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♪ >> Hey, everybody.

Welcome to box.

I'm David Cruz.

As we head into another election season fought with tension an discord, we are going to talk with professor Eddie glove Gl Glaude Jr. Let's talk to a congressman who decided to give up spending his days in a Victorrian paradise for the stuffy halls of con congress.

Curtis joins us now.

Welcome.

Curtis: thanks, David, it's great to be with you today.

DAVID: You watch to give up coffee for the mess hall at the capital?

Curtis: we love the businesses that we bill down here.

You know, we are in the hospitality business as you said.

And we talk to people all the time.

The country has gone off in a little bit of a different direction.

People are upset.

I felt a real call to this mission because I want to make sure we fight for freedom and security for all New Jerseyans.

We threw our hat.

This country is by the people, for the people and if citizens don't serve, we don't have a government.

DAVID: Full disclosure, it was almost impossible to get you and your opponent, Christine Serrano at the same time.

What sit about her that makes you not want to be in the same room with her?

Curtis: well, the debate that we kicked around having was scheduled after Tammy Murphy where draw from the race.

when Tammy Murphy redrew from the primary that was a seismic shift in the dynamic of the race.

The democrats were consolidat ing around one candidate and getting ready to focus on a general election.

One of our two main opponents in the primary saw that we needed unity as well immediately stepped aside and endorsed our campaign.

We won 14 county endorsements and we're the only campaign to go to all 21 counties and participate in the process.

So we felt it was best to start to focus on the general election and not debate at that time.

DAVID: All right.

So Serrano Glasnow says in that debate and I'm using air quotes.

She would not have voted to ratify the 2020 election.

Is there any doubt in your mind who won the 2020 election?

>> No, there's not.

Joe Biden won the election.

It's been verified.

And you know, voters in New Jersey that I've been talking to are very concerned about election integrity.

But we want to move forward.

We have a race this year in 2024.

And I will tell you this, republicans are motivated to work together, to unify, to get out the vote and to really have a robust turnout this year so we can win in New Jersey.

DAVID: So you seem to have Reich a complicated relationship with -- you seem to have a real complicated with Donald Trump.

You weren't before but you are now a trump supporter.

ry voted for trump in 16 and 2020.

Donald Trump is the leader of the republican party chosen by the voters in this primary process this year nationally.

I'm supporting the entire ticket.

You know, our country is going in the wrong direction.

And quite frankly needs out outsiders business people like me to go to Washington to help fix things.

There are common sense issue that is are upsetting all New Jerseyans.

We talk to them.

Have been talking to them.

And we want to go there and unschakel small business from overregulation and restore opportunity.

Inflation is a massive issue for our voters in New Jersey including two and a half million unaffiliated voters.

Whatever we say about the economy being good the Biden administration says it's around the kitchen tables.

everyone knows how much more groceries cost.

People want law enforcement support.

They want the border closed.

They want to feel safe and secure in their homes again.

And finally, they want their freedom.

They don't want schools keeping secrets from parents about their kids.

So people are motivated in this election cycle.

Donald Trump is at the head of the republican party and is the banner leader for this year's cycle.

We are all in to support a unified republican party top to woman in New Jersey.

We are running to take back this United States senate seat that hasn't been available or open in years and New Jerseyans haven't had a republican senator for 52.

We think we can win it in this cycle.

DAVID: But how do you recon seal support for some of the -- reconcile support for some of the voters find objectionable about the Mauga crowd -- maga crowd.

Isn't trump a loser for the New Jersey state?

>> I'm running for the United States senate seat to represent all New Jerseyans.

I'm running as a republican.

I wown't run as a republican if I didn't support Donald Trump.

And we have a real opportunity this year to win in New Jersey this senate seat and we are very focused on that race.

DAVID: So you're out this week with you first political ad.

Some people might watch it.

We're looking at some of it now.

And noticed that there's not a single person of color in the ad.

That's been a frequent criticism of your party that they don't do enough outreach to minority communities.

Is that a fair criticism and how are you reaching out to be voters of color?

Curtis: we are reaching out to voters of every community of the state and it's our mission to help expand the republican tent.

