Dr Wil Reilly - The 1776 Project Response to the 1619 Project or Facts WIN!

Dr Wil Reilly - The 1776 Project Response to the 1619 Project or Facts WIN! - Dr Wil Reilly from Kentucky State University joins Pete A Turner and Brooks Crenshaw to discuss the 1776 Project. In August of 2019, the NY Times led by Nikole Hannah-Jones created the 1619 project; an alternate narrative regarding the founding of the United States. From the 1619 project's launch, it met severe academic criticism.  

Read more about 1776 on their website.

This critique lead to a group of scholars focused on providing a narrative founded in research and scholarly work. This work less refutes the flawed 1619 work and focuses on celebrating the progress the US has made in delivering on its promise of equality, opportunity and the 

resilience of its people. 

Similar episodes:
Wil Reilly
Wilfred C Reilly
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Haiku
Not 1619
1776
Sorry New York Times

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Executive Producer/Host/Intro: Pete A. Turner
CoHost: Brooks Crenshaw
Producer: Damjan Gjorgjiev
​Writer: Bojan Spasovski

Transcript

Pete Turner  0:00  
Everybody Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of your break it down show. Our guest is will Riley, who is a political scientist from Kentucky State University. He has been on the show before. So we're welcoming him back. And today he's talking about the 1776 unites project, which is a response to the questionable 1619 project from the New York Times where they sort of struggle with the truth and focus on social narratives rather than actual facts. So the 1776 project looks at this from more scholarly approach so we can have a better understanding of what's there. Hey, joining us today is my friend Brooks Crenshaw

Pete Turner  0:00  
Everybody Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of your break it down show. Our guest is will Riley, who is a political scientist from Kentucky State University. He has been on the show before. So we're welcoming him back. And today he's talking about the 1776 unites project, which is a response to the questionable 1619 project from the New York Times where they sort of struggle with the truth and focus on social narratives rather than actual facts. So the 1776 project looks at this from more scholarly approach so we can have a better understanding of what's there. Hey, joining us today is my friend Brooks Crenshaw, who actually happens to be really passionate about this topic. He's a veteran friend of mine, and also a fellow spy. So good to have him around to ask some very, very good questions. I think you'll appreciate what is going on here. 1776 unite's dot com is where you can go to see the project and what they've created. And I think you'll fonts are very powerful narratives there. The point is, is not necessarily to tear down what 1619 did, but to provide a more positive and uplifting version of the same type of work. So hopefully we'll get some attention on this and give people a chance to experience the 1776 project. All right, here's a support the show, share, like, subscribe, rate review, tell your friends, buy the shirts, those are the things go to the 1776 project, tweet at will Riley so that way he knows that you're got there from the break it down, show those kind of things help out and help us show to other people, hey, this show had matters, people love it. And if you love it, that's what you got to do. That's how you get us the attention that we need to make the show bigger still and get even better guests. All right. One last thing as always, save the brave, save the brave.org go to the Donate tab, put a small amount of money in each month. And you will be doing a tremendous service for those of us with PTSD as we try to battle and keep these Warriors alive when they come home. Alright, here we go.

Unknown Speaker  2:03  
We'll Riley lions rock productions

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somebody there's a skunk Baxter.

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Gabby Reese is Rob bell. This is john Leon Guerrero.

Pete Turner  2:20  
Hey, and this is Pete a Turner.

wil reilly  2:25  
Hey, this is Dr. wil Riley of the Kentucky State University. You're listening to the break it down show as always with Pete Turner.

Pete Turner  2:35  
Yes, we are doing it once again, trying to cause a ruckus. Obviously, everybody should and this is still a current book so you guys should go check it out. It's called taboo. The 10 topics that we can't discuss i think is the full title. And it's crazy. You should go back and listen to the episode when we talk about the book. There it is in the background as we'll does it. We're not recording video but what I want to say is that book is excellent because it takes topics Except we can't talk about, for example, white privilege. Turns out having a dad in the house is significantly more important than than any kind of white privilege and just the way crime moves and race and all these things, IQ all of that stuff is covered in there extremely uncomfortable topics because what you believe about reality are going to be are not going to be in tune with one another. So I highly recommend that. We also have with us today co host Brooks Crenshaw, who's always fun for me to talk to and Brooks and we'll both share a Kentucky residency together. So hopefully those guys will get a chance to meet. But all in all, gentlemen, Sunday morning, thanks so much for coming on. We'll let's let's first talk about why the 1776 project and then Let's slide into the 1619 stuff.

wil reilly  3:48  
Well, the 1776 project or 1776, as we usually bill it in terms of what we actually trademarked is a pro American black led black owned, I guess you could say Although everyone is welcome response to the New York Times 1619 project, and we want to take it broader than that, we want to have more of a footprint than that. But essentially, I'd say there are three core points to 1776. I mean, one is pointing out that a lot of the things in 1619 and in that Howard Zinn take on American history just aren't real. I mean, at one point, the 1619 project claimed that the USA broke away from Britain because we wanted to preserve slavery. That's insane. written at the time was no better than we were, they had slaves. They didn't emancipate their slaves and overseas colonies until 1833. If anything, if you look at Irish slaves of war, what they did with black and mulatto, West Indians, I mean, Britain had a much wider racial diversity of slaves, and we did there's no evidence for that whatsoever. So we we were making some of those points. I think point two of 1776 is a real look at slavery and segregation and for that matter, the race wars and country's history whites versus natives without minimizing those but in context, um, is it really accurate that chattel slavery made the South the wealthiest region of the country? No, that again is factually inaccurate. The South was generally considered to be a feudal backwater until after the Civil War. That was classic plantation agriculture of the kind you would see in southern Europe. I mean, that was not the economic powerhouse of the USA. I mean, it's worth noting that there was an anti slavery movement led by black and white people of goodwill for obviously, the same period of time that there was slavery in the USA. That's why we don't have slaves anymore. So correct context would be point two. And I guess point three would be offering an alternative kind of inspirational view of what the USA is and should be. So I mean, if you look in a sentence for me, the United States of America is a flawed but very good society, where it's frankly not that difficult to succeed given hard work. And personal responsibility. People regularly come to the USA from what we have mockingly called third world countries, Vietnam, Ethiopia. And so on down the line, Nigeria might still fall in that category, North Korea and become more successful and all of those cases than the average for native born white and black citizens. So it's a bit ironic that there are these constant immigrant success stories white and black and Eastern all around us. But instead of focusing on this, we are teaching our people to endlessly rehash race wars with one another 150 years ago in this kind of thing. It's the opposite of a success based strategy. I mean, thank you so much. He's been an executive. He's been a coach teacher. So I mean, that's kind of our focus what is actually needed to look at some of the problems in the USA, illegitimacy rates are virtually identical among blacks and poor whites, and that's a new phenomenon. Well, how do you stop? fatherlessness is a real question whereas, you know which group suppression did this originate with? It's kind of a worthless question. It Assuming that there's any validity to that thesis at all answering it wouldn't solve the problem, who cares?

