TRIGGERnometry - We Are in a Moral Panic： Coleman Hughes

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is a show

00:00:11.060 for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our brilliant guest today

00:00:16.640 is a contributing editor at city journal and the host of the podcast conversations with colman

00:00:21.680 colman hughes we've been looking forward to this for a long time welcome to trigonometry

00:00:26.220 Glad to be here.

00:00:27.560 It's so good to have you on, man.

00:00:28.980 For anyone who doesn't know who you are, just give us a little brief overview of who you

00:00:33.560 are, how are you, where you are, what is the journey that brings you here talking to us?

00:00:38.940 Well, that's a big question, but yeah, I grew up in New Jersey.

00:00:43.820 Most of, you know, I was always good in school, but mostly into music as a kid.

00:00:50.660 I briefly went to Juilliard out of high school with the intent of becoming a professional jazz musician.

00:00:58.540 But then things changed and priorities changed, and I ended up at Columbia doing a degree in philosophy, which I finished about a month ago.

00:01:07.540 and during my time at columbia started writing for various online outlets on issues of race and

00:01:16.340 racial inequality uh politics um and other odd issues here and there usually in the american

00:01:23.600 context all right well it's brilliant to have you here your work and your your writing has been

00:01:28.720 quite sensational and exceptional and i've been following it for some time we all have i think

00:01:33.000 but let me let me take us back to 2008 because i remember that moment very well i remember where

00:01:40.840 exactly where i was you know it was a barack obama gets elected this brilliant charismatic leader

00:01:47.100 who seems to you know assemble a very large coalition you know most of the united states

00:01:52.120 most of the world is celebrating the fact that you have the first black president and what a

00:01:57.780 president too he's articulate he's intelligent he's capable he's inspiring don't go calling him

00:02:03.720 articulate that's a microaggression right right good point finally he's a skilled orator um

00:02:11.740 in a very non-racial way right um you know i i remember that moment i think many people will

00:02:18.100 remember how inspired they felt because what i think a lot of people felt was here we are finally

00:02:24.260 it does not matter what your skin color is you do whoever you are you can rise to the top and you

00:02:31.780 can succeed if you've got the talent to do it this is the end of the the racist past that we've had

00:02:37.460 what happened well even more useful is to roll it back to say 2007 and ask virtually any black

00:02:46.500 person in america whether barack obama could make it the answer you would get is almost

00:02:53.660 uniformly know we're not ready and the reason people said that is because they knew if he won

00:03:00.940 it would mean that we had made significant deep progress on the issue of racism and they did not

00:03:09.740 think we had made that progress and therefore believed that barack couldn't win now a strange

00:03:15.020 thing happened when barack did win which is that virtually nobody updated their views of how much

00:03:21.340 progress we've made as a country which doesn't make very much sense usually when you make a

00:03:26.780 prediction based on your model of the world and your prediction gets completely destroyed by

00:03:32.300 reality you're supposed to update your model of the world to come back in line with what's actually

00:03:37.020 happening people didn't do that with barack they should have so uh there was that moment where

00:03:42.860 obviously constantine mentioned where he barack obama got elected the yes we can speech everything

00:03:47.540 like that why has it suddenly distorted into where we find ourselves now is it do you think

00:03:55.500 just one reason in particular are there a myriad of different reasons do you mean uh the perception

00:04:02.920 of racism why has it gotten so much worse in the past 10 years absolutely uh well yeah i think that

00:04:10.100 social media has a lot to do with it uh when in 2008 when barack was elected not so many people

00:04:17.520 were on facebook some were but it wasn't what it is now not obviously twitter was barely a thing

00:04:26.220 instagram much less um people didn't you know smartphones were not ubiquitous i still had a

00:04:33.980 flip phone at that time. So what that means is in 2008, when an unarmed American gets shot by the

00:04:44.200 cops, which probably happened around 50 or 100 times that year, we don't have good data from

00:04:49.600 back then. You know, many of those would have been white, some of those would have been black.

00:04:55.780 Nobody saw a video of it in their newsfeed. If it happened in Kentucky, it stayed in a local

00:05:01.120 kentucky newspaper never made it to the new york times or the washington post or the wall street

00:05:05.440 journal and people what people saw on their news on the news was um you know a black man

00:05:15.480 getting elected to president um so you know that that's where people get their perception from

00:05:23.240 by and large. Now, you move to 2012 or 2014. The biggest shift that has taken place has nothing

00:05:31.560 to do with the presidency. Barack Obama has won his second term handily over a rather strong

00:05:39.480 candidate in Mitt Romney. But what's different now is everyone has an iPhone or smartphone,

00:05:46.420 own rather. Everyone's on Facebook and Twitter so that when Michael Brown or Philando Castile

00:05:53.940 or Alton Sterling dies at the hand of the cops unarmed, we are all confronted with this

00:06:03.560 for the first time in a visceral way. You see it. There's a huge difference between a story

00:06:10.820 staying in local news in Kentucky, which is what happens to 99% of tragedies that occur

00:06:18.080 throughout the nation. And being confronted with it, no matter where you are in the country,

00:06:23.800 on the news cycle 24-7, on your phone, in your Facebook feed, where all your friends,

00:06:30.760 people whose approval you care about are commenting on it, and now you feel pressure to

00:06:35.980 have an opinion at minimum, that creates an entirely different social dynamic.

