Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 272 | Which Black Lives Matter?

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

Black lives matter, but which ones and to whom? Today we analyze the ideology that drives Black Lives Matters' priorities and prescriptions and whether they correspond to betterment for black communities. We also talk about Elijah McClain and the importance of pushing past narratives to care about true injustice when it occurs. Today's Sponsors: Car Shield has affordable protection plans that can save you thousands for a covered repair including computers, GPS, electronics, and more. Visit CarShield.com and use code allie to save 10%! Maybe you’ve been wondering about the best way to protect your family. Or maybe you’re thinking about starting a business, but you don’t know the best way to do it. LegalZoom makes it easy to get started online. And if you need guidance, their network of attorneys can provide advice to ensure you make the right choices. For special savings, visit LegalZoom.com code ALLIE at checkout.

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. I hope everyone has had a wonderful week and that you had a great 4th of July. On Monday, I talked to Abigail Schreier.

She is Wall Street Journal journalist and she wrote a book called Irreversible Damage, the Transgender Cray, seducing our daughters. It was a really insightful conversation. And I just encourage you if you have not listened to it or watched it on YouTube to go do that, especially if you are a mom or plan to be a mom one day. But really, if you're just a person existing in this world, understanding the problem, at least one perspective on the problem that really is threatening young people, but particularly and disproportionately young girls, it's so important for us to just be aware of what's going on, especially in our school system. So go back and listen to that. Today and on Friday, we are going to talk about culture wars and what the culture wars right now look like and why they exist and what

we're supposed to do about them. And these are going to be, I guess, as always, controversial episodes, someone the other day said to me, you know, you have a lot of controversial takes, which is funny because I don't think that way at all. When I am prepared, these episodes. I'm not thinking, okay, here's my hot take. Here's the thing that's really going to be contentious to make people mad. If anything, I might plan it in such a way to where I'm like, okay, I'm going to be super straightforward and dogmatic on this. And then I dial it back. I always try to soften the things that I say to be a little bit more gracious and open and forgiving than maybe I had originally planned or my immediate reaction when I read a news story.

My desire is never to be controversial. It would be a lot easier. Like my life would be a lot easier if I was swimming downstream with the rest of culture. But instead, you and I were like human salmon. We got to swim upstream, which is not only really tiring to swim upstream, but also the bears try to get you. It would be a lot easier to be like a catfish or a bass or something like that, you know, just kind of like wading in the waters, bottom feet are like a catfish. but we're not. We are human salmon and we are swimming upstream and even with the threat of bears. We are called to go against the grain and to go against the current of culture.

And like I said, it would be a lot easier if we didn't have to do that. It would be so much easier to agree with the mainstream on everything. And understand that it is not my desire to go against the grain for the sake of going against the grain or for the sake of saying something different. My desire is not nuanced. It's not to be controversial. It is not to be a contrarian. I actually really don't like it when people try to be contrarians. Those people are really hard to get along with. I like to agree with people. However, we are beholden to the truth and the truth isn't always nuanced. Sometimes it is. The truth isn't always contrarian, but very often it is. And that is what we are called to. And also understand that I realize that as a fallible and flawed human being that I have

my own blind spots, I probably have my own places of hypocrisy and double think that I don't even realize. And my prayer constantly is for God to give me wisdom and for him to help me realize the spots where I am wrong. I don't desire to be wrong. My desire is to always be truthful. and as just an individual, a fallible individual at that, my pursuit of truth, even with the power of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God, is going to be imperfect. So thank you guys for following along, for listening and for learning with me, for pointing out the places where I could have given better insight or more insight and for offering your wisdom to me through all the Instagram DMs that I get in the emails and all of that. This podcast is called relatable because I am relating to

to you and relating to your concerns and relating to the things that you're thinking about in a learning process in the pursuit of truth. And one of the truth that we are going to pursue today is going to be the truth of Black Lives Matter as an organization. What is it? And what is the ideology behind it? And is it okay to say the phrase Black Lives Matter if you don't support organization and what that means and realize that when I speak about Black Lives Matter and I kind of peel back the layers, a lot of which a lot of you have already peeled and seen other people do the same. I am not talking about Black Americans as a monolith. Unfortunately, there are people on both sides who believe that Black Americans all believe the same thing,

that they all want the same policy prescriptions, that they all have the same feelings, that they all have the same grievances. And that's just not. true. There was a very interesting video by Marcellus Wiley. He is a sports commentator who talked about some of the problems with Black Lives Matter that we're going to talk about today. Terry Cruz has critiqued the movement in his own way. And I'm not even saying that those people agree with me. I'm simply saying people aren't a monolith. Of course, Americans aren't a monolith. Conservatives aren't a monolith. Liberals aren't a monolith. And neither are Black Americans. And so when I am critiquing Black Lives Matter, even though we hear consistently that if you could

black lives matter as an organization, you are saying that black lives don't matter, or you are racist and you don't, you don't care about what black Americans think. You want to dismiss them and dismiss their concerns, and that's not true at all. That is a way to stymie conversation. That is a way to stifle dissenting opinions. That is a way of emotional manipulation. That is a way of bullying to say if you don't support this organization and everything that it stands for, then you are a brutal racist. That's a way to silence people because no one