Pete Turner  7:05  
Right and the other thing I wanted to bring in with this with the especially your first point, just talking about the lack of factual credibility with 1619, the the argumentative gerrymandering to make this thing a white European problem leaving out Albanians, and all kinds of other white European folks that at 1619 this ship just magically shows up for the slaves. Turns out well turns out that the US had slaves well before 1619 at the first Thanksgiving is legitimately considered to be in St. Augustine with the Spanish well before 1619 there is evidence that there were hundreds of thousands of people in South America enslaving each other well before 1619. So to act like this premise that somehow it's a bunch of, you know, British guys that come here to bring this thing. It's just Okay, great. If that's true, what about all these other people? I mean, what about the indications that the population in the Caribbean was over a million people? You know, like, there's so many problems, factually tell this important story. But let's, let's not make this about these guys are the only guys who are assholes here, when everybody was playing by the same rules at the same time. Now, look, I'm a layman, but help me understand is it fair to look at 1619 and see something? Like historically we know that it's not accurate, but is there something valuable in terms of of understanding racer thing or is it just more? i? I can't take it seriously, man, I'm being honest.

wil reilly  8:43  
Well, I don't think narratives are valuable out of context. I recently got into a dispute with a right wing writer online I don't I don't have a huge problem with this guy. So I'm not going to name him and start some kind of silly Twitter beef. But um, I felt that his website which is tackling the issue of urban crime seem to focus entirely on crimes involving black guys. And I bet to myself as a Chicago and that it wouldn't really be hard to find crimes in cities involving, say Italian or Spanish guys or antifa fighters. That was the most laughably easy thing in the world. I just googled antipa beating, and there were suddenly hundreds of videos of poor white guys committing crimes. So I mean, I think that there's some value to saying, look, we have a crime problem in cities. Sure. You know, what can we do about that? Again, that's the question to ask as a leader, whether you guys are talking as warfighters, whether you're talking as a business executive, you're talking as, you know, a higher level athletic coach, there's a value to discussing what's really going on, but there's no value to presenting problems without solutions. And there's certainly no value to presenting problems without solutions out of context. That's the death. That's the definition of bad leadership, presenting problems without solutions and exaggerating them. So I mean, in this particular case, the guy is saying, well, look at all these black crimes, it would be stupid for me to run an alternative website called like a Pour white fights dedicated to antifa fight sort of crimes in urban Irish neighborhoods that just make me a racist, there'd be nothing productive that I'm doing. And it's the same thing with 1619. Of course, we need to recognize that slavery is a part of American history. But the context there is that slavery is a part of world history. What the 1619 project did is specifically pick a starting date when whites in our senses of the term with slaves arrived in the Americans. So prior to this date, obviously, there had been one slavery in the Americas. The Aztecs were one of the most brutal warrior peoples in history. I mean, one of the most highly trained, effective certainly Neolithic or copper age armies we've ever seen, they get the Spaniards run for their money during the note to trees to battle, for example, they had tons of slaves, they ate them, actually. They sacrifice they ritually sacrifice people to their god of war. hoody postally, the terror behind your shoulder that a great Pantheon. So there's that and And then even if you want to say, well, the Europeans engaged in a new form of slavery in the New World, okay, then you'd have to talk about the Spaniards, many of whom are Hispanic or mestizo in our terms, or the Portuguese, not a few of whom are black in our terms, who were the people to get here in the late 14, early 1500s. And they again had tons of slaves have every imaginable color combination, but that's not what the American left wants. They don't want Hispanic people enslaving black people whose ancestors and slave this panic people, you don't want to get into that multicolored palette of model see cristianos, right blacks versus whites, More's versus Hispanics. So what you do is you pick the first date that white people who you think might be able to guilt came to the USA with slaves, and that was in fact 1619. But no, I think that's a fairly biased picture. I mean, discussing that leaves aside where the African slaves came from. I mean, obviously, almost all slaves sent to the new world were sold by powerful African states like Ashanti, which were fairly near the cutting edge of technology at the time, although not as I mean, that leaves aside Aztec slavery that leaves aside slavery in the new world by people, we would now consider minorities. So I definitely do think that we need to deal with our country's history. But we need to deal with a real version of our country's history, which is that when all nations had slaves, we had slaves. It's worth noting, some people might come back and say, well, well, I mean, those Spaniards did not. That was not the beginning of the United States, though, that was another people doing their own thing and another country. But it's worth noting that 1619 wasn't the beginning of the United States either. I mean, these were non independent British colonies at the time. The many many colonials, including free blacks who opposed a slave who oppose slavery had really nothing to say to the British government about it at the time. So I mean, to some extent, you're picking an arbitrary date when white people as we now conceive of whites began the practice of slavery in the new world. And no, I don't I don't think that gives an entirely honest view of what slavery was slavery was a human Universal until our society ended it.

Pete Turner  13:01  
Yeah.

Brooks crenshaw  13:03  
Yes. From paetynn my background from an intelligence standpoint, we we identified multiple, you know, variables that are, that are that are part of the problem. As far as the 1619 narrative, I'd like to get your take on the way I see this and also potentially prescribe a potential solution. One thing is that the current state of the media is in a downward spiral, the business model is unsustainable, it's turning into a click, click culture, both, you know, all the way up to the New York Times, which historically has been on a high reputation in media, and that's less so today. The other issue is that of tribalism, which, you know, Pete and I have had extensive experience in in dealing with tribalism, both in Afghanistan, you know, I was with the Kentucky State Government. There's there's plenty of that in the eastern part of the state and in West Virginia Napa. There is a very Hatfields and McCoys, which is, I would say a human response to those variables at play in Afghanistan, as well as in is as in Appalachia. So I see those two factors as what's driving that narrative. Do you agree with that? And what what can we do about it?

wil reilly  14:19  
Well, I think that there's an element of truth to that. Yeah, definitely. There's an element of Yeah, that's probably a good chunk of what's going on in the United States. I think the first point you're making is that the media is having trouble sustaining their go to market model that they used to use, which is absolutely correct. I mean, the problem for the media is that there are now many alternatives. You see this even in the sports media clay, Travis, the sports journalist writes a great deal about this. ESPN model used to be that they would take they were essentially a very high end middleman for sports product. They would take game scores that almost no one else had, and they would deliver The them through their premier packages Sports Center and so on. The problem is that now anyone with a phone can livestream the game or film the game you can go on YouTube and watch the game the NBA actually has given up trying to fight YouTube's they condense each game to 16 minutes of highlights. So what do you need ESPN for? And what ESPN has responded to that by doing in my opinion, and and Travis's is trying to make what they consider unique clickbait content, a great deal of which comes from combining sports and politics. So you've got people like Jamil Hill, Max Kellerman, who are really liberal political commentators and funny ones for all their flaws that are delivering the sports news. So one effect of that has been the ratings have kept stable, they may have saved their business. But another effect of that is that they're driving away a lot of their old consumer base while they're attracting a new consumer base. I mean, ESPN, I like all sports. I was an athlete for quite a while, but I mean, I noticed ESPN hardly ever covers hockey anymore. They hardly ever cover baseball. There's obviously an element that those sports are watched by whites. Definitely I think another element would just be that they're watched more by less urban people that watch less TV that have, for example, blue collar jobs or you're not in front of the television as often. There's an intensive focus on football and tend to focus on basketball, getting away from ESPN, back to your question. I mean, all media are now dealing with that. So what you're seeing is a pursuit of clicks, a pursuit of ad sales. Really, that's why you want the clicks. You're seeing a pursuit of clicks through venues like social media, and it does turn out that the easiest way to get those clicks is rage. This is one of the interesting things actually about the new no cost ad sales model. It doesn't matter whether you click on the paper because you like it or you hate it. Traditionally, I mean, I used to take the tribune in Chicago, the Sunday traveler to 75. You wouldn't just buy a $3 paper and a lunch to go with it. Unless you liked what was being said. It at least didn't disgust you. They seem to have a good eye for the news, but you'll look at an article online for free and scroll through all 14 or 15 hours. And the articles though this were idiocracy whether it makes you happy or sad. So I think, yeah, the media has focused on a more clicks model. And one way to do that is to run very tribalist articles that get people either excited or upset. And I think that this does combined with the natural inclination of most of the media in the first place, which is our natural inclination set which is urban, coastal, mostly white, although it's not very relevant. upper middle class 93% liberal according to Pew, so I definitely think you see more anger generating clickbait on the left than on the right. Although now you have a lot of savvy, you know, post college conservatives who, you know, had a fun time in school doing the same thing with the Daily Caller and the daily wire and so on down the line, all these edgy sites, the daily wire is one of the best meme teams on the internet. So I mean, for sure. I think you're seeing it on both sides. I do think you'll see more of it on the left and yeah, some of that is a response to the need to market stories for free. You're buying the paper, you might want to read legitimate adult things, the week's investment tips. If you're looking at an article and you're gonna look at 39 articles that same day, you're going to notice an eye catching headline you're going to notice, like, we're even joking about the picture of Coleman and all of us in bright colors standing there, right on the podium, you're gonna notice epic photography. So you see more of that. And a lot of this is about being novel. So that was the thing was 1619. Certainly, this is novel, you know, blacks were at the very center of America, the entire country is evil and based on slavery, I mean, that got millions of clicks that trended on Twitter, but the question is, what damage are you doing to a stable social order with this kind of thing? What percentage of people are going to believe it is real?

