Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1014 | Anti-White Racism in the Church, at Work & in Law | Guest: Jeremy Carl

Starting point is 00:00:00 It's impossible to be racist against white people. White people are privileged. They are oppressors. It is our Christian duty to be anti-racist and to talk about white fragility and all of the ways that white people are holding black Americans back. That is the popular narrative, at least within the church. But I've got someone here today to dispel that narrative. It's Jeremy Carl.

Starting point is 00:00:27 He wrote the book, The Unprotected Class, how anti-and-the-tortected class, how anti-the-trash. white racism is tearing America apart. This book and our conversation are filled with the facts of how white people actually are being discriminated against in the United States and what we can do to push back against what is really injustice. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use code Alley at checkout. That's good Meantures.com, code alley. Jeremy, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. If you could tell everyone who you are and what you do.

Starting point is 00:01:14 Sure. So my name is Jeremy Carl. I'm a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, which is a public policy think tank. And prior to that, I was at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as a research fellow for many years. And in the interim was served in a senior role in the Trump administration. And that's kind of the highlights for me. And I also have a new book out, which is, you know, I think. think what we'll talk about a lot today. And that's why I wanted to come sit down.

Starting point is 00:01:40 Okay. But how in the world did you graduate from Yale and Harvard and then end up writing a book about anti-white racism? They must be so disappointed that you didn't imbibe all the propaganda. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think people have a different reaction, right? Like the people who don't kind of buy in who go to those schools are actually some of the most stubborn like holdouts you could imagine. And I have friends, like one of my classmates, Naomi Rao, who's a conservative judge on the D.C. Circuit, I mean, similar type thing. So I think sometimes if it doesn't take, it really doesn't take. Right, right. And you know all of their arguments better than the rest of us do. Exactly. Okay, let's talk about this book. It's called The Unprotected Class, how anti-white racism is tearing America apart.

Starting point is 00:02:33 I mean, this is something that we are told we are not allowed to mention. that it's actually impossible to be racist against white people. So why'd you write it? Well, it was to precisely try to smash that narrative. And I sort of saw this. We were talking a little bit before the show. I mean, the book is dedicated to my five kids. And I really wrote it most with them in mind because I grew up in America where I had certain opportunities available to me. And then I look and my older ones are starting to get into the sort of college market and things like that where things become more real for them. We're looking for jobs. And I sort of saw that that they were kind of entering an environment where they were going to be on a non-level playing

Starting point is 00:03:10 field. And so I felt it was really important to talk about that and to kind of lay out a case in a way that's not kind of histrionic or not trying to play victim or do anything like that, but to say, hey, we can do better. And particularly as white folks, you know, speaking of myself, like we don't need to put up with that and we shouldn't. We should have enough self-respect to kind of push back on that false narrative. You know, like we were talking before the camera started rolling, five years ago, I think most conservative commentators weren't willing to say that there was any prejudice against white people for fear that we would be called white nationalists, white supremacist, that we would be grouped with the right rally in Charlottesville that we'd be called alt-right. But certainly post-2020, there has been more frankness and more boldness and maybe just a greater. realization on the part of like the commentator class on the right of specific and targeted

Starting point is 00:04:10 anti-white hate. And we certainly are more willing to just blatantly say that now. What's your take on that evolution? Yeah. I mean, I think there's there's positive and negative elements to it. And I think it's just as you said. And you know, there are folks like you and you'll be pretty frank about when you see stuff on Twitter. And you might not say this is anti-white blah, blah, but occasionally you have. but you certainly will call it out. And there's guys like Tucker Carlson and Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk, who are all speaking out more frankly about this. Even it's interesting, I've certainly seen that evolution over five, even 10 years.

Starting point is 00:04:46 Even since I started writing the book just two years ago, I mean, there were times where I was doing it where I was like, whoa, you know, I'm kind of on the ledge here. And I hope I don't fall off. And then as things have gone around, there's more and more people by the time I got to publication. who were at least willing to have that conversation. Now, I still think the book is pushing the edge of what one is allowed to say in 2024, but I definitely feel like I'm not alone in at least these views or having stated these views. I've just sort of brought more evidence, hopefully,

Starting point is 00:05:18 to the debate. Yeah. Okay. So George Floyd was four years ago. Yeah. Four years ago. Can you believe that? I mean, that was such a revealing time, I think, for me, as a one, evangelical woman who saw so many pastors, Bible study leaders, influencers who call themselves conservative Christian, okay? And we agree on the LGBTQ issue. We agree on maybe 99% of issues. Post to Black Square say, yes, Black Lives Matter, we should be on the streets with Black Lives Matter. Oh, let's have a conversation about white fragility, white privilege, and systemic racism, and police brutality. and I tried to talk to some of them. Like, but here are the facts.

Starting point is 00:06:05 Here are the statistics. This is not really what's happening. And why would we perpetuate a narrative that is keeping a certain group of people in fear and at resentment? And they did not want to hear it. Yeah. church. And the failures of the church, we've had failures for our entire history. You know, there was one person who didn't have failures and he died on a cross. And it's just as simple as that, right? So I wasn't surprised that we did not as a church overall meet that moment in the way that

Starting point is 00:06:48 I would have liked to. But at the same time, it certainly opened my eyes and it was concerning to sort of see what went on and how quickly people sort of fell in for the narrative around. around George Floyd. And it was sort of interesting. And I have a whole chapter on the church in the book where I kind of discuss some of the failures of the church around critical race theory. Actually, interestingly, I truly think the best kind of treatment I've seen of this within the church and when I rely on quite a bit is Vody Bacham's book, Fault Lines. I don't know if you've read it. And I have to be honest, because I don't spend kind of as much time, even though I'm an active churchgoer in internal church politics. I knew who he was, but I didn't know that much about him. We have the same publisher and he sort of gave me a copy of the book as I was beginning to write mine. He said, you might find this interesting. And I was like, okay, well, it'll be this, this anti-woke black guy, fine, fine, you know, like, I didn't have huge expectations coming in. And then I read it. Because you just didn't think it would reveal anything to you that you didn't already know. Yeah, exactly. I thought it would be sort of a surface-level thing, which is how most books are.

Starting point is 00:07:52 I mean, there's sort of surface-level thing. It's not a particular slight on him. It's just, yeah. But then when I actually read it, I mean, it was a really deep theological exploration. I mean, the guy doesn't miss. I love Vodibakum. I mean, he'll name names and that's what he does in that book. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think his showing in great detail how kind of BLM and CRT, what he calls critical social justice actually in the book, completely substitutes itself for the gospel. And each, you know, he sort of shows how in each level of critical social justice in his terminology, you can find an absolute parallel within the actual gospel that it's replacing. So I thought it was a really profound book. And certainly, I love people to buy my book,

Starting point is 00:08:36 but particularly if you're interested in this issue within the church, I think Vody Bakum's book is absolutely terrific. Yeah, absolutely. So in chapter one, you give a lay of the land, not just within the church. We'll get into more specifically what this has looked like within the church, but give us the lay of the land of anti-white racism. How did we get here? And when did we get here? Yeah, you know, and this is a question I get asked a fair bit, and it's not one that I have, unfortunately, a super pat answer for it because I don't think it was like, you know, there was this sudden switch that flipped and everything changed. I think you can find the origins of it, certainly in the civil rights movement. And in saying that, there's some other people who've written a little more narrowly on these issues who are really quick to kind of say, oh, the Civil Rights Act was a disaster. And actually, you know, you had a really good discussion a few weeks back with Dono Squires, I thought, where he was actually. I thought, where he was actually. much closer to sort of my view on a lot of this, which is to say there were real problems that happened because of that. But it's really easy to kind of Monday morning quarterback it and say, oh, you know, this and that. Things were not perfect before then. It was a response to

Starting point is 00:09:42 real issues and real sins that we had in America that we needed to respond to. It was a blunt instrument to do that. I think it's really easy to look back and say, well, we shouldn't have done this and this and this, or it got carried away in these ways. But I'm not, you know, this book is not kind of a full-on attack on that. It's simply to say, we had a very different set of problems in 1964 when we came up with this than we do in 2024. I mean, 60 years have passed. A lot of American history has passed. And so we need to be, just have a very different approach to things, ones that kind of restores freedom of association and deals with the sorts of real problems we have today, which is not people not being able to.

