Ep. 1452 - Matt Walsh Sits Down With ＂Hate Crime Hoax＂ Author
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Summary
In this episode, we talk to Wilford Riley about his new book, Hate Crime Hoax, and the new film, Am I Racist, starring Matt Walsh and Robin DiAngelo. We discuss racism in the movie, the making of the film, and what it means to be a racist in America.
Transcript
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All right. We're joined by Wilford Riley. He's a college professor, author of the book,
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Hate Crime Hoax, How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War. But if you've seen the new film,
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Am I Racist, playing now in theaters, get tickets at miracist.com. Then you also know him as one of
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the only voices of sanity in the movie. In fact, of the, I guess we'd say expert class, the academics
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and so on that we talked to, the only voice of sanity in that group. And the two of us went head
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to head in an intellectual bout in that film, a bout that I'm sorry to say I probably lost,
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I can now admit. But he's here now. Wilford, great to see you again.
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So I wanted to talk about a lot of, several different things, issues that the movie deals
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with and that, and that you've dealt with a lot in your career that your book deals with. But
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before we get into any of that, this is sort of a unique opportunity to interview someone else
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about my own movie, which is interesting because there are things about the scene that we recorded
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together, we filmed together that I actually don't know from your perspective because I wasn't involved
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in the kind of booking side of things. So here's my question. I know that you knew who I was because
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we had followed each other on Twitter for probably years before this, but that's all I know about
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your perspective on this. So what was kind of like going through your mind when we were sparring back
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and forth and I was in my dumb wig? What was that from your perspective?
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I mean, I assumed that we were doing a sort of Borat style setup. I mean, I think we're both offhand
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pretty funny. I mean, so it was just being aware of that, but also sincerely answering the questions.
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I mean, they were good questions, actually. How many hate crimes are there per year? Is there a
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wave of interracial or hate crime that's certainly white on black, but even that's black on white?
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Is that going on? Those are things that are really out there in the discourse. And it was really
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interesting to respond as kind of the conservative consultant to that. But I mean, when you came in,
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it's pretty obvious this is Matt Walsh in a wig as someone who's in a right-leaning business space.
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So you, you kind of know what this is, you know, you, and that was, that was my assumption,
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but you just, you didn't go along with it. The theme was great for the movie.
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What did you think of the wig? Cause Robin DiAngelo says it was ill fitting. I thought,
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I thought it fit pretty well. I mean, it's an expensive wig. The wig's getting a hard time
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from the audience, but you, so you, you didn't buy the wig at all.
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Well, I mean, I didn't, I didn't buy the wig because I knew it was you. Um, I mean, you often
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could have grown my hair out for all you know. Yeah, but it, it, it was, it was, it did not look
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like that was what had happened. It wasn't a bad wig actually. I mean, I, I read Robin DiAngelo's,
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uh, response, which is called something like about that movie. Um, and I, I think there's a,
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there's a kind of attempt to downplay how silly she ended up looking in the movie. I mean,
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as everyone in the audience now knows, she paid reparations to one of the guys just on the daily
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wire staff. I think Ben, I mean, she reaches in her purse to give them $30 or something like that.
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So when you're, you're exposed like this, she ended up deleting her own Twitter.
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You're probably going to throw out as many criticisms as possible. I thought the wig was good,
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but it didn't make me think that you were, you were somebody else. No.
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All right. I'll take that as a C plus. We'll give it a C plus C plus wig. Uh, have you, uh,
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have you gotten, what's the reaction been like in your own life to people, uh, that maybe have
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seen the movie? Have you gotten recognized at all? Anything like that?
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Yeah, I've gotten recognized a few times. Um, I live in the Kentucky state Capitol,
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which is a small city, but where, I mean, the, the state house is a block down the street.
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National politicians will often come there to negotiate deals and so on.
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So like the gym I go to occasionally has just send me famous people wandering around and I,
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I, in environments like that, I sometimes get recognized that's happened more after the movie,
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but no one's particularly impressed. Um, it's the kind of environment where everyone would pretend
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not to be, even if they were. So it's just like, Oh, you're that guy. Uh, the reaction I've gotten
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on Twitter and Facebook from the, the audience in general has been very positive actually,
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because I think the thing with both of your films, both of which I've watched was that
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most people in the quote unquote expert class end up looking like idiots, which is obviously one of
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the points of the movie. I mean, in, uh, what is a woman? There's very famously, uh, some kind of
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academic that compares, uh, humans to chickens and says, well, sure you can sex a chicken, you know,
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female has a cloaca, but does a chicken commit suicide? Does a chicken fry? Um, and there was
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a lot of that in this movie as well. Uh, the Moana scene sticks in mind. So, I mean, most people that
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saw me were kind of just like, Oh, that's that guy on Twitter that, you know, teaches and does
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consulting and so on down the line. He seems pretty normal, which, which was good. I think that would
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be an advantage you'd have if you were coming from the right, which I think is where the correct
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position on this dwells, uh, in, in a piece like that. So the reaction has been good. If you haven't
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seen my new, uh, movie, am I racist? You need to, one of the most important things I learned about
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anti-racism during the film is that you have to look the part, which is why I'm excited to introduce
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the official am I racist movie merch collection over at dailywire.com slash shop. There's a, uh,
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t-shirt, which I have here, which is proudly displaying my DEI certification so that you can
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let everyone know that I'm at Walsh and DEI certified and here to help. So you're not,
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not, you're not displaying your own certification, but mine, um, which, you know, that could open doors
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for you. There's also a, um, this one I like as a big fan of dad jokes. This is like the ultimate dad
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because it's the pun and it's diehard. There's a DEI heart, which I could be taken the wrong way.
