Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - A New Crime Wave? - With Jason Riley

Episode Date: October 2, 2021

JASON RILEY’S BOOK: “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell”https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/maverick-jason-riley/1137602681?ean=9781541619685 THOMAS SOWELL’S BOOKS:https://m.barnesandnoble.com/s/Thomas%20sowell To write-in about the new podcast, please email: [e-mail]

I've lived in these communities. I've worked in these communities. I've gone to school in these communities. At no time have I ever come across any widespread sentiment that the problem is the police and not the criminals. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Before we start today, one housekeeping note. As you've probably picked up from recent episodes, the pandemic is not the only issue consuming us. That's a good sign. Elan and I had always intended for this podcast to be a limited series because at some point we would actually arrive at a post-corona world. And it seems, please Hashem, that we are slowly approaching that destination. We don't know if we're there yet,

but a number of our past guests, who I continue to check in with offline believe we are approaching the endemic phase rather than indefinite pandemic. It certainly feels like it. Let's hope and continue to pray and get vaccinated. What we didn't expect when we started this are the tens of thousands of listeners who now tune in regularly to Post Corona every week and frequently get in touch with me with their feedback on episodes or ideas for future guests. So with them in mind, we've been working on a new frame for the podcast that will broaden our conversations, a new topic, if you will, and even a new name. I'll have more to say about that over the next few episodes, but broadly speaking, what I want to focus on is this decade we're in,

the 2020s, because it strikes me that we'll look back at the 2020s as one of the most consequential decades in modern history. From inflation and unprecedented fiscal and monetary policies, the technological transformation driven by AI, blockchain, and life sciences, to the rise of China and Cold War II, to declining American engagement in the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, all against the backdrop of culture wars, public safety breakdowns, and public health crackups. There's a lot that's been packed into this decade already.

I could go on, but I also want to bring in some ideas from our audience. So feel free to drop me a line with ideas for the new podcast at dan at unlocked.fm. F as in Fred, M as in Mary. By the way, you won't need to worry about finding and subscribing to the new podcast when it comes out in a few weeks. It will simply appear in your feed instead of this one. But now on to today's topic.

I'm going to quote here from the New York Times earlier this week, quote, the United States experienced its biggest one-year increase on record in homicides in 2020, according to new figures released by the FBI, with some cities hitting record highs, close quote. That's from the lead paragraph on the front page of the Times just a few days ago. And as for 2021, while we don't yet have complete data, it so far appears that this homicide surge has continued well into this year as well. So tragically, this isn't going away soon. Much of the press coverage has focused on the connection between the crime surge and the pandemic. But did this crime wave begin well before the arrival of COVID-19? You may recall back in January, we dedicated an entire episode to this topic with Raihan Salam and Rafael Menguel of the Manhattan Institute,

what I believe is the most important urban policy think tank in America. The title of that episode was, Is New York Over Crime and the City? Well, given the new crime statistics just out, we wanted to revisit this problem. It's especially timely given the emergence of Eric Adams as the likely next mayor of New York City. Adams has been outspoken about confronting the crime wave in the city.

Much, of course, remains to be seen. But to help us understand what's going on, I checked in with Jason Riley. Jason is a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, where his column, Upward Mobility, has run since 2016. I'm a loyal reader of the column each week. He's also a member of the journal's editorial board and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Jason is the author of four books, three of which I've read. The first is Let Them In, The Case for Open Borders, which he published in 2008, Please Stop Helping Us, How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed, which he published in 2014,

and then his most recent book, which was just released earlier this year, called Maverick, a biography of Thomas Sowell. Jason has had a long career in journalism. In fact, he started at the Buffalo News in USA Today before moving to the Wall Street Journal. He was born in Buffalo. In this conversation, we won't talk about the Buffalo Bills, maybe next time. Jason has written about public safety, policing, and the future of our cities. He's also written extensively about identity and intersectional politics. Now, I've received a lot of questions from listeners about these topics and wanted to ask Jason about what's happening with the debate over critical race theory now and how it seemed to spread to

so many areas of American life. And finally, in this conversation, we'll talk to Jason about his most recent book, his biography of Thomas Sowell, which I devoured. Jason and I geek out on Sowell's books and his legacy. Here's Jason Reilly. And I'm pleased to welcome Jason Reilly from the Wall Street Journal and the Manhattan Institute to the podcast. Hi, Jason. Hello, Dan. Thanks for joining us. I've been looking forward to this conversation.

I want to jump right into things. And I specifically want to jump into news from this week, which is, and I'm going to quote here from the New York Times, the front page of the New York Times. Murders spike at record rate across the United States. And the subhead is tied to the pandemic. Surge seen in cities big and small, even as other crimes fell. And the piece goes on, the New York Times piece, which got a lot of press coverage, your paper editorialized about it, obviously, I'll quote from the Times here. Although major crimes were down overall, there were an additional 4,901 homicides in 2020 compared with the year before, the largest leap since national records started in 1960. The significant rise has roughly coincided with

the 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. So immediately they're focusing on the overlap between the surge in crime and the pandemic. The piece goes on to say, there's no simple explanation for the steep rise. A number of key factors are driving the violence, including the economic and social toll taken by the pandemic and a sharp increase in gun purchases. So most of the coverage in the Times focuses on the pandemic.

Then, I mean, paragraph after paragraph after paragraph, and then buried in the article near the end, it says that the protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis were also an important factor in 2020, although experts differ about why. So I want to first ask you, you've written extensively about crime and how crime affects, hits our cities and how you account and how we should analyze trends in crime and specifically the crime wave that this article refers to over the last year and a half. In your mind, how much of it should be attributed to the pandemic and how much to other factors? Well, I think the first problem I have with how the Times is

couching this is that the uptick in violent crime, particularly in major cities in the U.S., predates the pandemic, Dan. My Manhattan Institute colleague, Heather McDonald, has written extensively about this. You can go back to 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017. This started much earlier than the pandemic. You had significant increases in homicides and other violent crimes well before 2020. So I think this is a little bit of historical revisionism going on here to simply have as your starting point, the pandemic. And what was driving, or a big factor, I should say, in what was going on prior to the pandemic was the encounters between police and young black men in particular. These incidents were played up by the media.

