Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - June 05, 2024


Ep 1014 | Anti-White Racism in the Church, at Work & in Law | Guest: Jeremy Carl


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 20 minutes

Words per Minute

183.92365

Word Count

14,824

Sentence Count

922

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

37


Summary

Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a public policy think tank, and the author of The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart. In this episode, Jeremy talks about his new book, The Antifacist Class, and why he wrote it.


Transcript

00:00:00.860 It's impossible to be racist against white people.
00:00:04.540 White people are privileged.
00:00:06.160 They are oppressors.
00:00:07.720 It is our Christian duty to be anti-racist and to talk about white fragility and all
00:00:15.640 of the ways that white people are holding Black Americans back.
00:00:20.280 That is the popular narrative, at least within the church.
00:00:23.540 But I've got someone here today to dispel that narrative.
00:00:26.600 It's Jeremy Carl.
00:00:27.540 He wrote the book, The Unprotected Class, How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart.
00:00:34.180 This book and our conversation are filled with the facts of how white people actually are
00:00:40.100 being discriminated against in the United States and what we can do to push back against what
00:00:47.260 is really injustice.
00:00:49.360 This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers.
00:00:52.540 Go to GoodRanchers.com.
00:00:54.100 Use code Allie at checkout.
00:00:55.700 That's GoodRanchers.com.
00:00:57.060 Code Allie.
00:01:08.660 Jeremy, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
00:01:11.700 If you could tell everyone who you are and what you do.
00:01:14.400 Sure.
00:01:15.000 So my name is Jeremy Carl.
00:01:16.100 I'm a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, which is a public policy think tank.
00:01:20.040 Um, and, uh, prior to that, I was at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as a research
00:01:25.680 fellow for many years and, uh, in the interim was served in a senior role in the Trump administration.
00:01:31.060 And that's kind of, uh, the highlights, uh, for me.
00:01:33.880 And I also have a new book out, which is, uh, you know, I think what we'll talk about a lot
00:01:37.600 today.
00:01:37.980 And, uh, that's, that's why I wanted to come sit down.
00:01:40.140 Okay.
00:01:40.620 But how in the world did you graduate from Yale and Harvard and then end up writing a
00:01:46.920 book about anti-white racism?
00:01:48.720 They must be so disappointed that you didn't imbibe all the propaganda.
00:01:53.300 Yeah.
00:01:53.660 Well, I mean, I think people have a different reaction, right?
00:01:58.340 Like the people who don't kind of buy in, who go to those schools are actually some of
00:02:03.420 the most stubborn, like holdouts you could imagine.
00:02:06.480 And I, I have friends, like one of my classmates, Naomi Rao, who's a conservative justice judge
00:02:11.820 on the DC circuit.
00:02:13.180 I mean, similar type thing.
00:02:14.960 Uh, so I think sometimes if it doesn't take, it really doesn't take.
00:02:18.460 Right.
00:02:18.980 Right.
00:02:19.380 And you know, all of their arguments better than the rest of us do.
00:02:23.640 Okay.
00:02:23.960 Let's talk about this book.
00:02:25.260 It's called the unprotected class, how anti-white racism is tearing America apart.
00:02:32.680 I mean, this is something that we are told we are not allowed to mention that it's actually
00:02:37.180 impossible to be racist against white people.
00:02:40.260 So why'd you write it?
00:02:41.880 Well, it was to precisely try to smash that narrative.
00:02:44.600 And, and I sort of saw this, we were talking a little bit before the show.
00:02:47.300 I mean, the book is dedicated to my five kids and I really wrote it most with them in mind
00:02:52.480 because I grew up in America where I had certain opportunities available to me.
00:02:56.280 And then I look and my older ones are starting to get into the sort of college market and
00:03:00.920 things like that, where things become more real for them or looking for jobs.
00:03:04.140 And I sort of saw that, that, uh, they were kind of entering an environment where they
00:03:08.900 were going to be on a non-level playing field.
00:03:10.520 And so I felt it was really important to talk about that and to kind of lay out a case in
00:03:16.620 a way that's not kind of histrionic or not trying to play victim or, or do anything like
00:03:21.860 that, but to say, Hey, we can do better.
00:03:23.800 And particularly as, as white folks, you know, speaking of, of myself, like we don't need
00:03:29.080 to put up with that and we shouldn't, we should have enough self-respect to kind of push back
00:03:32.840 on that false narrative.
00:03:33.720 You know, like we were talking before the camera started rolling five years ago, I think
00:03:39.940 most conservative commentators weren't willing to say that there was any prejudice against
00:03:44.140 white people for fear that we would be called white nationalists, white supremacists, that
00:03:49.000 we would be grouped with the unite the right rally in Charlottesville, that we'd be called
00:03:54.800 alt-right.
00:03:56.360 But certainly post 2020, there has been more frankness and more boldness and maybe just a
00:04:03.420 greater realization on the part of like the commentator class on the right of specific
00:04:09.320 and targeted anti-white hate.
00:04:12.680 And we certainly are more willing to just blatantly say that now.
00:04:16.640 What's your take on that evolution?
00:04:19.120 Yeah.
00:04:19.420 I mean, I think there's, there's positive and negative elements to it.
00:04:22.740 And I think it's just, as you said, and you know, there are folks like you and you'll
00:04:26.720 be pretty frank about when you see stuff on Twitter and you might not say this is anti-white
00:04:30.520 blah, blah, blah, but occasionally you have, but you certainly will call
00:04:33.340 it out.
00:04:33.720 And there's guys like Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk who are all speaking
00:04:40.340 out more frankly about this.
00:04:41.500 Even it's interesting.
00:04:42.520 I've certainly seen that evolution over five, even 10 years.
00:04:46.360 Even since I started writing the book just two years ago.
00:04:50.020 I mean, when there were, there were times where I was doing it where I was like, whoa, you
00:04:53.660 know, I'm kind of on the ledge here and I hope I don't fall off.
00:04:57.540 And then as things have gone around, there's more and more people by the time I got to
00:05:01.420 publication who were at least willing to have that conversation.
00:05:05.340 Now, I still think the book is pushing the edge of what one is allowed to say in 2024.
00:05:11.120 But I definitely feel like I'm not alone in at least these views or having stated these
00:05:15.920 views.
00:05:16.340 I've just sort of brought more evidence hopefully to the debate.
00:05:18.700 Yeah.
00:05:19.680 Okay.
00:05:20.160 So George Floyd was four years ago?
00:05:23.940 Yeah.
00:05:24.180 Four years ago.
00:05:25.100 Can you believe that?
00:05:26.180 I mean, that was such a revealing time, I think, for me as a white evangelical woman who
00:05:34.440 saw so many pastors, Bible study leaders, influencers who call themselves conservative Christian.
00:05:42.880 And we agree on the LGBTQ issue.
00:05:46.580 We agree on maybe 99% of issues.
00:05:49.660 Post to Black Square, say, yes, Black Lives Matter.
00:05:53.240 We should be on the streets with Black Lives Matter.
00:05:55.380 Oh, let's have a conversation about white fragility, white privilege and systemic racism and police
00:06:01.600 brutality.
00:06:02.240 And I tried to talk to some of them like, but here are the facts.
00:06:05.380 Here are the statistics.
00:06:06.600 This is not really what's happening.
00:06:08.020 And why would we perpetuate a narrative that is keeping a certain group of people in fear
00:06:12.860 and in resentment?
00:06:14.180 And they did not want to hear it.
00:06:17.580 As you were sitting and watching also as a Christian, that whole thing happened.
00:06:22.840 Like, what were your thoughts?
00:06:25.120 What was your analysis?
00:06:26.560 Well, I think I was similarly disappointed, but not surprised because we're sinners and
00:06:31.180 that extends to the church and the failures of the church.
00:06:34.540 We've had failures for our entire history.
00:06:36.920 There was one person who didn't have failures and he died on a cross, and it's just as simple
00:06:41.520 as that, right?
00:06:42.400 So I wasn't surprised that we did not, as a church overall, meet that moment in the way
00:06:48.040 that I would have liked to.
00:06:49.500 But at the same time, it certainly opened my eyes and it was concerning to sort of see what
00:06:56.420 went on and how quickly people sort of fell in for the narrative around George Floyd.
00:07:03.820 And it was sort of interesting.
00:07:05.160 And I have a whole chapter on the church in the book where I kind of discuss some of the
00:07:09.380 failures of the church around critical race theory.
00:07:11.480 Actually, interestingly, I truly think the best kind of treatment I've seen of this within
00:07:16.060 the church and one I rely on quite a bit is Votie Bauckham's book, Fault Lines.
00:07:20.500 I don't know if you've read it.
00:07:22.380 And I have to be honest, because I don't spend kind of as much time, even though I'm an active
00:07:26.660 churchgoer, like in internal church politics, I knew who he was, but I didn't know that much
00:07:30.920 about him.
00:07:31.440 We have the same publisher and he sort of gave me a copy of the book as I was beginning
00:07:35.540 to write mine.
00:07:36.040 He said, you might find this interesting.
00:07:37.240 And I was like, OK, well, it'll be this anti-woke black guy.
00:07:40.220 Fine, fine.
00:07:40.740 You know, like I didn't have huge expectations coming in.
00:07:44.640 And then I read it.
00:07:45.900 Because you just didn't think it would reveal anything to you that you didn't already know.
00:07:48.540 Yeah, exactly.
00:07:49.520 I thought it would be sort of a surface level thing, which is how most books are.
00:07:52.940 I mean, they're sort of surface level things.
00:07:54.200 It's not a particular slide on him.
00:07:54.920 But then when I actually read it, I mean, it was a really deep theological exploration.
00:08:02.520 I mean, the guy doesn't miss.
00:08:03.740 I love Vodibakam.
00:08:05.320 I mean, he'll name names and that's what he does in that book.
00:08:08.800 Yeah, no, absolutely.
00:08:09.480 And I think his showing in great detail how kind of BLM and CRT, what he calls critical
00:08:17.140 social justice, actually in the book, completely substitutes itself for the gospel.
00:08:22.280 He sort of shows how in each level of critical social justice, in his terminology, you can
00:08:29.500 find an absolute parallel within the actual gospel that it's replacing.
00:08:32.920 So I thought it was a really profound book.