Starting point is 00:10:26 be served at lunch counters, but the fact that we've got overt discrimination against white people in education, in jobs, what have you. And so I'm trying to respond to that. So I think it sort of starts there. And then what happens is the administrative state gets to it, the Supreme Court gets to it. And they begin expanding this law with its pluses and minuses into much more negative territory that was not even contemplated in the original act. And then I think kind of the second big inflection point is at around 2013, and we see this in the social science data, we have the so-called Great Awakening. And for you and me, as Christians, that has a particular meaning, because, of course, we have the Great Awakening's, which were historical Christian moments where

Starting point is 00:11:08 we had real religious fervor and revival in America. I think the Great Awakening is a perfect name for this, because it truly was a religious movement, or again, a substitution for religious where all of a sudden Obama has his second, he gets reelected. And you can see in the survey data that all of these racial attitudes just go completely off the line and we kind of wind up in George Floyd world. I mean, it's a whole progressive revolution. Everything changed. And Pew Research shows this.

Starting point is 00:11:36 Yeah. In Obama's second term is when the left got radically more left. Conservative stayed about the same, if not even a little more liberal on some things. but the left got drastically more left on every issue during this Great Awakening. Absolutely. And the political scientists call that asymmetric polarization. And that's exactly what we do see in this Pew data. And again, this is for your listeners who may not be familiar.

Starting point is 00:12:01 I mean, Pew is not some right wing kind of, you know, this is just your standard general survey. Nobody's disputing like what we're seeing in this survey data. And they use what I would call left-wing language. Like they'll capitalize B for black. So this is not a conservative surveyor. So what happened in 2013? Why this changed? Well, so, I mean, I think there's a few things that you could point to.

Starting point is 00:12:25 And again, now I'm getting a little more speculative. And I'm a very person who likes to deal in facts. So I think Obama got bolder once he didn't have to get reelected on terms of some of his racial rhetoric that I didn't find particularly helpful. So I think that's a piece of it. Then you have a couple of incidents. You have the hands up, don't shoot. Michael Brown in Missouri. Of course, that didn't actually happen, but that got, that rhetoric went kind of haywire.

Starting point is 00:12:51 You have Trayvon Martin in Florida and Obama kind of saying, well, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon and kind of jumping in before the facts were known on these cases. And so you had a few cases where it really charged bad actors. You had the president of the United States, in my view, encouraging bad actors. And then there's a whole, you know, there's dark matter here that I'm not even seeing because I don't even think that's sufficient. to explain everything we saw, but we can definitely see a huge change. And I expect those are some of the things that drove it. Here's what you say in chapter one. The demand for quote unquote racism among political activists continues to increase, even as the supply of racism diminishes. So what you're talking about there is these activists who are conveying this message that

Starting point is 00:13:38 black and brown people are oppressed, white people are the ones who are oppressing them. But that just doesn't bear out when you look at how white people view minorities, right? No, exactly. And I think where you see this most dramatically, and I write about this a bit in the book, is again, this is general social survey data. So it's not, this is not from some right-wing pollster. If you look at kind of how groups view other groups, and they survey whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, everybody has an in-group preference, is what you call it.

Starting point is 00:14:12 So they prefer their own group. Within limits, this is not a problem. Just in the same way that you prefer your mom to some random woman on the street, you're going to generally have some preference for the group that's most looking like you and shares your culture to some other group. Conservatives have a little more than liberals. But again, like if you look across the races, across ideologies, it's all kind of like what you'd expect and pretty similar. With the one exception, liberal whites, liberal whites have an outgroup preference. And I've never seen this in any other country's social survey data. So liberal whites, I mean, it stands out, if you look at a bar chart, it's like so dramatic.

Starting point is 00:14:47 They think other white people are more criminal, stupider, you know, you kind of name it, down the line than all other groups. So there's a real pathology within liberalism of self-hatred. And it's kind of being visited, unfortunately, on the rest of us, particularly among liberal whites, unfortunately. Yeah. You say, actually, what is unusual about America is, in comparison with most other countries, the incredible historical openness of many white American to welcoming new groups into the American family. So even within, you know, conservative whites and like other groups, having an in-group preference, which, as you said, is natural, there is still a lot of tolerance, a lot of openness.

Starting point is 00:15:27 I mean, when you think about all the nationalities, ethnicities, cultures that live in close proximity to each other in America with general peace, that is what is astounding about our country, right? And yet we're told that we're actually, America is the outlawful. liar in our racism and how much we hate non-white people. It's just not true. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And if you were to kind of go to the average white person and point to some, you know, Indian American or Hispanic American or Asian American and say, is that person American? I mean, they are, of course, American. They're going to say, of course. Yeah. I mean, the number of people who would really question whites who would question the Americanness of somebody based on their race is incredibly small.

Starting point is 00:16:11 I mean, right? Like, and you compare that. I mean, I've traveled all around the world. I've lived in India. I can guarantee you those are not as permeable cultures to outsiders or a country like China, which takes a few thousand immigrants a year, you know, as opposed to millions. There's no comparison in terms of how open we have been in America. And I'd add more broadly in the West because you see, even though Europe is less open,

Starting point is 00:16:36 it's still very, very open to foreigners coming in and joining the, the, community. So you mentioned the Civil Rights Act, not all bad, not completely unnecessary, but it's now manifested itself in ways that were unintended, unforeseen, and it's created, of course, all these protected classes that get preferred treatment. They get preferential treatment, which means discrimination against white people simply because of the color of their skin, in particular are white males. And it follows along this intersectional ideology that white males are at the, you know, bottom of the totem pole. Right. And the most oppressive. So talk a little bit more about how that has manifested itself. Anti-white discrimination has manifested itself through civil

Starting point is 00:17:37 rights law. Yeah. Well, first of all, you have the protected class. And my book comes this notion of the unprotected class. Now, I think it's important to say so that any left us who are listening, don't kind of jump down my throat. I do acknowledge in the book. Nominally, whites cannot be discriminated against for being white. What we actually see is an epidemic of that. So it's in the law, but it's not really enforced except in rare situations. Although I would add, in a similar way to we can have this conversation a little better than we used to, we're beginning to see like some of the most extreme anti-white behavior for the first time being challenged. Like, you know, blatant things where they're saying white people cannot apply for this.

Starting point is 00:18:18 And they don't usually put it like this, but it's like, this is for Asian Americans or Latinos, right? Which means, you know, not for you. Like, and so we're beginning to say, hey, actually, you know, that's illegal. You can't do that under the law. And the Supreme Court did come down against affirmative action at universities, right? Right. And so there's this six three decision that happened this year where they overturned what was called the Bakke decision. I write about the Bakke decision a fair bit in my book and kind of what happened to it.

Starting point is 00:18:45 It's sort of a stunning story. but this is theoretically outlawed affirmative action. Now, the problem with that is people are kind of doing a way premature victory dance, because if you look in California, twice in the last 25 years, they've outlawed by popular initiative affirmative action in the universities, I've looked at the California admission statistics. If you really squint, you can maybe see a little bit of effect of that, but they are still finding all sorts of ways to discriminate against white Californians, to a lesser degree Asian,

Starting point is 00:19:20 American Californians as well. And they just call it something else and nobody has been able to challenge them. I expect that we are going to have some of the same problems without very, very aggressive lawfare on our part enforcing these sorts of things nationally. Now, a part of this conversation about affirmative action, whether it's official or unofficial out there or hidden is the result of incompetent people becoming doctors and becoming lawyers because, and this is part of the forbidden conversation that you're not allowed to say, but part of affirmative action is unfortunately lowering the standard of admission in order to allow more minorities into a med school, allow them to get on the path to becoming

Starting point is 00:20:11 doctors, I mean, that is a scary part of this, that anti-white discrimination, whites are still the majority in the country, leads to people who are not qualified for the pilot job, for the doctor job, for the lawyer job, getting those, I mean, getting those jobs. Yeah. And causing a lot of chaos. Well, I think that's absolutely right. And it's actually a good maybe kind of segue for me to talk about the Baki decision in particular, because, and I think particularly some of your women listeners, will be interested in this.

