A group of white cops beat a black man to death in a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee, and no one has been charged for the crime. What happened to make these cops so bad that no one will ever be charged?
00:00:00.000Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs, and welcome to The Great America Show.
00:00:04.580Good news. The Biden regime says the COVID emergency ends on May 11th of this very year,
00:00:11.420a little over three months from now. I guess we shouldn't get too excited, though.
00:00:16.480Biden has said before that COVID is over, only to have one of his helpers at the White House come
00:00:21.660out and say, not so fast. We'll see if this one sticks. Lots of talk about war. Word is Russia's
00:00:29.300making advances now in eastern Ukraine, but at a high cost, according to Ukrainian intelligence.
00:00:35.980The Ukrainian military says they're killing so many of the invaders that the bodies of Russian
00:00:41.180soldiers cover the battlefield. Well, despite those heavy casualties, the Russians are still
00:00:47.120retaking lost ground in the eastern Ukraine. President Biden shipping more weapons to Ukraine,
00:00:53.120but those M1A2 tanks that he promised Zelensky aren't being sent. Turns out Biden promised
00:01:00.160those tanks before the Pentagon did an inventory. It turns out we don't have enough tanks to ship
00:01:06.460over there. And about those jet fighters that Vladimir Zelensky wants? No dice. Biden says he
00:01:13.440can't send them. F-16s might cross Putin's red lines, and that wouldn't be terribly smart
00:01:19.240to Mr. Biden or his State Department or his Pentagon. Because one of the Biden's generals
00:01:25.440is now telling everyone that he thinks will be at war with China in two years. He says he doesn't
00:01:32.500want to be right. He hopes he'll be wrong. But there's a news break nonetheless. What that general
00:01:38.740didn't do was say who he thought would win that war that he thinks will start in 2025. The answer
00:01:44.700isn't clear, which should concern all of us. You would think that with a war raging in Europe,
00:01:50.680the head of NATO would have better things to do than travel all the way to Asia to make a
00:01:55.700proclamation about China's preparations to carry out a blitz attack on Taiwan. NATO Secretary General
00:02:03.240John Sultenberg did just that, saying that Xi Jinping is learning from Putin's war against Ukraine,
00:02:10.160suggesting China may soon attack Taiwan, but with full force. My point is this. How many advanced
00:02:18.000missiles, $40 million tanks that are the best in the world, how many of our troops do we want to
00:02:23.640ship to Ukraine when NATO and the European Union should be defending Ukraine? Why does Biden insist on
00:02:31.000acting like the Marshall Plan is still in effect? That the United States isn't being crushed by the
00:02:36.680Marxist Dems who have driven our national debt to backbreaking levels, and the prospects worsen
00:02:42.480steadily that we'll be in that war in Asia soon. The euros are perfectly capable of defending
00:02:49.240themselves, and the Biden regime is sending money, advanced weaponry, and munitions to Ukraine.
00:02:55.620Not only that, but Biden has withdrawn 200 million barrels of oil from our strategic petroleum reserves,
00:03:02.600which are now at the lowest levels in almost four decades. Hardly the strategic approach
00:03:08.800to prepare for an increasingly likely war that none of us wants. Maybe that's the reason a recent Gallup
00:03:15.940poll shows that the dysfunctional Biden government is the number one problem in America, followed by
00:03:22.860inflation, immigration, and the economy in general. Not a pretty picture, is it? Well, not such a pretty picture
00:03:30.380in Memphis, Tennessee, either. Those five policemen who beat a man to death, the video is sickening,
00:03:36.660and then we learn those five cops weren't even held in custody. They were out on bail while facing
00:03:42.840murder charges in the death of Tyree Nichols. Five black cops killing a black man. What sense does any of
00:03:50.440that make? What was going on in that moment? There has to be a lot more than we know. And now reports
00:03:57.360that two more Memphis cops and two sheriff's deputies have been relieved of duty, and three
00:04:02.560fire department EMTs have been fired. A total of 12 people now involved at this point in what is
00:04:10.420a murder investigation. And not a word about why the head of the police department and several
00:04:15.760supervisors aren't being questioned and investigated as well. Memphis obviously has a cesspool for a police
00:04:23.120department. And no one should kid themselves. This is about sadistic cops and leaders who permit the
00:04:29.680abuse of their citizens. Everything else the national media is spewing as an effort to enlarge Memphis
00:04:35.400to a national problem and make the Memphis incident smaller. But that incident is only getting bigger.
