The Charlie Kirk Show - A Systematic Takedown of 'Systemic Racism' with Dr. Shelby Steele

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00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:09.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we have the incredible Dr. Shelby Steele.

00:00:12.000 Dr. Steele is one of the leading authors and thought leaders when it comes to the racial issues in America.

00:00:22.000 He coined the term white guilt in the mid-2000s and has a new documentary out, What Killed Michael Brown.

00:00:30.000 You are really going to enjoy this conversation.

00:00:32.000 We talk about systemic racism, what is driving the ultra-liberal elites to continue this racial division in our country, and so much more.

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00:01:09.000 Shelby Steele is here.

00:01:10.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:11.000 Here we go.

00:01:13.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:14.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:01:16.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:20.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:23.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:24.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:25.000 His 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.

00:01:34.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:42.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:46.000 I'm going to be really direct with you guys.

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00:02:37.000 Hey, everybody.

00:02:37.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:40.000 We 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.

00:03:01.000 Dr. Steele, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:03:04.000 Thank you for having me.

00:03:05.000 So tell us about your new documentary, What Killed Michael Brown, and also tell us a little about the news surrounding Amazon canceling this documentary.

00:03:16.000 I'm reading from a Wall Street Journal piece that says Amazon cancels Shelby Steele.

00:03:23.000 Yes, they did.

00:03:25.000 They canceled us.

00:03:27.000 We're now in discussions, I guess is the way you would put it, to see whether or not we will come back.

00:03:35.000 But no, they were very vociferous and a little nasty.

00:03:41.000 And cancel is, I think, the correct word.

00:03:46.000 They wanted to be rid of us.

00:03:49.000 Then publicity came out.

00:03:50.000 And the Wall Street Journal had a couple pieces in two, three days in a row.

00:03:57.000 And all of a sudden, we were up and streaming on Amazon.

00:04:02.000 So we're sort of still in the middle, what that means, what kind of relationship, if any, we're going to have.

00:04:07.000 But they clearly were censoring.

00:04:10.000 And it's important for me to have them own up to that in some way.

00:04:15.000 So I saw the trailer to your film.

00:04:17.000 I have not yet had a chance to watch the film.

00:04:20.000 Tell us why you made it.

00:04:22.000 And 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?

00:04:34.000 I think what got me interested initially is the incident with Michael Brown.

00:04:41.000 Like also, there's been several such incidents, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, young black male shot by policemen or otherwise killed by policemen.

00:04:53.000 And so this story, all of these instances, George Floyd is a more recent one.

00:05:00.000 They're followed by an explosion of public fascination, demonstrations around the world and so forth.

00:05:09.000 Why is that?

00:05:10.000 What's really going on there?

00:05:12.000 We wanted to sort of look at that in some depth and try to understand.

00:05:19.000 One 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. 0.65

00:05:31.000 It gives them a moral authority that we can wield over the rest of society.

00:05:39.000 And so a situation where a black teenager is shot and killed by a white policeman evokes the racism of American history.

00:05:48.000 And so there is potentially, at any rate, enormous power in that.

00:05:54.000 And the power to affect and change society in any number of ways. 0.96

00:06:01.000 The power that comes out of black victimization is the deepest source of power on the political left, I think, in America. 0.99

00:06:10.000 And so we wanted to sort of expose that and show how it worked. 0.98

00:06:14.000 And 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.

00:06:31.000 I think is, again, a measure of the power that is at stake in situations like this.

00:06:37.000 And from people came into Ferguson from all around the country, even around the world for that matter.

00:06:45.000 So the title is What Killed Michael Brown, not who killed Michael Brown.

00:06:50.000 What did you mean by that?

00:06:51.000 Did you think that there was underlying just events or preconceptions?

00:06:58.000 Obviously, you chose that word intentionally.

00:07:01.000 What exactly does the movie kind of, what's the story that it tells that helps answer that question?

00:07:08.000 What 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.

00:07:34.000 And, you know, when you do that, the confession was, I think, a moment of greatness in America.

00:07:41.000 It showed a character that I've never seen or heard of in any other society in the world.

00:07:47.000 It was America at its very highest moment.

00:07:51.000 However, when you confess, you lose moral authority.

00:07:56.000 And people can use that, your confession against you.

00:08:00.000 And they can doubt everything you do and say, well, see, don't say you weren't racist.

00:08:05.000 Look at what you did in the past. 0.94

00:08:08.000 You're systemically racist.

00:08:11.000 And it gives them a kind of power that America doesn't know what to do with pretty much since the 60s.

