america. in the meantime, we're pleased to be joined by author joel

pollock, who is also senior editor at breitbart.com. he's written a dozen or so books. and before we get into the books, i want to read a quote from you. and get you to expand on it a little bit. you have said, quote, i'd like to be the conservative in a liberal city. what does that mean and why? >> los angeles is a wonderful place. and california is a beautiful state was so much going for it. we are not governed terribly well and l.a. has huge challenges. but i think being a conservative in an environment where most people around you are either liberal or completely apolitical, is a welcome challenge. it is a nice way to go through life. it takes a certain kind of personality to enjoy being in the minority on most issues.

and i do not bother neighbors and fellow parents at the school and things like that with my political views. but when politics does emerge in conversation, it is nice to be someone with a different point of view. and i like cities. i like this city. i grew up in the suburbs of chicago. los angeles is an incredible place in many ways, it is a creative place, a dynamic place. right now it is spectacularly beautiful. we have had this wonderful winter of rain and snow. it even snowed on the hollywood mountains on march 1. and it only just stopped raining a couple weeks ago, and you can see all around us everything is in bloom, the colors are incredible. so it is really a wonderful place to be. there is a lot of innovation happening. the beach, santa monica, and the part of l.a. closer to the ocean. lots of tech companies are moving here. of course there is hollywood, the media.

there is so much to do here. and we are here on the campus of usc, which has a terrific student body, great faculty, there are great debates that have happened here. i have been invited to speak here. so, it's fun to participate as a conservative, as a contrarian. i do not derive much pleasure by preaching to the choir or being surrounded by people who agree with me. the two books we are going to talk about today both spring out of that affinity for the contrarian christian. when i wrote read november in 2020 about the democratic primary, i was doing so as a conservative surrounded by democratic voters, going to all the different democratic presidential candidate events, going to all the early primary states, talking to left-wing and liberal voters whom i may not have had much in common other than an interest in politics. but i really wanted to experience the process of nominating a democratic presidential nominee from within

that process, but as a conservative with a different perspective. likewise with my biography of my mother, she lived her entire life as a contrarian. passed away about a year ago. but right until the end she was challenging people on social media, challenging people through her columns, often taking views on political issues, racial issues, even religious issues which were quite unexpected and sometimes going forth against the entire rest of the world. her versus the world. there's a kind of thrill to that. so i do not live for political arguments. i live to enjoy the sunshine and family and kids, all kinds of other things. but politics is a part of our lives whether we like it or not, and within that context i enjoyed being the contrarian voice. it is sometimes fun when you do find common ground and people agree with the, and i am finding that more and more because of the problems los angeles is having because of the failure of so many of our left-wing policies.

i am finding more and more room for agreement with neighbors and other people in los angeles. but it is fun to take a different view. >> have you been canceled as a conservative in los angeles, or in california? >> there are really two kinds of cancellation. one is a this invitation. -- a dis-invitation, when you are invited to something and then it is withdrawn. that has happened to me once or twice, once and washington, d.c. actually and once in los angeles. now, you cannot always be sure why the dis-invitation happened. the reasons given are never, we will not tolerate your views. maybe some people have received that kind of direct cancellation but usually there is some other reason given. the second kind of cancellation involves the kind of invitations that just did not arrive. you do not get invited to certain things, you are not sought after, your opinions are

not included. and sometimes that's just because people are not interested, but sometimes they're really trying to exclude conservative views invoices. if you really want to be part of the discussion you have to speak up and speak out. a few years ago i was at my 20th college reunion, and they had a political discussion. every single person on the panel was left of center or further to the left. and so, i wrote to the person organizing it and said, wouldn't you like to have someone on the right? and they did, they made space for me. but that is a softer kind of cancellation where they assume everyone has the same point of view, or they are not come to bow looking for alternative points of view. but for the most part i have managed to participate in discussions and debates, even contentious debates, without having people react in a very negative way. i think most americans, outside of the glare of the political spotlight, are quite happy to hear from people with different views.

people are not so easily triggered. maybe a younger generation of americans is more like that. but i believe that people are fundamentally decent and if -- if you are serious about solving problems, and if you can listen as well as you can attempt to argue or express your own views, then i think people are more come to will have in your views around. so i have not had the same degree of hostility other conservatives have experienced, perhaps because i accept that i am in an environment where people tend to disagree with me and i live that way happily. >> we have about 20 minutes with author joel pollak. we are going to put the numbers on the screen so you can participate. 202-748-8200 for eastern time zones, 202-748-8201 for mountain time zones. protects, 202-748-8903.