We were in go Chester with an African-American American candidate.

We love to see the diversity that's permeating our party including people of all kinds of orientations, colors, ethnic backgrounds, religious backgrounds.

We are very excited to see the registration in the republican party of different communities joining with us because of three things.

Many are immigrants, but they came here legally and they don't want to see an open border.

Most are small business people running stores and businesses and they want government off their back.

and finally, they're people of faith, who don't want schools keeping secrets from their parents.

They don't want government intrusion into their home there's a freedom movement in this state and in this country if we think is -- is -- is a bi-product of the extreme woke ideology that's permeated our culture and the post Covid lockdowns.

People are ready to breathe free again.

To give each space and we want to pursue our happiness, domestic tranquility and work back to these core values that made America the land of opportunity.

DAVID: But none of those things, the diversity that you love is represented in that ad.

Curtis: the ad is an ad that we just shot in our home turf here.

And there's a lot of diversity in and around our state.

And we are talking to every single person and community in our state.

DAVID: So you are a pro-choice candidate, yes?

Curtis: I believe that abortion should be safe, legal and rare.

I do think that the federal government was the worst place to try to adjudicate that.

And I'm glad it was returned to the states.

I will tell you this.

The democrats are going to try to make in the biggest issue this fall.

And I think most republican voters agree with me.

And we're not going to let it be the biggest issue because the issues are inflation, the bo border, law enforcement, parental rights.

These issues have awoken New Jersey not just republicans, but independents unaffiliate and democrats.

>> Let's talk about immigration.

you mentioned the bore.

you mentioned it in your ad and republicans have defined this issue for most voters.

What do you do to quell the border situation, and what do you do with 11 million unauthorized people living here now who are part of the fabric of this country?

That's two questions there.

Take on the border first.

Appear then what you do -- and then what you do with the 11 million?

Curtis: I believe the border should be closed to illegal immigration.

It's taxing social resource.

It's concerning people -- DAVID: Close the border, then?

Curtis: to illegal immigration.

We need a real immigration policy that allows people to come here legally and join our country, our society and work.

We are a land of immigrants and I support legal immigration wholeheartedly.

I believe with that second question you asked that the citizen that is are here anyone who has been proven to be convict odd.

-- convicted of a crime should not be here.

DAVID: You're painting wit a broad brush -- Curtis: if any are convicted criminals or have got entangled with law enforcement say that should go home.

DAVID: What about the other 10 and a half million?

>> You know, our company about a third of our employees are first generation Americans.

I was honored in 2016 at the 200th anniversary of congress hall to be sworn in as an honorary judge help naturalize some of our own employees who have gone through an legal process.

It was one of the most moving days of my life.

Those natural liesed citizens have learned more about our civics than many of our graduates than high school and colleges around our nation.

I'm a big advocate for legal immigration.

And I'm a big advocate for a return of our significantics and core values.

DAVID: On the question of the -- return of our civics and core values.

DAVID: On the question of the Israel-Hamas war, is the solution a two-state lose and what role can the U.S. play there?

Curtis: I think Israel has a right to defend itself.

It's one.

our closest allies in the Middle East.

And we have to understand that -- that there could be a cease-fire any minute if Hamas would just release the hostages.

We have to remember that Hamas went and took those citizens, ripped them from their homes and their lives and took them over to Gaza.

So this is the issue at hand and I dope understand why the hostages won't be released and we have a cease-fire.

Did in your mind any cease-fire is contingent on Hamas making the first move there?

Curtis: I believe that they should, yes.

DAVID: Let me move on because I literally ran out of time.

I just want to ask you what your thoughts were on these campus protests if you could do it in 30 seconds.

Curtis: I believe my right to peaceably aacceptable means that I have to let other people peaceably aacceptable.

We have to let all of our citizens live in freedom.

I believe what's happening in these college campuses have gone beyond freedom.

It's discriminatory and intimidation of the Jewish students.

it's violating their civil rights.

>> So the colleges are doing right by breaking them up?

>> I believe so, yes.

DAVID: All right.

