The BLM Movement and Civil Rights | Constitution Day Celebration Panel

my name is michael anton i am a lecturer and research fellow at the hillsdale college's washington dc campus across the river here where we teach undergraduate students who come in for one semester to do an internship in the swamp and then have their minds cleansed and purified at their evening courses with hillsdale faculty who explain to them why they need to resist maybe some of the allures that they've been tempted by during the day and we also are now uh relatively new uh granting ma degrees we're teaching grad students we're teaching mid-career uh swamp dwellers for lack of a better term people who live and work here full-time and want that extra education they want to learn some things that they didn't get from their undergraduate education but they either can't or or don't want to drop out of the workforce for two or three years and go off to grad school so we're making that available to them a hillsdale education available to them here mid-career and focusing on obviously politics and political people okay our panel this moment this morning is entitled the black lives matter movement and civil rights and we're going to go in alphabetical order so our first speaker is arthur millick arthur is just became actually the executive director of a new center from the claremont institute which uh barely exists arthur is it's only i think as of now employee he is standing it up it will be called the center for the american way of life uh and it's launching now essentially uh prior to that arthur was associate director of the center for american studies and the awc family foundation fellow at the heritage foundation just across the street from our hillsdale's washington dc campus as i'm sure many of you know his work there focused on the tradition of american political thought and freedom of speech prior to his time at the heritage foundation arthur worked at the house committee on armed services and the hudson institute he holds a masters from the university of chicago and a ba from emory university i'll also say if i'm incorrect in this arthur can correct me and i apologize in advance but of the four people standing before you today he's the only one who hasn't been regularly featured on the tucker carlson show and in fact i don't think he's ever been on it at all actually if you could if you could make your remarks from the podium and then we'll do the q a from there sure well thank you very much everyone for joining us here and thank you very much to hillsdale for inviting me it's really a great honor i should say that i've long admired hillsdale i'm not a graduate of hillsdale but i feel that i graduated in spirit which mind you is not an accredited degree now the recent blm organized riots have been good for business not for the businesses of course that were torched looted and forced to close down the riots were good for blm's bottom line i've calculated that approximately 10 billion dollars was given or pledged to blm or black focused causes by america's corporations foundations and individuals as a result of these riots and protests most notably bank of america pledged one billion dollars with a b over four years to support as they say economic opportunity initiatives to combat racial inequality accelerated by the global pandemic not only are these breathtaking amounts but they were given based on three falsehoods the first that george floyd was murdered because of his race the second that black people are being systematically murdered by cops and the third that america has racism in its very dna the left learned an important lesson from all of this the more they riot the more corporations pay out why have there's why has there been so little corporate resistance to this only a few have stood up and said this is a shakedown it's extortion in the span of three generations america's most powerful corporations went from being more or less patriotic to globalist to giving money to revolutionary causes that would ultimately put them out of business so what happened both our political parties have taken different approaches to courting america's corporations the right had an earnest strategy that spanned for about 30 years until trump and it was basically giving them whatever they wanted access to the world's markets both to break labor unions and to sell to adversaries like china lacks labor lacks border enforcement allowing illegals into the country coupled with high low level and high level immigration and of course there were various tax breaks the right wrongly bet that they could give away the farm and in return produce permanent loyalty and gratitude our corporations ended up with all that the right gave them and yet they ultimately went left and i think what the left has done is far more powerful successful and interesting first of all in case you've been asleep for the past 20 years you will have noticed that the left has gained enormous influence over all of america's major institutions the press the bureaucracy the universities the culture industries big tech and many fortune 500s before the left became neoliberal in the 90s its center of gravity was the working class and they thought the great evil was corporate power and money but the new left which began to emerge in the 60s and 70s is different not proletarian revolution but the liberation of the so-called marginalized and oppressed of women gays and blacks became their goal and in its mature form today liberation requires the punishment of the alleged oppressor group who still prevents their identities from flourishing so they claim and in case you haven't guessed it the oppressors are white people as they say the greatest evil now in other words has shifted from money to whiteness as these ends have changed so too have corporations become tolerable to the left and even useful in fact for the time being the identitarian left needs corporate money and political clout to advance its goals and corporations by the way like this new left more than the old left they understandably fear bernie sanders socialism more than blm bernie wants to heavily tax and regulate their businesses and personal wealth and in the short term at least blm wants to do the shakedown force race conscious policies but leave them more or less intact for now so what is blm its growth has been nothing short of amazing it's only seven years old but it's raking an enormous dough gaining astonishing moral power and it's imitated throughout the world blm was founded by three women shortly after the trayvon martin case and then it grew in national notoriety after michael brown was shot by the police but blm itself is really the tip of the spear of an obscure network this is what you have to keep in mind you first learn about its hidden side when you try to donate to it you can't actually donate to blm directly only to its partner organizations and i think this is by design blm takes on the organizational the organizing the rioting the the threatening the street theater function there are the shock troops the main extortion mechanism meant for prime time tv and not being able to donate to blm is smart if they get labeled as a terrorist organization or is a group engaged in sedition and the case can certainly be made for that their assets would be frozen and seized and since they are not really a legal entity but a movement a network the money is largely untraceable and yet it's tax deductible much of those 10 billion dollars pledged or donated largely go elsewhere and it's too early to trace it all but some of the funding on the face of it goes to good causes education for historically