00:06:42.480 And what I want to, what is most important to glean here is that all of the actual problems,

00:06:49.740 if you're talking about, for example, police killing unarmed Americans in general,

00:06:56.140 or unarmed black Americans in particular, if you're talking about the number of black Americans

00:07:00.900 in prison all of these issues have been going in completely the right direction for the past 20

00:07:07.860 years most people don't know for example that the incarceration rate for black black men in

00:07:14.100 their 20s has more than cut in half since 2001. most people don't know that just in the past five

00:07:21.780 years that we've been measuring police killings of unarmed americans it's gone down from you know

00:07:27.780 almost 100 to just over 50 uh and you know the the data is not good here but the like nypd has

00:07:36.280 kept great data since the 70s and they killed like 93 people unarmed or perhaps not unarmed but in

00:07:43.540 total in in 1971 and they had it down to five by last year so you know every one of these questions

00:07:50.360 has gone in the right direction sometimes quickly and drastically but the perception

00:07:56.660 is that it's gone in the opposite direction, that things have gotten worse. And that is entirely the

00:08:02.860 result of social media. I think some people are tempted to blame it on Obama. I think people are

00:08:07.620 too hard on Obama. Yeah, sometimes he played a bit of identity politics, but in truth, you know,

00:08:15.060 I don't think he had, he couldn't have predicted the effect that Twitter and Facebook and the rest

00:08:20.640 were going to have on the country and on the perception of racism. Well, I think that was

00:08:25.520 actually one of the things that inspired someone like me about his campaign at the time is that

00:08:29.780 there was no sense at all that he was using his identity as a weapon certainly he wasn't pretending

00:08:35.560 he wasn't black but he wasn't using that as a way to to claim additional credit or whatever he was

00:08:42.700 just a guy who was very inspiring to a lot of people and you know his politics aside is it's

00:08:48.420 a slightly different issue as a personality i think he was he was very persuasive in that way

00:08:52.720 but if you I mean you say that all of these we've made moves in the right direction all these issues

00:08:58.720 but is there not an argument there to say that okay well maybe it's 50 people who die unarmed

00:09:04.140 at the hands of the police now but that's still way too many and what we've seen is the proliferation

00:09:09.220 of the camera phone it has shone a light on you know genuine police brutality that should not be

00:09:14.740 happening at all and you know the outrage we see now is justified as a response to us becoming aware

00:09:21.560 of genuine injustice. I mean, you know, the George Floyd example, which I'm sure we'll get onto

00:09:26.040 being a perfect example of just an open and shut case of police brutality.

00:09:32.180 So here we have to be very careful about what we're talking about.

00:09:35.820 If we're talking about George Floyd and an officer putting his knee on the neck of a suspect for nine

00:09:42.720 minutes while he begs for his life, begs for his mother, that is something I think we can

00:09:48.040 completely get rid of. You know, I think it has to be possible to enforce some kind of policy that

00:09:56.280 permanently prevents things like that from happening. Or if they do happen, they happen,

00:10:01.980 you know, once every 10 years, and it's a scandal, and that cop gets fired immediately. And it's,

00:10:07.360 you know, it's, it's one of those freak news stories. You know, the same thing happened to

00:10:14.400 a white man named Tony Timpa in 2016. Very few people paid attention. It was caught on video,

00:10:20.820 almost an identical incident. He was killed, suffocated with a knee on his upper back,

00:10:25.920 begging for his life. So that's the kind of thing I think, I hope it's possible to completely

00:10:33.100 eradicate. But if we want to talk about the wider phenomenon of a cop killing a person while

00:10:41.440 unarmed there are a lot of reality checks that we have to we have to keep in mind before we

00:10:47.900 we jump to the idea that the number ought to be zero okay like i would love for the number to be

00:10:55.000 zero i think everyone would i would also love for the number of murders in general to be zero

00:11:01.520 it's never happened in any society ever and america is a particularly unique case for a

00:11:07.420 couple of reasons one we're a huge country we're 10 times the size of canada population wise

00:11:14.420 which means that extremely low probability events happen 10 times as often here as they do

00:11:19.980 in somewhere like canada if canada were identical to the u.s so it can seem like something you know

00:11:26.220 lightning will people will die from lightning strikes more often here um secondly and more

00:11:32.160 importantly, we are a gun country. We are a huge gun country. We have a rate of gun ownership

00:11:38.920 that's more than 20 times the rate in the UK. And what that means is when the cops in America

00:11:45.080 pull someone over, they have every reason to suspect and be prepared for the fact that they

00:11:53.600 have a pistol hidden in the glove compartment. And that's just not true in other countries.

00:11:59.080 In the UK, when you pull someone over, you have almost no reason to suspect that they might have a gun because so few people do have guns.

00:12:07.760 A cop gets shot roughly every single day in America.

00:12:13.160 And what that means is in America, the cops are always going to be more likely to mistake a wallet for a gun when an unarmed person reaches in their waistband for something.

00:12:23.580 uh and and this happens to white people as well all the time it's just you know they never get

00:12:31.060 elevated to to national news there are probably over a dozen cases like this every year and i

00:12:37.040 don't see realistically how any amount of training or um you know any amount of reform

00:12:45.660 is going to get rid of the problem that that police are aware that a cop gets shot every

00:12:51.460 day in this country, unlike in other countries, and that in the heat of the moment, you often

00:12:57.400 actually cannot tell whether something's a smartphone or a wallet. So what I'm saying is,

00:13:04.240 yes, I think we can probably get the number from what it was last year, which is about 56. We can

00:13:10.240 probably reduce that. But we absolutely cannot reduce it to zero. And that's very important,

00:13:16.600 because if the future of race relations or the future of civilian cop trust depends on that

00:13:24.620 number being zero, then we are absolutely doomed as a country. And Coleman, we've been talking about

00:13:31.620 hysteria on social media, how it gets whipped up, how then it distorts reality. What responsibility

00:13:37.700 does Trump have to take? Because there have been certain tweets that he's done, which have been,

00:13:42.180 to put it quite frankly inflammatory and not going to help the situation absolutely yeah

00:13:48.960 trump he he's seen it almost seems as if he's trying to say the thing that is going to piss

00:13:57.160 the left off as much as possible or piss black people off as much as possible

00:14:03.260 i mean he could do slightly worse but he couldn't do that much worse realistically

00:14:07.960 I think there's no doubt that he has added some fuel to the fire of the protests and the riots.

00:14:17.520 And in many ways, he thrives in this condition because every far left access, when people on the left say they're going to get rid of, dismantle or defund the police, Trump comes to look actually sane by comparison.

00:14:32.520 When he makes people go insane, become as insane as him, it gives people the impression that, well, yeah, Trump is insane, but the far left is insane, too, and maybe Trump's our only bet.