Pete Turner  18:41  
You know, one of the things to talk about the media in general is we latch on to certain heels You know, this is really like WWE wrestling. The Nazis are the all time greatest he'll forever but for some reason, the Japanese from World War Two really get off kind of easy. You know, they're not seeing this to this day, this, this trophy thing. And the same thing with slavery, like I defy someone to speak intelligently about slavery for more than then I'll say, eight minutes, you know, and all of a sudden their ability to say something interesting or non tropi, it goes away because we haven't spent any time understanding this history. We know what's out there. Obviously, it's horrible. Maybe they can say the word indentured servitude, and Irish, but then after that, they run out of ideas, because we just see it as plantation owners are evil, and the government was evil, but in reality, to get 75% of people in the room together in a congressional manner or some kind of some kind of legislative body to agree on one thing. Well, shit, man, you couldn't do that today with something as hard as slavery or anything else. We can agree on anything. So it seems like media has created this kind of legitimately again, I hate to even say this, obviously slavery As bad we don't want to say that it's good. But the way the Media presents these things and movies and everything has really taken away the intellectual understanding of what slavery was, what the context of the time was, I don't know if you saw this, but maybe in December, they dug up Laura Ingalls Wilder and said, racist, she hated Indians. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. The lady has been dead for 150 years and has inspired tons of women to write. And that's what the narrative was. And she's been dead for 100 plus years.

wil reilly  20:32  
Didn't she hate Indians? Because their dad fought the Indians? Like that was Little House on the Prairie like the Indian Yes, rating them your constant back and forth rates? Yeah. I mean, so I think that's a classic example of not understanding history. I mean, the Indian Wars are another example. So I think I'll go back to your starting point there, which is that as you get into the clickbait media era, and as people get dumber, frankly, as fewer people have those foundational experiences, there's no longer mandatory military service. church attendance rates are going down. varsity sport participation is going down the intellectual college degrees common core curriculum, those are going down with an increase in degrees like hospitality. So as you see more clickbait and as people get not dumber IQs have remained at least the same but less factually educated. Um, yeah, there tend to be tropes heuristics, we call them in politics, right? We'll have them on things. So the idea of slavery would be like brutal master with a whip, you know, pretty girl with shattered face walking into owners upstairs bedroom, brave black and white soldiers killing the guy a bit later. The end now we go on to the origin trail. In reality, slavery was a huge chunk of human history. I mean, for most of history. One of the risks if you were a male in particular was being a battle cap, and battle captives unless they were killed were made into slaves. And many societies like ancient Rome, 15 or 20% of the population were slave.

Slavery was a variable that affected how you were treated like income or anything else. So slaves in general were treated like crap. But there were also slaves that could rise to positions like satrap, or Grand Vizier that weren't technically in the lineage of the king. But they were extremely powerful. So this is a very complex institution that went on throughout most of history. And because of the prevalence of the heuristic in the USA, there's almost a hostility to nuanced explanations of slavery. Two of the books I read when I started reading about or I read, when I started writing about slavery, were time on the cross by as I recall, Eugene Jenna, VC, which is an accurate quantitative analysis of how slavery operated, and black masters and time on the cross makes the point that slavery was of course unpleasant, but that it's an empirically measurable system. slaves were African battle captains who did a certain set of working class jobs in the United States for a certain period of back. So he looks at diet, he looks at frequency of physical abuse, and finds that slaves were treated slightly better than Irish, Italian, Dutch, etc. Workers in the north at the same time, I don't know if I agree with that I'd rather get hit with I mean, I'd rather get punched in the face and a dot fight than hit with a whip. I mean, there's a level of dehumanization. But he says essentially, during this period when most males were low paid or non paid Scott, industrial workers, slaves were low paid or non paid Scott, agricultural workers. This is how we can measure diet. This is how we can measure life expectancy. And he says that slaves were treated about as badly as, say, Irish factory workers. Again, more dehumanization. But I suspect that that's probably accurate. This book received a massive amount of criticism because the explanation was, well you're justifying slavery. And his point was no, I'm not I'm not justifying indentured servitude for the Irish either. These these things are bad. I'm saying that you can measure living conditions at this time and they weren't among the worst in the world. A black masters makes another point. It's a very complex book focused on one family. But the point is that something like 25% of free blacks own slaves, minority groups, free blacks, Jews, Native Americans were no less likely to own slaves than whites. All three of those groups economically when you consider that most blacks were slaves were doing fairly well. Native chiefs would often own four or 500 slaves. And it gets very complicated. Those slaves that were captured warriors would sometimes be trained to fight other native chiefs. Other native tribes sold themselves out as slave catchers like the chop chop, who would run down runaway slaves using hunting and Battlefield skills that frankly, no whites or blacks of the world probably had at that time. I mean, this was the first time in history of stone age, people encountered modern weapons, there must have been legendary warriors. I mean, they halted the USA is advancement for 400 years riding around on horses. So I mean, imagine those people chasing you through the woods. I mean, so all of this is part of history and ignoring it without nuance is meaningless. I mean, this is an issue for Reparations, I mean, if 30% of blacks and natives own slaves, and those are the two largest racial minority groups in the country. What do you do in terms of reparations, I'm a both black and native descent and I'm fairly well up. I mean, my ancestry would have included slaves, but also slaveholders. So do I give or do I pay? And I don't really have an opinion about some of this. I think reparations in many ways is a dumb idea in the first place. But those are questions you have to answer before you make social policy. You can't just point at a date in history and say bad bad, you know, ancestor man bad, which I think we have a tendency to do. Last point I mean, the I noticed that we've moved from you know, drums on the Mohawk when it comes to discussing Native American Indians to like Dances with Wolves our past hundred years. That's probably because the great native war bands I mean, like Red Cloud, or the Indian general is a man I admire. He was once asked how he got his name, and he just said the white saw my army. Like when he wrote onto a plane, there were 10,000 warriors behind him painted in the blood of their enemies and so on. And I mean, these people, they lost the war, but they did incredibly well given that they had stone arrows against parrot breech loading cannons and so on. We've moved from that like red clouds army sweeping down from the north to like cheerful people playing with bear comes Red Cloud and be disgusted to watch this garbage. But I mean, you need To put history and context,

Brooks crenshaw  26:02  
don't you think that one of the I mean, one of the big intellectual traps that's at play here, and it's something that it's a rule of mine not to fall into is we judge individuals of history based on our standards, rather than the, you know, the world in which they lived. And you know, haven't been, you know, with with PETA guy who's who's seen some of the worst human behavior has to offer in a combat situation and combat scenario that, that most people fall into the trap in which they believe that were they alive during the Holocaust, they would have been, you know, Schindler, they would not have been the gate guard, they wouldn't have been the bad guy in the situation when, historically, that's not true.

