The Daily Signal - How Conservatives Can Do Better in Engaging Black Americans

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

Commentator Deroy Murdock, besides being a Fox News regular and a contributing editor at National Review Online, is a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. Murdock joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to share his journey to conservatism, how he got started in journalism, and what he thinks conservatives can do better to reach the black community. "I think the primary thing that conservatives need to do to reach black Americans is make the effort," Murdock says, adding: I think that there is a certain hesitancy to do so. I don't think it's malicious. I just think there's a sense pretty well among white conservatives, [of] 'Well, we don't know what to say to them and we don't know quite the language and maybe there'll be upset.'The best thing to do is knock on the doors, go to the black churches, go to the black businesses, go to the black schools, whatever it is, and talk about these ideas and why they're good for America and why they're good for black Americans.We also cover these stories: President Biden holds his first official press conference over two months since taking office. The CEO’ of Facebook, Twitter, and Google testify before a House committee. Republican senators introduce legislation to end child trafficking at the border.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, March 26th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Dahl Judis. DeRoy Murdoch is a Fox News contributor and a contributing editor of National Review Online and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. He joins the Daily Signal podcast to share about his own journey in conservatism, how he got started in the conservative media and journalism, and how he thinks conservatives can do better to reach the black community. And don't forget.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave us a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now, onto our top news. President Joe Biden had his very first press briefing on Thursday, over two months after being inaugurated as president on January 20th. He blamed former President Donald Trump for the current crisis at the border. You bear responsibility for everything that's happening at the border now. I hear you talking a lot about the past administration. you decided to roll back some of those policies. Did you move too quickly to roll back? What? I'm sorry?

Policies. Did you move too quickly to roll back some of the executive orders of your predecessor? First of all, all the policies were underway were not helping at all. Did not slow up the amount of immigration and as many people coming. Here's what Biden had to say about the filibuster via the daily caller. With regard to the filibuster, I believe, we should go back to a position of the filibuster that existed just when I came to the United States Senate 120 years ago. And that is that it used to be required for the filibuster, and I had a card on this. I was going to give you the statistics, but you probably know them, that it used to be that from between 1917 and 1971, the filibuster existed.

there were a total of 58 motions to break a filibuster, that whole time. Last year alone, there were five times that many. So it's being abused in a gigantic way. And for example, it used to be you had to stand there and talk and talk and talk and talk until you collapsed. And guess what? People got tired of talking and tired of collapsing. The filibusters broke down and were able to break the filibuster and get a quorum and vote. So I strongly support moving in that direction.

In addition to having an open mind about dealing with certain things that are just elemental to the functioning of our democracy, like the right to vote, like the basic right to vote. We've amended the filibuster in the past. But here's the deal. As you've observed, I'm a fairly practical guy. I want to get things done. I want to get them done consistent with what we promised the American people. And in order to do that, in a 50-50 Senate, we've got to get to the place where I get 50 votes

so that the vice president of the United States can break the tie, or I get 51 votes without her. And Biden said he doesn't criticize China for its goal of becoming the most powerful country in the world. Here's what he had to say via Fox News. China has an overall goal, and I don't criticize them for the goal, but they have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world. The CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google testified Thursday before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The hearing was the first time the CEOs have testified before Congress since the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Democratic Representative Mike Doyle is chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. During his opening remarks, Doyle was critical of the role tech companies played in the January 6th attack,

saying they should have done more to stop the spread of misinformation. He accused the CEOs of picking engagement and profit over health and safety. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quick to refute these claims per the Hill. We did our part to secure the integrity of the election. And then, on January 6th, President Trump gave a speech, rejecting the results and calling on people to fight. The attack on the Capitol was an outrage. And I want to express my sympathy to all of the members, staff, and capital workers

who had to live through this disgraceful moment in our history. And I want to express my gratitude to the Capitol police who were on the front lines in defense of our democracy. I believe that the former president should be responsible for his words, and that the people who broke the law should be responsible for their actions. Republican Representative Kathy McMorris Rogers of Washington State criticized the tech companies for not doing more to protect children from the harmful effects of social media, per the energy and commerce GOP Twitter.

