Welcome to Keith and I don't tread on anyone in the
Libertarian Institute. Today I'm joined by Doctor
Wilfred Riley, author of Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me.
I have read the book. I absolutely loved it.
Doctor Riley, where is the best place for people to buy Lies?
My liberal Teacher told Me. Probably the best single place
to buy the book is Amazon because that makes it possible
to look at concentrated sales in one kind of location.
But the book is available, you know, everywhere fine books are
sold, the books carried by, you know, Target, Walmart, Barnes
and Noble, all the major, the major book houses.
But most of the purchasing we've seen goes through Amazon and
that's the easiest way to track purchases.
I have one of the author central pages on there and so forth.
Sounds good. On page 125 you mention the
importance of falsification when looking at historical
narratives. What does it mean to falsify a
historical narrative or general theory?
So you said page 125. Yes.
So this is in reference to colonialism, but specifically it
was the one place in the book you mentioned the importance of
falsifying theories. So before getting into the
specific material, what does it mean to falsify a theory?
Yeah, the the idea of falsification in science really
gets into the philosophy of science.
So this is there's a very famous philosopher of science known as
Karl Popper, who really developed a lot of what would be
thought of as modernistic scientific theory.
So not postmodern, not pre modern, but what when I went to
grad school, almost everybody kind of trained in.
And one of Karl Popper's ideas was simply that there's a whole
formalized scientific method, of course, which is now well beyond
the the four steps he used in high school.
But one of Popper's ideas is simply that the theory is not
really scientific unless you can falsify it, unless you can prove
it wrong. So when you talk to someone
who's a postmodernist 4th wave feminist writer or something
like that, they'll often say, well, I know what I know, which
is that the the world is ruled entirely by wicked men or
something like that, based on my lived experiences.
And so the this paper that I've written is a series of seven
anecdotes about my life growing up as a black girl in New
Orleans. And no, I won't be taking
questions. And the traditional perspective
in science is that that is almost worthless, that you have
to be able to look at the claims that a theory would logically
make and look at the things that would be predictable and
discoverable if the theory was true.
And look at the things that would be predictable and
discoverable if the theory was false and determine whether or
not the theory is true or false. So a claim is only scientific if
it's prone to be falsifiable. For example, if I argue that the
this is actually something that I would be interested in
testing, but that if you are an actual genetic hereditary.
This is one of the groups that debates the topic of IQ.
If you believe that there is human genetic variation in IQ
and athleticism, you would logically expect both the lowest
and highest I QS to be found in Africa.
Just as you would expect the most and least athletic people
or biggest and smallest people to be found in Africa.
Because the widest range of human genetic variation exists
on the African continent. And this is probably true.
Actually, as we get improved schooling in Africa, we see
groups like the Nigerian Igbo. No, I think IQ is very heavily
mostly cultural, but we see groups like the Nigerian Igbo
performing at East Asian levels. We see other countries are still
testing in the 70s. I think that'll change.
But if it doesn't, that's actually a pretty strong
argument for the hereditarian position.
But that whether whoever's right, that's a testable
scientific claim. That's sort of a standard claim
that you'd see a broad IQ range on the continent of Africa and
it would be broader than what you see on the continent of
Europe. I guess the point is that many
postmodern theories aren't testable at all.
And I, I think my point there was that I was agreeing with
Doctor Bruce Gilley that a lot of the things that are said
about Western colonialism aren't testable.
So Doctor Gilley says that when you look at the impact of
Western colonialism on, say, East Africa, which itself is a
pretty civilized region, Zanzibar, Kenya, so on, it was
good. You can look at how many
railroads they had before, you know, the white man came, you
know, what were the Arabs doing? And then you can say, well,
after the white man left, they had state acts.
I believe it was as many rail rights.
So sure there was some war fighting, but the white guys
built a lot of rail rates and built a lot of schools.
This. You can't just say this was a
bad thing. The anti colonial argument tends
to be something along the lines of but what price freedom?
It moves from the testable, it moves from the scientific into
sort of the very airy, you know, the the argument that there's
nothing, there's no price that can ever justify a black man
being ruled over by a white man or something like that.
And what the good doc is saying and what I think I would agree
with is, well, that's a worthless argument.
You can't that's not a scientific argument.
You can't say, well, there's no price that's worth having a
black leader instead of a white leader.
I didn't say that extremely well, but that's just a
meaningless racist nonsense. And I think that very often when
smart people engage awoke and sometimes dissident arguments,
you kind of get that feeling like, what is this horseshit I'm
looking at? You're not, you're not making a
claim. You're just you're sort of just
saying things. This is like the essay sort of
arguments, like when people start saying it as a Christian,
as a black girl, and you just kind of look at the text and
you're like, OK, this probably isn't going to be something that
I can break down in mathematical terms, right?
You mentioned in that section, I know you just touched on this,
but you said in every transition there are trade-offs.
Why is that something important? Well, that that again, I mean,
so we're we're really just kind of breaking down.
I think this might be kind of for the benefit of the audience.
We're just breaking down some of these core principles in
economics and political science. I mean, this is the great we
already did Karl Popper. This is the great Tom Soul who's
giving advice to leaders in basic economics.
And he says, remember, there were very few solutions.
There are a lot of trade-offs. So a solution when you're
thinking from a leadership perspective is a decision that
eliminates a problem with very few corresponding new or
reciprocal problems. So you just, you know, you
eliminate the issue, you get it out of the way.
There may be a cost upfront and say cash money, but then it's
gone. In reality, what you most often
encounter are trade-offs where you eliminate a problem, but in
doing so you create one or more slightly smaller problems.
The classic example that's sometimes used is the green
revolution in foods. We had a problem in the world
with starvation. I mean, a large number of
countries like Vietnam was not uncommon for natural starvation
diseases like Coachacore to be very prevalent among young kids.
So we literally developed, and the Western world deserves a lot
of credit for this. We developed, for example, new
varieties of rice and wheat that, you know, but not but
that, you know, more rapidly or whatever.
And so we were able to feed more people.
But the flip side of this is that as more food became
available in a, you know, happily capitalist, rapidly
processing world, people became more obese.
So we're now dealing with these problems of obesity, and in
fact, the total number of deaths from misconsumption of food has
remained quite similar. So it's very hard to solve a
problem. It's very hard to eliminate an
issue like bad diet. What you normally do is you
knock down one mole, and anyone who's been in the leadership
role knows this, and then another problem comes about as a
result of that. So for example, men and women
interact in a set of predictable ways.
The two groups are sexually attracted to one another.
Offices interestingly, they've always been hotbeds of actual
sex, something you find out kind of disturbingly, if you're ever
in charge of running an office building.
And so you have to you have to kind of deal with that.
Now traditionally in the past, businesses have had a kind of
ass slapping sort of harassment culture in place, which is is
annoying. No one really improved fit.
So you've seen movements like me too that are designed to kind of
clutch that. The problem turned out to be
that many men and a surprising number of women sort of liked
that and it became part of internship.
And as people became more and more afraid of dubious
harassment charges, you've seen a shunk decline in mentorship,
especially mentorship cross sexual lines.
So mentorship, which is a key part of the junior executives
life for men of women and by the way for women of young men has
dropped something crazy 7080%. So it's very hard to just get
rid of a problem. You normally get rid of one
element of a problem and then immediately face another element
of a problem. So we're in corporate America.
I don't even know what they're going to do about the mentorship
issue. It seems like they're now trying
to bring back things like retreats where they isolate
people together and so on. They're just going to return to,
you know, what was, what was going on before.
So that is, it's the circle of life.
They always have a number of trade-offs in mind when I say,
you know, I think it'd be really important and empowering if
parents had school choice and they weren't restricted to
whatever district they have. Immediately you get a long list
from the progressives about all the terrible downsides of if
parents or black parents we could use specifically had the
freedom to choose. Well, unfortunately a lot of the
parents are ignorant and they wouldn't know what school to
sell them to. This might allocate money away
from poorer schools and give it to richer schools that already
have enough funding. They have a huge list when you
want to introduce one new little freedom, they have a ton of
list. But when it's like, well, you're
changing who is calling the shots for a number of African
countries, they're like, Nope, no tradeoffs, that there's only
a benefit and that's increase in freedom.
So it's certainly seems like they accept this principle, but
only in certain aspects of of life.
When it comes to trade-offs, let's look at very difficult
examples of people who supported slavery or at least opposed
abolitionism when it came to opposing busing, when it came to
opposing civil rights, when it came to opposing gay rights.
