Ep 293 ｜ Why Police Shootings Need Context
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Summary
On this episode of Relatable, I discuss the accusations of racism by white police officers in relation to the protests and riots that have been happening across the U.S. in the wake of the George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin murders.
Transcript
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Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. I hope everyone has had a great week so far.
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If you haven't listened to Monday's episode with Dr. John MacArthur, I had the privilege
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of interviewing him and it was such a wonderful short conversation. So make sure that you go
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back and you listen to that episode. You guys know I am doing an election series every Monday
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until the election we started. Last Monday, we talked about abortion. And then this past Monday,
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we talked about religious liberty. And we are comparing where Republicans and Trump are on
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these issues and where Democrats and Joe Biden are on these issues. You guys know I'm coming from a
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particular perspective. So don't allow me to be the only person that you listen to. Definitely do your
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own research. I am trying to give you the most unbiased truth that I possibly can. But you guys
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know that my worldview is a Christian, biblical, conservative worldview. And so that, of course,
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is going to characterize the things I talk about and how I talk about them. That doesn't mean that
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I am trying to be biased or I'm trying to leave out information that is never, ever my goal. But I do
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encourage you knowing this about me to make sure that you listen to other perspectives and other
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sides. And at the end of the day, you have to do your own research. And most importantly, as a
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Christian, you have to go back to the Word of God. You have to ask yourself, does he care about unborn
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life? Does he care about things like religious liberty? You need to study the regimes that I talked
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about on Monday yourself. You need to look at Pol Pot's Cambodia. You need to look at Mao's China,
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current China. You need to look at Cuba. You need to look at Venezuela and how all of those
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fared in relation to religious liberty and freedom of speech and freedom of the press
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when they have gone in the way of socialism. It will make a much bigger impact on you if you do
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your own research. Don't allow me to be the only person to shape your views, although I am so
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thankful for all of you who listen to the podcast and who reach out to me regularly, email me and
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message me and tell me about the impact that this podcast has had on you. That really does just
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humble me and makes me so grateful for the privilege of being able to do that job. Now,
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today we are going to talk about something that is very controversial. I don't like talking about
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this. I really wish I could avoid talking about this. We've talked about it. It seems several times
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over the past few months because of the riots and sometimes the peaceful protests that have been
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happening in relation to police brutality and what is called systemic racism. We have talked about
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this several times. We did a podcast after the George Floyd incident called Does the Truth Matter?
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We've done another podcast episode titled Which Black Lives Matter? Of course, I've talked about these
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things with people like Samuel Say and Vodee Bauckham, and we have really labored to break all of this
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down from a biblical perspective. I've gotten a lot of negative messages, a lot of negative posts on the
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internet, a lot of negative reviews, people that are angry that I'm talking about this from a perspective
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that is different than the mainstream. But more than that, way more than that, what eclipses that
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is the number of messages and emails and comments and posts that I've gotten from people who are very
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grateful for an alternate perspective to everything that is going on. If you're new to the podcast,
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I've got a lot of new people here because maybe you bought my book. A friend suggested you read my
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book and you read it, and now you know about my podcast. And so you're coming on here and you don't
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know what to expect. And maybe you don't align with me politically. You're not a conservative. And so
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maybe you are a little bit nervous in coming into this episode or any of my episodes because you're
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afraid you might disagree with me. You might disagree with me. You might understand that my motivation
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is always truth and compassion. I don't want to sacrifice one for the other. And so when we talk
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about racialized police brutality, when we talk about, I don't know if we'll get into the accusation
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of systemic racism today, but when we talk about these very rightfully sensitive subjects, know that
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that that is my heart, that that is my motivation. And maybe I fail when it comes to that because I'm,
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you know, just a finite, sinful human being, just like everyone else. But that is my heart behind
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talking about these subjects. But I cannot, I cannot allow people to just be taken down this current
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of narrative surrounding police brutality and surrounding racism in the police without talking
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about the truth, without giving counterfactuals. Because it's important as Christians that we
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ground our beliefs in objective reality. That doesn't mean that we're not compassionate. That doesn't
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mean that we're not sympathetic. That doesn't mean that we're not loving. I would argue that it is the
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most loving thing that we can do to ground our beliefs and to ground our reactions in the truth,
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in statistical truth, in data-driven truth, and most importantly, in biblical truth. So what does
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the Bible say about justice? What does the Bible say about murder? What does the Bible say about image
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bearers and what people are worth and what our reaction should be? And the reason why we're talking
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about all of this today is because a black man by the name of Jacob Blake, he's a 29-year-old man,
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was shot by a police officer, a white police officer, seven times on Sunday. And now there are riots and
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arson that is taking over Kenosha, Wisconsin, where this incident happened. And that is in addition
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to the riots and the arson and the vandalism and the assault, and in some cases, murder that's going on
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in the riots that have been taking place in America's major cities for over three months.
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That started with George Floyd, but I would argue have not been about George Floyd for a very long
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time. And once again, I want to distinguish between the peaceful protesters and these rioters,
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many of whom have no idea why they're rioting. They desperately want to be a part of something.
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They desperately want to have purpose and worth and identity, and they're finding it
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in these anarchist groups. A lot of these people are not protesting against systemic racism,
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rioting against systemic racism, or what they perceive to be systemic racism. But the peaceful
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protesters that were peacefully protesting in the beginning, many of whom are still having
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conversations and working for change today, are truly working for more transparency in the police
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and for what they see as major problems in our justice system. And it doesn't matter whether or not
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I agree with every single policy position that those peaceful people are talking about.
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I commend them for using their First Amendment rights to do that. So I will never condemn a
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peaceful protester, whether or not I agree with the premise of their protest. I will never disagree,
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or I will never condemn someone who is bringing up hard and difficult conversations,
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policy prescriptions, things like that in a peaceful way, even if I disagree with them.