black colleges scholarships help to black only financial institutions but another part of the money goes to fueling the race consultant industry to bailing out violent protesters and looters and people who have assaulted the police some presumably goes to lobbyists who will lobby on behalf of blm's legislative causes and it may end up going to political campaigns we simply don't know but what's most important is the broad consideration that all of this is fueling all of this clout money is fueling the infrastructure for this kind of form of rioting protesting and spreads the moral power of what are truly revolutionary goals and doctrines so what are these doctrines well blm you guys have probably heard this expression blm is anti-racist and i think that this is you know it it drapes itself in very sophisticated jargon this theory but i think it's actually very simple and it boils down to just a few very simple points um and the way to kind of get to them is not by going to blm which is very obscure about what it means but by turning to a nationally renowned new york times bestseller who has the most prestigious position at boston university succeeding nobel laureate ellie wisel in this position uh and his name is ibrahim kendi you guys have probably heard of him and he despite all of these honors all this money is among the marginalized as he claims now for him racism means racist ideas and racist policies that promote racial inequalities i'm going to try and break this down very quickly for you it's actually very simple so what it means is that all policies or laws are racist if they don't lead to complete parity among groups so for example there must be complete parity among racial groups of homeownership of medium salaries incomes college and high school graduation and also parity in bad things like arrests criminal convictions if there are disparities among groups in these things that means there's racism in the system and so if there's racism in the system there are two options of what to do the first is get rid of policies get rid of laws regulations whatever it might be that produce these disparate outcomes so for example get rid of sat scores get rid of policing get rid of criminal penalties get rid of credit scores for mortgage loans that's the first option and the second option and this is the more radical one is that you must intentionally discriminate these are his words you must intentionally discriminate against the oppressor group as he says the only remedy to past present and future discrimination is discrimination against the oppressor now of course we have to get rid of racist ideas too not just policies this means boiled down this basically means never making judgments of a group's behavior according to the standards of american civilization because those standards are merely white standards so for example it is racist to say that there is something wrong with teen pregnancy the national museum of african american history and culture recently chimed in on this note and announced that things like work ethic scientific thinking grammar politeness being on time i'm basically quoting them are all actually tools of white supremacy regrettably in their hatred of their alleged oppressors they constantly mistake things needed for any free society like intact families or the rule of law merely for whiteness that's one of the main confusions in their mind oppressors minds who operate on the basis of these standards um must be cleansed through bias training and hate speech regulations what is being asked asked for in this theory is simply impossible and it's this the standards of civilized life cannot be imposed onto any marginalized group but at the same time there must be perfect statistical parity among all of these groups it's simply not possible and if it isn't already clear corporations have an obvious role to play here justice would demand giving jobs to the marginalized and putting them in high positions of influence the transfer this transformation is is in the midst of taking place but it's pretty clear that if it advances these corporations will likely fail but behind these theories there's one very ugly implication and the implication is this that the marginalized because of their marginalization marginalization are fundamentally superior both intellectually and morally to their oppressors they're intel they're morally superior because as candy says it has been a gift that's a quote it has been a gift to be marginalized because it allows him to understand justice who deserves what in a way that oppressors simply cannot he in other words is pure and blameless morally and it means fundamental intellectual superiority because the pr the oppressor you see cannot understand the culture or the psychology of the marginalized but the reverse is not true the marginalized can perfectly understand the oppressor's white fragility white superstructures his cisgenderism and so you see you may already kind of see this but if you want to implement these kinds of theories these kinds of theories of racial superiority racial purity you have to have tyranny that's there's no other way to achieve this and uh it's not even clear but i will kind of add one thing which is that it's not even fully clear that these people believe in these theories and it may just be that they are really animated by animus and hatred now you you may say that these theories are full of contradictions in a way they're silly why have they had such a great degree of success in imposing themselves onto well the universities obviously but corporations in particular and and there's an answer to that the blm and the the organizations that are part of it have a kind of shakedown structure and it goes like this it was perf it was started by al sharpton in the 80s and 90s but it's perfected itself since then and i'll give you the example from louisville kentucky and this is from one of their websites they say first you have to identify the target businesses kroger kfc humana then you have to demand that they issue statements in support of blm if they don't then you target the ceos the cfos the c-suite to force them to do that if they resist and they may well they may well resist then you get the local and national press corps to deride them as racists you swarm them on social media you agitate inside of their companies with sympathetic employees who in turn will agitate with the leadership you target hr departments um all of this has been perfected and works almost to a t and these old school you know libertarian thoughts that you know ceos are these titans who are uh free to act in any courageous and bold way that they want is simply not true this leverage is very strong but this isn't all of course there's one last thing that really makes this uh possible and that is uh white guilt the the white guilt that has been uh issued forth into society uh has been imposed through uh the press through universities onto many corporations and ceos is deeply felt and what it basically means what this doctrine of white guilt basically means is that white people the oppressor group is born with a sin with an original sin which is privilege but unlike original sin it can never be expunged one must perpetually apologize give more and more grants listen be quiet uh and uh uh succumb to this this kind of uh rule and then there's this other kind of ceo that i suspect believes regrettably that uh the left will probably win over the long haul and i might as well tether my wagon with them and give money to them that's the other kind of cynical decision um i'm running out of time but i want to propose a couple of solutions first this