TRIGGERnometry - They’re Lying About Hate Crimes

00:00:00.720 The Jussie Smout story is an archetypal example of, well, this victimization can happen anywhere,

00:00:06.060 it can happen to the most successful of us, nothing has changed.

00:00:08.520 Again, the only difference is that the story was a lie, and the Michael Brown story was a lie,

00:00:12.660 and to a large extent, the Trayvon Martin story was a lie.

00:00:15.620 In the two years after Mr. Floyd's death, there are a bunch of practical questions.

00:00:21.200 I mean, where they're dueling toxicology reports and where it appears that George Floyd took

00:00:25.280 enough of fentanyl to kill about 70% of adult males.

00:00:29.200 To this day, no one has explained to me what the racism was.

00:00:34.740 There's no convincing evidence of racism in that case.

00:00:39.260 Wilford Riley, it's been a long time coming. Great to have you on the show.

00:00:42.540 Before we get into the fantastic work you do on hate crime hoaxes and all of that kind of stuff,

00:00:48.000 tell us a little bit about your background and who you are.

00:00:51.160 Well, right now I'm a professor of political science at Kentucky State University down in

00:00:56.160 Frankfurt that's a historically black college in the Kentucky State Capitol.

00:01:00.700 I've written a number of books. I mean, you've mentioned some of them, hate crime hoax, taboo.

00:01:05.440 But before that, I was a kid from Chicago. I was born on the south side of the city.

00:01:09.520 I grew up mostly on the north side in what's currently the Wicker Park area, kind of our hipster district.

00:01:14.500 It wasn't then. It was jokingly nicknamed Needle Park. Very urban, interesting area.

00:01:19.820 But grew up, had a normal sort of working class life. My mom was an inner city school teacher, actually.

00:01:25.940 She taught for most of her, not life, but the period when I was there in the East Aurora School District,

00:01:32.420 right outside of Chicago, heavily Latino. Went from there to colleges in the state.

00:01:38.460 I went to Southern Illinois University, perfectly solid college, but also at this time,

00:01:43.140 I think Playboy's third-ranked party school.

00:01:45.600 Congratulations.

00:01:46.600 That's right. I did my best to keep the name up, really.

00:01:50.440 But went from there to the University of Illinois. I got a degree in law.

00:01:53.820 And by this time, because, I mean, it's not really all that hard to graduate from the Chicago and Aurora public schools

00:01:58.660 without insulting them. It's not that hard to graduate from SIU in 2000.

00:02:03.820 So I was, like, 23 when I got out of law school, something like that.

00:02:06.700 23 at the oldest. And so I had to kind of figure out what to do.

00:02:10.140 And I ended up doing about a 10-year odyssey of different things.

00:02:13.260 I went back to graduate school. I ended up getting a PhD, which is how I came to be in my current position, of course.

00:02:19.260 But while pursuing the degree, my mom fell fairly sick.

00:02:22.700 So I ended up back in Chicago.

00:02:24.200 I worked as one of the canvas managers for a public activist group for a while.

00:02:28.920 So there's literally guys out on the street like, hey, got a minute for true gay love with the number of physical scuffles and so on that you'd expect.

00:02:36.820 I did that for a couple of years, kind of the archetypal city kid job and met this fascinating group of people.

00:02:42.140 I mean, the New York office had an even larger one, but this is downtown Chicago.

00:02:45.500 So you met all these poets, writers, aspiring athletes, people like this who were just coming through one of the big cities in the USA.

00:02:53.020 Moved from there to kind of a sales or trading floor bullpen job.

00:02:56.980 It was actually a British company, Marcus Evans.

00:02:59.240 I was in the branch of the company that does outreach to CEOs to book them to meet our clients, which was as obnoxiously aggressive as you can probably imagine.

00:03:07.960 You had to get the cell phones of these guys and call them and not get thrown off the line.

00:03:11.360 And people were betting on whether or not you'd do it for each call you made.

00:03:14.180 The numbers all go up on a big board on one side of the office.

00:03:16.600 So I did that for two or three years and did pretty well, honestly.

00:03:21.580 And after that, by this point, the degree was mostly completed.

00:03:26.340 I also taught in the city colleges of Chicago, which is interesting.

00:03:30.180 I mean, those are, again, somewhat inner city, although they're community colleges rather than high schools.

00:03:35.740 Malcolm X College is one of them.

00:03:38.420 Harry Truman was the college I taught the most at.

00:03:40.600 So by the time I was done with all this, I ended up just getting the degree and getting out of school.

00:03:44.720 And applied for jobs as an academic, essentially.

00:03:49.900 And I got some of them.

00:03:52.520 You know, I don't know how much being an in-state minority from a reasonably well-known family on my mother's side helped.

00:04:00.660 My mom was kind of separated from a lot of the rest of the group at this point.

00:04:04.620 But I ended up getting some offers and choosing Kentucky State partly because it's a historically black college in Appalachia.

00:04:11.920 So I thought there would be an actual chance there to, you know, help some kids go on to live kind of the rest of their lives.

00:04:18.340 And there actually has been.

00:04:20.260 So that's who I am and how I came to be here.

00:04:23.140 Well, that's great.

00:04:23.760 And one of the things that you have done is to address very directly something.

00:04:28.700 And I'd be curious to hear your opinion, whether it's something that happened more recently or whether it's something that's been going on for a long time.

00:04:34.360 But there seems to be a huge gap between the reality of race relations and policing in America, particularly of ethnic minority groups, and the perception as it exists in the public.

00:04:49.740 Is that a more recent phenomenon?

00:04:51.380 I remember encountering it as a non-American in 2014 with the Michael Brown case, where I read about it in the newspapers and I read the official narrative.

00:05:02.080 And then I actually looked and read every single word of the grand jury process.

00:05:08.440 And those pictures were completely different.

00:05:11.540 And that's when I first became aware of this.

00:05:13.660 Is this, first of all, the disparity between what we're told and what the reality is?

00:05:17.780 Is that a new thing or has that always been the case?

00:05:19.560 The extent to which we're seeing that now is, I'd say, completely new.

00:05:24.700 I mean, so there's actually some interesting data on this on American race relations, where Pew tracks people essentially every year and asks how they feel race relations in the USA are going.

00:05:35.220 And when this process began in kind of the modern version, it began in the 1990s, people basically said race relations were good.

00:05:43.460 As I recall the famous graphic, it was 70% of African-Americans, 66% of whites.

00:05:48.640 Those numbers might be reversed.

00:05:50.540 Said race relations were positive to very positive.

00:05:53.620 This is kind of the Michael Jordan, Larry Bird era.

00:05:56.960 I mean, we're not talking about segregation here.

00:05:59.080 If you're living in, again, Chicago or New York, whatnot.

00:06:01.580 Probably half the intimate relationships in my high school were interracial.

00:06:06.760 So that was that was the situation.

00:06:08.500 People are getting along fairly well and people thought they were getting along fairly well.

00:06:12.900 And since then, we've seen kind of a weird downward trajectory.

00:06:16.180 So if you look at the same data today, only about 33% of African-Americans, 40% of whites think race relations are at all good.

00:06:23.440 And the problem with this is that objectively, they seem to be improving.

00:06:28.800 So, I mean, objectively, if you look at the number of interracial relationships in the country or something like that, or approval of interracial relationships, let's say, that's currently at 94%.

00:06:39.140 So 94% of Americans are fine with people of different backgrounds, marrying, you know, they're fine working for a black boss.

00:06:48.820 They're fine working for a white boss if they're African-American.

00:06:51.820 But there's this perception that something out there is making things worse.

00:06:57.040 I think that that's that's fair to say.

00:06:59.120 So you've got almost no one thinking things are good, while objectively, things are pretty good.

00:07:04.640 And I'd say it's hard to deny that media has played a big role here.

00:07:08.400 So, I mean, when you talk about the Michael Brown case, Michael Brown is a completely justified police shooting.

00:07:14.040 I mean, you mentioned reading essentially the legal transcripts of the case.

00:07:17.260 I'm an academic.

00:07:18.400 I'm actually a legal consultant.

00:07:19.760 I have as well.

00:07:20.600 I mean, what happened is that Michael Brown, now, Michael Brown is about 6'5".

00:07:24.400 Michael Brown is an enormous guy.

00:07:26.780 I recall recruited by community colleges as a linebacker.

00:07:30.620 That might be a different case, Alton Sterling.

00:07:33.740 But essentially, Michael Brown is a guy.

00:07:35.660 He's walking down the middle of a street in Ferguson, Missouri.

00:07:38.380 And this is after committing basically a strong arm robbery.

00:07:41.980 He beat up a well-loved neighborhood shopkeeper and stole basically a box of blunts.

00:07:46.120 I mean, a box of those little sort of Optimo brand cigars.

00:07:49.860 They're not the most serious crime.

00:07:51.340 But he's, as I recall, wanted at this time.

00:07:53.680 And so he's walking down the street.

00:07:54.880 A cop stops him for some reason.

00:07:56.820 They get into an argument.

00:07:58.300 And Brown actually attacks the officer.

00:08:00.800 And they're grappling for the officer's gun.

00:08:02.840 Like, Michael Brown's DNA was found on the slide and trigger guard of Darren Wilson's gun.

00:08:08.500 And Darren Wilson shoots the guy.

00:08:10.320 And you hate to see that happen, but it's one of the most justified police shootings you can possibly imagine.

00:08:15.800 I mean, the Obama Justice Department declared this to be a justified shoot.

00:08:20.160 This, as I recall, this was reviewed two or three times by different levels of legal authority.

00:08:25.880 So that's the real narrative.

00:08:27.940 And that's why Darren Wilson is, he was never convicted of anything.

00:08:31.980 As I recall, he's still in law enforcement, at least on the consulting side.

00:08:35.440 There's not, nothing really happened except, of course, you know, the tragic loss of a human.

00:08:40.320 Well, what really happened was the narrative around the world, which is hands up, don't shoot.

00:08:45.020 The guy had his hand up.

00:08:46.320 The police officer killed him despite all of this, right?

00:08:48.840 So this is your point about the media.

00:08:51.140 This was all bullshit.

00:08:51.980 It was a perfectly legitimate shooting that was all bullshit, as you say.

00:08:55.640 Yes.

00:08:56.080 I mean, bluntly put, I didn't mean to cut you off there.

00:08:58.120 But yeah, it's just, it's all complete BS.

00:08:59.480 Yeah.

00:09:00.140 The narrative that began almost immediately from kind of just casual friends of Brown or people that were observing the two men fight

00:09:08.480 was, yeah, that Michael Brown had been walking away.