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That is what this country is about. That is what has helped make America great for so long.
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I think that is different than the rioting and the destruction that is going on. And as we will
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talk about today, it is a myth to say that that is the only way to make change, because America has
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actually changed for the better in so many ways, using peaceful democratic processes. So that is a
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myth. And I believe that the reactions that are happening, if you can even call them reactions,
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they're simply not justice. And we can, on the one hand, say that, hey, I really don't like it
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when people die by the hands of the police. And we can also say, but the riots and the destruction
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that are ruining people's lives, in many cases, black people's lives by burning down their businesses
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and vandalizing their homes and places of work, that that is also not right. That is also injustice.
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We should be able to, as critically thinking people, hold those two thoughts in our mind at the same
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time. OK, so let's talk about what happened with Jacob Blake. So media reports say that the police
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were allegedly responding to a call about a domestic disturbance. They reportedly tried to tase Blake
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and he wouldn't comply. Again, this is reportedly there's so much that we don't know. And that's what
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I'm going to emphasize in just a second. There was a video shot of the scene from what looks like
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across the street, like a phone video. You see Blake going into his car. The police have their guns
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drawn. It looks like they're telling him to stop. And instead, he keeps going. He reaches into his
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car. A police officer is holding the back of his shirt. I don't want to play the video. It's
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it's very disturbing. Some people are saying, well, the video shows that the shooting is justified.
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I don't think that the video gives us that information. It is available online. If you want
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to go watch it online, I would not watch it with your children. It is disturbing. You can hear screaming.
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Apparently, there were children in the car, too, which is just so tragic and so disturbing. But
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this police officer is yanking at his shirt, obviously trying to get him not to reach into his
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car. And you see Blake going to reach into his car for something that we don't know. And then the
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police officer shoots him seven times in the back. We don't know if it was one police officer or the
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second police officer that also shot him. We really don't know much else. We really don't.
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We don't know exactly what happened before this. There are neighbors who were saying that he was
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trying to break up a fight. We just don't know that. We haven't been able to confirm that yet.
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According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, court documents show that there was a warrant out for
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his arrest for sexual assault, trespassing and disorderly conduct in connection to domestic abuse.
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So there was a warrant out for Jacob Blake's arrest for those things, sexual assault and domestic
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abuse. This was not his first violent run in with the police. In 2015, he pulled a gun at a bar and
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had to be taken down by a canine. Now, why am I saying that? Am I saying that that justifies what
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happened to him? No, those cases alone, those facts alone do not justify the shooting. And I'm not
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trying to say that. What I am trying to do is give enough context to take a step back and to reserve
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our judgment before we know the full story. It is possible that he reached inside his car to get a gun
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and maybe the officer saw that he was reaching inside his car to get a gun. And that's why they
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reacted the way that they did. And they and they shot him. I don't know. Maybe he was reaching inside
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his car to get his cell phone to call his lawyer. Maybe he was reaching inside his car to get his
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license. I don't know. Maybe it was totally unjustified by this police officer. Maybe they
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did overreact. I mean, I understand seven times. My first thought was seven times. Does it seven times?
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Was that really necessary? But what I have learned is that it is easy for us in the comfort of our
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homes to be looking on our iPhones and to judge the conduct of a police officer in a situation that
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we have never been in, where his life is on the line, and to say how he or she should have done
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their jobs. That's very easy for us to do. Maybe there were racial motives behind this shooting.
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Maybe there was bias, either explicit bias that can be proven by this police officer or implicit bias
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there. Possibly. But we do not know. We don't know that in the same way that we don't know that about
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Derek Chauvin. Maybe. But we don't know that yet. Social media, as you guys know, I've talked about
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this many times. Social media awards virtue points based on how quickly and how emotionally you react to
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something. And they judge you very harshly if you don't make the statement that they want you to make.
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But that is not true virtue. Social media slacktivists on the left, particularly, maybe it happens on the
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right, too, in different scenarios. But I would say, in particular, this is a characteristic of social media
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slacktivists on the left, that they scour your timeline. If you complain about one thing,
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they scour your timeline and they see if you complained about another thing that they want
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you to complain about. And if you didn't complain about the thing that they want you to complain
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about, then they judge you unrighteous. They judge you uncompassionate. They say, hey, I see that you
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didn't talk about X, Y, Z. I had someone, a Christian pastor who supports Black Lives Matter. He
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did the same thing to me on social media. I said something about Kenosha, Wisconsin burning down
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due to rioters. And he said, you know, I haven't seen you condemn this attempted murder. Well,
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I don't know. I don't know what happened. I don't know what the motivations were. I have no idea what
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happened before this clip. And no one else does either. And it actually does not help the dialogue.
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It does not help the conversation at all for me to contribute an analysis or a commentary that is
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based on things that I don't know. So today, I just want to tell you what I know and tell you also
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what I don't know. And also, by the way, what the rest of the world does not know either. We do not
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know this officer's heart. We do not know his motivation. We don't know the motivation of Jacob
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Blake. Like I said, he could have been a totally innocent guy in this particular scenario. He could
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have been reaching for his phone and said, hey, you know, I'm just going to call my lawyer. He could
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have been totally calm before this for all we know. We don't know. The police report says that they tried
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to tase him and it didn't work. I don't know if that's true in the same way that I don't know if
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the neighbor's report is true, that he was trying to break up a fight. I don't know that. And no one
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else knows that either, at least by the time I'm recording this. Now, this I always record it the day
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before. So maybe by the time this comes out, there will be more information that will either
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at least somewhat exonerate the officer or maybe it will totally exonerate Jacob Blake. Possibly.