has been an experiment for the left they wanted to see how far they can take white guilt in destroying and tearing down america and in a way they have succeeded they've learned how to socially engineer these kinds of situations and to make good on them next time next time this comes about i suspect that there will be if there isn't pushback there will be some desire to pass reparations legislation which they have already written which is already prepared to go or to implement anti-racism uh federal bureaucracies around the state on the state and local level one last thing to conclude this doesn't have to be the case corporations can stand up they can go to the press and they can say shakedowns are unamerican we are being extorted the irs too can investigate where on earth is all of this money going what's it actually being used for and the president of course can do a gambit something like this he can say to the corporations you have contributed to riots that have burned down torn down american cities demand your money back from blm and if you don't well you have contributed to the tearing down of these american cities and investigations should look into this whether you consciously contributed to this or not thank you very much [Applause] okay our next speaker is wilfred wilfred riley sorry associate professor of political science at kentucky state and the author of the books taboo 10 facts you can't talk about hate crime hoax and the 50 000 question he's currently working on the upcoming project alt wrongs an american case against racial nationalism nationalism as well as sketching out a book looking at the transgender gender fluid and other kin i can spell that if you need me to it seems like a neologism if ever i've heard one other kitten communities and and the idea of flexible identity he has published pieces in academic questions commentary quillette and a number of other journals and magazines and i will just say to tie this back to my earlier remark i first became aware of professor riley's existence and work on of course the tucker carlson show where i saw him and was quite impressed by his analysis and wondered why i didn't know about him before but now we do and now you can hear from him directly [Music] well good to be here and thank you for the intro um i will note as read the upcoming potential book about flexible identities as a social scientist who leans right i've enjoyed some comments from the earlier speakers about whether the woke left in fact is sort of the party of science in modern american society and uh looking at my phone getting ready to prep my speech i see that facebook and twitter as of today recognize 58 scientifically distinct sexes or genders so i don't know if they're any uh hillsdale biology faculty in the audience but you may be able to tell me later on at lunch or reception whether that's scientifically accurate or not i will also note if you are dealing with white guilt you can a sage that by buying any of the books just mentioned um so but in in all honesty uh the opening joke aside i'm glad to be here i've worked with bob woodson on a number of things i'm an academic myself and a big fan of the hillsdale model and i'm talking today about what's obviously an extraordinarily relevant topic which is policing not merely in the context of the constitution but of the modern crime environment especially esri inner city crime and especially esri the currently popular idea of defunding the police dramatically shrinking police departments cutting budgets by most proposals are on the order of 40 to 65 percent and these are complex topics but my basic one sentence take on policing is that it's a good idea um i the police are not the police are in general good they're not murdering people in mass and any serious move toward bulk defunding of law enforcement is a silly and dangerous idea and this last point is not a hypothetical from me as sort of center-right political pundit we know this as a fact because we've tried it before um there's a full-length best-selling book by mona sharon do-gooders which is really just the best and one of the most readable of many uh tackling what happened when this last occurred that breaks down how that worked i see a couple people taking notes that's do-gooders well worth reading but between about 1960 and 1974 an incredible number of well-intentioned but unfortunate liberalizing changes were made to the american criminal justice system and i attended law school myself at the university of illinois but i will say this is the case to an extent to which most people who are not themselves leos law enforcement officers or members of the legal community are not aware so we obviously during this period saw miranda the famous case requiring the reading of a right statement to criminal suspects but we also saw a lesser-known matter called escobado which substantially extended that previous case we saw community policing as it's called where many cops spent their time running for example baseball leagues rather than patrolling on foot or in cars we saw the open defunding of many police departments such as newark's we saw lowered average sentences we saw mandatory maximum sentences as well as mandatory minimum sentences i don't want to get too wonky here but what's called the fruit of the poison tree doctrine really took hold around the same time this is the idea that if police officers violate any technical rule while making an arrest or preparing a case it is not the case that the officers are suspended or fired but instead any evidence that's been obtained through this methodology is tossed out and the defendant very often a majority of cases goes free this was famously described by a member of the supreme court as the criminal being set loose because the constable has blundered so i'll note actually even the idea that every criminal defendant must be provided with a free attorney paid for by the state is a product of this era that dates very specifically to the gideon v wainwright decision in 1963. um it's my suspicion that citizens certainly might want to keep some of this gideon for example perhaps miranda in place but the combined effect of all of it at once like so many of the things that happened during the era that's misnamed the 60s so i've heard was predictable and remarkable between the 1960s and the 1990s crime in the usa surged about 570 percent overall if you're looking at the full set of crimes in every statistical model i've seen that's not an exaggeration you can find u.s crime rates between 1960 and 2018 just by searching logically enough the phrase u.s crime rates between 1960 and 2018 and but smart group computer access is broad in the room i suspect but between 1963 and 1993 to give out some of the core statistics here murders surged from thousand six hundred forty to about twenty five thousand uh perhaps even more disturbingly rape sexual assaults jumped from seventeen thousand to a hundred six thousand um robberies went from 116 000 to 660 000. and this is again this is in the modern era when people were reporting crimes this is from the middle of the 1960s to the middle of the 1990s and so on down the line for virtually every other variety of serious crime the only thing that stopped this trend in crime the new normal for crime really it's a bit bizarre to describe something system-wide that lasted 30 to 40 years as a crime wave was republican and conservative democratic mayors and governors probably most notably mr giuliani in new york mayor daley in my hometown of chicago refunding police using technological tools like compstat to track criminals and pulling back as much of what i just described although