What were some of the trade-offs and constraints that people at
the time were facing when they were looking at issues like
this? Well, I think those are those
things are all very different from our moral standpoint today.
What I want to say, of course, is that our moral standpoint
today is a very unusual 1. So this gets into the whole idea
of presentism, which is that you can't judge the opinions for the
behaviors of people in the past by the moral standards of today.
Most social scientists, including me, think that
ultimate morals don't exist at all.
I mean, whether God agrees with that, I suppose, is a discussion
you'll have with him or her after death if you know such a
being exists. But in terms of the codes in
society that, like an honorable warrior, follows, there are
about 12 things that are universal over time.
And I'm I'm willing to concede those are things like don't rape
kids, few exceptions, southern ancient Greece and so on.
But in general, like everyone kind of agrees on that one.
Don't eat people unless you're starving it.
OK, Beyond those 12 baselines or anthropologists, I think you're
adding another one or two. The reality is that the basic
opinions on things like sexuality, the consumption of
psychedelics and other drugs, consensual dueling among males,
rating and trading like almost everything have actually varied
widely across society to a point where it's kind of silly to
pretend this isn't true. I mean if you compare highly
civilized cultures, the Romans, the Aztecs, the Japanese, the
Arabs and US today, the Americans, the the core ideas on
almost everything are completely at odds with one another.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson, who's often criticized by contemporary
kind of pro woman or pro black scholars as being a rapist and
so on, would be absolutely horrified by only fans where,
you know, the day you turn 18, you can go online as an actual
prostitute and start having anal sex with strangers and make
millions of dollars. So I mean, I'm not entirely sure
we're in a moral position using most standard Christian or
Muslim or whatever codes of ethics to criticize, you know,
most groups of people in the past.
So the the non present is standard you would use.
I think if we're looking at people in moral terms would be
sort of, you know, if we accept these rules at all.
How did people do in the context of the morality of their arrows?
It's just meaningless in in their society.
It's just meaningless to look at Shaka Zulu and say, well, he was
a rapist slave trader. Well, of course, because he was
an African cake. I mean, it, it, there's no,
there's no context in which Shaka Zulu would be expected to
have host Christian quote UN quote slave morality.
It's just absolutely absurd. You'd have to find a Zulu or by
the way, an almost identical Viking standard and hold him to
that. By that standard, he was a bit
crazy, but he's a pretty good, pretty good leader.
I mean, I've heard of the entire country for his people.
But anyway, so the point that I'm making here is it might
sound absurd to us to look at the idea of trade-offs in some
of these situations, but that's because we're imagining the
existence of a moral system that even today we imperfectly follow
and which no one alive at this time, of course, had ever even
heard of. So, I mean, in the case of
fraying the slaves, they're obviously a large number of
potential trade-offs that were envisioned.
The the most basic was that in in America where it was
understood that violence would be required for that you'd have
to fight a massive bloody war to set the, the enslaved population
free. I mean, that's that we forget
this now because we accept that the Civil War took place, but
the Civil War was the most violent military conflict in
American history. The total number of casualties
was about 620,000. And brother fought brother in
the South, one in four fighting men, men of military age and
reasonable physical fitness was killed or injured.
I mean, there were also a number of battle casualties beyond the
620 thousand were killed. So people had their legs blown
off, their arms blown off. So on every building in the
South over two stories, at least along Sherman and Grant, some
marches was burned to the ground.
So that was the primary trade off.
We knew we were going to have to do this.
And then the question was, what do you do with the freed slaves?
You're you're going to have a population of people from
another society. And all of these were warrior
societies at the time. These were bought to West
Africans mostly, many of whom had only been in slavery for a
couple of generations. If one, in some cases another
population from another reasonably developed society
that didn't much like this society in the country, what are
you going to do with them? Are they going to assimilate or
are you going to have a permanently hostile, you know,
quote UN quote alien minority in the country?
And in fact, whites and blacks have adjusted to one another
fairly well by world standards in the USA.
But the the primary idea at the time was actually what was
called colonization. We were going to take black
Americans and send them back to Africa.
And that actually led to the creation of the nation of
Liberia, which is one of those great historical stories where,
I mean, under a black general, a bunch of black freed slaves came
back to Africa and took over a country.
I mean, they had conquered the local people.
They built a pretty good sized city.
They set themselves up as kings. They established a local
democracy, at least for the descendants of American slaves,
so on down the line. But, you know, the, those are
the obvious trade-offs. What is what's going to be
required to free this group of people?
And then what's going to happen to them?
Is there going to be constant, incessant lower level racial
warfare? In terms of the other two cases,
the the trade-offs are a lot clearer.
I think most people today and even many people in that era
would say, well, slavery is bad, it can't have slaves.
But in terms of busing, for example, busing, the trade-offs
obviously outweighed any of the benefits.
That's why we stopped busing. Busing, for those that don't
know, is the practice of taking people from school with one
racial composition and moving them to a school with another
racial composition to get sort of racial equity between the two
schools. And busing was extraordinarily
unpopular during the 60s and 70s.
And in part this was because wealthy schools almost
invariably managed to avoid busing.
So what you'd have is sort of like South Boston High School,
which is a legendary Irish and Italian high school, being
bused, and combined with Roxbury High School, which is a high
school in a black ghetto, and the results were pretty much
what you'd expect. They were like the football team
was pretty good, but if you went to the school, there was this
constant violence and brawling, you know, 50% non attendance, a
lot of interracial sex and hooking up apparently on both
sides. But you know, a lot, a lot of
people became pregnant and eventually they just
discontinued the experiment. But the, the trade off there.
On the one hand, I guess the benefit is you're seeing racial
integration, which was presumed to be a good in, in and of
itself. The negative is that you're
seeing violence, you're seeing lowered educational performance.
You're seeing, I'm sure you're seeing people become more
racist. I mean, like I had a lot of
buddies along ethnic lines, but I went to an integrated quote UN
quote hood school in the 90s. We had blacks, Hispanics,
Irishmen, Italians, all that. And I mean, it's got a long 5,
but I'm not sure it it reduced stereotyping.
I'm not sure people left thinking that African Americans
or poor whites were less criminal than they had believed
when they went in. So busing, I mean, the the
trade-offs or the negative backlashes outweighed the
benefits. Gay rights is an interesting
one. Not to just yap on for 10
minutes straight, but I think that when most people who were
urban kids who enjoy dancing and sex, I mean, like I was a former
raver when most people who were in one of the city scenes, hey,
punk, hip hop, whatever, talk about gay marriage.
It's with a little kind of disillusionment because the
assumption in the 90s, the 80s and 90s was just this was one of
the yeah, OK, whatever, Rocky Horror, like we'll push it
through. This is the last civil rights
movement, God damn it. We'll get our gay buddies their
rights, then it's over. Everybody shuts up.
We already heard this from the blacks.
The Irish got theirs in the 40s, Jews, but that around the same
time women where we have all these feminists all over the
place. This is the last one.
And I think that gay marriage seems like a really basic thing,
like what the gay movement, the gay activist movement HRC Solon
was asking for was to become bourgeois.
And to some extent that's really deep.
I mean, other than Martin Luther King, that's not what any
radicals before had really ever asked for.
You know, the, the core of the feminist movement was, you know,
equal rights and checking accounts, Sure.
But also we wanted to demolish many of the traditional gender
roles, which is, by the way, a terrible idea.
On the core of the black radicals, the Huey Newtons and
so on was, you know, we want to violently take over X percent of
the leadership slots or change the structure of society or make
society more Marxist. A lot of incoherent demands, but
gay people are just saying like, look, we want a cat by the fire.
We want to mainstream this type of love, which has been very
common since ancient grace. So I mean, initially there
didn't seem to be any trade-offs at all.
This is something where you saw support kind of, we call this a
ski slope graph. We saw support go up just
dramatically through the 70s, eighties, 90s O OS.
You might correct some of those decades, but the gay marriage
with the state laws beginning in the O OS and then Obergefell
became a reality. I think we saw subsequently that
the one trade off was acceptance of movements traditionally
considered deviant. Blame the gay community for this
at all, actually. But immediately following the O
Berserfeld decision, I actually was a canvasser for the Human
Rights Campaign for I was a canvas manager.
Like I took a lot of our teams out in Chicago for like years
now. I did it as a college job.
I wasn't like, I don't have a rainbow flag tattooed on my body
or anything. It was kind of moving, you know,
we saw some wins. I actually quit.
I quit this and got a job on basically the trading floor.
It was a sales bullpen. We weren't primarily in
security, but very high end, like 6 figure deals.