00:04:43.040Memphis is a city of about 700,000 folks. A million and a half people live in the metro area.
00:04:49.320Memphis residents are 60% black, and the city has one of the highest poverty levels in the country.
00:04:56.040Second highest, in fact, overall, and in child poverty. Memphis also has the highest crime rate
00:05:02.940in the nation. And yes, the city is a Democrat stronghold. A Democrat has run the city for ages,
00:05:10.100and in this crisis, we hope the Memphis police unions will stand up for what's right and not try to
00:05:16.840cover up for those in uniform who tore up a young man's life. They'll be under immense social and
00:05:23.140political pressure to do just that. Let's hope that Memphis can come together to assert that standing
00:05:29.060up for law and order isn't racist, that calling for peace and reason isn't hate speech. They're
00:05:35.840necessary conditions to have a peaceful and prosperous community. Our guest today is Heather McDonnell,
00:05:42.560brilliant social critic, attorney, best-selling author, Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan
00:05:48.480Institute. And welcome back, Heather, to The Great America Show. How have you been?
00:05:53.680I've been great, Lou, except I haven't been talking to you for a while, so there's been a slight
00:05:57.120lack in my life, but now I feel full and satisfied. So thank you for having me on.
00:06:03.820Well, it's great to have you here. Thanks so much. And I want to talk about, you know,
00:06:08.760a great comment that you, of many, a constant flow of great comments that you make and remarks
00:06:15.800just in discussion. And when you talked about it is not hate speech to defend the republic,
00:06:24.320to defend America, I thought that was such a wonderful statement and a wonderful motto.
00:06:30.260It is the case that if you defend American values today, you're something of, well, I don't know,
00:06:39.900a hateful person, a despicable person, certainly a deplorable. Do you think that's changing or not?
00:06:50.300It's not changing because not enough people, especially in the professions, are willing to
00:06:55.880stand up for the truth, to stand up for the very tradition and profession that they have worked
00:07:02.960their lives for. It's still a few iconoclasts that are willing to say that the police are not racist.
00:07:12.280It is not hate speech to say that Americans have the absolute right to enforce border laws,
00:07:19.580that parents are right to have oversight, the final, the first and the final say over their
00:07:27.860children, that it's not hate speech to say that you cannot change somebody's sex by castrating that
00:07:33.620person. Far too many people are simply terrified to speak the truth. And the left is in the business
00:07:43.780of turning us into some kind of terrified, cowering totalitarian state by using several forms of
00:07:54.520emotional blackmail. And this is the series of steps they take, Lou, in order to shut down speech.
00:08:02.480First of all, too many of us went along with the idea that college students are somehow unsafe.
00:08:12.360You know that they're like, they're in jeopardy of their lives being on a college campus, which is
00:08:19.620the most preposterous idea. There is no safer place in the country, in the world, than an American
00:08:29.680college campus. These students are coddled. They are privileged simply by virtue of the fact that
00:08:36.340they have at their fingertips the thing that Faust sold his soul for, which is knowledge.
00:08:41.340But too many adults on campus went along with this idea that if a student is upset by something,
00:08:51.680he is unsafe. And then they also went along with the idea that speech with which you disagree,
00:08:59.740if you are the dominant progressive class, may be characterized as hate speech. And then,
00:09:07.380here's the final step. If it's hate speech, and again, what is being characterized as hate speech
00:09:14.160is something like, well, yes, America was racist in the past, but it is not racist today. That is not
00:09:22.880our endemic trait. Yes, we have a terrible racial history, but we have made amends for that history.