00:09:10.500 He'd had his hands up and he was sort of ruthlessly shot, as I recall, shot in the back by this, this killer cop, this white man.

00:09:17.460 And none of that occurred.

00:09:18.620 And I think you got to a very important point.

00:09:20.240 So the question is, why did race relations go from being viewed as 70 percent positive to being viewed as 30 percent positive while they were improving?

00:09:27.100 And the answer to that, I think, is that there's constant media presentation of this absolutely false narrative that we're all killing each other over here.

00:09:36.600 And I will say, especially to a U.K. audience in part that might not know this, I mean, we're now seeing this from the American right as well,

00:09:44.400 where there are videos constantly trending on social media or being written up on sites on the right that have quite a large audience,

00:09:50.920 you know, showing, say, five black men beating up a lone white guy.

00:09:55.220 The one time I looked at this for a serious paper, interracial crime in the classic sense.

00:09:59.880 So violent crime involving, how would you say, a black perp and a white victim or a white perp and a black victim?

00:10:06.160 That's three percent of what we call index crime, which is how serious crime is categorized in the USA.

00:10:10.820 It's extraordinarily rare.

00:10:12.900 Both of these groups are pretty tough and well armed.

00:10:15.200 There's not there's not a massive amount of this.

00:10:17.980 What does occur, by the way, is 80 percent black on white.

00:10:21.620 So if you're going to focus on this niche category of crime, it's absolutely correct that the mainstream left wing narrative is even more wrong.

00:10:29.880 than any of the other narratives out there.

00:10:31.320 I think that's that's fair to say.

00:10:33.460 But, yeah, the entire storyline that this is continually going on and that it is a sufficient problem to disrupt the progress we've made in race relations, that's that's invented.

00:10:43.820 And the question is sort of who invented it and why?

00:10:46.520 I think that's fair to say.

00:10:47.960 And what is the answer to that question?

00:10:49.920 Well, I think the answer to that question is, in large part, activist organizations and the media are somewhat intentionally presenting a false narrative.

00:10:58.460 Now, the media's motivation here is, I think, a little more understandable.

00:11:02.400 I mean, there's a famous old line.

00:11:03.720 If it bleeds, it leads.

00:11:05.540 So, yeah, I mean, it's true about journos and I think every every country.

00:11:10.380 But so people have realized that presenting this this image of constant racial conflict or black victimization leads to cliques.

00:11:18.960 It leads to that sort of liberal, heavily female, mostly white audience that consumes, for example, the Times and the Post feeling guilty, buying papers.

00:11:28.580 I think for the activists, there is a deeper motivation, which is which is instrumental.

00:11:34.180 And it gets into one of the issues in the United States, which is that there are extremely large performance differences between ethnic groups in the country.

00:11:43.180 And this is true, by the way, if you read the great Thomas Sowell or William Julius Wilson on the left or something like that.

00:11:48.260 This is true in every really polyglot society, Malaysia or something like that, where you might see more Malay warriors in the army.

00:11:56.260 You might see more Chinese students getting engineering degrees.

00:11:58.940 Perhaps Indians do this, that kind of thing.

00:12:00.640 But in America, we don't really like to think about that.

00:12:03.920 The idea is it's the land of equal opportunity for everyone.

00:12:06.620 So when you actually see these performance differences, I mean, so on the SAT annual exam, the average score for black students is a 950.

00:12:13.880 The average score for whites is an 1110.

00:12:17.220 When you see something like that, there's this question that automatically arises of what caused that, what could cause that.

00:12:24.480 And in reality, there are a number of different answers.

00:12:26.940 I mean, an awkward one is that there is a more hood, quote unquote, culture in the black community.

00:12:31.480 African-Americans, on average, tend to be more working class, more urban, more distrustful of the surrounding society, which you can almost understand.

00:12:39.000 Right. I mean, so on down the line.

00:12:41.140 Black people are also a lot younger.

00:12:42.720 So, I mean, the average age for a black man in the United States is 27, at least at the mode for a white guy.

00:12:48.020 It's 58.

00:12:49.340 Yeah, that's a huge difference.

00:12:50.720 White Americans are kind of dying off.

00:12:52.120 That's one of the underlying things with the, quote unquote, great replacement that's not discussed.

00:12:57.820 I mean, white people, Americans in general, aren't having kids, but white Americans certainly are not.

00:13:04.100 And upper middle class white Americans really are not.

00:13:06.900 The entire what's called TFR in the country, the total fertility rate is 1.81.

00:13:12.340 You need a 2.1 to survive.

00:13:14.380 I'm sure that any Westerner knows this to some extent about most of these societies.

00:13:18.080 Actually, it's interesting because I think many of us who listen and talk to these things, talk about these things, know the vast majority of people still they're still stuck in the paradigm of 20 years ago where our babies are killing the planet and destroying the earth.

00:13:33.140 That's exactly that.

00:13:34.320 That's a good response point.

00:13:35.440 I think that's that's correct.

00:13:36.720 The normies are still stuck in that paradigm.

00:13:38.580 Yeah, and that's that's completely wrong.

00:13:40.780 We don't have enough people.

00:13:42.340 We're not going to have enough people, especially upper middle class taxpaying citizens, to sustain that mass infrastructure of Social Security, Medicare, NHS in Britain, all of that that we've built up over the past 60 years.

00:13:53.840 People need to be having kids.

00:13:55.720 And there are a ton of ton of reasons why this is happening.

00:13:58.060 I mean, the most obvious is that men aren't proposing marriage until the average age of 33 and most women prior to that point are on birth control.

00:14:06.280 So it's very difficult to have children until you get to the point where you almost biologically can't without being glib about it.

00:14:12.540 So, I mean, that's that itself is an interesting question.

00:14:16.280 But I mean, the we got here talking about just age gaps between blacks and whites.

00:14:20.840 I mean, the age gap in mode is 31 years just at the mean.

00:14:24.040 I believe it's 11.

00:14:24.800 So there are anyway, the point there, I think, is that if you're a solely in which I am, or if that matter, if you're a genetic hereditarian or a bunch of other things, there are plenty of explanations for why groups would be doing differently.

00:14:35.180 But the one that seems to have found acceptance in the United States in the mainstream is that the answer is racism.

00:14:42.860 So the the one cause of any performance difference between any two large groups of people would be racial prejudice.

00:14:50.520 And people like Ibram Kendi, for example, pretty openly say this.

00:14:54.000 I saw some light smiles at the mention of the great man's name.

00:14:57.360 But I mean, I think on page 12 of one of his books, how to be an anti-racist, this is stated very explicitly.

00:15:03.640 Like when you see groups performing differently, there are two options.

00:15:06.560 Either there's something wrong with one of the groups.

00:15:08.640 That's how he chooses to phrase it.

00:15:10.200 Or prejudice.

00:15:11.380 There's something going on in systems.

00:15:14.500 And I think basically getting to the point, I think activists believe that or at least find it useful to believe that.

00:15:20.180 And I think they say it sort of intermittent instrumentally.

00:15:23.040 So when you look at a mainstream sort of New York Times feature piece on racism, very rarely do they prove that there's a lot of racism in the industry or the social class group that's being attacked.

00:15:36.040 And in fact, it would usually be pretty hard to do that because every year we ask people basic questions about racism.

00:15:43.220 Would you be willing to vote for a qualified same party political candidate of a different race?

00:15:48.200 And what we find is that, whatever it is, that year 92, 96 percent of people said it would be.

00:15:54.320 So you actually can't identify a ton of mainstream racial prejudice from blacks or whites in the USA.

00:16:00.400 So the way racism is determined, quote unquote, in these studies is that you'll basically just point to a gap.

00:16:06.820 Infant mortality recently came up.

00:16:08.640 So you'll say that African-American women have four times the infant mortality rate of Caucasian women, which is which is true in some years.

00:16:19.380 But I mean, what's not pointed out is that the rate for Caucasian women is, you know, 99.8 survival of healthy babies over one year.

00:16:29.620 And the rate for black women is 99.2 percent survival of healthy babies or something like that.

00:16:35.320 That's the first point.

00:16:36.120 But going beyond that, there is there really is not much evidence that prejudice is is the cause of that.

00:16:44.040 I mean, you could look at a whole bunch of things, southern culture, obesity, drug use, although whites are certainly catching up on some of these some of these metrics.

00:16:53.820 Good, good, tight race.

00:16:55.340 But anyway, that that's how racism is demonstrated.

00:16:57.800 And there's an instrumental goal here, of course, which is if racism is the cause of all of these massive problems we see.

00:17:03.740 And it really is kind of hard to overstate this.

00:17:05.980 Like when you look at African-Americans here on a bunch of metrics and whites here, there is a natural desire unless you're a bigot to say, well, let's fix that there.

00:17:15.640 There must be a problem.

00:17:17.200 We must be responsible for this.

00:17:18.860 And that's that's that's an extraordinarily appealing proposition, I think, for me, one of the cases that took this whole thing mainstream and by mainstream, I mean, international was a Jussie Smollett case.

00:17:32.460 Ah, in which you I remember listening, hearing about it for the first time, I go, that's kind of odd, you know, because as somebody who grew up in an area where there were in my day, what was called the National Front far right organizations.

00:17:48.200 It's rare that they as cartoonish as Jussie described in his account.

00:17:56.140 So let's talk about that case.

00:17:57.460 And why do you think it went international?

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00:19:08.580 Well, I think a couple of things.

00:19:11.720 First of all, I think that that's a characteristic of hate hoaxes in general, like a silly cartoonish presentation.

00:19:17.700 So, I mean, I think we're all familiar.

00:19:19.480 We're all pretty competent online debaters.

00:19:22.080 And I mean, I think we're familiar with the alt, right?

00:19:23.920 The guys with the frogs and toads and so on.

00:19:26.320 So obviously there is a racist right.

00:19:28.060 If you saw Pepe or Groiper or something like that painted on a wall over the phrase TND or something, you'd probably say, oh, that's some racist jackass who's a decent graffiti artist.

00:19:38.120 Like, you'd understand what it meant.

00:19:39.340 But, I mean, there aren't that many people that are Nazis, if that makes sense.

00:19:42.340 There aren't that many genuine neo-Nazis.

00:19:44.220 And they're generally mocked even by people who are racist.

00:19:46.220 There are almost no Klansmen.

00:19:48.160 So what you discover with a lot of hate hoaxes is this kind of crude, almost reverse minstrel show presentation where you've got the swastikas written on the wall, but it's written backwards.

00:19:59.160 The arms, they're going the wrong way.

00:20:01.300 And I think that that's a pretty good sign that you're encountering a hoax.

00:20:05.800 So Jussie Smollett fits that bill.

00:20:07.340 By the way, I mean, when you say you're from a large urban area, it had minorities, it had races.

