How to Fool People and Captivate Hearts

In this 13-minute conversation, national treasure Thomas Sowell breaks down some of the ways politicians manipulate language to manipulate voters. The conversation (a classic!) was held during the Obama administration, but the tactics Obama used are still around — and have been for a very long time. During these turbulent times, these methods are worth knowing about so we can recognize them.

Editor’s Note: The transcript that follows was automatically generated and lightly edited, so please be aware there could be typos or other small errors. The Stream is working toward a transcription service that does fast, accurate, and reliable work; thank you in advance for your patience!

00:00:00:17 – 00:00:10:28
Barack Obama got his B.A. from Columbia, his J.D. from Harvard. He taught for a number of years at the University of Chicago Law School. May I suppose that Tom Sowell is duly impressed?

00:00:11:01 – 00:00:19:08
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah. You might say the road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.

00:00:19:10 – 00:00:29:18
Ha ha ha. All right. A few clips of the president of the United States delivering his State of the Union address earlier this year. Clip number one.

00:00:29:21 – 00:00:40:14
Higher education can’t be a luxury. It is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

00:00:40:16 – 00:00:51:21
Higher education an imperative. All he’s asking is that all young Americans should have the same opportunity to get a really good education. That Tom Sowell had. Tom?

00:00:51:23 – 00:01:11:28
I love the way that they use of the word opportunity. You know, I had as much opportunity to become an NBA star as Michael Jordan had. It just happens that there was some difference in skill. And so the same thing with education. There is no point trying to run people through institutions that they have very little interest in.

00:01:12:01 – 00:01:26:24
And they may not be suited for. In fact, I would argue that one of the problems of American education is you have a lot of people in college who have no interest in what a college is supposed to be, nor is there any reason why they should.

00:01:26:27 – 00:01:29:01
And so the intellect, the.

00:01:29:03 – 00:01:40:08
So you watered down the education of the people who are there to get an education because of the people who are not there for that purpose and who, and, and who you’re trying to appease in some way.

00:01:40:10 – 00:01:51:27
And is the impulse that we just saw of Barack Obama and his supporters, to in constantly more and more people run them through college, run them through college.

00:01:51:27 – 00:01:52:06
Yes.

00:01:52:06 – 00:02:01:26
And that’s what? That’s to enhance the standing of intellectuals in society, to teach more and more Americans, to defer to intellectuals. Is that part of what’s going on.

00:02:02:03 – 00:02:03:14
It’s to win votes, frankly.

00:02:03:15 – 00:02:08:17
All right. Straightforward as that. President Obama once again.

00:02:08:20 – 00:02:25:10
I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here. We’ve subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough.

00:02:25:13 – 00:02:27:29
This is pre. This is pre-Solyndra, of course.

00:02:27:29 – 00:02:31:15
Pre-Solyndra. Tom?

00:02:31:15 – 00:02:46:02
You know, this notion of picking out something and calling it a good thing, like education or affordable housing or whatever it might be. Everything is a matter of trade off. God. What? What did the man say there?

00:02:46:05 – 00:02:53:13
That that he will not cede wind or solar or or baddest battery, the battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment.

00:02:53:13 – 00:03:10:21
It’s amazing that here is a man talking about five different industries, in none of which he has the slightest experience. You know, but because he has these degrees from the places you mentioned, he thinks and people have told him how clever he is, he now thinks that he can can do this.

00:03:10:22 – 00:03:11:12
So can you.

00:03:11:18 – 00:03:13:14
No human being on this planet could do this.

00:03:13:15 – 00:03:21:00
Can you explain, Tom, the particular appeal to intellectuals of the kind you describe here of the green movement, of the environmental movement?

00:03:21:02 – 00:03:33:16
Oh, it shows them again in the role they relish. They’re the they’re the wise and noble forcing the rest forcing the rest of us poor dummies to do what’s right. You know, even though we don’t want to.

00:03:33:18 – 00:03:37:09
So it’s what your old friend Karl Marx would have described as the will to power?

00:03:37:11 – 00:03:38:23
Yes.

00:03:38:25 – 00:03:46:19
All right. You don’t want to. You don’t want to cut them a little slack. That’s. I mean, you’re just saying it’s ego and pride and vanity.

