Cory Booker is proposing legislation to create a reparations commission. A commission to look into reparations for slavery. Now my first reaction to that was next. Meaning that it's such a nonstarter for a national political campaign that it would make him irrelevant as a candidate. That it would be such a provocative stand that he would not really be a credible candidate for president.

And then I saw that most of the Democrats have to agree with it or at least agree with looking into it or agree to try to make something happen there. And I thought to myself the problem of them being too woke is really displayed in this issue. Because I don't know that any Democratic candidate could win the nomination coming out against that. It would be better if it had never been mentioned in terms of politics.

As soon as the first candidate gets serious about it—and that was Booker—so now that Booker has gotten serious about it, the other candidates have to answer to it. They have to answer a yes or no question. Are you for or against it? I don't think Trump will have trouble with the question, but the Democrats can have real trouble. Because if they say no, they can't get the nomination. And if they say yes, they can't get elected president.

So Cory Booker has set up an almost complete trap, making it impossible for any Democrat to get elected. Am I wrong? Am I wrong that you could not get the nomination now unless you come out in favor of reparations? Because you wouldn't be woke enough if you didn't. And if you do and you get the nomination, Trump is going to slaughter you. Just slaughter it. It's not even going to be close.

Now there's one thing that I don't think we've seen yet. There's something we haven't seen yet. But if Trump ends up running against reparations, you're going to see it. And it's going to look like this. Successful Black people, and even maybe some who are not successful yet, are going to come out and say, fuck that. You give us reparations and it's going to make us look like second-class citizens. There will be Black people very aggressively coming out against this idea because it's going to make them seem like less than regular citizens. So I think you're going to see the reparations thing is a double-edged sword.

On an intellectual, let's say on a scholarly level, you can make a case for it. You know, we're all familiar with what the argument is. That the African-American population of the country has such a disadvantage coming from that legacy that maybe the country owes some kind of an evening. Eventually somebody's going to say, let's be scientific about this. If the argument is—God, can I even say this without losing everything I have? This is one of those questions you have to stop and ask yourself when you talk in public. What I'm going to say is innocent, but how easily it could be taken out of context. Uh, maybe not. Yeah, maybe not. Maybe I will save myself for a better fight. Okay. But we'll maybe circle back to that another day.

Oh no, screw it. I'm just going to say it anyway. If the reparations argument gets serious, somebody's going to say, what is your reference point? In other words, what is your reference point for saying here's where the African-American community is, and what are you comparing it to? When we get to that question of who are you comparing it to, things are going to get ugly. Because somebody, sooner or later, somebody's going to say, how would you be doing if you had never come to this country by force? And they're going to say, I'm not saying this—let me clarify, this is not my opinion—somebody's going to say, how would you have done if you would not come to this country by force as slaves? And they're going to say, should we compare you to the people who didn't come? Is that the right comparison? Because if you compare them to, say, an average African citizen, are they doing better than the average African citizen or worse?

Now do you hear, do you feel how ugly that is? Like that point, that's an ugly point. But somebody's going to say it. And then that argument is going to get really racist and really bad. Because the reparations thing—and by the way, I have written, I have personally written back in 2016 I think, not that long ago, that we should consider reparations. So just to be clear, I have come out saying we should seriously think about a way to do this. Because there's a bad way to do it and there's a good way.

Now I'm going to suggest a way that avoids that ugly problem I just mentioned. The good way to do it is what I'm going to call the Hawk Newsome approach. And I'll give him credit for this. Hawk, as you know, had been—I'm not, I think he's still associated with Black Lives Matter of New York. And his idea was that any policy you do for the country that helps the African-American part of the population ends up helping everybody. And it's one of those points that you have to think about for a while to see that there's actually some depth to the point. That even if you're thinking about helping the African-American community, there's nothing you can do in a rule of law that wouldn't also help everybody who's in a similar situation. Meaning anybody who's got an economic disadvantage, for example.

So if we came up with, let's say reparations is just prioritizing education at the top. Free education. So let me say this. Let's say Bernie Sanders—I'll give Bernie some free advice. If Bernie Sanders says let's make education free as a response to reparations, it's not reparations because it would be free for everybody. College and let's say trade training. So any kind of training for an adult education, an adult skill set, any kind of training would be free, at least as a goal.

If you're Bernie, let's say you're Bernie and you're saying this and you say that this is our way to address reparations without making it unfair to the rest of the population who did not get any advantages from the legacy of slavery. So if you framed it that way, you would simply have taken a whole bunch of priorities and you say, what's our top priority? Free health care, free education, higher minimum wage. What's our priority? And you just say because of reparations we'll make our top priority education because that has a societal benefit but it has an unusually good benefit for anybody who's at the lowest part of the economic situation.

So I'm not saying that would be necessarily the best idea in the world. But what I'm saying is that when you talk about reparations, it could be a really wide conversation and there might actually be a way to do it that even everybody in the country says, huh. Because remember there's always a second benefit to anything that you call reparations that people say is a good idea. The second benefit is the psychological benefit.

I would argue that one of the great powers of this country is a rule of law, treating everybody equally as best we can. You know, we have to tweak this every generation. The laws got to get tweaked to make sure that we're still staying on our brand. But one of the great things this country did was brand itself as a melting pot. So when America branded itself as a melting pot and started to socialize the children with that term, generations grew up saying that one of our powers, one of the powers of being an American, is that we can absorb different cultures and turn that into power.

The United States, probably more than any country—yeah, I'm not a historian, there may be other examples where this has worked—but I would argue that the United States as a manufactured country, meaning we're created by people coming in from lots of different places, we're mostly a manufactured country. Ancient Rome, somebody says there might be another example of this. But probably nobody, at least in the modern times, has done a better job of turning what could be a problem—which is all kinds of different people trying to live together, naturally that would be a problem, right? You would expect it—but we've somehow cleverly managed to turn that into a strength.

And I think that that's legitimate. As many problems as you get from having different types of people, and those are real, those are real problems when you have different types of people living in the same place, I think we've legitimately turned it into a strength. I think that's real and it's amazing and it's a psychological invention. It's a psychological invention as powerful as the steam engine. It was that powerful for creating the America that we have.

So if you have a little bit of a defect in your invention—and I'm going to say the invention is the psychological invention that America is a melting pot and the idea that we do that well and we can convert that into strength. That's the invention. And we've had that invention guiding us for generations. But it's a little bit defective because there's still this problem with our invention that the legacy of slavery is making people uncomfortable in different ways.

So if we could fix just that little tweak with our great invention of the melting pot mental construct, if we could do that at the same time that we're getting people better education, maybe that's a win. Who knows?