Rebel News Podcast - November 28, 2019


Victim culture by the numbers： Let's talk about the history of the grievance industry


Episode Stats

Length

33 minutes

Words per Minute

170.6623

Word Count

5,797

Sentence Count

311

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

23


Summary

Is grievance culture a new thing? My guest tonight argues it is as old as time. Mark Mielke joins me in an interview we recorded earlier to discuss his new book, The Victim Cult: How the Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilizations.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello Rebels, I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my
00:00:05.400 Wednesday night show, The Gunn Show. However, this is the internet. You can listen to it whenever you
00:00:11.100 like. Tonight my guest is author Mark Milkey. Now if you like listening to the show, then I promise
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00:01:32.900 Is grievance culture a new thing? My guest tonight argues it is as old as time. I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed,
00:01:40.780 and you're watching The Gunn Show. I want to read you an excerpt of a book I've recently finished.
00:02:04.180 Are you ready? I'm ready. By the 1980s black married couples with college education,
00:02:10.780 already earned slightly more than white college-educated married couples in the United States.
00:02:18.320 In 1981, in Canada, earnings for those with Japanese ancestry were 13% higher than those
00:02:25.380 of European ancestry. By the late 2000s, Americans had elected a president who was half black and half
00:02:33.080 white. As the author writes, that's progress. Now, if you submerged yourself in left-wing media,
00:02:40.760 or even just regular mainstream media, you would never know the statistics I read to you just now.
00:02:46.640 So why is society so invested in this hierarchy of victimhood, and offering reasons why people
00:02:52.760 can't accomplish things, when we know accomplishments and progress are taking place all around us,
00:02:58.980 every single day? And aren't we really setting up entire generations of people to fail,
00:03:04.200 when we feed them into a victimhood mentality? The book I just read those statistics to you from
00:03:10.760 is called The Victim Cult, How the Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone and Wrecks Civilizations. Now,
00:03:17.920 it is full of statistics and history, and it is meticulously footnoted. It's an examination of
00:03:24.620 worldwide grievance culture, past and present. And the author of this amazing book,
00:03:30.180 Mark Mielke, joins me in an interview we recorded earlier.
00:03:49.660 Joining me now is the author of that book, The Victim Cult, How the Culture of Blame Hurts Everyone
00:03:55.400 and Wrecks Civilizations. Hey, Mark, thanks for joining me. I guess my first question for you is,
00:04:04.600 what exactly is The Victim Cult? Well, think about people who have had something awful happen to
00:04:11.680 them, or people who merely think that, and then, right or wrong, you know, they may have been harmed,
00:04:18.720 they may not have been harmed, but they obsess over it. And we know in our personal lives,
00:04:22.140 when I was writing the book, I'd ask people, have you ever met...
00:04:25.400 ...who thinks like a victim, and people would go, yeah, you know, I should tell you about my family,
00:04:28.820 or my friend, or someone at work. Well, multiply that by millions, and literally, you get what I
00:04:34.700 describe as victim cult. So, kind of an obsession over a real harm, or, you know, sometimes, you know,
00:04:41.800 people make this stuff up in their heads, or they link to the wrong effect, the wrong cause. So,
00:04:48.560 the victim cult is really about people we meet every day, but multiplied by millions, and how that
00:04:54.480 affects our societies, our country, and even international relations.
00:04:58.640 So, I think this is probably the first book of its kind that is sort of through a Canadian lens.
00:05:04.560 What prompted you to write this book? Because I think it's sort of apropos for the time that we're
00:05:09.440 in right now. And I don't know if that's, you know, after reading the book, I was, you know,
00:05:14.720 maybe it's just because of the 24-hour news cycle and social media, but you often feel like, boy,
00:05:22.640 things are sure awful out there, and everybody thinks they're a victim, but you look at this
00:05:27.540 through both a Canadian lens and a historical lens, and it's sort of always been this way,
00:05:32.540 hasn't it? It has, but the Canadians sort of spur for this, I mean, the spur for the book really was,
00:05:38.620 I've done a lot of policy work over the years on aboriginal issues, and what I found continually
00:05:43.860 was some, and I emphasize some, not all, but some First Nations leaders in Canada, relentlessly
00:05:49.420 portray themselves as victims. Now, historically, in some cases, select cases, many cases, they were,
00:05:56.880 or their ancestors were, and that's an important distinction. We are not our ancestors.