00:20:11.640 I'm actually, as I said, I'm from Chicago.

00:20:13.720 So that area, Streeterville, is our young professional district.

00:20:16.860 It's sort of pork belly salesman and that kind of thing.

00:20:19.800 It's probably 10% black, 10% East and South Asian, at least 15% gay, although I might be stereotyping a little bit as a heterosexual man.

00:20:29.660 But I mean, the idea that there'd be two people walking through there in sort of patriotic ski masks with MAGA hats on, I mean, carrying ropes and nooses and bottles of bleach.

00:20:40.760 I mean, there'd be a brawl, the first Irish pub you encountered, a first black hip hop club.

00:20:45.200 I mean, so no, it just struck me as inherently ridiculous.

00:20:47.640 Like, no one could believe that.

00:20:48.520 Also, at this time of year in Chicago, it's usually about negative four.

00:20:52.440 Jussie Smollett actually said this.

00:20:53.780 I mean, if you're going out at two in the morning, there's wind skating off the lake, which is an inland sea.

00:20:58.520 It's one of the great lakes.

00:20:59.520 There's snow blowing horizontally.

00:21:01.880 People are shielding their girlfriends on the inside.

00:21:03.920 I mean, so it just, it clearly wasn't true.

00:21:06.400 And I think a lot of people knew that.

00:21:08.380 I mean, Dave Chappelle, who's from another big American city, goes to Chicago all the time to do comedy in our theaters.

00:21:13.780 I mean, he just said, like, you know, I'm going to knock the black pronunciation off this guy's name.

00:21:17.500 He's going to be Jussie Smollett, the mad Frenchman from now on.

00:21:20.720 No one could lie like this in our community.

00:21:23.060 I think a lot of people had that first impression.

00:21:26.240 Why did this go so viral, though, so international?

00:21:28.720 Yeah.

00:21:28.980 So why was it?

00:21:29.980 Why did it capture the imagination as much as it did?

00:21:32.480 Because you could argue, look, this is an actor.

00:21:34.500 But no one really knew who Jussie Smollett was.

00:21:37.720 I mean.

00:21:38.020 They do now.

00:21:38.800 They do now.

00:21:39.720 Yeah.

00:21:40.560 Well, it's sort of like, it's like Benedict Arnold, right?

00:21:42.820 You just make just one mistake.

00:21:44.340 Yeah.

00:21:44.660 He was a pretty effective cavalry captain before that.

00:21:47.080 It was already called Judas.

00:21:48.500 But to answer your question, I think that this story illustrated to a lot of people.

00:21:55.020 It was, again, an instrumentally useful story.

00:21:57.520 It illustrated to a lot of people that the worst was still going on.

00:22:01.520 You know how the Americans are.

00:22:03.960 You know how the whites and, for that matter, the blacks are over there.

00:22:06.620 You know, the violence.

00:22:08.040 You know, so it was this innocent young black man.

00:22:10.280 He's gay.

00:22:10.880 He was walking down the street.

00:22:11.960 He's knocked over the head by these thugs and goons.

00:22:15.180 You know, he's abused.

00:22:16.220 He fights back bravely.

00:22:17.320 It was a perfect story.

00:22:19.000 And that's why it went viral, because it was a perfect story.

00:22:21.420 It perfectly illustrates National Front.

00:22:23.760 We would say KKK-style hatred.

00:22:25.600 It illustrates that that era is not over.

00:22:28.560 That kind of thing.

00:22:29.860 And, I mean, the only problem was that it was fake.

00:22:33.040 It was totally made up.

00:22:34.340 So that was an issue.

00:22:36.140 I mean, it is a point.

00:22:38.120 It is an issue.

00:22:38.800 Do you think that there's this deep-seated need within us to have these stories, to have

00:22:45.180 it reinforced that we are victims, that, you know, that we are powerless?

00:22:49.820 And here's another example of it.

00:22:51.760 Well, I mean, there's no such need within me, and I don't think within you.

00:22:54.720 But I do think that on the left, we've replaced heroism.

00:22:57.760 On the modern progressive left, we're not talking about union pipe fitters or some such,

00:23:02.560 as you guys know.

00:23:03.100 But, I mean, we've replaced heroism with victimization.

00:23:05.680 So the goal now is not to kill the dragon.

00:23:08.500 It's to be eaten by it or at most saved from it.

00:23:11.680 To be harassed by the dragon.

00:23:12.940 Yeah, to be pinched on the ass once by the dragon.

00:23:15.760 And your career is made.

00:23:16.860 I mean, isn't it?

00:23:17.380 But it really is, it's difficult to overstate the extent to which this is true.

00:23:22.100 I have a buddy of mine who's an African-American doctor.

00:23:25.160 In fact, I have like five buddies who are African-American doctors, but only one is relevant to this

00:23:28.240 story.

00:23:29.000 And this guy was talking to me, and just, it was a bunch of us in sort of a group chat

00:23:32.740 kind of setting.

00:23:33.280 And he said, you notice there aren't any white women online on dating apps?

00:23:36.560 And I was just like, what the hell are you talking about?

00:23:38.500 It's 60, 70% of them.

00:23:40.000 And he said, no, like every woman who's an upper middle class Caucasian woman doesn't

00:23:44.520 just want to say that because there's nothing exciting about being a well-adjusted white

00:23:48.560 girl from Cleveland.

00:23:49.500 So they're all something else.

00:23:50.960 Like they're Jewish, meaner, neurodivergent, bisexual, and a proud LGBT ally, like with the

00:23:57.200 flag.

00:23:57.800 And he showed me like the profiles that were contacting him.

00:24:00.340 And it was, it was literally eerie.

00:24:01.880 And this might be different because he's a black guy.

00:24:04.120 If we're putting that in frame, but it literally, every one of them mentioned their sexual identity,

00:24:08.720 mentioned some kind of alleged physical or mental disability on the order of ADD, mentioned

00:24:15.260 that they were a member of some invisible minority group, like proud to be half Lebanese, you

00:24:19.940 know, this sort of thing.

00:24:21.860 And I mean, it really was, it was very notable.

00:24:24.360 And ever since then, I've, I've seen the same sort of thing across a range of media.

00:24:29.480 So I think we're at giving power to victimization.

00:24:31.860 And I think that the Jussie Smollett story is an archetypal example of, well, this victimization

00:24:36.800 can happen anywhere.

00:24:37.560 It can happen to the most successful of us.

00:24:39.160 Nothing has changed.

00:24:40.220 Again, the only difference is that the story was a lie.

00:24:42.480 And the Michael Brown story was a lie.

00:24:44.380 And to a large extent, the Trayvon Martin story was a lie.

00:24:46.760 Trayvon Martin was 17, not 12.

00:24:48.720 He started the fight.

00:24:49.560 This is essentially two men that got into a brawl.

00:24:51.740 You know, almost every one of these stories was a lie.

00:24:55.240 Even we saw, not to get off track, but we saw the Daniel Penny case, in my opinion, having

00:25:01.260 a legal background, collapse the other day when it was revealed that after the fight between

00:25:06.280 these two men, Jordan Neely was alive, had a strong pulse.

00:25:11.320 It was still moving in his body.

00:25:12.660 The cops refused to give him a very basic CPR technique because he was too filthy.

00:25:16.980 This is something that just came out in the case.

00:25:18.920 None of these, none of these storylines were real.

00:25:21.940 Some were exaggerations.

00:25:23.440 Others were completely made up.

00:25:24.660 And the Jussie Smollett story, I think, is the archetypal example of the second category.

00:25:29.780 Or just something that didn't happen at all.

00:25:33.380 But that's so worrying that the fact that these stories, and some of them are serious.

00:25:39.260 You know, whatever you think about the Michael Brown, that's a serious incident.

00:25:42.420 Somebody lost their life.

00:25:43.420 Of course, of course.

00:25:44.040 But the fact that we happily, well, not we, but people happily make up lies about them is

00:25:52.280 incredibly worrying because it's not just the lie that happens.

00:25:56.220 It's the effect that that lie has on society, on the effect that that lie has on racial relations.

00:26:03.880 It's really toxic.

00:26:05.340 And policing, which is very important, too.

00:26:07.360 Yes.

00:26:07.880 And I'm glad you brought that up, actually.

00:26:09.400 I mean, one of the things that is discussed in real scholarship on this is what's called

00:26:14.320 the Ferguson effect and then the Floyd effect.

00:26:16.580 So, I mean, in the two years after Mr. Floyd's death, there were, I intentionally won't say

00:26:23.100 murder or something.

00:26:24.320 I mean, again, that's a case where obviously not ideal police work, but where there are a

00:26:28.960 bunch of practical questions.

00:26:30.480 I mean, where they're dueling toxicology reports and where it appears that George Floyd took

00:26:34.700 enough fentanyl to kill about 70% of adult males.

00:26:39.400 So, I mean, again, the frame for all of this is not let's neutrally analyze what actually

00:26:46.360 happened.

00:26:47.240 It's sort of in the minds of the activists and the journalists moving this forward.

00:26:52.640 It's sort of how can we make this ambiguous story serve a narrative that benefits us, that

00:26:59.480 benefits our cause?

00:27:00.720 And that's really problematic.

00:27:01.580 But, I mean, following George Floyd's death, I mean, we saw murders rise over 20,000 in

00:27:06.980 the USA for the first time since, I believe, 1993.

00:27:10.800 The next year, we were at 21,000, 22,000 murders.

00:27:13.740 And those eventually plateaued and then dropped off.

00:27:15.820 They couldn't not.

00:27:17.220 But that's one of the worst things that's happened in the recent history of the country.

00:27:21.960 And to some extent, that's simply not discussed.

00:27:25.040 I mean, and this is one reason I think more people did turn to sort of the edge, right?

00:27:29.100 If you look at, say, Steve Saylor or Breitbart, I mean, people that are by no means idiots and

00:27:34.980 that have Excel and Stata programs on their computers, they were looking at this.

00:27:39.400 I mean, there's a discovery made by, I believe, actually, Saylor that traffic deaths skyrocketed

00:27:45.300 at the same time murders did because the cops simply stopped enforcing the law.

00:27:49.020 When myself and a colleague named Bob Maranto actually looked at this empirically using modern

00:27:54.260 methods for a pretty major journal, we just published that article, which police departments

00:27:58.540 make Black Lives Matter was the title.

00:28:02.160 But, I mean, what we found is that there's a correlation between the rate of stops, like

00:28:05.400 how often police just pull a car over, stop the guy, talk to the guy, and the rate of

00:28:10.640 violence that's very unsurprising.