00:08:18.000 We came up with social programs.

00:08:20.000 There was a war on poverty.

00:08:20.000 It was a great society.

00:08:22.000 There was affirmative action, school busing, expanded welfare.

00:08:25.000 It'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. 0.84

00:08:41.000 The problem is that blacks then became dependent on that white guilt. 0.83

00:08:49.000 And white guilt and black power, as we've emerged through the years, have become the same thing. 0.73

00:08:59.000 And so in a situation like Michael Brown, well, boy, it's a war. 0.68

00:09:05.000 It's a mini war over who's right, who's going to come away from this with moral power.

00:09:13.000 In 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.

00:09:24.000 Nothing to prove it.

00:09:26.000 Yet, 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.

00:09:39.000 Facts mean nothing, but the feeling is we can't say something different, or we'll lose power if we actually tell the truth.

00:09:48.000 And so blacks then, we find ourselves in that position where our power is contingent on us continuing to be victims of racism.

00:10:02.000 And so we think of ourselves now and have for 60 years as victims.

00:10:09.000 It is a tragic sort of place to be.

00:10:14.000 But if you want to upset the black leadership in America, tell them that they're not really victims anymore. 0.94

00:10:22.000 Well, that's how far gone we've, in a sense, become, given this last 60 years of symbiosis between white guilt and black power. 0.88

00:10:36.000 And we wanted to show how deep that goes and how much it affects our lives here in America. 0.95

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00:11:27.000 Yeah, I got my political start right during the beginning of the Ferguson riots and the beginning of Black Lives Matter. 0.77

00:11:34.000 And it had implications that were far-reaching outside of Ferguson.

00:11:41.000 It was the hands-up, don't shoot moment as well, when all the CNN anchors put up their hands, and it was completely untrue.

00:11:49.000 It was an absolute lie.

00:11:51.000 The 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. 0.95

00:12:05.000 And then it even spread as far to the University of Missouri, where they saw a decline in enrollment and donations.

00:12:13.000 All of this kind of, and I love the way you frame it.

00:12:16.000 I want to ask a question here more about your documentary, What Killed Michael Brown.

00:12:22.000 It 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.

00:12:35.000 Have 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?

00:12:49.000 What were your findings as you did this film?

00:12:53.000 Yes.

00:12:56.000 One of the things we found was what I call poetic truth.

00:13:01.000 And 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.

00:13:25.000 You are creating a sort of, with poetic license, you are creating a narrative, a story that shows extreme white racism and extreme black victimization. 0.61

00:13:38.000 And, of course, the people who conceive the poetic truth, who spin it out to the world, then of course benefit. 0.68

00:13:50.000 That means that you mentioned the situation with me and Amazon at this point.

00:13:58.000 Amazon sort of canceled my film, but at the same time gave $10 million to Black Lives Matter.

00:14:07.000 Well, I'm telling you the flat objective facts and truth about what happened, grand juries and the evidence and so forth.

00:14:15.000 Black Lives Matter is invested in the idea that Michael Brown was a victim of racism and no hands up and so forth. 0.53

00:14:23.000 So again, the poetic truth is where the money and the power is, and it's where the white guilt is. 0.62

00:14:30.000 Because poetic truth always is designed to prick white guilt.

00:14:35.000 Because 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.

00:14:44.000 They have to pay us off. 0.77

00:14:46.000 I call that entitlement.

00:14:48.000 We use our poetic truth to sort of expand our entitlement in American life.

00:14:56.000 And that, again, is our tremendous source of power.

00:15:00.000 So the death of one kid in Ferguson causes all this.

00:15:06.000 Simultaneously, in 2016, 3,000 black kids were shot in Chicago.

00:15:13.000 762 were killed.

00:15:20.000 No government, no presidential interventions, no attorney general coming in, no local interest barely covered in the local press. 0.98

00:15:31.000 Because the trigger finger in Chicago was black. 0.97

00:15:36.000 The trigger finger with Michael Brown was white. 0.78

00:15:41.000 And so therefore, it replicates, seemed to replicate the past of America's racial past. 0.76

00:15:51.000 And so there was tremendous power, tremendous power.

00:15:55.000 You mentioned the University of Missouri.

00:15:57.000 Universities across the country are affected by this.

00:16:00.000 Their curriculums have changed. 0.79

00:16:02.000 Universities are different institutions than they used to be because of so much concern with sort of Michael Brown circumstance of black victimization.

00:16:17.000 What really led to that intersection point of Michael Brown?

00:16:21.000 For example, why didn't this happen in 2009 or in 2002 or in the mid-1990s?