Starting point is 00:20:45 So, Baki, which was the original affirmative action decision of the court that was the law of the land until this last year, was a medical student or was applying to medical school at UC Davis. He was rejected in favor of some African American candidates who had dramatically lower qualifications on paper. One of these in particular was kind of held up in the media is this is the guy who got, and I tell this story in the book, this is the guy who got that spot that Baki did, and isn't it great because he's in the community being a doctor? He's doing all these really useful things for women. He was an obstetrician, I believe, and he was celebrated at Ted Kennedy in a long profile in the New York Times.

Starting point is 00:21:28 So fast forward a few years. He kills one of his patients. I believe he may have sterilized another few unintentionally during delivery. Don't quote me on that. But like very serious medical malpractice. He kills another patient in liposection and kind of abandons her to die. I mean, it's really horrific stuff. And this is the consequence of, you know, people actually die.

Starting point is 00:21:53 Airplanes fall out of the sky when you have incompetent people being supported just by race. And this is literally the Baki case, whereas Bacchi eventually is admitted and goes on to work at the Mayo Clinic, which is one of the best kind of medical centers in the entire country. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. And we see that kind of thing manifest itself. so many different ways, starting in school. We see there is a disparity in disciplinary action taken, or there is a reduction of disciplinary action taken because of the disproportionate

Starting point is 00:22:26 outcomes because of the disproportionate impact that it has on minority students. Can you talk about that? Absolutely. And again, I go over some of this in the book, but you even have things like both of the horrific Florida case a few years back where the guy goes into Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School and shoots up. So the Obama administration is putting pressure on schools to lower the rate of disparity in discipline by race. So this guy is Hispanic. They don't want to have that. So they basically do things that. He should have been red flagged earlier. He's not. Similarly, Trayvon Martin, similar thing. Very few people know about this, but he's basically caught with burglary tools and women's jewelry that completely matches. This is obviously before he

Starting point is 00:23:18 gets killed. The jewelry reported stolen elsewhere. It's never reported by the school resource officer to the police because they're trying to basically do this racial balancing. So you have this huge incident that becomes a national incident, because we have this racial balancing rather than just being dispassionate and enforcing the same rules and regulations on everybody. You say on page 81, the Obama administration pushed policies that disproportionately put white students and teachers at risk in order to hide facts about the disciplinary records of black and Hispanic students because Democrats were uncomfortable with the underlying demographics of school misbehavior. So they push these policies, put the pressures on the school to say, hey, let's make sure that the outcomes aren't disparate. we see the same thing with policing while let's charge them less, let's arrest them less because we're only concerned with the outcomes.

Starting point is 00:24:26 But so Trump, the Trump administration ended Obama's disparate impact school disciplinary policies. The Biden administration was only too happy to bring them back. But even so, from 2017 to 2019, obviously Trump is president there. But in California schools, 3.7% of African Americans, 3.8% of Native Americans, and 2.1% of Hispanics were punished for fighting four or more times compared to just 1.2% of whites and 1% of Asian-American. So even with these policies trying to say, nope, we don't want any gaps. We don't want it to look like black students are misbehaving more than white students.

Starting point is 00:25:05 You still see a disparity there. That's a pattern that we see over and over again. That is, I mean, social justice, basically, which is trying to maneuver things so that the group that is lagging behind gets ahead, not by addressing the root cause of it, but basically trying to cook the numbers by changing the policies. Right. Absolutely. And one of the things that you just alluded to in reading that passage, it's also important, a lot of the times because the critic would say, ah, well, it's just institutionalized white supremacy. That's what's driving it. For almost all of these metrics that you mention, Asian Americans will actually do better than whites. They're less likely to be misbehaving in school. Their grades are better if you get to adults. Their income is higher.

Starting point is 00:25:47 Their health care is better. Yep. They have to be erased. Less fatherlessness. Right. More time on homework. Growing up all different measures, Asians pretty much surpass whites. Absolutely. And so they have to be erased from this conversation because it totally wrecks the white supremacy narrative to have them in this conversation. And so I think that's a really important thing to mention. Yeah. And I've talked to white women about this, that, okay, you're saying that there's institutional white supremacy, and that's why that there are these disparities of outcome between white Americans and black Americans.

Starting point is 00:26:21 It's always just compared white and black, whether it's maternal mortality or whatever, and they always leave the Asians out, and they say, well, that's a model minority myth, which I'm not even sure how it's a myth if we've got the statistics. And even in some things, Hispanics have to be excluded. Like when it comes to maternal mortality, they'll say, well, white women are so much less likely to die in childbirth

Starting point is 00:26:41 than black women. while Hispanic women actually have a better rate of survival in a lot of cases. And so you can't talk about that, though. It's all to perpetuate this resentment and this war between whites and blacks. Right. Absolutely. And again, you know, I sort of wrote this, particularly for the parents who are listening to this. I mean, again, I really did write it with that in mind. I wrote it as a parent out of my concern as a parent, you know, in thinking, you know, how do I talk to my kids about this? And my

Starting point is 00:27:16 kids, my older ones have all read the book, actually. I didn't expect them to necessarily do, but they did. And it's a great kind of manual that you could give certainly to an older kid and say, hey, here's some of the things that you're going to deal with and maybe just think about how that maps with your experience. And one thing that's actually been really interesting. One of the first interviews I did on this book was with Charlie Kirk. And Charlie said, you know, I talk to my older donors, they're like, oh, you know, I'm not sure I can say that. It might be racist. When I talk to all the young kids in school, particularly young white kids, they totally get it, right? And you're, you know, they're like, absolutely, this is happening. And so it's

Starting point is 00:27:56 sort of giving them the tools to talk about this in a common, responsible fact and evidence-based way without being sort of histrionic or, you know, crying victim or anything like that. You know, I was talking to a baby boomer a few months ago, Republican, conservative, successful business owner talking to him about DEI. And he, you know, wanted to have a kind of like nuance take. Well, you know, DEI is important in some ways. You just have to remember that we grew up in a time of explicit racism and discrimination. And a lot of us feel guilty. And we feel like we're making up for either the racism that we saw in our parents' generation or that we saw around us in the South and the 60s and 70s. But then when I asked him, I said, okay, but you really, but you really

Starting point is 00:28:42 how this is going to affect your grandsons. Your grandsons who are teenagers right now, how would you feel if this DEI policy negatively tangibly affects him? And that got him thinking a little bit. He was like, I got to think about that. Do you see that that some of this is motivated actually by even white conservatives in the baby boomer class

Starting point is 00:29:05 because they are, they feel guilty? Yeah. And I think for older people, particularly my parents are kind of, They were born right before World War II. And so they kind of grew up with this world that was different. And they can't totally make that frame switch to like, hey, it's not the 1940s and 50s anymore. I mean, of course, in certain ways they can. But they've sort of grown up with this.

Starting point is 00:29:29 And they've also grown up with a lot of the propaganda around this that we've had. And so it's difficult. And so I do try to personalize it, particularly when I'm talking to parents and say, hey, this is not abstract. This is about whether you're. kid is going to have the same opportunities that other kids are, whether it be in the workplace, in jobs, how they're going to be portrayed in the culture. Because we've talked about a lot of informal things in this, or formal things in this conversation, but I have chapters on

Starting point is 00:29:56 Hollywood in places like that or how we teach history that there is some actual formal discrimination going on in both of those places. But a lot of it is sort of just like, what are the messages the culture is giving us? And again, as Christians, we pay a lot of attention to the fact that we don't always love those messages. But we're also getting a lot of messages from Madison Avenue, from Hollywood, about, you know, white people being evil, white people being bad. And your kids are sitting in front of Disney cartoons or whatever, and they're imbibing that message, unfortunately. Yeah. And I want to talk about that.