00:08:34.660 And certainly, I love people to buy my book, but particularly if you're interested in this
00:08:37.920 issue within the church, I think Vodibakam's book is absolutely terrific.
00:08:42.000 Yeah, absolutely.
00:08:43.220 So in chapter one, you give a lay of the land, not just within the church.
00:08:47.600 We'll get into more specifically what this has looked like within the church.
00:08:50.640 But give us the lay of the land of anti-white racism.
00:08:54.300 How did we get here?
00:08:55.160 And when did we get here?
00:08:56.640 Yeah, you know, and this is a question I get asked a fair bit.
00:08:59.860 And it's not one that I have, unfortunately, a super pat answer for, because I don't think
00:09:03.420 it was like, you know, there was this sudden switch that flipped and everything changed.
00:09:08.280 I think you can find the origins of it, certainly in the civil rights movement.
00:09:11.780 And in saying that, there's some other people who've written a little more narrowly on these
00:09:16.140 issues who are really quick to kind of say, oh, the Civil Rights Act was a disaster.
00:09:21.060 And actually, you know, you had a really good discussion a few weeks back with Delano
00:09:24.360 Squires, I thought, where he was actually much closer to sort of my view on a lot of this,
00:09:29.800 which is to say there were real problems that happened because of that.
00:09:33.820 But it's really easy to kind of Monday morning quarterback it and say, oh, you know, this
00:09:38.540 and that.
00:09:39.220 Things were not perfect before then.
00:09:40.740 It was a response to real issues and real sins that we had in America that we needed
00:09:46.080 to respond to.
00:09:48.200 It was a blunt instrument to do that.
00:09:50.380 I think it's really easy to look back and say, well, we shouldn't have done this and
00:09:53.080 this and this, or it got carried away in these ways.
00:09:56.140 But I'm not, you know, this book is not kind of a full on attack on that.
00:10:00.500 It's simply to say we had a very different set of problems in 1964 when we came up with
00:10:06.120 this than we do in 2024.
00:10:08.360 I mean, that's 60 years have passed.
00:10:10.840 A lot of American history has passed.
00:10:12.960 And so we need to be just have a very different approach to things, ones that kind of restores
00:10:19.700 freedom of association and deals with the sorts of real problems we have today, which
00:10:24.640 is not people not being able to be served at lunch counters, but the fact that we've got
00:10:28.140 overt discrimination against white people in education, in jobs, what have you.
00:10:33.640 And so I'm trying to respond to that.
00:10:35.160 So I think it sort of starts there.
00:10:36.480 And then what happens is the administrative state gets to it, the Supreme Court gets to
00:10:40.400 it, and they begin expanding this law with its pluses and minuses into much more negative
00:10:45.460 territory that was not even contemplated in the original act.
00:10:49.120 And then I think kind of the second big inflection point is at around 2013, and we see this in
00:10:56.800 the social science data, we have the so-called Great Awokening.
00:11:00.220 And for you and me as Christians, that has a particular meaning because, of course, we
00:11:04.620 have the Great Awakenings, which were historical Christian moments where we had real religious
00:11:09.140 fervor and revival in America.
00:11:11.080 I think the Great Awokening is a perfect name for this because it truly was a religious
00:11:15.100 movement or, again, a substitution for religious where all of a sudden Obama has his second—he
00:11:21.880 gets reelected.
00:11:22.840 Yeah.
00:11:23.200 And you can see in the survey data that all of these racial attitudes just go completely
00:11:27.740 off the line, and we kind of wind up in George Floyd world.
00:11:31.680 And LGBTQ.
00:11:32.080 I mean, it's a whole progressive revolution.
00:11:33.480 Of course.
00:11:34.520 Everything changed.
00:11:35.520 And Pew Research shows this.
00:11:36.680 Yeah.
00:11:36.860 And Obama's second term is when the left got radically more left.
00:11:41.980 Conservatives stayed about the same, if not even a little more liberal on some things.
00:11:46.540 But the left got drastically more left on every issue during this Great Awokening.
00:11:51.700 Absolutely.
00:11:52.640 And the political scientists call that asymmetric polarization.
00:11:55.740 And that's exactly what we do see in this Pew data.
00:11:58.540 And again, this is for your listeners who may not be familiar.
00:12:01.780 I mean, Pew is not some right-wing kind of—
00:12:04.700 No, not at all.
00:12:04.800 This is just your standard general survey.
00:12:08.160 Nobody's disputing what we're seeing in this survey data.
00:12:11.180 And they use what I would call left-wing language.
00:12:13.800 They'll capitalize B for black.
00:12:15.860 So this is not a conservative surveyor.
00:12:19.220 So what happened in 2013?
00:12:21.580 Why this change?
00:12:23.020 Well, so I mean, I think there's a few things that you could point to.
00:12:25.860 And again, now I'm getting a little more speculative.
00:12:27.740 And I'm a very person who likes to deal in facts.
00:12:29.700 So I think Obama got bolder once he didn't have to get reelected in terms of some of his racial rhetoric that I didn't find particularly helpful.
00:12:37.860 So I think that's a piece of it.
00:12:39.480 Then you have a couple of incidents.
00:12:41.680 You have the hands-up, don't shoot.
00:12:43.460 Michael Brown in Missouri.
00:12:45.040 Of course, that didn't actually happen.
00:12:46.800 But that rhetoric went kind of haywire.
00:12:50.680 There you have Trayvon Martin in Florida and Obama kind of saying, well, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon and kind of jumping in before the facts were known on these cases.
00:13:02.520 And so you had a few cases where it really charged bad actors.
00:13:05.600 You had the president of the United States, in my view, encouraging bad actors.
00:13:09.140 And then there's a whole, you know, there's dark matter here that I'm not even seeing because I don't even think that's sufficient to explain everything we saw.
00:13:16.200 But we can definitely see a huge change, and I expect those are some of the things that drove it.
00:13:21.660 Here's what you say in Chapter 1.
00:13:24.100 The demand for quote-unquote racism among political activists continues to increase even as the supply of racism diminishes.
00:13:33.020 So what you're talking about there is these activists who are conveying this message that black and brown people are oppressed, white people are the ones who are oppressing them.
00:13:43.380 But that just doesn't bear out when you look at how white people view minorities, right?
00:13:51.400 No, exactly.
00:13:52.620 And I think where you see this most dramatically, and I write about this a bit in the book, is, again, this is general social survey data, so this is not from some right-wing pollster.
00:14:02.280 If you look at kind of how groups view other groups, and they survey whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, everybody has an in-group preference, is what you'd call it.
00:14:12.960 So they prefer their in-group.
00:14:14.640 Within limits, this is not a problem.
00:14:16.120 Just in the same way that you prefer your mom to some random woman on the street, you're going to generally have some preference for the group that's most looking like you and shares your culture to some other group.
00:14:26.980 Conservatives have a little more than liberals.
00:14:28.380 But, again, like if you look across the races, across ideologies, it's all kind of like what you'd expect and pretty similar.
00:14:35.220 With the one exception, liberal whites.
00:14:37.240 Liberal whites have an out-group preference.
00:14:39.500 And I've never seen this in any other country's social survey data.
00:14:42.860 So liberal whites, I mean, it stands out.
00:14:45.060 If you look at a bar chart, it's like so dramatic.
00:14:47.460 They think other white people are more criminal, stupider, you know, you kind of name it, down the line, than all other groups.
00:14:53.420 So there's a real pathology within liberalism of self-hatred.
00:14:57.880 And it's kind of being visited, unfortunately, on the rest of us, particularly among liberal whites, unfortunately.
00:15:02.740 Yeah.
00:15:03.900 You say, actually, what is unusual about America is, in comparison with most other countries, the incredible historical openness of many white Americans to welcoming new groups into the American family.
00:15:15.700 So even within, you know, conservative whites and, like other groups, having an in-group preference, which, as you said, is natural, there is still a lot of tolerance, a lot of openness.
00:15:27.520 I mean, when you think about all the nationalities, ethnicities, cultures that live in close proximity to each other in America with general peace, that is what is astounding about our country, right?
00:15:40.360 And yet we're told that we're actually – America is the outlier in our racism and how much we hate non-white people.
00:15:47.260 It's just not true.
00:15:48.180 Yeah.
00:15:48.500 Oh, absolutely.
00:15:49.400 And if you were to kind of go to the average white person and point to some, you know, Indian American or Hispanic American or Asian American and say, is that person American?
00:15:59.860 And, you know, assuming they are, of course, American, they're going to say, of course.
00:16:04.200 Yeah.
00:16:04.360 I mean, the number of people who would really question – whites would question the American-ness of somebody based on their race is incredibly small.
00:16:11.560 I mean, right?
00:16:12.120 Like – and you compare that.
00:16:13.940 I mean, I've traveled all around the world.
00:16:15.500 I've lived in India.
00:16:17.540 I can guarantee you those are not as permeable cultures to outsiders or a country like China, which takes a few thousand immigrants a year, you know, as opposed to millions.
00:16:27.360 There's no comparison in terms of how open we have been in America and I'd add more broadly in the West because you see – even though Europe is less open, it's still very, very open to foreigners coming in and joining the community.
00:16:41.800 So you mentioned the Civil Rights Act, not all bad, not completely unnecessary, but it's now manifested itself in ways that was – that were unintended, unforeseen.
00:17:06.040 And it's created, of course, all these protected classes that get preferred treatment.
00:17:12.140 They get preferential treatment, which means discrimination against white people simply because of the color of their skin, in particular white males.
00:17:20.980 Yeah.
00:17:21.420 And it follows along this intersectional ideology that white males are at the, you know, bottom of the totem pole.
00:17:28.200 Right.
00:17:28.480 And the most oppressive.
00:17:30.700 So talk a little bit more about how that has manifested itself.
00:17:34.540 Anti-white discrimination has manifested itself through civil rights law.
00:17:38.560 Yeah.
00:17:39.040 Well, first of all, you have the protected class.
00:17:41.080 In my book comes this notion of the unprotected class.
00:17:44.860 Now, I think it's important to say so that any leftists who are listening don't kind of jump down my throat.
00:17:50.260 I do acknowledge in the book, nominally, whites cannot be discriminated against for being white.
00:17:55.080 What we actually see is an epidemic of that.
00:17:58.220 So it's in the law, but it's not really enforced except in rare situations.
00:18:02.120 Although I would add, in a similar way to we can have this conversation a little better than we used to, we're beginning to see, like, some of the most extreme anti-white behavior for the first time being challenged.