wants to be a racist. So I am going to buck against that and say that, yes, we can care about our fellow Americans who are black, who look differently than those of us who are white. And we can listen and we can have conversations and we can hear real concerns. And at the same time, I know it's so scandalous and controversial these days and radical these days to hold two thoughts in our mind simultaneously at the same time, we can look at Black Lives Matter and say, hang on just a second. Is this an organization that is helping Black Lives? Like, is it living up to its name? And unfortunately, while there are so many wonderful pastors that are doing this and helping their flocks discern and walk through the confusing waters of culture, unfortunately, there are too many pastors,

too many church leaders that are afraid to say to their congregants, hey, congregants, I see that you're all posting black squares. I see that you're all posting links to the Black Lives Matter organization. I see that you're all repeating talking points from this organization. Let me help you be a little bit discerning. And that's not to say that that pastor can't also talk about why racism is a sin or how racism manifests itself or whatever. But it seems like pastors who are willing to talk about racism and give their congregants helpful discernment and what that looks like are not also willing to give discernment to their congregants and saying, hey, Black Lives Matter doesn't actually uphold the values that the church should hold. And so, church, I am going to

give you some wisdom and give you some insight into why this organization is not. one that we should support if, of course, the pastor believes that, which I'm going to make the argument that they should believe that and they should be talking to their churches about that kind of thing. So as I said, today we're going to talk about Black Lives Matter and this is kind of going to be a two-part series about the cultural revolution, the culture war that is going on right now on Friday. We are going to talk about not Black Lives Matter, but the different parts of the culture war. Today we're going to talk about that organization. We're going to talk about the ideology that's driving them, Colin Kaepernick, Frederick Douglass. Then on Friday, we're going to talk about Trump's Mount Rushmore speech, the 2020 election, the destruction of words, the gaslighting that's going on by the media who are saying there is no culture war at all. What are you talking about? And so we're going to talk about all of that. And you might feel a little bit distressed as you might in some of my episodes, just by nature of what we're talking about. But, But I want you to, in these episodes, feeling motivated and feeling equipped and realizing that, yes,

there is a moral and political and cultural, unfortunately, war being waged, a spiritual war in some ways being waged. And we need to be aware of these things. We need to know what it looks like. And we need to have tools in our belt to be able to push forward to the glory of God. So let's get into this controversial stuff. Like I said, many in the black community have voiced concerns with Black Lives Matter. A lot of conservatives have talked about the problem with it.

And we are going to lay those out right now. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the news. day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity

over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. So the question among Christians has never been when we're talking about the subject of police brutality or racism has never been whether or not Black lives matter, at least not in the current conversation. Now, you could argue that 50 years ago. Certainly that was not a popular idea in the church that black lives are equal and black lives matter.

Even in the biblical sense, certainly there is a history there. But in the current conversation that we are talking about and have been talking about, about for several years. The question is never whether or not black lives truly matter. We affirm the reality that black people are made in the image of God. They are equal in value to everyone else and thus should be treated as such. The questions are the questions that we have wrestled with that we should be wrestling with. What are the real problems our country and vulnerable communities are facing? What does true justice look like? And with whom should we partner to tackle these issues. And this last question is what we are mostly focusing on today. And we've talked

about the answers, possible answers to the other questions as well in the episode, does the truth matter? We talked a lot about that a couple weeks ago. So I'm talking specifically about the organization of Black Lives Matter. And like I said, I'm not lumping every activist together. I'm not saying that everyone who cares about racism is a part of this group. I'm not saying that every protester is a part of this group. I am not discounting the real and productive conversations and points being raised. And I'm going to go further into that. We're talking about this organization and what they represent. So according to their site, hashtag Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's murder by combating and countering acts of violence,

creating space for black imagination and innovation and centering black joy. We are winning immediate improvements in our lives. Okay, so it's kind of unclear what some of those things mean. So let's look at the ideology that drives them and ask ourselves if it is manifesting itself in ways that are tangibly helping and tangibly adding what they call immediate improvements to the lives of black people. The leaders of Black Lives Matter are self-avowed Marxist. And since a lot of people scoff when we say the word Marxist as if it's just a buzzword that has no meaning. I'll play you this short clip. I think that the criticism is helpful.

I also think that it might, I think of a lot of things. The first thing I think is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. that is a co-founder of BLM saying that we are trained Marxist. Now, Marxism is somewhat of an elusive term, but it is essentially the driving philosophy behind socialism and communism. German philosopher Karl Marx blamed capitalism and the rich for the plight of the poor, believed that a proletariat-led socialist revolution was necessary and inevitable overthrowing the power

of the bourgeois or the rich. So let's dig a little bit deeper. BLM, co-founder Opel to Medi. She is actually a friend of Hillsong Pastor Carl Lentz, apparently a member of his church. According to Lynch's Instagram, they've had conversations on Instagram. She penned an article in 2015 praising the revolution led by Venezuelan communist dictator Hugo Chavez for their, quote, championing of, quote, democracy. Now, even Bernie Sanders calls Chavez a brutal dictator. He silenced journalist. He packed the courts. He had protesters jailed and murdered. There's no speech there. There's no independent judiciary. There's no freedom at all. In 2015, Venezuela's latest dictator, Nicholas Maduro, spoke at a summit in New York alongside Temetti,

expressing solidarity with black Americans who are suffering from racism, which is funny because Maduro certainly doesn't have a record of treating minorities or treating anyone in Venezuela with any kind of care and respect. Maduro is the same as Chavez in that regard, if not worse, brutal, evil, corrupt. Here is some of what he said in that speech. Now listen to this and listen to how similar it sounds to a lot of the rhetoric that you are hearing. We suffer and feel Ferguson. This is in 2015. It heard us. It heard us to see that the old scaffolding of racism is still intact and is like a ghost that is haunting our peoples. Racism that is just the son of slavery, the direct descendant of slavery and the regime of slavery and segregation and exploitation. Again, notice how similar his rhetoric. is to Black Lives Matter. And the guy is literally not exaggerating. This is not hyperbole. Anyone can admit this if they're going to be intellectually honest on any side of the aisle.