Starting point is 00:30:29 I want to talk about so-called representation in a second. But I'm still on this. And I know we have to move past, like, the first couple chapters, but there's so much packed in. and I just encourage everyone to get the book because you're not getting in this conversation because it's a conversation, all of the data. There's so much data in here that we just can't even cover. But I do want to talk about, you mentioned this, which is really interesting. Again, something that I think a lot of people noticed but didn't know if it was actually happening. Anticipated in unfavorable Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action,

Starting point is 00:31:01 education elites began to do everything they could to reduce objective performance measurements largely under the cover of COVID. Some schools began moving to eliminate standardized tests entirely versus their requirement and later even as an option, as happened in California. And they say that they're doing this again for COVID, but some people might even say inclusiveness. Maybe they'll cite DEI. We see similar policies in grade school, public schools, removing reading requirements. There was that school, I think it was a school in Baltimore where 80% of the seniors could not read. read. They basically were illiterate and they still graduated. Again, because the only concern is outcomes, not the real problems. Right. And when you have an outcome-based metric like that,

Starting point is 00:31:54 when people aren't meeting the standard, what goes is not the people but the standard. And that's what we're seeing. And that has profoundly negative consequences for all of society as we were kind of, even at our top, top institutions, kind of walking away from standards. And in fact, this got so extreme that some of the Ivy League has kind of looked at, they kind of got rid of the SATs, their student quality drops so dramatically that quietly they've begun to reverse themselves. They're not going to go all the way and it's not going to be complete.

Starting point is 00:32:24 But it was just, it was really so visible how much getting rid of standards had hurt them that they said, well, we've ultimately got a brand to protect. So we're going to, you know, walk back at least a little bit. Yeah. I don't know if you listen to the Solda Story podcast. It came out, I think, yeah, it was last year, a little over a year ago. And it's just about how we have, as a public education system, we have accepted this mode of reading that instead of relying on any phonics, it's like weird tactics of word memorization, whatever. But one of the statistics in there was that most fourth graders, most fourth graders of all races can read at a kindergarten level or below.

Starting point is 00:33:08 and 82% of black fourth graders cannot read. 82% of black fourth graders. And so if we really cared, if we really cared about black excellence, if we really cared about them being the doctors and the scientists and lawyers, which I don't think you and I have a problem with that, with any competent person achieving those goals. But looking at the statistics, that can't happen in a competent way. or yeah, it's just not going to happen if this is what's going on.

Starting point is 00:33:42 And like you said, outcomes-based systems, that's what that leads to. Absolutely. And even though I have my share of disagreements with him, when George W. Bush was talking about the soft bigotry of low expectations, I think that this was, you know, one of the more effective things he does. And people will, by the way, not, you're never going to have perfect equality outside of communism, right? Exactly.

Starting point is 00:34:05 But that wouldn't obviously be perfect for many reasons. But if you set a high standard and high expectations and you meet them for everybody, you'll be surprised by who will kind of come up and do that. And it's one of the things kind of in a similar way. You hear a lot of discussion about black fatherlessness, for example. And they said, the apologists say, oh, this is a legacy of slavery. Well, if you go back to 1940, a much closer time to slavery than 10. today, the African-American fatherlessness rate was around 15%, which is not only, it's, it's way lower than even the white rate is today, which is like 35, 38%. So what we had is nobody's

Starting point is 00:34:49 genetics changed. Certainly America didn't get more racist, but the culture changed a lot, and the expectation changed a lot. And that had a really profound negative effect. So that's by this, by the way, this sort of discussion matters, not just for white people or white listeners. but for everybody because the policy we are putting in place, policies we're putting in place, are hurting everybody, not just white students, white people. Gosh, I've, I recommended this book so much in 2020. I'm sure you've read it, discrimination and disparities by Thomas Sol. I'm sure you have.

Starting point is 00:35:21 But a lot of this conversation just reminds me of that because that's something that he points out, one, that disparities of outcome don't automatically prove that there's discrimination. There could be all different kinds of reasons for disparities, but also pointing out the statistics that you're that you're talking about that if we're looking at these disparities as proof of discrimination, well, if we go back to before the Civil Rights Act, if we go back to the 50s and 60s, those disparities are a lot smaller when racism was much more pervasive and pronounced. And so racism can't be the cause of greater disparities today when clearly we're not as racist

Starting point is 00:36:02 as we were 60 years ago. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I'm glad you mentioned Seoul because he was absolutely a touchstone for this book. And in fact, I kind of mention, I'd, of course, I mean, you can't be in America

Starting point is 00:36:15 and not ever think about race. But the first time I really remember seriously thinking about race and public policy, I was a newlywed. My wife and I were both Americans, but we were living in India. I was doing public policy work out there in 2004.

Starting point is 00:36:28 And I read Thomas Sol's book, affirmative action around the world an empirical study, which is a terrific book. And I realized that a lot of the things I was seeing in India around caste politics were really the exact replication of what we were seeing in the U.S. around racial politics, just different groups kind of swapped in as the victims and the oppressors. And so that was really the beginning of my really thinking more seriously about a lot of this stuff. Which is funny because there is a book that was popularized. Maybe it was published, too, but popularized definitely after 2020, that I saw Christians promoting, that I saw Oprah promoting.

Starting point is 00:37:00 I think the author's last name is Wilkerson called cast. And it is, it argues, though, the opposite of what you're saying. I mean, it argues that black and brown people are in a caste system. Yeah. And the United States, thanks to the white oppressor. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is the dynamic that the left shows. And again, I mean, what I try to do in my book is just demolish that with, with facts and logic.

Starting point is 00:37:23 I mean, I want to sound to Ben Shapiro here. But there's like an element of just, yeah. Yeah, I put out the evidence. and people, I'm not screaming about it, but like people can judge for themselves. And I think the people who read the book find it pretty persuasive. So we've heard for a long time the importance of representation. And like a lot of leftists speak, it starts out sounding innocuous, tolerance, inclusion, diversity, equity, all of these kind of universally positive terms or they once were universally positive terms. And so you feel guilty questioning them and not accepting them.

Starting point is 00:38:09 And the same is true of representation. Well, sure, everyone should be represented. And then all of a sudden, I mean, when it comes to race, it's like, wait, was there a white person in that commercial? Right. I haven't seen a white person in a commercial in forever. Right. So everyone gets represented disproportionately now in the media except for white people. Right.

Starting point is 00:38:29 And I talk about there's a Twitter feed. I think it's called white people are stupid in commercials. Stupid white ads, I think is the official. But it's literally just so that they're actually being represented, but it just points out. And by the way, when you read ad industry blogs as I did for this, it's like a trope actually today of like the stupid white person doing something dumb in the ad and the kind of enlightened minority comes in and saves them. This is among like liberal people in the ad industry acknowledging that this goes on. Or similarly, something like Hamilton, which I actually think is artistically actually a very interesting work and it's well done. Very catchy.

Starting point is 00:39:05 Love the songs. Yeah. But yet if you kind of poke beneath that to the racial politics, at one level you could say, hey, that's great that they're saying that all these different racial groups can be inheritors of the founding because we, of course, do believe that. But then the one villain, King George, or like the kind of obvious villain is the only guy. He's the white guy. Right? And then there's also a point, like, I remember some of my younger kids were like, you know, didn't even fully understand. Oh, no. The founders weren't actually African American, right? So there's that. And then you see the black woman as Mary Queen of Scots. or whatever, but you could never imagine a white guy playing Frederick Douglass, right? So it's that when we talk about representation, which you raised earlier, the problem is that

Starting point is 00:39:49 representation tends to only go one way, right? So like if we're going to totally open it up, which I actually argue probably we shouldn't totally open it up, but if we are going to... What do you mean by open it up? Well, I mean, if you're just going to say, yeah, there's no problem with a black actor playing Mary Queen of Scots. And a white actor playing Martin Luther King. Yeah. Yeah. I think you can't open it up a little bit, but you have to be careful. Depends on what it is. Is it representing history or is it just like a silly work of fiction where the race doesn't actually matter?

Starting point is 00:40:18 Right. I recount a story that was emblematic to me of this African-American actress who had been cast as Eliza Doolittle and My Fair Lady. And for those of you've seen this, and she was kind of complaining that she was really seen as a black actress here. And if you know the story of My Fair Lady as a musical, it's entirely. about this white cockney, lower class, British woman. That's the entire plot. The entire dramatic tension is around that aspect of her identity. And to kind of cast somebody who's not white in that role.