00:14:44.160 So he really thrives in this circumstance.

00:14:47.640 He certainly has added fuel to the fire.

00:14:50.060 What you would want right now is a president who can be a unifying force, and Trump is constitutionally incapable of that.

00:14:56.900 At the same time, the riots and the underlying distress that we're feeling as a country is not caused by Trump.

00:15:06.800 These are perennial issues.

00:15:08.080 We had riots in the late 60s, riots in the 70s, not so many in the 80s, but huge riots in 1992, riots in Ferguson and Baltimore 2014 and 2015 under Obama.

00:15:20.440 And Obama would have been ostensibly the perfect president to stop it.

00:15:24.600 But the truth is, the issues are much deeper than any particular president.

00:15:29.660 That's interesting.

00:15:30.700 Coleman, let me ask you this, because you've several times now,

00:15:34.680 you've talked about the white suspect who died in similar circumstances to George Floyd.

00:15:40.740 And see, even though you said his name and I'm familiar with it,

00:15:43.560 I can't remember it now, which is kind of a...

00:15:45.760 That's because you're a racist, mate.

00:15:46.880 Yeah, racist against white people, obviously.

00:15:48.960 but this kind of makes your point which is you know we don't treat these instances in the same

00:15:57.220 way why is that well that's a very deep question I think deep in the American subconscious you know

00:16:07.380 many of us have seen the videos of police putting the hoses and the dogs on perfectly peaceful

00:16:16.560 civil rights protesters in the 1960s who are simply asking for the right to vote, the right

00:16:21.160 to go to a restaurant. And we've seared those images into our subconscious and they form part

00:16:28.700 of how we make sense of morality and right and wrong. And when an American and probably true of

00:16:37.260 many Europeans as well, sees a white cop doing something to a black suspect, they feel differently

00:16:44.860 and they feel angrier than if a white cop had done it to a white suspect or frankly if a black cop

00:16:53.540 had done it to a black suspect. It hits harder. It tugs at one's heartstrings a little bit more,

00:17:00.720 in fact a lot more, even if it's the identical crime. And this is this is a deep it's a deep

00:17:10.580 kind of moral confusion that we have but it's extremely hard to root out because ultimately

00:17:16.800 a life is a life that if that's not true nothing is true but um we just we're just hardwired to

00:17:25.460 feel well i shouldn't say hardwired we're we're our software our cultural software as americans

00:17:31.820 makes us feel that a racist crime, there's a particular edge that that has in our feelings

00:17:42.260 that intraracial violence doesn't have.

00:17:48.440 So that's why you see the fact that there are dozens of, there are videos of white people

00:17:54.100 getting killed by the cops with their hands up, begging for their lives, every bit as

00:17:58.820 brutal and and terrifying and awful as the videos we've seen um you know there's this whole

00:18:07.380 at all the black lives matter protest there's this thing you know they always say say their name

00:18:13.720 when you say the name alton sterling philando castile tamir rice sandra bland michael brown

00:18:19.440 eric garner etc there are so many white names there are in fact in absolute terms there are

00:18:26.840 more white names than there are black names. And I've spent some time looking at them and they're

00:18:30.640 identical. The case is for every black person killed by the police, there are usually two or

00:18:37.680 three white people that died exactly the same way. Nobody says their names and nobody cares.

00:18:43.400 That seems to people like the correct moral bias because we're imprinted with the symbolism of the

00:18:52.580 civil rights movement but we have to outgrow this if we're going to be a cohesive country going into

00:19:00.720 the 21st century which is you know a very different reality than where we're coming from

00:19:05.580 the interesting thing about this movement in particular the murder of george floyd was it

00:19:10.620 doesn't obviously it hasn't affected america it's turned into this global movement why do you think

00:19:16.140 that is common why do you think that people in the uk in australia in brazil where they're having

00:19:21.480 huge blm rallies why is it that people have really connected with him with this particular crime

00:19:28.100 that is a fascinating question um i've already given my rant on social media

00:19:34.760 and you know i think no doubt that has something to do with it i love how you describe it as a

00:19:40.700 you're so mild-mannered and calm that your calm and gentle description of your concerns about

00:19:46.280 social media becomes a run i love it um but the you know i think probably coronavirus has something

00:19:56.300 to do with it i have to imagine people around the world are working much less than usual in their

00:20:01.440 house much more than usual on facebook twitter and watching the news much more than usual

00:20:06.200 are more restless and bored than usual all of those things conspire i think to make people

00:20:12.320 more likely to go out and protest and do you think that i mean this is my theory of it because

00:20:18.540 you know i've got a lot of friends like in the uk who are black and they're talking about their

00:20:22.780 experiences and from growing up and they're in their 30s and they're good and they're talking

00:20:28.120 about what it's like to be a black man in south london in the 90s when the police were really

00:20:32.460 racist do you think part of this is just unearthing some deep trauma within people

00:20:38.740 from years and years back, like my mom came to this country from Venezuela. She's a brown woman

00:20:43.980 and very conservative, very, very right wing, but she doesn't like police. And I didn't expect

00:20:50.240 that response from her. She was saying police are racist. So do you think it's just this trauma

00:20:54.780 that a lot of people are carrying and all of a sudden they get a chance to expunge it almost?

