They’re Lying About Hate Crimes - Wilfred Reilly

The Jussie Smouth story is an archetypal example of, well, this victimization can happen anywhere. It can happen to the most successful of us. Nothing has changed. Again, the only difference is that the story was a lie. And the Michael Brown story was a lie. And to a large extent, the Trayvon Martin story was a lie.

In the two years after Mr. Floyd's death, there are a bunch of practical questions. I mean, where they're dueling toxicology reports and where it appears that George Floyd took enough fentanyl to kill about 70% of adult males. To this day no one has explained to me what the racism was. There's no convincing evidence of racism in that case.

Wilfred Riley, it's been a long time coming. Great to have you on the show. Before we get into the fantastic work you do on hate crime hoaxes and all of that kind of stuff, tell us a little bit about your background and who you are. Well, right now I'm a professor of political science at Kentucky State University down in Frankfurt. That's a historically black college in the Kentucky State Capitol.

I've written a number of books. I mean, you've mentioned some of them, Hate Crime, Hoax, Taboo. But before that, I was a kid from Chicago. I was born on the south side of the city. I grew up mostly on the north side in what's currently the Wicker Park area, kind of our hipster district.

It wasn't then. It was jokingly nicknamed Needle Park. Very urban, interesting area. But grew up, had a normal sort of working class life. My mom was an inner city school teacher, actually. She taught for most of her... Not life, but the period when I was there in the East Aurora School District right outside of Chicago, heavily Latino.

Went from there to colleges in the state. I went to Southern Illinois University, a perfectly solid college, but also at this time, I think Playboy's third-ranked party school. Congratulations. That's right. I did my best to keep the name up, really. But went from there to the University of Illinois. I got a degree in law. And by this time, because, I mean, it's not really all that hard to graduate from the Chicago and Aurora public schools without insult.

them. It's not that hard to graduate from SIU in 2000. So I was like 23 when I got out of law school, something like that. 23 at the oldest. And so I had to kind of figure out what to do. And I ended up doing about a 10-year odyssey of different things. I went back to graduate school. I ended up getting a PhD, which is how I came to be in my current position, of course.

But while pursuing the degree, my mom fell fairly sick, so I ended up back in Chicago. I worked as one of the canvas managers for a public activist group for a while. So there's literally guys out on the street like, hey, got a minute for true gay love? With the number of physical scuffles and so on that you'd expect. I did that for a couple of years, kind of the archetypal city kid job.

And met this fascinating group of people. I mean, the New York office had an even larger one, but this is downtown Chicago. So you met all these poets, writers, aspiring athletes, people like this who are just coming through one of the big cities in the USA. Moved from there to kind of a sales or trading floor bullpen job. It was actually a British company, Marcus Evans. I was in the branch of the company that does outreach to CEOs to book them to meet our clients.

which was as obnoxiously aggressive as you can probably imagine you had to get the cell phones of these guys and call them and not get thrown off the line and people were betting on whether or not you'd do it for each call you made the numbers all go up on a big board on one side of the office So I did that for two or three years and did pretty well, honestly. And after that, by this point, the degree was mostly completed. I also taught in the city colleges of Chicago.

Which is interesting. I mean, those are, again, somewhat inner city, although they're community colleges rather than high schools. Malcolm X College is one of them. Harry Truman was the college I taught the most at. So by the time I was done with all this, I ended up just getting the degree and getting out of school and applied for jobs as an academic, essentially. And I got some of them.

I don't know how much being an in-state minority from a reasonably well-known family on my mother's side helped. My mom was kind of separated from a lot of the rest of the group at this point. But I ended up getting some offers and choosing Kentucky State, partly because it's a historically black college in Appalachia.

So I thought there would be an actual chance there to help some kids go on to live kind of the rest of their lives. And there actually has been. So that's who I am and how I came to be here. Well, that's great. And one of the things that you have done is address very directly something. And I'd be curious to hear your opinion, whether it's something that happened more recently or whether it's something that's been going on for a long time.

But there seems to be a huge gap between the reality of race relations and policing in America, particularly of ethnic minority groups, and the perception... as it exists in the public. Is that a more recent phenomenon? I remember encountering it as a non-American in 2014 with the Michael Brown case. I read about it in the newspapers, and I read the official narrative, and then I actually looked and read every single word of the grand jury process. And those pictures were completely different.

And that's when I first became aware of this. Is this, first of all, the disparity between what we're told and what the reality is? Is that a new thing or has that always been the case? The extent to which we're seeing that now is, I'd say, completely new. I mean, so there's actually some interesting data on this on American race relations, where Pew tracks people essentially every year and asks how they feel race relations in the USA are going.

And when this process began in kind of the modern version, it began in the 1990s. People basically said race relations were good. As I recall the famous graphic, it was 70% of African-Americans, 66% of whites. Those numbers might be reversed. Said race relations were positive to very positive.

This is kind of the Michael Jordan, Larry Bird era. I mean, we're not talking about segregation here if you're living in, again, Chicago or New York, whatnot. Probably half the intimate relationships in my high school were interracial.

So that was that was the situation. People are getting along fairly well and people thought they were getting along fairly well. And since then, we've seen kind of a weird downward trajectory. So if you look at the same data today, only about 33 percent of African-Americans, 40 percent. of whites think race relations are at all good. And the problem with this is that objectively they seem to be improving.

So, I mean, objectively, if you look at the number of interracial relationships in the country or something like that, or approval of interracial relationships, let's say, that's currently at 94%. So 94% of Americans are fine with people of different backgrounds, marrying, you know, they're fine working for a black boss, they're fine working for a white boss if they're African American.

But there's this perception that something out there is making things worse. I think that that's fair to say. So you've got almost no one thinking things are good, while objectively things are pretty good. and i'd say it's hard to deny that media has played a big role here so i mean when you talk about the michael brown case michael brown is a completely justified police shooting i mean you mentioned reading essentially the legal transcripts of the case

I'm an academic. I'm actually a legal consultant. I have as well. I mean, what happened is that Michael Brown, now Michael Brown is about 6'5". Michael Brown is an enormous guy. I recall recruited by community colleges as a linebacker. That might be a different case, Alton Sterling.

But essentially, Michael Brown is a guy who's walking down the middle of a street in Ferguson, Missouri. And this is after committing basically a strong arm robbery. He beat up a well-loved neighborhood shopkeeper and stole basically a box of blunts. I mean, a box of those little sort of Optimo brand cigars are not the most serious crime. But he's, as I recall, wanted at this time. And so he's walking down the street. A cop stops him for some reason.

They get into an argument and Brown actually attacks the officer and they're grappling for the officer's gun. Like Michael Brown's DNA was found on the slide and trigger guard of Darren Wilson's gun. And Darren Wilson shoots the guy.

And you hate to see that happen, but it's one of the most justified police shootings you can possibly imagine. I mean, the Obama Justice Department declared this to be a justified shoot. This is, I recall, this was reviewed two or three times by different levels of legal authority.

So the that's the real narrative. And that's why Darren Wilson is he was never convicted of anything. As I recall, he's still in law enforcement, at least on the consulting side. There's not nothing really happened except, of course, you know, the tragic loss of a human.

Well, what really happened was the narrative around the world, which is hands up, don't shoot. The guy had his hand up, the police officer killed him despite all of this, right? So this is your point about the media. It was a perfectly legitimate shooting that was... All bullshit, as you say.

