Dr. Cornel West joins Tavis Smiley

0:00Meet the Red Bull Dragonberry Emergizer. It's one of the many new drinks out now. Who knew ice cold drinks could be so fire? Try them all only at McDonald's. It's fall in Jeep country and during the drive into fall sales event get a great deal on four by fours that refuse to be contained like Jeep Wrangler. Confidence built into every drive with the most awarded SUV ever, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and freedom that can't be denied with the open air freedom in Jeep Gladiator. After 85 years, it's no surprise that Jeep became America's SUV brand. Get a great deal during the Jeep drive into fall sales event. Jeep is one more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV brand, Jeep and the Jeep Grill or Registered Trademarks of FCA US LLC. Sounds like Atlantic Star to me, not to call me a West, chooses his own walk on music every Monday and Thursday, time of the second hour. Super shadow, Dr. West. I hear you, man. I hear you. Lord, I'm telling the world,

1:01six different owners, of course, Mississippi. There was a star that spawned the Swiss, or Spirely, and Spirely had a special calling, a special vocation. It said, I want you to be a star to show that your life could shine because you got a calling and a vocation to be the soul of the world to be a force for good to fall in love with black people, to fall in love with people who are suffering and to be constant and consistent your whole life. And here you are now 62 years later, steal constant, steal consistent, let your life shine the way family Lou Hamer would put it, and doing it with style and a smile. So happy birthday brother and thank God for Atlantic Star, because they had their own star shining too. That's brother with a singer, that's the Louis Brothers, David N. Wayne, Wayne, of course, recently passed.

2:01God bless him, his soul and his family. But nevertheless, smiley, he's still on the cutting edge, and I thank God he's my brother. Turn it up, Miles. Turn it up. Turn it up. And my shadow will not silver with the name, and the world will always remember you love. Show it up. Open your shirt. Show me by you. Throw all to the sea. You leave out that silver shadow. My future shadow. Try to tell me of the star I would be. As you can tell, Cornell West is my friend. My friend and my brother, and I love seeing my friends win. I love celebrating my friends,

3:02and it's a beautiful thing. When your friends celebrate you yesterday was, in fact, my 62nd birthday, and I am grateful for another year around the sun, grateful for another chance, another year, to try to get it right. But it's the Bible that I read, not to prostilatize, says that he that had friends must first show himself friendly. And so I grew up for my friends. It's always nice when your friends root for you and celebrate you. So thank you, Dr. West, for the birthday greetings. We'll get to some issues with Dr. West when we come forward here. On to have a smile. Dr. Cornell West, we're honored to have, blessed to have on this program every Monday and Thursday, top of the second hour. And you probably know if you listen to this program with any regularity, the Dr. West was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I grew up, of course, in Sacramento, left Sacramento to go to Harvard, as an undergrad, and never got back to California. So he's one of the East Coast. Most of his life and most of his career. And I was trying to recall, Doc,

4:03where you were exactly when 9-11 hit 25 years ago. Where were you? Brother, I had spent the whole day supporting Fredrick Frittraz, who was going to be the first Puerto Rican mayor of New York City. We had about seven stops that day. I was in the mayor's, I told Tale right there on 42nd Street in Times Square. And I saw the second plane going in. I was right in New York. And it was the first day of school at Harvard. So I somehow, I had to get out of the hotel, get special permission to get in my car and drive back the Cambridge to make sure that I didn't miss my class. And I walked in class three minutes before. So I'll never forget that, though. I'll never forget that. That was something, mate. Obviously, that drive from New York back to Boston back to Cambridge, it gives you a few hours to think.

5:04In that moment, we didn't know all the details. I'm sure you just in the radio as you could and trying to get downloaded. But what do you recall about the way you were processing it on that drive from Manhattan, just literally blocks away from where these planes hit on the right back to Cambridge? What do you recall? You were processing then. I was just wondering, you know, exactly what happened. My mind was open. I didn't want to impose any kind of framework. I was going to wait and see what the evidence was. I just felt so bad about people who had been killed. I've been at that restaurant on many occasions. I'm sure you've been there. Oh, yeah. Top of the... Top of the... Something's not my forget. But I was just thinking about the folk who had been hit. And I said, my God, my God, we shall see exactly what is going on here. The thing about these anniversaries,

6:04sometimes good, sometimes bad, but these moments give us an opportunity if we accept it. We take it seriously, an opportunity for reflection. And so we spent the first hour today talking to Robert Cutner, getting some of his reflections about 9-11, particularly as it relates to the surveillance state, and where we are a quarter century later. I played a clip for him of one of my commas, his recording, Pao, years after 9-11, when he had some time to reflect on the speech he gave to the world, at the UN, wherein he gave a lot of false information. Pretty much everything he said that day was wrong. We now know. And so I had occasion a few times to talk to Colin Powell about that, about that moment. And so I played a clip for Robert Cutner in our one. I saved this clip for you for all the obvious reasons. I don't need to explain it a bit more when Dr. West hears it. I mean, you hear it.