00:16:27.000 What was it about that incident, maybe with social media, maybe with the outside groups being pushed?

00:16:35.000 I would love to dive deeper into all the different pieces that went into it.

00:16:39.000 But 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.

00:16:56.000 And 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.

00:17:06.000 And if you dare question it, you have your Amazon will cancel you or you'll get kicked off a college campus.

00:17:13.000 So, Dr. Steele, I want to ask about this idea of systemic racism.

00:17:20.000 I get this all the time on college campuses.

00:17:22.000 I think we have become pretty equipped in combating this charge that America is systemically racist.

00:17:32.000 Can you help our listeners and our viewers unpack this lie that America is systemically racist to its core?

00:17:42.000 Yes, it's particularly easy for me to do that because I was raised when segregation was real.

00:17:50.000 When 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.

00:18:00.000 We never could play in their yards. 0.88

00:18:02.000 We never could say hello to them.

00:18:04.000 It was a complete wall.

00:18:08.000 You wanted to get an Italian sausage sandwich at the local deli, and you had to stand outside the door sill.

00:18:17.000 I'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.

00:18:32.000 Yet we did move forward.

00:18:35.000 And I'll come back to that.

00:18:39.000 But that was the today, segregation is, it's impossible to say it's completely vanished.

00:18:52.000 Racism will always be there and is a part of the human condition, as I say. 0.99

00:18:56.000 Stupidity is a part of the human condition as well. 0.95

00:18:59.000 We will always have to be on guard against that impulse within us to judge people by their race. 1.00

00:19:08.000 But the much larger reality today is that we as blacks are free for the very first time.

00:19:18.000 And our challenge today is not racism, it's freedom.

00:19:21.000 This is where we've not had a lot of experience.

00:19:24.000 This is where we've not built a culture that is prepared to take on the challenges of freedom.

00:19:31.000 And those are very, the demands of freedom are very rigorous.

00:19:36.000 And so rather than face that challenge, we pull back and say, no, our problem is systemic racism.

00:19:44.000 Thought racism was just a little bit, but it's much larger than that and it's what's?

00:19:49.000 It's what's holding me back and stifling my humanity, and and uh um, once again um, systemic racism is designed to expand entitlement.

00:20:04.000 If I say well, racism is just here and there, a little isolated incident, then no big deal.

00:20:11.000 But if I say it's everywhere, then my entitlement is everywhere.

00:20:17.000 Then my moral power is everywhere.

00:20:20.000 I can begin to tell the institutions how to behave.

00:20:23.000 I can tell corporate America to contribute money to Black Lives Matter.

00:20:28.000 I can change the curriculum at my university.

00:20:31.000 I can, in my corporation, insist on a new human resources department.

00:20:36.000 I can, on and on. 0.99

00:20:37.000 I've got real power that I can wield in society because whites don't have the moral authority to resist it.

00:20:47.000 To say to whites cannot say to me, there's no such thing as systemic racism anymore. 0.58

00:20:55.000 They can't name the truth. 0.98

00:20:58.000 We can't hear the truth.

00:21:01.000 That's where we are.

00:21:03.000 And 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.

00:21:17.000 So 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.

00:21:29.000 It 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.

00:21:37.000 The term racism is not, that's not their definition of racism.

00:21:41.000 Their definition of racism is a power struggle, is that black people are unable to be racist towards white people. 0.55

00:21:49.000 And even deeper than that, so that's number one I'd like to have you unpack. 0.57

00:21:52.000 And 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. 0.59

00:22:05.000 You see this with Candace Owens, Brandon Tatum, yourself, Thomas Sowell.

00:22:10.000 The leading kind of black voices are no longer considered to be adequately black because they do not hold a certain ideological view.

00:22:19.000 Can 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?

00:22:34.000 Right.

00:22:36.000 What 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.

00:22:54.000 As a black, I can go around and I have a moral authority in American life to come up with wild ideas like systemic racism.

00:23:05.000 I can demand this.

00:23:06.000 I can demand just because I come from a race that's been victimized by America in the past.

00:23:14.000 So America's indebted to me.

00:23:15.000 They owe me.

00:23:17.000 That's power.

00:23:18.000 At least I think that. 0.99

00:23:21.000 What 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. 0.69

00:23:36.000 We could use it. 0.67

00:23:37.000 We have used it a great deal.

00:23:40.000 So Without realizing it, we developed a faith, almost a religious faith in the idea, belief that we're victims of white racism.

00:23:55.000 It just becomes a part of the identity.