Yes, I mean, bluntly put, I didn't mean to cut you off there, but yeah, it's all complete BS. Yeah, the narrative that began almost immediately from kind of just casual friends of Brown or people that were observing the two men fight was, yeah, that Michael Brown had been...

walking away he'd had his hands up and he was sort of ruthlessly shot as i recall shot in the back by this this killer cop this white man and none of that occurred and i think you got to a very important point so the question is why did race relations go from being viewed as 70 positive to being viewed as 30% positive while they were improving. And the answer to that, I think, is that there's constant media presentation of this absolutely false narrative.

that we're all killing each other over here. And I will say, especially to a UK audience in part that might not know this, I mean, we're now seeing this from the American right as well. where there are videos constantly trending on social media or being written up on sites on the right that have quite a large audience, you know, showing, say, five black men beating up a lone white guy.

The one time I looked at this for a serious paper, interracial crime in the classic sense. So violent crime involving, how would you say, a black perp and a white victim or a white perp and a black victim. That's 3% of what we call index crime, which is how serious crime is categorized in the USA. It's extraordinarily rare. Both of these groups are pretty tough and well-armed. There's not...

There's not a massive amount of this. What does occur, by the way, is 80 percent black on white. So if you're going to focus on this niche category of crime, it's absolutely correct that the mainstream left wing narrative is even more wrong. than any of the other narratives out there i think that's that's fair to say but yeah the the entire storyline that this is continually going on and that it is a sufficient problem to disrupt the progress we've made in race relations that's

That's invented. And the question is sort of who invented it and why? I think that's fair to say. And what is the answer to that question? Well, I think the answer to that question is, in large part, activist organizations and the media are somewhat intentionally presenting a false narrative. Now, the media's motivation here is, I think, a little more understandable. I mean, there's a famous old line, if it bleeds, it leads. So, yeah, I mean, it's true about journos and I think every country.

But so people have realized that presenting this image of constant racial conflict or black victimization leads to cliques. It leads to that sort of... liberal, heavily female, mostly white audience that consumes, for example, the Times and the Post feeling guilty buying papers. I think for the activists, there is a deeper motivation, which is instrumental.

And it gets into one of the issues in the United States, which is that there are extremely large performance differences between ethnic groups in the country. And this is true, by the way, if you read the great Thomas Sowell or William Julius Wilson on the left or something like that. This is true in every really polyglot society, Malaysia or something like that.

where you might see more Malay warriors in the army. You might see more Chinese students getting engineering degrees. Perhaps Indians do this, that kind of thing. But in America, we don't really like to think about that. The idea is it's the land of equal opportunity for everyone.

So when you actually see these performance differences, I mean, so on the SAT annual exam, the average score for black students is a 950. The average score for whites is an 1110. When you see something like that, there's this. question that automatically arises of what caused that, what could cause that. And in reality, there are a number of different answers. I mean, an awkward one is that there is a more hood, quote unquote, culture in the black community.

African-Americans on average tend to be more working class, more urban, more distrustful of the surrounding society, which you can almost understand, right? I mean, so on down the line. Black people are also a lot younger. So, I mean, the average age for a black man in the United States is 27, at least at the mode for a white guy, it's 58. Yeah, that's a huge difference. White Americans are kind of dying off.

That's one of the underlying things with the quote unquote great replacement that's not discussed. I mean, white people, Americans in general aren't having kids, but white Americans certainly are not. And upper middle class white Americans really are not. The entire what's called TFR in the country, the total fertility rate is 1.81. You need a 2.1 to survive. I'm sure that any Westerner knows this to some extent about most of these societies. Actually, it's interesting because I think.

Many of us who listen and talk about these things know... The vast majority of people, they're still stuck in the paradigm of 20 years ago where our babies are killing the planet and destroying the earth. That's exactly, that's a good response point. I think that's correct. The normies are still stuck in that paradigm. Yeah, and that's...

That's completely wrong. We don't have enough people. We're not going to have enough people, especially upper middle class tax bank citizens, to sustain that mass infrastructure of Social Security, Medicare, NHS in Britain, all of that that we've built up over the past 60 years. People need to be having kids. And there are a ton of reasons why this is happening. I mean, the most obvious is that men aren't proposing marriage until the average age of 33.

And most women prior to that point are on birth control. So it's very difficult to have children until you get to the point where you almost biologically can't without being glib about it. So, I mean, that's that itself is an interesting question. But I mean, the we got here talking about just age gaps between blacks and whites. I mean, the age gap in mode is 31 years.

Just at the mean, I believe it's 11. So anyway, the point there, I think, is that if you're a Solian, which I am, or for that matter, if you're a genetic hereditarian or a bunch of other things. There are plenty of explanations for why groups would be doing differently. But the one that seems to have found acceptance in the United States in the mainstream is that the answer is racism.

So the one cause of any performance difference between any two large groups of people would be racial prejudice. And people like Ibram Kendi, for example, pretty openly say this. I saw some light smiles at the mention of the great man's name. But I mean, I think on page 12 of one of his books, How to Be an Anti-Racist, this is stated very explicitly.

like when you see groups performing differently there are two options either there's something wrong with one of the groups that's how he chooses to phrase it or prejudice there's something going on in systems And I think basically getting to the point, I think activists believe that or at least find it useful to believe that. And I think they say it sort of intermittent instrumentally. So when you look at a mainstream sort of New York Times feature piece on racism.

Very rarely do they prove that there's a lot of racism in the industry or the social class group that's being attacked. And in fact, it would usually be pretty hard to do that. Because every year we ask people basic questions about racism. Would you be willing to vote for a qualified same party political candidate of a different race?

And what we find is that whatever it is that you're 92, 96 percent of people say they would be. So you actually can't identify a ton of mainstream racial prejudice from blacks or whites in the USA. So the way racism is determined. unquote, in these studies is that you'll basically just point to a gap. Infant mortality recently came up. So you'll say that African-American women have four times the infant mortality rate of Caucasian women.

which is true in some years. But I mean, what's not pointed out is that the rate for Caucasian women is, you know, 99.8 survival of healthy babies over one year. And the rate for black women is 99.2% survival of healthy babies or something like that. That's the first point. But going beyond that, there really is not much evidence that prejudice is the cause of that.

I mean, you could look at a whole bunch of things, Southern culture, obesity, drug use, although whites are certainly catching up on some of these some of these metrics. Good, tight race. But anyway, that's how racism is demonstrated. And there's an instrumental goal here, of course, which is if racism is the cause of all of these massive problems we see.

And it really is kind of hard to overstate this. Like when you look at African-Americans here on a bunch of metrics and whites here, there is a natural desire unless you're a bigot to say, well, let's fix that there. There must be a problem. We must be responsible for this. And that's an extraordinarily appealing proposition, I think. For me, one of the cases that...

took this whole thing mainstream, and by mainstream, I mean international, was a Jussie Smollett case. I remember hearing about it for the first time, and I go, that's kind of odd. You know, because as somebody who grew up in an area where there were, in my day, what was called the National Front far-right organizations, it's rare that they're as cartoonish. as Jussie described in his account. So let's talk about that case. And why do you think it went international?

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Well, I think a couple of things. First of all, I think that that's a characteristic of hate hoaxes in general, like a silly cartoonish presentation. So, I mean, I think we're all familiar. We're all pretty competent online debaters.

And I mean, I think we're familiar with the alt, right? The guys with the frogs and toads and so on. So obviously there is a racist right. If you saw Pepe or Groyper or something like that painted on a wall over the phrase TND or something, you'd probably say, oh, that's some...

racist jackass who's a decent graffiti artist like you'd understand what it meant but i mean there aren't that many people that are nazis if that makes sense there aren't that many genuine neo-nazis and they're generally mocked even by people who are racist there are almost no clansmen So what you discover with a lot of hate hoaxes is this kind of crude, almost reverse minstrel show presentation.