What would happen after that is a heavy focus on police in these cities. Sometimes a rioting ensued. And what we saw in city after city after city, and there is social science to back this up, is a subsequent uptick in violent crime in these cities. So this happens after Michael Brown in Ferguson. It happens after Freddie Gray in Baltimore. It happens after Laquan McDonald in Chicago. Heavy focus on police. Police pull back. They get out of their car less often. They have fewer encounters

with civilians. The national media comes down on them, not just the officers who did or did not do something wrong, but the entire police department. And police react to that. And how do they react? Well, they react with less proactive policing. Like I said, they take a little longer to respond to calls. They're less likely to get out of their cars and interact with civilians. All of this takes place in city after city. Roland Fryer, Harvard economist, has looked at this, as have some others. So this was all happening before the pandemic, and it happened after George Floyd as well. And so there's really no shock here. Now, in addition to all of that, what you also have going on in the background here are calls for defunding the police or diverting

resources away from police departments. You have so-called bail reform going on, which is basically reducing the discretion of judges and prosecutors to hold suspects, even violent suspects, until their trial date. And then you do have the COVID-related issue here, but not quite in the way the Times is trying to present it. Under COVID, one of the things we did in many cities is release people early from prison to avoid overcrowding. So they wanted to deal with overcrowding in prisons because of viral spread. And of course, most violent crime and crime in general is committed by people who have already committed crimes before. Recidivism is responsible for most crimes. So if you put this all together in your salad bowl, and bail reform, releasing

prisoners early, crackdowns, scapegoating of police in city after city, how could we not have an uptick in crime? I mean, this is largely man-made, manufactured. These are where these types of policies have led us, and this is the result. Early on in the, when there were early signs that the crime wave was in full swing, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive leaders argued that the stress of the pandemic, and the Times article alludes to this, the stress of the pandemic, people are hurting economically, they're desperate. One would expect crime to go up because people, it's almost like a survivalist instinct.

What's interesting, the Times acknowledges the significant rise has roughly coincided. It says that although major crimes were down overall, there were an additional 4,901 homicides, meaning, according to the Times, crime was down in other categories, but homicides were up. And Rafael Menguel made the point, if it were really what the progressive critics were saying was the root of it, which people were desperate, then it wouldn't be murders. It would be robberies.

It would be people stealing supplies, food, money. This is different. This is murder violence. And it's harder to draw the connection to the pandemic, if that's really what the primary category is. Yeah, I, I, I agree entirely with that. They're, they're, they're, they're, they're trying to explain away, I think, what's behind this, the Times and others on the left, because they have a political agenda here, which is to deny, I think, the reality of the consequences of many of the reforms that they've been pushing for. And they're basically soft on crime policies.

And when you go soft on crime, you get more crime. This isn't the first time this has happened. We saw this happen in the late 60s, all through the 70s. I mean, it got really bad starting in the late 60s. And we had a crime wave with murders increasing all the way up through the early 1990s. So we've been here before. and it was, again, a combination of soft on crime policies on the left and other factors. There were demographic factors as well. You had a large younger population, and younger people are more prone to crime than older people and so forth. So there were a combination of factors. What I find really disturbing about this, Dan, is that the left claims to care so deeply about low-income minorities. Soft-on-crime policies, you know, who bears the brunt of them are these low-income minorities. They are the most likely victims of not only of petty crimes, of theft and robbery and so forth, but of violent

crimes. They are far more likely than other groups, blacks and Hispanics in particular, to be victims of crimes. So to the extent that you are going soft on criminals, to the extent you are pushing, you know, you're scapegoating cops or pushing for resources to be diverted out of protecting these communities from criminals, you are making life much more difficult for the mostly law-abiding residents of these communities who have to deal with these issues day in and day out. And that's what's really sad about this, is you have a bunch of elites, black elites and others, claiming to speak on behalf of these low-income minorities, but in fact not representing the interest of these minorities,

at least as far as what these residents of these communities tell pollsters. And we can get into some of the data there. But there's clearly a divide between... Can you talk a little bit about that data? Sure, sure. You've written about this. There's this dichotomy between what elites are saying in terms of diagnosing the problem

and then what the people who are having to live with the consequences of our policies on policing are saying. I should preface this by saying this is part of a broader chasm that exists out there between elites, activists,

politicians, media types, and rank-and-file blacks. And you can go down the list whether you're talking about school choice issues, whether you're talking about voter ID laws, whether you're talking about race-based college admissions. There is a huge gap between what the elites want and what the people in these communities say that they want. And crime is just another example of this. And I do have some data I can bring to bear here. So in a Gallup poll released last year, 81% of black Americans said they wanted police presence in their neighborhoods to either remain the same or to increase. That's 81%.

Just 19% said they wanted it to decrease. Another Gallup poll released a year earlier asked Black and Hispanic residents of low-income communities in particular about policing. 59% of both Blacks and Hispanics said they would like the police to spend more time in their area than they currently do. In 2015, which is right after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, a poll found that a majority of black respondents said police treat them fairly and more blacks than whites by a two to one margin said they want a greater police presence in their local communities. Again, that's after Ferguson went down. And this is not a recent phenomenon, Dan. Crime control has been a priority for Blacks going back decades. In 1993, there was a poll done by Gallup

that found that 82% of Black respondents said the criminal justice system doesn't treat criminals harshly enough. Think about that. 75% of blacks wanted more cops on the streets to combat crime. 68% said we ought to build more prisons so that longer sentences can be given. So when you ask the residents of these neighborhoods what they want, and then you

compare those responses to what the elites are saying, you see how divorced those two camps are when it comes to crime control in these communities. I mentioned Rafael Manguel from the Manhattan Institute. We had him on early in this podcast series and he painted a picture of where this was heading before he had the data we now have uh and he painted a picture of what the city could look like new york city where where i live and i know where you spend a lot of time and work. And now we have the data. So coming back to the Times article, New York City recorded about 500 homicides in 2020 compared with 319 in 2019. Chicago recorded 771 homicides compared with 500 last in 2019. And Los Angeles recorded 351 homicides last year

compared to 258 in 2019. So in New York, 500 homicides, those are among the biggest numbers you'll find going back to the, you mentioned, you know, to the early 90s. Rafael painted a picture that when the crime gets really bad, the city is going to feel fundamentally different. Do you feel like that is happening? Now we have the data to prove out what he predicted. Do you feel like the city, there's just a different dynamic, a different sense to the city in the attempt to return to normalcy post-corona because of this overhang of violent crime? I think we're headed in that direction. And the reason I want to qualify it is, as many people point out correctly,

is that we are not back to the levels of the early 1990s. When you had 2,000, 2,100, 2,200 homicides in New York City. We are not anywhere near close to being back there. And as I said, that trend had started in the late 60s. It was a multi-decade. That is a true crime wave. Enough time has not elapsed to start saying we are back to the bad old days.