7:05He said, well, he said, well, I understand why I saved this one for him. But take a listen to Colin Powell and yours truly in commas. President Obama has used more drones now than George Bush did. We know that when President Bush left office, he asked President Obama to continue at least two programs that had to do with foreign policy. The President didn't just continue the use of drones. He's increased it. What's your sense of the use of these unmanned vehicles that too often to my mind, at least are killing innocent women and children? Well, let's remember they may be unmanned in the sense that there is no human being, aboard the aircraft, but they're being manned by people who are watching. And they don't just go out and indiscriminately drop bombs and people and nobody's monitoring it. The people who operate these things are using the best intelligence they have. But in a war, which we are in with respect to these terrorists, mistakes will be made. I think that the administration and our military commanders, as we've heard in recent days,

8:05have to do all they can to make absolutely sure of the targets they're going after. And not do it in an indiscriminate way. And sometimes letting a target go if the likelihood of creating or causing collateral damage and killing innocent civilians is a likelihood, then pass. Get the guy another time. But drones are just another weapon. They turn out to be a very effective weapon that puts no American troops at risk. I don't see why we shouldn't use them against identified enemy targets. There are people out there who are trying to get the capability, not only to attack us here, but to kill our soldiers in Afghanistan. And I see no reason why we shouldn't use that weapon against those who would kill us if given the chance. All right, Dr. Westopin. I see Will on that clip from Colin Powell some years ago in Dottalong with me. But there are three words that jumped out at me when I heard that clip. As I said earlier, it's good to have a catalog, good to have a library. And I've been blessed over these 62 years, 35 of those years spent in media,

9:07to talk to pretty much everybody. I'm grateful every day for all the people that I've been honored to talk to over the course of my career. But when I heard that clip, when my producer Jay-Z went into the vault and pulled out my Colin Powell conversations, and I heard that clip, Doc, three words jumped out at me when he said that drones are just another weapon, just another weapon. Well, we know that drones all these years later are not just another weapon. It is the way we do warfare. And it's cowardly to my mind, Colin Powell, where you hear me disagree with me on that? We'd argue about that, and that's okay. But I stand down. Reflect if you will on 9-11, on the use of drones, the growth, the significant growth, the burgeoning growth of our reliance on these unmanned vehicles all these years later. It's all yours, Doc. Take it away. Well, one, no brother, you were one of the few journalists who even asked that question

10:07and filed them up and waited for an answer. So you already got too many complacent, if not downright cowardly journalists, who were so embedded that they didn't want to keep these folks accountable. Now, Colin Powell himself, he knows that these particular drones are having a massive impact on communities that result in what he called collateral damage, but it meant they were killing innocent folk that underbushed, they were already killing innocent folk under Obama. What is it? 546 drones under Obama killing thousands of innocent folk meeting in the White House every Tuesday night to decide who they were going to kill. So, there was one thing for Colin Powell to say, well, I'm never really telling a lie, but he's so locked into a system of mendacity that he becomes then part of the chain

11:09that generates the lies that hide the crime. Even my dear brother, the cutner, you know, brother, the cutner is a national treasure, man. He's been a two-tell-of-a-long time American prospect. I read it every week, but every once in a while, even he can fall into it. He paid the other day, well, Obama's the best of America. I did now, war crimes bailing out Wall Street military, a mass incarceration, reinforced military, militarized and police departments. That did make Obama the best of America, but cutler's telling some other deep truth, and I'm winning 85-90%, but we have to be consistent across the board. When Colin Powell says my speech was written by somebody else who wrote it. We'll call it, Condoleezza Rice told him it was written by those end-of-by-the-presidents office. Oh, so now we got to go to change the exemplar of the two-tellin' and just thinking, please,

12:10please, he's locked into a whole system of mendacity that specializes in hiding crime in order to achieve the aims that they wanted. And the Bush administration wanted to go to war. It was going to justify it one way or the other, and Colin Powell had a reputation of being more honest. If Cheney had given the speech, if Rumsfeld had given the speech, everybody would know they lied because they have a reputation for lying. But here they bring the black manion. They bring in Colin Powell, who has some sense of honor left. And he falls down on his face telling lies quite explicitly to the whole world that he has to live with for the rest of his life. But he was likely to do this clandetation of mendacity, which is what the military industrial complex really is, my brother. No question about it. I was about to say the same thing. You just said that Colin Powell to live with that stain. And that stain isn't a strong word, but that stain on his reputation.