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But as of right now, I don't know. And no one else does either. And everyone is assuming that they
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know. And you get awarded points on social media if you automatically, quickly, without any reasoning,
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without any truth, without any facts whatsoever, say the most extreme thing possible about the
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motivations of this officer, no one will come back and say, hey, you should probably issue a
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correction. Hey, you should probably wait until the facts come out. It doesn't matter. When it is a
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left-wing narrative, you can be as speculative as possible and no one on the left will ever check you
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and say, hey, actually, we should probably wait just a second. No, because apparently the more
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emotional you are and the more automatic you are, the more knee-jerk you are when it comes to
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something like this, claiming racialized motivations, the more virtuous you are. But again,
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that is not true virtue. That is not how God is judging your compassion. That is not how God is
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judging your righteousness. I saw Daryl Harrison, the host of the Just Thinking podcast, said the other
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day, you would think that social justice advocates think that anger is a virtue. They love to use Jesus
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flipping over the tables as an example of that. There was a particular reason why Jesus was flipping
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over the tables because they were making the temple into what he called a den of robbers. Yes,
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I do think righteous anger is often justified, and maybe it's justified in this case, but we don't know
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yet. And it has to be okay. We have to be humble enough to be able to admit that. You might have your
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guesses. We might have our assumptions in our minds, but I think it's okay for us to reserve judgment
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while we can. Now, thankfully, no matter which side of the issue that you are on here, thankfully,
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Jacob Blake is not dead. He is stable. He's in critical condition in the hospital, but he is not
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dead. And for that, I am so grateful. I am so grateful that he's alive. 29 years old, young guy,
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about the same age as me. He has four children. I hope to God that God continues to heal him fully,
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that he makes a full and quick recovery, that God uses this terrible situation, no matter if the
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shooting was justified or not, no matter what was going on before this video. It is a terrible
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situation, no matter of any of those factors. I hope that God uses the situation to draw him and to draw
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his family to himself and to glorify himself. I hope that God uses this preservation of life
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to glorify himself and to share the gospel. I am always for the preservation of life where it can
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be and should be preserved. I am always for redemption where something or someone can be redeemed. And I am
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praying for Jacob Blake. And I mean that sincerely. I'm praying for his sons who apparently, like I
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said, tragically witnessed this. I am praying for his friends, for his family. I pray that God would
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continue to heal him. Jacob Blake, like all people, as we know, was made in God's image. That means that
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he, like every other human being, has incredible worth. He has a soul that will live forever in one
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of two places, just like yours and mine. He needs Christ, just like you and I do. And praise God that he
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did not go out in the way that it looked like he was going to. I am sincerely so thankful for that.
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Do I wish that officers would never have to shoot people? I sincerely do. Yes, even criminals. I would
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rather in an ideal world, that person who is caught by the police, I would rather that person live and go
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to prison than be shot and killed by a cop because they're human beings. And as long as that person is
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alive, Jesus can save them. The thief that was dying on the cross when Jesus assured him, the thief was
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dying on the cross when Jesus assured him that today you will be in paradise with me because of your
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faith. I want that for everyone. And I am willing to advocate for whatever training possible to make
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it less and less likely for it to happen that a police officer shoots a person, especially in the back.
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As Votie Bauckham talked about on this show a few weeks ago, proper chokeholds used by police officers
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actually save lives. They can prevent situations like this from happening when done properly. It is safe
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and effective. It's a safe and effective way to subdue someone who is resisting arrest without killing
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them. And yet there are at least 13 states and cities across the country right now that are banning chokeholds
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or in the process of trying to legislate a ban on chokeholds, according to CNN, because it sounds
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good to do. It sounds like the right thing to do. In reality, more lives will likely be lost by that
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change than saved by that. If all police officers could be trained with Brazilian jujitsu, I think that
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would be better for everyone like Votie Bauckham has advocated for. But I also understand that it's not
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always possible for police officers to do anything else but use their gun. And I don't know if this
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situation with Jacob Blake was one of those situations. I do not know. There are several situations where
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it's obvious, in my personal opinion, that police used disproportionate force. Does that happen? Yes, it is
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rare, but it happens. Botham Jean is one of those cases. One of the most tragic stories ever where an off-duty
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police officer who was a white woman, she came into his apartment that she says she thought was hers and
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shot him dead. He was 26 years old. Hopefully it was truly an accident. Again, we're never really going
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to know, but she was convicted of murder, sentenced to, I think, just 10 years in prison. And it was
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Brant Jean, who was Botham Jean's brother, who extended this amazing, amazing speech of
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forgiveness to Amber Geiger, who was Botham Jean's killer. And it was just an amazing situation where
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God used a tragic scenario to bring glory to himself. But that was, without a doubt, something
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wrong that happened, something bad that happened, something unjust that happened. Botham Jean did
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nothing wrong. Tatiana Jefferson killed in her home by an officer outside her home. Now, she did have a gun,
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but she was inside her home in the middle of the night. That's your Second Amendment right to have
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your gun. She probably thought it was an intruder and was probably trying to defend herself. The
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officer was indicted for murder after shooting and killing her in her own home, exercising her Second
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Amendment rights. Elijah McClain, he was walking at night, apparently, to get a drink for his brother
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wearing a ski mask. A 140-pound, very thin, small, autistic kid pinned to the ground by the police,
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given a sedative by the EMT that apparently, according to the autopsy, killed him. In my opinion,
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he never should have died. He never should have been tackled by the police. This is still being
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investigated. Justine Damon, a white woman shot by a black police officer, all she did was call the
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police reporting what she thought was a sexual assault in her alley. Came out of her house in pink
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pajamas to talk to the police, and the officer shot her from his car for a reason that we do not know.
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He only got 12 years in prison. Tony Tempa, a white man, pressed into the ground until he couldn't
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breathe, whimpering. We saw a video of this begging for them to stop while officers laughed at him.
