00:01:25.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
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00:02:37.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:40.000We are joined today with Dr. Shelby Steele, who is the really the mastermind behind this incredible new documentary, Who Killed Michael Brown, and also involved with the Hoover Institution, which is one of my favorite organizations, and just an incredibly clear and articulate voice in our country.
00:03:01.000Dr. Steele, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:03:05.000So tell us about your new documentary, What Killed Michael Brown, and also tell us a little about the news surrounding Amazon canceling this documentary.
00:03:16.000I'm reading from a Wall Street Journal piece that says Amazon cancels Shelby Steele.
00:04:22.000And also, what are some of the lessons that you hope people glean from it, especially in this election cycle that has become, in many different ways, I think, overly racialized?
00:04:34.000I think what got me interested initially is the incident with Michael Brown.
00:04:41.000Like also, there's been several such incidents, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, young black male shot by policemen or otherwise killed by policemen.
00:04:53.000And so this story, all of these instances, George Floyd is a more recent one.
00:05:00.000They're followed by an explosion of public fascination, demonstrations around the world and so forth.
00:05:12.000We wanted to sort of look at that in some depth and try to understand.
00:05:19.000One of the things that occurred to me even as we got into the film, one of the greatest sources of power for black Americans today is the history of their victimization.
00:05:31.000It gives them a moral authority that we can wield over the rest of society.
00:05:39.000And so a situation where a black teenager is shot and killed by a white policeman evokes the racism of American history.
00:05:48.000And so there is potentially, at any rate, enormous power in that.
00:05:54.000And the power to affect and change society in any number of ways.
00:06:01.000The power that comes out of black victimization is the deepest source of power on the political left, I think, in America.
00:06:10.000And so we wanted to sort of expose that and show how it worked.
00:06:14.000And here you have one black kid shot and killed, President of the United States, Attorney General of the United States, the Justice Department, the FBI, not to mention all the local police agencies involved in investigating it.
00:06:31.000I think is, again, a measure of the power that is at stake in situations like this.
00:06:37.000And from people came into Ferguson from all around the country, even around the world for that matter.
00:06:45.000So the title is What Killed Michael Brown, not who killed Michael Brown.
00:06:51.000Did you think that there was underlying just events or preconceptions?
00:06:58.000Obviously, you chose that word intentionally.
00:07:01.000What exactly does the movie kind of, what's the story that it tells that helps answer that question?
00:07:08.000What killed Michael Brown was, as we discovered as we got deeper into it, a brand of liberalism that came out of the 60s that through it, again, in the 60s was the trigger was that America confessed the centuries of racism.
00:07:34.000And, you know, when you do that, the confession was, I think, a moment of greatness in America.
00:07:41.000It showed a character that I've never seen or heard of in any other society in the world.
00:07:47.000It was America at its very highest moment.
00:07:51.000However, when you confess, you lose moral authority.
00:07:56.000And people can use that, your confession against you.
00:08:00.000And they can doubt everything you do and say, well, see, don't say you weren't racist.
00:08:22.000There was affirmative action, school busing, expanded welfare.
00:08:25.000It's just on and on of things that programs and policies that America thought would buy back some of the moral authority they lost by confessing to their past.
00:08:41.000The problem is that blacks then became dependent on that white guilt.
00:08:49.000And white guilt and black power, as we've emerged through the years, have become the same thing.
00:08:59.000And so in a situation like Michael Brown, well, boy, it's a war.
00:09:05.000It's a mini war over who's right, who's going to come away from this with moral power.
00:09:13.000In Michael Brown's case, there was not a single shred of evidence to suggest or prove that Michael Brown was killed by racism, that there was a racial animus behind it.
00:09:26.000Yet, even to this day, this moment, there are many people in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere who believe that he was killed, that it was a racially motivated murder.
00:09:39.000Facts mean nothing, but the feeling is we can't say something different, or we'll lose power if we actually tell the truth.
00:09:48.000And so blacks then, we find ourselves in that position where our power is contingent on us continuing to be victims of racism.
00:10:02.000And so we think of ourselves now and have for 60 years as victims.
00:10:52.000You guys have heard me talk about it, thinker.org slash Charlie, T-H-I-N-K-R, has solved that problem by summarizing the key ideas from new and noteworthy fiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.
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00:11:09.000If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, and what?
00:11:51.000The Ferguson effect also then spread to many different cities in the region where they, because of the retreat of police, more black individuals were victims of crime.
00:12:05.000And then it even spread as far to the University of Missouri, where they saw a decline in enrollment and donations.
00:12:13.000All of this kind of, and I love the way you frame it.
00:12:16.000I want to ask a question here more about your documentary, What Killed Michael Brown.