Starting point is 00:40:54 I mean, you can do it. It's not totally crazy. But it's asking the audience to do a lot of work. Right. And, you know, so maybe you say that you don't have to do it for a show like that. It matters. And it's funny because in those kind of situations, they are asking us. to be completely colorblind.

Starting point is 00:41:10 That we're just supposed to not think about like the history of racial dynamics in this country when we're watching something like that. But we're also told on the flip side that being colorblind is bad. Right. We have to focus on color. We have to make our decisions and choose our words based on the color of the person that we are interacting with. So it's kind of whiplash for a lot of white Americans.

Starting point is 00:41:33 And that is part of this is that both well-meaning white Americans and, you know, And then I would say, like, liberal white Americans who many times are just virtue signaling or maybe it's genuine. I don't know. They're desperately just trying to be a good person. They're desperately trying not to be called a racist and not to be called a bigot. And yet the standards are so elusive. You're supposed to tell yourself and accept the fact that you will always be a racist, that you're inherently racist. Does it matter the anti-racist work that you've done?

Starting point is 00:42:08 it doesn't matter if your mother Teresa. Right. If you are white, you have the original sin of racism. Right. And you carry the sin, not even of your ancestors. This is something that I thought about, just the language surrounding 2020, like your ancestors own slaves. It's like, well, you don't know that. What you're saying is that someone who vaguely looked like me 200 years ago in the same

Starting point is 00:42:33 general vicinity of the United States own slaves. Right. That's not, you don't know that that's my. ancestor. You have no idea when my ancestors even came to America, what they look like, or where they lived. Right. So we take on the sins of our ancestors, but they only inherit the oppression of their ancestors, never the sins of their ancestors. I, we as white people, never inherit the oppression of our ancestors. Doesn't matter if your ancestors were in the Holocaust, if they went through the horrors of communism and Russia. Like, it doesn't matter. You don't inherit that oppression. You only inherit

Starting point is 00:43:03 the sins. They only inherit the oppression. And so white people who are like, I really, want to be a good person. Sorry, you can't. You can't. These are the dynamics at play. Right. Oh, absolutely. And I think you kind of touch on that, that brilliantly. And Vody Baccombe talks about this a lot, this kind of notion of how unbiblical it is to say that you have sin based on the color of your skin. We all have sin. And the problem with, as he points out, saying that you have this based on the color of your skin is that we can't get, absolution through Jesus Christ for that, right? It's a sin that does not have expiation as you just touched on, right? Nobody takes on that, that sin for us. So, I mean, that's how very extremely

Starting point is 00:43:49 unbiblical. And there's no redemption and there's no repentance. Of course, that's like you said earlier, like that's the whole idea of CRT being a religion is that you are stained with a sin that no one can ever wash clean. Right, right. And that is, that is the opposite of what Christianity should teach. But even to the kind of practical issue that you raised of how some of this works, a classic example that I talk about is when white people fled, it's called white flight when they fled neighborhoods. And I talk about how really this was the only form of ethnic cleansing for which the victims were kind of blamed. They weren't the only victims, but they were certainly, I would argue, the predominant victims. And then if they come back to a minority

Starting point is 00:44:34 neighborhood decades later, it's gentrification. So the only thing, thing. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, right? And so you should stop. You know, if you're a white person kind of tearing out your hair, my advice is just stop. Stop playing their game. And, you know, I wrote the book to say, hey, we don't need to play this game and we don't need to be, you know, at least individually, if you haven't done anything wrong, you haven't done anything wrong. Yeah. I want to talk about a little bit more of how this is manifesting itself in the church. And this was, a beat that I focused on a lot in 2020 because I did feel like there were so few white Christians and white Christian women saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why are we reading how to be an anti-racist in white fragility?

Starting point is 00:45:36 Right. Why are we talking about inherited sin, inherited oppression? Why are we using this language? And I'm talking about like voices that are very accepted within Protestant Christianity like Latasha Morrison and Be the Bridge. Right. She absolutely, she might be a totally well-meaning kind person. Yeah. But in her book and in the Facebook group that is centered on her book, Be the Bridge, they perpetuate this narrative that, yes, white people, you are collectively responsible for being the initiators of reconciliation.

Starting point is 00:46:11 because of what some black people at some point in history went through and what some white people at some point in history went to. And then they point to the Bible and say, well, Israel was responsible for the sins of their ancestors, even though white people are not a covenant people. Right. Like Israel, it's totally different. But this has been 100% accepted, celebrated, glorified, even among conservative evangelicals. This just at least the implication that, yeah, you know, know white people, we're going to preach a different message to you. You can take the harsher message of repentance. You black people over here, you don't need a message of repentance. It's softer

Starting point is 00:46:51 and gentler for you, which is a total dereliction of duty. It's crazy. You see this. I talk about Christianity today, the Gospel Coalition, Acts 29 network. And again, I'm not painting with a broad brush, both from knowledge and also not wanting to falsely accuse everybody who is associated with that with engaging in this, but you saw these sorts of problems prop up in these very prominent evangelical spaces. Jamar Tisby, somebody I talk about in the book, a guy who won a major, major evangelical book award in the last couple years, and he was a guy who was perpetuating the Michael Brown, hands up, don't shoot hoax, and various other things that are just, they're just not biblical. And I'm not questioning his Christian belief, but I am saying,

Starting point is 00:47:39 saying that he is doctrinally in error in some fairly serious ways in making those types of accusations, and we certainly should not be giving him a pass on that. Yes, absolutely. At places like the Gospel Coalition, you write on page 218, Christianity Today and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stalwarts of modern popular evangelicalism, critical race theory has a significant presence. A tweet by Brett McCracken, a senior editor at the Gospel Coalition, is instructive. He calls on white Christian leaders to listen to and defer to non-white and non-Western

Starting point is 00:48:09 Christian leaders. And we see this kind of language over and over again that you just need to, look, we've held space for too long. We've been leaders for too long, sit down, shut up, be humble. And if you don't agree with the arguments about systemic racism, it's not because you have a point. It's because you're arrogant or you're fragile or worse, you're racist. Yeah. It's interesting, even the generational difference between us. You talk about holding space so naturally. And I'm like, okay, when she was in school, you know, she was hearing all this, right? Whereas I'm like a core Gen Xer.

Starting point is 00:48:46 And, of course, I recognize that sort of language, but I was never actually exposed to it as a student. I just hear about it from my millennial friends or Gen X, you know, people who I met or Gen Z people I'm mentoring. So that's absolutely, it's out there. I have a thing in there, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at the time saying, I'm a racist and I'll be racist until my glorified body is resurrected. And you're sort of, you know, doing a deep breath. And it's such a virtue signal, right? Because if you're actually racist, at least in the popular understanding of that,

Starting point is 00:49:19 well, then you certainly shouldn't be running the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. But what you're really doing is his virtue signaling. Yeah. Remember, not true at Kathy, Dan Kathy, when he was like washed the shoes, shined the shoes of Lecrae and that like virtue signaling display. And, you know, I have, I do have grace for a lot of Christians during that time who just weren't where we were because we had been watching this unfold for a little while. We were ready to say like, no, no, not to say I got it perfectly at all.

Starting point is 00:49:53 I'm sure there were things I said that were wrong. But I do think that some of them since then have realized like, oh, maybe I shouldn't have said that or that person that I platformed. Yeah. Because I thought that they were a Christian, you know, social justice warrior. It turns out they actually just hate white people and I'm not going to platform them. Now, I would love to see public repentance from them. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:14 I haven't seen any apologies from these people saying, ooh, I don't think deriding white image bears of God was the right thing. Right. Yeah. And I think you're probably going to be waiting a long time before you get that type of apology. Yeah. But look, again, it's just it's the church is filled with fallible and sinful humans. and that was true 100 years ago and 500 years ago, and it will be true 100 years hence. And we just need to be honest about what the church can do and what it can.