wil reilly  26:47  
Yeah, I mean, so first of all, there are two questions there one at a certain level, I think most competitors understand that morality is not real in the first place. We must behave as though it is with our wife and And so on. But I mean, I don't have the military background, you guys have been in those situations in my life where I've had people pull out weapons on or near me. Even things if there's a six or seven figure business deal on the table, sexuality, assuming that's consensual, you guys have already agreed you're going to do this. You don't do it necessarily a whole lot of right and wrong thinking what you think about is what's probably going to happen and how you're strategically going to handle it. If these two guys come at me, how am I going to respond? If he offers 1.8 million instead of 2.1? And this moves me out of the hood, real situation? How am I going to respond? So all of this stuff about ethics? First of all, to some extent, complete bullshit, if General Sherman and general Red Cloud are fighting one another? I would assume it would be entirely throughout those two men did not but I assume that'd be a kind of a brutal no holds barred affair that they would, you know, make into something else later. But if we are going to pretend that morality is real, which is something I advise us doing, you know, um, you can only judged people an evil person, to a very real extent is simply someone who's more than two standard data. Asians away from the norm of their time. There's no other way to look at it. I mean, the dominant personality trait in ancient Rome was alpha personality, male sadism. I mean, it was extremely, extremely common to bring your date to a gladiatorial event where you'd watch soldiers and baboons tear each other apart and then have anal sex in the stand because that doesn't get people pregnant. I mean, that interesting day, given that the soldiers consented to be out there, I don't care about the baboons. But I mean, like, that's something that in our society would be viewed as insanely perverse. That was a normal evening out. And the Romans are one of the greatest civilizations in history. We can't simply look at them, the creators of all this art of our own culture and say these people were evil. Simply put, they were closer to the savage than we were. I mean, this is 2000 years ago, Christ was alive. Their moral system included stoicism was quite honorable. It also included that as a way of relieving stress, letting off tension, I think it's disgusting, but it's stupid to call every Roman evil anyway, getting Back to the point whose standard deviations away from your norm is evil. So we can judge people historically in the context of their time. But yes, Brooks, I mean, your points absolutely correct if we try to apply our current standards to people that existed in other temporal and historical and moral areas, that doesn't make any sense.

Pete Turner  29:17  
Hey, this is Pete Turner from lions rock productions, we create podcasts around here. And if you your brand or your company want to figure out how to do a podcast, just talk to me. I'll give you the advice on the right gear, the best plan and show you how to pick a podcast that makes sense for you. That's sustainable. That's scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at break it down show calm. Let me help I want to hear about it.

wil reilly  29:39  
That doesn't make any sense. It's worth noting that even though an interesting point you're actually in a sentence the left only ever deconstructs whites on the right. But if you apply those standards that are so often used to deconstruct Lincoln or Sherman, to Red Cloud or to come sir, I mean, some of those people and at least a ritual sense. We're probably cannibals. I mean anyone that you captured would be castrated or blinded or have their hands chopped off. If they really liked you, they might just take off two ears and a thumb and then let you go. They didn't have a concept of really keeping prisoners of war around, they did have a concept of letting useless people eat. They scout people burn people alive. But I mean, it would be stupid to say that to come. So was a dishonorable or evil man, those are just the standards of primitive war. Well, you don't have any room back in the village for useless enemies, you have to keep guard on. So at any rate, yes, the your your questions correct. People have to be judged by the standard of their time, I suppose.

Brooks crenshaw  30:32  
But in much the same way that you know, a lot of the proponents of the 1619 narrative would also turn a blind eye to modern Sharia being practiced in America. Right, they turn a blind eye to, you know, the red clouds of history.

wil reilly  30:47  
Yeah, I mean, when I've traveled extensively in the developing world, I mean, I was one of those HFS volunteers in Latin America in the late 90s. This was a disturbed time for Latin America. I went to a mostly Latino High School. So I've tried to Mexico with essentially just personal friends. I think I'm going to Africa and security and business consulting capacity pretty near future. I've never seen the Middle East. I don't know, I would trust you guys descriptions of that. But if you go to pretty much any society other than America, you notice that the things are not Norway. But I mean, if you go to most societies other than the USA, you'll notice that the things that woke Americans complain about are much more prevalent in that society. And the concept of sexism, at least when I was there, at least outside of the universities would be virtually alien to most upper middle class Latin Americans. Spanish actually, as you guys know, has distinctive masculine and feminine endings for every word. The absolute expectation for every woman and I mean, I went on dates in the area is that as a man you would pay for the date you would open the doors if there's a physical fight, only you're involved. None of this involves your date at all because you are a man. There's nothing in particular wrong with this but the same things that outrage feminine about modern American society seemed not to outrage them so much about, say serve on tests. And it's the same thing times five in the Middle East where I mean, people are literally draped in burkas and shut doors and so on. And that's often required by law. So again, I think the point here, I find that conservative sometimes and for whatever reason, black conservatives fairly often sometimes defend indefensible things about the USA, like, Hey, we used to have slaves, but it wasn't that bad. That's not how I feel. I feel that slavery is in my training as an upper middle class, modern Western leader evil. I would strongly resist any attempt to implement it in this society even to say less some kind of debt servitude. But if we're going to look at the historical path of slavery, that requires looking frankly, at the fact that Native Americans, Arabs, virtually every civilized group of people engaged in slavery, and this would be true for virtually any practice, abusive treatment of battle captives has been and is more common in the Middle East than it is in The West, unprovoked aggressive war Jihad has been and is more common in the Middle East than it is in the West. So it's fine to speak against these things. It's not fine to dis honestly associate them only with our own society, which happens to be one of the better societies in the world.

Brooks crenshaw  33:16  
In addition to the sexism piece, like I've never seen as much racism, as I have seen in Asia, or at least South America, like it's, it's it is prevalent and a lot of it has to do with I mean, simple skin tone.

wil reilly  33:32  
Well, when I was in Latin America was more casually friendly thing like Latin Americans weren't politically correct. So people would jokingly say, oh, you're a black guy, you must be good at sports. Or, you know, do you like white women, which is a stereotype of black men with money which they assumed I had as an American in Latin America. I saw a less visceral hatred. I didn't see anything like the alt right or the crazy black Muslims in Latin America, Latin Americans actually tend to take it for granted that everyone is mixed, essentially. I mean, so I've had people say things like, well, I wouldn't be black, but I'm rich, and it becomes a subject of banter. But yeah, Asia, you're absolutely right. I mean, a good buddy of mine is Japanese. And he showed me some of the warning signs, telling people not to do stupid things that are around Tokyo. And what struck me is amazing is that the people in all of the images like don't go into a tiger cage are either blondes or their blacks. Because the idea is that no Asian whatever be stupid enough to walk into a tiger cage. What you have to do is tell the dumbest Westerners be they you know, blondes or redheads or Africans not to walk up and touch a man eating tiger. And the racism in Japan, for example, from business experience and just reading doesn't just stop with Westerners. I mean, it extends to people that we would view as indistinguishable from the Japanese. It extends to Koreans. It extends to the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands. I mean, all these people are Asian Koreans or stone East Asian genetic indistinguishable from the Japanese, right? But there's an entire sub caste of Koreans in Japan who are treated roughly as badly as we treated say blacks during the 70s perhaps not the 50s. Um, so again, yeah, there are certain things from savagery and war to racism to the abuse of women that seemed to be just human problem. The temptation to most humans who aren't cowards who have traveled to felt the sensation of blood loss or ask themselves questions about their sexuality or where they want to go in life. This is not something that's new and unique to the west any of these moral question. They only however, tend to be addressed within the modern west by a substantial subset of intellectuals, which is weird. I won't even say it's a problem because most academic research doesn't matter at all. But it's weird.