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There's a DEI hard t-shirt that you'll, uh, that'll make you say yippee-ki-yay mother or race
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hustler. Sorry. Oh, race hustler. Uh, that's there. I like that one. That's a nice pun. Plus you can
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get the all new am I racist party game that makes you and your friends do the work to figure out
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where you all, where you all are in your anti-racist journeys. Uh, this is a very important
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game. A lot of fun also. So go to dailywire.com slash shop to shop the collection today.
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Uh, and also it's, even for me watching the movie back, uh, of course I've seen it a million
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times through the editing process, but watching it in a totally finished form in a theater at
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the premiere, uh, it's also refreshing because by the time that you appear in the film, we've
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heard so much nonsense. Uh, it's, and then, and then to get just like someone saying things
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that are obviously true. Uh, I think it's very refreshing. You can kind of, I could feel
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that in the theater is almost like a, a breath of fresh air to just, just have someone have
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a little glimmer of light in the midst of all that. I think that's also happening there.
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Well, I, I think we all feel that way sometimes just as middle-class or upper middle-class citizens.
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Like I, even I sometimes as someone who's in this field wonder, like, could I be wrong about
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these obvious things? There seems to be such a mass of people that are saying absolutely
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crazy stuff. Like men can be women. I think that's the obvious one, but just going on beyond
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that. I mean, during COVID, uh, not learning and you see a little bit of this on the right
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too, but not learning and not studying doesn't affect your performance on IQ tests. Just things
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that seem objectively insane. America is one of the most racially fraught countries on earth and
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you go to a high school football game. So there's this, there's this presentation that almost everyone
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seems to be nodding along to that's obviously not real. And that creates a real dichotomy in the minds
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of many people. I mean, the equivalent would be hundreds of years ago being taught a false version
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of religion or some bizarre heresy by the government and being forced to go along with this. I think
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that's a very close parallel. And then I suppose most people did as well. You wouldn't want the
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punishments that came along with rejecting it. But I mean, I, I think that there, and this is,
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I guess, a message almost for the audience. Like there's a facility of logic that human beings have.
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It's one of the first classes you take at any decent college, including my own. Um, and it's this
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ability to logically analyze that makes it possible to serve on juries and question professional
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prosecutors to write op-eds that go to a major local paper that a hundred thousand people read,
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to submit to what we call interdisciplinary journals, an academic who's fairly good.
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I can write in any field from willing to take criticism that comes from an inherent ability
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humans have. So when you see people saying things that are nonsense and you yourself are not an idiot,
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you're a country lawyer, a housewife with six kids, or someone else who has responsibility in your
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life. The question isn't, am I going crazy? It's why is this person saying something that's
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objectively not real? And that's, that's a fascinating question. And it's a very tough
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question to answer. So, but I think that when someone says, and we've probably both been in
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this role, but when someone says, look, what you're saying just isn't true, you know, how do you know
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that people are male or female? I mean, the gametic analysis is what we use for horses in Kentucky.
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Like when someone says something like that, I do think that people often sort of gasp and say,
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yes, thank God that's true. And then you return to the question of why are people saying the thing
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that's false, which is, is interesting to me. Yeah. I think that, um, segues into my, my question
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is we move away from the movie itself and some of the issues that it addresses. Why do you think
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people like Robin DiAngelo and, uh, her ilk, the, what I would call the race hustlers,
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how do they get to a point of such cultural power in, in your view, given that, uh, when you
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actually sit down and talk to Robin DiAngelo, as I obviously have, or you read her book as
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unfortunately I did, it's, it's so vapid. It's so ridiculous. Um, there's really, I actually picked
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up her book and I read it almost hoping for my own sake, cause I have to read this whole damn thing.
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I was like hoping that maybe I'd find a couple of, a couple of interesting insights in there.