13:12That mark on his reputation. He had to live with that the rest of his life. He of course is deceased now, but that moment. God bless you. I'm a God bless you and a family. That moment followed him to the grave. So he was exploited, used or allowed himself to be exploited, used, I don't know, by the Bush administration. But what that raises for me is what you said a moment ago, I want to come back to. And we could do this all day long if we had the time, but the ways in which even at the highest levels of government, black people do end up being used and exploited. And sometimes they volunteer. My read is sometimes sometimes you are a victim and sometimes you are a volunteer. Colin Powell may have been a victim, but he would even insane that. And God rest his soul. But even insane, the Colin Powell might have been a victim, Colin Powell knew better. And what I mean by new better, he knew the point that Doc made a moment ago that George W. Bush was trying to find any pretext to go to war after 90 level, Colin Powell knew that.

14:17And so I don't know if he was a victim or a volunteer, maybe more victim, but you think about Tim Scott. If that Republican convention last week, you think about Byron Donald, some of the other black folk in real time, you think about Clarence Thomas. These nighos ain't victims, Doc. They're volunteers. They are volunteering to be black faces and high places to mislead people. That's right. Yeah, absolutely right. But it's not just Republican party. Would it be old fascist policies? So, but you got black folk in high places in the Democratic party who will say anything to justify their position to stay on that Democratic party plantation. Yeah. No, it's tragic when I think about again what happened to Colin Powell all those years ago, nearly 25 years later, wrestling with it. I asked a couple of questions of Cutner earlier on the day show that I'm anxious to ask you given the story you told earlier, I've forgotten about that. So that's why I wanted to start with you reminding me where you were 25 years ago. In the minute you start telling the story, I remember I remember it now. I remember talking to you when you got back to back to Cambridge that night.

15:23But what's your sense of the surveillance state all these years later? What's your sense of whether or not we can actually trust the intelligence that we are given? Where are we 25 years after 90? Oh, we're far down the road of not just a surveillance state, but the mechanisms of control that have no accountability whatsoever that resemble very much a neo-fascist police state. That's 25 years later and that's been reinforced by both parties and journalists too often not asking the kind of questions that you asked Colin 25 years ago. They themselves also capitulate. They themselves are also complacent. They themselves do not big, vigilantly support voices and persons who are raising voices against that state because they also are operatives.

16:28They are also in either party, Democrats or Republicans and their jobs and their positions are also too often predicated on staying within that narrow framework that reinforces the surveillance state so much. We are between a rock and a hard place but that's not new for black people. Black freedom movement has always been under surveillance. The black freedom movement has always been targeted. It's always been subject to being crushed by powers that be. I want to close by asking the professor whether or not America learned anything. I have learned anything 25 years later. I don't want to color the question much more than that. But America seems to me to have these moments. These teachable moments that oftentimes end up not teaching us anything. Yeah, that's very real. I see you having my dear sister Barbara Lee on. I always had a black study that Princeton just a year later.

17:32We invited her to come to Princeton right after that vote. We had to keep underground. The death threats were so intense. She was correct. Then she's courageous now going back to Alan. She was a great J. Alpac Smith and of course, Ron Dellum who in many ways the kind of mentor to her. But what we do, what we what we started to show you, we accent the fight back. We accent those who's to be like who choose to be forces for good who choose to be solid earth who choose to be courageous and compassionate, not with a spirit of self righteousness, but a surrender to causes bigger than us because we've been shaped by love's grand. And we keep the fight back, but we're honest about what we fight against. He saw from referred to as a rock star professor. I prefer an R&B professor. I get the point.

18:34There you go. I mean, when they say he's a rock star professor and I laugh because nobody has a way of tying it up and putting a bow on it like Cornell West does. He has a way every Monday and Thursday of starting in one place. I don't care where we go. He got bring it all the way back home. Tie it up, put a bow on it, connect the top with the bottom. That's what you call good commentary. And that's why I'm always on it. To have that Cornell West on this program, Monday and Thursday, toppled the second on. Love you Doc. I'll talk to you soon. Stay strong. Happy birthday, happy birthday. Happy birthday. He is my friend. He is my friend. We go from Cornell West to Barba League when we come forward on Tavismar.