00:09:31.340To say that second part is now hate speech. And if you say that second part, which is that
00:09:38.360the reality today is not white privilege, it is black privilege, you are both engaged in hate speech,
00:09:46.120and as hate speech, you are engaged in assault. It is no longer speech, it is behavior and may be banned.
00:09:53.720I was just going to say, thought crimes now are crimes. We're moving in that direction, aren't we?
00:10:05.040We are. People are getting, they're finding their PayPal accounts shut down, their crowdsourcing
00:10:14.080accounts are shut down, they're kicked off of media sites, but they are being followed. You know,
00:10:22.120there's going to be more and more, I'm sure, types of punishments of not being able to spend your own
00:10:29.080money, not being able to go where you want to go. And all because of this emotional blackmail
00:10:36.660saying, well, if you don't, if you don't agree with me, you're hurting me. And you know, if you're
00:10:43.280not using my, the gender pronouns, which I in an act of sheer, aggressive power hunger are trying to
00:10:54.260impose on the world, you're going to put me at risk of suicide. You know, it's absolute emotional
00:11:02.720blackmail, and nobody should go along with it. It's emotional blackmail, and on a lower level,
00:11:11.560it's pure nonsense. There is no intrinsic logic to any of this. And to think that corporate America
00:11:24.220has consumed this and is now spitting it out, and by that I'm talking about all of this left-wing
00:11:33.180Marxist blather in the form of ESG and CRT and a whole new left-wing initiative that is brought to
00:11:44.920you by your friendly globalist corporation. And that, of course, influences everything that's
00:11:51.860happening in Washington, D.C., because they are the preeminent donor class, aren't they?
00:11:57.660Yes, and I don't see why there's a single parent out there in America that knows what's going on,
00:12:02.980which is using any Disney product whatsoever. Believe me, parents, Disney is expendable.
00:12:12.820There is a wealth of children's literature coming out of Britain and America in the early part of the 20th century
00:12:21.780that is glorious, beautiful. I am so grateful that my parents read me Wind in the Willows,
00:12:28.540Charlotte's Web, Winnie the Pooh in their original forms with their glorious illustrations by Ernest Shepard,
00:12:37.140not the bastardized Disney versions, you know, Alice in Wonderland, E. Nesbitt books, Wizard of Oz.
00:12:48.700There's 13 Oz books that are all more wonderful than the next. You can do much better by your children
00:12:55.960by reading to them the classics and filling their ears with language than parking them in front of the
00:13:04.020Disney Channel or showing them a Disney cartoon with its increasingly terrible soundtrack. I'm sorry,
00:13:12.060I'm going to alienate a lot of viewers here, but Frozen is not a great set of songs.
00:13:20.680But Disney is in the vanguard of the left and many other corporations are as well. It is harder to
00:13:28.760decouple from Amazon, and I confess that I have not done so. I don't order much, but there's times when
00:13:36.900I do. But it's not actually all that surprising, Lou, because every year colleges are belching forth
00:13:45.220another group of brainwashed graduates who go to corporations to work, and the CEOs are terrified of
00:13:54.860them. The CEOs are also terrified by their dopey left-wing wives, and they're terrified by the New York
00:14:02.320Times, and they just see it as a lot easier to kowtow to the loud voices within them and outside of them
00:14:11.660and gain their virtue points than it is to say, we're going to steer clear of all things political
00:14:18.960and hew to the tradition of vibrant market exchange without feeling like we have to bludgeon
00:14:29.140the public with our virtue signaling. The virtue signaling, it must leave some exhausted in our
00:14:36.820society because there is so much of it going on in the media, each one more sanctimonious than the
00:14:43.140other, each one more trying to project more righteousness than any saint that is familiar
00:14:51.320to anyone. This is a remarkable period in our history. It is, and I laugh at it because, as I say here
00:15:00.900too often, when you finally cross the penumbra into the absurd, all you can do is laugh. And we are now
00:15:12.640in that we have gone well beyond the penumbra. This is a time of just extraordinary madness in this country.