recent banner headline, quote, 1500 book bans in first half of the year. when it comes to books in schools especially or school libraries, where do you come down when it comes to book bans? >> i think the use of the term book banned in the context of a school library is inappropriate. these are not book bans in a general or public sense. it will be one thing if they were banning the books from public libraries or university libraries or from bookstore shelves. when we are talking about schools, there are curriculum choices that are made by teachers, parents, school boards. that is not banning a book. excluding certain books from a curriculum is not the same as banning a book. you are not saying that this book should not be read at all. you are saying that we want to shape the education of our

children in a certain way. so to use the extreme example often cited, you do not allow pornography in school libraries. that does not mean we are banning pornography, it just means it is not appropriate for children. i think that children are best served by having reading materials that do challenge their critical faculties. i was very well served in my high school education by having a display that the librarians put out. i remember very clearly my freshman year, for black history month. there were a lot of radical books that excited my interest. i picked up the autobiography of malcolm x, black like me, several books about the black and american experience. i would not have had that at the school decided they were too controversial. so i think we have to allow for wide latitude in terms of the literature available, especially at the high school level. but i think we have to have a grounding first in the basics of american history, the basics of

american civics. and the emphasis should be on providing those books to students rather than focusing, necessarily, on the radical books, the radical critiques, especially at younger grades. we can introduce them to the difficult and problematic parts of our history. we can introduce them to different topics like abortion, same-sex marriage, things like that. i think it is not banning books to decide that some books do not serve that purpose in a way that is age-appropriate. ironically, the banning is happening more frequently on liberal college campuses or even in liberal states like california. just recently, a state judge struck down a state law that was signed by jerry brown, the predecessor of our current governor, that applied penalties of up to one year in jail for people who misgendered other people in a nursing environment. and you are penalized for using the wrong gender, or the gender

that corresponded with someone's biological sex as opposed to the gender they had chosen. that is a severe restriction of freedom of speech. there are authors here in california, my good friend abigail schreier has written about transgender is him, she's had her books banned in certain settings. they were excluded in parts of canada, on the amazon bestseller list, they are often take of the -- taken off the lgbtq sections. the intolerance of -- i am generalizing here, but in these kind of institutions, left-wing academic institutions, liberal states, very uncomfortable. we saw what happened at stanford, which is a private institution, when a judge was essentially hounded off campus, including by a member of the administration. so i think that the universities are not doing a good job of setting the example for tolerance, nor are some of our blue state governments.

i do think there is a tendency sometimes, because parents are so hypersensitive right now about the material their children are -- there's a tendency to go too far. i do not agree with all the books that have been taken out of circulation. but i would not apply the term book bans to what is happening in schools. >> the phrase, we are going through a national divorce, has been used and was used a little earlier today by kirk, an author and townhall.com -- that we're selecting who we are living with and hanging with. >> i do not know that we are experiencing divorce just yet. i think we are taking a step back to evaluate what our common future is, without giving up on a common future. and i think we still have so much more in common than we have that separates us.

i do think we are consuming different media, and of course breitbart is a part of that. breitbart started to challenge what andrew breitbart saw as the left-wing or liberal dominance of the mainstream media. it exists still today to provide an outlet for conservative voices that would be drowned out or censored under the rules that silicon valley and the mainstream media have tended to apply lately. but i think that most americans still share the same goals for their own lives, for the lives of their children. and i think even though i am engaged every day in politics and political analysis and political reporting, i think that most americans have a healthy relationship with politics where it does not dominate their lives. of course i want people to take an interest because that is what i write about, but it is a sign of mental health when a person says i am informed on the issues but i do not get too involved in

politics. we want people to be involved, it is the essence of democracy, participation in government. but most people have a healthy arm's-length relationship with politics and are willing to put those things aside. there was a statistic year or so ago saying about 14% of all social media users drive most of the fighting on social media and the other 86% are happy to get along and share baby pictures and vacation photos and things like that. >> let's take some calls, they are lining up. let's begin with donald in covina, california. donald, you are on with author joel pollak. >> thank you for having me on. i'm glad joel came on. we are separating so much. pain i was raised as a democrat. -- and i was raised as a democrat.