00:18:14.560 Like, you know, blatant things where they're saying white people cannot apply for this.
00:18:18.300 So they don't usually put it like this, but it's like, this is for Asian-Americans or Latinos, right?
00:18:23.000 Which means, you know, not for you, right?
00:18:26.500 And so we're beginning to say, hey, actually, you know, that's illegal.
00:18:29.440 You can't do that under the law.
00:18:31.940 And the Supreme Court did come down against affirmative action at universities, right?
00:18:35.400 Right.
00:18:35.660 And so there's this 6-3 decision that happened this year where they overturned what was called the Bakke decision.
00:18:41.380 I write about the Bakke decision a fair bit in my book and kind of what happened to it.
00:18:45.300 It's sort of a stunning story.
00:18:48.120 But this is theoretically outlawed affirmative action.
00:18:51.420 Now, the problem with that is people are kind of doing a way premature victory dance.
00:18:57.340 Because if you look in California, twice in the last 25 years, they've outlawed by popular initiative affirmative action in the universities.
00:19:06.620 I've looked at the California admission statistics.
00:19:08.960 If you really squint, you can maybe see a little bit of effect of that.
00:19:13.380 But they are still finding all sorts of ways to discriminate against white Californians, to a lesser degree, Asian-American Californians as well.
00:19:22.960 And they just call it something else and nobody has been able to challenge them.
00:19:26.660 I expect that we are going to have some of the same problems without very, very aggressive lawfare on our part enforcing these sorts of things nationally.
00:19:37.220 Now, a part of this conversation about affirmative action, whether it's official or unofficial, out there or hidden, is the result of incompetent people becoming doctors and becoming lawyers.
00:19:53.920 Because, and this is part of the forbidden conversation that you're not allowed to say, but part of affirmative action is, unfortunately, lowering the standard of admission in order to allow more minorities into a med school, allow them to get on the path to becoming doctors.
00:20:12.420 I mean, that is a scary part of this, that anti-white discrimination, whites are still the majority in the country, leads to people who are not qualified for the pilot job, for the doctor job, for the lawyer job, getting those, I mean, getting those jobs and causing a lot of chaos.
00:20:33.900 Well, I think that's absolutely right.
00:20:35.900 And it's actually a good maybe kind of segue for me to talk about the Bakke decision in particular, because I think particularly some of your women listeners will be interested in this.
00:20:44.740 So, Bakke, which was the original affirmative action decision of the court that was the law of the land until this last year, was a medical student or was applying to medical school at UC Davis.
00:20:55.480 He was rejected in favor of some African-American candidates who had dramatically lower qualifications on paper.
00:21:04.220 One of these in particular was kind of held up in the media as this is the guy who got, and I tell this story in the book, this is the guy who got that spot that Bakke did, and isn't it great because he's in the community, being a doctor, he's doing all these really useful things for women.
00:21:21.300 He was an obstetrician, I believe, and he was celebrated by Ted Kennedy and a long profile in the New York Times.
00:21:27.840 So, fast forward a few years, he kills one of his patients.
00:21:33.040 I believe he may have sterilized another few, like, unintentionally during delivery.
00:21:37.680 Don't quote me on that, but, like, very serious medical malpractice.
00:21:41.040 He kills another patient in liposuction and kind of abandons her to die.
00:21:45.860 I mean, it's really horrific stuff.
00:21:47.860 And this is the consequence of, you know, people actually die.
00:21:53.200 Airplanes fall out of the sky.
00:21:54.380 When you have incompetent people being supported just by race, and this is literally the Bakke case, whereas Bakke eventually is admitted and goes on to work at the Mayo Clinic, which is one of the best kind of medical centers in the entire country.
00:22:07.740 Yeah.
00:22:08.120 Oh, my goodness.
00:22:08.820 And we see that kind of thing manifest itself in so many different ways, starting in school.
00:22:14.460 We see there is a disparity in disciplinary action taken, or there is a reduction of disciplinary action taken because of the disproportionate outcomes, because of the disproportionate impact that it has on minority students.
00:22:31.400 Can you talk about that?
00:22:32.280 Absolutely.
00:22:33.240 And again, I go over some of this in the book, but you even have things like both of the horrific Florida case a few years back where the guy goes into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and shoots up.
00:22:45.400 So the Obama administration is putting pressure on schools to lower the rate of disparity in discipline by race.
00:22:58.000 So this guy is Hispanic.
00:23:00.180 They don't want to have that.
00:23:02.040 So they basically do things that he should have been red flagged earlier.
00:23:05.440 He's not.
00:23:06.440 Similarly, Trayvon Martin, similar thing.
00:23:08.220 Very few people know about this, but he's basically caught with burglary tools and women's jewelry that completely matches.
00:23:17.100 This is obviously before he gets killed.
00:23:20.280 The jewelry reported stolen elsewhere.
00:23:22.900 It's never reported by the school resource officer to the police because they're trying to basically do this racial balancing.
00:23:31.840 So you have this huge incident that becomes a national incident because we have this racial balancing rather than just being dispassionate and enforcing the same rules and regulations on everybody.
00:23:42.640 You say on page 81, the Obama administration pushed policies that disproportionately put white students and teachers at risk in order to hide facts about the disciplinary records of black and Hispanic students.
00:24:05.780 Because Democrats were uncomfortable with the underlying demographics of school misbehavior.
00:24:11.860 So they pushed these policies, put the pressures on the school to say, hey, let's make sure the outcomes aren't disparate.
00:24:17.580 We see the same thing with policing.
00:24:19.340 Well, let's charge them less.
00:24:20.940 Let's arrest them less because we're only concerned with the outcomes.
00:24:26.140 But so Trump, the Trump administration ended Obama's disparate impact school disciplinary policies.
00:24:32.180 The Biden administration was only too happy to bring them back.
00:24:35.400 But even so, from 2017 to 2019, obviously Trump is president there.
00:24:41.480 But in California schools, 3.7 percent of African-Americans, 3.8 percent of Native Americans and 2.1 percent of Hispanics were punished for fighting four or more times compared to just 1.2 percent of whites and 1 percent of Asian-Americans.
00:24:56.180 So even with these policies trying to say, nope, we don't want any gaps, we don't want it to look like black students are misbehaving more than white students, you still see a disparity there.
00:25:07.000 That's a pattern that we see over and over again.
00:25:09.160 That is, I mean, social justice, basically, which is trying to maneuver things so that the group that is lagging behind gets ahead.
00:25:17.960 Not by addressing the root cause of it, but basically trying to cook the numbers by changing the policies.
00:25:24.940 No, absolutely.
00:25:26.020 And one of the things that you just alluded to in reading that passage that's also important, a lot of the times because the critic would say, ah, well, it's just institutionalized white supremacy.
00:25:35.000 That's what's driving it for almost all of these metrics that you mentioned.
00:25:40.000 Asian-Americans will actually do better than whites.
00:25:43.000 They're less likely to be misbehaving in school.
00:25:45.080 Their grades are better if you get to adults.
00:25:46.960 Their income is higher.
00:25:47.780 Their health care is better.
00:25:48.940 They have to be erased.
00:25:50.340 Less fatherlessness, more time on homework, growing up, all different measures Asians pretty much surpass whites.
00:25:56.520 Absolutely.
00:25:56.840 And so they have to be erased from this conversation because it totally wrecks the white supremacy narrative to have them in this conversation.
00:26:06.460 And so I think that's a really important thing to mention.
00:26:09.140 Yeah.
00:26:09.380 And I've talked to white women about this, that, OK, you're saying that there's institutional white supremacy and that's why that there are these disparities of outcome between white Americans and black Americans.
00:26:21.480 It's always just compared white and black, whether it's maternal mortality or whatever.
00:26:25.780 And they always leave the Asians out and they say, well, that's a model minority myth, which I'm not even sure how it's a myth if we've got the statistics.
00:26:33.140 And even in some things, Hispanics have to be excluded.
00:26:36.140 Like when it comes to maternal mortality, they'll say, well, white women are so much less likely to die in childbirth than black women.
00:26:43.240 Well, Hispanic women actually have a better rate of survival in a lot of cases.
00:26:49.140 And so you can't talk about that, though.
00:26:51.240 It's all to perpetuate this resentment and this war between whites and blacks.
00:27:00.420 Right.
00:27:00.980 Absolutely.
00:27:01.740 And again, you know, I sort of wrote this and particularly for the parents who are listening to this.
00:27:07.700 I mean, again, I really did write it with that in mind.
00:27:11.240 I wrote it as a parent, out of my concern as a parent, you know, in thinking, you know, how do I talk to my kids about this?
00:27:16.740 And my kids, my older ones have all read the book, actually, which I didn't expect them to necessarily do, but they did.
00:27:24.640 And it's a great kind of manual that you could give certainly to an older kid and say, hey, here's some of the things that you're going to deal with and maybe just think about how that maps with your experience.
00:27:35.620 And one thing that's actually been really interesting, one of the first interviews I did on this book was with Charlie Kirk.
00:27:40.860 And Charlie said, you know, when I talk to my older donors, they're like, oh, you know, I'm not sure I can say that.
00:27:46.480 It might be racist.
00:27:47.540 When I talk to all the young kids in school, particularly young white kids, they totally get it.
00:27:52.220 Right.
00:27:52.440 And you're, you know, they're like, absolutely, this is happening.
00:27:55.340 And so it's sort of giving them the tools to talk about this in a calm and responsible fact and evidence-based way without being sort of histrionic or, you know, crying victim or anything like that.
00:28:06.400 You know, I was talking to a baby boomer a few months ago, Republican, conservative, successful business owner, talking to him about DEI.
00:28:16.100 And he, you know, wanted to have a kind of like nuanced take, well, you know, DEI is important in some ways.
00:28:24.280 You just have to remember that we grew up in a time of explicit racism and discrimination and a lot of us feel guilty and we feel like we're making up for either the racism that we saw in our parents' generation or that we saw around us in the South in the 60s and 70s.
00:28:39.340 But then when I asked him, I said, okay, but you realize how this is going to affect your grandsons, your grandsons who are teenagers right now.
00:28:48.720 How, like, how would you feel if this DEI policy negatively, tangibly affects him?
00:28:54.900 And that got him thinking a little bit.
00:28:57.180 He was like, I got to think about that.