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The criminal charges against the officers in this situation were dropped. Daniel Shaver, another white
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man, begging for his life while police officers pointed their guns at him. He apparently reached down to
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pull up his pants, and they shot him dead. So these instances of disproportionate police force
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do happen. They are tragic, and they are always investigated. They are also, thankfully, very rare,
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increasingly rare. By the way, the vast majority, this is a fact, the vast majority of police interactions
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end peacefully. And the vast majority of police effectively subdue situations so that force is
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unnecessary. Police officers don't want to kill people. Do you think they want to be the next
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headline? Do you think they want to take someone's life? They don't want themselves, they don't want to
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die. They want to go home to their families. And so it is always preferable for a police officer not to
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escalate a situation. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't care, and we shouldn't investigate when
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it looks like the police used force when they shouldn't have. We absolutely should. That is the
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beautiful thing about due process in this country. I don't want police officers that bully and threaten
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the populace to just go away unscathed. That's why I actually think we should not have police unions.
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It makes it too difficult to fire bad police officers. Derek Chauvin had a record of using
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disproportionate force and it was the police union that shielded him. I don't think we should have
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public unions, period. I don't think that we should have teachers unions. It is not, it's not ethical
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for our tax dollars to go to a union that has been funding politicians that, whether we're on the left
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or the right, we probably don't support. And unions so often are just about power and not actually
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representing the either teachers or the police or the postal workers that they claim to represent.
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If we could all agree, if we could just all agree that every instance of disproportionate force,
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perceived disproportionate force, or actual disproportionate force by a police officer
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should be investigated, that officers should be held accountable, that there should be transparency,
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that there should be good training, I think we would all agree. I think most police officers
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would agree. I don't, like I said, I don't want bad police officers. I don't think other police
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officers want bad police officers. But unfortunately, we can't seem to agree on these common sense
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measures. As soon as it comes out that a black person is killed by a white police officer, the immediate
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and viral reaction and assumption is that A, it is racist, that it's a racist motivation, and B,
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that this happens all the time, that there is an epidemic of white officers killing unarmed black
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men. And this is the most controversial thing to say. But it is not true. It is not true. And it is
00:25:13.360
loving to say that it is not true. Isn't that good news that that is not actually true, that it is not
00:25:20.200
factual, that that epidemic exists. Coleman Hughes, who is black, and he is also a liberal, he is an
00:25:26.540
admitted Biden voter. He wrote an article for City Journal a few months ago called Stories and Data.
00:25:32.680
I'll link it in the description. You can see for yourself. He also links a lot of other studies in
00:25:38.540
the in the article that you can click on. And again, please research this for yourself. Do not take my
00:25:45.000
word for it. But I'll make it easy for you. You can go and you can look at this article and you can look
00:25:50.600
at the studies that he included. So in this article, Stories and Data in City Journal, Coleman Hughes
00:25:55.720
talked about how he at one point was fully on board with Black Lives Matter. He was all in on the
00:26:01.040
narrative that racialized police shootings, that it was an epidemic until he actually started to do the
00:26:07.420
research for himself. Here's what he said. The basic quote, the basic premise of Black Lives Matter
00:26:12.780
that racist cops are killing unarmed black people, Coleman Hughes says, is false. For every black person
00:26:19.100
killed by the police, there is at least one white person, usually many, killed in a similar way.
00:26:25.160
The day before cops in Louisville barged into Breonna Taylor's home and killed her,
00:26:31.620
cops barged into the home of a white man named Duncan Lemp, killed him and wounded his girlfriend.
00:26:36.400
Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart, Tony Tempa. We already
00:26:42.420
read that story. He talks about how the police officers were cracking jokes in the criminal
00:26:48.820
charges that were brought against them were later dropped. He says, you might agree that the police
00:26:53.940
kill plenty of unarmed white people, but you might object that they are more likely to kill unarmed
00:26:59.260
black people, Coleman Hughes says, relative to their share of the population. That's where the data comes
00:27:04.200
in. The objection is true as far as it goes, but it is also misleading. To demonstrate the existence
00:27:10.300
of a racial bias, it is not enough. And this is this is what is so important. It is not enough
00:27:16.340
to cite the fact that black people comprise 14% of the population, but about 35% of unarmed
00:27:23.460
Americans shot dead by the police. That is the statistic that you will see in the New York
00:27:26.980
Times and the Washington Post and every Instagram infographic out there saying, look, this is an
00:27:32.140
epidemic. This is happening a lot more to the to the black community than it is the white community.
00:27:39.020
They say this, that black people comprise 14% of the population, but about 35% of unarmed Americans
00:27:45.840
shot dead by the police. That is misleading. And he explains why he says by that logic, you could
00:27:52.260
prove that police shootings were extremely sexist by pointing out that men comprise 50% of the population,
00:27:57.740
but 93% of unarmed Americans shot by cops. But of course, you don't say that you say, well, men commit the
00:28:04.580
majority of the crimes. They have the majority of interactions with the police. So it makes sense
00:28:08.940
proportionally that they would be tragically, usually the victims of this. And so that logic
00:28:14.920
to just use population size doesn't work. Coleman Hughes goes on. Instead, you must do what all good
00:28:20.400
social scientists do control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable
00:28:26.520
has upon another. In this case, the effect of a suspect's race on a cop's decision to pull the
00:28:31.920
trigger. At least four careful studies have done this. One by Harvard economist Roland Fryer,
00:28:37.860
one by a group of public health researchers, one by economist Sandil Moulinathan, and one by David
00:28:44.560
Johnson et al. None of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course,
00:28:50.080
that hardly settles the issue for all time. As always, more research is needed. I agree with Coleman Hughes
00:28:55.260
on that. But given the studies already done, it seems unlikely that future work will ever uncover
00:29:00.600
anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world
00:29:05.320
believe exists. So when you control for all factors, when you control for number of police
00:29:10.600
interactions between white and black people, when you control for the factor of the crimes committed
00:29:17.840
between the black community and the white community, there is no, from the data that we have,
00:29:23.800
from these studies that he cited, there is no racial bias. There is no disproportionate victimization of
00:29:31.600
black people by the police. We just do not see that according to the data. And there has been study
00:29:37.740
after study showing this. And actually, the Roland Fryer study, he is a black man and he did this study
00:29:44.660
for Harvard University. And he actually went into it thinking that he was going to be able to prove
00:29:51.400
racial bias and he just didn't find it. Again, read this article for yourself. Look at the studies for
00:29:57.480
yourself when you control for all factors, which the people who just use the sheer population proportion
00:30:03.900
of the black community do not control for all factors. When you control for all factors, you do not find,
00:30:09.780
according to the data, that there is a racialization, there is a racial aspect to these police shootings.