00:21:00.480 Absolutely. I think there are decades and decades, you know, we can talk about to what extent the

00:21:06.700 cops are racist today in 2020. But there's no doubt that for, you know, I know less about

00:21:12.300 London's history, but I definitely take your mother's experience as probably true of a lot

00:21:20.480 of people. There's no doubt that there's just decades and decades of accumulated bad faith

00:21:27.800 between the police and in particular, the black community for disproportionately stopping black

00:21:33.040 and Hispanic people, men especially, you know, planting drugs on suspects, all kinds of corruption

00:21:41.680 and lying and brutality. There's just decades of accumulated experience with that. And all of that

00:21:49.140 gets symbolically discharged when an event like this happens. It's not just about George Floyd

00:21:59.860 for people it's about the whole history of you know of of brutal policing going back many decades

00:22:08.820 and ultimately the history of white supremacy going going back to slavery um i do think there's

00:22:15.140 a danger in making an issue symbolic like that because then you you kind of decide what you

00:22:24.420 think about the George Floyd incident before you've actually looked. To you, if it's really

00:22:30.540 about whether the police in Brooklyn or South Central LA were racist in 1990, which I have

00:22:36.600 no doubt that they were, if that's what decides your opinion on George Floyd in 2020 and Black

00:22:45.840 Lives Matter and the degree to which the cops are racist now, then we're just having two

00:22:51.400 separate conversations and it becomes very difficult you know then facts facts cease to

00:22:57.280 matter in the in the now but I can totally understand why someone you know we all bring

00:23:03.500 all of our our whole life history with us and the police have a horrible history they made a lot of

00:23:11.660 progress and but you know another way to frame that is that they used they used to be far far

00:23:17.540 worse and a lot of people remember it and they resent it and you talked about the different ways

00:23:22.960 we treat these instances when depending on what what race of victim is involved do you think

00:23:29.140 there is an element where there are assumptions that are made if the if the suspect who dies

00:23:35.300 is black which aren't necessarily i mean they may be accurate but they may not like is there

00:23:40.400 any evidence at the moment that george floyd was his murder is racially motivated do we know that

00:23:46.720 uh the the short answer is no um it's one of those things that

00:23:52.800 i want to be clear about what i'm saying we don't have reason to believe that it was racist right

00:23:59.320 it could have been racist that's exactly what i'm saying it may well be deeply racist but

00:24:03.780 we don't know that but i think the assumption we just don't know either way it was right yes and

00:24:09.080 the reason they make that assessment assessment is because the vast majority of people they haven't

00:24:13.360 seen all the videos of white people being killed in this way. They haven't seen the Tony Timpa

00:24:17.340 video where the same thing happened to a white guy a few years ago. And so they assume because

00:24:22.060 this kind of thing overwhelmingly or only happens to black people that therefore it's racist.

00:24:26.940 Still, I'm sure even if you show them all the videos of it happening to white people,

00:24:31.580 a certain kind of person will say, no, I just know it in my bones. I know it. I know that he

00:24:36.220 wouldn't have done that to a white boy. And you can't argue with that because it's faith at that

00:24:41.680 point and let's move on to the organization of black lives matter now i think we everybody agrees

00:24:49.340 of course black lives do matter of course they do and it's important that we end police brutality

00:24:54.660 of course it is or essentially you know try and minimize it like you said as much as possible

00:25:00.780 but why is it that we have this organization someone and you i've read through like you know

00:25:07.380 what what they want to achieve you know the abolition of the nuclear family um defunding

00:25:12.780 the police and lots of other things and it makes you deeply deeply uncomfortable well it does for

00:25:19.640 me because of my background as a venezuelan why is it that you can't criticize black lives matter

00:25:26.100 the organization well what they've what they've done which is you know what all successful

00:25:33.340 propagandists do is to have a very a very um indisputable you know facial argument by which

00:25:47.900 i mean who who wouldn't agree that black lives matter like if you if you actually disagree with

00:25:54.200 that taken literally you're a monster right so on the one hand they could say oh we're just

00:26:00.640 all we're saying is that black lives matter and then when you say but wait a minute what about

00:26:06.200 that abolishing the nuclear family thing they can always retreat to say listen we're about

00:26:11.160 black lives mattering you're either with that or you're not and then they hide all of these

00:26:16.640 other much more radical much more controversial much less defensible claims but you know it's

00:26:25.800 also worth stating that black lives matter is not like the civil rights movement it's

00:26:29.360 the civil rights movement was pretty coherent. They had a set of, you know, goals that there

00:26:36.400 was a top-down structure to the organization that, you know, made it, made it, you know,

00:26:43.620 it made sense to talk about it as one body, but Black Lives Matter, they have chapters all over

00:26:50.020 the nation. The people protesting with that slogan, many of them don't believe this stuff that

00:26:55.920 you find on on the you know the national website about abolishing the nuclear family

00:27:00.700 um you know a lot of that is coming from the higher-ups that always have an incentive to go

00:27:08.800 for the more and more radical thing whereas i think i've been to a couple of these protests

00:27:13.600 and yeah i think there are some folks who really go all the way with it and but there are others

00:27:20.320 that are just there because you know they saw the video they were moved by it and they think

00:27:24.600 something has to be done about police brutality so i'm always wary of painting with too broad a

00:27:29.980 brush um but yeah that that would be my answer to that so so what is your assessment of the impact

00:27:39.000 of the of the black lives matter as an organization or as a movement do you see it as a force for good

00:27:44.300 in part um i think you know i'm not if not for black lives matter i'm not sure how much we'd be

00:27:52.140 talking about police reform right now would we be talking about ending the legal doctrine of

00:27:58.280 qualified immunity which which makes it tough to bring civil rights lawsuits against police

00:28:03.360 officers probably not would we be talking about universal body cams um you know not funding the

00:28:13.180 use of military grade weapons to go to police departments all these strike me as probably good

00:28:18.820 ideas. And I'm not sure we'd be talking about them. Frankly, I'm not even sure we would have

00:28:23.620 a national database on police shootings, which we didn't actually have until 2015.

00:28:28.840 And we still don't have an official government run database. So all of that is to the good.

00:28:35.800 And I think Black Lives Matter deserves credit for. At the same time, the central premise of

00:28:44.780 their movement is not true. The idea that we have a problem with racist cops killing unarmed Black

00:28:50.440 people. And it's a dangerous myth because it's the kind of myth that if you believe it,

00:28:59.160 it makes sense to go out and riot and destroy businesses and loot and set things on fire.

00:29:07.240 If it's really true that the state is uniquely coming after your people and shooting them dead,

00:29:11.820 that's the kind of thing that leads people to riot and that's the narrative we've been

00:29:17.440 sold for the past roughly seven years let's say

00:29:22.500 and then the nation started burning and i don't know who else to blame but the people who spread

00:29:31.960 this myth and where do where do you stand i i know i can guess what the answer is going to be

00:29:38.920 So, for instance, I talk to some of my friends who are more on towards the left, the progressive left.

