This Is the Craziest Immigration Battle You Will Ever See

0:00 radical discourse music video launch let's do it this is a crazy one hi there friends fans and foes of dad Saves America John paa here and this Friday I've got a kind of special episode for you because this is a big week for us here at emergent order Foundation which is the organization under which dad Saves America exists and we have a new project that just launched this week and I want to talk about it I

0:28 want to talk about what it is how you as parents and teachers can use it and give you a little preview so I'm going to try to keep it short and encourage you to go check it out this is the Battle of the borders our new rap battle about immigration policy first up is the closed borders side of the argument led by Economist George [Music] boras we are one nation United free to

0:59 keep it that way we need sovereignty a border regulated with Integrity protected by folks we've elected see let's listen to our people's frustration and Take Back Control of immigration the forest borders have brought in Invasion tragedy crisis and exploitation I don't fault those who come to build wealth look at me an immigrant myself we came to this country poorer than poor but did it the right way through the front door this is the primary role of the state to

1:27 defend the rights we each hold a Nate upholding the the law protecting our fate do it to keep our America great so that is the opening verse from the closed restricted borders side of the argument George boras uh whose work has focused on the impact of illegal immigration and low-skilled legal immigration on the wages of workingclass Americans and he is a Harvard Economist he's well recognized as being the leader

1:58 in this field from an arent perspective with a little punch in from the more political voice Steven Miller up in the announcer Booth uh delivering a little more cutting an argument and now let's hear The Other Side Oh what's the fastest way to enrich a nation with freedom wealth and job creation too slow too much hesitation there's a one word answer that's immigration when new folks come they work and they earn and we get the goods that they make in return bless

2:25 culture growth new ideas and F it's a slam don't trade if you check the ter the place of your births like a lottery right the luck of the draw leads to Poverty light cross over a border and wages take flight by a factor five or 10 overnight here's the truth your Distortion exposed The Border's now 95% closed We're a nation of immigrants don't be a coward man get on board for the open B's power slam batt the of the

2:49 migrant immigration Gladiator ready to who's sing the Bel who's scking the fall open the borders out build the wall Battle of the borders out come unknown to the doors in the Thunder who's running again who's still in the zone let come in set so some of you might be thinking what is wrong with you why did you do this who was involved in the making of this insane thing and what are you trying to accomplish here well a

3:18 little backstory is in order first of all this is just a sample it is a long video that goes into a lot of depth about the issue from both sides and it is as evenly portrayed throughout the video and song as you just saw and we tortured ourselves to do that and that is kind of the point you know if you've been a viewer here at dad Saves America that I am not unbiased I don't claim to be

3:44 unbiased I don't claim to be neutral I have a worldview I try to put it Forward especially in these videos here on Friday but one of the things that I am very passionate about is discourse free expression and the Battle of ideas is I am a nerd for this I love it I have been arguing since I was a little kid with my Uncle Bill um in high school and in college and then I kind of had to keep

4:14 my mouth shut about my politics when I started working at MTV back in the early 2000s and then eventually in the aftermath of the financial crisis I decided that I needed to start speaking out again about the issues I cared about and the way I did it was a rap battle I was grappling with the government's response to the financial crisis in 2008 and as part of that I came to believe that the free market answer was the

4:41 right one and that the the sort of big government Keynesian deficit spending stimulus programs like President Barack Obama at the time had passed which now looked puny from hindsight in 20124 that they were a bad idea that they wouldn't work and in fact they didn't work and that only one side of the argument was being heard that was my concern and of course in our media and discourse and news media it was the left of center

5:10 argument it was the pro big government argument and so rather than simply produce a pro capitalism free market video myself and Russ Roberts an economist from Georg Mason University who's been on the show several times as a guest came up with something a little different we made a rap video called fear the boom and bust that actually pitted hyek versus kees in a battle of

5:41 ideas that was fair to both people that steel manned both sides of the argument and the thinking was well that's what you're supposed to do that is how you compete for what is true it's great to be persuasive right you want to hone your rhetoric but if your argument can't compete with the other side you might be wrong and that's become the default

6:11 position I tend to occupy whenever I see someone who's trying to shut down debate or trying to keep people from hearing an argument my default position is they're probably on the wrong side fast forward to today this rap video fear the boom and bust and its sequel fight of the century and then and then a later sequel misus versus Marx comprised a kind of Trilogy of Economics rap battles that have been viewed tens of millions of

6:41 times but more importantly they've been used by students and teachers for a decade all around the world and especially here in the states I have been shocked and surprised by the impact these videos have had many of you may have seen them in class or been shown them in the aftermath of the financial crisis um in fact I have something that I keep with me in my backpack as a momento maybe one of my favorite

7:12 examples of the impact that these videos have had and and of the kind of discourse that I think we all deserve is this this is a book report from a 9-year-old who watched a macroeconomics rap battle with textbook grade economics and summarized it for class when I got this in my email inbox years and years ago it was part of the reason why I quit my job at Spike TV

7:43 to start this organization and why I've dreamed of doing more videos like this and so this video Battle of the borders is the return to form and we've launched it at the YouTube Channel radical discourse freshly rebranded because that is what we need these days we need radical discourse we need a battle of ideas that gets to the root of the things that we're struggling with we need to do battle even with the people