00:28:12.740 I mean, because obviously, if you're out there doing policing, it's going to increase kind

00:28:16.560 of the negative penalty that might go along with crime.

00:28:19.720 Yeah.

00:28:19.940 So a lot of people died.

00:28:21.240 Sorry.

00:28:21.940 Go for it.

00:28:23.760 So what you're saying is, just to get this clear, as a response to people's concern about

00:28:31.280 the way that George Floyd was treated, in an environment and an ecosystem in which there's

00:28:37.880 this whipped up frenzy of concern about police mistreatment of Black people more generally,

00:28:43.280 the consequence of all that liberal outpouring of love and support and whatever, and money,

00:28:51.100 has been that way more people have died, been murdered, been burgled, been injured, etc.

00:28:59.040 And most of those people, or certainly many of those people, would have been Black people.

00:29:03.460 Yes, that's an excellent analysis.

00:29:04.820 I mean, so the way you'd say this in social science terms is simply that as the police

00:29:10.060 stop rate, you know, X goes up, the crime rate, Y, goes down.

00:29:14.240 I mean, it really is pretty simple.

00:29:16.020 And I think that there's something about the extreme left, and perhaps the extreme right

00:29:21.060 as well, which keeps insisting that modern businesswomen want to move to homesteads and

00:29:24.800 live there, and this kind of thing, raise a certain number of purebred pigs.

00:29:30.460 But I mean, like, the extreme left, I think, are the undisputed champs at this.

00:29:34.460 There is a remarkable ability to ignore reality.

00:29:37.580 So if at a typical American or UK dinner party, you were to say something like, obviously,

00:29:42.380 men and women are different, and that's genetic.

00:29:44.400 Every time I've seen this happen, it starts a frenzied argument, and people just absolutely

00:29:48.300 deny it.

00:29:49.180 But I mean, at the same level, you notice that some people have breasts and others don't.

00:29:53.280 I mean, I don't mean to be glib or crude about this, but the men are, on average, 40% bigger.

00:29:57.520 It's absolutely obvious what gender you guys are, so on.

00:30:00.900 At almost the same level of absurdity is the idea that police don't prevent crime.

00:30:05.160 But if you Google policing does not prevent crime, I guarantee you, you'll find hundreds,

00:30:10.140 maybe thousands of articles.

00:30:12.220 So this is something that's been argued quite a lot.

00:30:15.240 What we find when you turn the quants loose on it is that there was a correlation, 0.46 or

00:30:19.600 something like that.

00:30:20.280 Yeah, there's an extremely high correlation between cops doing their job and people,

00:30:23.260 not committing crimes.

00:30:24.740 That doesn't seem entirely shocking to me, I must say, just as someone who's not an expert.

00:30:29.400 So that being the case, what do you make of the idea that was very prevalent?

00:30:34.620 Thankfully, I don't think it's as prevalent now, but some people still cling to it.

00:30:38.920 An idea, by the way, that was peddled at the very top levels of the Democrat Party,

00:30:43.540 which was defund the police.

00:30:45.100 What, as an academic who studies this, what do you make of that?

00:30:47.660 I think it's an absolutely moronic idea.

00:30:49.580 So there's a cliche for a reason, and bar rooms, and country clubs, and working class

00:30:56.240 hoops courts, and so on.

00:30:57.520 You've got to be real educated to believe something that stupid.

00:31:00.360 And the reason for that, I think, is that there, if you're trying to get published in

00:31:04.900 academia, you can't do that by restating Aristotle, or by outlining a simple mathematical model

00:31:12.280 for how cops arrest criminals.

00:31:15.480 I was amazed Bob and I got that published, actually.

00:31:17.520 But at this point, it's probably seen as daring and bold.

00:31:21.240 But I mean, so where the reward is, where the gold is, is finding new, innovative theories

00:31:26.840 about how the world works that are different from anything anyone's ever known before.

00:31:31.480 There was recently an article that ran, I think, Scientific American called Woman the

00:31:34.820 Hunter.

00:31:35.080 And the picture, the front piece was of a woman cradling, like, a small deer, not a

00:31:41.620 baby, on her slightly larger hip with a long bow in one hand.

00:31:45.360 And the idea was, you've discovered this thing that hasn't previously been discovered in human

00:31:49.280 history, that the majority of big game hunters were female.

00:31:52.280 And they mentioned some legitimate female advantages, almost as good as or slightly better than men

00:31:56.940 at ultra-marathon running and so on.

00:31:59.100 But I mean, that is the thing that will generally produce tenure.

00:32:03.100 That's the thing that sounds new and innovative.

00:32:05.660 So I guess the point would be, you see a lot of crazy ideas in the lower elite that you

00:32:11.060 don't see anywhere else.

00:32:11.900 And a parallel might be to fashion.

00:32:13.940 I mean, if you go to a fashion show for Kanye West's brand, which a friend of mine has in

00:32:17.800 Chicago, or you go to Fashion Week in Paris, I mean, you're going to see people literally

00:32:21.880 walking around wearing garbage bags, I mean, wearing hats and crinolines.

00:32:25.640 To be fair, that's just a Republican party now.

00:32:28.140 Everybody's walking around in a garbage bag.

00:32:29.880 But I take your point.

00:32:30.820 But Fashion Week's not during Halloween.

00:32:32.360 I mean, it's just, you see things that no one would ever, you don't see a lot of like

00:32:37.460 navy blue polos with a horse on them.

00:32:39.180 I totally get the point you're making.

00:32:40.640 If you are a historian, if you can discover that actually the Vikings were all trans,

00:32:46.900 you're going to get a lot more attention.

00:32:48.400 That's a real article, by the way.

00:32:49.300 I know it is.

00:32:49.960 That's why I'm, yeah.

00:32:51.100 You know, if you discover, in inverted commas, that you're going to get a lot more attention

00:32:56.760 than actually looking at the data and the facts and presenting them, because a lot of that

00:33:01.500 work's already been done by people 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years ago.

00:33:06.080 No, that's quite correct.

00:33:07.480 I mean, you've been doing some reading in the social sciences, eh?

00:33:10.480 I mean, like, yeah, that article came out recently.

00:33:12.660 No, they weren't shield maids.

00:33:13.920 They were gender atypical women.

00:33:15.140 The interesting thing about this, as someone who's not entirely hostile to the first 2.5

00:33:21.520 waves of feminism, is that that's an insanely sexist thing to say, right?

00:33:27.240 So, I mean, you finally, you found that physical science would predict this, the top 10% of

00:33:31.680 women often fought as warriors in the past.

00:33:33.640 Okay, that's pretty cool.

00:33:34.620 Shout out to the ladies.

00:33:35.540 But the take on that now is, no, they didn't.

00:33:39.320 Those women were actually men.

00:33:40.900 They had some sort of hermaphroditic condition, or they identified as males, or something like

00:33:45.480 that.

00:33:45.700 It's, I think, exactly the opposite of how a 1970s or 80s actual feminist scholar would

00:33:52.180 have treated this.

00:33:53.020 But again, like, all of that is part of being, contributing to the wave of fake innovation.

00:33:58.580 At any rate, I think that the things that humans have known for 3,000 years are most

00:34:01.940 often true.

00:34:03.240 I mean, when you look at these bizarre conversations on Twitter, like, is it abusive to expect your

00:34:07.120 male partner to have a job?

00:34:08.980 We are all on Twitter.

00:34:11.080 This went viral three weeks ago.

00:34:12.220 Two weeks ago, it was, is it abusive to expect your female partner to sometimes want to sleep

00:34:16.500 with you?

00:34:17.320 I mean, no.

00:34:18.680 These sort of, people are attempting to analyze, redefine, deconstruct the most basic elements

00:34:24.040 of human life.

00:34:25.080 And it reaches the point of absurdity, and it sometimes crosses over into things that

00:34:29.120 we're all used to hearing now.

00:34:30.220 I mean, like, I, for an upcoming article, looked up the formal definitions of sexualization,

00:34:36.540 quote unquote, in feminist theoretical literature, and they all pretty much just mean being attracted

00:34:40.980 to people.

00:34:41.920 So, I mean, just putting a witty negative label on something that's obviously a part

00:34:46.260 of human behavior is a good way to make money and get tenure.

00:34:48.780 And that, that has real impact.

00:34:51.280 Defund the police is an idiotic idea, of course, because without police, there will be more crime.

00:34:54.880 You know, I could have just said that, really.

00:34:58.420 Ten minutes of dribble.

00:35:00.160 I mean, I'm an academia too, by God.

00:35:02.760 But, you know, I'm glad we're actually talking about women because one of the, there was another

00:35:08.220 manifestation, you did a very good article about it, talking about now white women and

00:35:15.760 saying, and using examples of them encountering black men and then making a complaint and then

00:35:22.580 people going, they're racist, and it's the same phenomenon in a slightly different form.

00:35:28.440 So let's talk about this.

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00:36:47.840 Sure.

00:36:48.260 Well, this is one where I'm totally on the side of the women, actually.

00:36:51.720 I looked at the 10 most prominent Karen cases, quote unquote.

00:36:55.100 I mean, Barbecue, Becky, and all that kind of thing, if you still remember these names

00:36:58.320 from 18 and 19.

00:37:00.140 And hopefully, to some extent, nobody does.

00:37:02.560 So these people can just move on with their damned lives as software executives and so on.

00:37:06.000 But there were all of these cases for a period of time where people were saying that white

00:37:09.660 women were essentially abusing young black men.

00:37:12.420 There was a case where a woman was alleged to have, for no reason, gone up to a group

00:37:17.120 barbecuing in Oakland, California, and kind of told them to move on and shoved one of them.

00:37:22.080 Just risky, dangerous behavior by these white women.

00:37:25.400 There was another case where a pregnant nurse was alleged to have tried to steal a bike from

00:37:32.700 a group of young black males.

00:37:34.680 I mean, they had apparently paid via City Bike or one of those platforms for a bicycle,

00:37:40.920 and she claimed to have a receipt for the same bike and tried to take it from them.

00:37:45.580 And there were numerous other ones.

00:37:47.220 A pool patrol Paula.

00:37:48.440 Someone thought that a group of noisy kids playing in her swimming pool were not from her

00:37:53.340 housing complex.

00:37:54.340 And I looked through those cases, and I think that person was actually guilty of being mildly

00:37:58.840 rude, the last one.

00:37:59.580 But most of them were complete nonsense.

00:38:02.080 I mean, the Barbecue Becky case involved a group of people who were grilling in a no-fire

00:38:08.660 dog-run area of a public park.

00:38:11.420 And so someone just walked over and said, hey, you're not supposed to be holding a barbecue

00:38:14.720 here.

00:38:15.660 Could you finish the next round of the dishes you're cooking and move on?