Pete Turner  35:49  
One of the things that always strikes me as odd is as we judge these things, you know, and we look at I'm doing Cody fingers, white people, and they're so horrible. Everything, then you Yeah, like you said, you put it into context, like the Bible is full of groups of people that you can find no historical reference for beyond that, because they were fucked away, killed away, whatever, like, go find me some Carthaginians you know, like they just they don't exist, there are so many people like that, where, you know, man has been a savage animal for a long time now that we're getting to this place. And I'm going to get into kind of a dangerous ground here. So understand, I'm just going to try to struggle to say this. Well, now that we're getting into this place where in America, you can be gay, you can be married, these things are in a lot of the world, illegal and potentially refold to say openly. It seems like if we're going to blame white dudes for being these horrible people, we should also say, Hey, you guys lead the way in so many ways you create this society where anybody where someone can be an immigrant, Refugee, and become a house representative person. Like there are so many wonderful things, you can't have both sides, you can't have both sides of the argument where you want the benefit of living here. But you also want to denigrate the people that built this system, just barely, by the way. I mean, how many times will did the US almost fail to exist? I want you to get into that. So So it seems like we just we're not good at balancing the scale. And, you know, we continue to have at least less climatic, less dangerous versions of this race war thing, but I was brought up as a Gen Xer to be like, yeah, people are different color, who cares? You know, like, it just doesn't matter. But we just can't seem to shake that like, and as a sports guy, you'll know every time they say the word Tony Dungy, they'll say, first black NFL coach, or first black Super Bowl winning coach. He's just a fucking NFL coach. He was an incredible defensive, you know, strategic guy. He doesn't have to be black. I mean, that's how I was raised. So let's talk a little bit about that racial part of it.

wil reilly  37:57  
Well, I think there's a whole lot there. First of all, I'll say on the record White people did do a lot of stuff. Um, I personally, I don't, I don't really get, I don't see much of a point to a lot of these online conversations about kind of whose ancestors developed the pig. I mean, I think that most groups of people have pretty substantial accomplishment. So I mean, African Americans or blacks and black people, I hardly ever say African American. And of course, most blacks don't live in America. But black people almost certainly developed say, hunting warfare and a number of other things human beings do in the motherland of Africa and in heartland countries, countries like Ethiopia. Similarly, dark skinned Caucasians like the Sumerians developed farming. I don't think any of this is especially challenged mathematics was the Arabs, the Arabs, as they're called time Arabic numerals, Morris numerals, white, certainly responsible for the Industrial Revolution, the last great social advantage. I mean, the Chinese through the background are more civilized than all of our ancestors most of the time. So I mean, I don't necessarily think it's a matter of whites are responsible for Or, you know the most positive final culture I think that white the white conquerors took the skills from many other peoples and built a great society it would be a silly for me to thank whites for industry as it would be for you to thank me for hunting or something. But we the the idea of cultural appropriation is so stupid because of this, by the way. I mean, it's a Ralph Lauren jacket, the whole idea of professors wearing tweed jackets comes from the Brits, but we fought the English, you know, here in America, does that mean I have to take this off and wear just a stock price with three holes cut in it? I mean, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I don't think most people are going to start doing that. But in terms of your your point, yeah, obviously whites did do a lot. I think that the reason there's so much critique of modern Western society, and this just came to me, but it's the same reason there was so much critique of war. What made the Vietnam War unique as a military conflict was not that it included a fair amount of brutality or in dubious quote unquote local allies or It included mildly corrupt generals, because every conflict in history had included these things. What made the Vietnam War unique was it included television? Hmm. For the first time, you could have reporters who, by the way, were of a different social class and political party than most of the trip, pretty close to betrayal on many occasions, but it included these people following the soldiers around showing this audience at home what or look like, and that shocked a lot of people. And it made a lot of people who weren't experienced in the trade of war, confident that they had opinions about what to do and what was happening. Similarly, Western culture is not, I mean, it probably is the best of the world's cultures. But it's not unique and being a great culture. I've had a massive amount of respect for the Chinese and Japanese over the years fairly familiar those societies. It's not unique and being bad at some things. What it is unique in being is the culture that existed at the time when mass digital media became a reality. It's very, very easy to critique Western culture, whereas most people don't know enough about other cultures to critique them. Most people. There's a term I use when I speak to business execs, thin intelligent, most people have a decently high IQ and know a little shit. And so feel very confident about themselves that intelligence. So if you're debating someone at a cocktail party, if I, I often won't even talk to someone if I say, Well, I like Western culture, and they say, well, we had slaves, because explaining why that's meaningless would require unpacking the fact that they don't know anyone else had slaves, right? What the other cultures are like, do they know what a Westerner is as versus what we used to call an oriental and Easterner? Do they know what they do? They know if the Greeks came before the Romans, very often I'll just say, well, nobody's perfect. And I'll go get a whiskey. I mean, it's made to handle that level of intelligence, that level of knowledge. So I think Western culture is the culture we live in. Now. One, most people only understand their own culture until recently, most people only what about 40 feet from the door. They're farmers. You know, we're better than we used to be. Traveling Salesmen, except for five merchants would have been an inconceivable profession in most societies. But most people only understand their own society. And we now have critical tools, Twitter, Facebook, that we did not in the past, and that leads to a massive focus on our society. One of the things that I've noticed talking to college kids, as someone who has at least a high level amateur interest in the history of the Irish in the natives, is that many of them don't understand that a lot of tropes didn't evolve with the white and black race wars in the USA, for example, the whip, I brought a whip to one of my classes to represent the oppression of poor men, and someone said it was insensitive to them as a black person. And I said, well, we're talking about England here. Do you think black people are the only people ever to be hit with whips? And it turned out they did. They weren't aware that the whip was the weapon of historical oppression. It's showing contempt for someone you don't even need to challenge them to a physical fight. You can hit them and they won't resist. You know, they were made out of leather and these crazy things rhinoceros Cox I mean, they were This was a tool that was used for all these thousands of years to beat the poor man. And specifically the poor man. women generally had other things that were less abusive, but more humiliating, done. And we went into all that in class and people said, Wow, I just thought that's what slave masters hit black people with. The noose is a similar one. So I mean, whenever there's a fake hate crime, something else I wrote a near bestselling book about, but whenever there's a fake hate crime on a college campus, you see that ubiquitous news. And that's a clear sign to me that this is fake. No one who's actually part of a noxious alt right internet culture now still wears Klan robes and talks about nuisance as much as I dislike these people. If you stopped Pepe the Frog or graper iconography that might be real, but the news itself has become linked strictly to historical oppression of black people. nooses again, we're what we're used to hang people, especially poor people in every society until recently. Um, this is another one of those facts that become somewhat taboo. But if you go through the list of lynchings The United States you find 3000 blacks but you also find 2000, whites and Hispanics. That's just a fact Tuskegee Institute keeps the data. The largest lynching incident in the United States involved a number of Italians in New Orleans, who attempted to bring the 1910 Sicilian concept of justice to the USA. A judge sent one of their fighting men basically to jail so they went killed the judge. And the entire city of blacks as well as whites got ropes went to the Italian quarter of the city and hung 12 guys from lamp poles, to make the point that here in the USA, we don't kill the judge if they vote against you. Whether you view that as justified or unjustified. I mean, that would be a typical lynching incident. But the rope again has changed form so that it's strictly used to oppress black people. The point of all this is yes, I agree. Most people have intelligent heuristics about their society. And in post Vietnam style. Most people criticize only our society without excusing them. One reason for this is that most people only know about our society.