00:06:00.480 But the problem with that is for some First Nations leaders to continue to blame everything
00:06:05.500 on 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, there's a two-fold problem with that. One,
00:06:11.100 by looking back, you don't look forward, and that's a problem, because how do you succeed if
00:06:15.220 you're always looking in the rearview mirror, right? You end up in a collision, you end up in
00:06:18.300 an accident, so to speak. The other problem with it is you really link the wrong cause to modern-day
00:06:24.740 effects. So let me give you a clear example. We often hear today that the problem
00:06:29.820 with aboriginal Canadians' incomes or social economic indicators has everything to do
00:06:36.180 with perhaps what happened 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, in some cases, residential schools.
00:06:42.740 And without downplaying the effect of, say, sexual and physical abuse on reserves, which I don't think
00:06:47.160 we should, to blame everything in residential schools or to blame everything on reserves is
00:06:52.060 actually a mistake. Except in this way, which some First Nations leaders don't get or are not honest
00:06:59.020 about, many First Nations reserves are in the middle of nowhere. If you want to look for a modern-day
00:07:04.200 reason why some aboriginals, especially, specifically First Nations, right, what used to be called Treaty
00:07:10.060 Indians, you know, for federal purposes, are not succeeding, it's because they're on a reserve in the
00:07:16.480 middle of nowhere. And geography explains a lot more than, you know, allegations of racism or colonialism
00:07:22.020 or allegations that somehow Canada was a genocidal state akin to Nazi Germany, which actually a report
00:07:29.340 earlier this year came out and alleged just that, right? So I take that apart. And to give you a clear
00:07:34.880 example of where aboriginals can succeed in this country, I looked at census data from the last census.
00:07:40.520 And very simply, if you look at young aboriginals ages 25 to 34, with a university education,
00:07:47.920 they have the exact same incomes, in fact, slightly higher than other Canadians. And why is that?
00:07:53.260 Because they are more likely to be in cities. They're not stuck in a reserve in the middle of
00:07:56.900 nowhere. And so their incomes are equal to those of other Canadians. And if you have a PhD as an
00:08:02.800 aboriginal between 25 and 34, you earn about 3,000 more every year than other Canadians. So the problem
00:08:10.240 really is, and the good thing about this is what that points to is the problem is geography and
00:08:16.220 education, and both those are correctable. But to make links, as people do, to 50 or 100 years ago,
00:08:22.400 when First Nations leaders do that, that's the problem. They're actually not, you know,
00:08:27.860 linking up the right cause to the effect. And that's unfortunate because it can hold people back.
00:08:32.640 And so that's kind of where the book started, was this observation that First Nations leaders
00:08:36.980 often make these mistakes, as do others. And that harms Aboriginal Canadians more than anybody else.
00:08:43.660 You know, I finished your book finally last night. I sort of jumped around all over the place when I
00:08:50.560 was reading the book, leafing back and forth, as, you know, things became timely, sort of in the news
00:08:56.060 cycle and in the culture war. And now that you're talking about Indigenous issues, you actually
00:09:01.960 dig quite deep into how well-intentioned laws designed to help Indigenous people can actually
00:09:13.180 harm them. And you pointed to two instances of Indigenous children, Baby Serenity and Baby
00:09:21.900 Veronica, who, because of policies designed to undo colonialism, it actually ended up harming these
00:09:29.980 children and shifting the blame off the adults involved in their stories onto colonialism. And
00:09:37.080 it didn't really address the real injustice happening to these little girls at hand.