Run out of time.

Curtis bashaw.

Good to meet you.

>> See you soon.

DAVID: I hope you enjoy your summer because the fall is going to be something else.

Uncertainty once ag again is calling into question our ability to function as a democracy into this season of chaos comes a new book from Princeton professor, commentator and intellectual man of our town, Eddie glaude Jr. called "we are the leaders we have been looking for."

It brings the professor back to chat box.

Welcome back to the show.

>> Good to see you.

I hope you're doing well.

DAVID: We're trying, man.

We're trying.

The book title is a quote from civil rights icon Ella Baker.

And it suggests that we need to look at our ourselves for solution to our varied crises rather than our so-called leaders.

But done it feel like that challenge comes at a time when we seem least capable of meeting it?

>> Absolutely.

I think, you've identified a key par docs.

-- paradox.

If we're going be the leaders to that we're looking for, we need to become a better people.

I think it rewards selfishness.

It rewards greed.

It rewards a grievance in the like some of what I'm trying to do in the book is for us to become a better people.

When we become better people, we will accepted better people to D.C. DAVID: Let's talk about the book.

I've seen you say that this was a personal journey.

Tell us about the source material here and how it all relates to that -- to that journey.

>> These were lectures I delivered at Harvard.

It's the most important lectures in the feel.

And I decided to use it as an occasion to think about demock schism I was upset in 2011 back over the ways in which people were narrating the black freedom struggle.

They were saying that president Obama's presidency, his presence in the White House was a fulfillment of the black freedom struggle.

I just thought that was wrong.

I wanted to engage my heros the people that were so important in the ways in which I imagine myself as a political actor and as an intellectual.

So I decided to take up the life of Dr. King and mall cox x and Ella baker.

Malcolm x was so important because it had do with my father.

I grew up in the coast of Mississippi.

My father who was the most responsible man I've ever met scared the living daylights out of me.

In some ways he deposited a kind of fear in my gut that I had to kind of prove to myself that I wasn't a coward.

And so I began to embrace heros to allow myself to imagine what it meant to be a man in the world.

And in some ways I lost myself in my imitation of my hero.

I have the goatee because of the importance of mall come x in my -- Malcolm x in my life.

DAVID: So who is the we in the leaders?

>> All of us.

My great grandma ma was right and that means democracy can't work unless we are committed to the values.

Virtue matters, character matters.

If we're not the right kinds of people then democracy can't function because we're trying to throw it into the trash bin with our own self-interests are at stake.

We are all of us who say we're committed to this fragile experiment.

That requires of us a recognition of the diversity that's at the heart of the country.

We have to discover who we are as Americans.

DAVID: Want to touch on that in a second.

Is race and our inability to reconcile what it is to be black in America the fundamental obstacle to getting our democracy healthier?

>> You know, I would put it in a different way.

Race is at the heart of it.

It's, you know, Fredrick Douglas said in July 5th of 1852 that we have a dangerous rep Nile the boss some of the nation.

and that reptile was slavery.

I wouldn't say it's about black folk.

I would say it's about the way in which white folk understand themselves.

Everything flows from this noxious idea that because of with the color of one's skin that somehow you are more valuable of a human being because you consider yourself why and what has followed from that not only in retaliation black people but brown people, native peop peoples in terms of the world and until America gives up the idea that it must be a white nation the vain of old Europe we will never understand our power, it seems to me.

>> We all have to go on this journey to get to this place so we can engage in debate and deliberation together but getting there is not the same trip for everybody as you just alluded to.

You said we refuse to accept who we are and that's a kind of adolescence that can make us monstrous.

Professor glaud e: when you think you're always innocent, it's the perfect execution.

It's built in to allow you to run rampant not only domestically but across the world.

you can do whatever you want to and not be held to account.

We're in the midst of -- our democracy.

The very foundation of craft.

If we don't get clear about our commitment and who we are, we could lose this thing.

That's not hyberbole.

That's the truth.

DAVID: Meanwhile we see attacks on diversity and inclusion from schools government when it seems that that's exactly what the nation needs right now.