00:28:59.540 Do you see that, that some of this is motivated actually by even white conservatives in the baby boomer class because they are, they feel guilty?
00:29:08.380 Yeah. And I think for older people, particularly my parents are kind of, they grew up, they were born right before World War II.
00:29:15.060 And so they kind of grew up with this world that was different and they can't totally make that frame switch to like, hey, it's not the 1940s and 50s anymore.
00:29:26.320 I mean, of course, in certain ways they can, but it's, they've sort of grown up with this.
00:29:29.800 And they've also grown up with a lot of the propaganda around this that we've had.
00:29:33.820 And so it's difficult.
00:29:35.500 And so I do try to personalize it, particularly when I'm talking to parents and say, hey, this is, this is not abstract.
00:29:40.680 This is about whether your kid is going to have the same opportunities that other kids are, whether it be in the workplace, in jobs, how they're going to be portrayed in the culture.
00:29:49.400 Because we've talked about a lot of informal things in this, or formal things in this conversation.
00:29:55.180 But I have chapters on Hollywood and places like that, or how we teach history, that there is some actual formal discrimination going on in both of those places.
00:30:04.640 But a lot of it is sort of just like, what are the messages the culture is giving us?
00:30:08.920 And again, as Christians, we pay a lot of attention to the fact that we don't always love those messages.
00:30:12.500 But we're also getting a lot of messages from Madison Avenue, from Hollywood about, you know, white people being evil, white people being bad.
00:30:21.420 And your kids are sitting in front of Disney cartoons or whatever, and they're imbibing that message, unfortunately.
00:30:28.440 Yeah.
00:30:28.760 And I want to talk about that.
00:30:29.880 I want to talk about so-called representation in a second, but I'm still on this, and I know we have to move past, like, the first couple chapters.
00:30:36.900 But there's so much packed in, and I just encourage everyone to get the book, because you're not getting, in this conversation, because it's a conversation, all of the data.
00:30:45.880 There's so much data in here that we just can't even cover.
00:30:50.160 But I do want to talk about, you mentioned this, which is really interesting.
00:30:53.800 Again, something that I think a lot of people noticed, but didn't know if it was actually happening.
00:30:57.500 Anticipating an unfavorable Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, education elites began to do everything they could to reduce objective performance measurements, largely under the cover of COVID.
00:31:09.220 Some schools began moving to eliminate standardized tests entirely versus their requirement, and later, even as an option, as happened in California.
00:31:18.920 And they say that they're doing this, again, for COVID, but some people might even say inclusiveness.
00:31:25.700 Maybe they'll cite DEI.
00:31:27.400 We see similar policies in grade school, public schools, removing reading requirements.
00:31:33.680 There was that school, I think it was a school in Baltimore, where 80% of the seniors could not read.
00:31:39.020 Like, they basically were illiterate, and they still graduated.
00:31:43.600 Again, because the only concern is outcomes, not the real problems.
00:31:49.300 And when you have an outcome-based metric like that, when people aren't meeting the standard, what goes is not the people, but the standard.
00:31:58.300 And that's what we're seeing, and that has profoundly negative consequences for all of society as we were kind of, even at our top, top institutions, kind of walking away from standards.
00:32:10.640 And in fact, this got so extreme that some of the Ivy League has kind of looked at, they kind of got rid of the SATs.
00:32:16.880 Their student quality dropped so dramatically that quietly they've begun to reverse themselves.
00:32:21.900 They're not going to go all the way, and it's not going to be complete, but it was just, it was really so visible how much getting rid of standards had hurt them that they said, well, we've ultimately got a brand to protect, so we're going to, you know, walk back at least a little bit.
00:32:35.280 Yeah.
00:32:35.580 I don't know if you listened to the Sold a Story podcast.
00:32:39.480 It came out, I think, yeah, it was last year, a little over a year ago.
00:32:43.640 And it's just about how we have, as a public education system, we have accepted this mode of reading that instead of relying on any phonics, it's like weird tactics of word memorization, whatever.
00:32:59.600 But one of the statistics in there was that most fourth graders, most fourth graders of all races can read at a kindergarten level or below, and 82% of black fourth graders cannot read.
00:33:12.200 82% of black fourth graders.
00:33:15.700 And so if we really cared, if we really cared about black excellence, if we really cared about them being the doctors and the scientists and lawyers, which I don't think you and I have a problem with that, with any competent person achieving those goals, but looking at the statistics, that can't happen in a competent way.
00:33:38.260 Or, yeah, it's just not going to happen if this is what's going on.
00:33:42.880 And like you said, outcomes-based systems, that's what that leads to.
00:33:48.840 Absolutely.
00:33:49.600 And even though I have my share of disagreements with him, when George W. Bush was talking about the soft bigotry of low expectations, I think that this was, you know, one of the more effective things he does.
00:33:59.160 And people will, by the way, not—you're never going to have perfect equality outside of communism, right?
00:34:04.880 Exactly.
00:34:05.240 But you're—and that wouldn't obviously be perfect for many reasons, but if you set a high standard and high expectations and you meet them for everybody, you'll be surprised by who will kind of come up and do that.
00:34:19.200 And it's one of the things, kind of in a similar way, you hear a lot of discussion about black fatherlessness, for example, and they say—the apologists say, oh, this is a legacy of slavery.
00:34:29.960 Well, if you go back to 1940, a much closer time to slavery than today, the African-American fatherlessness rate was around 15%, which is not only—it's way lower than even the white rate is today, which is like 35%, 38%.
00:34:45.880 So what we had is nobody's genetics changed.
00:34:51.360 Certainly America didn't get more racist, but the culture changed a lot, and the expectation changed a lot, and that had a really profound negative effect.
00:35:00.040 So that's why this, by the way, this sort of discussion matters not just for white people or white listeners, but for everybody, because the policy we are putting in place, policies we are putting in place, are hurting everybody, not just white students, white people.
00:35:12.080 Gosh, I recommended this book so much in 2020.
00:35:16.680 I'm sure you've read it, Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell.
00:35:20.340 I'm sure you have, but a lot of this conversation just reminds me of that, because that's something that he points out.
00:35:25.880 One, that disparities of outcome don't automatically prove that there's discrimination.
00:35:29.920 There could be all different kinds of reasons for disparities, but also pointing out the statistics that you're talking about, that if we're looking at these disparities as proof of discrimination, well, if we go back to before the Civil Rights Act, if we go back to the 50s and 60s, those disparities are a lot smaller when racism was much more pervasive and pronounced.
00:35:56.480 And so racism can't be the cause of greater disparities today when clearly we're not as racist as we were 60 years ago.
00:36:04.040 Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
00:36:05.480 And I'm glad you mentioned Sowell because he was absolutely a touchstone for this book.
00:36:09.680 And in fact, I kind of mentioned, I'd, of course, I mean, you can't be an American and not ever think about race.
00:36:16.580 But the first time I really remember seriously thinking about race and public policy, I was a newlywed.
00:36:22.600 My wife and I were both Americans, but we were living in India.
00:36:25.020 I was doing public policy work out there in 2004.
00:36:28.580 And I read Thomas Sowell's book, Affirmative Action Around the World, an Empirical Study, which is a terrific book.
00:36:34.500 And I realized that a lot of the things I was seeing in India around caste politics were really the exact replication of what we were seeing in the U.S. around racial politics, just different groups kind of swapped in as the victims and the oppressors.
00:36:47.160 And so that was really the beginning of my really thinking more seriously about a lot of this stuff.
00:36:52.920 Which is funny because there is a book that was popularized, maybe it was published too, but popularized definitely after 2020 that I saw Christians promoting, that I saw Oprah promoting.
00:37:01.040 I think the author's last name is Wilkerson called Caste.
00:37:04.240 And it argues, though, the opposite of what you're saying.
00:37:08.260 I mean, it argues that black and brown people are in a caste system in the United States thanks to the white oppressor.
00:37:14.620 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:37:15.380 Well, this is the dynamic that the left shows.
00:37:18.240 And again, I mean, what I try to do in my book is just demolish that with facts and logic.
00:37:23.620 I mean, I want to sound too Ben Shapiro here, but there's there's like an element of just, yeah, I put out the evidence and people I'm not screaming about it, but like people can judge for themselves.
00:37:34.540 And I think the people who've read the book find it pretty persuasive.
00:37:37.000 So we've heard for a long time the importance of representation.
00:37:51.960 And like a lot of leftists speak, it starts out sounding innocuous.
00:37:56.440 Tolerance, inclusion, diversity, equity, all of these kind of universally positive terms or they once were universally positive terms.
00:38:04.860 And so you feel guilty questioning them.
00:38:07.000 And not accepting them.
00:38:08.920 And the same is true of representation.
00:38:10.620 Well, sure, everyone should be represented.
00:38:13.600 And then all of a sudden, I mean, when it comes to race, it's like, wait, was there a white person in that commercial?
00:38:19.680 Right.
00:38:19.840 I haven't seen a white person in a commercial in forever.
00:38:23.080 Right.
00:38:23.300 So everyone gets represented disproportionately now in the media except for white people.
00:38:28.900 Right.
00:38:29.440 And I talk about there's a Twitter feed.
00:38:31.120 I think it's called white people are stupid in commercials.
00:38:34.360 Stupid white ads, I think, is the official.
00:38:36.540 But it's literally just so that they're actually being represented.
00:38:39.720 But it just points out.
00:38:40.960 And by the way, when you read ad industry blogs, as I did for this, it's like a trope actually today of like the stupid white person doing something dumb in the ad.
00:38:49.880 And the kind of enlightened minority comes in and saves them.
00:38:53.260 This is among like liberal people in the ad industry acknowledging that this goes on.
00:38:57.680 Or similarly, something like Hamilton, which I actually think is artistically actually a very interesting work.
00:39:03.120 And it's well done.
00:39:04.300 Very catchy.
00:39:05.060 Love the song.
00:39:05.760 Yeah.
00:39:06.160 But yet, if you kind of poke beneath that to the racial politics, at one level, you could say, hey, that's great that they're saying that all these different racial groups can be inheritors of the founding because we, of course, do believe that.
00:39:18.640 But then the one villain, King George, or, you know, like the kind of obvious villain is the only guy who's the white guy.
00:39:24.580 Yeah, of course.
00:39:24.980 Right?
00:39:25.460 And then there's also a point, like I remember some of my younger kids were like, you know, didn't even fully understand.
