nt has once again correctly found exactly the right sweet spot for persuasion in his slogan. And I don't know how many times he has to do this before people get that it's not luck. This isn't luck. This is skill. This is the highest level of branding skill you've ever seen, bar none. I mean, there's nobody close. There's nobody in his category. And I think a lot of it is just sort of a natural talent that he can tell that "Keep America Great" is a better deal.

Now I'm not gonna say he's gonna keep this slogan. He might revise it. You know, everything's an A/B test. If it doesn't go well, maybe not. It doesn't have a great acronym, but in terms of persuasion perfection, it's exactly where it needs to be. Make people afraid of losing what they've already gotten. That's the strongest persuasion lever.

All right, let's talk about something else. Talk about reparations. Here's the topic that will make your head spin. First of all, pretty much everything you're seeing on the topic of reparations so far, if you're watching Fox News, is just all wrong. It's just all fake news reporting on the talk. Why do I say that? The reason I say that is because this is what's happening. The people talking about reparations say, let's have a conversation about reparations. We don't know what that's going to look like, but what is not going to look like, we agree, what is not going to look like is that the people who are not African-American are writing checks to simply give money to the people who are African-American and have some legacy of slavery.

So the people talking about reparations say that's not the plan. That's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to have a conversation and to see if there's some way to make any kind of a change that people would agree on. So then you turn on Fox News and Fox News will say, how can you say you want to make the people who were not slave owners and weren't even here, our families were not even here during slavery, why should we pay for it? And the reparations person will say, we're not even talking about that.

And five minutes later, your next Fox News host will say, how could it be fair to give a check from people who weren't to blame to people who were descendants from people who are already dead? How could that be fair? And the reparations people will say again, nobody's even talking about that. So be aware that almost everything you see on this topic is fake news.

But let me tell you the real news as best I understand it. First of all, I watched some of the hearing. I watched a good deal of it actually, the opening speeches. And I gotta tell you, there's a strong case to be made for reparations.

Now when I said that, what did most of you just think? I just said there's a strong case for reparations. I'll bet 70% of you just said, what do you mean? You can't tell people who were not involved with slavery to write a check to people who are not, we're not even alive then. No, nobody's talking about writing a check. I'm not talking about writing a check. You're not talking about writing a check. And you can see in the comments, right, people have gone a little, boy oh boy, this is moving some stuff from me to you. I don't want any of this. There's nothing you can say to me that's gonna make me think reparations are a good idea.

Watch me change your mind. You're ready? How many of you think I could change your mind in the next few minutes on the topic of whether reparations are a good idea or a bad idea? None of you, right? Wouldn't you say that? None of you think there's anything I could say in the next few minutes that would change your mind on it. You think that, right? Let's see. Give me five minutes, probably less.

Let's just say number one, listening to the people who know the most about the history, etc., including let's say Sheila Jackson Lee and including listening to Cory Booker. I listened to both of their little speeches ahead of the hearings, and they were really good. Really, really good. And I'll tell you what I liked about them. They educated me about, you know, when you think about slavery, it's easy to have this sanitized version that you learned when you were in school. Because when you're in school, you don't learn the bad stuff. When you're in school, you learn that slavery existed and that was bad and that they died and maybe they were punished for things. You say you learned a lot of the bad stuff, but you don't really learn the bad stuff. You don't learn that rape was literally a tool of controlling the slaves. You don't learn the really bad stuff. So when you get a taste of this, it's good to remember it.

Now the first thing I'd say is that if you look at, say, the way Israel has weaponized the Holocaust. Now I think we'd all agree that the Holocaust is one of the worst things, if not the worst thing that ever happened in the entire world. But there are plenty of other horrible human events that are on the same scale, but we don't really talk about them, so they're not weaponized. They don't help the people who are alive today because their stories are sort of disappearing. Israel's very smart. There's power in the story of the Holocaust, and so they keep it alive and use it as an asset, which has a real advantage for Israel. I think it's smart that they do that, and it has power.

What I see is that the folks who are talking about reparations are trying to do some version of that. In other words, they're trying to raise our awareness, how much we care about it, how much we think about it. Is that good? It might be. It's definitely good for the people who might want to weaponize that for some kind of negotiating, etc.

So the first thing I'll say is that we're a democracy or a democratic-like system or republic, and I always respect it when people are doing a good job persuading on something that's a real thing. You know, they're not making it up. There really was the horror of slavery. They're educating us. I'm okay with that. So so far I'm okay with the conversation.

Here's the part you don't know, and here's the clever part. When the folks who are pushing this are talking about forming a committee to talk about it, here's how I think this is gonna go. It seems to me that reparations as a topic won't go away, but there are two problems with it. You can't do it because anything that we talk about in terms of doing it is so unfair to other people. You just can't get there. It's a non-starter. At the same time, you can't not talk about it. So you have something that's hanging over us that you can't fix. It's the worst possible situation. A terrible problem, unfixable.

