Transcript of 'The Five': Is it time to give up on 'wokeness' after Kamala Harris' loss?

Conrad Harris's bruising loss has got some Democrats wondering if it's time to give up on wokeness. New York Democrat Richie Torres is telling his party, quote, Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like defund the police or from the river to the sea or Latinx. And he elaborated more on CNN.

I have a concern that the far left is pressuring the party to take policy positions that are deeply popular among most Americans. One example is defund the police. If you're speaking to working class people of color, then you would realize that there was never a mass constituency for a movement like defund the police. And so we should be taking positions that are in line with the majority of the markets.

Even the folks over at Morning Joe may think it's time for Democrats to break up with the far left.

Seeing ad after ad after ad in NFL football games saying that taxpayers were going to be funding transgender surgeries for inmates, it's not something that's going to play well in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, among men. They were afraid to respond to it because it might offend some small subset of their base.

You know who's been missing from all this conversation, Harold? Where's Ron Klane, the former chief of staff to Joe Biden? Because he was one of the people who really catered to the far left early on on Green New deal stuff, on all of these things because he wanted their votes for some of the legislation. And now he's nowhere to be found.

Yeah. I listened to my friend Joe Scarborough. I think he's right. I think that Bernie Sanders said some things early that I don't necessarily agree with. Senator Sanders said that Democrats should not be surprised that working class people have abandoned them. He went down a list and enumerated some of the things that he believes in, and he's entitled to those beliefs. But I have a counterargument. I think working class people are capitalists. Working class people don't want to be overtaxed. Working class people don't want to be lorded over and dictated to by rich people, big corporations or politicians who are sanctimonious. If we're going to find our way back to that group, I was in Virginia this morning, near Hot Spring, Virginia, coming back to the airport in Charlottesville, was driving. The number A lot of Trump van signs I saw in these neighborhoods that 25, 30 years ago would have had Democratic Yard signs. It just reminded me of the real answer over the last several years to this political education that Democrats and even Republicans, whose party has been changed and transformed over the last several years, the political education's name is Donald Trump.

I'm not a supporter of Donald Trump, but I'm just trying to understand politics here. I would caution my party, Stop Stop telling Democrats in the country that democracy is dead. Stop telling people that he's Hitler and that we somehow are not going to find our way off a deep, deep cliff. We are the United States of America. As a political party, if we want back in, We can't get ourselves back in by trying to ice ourselves and shut ourselves out. Working class Americans found a voice this election. It's not indefinite or infinite that this voice of Donald Trump will be there for that matter what he's espousing. But right That's how it is. For us to learn from it, we have to learn from it and not get so constipated in the head and diarrhea with the mouth about how bad he is and how bad this moment is. Let's do a little introspection here and figure out what we can do to help working class capitalists capitalize on being Americans again.

Take your probiotics, too. All right. Hey, Judge, one of the things that they did is they were just so hyper-focused on wealthier liberal issues like student loan debt forgiveness. That really made this working class mad.

It made you mad, too. It's all of us. Let's make the working man who made a decision not to go to college or is still paying for his F-150, let's make him pay for the loans of people who are lawyers and doctors. Look, the Democrats did this to themselves. Richie Torres is so right in taking them down. Bernie Sanders is right. They did abandon the working class because what they told the working class was, and this is why the Blue Cities went right with Donald Trump. They said, We're going to defund the police. The police are Hitler, too. Then all of a sudden, the Blue Cities are inundated with crime. Nobody has the ability to protect the minority community. It was the left that said, Hey, let's open the borders. Then the people living in the inner cities were suffering. Their kids were taken out of school so that the immigrants could be in the schools or be in the playgrounds. It was the Democrats who said to young girls in America, Forget We're going to put men in women's sports. You know what I did? I asked my producer and I, Roman, we were sitting there trying to figure out, why would the Democrat Party do this to young girls?

It was like 1.1 1% of the population is transgender. Of that number, less than 100 are in the NCAA. And yet what they wanted to do was destroy every young girl's dreams because we got to champion the transgender Let them have their own game in their own lane. When you take the side of people who need the government and my final example, kids who went to college, the youth vote was with Donald Trump. You know why? Because their parents work hard to put them in school, and they believe in America, and they didn't want to hear that they were oppressors or white supremacists or that they were colonizers. They wanted to raise the American flag. The Democrat Party They created it, and they deserve it.

They put so much more effort into talking about the electric vehicle tax credit than the child tax credit. Now you see them basically having to scramble in California to try to deal with an energy crisis.

Yeah, well, Jeanine's right. I think they panicked after Floyd. When Democrats get nervous, they just start appeasing. They just start giving people things. They're like, Okay, you guys are upset. Here's billions of dollars to BLM. What else you want? Dei jobs? Here's some jobs. You guys hate police? Yeah, we hate police, too. They started kneeling. They literally submitted to the far left. Then it bubbled up to corporate America, bubbled up to sports, and it took over the country. Asians were like, Wait a second. We merit. The Hispanics were like, What's Latinx? All the working class white guys were like, We just want to wear a sombrero on Halloween. Can you guys leave us alone with the pronouns? Then Biden, he should have been the one because he's the old white guy to shut down, but he didn't know what he was doing. Remember, they were just passing him things to sign about equity? He claimed transgender day on Easter Sunday. Fool. Kamala, California girl, doesn't know how to handle any of this stuff. She was like, That's how she got ahead in life. Then Bernie made a point, and I would disagree a little bit about that.

What's your name again, Harold?

My name's Harold Ford Jr.

Bernie's like, can we talk about... It's in your face, Harold. It's in your face, Harold. Thanks, Fudge Jeanine. Bernie's like, can we talk about wages or health care or education? You know the stuff that we always beat Republicans on year after year? That's all. They got hijacked by extremists.