00:30:15.540
And as Coleman Hughes said, studies actually do show, the same Roland Fryer study shows,
00:30:19.900
that it does seem that non-white people are more likely to be roughed up by the police,
00:30:26.460
maybe not white police officers, but by the police in general, than white people.
00:30:30.800
We don't know if that's, you know, if there are racial motives there, but that does seem to show
00:30:34.860
that. And we could certainly say that that's a problem. But as far as fatal force, we do not see,
00:30:40.020
according to data set after data set, that there is a racialized aspect to this and that this is
00:30:45.540
happening at epidemic levels or disproportionate rates at all in the black community versus the
00:30:50.820
white community. And we have people like Sean King tweeting out, you know what? You guys deserve
00:30:56.860
these riots. You deserve the unrest. You deserve the arson. You deserve the violence. He tweeted that,
00:31:03.440
you know, that's the only language that y'all hear. We tried peace and it just didn't work. And
00:31:08.240
that's what we keep hearing, that riots are the language of the unheard, that this is what people have
00:31:12.500
to do. They have to loot. They have to burn down. They have to steal. They have to assault. They
00:31:16.780
have to kill. They have to block roadways. They have to ruin people's lives and livelihoods. They
00:31:20.980
have to burn down a car shop in Minneapolis with a minority man that was inside that got burnt alive.
00:31:28.700
They have to do these things, they say, in order for people to take them seriously. That is a myth.
00:31:36.120
That's just not true. That is to say that we haven't made any progress since the civil rights area
00:31:40.700
toward black Americans, toward non-white Americans. That is just not true. And Coleman Hughes talks
00:31:46.380
about this in his article. He says the case for violence rests on the false notion that without it,
00:31:51.840
little progress can be made. Recent history tells a different story. In 2018, the NYPD killed five
00:31:58.000
people, down from 93 people in 1971. Since 2001, the national incarceration rate for black men ages 18 to 29
00:32:05.860
has gone down by more than half. Put simply, we know progress through normal democratic means is
00:32:11.980
possible because we have already done it. And yes, there's no way that you can look throughout history
00:32:17.460
over the past 50 years and say that we have made no progress. Guys, in a single lifetime, in less than a
00:32:24.920
lifetime, we went from segregation. We went from absolute institutionalized racism to having a black
00:32:34.140
president two times in a row elected overwhelmingly. And no, that doesn't prove once and for all that
00:32:39.760
America is not racist. That alone doesn't prove once and for all. But as John McWhorter said, who is also a
00:32:46.040
black academic, that it does mean something. It does mean something that America overwhelmingly
00:32:52.120
elected a black man to the highest office in our land just a few decades after America was provably,
00:33:01.500
demonstrably, an institutionally racist country in many cases. I mean, we have made a lot of progress,
00:33:08.640
guys, a lot of progress through peaceful, democratic, and social means. Yes, we have. And so the idea that,
00:33:15.980
oh no, we need violence and we need arson to do this, I guarantee you it will be counterproductive.
00:33:20.220
I guarantee you it will take us backwards, not forwards. And that is what Coleman Hughes argues as well.
00:33:26.680
Now, he says, which of course I agree with in this article, in a perfect world, I would like to see the yearly
00:33:32.280
number of unarmed Americans killed by police decrease from 55 to zero. But the more I think about how we would
00:33:39.460
achieve this, the less optimistic I am. At a glance, copying the policies of nations with very few police shootings
00:33:44.840
seems like a promising path, but on closer inspection, one realizes how uniquely challenging
00:33:49.140
the American situation is. He says, he goes on to say, the only way out of this conundrum,
00:33:54.860
it seems to me, is for millions of Americans on the left to realize that deadly police shootings
00:33:59.460
happen to blacks and whites alike. As long as a critical mass of people view this as a race issue,
00:34:06.300
they will see every new video of a black person being killed as yet another injustice
00:34:10.320
and a long chain dating back to the middle passage. That sentiment, which is felt deeply and earnestly,
00:34:17.320
will reliably produce large protests and destructive riots. But he says, if we can elevate the national
00:34:25.480
discourse, if we can actually have that honest and uncomfortable conversation about race that people
00:34:32.320
have been claiming to want for years, we might have a chance. And I agree. We have to be honest about
00:34:40.080
these conversations, not just about policing and possibly racialized policing and police brutality,
00:34:46.200
but about the whole idea of institutional and systemic racism in general. Because people don't
00:34:51.620
seem to be able to define that, except in this intangible sense that the feeling of white supremacy still
00:34:55.940
reigns. They point to disparities between blacks and whites. And for every disparity that they see,
00:35:02.400
they see discrimination. For the millionth time, rediscrimination and disparities by Thomas Sowell,
00:35:08.080
who also happens to be black, by the way. And you will see that disparities do not necessarily
00:35:12.440
equal discrimination. And when you say without a doubt that they equal discrimination and therefore
00:35:17.800
systemic racism, you actually end up prescribing faulty solutions to a faulty problem,
00:35:23.480
when there actually might be a variety of factors for the disparate outcomes between the two groups.
00:35:29.720
As I've said many times, the most successful by a variety of factors groups in this country,
00:35:35.240
as far as median income, as far as average graduation rates, as far as family togetherness.