a great deal of it came down from the federal supreme court level as they could locally and it worked i'm not going to run through every single one of four or five crime stats again but in terms of the key one between 1993 and 2013 murders dropped from that high point of 25 000 that i gave to barely 14 000. new york city alone was responsible for something like one-third of that drop whether or not you like every aspect of his leadership style or not under giuliani mayor giuliani times square in new york city literally went from live sex shows in theaters and people dressed up as cowboys wandering around playing guitars and asking you for money to disney reviews and flashing digital billboards and this wasn't a one-off coincidence um since the sample sets that i've described 1963 and 93 and 2013 every single time we've seen law enforcement pull back or lose by law a major police power we've seen a spike in crime following the michael brown riots just recently i mean we've seen over the past five years perhaps since the ferguson riots in 15 it's important to recall the most sustained wave of rioting in the usa since the 1960s this occurred under president obama this occurred under president trump but following the michael brown riots when activists specifically asked cops to stop what are known as discretionary stops and they did murders went back up from fourteen thousand to seventeen 17294 inside two years this was so obvious that even the u.s mass media had to notice it and they named the trend the ferguson effect we've seen the same thing this year as law enforcement pulls back in response to the riots following the terrible death of george floyd with police precincts literally burning in a couple of cities the famous old third precinct building was set on fire burnt to the ground in minneapolis we've seen shootings double again across entire large neighborhoods of chicago and new york including the one i used to live in the south side of chicago specifically the englewood and bridgeport regions of the city this is literally the most basic sort of common sense um the more good cops you have the less crime you have i'll also add citing the excellent if sometimes ignored work of criminologist john lott the more citizens with legal guns you have the less crime you have the more taxpayers you have fighting crime in general overall the less crime you have this isn't rocket surgery i'll add something controversial and i did intentionally say rocket surgery and honor of an old coach who'd been a military man for many years um i'll add something controversial to this that i do personally think uh in both of these senses that i just gave whether you're talking about police officers or just strong fathers with a shotgun at home the hood quote unquote tends to be under-policed not over-policed uh we hear constantly that there's almost a military occupation of working-class inner-city neighborhoods this is not true police tend to go where there is a surface of crime and just as white americans dominate corporate crime uh the african-american violent crime rate currently is around 2.5 times the white violent crime rate this is simply a fact it can reach 10 to 20 times the white vcr rate as it's called in some inner city areas so i checked a couple of days ago and the murder rate for black males that i didn't adjust by age or anything else just black males in baltimore was around 50 per 100 000 per year to put that in context that would put one of our cities third in the world for violent homicides so baltimore would fall after el salvador venezuela but ahead of afghanistan somalia bosnia kosovo and uganda those were specifically the countries i checked as comparators but there aren't three times or five times or ten times as many cops in baltimore as there are in chicago or as there are in most suburbs at least not on any consistent basis so this creates a worst of both world scenario where honest minority citizens do feel that they are harassed by the police because there are slightly more officers and they're very overworked and they can i'm sure be harsh but where there's still a great deal of crime because there simply aren't enough police to deal with it because the crime rate is 10 times the national normal and that simply can't be matched by the number of officers on the ground and many minority citizens i will note i mean one of the great never discussed facts of american life is the large majority of white and black and asian american and jewish american individuals are normal taxpayers that think very similarly many minority citizens at some level know this gallup recently did a very good-sized poll of black americans instead of white liberal quote unquote allies and found that 81 of black citizens want as many or more police in their neighborhoods and most of these people have a positive view of the cops that are already there the usual counter argument to this and i've sort of had to include this in any talk of this kind because it's been a feature of media coverage for months if not years now the usual counter argument to findings like this is that we are deluded um the claim of activists and i think it's fair to say of much of the u.s mainstream media is that there's a wave of police murders essentially and any black person or other american who denies this just isn't quote unquote woke um just since late may or early june this year we've seen the police-involved killings of george floyd richard brooks hakeem littleton brianna taylor most recently ricardo munoz become major national stories and the idea that's usually presented is that this of course is just the visible tip of a very very sizable iceberg but this is almost entirely a false narrative and it's important to point this out um first speaking from a legal perspective many of these cases are far more complicated than they sound uh mr munoz was literally chasing a cop down the street with a buoy knife when he was shot um given that this produced riots and violence it's difficult to think what might not with without being glib i mean that that is literally probably the most sympathetic imaginable police shooting except perhaps other than mr munoz chasing an officer down the street with a gun but um even the brianna taylor case while a tragedy involves police being shot at while serving a warrant to the correct address and then returning fire that's the actual sequence of events there it's widely detailed and all reports of the case but more to the point the cases that we read about whatever you might think of them aren't just the tip of a giant list i discussed this in one of the books that was mentioned taboo very often they are virtually the whole list according to the excellent annual database of police shootings it's called the counted maintained by the washington post which is not a hard right media outlet the total number of unarmed african-americans killed by the police last year was 14 um 1-4 i will note that after some commentary from myself and others that was increased from the previously cited number of nine which had been up for about eight or nine months so between nine and fifteen uh individuals um if you wonder if there might be some something iffy and how they're defining black i'll note that less than 70 unarmed people overall were shot don't have the number in front of me but i believe it was 62. if you wonder how they're defining unarmed less than a thousand people were killed overall and of 598 of those specifically had a gun 172 specifically had a knife this is all listed almost 100 were trying to run down the officer with a car and all of this is out of about 60 million police stops every year so