But as I said, we are certainly headed in that direction. And this all started prior to the pandemic. So I don't think that can be the sort of all-purpose explanation for what we're seeing as some on the left want to claim. But I just hope we can nip it in the bud. You know, it's not too late. These bail reforms can be re-reformed. We can, you know, reinstill confidence in police. We can take back these neighborhoods and not hand them over to criminals to run rampant. I mean, it's not too late to do all of these things. And what I've noticed is you not only have someone like Eric Adams in New York running, you have these sort of pro-police or pro-policing or anti-crime candidates in a number of major

cities. Atlanta has also seen an uptick in violent crime. The mayor's race down there is also going to feature someone running on crime. So I think even people on the left, or at least some politicians on the left, you see breaking with their progressive wing on this issue. Democratic political leaders breaking with the left. So let's stay on Adams for a minute. So he has got a complicated history in his own career in law enforcement, but the fact is every interview I read that he gives now, he is saying all the right things about what needs to be done vis-a-vis law enforcement and bring some normalcy and public safety back to the city. He ran, it seems, in the mayoral primary, in the Democratic primary, explicitly on this issue, almost like he understood what was actually

really going on in the communities, probably more in the outer boroughs than Manhattan, and in those communities where people were voting in the primaries better than some of the progressives in Manhattan who were getting all of the press attention and all the big endorsements from, you know, Washington political leaders. Do you think that was just like, he's from Brooklyn, he's in touch with these communities, he actually really understood where this sentiment was, where that public polling that you cite, what it represented? Yes, I think, and he's smart. It's smart politics. I mean, for some of us, it's a no-brainer. Everyone knows this is the top issue for residents of the city. And as a police officer, he also knows that the biggest problem in these communities is not policing, Dan. I mean,

I've lived in these communities. I've worked in these communities. I've gone to school in these communities. At no time have I ever come across any widespread sentiment that the problem is the police and not the criminals, which is what the progressive left is trying to push. And they just don't have the data on their side to back that up. Just to give you an example, in 2019, so prior to the pandemic, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, there were 492 homicides in the city of Chicago, three of which involved police. Hmm. Three out of 492 police shooting deaths. Say the number one more time.

492 homicides in the city of Chicago, three of which were perpetrated by police. And here's another thing Eric Adams knows. Policing in New York has not only been improving, it's been improving dramatically to the point where it's a big city model for the rest of the country. Just to give you some other figures that you rarely hear. So there's no national database on police use of lethal force. There's some people that are pushing for it. I certainly wouldn't have a problem with putting one in place. But right now, different states, different cities report or don't report different data. There's no uniform database in place. But New York City is one of those places that has kept detailed records on police use of lethal force going all the way to the early 1970s. So in 1971, New York City police shot had dropped to 108 from 314, and fatalities had dropped to 91.

Fast forward to the latest figures I've seen, which are from 2019. Police shot 34 people in New York, 10 of them fatally. So you're talking roughly a 90% reduction in both police shootings and police shooting fatalities in the nation's largest city with the nation's largest police force. Eric Adams knows those numbers too. And it might disturb him somewhat that you have activists running around and politicians running around claiming that not only do we have an epidemic of police shooting young black men or anybody in this country, but that the numbers are rising. He knows that's not true. He knows the data does not support that claim. And New York is no outlier here. Nationwide,

police shootings have been falling dramatically over the past 50 years, and particularly shootings of minorities, Black and Hispanic men. And there have been economic studies of major cities that have shown this empirically. So there's this counter-narrative out there that needs airing, and maybe Eric Adams is someone who can credibly present it. To be clear, you are not saying there aren't some reforms that are important in law enforcement as it relates to dealing with certain issues? No, no, no. What I'm saying is we can have a debate about police reform. We can make it easier to fire bad cops. We can make it easier to collect the data on what they're doing than it is. And you've spoken about the need to like some of these rules or light non-rules that make it easier for police who have real complaints

against them who are dismissed from certain police forces to move to another police force. Yeah, and not have their record foul them. Yes, again, I think all of that can be fair game, and we can always improve policing. And I'm not saying there are no bad cops or no racist cops or no cops who abuse their authority. What I'm saying is that a debate about police reform has morphed into a debate about scapegoating cops for social inequality in America. And you're not doing the most violent neighborhoods any favors when you have that discussion or want to focus on that, because these are the communities that are most in need of good policing. And so my problem is that this debate

over police reform has sucked all the oxygen out of the room when we really need to have a debate about crime control. And that's the problem. The press is very eager to break down police shootings by race. They have no interest in breaking down criminal behavior by race. And if you want to talk about one without talking about the other, you're not really having an honest conversation. You're pushing a political agenda. And that is what has been going on in this country, particularly since the George Floyd incident. But even prior to that, no one wants to talk about the racial breakdown of criminal behavior and how police respond to that. And if a community is going to have more contact with police and how that can be legitimate contact,

given crime levels in certain neighborhoods versus other neighborhoods. And so my problem is that we're not having an honest conversation about these issues. You have also responded to, just pivoting off what you said a moment ago, you have also responded to in pivoting off what you said a moment ago you have also responded to in your public commentary and your writings to the role this idea the role of race in violence writ large and and you've argued so leave aside police violence i'm just saying violence criminal violence civilian on civilian criminal violence or meaning non-law enforcement uh criminal violence you've argued that that it's less

about race and i don't want to misquote you so but you've said it's less about race and more about the breakdown of the family in certain communities. So again, because I don't want to misquote you and I don't want to bungle it, can you explain what you meant on this topic? Well, there's certainly a correlation between involvement with the criminal justice system and fatherless homes. Just like there's a correlation between fatherless homes and teen pregnancy and drug use and school dropout rates

and a whole basket full of bad social outcomes have been associated with the breakdown of the nuclear family and single parenting and so forth. And again, this can too be shown empirically. If you go back to as recently as the early 1960s, two out of three black children were being raised by a mother and a father in a home. Today, more than 70% are not. And in some of our inner cities, it's as high as 80 or 90%. There have been criminologists. The one that comes to mind is Barry Latzer, who's at John Jay College, has noted that the black male homicide rate in the 1940s fell by about 18% while remaining flat for whites.