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Like maybe there'd be a few moments where I could say, okay, well, that was an interesting
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point or she has a point there. And what I found is honest to God, not a single, that didn't happen
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a single time. It was just utter drivel. So, and yet she, and this is changing now for her for a
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couple of different reasons, but she got to a point of great cultural influence and power
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and people like her, uh, Ibram X. Kendi being another one before his downfall. So how does that,
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how does that happen? How did they get to this point?
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It's a, it's a fascinating question. I mean, that might be the topic of my next book,
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depending on what the publisher's offers look like. It's going to be either that or a book
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called Panda bears about why young people can't seem to mate and marry. But I mean,
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your show actually played a role in inspiring that title. Um, but yeah, the Panda bears one would be
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funny. I mean, and I, that actually is one where I would go do interviews and things like that. I mean,
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I read recently that, uh, don't overstate this, but 47% of young men, um, this is true across
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Republicans, Democrats, Christians, other faiths, whatever, have never asked a woman on a date.
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Young men goes up to 25. So there's a lot of criticism of feminism and the like, and some
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of that's legitimate, but there's also, you're failing in the most basic kind of male role in
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that situation, which, you know, Fox has managed to figure out. So why, and I want to sit down with a
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panel of guys and a panel of women and possibly even have my fiance host that one and just go and
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ask them. And I'm genuinely curious, but to, to answer your question, which is why is nonsense
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prevalent? First of all, I think it's important to realize that the default for humans isn't sharp
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wit in a capitalist liberal democracy. This I think is one of the points that Tom soul made over the
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years. It was like, it was so important that the default for humanity in Europe and West Africa
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and China everywhere was grinding poverty under a cane, you know, and part of that generally was
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believing nonsense. I don't mean to single out any one religion, but I mean, I don't believe that
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traditional Hindu theology happens to be accurate. I mean, I would assume that in thousands of
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traditional schools across the great nation of India, people are taught this. It's assumed that
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there is an instrumental social value to them learning it and people believe it, you know? So it's
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the idea that people believe things that may or may not be true. The traditional hierarchy of
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the races, when that was perhaps necessary to justify conquest, so on down the line, that's nothing
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new. That's, that's a constant. Why do people believe that? Because there's a tendency on the part
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of people, and I don't even know if believe is the word, but to obey the things that are told to them by
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reasonably competent leaders in order to get along in society. The, the deeper question though,
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is why this particular mythology took off the anti-racist and queer theory, all of the, I'm kind
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of stumbling here, but all this stuff that we see now, I think that there are a number of reasons
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declining belief in anything traditional is one of them. But a big one simply is that this stuff to me,
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all the down road Marxist stuff is an endemic disease of capitalist competitive society.
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When you see what's a pretty fair system, like American SAT testing, produce wildly disparate
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results. Or last year, Native Americans brought up the rear, got a 912. Asians were ahead of everyone,
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including whites with a 1250. When you see a gap like that, it's very tempting to think that the
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fair system is in fact unfair and start coming up with explanations as to why. So Kendi and D'Angelo
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actually have a very simple kind of bear trap mythology that they've made up. That's incredibly
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tempting to midwits. And the idea is basically there are two possible explanations for large
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group differences in performance. One is genetic inferiority, which nobody really wants to believe
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in. People might accept that there are 2% differences in mathematical ability or foot speed or something,
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but no one wants to believe that causes the 300 point gap. And it almost certainly doesn't.
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But the other alternative, according to them, is racism. So Kendi will just ask during his
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presentations, which do you believe? Do you believe there's something wrong with black people and no
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hands grow up? Do you believe that it has to be systems then? Every hand goes up. The reality,
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of course, is that there are dozens of things in between, like culture. But I think in our society,
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we're a diverse society that produces strengths and weaknesses. We're looking at these very large gaps.
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And this crap provided an instrumental explanation for these gaps that wasn't as awkward as single
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mothers are likely to produce failures as such. Or, you know, study time is critical for performance
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on tests. You could simply say this. And this became very popular. And because it involved kind
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of uplifting people, it became a quasi-religion for a lot of Americans. I think that's kind of the
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And also, I wonder if this is part of it, going with the racism explanation also means that you
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don't have to actually do anything about it. Because ultimately, it's a non-fixable situation.
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I mean, they say America's inherently racist. I asked Robin DiAngelo in the movie,
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is it even possible to be not racist? She says, well, in any given moment, you can be less racist
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or more racist, talking about white people, of course. But you can never be not racist. And
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even in her, as you say, mythology, which is the way of putting it, it's like in any given moment,
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your racism fluctuates wildly. Which is, if you believe that, it's quite hopeless. So I wonder
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if part of it also is, if you chalk it up to, even though they have their ideas for policies and
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laws and all that kind of stuff, but really, if you chalk it up to racism, then you don't actually
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have to do anything about it. And certainly, on the individual level, there's not anything any
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individual person really needs to do, because you're just kind of waiting around for the system
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to fix it, which it never will. Well, first of all, I think that last point is extremely
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important. When you get into left-wing ideas, or yeah, contemporary left-wing ideas is a fair way to
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put it, about racism, even about environmentalism, what they're doing is changing the definition of
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the thing so that you can't improve yourself and fix 90% of the thing. So, I mean, you know,
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I pick up my trash, you know, I go camping, I fish, I hate people that throw junk on the ground.