to cut the stat short there's no epidemic of police killing people and there's one thing that's worth saying here just as a qualitative personal opinion that also came up during the covet 19 panel the mainstream media very very often basically makes up stories where no national level national media worthy narrative exists no one wants to minimize even one death but many of these things are not epidemics that are sweeping the country we've seen this over the years with plane crashes for example young child kidnapping which terrified virtually every upper middle class woman in my circle to the point where they were walking around small children on leashes from the late 90s until about three years ago i don't don't mean to make a joke out of this but again that's about a hundred incidents per year animal attacks don't go in the water satanism in the daycares uh and now to a very real extent we're seeing the same sort of thing with not only police killings but with race relations more broadly to illustrate this very simply it's undisputed that three quarters or so of those killed by police are not black they're white or caucasian hispanics a very valid question to ask is even if we concede that there's some slight disproportion here why are those cases never mentioned i've asked that question in a dozen debates i've frankly never heard an answer um you don't have to give them a disproportionate amount of coverage but why none the one time i looked at this these cases received between five and ten percent of all media coverage of police violence you can test this yourself just by googling something like well-known police shooting uh the most recent time i did this i think i found one hispanic case two white cases in 36 african-american cases so all in all sort of resolving this there are some bad cops sure but it's the sort of coverage i just described that is how you get a fantasy narrative of genocide or race war in the world's wealthiest and i think best country but ordinary taxpayers don't get to live in narnia or any other fantasy world we live in mundane reality and in reality the place where white criminals burning down black businesses while chanting black lives matter just doesn't make a whole lot of sense we need police and maybe a gun at home so we don't get robbed and that really is my presentation in a sentence i could have saved you guys some time but thank you for all that you gave me all right our next speaker is robert woodson he's the founder and president of the woodson center an influential leader on issues of poverty alleviation empowering disadvantaged communities to become agents of their own uplift he is a frequent adviser to local state and federal government officials as well as business and philanthropic organizations his social activism dates back to the 1960s when as a young civil rights activist he developed and coordinated national and local community revitalization programs i think that's important if you if you follow bob woodson as i do uh he can tell you know war stories from that era from a different perspective than from what you usually hear and i think you'll hear that some of that this morning i hope we will and i also just want to mention he i'm sure he doesn't remember this because it was a long time ago and i was a nobody still i am relatively speaking to him and he was somebody but he helped me in the 90s on a project that i was working on at a think tank and i can remember visiting him i don't know if his office is still there but at those days he had a beautiful office in the corner of connecticut avenue in dupont circle in one of those buildings shaped like a triangle and his office was in the point of the triangle in this lovely room and it was wonderful to meet him and get get his help back then and it's great to have him here today uh thank you thank you so much there's a prayer that i utter each time before i speak and i i shared with you and that is god give me the strength to tell and pursue the truth especially when it's inconvenient to me because if you want to go someplace you haven't been you've got to be willing to do something you haven't done and dr king said that the highest form of maturity is the ability to be self-critical and i think as conservatives this is a good time for us to look inside to find out what course correction that we can take to change it will pointed out the fact that there are 14 unarmed blacks killed by white police officers when in fact for every one black is killed by unarmed police i mean unarmed there are 270 that are killed by other blacks that is a reality which means that people are not motivated to change based upon the facts facts are perceptions can have much more of an impact than facts also what i'd like to talk about is strategic interest your strategic interest is associated with your strategic circumstance for instance about a farmer coming to a stream with his mule going to market and the stream is about three feet high moving along at 20 miles an hour and he forces the mule in and it gets swept a mile down the stream then he crosses a year later the farmer comes to the same crossing same mule this time the creek is only six inches and the mule refuses to go in because the mule had good memory but poor judgment you have to understand that your strategic reaction is in response to your strategic circumstance in the 60s i was for central government intervening in the marketplace because blacks did not have the right to vote and so and that required people with bayonets coming and reinforcing telling the states to do today i am against government integration because my strategic circumstance is influenced by my prestigious uh my situation is strategic circumstance and so i'm against that but as a veteran of the civil rights movement i led demonstrations in the 60s but i left the movement because the many of the people who suffered and sacrificed most did not benefit from the change because well that you got remember picketing outside of a pharmaceutical company and when they hired nine black phd chemists they said we got these jobs because we were qualified when this happened i realized i was in the wrong struggle when we also embraced integration and busing i opposed it i said the opposite of segregation is not integration it is desegregation remember debating a a ph.d black law professor before the new york bar association on that issue and i said that if you we have two situations school a where there's all black and it's a presence of educational excellence and school b that's integrated where there's diminished excellence where should we send our children he says school b i said there's no debate but i think that dilemma it was faces but anyway i left the civil rights movement when i realized that a lot of people like poor blacks were not benefiting from the gains of the civil rights movement and when the civil rights leaders entered democratic politics and began to run the cities the fact that the federal government spent 22 trillion dollars on programs to aid the poor with 70 cents of every one of those dollars not going to the poor but those who served the poor they asked which problems are fundable not which are solvable we created a commodity out of poor people because those same elected officials were responsible for dispensing them funds so we we have now a classic two out of uh ten whites with college education works of government six out of ten blacks with college it works for government so our middle class is anchored in a second sector of our economy that requires their black counterpart to be dependent so we have created a structure so so now we have had these huge expenditures