but i do not want to go there anymore, only because of how it is going. they say that we're lying about things, when it's actually them that lie so much about stuff. >> give us a specific, very quickly, and then we have to move on. >> well, like, uh, biden says that, uh, the prior president was the problem of what we are in. and we all know it's not. so. >> thank you. what did you hear from that caller? >> i think what he is describing is a common experience, certainly when we meet people would disagree with us, sometimes friends and relatives. i have friends who vote democratic and are liberal, left-wing. the reason we maintain those friendships is when we talk about politics, we do not just

avoid politics. we do not try to argue and convince one another. we ask each other questions. tell me why you think this way. tell me what you have heard that lead you to believe this and that. and we leave the issue of converting someone to our point of view aside, the way one would with religion. you have someone from a different faith or church, you do not necessarily try to convert them. you might ask them why they celebrate a holiday this way or why they believe what they believe. i think if the discussion begins with questions, then i think we can get along. it is difficult when people are beating each other over the head with talking points. but once we settled down and listen to each other and show a real interest in finding out how the other person is thinking, we often find that commonality. >> read november came out july 2020. subtitle, will the country vote red for trump or socialism? did we as a country vote for socialism? >> we did. the story about joe biden was

that he was a moderate. but he was only the most moderate of a very left-wing field. if you look at joe biden's political career, it is driven less by convictions on any particular issue and more by an ability to stay roughly at the center of debate within the democratic party. as the party shifted left, so did he. and so what i wrote about in red november was how far the party moved to the left, and that process had produced a nominee who was likely to be the most left-wing president in american history. and i will give you one quick example. after biden had sewn up the nomination, the tendency of candidates is to move towards the center once they have secured the nomination and the primary. they tend to run to the left or the right on the publican side in the primary. once he secured the nomination, he started sounding more left-wing. he used a lot of bernie sanders phrases, because he had to keep the party base engaged. and he governed that way and would have governed it a more left-wing fashion had it not

been for kyrsten sinema and joe manchin dissenting on a few key pieces of legislation. >> neither free nor fair, the 2020 presidential election. december 2020, right after the election. it's going to be updated, you said? >> breitbart.com is rereleasing that. and i wrote that because i wanted to explain, primarily to a conservative audience, what i thought had happened in the election. i said then that we did not yet know the whole story with allegations of voting fraud and voting machines and things like that, but let us focus instead on the things we do know. the censorship, the violence on the streets, the changes of rules at the last minute over the objections of the republican side. let's compare it to the international standard for a free and fair election. i showed how it fell short. so, without getting lost in the land of conspiracies, i tried to explain how you can better articulate the feeling so many conservative voters had

that what happened in 2020 was not right. >> the next call for joel pollak comes from joe in minneapolis. please go ahead. >> thank you for having me. i just wanted to piggyback on what you are saying, joel, talking about each other's point of use and asking questions. i'm noticing there are a lot of clubs for all different types of religions here. my question as a christian would be, are there any steps being taken towards bettering the education, at the education level, at how we reintroduce the biblical precepts our country was founded on? >> there are wonderful things happening, often undertaken by colleges like hillsdale, which has invested a lot in restoring american historical education. i was really pleasantly surprised. we mentioned living in los angeles. my daughter's public school we relive has done a phenomenal job teaching american historyin --

history in a very straightforward, non-woke way. you can talk about slavery and the civil rights movement without veering off into ideological paths. they have done it in a very effective way by teaching the children in the form of musical theater. the children actually perform events that happen in american history. we have seen a play about the constitutional convention. we just saw a play about the lewis and clark expedition. so, i think if we teach children that this history is alive an interesting, that the characters are interesting, i think we can restore that connection to the values that founded our country. >> public schools. >> there are always great teachers in public schools. the system itself is not working too well. we had a three day teachers strike a few days ago, and there is a lot of frustration about the way our schools are run here. california is underperforming. but there are pockets of excellence and definitely teachers who do their absolute

best to get the children the best they can. >> bill, kentucky, you are on book tv with author joel pollak. >> yes, i would like to know what you think about income inequality. can it get too bad? can inequality get too far out of line? and what do you think about company stock buyback, and you think that might be related to income inequality? >> thank you so much. i am going to have to cut you off. >> i think our concern has to be with how the poorest americans are living, more so than the gap between poor and rich. which, i think, will continue to grow, unfortunately, because that is the tendency of wealth. but in the past, our history has been fortunate to have very wealthy people who donated their fortune to worthy causes. we have to be concerned about the welfare of the poorest among us. here in los angeles it is a

