CHUCK D, HIP HOP ARTIST: Thank you.
HUGHLEY: You were in the back. You listened. You heard me talking to Michael Steele.
D: It was so exciting, just eloquence across TV.
HUGHLEY: He's an eloquent man. I don't know that I necessarily agree with him but I can honestly say that I never heard -- never heard the Republican agenda articulated so accessibly.
D: About time.
HUGHLEY: Yeah, right. Can hip-hop save the Republican Party?
D: I wouldn't even mix it. Hip-hop needs an infrastructure, an administration that's really showing that it needs help. The record business is in trouble and hip-hop is really seriously, you know, as a fiscal situation in trouble, too. So it needs its own infrastructure instead of figuring out how it can be used to help something else. I think it's a culture, subculture comes out of the people, has got to be given back to the people.
STEELE: Chuck D, that's exactly my point. It's going to the roots. And you just laid it out very clearly. The reality in the black community that it has moved from a slave mentality into a self- empowerment mentality, which is so critically important.
And one of the things I recognized and what moved me into the GOP when I was 17 years old was the idea that this party focused on the individual, the right and the ability of the individual to articulate a vision and a future for themselves and move towards that.
And what struck me about hip-hop as a genre, as music, as whatever you want to call it, a culture, was the fact that you have guys like yourself who come out of the projects, come off the street. Myself, I grew up on Eighth Street in DC. That's a whole different world from where I am right now. And the reality of it is, you took that struggle ...
D: I grew up in Roosevelt, Long Island, it's not the projects. It's where black people live.
STEELE: Where black people live. I'm just saying, where people, stereotypically or otherwise find us living, we moved from that into something different. And the question is, what do you do with it now that you're here?
HUGHLEY: Well, Michael, I agree. I'm telling you, if it were the sign alone -- in other words, the tenets of the Republican Party are amazing and they seem warm and welcome. But when I watch it be applied -- like you didn't have to go much further than the Republican National Convention.
STEELE: Agreed.
HUGHLEY: It literally look[ed] like Nazi Germany. It literally did. I make that point, not only are we not welcome -- not only are we not welcome, but they don't even care what we think. And that ...
STEELE: Well, I'm here now ...
D: I'd like to say I covered the Republican convention in '96 for MTV. I have been involved with the Choose or Lose and Rock the Vote for the last 12 to 20 years. Seriously, their agenda was totally somewhere else, which told me, you know, did not have black people or people of color in mind. They have a big -- they may have the right person to try to sell them. I'm just saying the tricks should be over as using something else to try to get black people. I mean, real talk is going to have to get people of color for real things. I mean, I feel that -- first of all, the two-party system is just played. It has to expand. The Green Party had Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, with issues and dealing with a lot of issue that's we kind of felt but also at the same time maybe the rest of America would have had a problem with it. So it's got to be a situation where maybe three parties, maybe four parties, talk to all of the people, and maybe the whole system being repaired.
HUGHLEY: Well, you're right.
A lot of the things I see Republicans do specifically are reactionary. They'll go, you know what, they don't like Hillary? Let's give them Sarah Palin. They voted for Obama. Let's give them Michael Steele. And the other guy who will not show who he is yet. It is always so plastic, that you go, wow, is this what they think? They think that -- they're missing the entire point of what happened during the Obama transformation. They missed the entire point. And I don't understand that. That's what seems so off-kilter to me.
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