It fell by another 22% in the 1950s, again, while remaining relatively flat for whites. And what was particularly interesting about this is this was during part of the great migration of blacks out of the South into more urban areas, both in the North and in the South. So they were coming from rural environments into urban areas, which are typically much more violent than rural areas. So you would have expected violent crime rates to be going up in the 1940s and 50s, particularly among blacks. The opposite was happening. So these violent crime rates that we see today, and they are quite high in some of these communities relative to what we see among other groups, violent crimes rates among blacks are seven to ten times higher than they are among other groups. That is more of a

post-60s phenomenon and very much coincides with the breakdown of the black nuclear family that we saw over the same time period. Also a cause of or a source cited by many in the public debate about what's called you know this sort of the term mass incarceration so we have this mass incarceration problem in the u.s too many people behind bars and the people behind bars are disproportionately represented by the black black communities by black men specifically and this is partly attributed to the unequal enforcement of our drug laws and that you know non-blacks whites who break drug laws don't wind up behind bars just the way the system works because of inherent racism in the system, or at least the way that the system is practiced and the way justice is meted out,

or from their perspective, from their criticism, lack of justice or uneven justice, it means that blacks breaking drug laws get disproportionately punished in terms of jail sentences. What's your response to that? Well, this is a big issue. And it's not just left-wing progressives that make this argument. You have a number of libertarians more closely associated with the political right, who also cite the drug laws as a big driver of racial inequality in our criminal justice system. I have a couple responses to this. And I should preface this by saying, I'm kind of agnostic on the war on drugs and whether we should continue it. I think there are very good arguments on both sides that this is, you know, the alcohol prohibition attempt redux. And it's not, you know, it's doing more harm than good.

And we should rethink our drug laws. I think that is a perfectly legitimate argument. I could see myself getting behind it, depending on how such laws were put together. But if your goal is to reduce racial disparities in our criminal justice system, or if your goal is to address so-called mass incarceration in our criminal justice system. Going after drug laws is barking up the wrong tree. And here's why. Blacks are about 36, 37% of the incarcerated population in this country. And I'm talking about people in state and local jails and prisons, which are about 90% of the people incarcerated.

There's a separate federal prison program, but it only has about 10% of inmates. So blacks are about 37% of who's locked up in state and local prisons. And they're about 13% of the population at large, but 37% of inmates. If you were to send home everyone who's locked up in prison on a drug offense, blacks would still make up right about 37% of the prison population. Because what is driving incarceration rates among all groups is not drug offenses, it's violent offenses. And as I mentioned, black violent crime rates are significantly higher than they are among other groups. So the latest data I saw in the breakdown, again, these are pre-pandemic numbers, but about 54% of people incarcerated are there for violent crimes. About 19% are there for property crimes.

And then coming in third are people there for drug offenses at about 15%, or less than a third of the people there for violent offenses. And among those drug offenders, only 5% are there for possession. The rest are traffickers. We are not locking up people with a dime bag or people who have a little pot for personal use at home. That is not who's locked up in prison on a drug offense. These are traffickers who have been locked up. And if you want to say they shouldn't be there or whatever, you're still only dealing with a small percentage of people who are incarcerated. So again, regardless of where you come down on the drug war or the situation and our drug laws, if your goal... And the other

thing I wanted to add is if you sent home everyone in prison on a drug offense, America would still have the highest prison population in the Western world or in the civilized world, however you want to put it. Again, because most of our prison population does not consist of people there on drug offenses. So going after the drug laws will help you solve neither the racial disparity issue nor the mass incarceration issue. But if you want to tackle drug laws, feel free. I just don't think it's going to get people what they think it will get them by going after those laws. And I'm always hesitant to say, use terms like mass incarceration, that we're locking up too many people.

I mean, what is too many people? What I want is the conviction rate and the incarceration rate to match the violent crime rate. To me, that's the mix. You know, America is a uniquely violent place and has been for a very, very, very long time. And so one would expect for us to have higher incarceration rates here. So I try and steer clear of mass incarceration or over-incarceration and so forth, because I don't think that's really, they're using the right metric there. I want to pivot to another issue that has been a really hot issue and seems to have come somewhat out of nowhere, which is the debate over critical race theory. And before getting into like the merits of it, just how this issue, I was, I was, how this issue just sprung upon us seemingly

at like rapid speed, because my understanding was for some time, the critical race theory debate had been kind of, you know, relegated to college campuses, faculty debates effectively. And then suddenly it sprung out and it is now ripping through K through 12 schools. It's ripping through a lot of workplaces, corporate environments, nonprofit environments. So can you just explain to us how, where this, where the critical race theory debate originated and how it seemed to have, you know, moved to so many different corners in our society so quickly? Sure. Well, you're right. Your description, I think it's pretty accurate. This is something that

originated on college campuses, particularly in law schools in the 1970s. Some of the early proponents were people like Derrick Bell, Kimberly Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, all people in the legal sphere. And it's really, I mean, at the end of the day, it's a glorified argument, a fancy argument for racial preferences. That's what critical race theory really is. And that's what it was in its original form. Racial preferences for faculty jobs or for student admissions? Well, it's an argument for racial preferences, starting with faculty jobs.