00:38:19.600 And I mean, we're all from large cities, and no, get the hell out of here, was almost

00:38:23.500 certainly the reaction.

00:38:24.280 But a stupid argument broke out.

00:38:25.500 That was it, and the person was in the right, actually.

00:38:28.740 Probably the most famous of these cases was Amy Cooper.

00:38:32.880 I mean, so this is the woman that's walking her dog in New York Central Park, and a man

00:38:38.860 comes out of nowhere in what's called the Ramble.

00:38:41.240 So you're in the middle of essentially the woods.

00:38:43.040 You're surrounded by trees and so on.

00:38:44.860 And this guy walks out down a path and tells her to put her dog on a leash.

00:38:50.960 As I recall the argument, she says, well, no, I'm not going to leash my dog.

00:38:54.540 We're in the woods.

00:38:55.960 Whatever.

00:38:56.180 My dog needs to run.

00:38:57.300 The guy, it turns out the guy was a bird watcher.

00:38:59.460 No one knew this.

00:39:00.100 He was upset about ground nesting birds potentially being harmed or something.

00:39:03.900 But when Cooper said, no, I'm not going to do what you want, the man said, well, in that

00:39:08.640 case, I'm going to do something to you that you're not going to like, and started reaching

00:39:11.800 into his bag.

00:39:12.780 And she started screaming, essentially, and saying, you know, I'll call the cops.

00:39:16.980 You're a big black guy.

00:39:18.000 You don't necessarily want me to do that.

00:39:19.760 And as I recall, one or both of them then called the police and he started yelling about how

00:39:25.960 he was being racially profiled and he was acting perfectly normal.

00:39:29.280 And I mean, to some extent, in a lot of these cases, both people seem to be acting like assholes.

00:39:34.260 I mean, it's very, very typical New Yorkers, I would say, as of Chicago, and they can't

00:39:38.440 even get their damn dogs walked around one another.

00:39:40.680 But the simple reality, though, is if you're a man and you're watching birds in the woods

00:39:46.060 and you come out of the woods and start screaming at some lady about how you're going to treat

00:39:50.780 them in a way they won't like, I think it's going to be pretty unsurprising if you get

00:39:55.720 some hostility back in return.

00:39:57.040 So the frame of that in the media wasn't, well, they were both being pricks.

00:40:01.100 It was this white woman attempted to murder a black man in a couple of publications like

00:40:07.620 The Root.

00:40:08.020 And the question is, well, how'd she attempt to murder him?

00:40:09.700 Well, by calling the police.

00:40:11.280 So it was the entire thing, the whole like Michael Brown fake framework built up around

00:40:15.840 that.

00:40:16.680 But there was also this additional idea of white women are using their privilege or whatever

00:40:22.320 the case might be to attack black men.

00:40:23.860 And yeah, most of the cases did not turn out to be one-sided abuses in many or most

00:40:30.840 of them.

00:40:31.140 In fact, the black man, the person that was being argued with was at least as much at

00:40:34.460 fault.

00:40:35.200 So it's just a question of how you create narrative, how you create a storyline.

00:40:39.500 I think you take this argument.

00:40:41.800 What you really do is you pick out the person who's in the oppressor class, quote unquote,

00:40:45.120 and then the person who's in the oppressed class, quote unquote, you say, well, he must

00:40:48.240 be right.

00:40:49.120 So every example of this happening is an example of the oppressor class picking on someone else.

00:40:53.220 That's how the Karen stories, I think, came to be.

00:40:56.300 And there's also the element of social media, because the thing that's so powerful of social

00:41:00.200 media is obviously video.

00:41:02.220 But one of the things that is so worrying about this phenomenon is you can take a video,

00:41:08.340 let's say it's three minutes, and then you can clip a bit out of it completely out of

00:41:12.080 context.

00:41:12.640 It goes viral.

00:41:13.580 And you can make one person look like the hero, the other one look like the villain

00:41:16.860 or vice versa, depending on how you edit it.

00:41:19.680 And you can do that for both people.

00:41:22.280 I mean, so I've seen conservative accounts take essentially that Amy Cooper video and

00:41:27.400 just use the clip like, I'm going to do something to you you're not going to like.

00:41:30.960 You can literally take the same encounter between two individuals, as you just said, and flip

00:41:35.680 it any way you want.

00:41:36.560 I'm not sure that's just a social media thing, though.

00:41:39.840 Like, if you go back to the Rodney King beating, the reason that became such a sensation is

00:41:44.560 that there were 61, I believe, seconds of just this man on the ground.

00:41:48.000 I'm not going to try to simulate the motion sitting here, but this man on the ground being

00:41:51.060 beaten by clubs, kicked.

00:41:52.920 I mean, it looks terrible.

00:41:54.040 The problem with that video was that it was originally, and someone in comments might correct

00:41:57.380 me, but 391 seconds long.

00:41:59.120 So, I mean, the news intentionally used the most visually provocative small chump of that

00:42:07.560 to create this storyline of racism and unprovoked abuse.

00:42:10.600 The cops hit the guy too hard, but that's because they pulled him over after a high-speed

00:42:14.380 chase that went on for minutes.

00:42:16.360 They asked him to get out of the car.

00:42:17.660 There were two other people in the car, by the way, both black, both employed.

00:42:20.360 Neither one was harmed.

00:42:21.840 They just sat on the curb, essentially, and watched this insane fight go on.

00:42:25.920 One of them later wrote an article about it.

00:42:27.500 But King got out of the car.

00:42:29.680 He scuffled with the cops.

00:42:30.920 He refused to do basic things like put on handcuffs.

00:42:33.320 He finally sort of rushes the cops, and they basically get tired of it and beat his ass.

00:42:37.340 And, I mean, I think that's over the line.

00:42:38.740 I think you guys probably would.

00:42:39.980 But the way you make that look like just an unprovoked, brutal, Mississippi-style violation

00:42:45.360 of civil rights is that you only show the beating.

00:42:48.380 You don't show King lunging.

00:42:50.220 I don't even know if this was on video, but you don't show the chase with many other people

00:42:53.120 at risk.

00:42:53.460 You don't show anything except the end game.

00:42:55.380 And that's a trick that a lot of people on social media learned from, some pretty explicitly,

00:42:59.960 and that they use as well.

00:43:02.080 So the last line, but a tip I would give is that if you see something like this, if you

00:43:06.400 see a video of a black man and a white man fighting for five seconds or something like

00:43:10.380 that, I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that at all.

00:43:13.740 I mean, did that initiate with a horrible racial insult from one guy or, quote-unquote,

00:43:17.280 ghetto behavior from the other guy?

00:43:18.980 Were both people in the wrong?

00:43:20.080 Were both people in the right?

00:43:20.980 You don't know.

00:43:21.980 You have no idea what you're saying.

00:43:23.200 You have no idea what the background of that is.

00:43:24.940 You're just, you're watching just two guys shout.

00:43:26.980 Right.

00:43:27.200 So it's important to keep that in mind.

00:43:28.420 And one of the things that this does is it creates a lot of these narratives that, like,

00:43:33.500 I don't know, maybe I'm dumb or maybe I haven't done my research or whatever, but we were told

00:43:38.900 that whatever happened with George Floyd, let's say that he was murdered.

00:43:43.120 Let's say we accept that.

00:43:44.040 It was presented as an example of everything that's wrong with America, systemic racism,

00:43:53.180 whatever.

00:43:54.480 To this day, no one has explained to me what the racism was.

00:44:00.600 What is the evidence of racism in that?

00:44:02.940 Let's say he was murdered by Derek Chauvin deliberately.

00:44:05.720 No one has still explained in any way that is convincing or explanatory what the racism

00:44:13.360 was.

00:44:14.160 There's no convincing evidence of racism in that case.

00:44:17.380 And I think it's interesting to go through all of these and deconstruct them because,

00:44:21.060 I mean, the Amy Cooper case was not real as it was presented.

00:44:24.840 The Sarah Brash case, she happens to be a personal friend of mine, was not real as it

00:44:28.880 was presented.

00:44:29.800 Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman.

00:44:31.060 I mean, these are two males who unfortunately got into a brawl.

00:44:33.640 One of them had a gun, which is very common in the States, whatever you guys might think

00:44:37.640 of that.

00:44:37.940 I mean, it was a shooting.

00:44:38.840 It was tragic.

00:44:39.640 But there's no racism there either.

00:44:41.160 Zimmerman is half white, but half Afro-Latino.

00:44:43.900 There's just no evidence of anything.

00:44:45.640 Michael Brown didn't happen as it was alleged to have happened.

00:44:47.880 Jacob Blake didn't happen as it was alleged to have happened.

00:44:50.200 And I think George Floyd is kind of almost the chessboard king of these stories, because

00:44:56.020 if you bring up all the other cases that I've brought up, someone will say, but I saw

00:44:59.020 George Floyd under the knee.

00:45:00.260 You can't deny there's a problem with policing.

00:45:01.960 The problem with that, do either of you guys do any kind of martial art role in the dojo

00:45:07.680 or anything like that?

00:45:08.340 I do.

00:45:09.020 I do.

00:45:09.440 But I don't.

00:45:10.020 I just do kickboxing.

00:45:11.260 I don't do BJJ.

00:45:12.260 BJJ.

00:45:12.640 Yeah.

00:45:13.040 No.

00:45:13.680 Mine were, my two were boxing and Shotokan karate like years ago.

00:45:16.940 And I was that great at him, you know?

00:45:18.340 But like, if you've just, if you've ever been in a sparring level fight with someone, I mean,

00:45:22.140 if someone puts a knee to the back of your neck or does a sleeper hold, you're a healthy

00:45:26.320 adult male for a minute or two, you're not going to die.

00:45:29.860 So the obvious reality, I think, and this is a personal opinion, but looking at the George

00:45:34.000 Floyd case is that there were a number of things that exacerbated what happened there.

00:45:37.540 Again, like no one views that as ideal policing, but the, it's hard to not believe that taking

00:45:44.160 fentanyl and taking methamphetamine at the levels that he did that we now know about didn't

00:45:48.420 have some effect on, for example, George Floyd's heart.

00:45:50.780 That that didn't really strongly contribute to the, the tragic outcome there.

00:45:55.540 But getting to your point, even if we just say, well, okay, we're not going to debate any

00:45:58.480 of that.

00:45:59.040 It's a murder.

00:45:59.680 It's crooked cop.

00:46:00.560 Yeah.

00:46:00.920 There's, there's not any evidence of racism per se that I've ever seen in the case.

00:46:05.260 Right.

00:46:05.660 I mean, yeah.

00:46:06.160 Floyd and Chauvin knew each other casually.