Where you've got the swastikas written on the wall, but it's written backwards. The arms, they're going the wrong way. And I think that that's a pretty good sign that you're encountering a hoax. So Jussie Smollett fits that bill.

By the way, I mean, when you say you're from a large urban area, it had minorities, it had races. I'm actually, as I said, I'm from Chicago. So that area, Streeterville, is our young professional district. It's sort of pork belly salesmen and that kind of thing. It's probably 10% black.

10% East and South Asian, at least 15% gay. Although I might be stereotyping a little bit as a heterosexual man. But I mean, the idea that there'd be two people walking through there in sort of patriotic ski masks with... MAGA hats on. I mean, carrying ropes and nooses and bottles of bleach. I mean, there'd be a brawl at the first Irish pub you encountered, the first black hip-hop club.

I mean, so, no, it just struck me as inherently ridiculous. Like, no one can believe that. Also, at this time of year in Chicago, it's usually about negative four. Jussie Smollett actually said this. I mean, if you're going out at two in the morning, there's wind skating off the lake, which is an inland sea. It's one of the Great Lakes. There's snow blowing horizontally. People are shielding their girlfriends on the inside. So it just, it clearly wasn't true.

And I think a lot of people knew that. I mean, Dave Chappelle, who's from another big American city, goes to Chicago all the time to do comedy in our theaters. I mean, he just said, like, you know, I'm going to knock the black pronunciation off this guy's name. He's going to be Jussie Smalley, the mad Frenchman from now on. No one could lie like this in our community. I think a lot of people had that first impression.

Why did this go so viral, though, so international? Yeah, so why was it? Why did it capture the imagination as much as it did? Because you could argue, look, this is an actor, but no one really knew who Jussie Smollett was. They do now. They do now, yeah.

Well, it's sort of like Benedict Arnold, right? You just make just one mistake. He was a pretty effective cavalry captain before that. It was already called Judas. But to answer your question, I think that this story illustrated to a lot of people... It was, again, an instrumentally useful story. It illustrated to a lot of people that the worst was still going on. You know how the Americans are.

You know how the whites and for that matter, the blacks are over there. You know, violence. You know, so it was this innocent young black man. He's gay. He was walking down the street. He's knocked over the head by these thugs and goons.

You know, he's abused. He fights back bravely. It was a perfect story. And that's why it went viral, because it was a perfect story. It perfectly illustrates National Front. We would say KKK style hatred. It illustrates that that era is not over. That kind of thing. And I mean, the only problem was that it was fake. It was totally made up. So that was that was an issue. I mean, it is a point that is an issue. Do you think that there's this deep seated need within us to have these stories to.

To have it reinforced that we are victims, that we are powerless. And here's another example of it. Well, I mean, there's no such need within me, and I don't think within you. But I do think that on the left, we've replaced heroin. On the modern...

progressive left we're not talking about union pipe fitters or some such as you guys know but i mean we've replaced heroism with victimization so the goal now is not to kill the dragon it's to be eaten by it or at most saved from it to be harassed by the dragon yeah to be

Pinched on the ass once by the dragon and your career is made. I mean, isn't it? But it really is. It's difficult to overstate the extent to which this is true. I have a buddy of mine who's a African-American doctor. In fact, I have like five buddies who are African-American doctors, but only one is relevant to this.

this story and this guy was talking to me and just it was a bunch of us in sort of a group chat kind of setting and he said you notice there aren't any white women online on dating apps and i was just like what what the hell are you talking about? It's just 60, 70% of them. And he said, no, like every woman who's an upper middle class Caucasian woman doesn't just want to say that because there's nothing exciting about being a well-adjusted white girl from Cleveland.

So they're all something else. Like, they're Jewish, Mina, neurodivergent, bisexual, and a proud LGBT ally, like, with the flag. And he showed me, like, the profiles that were contacting him, and it was literally eerie. And this might be different because he's a black guy. if we're putting that in frame, but it literally every one of them mentioned their sexual identity, mentioned some kind of alleged physical or mental disability on the order of ADD.

um mentioned that they were a member of some invisible minority group like proud to be half lebanese you know this this sort of thing and i mean it really was it was very notable and ever since then I've seen the same sort of thing across a range of media. So I think we're giving power to victimization. And I think that the Jussie Smollett story is an archetypal example of, well, this victimization can happen anywhere. It can happen to the most successful of us. Nothing has changed.

Again, the only difference is that the story was a lie and the Michael Brown story was a lie. And to a large extent, the Trayvon Martin story was a lie. Trayvon Martin was 17, not 12. He started the fight. This is essentially two men that got into a brawl. You know, almost every one of these stories was a lie.

Even we saw, not to get off track, we saw the Daniel Penny case, in my opinion, having a legal background, collapse the other day when it was revealed that after the fight between these two men, Jordan Neely. Was alive. Had a strong pulse. It was still moving in his body. The cops refused to give him a very basic CPR technique because he was too filthy. This is something that just came out in the case. None of these storylines were real.

Some were exaggerations. Others were completely made up. And the Jussie Smollett story, I think, is the archetypal example of the second category. Just something that didn't happen at all. But that's so worrying that the fact that these stories and some of them are serious. You know, whatever you think about the Michael Brown, that's a serious incident. Somebody lost their life. Of course, of course. But the fact that we happily. Well, not we, but people happily make up lies about them.

is incredibly worrying because it's not just the lie that happens, it's the effect that that lie has on society, on the effect that that lie has on racial relations. It's really toxic. And policing, which is very important, too. Yes, and I'm glad you brought that up, actually. I mean, one of the things that is discussed in real scholarship on this is what's called the Ferguson effect and then the Floyd effect. So, I mean, in the two years...

after Mr. Floyd's death, there were, I intentionally won't say murder or something. I mean, again, that's a case where obviously not ideal police work, but. where there are a bunch of practical questions. I mean, where they're dueling toxicology reports and where it appears that George Floyd took enough fentanyl to kill about 70% of adult males.

So, I mean, again, the frame for all of this is not let's neutrally analyze what actually happened. It's sort of in the minds of the activists and the journalists moving this forward. It's sort of how... How can we make this ambiguous story serve a narrative? that benefits us, that benefits our cause. And that's really problematic. But I mean, following George Floyd's death, I mean, we saw murders rise over 20,000 in the USA for the first time since I believe 1993.

The next year, we were at 21, 22,000 murders, and those eventually plateaued and then dropped off. They couldn't not. But that's one of the worst things that's happened in the recent history of the country. And to some extent, that's simply not discussed.

This is one reason I think more people did turn to sort of the edge, right? If you look at, say, Steve Saylor or Breitbart, I mean, people that are by no means idiots and that have Excel and Stata programs on their computers, they were looking at this. I mean, there's a... Discovery made by, I believe, actually, Saylor that traffic deaths skyrocketed at the same time murder's dead because the cops simply stopped enforcing the law.

when myself and a colleague named bob maranto actually looked at this empirically using modern methods for a pretty major journal we just published that article which police departments make black lives matter was the was the title

But, I mean, what we found is that there's a correlation between the rate of stops, like how often police just pull a car over, stop the guy, talk to the guy, and the rate of violence that's very unsurprising. I mean, because obviously if you're out there doing policing, it's going to increase. kind of the negative penalty that might go along with crime. So a lot of people died. Go for it. So what you're saying is, just to get this clear...