I quit and got that first sort of junior executive job like the
year before Albergefell happened.
So I was fairly tied into all of this.
And when gay marriage passed, I mean, I remember calling some of
my old friends and saying again, hey, that's it.
This is this is over. I'll never see another one of
those damn HRC fundraising letters again.
Because by this point I started making money and they were
contacting me like. You know, 2% of $300,000 is
only, you know, So I thought this was the end of it.
And the next year I remember as their fundraising cycle and they
sent me this brightly colored missive that had a new flag on
it. It was pink, white and blue.
And it was like, Are you ready to support our transgender
rights campaign? I, it was, it was what they call
foreshadowing in the writers trade.
Like, I didn't quite know what it was yet, but it was like, oh,
they didn't stop fundraising. They didn't take a two year
break like some of their executives implied they were
going to. It's this new thing.
And I don't, I don't really know what this is yet, but I, I think
the trade off was that as the gay community got through the
door, we found out that many, many more people had identified
sexually in ways that were not yet being talked about.
So I mean, like kink was something that like your girl
would ask you to do at 1:00 AM. Like there wasn't a BDSM
community, there weren't people walking around with, you know,
the sex worker red umbrellas or with like balls in their mouth
in public or with like sub collars on even in downtown
Chicago at this time. And any of the the other things
that went along with that being not trans or people with gender
dysphoria, I'm sure, but like being non binary didn't exist.
Being ace, Like the idea that if you wait three days to have sex,
you have a sexual identity that didn't exist.
So all of that kind of came through the door next.
And I get the feeling from old lion gay male buddies that the
gay community has almost been pushed out of the gay movement
where the rainbow flag now is a block of all this crap and then
just the actual rainbow flag. So that that I think was the
trade off. It was a subtle and submerged
trade off that as you extend equality, you recognize that
they're always going to be more minorities.
The most impressive, or I shouldn't say impressive, the
most surprising statistic you give is you're quoting either
Gallup or the New York Times from the 70s where you say 4% of
white supported busing, which I figured it'd be something like
that, and 9% of blacks did. That shocked me because the way
it's sold is these people were fighting for these busing
rights, but the whites in power just wouldn't give it to him.
And then the blacks finally won their rights.
So to find out that it was 9% was very shocking.
I want to keep going in this direction.
You have a section on white flight.
Here is how white flight is summarized by Ibrahim X Candy.
He says the ghetto had expanded into the 20th century, and it
swallowed millions of black people migrating from the South
to western and northern cities like Philadelphia.
White flight followed, but the word ghetto, as it migrated to
Main Street of American vocabulary, did not conjure a
series of racist policies that enabled white flight and black
abandonment. Instead, ghetto began to
describe unrespectable black behavior on the N broad streets
of the country. What is left out of the white
flight narrative that Ibram X Kenti tells us about?
Well, I think there are two different things there that are
worth pointing out. So first of all, when you, you
seemed a little surprised that only 9% of blacks supported
busing. It's it's worth recalling when I
said there were different moral systems in previous societies.
It's worth recalling that the moral systems of previous
societies worked pretty well. This is a point that I try to
emphasize. So I mean, obviously no one
wants to return to these in entirety, but like when you talk
about the somewhat segregated, say Upper S, lower North, the
the system wasn't one where if you saw a black guy or a white
guy walk by you on the street, you had to fight it.
What that meant is that there were things like restrictive
covenants in place in terms of who you could transfer your
business to, anyone black or white, ethnic white.
There was some question about the how Jews, Irishmen, so on
ranked in societies. I'm sure you understand, but I
mean, like any of these groups could own a business.
In fact, it was much easier to do that at this time and so many
ways this was a much better society.
Members of all of these groups were expected to take care of
their children. Very little tolerance for father
abandoned and so on down the line.
There is just one problem in society, which is that racism
was more sure there are other problems.
We're fighting the Russians or whatever in terms of race
relations. The sole problem was that racism
was more tolerated. I mean, the black business
sector, if you think about black Wall Street and so on, was in
fact significantly stronger at this time.
So what you had was a pattern of separation of neighborhoods of
the kind that you'd find and say upper middle class India Today
where you'd have the blacks here and then the Italians and the
Irishmen and Anglo whites. They might have gotten the one
hill in town Anglo whites. They didn't have like your one
block Chinese neighborhood and so on.
You're talking about a mid sized Midwestern city here.
And these people didn't hate each other or love each other,
just didn't interact with each other very much.
And there was some legal discriminations in place against
the members of technical minority groups.
No one approves of that. But the idea that the black
school in town would have been wildly nonfunctional is, again,
a presentest assumption. Tom Soul actually looked at the
black schools in New York in the 1940s and has a quote about this
where he says, well, no, in Harlem.
I mean, sometimes we outperformed them.
He's talking about ethnic whites in the Lower East Side.
And sometimes they outperformed us.
Now, all of us would have been testing it like IQ 89 at this
point, but there weren't any major differences within that
working class Clay, to the population.
And as far as I can tell from checking his data, that's
correct. So I mean, the things that
really devastated the black community where when you think
of a black community, you think of and again, this, this might
have been a little different in the South.
I'm sure there were some kind of third world like villages
adjacent to plantations and so on.
That's not something I've researched.
But if you're talking about a black community in Cedar Rapids,
IA, in 1950, I mean, the things that are associated with ghettos
today, like widespread fatherlessness, high crime
involving guns and knives, that kind of thing, those would not
have been any more visible or certainly they wouldn't have
been more than twice as visible than they were in surrounding
rape communities. So I mean, the getting to the
point where they were very common took a lot of things,
some of which had to do with racism, most of which didn't.
I mean, you're talking primarily about Lyndon Baines Johnson's
Great Society welfare programs. Like everyone on the right says
this like we're invoking our catechism.
That's because we're career, right?
I mean, there was literally a program, pay per child welfare,
where you got a certain amount of money, usually in the
hundreds of dollars. If you had another kid.
One caveat was that you couldn't have a married male in your
house. This absolutely destroyed both
black and poor white families. I still see its impacts.
Down here in Appalachia. We don't have a lot of black
people. So, I mean, you had this, you
had the liberalization of the justice system in the 1960s,
blah, blah, blah. But the the basic idea that
black people lived in dysfunctional squalor in at
least the Upper South or the Midwest or whatever, and would
be expected to want to be around whites during a time when the
two groups were clashing. Yeah.
There's there's really not much basis for that at all.
And I think this is true whenever we look back at these
historical roles. So, I mean, I think, for
example, feminist writers, and I don't mean to bash the feminists
here. I've been arguing with them
online for a couple weeks. Obviously it's good that we have
women's rights and you could be an executive as a woman and so
on. You know, men now know what
female orgasms are like. There are a lot of positives
that have come out of feminism. But I mean, the one of the
things the feminists did was very intentionally, if you read
the Beauvoir later, it's on target housewifery and try to
dishonestly present the idea of being a healthy mother to your
kids as unappealing because this is such a natural role for so
many women in particular, but so many members of couples.
So I think a lot of people would sort of default assume that the
the existence of, you know, an upper middle class woman in 1955
was sort of horrible. Like you're on pills, you can't
have your own money, your husband physically or sexually
abuses you. Not really.
I mean, there were some problems with the law at this time, like
marital rape technically wasn't possible in either direction,
although statistically it was not particularly common.
I'll also note like the physical abuse wasn't possible against
men generally. So like if your wife hits you
with a skillet, you couldn't press charges.
But overall, like in the typical family, women ran the budgeting
so your husband would come home with a pay envelope and give it
to you and you'd make all the purchases for the household.
Like actual reports of domestic violence, like some of this may
have been due to reluctance to complain or something like that,
but were significantly, significantly lower than they
are now. Where you have a lot of people
that are not married living together in sort of family style
situation shifts with multiple kids from different
relationships and so on. So I mean, the basic idea that
women running the home and men working outside it was totally
unsustainable and men were brutalizing their wives and
wives are stabbing their husbands and so on.
There's, I mean, the murder rate was sort of what it is today.
There's no evidence of that at all.
So anyway, the the basic idea that systems that we now
disapprove of because they had real flaws, like it is good we
have female executives now, but that those systems were non
functional and they endured for 100 years just for some reason
that that doesn't ever stand up. It never makes sense.
But to get to your point, and I'll because I went on about
that for like 5 minutes, I'll say this quickly.
Like Candy is kind of doing this a, a variation of what I'm
criticizing when he talks about like the language he used there,
like the ghetto just spread. It just expanded.