00:46:07.980 They had jobs as bouncers together, but beyond that, there are the police officers that

00:46:12.160 were working as a team there, I believe were four different races.

00:46:15.280 I know Thao's Cambodian.

00:46:17.720 You had a black guy that might be Kang or Kung.

00:46:20.780 Um, I'm glad you said it and not me.

00:46:23.620 Well, Kang, all right.

00:46:26.600 I mean, it's his name, really.

00:46:29.060 But, um, we, uh, but anyway, so, but in all seriousness, you had, um, an African-American

00:46:34.840 guy, or at least half black.

00:46:36.020 You had a Cambodian guy.

00:46:37.540 You had a white guy who was in an interracial relationship, by the way.

00:46:40.360 Chauvin's wife was either black or Asian, I think East Asian, maybe.

00:46:44.200 But just so that was something that came up.

00:46:46.140 I only learned that a couple of months ago.

00:46:47.800 So the, the presentation of him as some kind of urban Klansman, that again, just fails

00:46:52.320 if you get to the door of his house.

00:46:53.660 And it seems like there was a conscious effort made not to do that.

00:46:55.880 And on top of that, of course, we know that there was a case exactly like it involving

00:47:01.980 a white man called Tony Timper that happened very similar, very, very similar.

00:47:06.740 But of course, that was never made into a big thing.

00:47:08.840 And this is what I'm getting at, Wilfred, is it seems to me like the concoction of these

00:47:13.140 media narratives is incredibly damaging to the way that Americans see each other and

00:47:19.020 that foreigners like us see Americans.

00:47:21.620 And I'm sure you have the stats on this.

00:47:23.500 From what I know, the average American overestimates the death of black suspects by police action

00:47:30.340 so wildly as to essentially live in a different country to the one they actually live in.

00:47:36.020 Yeah, it's by four orders of magnitude.

00:47:39.460 So first of all, let's get the data out there for anyone that hasn't read the recent wave

00:47:42.980 of papers.

00:47:43.540 I mean, the average number of unarmed black men killed by the police in a typical year is

00:47:47.140 about 12. I mean, you can go to the Washington Post database, the counted, aka killed by

00:47:52.440 police, and you can you can find these figures.

00:47:54.460 They're not seriously contested.

00:47:56.300 You know, I and Heather McDonald and others from the right have looked at them, did the

00:47:59.580 post, were they off by three or four?

00:48:01.500 I mean, they're pretty much correct.

00:48:04.060 The total number of unarmed males of all races killed by the police in a typical year is

00:48:08.320 100, maybe less than that.

00:48:10.440 Usually this include Indian reservations, all the poor whites, Latinos, Italian.

00:48:15.500 I mean, that would be everyone in the country.

00:48:18.500 So what's the what do people think that the total is, though?

00:48:21.180 Well, that's very different.

00:48:22.840 I mean, the there's a poll by the Skeptic Research Center, which I think is what you're

00:48:26.900 directly referring to, that looked at how left left leaning, at least Americans, liberal

00:48:33.360 and leftist, what they think about the issue of police violence.

00:48:37.280 And what they found was that if I'm getting this correct, 35 percent of people to the

00:48:41.620 left of center in the USA think that the average number of unarmed black men, just unarmed

00:48:46.500 black men killed by police annually is, quote unquote, about a thousand.

00:48:51.200 Another 14 to 15 percent think it's about 10,000 and eight percent think it's more than

00:48:55.980 that.

00:48:57.340 Now, the real figure is 12, 12.

00:48:59.140 Yes.

00:48:59.340 Not 12,000 or anything like that.

00:49:01.220 Right.

00:49:02.040 Just 12.

00:49:02.440 I mean, that is a bit surprising.

00:49:06.440 I mean, but the reason this is dangerous, sorry, Francis, is that means in these people

00:49:11.440 vote.

00:49:12.020 Yes.

00:49:12.620 Right.

00:49:12.980 These people get a say and stuff.

00:49:15.640 They express their opinions about this stuff.

00:49:17.800 But they're so wildly off base because I would argue it's not their fault.

00:49:21.960 They've been misled by the media and activists that therefore I almost understand why they would

00:49:29.560 chant something as moronic as defund the police, because if you think the police are killing

00:49:33.080 thousands of black people who are unarmed every year, you'll be like, God, we need to

00:49:37.260 do something.

00:49:37.980 Nazi monsters.

00:49:38.960 Yeah.

00:49:39.300 It's no that I think it's to put this in context.

00:49:41.460 There are only about 20,000 murders total in the United States in a bad year.

00:49:45.420 So, I mean, when you say and African-Americans were overrepresented, but we make up maybe maybe

00:49:50.220 half of that.

00:49:51.420 So, I mean, when you say there are 10,000 police murders every year, that's larger, at least

00:49:56.820 in my racial group category than the number of murders.

00:49:59.820 So, I mean, that's that's an incredible misunderstanding of reality.

00:50:05.080 Yeah, I suppose that I would want the police defunded if I genuinely believed that there

00:50:08.800 were 10,000 killings of just totally unarmed black man going to church or something like

00:50:14.360 that every year.

00:50:14.860 I mean, that would be terrible.

00:50:16.820 But that is that is not the case.

00:50:18.560 And it's also they say defund the police.

00:50:20.500 Well, I'm afraid if you want a better police force, you need to fund them better.

00:50:24.540 You need to have better training.

00:50:25.940 You need to have higher standards.

00:50:27.680 You want the very best people to become police officers.

00:50:30.460 And the only way you're really going to be able to guarantee that or certainly improve

00:50:34.360 the level of recruits is to pay people more, to have better conditions, to have better

00:50:39.020 pay, better pension.

00:50:40.540 And then when they come in, put a lot of money into training these people so that they can

00:50:45.740 actually, when they're in these type of high pressure situations, operate in a more effective

00:50:50.720 manner.

00:50:51.140 And by the way, when they make the right call, even though it's difficult, you have to back

00:50:55.480 them up.

00:50:56.640 Yes, I think that second part is very important.

00:50:58.340 But yeah, both of those points are simply correct.

00:51:01.040 I mean, when again, Bob Maranto and I looked at what actually predicts effective policing

00:51:06.940 in the United States, the best department in the USA was New York.

00:51:11.580 Chicago was in the top five.

00:51:13.700 And I mean, both those cities take a lot of ridicule for having crime.

00:51:17.000 But there's a lot of crime there because there are tens of millions of people.

00:51:20.020 I mean, the New York now, this is the Metro, but New York is about 20 million people,

00:51:23.220 11 just in the city.

00:51:24.560 Chicago, if you're counting Metro, is 11.

00:51:26.700 I mean, so if you have, say, split the difference between the two cities, 600 murders a year,

00:51:30.560 that's actually a lower murder rate than you're going to be finding in many rural, black or

00:51:36.160 working class Caucasian communities.

00:51:37.940 I mean, I live in Appalachia.

00:51:39.160 And many of the murder rates in the area are significantly above that.

00:51:42.900 You just don't think that when you look at a city like Frankfurt, Kentucky, which has

00:51:46.720 perhaps 60,000 people and six murders.

00:51:49.040 I mean, so there's not the same level of analysis, but I mean, you know, if you move that up to

00:51:54.940 600,000, there'd be 60, you know, 6,600,000, and that's half of Metro Chicago.

00:52:01.000 But at any rate, the worst police departments tended to be underfunded, small kind of regional

00:52:09.020 cities, Memphis, Little Rock, I think Charleston, West Virginia made the list, where there was

00:52:15.260 some corruption, but there also just wasn't really a pull to get good officers in.

00:52:19.660 You knew the department needed men.

00:52:21.200 You knew they weren't going to get much money.

00:52:22.600 It was actually Memphis, which started trying specifically to hire African-American males

00:52:27.620 from the city of Memphis, where you had five cops basically just beat someone to death.

00:52:32.840 I mean, that's a case that vanished from the headlines pretty quickly.

00:52:35.340 It was essentially a black-on-black violence, I guess.

00:52:38.020 But if you read through the backstory there, there were allegations of adulterous relationships

00:52:42.300 and that kind of thing. So those tended to be the worst or the lowest performing departments.

00:52:47.640 The best departments, yeah, well-funded, professional, you were looking for more than a high school

00:52:51.920 degree, that kind of thing. And a last comment on this, sending in cops or sending in social

00:52:57.900 workers and so on instead of police is something that's recently become sort of trendy.

00:53:03.220 Yeah, it's an insane idea that's going to get people killed and raped. But there is a version

00:53:07.580 of that that works, which is where you send an actual mental health professional along with

00:53:12.100 the cops. But that costs more money, not less. You have to have actual therapists,

00:53:17.460 actual hostage negotiators, actual psychiatrists on the payroll of the police department at their

00:53:22.580 usual retainer. So the issue there wouldn't be defunding the police. It would be funding the

00:53:27.740 police at a higher level.

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00:54:45.740 I'm not sure about, so correct me if I'm wrong, but in the UK I was talking to a police officer

00:54:50.460 and he was actually saying to me, look, a lot of what we do now isn't even crime. It's,

00:54:57.240 they've closed a lot of the mental health hospitals. So a lot of these people are just

00:55:01.020 walking around. They're unable to function. They're a danger mostly to themselves. They

00:55:05.480 behave in an antisocial manner. And so when one of these enters a public place or is behaving

00:55:10.460 in an erratic fashion, what's the first thing people do understandably is they call the police.

00:55:15.440 That is not a police matter. That is a matter for mental health services, but the police are

00:55:22.040 involved in it. So what you're seeing as well is just the police being stretched and having to do

00:55:28.200 jobs that they're not meant to do. They're not meant to deal with somebody who's having a profound

00:55:32.920 schizophrenic episode.

00:55:34.720 No, I think that's very well put. Yeah, the United States, we did the same thing. It's joked about

00:55:39.260 sometimes is the only thing Reagan and the Tip O'Neill Democrats agreed on. The libertarians as well,

00:55:44.060 actually, because they don't think there should be government services of any kind. So you got

00:55:48.020 virtually 100% consensus across our political spectrum, but toward this sort of negative

00:55:53.100 outcome. But yeah, in the eighties, the argument from leftists, I think many of them had watched

00:55:57.520 one flew over the cuckoo's nest, maybe one too many times. Conservatives just don't want to pay for

00:56:03.000 shit. Libertarians, there shouldn't be shit. So, I mean, just total political consensus on closing

00:56:09.600 the asylums, which we used to have quite a few of, I don't know whether your rate was ahead of

00:56:12.940 ours, but there used to be hospitals for the criminally insane. Many of which had not nurse

00:56:18.160 ratchets, but genuinely caring doctors working with these people. And when those 94% of those

00:56:22.840 properties closed in the late 1980s in the USA, and that's when you started seeing people living

00:56:27.760 under bridges and talking to themselves and the air and people who aren't there. And it's a bit

00:56:32.980 glib to put it that way, but this is a phenomenon. Again, like in downtown Chicago, we have what's

00:56:37.620 called the University Center, where a former girlfriend of mine, Kristen, used to live and

00:56:42.560 attend school. And you would go there and you'd be sitting outside smoking a cigarette or whatnot.