00:09:42.240 Right. So in that part of the victim cult, I went into this notion of, okay, if there's a problem in
00:09:49.640 my life or, you know, in the tribe that I belong to, and by tribe, I mean, whatever collective you
00:09:54.540 belong to, right? We all have some tribe. We may play golf with friends. We may have, you know,
00:09:59.080 be part of a nation that we're proud of, whatever, whatever your tribe happens to be. I mean that in
00:10:03.720 very, you know, in a wide sense in the book. Right. But I went into the notion of culture in
00:10:08.520 the victim cult, because people often think, okay, especially if they've been harmed or, you know,
00:10:12.420 their society's been harmed, what we need to do is restore pure culture. For reasons that I go into
00:10:18.360 in other chapters, Germans thought this in the early 19th century, and that was a mistake.
00:10:22.180 Pure culture won't save you. In fact, learning from other cultures, integrating with other people
00:10:26.720 voluntarily can help your culture learn from others and succeed. But the problem with this
00:10:31.960 notion of pure culture, and some First Nations, again, are deep into this in Canada and the United
00:10:36.780 States, is you're trying to correct some wrongs that happened 50 years ago. So for example, people
00:10:43.460 have heard of the scoop where Aboriginal children in both Canada and the United States were taken out
00:10:48.820 of their parents' homes, sometimes for entirely legitimate reasons. They couldn't care for them
00:10:54.580 for whatever reason, and sometimes not. But we don't know whether that's 90 percent of the kids
00:10:59.520 or 10 percent. We really don't. At least I couldn't find the statistics, and a lot of the records have
00:11:03.720 disappeared because they were paper. The problem, though, with looking back and saying, okay, there were
00:11:09.100 some historic harms done to some Aboriginal children in Canada and the United States, and now what we need to
00:11:15.360 do to correct that? Sorry, let me back up. What was the problem back then? The problem is when this was
00:11:22.280 happening unjustly and kids weren't allowed to, like, be back with their parents, even if their parents
00:11:26.100 care for them again, and Aboriginal kids were too quickly adopted out, perhaps, right? That's the argument
00:11:31.660 that did happen in some cases. The problem back then was what? State agencies weren't looking at people as
00:11:37.900 individuals. They were treating them as part of some sort of collective. Well, we make the same mistake
00:11:43.760 today, 50 years later, when through well-intentioned legislation in the United States and well-intentioned
00:11:49.280 policy in Canada, the determining factor as an Aboriginal kid where you should be is if someone
00:11:55.140 shares your bloodline. Sorry, more than that. It's not just family. It's, you know, if someone shares
00:12:01.100 your community. So you come from a First Nation, and the preference really is to get you back to that
00:12:06.300 reserve. Now, that can be fine if you're going back to grandpa and grandma, if your parents can't care
00:12:13.100 for you. But that's a bit different than saying, wherever possible, we're going to make sure you
00:12:17.420 have a cultural connection to your reserve or your First Nation, and that's going to trump everything
00:12:22.960 else. Now, you know, day to day, bureaucrats and others will say, well, no, we would never put a
00:12:28.300 children in that situation. What I detail in the victim cult is, in fact, in Alberta, they did that
00:12:34.540 with a little girl called Serenity. They put her in that situation, despite warning signs all over the
00:12:39.460 place, that they shouldn't have been doing that. This little girl ended up being sexually and physically
00:12:45.380 abused and dying at age four years old, somewhere in central Alberta, the government never made clear
00:12:50.720 where. She was there with with grandparents, but they didn't know who were checked out. But the other
00:12:57.100 people in the home and, and were never checked out, for example, criminal records or, you know, a possible
00:13:02.040 past, you know, sexual abuse. So you have this little girl in this home that was abused, physically and
00:13:08.700 sexually at the end of it all, and had a concussion, which would send her to the hospital, and she
00:13:14.160 finally died from that. I mean, this is a tragedy, but she was there because of this preference for
00:13:18.840 kind of cultural kinship. Now, again, look, if we can understand that the first priority should always
00:13:25.640 be to get kids back with their parents, that's commonsensical. But there's this kind of romantic
00:13:30.980 notion that, well, you know, a village will raise a child. 100 people can't really raise a child.