over 50 or 60 years and and so but now because of those so-called inequities have increased in cities that have been run by in order for those officials to justify or answer the question why if racism were the culprit today then why are black children failing in institutions run by their own people but to avoid having to address those kind of inconvenient questions they point to institutional racism whatever that means that means you white folks got this magic uh remote that you point at a school system run by blacks so to make sure the leadership miseducates their children and so it is important to understand that that the reason that that black lives matter and others have convinced people against their perception that the problems of 70 out of wedlock births the high black on black crime rate more blacks are killed by other blacks in six months than were killed in 9 11. we have a 9 11 every six months but to avoid having to address the the cause of that we say it's institutional racism so that then we don't have to address the problems within the black community and why we are not moving and so uh and because the problems of outer wedlock birth for instance and i don't want to have time to go into it but it was a conscious policy of cloud and pivot at columbia university where they said if we can just separate work from income it will mean fathers are redundant and therefore you'll see a school dropout so all of the problems of the decline of the family occurred as a consequence of not just a policy but the federal government had to actually come in and open offices and actively recruit people into the welfare system so we have millions coming in in three years in the 70s into the welfare system at a time when the unemployment rate in the black community was only four percent and so that's how we have it is a conscious policy and so what we're doing at 1776 unites at the woodson center is that we're we know that the left is weaponizing race today with 1619 and our pushback against that cannot be white papers that think tanks discussing it on fox news we need a ground game that confronts their uh uh a narrative with an alternative narrative that not only provides data and and reports for instance they are saying that the the uh the the decline of the family was related to institutional slavery that is not case between 1930 and 1940 when when racism was enshrined in law we had no political representation the black marriage rate was higher than any group in the country elderly people could walk safely in those communities without fear being mugged by their grandchildren so we at 1776 are presenting this to deal with the perception that racism is the cause of the problems today and we are presenting a whole array of information and also videos and curriculum that says when white people were at their worst blacks were at their [Applause] [Music] best and therefore there must be so so so that we have demonstrated by our actions that we have resilience and we're talking about slavery we need to talk about a history of resilience and so what we're doing again is at the woodson center in 1776 is not just present arguments we must present examples jesus understood that when the service of john the baptist came to him said are you the one shall we seek another he didn't say wasn't i born on christmas here's my resume here's my birth certificate no what he did he didn't say anything he healed in their presence and said go tell them what you saw ladies and gentlemen the conservative movement has got to do more than just talk about what the left is doing we must join with the joseph's of this world low-income people in these neighborhoods who are suffering the consequence of these race policies they're being pimped they're being bamboozled they're being exploited we need to join in common community with low-income mothers i'll be meeting with 300 of them who've lost children not to white police officers but to other blacks and they are going to stand up and demand that we want more police they are the voice in other words what the what the left does is their moral authority is derived from saying they are the legitimate representative of marginalized people well we need to join with these so-called marginalized people and give them the ability to speak for themselves to say they don't represent us and therefore what we are seeking at the woodson center is to develop an alliance between the pharaohs the good pharaohs and the good josephs in our society as you know in in genesis and i know we're running out of time in my book the triumphs of joseph i talk about what's going to save america is joseph's uh i mean the good pharaohs are powerful wealthy people who are able to see beyond their power and their wealth and see something over the horizon that's troubling them but they're also able to reach across racial ethnic and class lines and empower a 31 year old uneducated hebrew shepherd in the pharaoh's prisons and come together and join in a partnership to save america and that's the kind of coalition that we need to bring together the people low-income blacks are are the sleeping giant in america when we come together and empower them and we stand together to unite to push back against 1619 and the anarchists that are trying to destroy our nation the people suffering the problem must be given in voice in their own restoration and and uplift god bless you [Music] [Applause] okay first i want to give the panelists an opportunity to make comments or ask questions of one another and then we will turn it over to questions from the audience and we do have uh students with the microphone so please wait until you're called on and get the microphone but first of our panelists have anything to to add or say or ask no okay we can we can go to the audience then good speeches guys i can't see any raised hands because the lights are right in my eyes but i'll keep looking uh this student may have found you there okay well we've got you've got the microphone you've seen i guess i'm first oh here we go good if we don't have government police in a community that doesn't mean we'd have no police thousands of years of history looking around the less developed world today if there's no government police then you have criminal gangs or militias vigilante groups i mean this seems so obvious why isn't this obvious to everyone okay i guess is kind of junior man on the policing question i'll take that one first that's absolutely correct um if you want more kyle written houses in the streets the best way to get that is to defund and disband the police what happened in kenosha which again is about 50 miles perhaps from where i grew up in chicago is that a group of essentially armed left-wing fighters had been burning buildings i mean there was a sizable church that had been damaged if not destroyed a massive used car lot minority owned like most of the businesses had been damaged or destroyed and a bunch of frankly right-wing militiamen showed up to fight the left-wing militiamen i mean you can discuss the motivations of either side but that's what happened you had two groups in the streets and there was a gun battle um to some extent written house won but i mean during the shooting that became famous he was being followed by down the street by a group of other males two of whom were armed with firearms so yeah the way you get groups of young guys in the street fighting with guns is to disband the police i couldn't agree with that more a very quick follow-up comment i'm a fan of the movie gangs of new york there's a scene that shows what this would look like where two volunteer fire and police companies get into a