00:56:48.080 And you would notice that many of the people in the area were visibly insane. People would be

00:56:52.440 cutting themselves with knives. People would be literally howling at the moon. People would be

00:56:55.840 wandering around the block time after time. And I think any urbanite has wondered, well, why isn't

00:57:00.420 there a place? Why isn't there a center where you can send these people? The answer is because we

00:57:03.580 closed them all. We made it virtually illegal to open new ones. And I mean, yeah, non-voluntary

00:57:08.600 incarceration is going to be the solution for a lot of the homeless problem. And just one quick

00:57:13.580 story from social media. I was scrolling through Twitter and the like the other day, and an actual

00:57:19.080 violence interrupter, I mean, female mental health trained, somebody who does pretty good work, was

00:57:23.880 describing one of these people. And she said, well, this person is a homeless woman who's schizophrenic and

00:57:29.140 who has like short-term memory loss. She'll do things and forget them. So about once a week,

00:57:33.500 she's kidnapped and sexually abused by a group of 10 men. These are college guy types, from what I

00:57:39.560 can tell. There's no one's ever been able to find them. I mean, this person would be the only

00:57:42.260 testifying witness. Everyone else is a hobo or drug dealer in the neighborhood. But they'll take

00:57:45.860 her to an apartment, have brutal sex with her, possibly film it, and then they'll just dump her

00:57:49.280 back off on the street. They'll give her a shower. And I would suspect that that sort of thing,

00:57:54.120 what used to be mockingly called troll bashing in New York, takes place a lot. And there's really,

00:57:58.280 there's no way to enforce that, to penalize that. I don't think someone who's living illegally

00:58:04.460 outdoors in most cases is going to go to court as a witness or as an accuser. So yeah, the idea that

00:58:13.240 that is somehow kinder than having anything from a single room occupancy to just a mental hospital

00:58:20.680 that you're going to be forcibly thrown into and treated at, that's not correct. It's hard to imagine

00:58:25.200 anything crueler. No. And focusing on the mental health aspect of it, there's also the element of

00:58:31.160 the police where people go, how can the police behave in this fashion? I'm going, well, if you

00:58:36.380 have served for, let's say, 20 years as a police officer in an inner city, American city or UK city,

00:58:42.980 you've seen some pretty wild shit, to put it mildly. You probably have PTSD or some form of it. It's gone

00:58:49.700 untreated and you were going to behave less appropriately than other people would.

00:58:56.660 Yeah. I mean, I think that virtually everyone I've known who's been in situations of extreme

00:59:02.860 uncontrolled violence, combat soldiers, cops who worked in the projects where everyone appeared

00:59:08.660 to hate them, have at some point come to the conclusion it might be better if these people

00:59:11.960 didn't exist. And that's a pretty rational conclusion for humans to come to. Obviously,

00:59:17.720 for moral reasons, we can't allow it as the basis of social policy. But I mean, I would assume many

00:59:22.680 Israeli soldiers feel this way right now. We've seen considerable evidence their opponents do.

00:59:28.100 But that sort of, again, that sort of attitude, bad in moral terms. But yes, like, I think police

00:59:36.300 are surprisingly restrained given human nature in general. I mean, this is a job where virtually

00:59:42.940 every interaction you have with someone is going to be their worst moment probably of the month.

00:59:48.780 So you're going to be pulling over a harried African-American father who thinks he might shoot

00:59:53.800 him who's 15 minutes late to work. You're going to be breaking up a party full of rowdy college kids

00:59:58.200 of whatever race. You're going to be talking to rape victims. You're going to be chasing serious

01:00:02.680 criminals that you know are responsible for most of the danger in what's probably your youth

01:00:06.760 neighborhood. And you know that if you just shoot this guy, at least until pretty recently,

01:00:10.500 that violence would stop. If you arrest him, he's just going to go to court, bond out in two days

01:00:15.660 and do the same thing again. So given that, the rate of unprovoked police violence is actually

01:00:19.660 pretty low. I mean, it's contained at levels that I think should be more than socially acceptable.

01:00:25.960 Particularly when you factor in that they don't know if someone's got a gun or not.

01:00:30.080 Yeah, that's the thing that's unique about American urban policing. Like, everyone I know who's been a cop

01:00:35.060 in Chicago, East Aurora, the places I've lived, has said, well, the worst thing is doing stuff like

01:00:39.520 traffic stops. You know, why are people so hostile when they pull over a car with tinted windows with

01:00:44.240 six males inside? Well, because that's when cops get shot. Like, if anyone just cranks the window

01:00:49.560 down, pulls the pistol out, fires a couple shots, like, that's it. You don't have time to get to

01:00:54.540 your gun. It happens about 40, 50 times a year. There are far more cops killed by black men, and for

01:01:00.380 that matter, by white men. White men are slightly ahead, if that's a term. But in any particular year,

01:01:05.000 than there are unarmed, defenseless men killed by police, obviously. That's something that's never

01:01:09.760 said but needs to be pointed out occasionally. So yeah, the worry when you do the traffic stop,

01:01:13.520 you've got the tinted windows for Hispanic males, perhaps here legally. I mean, the question is,

01:01:20.220 am I going to, you know, make it out of this? And you can't allow too much paranoia from public

01:01:25.060 employees. In fact, 100,000 times out of 100,001, you will make it out. But still, knowing that 50

01:01:30.740 brothers, you probably consider them, have been killed this past year, often in that way, that's

01:01:34.680 going to influence your thinking. Yeah. Well, I'm glad we're having this conversation, because

01:01:38.560 I feel like we're recording this at the time of the election. By the time this is out, it's already

01:01:44.060 happened. But it just feels like this was the election when the media really went to die.

01:01:49.780 And I think that's a good thing for, in some ways. In some ways, it's a bad thing. But the reason

01:01:54.120 it's good, I think, is I just see the way these narratives have been created and the terrible

01:01:59.300 impact they have. And it really, what struck this home for me was a man called Ben Carson,

01:02:06.820 who I'm sure you know. Of course, yeah.

01:02:09.160 And the only thing I knew about him was that he was this right-wing guy who people made fun

01:02:14.440 of because he was with Trump and all of this other stuff. And then my wife, who's completely

01:02:18.920 apolitical, we have movie night every week. And she was like, she usually picks the movie

01:02:24.480 and we watch it. So she picked a movie and she was like, oh, it's called Gifted Hands.

01:02:28.620 I was like, what is it about? And she was like, oh, it's about a surgeon.

01:02:32.920 You know, okay, cool. That sounds great. And then we start watching it.

01:02:36.100 Good reaction.

01:02:36.740 And I realized that it's a movie about the life story of Dr. Ben Carson, in which it

01:02:41.880 turns out this guy was an incredible man.

01:02:44.140 Yes.

01:02:45.360 Pioneering surgeon, like everything you'd want an upstanding citizen to be. It's a movie.

01:02:51.620 So, you know, um, it was just incredible. And I've had that experience with other people

01:02:57.740 so many times. I remember, um, I watched, uh, die hard.

01:03:02.620 Okay.

01:03:03.280 Uh, and, uh, you, you go back and you watch it and there's a, there's a scene in which a

01:03:08.740 black woman, uh, is told to do something that's like impossible.

01:03:13.100 Okay.

01:03:13.500 And she goes, if you think I'm going to do that, you think I'm going to marry Donald

01:03:16.460 Trump? Because Donald Trump, before he ran for president, was an aspirational figure.

01:03:22.520 Every woman wanted to marry him. Every guy wanted to be him. That's how it was.

01:03:26.280 And then on a dime, suddenly he's the most evil man in history and the same with Carson.

01:03:32.440 And, and so it just allowed me to see the power of these media narratives and how much

01:03:38.540 they shape our perception, even in situations where the fact I just, forget about Donald

01:03:44.120 Trump, forget about Ben Carson, just on police shootings alone, how misrepresentative it is

01:03:49.740 that we hear one thing and then there's a completely thing on the ground.

01:03:53.800 Yeah. I think that, so first of all, as a hip hop kid, I think that's a great framing

01:03:57.900 with those two individuals. I mean, so Donald Trump, there's a song by Mac Miller that was

01:04:02.360 playing when I was at the end of my time in the sort of club nightlife businesses, like

01:04:06.360 2012. That's another thing I did, by the way, when I talk about it, we'll talk about

01:04:09.540 important stuff. But, um, there's a song by Mac Miller called Donald Trump and Donald

01:04:14.900 Trump is presented as sort of the archetypal figure. If you like partying and making money

01:04:19.320 and living in cities, it's Mac Miller in a penthouse and probably Philadelphia, like

01:04:23.700 doing this with girls dancing around him and like gold raining from the air. And that

01:04:27.460 was the Donald Trump archetype. I mean, the rapper Nelly has a song where the chorus is

01:04:32.180 Donald Trump, Bill Gates, let me in now. And it was just absolutely no one had a problem

01:04:36.680 with the guy.

01:04:37.340 People thought he really wanted to go to Epstein's Island, huh?

01:04:39.800 I don't have any negative comments about Nelly, but just look at the, look at the, look

01:04:44.040 at the background of a ditty party. You'll see a lot of people of all ethnic backgrounds.

01:04:47.380 Right.

01:04:47.820 One of the things that's actually kind of interesting is that when I was a kid and not really

01:04:51.580 a kid, but like in Chicago, there was less than there'd be in New York maybe, but there

01:04:55.960 were parties where people had like bowls of drugs on the counter and so on. And I always

01:04:59.540 found after maybe 20, I found decadence boring and annoying. But I mean, I think that a common

01:05:05.940 belief among a lot of people, both from the hood and in this kind of scene, like the young

01:05:09.620 adult post rave scene, a common belief was that there were wealthy decadent people who had

01:05:15.660 all sorts of unbelievable Roman Imperial vices who were running the country in the world.

01:05:19.920 And as I got older, I was like, yeah, it's probably not true. You see the Christian conservatives

01:05:24.300 versus the feminists. And it's like, I don't know. That was probably wrong. Then you see

01:05:27.940 the Epstein and Diddy guest lists and you realize like a lot of people were just lying

01:05:32.020 like that, that kind of was the case. I mean, I would encourage everyone watching this to

01:05:37.140 Google like P Diddy guest list. I mean, you'll see pictures like Jennifer Lopez, Jay-Z and

01:05:41.960 the deputy mayor of New York, obviously stoned out of their minds, just wandering around.