As a response to people's concern about the way that George Floyd was treated. Yes. In an environment and an ecosystem in which there's this whipped up frenzy of concern about police mistreatment of black people more generally. The consequence of all that liberal outpouring of love and support and whatever, and money, has been that way more people have died, been murdered, been burgled, been injured.

etc. And most of those people or certainly many of those people would have been black people. Yes, that's an excellent analysis. I mean, so the way you'd say this in social science terms is simply that as the police stop rate, you know, X goes up.

the crime rate Y goes down. I mean, it really is pretty simple. And I think that there's something about the extreme left and perhaps the extreme right as well, which keeps insisting that modern business women want to move to homesteads and live there and this kind of thing. raise a certain number of purebred pigs but i mean like the the extreme left i think are the undisputed champs at this there is a remarkable ability to ignore reality

So if at a typical American or UK dinner party, you were to say something like, obviously men and women are different and that's genetic. Every time I've seen this happen, it starts a frenzied argument and people just absolutely deny it. But I mean, at the same level, you notice that some people have.

breasts and others don't i mean i don't mean to be glib or crude about this but the men are on average 40 percent bigger it's absolutely obvious what gender you guys are so on um at almost the same level of absurdity is the idea that police don't prevent crime But if you Google policing does not prevent crime, I guarantee you, you'll find hundreds, maybe thousands of articles. So it's this is something that's been argued quite a lot. What we find when you turn the counselors on it is that.

There was a correlation 0.46 or something like that. Yeah, there's an extremely high correlation between cops doing their job and people not committing crimes. That doesn't seem entirely shocking to me, I must say, just as someone who's not an expert. So that being the case, what do you make of the idea that was very prevalent? Thankfully, I don't think it's as prevalent now, but some people still cling to it. An idea, by the way, that was peddled at the very top levels of the Democrat Party.

which was defund the police. As an academic who studies this, what do you make of that? I think it's an absolutely moronic idea. So there's a cliche for a reason, and bar rooms, and country clubs, and working class hoops courts, and so on. You've got to be real educated to believe something that stupid. And the reason for that, I think, is that they're...

If you're trying to get published in academia, you can't do that by restating Aristotle or by outlining a simple mathematical model for how cops arrest criminals. I was amazed Bob and I got that published actually, but it was at this point, it's probably seen as daring and bold. But I mean, so the where the reward is, where the gold is, is finding new innovative theories about how the world works that are different from anything anyone's ever known before.

There was recently an article that ran, I think, Scientific American called Woman the Hunter. And the picture, the front piece was of a woman cradling like a small deer, not a baby. on her slightly larger hip with a long bow in one hand. And the idea was you've discovered this thing that hasn't previously been discovered in human history, that the majority of big game hunters were female.

And they mentioned some legitimate female advantages, almost as good as or slightly better than men at ultra marathon running and so on. But I mean, that that is the thing that will generally produce tenure. That's the thing that sounds new and innovative. So I guess the point would be you see a lot of crazy ideas in the lower elite that you don't see anywhere else. And a parallel might be to fashion.

I mean, if you go to a fashion show for Kanye West brand, which friend of mine in heaven, Chicago, or you go to a fashion week in Paris, I mean, you're going to see people literally walking around wearing garbage bags.

I mean, wearing hats and crinolines. To be fair, that's just a Republican party now. Everybody's walking around in a garbage bag, but I take your point. But Fashion Week's not during Halloween. I mean, it's just... You see things that no one would ever... You don't see a lot of, like, navy blue...

polos with a horse I totally get the point you're making if you are a historian if you can discover that actually the Vikings were all trans you're gonna get a lot more attention that's a real article by the way I know it is that's why I'm yeah uh you know if you discover discover in inverted commas that you're going to get a lot more attention than actually looking at the data and the facts and presenting them because a lot of that work's already been done by people 10 15 20 30.

40 years ago. No, that's quite correct. I mean, you've been doing some reading in the social sciences, eh? I mean, like, yeah, that article came out recently. No, they weren't shield maids. They were gender atypical women. The interesting thing about this, as someone who's not... entirely hostile to the first 2.5 waves of feminism is that that's an insanely sexist thing to say, right? So, I mean, you finally, you found that physical science would predict this.

Top 10% of women often fought as warriors in the past. Okay, that's pretty cool. Shout out to the ladies. But the take on that now is, no, they didn't. Those women were actually men. They had some sort of hermaphroditic condition or they identified as males or something like that. It's... I think exactly the opposite of how a 1970s or 80s actual feminist scholar would have treated this. But again, like all of that is part of being contributing to the wave of fake innovation.

At any rate, I think that the things that humans have known for 3000 years are most often true. I mean, when you look at these bizarre conversations on Twitter, like, is it abusive to expect your male partner to have a job? This went viral three weeks ago. Two weeks ago, it was, is it abusive to expect your female partner to sometimes want to sleep with you? I mean, no.

These sort of people are attempting to analyze, redefine, deconstruct the most basic elements of human life. And it reaches the point of absurdity and it sometimes crosses over into things that we're all used to hearing now. I mean, like I, for an upcoming article, looked up the formal definitions of sexualization, quote unquote, in feminist theoretical literature, and they all pretty much just mean being attracted to people. So, I mean, just putting a witty negative label on something.

that's obviously a part of human behavior is a good way to make money and get tenure. And that has real impact. Defund the police is an idiotic idea, of course, because without police, there will be more crime. You know... I could have just said that, really. Ten minutes of drivel. I mean, I'm in academia, too, by God. But, you know...

I'm glad we're actually talking about women because one of the, there was another manifestation, you did a very good article about it, talking about now white women. and using examples of them encountering black men and then making a complaint, and then people going, they're racist. And it's the same phenomenon in a slightly different form. So let's talk about this.

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Sure. Well, this is one where I'm totally on the on the side of the women. Actually, I looked at the 10 most prominent Karen cases, quote unquote. I mean, barbecue, Becky and all that kind of thing. If you still remember these names from 18 and 19.

And hopefully to some extent nobody does. So these people can just move on with their damned lives as software executives and so on. But there were all of these cases for a period of time where people were saying that white women were essentially abusing young black men. There was a case where a woman was alleged to have for no reason gone up to a group barbecuing in Oakland, California and kind of told them to move on and shoved one of them. Just risky, dangerous behavior by these white women.

There was another case where a pregnant nurse was alleged to have tried to steal a bike from a group of young black males. I mean, they had apparently paid via City Bike or one of those platforms. for a bicycle and she claimed to have a receipt for the same bike and tried to take it from them and there were numerous other ones a pool patrol Paula someone thought that a group of noisy kids playing in her

Her swimming pool were not from her housing complex. And I looked through those cases and I think that person was actually guilty of being mildly rude, the last one. But most of them were complete nonsense. I mean, the barbecue Becky case involved a group of people who. were grilling in a no-fire dog-run area of a public park. And so someone just walked over and said, hey, you're not supposed to be holding a barbecue here. Could you finish the next round of the dishes you're cooking and move on?

And I mean, we're all from large cities and no, get the hell out of here was almost certainly the reaction. But a stupid argument broke out. That was it. And the person was in the right, actually. Probably the most famous of these cases was Amy Cooper. I mean, so this is the woman that's walking her dog in New York Central Park, and a man comes out of nowhere in what's called the Ramble. So you're in the middle of essentially the woods. You're surrounded by trees and so on.