But it looks to me like there are some very smart people involved with this who are saying exactly what it is that they're trying to do. If you read between the lines, this looks like what they're trying to do. It looks like they're trying to finesse the problem that you have this problem hanging out there that won't go away, the way we feel about slavery and the legacy, etc. At the same time, it can't possibly be fixed with reparations or checks or anything obvious. They want an off-ramp. So the smart people are looking for an off-ramp. And if we're smart too, we'll let them look for it. I don't know if they can find it, but the process of talking about it is valuable.

The fact if you can get you and I and the people who are not descended from slaves, if you and I will take this conversation seriously, we've made progress. We can take it seriously. And then agree with the black community, with every other community. Once we've talked it out, once we've sort of educated the public, re-educated them about the history, then and only then do we have an off-ramp.

And let me give you an example. Did you ever see the movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"? There's the famous opening scene in that where there's a card game and the Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy are there. And the Sundance Kid is a famous gunfighter. He's so fast he'll never lose a gunfight. And somebody accuses him of cheating in the card game, and it looks like they're gonna draw down and there's going to be death right there at the card table because Sundance is starting to talk about, you know, you should stop accusing me of cheating. And Butch Cassidy is trying to talk him down like, don't do it, don't do it. You know why? Because he noticed that this other guy's gonna get killed in a minute, so he doesn't want anybody to get killed.

And then in the famous line, Sundance says, I won't leave unless he asks me to stay. And nobody quite understands what that means, so he has to sort of repeat it a few times. He's looking at the guy like he's gonna kill him in a second. You know, his gun's gonna come out and he's just gonna blow this guy away. He just says again, I won't leave unless he asks me to stay. And then the guy finally gets it. He understands who this is. He realizes it's the Sundance Kid and that he's one second from being dead. And the guy says, would you stay and play? And the Sundance suddenly changes from I'm gonna kill you at any second to, no, I gotta go. He takes up his chips and he walks away.

It seems to me that the smartest people in this conversation about reparations, it looks to me like they're smarter than maybe you thought on the surface. And I'm talking about everybody. You know, I'm not talking just about the civil rights leader types. I'm talking about the Democrats, you know, the generic white Democrats who are part of this. I think they're creating an off-ramp very much like the Sundance Kid. They need to have the conversation before they can say no thank you.

Do you see it yet? You have to have the conversation before you can say no thank you. Doesn't sound the same now, right? Because you're thinking about it and you thought, wait a minute, that's not exactly the way this is being reported. No it's not, because nobody can say what I just said. Nobody can say that this is theater, but really, really useful theater. This is theater in the best sense of government, in the best sense of healing.

I want to have this conversation. I would like to be a constructive part of it. You know, I've already written the pattern. I blogged about it. I've suggested that we should do it. Let me tell you how you could thread this needle and have reparations without any reparations. Are you ready for this? Are you ready for me to tell you how you can have reparations for slavery at the same time there are no reparations for slavery? It can be done, and I think that they're starting to navigate toward it.

Here it is. This is the Hawk Newsome strategy. Hawk Newsome, a leader of Black Lives Matter in New York, once told me one of the smartest things you'll ever hear. He said that if you help the black community, you can't do it without simultaneously helping everybody who's in the same situation. It doesn't matter your ethnicity. The only way you can help the black community, you know, realistically, is in a way that helps everybody.

So hypothetically, if the government said let's do a basket of things that are really good for people at the lowest level of the economic spectrum. We'll do some things to help them get jobs. We'll do some things to help low-income people get to college better. We'll get them better mentors. We'll help them be safe. We'll get them fed better food maybe, because nutrition matters. Maybe we'll work on, wait for it, prison reform. Which of the things I said are black specific? None. None. There's not a single thing I said that is specific to the African-American community.

But if the way we get there, yes, the way we get there to a place where we figured out collectively an agreeable number of things we can do for the people who need the most help, if we can agree on that, it's good for everybody. The African-American community will be primarily responsible for getting that done. They will be one of the biggest beneficiaries just because of the numbers of people who are in different categories. But they will not be the sole beneficiaries, and it will be good for all.

Now my minimum requirement for this is that the only people who will pay for it would be the rich. The rich black, the rich white, the rich brown, rich whatever else. As long as it's the rich, not the middle class. But only the rich who are. Everybody lose me? If only the rich are paying for it and it helps everybody, it's not limited to ethnicity, but it does help the black community more because there might be more of them in a certain economic strata. Would you be against that? Because it would solve two problems. Number one, it would