He is a brutal communist dictator that has helped bring Venezuela further into disarray. Venezuela is starving. Here is a picture that I'll put up if you're watching on YouTube. A journalist at the New York Times took of a man being treated for schizophrenia at one of their hospitals. I mean, this person looks like he has, he's definitely dead by now. For sure, this article was written in 2018. This person is certainly dead. He looks like he hasn't eaten in a year. It is absolutely devastating to look. I'll include this. I'll include the link to this article in the description and you can just look and let your heart break at the devastation and the suffering that is going on in Venezuela. One of the most resource rich countries in the

world is suffering and struggling and its people are starving, not because of American imperialism, which is what communist propaganda has been saying for, you know, 100 years about America and what unfortunately someone like Opultimetti believes, but because of the corruption of their own system and their own people, because of the nature of socialism, it always does this. The article that that picture is from is titled Starving Babies, Molotov Cocktails and Death Threats, One photo journalist, Venezuelan reality, he talks about being detained several times as a member of the press. The article says that babies are starving to death and dying. Young boys are joining street gangs just because they're starving.

They're desperate. They don't know what to do. Venezuelans have lost on average of 19 pounds in the past year. Anyone who tells you that this is somehow, like I said, America's fault is lying. This is socialism. Again, this is an oil-rich country that has been ravaged by corrupt. socialist and Nicholas Maduro, one of the most brutal dictators in the world, wants to come to the United States and talk to us about police brutality and racism. Bro, look around your own country.

And for Opel to Mattie, to not only support him, there's a picture of them together, but also support his predecessor Chavez, which again, unequivocally was a brutal dictator. She actually calls out Bernie Sanders in her article saying that she denounces Bernie Sanders, calling Hugo Chavez, a brutal dictator, that's insane. Do Venezuelan lives matter? I'm just wondering, you can go to Human Rights Watches a website and read more about the evils of the Chavez and Maduro regimes if you're interested. But this is what Marxists and communists do. They support one another no matter what. They care about ideology, not outcome. The Venezuelan socialists say and believe the right things, according to people like Tamedi, so they should be.

praised despite the fact that their policies have led exclusively, exclusively to human suffering. Every country in which Marxism has been implemented has resulted in suffering, starvation, and death. The USSR, Eastern Germany, China, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea, just to name a few, Marxism is violent by nature. As compassionate as the intentions of Marxism may sound, lifting up the oppressed using, quote, the language of the oppressed, when executed, it always destroys, it never builds.

I mean, why do you think some of these things are happening around the country in which not just Confederate statues are getting toppled, but all kinds of statues and monuments are getting toppled. The streets are filled with rioters and looters and businesses are burning down, whether they are black owned or owned by white people, whether they have a sign in their window that says, I support Black Lives Matter or not. this is what Marxism does. All it does is create resentment. That's all it does. It cannot actually build anything. It always promises and then it destroys. It is the most devastating example of

overpromising and under-delivering that you have ever seen and the effects are always devastating. I mean, that's why, for example, in CHOP or Chas or whatever it was, in Portland, Seattle, I don't even know. It's all the same to me. That is why they, unfortunately, lost life due to violence in their in their own group they won they didn't believe in the police coming to help them and they don't believe in the police at all but Marxism and this kind of a socialist mentality that we were going to overthrow the powerful by way of some kind of destructive revolution doesn't actually lead to peace it just breeds more violence unfortunately a 16 year old black boy was killed in shop by someone who shot him point blank. So don't tell me that this is an ideology that is leading to peace when we know around the world that it has it and it's not leading to peace right now. And this is the ideology, the stated ideology of the Black Lives Matter organization.

Every country, like I said, that has been characterized by Marxism has gone down the road of suffering, not just the kind of suffering that you see from starvation and being arbitrarily detained, for example, but also you don't have freedom of religion, you don't have freedom of speech, you don't have freedom of conscience. It is totalitarian in that way. One of the first institutions, because it's totalitarian and because it is looking to exact control, one of the first institutions that Marxists, that communists, that socialist seek to demolish in their revolution is the family because no one can have an authority or a value system that is not derived from the state, that is a threat to the state and Marxists are chiefly concerned

with power. We see that characteristic of Marxism in BLM's statement of belief. This is according to their website. The organization seeks to, quote, do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege, quote, disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family and free themselves from, quote, the tight grip of heteronormative thinking. If that sounds nonsensical to you, that's because it is. Half of these words. were discovered in 2015 by a gender studies professor of intersectional politics. They're not real. And yet, to them, they have meaning. As a piece on a medium points out, BLM is inherently a movement sustained by a politics of blackness that is Charlene Carruthers reminds us unapologetically feminist, womanist, and queer. That is, of course, true. The LGBTQ movement and philosophy.