And this guy walks out down a path and tells her to put her dog on a leash. As I recall the argument, she says, well, no, I'm not going to leash my dog. We're in the woods, whatever. My dog needs to run. It turns out the guy was a bird watcher. No one knew this. He was upset about ground nesting birds potentially being harmed or something. But when Cooper said, no, I'm not going to do what you want, the man said, well, in that case, I'm going to do something to you that you're not going to like.

and started reaching into his bag and she started screaming essentially and saying you know i'll call the cops you're a big black guy you don't necessarily want me to do that and As I recall, one or both of them then called the police and he started yelling about how he was being racially profiled and he was acting perfectly normal. And I mean...

To some extent, in a lot of these cases, both people seem to be acting like assholes. I mean, it's very, very typical New Yorkers. I would say it's Chicago and they can't even get their damn dogs walked around one another. But the simple reality, though, is if you're a man and you're.

watching birds in the woods, and you come out of the woods and start screaming at some lady about how you're going to treat them in a way they won't like, I think it's going to be pretty unsurprising if you get some hostility back in return.

So the frame of that in the media wasn't, well, they were both being pricks. It was this white woman attempted to murder a black man in a couple of publications like The Root. And the question is, well, how did she attempt to murder him? Well, by calling the police. So it was the entire thing, the whole like Michael Brown fake framework built up around that. But there was also this additional idea of white women are using their privilege or whatever the case might be to attack black men.

And, yeah, most of the cases did not turn out to be one-sided abuses in many or most of them. In fact, the black man, the person that was being argued with, was at least as much at fault. So it's just a question of how you create narrative, how you create a storyline, I think. You take this argument. What you really do is you pick out the person who's in the oppressor class, quote unquote, and then the person who's in the oppressed class, quote unquote. You say, well, he must be right.

So every example of this happening is an example of the oppressor class picking on someone else. That's how the Karen stories, I think, came to be. And there's also the element of social media, because the thing that's so powerful of social media is obviously video. But one of the things that is so worrying about this phenomenon is you can take a video.

Let's say it's three minutes, and then you can clip a bit out of it, completely out of context. It goes viral. And you can make one person look like the hero, the other one look like the villain, or vice versa, depending on how you edit it. And you can do that for both people.

I mean, so I've seen conservative accounts take essentially that Amy Cooper video and just use the clip like I'm going to do something to you you're not going to like. You can literally take the same encounter between two individuals as you just said and flip it any way you want. I'm not sure that's just a social media thing, though. Like if you go back to the Rodney King beating.

The reason that became such a sensation is that there were 61, I believe, seconds of just this man on the ground. I'm not going to try to simulate the motion sitting here. But this man on the ground being beaten by clubs, kicked. I mean, it looks terrible. The problem with that video is that it was originally in someone. comments might correct me, but 391 seconds long. So I mean, the news intentionally used the most visually provocative small chunk of that.

to create this storyline of racism and unprovoked abuse. The cops hit the guy too hard, but that's because they pulled him over after a high-speed chase that went on for minutes. They asked him to get out of the car. There were two other people in the car, by the way, both black, both employed. Neither one was harmed.

They just sat on the curb, essentially, and watched this insane fight go on. One of them later wrote an article about it. But King got out of the car. He scuffled with the cops. He refused to do basic things like put on handcuffs.

He finally sort of rushes the cops and they basically get tired of it and beat his ass. And I mean, I think that's over the line. I think you guys probably would. But the way you make that look like just an unprovoked, brutal, Mississippi-style violation of civil rights is that you only show the beating.

You don't show king lunging. I don't even know if this was on video, but you don't show the chase with many other people at risk. You don't show anything except the end game. And that's a trick that a lot of people on social media learned from, some pretty explicitly, and that they use as well.

So the last line, but a tip I would give is that if you see something like this, if you see a video of a black man and a white man fighting for five seconds or something like that, I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that at all.

I mean, did that initiate with a horrible racial insult from one guy or quote-unquote ghetto behavior from the other guy? Were both people in the wrong? Were both people in the right? You don't know. You have no idea what you're saying. You have no idea what the background of that is. You're watching just two guys shout. So it's important to keep that in mind.

And one of the things that this does is it creates a lot of these narratives that, like, I don't know, maybe I'm dumb or maybe I haven't done my research or whatever, but we were told that whatever happened with George Floyd, let's say that he was murdered. Let's say we accept that. It was presented as an example of everything that's wrong with America, systemic racism, whatever. To this day, no one has explained to me...

what the racism was. What is the evidence of racism in that? Let's say he was murdered by Derek Chauvin, deliberately. No one has still explained in any way that is convincing or explanatory. what the racism was. There's no convincing evidence of racism in that case. And I think it's interesting to go through all of these and deconstruct them because, I mean, the Amy Cooper case was not real as it was presented.

The Sarah Brash case, she happens to be a personal friend of mine, was not real as it was presented. Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman. I mean, these are two males who unfortunately got into a brawl. One of them had a gun, which is very common in the States. Whatever you guys might think of that. I mean, it was a shooting. It was tragic. But there's no racism there either. Zimmerman is half white but half Afro-Latino.

There's just no evidence of anything. Michael Brown didn't happen as it was alleged to have happened. Jacob Blake didn't happen as it was alleged to have happened. And I think George Floyd is kind of almost the chessboard king of these stories.

Because if you bring up all the other cases that I brought up, someone will say, but I saw George Floyd under the knee. You can't deny there's a problem with policing. The problem with that, do either of you guys do any kind of martial art role in the dojo or anything like that? I do. I do. But I don't. just to kickboxing i don't do bjj yeah no

Mine were, my two were boxing and Shotokan karate like years ago. And I was that great at them, you know, but like, if you've just, if you've ever been in a sparring level fight with someone, I mean, if someone puts a knee to the back of your neck or does a sleeper hold, you're a healthy adult male for.

minute or two you're not going to die so the obvious reality i think and this is a personal opinion but looking at the george floyd case is that there were a number of things that exacerbated what happened there again like no one views that as ideal policing but It's hard to not believe that taking fentanyl and taking methamphetamine at the levels that he did that we now know about didn't have some effect on, for example, George Floyd's heart.

that that didn't really strongly contribute to the tragic outcome there. But getting to your point, even if we just say, well, okay, we're not going to debate any of that. It's a murder. It's a crooked cop. Yeah, there's not any evidence of racism, per se, that I've ever seen in the case.

Right. I mean, yeah, Floyd and Chauvin knew each other casually. They had jobs as bouncers together. But beyond that, the police officers that were working as a team there, I believe, were four different races. I know Thao's Cambodian. You had a black guy. That might be Kang or Kung. I'm glad you said it and not me. Kang. All right. I mean, it's his name, really. But anyway, so...

But in all seriousness, you had an African-American guy, or at least half black. You had a Cambodian guy. You had a white guy who was in an interracial relationship, by the way. Chauvin's wife was either black or Asian. I think East Asian, maybe.

But just so that was something that came up. I only learned that a couple of months ago. So the presentation of him as some kind of urban Klansman, that again, just fails if you get to the door of his house. And it seems like there was a conscious effort made not to do that. And on top of that, of course, we know that there was a case exactly like it involving a white man called Tony Timper that happened.