Pete Turner  44:56  
Yeah, that that's a good point. They only know about our society, and whatever fits their their belief set their culture is what they're gonna stick with. And I don't blame anybody for that. Because look, culture, culture and easy, you know, intersects and as long as you know you're in an intersection you can navigate through it but it requires you to be uncomfortable as you learn how to do these intersections. Something else within this is in the 1619 project, they let me let me back out and ask you this, the 1619 project comes out last year, did that inspire the 1776 project? Or was this already in the works and they just beat you guys to market?

wil reilly  45:33  
Well, I think some of the 1776 isn't just a response to 1619. A lot of this like Bob Watson's had the Woodson center for decades, I've given to the Woodson center. What the once in center is is a fascinating experiment where you use kind of conservative and many of the people that work with the Woodson center military veterans actually, most of the rest actually come from the athletic or business world. But the idea is that you use conservatively principles like competition to go into the hood and make people better. ie you offer to groups of young men a chance to compete using Woodson center funds to go out and get the most jobs, for example, or you offer government granting funds to public housing residents that let them buy their own section eight homes. And then the deal is we'll keep coming by and having the young man help out as long as the house is clean. It's well maintained. You know, a family living in it might perhaps be married so on down the line so what's in center is these traditional American principles applied to the port does a great deal of good but that it already existed I had already given to Woodson and I'm sure a lot of the other people like Talib Starks who wrote Black Lives Matter. Carol Swain, who you mentioned Vanderbilt you, Glenn Lowry, the legendary kind of center right economist from I believe the Reagan administration, all those people had been giving. We'd all been doing work in our own communities. I work with kids, but I went Bob contacted us and said well 1776 this new idea. I want to launch I want to do this in DC at the National Press Club which obviously they would book for me and ultimately for you guys. I want to do some big donor outreach. I want to do something national would you respond to 1619? On top of what I was planning to do this year, everybody pretty much said yes. And so I mean, I actually, I wrote part of the business plan or the perspectives for at least some 1776 initiatives. And I mean, I'd like to see us have a fully maintained website with new essays cycling up every couple of days. I'd like to see us having an annual conference. And I mean, the themes are obviously one that I would support is I mean, you have the same problems of black and poor white communities. How do you fix both? Right? I mean, two groups that are often taught to hate one another by corrupt political leaders. How do you fix both? that that's something I'd be very interested in. But I mean, speakers vary. I mean, you can book any of our people as consultants that should be up on the website. Everything from security to diversity in the real sense of how to make a diverse team work. I want us to start doing school curriculum. That was originally Bob's idea, but I mean, I think initially, he thought it was a little practice. unrealistic. But I see that 69 teams already doing this. they've partnered with the Pulitzer Center and they have a full curriculum, it starts to like great to have teaching kids to be woke. Like, you know, Mommy, what is a slave kind of stuff? Like, do you ask your parents about patterns of historical oppression? And to me, this is just bad. I don't think this is the same thing as sex education when you're seven. I mean, before you get to be 15, and start going out on dates before you can dry, you certainly need to have some realistic understanding of sex. But I don't think five year olds need to hear things like sometimes grownups like to put their penis in an anus, which is an actual line from a California sex education course. Similarly, I don't think little kids who need to be learning about math, need to sit down and look at questions like who decides what answer is right? And what color are they usually, you know, that nonsense, in a sense is something that is admirable only among children, but it's very affable. Moreover, among children, there's nothing worse than a ruined child. So, I mean, at any rate, we decided to respond to some of that. So this already existed once it already existed. We all had fairly profitable businesses, we all were in the same space. But when Bob said, why don't I just trademark the phrase 1776? You know, before these damn hippies can, and you know, create the Black Eagle on flag logo and do this sort of stuff. Would you be a part of that? Everyone said, yeah. And I mean, I think you've seen a great response from not just like the black right, but sort of the black business community. I mean, Clarence Paige, who writes for the Tribune, probably by this point, has an ownership stake in the tribune in Chicago, john Sibley Butler, Robert cherry, I mean, some of the people that are in business advisor role, James Forrest, I think that the concept was, well, we can't just let them do this. I mean, it's fine if that's one voice, but it does not make sense that we would allow without any opposition from the successful black community, uninspired curriculum targeted at teaching whiteness to five year olds, and so 1776 Pretty easy to get off the ground.

Pete Turner  50:01  
Why is it all black? At least to start it? Like, why is that even important?

wil reilly  50:06  
Oh, it's not like three of those people I named are white. Okay, good. Okay. Like James, for instance? Oh, no. I mean, we're absolutely anti racist. It's worth noting, if you're doing this from a serious business standpoint, you can't be racist. that's against the law. So I mean, when people ask, and this is something, I really think that the left gets away with this quite a lot. Where I mean, you'll have organizations like the original rainbow push that are $50 million businesses that are 99.6%, African American, everyone's related. I mean, I think that if that were happening with a conservative organization, or just a trucking company at the same level of prominence, I mean, that probably wouldn't be allowed for very long. We are not interested in replicating that model. So I mean, in terms of the initial group that we had, at the event, I mean, to clarify, James White, Bob Cherry's white. Now I think it means people don't mind being mentioned. 1776 Um, yeah, that feeling does a lot of our strategic work is white. We're working with a leopard PR, which is Maria Rosada as company. She's Caucasian, I believe of Spanish descent. So no, I mean, that's not really relevant. One of the things about diversity is that diversity works when you almost don't notice it for the first five minutes. Um, when I went into the first 1776 meeting, my first reaction was, Oh, this is a bunch of people in suits, I better step my game up because I was wearing my tweed. And my second reaction was, well, they looked like they know what they're doing. We started with the money portion of discussion, which is always good way to begin. And then my third reaction was, oh, the group 75% black. That didn't really register because it wasn't important for any of the things positive or negative that you might stereotype of black men for it's really unlikely Glenn Lowry is going to step up behind you and take your wall. Like there was no I mean, we're not we're not playing ball here. I mean, there's no there are no positives or negatives that could possibly be associated with the blackness of Glenn Lowry in this setting. Not Of course it most black people are criminals or athletes, but in this case, the diversity just didn't And that's why I'd mentioned I would strike me as weird. I know why you SP. It strikes me as weird to go through a list of your executives by race. Yes, people do that more and more often, like our diversity outreach coordinator, Vivian Chang, who's Chinese American, in case you didn't catch that for the name Vivian Chang, and I've always found that kind of annoying. I am I have noticed that I'm introduced as an African American social scientist mostly on left wing programs. right wingers do it sometimes to just you know, cuz what you do, but every time I go on to talk with, you know, friendly liberal audience, it's like, despite being a proud black man, which is crazy. Well, Fred Riley has some things to say about the Democratic Party. It's like Jesus Christ, like you could you could have to condense all that to well, Fred Riley like he has a race and political independence. So at any rate, yes, we're quite diverse.

Pete Turner  52:49  
Yeah, I don't like being assigned a platform or like a status of being a trumper or a maga guy you know, just because I'm white, and I go, you know, the guys allowed to make some good decisions, you know, look around, it drives me a little bit crazy. And I asked the question about the racial makeup partly because I, you know, the person who doesn't know this is gonna make this assumption that it says Black Caucus, you know, speaking back and everything and I wanted to I wanted to smash that. And then finally, one of the things that I always struggle with because you know, guys like Brooks and I, we've been abroad, you've been to the third world, you see what happens. We are very fortunate here to blend simultaneously a diverse population, which is self selected for the most part, with with a fairly unified approach, when I tell my lefty friends that diversity and unity are really antonyms you know, like, diversity is not just exclusively great, you know, like, yeah, of course, it's great. But when you look at what unity and diversity have, they're different things and they don't really work together well. So Talk a little bit about that.