00:23:57.000 We develop what I call a victim-focused identity. 1.00

00:24:01.000 You want to make many blacks angry?

00:24:03.000 Tell them that they're not a victim. 0.92

00:24:06.000 That's just beyond the pale.

00:24:08.000 And so it's more than ideology.

00:24:12.000 It 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.

00:24:23.000 And this is the tragedy.

00:24:25.000 We don't invent computers.

00:24:27.000 So we don't do other sorts of things that traditionally bring power.

00:24:32.000 We were victims.

00:24:34.000 And boy, there's a lot of power in that when a society has admitted, yeah, we did victimize.

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00:25:46.000 Do 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?

00:26:00.000 For example, I was born in 1993, almost three decades after the civil rights movement.

00:26:06.000 I am completely, personally, disconnected from any form of the real and legitimate segregation and racism that you lived through.

00:26:15.000 However, I'm still being blamed for it intergenerationally, despite myself having no involvement in it.

00:26:22.000 Do you think that is part of the problem that we are not viewing people as individuals instead, almost in tribal groups?

00:26:29.000 It'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. 0.61

00:26:39.000 I think the real problem behind this is that white Americans have lost their moral confidence.

00:26:49.000 They don't know whether they're, they may, they all doubt.

00:26:52.000 There's a doubt.

00:26:53.000 Am I racist?

00:26:54.000 Am I not?

00:26:55.000 There's an ambivalence.

00:26:56.000 There's a question.

00:27:00.000 As a black, well, boy, there's my chance.

00:27:03.000 There's my opportunity to exploit.

00:27:06.000 They can't make up their mind.

00:27:07.000 They're confused. 0.99

00:27:10.000 They don't have the confidence to enforce on me as a black the same values and principles they enforce on themselves.

00:27:20.000 They can't ask me to sacrifice in order to get ahead.

00:27:24.000 They have to give me something.

00:27:26.000 You 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.

00:27:35.000 We're never going to ask anything. 0.92

00:27:38.000 That attitude basically destroys black America. 1.00

00:27:42.000 We haven't recovered yet. 0.59

00:27:44.000 So, if the government asks us of something, ask something of us, we just built a whole new school system here in this city.

00:27:50.000 We'd like you to get your kids, so forth and so on. 0.97

00:27:54.000 Well, you're a racist. 0.99

00:27:58.000 And that's your real motivation. 0.97

00:28:03.000 And 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. 0.65

00:28:21.000 And we sort of have used that. 0.66

00:28:26.000 We've developed what's called the grievance industry, which basically exploits the lack of confidence in whites. 0.73

00:28:32.000 So, one of my real prayers is that at some point white America finds its confidence again. 0.59

00:28:43.000 Find some confidence that because they're not helpful, they're not going to be helpful.

00:28:49.000 We can't get over that problem.

00:28:55.000 Why would Amazon give somebody like me and give $10 million to Black Lives Matter if they had confidence?

00:29:07.000 They don't have any. 0.88

00:29:09.000 So, 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. 0.96

00:29:23.000 So, this is this sort of symbiosis that whites and blacks have today is, I think, where the real problem begins. 0.97

00:29:33.000 I think that's really well said. 0.95

00:29:34.000 And 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? 0.62

00:29:44.000 You saw this coming 15 years ago, 14, 15 years ago.

00:29:49.000 So, I want to ask a question: what was it about that year at that point that kind of exploded all of this social unrest?

00:29:58.000 Because in 2012 or 2008, there were demonstrations, but nothing like that.

00:30:04.000 Was it just the right place, right time?

00:30:06.000 Was there a social movement that led to this?

00:30:09.000 What 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?

00:30:22.000 Well, I'm not sure there was one sort of thing behind the timing of it.

00:30:29.000 This had been building.

00:30:31.000 The big incident before Michael Brown was Trayvon Martin, who was in Florida.

00:30:37.000 George Zimmerman killed by George Zimmerman, shot, so forth.

00:30:41.000 And that sort of was the beginning of the people began to, in these events, began to smell power.

00:30:49.000 There 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. 0.78

00:31:08.000 Well, wow, that imagery translates into black power.

00:31:13.000 And again, that's when Black Lives Matter began to form into a group, into an organization. 0.88

00:31:19.000 That's where other groups, the whole sort of violent demonstrations and so forth that we see today sort of got started there. 0.62

00:31:27.000 Realized, 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.

00:31:50.000 So 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.

00:32:01.000 And so you defer to anything.

00:32:03.000 And in your deference, you, in a sense, establish your innocence of racism, of evil.