00:13:39.160 And we need to be a little less naive, that, you know, there are some not great people in all
00:13:46.620 societies, and you want to protect kids from that. So I went into this example, because it's a good
00:13:51.280 example of, you know, and the American example, it's a good example of where, because you've got,
00:13:57.500 you know, a certain bloodline, you should forever be attached to that collective. And in the case of
00:14:03.900 the United States, the example I gave from Oklahoma was a little girl given up for adoption, Veronica.
00:14:10.680 The father didn't want anything to do with her when his ex-girlfriend was pregnant. He made that
00:14:15.740 clear. She gives birth, gives away the child, the daughter, to a couple from another state. And then
00:14:23.000 the father decides he wants to be involved. And this leads to basically three years, four years of
00:14:28.900 court fights. She's with her adopted parents for two years, then she's with her father who had never
00:14:34.780 seen her before. The problem with this is she's like 1.2% Cherokee. She's 50% Hispanic. But think
00:14:42.620 about the absurdity of this. We're starting to debate whether a child who the father initially didn't
00:14:48.240 want should be what? Given to a certain collective, or the preference of that collective should matter
00:14:55.580 over her 50% bloodline versus her 1.2% bloodline. Like, how do we get started with this is the
00:15:04.340 problem, right? Part of it is this fascination, romanticization of culture. Yeah. And I mean,
00:15:10.340 in the end, when you put this, like you say, the victim cult and this romanticization of culture
00:15:15.620 over and above the welfare of children, it's the children who pay. And I guess society as a whole,
00:15:22.940 when we are refusing to care for the needs of our most vulnerable, because their health and safety
00:15:32.100 is somewhere down on the totem pole underneath a culture and this blood quantum that we use to
00:15:40.500 appoint caregivers for children. And it's truly bizarre. You've actually used-
00:15:45.460 The problem really, and this is what I show in the victim cult, is that, again, we treat people
00:15:49.760 not as individuals, but as part of some collectives. And collectives, there's no other way to put it,
00:15:54.880 collectives eventually demand a sacrifice. And my view is that individuals should always trump in
00:16:00.020 law and policy. Why? Because look, if a parent wants to give their child to whomever, I mean,
00:16:06.140 since when does race and blood come into it, right? Ethnicity. I mean, this is how we've developed in
00:16:12.700 the last two centuries in Western societies. And the only exception is when it comes to indigenous
00:16:19.280 children. But in essence, what we're saying is, it doesn't matter what you as a parent want for
00:16:23.560 your child. And in both Veronica's case, in both Serenity's case, the parents wanted something
00:16:28.700 different than the First Nations collective. And they were told by the bureaucracy and by the courts,
00:16:33.460 no, you can't have that. How do we get to this point where the parents are not the primary deciders
00:16:38.400 of where a child should go? And so it is this fascination with culture and the collective,
00:16:43.620 which is very dangerous. And it's one of the reasons into the book, I go into the sort of the
00:16:47.020 German notion of collectivism and culture, and how that became very, very dangerous long before kind
00:16:53.020 of race consciousness and race, you know, purity became evident in Germany in the early 1900s.
00:16:59.440 Now, we sort of talked about the indigenous cultures and how this collectivist notion of
00:17:09.560 culture is harming indigenous cultures. But let's talk about the flip side of this. You actually
00:17:15.360 talk about the Pacific class. So immigrants to North America who were largely Asian, Chinese and
00:17:24.160 Japanese, who are doing much better than the, I guess, the immigrant class around them. And that's
00:17:33.680 being exhibited in college rates. And now that you mentioned it, you pointed out how, you know,
00:17:40.540 if you are indigenous and you get a college degree, that's your way out. That's really been the way out
00:17:46.020 for this Pacific class of immigrants. Right. So both for Canadians and Americans, I mean, one of the
00:17:54.840 things I wanted to do in the victim cult was show also how you would escape the victim cult personally
00:17:58.880 or as a society. And, you know, there are examples of First Nations in Canada that do very well,
00:18:04.720 because they were tuned to the economy. These take advantage of their location. I grew up in Kelowna.