Very similar. Very, very similar. But of course, that was never made into a big thing. And this is what I'm getting at, Wilfred, is it seems to me like the concoction of these media narratives is incredibly damaging. to the way that Americans see each other and that foreigners like us see Americans. And I'm sure you have the stats on this. From what I know, the average American overestimates the death of black suspects by police action.

so wildly as to essentially live in a different country to the one they actually live in. Yeah, it's by four orders of magnitude. So first of all, let's get the data out there for anyone that hasn't read the recent wave of papers. I mean, the average number of unarmed black men killed by the police in a typical year is about 12.

I mean, you can go to the Washington Post database, The Counted, a.k.a. Killed by Police, and you can find these figures. They're not seriously contested. You know, I and Heather MacDonald and others from the right have looked at them. Did the Post, were they off by three or four? They're pretty much correct. The total number of unarmed males of all races killed by the police in a typical year is 100, maybe less than that. Usually this include Indian reservations, all the poor whites, Latinos.

Italian. I mean, that would be everyone in the country. So what's the what do people think that the total is, though? Well, that's very different. I mean, the there's a poll by the Skeptic Research Center, which I think is what you're directly referring to that look. at how left-leaning, at least, Americans, liberal and leftist, what they think about the issue of police violence. And what they found was that, if I'm getting this correct, 35% of people to the left of center in the USA...

think that the average number of unarmed black men, just unarmed black men killed by police annually is quote unquote about a thousand. Another 14 to 15% think it's about 10,000. And 8% think it's more than that. And the real figure is 12. 12, yes. Not 12,000 or anything like that. Right. Just 12. I mean, that is... It's a bit surprising, eh? But the reason this is dangerous, sorry, Francis, is that means in...

These people vote. Yes. Right? These people get a say in stuff. They express their opinions about this stuff. But they're so wildly off base because, I would argue, it's not their fault. They've been misled by the media. an activist. The, therefore

I almost understand why they would chant something as moronic as defund the police. Because if you think the police are killing thousands of black people who are unarmed every year, you'll be like, God, we need to do something. Nazi monsters. Yeah, it's no that I think it's to put this in context.

only about 20,000 murders total in the United States in a bad year. So, I mean, when you say, and African-Americans, we're overrepresented, but we make up maybe half of that. So, I mean, when you say there are 10,000 police murders every year. That's larger, at least in my racial group category, than the number of murders. So, I mean, that's an incredible misunderstanding of reality. Yeah, I suppose that I would want the police defunded if I genuinely believed that there were...

10,000 killings of just totally unarmed black men going to church or something like that every year. I mean, that would be terrible. But that is that is not the case. And it's also they say defund the police. Well, I'm afraid if you want a better police force.

you need to fund them better. You need to have better training. You need to have higher standards. You want the very best people to become police officers. And the only way you're really going to be able to guarantee that or certainly improve the level of recruits is to pay people more.

have better conditions, to have better pay, better pension. And then when they come in, put a lot of money into training these people so that they can actually, when they're in these type of high pressure situations. operate in a more effective manner. And by the way, when they make the right call, even though it's difficult, you have to back them up.

Yes, I think that second part is very important. But yeah, both of those points are simply correct. I mean, when again, Bob Maranto and I looked at what actually predicts effective policing in the United States, the best department in the USA was New York.

Chicago was in the top five. And I mean, both those cities take a lot of ridicule for having crime, but there's a lot of crime there because there were tens of millions of people. I mean, the New York, now this is the metro, but New York is about 20 million people, 11 just in the city.

chicago for county metro is 11. i mean so if you have say split the difference between the two cities 600 murders a year that's actually a lower murder rate than you're going to be finding in many rural black or working-class caucasian communities i mean i live in appalachia

And many of the murder rates in the area are significantly above that. You just don't think that when you look at a city like Frankfurt, Kentucky, which has perhaps 60,000 people and six murders. I mean, so there's not the same level of analysis, but I mean... You know, if you move that up to six hundred thousand, there'd be 60, you know, six million six hundred. And that's that's half of Metro Chicago. But at any rate, the worst police departments tended to be underfunded, small.

kind of regional cities, Memphis, Little Rock. I think Charleston, West Virginia made the list where there was some corruption, but there also just wasn't really a pull to get good officers in. You knew the department needed men. You knew they weren't going to get much money. It was actually Memphis, which started trying specifically to hire African-American males from the city of Memphis, where you had five cops basically just beat someone to death.

I mean, that's a case that vanished from the headlines pretty quickly. It was essentially a black-on-black violence, I guess. But if you read through the backstory there, there were allegations of adulterous relationships and that kind of thing. So those tended to be the worst or the lowest performing departments. The best departments, yeah, well-funded, professional. You were looking for more than a high school degree, that kind of thing. And a last comment on this.

Sending in cops or sending in social workers and so on instead of police is something that's recently become sort of trendy. Yeah, it's an insane idea that's going to get people killed and raped. But there is a version of that that works.

which is where you send an actual mental health professional along with the cops. But that costs more money, not less. You have to have actual therapists, actual hostage negotiators, actual psychiatrists on the payroll of the police department at their usual retainer. So the issue there wouldn't be defunding the police. It would be funding the police at a higher level. Nothing beats a peace of mind that comes from knowing your home and loved ones are protected.

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Start the year with greater peace of mind. Right now, you can get 50% off a new SimpliSafe system with a professional monitoring plan and your first month free. Just visit simplisafe.com slash trigger. That's SimpliSafe. .com slash trigger. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. I'm not sure about, so correct me if I'm wrong, but in the UK I was talking to a police officer and he was actually saying to me, look, a lot of what we do now isn't even crime. It's...

They've closed a lot of the mental health hospitals. So a lot of these people are just walking around. They're unable to function. They're a danger mostly to themselves. They behave in an antisocial manner. And so when one of these enters a public place or is behaving in a... erratic fashion what's the first thing people do understandably is they call the police that is not a police matter that is that is a matter for mental health services but the police are involved in it so

What you're seeing as well is just the police being stretched and having to do jobs that they're not meant to do. They're not meant to deal with somebody who's having a profound schizophrenic episode. No, I think that's very well put. Yeah, the United States, we did the same thing. It's joked about sometimes is the only thing Reagan and the Tip O'Neill Democrats agreed on. The libertarians as well, actually, because they don't think there should be government services of any kind.

So you got virtually 100% consensus across our political spectrum, but toward this sort of negative outcome. But yeah, in the 80s, the argument from leftists, I think many of them had watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, maybe one too many times.

conservatives just don't want to pay for shit libertarians there shouldn't be shit so i mean just total political consensus on closing the asylums which we used to have quite a few of i don't know whether your rate was ahead of ours but there used to be yeah hospitals for the criminally insane Many of which had not nurse ratchets, but genuinely caring doctors working with these people. And when those 94 percent of those properties closed in the late 1980s in the USA.

And that's when you started seeing people living under bridges and talking to themselves and the air and people who aren't there. And it's a bit glib to put it that way, but this is a phenomenon. Again, like in downtown Chicago, we have what's called the University Center.

where a former girlfriend of mine, Kristen, used to live and attend school. And you would go there, and you'd be sitting outside smoking a cigarette or whatnot, and you would notice that many of the people in the area were visibly insane.

People would be cutting themselves with knives. People would be literally howling at the moon. People would be wandering around the block time after time. And I think any urbanite has wondered, well, why isn't there a place? Why isn't there a center where you can send these people? The answer is because we closed them all. We made it virtually illegal to open new ones.

And I mean, yeah, non non voluntary incarceration is going to be the solution for a lot of the homeless problem. And just one quick story from social media. I was scrolling through Twitter and the like the other day.