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That, to me, is what environmental concern is. You know, if you go out in the woods, you take a
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shovel, you clean your stuff up. That's not what environmental activism means, if you've ever read
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anything current from Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. They start by talking about, like, large systems
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led by the USA in the West and China in the East that rely on models of late capitalism.
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So, environmentalism becomes sort of a vague concern about the world that you can displace
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your empathy onto. It's the same thing with racism. Racism is individual dislike of other
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races. In the quantitative social sciences, where we actually have to conclude things or get fired,
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that's what it means. You can measure it quite easily. On a 1 to 10 scale, how warm do you feel
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toward interracial marriage? I'd say about a 7. I don't really care what people do. I may have a very
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slight preference for my own group, but you can measure that. Most people have taken tests of this
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kind. But that's not what Ibram Kendi means by racism. What he means by racism, as closely as I
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can parse out, is any system that produces disparate results between any groups, most of which results
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can never be fixed because, in fact, the cause isn't racism. So you're right about that. So racism
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becomes sin would be a good way to think about it. Like, if you're born into certain groups,
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you're capable of racism. And if you're born into other groups, although you can be equally
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prejudiced, you're not. So your job is not just being less racist, hiring 10 percent black guys on
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the job site. It is recognizing the sin within yourself, apologizing, shaming yourself in public
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meetings. And it's easy to see why this appeals to a certain kind of masochistic, perhaps especially
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female, upper middle class person. In my opinion. Yeah, you said something there. You gave the
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answer a question I was going to ask a few questions down the line, which is what is
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racism? And you gave a definition there that I that I also that's the definition I would give
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because it's pretty simple and straightforward. It seems intuitively correct. I think it's how
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everybody would have defined racism up until very recently. But that's one of the interesting
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things in making the movie. Am I racist is that we could have actually called the movie. What is
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racism? There's a whole other movie we could have made where I'm only going around and asking that
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question to these race activists? Just they're anti-racist. They define themselves as anti-racist.
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Well, what even is racism? And that is a question that I did ask in the course of many of these
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interviews. And we and it was a very what is a woman like experience where they didn't want to
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answer it. And I was a little surprised by that. I thought that I knew they wouldn't give the answer
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to racism that you just gave. I knew they'd have a different definition, but I thought they'd have
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a definition ready to go. But they didn't. They they they really didn't want to be nailed down to have
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to give any kind of discernible definition for what racism is. Well, I mean, what do you make of that?
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Well, what I make of that is that a lot of these people are brifters that want to call everything
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racist. I mean, so when you see. So, again, just common sense for the audience. When you see
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someone engaging in behavior that looks kind of grifty, that doesn't seem to make a lot of coherent
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sense, there are essentially two possibilities. One is that you've encountered a genius that is
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substantially smarter than your own 115 or whatever IQ. And you just can't understand this brilliant,
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you know, venerable bead level individual. And the other thing is that you're being BS'd and it's
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exactly what you you think it might be that happens to be going on very frequently. And I don't want
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to give an R-rated example here, but I was reading the joke here would be, you know, every day I read
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20 pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, the Holy Quran or Karl Marx, Know Your Enemy. But I actually did
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glance at an issue of Cosmo that people were debating online. And one of the articles
00:21:49.480
a couple of months ago was titled, Men Are Making Women Orgasm As Much As Vice Versa Now,
00:21:57.280
Here's Why That's Bad. And the subtitle was, So Your Husband Really Cares About Pleasing You.
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Of course he does. It's all about him. And this feminist author went on to explain about how men
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are competitive, aggressive creatures and we're still brutes and so on. And I mean, I was reading
00:22:12.220
this and laughing, but I could easily imagine multiple ex-partners from the Chicago legal and,
00:22:17.340
you know, Salesforce world actually taking this quite seriously. So the framework there, of course,
00:22:22.680
would be if you don't care about your wife's emotional and physical satisfaction, you're a
00:22:28.280
brutal savage. If you do care about your wife's emotional and physical satisfaction, you're a
00:22:32.720
brutal savage wearing a jacket. The framework of fourth wave feminism is you're always a brutal
00:22:37.720
savage and we should kill all the men. I mean, at a certain level past a certain point. It's the same
00:22:42.820
thing with racism. You know, if you flee a black neighborhood, you are engaging in white flight.