Whites began using the term the ghetto to describe the black
people. It's as though he's describing
magic. And this is the usual
description of white flight. Like as black people came to the
north for no reason or for because of pure racism, a second
phenomenon happened, which is that white people began to
leave. And I, I think that it's, you
know, sounds a little brutal to put it this way, but people like
Tom Soul would say, well, no, there's an obvious
interrelationship here as black people.
And by the way, the 1st wave of third world immigrants came to
the North. And as policing liberalized
behavior, there's the intervening X variable here
caused many people to leave the urban inner cities.
Like, so white flight didn't happen in a vacuum, basically.
Like as you had a lot of black migrants from the higher crime
South and support white migrants as well.
And as you had a large number of immigrants from generally higher
crime states, crime increased. And as crime increased, a lot of
people fled the cities. So I mean, there was some racism
tied in here. I mean, there was a practice
called Blockbuster, but even that it wasn't just like racist
guys decided to leave. It was sketchy law firms,
generally led by people on what we call the left Democratic
contributors hauling up these ethnic neighborhoods and saying
like, hey, buddy, you know, they're coming in, you better
sell now or you're going to lose everything you have.
You know, there was there was a concerted effort by kind of
sleazy downtown businessman to move people out of these
traditional, you know, Irish, Italian, whatever neighborhoods.
So as you had people moving in, you had crime increasing and you
had people really try to push out the people that were living
there so they can take these houses on the cheap.
You saw people leave. You didn't just see people leave
because they was racist. One final statistic on crime.
Let me actually pull this up. It's a site I often use to make
this point. This is Disaster Center.
It's one of the few sites that puts together both the BJS and
UCR crime numbers. OK so crime increased by about
500% and black crime increased by about 800% between the years
1963 and 1993. The center right columnist Mona
Sharon has a great book about this called Do Gooders.
But OK so in 1963 let's look at murders.
You had 8530 murders according to disastercenter.com.
Now in 1993 when I was roaming the the streets of Chicago in my
giant rave Jinko's, you had 24,530 murders.
So I mean during the period when white flight was occurring, like
murder in the cities went from, you know, 8000 with basically
the same population. We're talking about a 2530 year
window to 25,000. Aggravated assault in 63 is
174,210. Let's see what it is in 93,
1,135,610. So I mean, that's that's a huge
part of the white flight story that it would just became
untenable, as Jack Cashell puts it, to live in a lot of these
neighborhoods. And you also said, is it
reasonable that transportation, access to transportation,
actually increased the amount of all people moving?
For example, candy just runs over the fact that there was
black flight from the South to the north and then white flight.
I don't know why he only calls it flight when it's one group,
but maybe transportation could explain why there was so much
movement. Because people now had
opportunities they didn't previously have.
Yeah, that that's correct. One thing I try to do in this
book is throw in some of the dull social science where it's
not just, we're not just talking about like black crime and Rick
resistance to it and so on. But it's also just like there
were a lot more streets after the 1945 Roadways Reconstruction
Act sort of thing. Yeah.
I mean, one of the things we forget is that suburbs didn't
always exist. So I mean, the traditional
model, which has been called the post Roman model for countries,
is that you have a city and then you have a countryside that
feeds the city. The idea of a bunch of people
living in big houses with like 1/4 acre of lawn around them
that doesn't grow crops is very, very new.
So in order for white flight to occur, and as you mentioned,
yeah, there's a lot of upper middle class black flight,
Asians are more likely to live in the suburbs than any other
group. I don't actually understand
hostility toward the suburbs in the 1st place.
So I mean, the whole white flight thing comes up in a
broader conversation between urban people and rural people
and people who just hate the whole idea of the Brady Bunch.
Anyway, like the for a white flight to happen, there had to
be a bunch of things like people had to regularly have personal
vehicles that have cars. You had to have roadways that
could take people in cars outside of the cities.
You had to have incomes that could support people buying
either a first or second home outside of the city.
So I mean, it's a white plate chapter.
I talk about all this like I talk about suburbanization
beginning. I mean, remember, Lebanon was
only built in 1951. And a lot of the things in this
book used to be the core stories we told the kids, like us
building the railroads across the country, you know, us
building Leviton in the suburbs. So mom and I can come here and
give you guys a nice life. You know, dad points at the yard
outside. You know, a lot of this the
Wright brothers building the first airplane and managed to
squeeze into the book. A lot of this has been kind of
tossed out in favor of this specifically civil rights and
Vietnam narrative from kind of the post hippies, I think, where
like almost every story involves black people or natives in some
way. And I'm black and a bit native.
I don't, you know, I don't mind that bit native at least per
family legend, but like it doesn't really have that much to
do with the, the core tales of the country.
So I, I do try to give back a bit of that.
But anyway, the the whole point is that, yes, like
suburbanization, the growth of the automobile, the growth of
the roadways, yeah, all that contributed as well.
So central one thing I will last line.
If you go to like Wikipedia or Britannica and you look at the
population of every city in the country, whether majority white,
majority black went out, you'll see what's called the American
pattern, where the city will grow massively in size until
about 1960 and then it will shrink.
And this has nothing to do with racial conflict.
And a lot of these cases, I mean Mobile, AL, where you got middle
class blacks and whites living together, Boise, ID, I bet,
displays this pattern. What it means is that those
cities, more and more people move from the country over time,
more and more farm kids moved into the city.
It became a whole thing. This is what Guns and Roses and
all those bands from my childhood sucked by like just a
country girl, you know, going in to be a waitress or to work for
an ads agency or whatever. But eventually people started
moving out. You go into the city, you move
out into the exurbs. That's that's it.
So like actually like mobile AL is a good example of this.
Like, this is just a totally typical city of its size.
Let's see what the population here is.
I looked at this for a consulting gig like a couple
days ago. Not going to waste too much time
on this, but yeah. OK.
So like 1920 sixty thousand 1930 sixty 8019 forty 78,019 fifty
129,000. It's after World War Two that
people really started leaving the farm.
And there were songs about this Like you can't keep them down on
the land after they've seen Gay Perry 1962 hundred 2000, then
1970 a 190 thousand 1980. It's a pretty stable 19 ninety
196 thousand, 2198 thousand. And now it's down to 183,000 and
it looks prone to shrink still more.
And that's actually less shrinkage than you see in most
places. Sunny room.
That's that's all part of a pattern that's pretty universal.
When it comes to the origin narrative that liberals in
general refer to, they will start with the very dangerous
result of mass immigration from Europe to America, where the
natives were living. I found this 5 second clip which
summarized how my liberal teacher actually explained
things to me. Wow, you're a different color
than me. Would you like to be equals?
So for those who are just listening to the audio, it was a
black gentleman and Family Guy saying would you like to be
equals? And the white person just throws
them in a net and kidnaps them. That is generally how I thought
things went down. What is either omitted or
outright deceptive about the liberal telling of Native
American, US, European relations?
Well, I mean that that whole story in the context of either
root style intervention in Africa or Native American is a
complete lie. I mean, so first of all, it
begins with the ultimate lie, which is sort of that savages,
if you will, like people living in the the state of nature or
close to it, were peaceful and calm.
That's complete nonsense. First of all, most Native
Americans weren't savages. The Aztecs built giant cities.
And secondly, secondarily, people that were aren't kinder
than anyone else. So one of the great left wing
fictions is that this computer actually is running low on
battery. It might die soon, but it's the
worst. We'll switch to another computer
or something. One of the one of the great left
wing fictions is that human nature is itself sweet and
kindly and it's corrupted by something else like capitalism,
toxic masculinity that's taught to sweetly innocent boys by
their abusive fathers or something like that.
And this is actually complete nonsense.
Like if you look at other animals like both male and
female chimps, this, the 100 studies have been done here,
they're actually a lot more aggressive and vicious than we
are. Like, if anything, what
civilization does is restrain that savage instinct that humans
have that made us feel kinship with and domesticate wolves.
You know, So the, the idea on a certain part of the political
left, which is unfortunately really over represented in the
field of anthropology, is that if you come across people in
their natural state, just like hunting in the woods, they're
going to be kindly and sweet and they're going to give you
everything they have. But it turns out that's not true
at all. Like if you actually come across
people hunting in the woods, they're probably going to kill
and eat you. Like if you actually went back
to the CRO Magnon Neanderthal period, even a lot of the Native
Americans seem to have done this.
Like there's a lot of attempt to minimize it.
They're dozens of digs or construction workers have come
across bones that are like perked and cracked for Morrow.