wil reilly  54:01  
Well, yeah, I think that diversity is never discussed, honestly, by either the right or the left, I would say, Okay, so I'm just speaking as a professional social scientist, it's my current primary profession, you know, TV talking and occasional consulting and so on aside, diversity has a number of well recognized positives in the literature. The first is that it increases cosmopolitanism. So there's no comparing the arts and culture, the cuisine, the datings, the patent rate so on of downtown Los Angeles with that of even the most sophisticated mono blot cities, Oslo or Accra, Ghana, or something like that. The second is that diversity decreases group thing. So you find that diverse countries, for example, are much less likely to fight aggressive wars than purely mono racial countries like traditional Germany or Serbia. Blacks and Asians and so on, are certainly willing to fight passionately for the USA, but you kind of need to say why there's not going to be the same sense of shared ancestral grievance with the French that Uh huh. hundred million Germans would have. Diversity also increases go to market for business, the most basic level, you're better as a sales floor if you've got some Asian guys to sell into diverse and Asian markets. I mean, that's that's undisputed. Now you could argue enough diversity would dilute that because everyone be interracial or something. So 200 years we'll have to have that conversation. But for right now increases cosmopolitanism improves business decreases group thing. Now, the left admits that, but they ignore the massive downsides of diversity, a diversity clearly decreases social trust. Putnam found this 1015 years ago, he looked at how diverse the city was. And he found that being more diverse did make cities pretty livable, he liked Mexican food, he goes into this whole thing about diverse bowling leagues and but then it gets to the meat of the sandwich where he's like, and by the way, people hate each other twice as much. There were people spent more time inside there are twice as many ethnic fights trust decline. Um, I think that's pretty undisputed. So there's trust and there's also decreased enjoyment of certain spaces, both whites and blacks tend, for whatever reason to be scared of the other groups, young males, looking at American crime rates. I'm not too shocked by that in either case. So I mean, there's some positives, there's some negatives. I think that manage diversity is good. Which is to say, if you take a group of people, if you're if I were king of a country, almost made the jackoff gesture, but in this hypothetical scenario, excuse me goofing around where I was king of a country, I would let in a diverse mix of people given that everyone had an IQ score over say, 98 clean criminal record and was willing to integrate. And even then I would probably schedule my housing in such a way that there'd be escape rooms kind of that if you were a working class person of Italian ethnic heritage, you could if you wished, by a house in a neighborhood full of working class people of Italian heritage, so there wouldn't constantly be distressing. Everyone seems different from me. I don't feel like I have a home, but I would certainly allow and encourage diversity. I would just be aware of the caveats that everyone in a leadership role should be aware of. In general, rambling a bit here, I find the left only talks about the positives. I find the right and especially the alt right, only talk about the negatives. Yes, I had a I had a debate with Jared Taylor about the nature of diversity. And although I think I was a bit glib, I was scored the winner by most of the outlets that would actually review it, because both of us were a little off the taboo charts. But I mean, his comment was just it was just a list of the negative things about diversity. And then I got to say, Well, what about the positive things about diversity? And I don't necessarily know if he'd heard some of those claims before. I mean, there's an entire managing diversity literature. So I think as with everything else, the truth is somewhere in between, right. If you want to run a website called crime, urban crime today, you're doing a public service, but you have to recognize there'll be plenty of links there to crimes committed by blacks. violence on plenty of links to crimes committed by whites and to full Wilding and brawling, regular robberies, plenty of crimes committed by Hispanics illegal immigration, perhaps You won't just be able to target one group of people and say this is crime. And I encourage that real social science lens on almost every topic. I want to know what the facts are so I can make decisions that might make my university a few million dollars that might get Appalachian kids through college. There's a goal to all this. If I want to be entertained, I'll read no Kipling or Dean coats or something, if I want to make business decisions, I want information. Um, and I think very often in the clickbait internet space, you don't get information, you get just bs from one side to the other. That's a real problem. That's a problem that can affect lives. last sentence, but I mean, Black Lives Matter is a group I really have an issue with. I've written major pieces about them is what these guys did. It's a group of upper middle class college kids, we actually look at their leadership that showed up in hood areas, found the police to be a little bit rude and then encouraged the police to pull out a hood area and the police did. They thought of this as a serious suggestion from residents of those areas, which was a major misread something like 4000 black people, plus A few thousand poor whites died as a direct result of it. It's called the Ferguson effect. You saw a massive surge in crime in every major Metro Center from white Charleston, West Virginia over more terribly to black Detroit. So these ideas have consequences if they're taken seriously.

Brooks crenshaw  59:15  
I think one of the you just touched on the police brutality issue. I think one of the things that is so often left off the table is the fact that the mayors in these metro areas are the ones that own the police department and own police policy. So when I see a de Blasio, you know, walking in protest of his own police department, it strains credulity and but i think is playing off of the ignorance of the general populace as to how, you know, a civic organization is is is put in place and how it works. Correct. And I think

wil reilly  59:51  
another there really is, I'm a fan of quantitative research where you crunch the numbers, you see the outcomes, but I'm also a fan of qualitative research. We go In the area, you talk to people, I plan on writing a book about poor whites, essentially, in the near future, I plan on going to the equivalent of the hood and sitting around drinking beer with people and writing down what they say. Um, but I mean, so where I'm going with qualitative research is if you actually unpack what's going on in most of these urban metro areas, the first thing that becomes very obvious is that these police aren't Klansmen. And the mayor's in charge of them are usually minorities. Bill deblasio is an urban Italian guy with a black wife, black son who's damn near communists. So I mean, we go without getting into the whole breakdown of de Blasio versus his own police because I think a big mistakes on both sides, but the idea that de Blasio is ordering the cops to go out and murder people is fantastic nonsense. He's from a scrappy Italian neighborhood, his wife's black, she's from New York, they're both too left for me to even vote for. There is not a genocide going on there. But if you want to make this claim, you can make this claim no matter what like I've been called the black white supremacist. So I mean, when I When I say something like, Well, clearly there's no evidence of racism in this case. You know, I'm a black man from a black college and I'm debating you about the actions of a black mayor. What someone will very often say, well, you and the mayor, Uncle Tom's, you don't understand my real black perspective,

Brooks crenshaw  1:01:15  
the Marxist standard of blackness, it's the same thing that's in the LGBTQ community with regard to you know, Peter teal recently being told he's not gay might sleep with men, but he's, he doesn't have a gay voice read Marxist, essentially.