00:15:21.160It is, and it is a whole group of people preying on another in this society. And then it's other groups
00:15:31.220preying on other groups. It is chaos in a sociological, in our society. It's just unbelievable.
00:15:40.820Well, Lou, I envy you your good spirits and your sanguine personality. And I don't want to be a
00:15:51.220downer here in a black cloud, but I have to say part of the way we got to this point is that too many
00:15:59.180people were laughing. We went through that whole period when we first had trigger warnings and
00:16:05.260microaggressions. And, and, and, uh, undergraduates were saying they couldn't be asked to read Ovid,
00:16:13.000the great metamorphoses, one of the marvelous, uh, early Latin works that, that provided thousands of
00:16:22.120years of inspiration to subsequent painters and poets and sculptures, sculptors, uh, that is just a
00:16:29.740phantasmagorical understanding of the constant flux and transformation in, in reality. But students
00:16:39.320saying, Oh, we can't read Ovid because it, it portrays, uh, abductions of Jove and, and Jupiter,
00:16:48.660you know, abducting, uh, lovely nymphs for his, uh, sexual pleasure. And if we read this, we will be
00:16:57.180struck dead ourselves and, and, and, and people laughed and said, Oh, these silly snowflakes,
00:17:03.420uh, just let them get to the corporate world and they'll wise up quickly because they'll be in
00:17:10.300hard America rather than soft America. And people complaining about the cafeteria food,
00:17:17.300you know, they're being served tacos and this is cultural appropriation because it wasn't served
00:17:23.060properly or, or soggy Chinese food. And that this was also upsetting to them because it wasn't cooked
00:17:30.000properly. We were all laughing at that. No, I'm sorry. It's not, it was not funny then. And it's
00:17:35.860not funny now. These people are deadly serious. There's nothing that, uh, you know, they've said
00:17:43.740they were going to do that they have not done. And so it's, it's time to start not brushing it off
00:17:52.080and, and looking away, but realizing that as long as we fail to defend our traditions against what
00:18:01.520is, I think the most powerful charge today, which is that of endemic racism, uh, the left wins,
00:18:09.780it is all coming down. It's not just a question of tearing down statues,
00:18:15.620including of the founders, including of Frederick Douglass. It's a question of tearing down the very
00:18:23.300possibility of raising your children to have a love of life, of being able to read literature
00:18:31.740and experience the sublimity of expression and wit and irony that the greatest authors can give us
00:18:41.440of seeing beauty and art. All of that is coming down and being replaced by anger and hatred of the,
00:18:49.260uh, that is the only thing that the mob has to offer, which is tearing things down and not building it
00:18:56.300up. And mob, uh, is very much a part of our daily existence. Now, when we watch, uh, Hakeem Jeffries,
00:19:08.220uh, talk about how unified the Democrat party is as, uh, Speaker, uh, McCarthy, uh, steps up to take the
00:19:16.460gavel, uh, he, he's talking about conformity, not, uh, unity. He's talking about an absence of dissent,
00:19:24.640uh, uh, tolerated, uh, uh, there's just no toleration for dissent in the Democrat party.
00:19:30.780They are moving in lockstep on every issue in every form. Uh, their hates are all the same.