And an actual violence interrupter, I mean, female, mental health trained, somebody who does pretty good work, was describing one of these people. And she said, well, this person is a homeless woman who's schizophrenic and who has, like, short-term memory loss. She'll do things and forget them.

So about once a week, she's kidnapped and sexually abused by a group of 10 men. These are college guy types from what I can tell. There's no one's ever been able to find them. I mean, this person would be the only testifying witness. Everyone else is a hobo or drug dealer in the neighborhood.

But they'll take her to an apartment, have brutal sex with her, possibly film it, and then they'll just dump her back off on the street. They'll give her a shower. And I would suspect that that sort of thing, what used to be mockingly called troll bashing in New York, takes place a lot. And there's really, there's no way to... to enforce that, to penalize that. I don't think someone who's living illegally outdoors in most cases is going to go to court as a witness or as a accuser.

So, yeah, the idea that that is somehow kinder than having anything from a single room occupancy to just a mental hospital that you're going to be forcibly thrown into and treated at, that's not correct. It's hard to imagine anything crueler. No, and focusing on the mental health aspect of it, there's also the element of the police where people go, how can the police behave in this fashion? I'm going, well, if you...

I've served for, let's say, 20 years as a police officer in an inner city, American city or UK city. You've seen some pretty wild shit, to put it mildly. You probably have PTSD or some form of it. It's gone untreated. And you were going to behave less appropriately than other people would. Yeah. I mean, I think that virtually everyone I've known who's been in situations of extreme uncontrolled violence, combat soldiers, cops who...

worked in the projects where everyone appeared to hate them, have at some point come to the conclusion it might be better if these people didn't exist. And that's a pretty rational conclusion for humans to come to. Obviously, for moral reasons, we can't allow it as the basis of social policy. But I mean, I would assume many Israeli soldiers feel this way right now. We've seen considerable evidence their opponents do.

But that sort of again, that sort of attitude bad in moral terms. But yes, like I think police are surprisingly restrained given human nature in general. I mean. This is a job where virtually every interaction you have with someone is going to be their worst moment probably of the month. So you're going to be pulling over a harried African-American father who thinks he might shoot him who's 15 minutes late to work.

You're going to be breaking up a party full of rowdy college kids of whatever race. You're going to be talking to rape victims. You're going to be chasing serious criminals that you know are responsible for most of the danger in what's probably your youth neighborhood. And you know that if you just shoot this guy.

at least until pretty recently, that violence would stop. If you arrest him, he's just going to go to court, bond out in two days, and do the same thing again. So given that, the rate of unprovoked police violence is actually pretty low. I mean, it's contained at levels that I think should be more than socially acceptable. Particularly when you factor in that they don't know if someone's got a gun or not.

Yeah, that's the thing that's unique about American urban policing. Like everyone I know who's been a cop in Chicago, East Aurora, the places I've lived has said, well, the worst thing is doing stuff like traffic stops.

You know, why are people so hostile when they pull over a car with tented windows with six males inside? Well, because that's when cops get shot. Like if anyone just cranks the window down, pulls the pistol out, fires a couple shots, like that's it. You don't have time to get to your gun.

It happens about 40, 50 times a year. There are far more cops killed by black men and for that matter by white men. White men are slightly ahead if that's a term. But in any particular year than there are unarmed defenseless men killed by.

Police, obviously, that's something that's never said, but needs to be pointed out occasionally. So, yeah, the worry when you do the traffic stop, you've got the tinted windows for Hispanic males, perhaps here legally. I mean, the question is, am I going to make it out of this?

And you can't allow too much paranoia from public employees. In fact, 100,000 times out of 100,001, you will make it out. But still, knowing that 50 brothers, you probably consider them, have been killed this past year, often in that way, that's going to influence your thinking. Yeah. Well, I'm glad we're having this conversation because I feel like we're recording this at the time of the election by the time this is out.

It's already happened. But it just feels like this was the election when the media really went to die. And I think that's a good thing in some ways. In some ways, it's a bad thing. But the reason it's good, I think, is... I just see the way these narratives have been created and the terrible impact they have. And really, what struck this home for me was a man called Ben Carson, who I'm sure you know. Of course, yeah.

And the only thing I knew about him was that he was this right-wing guy who people made fun of because he was with Trump and all of this other stuff. And then my wife, who's completely apolitical, we have movie night every week. And she was like... She usually picks the movie and we watch it. So she picked the movie and she was like, oh, it's called Gifted Hands. I was like, what is it about? And she was like, oh, it's about a surgeon. Okay, cool. That sounds great.

And then we start watching it. Good reaction. And I realized that it's a movie about the life story of Dr. Ben Carson, in which it turns out this guy was an incredible man. Yes. Pioneering surgeon, like everything you'd want an upstanding citizen to be. It's a movie, so, you know, it was just incredible. And I've had that experience with other people so many times. I remember I watched Die Hard. Okay. And you go back and you watch it, and there's a scene in which a black woman...

is told to do something that's like impossible. And she goes, if you think I'm going to do that, you think I'm going to marry Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump, before he ran for president, was an aspirational figure. Every woman wanted to marry him. Every guy wanted to be him. That's how it was. And then on a dime... suddenly he's the most evil man in history. And the same with Carson. And so it just allowed me to see the power of these media narratives and how much they shape our perception.

even in situations where the fact, forget about Donald Trump, forget about Ben Carson, just on police shootings alone, how misrepresentative it is that we hear one thing and then there's a completely thing on the ground. Yeah, I think, so first of all, as a hip hop kid, I think that's a great framing with those two individuals. I mean, so Donald Trump, there's a song by Mac Miller that was playing when I was at the end of my time in the sort of club nightlife business is like 2012.

That's another thing I did, by the way, when I talk about it, we'll talk about important stuff. But there's a song by Mac Miller called Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is presented as sort of the archetypal figure. If you like partying and making money and living in cities, it's Mac Miller in a penthouse in probably Philadelphia, like doing this with girls dancing around him and like gold raining from the air. And that was the Donald Trump. archetype. I mean...

The rapper Nelly has a song where the chorus is Donald Trump, Bill Gates, let me in now. And it was just absolutely no one had a problem with the guy. He really wanted to go to Epstein's Island, huh? I don't have any negative comments about Nelly. I'm kidding.

background of a ditty party you'll see a lot of people of all ethnic backgrounds right one of the things that's actually kind of interesting is that when i was a kid and not really a kid but like in chicago there was less than there'd be in new york maybe but there were parties where people had like bowls of drugs on the counter and so on and

I always thought after maybe 20, I found decadence boring and annoying. But I mean, I think that a common belief among a lot of people, both from the hood and in this kind of scene, like the young adult post rave scene. A common belief was that there were wealthy, decadent people who had all sorts of unbelievable Roman imperial vices who were running the country and the world.

And as I got older, I was like, yeah, it's probably not true. You see the Christian conservatives versus the feminists. And it's like, I don't know, that was probably wrong. Then you see the Epstein and Diddy guest lists and you realize a lot of people were just lying. Like that kind of was the case.

I mean, I would encourage everyone watching this to Google, like, P. Diddy guest list. I mean, you'll see pictures like Jennifer Lopez, Jay-Z, and the deputy mayor of New York obviously stoned out of their minds just wandering around. But at any rate, um... The point, though, I think, is that Donald Trump, who also knew both Epstein and Diddy, as did Bill Clinton, as did Barack Obama, but at any rate...

Donald Trump was, yes, he was an aspirational figure in hip hop and rock musical culture for decades. The Ben Carson thing is even more striking. Like I did a podcast with Ben Carson a couple of weeks ago. And I actually knew who Ben Carson was as a black business type. I mean, I've watched Gifted Hands. And yeah, he was one of the country's best doctors.