00:39:32.240 Oh, no.
00:39:32.680 The founders weren't actually African-American.
00:39:35.380 Right?
00:39:35.680 So there's that, and then you see the black woman as Mary Queen of Scots or whatever, but you could never imagine a white guy playing Frederick Douglass.
00:39:44.880 Right?
00:39:45.360 So it's that when we talk about representation, which you raised earlier, the problem is that representation tends to only go one way.
00:39:52.540 Right?
00:39:52.740 Right.
00:39:52.840 So like if we're going to totally open it up, which I actually argue probably we shouldn't totally open it up, but if we are going to –
00:39:58.520 What do you mean by open it up?
00:39:59.400 Well, I mean if you're just going to say, yeah, there's no problem with a black actor playing Mary Queen of Scots.
00:40:04.460 And a white actor playing Martin Luther King.
00:40:06.480 Yeah.
00:40:06.620 Yeah.
00:40:06.900 I think you can open it up a little bit, but you have to be careful.
00:40:11.080 Depends on what it is.
00:40:12.940 Is it representing history or is it just like a silly work of fiction where the race doesn't actually matter?
00:40:18.300 Right.
00:40:18.740 And I recount a story that was emblematic to me of this African-American actress who had been cast as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
00:40:27.880 And for those of you who've seen this, and she was kind of complaining that she was really seen as a black actress here.
00:40:33.340 And if you know the story of My Fair Lady as a musical, it's entirely about this white, cockney, lower class British woman.
00:40:43.000 That's the entire plot.
00:40:45.800 The entire dramatic tension is around that aspect of her identity.
00:40:51.000 And to kind of cast somebody who's not white in that role – I mean you can do it.
00:40:55.200 It's not totally crazy.
00:40:56.720 Yeah.
00:40:56.880 But it's asking the audience to do a lot of work.
00:41:00.000 Right.
00:41:00.560 And, you know, so maybe you say that you don't have to do it for a show like that.
00:41:05.020 Sometimes it matters.
00:41:05.640 And it's funny because in those kind of situations, they are asking us to be completely colorblind.
00:41:10.480 Yeah.
00:41:10.860 That we're just supposed to not think about like the history of racial dynamics in this country when we're watching something like that.
00:41:18.360 But we're also told on the flip side that being colorblind is bad.
00:41:21.760 Right.
00:41:21.900 That we have to focus on color.
00:41:23.640 We have to make our decisions and choose our words based on the color of the person that we are interacting with.
00:41:29.800 So it's kind of whiplash for a lot of white Americans.
00:41:33.920 Yeah.
00:41:34.080 And that is part of this is that both well-meaning white Americans and then I would say like liberal white Americans who many times are just virtue signaling or maybe it's genuine.
00:41:45.960 I don't know.
00:41:47.420 They're desperately just trying to be a good person.
00:41:50.420 Right.
00:41:50.600 They're desperately trying not to be called a racist and not to be called a bigot.
00:41:55.360 And yet the standards are so elusive.
00:41:58.580 You're supposed to tell yourself and accept the fact that you will always be a racist, that you're inherently racist.
00:42:04.820 It doesn't matter the anti-racist work that you've done.
00:42:08.380 It doesn't matter if you're Mother Teresa.
00:42:10.460 Right.
00:42:10.720 If you are white, you have the original sin of racism and you carry the sin, not even of your ancestors.
00:42:19.280 This is something that I thought about, just the language surrounding 2020, like your ancestors own slaves.
00:42:25.640 It's like, well, you don't know that.
00:42:27.180 What you're saying is that someone who vaguely looked like me 200 years ago in the same general vicinity of the United States own slaves.
00:42:36.660 Right.
00:42:36.820 That's not, you don't know that that's my ancestor.
00:42:38.740 You have no idea when my ancestors even came to America, what they look like or where they lived.
00:42:42.760 Right.
00:42:43.000 So we take on the sins of our ancestors, but they only inherit the oppression of their ancestors, never the sins of their ancestors.
00:42:50.480 I, we as white people, never inherit the oppression of our ancestors.
00:42:54.180 It doesn't matter if your ancestors were in the Holocaust, if they went through the horrors of communism and Russia.
00:42:59.820 Like, it doesn't matter.
00:43:01.040 You don't inherit that oppression.
00:43:02.340 You only inherit the sins.
00:43:04.120 They only inherit the oppression.
00:43:05.700 And so white people who are like, I really want to be a good person.
00:43:10.320 Sorry, you can't, you can't.
00:43:12.580 These are the dynamics at play.
00:43:14.200 Right.
00:43:14.440 Oh, absolutely.
00:43:15.860 And I think you kind of touch on that, that brilliantly.
00:43:19.720 And Votie Bauckham talks about this a lot, this kind of notion of how unbiblical it is to say that you have sin based on the color of your skin.
00:43:27.480 We all have sin.
00:43:28.980 And the problem with, as he points out, saying that you have this based on the color of your skin is that we can't get absolution through Jesus Christ for that.
00:43:40.920 Right.
00:43:41.060 It's a sin that does not have expiation as you just touched on, right?
00:43:45.300 Nobody takes on that, that sin for us.
00:43:47.400 So, I mean, that's how very, extremely unbiblical.
00:43:50.780 And there's no redemption.
00:43:52.540 Right.
00:43:52.680 And there's no repentance.
00:43:53.760 Of course, that's like you said earlier.
00:43:54.940 Right.
00:43:55.140 Like, that's the whole idea of CRT being a religion is that you are stained with a sin that no one can ever wash clean.
00:44:03.940 Right, right.
00:44:04.280 You have to do the work.
00:44:05.520 That is the opposite of what Christianity should teach.
00:44:08.940 But even to the kind of practical issue that you raised of how some of this works, a classic example that I talk about is when white people fled, it's called white flight, when they fled neighborhoods.
00:44:22.440 And I talk about how really this was the only form of ethnic cleansing for which the victims were kind of blamed.
00:44:28.240 They weren't the only victims, but they were certainly, I would argue, the predominant victims.
00:44:31.920 And then if they come back to a minority neighborhood decades later, it's gentrification.
00:44:36.320 So, the only thing, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
00:44:40.460 Right.
00:44:40.580 And so, you should stop.
00:44:42.020 You know, if you're a white person kind of tearing out your hair, my advice is just stop.
00:44:46.500 Stop playing their game.
00:44:48.440 And, you know, I wrote the book to say, hey, we don't need to play this game and we don't need to be, you know, at least individually, if you haven't done anything wrong, you haven't done anything wrong.
00:44:58.800 Yeah.
00:45:06.320 I want to talk about a little bit more how this is manifesting itself in the church.
00:45:15.280 And this was a beat that I focused on a lot in 2020 because I did feel like there were so few white Christians and white Christian women saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:45:31.900 Why are we reading anti—how to be an anti-racist in white fragility?
00:45:36.420 Right.
00:45:36.660 Why are we talking about inherited sin, inherited oppression?
00:45:40.660 Why are we using this language?
00:45:42.300 And I'm talking about, like, voices that are very accepted within Protestant Christianity like LaTosha Morrison and Be the Bridge.
00:45:51.680 Right.
00:45:51.980 She absolutely—she might be a totally well-meaning, kind person.
00:45:55.680 Yeah.
00:45:55.980 But in her book and in the Facebook group that is centered on her book, Be the Bridge, they perpetuate this narrative that, yes, white people, you are collectively responsible for being the initiators of reconciliation because of what some black people at some point in history went through and what some white people at some point in history went to.
00:46:20.480 And then they point to the Bible and say, well, Israel was responsible for the sins of their ancestors, even though white people are not a covenant people.
00:46:27.680 Right.
00:46:28.100 Like, Israel is totally different.
00:46:29.800 But this has been 100% accepted, celebrated, glorified, even among conservative evangelicals.
00:46:38.120 This just—at least the implication that, yeah, you know, white people, we're going to preach a different message to you.
00:46:44.860 You can take the harsher message of repentance.
00:46:47.120 You black people over here, you don't need a message of repentance.
00:46:51.400 It's softer and gentler for you, which is a total dereliction of duty.
00:46:55.440 It's crazy.
00:46:56.020 You see this.
00:46:57.120 I talk about Christianity Today, the Gospel Coalition, Acts 29 Network.
00:47:01.200 And again, I'm not painting with a broad brush both from knowledge and also not wanting to falsely accuse everybody who is associated with that with engaging in this.
00:47:10.040 But you saw these sorts of problems prop up in these very prominent evangelical spaces.
00:47:17.260 Jamar Tisby, somebody I talk about in the book, a guy who won a major, major evangelical book award in the last couple years.
00:47:25.800 And he was a guy who was perpetuating the Michael Brown, hands up, don't shoot hoax, and various other things that are just—they're just not biblical.
00:47:35.380 And I'm not questioning his Christian belief, but I am saying that his—he is doctrinally in error in some fairly serious ways in making those types of accusations.
00:47:45.940 And we certainly should not be giving him a pass on that.
00:47:49.220 Yes, absolutely.
00:47:50.100 At places like the Gospel Coalition, you write on page 218, Christianity Today, and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stalwarts of modern popular evangelicalism, critical race theory has a significant presence.
00:48:00.140 A tweet by Brett McCracken, a senior editor at the Gospel Coalition, is instructive.
00:48:03.800 He calls on white Christian leaders to listen to and defer to non-white and non-Western Christian leaders.
00:48:10.560 And we see this kind of language over and over again that you just need to—look, we've held space for too long.
00:48:18.200 Right.
00:48:18.560 We've been leaders for too long.
00:48:20.420 Sit down, shut up, be humble.
00:48:22.760 And if you don't agree with the arguments about systemic racism, it's not because you have a point.
00:48:30.740 It's because you're arrogant or you're fragile or, worse, you're racist.
00:48:35.680 Yeah.
00:48:36.020 It's interesting, even the generational difference between us.
00:48:38.840 You talk about holding space so naturally, and I'm like, okay, when she was in school, you know, she was hearing all this, right?
00:48:44.760 Whereas I'm like a core Gen Xer.
00:48:46.460 And, of course, I recognize that sort of language, but I was never actually exposed to it as a student.
00:48:51.860 I just hear about it from my millennial friends or Gen X, you know, people who I met or Gen Z people I'm mentoring.
00:48:58.440 So that's absolutely—it's out there.