And some on my understanding is that they're generally
encouraged to bury these, which is not at all the usual
practice. So they don't, you know,
contribute to the spreading of false narratives about our
innocent indigenous brethren. But so at any rate, when the
Whites came to the New World, what they found was a complex
mix of societies at varying levels of sophistication.
Some, like the Aztecs and Inkos, were as sophisticated as the
Whites, just at a lower level of technology, stone and copper as
opposed to iron based tech. Others were sizable tribes like
the Mississippians. Some were isolated bands of
hunters. Some of them were particularly
kindly. I mean, a typical group would be
the Iroquois, which were, you know, well developed people,
roughly equal roles for men and women, but which legendary
warriors? And they gave the world the
Mohawk, they gave the US special forces, from what I've heard,
the idea of wolf warrior raiding, you attacked just
before the crack of dawn and very small parties.
I mean, they, they were along with the Scots, Irish for some
of the people to bring scalping to the world.
So like the idea that these people got off a boat and they
encountered these innocent naked people who started bringing them
gifts of corn and beer and bowing down and so on.
No, the first people that have come from encountered were Chief
Massas White's warriors who had long bows and were coming out of
the woods and regimented formation with deer skins over
their shoulders. And so they're just humans.
I think it's a good way to look at it.
The natives were no better or worse than anybody else.
They were skilled warriors and good narrators, and they fought
off the Whites for 400 years. I mean, that's really it.
They were no better or worse than anybody else.
But presenting them as sort of peaceful Eloy actually implies
they were better or worse. They were a different breed of
man, and that's not correct. There are no different breeds of
man. Same thing in black Africa, by
the way, which I think is where Peter Griffin was actually
supposed to be with the Afro on his head and the bone in his
nose. Neither of which was an African
style, by the way, but I mean like the idea that the whites
went to Africa and started throwing Nets over people.
Like they just showed up in Zulu land with a rope and like
grabbed a couple warriors and nothing happened because they
were white is obviously fantastically nonsensical.
What what actually happened in the African slave trade is there
was a long running African slave trade run by the West African
kingdoms that are today Ghana and Nigeria.
Other like bricks level countries and the black Africans
were more than willing to sell slaves to the Arabs who had been
their old friends slash enemies. And when the whites entered this
long term market that was run by Ashanti Banan, again, trees that
were certainly on par with some of the countries in Eastern
Europe, the blacks sold to the whites too.
That's it. What do you think about that
disease environment in Africa where you've got the what are
the Titsi flies that'll kill a horse?
You know, you have the malarial and dingue fevers and so on in
the center of the country. I would bet that the life
expectancy of a Caucasian fighting man in Africa would be
measured in weeks. It would be like an African
attempting to raid into the Viking country there.
That just didn't happen. So no, the whites would pull up
along shore in a boat with a bunch of dangerous guys on it
with guns. And they'd be met at the shore
by a bunch of dangerous guys with guns and bows.
And the two groups would shake hands and get drunk together.
And eventually someone would bring a cough full of slaves
down to the beach and they'd negotiate price and the slaves
be loaded on a boat. And this sounds horrible to us,
but this was the institution of slavery around the world.
Who were the slaves? I mean, they were people who'd
been defeated by, say, King Gezo in war throughout most of
history. If you lost a battle, you were
loaded on a ship, and you were given an unwelcome chance to
develop your agricultural skills somewhere else.
I mean, there were white galley slaves throughout the Muslim and
to some extent black Mediterranean.
There were white sexual slaves, something that's minimized for
obvious reasons today. Throughout the Arabic harems,
blondes were in high demand. There were black agricultural
slaves in the Arab world. There were black slave warriors,
there were white slave warriors, the Janissaries.
I mean, at the time there was a significant price for defeat.
You mention a book, Larry Kroger's Black slave owners free
Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 17921860.
So when we look at the historical record, we see
slavery going back to ancient Mesopotamia, crosses races,
crosses continents. What the lesson that I learned
from slavery was don't even be a little racist because it could
lead to really bad things, worse of them being enslavement.
So if don't be racist isn't the primary message we could learn
from slavery, what is the message we could learn from The
idea that some people owning other people took place for 1000
years and was really evil, but there wasn't much pushback until
recently. What's the great lesson from
history we can learn? Well, I mean, I think one lesson
we can learn, if you want to be a bit cynical and amoral, is
that rules aren't real. Slavery existed for almost all
of history. No one really objected to it
because people just don't feel much of anything for defeated
enemies. And finally, within the context
of a particular religious frame, we said this is wrong.
And now most people, including me and you have been raised with
the kind of, you know, sort of philosophical training that
causes us to most of the time think this is wrong.
But the idea that there are definite moral standards that
you would hold to in any historical era is almost
certainly not true. I mean, like the idea that you
would think of only fans is acceptable if you've been raised
in any other historical era or factory farming or the existence
of nuclear sun bombs or something like that, that that's
simply not accurate. And in reverse, the idea that
you would be utterly concerned about some captured been a night
warrior who's outside harvesting your cotton.
I mean that that's almost certainly not true.
So I mean, I think that what can we learn from slavery?
I mean, it's important to give, you know, some kind of moral
indoctrination to kids early on. The the basic idea of slavery is
so that I guess that's actually the point I had to teach kids
what we think is good early on, recognize that humans are
capable of a large number of things that we today consider
evil. You know, I think that's a
valuable point. The, the basic thing that I
think people should take from my discussion of slavery in the
book, as you kind of pointed out, is that slavery is actually
not a particularly race linked practice at all.
So every race has engaged in the practice of slavery.
Slave is one of the 1st 20 or so human words.
I mean, if you go back to those primeval cinea form languages in
Babylon and before that in Ur and Uruk and so on, I mean the
word slave literally just means defeated warrior.
It's a slave. The symbol for slaves, the
symbol for man from the mountain cities.
But it's been changed a bit. The editing actually looks a bit
like a shackle. You know, So it's just, it
means, like, you came down here and you fought the plain cities
and you lost. And from that point forward to
Greece, through Rome, through Arabia, through Thailand.
I mean, you've seen slavery in practice now.
I mean, there are obviously people who specialize more in
this branch of social science than I do that I'm sure will
have all kind of technical critiques.
Like, you know, Riley didn't know that American slavery is
specifically racialized. But one of the things about
being a smart generalist is that I don't necessarily understand
why that's supposed to matter. Like, the argument is that,
well, we in the USA, we had slaves that were almost entirely
members of one race. Well, yeah.
But I mean, the Islamic rule is that you can't enslave members
of your own religion. So all the slaves were
Christians and Jews or pagans. And I mean, in at the time,
conversion was almost impossible.
I mean, you couldn't, your family presumably would kill you
if you're a Christian. And you just say, well, I'm a
Muslim now, you guys keep, you know, howling those plants out
there. So I mean, why would why would
slavery based on religion be less offensive than slavery
based on race? I'm not quite sure.
I would actually also argue that the Arab trade incorporated the
idea of slavery based on race. The Arabs gave the world both
commonly used terms for slaves. So a Slav, a Slav is a Southern
European, often a white blonde. That Southern Europe, southern
Eastern Europe has traditionally been a very poor region of the
world. I mean, you're talking about
Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, a lot of it's on par
with many areas of Africa today in terms of rate of conflict
over the past century and so on. Slav referred to became the term
for slave, the denim for slave, and it referred to people from
there. And that generally meant a white
slave. There's also a term avid, which
refers to an African and which generally came to mean a black
slave. It's used as a derogatory term
for blacks in the Arab world today.
So I mean, the Arabs were definitely aware and they
believed that they were suited for different things like
agricultural work outdoors in the Arabic lands was seen as
more appropriate for blacks or for captured Muslims and for
whites. And you can understand for
genetic reasons why that would be the case.
So a lot of this seems like a very technical attempt to find
fault with the West when you get into these details like, well,
we were the only country that held black slaves in the New
World. Well, yeah, because you had to
find the New World. I mean, there, I don't see that
slavery was very different in any of its forms globally.
In fact, last line there seemed to have been.
There don't seem to have been. There were elements of
traditional slavery that were far harsher than anything that
we engaged in in North America, as horrible as our practices
were. I mean, the ancient Romans held
full on gladiatorial games where slave men and women were pitted
against like chimpanzees, tigers, You know, they would
dress you in these ornate military outfits from ancient
societies and put you in the Colosseum, in a boat, in a sea
full of crocodiles. You know, that was the the
penalty of capture by the Romans.
I mean, you know, and this this sort of thing went on and on
through the eras. The Arabs would regularly
surgically modify captured white and black fighters.
You know, cutting off someone's penis was very common.