fight during a fire uh essentially the young men in the neighborhoods were the police and fire squadrons at the time they show up at the scene of a fire where there's also criminal felony theft going on recognize one another from a bar fight and take on one another while the fight goes on and people run out of the building with bags of valuables so i prefer professional policing to that second option i'd like dr woodson to uh comment on the role of faith in in your programs the role of faith is central to the restoration and redemption of individuals in low-income communities the woodson center has 2 500 grassroots leaders in 39 states of all racial and ethnic groups 90 of them there they have been delivered from brokenness in their lives because of their faith in god that they have used as as a foundation and and also what is important their lives are are they are the foundation of their success are consistent with the founders principles they don't understand it and so it so it is it is a upon the foundation of a virtue of self-determination all of the things that black lives matter say are white or bourgeois values it is precisely those bourgeois values that have helped blacks transcend slavery jim crow and the current crisis so faith is central to everything that our people do just recently president trump signed an executive order that stopped the use of critical race theory as a training platform in the executive branch departments could you speak to what critical race theory is and how it infiltrated the executive branch departments sure let me uh try my hand at that uh critical race theory uh has to do with the theory that i tried to lay out in my talk uh namely that the marginalized are superior on these two grounds uh intellectually and morally to their oppressors and that all policies that stem from that insight that realization must be to correct the oppressor's illegitimate usurpation of the moral qualities of the property of the freedoms of the very souls of the so-called marginalized so that's the theory now you're right that it has crept into the federal bureaucracy and in a way that should not be surprising it's it's alarming it's despair it's it's it's disappointing but it's not surprising because these theories were born in universities they basically dominate almost every university in america except for hillsdale and a tiny handful of others and they have spread through the press to a an entire industry that works to do these kinds of consulting jobs to teach the oppressor group how despicable they are how they must bow down how there are superiors who ought to rule them and govern them and tell them how to think now regarding this executive order it's a very good step but regrettably it's reversible the next president can very easily reverse this and if you really want to do damage to these kinds of doctrines you have to do damage to the universities that relentlessly propagate this kind of stuff and it's actually easier to do than you'd think you can take away federal research funds that go from taxpayers to universities that are spreading these kinds of doctrines and who are hiding using that federal those federal research funds to hide behind science so there are actually a lot of creative things that conservatives can do but they regrettably haven't thought about doing them because a lot of conservatives have been asleep thinking that this is a problem that will just take care of itself but i i think what what bob has said is correct that now is a time for activism from conservatives in in rooting out these kinds of problems how is it that the message of dr martin luther king it seems to have gotten buried and i was wondering if blm does not want to ascribe to his message because he is a man of faith i had had the pleasure of meeting him and having marched with him and i think his words are more prophetic now than ever before we all needed isn't justice is i had a dream speech but his letter from a birmingham jail he said the greatest stumbling block the black progress is not the white citizens council it's lukewarm acceptance from people of good will it's more difficult and to deal with people of ill will and so but but dr king's the content of your character is still central to what we at the woodson center and most grassroots leaders in these communities are pursuing the problem is they don't have a voice because the qualities that make grassroots martin luther king oriented people effective also renders them invisible because the left does not give them you know i get invited to speak on the left but one time because once we get around the gatekeepers i remember taking this message for three hours on black news network it went out to 12 states for three hours and the host was hostile to me and after half an hour arguing well let's see what the the listeners think it was seven to one in support of everything that i was saying and so the challenge is how do we get our message directly to the people the 80 percent of black americans who recently polled said they off support the police they are the ones that we need to reach around these gatekeepers and give them an opportunity to speak and act for themselves that's when that's how we can change it great thank you for your talks i wonder if uh any of you could comment on how the definition of racism seems to have changed in modern times where it used to be sort of prejudiced against someone on the basis of their ethnicity or their skin color and now it seems to be you can have unconscious racism if anything harm someone of of of color then it was a racist act or a racist institution could you talk about how you see the word racism being used and how that is maybe different than how it was used 40 years ago all right i think that that's um that's a complex question that has a fairly simple answer racism traditionally has been and i'd be interested to hear what the other two panelists have to say about this but racism traditionally has been defined as a fairly simple human vice you don't like other people because of their membership in a particular racial group and in the usa in recent years that's faded extraordinarily dramatically if you ask people black white hispanic american would you not date an attractive woman for example of another race the percentage that say no absolutely would not that's down under 10 so as that's begun to fade there have been some questions about the viability of the organizations frankly that depend on fighting racism and perhaps coincidentally you've seen a change in the definition of what racism is what racism means now and i think both the other panelists have referred to this to a lot of people is any disparity kind of getting to the point the critical race theory definition of bigotry is essentially disparity so the great social scientist tom sol actually wrote a book responding to this but the idea of critical theory is that racism is inherent in what look like let's say facially neutral systems for example the sat exam and the reason that we know that there must be bigotry inherent in these systems is that different groups perform differently in a typical year asians outscore caucasians whites beat african-americans african-americans perhaps beat recent latino immigrants so on down the line there must be some kind of prejudice math may perhaps be racist um and i'm not i'm not saying this to be glib at all ibrahim kendi openly argues this he says that there are only two options when you look at a gap like this one you can believe that the group that's underperforming is inferior and he means genetically from my read of his book or two you can believe that the instrument