00:49:00.380 I have a thing in there, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at the time saying, I'm a racist and I'll be racist until my glorified body is resurrected.
00:49:11.200 And you're sort of, you know, doing a deep breath.
00:49:13.660 And it's such a virtue signal, right?
00:49:15.640 Because if you're actually racist, at least in the popular understanding of that, well, then you certainly shouldn't be running the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
00:49:22.520 But what you're really doing is just virtue signaling.
00:49:24.480 Yeah.
00:49:25.060 Remember—not true at Kathy—Dan Kathy, when he, like, washed the shoes, shined the shoes of Lecrae, and that, like, virtue signaling display.
00:49:36.720 And, you know, I have—I do have grace for a lot of Christians during that time who just weren't where we were because we had been watching this unfold for a little while.
00:49:49.300 We were ready to say, like, no, no, not to say I got it perfectly at all.
00:49:53.800 I'm sure there were things I said that were wrong.
00:49:56.560 But I do think that some of them since then have realized, like, oh, maybe I shouldn't have said that.
00:50:03.000 Or that person that I platformed because I thought that they were a Christian, you know, social justice warrior.
00:50:08.940 It turns out they actually just hate white people, and I'm not going to platform them.
00:50:12.260 Now, I would love to see public repentance from them.
00:50:14.780 I haven't seen any apologies from these people saying, ooh, I don't think deriding white image bearers of God was the right thing.
00:50:21.480 Right.
00:50:22.080 Yeah.
00:50:22.440 And I think you're probably going to be waiting a long time before you get that type of apology.
00:50:26.600 Yeah.
00:50:26.720 But look, again, it's just – the church is filled with fallible and sinful humans, and that was true 100 years ago and 500 years ago, and it will be true 100 years hence.
00:50:38.240 And we just need to be honest about what the church can do and what it can.
00:50:42.400 And I think I would encourage folks within their own churches – I've been fortunate this has not been a big issue in my church.
00:50:47.900 But if you're seeing that type of language, and you do see it even in good evangelical churches – I mean, I talk about how crazy some of these mainland churches have begun.
00:50:57.360 There are a lot of believers who are even going to some of these mainland churches, have no idea the crazy kind of positions their denominational leaders are taking.
00:51:04.540 But even within the evangelical movement, if you see something, say something, right, as they say.
00:51:10.200 If you see this sort of thing in a spirit of love and grace, go up to some of your colleagues and – or, you know, co-paritioners or even your pastor and say, hey, you know, I think that's not – that's not kind of Bible-based thinking about this sort of issue.
00:51:24.620 Yeah. I also think another thing within this realm that trips Christians up is immigration, refugee acceptance, while the Bible says to love the foreigner.
00:51:36.680 Like, I saw some, like, tweet by a Christian the other day was like, I'm way more scared of, like, you know, a southern Caucasian than I would be an immigrant.
00:51:45.820 Right.
00:51:46.340 And, like, they just feel – and this is a white person – like, they just feel the need to put down white people.
00:51:52.280 Just – I think they think that it's holy and compassionate.
00:51:56.180 Yeah.
00:51:57.080 Absolutely.
00:51:57.680 And if I see – so immigration is – which I talk about a lot in the book is one of my real specialty areas and something I've written a lot about.
00:52:04.320 And so I think I even do address it a little bit in the chapter of the church because if I have to hear one more thing about Jesus and his family being, like, illegal migrants who, you know, are fleeing – I'm like, no.
00:52:14.740 You know, it's just, like, biblically wrong, you know, besides you're just beating up on white people, right?
00:52:20.740 But there's a bunch of –
00:52:21.800 Historically, geographically wrong, it's all wrong.
00:52:23.600 Yeah, and there is actually – for those who are interested, there's entire books on biblical views of immigration kind of going back to the Old Testament that you can kind of understand.
00:52:34.020 And then at the most trivial level, we kind of understand the Caesar-Christ distinction and no matter how you kind of – where you fall on the two kingdoms continuum, like, there is certainly room for different communities.
00:52:47.300 And the notion that because we may all be a family as Christians doesn't mean that we don't have a border, that we don't have cultures, and that, you know, the Tower of Babel is, like, the – kind of where you wind up.
00:52:59.560 Like, we're not – the Bible warns many times against us all trying to be one people, right?
00:53:04.320 Yeah.
00:53:04.720 Well, and progressivism, as we've said many times, it's a competing religion with Christianity.
00:53:09.400 Christianity, it's got its own theology, it's got its own Christology, it's soteriology, so, like, the study of salvation.
00:53:15.560 It's got its own eschatology, too.
00:53:17.560 And that's what what you just said reminded me of, is that it has this idea, as vague as it might be, of what the kingdom here on earth will look like, what the end result of progressivism will be.
00:53:28.660 When they get rid of the family, when they get rid of white people, when they get rid of countries and borders and all of these boundaries that they see as oppressive, then it will be like John Lennon's Imagine.
00:53:40.620 They don't know what it's going to be, but somehow there will be a new species of human who doesn't fight, doesn't oppress, and, you know, doesn't discriminate.
00:53:49.380 Whatever it is, they'll just keep on destroying until they get there, which, of course, is utopia.
00:53:55.940 Right.
00:53:56.380 And what they're trying to accomplish is heaven on earth without Christ, like, without salvation from sin.
00:54:07.560 And so I think that there is a religious motivation, a non-Christian religious motivation behind getting rid of countries.
00:54:16.300 It is like making heaven on earth without Jesus, because heaven will be lots of tribes, lots of people, people who have different languages, people of different ethnicities, but united by Christ.
00:54:30.180 Right.
00:54:30.360 And the progressive religion, it's going to be all of those things, but only united by sin, one will be of peace and one will be just constant chaos.
00:54:38.560 No, absolutely.
00:54:39.940 And there's a writer, a conservative blogger, actually a secularist named Ace of Spades, who once wrote this great phrase, I'm going to get it a little bit wrong, but I've quoted it before, where he said, look, like the left, I'm a secularist.
00:54:52.380 But they're really poor secularist because in attempting to eliminate religion from their worldview, they've actually allowed religious thinking to infect every single mode of their thought.
00:55:02.760 And so you look at what they're doing and it's like, it is all religion, but without Christ and all the good things that come with belief in Christ.
00:55:10.480 And that's what makes them so dangerous.
00:55:12.880 And it also means they'll never stop because they're always like, well, why aren't we getting to this place where everything's paradise?
00:55:21.080 And as Christians, we understand that you're not, we're not going to get that.
00:55:25.240 So.
00:55:25.960 Yeah.
00:55:26.360 Why do you think Christians mistake white guilt for Christlike humility?
00:55:32.760 Well, partially it's the culture is making it easier, right?
00:55:35.940 And there's, there's a, um, it's, it's, it's, I think most of the criticisms that I would get on this book, I kind of just disregard, like I don't even mean anything.
00:55:46.760 The, the only one I kind of pay attention to broadly is to say, well, you know, you don't want to portray yourself as like some grand victim or whatever, but actually it's much harder.
00:55:54.820 Or let me tell you to kind of go confront these falsehoods and say like, what you were doing to me is wrong.
00:56:00.740 Um, then it is to just sort of, oh, you know, you be quiet.
00:56:03.580 And then like, I kind of deserve it in some way.
00:56:06.260 And there, and everybody's going to think I'm a good person.
00:56:08.360 Sometimes of course, for many of your listeners who might be in a corporate environment, their costs to speaking out, um, greater costs.
00:56:15.160 I think a few years ago, I think you can get away with a little bit more now.
00:56:17.860 And I, I, again, I'm hoping to, in writing this book, open up more space, but there's all sorts of informal and formal costs to speaking out and the culture, especially if you're sending your kids to government school, but even in a lot of Christian schools, you know, they're imbibing this message.
00:56:33.220 Your kids from the time they're little, they're imbibing it in, um, the entertainment that they're watching unless you're incredibly scrupulous there.
00:56:39.940 And so it's really hard to go against that type of conditioning that you're just getting 24 seven.
00:56:46.280 And it's a sort of soft totalitarian environment that we're in, at least on these issues.
00:56:51.980 Do you think it's better for people to be proud of their skin color or to not really think about their skin color at all?
00:57:00.880 I'd say I'm probably like, I would maybe reject that dichotomy in that.
00:57:05.180 I mean, I think you can, within that, your family's from a certain area.
00:57:09.780 You can be proud of that heritage, right?
00:57:11.920 Like, um, that's not really why.
00:57:14.040 I mean, you could say maybe European or something like that.
00:57:16.840 I mean, you can be, um, respect the achievements of your ancestors or feel that there are good things that came out of that culture.
00:57:25.200 Um, I actually do push back a little bit against the color blindness because I think it's a little bit of a naive way to look at the world.
00:57:33.220 I think we want to try it as best as possible to be legally colorblind because that is the right way to go forward.
00:57:38.560 But when people say, oh, I don't see color, that always strikes me as a little bit disingenuous.
00:57:43.720 We all go around, we see color, we should acknowledge that and then attempt as best as possible, at least within our legal frameworks.
00:57:51.240 You know, maybe our cultural frameworks are a little different, but within our legal frameworks, we want to try to not take that into account.
00:57:57.400 But, but we're going to see color and we need to accept that and be comfortable with that and not feel that there's anything wrong in kind of acknowledging that reality.
00:58:06.600 Mm-hmm.
00:58:07.020 We can just be thankful for how the Lord made us without putting pride in any superficiality, whether it's our eye color or, you know, the length of our hair, whatever it is.
00:58:18.460 Because none of us are responsible for those things.
00:58:20.640 Of course.
00:58:21.200 And there's no reason, obviously, to put anybody down based on any of their background.
00:58:26.640 Again, you're just as good as you are or bad as you are.
00:58:30.780 And you're both infinitely more loved by God and more infinitely sinful than you could probably possibly imagine, as Tim Culler of my denomination, the late Tim Culler once noted.
00:58:41.080 But, but yeah, so you don't have a particular pride because you look a certain way or animus towards somebody else because they don't.
00:58:49.820 But, you know, you try to take the good parts that you've inherited from your tradition and push that forward while still being open to other people and other traditions.
00:58:58.280 Yeah.
00:58:58.700 What do you, how do you respond to the more, I don't know, maybe it's a like nuanced take.
00:59:04.180 I would still consider it left, left wing, but I think some conservative Christians would say, okay, you know what?
