country is wholly racist and it's hunting down black people and killing them for no reason. of course your solution is going to be the burn the whole system down. so that's why i point out why they're flawed. but beyond that i know my target audience is really conservative to because i may say i agree with you, but i think you need to try a different approach and actually liberals and i know some conservatives don't agree with me, but i think there is a difference between liberals in the far left. and so liberals don't like republicans. they don't like most people in this room. they don't like your politics they disagree with you. they have a different view of government. however, they love free speech. and they don't like the fact that they're being called races right now if you don't believe me go look up brett weinstein and and bill maher and and look at the things that they are saying, right? they're liberals. they didn't politics didn't change. they just like, you know, i was on your side left and now you call it in today's left. i'm a racist. it's silly. so we need to talk to them we need and because the media is not on our side. we need more foot soldiers. it's not enough of us physically. there's many of them. so if they start to go out and speak it, you know, makes it easier because they can talk to an audience that we can't talk to. so to them. i say i give them the argument so all blacks are being hunted. so we agree on that. so let's not, you know debate that what we can do though is say if that's the case. how do we solve it? because the far left is saying burn it all down. right, you don't agree with that in the liberals. like of course not so why don't you join us in solving this cultural slide and this racism and then and it's radical left and then, you know we can argue about issues after the fact so that's what i do in the book. so from the 16, i mean from the blm standpoint, i explained what they really believe because that's a george floyd was killed. we had people giving all this money people feel bad corporation signed on we're gonna give new holidays, we're gonna give them all this money and many people saw that and said, this is crazy. look at how much money they get it and there's a problem. and where's this money going? i'm like we can look for that for days and i explained the book why that's gonna be hard to do kudos to rand paul if he can pull it off, but i doubt it, but and i talk about why in the book but what i say is forget about where the money's going that's a hard fight. but what we can do is we can go to the people who are giving them money and clearly explain what they believe and say if you believe this after knowing what they believe and you still want to give them money by all mean do it, but i don't think they do like i don't think they know. that for instance the police. you heard the debate between defund the police and people on the right would say that's bad. it'll be it'll lead to dangerous neighborhoods. and the people on the left said well, we don't really mean to fund. that's just a euphemism. we really just mean, you know reallocates resources and give them some support and bring in some some social workers to help them go to domestics not true in their own words. we are abolitionist. we want to abolish all prisons jails immigration detention centers. we don't want police in school. we don't want security guards. we don't want surveillance kind of hard to you know, take those words out of context. but most people don't know that because it's not on the blm website when i was doing this research for the book originally it was gonna be like debunking the blm movement finding out what they say, but i couldn't find anything. anything. i'm like, this is weird. so in doing research i found this article about a group getting a hundred million dollars over five years, but it didn't say blm the article said the headline said blm, but in the article, they didn't talk about it was this organization gives it to this philanthropist which gives it to creates the black lead movement bond, which takes that money and gives it to the movement for black lives. and so i looked up all the organizations and with you if take you take nothing else from this when you leave look up m4bl.org the movement for black lives. i found it and it was a treasure trove. it's insane. they have acts that they have written that they're ready to give congress once they move far enough to the left. they have a preamble like a constitution. it's all about, you know, all the things that they believe all the demands that they have and it's anti-capitalist. it's a reparations for migrants. it's lgbtq gender focuses. i think they use a word that they made up. i'm good at it now, but i couldn't read it at first called sis heteropatriarchy. multiple times in a book we stand behind we push to the front of our movement gay trans lesbian queer queer affirming gender non-confirming, uh precariously housed cash poor all the stuff, but it's not about whether you agree with it or not. you just have to ask is that police brutality? because i thought that's what your movement was about. right, it's simple. so you say that to a liberal you have them read that you know, they might be like oh, so the goal is really baby steps. stop read this stop giving them money. we work on the rest later. and then the other >> you know the crt movement and the only thing i say in the book about crt is why i didn't write about crt. mostly because the conversation around that was starting when i wrote the book but it doesn't matter. i'm not against that fight but it's a larval back. it's not that i see that argument, is that there's different ways to attack a problem but the issue is if you watched the news what you hear? you hear crt is terrible for a job, we're not teaching crt. yes you are. you don't even know what crt is and you just need to know black history and you go nowhere. you can't do that with the 1619 project. three approaches wife the 1619 project is more important than crt. no one's going to tell you they're not teaching it in schools . the product was written and by the fall it was in 4500 schools, dc, baltimore and all of chicago chhave adopted it. it'sceeverywhere, you know it's in the schools . that argument falls away. in my mind technically i'm kind of a literal guy. it's worse than crt because crt says race is important and endemic to the country so we can ignore it so we have to bring it into the school to talk about it fairly and wlet the kids understand what it's about the conversation is centered around whiteness so we need to have this focus and amplify the voices of blacks. disagree, agree, doesn't matter. i disagree because they say stuff like we want to teach culturally relevant priority so we need to add culture into every class. you want blacks to do better than math? teach it the way they slearn. i'm not saying it's that bad. so that in and contracted to the 1619 project. essentially the 1619 project was founded to reimagine the founding of america. framing it around when the first black advocates were brought in as slaves and what they say is slavery and anti-black racism is endemic to america and to america but for it, america could not have been founded and it isin the dna of america . i thought dna, your dna could not be changed. that's your dna so it'lends to my logical argument that if it's in the dna of america and i'm giving the argument, not saying i agree, why don't we try to change it? why are we even fighting? what good will it do to tear down the system because it's in the dna. it's still there. when you rebuild the system guess what's going tobe in it ? it's still thereif it's in the dna and it makes no sense . everybody write an essay on all different topics trying to explain their problem and the process of the countryand why it's a problem and they're all framed around slavery , not racism