In a pretty amazing and amazingly stupid interview on CNN, comedian Kamau Bell says that what he discovered about Chicago is that the gang members don’t want to be gang members, and they can solve all the problems there, they just need money from the government.
Watch below:
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This is just sad. Kamau Bell is a well-meaning guy but he’s absurdly left-leaning which colors everything he does, and he has not a whit of insight into any of these problems. When he talked to Richard Spencer, the alt-right white nationalist, Bell had absolutely nothing to say because he’s never intellectually grappled with the arguments that were presented to him. It’s the same here.
“What surprised me most is when you talk to the gang members, they don’t want to be in the gangs. They feel like it is a life they have to live in, and they actually have the solutions for how to clean up the neighborhoods. They just need resources.”
“It is not a life they want to live, despite all of the rhetoric we hear about — or, you know, what we think we know. This is not a life they want to live. It feels like a life they’ve been backed into.”
Now look, I was raised in a gang-infested neighborhood. I know that people feel like they get trapped into this lifestyle. But ultimately, it’s in their power to escape and make their neighborhood better, and instead they all choose to make it worse.
So here’s the deal.
There are jobs there, they’re just not easy jobs. There are schools there, and they are not great schools. But what people want is to have as easy a road to success as everyone else. And that’s just not in the cards. So you can sit around whining that everyone else has it better and wallow in pity, or you can do the best with what you can and make your life better. They’re NOT choosing to do that.
And the fact that they’re whining to Kamau Bell that they need more government assistance is the proof of it. We live in one of the freest societies on Earth. If enough people in the black and hispanic ghettos of the inner city chose to simply work hard and avoid putting stumbling blocks before themselves, every neighborhood would be improved vastly. And this applies to poor whites in rural areas too.
And I’m not telling you this as a member of a privileged class. My dad was an immigrant to this country and had nothing when he came here, and I grew up very poor. But I had a dad and a mom that stuck together, my dad worked his ass off every day to put food on the table, and their good example inspired me to do much better for myself. While I have sympathy for anyone in this country who feels like they can’t get ahead, I’ve seen too many examples of people with nothing who worked very hard for years and were able to succeed.
So, NO, gang members don’t need government assistance to improve Chicago. They need to stop being gang members and be productive members of society instead.
This is why it’s generally a bad idea to put comedians in charge of anything.