wil reilly  1:01:29  
Just like dudes a lot, you know, in the bedroom. No, but I mean, I think that this, this is a very important point. And it's important to counter it. And this is one of the things 1776 says, actually, thank you. You might have given me an essay for the website, but I mean, like, I could call it if you're black, you're black. Meaning that what makes a person black is that there have more than 50% SubSaharan black or maybe Ethiopian ancestry. That's what being black is you're more than half African. So trying to redefine black to mean liberalism. Sir, but you see this very often the right is, of course, is imperfect without reach to minorities and poor whites and every other group we've discussed today as well, verging on ignoring in the one case, racism and the other. So I'm not just targeting the left here. But I mean, I'm a man of the center, right? I noticed this more often with the left. And I don't think that most leftists in the classical purple haired, radical college girl sense really like minorities. When I look at situations I think of as successfully integrated, and we've all talked about all these throughout the program, but I mean, I think of the military. I think with some flaws, but fairly well do a good job. I think of business. It's about money. You can only waste so much time and all that other ancillary bullshit before your boss fires you. I think of athletics. I think of the groups like a Fs that do public aid for others Habitat for Humanity, Salvation Army, when I think of all those situations, I don't think of a lot of places where I see a lot of SJW I don't really very often see someone who self identifies as a male feminist pushing a tackling, slash To across a parking lot on a Saturday morning, it doesn't happen. So I don't think that most of these people like blacks, in fact, I find they're very often scared of us. I consider myself kind of a nerdy guy in comparison with most of my friends. But I've often tried to do outreach to social justice groups with the usual suit and loud voice and so on and just seeing kind of a nervous inability to get anything done. And I think that that's very common when these groups interact with the black community or Spanish Hispanic communities. I think that minorities are seen by them as useful footsoldiers for communism. The term as I recall, is lump and proletariat, the idea that there's a group of oppressed even more than the ordinary proles that don't know why they're oppressed. And if you can convince them of the real issue of class while pretending to be sympathetic to their stupid little cause, then you can recruit great warriors. And I think that that's what a lot of these people Bernie Sanders community organizers in the like walk with the black community in terms of actual issues for the black community like the black church. is very underfunded, we tend to be less, basically black communities don't tend to be as good other getting better as white communities in long term fundraising. So a lot of the classic historic churches are facing a deficit of funds. I'm not the most religious guy, but if I were going to give to something in the black community, it might be that lack of fathers, you know, discontent with illegal immigration. This is another one of those things blacks and working class whites should agree on like importing a bunch of very hard working foreigners to take your job isn't a good thing if you're a working class male. But those actual issues I don't think the social justice left has any interest whatsoever in fixing I think the issue is getting black voters on board and then backing say college debt really worth noting. I mean, many, many black people go into the trades rather than college and those that go into college very often either have a military background where it's essentially free on athletic background, a Southern Regional scholarship, so forgiving the college debt of the people that majored in women's studies wouldn't have Black people are degrees when we had to pay for them tend to be in things like teaching or nursing where you can get a damn job. So we would literally just be giving broke white guys our money, the goal is getting black people and Asians imagine that on board with these ideas by appealing to race. And that's why there's a constant discussion of racism. I'm Mitt Romney is gonna put you back and change. john mccain has no idea how to lead in an integrated environment. I heard that one I was like, What? This guy managed a battleship. Like that's not something that's factually accurate, but it's something that's very appealing to a scared percentage of minority demographics.

Brooks crenshaw  1:05:36  
Isn't it interesting that you know, when you talk about institutional racism, one of the one of the loan, recent examples of that has been Harvard's policy with regard to to Asians.

wil reilly  1:05:49  
Yeah, I mean, so first of all, institutional racism is an interesting idea. Um, I have a standing challenge on Twitter, you can still find this it's got something like 170 likes 300 comments, but I have a standing challenge on Twitter that I'll give I think it's $500 to anyone who can present me with an example of institutional racism that doesn't collapse if you adjust for two variables other than race. So what I mean by that is, for example, the average black male income is 86% of the average white male income. Now, first of all, even from the starting point, this would be kind of like my perception on racism, which is sure we need to work on the remaining 10%. But 90% of a white male executives, you're not going to starve. There's no excuse for domestic violence or anything, like go out there earn that and we'll work on racism. But even that, that 86% the gap closes almost entirely if you adjust for two things age and region. It turns out most African Americans live in the south because that's where the boats stopped. And it also turns out that the average black man is 27, while the average white man is 58. This is one of the things I encourage people to Google and I'm a very honest speaker, that's what's called a modal average most common number, so it closes by about half if you're looking at media But still, if there's a 20 year age gap between white man a and black man B, if you say blacks commit more crime, or whites have more money, you have to explain to me why you're not adjusting for age. Otherwise, either of those points is completely meaningless. How does a 27 year old Southern white guy do against a black guy? I haven't broken this one down yet. But I guarantee you 27 year old Southern white guy and black guy, those guys are identical and there's a good chance they're friends. So institutional racism almost always collapses in this fashion. Another example would be si t test scores. You know, blacks, by the way, we're doing fairly well now we get a 960. But whites are still almost an 1100. Good job. I don't think this is something I get angry about either way. But

although again, none of us have anything to do with the averages for our groups for people we don't know. But anyway, so what you find is that that 960 to 1000 gap collapses again, if you just adjust for hours of study for the test. It turns out black kids spend more time an athletic practice more time dating, this isn't a good or bad decision since we're still almost at 1000. But we should probably crack the books a little bit more. If you adjust for time spent studying for the test, the black white gap closes. where I'm going with this is that I find most institutional racism just isn't real. what people are doing is a high school science fair level of social science, where you just identify a gap, and you immediately attribute it to racism, without checking for any confounding hypotheses. That's ridiculous. But I mean, there's there's a one of the best selling books of all time, The New Jim Crow is based basically around this. The author who's a witty, fun social scientist, I mean, goes to the conferences, but looks at the fact they're twice as many blacks proportionately in jail as whites and attributes of racism, and does an excellent analysis of the history of racism. What she forgets to do is check the crime rates turns out the black crime rate is very consistently about 1.9 times the white crime rate explains the entire difference. So that's my take on institutional racism in the first place. Mmm. Now you made an interesting point there Brooks because you say, Well, if there's any institutional racism, it might be cutting in the other direction by now. That's that's a valid point. I've thought about that I've haven't really come to a conclusion. But if you take a standard definition of institutional racism, which is that there's a formal practice in place that treats people differently based on race, it's hard not to put affirmative action in there, isn't it? And it's not just a black white issue now, because I mean, blacks are starting to score above Hispanics, as we increase more massive as more mass immigration become frequent. Blacks are beating out at least immigrant Hispanics, Asians are beating out whites, Jews are beating out whites and Asians. So you have a situation where one minority group is, is over performing another minority group. And a third minority group is the top performing group in the pool except maybe for a fourth minority group. So what you're doing is getting into the silly proportional representation stuff where you're saying, colleges are just blatantly saying, well, we're going to have about 45% whites this year. I've heard this not in my school, but in meetings of higher educators. And I mean, that's probably the worst possible way to pick. The other thing about affirmative action is that it's only part of a whole system of BS college college admissions preferences, as you probably know. So when I went to the University of Illinois, the old joke was that only about one person in 10 actually got in. We were about a third ethnic, and that's doing large part to our massive affirmative action programs. We have massive scholarships for the state of Illinois, which is a great state, but not perhaps the most intellectual in the us a lot of farming going on. We had giant athletic teams, we're talking about the big 10 conference, we had legacy programs for the children of alumni, that's probably half of the white. So when you break down all these preferences, you really find it was more like 20, but not that many people, at least based on my understanding of the system get into the scope. So is there something to be said for getting rid of all that and just letting the best man win, I'd say so. The interesting thing is that it's so complicated now that that wouldn't necessarily even screw over my group, middle class blacks. We'd finish about halfway down the pole in terms of time. Or spitting out many immigrant groups, Asians and whites, who also wouldn't have to deal with white legacies and so on. So what you probably see is a campus that was fully 8%, black, six, 7%, Hispanic, 15%, Asian, 5% Jewish. I mean, the minority diversity would be very similar to what it is today. Everyone would just be qualified to be there.

Pete Turner  1:11:20  
That's the problem of trying to manage a multivariate problem across time, you know, we just, we struggle to reliably do that, Hey, tell everybody where they can find the 1776 papers and essays so they can find it and participate.

wil reilly  1:11:34  
I mean, we've got a bunch of contact points. If you Google Woodson Center, the first point will be Bob Watson's Woodson center with a link to 1776. We also have the website 1776 unites I believe that's dot org. We also bought calm that was a bad org doesn't work out to 78 7069 dot com 7769 dot org those major site. I'm one of the founding members I can be found. I'm on Twitter, Wi l, Fr, Ed Rei live Facebook the same ad I mean, it's just as easy to locate elite stars john wood Coleman Hughes, Carol Swain made many Glenn Lowry john Smedley Butler. These are in general pretty well known, Almost Famous individuals. So reach out to any and all of us. I'd be glad to take your questions and I'm sure Bob and the rest of you guys take money.

Pete Turner  1:12:19  
Hey man, thanks for coming on and chatting with us.

wil reilly  1:12:22  
Hey, guys, thanks for having me. It's always a compliment.