00:32:10.000 That's what the mayor of Minneapolis gives the police station over to the mob to burn down. 0.53

00:32:18.000 This is white guilt in its purest, in its purest form.

00:32:23.000 Take over the city of Seattle for a number of days and weeks.

00:32:29.000 The city showing deference to these kids, these wild protesters and so forth.

00:32:36.000 All because there again is this lack of moral confidence that comes from our history.

00:32:44.000 We have not fought, it's though we're paying a price year in and year out now for that history.

00:32:51.000 And it weakens our entire society.

00:32:55.000 So 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. 0.88

00:33:06.000 What 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? 0.80

00:33:23.000 I think, well, it's not easy. 0.91

00:33:25.000 If it was easy, it probably would have already happened by now.

00:33:28.000 But 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.

00:33:39.000 We're a specific people in a specific place in a specific time and history. 0.97

00:33:45.000 And it's important for us to understand you're born white today in America and you're already guilty. 0.99

00:33:53.000 You're already a racist. 0.97

00:33:56.000 And that is the sort of ideology that minorities feel empowered them. 0.99

00:34:03.000 It doesn't. 0.98

00:34:03.000 Believe me, it does not. 0.98

00:34:04.000 It ruins them.

00:34:05.000 But the illusion is that that power really is their power that history has bestowed on them to use in this society. 0.59

00:34:13.000 Well, 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. 0.72

00:34:29.000 Whites have to stand up for themselves. 0.55

00:34:31.000 They have to fight back on this at some point and say, enough is enough. 1.00

00:34:35.000 The principle, here's my, what's the solution?

00:34:38.000 What's the way out of this?

00:34:40.000 Never again reward race for anything.

00:34:43.000 Never count race.

00:34:44.000 Race has no meaning.

00:34:46.000 What is important is that you and I are citizens of the same democracy.

00:34:51.000 We have the same responsibilities, the same freedoms, and so forth.

00:34:55.000 And we have to treat each other strictly as citizens.

00:34:59.000 And this idea that you, the government, you have to honor my identity as a black.

00:35:05.000 I know then immediately you're making a power move on me.

00:35:09.000 You're going to hurt me in another way.

00:35:11.000 No, no, no, no.

00:35:12.000 Treat 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.

00:35:24.000 And that's it.

00:35:26.000 And with discipline, never go into identity.

00:35:30.000 Never go there.

00:35:32.000 It is the kiss of death.

00:35:35.000 It may seem that it serves you well in the short term, but in the long term, it will destroy you. 0.94

00:35:41.000 When I grew up in a poor black community, the south side of Chicago, there was no black underclass in the 1950s. 0.76

00:35:50.000 There were also no social programs, no governmental programs, nothing.

00:35:54.000 We were on our own, up against the segregated society.

00:36:00.000 And we were thriving.

00:36:02.000 We were doing well.

00:36:04.000 The minute mid-60s comes, we win the civil rights victories.

00:36:09.000 We put into place countless programs.

00:36:12.000 We have been declining steadily ever since. 0.90

00:36:16.000 And identity, the liberal, liberalism uses identity to sort of, again, win back white innocence. 0.82

00:36:27.000 We've got to get over that and expect the same things. 0.86

00:36:32.000 You're black and you apply to university, then it's irrelevant. 0.99

00:36:36.000 You make it on merit or you don't make it at all. 1.00

00:36:39.000 Blacks need that. 1.00

00:36:41.000 We need that kind of discipline at this point to give up this idea that our victimization is our freedom.

00:36:50.000 Well, everyone, thank you, Dr. Steele, for that.

00:36:52.000 Everyone, check out whatkilledMichaelBrown.com.

00:36:54.000 Check out the documentary, What Killed Michael Brown.

00:36:56.000 I know we're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the coming days and weeks.

00:37:00.000 A very important documentary for the times that we're in.

00:37:03.000 Dr. Shelby Steele, it was an honor.

00:37:05.000 Thank you so much for joining us.

00:37:07.000 Thank you for having me, man.

00:37:08.000 Enjoyed it.

00:37:11.000 Thank you guys for listening.

00:37:12.000 Do you want to get involved with Turning PointUSA at tpusa.com?

00:37:16.000 Well, tpusa.com is your starting point to make a difference in our country.

00:37:20.000 tpusa.com is where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win America's culture war.

00:37:27.000 Email us freedom at charliekirk.com of any feedback or questions that you have.

00:37:32.000 And please consider supporting us and our program at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:37:38.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:37:40.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 20, 2020

A Systematic Takedown of 'Systemic Racism' with Dr. Shelby Steele

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