00:12:22.000It seems as if that the kind of Michael Brown outrage industry, that's not the right way to put it, but the outrage industry around that started with Michael Brown, and it has been replicated and duplicated in years past.
00:12:35.000Have you found that there are people that are financially incentivized and incentivized in other ways to almost find the next point of outrage and try to make it seem worse than it might actually be, try to imply racism where it might not exist?
00:12:49.000What were your findings as you did this film?
00:12:56.000One of the things we found was what I call poetic truth.
00:13:01.000And poetic truth is when you take an event like the murder of the shooting of, it's not remotely a murder, the shooting of Michael Brown, and you cast it as a murder, as something having to do, again, reflecting how deep racism is in American society.
00:13:25.000You are creating a sort of, with poetic license, you are creating a narrative, a story that shows extreme white racism and extreme black victimization.
00:13:38.000And, of course, the people who conceive the poetic truth, who spin it out to the world, then of course benefit.
00:13:50.000That means that you mentioned the situation with me and Amazon at this point.
00:13:58.000Amazon sort of canceled my film, but at the same time gave $10 million to Black Lives Matter.
00:14:07.000Well, I'm telling you the flat objective facts and truth about what happened, grand juries and the evidence and so forth.
00:14:15.000Black Lives Matter is invested in the idea that Michael Brown was a victim of racism and no hands up and so forth.
00:14:23.000So again, the poetic truth is where the money and the power is, and it's where the white guilt is.
00:14:30.000Because poetic truth always is designed to prick white guilt.
00:14:35.000Because that's where we get, that's whites then are in a position where in order to be innocent of racism, they have to give us things.
00:16:02.000Universities are different institutions than they used to be because of so much concern with sort of Michael Brown circumstance of black victimization.
00:16:17.000What really led to that intersection point of Michael Brown?
00:16:21.000For example, why didn't this happen in 2009 or in 2002 or in the mid-1990s?
00:16:27.000What was it about that incident, maybe with social media, maybe with the outside groups being pushed?
00:16:35.000I would love to dive deeper into all the different pieces that went into it.
00:16:39.000But you made a great point, which is that the American left have been searching for individual narratives or individual stories to fit a false narrative that they have been talking about for the last couple of decades that give them a lot of power.
00:16:56.000And if they find singular names or singular instances that confirm that, then they are able to speak about it for weeks or months on end.
00:17:06.000And if you dare question it, you have your Amazon will cancel you or you'll get kicked off a college campus.
00:17:13.000So, Dr. Steele, I want to ask about this idea of systemic racism.
00:17:20.000I get this all the time on college campuses.
00:17:22.000I think we have become pretty equipped in combating this charge that America is systemically racist.
00:17:32.000Can you help our listeners and our viewers unpack this lie that America is systemically racist to its core?
00:17:42.000Yes, it's particularly easy for me to do that because I was raised when segregation was real.
00:17:50.000When every single aspect of your life, white people lived on one side of the street I grew up on, blacks lived on the other side, and the 20 never met.
00:18:08.000You wanted to get an Italian sausage sandwich at the local deli, and you had to stand outside the door sill.
00:18:17.000I'd be here for a month talking about all the constrictions, the little and large humiliations that we had to endure just to move forward in life.
00:21:03.000And what I have found in some of these conversations, and I'd love to have you help us unpack this, is sometimes when I'm interfacing with a leftist or a member of the activist media, we're talking about two different things.
00:21:17.000So racism, the way I was raised, is one person of a particular skin color having a prejudice or hatred or bias towards another person of another skin color or culture.
00:21:29.000It could be a white person against a black person or a black person against a white person or a black person against a Latino, so on and so forth.
00:21:37.000The term racism is not, that's not their definition of racism.
00:21:41.000Their definition of racism is a power struggle, is that black people are unable to be racist towards white people.
00:21:49.000And even deeper than that, so that's number one I'd like to have you unpack.
00:21:52.000And number two, and we've seen this happen, and you deserve a lot of credit for this in recent years more so than any other time in my lifetime, is the challenging of people are not black if they're not on the left.
00:22:05.000You see this with Candace Owens, Brandon Tatum, yourself, Thomas Sowell.
00:22:10.000The leading kind of black voices are no longer considered to be adequately black because they do not hold a certain ideological view.
00:22:19.000Can you help unpack those two things about how we just have a disagreement on basic terms with some of the people that have been pushing them, especially when it comes to this idea of what is racism and is someone black if they are not on the left?
00:22:36.000What is behind this is the fact, again, coming out of the 60s, that our history of victimization in America as blacks became our greatest source of power in freedom.
00:22:54.000As a black, I can go around and I have a moral authority in American life to come up with wild ideas like systemic racism.