00:35:41.500
So the rate of divorce, as far as all those factors go for family cohesiveness and general success
00:35:48.440
and lack of poverty and high graduation rates and high test scores, that those are the most
00:35:55.020
successful people, according to those factors, are not white people in this country. It's East Asian
00:35:59.900
Americans and Indian Asian Americans. And so if there is a gap in success between the Asian Americans
00:36:06.860
and the white Americans, where the white Americans on average aren't doing as well as the Indian and
00:36:11.200
Asian Americans, are you going to say that that disparity also means there's systemic discrimination
00:36:17.340
against white people? Of course you won't. And so you see the faulty reasoning for saying that all
00:36:22.900
disparities between two groups equals automatically discrimination. It might in many cases, but it
00:36:29.340
doesn't always. And so we have to be able to have those honest conversations. But so often when we're
00:36:33.940
talking about police brutality, we're talking about racism. Of course, racism does exist. Someone said the
00:36:39.600
other day that, oh, you guys don't believe that racism exists. I've said probably a million thousand
00:36:44.480
hundred and seven times. That, of course, racism exists because isms exist, because hate exists in
00:36:51.280
the human heart. And the Bible says you cannot love God and hate your brother. So racism is a sin,
00:36:55.840
just like other isms. If you hate someone because of their skin color, if you hate someone because of
00:37:00.260
their nationality, if you hate someone because of their age or their ability, whatever it is, that is
00:37:04.940
all hate and that is condemned by God. And it is a sin. Of course, racism exists. Racism is a sin.
00:37:10.520
The question of whether or not we have an epidemic of police racism or whether or not America today in
00:37:16.720
2020 is institutionally racist. That is a different question. And we have to start with the facts and
00:37:21.920
we have to have an honest conversation about it. But when we don't, when we immediately jump to
00:37:26.300
conclusions, when we automatically slap the label of racism on something without knowing the facts,
00:37:31.660
we raise the temperature in this country and we start justifying violence. We start justifying chaos
00:37:36.820
and it doesn't help anyone. Disproportionately, the chaos, the riots, the burning down of buildings,
00:37:42.540
the vandalism that is going on in this country, in Portland, in Seattle, now in Kenosha and places
00:37:48.020
like Denver, New York City, the other democratically held cities is disproportionately hurting other black
00:37:54.680
people and other poor people that live in these inner cities. You are not hurting. In most cases,
00:38:02.300
the rich and the powerful and the white people that you claim are the ones who are holding up this
00:38:08.780
oppressive system. So in Kenosha, when they are burning down these churches, when they are burning
00:38:14.260
down car lots, when they are burning down buildings, you are not enacting justice. That is not justice.
00:38:23.160
You are punishing innocent people who did nothing to Jacob Blake, who did nothing to George Floyd,
00:38:28.200
who did nothing to any black person in America for the sake of anarchy. And they believe that this is
00:38:34.360
the only language that is going that they're going to hear and that is going to cause change. I guarantee
00:38:39.140
you it will go backwards. And so what we have to do in order to lower the temperature and actually
00:38:45.160
advance change, if we want positive change to happen, is to start with honesty. We have to start
00:38:50.880
with a truthful premise. We have to look at the statistics. For example, according to the Washington Post
00:38:56.740
and their database, 14 in 2019, 14 unarmed black men. Now it used to be nine a few weeks ago. So I
00:39:03.420
don't know how this changed, but 14 unarmed black people killed by the police in 2019. Their definition,
00:39:09.360
by the way, Washington Post of unarmed is very almost inaccurate. Like we don't know for sure that this
00:39:16.660
unarmed person, white or black, truly didn't have any kind of weapon. We don't know if they were
00:39:22.020
fighting the police. We don't know if they were trying to run the police over with their car.
00:39:25.200
We don't we don't know. All they're saying is that they didn't have like a knife or a gun on them.
00:39:29.920
They could have been resisting arrest in another way. We just don't know. I'm not saying that justifies
00:39:34.060
the police shooting, but just know that even the definition of unarmed by Washington Post is a little
00:39:40.320
bit I don't want to say sketchy, but it's a little bit liberal. But according to their database,
00:39:46.080
14 unarmed black people were killed by the police in 2019. 25 unarmed white people killed by the police
00:39:52.100
in 2019. And again, you can't make the argument. Well, that is, you know, black people only make
00:39:58.020
13% of the population and yet 35% of the unarmed police shootings. Again, you have to control for
00:40:04.120
all factors. Number of police interactions among each group, number of crimes committed among each
00:40:09.740
group as the studies that we already cited do. We don't even know in these cases. So 14 unarmed black
00:40:17.320
black people killed by the police in 2019. We don't know if the officers in all of those cases were
00:40:22.600
white. Probably not. Other studies show. I think it's also the Roland Fryer study that shows that
00:40:28.940
it's usually it's typically black police officers that are policing black communities. It is typically
00:40:35.780
Hispanic police officers that are policing Hispanic communities. I think that's a good thing. I think
00:40:40.740
that's how it should be. But we don't even know if all of these 14 unarmed black people killed by the
00:40:46.020
police in 2019 were by white police officers. So that is the number 25 unarmed white people
00:40:51.320
killed by the police in 2019. Jason Riley, who is also black says this in the Wall Street Journal,
00:40:58.940
and I understand this is controversial. This is what he says. This happens to be a fact. And this is his
00:41:04.480
analysis. Jason Riley says this, so long as blacks are committing more than half of all murders and
00:41:10.220
robberies while only making up 13% of the population and so long as almost all of their victims are their
00:41:15.540
neighbors. These communities will draw the lion's share of police attention. Defunding the police
00:41:20.480
or making it easier to prosecute officers will only result in more lives lost in those neighborhoods
00:41:25.280
that need protecting. And of course, we're seeing this right now. There's a surge in violence in these
00:41:30.500
inner cities that are mostly comprised of non-white people, of minority people in New York City,
00:41:36.000
in places like Chicago, that crime is through the roof. Homicides are through the roof in numbers that
00:41:46.240
we have not seen in decades. The majority of these victims are black young men, and it is because of
00:41:53.320
the neutering of the police. In New York, they decided to divert a billion dollars, I believe, away
00:42:00.560
from the NYPD. The same thing is happening in L.A. The same thing is happening in San Francisco.