somehow is prejudiced i say there's a third option group b might have studied less for the test and when you look i'm not when you look at white and african american performances relative to asian american performances that's what you find but there's a very very intense reluctance as some of your social scientists have no doubt found to do this there's a lot of criticism levied at people who look at for example how much study time different groups put in or the role of having a father present on this kind of thing but the short answer is bigotry is often defined now as any disparity there's a disparity in criminal arrests so policing is racist let me just one quick comment i have a column in the hill today that addresses that but i think i can speak for will riley and we belong to the great high council of black america and we have absolved all white people for their sins of their past you are absolved job all of them bob [Laughter] this uh one quick line this does illustrate to some extent how absurd this is i mean bob woodson and myself are both confident black men i teach at a well-ranked historically black college so i mean who has the black perspective would it be myself would it be him or would it be a left-wing opponent across from either of us on the debate stage or is there perhaps no such thing i'd like to add [Applause] again can i add just one thing uh on this question of of the expansion of the definition of racism you know it has gone from what my panelists have said and it has become diffuse and everywhere ever pervasive in the entirety of the system but this is just an abstraction you have to ask yourself where is that system where does it exist and what they end up saying is well that it exists in the minds and in the hearts of the oppressor group and so what then needs to happen is there need to be laws that criminalize hate speech there need to be various kinds of bias trainings to get rid of these things and you know you you walk into this situation and you ask yourself well huh the way that the left is organized today making racism the central facet of what it does do they actually want it to disappear must it continue to go on in perpetuity an unsolvable thing so that this whole infrastructure is kept together and to take that one step further one even wonders whether there's a kind of cynicism inside of blm leadership namely to rile up more people to say this is not right and to blame that as racism so that that little uh kind of you know exploitation shakedown mechanism continues to go on as america actually becomes less and less racist this reminds me of an anecdote for which i cannot vouch but it's apt that sometime in the 1950s some interior agricultural province of china had a major rat problem and so mao came up with the enterprising idea that he would pay the peasantry for every a bounty on rats after which point they started raising rats and i think we're about out of our out of time but we have time for one last question over here okay um i was wondering if you could speak to the role of youth in the conversation about racism as often we are still trying to find our own opinions but may seem pressed to have an opinion i couldn't hear the question can you can you can you repeat the question please for the panelists yes how off uh what role should youth have in the conversation about racism um when quite frequently we're still trying to figure out our own views do we just go yeah or whoever you know whoever has a thought on that i mean if i can interpret the question i think there's this notion you know a phrase that one did not hear five years ago uh but is now everywhere two-word phrase breaks silence there's this idea that like you must take a stand maybe you don't think you have an opinion on this maybe you think it's irrelevant to your daily life and your job but you have to sign on the dotted line or we'll identify you as a bad person and then when somebody who's held out for a while finally speaks they are said to have you know they break silence i i i assume that's what the questioner is getting at that dynamic well if we're just sort of moving down the table and answering that one i think there are a couple things first of all i don't think you have to take a stand on every single question if you don't have a strong opinion i recently asked my students their opinion on some of the fighting going on the rioting in the streets and so on and one kid responded and said if the situation actually was a neo-nazi a communist and a legitimately crooked cop fighting in the streets i would let them fight and walk on to work i don't think that's actually the situation but that's a very legitimate perspective you don't always have to pick a side you can be perfectly free to think that many movements and society are run by lunatics and grifters and just go on with your life um but with that said my advice if you're genuinely interested in questions of race or feminism or anything like that is to pretty much read everything one thing that i'm very thankful of is that i grew up in a diverse working class neighborhood away from kind of the sheltered single perspective you're supposed to have um if i went to the thrift store to pick up some books after practice i mean i got everything from hockey mod booty writing for third world press to people that would now be considered quote-unquote alt-right peter bremelo and pat buchanan writing about teachers unions and the death of the west military schwarzkopf and colin powell talking about when war is necessary and i don't know if i'd put any of these people in the categories they're sometimes placed into i'm just saying i read all these books i disagreed with some opinions i agreed with some opinions um that's what i would recommend i think that today in many universities there's sort of a crippling sort of left of center left ideology that's the only thing you're supposed to believe in and a lot of it's just nonsensically wrong like when the the quote-unquote joke was made earlier are there really 58 genders so if people ask you to believe in something i guess look at it go online research read maybe talk to a faith leader a coach your parents and see what you actually think and make your decisions based on the facts that come in from that that's really all i can say all right let me just say that my my prayer is that white people will will get to the point where they get race fatigue and just get tired of it and on the other hand i'm thinking about cashing in on it that's selling like everybody else i want to i want to sell for fifty dollars a paddle that guilty self-fledgling whites can buy for fifty dollars and whenever they feel this the surge of white guilt they can give it to a black right here didn't you want to sell these on the 1776 website at 50 maybe maybe low i you know i think people might be willing to talk to legal about it reparations pedal i'd pay more than 50. i recommend white guilt cards instead just you know i didn't know there were 58 genders the last time i had wrote about that i think was four years ago it just shows you how much progress the united states has made in four years because when bill de blasio announced his new policy for the city of new york i think in 2016 there were only 32. no one ever asks what the wage gap is across all of them all right well please join me in thanking our panelists

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 99,692

Rating: 4.8651462 out of 5

Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america, civil rights, BLM Movement, Constitution Day

Id: vzXhjEPchCU

Length: 70min 13sec (4213 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020