is inextricably intertwined with Black Lives Matter because that is, those are values of the Fountain members. This is precisely why the site mentions mothers three times, but never mentions fathers. You'll see that it mentions parents and mothers, but it will never mention fathers. It is not just because of the, quote, queer roots of the group, but because of its Marxist nature as well. It is their desire to dismantle the familial hierarchy that causes B.L. to downplay the universal need for fathers. Marxist thought informs the idea that the centralization

or even, I guess, the mere mention of fatherhood is patriarchally oppressive and therefore inherently misogynistic. Therefore, BLM, at least in its stated mission, not only aims to ignore fatherhood, but to replace it with, quote, villages that collectively care for one another. The problem with this, I mean, again, as compassionate as that might sound, that is a far-left communistic idea that children belong to the community and not to their parents. That's just a way of ensuring their indoctrination by eliminating that parent-child relationship. Again, you can look at the history of Cambodia, Paul Potts Cambodia, to see how that typically works out. But the problem with replacing fatherhood or ignoring fatherhood is both biblical for

the Christian and also practical. So as Christians, we know that fatherhood is necessary and good. God models the importance of the so-called nuclear family in the Bible in his creation of Adam and Eve. People like to believe that his creation of Adam and Eve and the first family that came about was just arbitrary, that it has no meaning, that it is not supposed to be a model for other families, but of course we know that it is. God called it good and very good. His creation of Adam and Eve is the first marriage and family. He emphasizes this throughout the Old Testament and the historical accounts of Israel. patriarchs and the New Testament directives towards fathers and families. And he shows this in his own

nature the importance of fatherhood. The relationship between God the father and Christ the son is a divine representation of the importance of fatherhood. Furthermore, God calls us, those who have been saved by grace through Jesus Christ, his children and himself are father. You can look at 1st John 3.1. There are also practical consequences of fatherlessness. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 44% of father absent homes are living in poverty compared to only 12% of two parent homes. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that children in fatherless households are far more likely to use drugs. 71% of college dropouts are fatherless. 56% of jail inmates grew up in a single parent home. Additionally, teen pregnancy and juvenile delinquency are both significantly more prevalent in homes without present debts.

this is not to diminish the amazing work of single moms. There are, of course, many children of single mothers who grow up to be wonderful, productive adults. It is simply to say that children thrive most when they are in a situation that God intended for them and created for us raised by a mom and a dad. He shows this in the beginning of creation. He reiterates it throughout scripture and demonstrates it both in his relationship with his son and with us, his children. So how How can anyone who proclaims that Black Lives Matter support an organization that works against fatherhood either explicitly or implicitly when the data so clearly shows its importance for children in their future success, whether you believe in the Bible or not in God's intentional setup

of the family, whether you want to deny that or accept that. You can look at the data that shows us that the lack of fathers in a lack of a lack of a father in a child's life leads to bad results, typically, a higher likelihood of bad results in their own life. So how can anyone who says that Black Lives Matter, you want black success, you want Black improvement, improvement of Black lives, as Black Lives Matter says that they do, how can you be implicitly or explicitly against the Western prescribed, as they call it nuclear family, which is just a mom and a dad? How can you be against the presence of a father? As of 2018, 65% of all black households in the United States were without a present father that's higher than the households of any other ethnic group.

Now, Black Lives Matter and similar activist groups will say, well, you know, we don't talk about that or when we do talk about it, we only talk about it as a result of systemic racism. That's what leftist activists will say. They will say the high number is because of mass incarceration. that's why we need an overhaul of not only policing, but of our justice and prison systems in general, which they assert are systemically racist. But the numbers don't support that theory, that incarceration is the historical driver of fatherlessness. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the rate of fatherless homes in the black community were already on the rise before the sharp increase in black incarceration in the 1970s through the 90s. Based on the numbers, it is more likely. that the breakdown of the family caused the rising crime rates than the other way around. It has also been asserted that fatherlessness in black communities is part of the, quote,

legacy of slavery. And that is partly true. I do believe that to be partly true, as Tonehisi Coates explains in a piece in the Atlantic, which obviously I disagree with a lot of what he says, but I do think he's a very insightful and talented writer, and he's very interesting to read. He writes in a piece in the Atlantic that black children have always, been more likely to be born to single mothers and that that was obviously due to slavery when slavery existed. And of course, that's true. But does the legacy of slavery explain why, as his same article shows in the Atlantic, that the fatherless rate among black Americans was fairly steady until the 1960s and then skyrocketed? I don't think so. That just doesn't correlate

that the fatherlessness rate was about the same from slavery until the 1960s. And then all the sudden went up. And again, that's before the so-called trend of mass incarceration started to happen. And slavery, it cannot be to blame for the white fatherlessness rate going up at the exact same time. So in the 1960s, both the white fatherlessness rate and the black fatherlessness rate skyrocketed and has continued to increase since the 1960s. And so you can't say the legacy of slavery is to blame for white fatherlessness that has gone up at the same rate. And you? Of course not. As economist Thomas Soul argues, nearly a hundred years of the supposed legacy of slavery found most black children being raised in two parent families in 1960,

but 30 years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent, which is true. Now, that is his argument for why that the welfare state was the, and is the biggest driver behind broken up families in the black community. and in white communities. I would also argue that for all demographics, the sexual and moral revolution of the 1960s helped deprioritize marriage before, helps deprioritize getting married before you have sex and have children. But no matter the reason for fatherlessness, we know the importance of present dads, both biblically and practically. So if black lives matter, and they do, by the way, eternally, why would Christian,

support an organization actively discouraging and seeking to dismantle the one thing we know kids and communities of all ethnicities need most present fathers and coherent families and cohesive families. The idea of a collective village family, like I said, is a communist idea and you can study the way totalitarians have always first sought to break up the family in that way and put kids under collective care so they can become indoctrinated agents of the state. Why would we support an organization whose driving ideology is one that has manifested itself in violence and division throughout the world? What good can that bring? Now, I'm going to get into some other parts of that and the way some people answer that question from the other side in just a second. So some people say,

in response to all of this, that Black Lives Matter is still helping the black community because they are helping to save black lives. But is that really true? Like, is that what they're doing? There were, according to the Washington Post, 15 unarmed black people killed by the police last year. Every one of them important. Every one of them made in the image of God. Every one of them worth paying attention to. Every one of those cases should be investigated. All cases where someone is killed should be investigated. And if a police officer murders someone, they should be held accountable. They should go to jail for the rest of their lives, just like anyone else. But there were 15. 55 police officers were murdered in 2018, according to the FBI, just for a little perspective.