00:42:06.120
The same thing is happening in Minneapolis. The same thing is happening in Austin. I put this on my
00:42:11.000
Instagram stories. There's a highlight on my Instagram that talks about all these and links
00:42:16.200
the articles to all these situations where these cities that are led by Democrats have decided that
00:42:20.920
they are going to neuter their police. They are going to weaken their police, take money away from their
00:42:25.700
police, and they are seeing the effects of that right now. Violent crime, homicides, which are
00:42:32.160
predominantly killing and affecting young black men. And I understand that people say, well, it's racist
00:42:39.860
to point that out. It's racist to point out what Jason Reilly said, but it's not. It doesn't say
00:42:45.220
anything about black people in general or inherently. It is just a statistic. It's just true that there is a
00:42:51.720
disproportionate number of violent crimes and homicides, unfortunately, in the black community.
00:42:56.840
And we can talk about what causes that. Yes, I believe that we can look at root causes, but that
00:43:02.560
is a fact. And that leads to a higher number of police interactions. That is the factor, again, that when we
00:43:08.580
look at these police interactions, that has to be controlled for. And Jason Reilly is also right in this
00:43:15.780
Wall Street Journal article, defunding the police or telling the police to stand down will only make
00:43:20.900
things worse. That is why, according to Gallup, that the majority of black people, the vast majority of
00:43:25.700
black people either want to maintain the level of policing that they have traditionally had, or they
00:43:30.060
want to increase the level of policing. Because it is law-abiding, innocent, and often vulnerable
00:43:35.480
black people, women, children, the elderly, the disabled in these inner cities that cannot protect
00:43:41.580
themselves, that need the police to keep them safe. And they don't have the money to leave these inner
00:43:45.880
cities when the police, because of their absence, have left them vulnerable. And so, again, they are
00:43:52.240
the ones that are disproportionately and negatively affected by these riots and this surge in crime
00:43:56.960
because the Democrats' decision to take away police presence. It hurts them. So, again, this is another
00:44:05.680
example of what Thomas Sowell calls cosmic justice in his book, Quest for Cosmic Justice. Social justice
00:44:13.620
is very often really what they mean by that is cosmic justice, this intangible thing that can't actually
00:44:20.080
be achieved because they want to accomplish some kind of completely equal utopia where there are no
00:44:26.920
disparities between people or between groups whatsoever, and it's never accomplishable.
00:44:32.420
And he argues that social justice actually very often is anti-social justice because what is
00:44:38.500
disregarded in social justice initiatives is the cost to society. So, a social justice initiative would
00:44:44.960
defunding the police or telling the police to stand down because you want there to be fewer cases of
00:44:51.000
police brutality. You want the number of 15 unarmed black people to go down in this country, and so
00:44:58.320
you want to defund the police and get rid of the police altogether. Okay, well, what's the other side of
00:45:03.800
that equation? The other side of that equation is that crime goes up, and now there are dozens and dozens of
00:45:08.720
young black men that are being killed by the hands of other black men. Is that better? So, do we not care about
00:45:15.880
black lives actually dying? Do we only care about how they die? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me if you
00:45:23.440
truly believe that black lives matter. The fact of the matter is that the number one and number two killers of young
00:45:29.400
black people in America is abortion and homicide. They are disproportionately represented in both
00:45:34.420
categories. And again, we can talk about the reasons why this is the case, but we have to be factual about this.
00:45:45.120
We do. In order to have an honest and a good conversation, to take the temperature down and to try to move
00:45:50.000
forward, we cannot jump to racism when we do not know. And that, of course, is what Joe Biden did. He sent out a
00:45:57.940
statement saying this is another example of systemic racism. This is racism. Of course, he doesn't put out
00:46:05.080
any statements when the races are exchanged, when they are different, when it's a white person killed
00:46:11.520
by a white police officer, a white person killed by a black police officer. This is the only instance in
00:46:15.720
which he says something. This is not what brings people together. This is what divides people. This is
00:46:20.680
what raises the temperature in this country. When you assume the motives of people without knowing, when you
00:46:25.740
spin a narrative that is not based on fact, I am not denying that we have problems. I'm not denying that
00:46:31.820
prejudice exists. I'm not denying that injustices in this country exist. Some of them exist in our
00:46:37.480
justice system. I agree with you, but we have to start at a factual premise. And yes, Christians are
00:46:44.660
bound to factual premises. Like we have to be. We are bound to objective truth. We are not bound to what
00:46:51.640
the media says. We are not bound to a narrative on the left or the right. We do not pledge allegiance
00:46:58.480
to the police. We do not defend the police no matter what. And also, we don't defend the other
00:47:03.960
side no matter what. We say, I don't know what happened in this situation. I am going to look at
00:47:08.200
the truth. I am going to look at the data. And then I am going to look at the Word of God for what
00:47:12.140
biblical justice looks like. This is what, according to God's Word, justice when it comes to due process
00:47:17.420
in the court of law. This is what justice looks like. Yes, there are other kinds of justice in
00:47:21.600
the Bible, like caring for the poor, caring for the least of these. But when we're talking about
00:47:26.420
justice of proving innocent or guilt, we don't assign those things according to people's skin
00:47:31.160
color, socioeconomic status as Marxism does. We assign them according to the facts at hand.