In other words, what Bell and Crenshaw and others were arguing is that race and ethnicity and gender should be used as an academic credential, an academic credential in faculty hiring. And you know who was one of the first people to call them out on this was Randall Kennedy, the Harvard Law School professor, and a famous Harvard Law Review article written in the late 1980s. It might have been 1990, but I think it was 1989. And he called them out, called them to task on this, and said, you know, you guys, this seems like a very self-interested argument you're making here. And that's, you know, that's where critical race theory here in the US

got it started. Again, no one was paying attention to it except people, fellow academics. And then it did start to creep off of campus and into our diversity training at work and now into our school curriculum. And I think that, well, the biggest vehicle for that right now is the 1619 Project from the New York Times. So talk about that. So just spend a minute, because not all our listeners are following it as closely as possible, just how the 1619 Project originated and then how it became such a phenomenon. Well, it was the brainchild of a journalist named Nicole Hannah-Jones at the New York Times.

And she published a series of essays, and she wrote the lead essay in the New York Times Magazine in a supplement. Recently, in the last couple of years. Yes, right. Arguing that slavery should be put at the center of America's founding, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve the institution of slavery, that slave labor built this country. And that the reason she pegs at 1619 is because that's when... That's the year the first black slaves arrived.

There's some dispute about not only the year, but whether they were actually slaves versus indentured servants who could and did work off the cost of their travel to this country the way a lot of non-blacks did. So there's some debate even there. But nevertheless, the 1619 Project paints America as somehow uniquely evil because of its slave past. And that is where some people have taken issue with her. As you know, there are no shortage of books about slavery or the American Revolution. None of them have been written by Nicole Hannah-Jones. So people might be surprised that she's getting all this deference. Single-handedly upending the way we study the... Nicole Hannah-Jones has never written a book, never written an academic paper.

Yet you have these people deferring to her and her co-authors revisionist views of America's founding. And I think this is disturbing for any number of reasons. First of all, it's inaccurate history. The American Revolution was not fought to preserve the institution of slavery. America is not uniquely evil in terms of having a slave past. Slavery predates America, predates the continent before it was known as America. Slavery has existed in societies all over the world down through history. And to try and paint America in this way, I think, is just fundamentally false. What makes America unique is not its slave past.

It's not slavery. It's emancipation, which makes America unique. And so there are other issues as well. But you've argued just because on the surface, it sounds like a pretty provocative statement. You've argued that, and I'm quoting you, that America's history of slavery, at least relative to the history of other countries, is the least remarkable part of American history is the point you made. Exactly. Given how widespread this institution has been down through history all over the world. Globally.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Globally. So, and I mean, more African slaves went to the Middle East and North Africa than came to the West. Far more. And this also gets into her argument about American wealth being built off of slavery. The South was the poorest part of the country, both during slavery and since slavery.

And in other countries that have had slavery, those sections of the country that had slavery, like in Brazil, were the poorest parts of Brazil, both during slavery and since slavery. Eastern Europe had slavery far longer than Western Europe, and Eastern Europe has long been much poorer than Western Europe. And even in the Middle East, where more slaves went, when the Middle East started to get wealthier, it wasn't due to slavery. It was due to the

discovery of oil beneath the sand. So if slavery makes a country rich, where's the evidence here? And your classical liberal economists from your Adam Smiths and your John Stuart Mills, had long called out slavery as economically inefficient. They opposed it. Not only morally, but they said it's bad. It's a bad way to run an economy. So one of the more egregious, egregious aspects of the 1619 Project is there's a line in one of the essays that said that to the extent that blacks gained some sort of equality in this country and rose, it was due to their efforts alone,

she says, ignoring the collaborations with Jews, with Catholics, with all kinds of groups, whites in general, who fought for equality for Black Americans. It's just, it's outrageous that she would, the Quakers, I mean, it's just outrageous that she would make such a statement. And yet, so the big takeaway for me, though, and I always come back to this, is, as I said, there's no shortage of historians, academics, scholars who know the real history and that could call her out on it and could call the New York Times out on it.

Why don't they? You've had people like James McPherson. You've had a few. You've had a few. Sean Lentz, Gordon Wood. There have been a few. McPherson is like one of the most renowned Civil War historians. But why aren't historians at every major college and university in the country shouting from the rooftops that this is nonsense. And the reason is that they are afraid. They are afraid. They're afraid of being called names, racist, sexist. They're afraid that their

livelihood could be affected by this. They're afraid of the Twitter mobs or social media backers. They are afraid. We have a, you talk about an epidemic in this country, there's an epidemic of intellectual cowardice in this country. And nowhere is it more prominent than in this debate over critical race theory and the 1619 Project. It drives me crazy. The other, just from a practical point of view here, you know, the fastest, we're becoming a more pluralistic country by the day. The fastest growing groups are Asians, Hispanics. The critical race theorists want to teach our children, our children, to focus on their racial differences, to focus on skin color and ethnicity. They want to teach us to obsess over these things in a country that is becoming increasingly

pluralistic. Gee, what could go wrong here? It is asinine. So it's not only historically ahistorical, I think as a practical matter, it's something that deserves a lot of pushback for the damage it can do. People like to talk about diversity being America's strength. That's what makes us strong, our diversity. No, no, no. Our strength is being able to overcome the problems associated with diversity and focus on what unites us. That is America's strength. And a lot of countries can't get that right, by the way. So why has this lit up? It just, it does not, there's nothing gradual or incremental. It doesn't seem to me, as an observer,

there's nothing gradual or incremental to this epidemic, as you put it. It seems to have just almost come out of nowhere and then spread like wildfire. So what do you think was going on? What happened? What am I missing here? I don't know if I'd agree with that.

I mean, if you're someone who, as I have, been following these debates, going back to the 1980s over multiculturalism, I really think this is an outgrowth of that. This is the victory of the multiculturalists, the people who are cultural relativism. I do. I think these are people who have wanted us to focus on our differences from day one. They think that America is uniquely evil because of slavery, because of what was done to Native Americans and so forth. And they've been fighting this for a long time. And I think this is their moment. This is the ascendance of progressives in the Democratic Party has given these views more prominence. And, you know, I'm afraid things could get worse before they get better,

particularly given the intellectual cowardice out there in terms of pushing back or not pushing back. What does worse look like? Well, it spreads. You know, they want to get it into the curriculum. And I think the curriculum will get more and more strident, frankly. You know, one of the recent MacArthur Genius Grant awardees was Ibram Kendi, who's in some ways the face of a lot of this going on.