Starting point is 00:50:42 And I think I would encourage folks within their own churches. I've been fortunate this has not been a big issue in my church. But if you're seeing that type of language, and you do see it even in good evangelical churches, I mean, I talk about how crazy some of these mainland churches have begun. There are a lot of believers who are even going to some of these mainline churches have no idea the crazy kind of positions their denominational leaders are taking. But even within the evangelical movement, if you see something, say something, right? As they say, if you see this sort of thing, and a spirit of love and grace, go up to some of your colleagues and, or, you know, co-pritioners

Starting point is 00:51:17 or even your pastor and say, hey, you know, I think that's not kind of Bible-based thinking about this sort of issue. Yeah. I also think another thing within this realm that trips Christian, Christians up is immigration, refugee acceptance while the Bible says to love the foreigner. Like I saw some tweet by a Christian the other day was like, I'm way more scared of like, you know, a Southern Caucasian than I would be an immigrant. And like they just feel, this is a white person. Like they just feel the need to put down white people. Just I think they think that it's holy and compassionate.

Starting point is 00:51:56 Yeah. Absolutely. And if I see, so immigration is. which I talk about a lot in the book is one of my real specialty areas. And something I've written a lot about. And so I think I even do address it a little bit in the chapter of the church because if I have to hear one more thing about Jesus and his family being like illegal migrants who, you know, I'm like, no. You know, it's like biblically wrong, you know, besides you're just beating up on white people, right?

Starting point is 00:52:20 But there's a bunch of- Historically, geographically wrong. Yeah. And there is actually, for those who are interested, there's entire books on biblical views. of immigration, kind of going back to the Old Testament that you can kind of understand. And then at the most trivial level, we kind of understand the Caesar Christ distinction. And no matter how you kind of, where you fall on the two kingdoms continuum, like there is certainly room for different communities and the notion that because we may all be a family as Christians doesn't mean that we don't have a

Starting point is 00:52:52 border, that we don't have cultures. And that, you know, the Tower of Babel is like the kind of where you you wind up like we're not, the Bible warns many times against us all trying to be one people, right? Yeah. Well, in progressivism, as we've said many times, it's a competing religion with Christianity. It's got its own theology. It's got its own Christology. It's so tearyology.

Starting point is 00:53:14 So like the study of salvation, it's got its own eschatology too. And that's what what you just said reminded me of is that it has this idea, as vague as it might be, of what the kingdom here on earth will look like, what the end result of progressive will be. When they get rid of the family, when they get rid of white people, when they get rid of countries and borders and all of these boundaries that they see as oppressive, then it will be like John Lennon's imagine. They don't know what it's going to be, but somehow there will be a new species of human who doesn't fight, doesn't oppress and, you know, doesn't discriminate, whatever it is. They'll just keep on destroying until they get there, which of course is utopia. Right.

Starting point is 00:53:56 And what they're trying to accomplish is heaven on earth without Christ, like without salvation from sin. And so I think that there is a religious motivation, a non-Christian religious motivation behind getting rid of countries. It is like making heaven on earth without Jesus because heaven will be lots of tribes, lots of people, people who had different languages, people of different ethnicities, but united by Christ. And the progressive religion, it's going to be all of those things, but only united by sin, one will be of peace and one will be just constant chaos. No, absolutely. And there's a writer, a conservative blogger, actually a secularist named Ace of Spades, who once wrote this great phrase, I'm going to get it a little bit wrong, but I've quoted it before

Starting point is 00:54:49 where he said, look, like the left, I'm a secularist, but they're really poor secularist because in attempting to eliminate religion from their worldview, they've actually allowed religious thinking to infect every single mode of their thought. And so you look at what they're doing, and it's like, it is all religion but without Christ and all the good things that come with belief in Christ. And that's what makes them so dangerous. And it also means they'll never stop because they're always like, well, why aren't we getting to this place where everything's paradise? And as Christians, we understand that we're not going to get that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:25 So. Yeah. Why do you think Christians mistake white guilt for Christ-like humility? Well, partially it's the culture is making it easier, right? And there's a, it's, it's, it's, I think most of the criticisms that I would get on this book, I kind of disregard. Like, I don't even mean anything. The only one I kind of pay attention to you broadly is to say, well, you know, you don't

Starting point is 00:55:50 want to portray yourself as like some grand victim or whatever. But actually, it's much harder, let me tell you, to kind of go confront these falsehoods and say, like, what you were doing to me is wrong than it is to just sort of, you know, you be quiet. And then, like, I kind of deserve it in some way. And everybody's going to think I'm a good person. Sometimes, of course, for many of your listeners who might be in a corporate environment, there are costs to speaking out. Greater costs, I think, a few years ago, I think you can get away with a little bit more now. And, again, I'm hoping to, in writing this book, open up more space. but there's all sorts of informal and formal costs to speaking out.

Starting point is 00:56:26 And the culture, especially if you're sending your kids to government school, but even in a lot of Christian schools, you know, they're imbibing this message. Your kids from the time they're little, they're imbibing it in the entertainment that they're watching unless you're incredibly scrupulous there. And so it's really hard to go against that type of conditioning that you're just getting 24-7. And it's a sort of soft totalitarian environment that we're in, at least on these issues. Do you think it's better for people to be proud of their skin color or to not really think about their skin color at all? I'd say I'm probably like, I would maybe reject that dichotomy in that, I mean, I think you can within that, your family's from a certain area.

Starting point is 00:57:09 You can be proud of that heritage, right? Like, that's not really why. I mean, you could say maybe European or something like that. I mean, you can be respect the achievements of your. ancestors or feel that there are good things that came out of that culture. I actually do push back a little bit against the color blindness because I think it's a little bit of a naive way to look at the world. I think we want to try it as best as possible to be legally colorblind because that is the right way to go forward. But when people say, oh, I don't see color, that always strikes me as

Starting point is 00:57:42 a little bit disingenuous. We all go around. We see color. We should acknowledge that and then attempt as best as possible, at least within our legal frameworks. You know, maybe Maybe our cultural frameworks are a little different. But with our legal frameworks, we want to try to not take that into account. But we're going to see color. And we need to accept that and be comfortable with that and not feel that there's anything wrong in kind of acknowledging that reality. We can just be thankful for how the Lord made us without putting pride in any superficiality, whether it's our eye color or, you know, the length of our hair, whatever it is. Because none of us are responsible for those things.

Starting point is 00:58:20 Of course. And there's no reason, obviously, to put anybody down based on any of their background. Again, you're just as good as you are or bad as you are and you're both infinitely more loved by God and more infinitely sinful than you could probably possibly imagine, as Tim Keller of my denomination, the late Tim Keller once noted. Yeah. But, but yeah, so you don't have a particular pride because you look a certain way or animus towards somebody else because they don't. but you know you try to take the good parts that you've inherited from your tradition and push that forward while still being open to other people and other traditions yeah what do you how do you respond to the more i don't know maybe it's a like nuanced take i would still consider it left left wing but i think some conservative christians would say okay you know what i'm with you i don't indict all white people i don't think all black people are oppressed but we can't deny what they would called the legacy of slavery. We've got slavery. We've got reconstruction. We've got Jim Crow.

Starting point is 00:59:25 We've got the, you know, we've got the war on drugs. And they would say that that is what, redlining, that's what's caused all of the disparities today. And so we need to write those historic wrongs. And they would say, maybe innocently, that that's the real definition of social justice, that we are writing those wrongs, the vestiges of real discrimination of racism are alive and well today. So let's close those gaps by fixing those injustices. I guess my question is, do you think that that's a true narrative? Well, I don't agree with it, although I do agree with your statement that this is the sort of more reasonable kind of counter-narrative to give, right? and I think there's a variety of reasons,

Starting point is 01:00:17 and I talk about a lot of them in the book why I think it's false. We talked about the sort of illegitimacy rate in the African-American community as one classic example of why I think this, you know, everything is because of oppression kind of falls apart when you look at it. Beyond that, and again, I think you can make

Starting point is 01:00:36 really strong factual cases against that. I won't just do it for the interest of time here. Fine. If you feel like you want to, have a leg up based on somebody's actual socioeconomic standing. Like if they're really at the bottom of the heap in terms of they're growing up in poverty or they're growing up in a fatherless family or whatever it is and you want to take that into account in some way for how you're bringing them into some organization or job. Okay. I mean, I think they're dangerous to that,

Starting point is 01:01:05 but I can deal with that. But that's not actually what's going on. And like just if purely, if you look at what's going on, whether it's set aside minority, small business contracts, I mean, that the government runs or who benefits from affirmative action in the workplace and the school market, which you see continually is it's better off people who tend to be the primary beneficiaries of that. So if you think that there's redress that needs to be done, then let's concentrate on the groups that are sort of at the bottom of the heap. Now, again, I'm kind of wary of going particularly far with that logic anyway, but even if you accept that logic, there is no reason why the children of an African-American multi-millionaire or even more because people could say, or somebody like Anne Coulter would say, okay, well, African-Americans have a very unique history in the U.S.