00:18:09.180 The West Bank First Nation is a great example of this, as is Assyrius, which has wineries and a hotel.
00:18:13.660 But to the specific example you mentioned in the victim cult from the United States,
00:18:19.280 there was some great data available, okay, on how did Asian Americans succeed despite the odds and
00:18:25.720 despite the notion, very popular kind of in victim, you know, circles, you know, in victim thinking
00:18:30.440 circles, I can't succeed because I was picked on and my ancestors were picked on in the past.
00:18:36.960 Well, that's not necessarily true. And we have a great example from early arrivals to the United
00:18:42.600 States to the West Coast and the rest of the country. So Chinese, you know, people who became
00:18:46.700 Chinese Americans, but who started to immigrate really in the late 1840s with the California gold
00:18:51.200 rush. 20 years later, 30 years later, the Japanese start to arrive in large numbers to the West Coast
00:18:56.600 of the United States, to San Francisco, for example, and other places. And both cohorts are heavily
00:19:03.160 discriminated against. I mean, there's no two ways about it. Initially kind of welcome in the early 1950s.
00:19:08.260 But then the public opinion turns and there's lots of racist laws, racist legislation, racist policy
00:19:15.560 against Chinese, the people who become Chinese Americans and their kids and grandkids. Same
00:19:20.440 thing with the Japanese arrivals. Okay, so what happened? How did they deal with this? Well, first
00:19:25.940 of all, they never wanted to stay in some sort of cultural ghettos, right? Because that's what the
00:19:32.680 racist wanted. So Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, you see, starting pretty early on in the
00:19:38.220 1850s, for Chinese Americans in particular, say, we're going to fight back. I don't know if it was
00:19:42.900 conscious, but they simply thought this is supposed to be the land of opportunity. So there's a great
00:19:48.020 letter, for example, from a Chinese American in the late 1850s. He writes to the California governor,
00:19:53.580 John Engler, at the time. John Engler says, you know, America is only for white people. Well, this
00:19:58.460 newly arrived Chinese person in the United States, who's very eloquent, writes to the governor, says,
00:20:03.500 this proposition is false in the extreme, and you know it, and cites the Constitution and
00:20:08.300 basically stands up for himself. And you see this again and again in the relationship between Chinese
00:20:15.560 and Japanese Americans to the state. And also, that goes on for really a century, because
00:20:21.780 they're discriminated against between 1850 and 1950, roughly, institutionally.
00:20:27.180 You also see them make efforts to integrate in other ways. You see an emphasis in entrepreneurship,
00:20:34.300 in part because Japanese and Chinese Americans aren't allowed, in some cases, to be in the
00:20:38.660 professions. You also see the importance of education. And what I found in researching the
00:20:45.580 victim cult, some fascinating statistics from 1910, 1920, 1930. In 1910, Japanese Americans and Chinese
00:20:53.480 Americans, their children are attending and graduating from high school and college, as the
00:20:59.400 Americans call it, at rates lower than white Americans. By 1920, though, in 1930, their attendance
00:21:05.420 rates and their graduation rates are significantly higher than white Americans, right? The majority
00:21:10.600 population at this time in the United States. And what this shows is, and this sets the ground for
00:21:17.020 future success, but what this shows is, is they are starting to succeed despite the heavy
00:21:22.040 discrimination. And people enthralled by kind of victimization theory that you can never succeed