00:22:49.620
If you enter a black neighborhood, you're engaging in gentrification. So yeah, getting to the point,
00:22:55.300
I think that asking the question, what actually is racism would have gotten you the what is a woman
00:22:59.980
result where people dance and stammer and they're avoiding an easily available explanation. So what a
00:23:06.560
woman is to trans advocates is anyone who portrays sex stereotypes. That's that's if you have a couple of
00:23:12.060
beers with one. That's what they'll get down to. I always loved pink. I like kissing boys, that sort
00:23:16.840
of thing. Similarly to Ibram Kendi or someone like that, racism is any system that produces any
00:23:24.460
differences between any groups, because if it weren't for oppression, all people and probably all groups
00:23:31.380
would be exactly identical. That's pure blank slate ism. That goes back to Rich Delgado that goes back in
00:23:37.240
terms of actual scientists to Franz Boas. This is a thing that was said through the 60s, the 70s,
00:23:42.940
the 80s. Now that we can scan someone's brain, this is what Musk does with mirror link. We know
00:23:47.960
that's nonsense. Some brains are twice as big as others, but many people believe it. And that's the
00:23:52.440
root cause of this. As an undeniable authority on style, decor and home ambiance. I know you've all
00:23:58.820
wondered, Matt, where do you get your candles? No candle companies met my rigorous standards. So we had to
00:24:06.720
make one. My personal collection of candles is now available at the Candle Club, including the all
00:24:11.660
new seasonal scent, Autumn Bonfire. And there's a note in my prompter, which says, reference the
00:24:18.040
candle on your desk. So I guess I'm supposed to, I mean, you can see it, but I need to specifically
00:24:23.220
tell you, you see this, this is the candle I'm talking about. You can see the one, because I'm
00:24:29.160
talking about a candle and there's one on my desk, but you probably, you weren't connecting the dots.
00:24:32.600
So it's this, this one right here, which is reminiscent of crisp autumn nights by the fire
00:24:38.200
and a day's end done right. I assume this is the same one.
00:24:44.800
It does. It smells like an autumn, uh, autumn breeze or whatever. What is it supposed to smell
00:24:48.840
like? Oh, autumn bonfire. Yeah. It smells like, smells exactly like an autumn bonfire. As an added
00:24:56.020
bonus, the mug is reusable. Once you finish the candle, I shouldn't have to say this, but please
00:25:01.080
wash it with soap and warm water before drinking out of it. Head to the candle club.com to get my
00:25:06.440
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00:25:12.440
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00:25:18.320
to shop now while supplies last. Uh, yeah. And then you mentioned even next candy. And now I'm,
00:25:25.880
I'm just remembering that he actually, there's a famous video of him, uh, being asked what is,
00:25:30.680
what is racism from several years ago. And he kind of infamously gives this winding tortured
00:25:37.080
answer, but basically his answer is racism is racism. It was something like racism is any system
00:25:42.440
that produces racist results or something like that, which is again, not good.
00:25:48.600
Oh, sorry. But it, these questions are funny because they sound like people answering the most
00:25:56.280
complex stoic or Christian theological paradigms. Like what's the difference between God and the
00:26:01.240
Holy ghost or father and all the ghosts, something like that. But it's being done in the context of
00:26:05.800
what are the easiest to answer questions that have ever been designed by man. That's why it's
00:26:11.080
entertaining. So racism again is measurable dislike for members of other races. If I wanted to off the top
00:26:17.480
of the head, come up with a better definition right now, it would be believing inaccurately and to an
00:26:23.560
immoral degree and the genetic inferiority of one human population to another. And each component of
00:26:29.240
that would be important. It has to be to a serious level where it's interfering in business or similar
00:26:34.280
relationships. It has to be inaccurate. If I believe that pygmies are small and weak by adult white or black male
00:26:39.640
standards, that's not racist. Samoans are tend to be larger guys. That's not racist, you know, and so on
00:26:45.480
down the line has to be genetic. So I think that's what people mean by racism. Kendi can't answer that
00:26:50.600
because obviously the majority of gaps in modern life aren't explained by that. So when Kendi says
00:26:56.600
something like the SAT is racist against minorities, or even I understand why whites would think the
00:27:03.560
college admissions process is racist. I'm surprised to see him admit what he means by racist is this thing
00:27:08.680
that we clearly just defined, but he's not going to admit. He's not going to say any system that treats
00:27:13.560
anyone differently is racist because then he sounds like a nutcase.
00:27:18.680
Uh, but I, so here's a simple question and maybe it's not so simple. Maybe, uh, maybe there's not
00:27:26.280
an answer for the, that you can give, but, uh, how with all this stuff factored in and these race
00:27:34.600
hustlers doing what they do, uh, what do you think race relations? And you guys think it depends on how
00:27:40.280
you define that, but do you think race relations in this country are getting better or worse unchanged?