00:03:46:22 – 00:03:48:03
Yes.

00:03:48:06 – 00:03:52:09
All right. Once again, the President of the United States.

00:03:52:12 – 00:04:26:16
Tax reform should follow the Buffett Rule. If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30% in taxes. And my Republican friend Tom Coburn is right. Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires. In fact, if you’re earning $1 million a year, you shouldn’t get special tax subsidies or deductions. On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98% of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up.

00:04:26:19 – 00:04:27:10
I love it.

00:04:27:12 – 00:04:29:26
You’re the one’s struggling. Tom?

00:04:29:28 – 00:04:59:03
When people keep their own money, that’s called subsidizing them. I love it. You know, that’s the brilliance of intellectuals that they they they can use words in such a malleable way that they can. I mean, Obama has an absolute talent for saying things that make no sense, but not only sound plausible, but inspiring. You know subsidizing? We’re subsidizing the oil companies when they deduct the cost of doing business in order to arrive at the figure of how much net income they have.

00:04:59:05 – 00:05:00:22
Everybody does that.

00:05:00:25 – 00:05:12:11
Right. So this notion, though, that that if you if you’re rich, you ought to pay more. Straightforward enough. No.

00:05:12:13 – 00:05:15:09
It is straightforward. It’s also straightforward nonsense.

00:05:15:09 – 00:05:18:11
Why is that?

00:05:18:13 – 00:05:26:19
People don’t button. They often speak of people who are rich as people who happen to have money. Right. Extremely few people happen to have money.

00:05:26:21 – 00:05:28:20
There aren’t that many Rockefellers.

00:05:28:23 – 00:05:31:00
Well, but Rockefeller didn’t happen to have.

00:05:31:00 – 00:05:32:04
Money, but his heirs happen.

00:05:32:05 – 00:06:03:28
To have it. Yes. My heirs happen to have money. So you’re going rocker Rockefeller? He. Rockefeller reduced the cost of oil to a fraction of what it had been before him, benefiting millions of people across the country. Therefore, they bought their oil from Rockefeller rather than from people who had more expensive ways of producing oil. For example, one of them being the the use of, tank cars on the railroads, the progressives were livid, that Rockefeller could ship his oil at a cheaper price than the other producers.

00:06:04:00 – 00:06:21:27
It never occurred to them an oil a Rockefeller shipped his oil and tank cars, which are a hell of a lot cheaper to transport than in barrels. I mean, we still measure oil in barrels today, but we ship it and tankers like and that’s how he became a multi-billionaire.

00:06:22:03 – 00:06:29:10
So we know from the study of economic history that wealthy people get wealthy by creating jobs, lowering prices of.

00:06:29:15 – 00:06:29:28
Yes.

00:06:30:05 – 00:06:53:15
Products rather than Bill gates, the richest man in America, one of the richest men in the world, invented and invented an entire industry that simply didn’t. All right. We know all that. And we also know, as we mentioned earlier, that cutting taxes worked to spur economic growth in the 20s. Again, under John Kennedy in the six. Actually, it was Johnson who ended up most of the tax cuts took place.

00:06:53:17 – 00:06:57:01
Let’s call it under the 60s and then again and run Ronald Reagan and.

00:06:57:05 – 00:06:58:06
George W Bush and.

00:06:58:06 – 00:07:11:21
George W Bush. So how is it that he can stand there in the face of this overwhelming evidence and be taken seriously? I’m not asking, though, about Barack Obama as an intellectual. I’m asking about the people listening to him.

00:07:11:23 – 00:07:33:15
That’s the question of the hour. You have people who don’t stop and think you’ve had dumbed down education. You’ve had propagandistic education. And people he’s what he’s saying connects with all those with all those kinds of things. All right. In fact, it goes the other way, too. I was just doing some research on Detroit and its decline, and they kept raising the city income tax.

00:07:33:22 – 00:07:56:09
And every time they raise the tax rate, the tax revenues went down. And in 2008, Charles Gibson, right. Put this to Obama when he was a candidate. It’s like, why are you for raising the tax rate on the rich? Because, you often get more revenue at lower tax rates than at the higher tax rate. And he said, well, it’s a question of social justice.