00:29:44.620 And I say, look, you know, I think it's important that we have these discussions.

00:29:47.820 Of course, I disagree with rioting and burning down businesses.

00:29:53.820 And I got described as having using the language of an Israeli or an occupier, which was delightful.

00:29:59.620 But there we go. Lovely way to spend a Tuesday afternoon, Coleman.

00:30:03.420 Where do you stand on this?

00:30:05.740 and people who say the only way that we can achieve something is by writing and looting

00:30:11.060 historically illiterate um i think you know some people will think that that's naive but

00:30:20.180 there there's a little something called the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of

00:30:25.500 1965 i don't remember a violent a single violent thing that protesters did to achieve that

00:30:32.000 the riots we had in the 60s didn't really start in earnest until 1967. That was after the great

00:30:39.040 civil rights legislative reforms. Martin Luther King's movement was a peaceful movement on

00:30:43.960 purpose. The police were violent, but the whole point was that no matter how violent the police

00:30:49.080 got, the protesters would never get violent, and they would win over the hearts and minds of

00:30:53.100 America by showing them how peaceful they were, how committed to their principles they were.

00:30:59.140 What did the violent protests of the late 60s achieve? Certainly nothing on par with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. As I said, progress usually doesn't come in the form of some sexy legislation that happens after you burn half of your country down.

00:31:26.560 actually usually progress happens a little bit every day and after at the end of the 20 at the

00:31:33.100 end of 20 years you say holy shit there are half as many black people in prison as they were in 2001

00:31:38.300 or young young black men in this case um but of course no one pays attention to that so they get

00:31:45.800 the impression that nothing has changed they're just watching the news every day they're not

00:31:48.960 looking at numbers because nobody does and and then they get this false impression that that

00:31:55.880 uh violence is the only way you can make progress i'll give another example the first step act

00:32:01.140 it's a little piece of legislation that nobody paid attention to um because frankly because it

00:32:07.380 felt well here's what happened you know trump ran a campaign saying he was going to build a wall

00:32:14.340 And, you know, we, a lot of people were afraid he was going to put Muslims on a kind of registry or something.

00:32:20.540 And frankly, we didn't really know whether he was going to be a Hitler or, you know, just like a kind of petty authoritarian, wannabe authoritarian.

00:32:32.140 Frankly, I didn't know because I didn't know how much of it was talk and how much of it was, was for real.

00:32:37.100 And I voted against him, largely worried about the small chance that he would end up being a kind of true Hitler figure.

00:32:47.960 Then he got to power.

00:32:49.380 In 2018, you know, he passes, you know, a bipartisan bill that includes every progressive criminal justice reform

00:33:00.800 that people on the far left have been calling for since 2007

00:33:05.760 called the First Step Act.

00:33:08.060 It releases a couple thousand inmates from federal prison,

00:33:12.860 reduces sentences for a couple thousand more.

00:33:15.300 The majority of these people are black.

00:33:18.760 It shifts the focus from punishment to rehabilitation.

00:33:22.700 It's just everything that you wouldn't expect

00:33:27.160 a sort of law and order politician like Trump to do.

00:33:32.180 And of course, he got no credit for it

00:33:33.520 because it was too awkward and surprising

00:33:36.720 to sort of admit that he did something like that.

00:33:39.800 But that was exactly the kind of progress

00:33:43.160 that if it had come after a riot,

00:33:46.020 people would have seen it as proof that riots work.

00:33:50.500 But because it just came sort of out of the blue

00:33:53.240 in the middle of Trump's first term,

00:33:57.160 um people just didn't even pay attention to it my point here being that progress is happening all

00:34:04.160 the time it's not that it needs riots to happen it's that all the people justifying the riots

00:34:09.020 they're not paying attention when the progress is happening hey man the riots have achieved

00:34:14.100 something we're tearing down statues in this country over something that happened in your

00:34:17.980 country so they're making progress in one way or another but um let's talk about i mean look

00:34:24.100 As you say, there are some legitimate complaints. And of course, there's some legitimate

00:34:28.460 positive outcomes out of what Black Lives Matter are doing. And I suppose the central complaint,

00:34:35.320 you bring up the white victims versus black victims. The central complaint would be that

00:34:41.760 black people are disproportionately imprisoned. Black people are disproportionately stopped.

00:34:47.240 Black people are disproportionately searched. Black people are disproportionately

00:34:51.000 the victims of police brutality, etc. And as far as I know, all those things are true. If you just

00:34:57.680 look at the raw statistics, black people, about 13% of the population, but much more represented

00:35:03.500 than that in all those other categories. So are those not legitimate claims?

00:35:09.180 Well, no, because, you know, as any intro stat student will tell you, you've got to control for

00:35:15.320 the confounding variables. Men make up more than 90% of victims in all these cases, whether you're

00:35:21.640 talking about brutality, prison, shot by the cops, or otherwise. Men are, of course, only 50% of the

00:35:27.160 population. Just viewing that fact doesn't tell you anything about anti-male bias, per se. You

00:35:33.860 have to think about, and it's impossible not to talk about the underlying facts of racially

00:35:41.800 disparate crime 13 of the population uh commits and suffers 52 of the murders

00:35:51.160 um and you know that that's probably the largest disparity but if you're talking about robberies

00:35:57.080 aggravated assaults um you know the all of the virtually all of the disparities except

00:36:04.200 you know drunk driving and a few others show black people showing up black men young black

00:36:10.360 men in particular, showing up heavily, heavily disproportionate rates. And that's a first

00:36:16.120 order problem. The police are coming into contact with young black men far more often

00:36:22.040 as a result, even if they didn't pay attention to skin color at all. And I'm not saying there

00:36:27.320 is no racial bias in the police. I think there is. I think some of that is just some of it's

00:36:34.920 It's just good old fashioned racism.

00:36:37.280 Some of it is the fact that, you know, if I were a cop in New York, where roughly 97%

00:36:45.300 of the shootings every year, 97% are committed and suffered by blacks and Hispanics.