00:27:46.200
I mean, how do you assess that broadly speaking?
00:27:49.480
Well, one of the things about quantitative social science, and I'm not, I'm hardly here as a defender
00:27:53.800
of the current academy, but, um, in terms of quantitative political science or psychology or
00:27:58.760
something like that, most people don't need to access these paradigms. Most people don't need a
00:28:03.400
professional shrink, but a lot of the stuff we do actually is pretty empirical, pretty verifiable.
00:28:07.880
So how do you race relations are getting a lot worse? How do we know that? Because Pew about
00:28:12.520
30 years ago started doing a process where they asked people how they feel about race relations.
00:28:16.280
I think it's on the census now. So every couple of years we asked millions of people these questions.
00:28:21.000
And I mean, what we actually found is that I might get a couple of the years wrong by 1% here,
00:28:26.360
but going back to 1990, going back to that kind of Jordan B. Byrd era,
00:28:31.240
race relations were very good. And that's what you'd expect about 70% of white,
00:28:35.480
65% of blacks rated them as very good. And the, that tiny gap there probably does indicate there's
00:28:41.000
a little bit of racism still going on. You're not surprised to see the minority group be four
00:28:44.760
or five points below. But I mean, this wasn't exactly the era of slavery, even the deep South
00:28:51.080
desegregated in 1954, or at least began that process. So by the 1990s, most people felt that this
00:28:59.880
was kind of done. This is as far away in time as warfare against Hitler. I mean, we started,
00:29:06.120
we pulled troops out of Germany as the Marshall Plan began in 1951, we kept them in the West.
00:29:11.720
I mean, so that wasn't a concern of most people I grew up with in Chicago, whether they're Irish,
00:29:16.600
Italian, black, Hispanic, 70, 65. Now today, after years of this crap, you've seen a steady trend line
00:29:24.680
down. And the last I looked after the full BLM era, and now the somewhat justified, but the
00:29:32.680
Caucasian online response, mobs of black guys beating up white guys, after all this has been
00:29:37.000
visible to everyone, I think we're at 33 white and 30 black. So race relations have been halved.
00:29:45.240
I mean, instead of emphasizing the positive, instead of, you know, the old white guy and a black guy in
00:29:50.440
astronaut suit standing in front of a flag, is it entirely real? No, but it's what countries do.
00:29:56.200
Instead of doing that, this sort of endless whining and minging about the Aztecs were introduced to war
00:30:03.560
for the first time ever by the savage incomers. This has massively, massively detracted from
00:30:10.520
the attitudes that people in general have toward the country and toward other groups within the country.
00:30:17.080
Well, here's my, uh, because I would answer basically the same about race relations. I mean,
00:30:22.760
as you say, it's pretty empirical. So, um, and race relations, I guess, are one of those things
00:30:28.120
that if everybody thinks they're bad, then sort of by definition, they, they are. Uh,
00:30:33.960
my theory about where that all began is it's certainly not just my theory is, uh, you kind of look
00:30:40.680
to me in the, in the middle part of the first decade of the two thousands is when things started,
00:30:48.680
things started being an issue that didn't seem to be an issue before, at least from my perspective.
00:30:52.520
And that's interesting because that is right around the time when we were the first black president,
00:30:56.360
um, which you would think would be, if you didn't know any better naively,
00:31:00.200
and I think people did think it would be kind of the, the final nail in the coffin of, uh, of,
00:31:05.880
you know, any, any, any semblance of poor race relations, that this is sort of the end of that.
00:31:11.880
And now we're into a post-racial future or whatever. It didn't work out that way, obviously.
00:31:16.680
And my theory about why that happened is that when you have a black man at the top of the system,
00:31:23.720
running the system, well, that's pretty good evidence that systemic racism is not much of an
00:31:30.360
issue anymore because this guy's running the system. But all that meant is that the race hustlers,
00:31:36.120
the, the Robin De Angelos of the world, even if she wasn't, uh, a factor back then, but people like
00:31:42.360
that now they had to kind of work overtime to convince people that they are racist. They had
00:31:48.200
to go looking for problems. And that's why we, that's when you first start hearing about things
00:31:52.200
like microaggressions that no one ever talked about before, but now you start hearing those things
00:31:57.000
because now they gotta, now they gotta, they don't want you to sit there and say, okay, we have a black
00:32:01.080
president. I think things are fine. Um, now they want to go find the problem. And, uh, and maybe that is
00:32:08.280
what started the snowball effect. What, what do you, what do you think about that?