Starting point is 01:01:58 And so maybe this more applies to them, but like why should a Hispanic or an Asian-American who do not have that same history benefit from that? And not all black Americans or even African-American or have ancestors that came from Africa. Well, and this is actually significant because it's now up to like almost a quarter of African Americans, I think, are either African immigrants or descended from African immigrants. That might be a little high, but it's very significant number. Among them, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, who, I mean, her father did not come from Africa, but came from Jamaica as a, became a professor at Stanford, right? So she didn't exactly grow up in poverty and oppression. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, it just shows how ridiculous.

Starting point is 01:02:48 And again, to come back to a Seoul quote, right, because there's always injustice as you can find from history. And Seoul says the quest for cosmic justice invariably leads to more injustice. And so that's how I think we all can kind of point back to some period in history. I don't care how privileged do you look where you were sort of on or your group was on the lower end of this. we shouldn't try to think that we have the hubris of thinking we can equalize all that. What we need to do is treat everybody fairly today to the best of our ability. And that is actual equity. Equity is supposed to be treating everyone fairly.

Starting point is 01:03:24 And that is like a theme that we see throughout scripture that God hates partiality. He hates partiality. He actually says, do not defer to the poor or to the great. Yeah, of course. And so don't show partiality to the poor just because they're poor. Now, he's also an advocate for the most vulnerable, an advocate for the fatherlessness. He believes in, charges us to treat the truly oppressed with extra dignity and extra care, not to extort them, not to manipulate them, not to ignore them.

Starting point is 01:03:55 And that is, of course, how the church changed the world when we burst onto the scene in the pagan world that did truly marginalize everyone except for the adult free male. And I think that's why the church gets tripped up here. because they use language that traditionally has been Christian language. Yeah. Love, equality, rights. These are Christian ideas. Sure.

Starting point is 01:04:16 That have now been bastardized by, you know, race hacks that have changed the definitions without a lot of Christians even noticing, oh, well, of course I'm supposed to love. Of course I'm called to empathy. That's a whole like other can of worms. Right. And then it softens them into actually embracing hate. hate against another group of people that God made. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:04:42 And then the other end of this is you get sometimes almost this extreme, because I would actually like churches to speak out in a different way than a lot of them are speaking out. Instead, you get some of this extreme Anabaptist behavior almost in the church. And you see a lot of people on the left getting really concerned about it, Christian nationalism. And I could go on to why I'm not particularly concerned about that. I mean, for variety of reasons.

Starting point is 01:05:06 One is that I'm not on the left. but I don't think we're about to become a Christian theocracy here in America. But I'm actually more concerned that a lot of churches are saying, well, we're going to have the only perfect community, I'm even using that in air quotes, is sort of within our church, but like we're going to ignore all the stuff that's going on outside the church, or we're certainly not going to speak out on controversial issues. And I see a lot of good theologically Orthodox churches kind of falling into that trap as well. Yeah, absolutely. I don't want to be political. I don't want to be divisive when really, I'm like, well, these are primarily Genesis 1 issues.

Starting point is 01:05:45 Right, right. They're biblical issues. We're kind of jumping around here, but in your chapter about crime and punishment and how this anti-white discrimination shows up there, you say, this trend toward desperately looking for white criminals to both charge and cover in the media has been so pervasive and so longstanding that the late, brilliant author and cultural critic Tom Wolfe, dubbed it the hunt for the great white defendant. And then you talk about Kyle, Kyle Rittenhouse, and they really are hoisted up as, look at this. white devil. And then there was the Covington. The Covington kid. Yeah, I forgot.

Starting point is 01:06:21 But it was just because he was white and he had a MAGA hat on and he had he was like the juxtaposition against the wise Native American man. Like Beth Moore, all these people were like, oh my gosh, this racist kid just because he's white and he wasn't

Starting point is 01:06:37 doing anything wrong. Yeah. I mean, in this, that we were constantly jumping to judgment as a society. And for a guy like Rittenhouse, I mean, thank God. I'm saying this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not totally. Thank God he killed a bunch of white felons, literally, which he did. If he had killed African-Americans, I don't know that he would have gotten off on those charges, despite the fact that he was demonstrably innocent of those charges, at least in my view.

Starting point is 01:07:02 It was in self-defense. I mean, it's not that he obviously he killed people. And it was happy that any of that happened. You can argue that he shouldn't have been there in the first place as a 17-year-old kid, but looking at the facts at hand. Yeah. And so you see this constantly. talk a lot in my crime chapter about the narrative on crime, which is pretty much the exact opposite

Starting point is 01:07:20 of reality. And that's why it actually matters, because when we, like, George Floyd doesn't just emerge like Athena from Zeus's head, fully armored, ready for battle, right? There's a whole series of falsehoods that have to be injected into the body politic for a thing like George Floyd to happen, right? Like a whole bunch of things that are not true have to become accepted as true about police brutality, about George Floyd himself, about unarmed African-Americans. That's the only way you can sell something that was that destructive. And so that's why it matters that we get these facts right. Yeah. You know, I remember, I don't remember whether it was after Ahmaud Arbery, which was a horrible situation or if it was after George Floyd, but LeBron James,

Starting point is 01:08:08 LeBron, the oppressed LeBron James, feel so bad for him. He said, he tweeted, stop killing us. Yes. But to that, you have this point in your book. Since 1968, according to FBI statistics, there have been approximately 193,500 interracial murders. So most murders are intracial, black on black, white, on white, except for, this is just a note, Asians. Asians are most likely to be killed by a black person than another Asian person. But anyway, 193,500 interracial murders since 1968, with more than 75% of those being white victims of black murderers. And then more than 85% of female victims of interracial murder are white victims of black murders. So it is much more likely for a white person to be killed by a black person, including police officers,

Starting point is 01:09:09 than a black person killed by a white person. And yet we keep hearing stop killing us hands up don't shoot yeah it's it's so toxic it's so and it's so funny because I've understood that this wasn't true for so long I almost take it for granted but then when I talk to somebody who's not living in my world they don't know they don't know right like they do not know this stuff and so that's one of the reasons I have data like this and and facts in the book just so that they are aware of what the reality is here and how starkly opposite in a truly like Emperor's New Clothes type way, it is to, you know, the narrative that is that is manufactured and put in front of us on a daily basis. Yeah. Yeah. It is really crazy. I remember seeing a

Starting point is 01:09:56 study a few years ago, I think, in 2020, that asked people of different groups, conservatives, liberals to guess like how many unarmed black men are killed by the police. And the most liberal group, most of them, I think it was like 72% of them or something, guess that it was over 10,000. Yeah. The number was like 17. Yeah, it's actually less than 10 usually. Yeah, less than 10. Not saying that, you know, any unjustified killing by the police is good.

Starting point is 01:10:24 Of course, we would all agree on that. Right. But even unarmed doesn't necessarily mean not deadly. Of course. But a lot of people don't, they do not know. Yeah, they do not know. And I've just accepted that. And it's because I talk to political people a lot.

Starting point is 01:10:40 I often forget how much people don't know. And I really did try to write this book, not for experts and also not for people who would already be convinced of my position. Like they almost, I don't want to say they don't need to read the book because they'll learn quite a lot, even those who do. But I really wrote it for somebody who maybe, they kind of have a sense that maybe not everything is right. And they don't really know how to talk about these issues.