00:36:52.400 That means you could forget the white part of that and almost not even make a dent in

00:36:56.600 the total number of shootings.

00:36:59.940 Is it possible that I would develop a kernel of racial bias, which is to say when I see

00:37:04.700 a black or Hispanic suspect, I suspect him more than I would a white person.

00:37:09.860 I would love to say that I'm such an amazing human being that I wouldn't develop that,

00:37:14.420 but I'm also not naive, and I don't want to be such a self-flattering backseat driver

00:37:19.980 to the cops whose job it is to actually keep everyone safe, including black and Hispanic

00:37:25.260 people, the vast majority of whom do not commit crime, even in the most criminal neighborhoods.

00:37:30.840 So you have to look at, you know, virtually every study I've looked at that controls for

00:37:39.520 all of these variables finds no anti-black bias in deadly shootings.

00:37:44.800 Sometimes they find anti-black biases in a cop's likelihood to put his hands on and rough

00:37:49.840 up a suspect.

00:37:51.040 And that's a very real problem.

00:37:53.180 But there's simply, there's really no disparity to be found when it comes to a cop's decision

00:37:58.520 to pull the trigger.

00:37:59.960 All right.

00:38:00.160 But what about this idea that this is still all down to racism because it's a

00:38:04.700 result of the fact that black people tend to be poorer and they're poorer

00:38:08.280 because of the history and the legacy of Jim Crow.

00:38:12.120 It's a legacy of slavery because a lot of black people are the descendants of

00:38:16.680 slaves. They don't have the same economic base.

00:38:19.160 Therefore they live in poorer neighborhoods. Therefore there's more crime.

00:38:22.420 Therefore they're still being punished for essentially being brought to America

00:38:25.800 as slaves.

00:38:26.320 um i think it's a very superficial analysis of what causes people to commit crime

00:38:32.940 um i i suppose it's a very long conversation you know if i talk to someone who

00:38:39.520 well let me put it this way if you look at the history of of the you know american crime rate

00:38:47.060 over the past hundred years and your theory is that poverty causes crime you're going to run

00:38:52.560 into a lot of awkward facts like um you know when the economy is booming crime doesn't always go

00:38:58.780 down sometimes it goes up uh you know during the recession 2008 crime went down why is that

00:39:05.140 on a theory that says poverty causes crime that there should have been a huge uptick

00:39:08.980 um i think the truth is much more complicated i think um

00:39:14.220 this gets into very different this gets into your picture of human nature and why someone

00:39:21.800 would commit crime to begin with and there begins to be such a a huge gap in worldview that that

00:39:28.680 it's sort of hard to settle in the course of a single conversation but suffice it to say i don't

00:39:34.280 really look for um reasons why someone commits a crime to me what we call a quote-unquote criminal

00:39:42.680 behavior for much of our species existence would have just been behavior like yeah you kill someone

00:39:49.800 from the other tribe he's in the other gang fuck him it's not that much more complicated than that

00:39:55.940 it's it doesn't have to be because you grew up poor rich people commit crimes too when they

00:40:00.100 all the people on wall street money laundering and defrauding investors why did they do it is

00:40:06.120 it because their childhood i don't know maybe it's because they wanted to get some you know like

00:40:10.800 i don't i some people would say that's extremely naive to me it accords with virtually everything

00:40:18.360 i know about human beings and how how they behave um but that doesn't explain the disparity between

00:40:24.520 different groups which is what we're really talking about sure um i mean listen the the

00:40:30.340 the causal the causal chain can just as easily go in the opposite direction crime causes poverty

00:40:35.580 last time i checked if you know if you if you live in a criminal in a neighborhood with a high

00:40:41.720 crime rate good luck getting a loan for your small business um good luck getting anyone to invest

00:40:48.240 good luck getting people to want to move to the area and therefore raising property values and

00:40:54.500 making everyone richer what we call gentrification is really just a synonym for the crime rate in a

00:41:02.000 formerly high crime neighborhood going down so the neighborhood becoming more desirable

00:41:07.300 and property values rising. Sorry to interrupt. All I'm trying to dig into is why is it that

00:41:15.260 crime in those communities is so much higher than in others if it's not the history of racism what

00:41:21.380 is it so i mean i'm objecting to the question a little bit because of in what two groups is the

00:41:27.760 crime rate ever equal why why do white white people commit so much more crime than asians

00:41:32.540 because white men are evil we know that but

00:41:36.400 this is what i'm saying people people have this expectation that every group should have like

00:41:43.760 identical statistics and then when they see a disparity they go oh my god why why is there such

00:41:49.060 a large disparity and me looking at the data all i see is disparity if i look at that if i compare

00:41:55.800 jews to protestants you're damn sure i'm finding a wealth disparity there i'm sorry that's just the

00:42:00.840 truth but i'm not asking why why why as if every deviation from equality has some nefarious

00:42:07.440 explanation it's because we're lizards made that's why jews do better but that's just you

00:42:12.460 know that's a David Icke theory anyway Francis go ahead mate uh so Coleman what I've really

00:42:17.660 enjoyed about this interview is that we're talking and that you're bringing nuance to

00:42:22.280 the conversation you talk why is it that we can't have these conversations anymore in the

00:42:27.680 mainstream media if we try and do this in you know the UK mainstream media or America

00:42:32.760 wherever it may be it would degenerate into finger pointing talking over one another

00:42:38.140 Why have we lost that ability?

00:42:41.320 Frankly, I'm not so sure we ever had it.

00:42:44.640 I don't know if we ever had it in my lifetime.

00:42:50.920 Yeah, I don't know.

00:42:52.420 The short answer is I don't know.

00:42:56.280 You know, mainstream media outlets select for people who make points that feel good,

00:43:04.160 that preach to the choir.