And we don't even know how many of the black Americans who were killed by police were killed by white police officers, presumably fewer than 15, since we know that typically minority police officers, police minority communities, typically. So the few times a white police officer kills a black American. are what BLM is focused on, but not the 2,600 black people murdered by other black people in 2018. And that number is similar throughout the years. Every year, there are more black murder victims than any other ethnicity. And they're not being killed by white people. And by the way, white people are mostly killing white people. The Chicago Sun Times reports that 18 people were killed on one Sunday, May 31st, making it the single most violent day in Chicago, six decades in 60 years, the most violent day in Chicago.

There were at least six black children murdered over the weekend, according to CNN. We will put their pictures up as I read their names. Cessoria Turner, eight years old, shot and killed in Atlanta. Her mom was getting off the interstate, trying to turn around, get out of the way of the protesters that were at this, Wendy's, where Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by a police officer. apparently she got in the way she was trying to get out of the way of these barricades that they had illegally put up and someone shot and killed this little girl who did nothing to them by the way again this is not justice exacting revenge um exacting revenge period but exacting revenge on people who did

nothing to you is not justice so you can stop telling me that these riots in the street are about justice they're not uh roida de marco giles also eight years old in Hoover, Alabama, shot and killed in a crossfire at a mall. Davon McNeil, 11, Washington, D.C., visiting family in D.C. when he was shot and killed. Natalia Wallace, seven, Chicago, playing outside, shot and killed. Six-year-old in what seems to be a drive-by shooting in San Francisco over the weekend. Police, yes, police, are investigating this still trying to figure out what and why. These stories come out of Chicago every week.

Just a couple weeks ago, this three-year-old boy was shot and killed in a shooting in Chicago. Anyone to remember Tishon Lee? You probably don't. You might not even know his name. He was a nine-year-old boy who was black that was playing basketball when a gang member that he knew lured him into an alley, shot him in the head point blank, murdered by a gang member named Dwight Boone Doty, who, according to the Washington Post, laughed

about it, made a joke about it when he was asked about it, showed no remorse whatsoever. And Black Lives Matter is openly calling. This is why I bring this stuff up. I know that some of you are thinking, well, that's not their focus and it's fine. I'm going to talk about that in just a second. You're right. They don't have to focus on everything, but I'm making a point with all of this. That with all of that happening, disproportionately in black communities,

Black Lives Matters openly calling for the defunding of the police. According to UGov, only 16% of Americans are in favor of that, which is honestly, it's too high, but it's still a minority of Americans are in favor of defunding the police because most people understand that that would be insane. Reforms, sure, accountability. Sure, there's a New York Times article that goes through all of the different forms of accountability and some forms of police reform that the vast majority of Americans are for. Like we, most of us agree that we want transparency. We want accountability. We want better improved policing and training and all of that. I think police officers want that. But defunding abolition of the police department? Absolutely not. And that's what's happening in Minneapolis. right now. Let me read you an excerpt from a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jason Riley,

who, by the way, is black. The political left with a great deal of assistance from the mainstream media has convinced many Americans that George Floyd's death in police custody is in every occurrence for black people in this country, and that racism permeates law enforcement. The reality is that the carnage we witness in Chicago is what's typical. Law enforcement has next to nothing to do with black homicides and the number of interactions between police and low-income blacks is driven by crime rates, not bias. So long as blacks are committing more than half of all murders and robberies, again, this is according to Jason Riley, murders and robberies while making up only 13% of the population.

And so long as almost all of their victims are their own neighbors, these communities will draw the lion's share of police attention. Defunding the police are making it easier to prosecute officers will only result in more lives lost in those neighborhoods that need protecting most. Reports about race and policing that omit relevant facts to push a predetermined narrative are not only misleading but harmful, especially to blacks. We know from decades of experience that when police pull back, criminals gain the advantage and black communities suffer both physically and economically. A common assumption among liberals is that the movement of inner city jobs to the suburbs in the late 1960s is what led to

the higher rates of crime, violence, and other social pathologies associated with ghetto life. But this gets the order wrong. The business flight took place after the rioting, not before. Will history repeat itself? That's a great question and I think it's rhetorical because we know the answer. The answer is yes. Anyone with means is going to leave cities like Minneapolis who are currently defunding the police and the people who are going to be impacted are going to be the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the children who are not going to be able to move and are going to not only suffer from lack of economic opportunity, but also higher crime, which are disproportionately, these crimes disproportionately committed by men. And so people who are vulnerable are going to be

affected most by this. And what about abortion? Here is another unfortunately tragic taker of black life from 2012 to 2016. This is also according to Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal. According to the Health Department, more black babies were aborted than were born. terminated were 136,426 pregnancies of black women. And black women gave birth to 118, 127 babies. That is the highest rate, even if you adjust for income levels. Planned Parenthood praise upon these minority communities, knowing that they're going to be able to convince these people to have abortions.