00:59:12.400 I'm with you.
00:59:13.160 I don't indict all white people.
00:59:14.780 I don't think all black people are oppressed, but we can't deny what they would call the legacy of slavery.
00:59:20.880 We've got slavery.
00:59:22.300 We've got reconstruction.
00:59:23.920 We've got Jim Crow.
00:59:25.200 We've got the, you know, we've got the war on drugs and they would say that that is what, redlining, that's what's caused all of the disparities today.
00:59:36.800 And so we need to right those historic wrongs and they would, they would say maybe innocently that that's the real definition of social justice, that we are righting those wrongs.
00:59:51.580 The vestiges of real discrimination of racism are alive and well today.
00:59:56.560 So let's close those gaps by fixing those injustices.
01:00:00.680 I guess my question is, do you think that that's a true narrative?
01:00:07.000 Well, I don't agree with it, although I do agree with your statement that this is the sort of more reasonable kind of counter narrative to give, right?
01:00:14.560 And I think there's a variety of reasons, and I talk about a lot of them in the book, why I think it's false.
01:00:19.340 We talked about the sort of illegitimacy rate in the African-American community as one classic example of why I think this, you know, everything's because of oppression kind of falls apart when you look at it beyond that.
01:00:34.780 And again, I think you can make really strong factual cases against that.
01:00:37.880 I won't just do it for the interest of time here.
01:00:40.420 Fine. If you feel like you want to have a leg up based on somebody's actual socioeconomic standing, like if they're really at the bottom of the heap in terms of they're growing up in poverty or they're growing up in a fatherless family or whatever it is, and you want to take that into account in some way for how you're bringing them into some organization or job.
01:01:02.900 Okay. I mean, I think there are dangers to that, but I can deal with that.
01:01:06.140 But that's not actually what's going on.
01:01:08.600 And like just empirically, if you look at what's going on, whether it's set aside minority small business contracts, I mean, that the government runs or who benefits from affirmative action in the workplace and the school market, what you see continually is it's better off people who tend to be the primary beneficiaries of that.
01:01:29.340 So if you think that there's redress that needs to be done, then let's concentrate on the groups that –
01:01:36.140 Are sort of at the bottom of the heap.
01:01:37.880 Now, again, I'm kind of wary of going particularly far with that logic anyway.
01:01:42.720 But even if you accept that logic, there is no reason why the children of an African-American multimillionaire or even more because people could say –
01:01:52.540 Or somebody like Ann Coulter would say, okay, well, African-Americans have a very unique history in the U.S., and so maybe this more applies to them.
01:01:59.920 But like why should a Hispanic or an Asian-American who do not have that same history benefit from that?
01:02:07.800 And not all black Americans are even African-American or have ancestors that came from Africa.
01:02:12.420 Well, and this is actually significant because it's now up to like almost a quarter of African-Americans, I think, are either African immigrants or descended from African immigrants.
01:02:24.260 That might be a little high, but it's a very significant number.
01:02:26.740 Among them, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, who – I mean, her father did not come from Africa but came from Jamaica as a –
01:02:39.340 And became a professor at Stanford, right?
01:02:41.040 So she didn't exactly grow up in poverty and oppression.
01:02:45.100 Yeah.
01:02:45.320 And so, yeah, I mean, it just shows how ridiculous – and again, to come back to a Sowell quote, right?
01:02:51.060 Because there's always injustices you can find from history.
01:02:54.240 And Sowell says the quest for cosmic justice invariably leads to more injustice.
01:02:59.300 And so that's how I think.
01:03:00.140 We all can kind of point back to some period in history – I don't care how privileged you look – where you were sort of on or your group was on the lower end of this.
01:03:09.480 We shouldn't try to think that we have the hubris of thinking we can equalize all that.
01:03:14.340 What we need to do is treat everybody fairly today to the best of our ability.
01:03:18.700 And that is actual equity.
01:03:20.480 Equity is supposed to be treating everyone fairly.
01:03:24.040 Yeah.
01:03:24.300 And that is like a theme that we see throughout Scripture, that God hates partiality.
01:03:28.880 Yeah.
01:03:29.020 He hates partiality.
01:03:29.920 He actually says, do not defer to the poor or to the great.
01:03:34.240 Yeah, of course.
01:03:34.920 And so don't show partiality to the poor just because they're poor.
01:03:38.280 Right.
01:03:38.380 Now, he's also an advocate for the most vulnerable, an advocate for the fatherlessness.
01:03:42.580 He believes in, charges us to treat the truly oppressed with extra dignity and extra care, not to extort them, not to manipulate them, not to ignore them.
01:03:56.060 And that is, of course, how the church changed the world when we burst onto the scene in the pagan world that did truly marginalize everyone except for the adult free male.
01:04:04.660 And I think that's why the church gets tripped up here because they use language that traditionally has been Christian language.
01:04:12.460 Love, equality, rights.
01:04:14.780 These are Christian ideas.
01:04:15.900 Sure.
01:04:16.240 That have now been bastardized by, you know, race hacks that have changed the definitions without a lot of Christians even noticing, oh, well, of course I'm supposed to love.
01:04:28.860 Of course I'm called to empathy.
01:04:30.760 That's a whole, like, other can of worms.
01:04:33.060 Right.
01:04:33.240 And then it softens them into actually embracing hate.
01:04:38.280 Right.
01:04:38.600 Hate against another group of people that God made.
01:04:41.400 Absolutely.
01:04:42.400 And then the other end of this is you get sometimes almost this extreme—because I would actually like churches to speak out in a different way than a lot of them are speaking out.
01:04:53.300 Instead, you get some of this extreme Anabaptist behavior almost in the church.
01:04:57.620 And you see a lot of people on the left getting really concerned about, oh, Christian nationalism.
01:05:02.380 And I could go on to, like, why I'm not particularly concerned about that.
01:05:05.900 I mean, for a variety of reasons.
01:05:07.060 One is that I'm not on the left, but, you know, I don't think we're about to become a Christian theocracy here in America.
01:05:12.920 But I'm actually more concerned that a lot of churches are saying, well, we're going to have the only perfect community—I'm even using that in air quotes—is sort of within our church.
01:05:25.040 But, like, we're going to ignore all the stuff that's going on outside the church, or we're certainly not going to speak out on controversial issues.
01:05:32.700 And I see a lot of good theologically orthodox churches kind of falling into that trap as well.
01:05:38.400 Yeah, absolutely.
01:05:39.900 I don't want to be political.
01:05:41.300 I don't want to be divisive when really—I'm like, well, these are primarily Genesis 1 issues.
01:05:45.680 Right, right.
01:05:46.480 They're biblical issues.
01:05:48.100 We're kind of jumping around here, but in your chapter about crime and punishment and how this anti-white discrimination shows up there, you say,
01:05:56.660 This trend toward desperately looking for white criminals to both charge and cover in the media has been so pervasive and so longstanding that the late, brilliant author and cultural critic Tom Wolfe dubbed it the hunt for the great white defendant.
01:06:09.160 And then you talk about Kyle Rittenhouse, and they really are hoisted up as, look at this white devil.
01:06:16.340 And then there was the Covington—the Covington kid.
01:06:19.880 The Covington kid, yeah.
01:06:20.920 Yeah, I forgot.
01:06:21.640 But it was just because he was white, and he had a MAGA hat on, and he was, like, the juxtaposition against the wise Native American man.
01:06:30.900 Like, Beth Moore, all these people were like, oh, my gosh, this racist kid, just because he's white.
01:06:36.880 And he wasn't doing anything wrong.
01:06:38.980 Yeah, I mean, in this—we were constantly jumping to judgment as a society.
01:06:43.540 And for a guy like Rittenhouse, I mean, thank God—I'm saying this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not totally—thank God he killed a bunch of, like, white felons, literally, which he did.
01:06:52.260 If he had killed African-Americans, I don't know that he would have gotten off on those charges, despite the fact that he was demonstrably innocent of those charges, at least in my view.
01:07:02.140 It looked like self-defense.
01:07:03.580 I mean, it's not that he—obviously, he killed people.
01:07:05.580 And no one's happy that any of that happened.
01:07:07.440 You can argue that he shouldn't have been there in the first place as a 17-year-old kid, but looking at the facts at hand.
01:07:13.340 Yeah, and so you see this constantly, and I talk a lot in my crime chapter about the narrative on crime, which is pretty much the exact opposite of reality.
01:07:21.220 And that's why it actually matters, because when we—like, George Floyd doesn't just emerge like Athena from Zeus's head, fully armored, ready for battle, right?
01:07:32.260 There's a whole series of falsehoods that have to be injected into the body politic for a thing like George Floyd to happen, right?
01:07:42.040 Like, a whole bunch of things that are not true have to become accepted as true about police brutality, about George Floyd himself, about unarmed African-Americans.
01:07:50.600 And that's the only way you can sell something that was that destructive.
01:07:55.680 And so that's why it matters that we get these facts right.
01:07:58.240 Yeah.
01:07:58.980 You know, I remember—I don't remember whether it was after Ahmaud Arbery, which was a horrible situation, or if it was after George Floyd.
01:08:06.720 But LeBron James, LeBron, the oppressed LeBron James, I feel so bad for him, he said, he tweeted, stop killing us!
01:08:16.380 But to that, you have this point in your book.
01:08:21.500 Since 1968, according to FBI statistics, there have been approximately 193,500 interracial murders.
01:08:30.780 So most murders are intraracial, black-on-black, white-on-white, except for, this is just a note, Asians.
01:08:37.440 Asians are most likely to be killed by a black person than another Asian person.
01:08:40.540 But anyway, 193,500 interracial murders since 1968, with more than 75% of those being white victims of black murders.
01:08:53.820 And then, more than 85% of female victims of interracial murder are white victims of black murders.
01:09:02.580 So it is much more likely for a white person to be killed by a black person, including police officers, than a black person killed by a white person.
01:09:13.060 And yet, we keep hearing, stop killing us, hands up, don't shoot.
01:09:16.580 Right. Yeah. It's so toxic. And it's so funny, because I've understood that this wasn't true for so long, I almost take it for granted.
01:09:24.300 But then when I talk to somebody who's not living in my world, they don't know, right?
01:09:27.920 They don't know?