8:14 who say the discourse is white supremacy or is you know the path to Fascism like people like Herbert maruza have argued that battle will take place too over time so that's the point that is what this project radical discourse is all about it is about laying out the arguments that matter to us in a way that's fun and also deep and very very strenuously researched and can stand the test of time and that is kind of the

8:43 part of the answer for the question that you might be wondering which is why did you do this why did you produce this crazy thing music is super powerful and I'm a filmmaker so our team here Jesse the producer and Danielle the director and Brian the creative director and Glenn the writer of the lyrics We all came together to make this thing and we've tortured ourselves on how to make it great how to make it fair how to make

9:14 it educational how to make it something that you as a parent can actually watch with your kids one of the things about this issue for me personally is that I have tended towards open borders actually that has been my sort of libertarian inclination the logic of it I think the arguments that get made for it even though it is a fringe position I think are interesting and yet that is a extreme minority worldview to take and

9:43 so what is interesting about that and I hope instructive is that in in working through this this video I actually found myself getting excited to beef up and make sure that the case for restricted immigration was as strong as it possibly could be to the point where I actually wrote the opening lyrics for George boras in the rap video the point is we have been told a lie it's a multi-layered lie actually the first lie is that objectivity is

10:17 possible or that you can be unbiased I don't think that's a thing I'm not some postmodernist who doesn't believe in truth but I don't believe that we can escape the fact that we have an inclination we have a worldview we have opinions they shape the way we understand the world the second lie is that we can't understand other points of view that empathy is impossible this is the identity woke view of the world that

10:50 in order to understand something you have to be the thing I can't understand the plight of someone who didn't live the life I've lived or that isn't my race or color or Creed or gender also false I actually think one of the things that's so magical about human beings is that we are actually capable of that kind of complexity it's hard but it's possible and that is what these videos are all about they're about presenting

11:23 the strongest versions of ideas even though it's impossible to Escape your worldview even though the people working on it and actually in this case had a very wide range of of views on this issue all from one side to the other and then shifting in between in fact for me personally working on this has moved me from a very sort of rigid sort of Dogma to being not so sure what the right answer

11:54 is that's a fact it is when you grapple with ideas if you're open-minded they can change the way you think and I think that this is a very complex topic it's a really important topic now just to give you a sense of the kind of impact I hope this video has I actually played it for a friend of mine who happens to be an undocumented immigrant from Mexico here in the US which could

12:26 be awkward and was really kind of interesting to see was this person watched it and said wow I've actually not heard the arguments in favor of restricting immigration put this way before in this way they are interesting and compelling and I understand I understand this is someone who personally could be deported and yet had the ability to watch the video hear the

12:57 arguments being made against their own personal self-interest and say that's hm I understand and that is the point that is what we're trying to do with these videos over at radical discourse here on YouTube and at radical discourse. comom it is a new project and and also not new it's also the continuation of the projects that began all of this work for me so that's the why to fill the Gap to

13:28 step into the breach where our discourse in this country has collapsed and where civility has gone to die to model it to say it is possible I want to give you a little window into the how because this is a crazy one we pulled out all the stops I raised a bunch of money from a bunch of different people to make this thing happen it was a philanthropic Endeavor so um that's how it came about financially we are a nonprofit

14:00 organization and so that's what we do um and that's actually what underpin the f funding of the prior rap videos as well these are educational content I think of it as Schoolhouse Rock for the 21st century but the way we did it's pretty cool so first of all we didn't shoot outside we shot in studios in Atlanta Georgia the trillet studios that where a lot of Marvel movies get made on a volume wall this is a giant t TV

14:30 basically that projects the background and it tracks the background with the camera as it moves here's a little here's a little window into behind the scenes as the camera moves around the background adjusts to really make it feel real so why do we do it that way well trying to shoot this outside near

15:02 the actual border wall may have been illegal and would have been punishingly difficult to pull off the Sun moving through the sky would have meant that we wouldn't have as much time to film The Heat would have meant everyone involved would have been completely drenched because I live here in Texas and in August in Texas it's 100° and so it would have been physically impossible to do it any other way we brought together this in Incredible Crew this is the other thing

15:31 that I think is worth knowing you know I came out of traditional entertainment the entertainment industry is overwhelmingly left of center that's just a fact and yet because we were actually tackling this issue with intellectual honesty and a representation of the full argument we had a really politically diverse group of people we had people working on big stuff we had people working on Marvel movies the next week so it is possible to bring people together around

16:02 discourse around radical discourse about the hardest issues in our politics and and that's the other lesson here even in the how even as we you know pulled together various people to work on this thing we were able to come together in common cause to try to bring debate to life especially in classrooms and for our kids so so anyway without further Ado I encourage you I ask you to check

16:33 it out we'll put a box up here where you can click and um there's going to be a lot more of these coming in the in the months and years ahead this is not a one-off we've actually got climate change overpopulation we're exploring a whole range of other subjects what's the true founding of the United States 1619 or 1776 we're going after the the hard topics we're not pulling any punches is we want to model what it looks like to

17:01 hear both sides and to understand them well enough to make their arguments better than sometimes they even make them themselves go check it out make it your Friday viewing coming up next and have a great weekend