You know, this is someone who, who was called for really policing speech. He wants a cabinet level post in the federal government to call out racist statements. I'm not even sure how, how, how you comport. I mean, how is this at all consistent with our basic freedoms in this country? And this man, you're either a racist or an anti-racist to him. The light is on or off. There's no dimmer. And he's being awarded.

His books are being assigned in schools. I mean, that's the bottom line here is that the racial grievance industry in this country has never been more lucrative. And it's going to continue to draw scholars, politicians, and anyone else into its orbit. I've argued before that the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s has become an industry, if not a racket. And there is a lot of money to be made on pointing out the failings of white people in this country. And so I think people will continue doing it until, I'm waiting for all you white people to stand up and say, enough of this nonsense.

Statues of George Washington coming down? You're going after Abraham Lincoln? I mean, where are you guys? Come on. So, I agree. So, Jason, you've said that this movement, the CRT movement, Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, that it turns Martin Luther King's legacy on its head. Oh, yeah. Because it's basically arguing that the sort of original sin is being white.

It's not that the original sin is being racist. It's the original sin is being white. It's not that the original sin is being racist. It's the original sin is being white. Is that, am I? Well, it turns it, it turns it King's message on its head in the sense that King wanted us to focus on things other than skin color, character. Black Lives Matter wants you to focus on things other than skin color, character. Black Lives Matter wants you to focus on skin color, which is why they get upset when you say all lives matter. Kendi wants a focus on race. They want to focus on our racial difference. CRT is about focusing on racial difference. King was not about that focus, and he knew where that could lead. There's a big difference between those civil rights activists of the 50s and 60s

and the social justice activists today. King was asking something of blacks. He felt that blacks had a responsibility, as well as whites. Whites had a responsibility for changing a fundamentally racist system, but blacks also had a responsibility in terms of readying themselves to take advantage of these opportunities once they were made available. So he was very hard. For example, he spoke openly about the problems of, of, of black criminality, um, misbehavior, antisocial behavior in the black community. Uh, he was very open about that. And so were many civil rights leaders of those days. Critical race theorists ask nothing of blacks, nothing at all. All black problems are the fault of whites and the responsibility of whites to solve.

So there's a fundamental difference in the approach being taken today. I think that's clear. So I want to use this as a jumping off point to the book, your most recent book, Maverick, the biography of Thomas Sowell. And we're going to provide in the show notes the details on how to purchase the book because it's a terrific book. We're going to get to Sowell's life in a moment because his life is very important. And it's extraordinary that someone, that you did a biography of him because it's a very important contribution. But I just want to quote on this particular topic. You wrote in the book, then as now 40 years later, liberal elites, I'm quoting from your book,

liberal elites place the onus on whites to fix the problems of blacks. Newer movements like Black Lives Matter and younger public intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and the critical race theorist Ibrahim Kendi remain far more interested in white behavior than in black behavior. Thomas Sowell took a different approach. So this is from your book. So it's basically a version of what you were just saying. Yes. The soul has long believed that the problems of blacks are greater than the moral failings of whites. And there's no evidence that focusing exclusively or largely or mostly on the moral failings of white people actually helps black people. You know, I have no love for the Confederate statuary being taken down, but I'm not sure how that's going to close the achievement gap in schools. I'm not sure how that's going to reduce the homicide rate in Chicago. So we could focus on Confederate statuary if we want, but it's not clear to me how that is going to help the black underclass in this country. But if you're an activist trying to raise money, that's what you focus on.

If you're a politician trying to scare people to the polls, you tell them it's still 1962 and your voting rights are in jeopardy. So everyone's got an agenda here. And Sowell's point was that the agenda of the civil rights movement no longer and hasn't for a long time represented the needs of most blacks. And so he broke with the civil rights movement in the late 60s. He had supported the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, but he saw them taking turns and directions that he found quite disturbing, one of which was this movement away from seeking equal opportunity into seeking special favors. And then this not only cost black liberals the likes of Thomas Sowell, it cost them many other long allies they'd have,

such as Jews, who were big supporters of the early civil rights movement. But when they started pushing for quotas and set-asides and others, a lot of Jews said, no, we cannot go there. We know where this leads, and we cannot go there with you. And so the black activists lost a lot of wider support when they took this turn. But Sowell's point was that in addition to that being morally wrong, it wasn't going to help blacks. It was taking the eye off the ball, which he felt was the development of black human capital. And in the post-60s era, not only was there a push for special favors, there was also a push for more black political clout. The thinking was, particularly after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the thinking was that if we can just get more of our own elected into office,

the rest will take care of itself. And so there was a big, big push to elect more black officials. And that became much more of a focus than the development of the human capital, which is what the King generation had been more focused on. And again, Sowell said, you guys, you're going down a bad road here. This is going to end well. This is not going to end well. So let's talk more about this book. First of all, why did you decide to write this book? I know you were trying for some

time to get Thomas Sowell to cooperate. I mean, let me submit this. Thomas Sowell had a huge impact in my own intellectual development, in my own, you know, where my intellectual curiosities took me when i was much younger often landed me at reading various books by thomas soul so he had a huge impact on me so i just want to i want to i want to lay out my my my bias but it wasn't until your book came out that it occurred to me and that's why i sort of got interested because then i learned that you had been trying for some time to get him to cooperate with this book. And it didn't really occur to me, wow, no one has actually ever really focused

not just on his writings, but this unique role he has played in the academic and intellectual debate and public policy debate in a way that's far more disproportionate than some of his peers in terms of the impact he had. So why hadn't a book been written? How did you get clued into maybe a book should be done?

I'm just fascinated by the genesis of this. I've actually been wanting to ask you this question, so I figured I'm going to ask you now on my podcast. Sure. So I wrote it for two main reasons. One is I, too, was shocked that he had not received a biographical treatment before, I think. And Sowell is someone who, even if Tom had never written a word about affirmative action, his scholarship would be worthy of biographical treatment.

You know, his specialty is the history of economic thought, the history of ideas. So he's expert in the studies of the classical liberal economists, you know, Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and David Ricardo and those guys. That is Tom's real bailiwick. That's what he studied under Milton Friedman and George Stigler at the University of Chicago. So I was just shocked. And, you know, he has written books on social theory, political philosophy, migration, sociology. And his best-selling book is called Basic Economics, which is essentially an economics textbook without any charts and graphs in it. So I was quite shocked that no one had, had, um, had written a biography of him already.