00:32:13.080
I think there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, I voted for Obama in 2008, certainly, um, forget
00:32:18.680
about 12, but I mean, I, I leaned to the right, even at that point. I mean, I was at that point,
00:32:24.600
I was in central, central Chicago, working those sort of post-college jobs. I wasn't a big fan of
00:32:30.440
democratic tax policies, but I thought it'd be cool to see the first black president. I think a lot
00:32:34.520
of people did. There was a massive rally in the downtown of Chicago with about a million
00:32:38.040
people present. Um, my take on Barack Obama, however, is that he's someone who really missed
00:32:46.040
his chance, kind of missed his Nixon and China moment because what Obama could have done in,
00:32:51.960
I think what most people expected him to do is what you basically just said, where he would stand
00:32:57.720
up and say, look, we haven't wrinkled out every last bit of bias in the Appalachian high hills.
00:33:05.560
There's still for that matter of an intolerable level of black crime in Detroit and Atlanta,
00:33:11.320
but we're all getting along pretty well. Look at the army. I'm the president enough with this.
00:33:16.040
Let's move on to newer issues. The rights for the campaign to actually benefit poor heartland
00:33:23.080
Americans who come in all colors is something that's decades behind in terms of the launch.
00:33:27.880
I think that's what a lot of people expected. This one's over fights over. We started in 1954. It's
00:33:33.880
done. Um, that's Obama almost did the reverse of that. He had some good domestic policy actually,
00:33:40.520
but his issues on race, I mean, the classic example, most people cite is my son would look
00:33:45.960
just like Trayvon. And the thing that's notable about that is that it's so obviously false. There's a
00:33:53.400
zero percent chance of the son of Barack Obama who went to Harvard, who's not an eight O's black
00:33:59.480
American, by the way, who's half white, I have noble lineage Kenyan, but there's a zero percent
00:34:05.720
chance of this kid wandering around and shoddy housing development at 1am getting in a fist fight
00:34:12.360
with the head of the local neighborhood watch that escalates to the point of guns being drawn hoodie on.
00:34:17.240
I mean, that's just obviously not true, but the decision to say that didn't occur in isolation.
00:34:25.240
I mean, it was part of Obama's, a lot's been written about this in my field, but it's part
00:34:29.160
of Obama's attempt to put together his coalition of the fringes for 2012 and so on down the line.
00:34:33.160
But yeah, Barack Obama definitely didn't help race relations. My opinion is that his presidency was
00:34:39.080
part of a gradual decline though. I mean, you saw kind of an era and I actually don't really
00:34:44.120
have much of a theory about this, but you saw an era of kind of open free speech
00:34:48.120
where Charles Murray's the bell curve came out on the right. And then Tom Soule wrote
00:34:52.120
a book responding to that black rednecks and white liberals, plus some other things.
00:34:56.680
I mean, people on the left, who's it? Nisbet wrote a book where he said both of them were wrong.
00:35:03.080
And this is a coherent liberal idea about how you can gain intelligence and learn civilized culture.
00:35:07.480
So we really just let people talk for quite a period. It was maybe 89 to 2005.
00:35:12.920
And then it stopped. To me, I think maybe the onset of social media played a big role,
00:35:18.120
because Facebook came out in 2006, something like that. So as you allowed these censorious people
00:35:24.040
to concentrate in groups, that had a real chilling effect. I think that played a huge role. I have
00:35:30.600
no documentary proof of that. My new film, Am I Racist, has become the surprise hit comedy for 2024,
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and the only way you can experience it is in theaters. You can get your tickets now
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still a top 10 movie in the country with a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and showing
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no signs of slowing down. But there was one movie that started all of this. What is a Woman? A
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groundbreaking documentary that unexpectedly became my first cultural phenomenon. Best part,
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you can stream it now on Daily Wire Plus. Not a Daily Wire Plus member.
00:36:03.000
We'll go to dailywire.com slash subscribe to join the fight today. Use code DW30 for 30% off your new
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Daily Wire Plus membership. We only have a few minutes left here, but I wanted to ask you another
00:36:16.920
thing that I've been wondering about a lot, especially after making the film. I guess you
00:36:21.720
get your take on it. We have the grifters, and we kind of know what motivates them. That's not all that
00:36:29.080
interesting. They get paid. They have a lot of influence and power and all that kind of stuff.