If you're a role you might play would be being a eunuch harem
guard. So the, the key thing about
slavery is that you are owned by someone else who can use you as
they see fit. And that is something that's
existed for all of human history.
What to take from that? It's universal prevalence, how
simple it is to fall into, and I suppose the idea that we should
train people to guard against the desire to do this, which is
very, very prevalent among humans.
The book is Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me.
I was just blown away by pages 110 through 120 where you
discuss lynching. So two things.
One, was there a gender lynching gap when it comes to victims?
And also what is often Lee omitted by the general lynching
narratives. Whites lynched blacks because of
their race or for so much as talking to a white person.
Yeah, I mean that. Well, first of all, that's a
fair description. There were a lot of purely
racially motivated lynchings where someone would be hanged
for eyeball and or something like that.
But it's also worth noting that that's not the normal
description of lynching in the USA.
So lynching in the USA has been a point of focus because there
was a racial element to it. But one of the things that I
note in the book is that again, history sucked to use one of the
the tag lines for the text, like the things that we take for
granted today, like a functioning police state in the
positive sense didn't exist for most of time.
So the basic idea of a posse like a group of citizens going
after a rapist and beating him and then hanging him from a
tree, that existed in almost all societies.
If you Google lynching in Kenya today, for example, you'll find
that there's a strong lynch tradition there.
That's how thieves and so on are often dealt with in isolated
villages. And that existed in the USA both
in states where there were black people and in states where there
weren't. And speaking frankly, many of
the people who were lynched were guilty.
That's something that's almost always removed, particularly
among the whites. That's something that's almost
always removed from these narratives.
So in the United States over, I guess all time would be the
period. There were about 5000 lynchings,
of which a bit more than 3000 involved a black victim and
somewhat less than 2000 involved a white victim.
There were 23 states in which more whites were lynched than
blacks. So I mean, I make the point that
again, there's there's no excuse for a great deal of the extreme
racialized violence in the South.
But even if you removed that, there'd be a the majority of
the, the lynchings would still have occurred.
And so I talked about the actual environment in which this
occurred. There were also probably at
least another thousand lynchings involving Hispanic and Native
American criminals and or victims, which aren't counted in
the University of Missouri Kansas City stats, which are
just whites and blacks. So I mean, you probably have
3000 plus black guys, 1500 or more white guys when you add in
some French cases that aren't in those stats.
And then 1000 or so Hispanics and natives, Native American
atrocities against natives are very, very hard to document.
So that is, that is a guess. But I mean, the official
figures, majority black been over 5000.
But at any rate, I mean, so I talk about the context in which
this occurred, which is, you know, you, you don't have
organized law in a lot of places.
You have, I mean, one judge who kind of rides the circuit for a
county that in those days was often say 1/5 the size of a
state. Even where you do have organized
law, you don't have the sort of professional, we would say post
P list policing that we do today.
So it wasn't infrequent for mobs to take over large chunks of
cities and to, for example, commit extrajudicial executions,
which at root is what a lynching is.
So there's a discussion in the chapter of the largest lynching
in American history, which occurred in New Orleans and
involved 11, I believe, Italian American victims following the
murder of a popular police chief in that city.
I mean, essentially, a crowd of young men gathered together, got
drunk, stormed the city Armory and was able to take out the
very small police detachment that was there.
Some of them were probably in on it.
They armed themselves with rifles.
Then they stormed the jail and in a battle took over the jail,
took out the Italian American men that were in the jail and
shot or hanged them. And that that sort of thing went
on pretty frequently. It was a book, Lynching Beyond
Dixie that goes through sort of the cowboy cases in the Wild
West. So I talk about lynching.
I, I obviously discuss the extreme racism of some of the
Southern lynchings. Then I discuss other southern
lynchings of blacks and whites. And then I expand outward to the
23 states where most of the lynchings had nothing to do with
racism and there were often as many lynchings.
And I make this sort of point about, again, civilization kind
of rising up against this older way, which was that if law
enforcement is incompetent, you're just going to have a mob
that starts killing people. And I describe this as kind of
the progression towards civilization that we've seen
over time. And I give other examples in
that chapter. I mean, we were hanging people
publicly until the 1960s. So, I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't
uncommon for much of American history for there to be like a
public hanging on the town green.
So, you know, you'd have a dance and you'd have a ball game.
And then at the same time, like in front of the courthouse, you
know, you'd kill someone who was publicly disliked in town and
people would walk by and spit on the corpse and take pictures
with it. You know, and this whipping was
legal for most of American history.
Most people whipped were also vital.
I'm sure they were disproportionately black.
You could whip soldiers and sailor men.
And, you know, so all this is discussed and broken down.
And I, I explained why we've moved past this.
But there's also an undertone of we need to understand that at
any point, if the core kind of judicial enforcement apparatus
in society doesn't work, this is what we're going to return to,
because it's extremely natural for humans.
Moving closer to the present, it's commonly accepted by
liberals that poverty causes crime.
How can we falsify this? Is this something you think is
accurate? Well, no, I mean, I, I think
again, again, I'll, I'll often note that some of these things
aren't my primary specialty, but I mean, I'm a, teach stats at a
State University. I'm pretty familiar with how to
read the tables in these papers. I would say looking at the
actual relationship causally, crime causes poverty more than
the reverse. How would you look at whether
poverty causes crime? And the simplest way to do it
would be that you would look at whether within one country, as
wealth has increased, crime has decreased.
And I don't think anyone even really tries to argue that in
the United States. You can also look at whether the
poorer states, probably put North Dakota or West Virginia up
there, have higher crime rates than wealthier areas,
Washington, DC or Maryland centered on Baltimore or
something like that. And obviously what you find is
that poverty alone is not a primary predictor of crime
demographics. Do you have a lot of young
people, a lot of males? African American crime rates 2.4
times the white crime rate right now do are much more
significant. Even things like the gun laws,
which can deter or increase crime depending on how they're
enforced, more significant predictors.
But just returning to that, first one of you can look at
income tracked against crime over time.
I mean, we just went through the the well known disaster center
graphics where you look at the 1950s or the 1960s and you see,
well, the entire country there are 8000 murders.
And in the 1990s following Reagan's boom years, there are
24,500 murders. I mean, that makes it very
difficult to say that crime is a downstream result of poverty.
These are just people that are, you know, trying what's that
they're trying to get bread for their families and these sort of
like popular leftist explanations.
So no, I don't, I don't really find a lot of evidence of that
at all, that there's probably some effect of poverty on
property crime. I mean, that's the that's the
impression that I get from the studies.
But no, I don't, I don't think poverty is a primary driver of
gang violence by year or something like that.
Yeah, that's the what I actually do find.
In fact, when I said I think the causal relationship goes more in
the other direction in the white flight in poverty chapters, what
I saw was not in fact, desperate people rioting.
Yeah, I what I didn't see was businesses leaving and then
desperate people rioting. When I looked at, say, Watts,
LA, Detroit, the Martin Luther King riots, kind of separating
the, the big incidents from common crime maybe, but I, I
didn't see that in any of eight or nine cases.
What I actually saw was people rioting, often almost for fun or
out of a sense of rage, or blacks just aren't being treated
well enough for something like that.
And then businesses leaving in mass.
And we also saw that during Black Lives Matter.
So it the relationship is the exact is tracks exactly in the
opposite direction of what is often said.
I mean, in Detroit in the mid 1960s, you had one of the most
integrated, best run business communities in the upper
Midwest. You had very successful black
and white shop owners, dozens of them.
Then you had a massive riot. I believe 270 businesses were
burned. Everybody else left and all of
those guys moved to either the middle class black or middle
class white suburbs. So parts of downtown Detroit
today still look like bombs hit them.
The obvious correlation is that because of the destructive
nature of those riots, which killed a large number of people,
you now have fewer businesses in those areas.
And common crime at a lower level has a very similar effect.
I mean, what you're seeing right now in California, Portland,
where interestingly enough, almost all the criminals appear
to be, you know, blue haired Caucasian kids.
But Seattle, it's a little more diverse.
San Francisco, it doesn't really matter what race they are,
doesn't, you know, But all these places where people like
smashing in the counters of jewelry stores and running out
with thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, They're going
into Walgreens and steal like 100 boxes of condoms, this sort
of thing. I mean, right now we're at kind
of stage one of the reaction where everything's locked up.
I travel often to speak, and it's the most annoying thing in
the world to shop in these cities.
You'll go in and you'll try to get, you know, a bagel.
Well, OK, you can probably get that.