00:23:21.000What tragically happened to blacks is that we thought the moral authority we gained when America confessed to its racist past, we thought that moral authority was our greatest weapon in society.
00:24:12.000It is really this, they are protecting today this idea of victimization as power because we don't have faith that we have another source of power.
00:25:46.000Do you think part of the problem is that there has been this continuation or the overemphasis or the over-generalization of a certain group of people being the oppressors versus the oppressed?
00:26:00.000For example, I was born in 1993, almost three decades after the civil rights movement.
00:26:06.000I am completely, personally, disconnected from any form of the real and legitimate segregation and racism that you lived through.
00:26:15.000However, I'm still being blamed for it intergenerationally, despite myself having no involvement in it.
00:26:22.000Do you think that is part of the problem that we are not viewing people as individuals instead, almost in tribal groups?
00:26:29.000It's not as if that you have the individual agency to apply yourself, but you are only in the box of which you look most similar to those people.
00:26:39.000I think the real problem behind this is that white Americans have lost their moral confidence.
00:26:49.000They don't know whether they're, they may, they all doubt.
00:27:26.000You notice all the social programs in the 19th, from the 60s on, every single one of them basically says, we're going to give you something.
00:28:03.000And whites then don't have the confidence to white America lost the confidence to enforce the principles that made it great, to enforce the Bill of Rights, to enforce the Declaration of Independence, so forth and so on.
00:29:09.000So, Black Lives Matter is going to extract millions from whites who will just go along with it and actually pretend that they're doing something wonderful and good and beneficent.
00:29:23.000So, this is this sort of symbiosis that whites and blacks have today is, I think, where the real problem begins.
00:29:34.000And I also think that the issue that you pinpoint of white guilt, and I think you wrote that in 2006, if I'm not mistaken, right?
00:29:44.000You saw this coming 15 years ago, 14, 15 years ago.
00:29:49.000So, I want to ask a question: what was it about that year at that point that kind of exploded all of this social unrest?
00:29:58.000Because in 2012 or 2008, there were demonstrations, but nothing like that.
00:30:04.000Was it just the right place, right time?
00:30:06.000Was there a social movement that led to this?
00:30:09.000What was it about the Michael Brown incident that just started this now six-year or six or seven-year kind of ramp-up as now we've seen in 2020 with BLM Inc. and George Floyd?
00:30:22.000Well, I'm not sure there was one sort of thing behind the timing of it.
00:30:31.000The big incident before Michael Brown was Trayvon Martin, who was in Florida.
00:30:37.000George Zimmerman killed by George Zimmerman, shot, so forth.
00:30:41.000And that sort of was the beginning of the people began to, in these events, began to smell power.
00:30:49.000There was in Trayvon Martin, wow, there was coming out of this event an imagery of white racism that and there again, it was in Michael Brown, the same sort of imagery.
00:31:08.000Well, wow, that imagery translates into black power.
00:31:13.000And again, that's when Black Lives Matter began to form into a group, into an organization.
00:31:19.000That's where other groups, the whole sort of violent demonstrations and so forth that we see today sort of got started there.
00:31:27.000Realized, and you see this in demonstrations right now, Portland, Oregon, and so forth, and Minneapolis, Antifa, as well as Black Lives Matter and other groups, all realize they all, as I say, they operate within that vacuum created by white self-doubt, by white faithlessness in themselves.
00:31:50.000So that the only, when you are motivated by white guilt, the only thing you can bring to bear as a solution to a problem is deference.
00:32:55.000So I want to read a quote you said here, and you said there is a struggle for moral authority in the country right now brought about by the death of George Floyd.
00:33:06.000What do those people listening and watching to this in the two minutes we have left, what can they do to reclaim the moral authority away from white guilt and black power and back towards a country that we all want to live in that is much more fair and decent?
00:33:25.000If it was easy, it probably would have already happened by now.
00:33:28.000But I think the first thing is that people have to understand the pressure that being white puts on them in this society with this history.
00:33:39.000We're a specific people in a specific place in a specific time and history.
00:33:45.000And it's important for us to understand you're born white today in America and you're already guilty.
00:34:05.000But the illusion is that that power really is their power that history has bestowed on them to use in this society.
00:34:13.000Well, until what I think whites have to begin to do is be very honest with themselves and stand up and say, if you've done something that is, that people accuse you of being racist, we've got to stand up for that.
00:34:29.000Whites have to stand up for themselves.
00:34:31.000They have to fight back on this at some point and say, enough is enough.
00:34:35.000The principle, here's my, what's the solution?
00:35:12.000Treat me only as a citizen of the United States and respect my rights and ask the same responsibilities, ask that I carry the same responsibilities.