Dr. Cornel West on the Joe Rogan Experience #1325, fact-checked
“Now, of course, part of the question here has to do with, they'll say, well, we wasted this money on the poor. You say, well, wait a minute. Donald Trump just passed a $750 billion military budget.”
What the evidence shows: West asserted that Trump "passed" a $750 billion military budget. The Trump administration's fiscal year 2020 budget proposal, released in March 2019, did request $750 billion in discretionary budget authority for national defense, according to a Congressional Research Service analysis of Office of Management and Budget data, of which roughly $718 billion was for the Department of Defense and the remainder for Department of Energy atomic-energy activities and other defense-related agencies. Congress did not enact that exact figure: the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2020, passed with wide bipartisan margins (377-48 in the House, 86-8 in the Senate) and signed by Trump on December 20, 2019, authorized $738 billion for national defense. The $750 billion figure therefore reflects the administration's initial request rather than the amount ultimately enacted, which was about $12 billion lower, and the bill's passage reflected bipartisan congressional negotiation rather than a unilateral presidential act. Overall the claim is roughly accurate in order of magnitude and directionally correct about a large defense budget increase under Trump, but imprecise about the exact enacted figure and about attributing the outcome to Trump alone.
“what was the last time we checked it was in the 90 percent right of people that are that are killed by drones are actually innocent it's some insane number”
What the evidence shows: West asserted that about 90 percent of people killed in U.S. drone strikes are innocent civilians. Documented reviews of drone strike casualty data place civilian casualty rates far below that figure. A Combating Terrorism Center at West Point analysis cites New America Foundation and Long War Journal studies estimating civilians made up roughly 5 to 6 percent of those killed in Pakistan drone strikes between 2004 and 2011, based on tallies of press accounts. A Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic review of the same trackers' 2011 Pakistan data found that the Long War Journal and New America Foundation likely undercounted civilian deaths, with its own recount of 72 to 155 civilians running as much as 2,300 percent higher than the New America Foundation's minimum tally and 140 percent higher than the Long War Journal's for that year, but still nowhere near a rate of 90 percent of everyone killed. Researchers across these sources agree that official government tallies understate civilian harm and that all estimates are hampered by limited on-the-ground access and reliance on contested 'militant' labeling from anonymous officials, but no reviewed estimate approaches the 90 percent figure West cited. The claim appears to conflate or exaggerate a narrower, contested statistic into a general figure not supported by available casualty-tracking research.
“Martin Luther King Jr. died. Basically a broke man. Gave every penny that he won from the Nobel Prize to the movement. Malcolm X only had $150 in his pocket.”
What the evidence shows: The claim combines two separate historical assertions. The Nobel Prize portion is well documented: King received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and both the National Park Service and the University System of Georgia's Civil Rights Digital Library confirm he accepted it on behalf of the civil rights movement and pledged the prize money to the movement's continued work rather than keeping it personally; historical accounts consistently describe King's personal finances as modest and he left no significant estate at his 1968 assassination. The specific claim that Malcolm X had only $150 in his pocket when he was assassinated in February 1965 is a widely repeated anecdote in popular retellings, but no primary source, biography excerpt, or fact-checking organization reviewed could verify that precise figure. Biographical accounts of Malcolm X, including Manning Marable's biography, describe his finances as precarious after his break from the Nation of Islam (which had controlled most of his assets), supporting the general idea he was not wealthy, but they do not corroborate the exact $150 figure. Overall, the MLK portion of the claim is well-supported; the Malcolm X dollar figure is an unverified, commonly cited detail whose precision cannot be confirmed.
“any time you talk about white supremacy, you've got the John Browns. And you know Mary Ellen Pleasant, who was a black woman who was worth $347 million in the 1840s.”
What the evidence shows: West claimed Mary Ellen Pleasant was worth $347 million in the 1840s. Historical sources show Pleasant received an inheritance from her first husband before remarrying in 1848, but no source discloses its amount, and she did not sail for San Francisco until 1852, at the start of the Gold Rush, arriving with modest means by comparison to her later fortune. She built her wealth over subsequent decades through real estate, mining stock, and other investments, largely in partnership with financier Thomas Bell. The most commonly cited peak figure for Pleasant and Bell's combined fortune is approximately $30 million (equivalent to roughly $745 million today), reached in the mid-to-late 1800s, not $347 million in the 1840s. No source found supports either the $347 million figure or wealth of that scale in the 1840s. The claim is false on both the amount and the decade.
“But the same is true within, let's say, black communities. You've got, okay, 1% of the population in America who own 41% of the wealth.”
What the evidence shows: West stated that the top 1% of the U.S. population owns 41% of the nation's wealth. Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) data for 2019, the year closest to this episode's airing, put the top 1%'s share of total household wealth at 38% under the standard "Bulletin" concept (marketable net worth) and at 33% under the broader "augmented" concept that also counts defined-benefit pension wealth. No Federal Reserve wealth-concentration measure from that era reaches 41%. The claim therefore overstates the actual concentration, though only moderately under the highest applicable Fed estimate (38% vs. 41%) and more substantially under the broader measure (33%). The broader point that U.S. wealth is highly concentrated at the top, and that a large racial wealth gap exists (median White family wealth was about eight times median Black family wealth in 2019, per the Fed), is well-supported, even though the specific 41% figure is not.
“It's very much like our Jewish brothers and sisters felt in 1973. They'd already undergone a genocidal attack, one out of three precious Jews killed.”
What the evidence shows: West stated that "one out of three" Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Historical scholarship consistently puts the death toll at approximately six million Jews out of a pre-war European Jewish population of roughly 9-9.7 million, meaning about two out of three European Jews, not one out of three, were killed. This also represented roughly one-third of the worldwide Jewish population at the time, which may be the source of confusion between the "one-third" and "two-thirds" figures. University Holocaust-studies research guides (Rowan University, Florida Atlantic University) consistently cite the two-thirds-of-European-Jewry figure. The claim understates the proportion of European Jews killed by roughly half.