Abortions pay their bills. You can say it's only 3% of what they do. They're still murdering babies and making money off of it. I don't care whether it's 0.5% of what they do. It's still evil. And they pray upon these vulnerable women who find themselves in unfortunate and desperate situations and they know they can make money off of them. Margaret Singer founded Planned Parenthood on eugenics for the exterminate the quote, quote, extermination of the Negro. That is the language that she uses. You can Google that. You can look that up. You're going to be able to find it. That is not a myth. That's not

an exaggeration. Margaret Singer had ties to the KKK. She was, was a white supremacist that is part of why she started Planned Parenthood. She was very similar to Nazis in that way. And yet, as we are knocking down statues that have nothing to do with white supremacy, the same people are praising Planned Parenthood. It's pretty amazing. And Black Lives Matter, by the way, supports abortion and supports Planned Parenthood and supports Joe Biden expressly for that reason of supporting abortion. Now, here's something that I think all sides of should talk about and should care about. We should talk about the black maternal mortality rate, which is much higher than other

rates, and that could be playing into, unfortunately, this high number of abortions that black women are having. But one side will tell you that it's only because of institutional racism and no access to proper care. But even though I do think that those definitely could be factors absolutely in it, but the reality is, is that according to the CDC, Hispanic women, have a lower maternal mortality rate, not just than black women, but also white women. And they are on average comparable economically to black women and presumably would also, may also experience discrimination. Again, that's according to

the CDC. And so where are the studies into the why that go beyond the cursory political talking points? And look, I'm not saying that there are no black organizations that care about this stuff. there are. Like I said, Black Americans are not a monolith. No group is a monolith. I think the majority of Black America cares about this stuff from the conversations that I've had, the things that I've been reading. You know, the haters that listen to this podcast think that I don't listen to the other side. You would be surprised if you looked at my library of books and the things that I listen to and the things that I watch that are of people of the other side that help me also shape my views. But, these black lives are not the black lives that are being brought to our attention by Black Lives Matter,

even though this is how the majority of Black Americans who die in an untimely way are dying through abortion and through the crime that is unfortunately tragically happening in these inner city communities. Why? Again, because Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization. They exist for Marxism. Marxism seeks to divide and conquer to create a oppressors in the oppressed in order to call for a socialist revolution. And focusing on the thousands of black lives lost to abortion and homicide every year, that doesn't accomplish what they want in the way of Marxism. But focusing on the few times a white officer shoots a black American does.

And if that's what they want their focus to be, I know if you're on the other side of the aisle and you're listening to this, I already know part of your rebuttal to what I'm saying and I'm going to address it. they don't have to focus on every issue facing the black community. I understand that. They can have their scope be narrow. If they want to focus on the few times that a black person is killed by a white police officer, I don't think that's a bad thing.

I do think that we should be having conversations about that. I don't think that we should ignore when that happens. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. If they want that to be their focus, then so be it. But the problem is it's not that their scope is actually very narrow so that it only only focuses on racialized police brutality. Their scope is actually very wide. They are really focused on a much larger revolution.

That includes the dismantling of entire systems they claim to be racist, not just ending police brutality. Police brutality and white supremacy are simply the wedges that they use to divide and conquer. So people say, oh, well, they're just focused on police brutality. No, they're not. It's that they're focused on a lot of issues that are not helping black law. That's the problem. They're focused on in a lot of ways, not always, but in a lot of ways, the wrong things and the wrong kinds of solutions, the Marxist solutions that have always ended in division and suffering.

And they are focused on dismantling the traditional family, which we know will disproportionately and unfortunately negatively affect black young people and especially black young men. And that's why they have the name Black Lives Matter instead of Black Lives taken by racist police officers matter, not because they are actually doing the work on behalf of all Black Lives, which I would applaud, by the way, but because they picked a name that no one could argue with in order to be able to exert influence over all sectors of society, from social media to corporate America. They picked a phrase that no one disagrees with because no one does disagree with it so that if you, you don't support them, they can assert that you don't believe that black lives matter. So everyone is bullied into supporting them because no one wants to be a racist because very few people are truly racist.

And they want to prove people who, you know, share Black Lives Matter post and say they support the organization. They want to prove that they're not. They have bought into this lie that if you don't support the organization, you don't believe that Black Lives Matter. That's just not true. The phrase in the group are obviously different. Of course, black lives matter. But the question is, what do you mean when you say that? Which black lives and why? And if you're going to say, well, if you really believe the black lives matter, you'll want to do all of the things we socialists tell you to do, then no, there are a lot of people who aren't going to get on board with that. Here's an interesting Noam Chomsky quote about propaganda that I think applies here. That's the whole point of good

propaganda, you want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against and everybody's going to be forward. Nobody knows what it means because it doesn't mean anything. Isn't that the case here? Have they created a phrase that no one can morally be against but doesn't have any real actual meaning? Now, one good thing that I do think has come out of all of this, even in the disagreements between the various organizations, I think one good thing that has come out of this is that we're talking about these things. My concern is that the sincere voices that are talking about real racism

and real problems, racism are not facing the black community are being drowned out. People who are presenting real solutions that are talking about real reforms, having substantive conversations that they are being lumped together with organizations like Black Lives Matter