00:21:27.620 until every institutional wrong is corrected, including ones from 50 or 100 years ago, people
00:21:32.620 who think you can kind of correct for that in modern day. Well, this kind of, you know, rebuts
00:21:38.160 the notion that, you know, once a victim, forever a victim. Japanese and Chinese Americans never
00:21:42.660 thought of themselves that way. They emphasized education. And they did this, by the way, and they
00:21:47.900 started to succeed in the most discriminatory period in American history. Remember that in
00:21:52.380 1924, Washington, the federal government, enacts legislation to ban most immigration, right? It just
00:22:00.320 cuts it off at the knees. And Asian immigrants from East Asia, in particular, are discriminated against
00:22:06.120 heavily. They're pretty much banned for 30 years. So despite that, Japanese and Chinese Americans are
00:22:13.800 starting to succeed wherever they possibly can. It's because they're entrepreneurs, because they
00:22:17.900 value education, and they keep pushing ahead for integration and keep fighting back. So all of those
00:22:22.880 four factors are why East Asian immigrants in the United States were able to carve out some success
00:22:29.140 despite a highly prejudiced society institutionally and personally. But it's also why, you know, starting
00:22:35.040 in the 1970s, you know, it started to become evident that they were succeeding wildly, far better than the
00:22:40.880 average American. But the statistics I discover for the victim call show that they were starting to
00:22:46.360 succeed 50 years earlier than that because of their tenacity and their their strategy, whether that
00:22:51.200 strategy were conscious or not, they just kept barely on ahead. And frankly, they made America live up to
00:22:57.360 her ideals of equality and liberty for all. And so they actually helped renew civilization. And that's part of
00:23:02.620 the theme in the victim cult is, you know, the victim cults can wreck civilizations. But if you stop being
00:23:08.140 a victim and a victim and say, Okay, I'm gonna, I'm not going to, like, forego my rights as a citizen in this
00:23:13.040 Republic or in Canada and in our dominion, I'm going to push ahead. And this actually helps renew
00:23:20.780 civilizations and helps us live up to our ideals. And I think that's a terrific thing.
00:23:26.380 I have, I guess, probably the most important question I have for you today, since this is so now embedded in our
00:23:35.540 society, this hierarchy of victimhood. And it's involved in our schools in our education system from,
00:23:42.360 from, you know, from quite little, all the way up through university. How do we come back from this?
00:23:50.360 I guess, how do we convince this younger generation, especially who's been taught, you know, about
00:23:57.620 class hierarchies and privilege and power dynamics, as just a way of life? How do we sort of write the
00:24:06.340 ship? Hmm. I think part of it is just keep telling the truth, trying to introduce them to real history,
00:24:15.060 try and place some questions in their mind. So let me give you a good example is, I mean, I gave you
00:24:20.640 one statistic already, right? We know that on average, Aboriginal Canadians do worse on statistical outcomes,
00:24:26.260 economics, you know, income, education, the average, you know, but when you get into Apple, Apple comparisons,
00:24:33.040 the one I mentioned earlier, young adults, you see the same statistical outcomes on incomes and other
00:24:38.240 statistics. So that's terrific. So I think just pointing out that, you know, there may be more to
00:24:44.360 this than meets the eye when you just look at averages. You always have to dig down in the data.