00:47:36.560
That is a biblical principle. Exodus 23, 1 through 3, you shall not spread a false report. You shall not
00:47:42.860
join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to
00:47:48.020
do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice,
00:47:54.540
nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit. That's what Exodus 23, 1 through 3 says,
00:48:01.960
Leviticus 19, 15. You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor,
00:48:07.200
nor defer to the great. But in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. And so God is very
00:48:12.840
clear. You don't pick the side of the real oppressed or the perceived oppressed simply
00:48:18.460
because they are poor. And you don't side with the rich man or the great man or the famous man
00:48:23.940
or the white man, whoever it is, just because they have those characteristics. But in righteousness and
00:48:29.420
in truth, we judge our neighbor. Go read those passages, Exodus 23, 1 through 3, Leviticus 19, 15.
00:48:36.460
And no, we are not ancient Israel, but the principles of justice still apply. They're still good ideas.
00:48:42.840
Listen to Deuteronomy 19, 15 through 21. I won't read the whole thing. A single witness shall not
00:48:48.680
suffice against a person for any crime or in any wrong in connection with any offense that he has
00:48:54.400
committed. Only on the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses shall a charge be established.
00:49:01.640
And so he talks again about not partially judging someone, not assuming the motives of someone,
00:49:08.540
not incriminating someone just based on what you think or based on what a narrative is,
00:49:12.820
but based on what actual truth is. The New Testament makes clear that God's judgment and
00:49:17.460
therefore his definition of justice is impartial. Acts 10, 34, Peter preaching the gospel to the
00:49:23.180
Gentiles says this. So Peter opened his mouth and said, truly, I understand that God shows no
00:49:28.440
partiality, but in every nation, anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
00:49:33.920
James 2, 8 through 9 says, if you really fulfill the royal law, according to scripture,
00:49:39.260
you shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. But if you show partiality,
00:49:45.560
you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. So God's justice is truthful,
00:49:51.000
impartial, proportional, and direct. So that means if a police officer or anyone does target someone
00:49:57.260
because of their skin color, does target someone because of their socioeconomic status,
00:50:01.260
that is also unjust according to God. But also if we incriminate someone based on something that we
00:50:06.460
assume based on a popular narrative, that is also unjust according to God. It is also unjust for us
00:50:12.460
to punish people, for activists to punish people who actually did not commit the crime by burning down
00:50:19.160
their cities. That is not justice. And as I've already talked about, that actually is not an effective
00:50:25.020
means of change. We've had very effective means of change. We have progressed so much as a country
00:50:29.920
in this way through peaceful and democratic means. So it is a myth to say this is the only language that
00:50:35.220
people hear. It is false. It is just anarchy based on a faulty worldview, based on a postmodern
00:50:41.020
godless worldview that Christians should have no problem condemning in the same way that we should
00:50:45.580
be condemning all forms of injustice, by the way. So the truth is important. The truth matters.
00:50:51.260
The Bible, the biblical worldview matters. And this is another reason why I could not vote for Joe Biden
00:50:56.400
because he just like Barack Obama did it every chance he got. He racialized something that we
00:51:01.780
just didn't know. It might be racialized. It might have a racial motive, but we just didn't know
00:51:06.240
whether it was racial or not. And to make that assumption, to spin that narrative, to only put our
00:51:11.580
attention on something that happens when it's a white person versus a black person raises the
00:51:16.060
temperature. It raises the tensions. It makes the likelihood of violence higher. I'm not blaming Joe Biden
00:51:24.140
for the violence. I'm not. But it exacerbates the tensions and the divisions that are going on.
00:51:30.200
Everyone says that President Trump is the most divisive president out there, and they don't see
00:51:34.420
how Barack Obama ignited these tensions so much while he was president, just in the subtle way that
00:51:39.360
he made everything that didn't have to do with race about race. Some things do have to do with race,
00:51:43.900
but a lot of things don't. And again, for us to make that assumption without looking at the facts,
00:51:48.120
for us to abandon biblical justice and biblical truth in exchange for a social justice narrative,
00:51:53.780
that only creates bitterness and anger and resentment, rather than reconciliation,
00:51:58.520
the thing that we all say that we want, then we are in sin. And that is not good. We can disagree
00:52:04.760
on this subject, but we've got to start with honest and truthful premises. Okay, that's all I have time
00:52:10.000
for today. I really want to talk about the RNC. The RNC has been pretty good, y'all. It's been pretty
00:52:15.280
good. Like, I'm very impressed. I underestimated the RNC, to be perfectly honest. Now, I thought the
00:52:21.100
DNC had a lot of good parts, too, if I were a Democrat. I obviously think that the DNC is a
00:52:27.460
Trojan horse for extremism and for the things that we're seeing in our major cities right now. But I
00:52:32.740
thought they did a pretty good job. I thought Michelle Obama, for example, gave a compelling
00:52:37.720
address to the Democratic voters. But in my opinion, you've got doom and gloom of the DNC who truly
00:52:43.860
believe that America is this horrible on the inside, just a rotting place. And then you've got the RNC who
00:52:49.460
was saying, look, we have our flaws, we have our problems, we have our injustices. But America
00:52:53.920
is a good country where people of all kinds can thrive by living their life according to certain
00:52:59.880
principles. And they've had a diverse range of people speak. And I'm very impressed. I'm very
00:53:07.540
impressed by that. I don't know if it's going to make a dent in the voting. Who knows? It's going to
00:53:13.200
be a bunch of craziness. Anyway, I understand controversial episode. It's going to make some people mad.
00:53:18.560
You can reach out to me. You can let me know if it is. I'm happy to hear your perspective. You can send
00:53:22.980
me counterfex. You can send me links. It's okay to have emotions in regard to this conversation. It is
00:53:28.280
emotional. That's fine. Emotions aren't bad. But again, we have to have a truthful premise. Okay, that's
00:53:34.040
all for today. I will see you guys back here on Friday.