>> Yeah, Richard the famous historian said that we're actually in a second redemption, a second lost cause.

It's an interesting kind of description because in the first lost cause, you know, south lost the war, but it -- lost the battle but it won the war.

It won the war of narrative, it won the war of story.

It renarrated what reconstruction was all about.

Those monuments that were put out across the state.

Glorifying the her women of Robert.

lean lye and stone wall Jackson.

All of that happied in a moment of retrenchment where they told the story in a way that narrowed the way of our moral considerations.

And here we are in a moment where we're not -- where we're not clear about who we are where we're not clear about where we're going as a country.

and so we fall back on the tricky magic.

You want to tell story about whiteness so we can feel comfortable about ourselves and other folk can know their place and shut-up.

DAVID: You wrote about the trump years that trump was at the center of all the upheaval but he was not the cause.

This was the ugly underside of the United States.

Trump simply turned the country over so that all of us could see the excrement hiding underneath.

>> Absolutely.

Absolutely.

When we think of our problems as kind of being a singular individual, we lose sight of the historical scope.

There's always been a liberal They has threatened American democracy.

Why did we have the rebellion?

What was the point of the slave revolt?

How are we to think about about police what are we to think about the worker's movement because there were forces to work in the country, the women's movement, forces at work in the country aimed at what?

Exploiting others and deepening their pocket.

Trump is just the manifestation of the rock that's at the heart of country.

He exploits grievances and fierce.

And it's that -- fears.

And it's that toxic cocktail that threatens the republic today.

DAVID: I wanted to touch on some of the protests across the country.

here in Jersey, at FRAN.

Not at Rutgers across the river.

Aside from support for the cause itself, is this part of if process of -- part of the process of people becoming the leader.

>> This general vacation a catastrophic generation.

They've come of age in the midst of mass shooting and political turmoil, economic uncertainty with student loan dead -- debt has surpassed other debts.

And so these young people are fighting for their understanding of the world as it is.

This is really important first so that we don't dismiss them.

As an edge Kay, to I my role is to steward these young people to give them resource and to understand as critical and intelligent human beings in the world.

But we need to understand what they're trying to do here.

They're making a moral and political claim that we are complicit in mass death.

And part of what that requires of us is not necessarily to agree with them but to at least hear it out.

Hear them.

Hear what they're saying to us about the world that we've made and the world that we're make.

So we're in one of those inflection points.

Of course, whenever the country is at an inflection points young people are at the center of it.

DAVID: You say democrats today are Reagan-era republicans.

And while the G.O.P.

has for better or worse found its voice, democrats are what?

>> That's a good question.

You know, wane to be careful.

I don't want to say that all democrats are liberal republicans.

What I'm trying to suggest here is that the democratic party as its currently constituted was a mirror image of the republican party in the age of Reagan.

If the age of Reagan is collapsing then all the institution that is are responding to it are revealing their contradictions as well and so oftentimes democrats find themselves in this position of being nostalgic.

We have to get back to some sense of normalcy.

We've got to get back to this current iteration of this republican party and what I think democrats need do is to be more imaginative to try to understand this divide that has been so central to our entities and question get about the business of speaking to the circumstances of our living in this country.

But you can want -- can't do that when you're trying to appeal to the Regan democrats or maintain your base when you think democrats are the only people to decide elections.

When they continue to define politics then we're there.

DAVID: Where are you today?

>> Nobody loves me but my mother and she could be jibing too.

Whatever happens it depends on what you and me -- what we decide to do.

Hopefully we decide to fight for democracy it seems to me DAVID: Book is called "we are the leaders we have been looking for."

It's been a pleasure talking to professor Eddie glaude Jr.

Thanks for coming on.

>> You take care of yourself.

I appreciate you.

DAVID: That's chat box this week you can follow me at Davidcruzny.

You can January the Q.R.

code on your screen.

For all of us here in chat box, we'll see you next week.

>> Promotional support with chat box is provided by insider nj, a political intelligence network dedicated to New Jersey political news.

InsinN.J.

is giving political players an interactive forum for discussion and insight.

Online at insidernj.com.

♪