00:24:49.000 I mean, that's a bit policy walkish, but let me put this another way. Let's introduce history,
00:24:52.240 real history as well. And let's ask some questions. So I quote Thomas Sowell in the book. Thomas Sowell
00:24:57.400 is a famous African-American economist who disagrees with this notion of victimization as well, or that
00:25:03.640 historic wrongs have as much effect upon incomes and success today as some people claim. So for example,
00:25:10.240 Thomas Sowell looks at black American families succeeding at Washington, D.C. schools in the 1890s,
00:25:15.960 20 years after the Civil War, right? So 30 years after the Civil War ends. And he goes to the 1930s
00:25:22.480 and says black American families are mostly together. You can't blame bad outcomes in the 1970s. And when
00:25:28.680 black American families start to come apart in large, large percentages, you can't blame that on
00:25:34.240 slavery since they were together in the 1930s, by and large. And so it's a matter of linking up the
00:25:40.420 right historical cause or present day cause to the observed effect. But I think as well, part of it
00:25:46.860 is, you know, maybe getting some modesty. I have a chapter in the book that I was initially going to
00:25:53.020 entitle, you know, All Our Ancestors Were Bastards. I instead toned it down a bit. But the basic gist of
00:26:00.620 that chapter is, if you look into history, you find out everybody's ancestors were victims. You know, it doesn't
00:26:07.740 matter whether you're, you know, Arab African, you know, or white European, or, you know, if you're
00:26:15.540 from East Asia, you know, all of our ancestors are pretty awful to each other. And when you really dive
00:26:21.680 down into that, you go, I have a lot more common with everybody else today. And it doesn't matter if
00:26:27.060 I was born in Dubai or Denver, or Paris, or Toronto, I have a lot more in common with other people around
00:26:33.860 the world today who are alive than my ancestors of 100 or 200 years ago. None of us really would
00:26:39.720 have cared to hang around them and what they did to each other, or approved of what they did to each
00:26:43.780 other. So I think a little sort of historical modesty about our own tribe, if I can put it that
00:26:48.680 way, is helpful. And then, yeah, just in historical awareness as well. I mean, look, everybody, victims are
00:26:56.440 created daily, and I don't deny that in the book. I think the danger, though, and the benefit of
00:27:02.320 getting a grasp on history is that you can then have a little bit of modesty about this, and you
00:27:08.640 can be a little more understanding of other people, and you can find commonalities. And I think that's
00:27:13.740 what's been lost. We've kind of retreated into, you know, the collective cult and the victim cult.
00:27:19.120 And that becomes really dangerous, because it basically says, you harmed my tribe 50 or 100 years
00:27:24.580 ago, or you harmed me yesterday, and I want to take revenge. Well, if you understand that almost
00:27:28.840 everybody's tribe was victimized or was doing the victimization in history, then you start to look
00:27:33.720 for solutions. I mean, one of the, the forwards of the book is written by Ellis Ross. Ellis Ross is a
00:27:39.960 former chief elected counselor for the Heisler First Nation on the coast of British Columbia.
00:27:44.040 I heard Ellis speak in Calgary earlier this spring, and I wanted to write the forward after I heard him
00:27:49.860 speak, because Ellis basically said, look, when I started to look into the archives for the Heisler First
00:27:53.940 Nation, he found awful things that were done to the Heisler, right? There's no two ways about it.
00:27:59.040 It was apartheid. But he said, look, I, I, my first impulse was revenge. And then my second impulse was,
00:28:05.060 that's not going to help anyone. How do we look ahead? How do we figure out, you know, how to change
00:28:09.580 this for, in his particular instance, for the Heisler people there? And so he looked for remedies,
00:28:15.160 and not chronic blame. So I think historical modesty, and then also thinking about how we're going to make
00:28:22.600 everyone succeed. I think that's how you get away. That's how you can solve the victim cult.
00:28:27.980 So teach people empathy, teach them about history, teach them to question their assumptions about the
00:28:33.040 wrong cause and effect links, and ask them to really think about what makes people succeed. Now,
00:28:38.020 maybe, maybe here's another way to look at it. It's really easy to blame the past. It's really easy,
00:28:43.060 for example, to look at colonialism in North America or anywhere, or, you know, nations that attack
00:28:48.420 other nations, and, and, you know, draw out a grievance narrative forever. And that's how we
00:28:53.040 continue problems around the world. I was in Hong Kong, though, six years ago. And without almost
00:28:58.900 without exception, I was there to do some research for think tank and talk to business people, to
00:29:03.160 politicians, to civil servants. And with almost without exception, what they said to me, and this
00:29:08.640 is in Hong Kong. This is not, you know, this is not London. It's not New York. It's Hong Kong,
00:29:14.900 which is what, you know, mainly Chinese origin. And they said to me, Mark, the three things we want
00:29:20.140 to keep, capitalism, the rule of law, including the British legal code, and our anti-corruption
00:29:26.140 efforts. And all this was vis-a-vis China proper Beijing. They were worried about losing this,
00:29:31.460 right, to the regime in Beijing, and for good reason. So, you know, so what that told me was
00:29:39.060 they grasped, and for very good reason, because they've been next door to China for 150 years,
00:29:43.720 first under the British, and then the last 20 years, obviously, under Chinese rule,
00:29:47.580 they get what's at stake. And so they took the best from the British colonial period,
00:29:52.820 and left whatever perhaps they don't like. And this summer, students protesting against Beijing
00:29:57.900 raised a British flag. Why did they do that? Because they're not victims of colonialism,
00:30:03.400 but they valued capitalism, rule of law, and anti-corruption efforts. Meanwhile, in the West,
00:30:09.600 we've got people who are chronic victims of what happened 50 years ago, 150 years ago. To me,
00:30:14.560 it was incredibly encouraging that you've got a population that is mostly non-British, obviously,
00:30:19.520 in Hong Kong, saying, we get how you succeed. And to me, that was both a warning to the West,
00:30:26.240 but a positive possibility for everyone if they can get past their victim thinking.