01:09:28.100 They do not know this stuff. And so that's one of the reasons I have data like this and facts in the book,
01:09:34.260 just so that they are aware of what the reality is here and how starkly opposite, in a truly like Emperor's New Clothes type way,
01:09:44.520 it is to, you know, the narrative that is manufactured and put in front of us on a daily basis.
01:09:53.600 Yeah. Yeah. It is really crazy.
01:09:55.680 I remember seeing a study a few years ago, I think in 2020, that asked people of different groups, conservatives, liberals,
01:10:03.440 to guess like how many unarmed black men are killed by the police.
01:10:07.720 And the most liberal group, most of them, I think it was like 72% of them or something, guessed that it was over 10,000.
01:10:14.920 Yeah.
01:10:15.480 The number was like 17.
01:10:17.020 Yeah. It was actually less than 10, usually.
01:10:18.900 Yeah. Less than 10.
01:10:20.140 Not saying that, you know, any unjustified killing by the police is good.
01:10:23.980 Of course, we would all agree on that.
01:10:26.160 Right.
01:10:26.460 But even unarmed doesn't necessarily mean not deadly.
01:10:29.620 Of course.
01:10:29.940 So, but a lot of people don't, they, they do not know.
01:10:34.400 Yeah.
01:10:34.820 They do not know.
01:10:35.660 And I've just accepted that. And it's because I talked to political people a lot. I often forget how much people don't know.
01:10:42.980 And I really did try to write this book, not for experts and also not for people who would already be convinced of my position.
01:10:50.620 Like they almost, I don't want to say they don't need to read the book because they'll learn quite a lot, even, even those who do.
01:10:56.020 But, but I really wrote it for somebody who maybe, they kind of have a sense that maybe not everything is right.
01:11:00.700 Um, and they don't really know how to talk about these issues and they're maybe not totally convinced by, wow, that sounds like a shocking thesis, but they're at least open to it.
01:11:11.120 That's the person who I most wrote the book for.
01:11:14.180 Um, and I think they'll hopefully be very persuaded. I mean, early reviewers have seemed to indicate that they, they have been. So that's been really encouraging and great news.
01:11:22.160 I think absolutely. If they already agree with your premise or they already have these suspicions that they need to read this book, because as you said, they confirm the suspicions, but then they remind you, okay, you're not crazy.
01:11:34.240 No, you're not some crazy white supremacist racist just because you're like, huh, this doesn't really seem fair or right. And this gives you all the facts and all the data and you can be prepared for those conversations.
01:11:45.360 But also you just, you just know, you know what you're facing. And I think it's important to know what obstacles you're facing. You also talk about how this happens. And I know we kind of have to wrap. I could talk for two more hours about this, but, um, you also talk about how this happens in big business, big tech discrimination in the workplace. So speaking of obstacles that white people are facing, uh, what's happening here?
01:12:08.040 Well, you have everything from, um, the weird racial politics of Silicon Valley. And I lived in the Valley for quite a while. So I kind of understand that. And, and there often people would talk about white supremacy or white being disproportionately represented, whereas every reasonable metric you could use on a population basis would in fact indicate that Asian Americans were dramatically more represented in everything in Silicon Valley as a percentage of population.
01:12:34.000 Not by the way, not by the way, inherently a problem, right? It's only a problem. They're blaming whites as if they've, they've done something wrong. Whereas in fact, they're underrepresented in many of these, um, groups, but in big business, I kind of talk about all of the craziness that went on in the wake of George Floyd and how many billions of dollars were pledged to a very, very corrupt. And I'm not using that word. Um, I'm using that word very carefully. Black lives matter movement. Um, we, my, my, my colleagues at Claremont and I, we documented this in a data
01:13:04.000 database that you can find of just like every group, all these big businesses kind of coming in to give millions of dollars to kind of push this false narrative and to get to some of the worst grifters in society. So big business is very much, unfortunately, implicated in a lot of this story. And again, it's just one of the many, many kind of simmering things in the book.
01:13:27.140 Yeah. You say a survey of 1000 hiring managers revealed that one in six was requested not to hire white men, even though, as you said earlier, this is illegal with another 14% discouraged from hiring white women. Most hiring managers in a recent survey believe their companies discriminate against whites in hiring and that a failure to bring in sufficiently quote unquote diverse hires will put their jobs in danger.
01:13:51.140 Therefore a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a quarter.
01:14:05.040 Right.
01:14:06.080 Yeah. Of course. And I should add of those groups, that's a severe undercount because hiring managers and that whole HR crew is some of the most liberal people in the corporate world.
01:14:17.520 So if they're acknowledging, if 25% of them are acknowledging that they're discriminating, the real number who are actually doing it is almost certainly much, much, much higher. And again, you see all sorts of cases of this taking place on just a regular basis.
01:14:35.460 Yep, absolutely. So where do we go from here? How do we combat this? What do we do about this? Because yes, as we said, the commentator class getting bolder about this, but I'm a suburban white woman that goes to an evangelical church.
01:14:56.200 Right. There may be something in the back of their head saying, maybe I got 2020 wrong. But if something like that were to happen again, they'd be right back there. They'd be right back there saying, oh, Trump is putting kids in cages.
01:15:11.600 Yeah. And oh, my goodness, that I can't believe that they arrested a black man and black people are targeted. They'll say things like I've had these conversations of like, well, you know, black people are pulled over by the police more just because of the color of their skin.
01:15:27.560 And I'm like, I get pulled over all the time, actually. And it's just because I'm a bad driver. So but I don't I'm worried that we are one incident away from getting right back to where we were four years ago.
01:15:42.200 Yeah, I mean, I, I, I hope that it won't be that bad. I do think that at least some people have learned something from George Floyd. But I think you're absolutely right that the media at least will definitely try to take us there.
01:15:53.600 The cultural elites will try to take us there. The Democratic Party will try to take us there. And there will be an incident. They're constantly trying to manufacture a new incident.
01:16:02.180 I think the average, you know, nice evangelical white woman who's attending church, arm yourself with the facts. And yeah, I don't want to do too much of a infomercial for the book here. But right, like, I've had a number of people who said, yeah, I bought a copy for my pastor, right? Like, yeah, so you can, you can buy the book, you can read it if you like it, you know, buy a copy for your pastor,
01:16:22.540 buy a copy for even your growth group or a small group in church, you could have a discussion about it or, and then at a practical level, you also need to, you can support politicians who have spoken out more forthrightly on these issues on our side.
01:16:40.140 And these are tend to be the more conservative people within our caucus. So you can, you can encourage that type of good behavior, and you can really ruthlessly punish bad behavior.
01:16:49.620 And I've got a whole set of other things in the book that I talk about, because I'm not just trying to be a Debbie Downer, where I'm saying, Oh, you know, it's so terrible, we can't do anything about it.
01:16:57.440 I actually think there's lots of things that we can do about it from a policy perspective. And I suggest a number of them in the concluding chapters of the book. And it's just a question of electing people who are willing to kind of put those sorts of plans in place.
01:17:11.740 Yeah. Unfortunately, history has told us where this kind of rhetoric and where this mentality leads. It's not to a place of liberation. It is to a place of further true oppression for both the revolutionaries and the victims of the revolution.
01:17:26.780 I mean, look at every left wing revolution. Look at Zimbabwe, when they said, You know what, we're gonna do away with these white people. And then, of course, it went from the breadbasket of Africa to the impoverished place that it is today. So lots of historical evidences of where this can go.
01:17:44.340 Yeah, absolutely. And I, it's sort of funny, you mentioned, I have a really close friend who's an Indian American. And when I was talking with him about the book, and he started reading it, he's like, you know, at first, you were like, talking about white people. And I'm like, I'm not white. It's not that he doesn't care. But he's like, why does that super affect me? Maybe he's it wasn't as personal for him. But then when you started sketching out how this is going to be really bad for everybody. I was like, wow, okay, yeah, I mean, we really do need to do something about this, not because it's happening.
01:18:14.340 to white people, but because it's happening to other Americans. And that's an injustice. And it's going to create problems.
01:18:21.040 Yep, absolutely. Okay, the cover, kill all wits. Yeah, what is that from?
01:18:27.660 So that was I didn't design the cover, but I thought, no, I like it.
01:18:31.580 It's good. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's good, too. So they just they did it. I was like, okay, that looks pretty good. That was painted, I believe it was graffiti from the 1990s that was in California somewhere.
01:18:41.640 Somebody put that up. And it kind of, I think it illustrates both the illiteracy and the dangerousness of this type of thinking that we have going on in America right now, and why we really need to put a stop to it.
01:18:54.160 Yeah, and of course, we've seen this kind of language echoed a lot over the past several years.
01:18:59.680 Yeah. And especially as Christians, like we have a charge to care about this.
01:19:04.740 Yeah.
01:19:04.900 Look, at the end of the day, God is not, he's not judging people based on their skin color. He's not saying you're more responsible for your sins and the sins of others because you have less melanin.
01:19:17.020 Right.
01:19:17.160 And you're less responsible. You have less agency because you have more melanin.
01:19:20.960 Yeah.
01:19:21.160 That's not how he works. And because of that, and because we care about the truth, because we care about order, and we're to be agents of order, and we care about all image bearers of God, this is something that we need to care about, as uncomfortable as it might be.
01:19:35.100 Let yourself be uncomfortable.
01:19:36.780 Yes. Yeah, that is. And I know particularly for, I just think of my own way, for a lot of women, you know, they particularly like that may feel like confrontational, and I don't want to be, I'm not that sort of person.
01:19:46.820 I would actually argue, if you read this, this is the most non-confrontational possible presentation of this book.
01:19:53.420 I think the best thing we did during the editing process is anytime I got at all flowery with language, we were just like, eh, take it out.
01:20:00.460 You know, we're just going to present the case.
01:20:02.440 And look, I mean, I've been fortunate that folks like Heather McDonald, and Charlie Kirk, and Tucker, and actually the longest-serving member of Peter Kirstenow, the longest-serving African-American member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in history, was one of the endorsers of this book.
01:20:16.940 So I think it's something that's gotten a lot of support, and I'm extremely grateful for that.
01:20:21.400 Good. So the Unprotected Class, How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart. It's available everywhere books are sold.
01:20:27.300 Yep.
01:20:27.740 Awesome. Well, we will put a link in the description of this episode so people can just click on it and buy it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
01:20:33.780 Thanks so much for having me on. It's been a great discussion.
01:20:35.760 Yeah.