00:36:37.080
What interests me more are the people who go to these grifters in the movie Race to Dinner. The
00:36:45.880
white ladies who sit around the table at Race to Dinner and get berated. The people that go to these
00:36:50.760
seminars that you see in the film that I'm there as a joke, but they're there in real life because they
00:36:54.600
really want to be there. It's a really, as I can say, as someone who's been there, it's a very
00:36:59.720
unpleasant experience. It's the opposite of inspirational. It's the opposite of anything
00:37:05.560
that I would ever choose to be around unless I was making a movie about it. Yet, these people choose
00:37:10.840
to go there and kind of be berated and degraded and demeaned, white people in particular, because
00:37:16.840
they're the ones who are in line for that kind of treatment. What do you think, this is more of a
00:37:21.320
psychological question, but what do you think motivates that? What do they get out of that
00:37:26.280
experience? Well, it's three levels. So first, just a personal opinion. I'd like to see people,
00:37:30.920
and in particular white people, stop doing this. We can debate all day whether morality is ultimate,
00:37:35.800
and if so, what morals are ultimate? Is it simply the short list given at the start of each of the
00:37:39.640
great religions, blah, blah, blah. But I think at a basic predatory level, human beings who were hunters
00:37:44.440
since before fire feel contempt for people that embarrass and debase themselves. And white liberals
00:37:52.120
don't seem to understand this. The idea is that outreach to Asian Americans or black business
00:37:58.200
people or something involves this shameful kowtowing and so on. And no, like the black and Polynesian
00:38:05.080
guys your kids played football with view that just like your kids would. It's bizarre.
00:38:10.520
Some people might accept the offer and exploit those people. Most people like me view it as sort
00:38:17.320
of ignoble to do that, but you don't want to associate with them either. So stop doing that.
00:38:21.000
That's extremely bizarre. A second level of analysis, someone I knew casually in graduate
00:38:26.040
school was a dominatrix as a part-time source of income. And she told me that people who tended
00:38:31.160
toward masochism, not sadism, which is unfortunately broad among males, probably comes out of 10,000 years
00:38:36.440
of rating. But, um, people who tended toward masochism were almost invariably upper middle
00:38:42.120
class, over spoiled, mostly female liberals who felt that someone they needed someone to dominate
00:38:49.320
them. And it's hard not to notice. I'm sure this will be clipped out of context if anyone bothers,
00:38:55.640
but it's hard not to notice that that's the exact demographic for race for dinner.
00:38:58.920
There's a whole lot of anger at my father. Someone needs to be the powerful Lord and shut
00:39:04.920
me up kind of stuff about a lot of this. The, what is it? Femin, the group that tears their tops off
00:39:11.320
and throws red paint on things and screams that cops like, are you mad enough to arrest me?
00:39:16.600
Eh, you know, it's, it's psychologically, there's a lot you can say there. Like, you know,
00:39:20.680
why do you have a zip down handmaid's tail outfit in your closet? Is that something you bought
00:39:26.040
specifically for this protest? One might wonder. I mean, so that's, that's a second level of just
00:39:31.240
personal analysis as an adult, as it happens, an adult male. Um, third level, I think though,
00:39:37.480
beyond the people that might be legitimately crazy and almost quote unquote, getting off on this,
00:39:42.600
beyond the people that are making money hustling, there is a third category of person who legitimately
00:39:48.920
has come to believe this stuff. And I think it's important to realize this about the prevalent
00:39:53.720
philosophy in society. We saw this even in communist countries, 30, 40% of the population
00:39:59.000
come to think it's true. Um, we've seen repeatedly, including under COVID-19 that people are willing
00:40:04.840
to quote unquote, snitch on their neighbors. If those in positions of leadership tell them to.
00:40:09.480
So I think a lot of these people are at these dinners because they feel that the only cause of
00:40:16.040
gaps in performance is oppression, that their group is responsible for the oppression and that they
00:40:21.720
want to learn how to stop the oppression. Now watching the full scene at that dinner where the
00:40:26.360
woman said to Rao at one point, you know, I talked to my white friends the same way. I don't feel like
00:40:29.880
this is useful. I think a lot of them began to realize as it went on that they weren't going to get
00:40:34.600
anything out of this, but there's a deeper message there. The reason that being taught about your
00:40:41.240
oppressive nature is not going to fix problems in the black community or on India reservations or for
00:40:46.200
poor whites for that matter is that those things are not caused by oppression. One of the groups I
00:40:51.320
just mentioned is white. They're caused by a combination of failed culture and structural
00:40:56.200
issues like our elite outsourcing our jobs. So all of this is just a Kabuki sideshow that makes a few
00:41:01.480
hustlers some money. That that's it. Yep. Fascinating. Um, a lot more we can talk about obviously, but I know,
00:41:07.720
uh, you got to go, uh, you have a real job as a college professor. Um,
00:41:12.600
if I call you again to be in another movie in a crazy wig, are you game or no?
00:41:18.840
Yeah. I've, uh, just, uh, released a new book lies. My liberal teacher told me. And so I've, uh,
00:41:23.000
getting some, uh, requests to talk in serious documentaries and such. And I think yours is the
00:41:28.360
highest grossing in that form right now for a while. So yeah, if you want me to come back, uh,
00:41:33.160
I'd be, I'd certainly be willing to do it. I might, might wear something myself in the skies. I don't
00:41:37.160
know. We'll see where you're on week. See what's up there. Uh, awesome. Appreciate it. Wilford Riley.
00:41:50.040
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