and drowned out. For example, there was a case of a young man with, I believe he had special needs, Elijah McLean, who was, in my opinion, abused by police officers in Aurora, Colorado. The video is online. It's tragic. It's heartbreaking. You can watch it. It was at night. He was wearing a ski mask, and he was anemic. And so his family said that he often got cold, so he wore this mask. And maybe you could see because of that, why someone might be skeptical of a man walking at 2 a.m. with a mask on. But it doesn't matter because he wasn't breaking the law. He was saying while police officers, multiple police officers, this little kid had to be

no more than, you know, like 160 pounds, multiple police officers on him unarmed saying, hey, I can't breathe. Sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to, he vomited saying, sorry, I didn't, I didn't mean to do that. I just can't breathe properly. Like I said, he was a small guy. He wasn't going to overpower these officers. He was unarmed. He was clearly scared. He was given ketamine to sedate him by the EMT. he went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital. He was put on life support and he died a few days later. I'm sorry, but unless there's another part to the story that I don't know, you can't tell me that this situation was okay.

I mean, again, unless I just don't know a part of the story that he required this much forced. I wasn't there. I don't know and you all know how much I love and respect good police officers, but we have to be able to say, hey, this is not all right. This is not how it should have gone. We should care. We should all care about the stories.

of people doing nothing wrong. Like the story of Justine Damon, a white woman who was literally shot and killed by a cop when she was walking in her pajamas after she called them to report a man in her alley that she thought was abusing someone, we should all care about these situations that are obvious instances of injustice. They're insane. These cases don't happen every day. Thankfully, as far as we know, they don't happen very often at all.

But we should care when they do. Absolutely. What I fear is that radicals have so monopolized this conversation for their cultural revolution, not just Black Lives Matter, but Antifa, the far left white saviors like Robin DiAngelo, who is just so wonderfully being raked over the coals by people all over the map right now and is just making thousands and thousands of dollars on anti-black racism. But that's another story. I fear these people are dominating the conversation. I'm thankful for the conversation that maybe they have. have brought to light, but I fear that they're dominating the conversation so they were unable to separate the radical Marxist from the people saying, hey, over here, here are some real

solutions, here's a different perspective, here's the real injustice that's happening, here are the real solutions that are happening. And I'm afraid for us, honestly, as conservative Christians, that we will turn our heart away from people like Elijah McLean, because we're afraid of buying into a Marxist narrative. I don't want that for us. I don't want that for us. I think that we need to be discerning about what Marxism is and what it isn't. We need to be discerning about the hashtags that we use, that the organizations we promote, the slogans that we use, the words that we use, like anti-racism and social justice terminology that, again, is more propaganda that doesn't have any substantive meaning. We need to be careful about that. But that doesn't mean

that we should harden our hearts against injustice that really happens. As Christians, we have to be discerning. We are not affiliated with the narrative. We don't pledge allegiance to a political party. We are flawed, which means that we are biased, that we have blind spots, like I said at the beginning of this. And I pray constantly for God to show me where I am coming up short and where I'm wrong. I don't want to be wrong. I don't want to say things that are not true. But I'm an imperfect person, so I know that I have gotten it wrong in the past. But it is my desire to look at the whole picture.

And that is what I'm trying to help us do on this show. The whole picture is that injustice exists, but not always where the mainstream tells. you that it does and it should be talked about but not always in the way that the mainstream tells you that it should be and there are problems but not always the ones the mainstream says that there are we shouldn't be in denial about problems that are facing all vulnerable communities and we shouldn't only bring them up when it's politically expedient that is true on both sides by the way and just as we can't say that all the problems in the black community are due to racism we also can't say that there is no racist person in America. Do any of us as Christians who believe that the heart is

desperately wicked that we are to pray sinners in need of a savior really think that racism is an impossibility that someone couldn't hate someone based on the color of their skin? Of course. Of course there are. There are people who hate for a number of reasons. And of course, God just calls this hate. He says if you hate someone in your heart for any reason, he doesn't qualify or specify, then that's murder. So by the way, the people who are saying that once skin color can't be racist against another skin color or someone who is of a lower station in life can't be accused of true hates or an ism against someone in a higher station in life. That's not true. That's not the qualification that Jesus gives us in the Gospels. If you hate, if you, anyone,

universal you hate someone in your heart that is murder. But that also includes people who hate someone because of their ethnicity, because of their culture. They might hate children. They hate women, they hate the elderly, the disabled, they hate Christians, Jews, whatever. There are people who hate, and there are people who hates, like we said, based on someone's melanin count. And hate can absolutely manifest itself in ways that hurt groups of people. And we have seen that in American history as well. And you can hear more nuanced and thorough explanation of that by going back to last Friday's episode. That said, I also believe and see that America is the least racist. This is such a controversial statement, but I have heard many black Americans say this, that America is the

least racist that we have ever been. We're only 244 years old. We endured the moral state of slavery. Hundreds of thousands of men gave their lives to end it. Black people continued in many ways have limited access to equal rights after that. We had Jim Crow, segregation, all of it. And we should know about it. We should learn from it. We should call it the evil that exists there. But we should also recognize the amazing progress that we have made in such a short amount of time. We have gone from segregation and Jim Crow to black billionaires, millionaires, scholars, professors, Supreme Court justices, Congress people, producers, directors, artists, cabinet members, a president of the United States named Barack Hussein Obama. You can't tell me that that means nothing. I understand it doesn't

mean everything. I understand that it doesn't erase any injustice that actually does exist. It doesn't change people's personal experiences and feelings. I'm not trying to do that. But it also doesn't mean nothing. And yes, there are still disparate outcomes for black people in America. And there may be multiple answers to these problems and reasons for them. Again, I encourage you to read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Soul. He talks about all of the disparities that exist and the why behind them.