01:05:45.520 But at any rate, the point though, I think is that Donald Trump, who also knew both Epstein

01:05:51.420 and Diddy, as did Bill Clinton, as did Barack Obama. But at any rate, Donald Trump was, yes,

01:05:59.160 he was an aspirational figure in hip hop and rock musical culture for decades. The Ben

01:06:03.980 Carson thing is even more striking. Like I did a podcast with Ben Carson a couple of weeks

01:06:08.440 ago and I actually knew who Ben Carson was as a black business type. I mean, I've watched

01:06:13.580 gifted hands. And yeah, he was one of the country's best doctors. I mean, he's the lead

01:06:17.440 surgeon in a major hospital. He wants separated, conjoined twins. He's one of the more impressive

01:06:21.560 men out there. So yeah, again, Douglas Murray has a good description of this where he says

01:06:27.180 something like the upper middle class moral norm is getting more annoying and unknowable

01:06:33.620 because every 12 seconds, something that was never true before is not only true, but can't

01:06:38.700 be denied. It's a great line. And I think the madness of crowds, but that applies to a lot

01:06:44.100 of this stuff where, I mean, the example that he uses is feminism and sexuality. And he gives

01:06:49.060 all these examples where through about 2019, maybe through me too, being feminist was being

01:06:53.780 as sexual as possible. So, I mean, like he lists a series of Nicki Minaj song titles, like

01:06:59.360 my butt and wet kitty and so on. The, actually one of the quotes that opens the book is from

01:07:04.080 Nicki Minaj and it's just a page. It's just the lyrics, like look at my butt and so on.

01:07:08.520 But then almost immediately that changed on a dime and the women's magazines began running

01:07:12.980 articles saying that approaching women anywhere outside of a dating app was a form of abuse

01:07:17.200 and all this sort of thing. And not only is that wrong, not only do no working class people

01:07:21.900 or normal aggressive males or whatever take that seriously, but it's also not something that

01:07:26.560 was ever even disputed by anyone, including feminists. No one had said it before. Feminism is

01:07:32.640 about sexuality. To some extent, it was pro-sex work. People liked dating feminists. Then that

01:07:37.120 rapidly reversed at Ouroboros and everyone was supposed to know exactly what the new rule was

01:07:43.040 immediately. And that's the same thing with all this stuff. Like, of course, Ben Carson didn't

01:07:46.260 become an idiot. Of course, Donald Trump didn't suddenly become a racist. Donald Trump's not

01:07:50.760 racist, although he talks a bit crudely. But I mean, everyone's heard someone sound like Donald

01:07:55.040 Trump on a golf course. Like there's no, nothing has changed except the mandatory perception to quote,

01:08:01.660 I think, brave new world. So that the mandatory perception of Donald Trump right now is that he's

01:08:05.760 a Nazi rapist. And I mean, not really, but a lot of people are going to say that and a lot of people

01:08:13.120 are going to be reluctant to publicly oppose that today. Yeah. Well, I just it's been really eye

01:08:17.980 opening for me with the media. Really, really eye opening, because especially coming over here,

01:08:24.120 you know, we live in the UK, we see stuff, we kind of go, CNN said it and MSNBC said it and other

01:08:29.980 people are saying it must be true. And even people on the right are like, well, you know, obviously,

01:08:33.660 this is a blah, blah, blah, you know, and you kind of and then you actually go and travel around

01:08:38.600 the country and you meet people. And you you it just fundamentally breaks your perception of the

01:08:45.380 media, which is why I think the trust is so low now, because they as we say in the UK, they've been

01:08:49.300 taking the piss for a very long time. No, I think that's correct. So one of the things that we've

01:08:54.000 talked about in this conversation repeatedly is that it's not what we're talking about with the

01:08:57.800 modern media, certainly on the right, as well as that becomes more more popular, more public,

01:09:02.900 but by far more often on the left. It's not that there's a legitimate misunderstanding of reality,

01:09:08.300 right? It's that a lot of stories are lies, like hands up, don't shoot was a lie. Like when you see

01:09:13.960 the image of Michael Brown, I'm an NFL fan. So you saw the players come out doing this before a major

01:09:18.280 game. Michael Brown didn't have his hands up. He was shot in the front while he was attacking a cop.

01:09:24.260 And most of the lies are at that level. And if you ask people these basic questions,

01:09:29.420 and it's interesting that polling data begins to reflect the lie pretty quickly. So I mean,

01:09:36.920 in terms of Douglas Murray's point, I'm pretty sure that if you ask people like do is do you

01:09:41.360 associate feminism in America with being more or less sexual than the norm, that would already

01:09:46.160 have changed. It would be less and people would rate that as a good thing, although that's only been

01:09:50.960 true for four or five years. But I mean, the same thing is true with a lot of the points that we're

01:09:57.280 discussing, like the lie is told, the lie is believed. And it's interesting to hear that the

01:10:01.980 lie is believed overseas. And yeah, I would always encourage people to sort of go to the data.

01:10:06.640 If you're interested in something like police violence, the one that really surprised me was

01:10:10.500 interracial crime, which both blacks and whites go on about, where I actually unpacked the BJS reports

01:10:15.700 for a decade. And I mean, I described to you the violent, classic interracial crimes, three percent

01:10:21.000 of crime. So it's just very often people are just, I don't even know if lying is the term.

01:10:26.180 Do you guys know the difference between lying and bullshitting?

01:10:29.720 I think bullshitting is where you make up a grandiose term.

01:10:33.360 I think that was a rhetorical question.

01:10:34.740 Yeah, all right.

01:10:35.120 No, but if you know it, I'd love to. No, but that wasn't like a pompous teacher moment. I think

01:10:39.960 there is a difference here that actually matters. Like the liar knows what the truth is,

01:10:43.800 is what that Princeton guy, Webb or whoever said in his book, bullshit. The bullshitter's goal is

01:10:49.500 to tell a story that presents him in the most positive light, like good, bad. It's to present

01:10:55.500 a narrative. The liar actually knows what reality is and is contradicting it. Like, no, I did not

01:11:02.360 cheat on you, honey. I think we see both lying and bullshitting in the media, but I think probably

01:11:07.960 more bullshitting. If I had to think about this, I'm sure that people could easily disagree with

01:11:12.880 that. But the goal is promoting the narrative. The USA is racist or something like that.

01:11:16.840 So you could easily throw together a real stat about black performance that we need to fix

01:11:21.720 with a fake made up explanation with a real quote from an academic and you would just pitch it as

01:11:28.020 the truth. And I think that after years, as people recognize that that is happening, trust is

01:11:34.720 declining. And by the way, I will say social media, that one of the few good things about computer

01:11:40.100 world, about social media, and so on, is that people can see that in real life.

01:11:44.060 Wilfred, it's been great having you on. Before we head to our substack and ask you our audience

01:11:48.000 questions, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

01:11:53.000 Before Wilfred answers a final question, at the end of this interview, click the link in the

01:11:59.280 description underneath. It will take you to our substack where you'll be able to see this.

01:12:04.120 How would you summarize the state of progress and positive momentum in US race relations prior to

01:12:09.420 BLM? And in your view, what legitimate issues persisted and remained to be fixed? What was it

01:12:15.260 like to film your scene and am I racist? You clearly know who Matt Walsh is. Were you supposed

01:12:19.940 to pretend you didn't? Does the emotional impact of generational past grievances arising from racism

01:12:25.540 and slavery, which was a universal thing, affect North American and Caribbean blacks more than other

01:12:31.740 ethnicities who could claim the same but don't? If so, why?

01:12:37.500 How to fix major problems that we have, I think, and I'll give climate change as an example.

01:12:42.980 We in the USA, and I think to a lesser extent in the UK, right now seem to be very prone to panics

01:12:48.060 and hysterias. I mean, I think the reaction to COVID-19, for example, is absolutely insane.

01:12:54.200 You can't shut down all of a healthy, functioning society because the death rate among 71-year-olds

01:13:00.880 might increase by 10%.

01:13:02.120 I think you found we did.

01:13:03.580 No, you're right. We can. But I mean, like, as a cold, leaderly decision, only an absolute

01:13:11.260 lunatic would look at those options and do that. It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen major

01:13:15.640 societies do. But that, I think, is a sign of an ongoing catastrophism in the modern West.

01:13:21.900 So, like, climate change. People are saying they will not have children because of climate

01:13:25.060 change, this sort of thing. The reality is that if you ever talk to an educated Chinese,

01:13:31.260 sounds a bit rude, but an educated person from China or an educated forward-cast Indian

01:13:35.260 or something like that, what they'll say is, like, look, this actually is a problem. We

01:13:39.040 don't deny it. I don't deny it. But the pace of innovation that's going to solve it is speeding

01:13:43.180 up. I'd give it, like, five years until we fix this. That's the general view. And the Chinese

01:13:46.980 and Indian universities I've been in contact with, I don't know about their general perception.

01:13:50.580 But, for example, there was a new kind of paint that was just invented at Purdue, where

01:13:54.620 if you slather it on roofs, apparently, like, the gray refractive paint bounces sunlight back

01:14:00.400 up. I'm sure that was an absolutely asinine explanation per their engineering department.

01:14:05.440 But I think something like that is going to be how we get through the, quote-unquote,

01:14:09.100 climate change crisis. Just, excuse the language, fucking planting trees would solve about half

01:14:13.200 of it. If every person plants five trees, we'll handle a great deal of the climate worries

01:14:17.840 that we have. So I think that not just you guys, you guys actually do a fairly good job,

01:14:22.200 but media in general, especially our alternative media, should start talking to people who want

01:14:27.160 to, who have reasonable ideas about how to solve the problems that we have, to cut off

01:14:31.860 the sort of chicken-running-without-hid hysteria we see so often. Interview the Purdue guy.

01:14:36.800 Talk to him about paint. You guys will make it funny. I don't know what it is. It's sort

01:14:41.620 of like dancing with a stare. You won't look that bad.

01:14:43.880 Sounds exciting, man. Wilfred, thanks for coming on.

01:14:46.220 Talk about paint. That's my final.

01:14:47.060 Talk about paint. Fantastic. Head on over to Substack where we ask Wilfred your questions.

01:14:53.200 The reparations debate came up at the recent Commonwealth Summit. Is it just a lazy money

01:14:59.260 grab or is there something else behind it?

TRIGGERnometry - January 12, 2025

They’re Lying About Hate Crimes - Wilfred Reilly

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