00:43:08.140 that are that don't involve any statistics because people don't want to hear numbers ever

00:43:13.740 they want to hear short sound bites and maybe at most a story um and anyone who wants to get more

00:43:20.460 complex than that is going to find him or herself relegated to not like this podcast like this is

00:43:27.020 where you end up mate yeah and that's not so bad i mean listen in a free market there's

00:43:33.740 there you know everyone can find their niche uh but yeah it just means that

00:43:40.320 you know the the most mainstream outlets sort of have to cater to the common denominator and i

00:43:46.440 think we kind of get the media we deserve so how do we move on colman because i mean look as you

00:43:53.360 say half your country is burning we're not quite there and hopefully we won't get there but a lot

00:43:58.860 of people are starting to feel like the venue of civilization is fraying at the edges how do we

00:44:05.800 move past these issues well i would say first of all you know always take note that things are not

00:44:16.000 as bad as they seem um you know the riots in minneapolis were horrible especially

00:44:22.260 and a few other cities and a lot of damage was done but um civilization i don't think is yet

00:44:30.040 fraying at the edges i think we have to guard against the very bad ideas like

00:44:35.400 dismantling the police and i think we will i don't think people will stand for it

00:44:40.440 i think we have to push for the reasonable reforms of the police that we ought to have done a while

00:44:46.680 ago um and above all we have to make sure that you know we are educated ourselves make sure

00:44:55.400 you you know what's going on don't just listen don't just you know listen to everything that you

00:45:01.400 uh hear um you know pick your battles but stand up for yourself when it matters

00:45:08.480 And, you know, I'm not sure I have much more advice to give than that

00:45:17.240 I like the points you make, Coleman

00:45:20.920 There's a part of me, and bear in mind I'm a rabid pessimist

00:45:23.720 So take this on board

00:45:25.040 But I just see a lot of people being really scared to voice their opinion

00:45:30.060 In case they say the wrong thing

00:45:31.780 In case they express an opinion clumsily

00:45:33.940 Which can then be twisted and distorted

00:45:35.600 and interpreted as racism and all the rest of it do you think that we are going to come to a point

00:45:42.780 where debate is simply going to shut down because people are too scared to speak

00:45:47.160 i mean i think we're kind of already at that point um yeah i think there are

00:45:53.900 there have to be tens of thousands of people just in the u.s that are horrified to say what

00:46:03.220 they really think even if they only have tentative opinions if they only half think something

00:46:08.920 they're terrified to say to say what they think um it's a lot more than a few tens of thousands

00:46:17.060 it's it's going to be in the millions i would suggest yeah probably yeah probably um

00:46:24.500 yeah listen they're afraid to lose their jobs they're afraid to lose their friends

00:46:30.700 um they're afraid to lose their relationships they're afraid to lose everything and you know

00:46:39.120 there's very you know it only really goes one way if you say defund the police right now

00:46:43.420 post that on your facebook despite how insanely radical that idea is you're not really going to

00:46:51.840 lose very much because of it your company's not going to fire you um you know maybe if you live

00:46:58.900 in a really red conservative bubble which many people do yeah maybe you'll face some consequences

00:47:05.300 but if you live in a city if you live you know anywhere close to blue america you know you'll

00:47:13.040 face no consequences for that but you'll you might lose everything if you if you say the opposite

00:47:17.260 if you so much as express a skeptical word about black lives matter so

00:47:22.480 yeah it's it's it's um it's extremely tough we're living in we're living through a moral panic

00:47:31.300 one of the great moral panics of american history about racism and white supremacy

00:47:36.040 and do you think sorry carry on colman no no go ahead and do you think it's almost in the sense of

00:47:42.400 like mccarthyism in that you know people are just getting outed left right and center as being

00:47:47.960 racist you know you you i mean white privilege you can agree you can disagree whatever it may

00:47:53.180 be but if you openly criticize white privilege we've seen incidences in the uk of you know

00:47:58.660 newscasters getting yanked and then having to give groveling public apologies and all the rest of it

00:48:04.020 no i mean the yeah mccarthyism is one of the one of the nicest analogies for what's happening right

00:48:09.920 now we look back on the mccarthyist era and we say how could they have been so out of their minds

00:48:14.680 with regard to this communist threat you know anytime someone was accused of being a communist

00:48:19.220 and a friend came to his his defense and said well hey wait a minute guys look look at the

00:48:24.380 details here okay he was a little bit of a socialist but if you actually look at what he

00:48:28.760 wrote he was you know he condemned stalin and yada yada yada people weren't people wouldn't

00:48:33.880 hear it they would just ask which side are you on as if that's the only you know question that

00:48:39.000 matters and that's what you're seeing right now common i was going to wrap up here but actually

00:48:44.240 want to ask you about this defund the police thing and the slogan because I've been in arguments with

00:48:53.100 people over this where like you I've said look this is a crazy idea one of the things that if

00:48:58.260 you get rid of the police one of the things that will happen is there'll be more crime in those

00:49:02.380 communities and more black people will die so if you believe that as I do that the lives of black

00:49:07.500 people matter this is the this is going to achieve the opposite of that right and the argument that

00:49:13.680 people make to me well defund the police doesn't mean abolish the police it just means you know

00:49:19.620 get rid of the the militarized weaponry that you talked about or whatever like is that true

00:49:24.980 people mean it in different ways yes some people just mean get rid of militar militarized weapons

00:49:30.720 um you know which is a very misleading it's a very misleading banner to put on that idea

00:49:38.300 wouldn't you say reform the police if that's what you meant right you you would i mean again defund

00:49:45.000 the police is a slogan and people are as they often do they're saying it before they know what

00:49:50.600 it means they're saying it because it sounds radical and cool and it makes them seem really

00:49:54.900 radical to their friends so whatever i don't know they can get laid more often or whatever

00:49:59.140 but and then you know does it work article look at him he's excited man if it didn't work people

00:50:04.720 wouldn't do it okay cool nice one colman thanks man um but uh they're they're they're coming out

00:50:12.640 with what it means you know slowly and after the fact so some people yeah some people do want to

00:50:19.320 abolish the police um that's ridiculous some people want to replace the police with community

00:50:24.620 police um so get rid of all the cops with badges and we're going to build an institution ourself

00:50:31.980 we're going to train them better so that these kinds of incidents never happen i think that's