But consider that some of the people who are telling you that racism is the only reason for these disparities, that discrimination is the only reason for these disparate outcomes and that Marxism and that socialism, anti-capitalism are the only solutions to these things are purposely and politically trying to drive a wedge, purposely trying to cause chaos, purposely trying to start a revolution. And then there are just some ignorant people, especially ignorant white people who just don't know and they're just going along because they don't want to be considered a bigot. Is there any country in the world, besides maybe South Africa, where the minority, where minority groups are doing as well as an even better than the majority?

Is there another country where a group was oppressed as badly as black Americans were as black slaves and black people under Jim Crow were that have excelled as much and as quickly as black Americans have. I don't know of them. And in what other country, by the way, again, besides probably South Africa, are the minority groups, the top earners in society. In America, it's Indian Americans and East Asian Americans that have the highest graduation rates, highest test scores, highest median income, whites come in third, and white people have been here the whole time enjoying all the rights in the world. In what other country is that possible? And what other country does that exist? That is why.

the most immigrants come to the United States every year. They know that there is opportunity here for people of any skin color. In what other world and what other country would someone like Colin Kaepernick become a multi-millionaire of tens of millions of dollars he is worth for kneeling during the national anthem? He had a deal with Nike. He just signed a deal with Disney. Tens of millions of dollars.

He has earned just by being an activist. He tweeted on the 4th of July saying that black people aren't going to celebrate your white supremacist holiday. because black people have been brutalized and oppressed using Frederick Douglass's What to a Slave is the Fourth of July. That's something I saw a lot on Fourth of July. But by the way, like if you study Douglas, he was, you should read his stuff. You should read What to a Slave is the Fourth of July.

It's really good. You'll find that he loved America and believed he came to this conclusion later in life. The Constitution in its original form is an anti-slavery document and actually sets the basis for the anti-slavery argument, and he was correct. Kaepernick is richer, the 99.9% of all people in the world, including white people, in no other country would his story be possible. But you want to say, people want to say that white supremacy is not just a problem, but is our main nemesis here?

Again, I'm not saying that there are no white supremacists that exist, but can we look around in 2020 and really believe that this is the issue of our day when the majority of black Americans are being killed by abortionists and other black men every day? Or is it that white supremacy is the buzz phrase that is used to divide us? Unfortunately, this is another tragic part of all of this. When it's used to describe everyone and everything, it loses its meaning. So people who are actually white supremacists who believe that white people are supreme can't get called out because everyone is a white supremacist.

That means people, when people are called that, they just don't care. Like, it's, when someone hears that phrase, they just assume that someone is being hyperbolic or that they're just completely making it up because that's what happens when words lose their meaning. And that is really unfortunate. This is being used to launch a cultural revolution where we take down not just Confederate statues, which I've said if communities want to peacefully do that, democratically do that, that is their decision. I get it. But Union soldier statues, founders monuments, and get this, a statue of Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, was toppled in Rochester, New York by the mop. He did just as much for freedom for all in this country as any other patriot did.

Toppled. I would just like to point out that none of the white people toppling statues and talking about racism would have been abolitionists. Like there's just no evidence of that kind of moral fortitude in their life. And none of the so-called Antifa members would have actually fought fascist in World War II, Why? Because they would have been the fascist. That's just true. For the radicals. For the radicals, I'm not talking about all of the many sane people who are having productive dialogue. For the radicals, none of this is about racism. This is about Western civilization. This is about destroying America and rebuilding a socialist dystopia. They're talking about how racist Mount Rushmore is.

Mount Rushmore. When Obama visited it, it wasn't racist. When Bernie Sanders visited it and both of them said, how awesome and great it was and how it made them proud to be on Americans. No one had any problem with that. But all of a sudden, we care about that. There's so much more that we could talk about. We could talk about Trump's speech in front of Mount Rushmore right now since we just ended with that. But I am going to talk more about that on Friday and the rest of the culture war that doesn't just have to do with race, but really just how we're understanding history, how we're breaking down the language and I'll relate it to 1984, which I'm reading in my book club. You can join. Men's Book Club with Ali Stucky on Facebook, and you can just pick up exactly where we are.

You can wait for the next book, but we are going through 1984 right now. It's extremely pertinent to everything that's going on. I do want to just finish with a quote by Booker T. Washington and just encourage you guys when you feel like human salmon and you're alone among all of the catfish just waiting around in the still water. I know that's not how it works if you're swimming upstream and the catfish are in the still water. I understand that my analogy is breaking down a little bit. But for those of you who, like, salmon, are swimming upstream when you're scared of the bears that are going to get you, understand,

one, that you're not alone, that there are a lot of us who are swimming upstream right next to you, and also that it doesn't matter that you're in the minority. It doesn't, it doesn't matter that you might be the only one around you who sees things clearly. Booker T. Washington says this. A lie doesn't become truth. Wrong doesn't become right. And evil doesn't become good. just because it's accepted by a majority. And human history proves that to be true, that when the minority really, no matter how small, speaks up for the things that are right and true and good, even if we disagree within this minority, as long as we are willing to have productive dialogue and to talk with compassion about real problems and solutions, we can push forward and push back

some of this Marxist darkness. And I'll be talking more about that on Friday. Okay, I will see you guys then. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos.

If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.