Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…King was a very impressive guy, more impressive, I think, than people think that he was. And what he did is he created his movement from the bottom on up. So he developed real organization, grassroots organization which put pressure on communities and officials to end segregation, to open up voting patterns. And I think what has to also be remembered about King, which is really quite extraordinary, is he won the Nobel Peace Prize. And there was, oh, you’re great, you’re wonderful. But then to the end of his life, he took on Lyndon Johnson on the war in Vietnam. And as soon as he did that, suddenly the editorial pages throughout America, the establishment papers no longer thought he was so great. In fact, the message sent out, “You’re black. Deal with civil rights. Don’t worry about foreign policy. We’ll take care of that.” But he said, “If I talk about peace and nonviolence, I can’t sit back and allow what’s going on in Vietnam to continue without speaking out.” Incredible courage to do that. And by the way, when he was assassinated at a fighting for the rights of AFSCME workers, garbage, guys that delivered the garbage who were treated terribly, low wages, bad working conditions. And he went out to support their right to form a union. That’s when he got killed. So on the war front, one of the things that people don’t often talk about, your work in politics. You gave what I think is a truly brave speech on the Iraq War in 2002, I believe. You voted no on the Iraq Resolution, you voted no on the Patriot Act, and you basically predicted very accurately what would happen if we go into Iraq. What was your thinking at the time behind those speeches, behind voting no on the Patriot Act on the Iraq Resolution? It maybe ironically came out of maybe the war in Vietnam and the ease and lies that people told. We went into Vietnam under a lie. We lost close to 60,000 Americans. Millions of people in the Vietnam and Cambodia died as a result of that. So I think twice about it. And then the war in Iraq, you had people like Dick Cheney and others telling us, “Oh, they have nuclear weapons and all that stuff. It’s the only way we can resolve the issue.” I didn’t believe it. I didn’t agree with it. And you’re right, it turns out, historically, I was right.…

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