And, uh, so I, yeah, a number of years ago I started, uh, uh, approaching him about it and approaching some of his friends to try and help me get him to cooperate. He had always said, you can do it. You don't need my cooperation, but I thought it would be a better book if he did, um, cooperate. I also thought more people would talk to me about his scholarship, because it's mainly an intellectual biography. I thought more people would talk to me, be willing to talk to me if they knew I had Tom's cooperation. So, you know, he's 91 years old. Maybe I just wore him down in his dotage, and he finally agreed. So that was the primary reason. Like you, he had had

a huge impact on my own intellectual development over the years. And so it was sort of a labor of love in that sense. The second reason I wanted to do it, however, is because of some of those names we mentioned earlier. Your Ta-Nehisi Coateses, your Nicole Hannah-Jones, your Ibram Kendi's, your Cornel West's. It disturbed me that those names are much better known than Thomas Sowell's. I think he's written circles around those individuals, maybe around all of them put together. And it's not only the range of his writings. One writer described him as a great intellectual

trespasser. But it's not only the range of his writings, but the depth and the rigor of his thinking, what he brings to the table, I think is unmatched by those other individuals who I think are real intellectual mediocrities, frankly, in comparison to Saul. And so one aim of this book was to maybe make him a little better known to a younger generation, or maybe an older generation that had never come across his work. And I not only did the book with that in mind, but I narrated a documentary film about his life for public television with that goal in mind as well. So I've been trying to raise his profile somewhat. And can you just spend a moment telling us about his early years? I think he had this extraordinary upbringing.

Sure. So this is a man who's 91 years old. He was born in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression in 1930, North Carolina, just outside of Charlotte. He's orphaned as a child, never knew his father who died before he was born. And his mother died in childbirth to a younger sibling. So he never knew her either. And was raised by a great aunt who took him in and moved the family up to Harlem when he was about 10, which is where he was raised.

And he was always a bright child, but he had a pretty tumultuous home life and ended up dropping out of high school at the age of 16. Tom never completed high school. He left home a year later at the age of 17 and struck out on his own and was sort of wandering aimlessly for a number of years, almost a decade. So he didn't pick up his studies until like his late 20s? Well, yes, exactly. He was drafted into the Marines during the Korean War, did a two-year stint there. And then he went to, enrolled at college on the GI Bill. And first enrolled at Howard University, black school in DC, and then transferred to Harvard. And then it was on to Columbia and eventually the University of Chicago. But you're right. He did not, Sol did not get an undergraduate college degree until he was 28 years old.

He didn't write his first book until he was 40. And he's written five books since turning 80. So he gets, he chooses his academic route. He becomes this very influential economist. He winds up very influential economist. Well, he winds up, he wanted, you know, he wanted to be an academic economist. I mean, he wanted to teach. He wanted to teach. He did not want to do research or really become a public intellectual.

And he preferred to teach at a small school where you could get to know students. And that's what he did in the 1960s and for much of the 1970s. He taught. He taught at Rutgers University. He taught at his and he had constant run-ins with faculty and administrators over his teaching style this was the 1960s and and and Sol was a very straight-laced guy he wanted to teach the way he had been taught. And he was sort of a no-nonsense teacher. And you have to recall what was going on on college campuses in the 1960s. So you have a women's rights movement, a gay rights movement, anti-war movement, and of course, the civil rights movement. And a lot of these activists found platforms on college

campuses and administrators didn't really know what to do with them. You know, what was their role in society now? There were debates over who should be admitted to schools, how they should be admitted, why more of them should be admitted and so forth. And all of this is playing out. And Tom just wanted to teach economics. And so, no, you cannot be excused from class to go to an anti-war rally. No, we're not going to spend all class talking about the latest newspaper headlines. I'm here to teach economics. You're here to learn economics. And so there were these constant clashes over that. And I think it reached a head at Cornell in the late 1960s, when you had the armed students occupying buildings, and then you had the faculty just

completely capitulate to them, give in to all their demands. This really disgusted Tom, that the adults on campus didn't stand up to them. And I think he was, after that incident at Cornell in the late 60s, I think he really had one foot out the door of academia. He held on, he went on to teach at Amherst, Brandeis, ends up at UCLA in the mid to late 70s and stays on there until 1980, when he eventually joins the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. And that's where he's been ever since. But his first love was teaching. He used economics to sort of explain the world around him to himself first, and then he wanted to teach others. And I just think what was going on on

college campuses in the 1960s wasn't going to happen. He coined so many terms that have had an impact on me, one of which was when analyzing public policy issues, debates, he said something like, and he wrote about this, he said something like, you know, in public policy, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. Yeah, trade-offs. Can you explain? And I think that one of the issues where that

became crystallized for him was when he started to do research on the debate over the minimum wage. Yes, yes. That was, yeah, I neglected to mention that, but Sowell was a Marxist in his early days, and all through his 20s, in fact. And that's something, he was a self-taught Marxist. He used to, back in the 1940s, after he had left home, he took a job as a messenger for Western Union, which was located in lower Manhattan, down in the Wall Street district. And he would some days take the bus back home to Harlem after work. And he'd ride on the, they had these double-decker buses and he'd ride on the top and

just watch the neighborhoods change as he headed north on the bus. He'd go to the financial district and then up, you know, through the ritzy shopping district, Saks Fifth Avenue, pass there and go up to Carnegie Hall and then go up Riverside Drive through another wealthy residential area. And he crossed these tenements, and those are the projects. He would cross this viaduct and he'd see the tenements where he got off and he would say, what just happened? Why did it look like that down there and it looks like this up here?

And he says, Marx explained that. Marx, you're being exploited. The capitalists are exploiting the working man. And he says he found that explanation very satisfying at the time. And it's something he clung to, that Marxism, all through college. Even after studying under Milton Friedman

and Gary Becker and George Stigler, he even took a course with Hayek at the University of Chicago. He got a very high grade in the course. But he clung to that. And as you said, it was a job in the government that really caused him to question his Marxism. And he was studying minimum wage laws in Puerto Rico.