00:19:37.740Their loves and passions are all the same. Uh, and most are in many cases perverted. Uh, this is a
00:19:45.900terrible time, uh, for, uh, uh, for dissent and for argument and for, uh, uh, disagreement. Uh,
00:19:53.660as we see right now in the Republican party, I believe the Republican party actually is, uh,
00:19:59.580ignition has been achieved. There is now a semblance of, uh, of real robust argument and
00:20:07.580disagreement out in front in public, whether it be the battle over the speakership, whether it be the,
00:20:12.760the bargaining over what would make him speaker. Uh, this is a, this is a Congress that for the first
00:20:20.000time I actually have hope that the Republicans may be something other than country club Republicans,
00:20:25.700uh, ordered here and there, uh, at, uh, in quick step by the chamber of commerce and the business
00:20:32.960round table. Things are getting better in so many ways in this Congress. So I have in that at least
00:20:39.880some hope that was absent, uh, just a short time ago, your thoughts. Well, as far as uniformity,
00:20:47.340we, we remember the statement, uh, by somebody in Congress several years ago, which is if you're,
00:20:55.020uh, you know, not taking democratic positions, you're not black or you're not female or you're
00:21:01.540not gay. There was absolutely a sense that any non-conforming black who does not think that the
00:21:10.460main problem facing blacks today is white racism, uh, he's just not counted. Uh, and, and, and so
00:21:18.320there's just pariahs, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, uh, Glenn Lowry, Jason Miley, they're,
00:21:26.880they're turned into pariahs. And I, I would agree. You said earlier, there's no logic to what the left
00:21:34.800is doing. I know what you mean. If you're using logic in its real meaning to say that if we were
00:21:43.040to approach this, uh, with expectations of rationality, they are so against the evidence
00:21:52.860and, and so anti-empirical that in one sense, a true statement on the other, there is a consistency
00:22:00.380in what the left is doing. And it is all about, uh, sending out the single message that everything
00:22:10.940in our world today is the product of racism and white supremacy and that any self-professed victim
00:22:20.500group should not be acknowledged to have any agency or any responsibility for, uh, a member of
00:22:30.380that group, any responsibility for his or her life outcomes, that there's nothing that, that culture
00:22:36.840or that individual can do. I think those are lies. I think right now, the biggest problems we have
00:22:44.120with both racial disparities and socioeconomic disparities are almost exclusively the product
00:22:52.920of culture and a failure of personal responsibility. But the left is insisting with a consistent logic
00:23:02.900that, uh, racism defines America and they are trying to tear every meritocratic institution down.
00:23:13.320I've been writing a lot about STEM and medicine, uh, and the medical schools and the medical professional
00:23:20.240organizations, the AMA, the American Association of Medical Colleges, all medical schools. They're all
00:23:28.160exercising vast racial preferences. They're admitting black and Hispanic students with standardized test
00:23:36.320scores and GPAs that would be automatic automatically disqualifying if presented by white and Asian students.
00:23:43.520And then those racial preference beneficiaries get passed along throughout their medical careers.
00:23:50.480We're, we're destroying grading systems in order to cover up the persistent academic skills gap.
00:23:58.380We've the, one of the important medical licensing exams has discarded grades and gone to a very crude
00:24:08.960pass fail system because grades had a disparate impact on blacks. So, uh, you know, we are really,
00:24:15.680really playing with fire here by, by the left pursuing to its logical end, the idea that only racism explains,
00:24:26.640uh, socioeconomic and racial disparities today. Absolutely. And, uh, if I wasn't clear,
00:24:33.520what I was talking about is the intrinsic logic of the policies, uh, and the precepts of, of the,
00:24:39.520the left in this country, the Marxist Dems, uh, which I, I think is wanting to say the least.
00:24:46.000Uh, you're no, you, you raise another is always important point. And that is, we are confronted with
00:24:53.040an education, higher education system right now. That is, um, it is, it wants, uh, stolid, uh, atrifying, uh, and indolent, uh, staffed with indolent, uh, professors and so-called scholars.
00:25:11.360And the admissions departments are, are confronted with a very simple issue. They cannot, uh, according to the admissions people I have spoken with,
00:25:22.000there's a reason for these, uh, changes in, uh, admission programs, uh, and, uh, and, uh, at least the screening.
00:25:31.040And that is that, uh, and I'm going to say this out loud and people are going to be outraged, but, um,
00:25:38.000the, the highest testing groups, demographic groups are Asian, uh, and Jewish students. Uh, and I've actually heard
00:25:47.600admissions officers say out loud to me that in point of fact, their school would be made up of Asians and
00:25:56.240Jewish students. If they didn't have some way to, uh, if you would, uh, leaven, uh, the, the body, uh,
00:26:05.920the association, uh, uh, of all those students, uh, it would be impossible because they would be the
00:26:12.240highest, uh, highest, uh, achieving in terms of schools, uh, standard tests, uh, as well as essays.