00:30:30.480 Mark, thank you for being so generous with your time. I guess my last question for you is,
00:30:37.440 how do people get a copy of this really great book?
00:30:41.280 Start with your local bookstore. You can find it at Chapters. You can find it at Amazon.ca.
00:30:47.040 If all else fails, look at markmilkey.com. You can find it there as well.
00:30:50.740 Great. Mark, thank you so much. First, for writing this book. For me, as someone who grew up poor and
00:30:57.820 then had a baby at 19, it really resonated with me. It's one of those things where you realize that
00:31:04.020 the recipe to get out of historical wrongs, it's not complicated, but it might be hard.
00:31:15.780 Family, education, hard work. It works for everybody. And so I'm really glad to see that
00:31:22.120 finally there's a book like this written through a Canadian lens.
00:31:28.080 Thank you, Sheila. And it was great to chat. And you're right, the family experience matters.
00:31:32.920 I mean, very briefly, my grandmother and grandfather had a tough time as well. You know,
00:31:38.040 when I think back to they came from Ukraine, they came from Poland, the late 1920s.
00:31:41.720 They had some very tough times, as I recount in part of the book. But like your story,
00:31:46.980 they found a way to get past it. And I never remember them, even though they could have
00:31:50.580 thought of themselves as victims, I don't remember them ever getting stuck there.
00:31:54.140 Throughout their entire lives, they were thankful for Canada, what it offered.
00:31:57.360 And they just never thought like victims, even though I guess in reality they were.
00:32:01.540 But they looked around the world in Canada and thought, we're really fortunate to be here.
00:32:05.220 And that's part of the message of the victim cult. You really don't have to get stuck there
00:32:08.540 as an individual, a family or a society. So thank you, Sheila.
00:32:11.720 Yes. Thanks, Mark. We'll have you back on the show real soon.
00:32:14.680 Thank you.
00:32:15.420 Thanks.
00:32:25.680 We don't have to look very far to find recent Canadian examples of victims.
00:32:31.640 Perpetual victimhood mentality is the thing that spawned Jessica Jonathan Yaniv upon the world.
00:32:37.220 You'll recall that's the BC-based transgender activist who claims to need a mobility scooter,
00:32:42.780 yet was mobile enough to bash in the head of my colleague David Mendes when David dared ask that
00:32:48.840 individual about his vexatious human rights complaints. You see, Yaniv claimed that it was
00:32:54.940 his human right to force unwilling estheticians to wax his genitals. And when he was denied by
00:33:01.300 these women, he claimed to be a victim. You see, victim culture brought us manipulators who realize
00:33:07.520 that being a victim literally pays if they are able to convince the right human rights tribunal
00:33:12.640 of their victimhood status. Now, wouldn't the world just be a better place all around if all of us
00:33:18.640 appreciated that hard work, good choices, education, and family are a recipe for something
00:33:25.200 much better? Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight. Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:33:30.720 I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.
00:33:34.260 And remember, don't let the government tell you that you've had too much to think.
00:33:55.200 Thank you.