So he was working for the Department of Labor, right Rico. So he was working for the Department of Labor, right? Yes, he was working for the Department of Labor. He was studying Puerto Rico's experience with minimum wage laws. Yes, I'm sorry. Yes, exactly. He wasn't in Puerto Rico. He was in Washington, the Department of Labor, studying the minimum wage laws and their impact on Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico.

And noticed that low-income minorities in particular suffered under these laws. They were being priced out of jobs and had higher unemployment rates. And he also noticed that the government didn't much care and was going to push these policies anyways. And it sort of forced Tom to reevaluate his whole view of socialism and the benevolence of government and understand that politicians and government officials and bureaucrats have their own agenda. Despite the rhetoric, they don't always align. That agenda does not always align perfectly with the needs of the people they claim to be helping. And so he had a, you know, it cost him to rethink his socialism there. But when it comes to the trade-off remark,

I think that that's of a piece with Tom's writings on political theory and political philosophy. He wrote a book in the mid-'80s called A Conflict of Visions, and it's his favorite of his books. And also, I think the one that his peers agree is probably his most important book. And it's really a book about human nature and how differing views of human nature are responsible for a lot of our political and social disputes going back hundreds of years, not only in this country, but even in Europe. He traces them back to the debates of people like the British journalist William Godwin and Rousseau and on through John Rawls in the 20th century

forward. And what Sowell is arguing is basically that there are two broad visions that people have, and he labels them the unconstrained and the constrained vision. Sometimes he calls the unconstrained vision a utopian vision, and the constrained vision a tragic vision or view of the world. And so people with the constrained view of the world see limits to human betterment. We may want to end poverty or racism or war, but that's not likely to happen. So the best thing we can do is to put in place institutions and processes that help us deal with problems we're probably never going to solve entirely. And he contrasts that with this more utopian or unconstrained vision, where the thinking is that, no, we can not only manage these issues, but we can solve these problems.

It's just a matter of willpower and reason. And furthermore, there are no trade offs. It's a win-win situation. And Sowell has argued that depending on where you come down on that view of human nature will tell us a lot about what you think about politics and and and and and public policy sometimes I I use music lyrics to illustrate the two visions so when John Lennon is thinking about imagine world peace and so forth there's your there's your unconstrained vision pretty much anything by Stevie Wonder is utopian I love his music but it's hopelessly unconstrained. But when Mick Jagger sings, you can't always get what you want.

There's your constrained vision. Or when Meat Loaf sings, two out of three ain't bad. There's your tragic view. So sometimes that helps people understand where we're... But my point is that a conflict of visions really gives you insight into where soul is coming from on any number of issues that he's writing about, whether it's race, whether it's politics, whether it's sociology, whether it's economics. He's operating within this framework of constrained versus unconstrained visions. And he obviously takes the more constrained view. The book is really part of an informal trilogy that he wrote.

The other book is- Which was over like a decade or so, right? I mean- Yeah. The second one was called The Vision of the Anointed. And the third one was called The Quest for Cosmic Justice. And those latter two books get more into critiquing the two visions. Whereas in the first one, A Conflict of Visions visions he doesn't hide the fact that he holds this more yeah but he's laying them out but he's just laying it just laying it out there and it's really if you want to get inside soul's head a conflict of visions oh yeah it's iconic in fact we'll put that book in the uh in the show notes too the only deal our listeners is that they have to buy your book too.

They can't go just- I like that. I second that. Before we wrap, let me just ask you one question, Jason. Have you, how's the reaction been? I mean, you're almost like a one-man campaign for telling,

I say that in the most positive, I mean, I admire it, kind of telling the story of Seoul, not only the story of Seoul, but as you point out, it's like an intellectual biography, an intellectual history. What kind of response have you been met?

I mean, I think people have, many people are intrigued by Seoul, and I think many people, especially in this heated, polarized environment we're in, have a very, you know, can get triggered by soul. Yeah, no, it's, I've been encouraged by the response and particularly by the response to, from younger people. I got a little taste of this after I did the documentary, after it appeared on public television, I also started

streaming on YouTube and Amazon. And the producers of the film could track who was watching it and had some demographic information on them. And it was trending younger, people in their 30s and 40s. And I was very encouraged by that because that's a demographic I was really targeting. On the other hand, I think I've run into the same problem that Soul has in terms of people who are unwilling to engage and just want to call names, call people names. Use terms like, quote unquote, he's a black conservative. Black conservative, just people more interested in ad hominem attacks rather than refuting arguments or even acknowledging

that there's another way of thinking about some of these issues. But, you know, Sowell was, to use today's language, canceled a long time ago. He's someone who refused to play footsie with his peers in the academy and liberals in the media, the people who hand out the academic awards. He's someone who has put truth above popularity, and he's paid a price in terms of prestige, in terms of prominence. It's one of the reasons why he's not as well known as some of those other folks we were talking about. But it's come at a cost. But as I said earlier about all the intellectual cowardice out there today, one way that Sowell has really distinguished himself is that he was not afraid. He was never afraid to follow the facts where they lead and report the findings,

even if those findings are unpopular or politically incorrect. And that's why I often say we need 100 more just like him. Yeah, and as I was reading your book, I thought what I would have done to have him as a teacher i mean the fact that he was so committed to teaching uh is is pretty extraordinary as is the book uh your book maverick so we'll encourage our listeners to to read it to buy it buy it is more important than reading it but if you could read it too that'd be great and uh and j Jason, thanks for taking the time. We kept you longer than we first advertised when I reached out to you, but I appreciate you doing it. It was a terrific discussion. Thank you for your interest in salt. I appreciate it. Take care.

All right. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Jason Reilly's work, you can find him on Twitter, at Jason Reilly, W-S-J. Reilly spelled R-I-L-E-Y and then W-S-J for Wall Street Journal. You can find his weekly column, Upward Mobility, in the journal, in the opinion section. And you can also keep up with his work at the Manhattan Institute, which is manhattan-institute.org. You can find any of his books at barnesandnoble.com or your favorite independent bookstore or that other e-commerce

site, which I think they're calling Amazon. Post CoronaCorona is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.