But if you want any sort of higher end cheese, well, that's
behind this screen. OK, I'm going to need some
razors. OK, we're going to have to
unlock that. What what about, I mean, some
scalp gel? OK, well, that's definitely
locked up. It's that's considered a black
hair product, you know. OK, what about deodorant?
I don't know that's in this case.
So I mean, right now we're there, but the ordinary person's
not going to shop in that environment.
So those businesses are eventually just going to close
and then you're going to see people are going to start
griping about this being a food desert or a care desert.
But that's because you made it one.
I mean, you destroyed your neighborhood.
So now there's there's nothing that can survive there.
And that's that's the pattern that we see.
Chapter 10 you discuss the continuing oppression narrative.
I found the best summary of what this narrative is in this book,
Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson.
I'll read a brief section. I want you to respond to what
your thesis is in chapter 10, please.
We think of police who kill us for no good reason as ISIS.
That shouldn't surprise you. Cops rain down terror on our
heads with relentless fire and make us afraid to walk on the
streets. At any moment, Without warning,
a blue clad monster will swoop down on us to snatch our lives
from us and say it was because we were selling cigarettes or
compact discs, or breathing too much for his comfort, or
speaking too abrasively for his taste, or running or standing
still, or talking back or silent, or doing as you say or
not doing it fast enough. Like all terrorists, they hate
us for who we are. They hate us because of the bad
things they and you think we do. Like, breathe, live.
That is our sin. Death is our only redemption.
What is your response to that worldview by Michael Eric Dyson?
Very popular guy. I'm not straw manning anything
here. Jesus Christ.
I mean, I dislike phrases like whining like a bitch because
they're kind of sexist, kind of kind of negative.
But I mean, just like, it's if you listen to this sort of
thing, and Mike is apparently a nice guy if you meet him in
person, but like, if you listen to this kind of thing, it
approaches hysterical. Like so much of modern leftism
is the young woman performatively screaming at the
sky. I mean, so this guy goes through
this whole paragraph of like, will he kill me?
The blue clad monster. I hear him approaching.
I hear his voice. It, it sounds like BDSM erotica.
I mean the it's just extraordinarily bizarre.
My response to that would be, first of all, calm down, take a
Valium or something or go to the shooting range.
But like, like there actually is a real response other than
banter and mockery. And that is that you have to
look at risks in context. You know, every single year I
think it's 152 people die, men die falling in the bathtub.
The total number of unarmed black men shot by the police
last year was 12. So in the the continuing
oppression narrative chapter, and I take a couple swipes at
the dissident right too, where I point out the total percentage
of interracial crime in the USA, black on white plus white on
black is like 3% person most likely to kill you is your wife.
Everybody needs to calm down. All these guys online, they're
sharing videos of like, well, my race won this fight.
Well, no, will you on this one? Like relax, it's not that
serious. They're 20 million crimes in a
year. The total number of interracial
murders last year. Now there are people the data
account fentanyl argue it's more than this if you counted
multiple offender attacks, depending on how you measure
those. But that's according to the FBI.
The total number of white murders of blacks last year I
think was 300. Black murders of whites was 500.
So I note all this in a lengthy chapter in my book Taboo, which
is where I'm getting all these stats from.
But I I do most of my swipes at the left because the left is so
much worse and more more hysterical with this stuff.
So breaking it down kind of point by point, I mean, I
respond to Mr. Dyson at chapter length.
And the first thing I say is that the Black Lives Matter
narrative is completely insane. The argument that Dyson makes
has been made over and over, by the way, I mean, Cherno Biko
went on Prime Time Fox and said that roughly every day, it's
either every day or every hour, an innocent black man is
murdered by the police. So innocent, presumably unarmed,
is full on murdered. Then who's that lawyer?
Benjamin Crump wrote an entire book called Open Season, The
Genocide of Colored People where he argues that the number I mean
for a genocide must be in the 10s of thousands.
And he goes through all these ways that black people are being
wiped off the planet. Again, if you actually look at
police violence in any coherent way, the unarmed total for
blacks in a typical year is 10 to 12.
Highest year I've ever seen was 25.
There's not even much more to say about that.
The total number of black people shot in a typical year by the
police is 250. All members of all groups.
Together, it's under 1000 out of 60 million police encounters
across the entire country. That's it.
Those are those are the facts. Interracial crime not only is
extraordinarily rare, black people commit 70 to 90% of it in
the typical year. I mean, in most interracial
crime is robbery. And that's one of the crimes
that's dominated by African Americans, just as a statistical
quirk. So like anytime you complain
about this tiny fringe thing, be aware that we're responsible for
85% of the tiny fringe thing. Like, so if anyone is
complaining about this at all, it shouldn't be blacks.
I mean, the the reason that I use the term continuing
oppression narrative is that the entire idea here is that the
explanation for black struggles today.
And this is the same argument that's used, of course, for any
group struggles, immigrants, women, members of the LGBT
community. The entire woke argument is just
the Marxist argument. Society is structured to oppress
me, and all gaps in performance within society indicate that
oppression with a few IQ points knocked off.
So you see this all across the map.
It's not just black people doing it, but continuing oppression
narrative is something I see mostly within the context of
race. And the argument within the
context of race is that the reason we see these problems in,
for example, black communities is ongoing racism in society.
Now, when people are challenged to find ongoing racism in
society, you know, I come from the business class, at least as
an adult. And there obviously are massive
affirmative action programs designed to help us out, right.
So where, where's the bigotry? Well, it's the police shootings,
but there are only 10 of them. Well, OK, it's you guys
attacking us on the street. Well, that never happens.
And when it does, we do 80% of it.
Well, it's cultural appropriation that doesn't
exist. So I just go through this whole
chapter about like this, this stuff is not real.
Like systemic racism is the final bulwark that I think I get
over. It's kind of the final boss.
But I cite the work of this economist, June O'Neill, that
actually just takes these performance gaps between blacks
and whites and does stuff like a just for IQ.
Like she's probably a better methodologist than I am.
But it's it's hilariously simple.
Like what happens to the income gap between black and white
people if you're just for the fact the average black guy's 20
and the average white guy's 50? What happens if you're just for
the fact that the average SAT for blacks?
We're getting it up, but it's 950 and for whites, it's 1100.
And it's just the simplest, most obvious thing in the world.
But when you do that, the gap closes to nothing.
And I mean, I've replicated some of this myself because it's not
hard to do. I just described the whole
model. But when you do that, there is
no gap. And it's just obviously you can
say, well, more black people are poor because we lost the last
race war. So there are more kids that are
going to struggle to get an SAT of 1100.
Sure, but that's not racism. And I think the point is that
once you point out the actual issue, which is that we have
more poor people, so we have lower test scores, we need to
get those bad boys up. You're you're left with this
whole House of mirrors that we can just move out of the way so
we can focus on getting the test scores up or lowering the crime
rate or something. And the continuing oppression
narrative is the distraction from doing that.
Yeah, the Washington Post article that you cite in here
says 95% of people killed by police are male.
And when you look at the stats, it is not proof of sexism
against men at all when you look at who commits the violent
crime. The Washington Post also
indicates ageism, that men in their 20s and early 30s are
disproportionately killed by police.
It shows nothing about actual ageism If you look at the other
side of the equation, which is higher levels of testosterone,
more likely to be violent. Do you have a little more time?
I just love this book so much. A bunch of things stood out to
me. Is that OK?
Yeah, like five. I have to get off in probably 5
or 10 more minutes. 5 minutes OK 10 probably 10 minutes 2. 30 I'd
say. Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara said in a book titled In Retrospect that he had told
Johnson to authorize the Gulf of Tonkin resolution after he
mistakenly thought an attack took place on August 4th of
1964. This was the resolution that
escalated things in the Vietnam War.
With regard to your Vietnam War chapter, is your case that it
was a justified war or that it was more popular than people
think it was? Well, I'm not sure.
So again, I'm, I'm something of an amoralist when it comes to
high level political decisions. I mean, I don't think either the
USA or the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam conflict
behaved in kind of a perfectly ethically forward fashion or
anything like that. I mean, the South Vietnamese
government was a badly run dictatorship.
But I mean, I think my point about Vietnam, my point about
Vietnam was simply that the war was almost certainly winnable
and more importantly that it was perceived very differently
within the USA than is commonly thought to be the case today.
And I guess, I guess that would really be, that's a good
question. I guess that's really my point
that the the lie is the presentation of the civic
understanding of the war. So the you're talking about
chapter four of the book, which is it has some some funny,
provocative title, but it's like the hippies were wrong.
The sexual revolution was terrible for you feminists and
the Vietnam War was winnable and popular.