00:07:56:12 – 00:08:14:07
He doesn’t really care about whether the government raises more revenues. If he can get people mad at the rich and they vote for him. Then the part, then it’s a success. Just as, Coleman Young’s policy is in Detroit, where a great political success for him. It ruined Detroit. But it didn’t just happen.

00:08:14:13 – 00:08:36:07
You and I happen to be reading on a similar subject from 1950 to the present. Two things happened. One was that the population of the United States of America roughly doubled. And the other was that the population of Detroit fell by roughly half. Yes. Unbelievable. All right. You write in intellectuals and Society about the intellectuals view of diplomacy and military affairs.

00:08:36:08 – 00:08:40:15
One last clip of the president of the United States.

00:08:40:17 – 00:08:43:12
Thank you. I’m sitting there.

00:08:43:15 – 00:09:06:21
Look at a run through the power of our diplomacy. A world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, now stands as one. The regime is more isolated than ever before. Its leaders are faced with crippling sanctions. And as long as they shirk their responsibilities, this pressure will not relent.

00:09:06:24 – 00:09:12:09
Tom, will you sleep better tonight? Having heard that?

00:09:12:11 – 00:09:30:02
I mean, time to take a sleeping pill so I can forget it. Then this man has diddle with Iran to the point where where the military people are saying, you know what? Even if we decide to go in and bomb that place, they are so dispersed, so far underground, it’s by no means clear that we can do it.

00:09:30:04 – 00:09:53:28
The time when he was going through all this wonderful diplomacy he talks about was precisely the time when those things were put underground and dispersed. It’s like. It’s like when Hitler was arriving, you know that. As Churchill said at one point, a memorandum could have stopped Hitler, you know, because the power was so lopsided. The on the side of the Western democracies, it’s like they can say, stop rearming or else.

00:09:54:00 – 00:10:00:27
And we can’t do that with. They did. They did a lot with Iran to the point where now we don’t know now.

00:10:00:27 – 00:10:19:13
But there’s something interesting about to me. Whereas with social policy, intellectuals tend to go for the policies that give them greater power, what greater power could an intellectual seek, the military power or the power to blow things up? So why? Oh.

00:10:19:15 – 00:10:37:27
Because oh, because. Because they believe that again, that their intellect is the is the unique factor that is going to save us. And to say that they’re a bunch of military people, are going to be more effective than doing all these terribly clever things that Obama is doing, undermines their whole position.

00:10:38:00 – 00:10:42:00
I see, all right.

00:10:42:02 – 00:11:07:11
While the Obama administration in Washington is not the root cause of the ominous dangers that face this country at home and abroad, it is the embodiment, the personification, and the culmination of dangerous trends that began decades ago. Moreover, it has escalated those dangers to what may be a point of no return, but that such an administration could be elected in the first place.

00:11:07:15 – 00:11:31:26
Headed by a man whose only qualifications to be president of the United States at a dangerous time. In the history of the world where rhetoric, style and symbolism and whose animus against the values and institutions of America had been demonstrated repeatedly over a period of decades beforehand, speaks volumes about the inadequacies of our educational system and the degeneration of our culture.

00:11:31:26 – 00:11:54:10
That Barack Obama in office has often done the exact opposite of what Barack Obama said, as a candidate on issue after issue should not cause half the surprise and disappointment that it has produced in many people who pinned high hopes on him. The really painful surprise is that so many people based their hopes on his words, rather than on the record of his deeds.

00:11:54:10 – 00:12:25:13
What that means is that even if we somehow managed to survive this man’s reckless economic policies at home, and his potentially fatal foreign policy actions and inactions, the gullibility and fecklessness of those voters who put him in the white House will still be there to be exploited by the next master of glib demagoguery and emotional images, who can lead us into another vortex of dangers from which there is no guarantee that we will emerge as a free people, or even as a viable society?

00:12:25:15 – 00:12:52:21
Our concern is not with one man, but with a country. Though history has shown repeatedly that one man in a key position at a crucial time can bring down a whole country in ruins. But history is just one of the things whose neglect has contributed toward the confluence of forces that can produce a perfect storm. When we look back at the decades long erosions and distortions of our educational system, our legal system, and our political system.

00:12:52:24 – 00:13:00:18
We must acknowledge the chilling fact that the kinds of dangers we face now were always inherent in these degenerating trends.