particular challenge. we have some 40,000 people who are homeless on the streets right around the scandalous. we have people who are struggling with the fentanyl pandemic, we can call it. and we have crime that is surging here as well. and the cost of living just keeps going up. california was already expensive. but we have to start to adjust the fact that our society is falling short on providing a system through which people can obtain the basics through hard work. i do not like dividing americans into middle, lower, and upper-class. but let's just look at the poorest among us. are they leading fulfilling lives? candy achieve things that they feel good about? and i think the answer right now is no. i do not think the answer is economic redistribution. there's a cultural crisis in america, perhaps a moral crisis, and we can adjust that by getting to know one another, through things like this, the book fair, book tv, and by sharing ideas.

obviously there are more practical steps that have to be taken. i am hopeful that the new mayor of los angeles, karen bass, will have some success. i have given her a chance even though i was very critical of her policies leading up to her election. i think you have to give people a chance, and hopefully we can start to adjust that level. because ronald reagan, as libertarian as he was, as conservative as he was, he began his career as a new deal democrat, and he believed there was a floor through which no one should fall. his problem was the progressive left kept moving things so far to the left it began taking things away from hard-working americans. we still have yet to achieve a consensus on how to address the basic needs of the poorest among us. i think there is a lot of productive room to move forward on that issue. >> peter's in new york city, you are on book tv. go ahead. >> hi. i would just like to know if you had a stomach ache and you went to a taylor and a taylor said,

well, you should have this kind of operation. would you really do it? yet you are willing to take people who have little understanding of what education is about, you have people who are librarians, you have people who are teachers, you have people who are educated, basically. why would you want people who don't have that ability to make those kinds of decisions? >> peter, thank you so much. joel pollak, what is your response to our gentleman caller from new york city? >> i am supposed to be an expert on politics, it is what i do every day. but i am humbled every day by the observations of ordinary people who seem to know much more than me about some issues and some contexts. i do not think we appoint educators as experts. yes, they may know more and we defer to their knowledge on certain subjects. ultimately the parents and the community are in charge of the schools. the educators need to take their

brief from the parents and the community. >> to you and your wife feel heard in the public schools your daughter and kids attend? >> we do feel heard but we have to speak up. we do not feel automatically heard. look, again, it's about relationships primarily. i find that certainly the level of local politics -- you know what is interesting? most people if you ask them who the president is, who the different parties are, more people know more about national politics than they do about their own neighborhood or even city. when you get past the red/blue of national politics and you talk to your neighbors were members of your school board, or the faculty, often there's so much more room for productive discussion then there is when we start introducing all these other ideologies. we have had issues in the past when some schools, not necessarily the ones we are at, have introduced very hot button issues like gun control inside the school. there, we have had to had a

discussion about diversity of views within the school community, and we had to make the administrators aware this is not how everybody thinks. so we have to speak up, but we are heard. >> wto minutes -- two minutes left, we are going to do a 180 here. you are probably the first son-in-law in history to write a biography of your mother-in-law. talk about rhoda. >> she was an anti-apartheid activist in south africa. she was appointed to the human rights commission by nelson mandela. she was a black feminist. by the end of her life she was a conservative trump supporter. she did not label herself as conservative, nor as liberal or left wing, marxist, in the early is of her career. what she was ultimately was someone who believed passionately in freedom. and she stood for human rights and for integrity, and fought against corruption wherever she saw it. she believed trump was a good president for the u.s. because he said he was going to drain the swamp. she saw american politics from

an outsiders point of view and believed america had a lot of swap to drain. so she championed trump as someone who she believed could clean out washington, and she still believed very fervently that that was necessary. i think that traces the long arc of her career. there is so much in this about the long arc of her life. she's an example of someone who really looked beyond race. she grew up in segregated south africa, her family was forcibly removed by the apartheid government. but she said i do not care about the race of the person providing a government service, or employed as an engineer. i care about the quality of the product they are producing, the service, and we have to judge ourselves on that basis, not constantly look back to the grievances of the past. she said despite spirits and the brutality of that racism directly. >> you can read joel pollak's journalism at breitbart.com, where he serves as a senior editor. and all of his books as well.

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