I mean, he's the lead surgeon in a major hospital. He wants separated, conjoined twins. He's one of the more impressive men out there. So, yeah, again, Douglas Murray has a good description of this where he says something like the upper middle class moral norm is getting. more annoying and unknowable.

because every 12 seconds something that was never true before is not only true but can't be denied it's a great line and i think the madness of crowds but that applies to a lot of this stuff where i mean the example that he uses is feminism and sexuality And he gives all these examples where through about 2019, maybe through Me Too, being feminist was being as sexual as possible. So, I mean, like, he lists a series of Nicki Minaj song titles like My Butt and Wet Kitty and so on.

The actually one of the quotes that opens the book is from Nicki Minaj. And it's just a page. It's just the lyrics like look at my butt and so on. But then almost immediately that changed on a dime. And the women's magazines began running articles saying that approaching women anywhere outside of a dating. app was a form of abuse and all this sort of thing. And not only is that wrong, not only do no working class people or normal aggressive males or whatever take that seriously.

But it's also not something that was ever even disputed by anyone, including feminists. No one had said it before. Feminism was about sexuality to some extent. It was pro-sex work. People like dating feminists. Then that rapidly reversed at Ouroboros.

And everyone was supposed to know exactly what the new rule was immediately. And that's the same thing with all this stuff. Like, of course, Ben Carson didn't become an idiot. Of course, Donald Trump didn't suddenly become a racist. Donald Trump's not racist, although he talks a bit crudely.

But, I mean, everyone's heard someone sound like Donald Trump on a golf course. Like, there's no, nothing has changed except the mandatory perception, to quote, I think, Brave New World. So the mandatory perception of Donald Trump right now is that he's a Nazi rapist. And I mean, not really, but a lot of people are going to say that and a lot of people are going to be reluctant to publicly oppose that today. Yeah, well, I just, it's been really eye-opening for me with the media.

Really, really eye-opening, because especially coming over here, you know, we live in the UK, we see stuff, we kind of go, well, CNN said it, and MSNBC said it, and other people are saying, well, it must be true. And even people on the right are like, well, you know, obviously this is a blah, blah, blah, you know. And then you actually go and travel around the country and you meet people and it just fundamentally breaks your perception of...

The media, which is why I think the trust is so low now, because they, as we say in the UK, they've been taking the piss for a very long time. No, I think that's correct. So one of the things that we've talked about in this conversation repeatedly is that it's not what we're talking about with the modern media.

certainly on the right as well as that becomes more more popular more public but by far more often on the left it's not that there's a legitimate misunderstanding of reality right it's that a lot of stories are lies Like, hands up, don't shoot was a lie. Like, when you see the image of Michael Brown, I'm an NFL fan, so you saw the players come out doing this before a major game. Michael Brown didn't have his hands up. He was shot in the front while he was attacking a cop.

And most of the lies are at that level. And if you ask people these basic questions, and it's interesting that polling data begins to reflect the lie pretty quickly. So, I mean, in terms of Douglas Murray's point, I'm pretty sure that if you ask people like, do you associate feminism in America with being more or less sexual than the norm? That would already have changed.

It would be less and people would rate that as a good thing, although that's only been true for four or five years. But I mean, the same thing is true with a lot of the points that we're discussing, like.

The lie is told, the lie is believed. And it's interesting to hear that the lie is believed overseas. And yeah, I would always encourage people to sort of go to the data if you're interested in something like police violence. The one that really surprised me was interracial crime, which both blacks and whites go on about.

where I actually unpacked the BJS reports for a decade. And I mean, I described to you the violent, classic interracial crimes, 3% of crime. So it's just very often people are just... I don't even know if lying is the term. Do you guys know the difference between lying and bullshitting?

I think bullshitting is where you make up a grandiose term. I think that was a rhetorical question. Yeah, all right, yeah. No, but that wasn't, like, a pompous teacher moment. I think there is a difference here that actually matters. Like, the liar knows what the truth is. truth is, is what that Princeton guy Webb or whoever said in his book bullshit. The bullshitter's goal is to tell a story that presents him in the most positive light, like good, bad. It's to present a narrative.

The liar actually knows what reality is and is contradicting it. Like, no, I did not cheat on you, honey. I think we see both lying and bullshitting in the media, but I think probably more bullshitting. If I had to think about this, I'm sure that people could easily disagree with that.

But the goal is promoting the narrative. The USA is racist or something like that. So you could easily throw together a real stat about black performance that we need to fix with a fake made up explanation with a real quote from an academic. And you would just pitch it as the truth. And I think that after years, as people recognize that that is happening, trust is declining. And by the way, I will say social media, that one of the few good things.

about computer world, about social media and so on, is that people can see that in real life. Well, it's been great having you on. Before we head to our sub stack and ask you our audience questions, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Before Wilfred answers a final question, at the end of this interview, click the link in the description underneath. It will take you to our sub stack where you'll be able to see this.

How would you summarize the state of progress and positive momentum in US race relations prior to BLM? And in your view, what legitimate issues persisted and remained to be fixed? What was it like to film your scene in Am I Racist? You clearly know who Matt Walsh is. Were you supposed to pretend you didn't? Does the emotional impact of generational past grievances arising from racism and slavery, which was a universal thing,

affect North American and Caribbean blacks more than other ethnicities who could claim the same but don't? If so, why? How to fix major problems that we have, I think. And I'll give climate change as an example. We in the USA, and I think to a lesser extent in the UK, right now seem to be very prone to panics and hysterias. I mean, I think the reaction to COVID-19, for example, is absolutely insane.

You can't shut down all of a healthy, functioning society because the death rate among 71-year-olds might increase by 10%. I think you found we did. No, you're right. We can. But I mean like the... As a cold leaderly decision, only an absolute lunatic would look at those options and do that. It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen major societies do.

But that's that I think is a sign of an ongoing catastrophism in the modern West. So like climate change, people are saying they will not have children because of climate change, this sort of thing. The reality is that if you ever talk to an educated.

Chinese sounds a bit rude, but an educated person from China or an educated forward cast Indian or something like that. What they'll say is like, look, this actually is a problem. We don't deny it. I don't deny it. But the pace of innovation that's going to solve it is speeding up. I'd give it like five years until we fix this.

That's the general view. And the Chinese and Indian universities I've been in contact with, I don't know about their general perception. But for example, there was a new kind of paint that was just invented at Purdue, where if you slather it on roofs, apparently, like the gray refractive paint bounces sunlight.

back up i'm sure that was an absolutely asinine explanation per their engineering department but i think something like that is going to be how we get through the quote-unquote climate change crisis just excuse language fucking planting trees would solve about half of it if every person plants five trees we'll handle a great deal of the uh

the climate worries that we have. So I think that not just you guys, you guys actually do a fairly good job, but media in general, especially our alternative media should start talking to people who want to, who have reasonable ideas about how to solve the problems that we have. To cut off the sort of chicken running without head hysteria we see so often. Interview the Purdue guy. Talk to him about paint.

You guys will make it funny. I don't know what it is. It's sort of like dancing with a stare. You won't look that bad. Sounds exciting, man. Wilfred, thanks for coming on. Talk about pain. That's my final. Talk about pain. Fantastic. Head on over to Substack where we ask Wilfred your questions. The reparations debate came up at the recent Commonwealth summit. Is it just a lazy money grab or is there something else behind it?