00:50:38.500 extremely naive you know you know the medical profession kills hundreds of thousands of people

00:50:43.700 every year with medical errors but no one is suggesting we dismantle or get rid of doctors

00:50:49.720 and surgeons and like replace them with our own system it's kind of ridiculous because a lot of

00:50:54.760 the problems are inherent in the job itself no matter who you get to be the police when you come

00:51:01.160 across a suspect of a violent crime a lot of times they're going to resist arrest sometimes

00:51:05.340 they're going to pull a gun on you it doesn't matter who you are it doesn't matter if you have

00:51:08.320 a badge or if you're the new black lives matter community policeman so we might as well work with

00:51:15.280 the system we have now and reform it no absolutely and it also doesn't take into account like the

00:51:21.700 human element of it like whatever like i was a former teacher whatever industry or profession

00:51:26.960 there is you're going to get good people and you're going to get people who are not good and

00:51:30.580 going to it for the wrong reasons like every teacher knows one teacher who was a bully

00:51:35.200 and used to bully the children and it's awful but that's how it is and i imagine if you're

00:51:40.560 somebody who likes to feel power likes to bully others and a police officer is a pretty good job

00:51:45.540 to have francis let's not talk about your career mate but do you think that's it that's a point

00:51:52.260 as well colman in that can we ever truly eradicate these things because they're ingrained in our

00:51:57.100 nature yeah i mean this comes back to to having you know fundamentally different views of of you

00:52:08.160 know man as a creature some people think that all of our foibles and flaws are a consequence of bad

00:52:15.880 ideas and bad policies that if we could only get the right set of policies and you know ideas and

00:52:23.880 raise children believing the right things, then there would be no murder, no rape, no war, no

00:52:31.360 anything, that we would truly achieve a utopia. And so they measure our society currently against

00:52:39.600 the imagined utopia that they have in their minds, and they always find our society to be lacking.

00:52:46.600 Other people, like myself, are more persuaded by the idea that human nature is a mixed bag,

00:52:52.820 like other animals, we come with a built-in set of tendencies. Some of those tendencies are good.

00:52:58.580 We love our families. We love our friends. We have empathy. We can see someone else's suffering and

00:53:05.620 feel it as our own. But we also have greed and the capacity for cruelty and the desire to climb

00:53:13.800 the ladder at other people's expense, the desire to be mean for no reason. If you've never felt

00:53:20.460 these feelings in yourself then then i you know either become more self-aware or thank your lucky

00:53:25.760 stars that you're like you know one of the few humans that was just born innately perfect

00:53:32.100 but listen you look at every society in history it's had it's had you know there have been many

00:53:43.340 have been worse than others but there have been none that were perfect i'm sorry there's been

00:53:48.280 none with no racism as long as there was ethnic difference there was bigotry ethnic bigotry

00:53:55.640 as long as there were men and women there was sexism almost always directed at women

00:54:01.480 um there was violence in every society we've ever seen uh so i i think that's a coincidence and

00:54:11.720 humans have just been getting the wrong answer to the question of what ideas to raise our children

00:54:16.760 with every single time. Or there's something baked into us by evolution that includes both

00:54:26.460 good qualities and bad qualities. And the institutions that allow us to make moral progress

00:54:34.060 are the ones that recognize human nature as fixed and try to allow us to make progress without

00:54:40.980 having to be saints because we're never going to be saints that's a really brilliant point on which

00:54:47.740 to wrap up the interview Coleman you're a voice that needs to be heard more of in this conversation

00:54:53.340 and people like you I think are actually the kind of people that can take our society forward rather

00:54:58.340 than the people who are burning down buildings and tearing things down so thank you for coming

00:55:03.180 on the show we've got one more question for you and it's a question we always end the show Coleman

00:55:07.580 which is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should

00:55:12.580 be? I suppose the answer is in America, the answer is homicide and violent crime.

00:55:27.200 At a time like this, it is more important than ever, even though it will seem completely tone

00:55:31.700 deaf to people, to remind the American population that homicide is the number one cause of death

00:55:40.240 for Black men in their 20s. That is not true of any other race. That it's a first order problem,

00:55:47.160 not just in terms of the lives lost, but in terms of the cycle of poverty and unemployment

00:55:55.700 that plagues high crime communities, the fact that stores have to charge higher prices to defray

00:56:01.720 security costs, the fact that it's very hard to attract investment, property values are low

00:56:08.140 because no one wants to be in a place that's unsafe. Every problem that a person of goodwill

00:56:16.860 would want to see solved is made worse by the reality of violent crime in pockets of U.S. cities

00:56:24.820 and suburbs. The police are one of the best tools we have, one of the primary tools we have to lower

00:56:34.220 crime rate. They're not the only ones. Social programs matter too. But we have to keep that

00:56:42.060 in view as a central problem. And that can't be lost. It's much easier to focus on the police

00:56:50.920 as villains it's easy they're wearing badges i mean when in every hollywood movie the guy with

00:56:58.080 the badge comes and stomps on someone and you know you feel reflexive sympathy as you should

00:57:04.220 for the person being stomped on and but you know society is not always a hollywood movie

00:57:10.300 sometimes the main villains are are her a small subset of criminals in a population that are

00:57:19.680 wreaking havoc for everybody else um so that's what i would say brilliant stuff all right colman

00:57:28.520 so thank you very much for coming on uh just tell everybody about your podcast and where they can

00:57:33.800 follow your writing as well um my podcast is conversations with colman you can listen to it

00:57:38.820 wherever you're wherever you listen to podcasts and you can follow me on twitter at cold x man

00:57:44.320 perfect and we'll make sure we'll put all those links uh in the video and in the audio description

00:57:49.660 Coleman thank you so much for coming on once again

00:57:51.920 and thanks everybody for watching

00:57:54.080 and listening we'll see you again very very

00:57:56.080 soon with another interview or

00:57:57.880 a live stream take care

00:57:59.840 and see you soon guys

TRIGGERnometry - June 14, 2020

We Are in a Moral Panic： Coleman Hughes

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