Starting point is 01:11:04 And they're maybe not totally convinced by, wow, that sounds like a shocking thesis. but they're at least open to it. That's the person who I most wrote the book for. And I think they'll hopefully be very persuaded. I mean, early reviewers have seemed to indicate that they have been. So that's been really encouraging and great news. I think absolutely if they already agree with your premise or they already have these suspicions that they need to read this book because, as you said, they confirm the suspicions. But then they remind you, okay, you're not crazy.

Starting point is 01:11:34 No, you're not some crazy white supremacist racist just because you're like, huh, this doesn't really seem fair. or right and this gives you all the facts and all the data and you can be prepared for those conversations but also you just you just know you know what you're facing and I think it's important to know what obstacles you're facing you also talk about how this happens and I know we kind of have to wrap I could talk for two more hours about this but you also talk about how this happens in big business big tech discrimination in the workplace so speaking of obstacles that white people are facing what's happening here well you have everything from the weird racial politics of Silicon Valley, and I lived in the Valley for quite a while,

Starting point is 01:12:15 so I kind of understand that. And there often people would talk about white supremacy or white being disproportionately represented, whereas every reasonable metric you could use on a population basis would, in fact, indicate that Asian Americans were dramatically more represented in everything in Silicon Valley as a percentage of population. Not by the way inherently a problem, right? It's only a problem if They're blaming whites as if they've they've done something wrong, whereas in fact, they're underrepresented in many of these groups. But in big business, I kind of talk about all of the craziness that went on in the wake of George Floyd and how many billions of dollars were pledged to a very, very corrupt.

Starting point is 01:12:54 And I'm not using that word, I'm using that word very carefully, Black Lives Matter movement. My colleagues at Claremont and I, we documented this in a database that you can find of just like every group, all these big businesses kind of coming in to give millions of dollars to kind of push this false narrative and to give to some of the worst grifters in society. So big business is very much unfortunately implicated in a lot of this story. And again, it's just one of the many, many kind of simmering things in the book. Yeah, you say a survey of 1,000 hiring managers revealed that one in six was requested not to hire white men. even though, as you said earlier, this is illegal, with another 14 percent discouraged from hiring white women. Most hiring managers in a recent survey believe their companies discriminate against whites in hiring, and that a failure to bring in sufficiently, quote-unquote, diverse hires will put their jobs in danger. A quarter of hiring managers surveyed strongly believe their company practices reverse discrimination, which I don't even like the term reverse discrimination because it implies that there was discrimination on the part of white people.

Starting point is 01:14:03 But that's, you know, kind of what they say, reverse-relivenation. Yeah, of course. And I should add, of those groups, that's a severe undercount because hiring managers and that whole HR crew is some of the most liberal people in the corporate world. So if they're acknowledging, if 25% of them are acknowledging that they're discriminating, the real number who are actually doing it is almost certainly much, much, much higher. And again, you see all sorts of cases of this taking place on just a regular basis. Yep, absolutely. So where do we go from here? How do we combat this? What do we do about this? Because, yes, as we said, the commentator class getting bolder about this, but I'm a suburban white woman that goes to an evangelical church. There may be something in the back of their head saying maybe I got 20-20 wrong. But if something like that were to happen again,

Starting point is 01:15:05 they'd be right back there. Yeah. They'd be right back there saying, oh, Trump is putting kids in cages. Yeah. And oh, my goodness, that I can't believe that they arrested a black man. Yeah. Black people are targeted. They'll say things like, I've had these conversations of like, well, you know,

Starting point is 01:15:23 black people are pulled over by the police more just because of the color of their skin. I'm like, I get pulled over all the time, actually. And it's just because I'm a bad driver. So, but I don't. I'm worried that we are one incident away from getting right back to where we were four years ago. Yeah. I mean, I hope that it won't be that bad. I do think that at least some people have learned something from George Floyd. But I think you're absolutely right that the media at least will definitely try to take us there. The cultural elites will try to take us there. The Democratic Party will try to take us there.

Starting point is 01:15:57 And there will be an incident. They're constantly trying to manufacture a new incident. I think the average, you know, nice evangelical white woman who's attending church, arm yourself with the facts. And, you know, I don't want to do too much of an infomercial for the book here, but right, like, I've had a number of people who said, yeah, I bought a copy for my pastor, right? Yeah. So you can buy the book. You can read it if you like it. You know, buy a copy for your pastor. Buy a copy for even your growth group or a small group in church. You could have a discussion about it. And that at a practical level, you also need to, you can support politicians who have spoken out more forthrightly on these issues on our side. And these tend to be the more conservative

Starting point is 01:16:41 people within our caucus. So you can encourage that type of good behavior. And you can really ruthlessly punish bad behavior. And I've got a whole set of other things in the book that I talk about because I'm not just trying to be a Debbie Downer where I'm saying, oh, you know, it's so terrible. We can't do anything about it. I actually think there's lots of things that we can do about it from a policy perspective. And I suggest a number of them in the concluding chapters of the book. And it's just a question of

Starting point is 01:17:07 electing people who are willing to kind of put those sorts of plans in place. Yeah. Unfortunately, history has told us where this kind of rhetoric and where this mentality leads, it's not to a place of liberation. It is to a place of further true oppression for both the revolutionaries

Starting point is 01:17:25 and the victims of the revolution. I mean, look at every left-wing revolution. And look at Zimbabwe when they said, you know what, we're going to do away with these white people. And then, of course, it went from the breadbasket of Africa to the impoverished place that it is today. So lots of historical evidences of where this can go. Yeah, absolutely. And it's sort of funny you mentioned. I have a really close friend who's an Indian American.

Starting point is 01:17:50 And when I was talking with him about the book and he started reading it and he's like, you know, at first you were like talking about white people and I'm like, well, I'm not white. It's not that he doesn't care, but he's like, why does that super affect me? Maybe it wasn't as personal for him. But then when you started sketching out how this is going to be really bad for everybody, I was like, wow, okay, yeah. I mean, we really do need to do something about this, not because it's happening to white people, but because it's happening to other Americans. And that's an injustice and it's going to create problems.

Starting point is 01:18:21 Yep, absolutely. Okay, the cover, kill all wits. What is that from? So that was, I didn't design the cover, but I thought, oh, no, I like it. It's good. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's good too. So they just, they did it.

Starting point is 01:18:35 I was like, yeah, okay, that looks pretty good. That was painted, I believe it was graffiti from the 1990s that was in California somewhere. Somebody put that up and it kind of, I think it illustrates both the illiteracy and the dangerousness of this type of thinking that we have going on in America right now and why we really need to put a stop to it. Yeah. And, of course, we've seen this kind of link. echoed a lot over the past several years. And especially as Christians, like, we have a charge to

Starting point is 01:19:03 care about this because, look, at the end of the day, God is not, he's not judging people based on their skin color. He's not saying you're more responsible for your sins and the sins of others because you have less melanin. And you're less responsible. You have less agency because you have more melanin. That's not how he works. And because of that and because we care about the truth, because we care about order and we're to be agents of order. Yeah. And we care about all image bearers of God. This is something that we need to care about, as uncomfortable as it might be.

Starting point is 01:19:35 Let yourself be uncomfortable. Yes. Yeah, that is. And I know particularly for, I just think of my own way, for a lot of women, you know, they particularly like that may feel like confrontational and I don't want to be, I'm not that sort of person. I would actually argue if you read this, this is the most non-confrontational possible presentation of this book.

Starting point is 01:19:53 I think the best thing we did during the. editing process is anytime I got it all flowery with language, we're just like, eh, taken up. You know, we're just going to present the case. And look, I mean, I've been fortunate that folks like Heather McDonald and Charlie Kirk and and Tucker and actually the longest serving member of Peter Kersenna, the longest serving African-American member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in history is one of the endorsers of this book.

Starting point is 01:20:16 So I think it's something that's gotten a lot of support. And I'm extremely grateful for that. Good. So the unprotected class, how anti-white races is. is tearing America apart. It's available everywhere where Brooks are sold. Yep. Awesome. Well, we will put a link in the description of this episode so people can just click on it and buy it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Starting point is 01:20:33 Thanks so much for having me out. It's been a great discussion. Yeah.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1014 | Anti-White Racism in the Church, at Work & in Law | Guest: Jeremy Carl

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