I mean, but I actually think those things are mostly true
lies. My liberal teacher told me
future classic, but the so the the 60s are something that has
been really mythologized to a great extent.
I don't know if this is still the case for you slightly
younger guns. But I mean, in my generation,
everyone had like the grandma maybe that had been to Woodstock
and that marched with King. And this was always discussed in
these golden terms. Like, so when did I grow up?
I was born in the 80s. Yeah.
No, definitely. Like grandma's about 60
constantly. This is John Kerry marching
across the debate stage. You know, my generation said we
would change the world and we did, like throwing medals over
fences and into the crowd like this.
This was the this is the the tenor of the times, like the
Copperhead Road and people, the guy went to Vietnam, people
singing about Vietnam today. The idea is always kind of
presented in sort of a golden light, like the people making
out in the mud at Woodstock, the people burning their bras, the
people marching behind the, the black icons in the South, this
kind of thing. One of the things I point out in
this chapter is that obviously basic black and female civil
rights were good but most of the stuff that come out of the 1960s
was absolutely terrible. Like the pro cowardice movement
with like young fighting men burning draft cards and people
chanting nothing is worth dying for came out of the 1960s and
has lost us several conflicts since then.
You could argue America hasn't won a major war since except
maybe Gulf War one. Although I wouldn't insult our
troops by making the strong form of that argument.
But I mean like the anti nuke movement and the eco freako
movement which has killed millions of people came out of
the 1960s. Like we literally could have a
nuclear powered planet now, we don't all that stuff.
Black radicalism, like the roots of all the candy nonsense you've
been reading this interview that came out of this like Stokely
Carmichael, Huey Long, all those guys came out of the 1960s.
The white radical terrorists that often would, you know, fuck
and party with the black radical terrorists, many of whom Bill
Ayers and so on, are college professors now, by the way.
But you know, the weatherman, those boys, they came out of the
1960s. Just all of it.
The Manson family, the drug revolution, the hard sex and
kink revolution, you know, the first furries were like 1974,
man. Like all of this crap came out
of the 1960s. And so I make the point like a
lot of this stuff wasn't good. People think it was fun because
they were high all the time and it was starting.
So like your buddy who was telling you that she sometimes
like anal sex, like, OK, who cares?
But then is writing books about it and becoming, you know, a
housewife and Vice columnist and so on.
This is a real person I have in mind here.
Like all of that stuff began in this particular moment and is
seen as positive by people that were in that moment, but mostly
had a pretty negative downstream effect.
The more serious Vietnam component of this.
And by the way, with the sexual revolution, I obviously think
it's good that both men and women now can enjoy oral sex and
so on. But I mean, I, there's a couple
pages where I actually talk about STI, which frankly didn't
exist before the, the sexual revolution.
So I mean, there was a period in time when it was considered
perfectly normal to have, say, 50 sexual partners, not to have
five relationships where you experiment and see what you like
as opposed to just getting married, but to sleep with 60
people. This was still prevalent on the
outskirts when I was in the rave scene as a younger guy, you
know, this wasn't very good for young teenage girls.
So I mean, there's a chapter where I talk about the groupies,
the plaster casters and all this stuff.
This is totally accepted. In the rock scene, for example,
through the 70s through the 80s, you know, AIDS came on the
scene. The the guy who kind of there
was a patient zero for AIDS who was a bisexual guy.
He knew he had AIDS and the guy, I forget his name, I'm not going
to libel someone, probably in the literal sense if I misnamed
him. But like the person who first
discovered he had AIDS apparently wouldn't stop having
sex with people at orgies. So he would go to mostly gay but
not entirely gay bath housing orgy events in San Francisco.
This is a flight attendant and he would just have sex with 10
people. And his doctor told him, well,
you have this disease that's transmitting to people.
It's it's a lethal disease. And the guy said, well, I don't
believe you. I have the right to have sex.
This is free love. This is the free love
generation. And he apparently just kept
screwing hundreds of people and he spread AIDS to the world.
That's a real thing that happened.
There were two or three guys like this actually.
So, I mean, we could have prevented the the development of
this international plague, or at least it's spread in the West,
as I understand, but we didn't. And that, that too comes down to
the tenor of a time. But anyway, Vietnam, Vietnam is
actually fairly popular. Like if you look at the Gallup
polling on Vietnam through I looked through 65 and I looked
through 68, the Vietnam was as popular as Gulf War two.
I mean, it was citizens in general were pretty pro the war.
They're certainly pro the troops, 80% ratings for the
troops. All the all the polling data
showing 70% opposition to Vietnam, interestingly, comes
from 10 to 15 years after the war, after sort of media well
poisoning about about the conflict for for decades.
So what I basically say is, yeah, we probably could have
won. And a lot of the reasons that we
think we couldn't have, or a lot of the things we think about
sexuality, about nuclear power or even about music that came
out of this era are basically crap.
Final question. A lot of this historical
narrative discussion could be met with, well, whatever
happened throughout history doesn't tell me what I should do
today. So whether everyone had slavery
or only Americans did, whether only blacks were lynched or it
was 5050, doesn't matter. Why are historical narratives or
prevailing interpretations of past events important for us
today? Well, I, I would agree that what
happened historically shouldn't change your morality.
I mean, no, you don't need to go out and get a slave, go fight in
Iraq or something and come back with a captive.
I mean, I don't, I don't really, I mean, it's a good question,
but I mean, no, of course you don't need to do that.
But I mean, I, I think that the, the reason that this is relevant
is that it should make you one of the things I want to do with
this book is kind of inoculate many groups that I have a lot of
friends in whites, black conservatives, men, gender
critical women against kind of obsessive guilt Jews as it comes
to the Israel Palestine conflict.
So if you believe that slavery is a uniquely American vice, it
would be reasonable. Like I said jokingly, I'm a, I'm
a mildly amoral businessman, You know, I, I personally would not,
I wouldn't disadvantage my family.
If I felt that America had done something uniquely bad, I'd
apologize sincerely. Then I'd go out of my life and
OK, we won the war. You got me, you know, But I
think that a lot of people who are perhaps a bit more
conventionally moral, if they felt that we were the only
country ever to commit an atrocity during war time or
enslave individuals or something like that, would feel compelled
to make up for that in a empirical way.
Reparations comes to mind. The the reality, though, is that
we're not. If you actually look back at
history, slavery was constant and the reparations debate is
complicated by a lot of practical realities like wealthy
black countries sold the slaves. So I mean like if you're if
you're talking about money being owed, why has no one presented
an invoice to Nigeria or Arabia, United Arab Emirates, South
Africa? I mean, again, these are all
like BRICS level states with multi billion dollar budgets.
Nigeria has the 30th largest economy on Earth and because we
think of Africa as poor, whatever I say that people kind
of joke like what are they going to do?
Pay us with another Hut building material?
Google Lagos skyline like they're actually like these.
These states should be contributing like half of the
bill if we're going to take this seriously.
And to me, the fact that no one ever makes this point indicates
that we're not taking this seriously.
It's just an attempt to extort white people.
But that that's an obvious question.
You know, many of the slave holders were black and most free
blacks in the USA owned slaves and not not this excuses the
behavior of white Americans at this time, but no slaveholders
are alive today. So I guess if you understand the
reality of history as this complex, often ugly time that
stretched through literally every period until the dawn of
today, it becomes a little more difficult to view your society
as either uniquely magnificent, which I do think is good.
We should honor the British and the Greeks, and for that matter
the Malians or uniquely evil because we're not.
So I think that the the panicked, frenzied guilt we
often hear and even the crazy fear like Mr. Dyson's, like I
run a risk of dying. How can I go outside, Sir?
Everyone to live, every woman runs a greater risk walking
outside than you do. Everyone, every soldier runs a
greater risk walking outside than you do.
Everyone ever to live has run a risk comes from a lineage of
ancestors that have done some bad things going down the line.
What this book does is simply illustrate the depth.
Of what those lineages are, I guess.
And the goal is to provide some context.
Again, slave, one of the 1st 20 things people said.
There's nothing unique about what we did in the West except
for the ending of slavery. There's no reason for guilt or
pathology about these things. Same things with the comments
about Native Americans so on down the line.
So the goal is just a a nuanced, neutral adult look at history
and at reality. The book is Lies My Liberal
Teacher Told Me. Link will be in the comments
below in the description below. Thank you for listening to Keith
and I Don't Tread on Anyone and the Libertarian Institute.
Doctor Riley, thanks so much for your time.
Oh yeah, always, always love coming up.
Thanks for having me.