Your platforms are my biggest fear as a parent. I'm a mom of three school-aged kids, and my husband and I are fighting the big tech battles in our household every day. It's a battle for their development, a battle for their mental health, and ultimately, a battle for their safety. I've monitored your algorithms. I've monitored where your algorithms lead them. It's frightening, and I know that I'm not alone. After multiple teenage suicides in my community, I reached out to our schools and we started asking questions. What's going on with our kids?

What's making them feel so alone, so empty and in despair? And this is what I heard over and over again from parents, pediatricians, school administrators, and teachers. They're all raising the alarm about social media. Representative McMorris Rogers asked Facebook CEO Zuckerberg about the impact social media has on young people. Here's what Zuckerberg had to say per the Energy and Commerce GOP Twitter. The research that we've seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits and well-being benefits, like helping people feel more connected and less lonely. Passively consuming content doesn't have those positive benefits

to well-being, but isn't necessarily negative. It just isn't as positive as connecting. And the way we design our algorithms is to encourage. meaningful social interactions. So it's a common misconception that our teams are our gold or even have goals of trying to increase the amount of time that people spend. Lawmakers also discussed the need to reform law Section 230, which protects social media platforms from being held accountable for the content their users post. While Zuckerberg says he is open to reforms being made to Section 230, the CEOs of Twitter and Google instead argued for greater content moderation tools on the platforms.

Republican senators have introduced legislation to end child trafficking at the border. According to a statement from Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, the bill requires DHS to deport alien adults if they refuse a DNA test and mandates a maximum 10-year prison sentence for all alien adults who fabricate family ties or guardianship over a minor. The legislation, which is co-sponsored by fellow Republican senators Joni Ernst of I Tom Tillis of North Carolina, and Mike Rounds of South Dakota, also criminalizes child recycling, which happens when the child is used repeatedly to gain entry by alien adults who are neither relatives nor legal guardians. If family ties or legal guardianship cannot be proven with the

accompanying adult, the act requires HHS to process the child as an unaccompanied minor under current law. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Doroy Mardock at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Americans use firearms to defend themselves between 500,000 and 2 million times every year. But God forbid that my mother has ever faced with a scenario where she has to stop a threat to her life. But if she is, I hope politicians, protected by professional armed security, didn't strip her of the right to use the firearms she can handle most competently. To watch the rest of heritage expert Amy Swear's testimony on assault weapons before the House Judiciary Committee, head to the Heritage Foundation YouTube channel.

There you'll find talks, events, and documentaries back with the reputation of the nation's most broadly supported Public Policy Research Institute. Start watching now at heritage.org slash YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe and share. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Dora Murdoch. He's the contributing editor to National Review Online. DeRoy, it's great to have you with us on the Daily Signal podcast.

Rachel, it's great to be with you. Well, thanks for being with us. I just want to start off. Can you tell us a little bit about your story? Were you always a conservative, or was this an ideological journey for you? That's a great question. The reason I'm a conservative, I really thank a couple people. My dad, to a degree, he was very much, I remember when his little boy, really little,

a big supporter of Richard Nixon. And we'd have our wonderful family dinners on most Sundays at my grandma's place. and he and my uncles who are not right-wing at all would get a big screaming matches about Nixon, Vietnam on and on and on and I didn't understand most of it, I guess some of that must have seeped in, but the two people who really should get the most credit are Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. I was a kid growing up in Southern California when Jimmy Carter is in the White House, and I remember coming home from school turning on the TV and watching the Iran hostage crisis,

the energy crisis, inflation, high interest rates, Soviets, Soviet agemone, all this sort of thing going on. And I thought, my God, this is really bad. If this man's reelected, I think we're going to have Red Army troops in Tijuana. I really believe that. And I think that might have been the case because the communists are sweeping up from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and probably headed north in our direction. Simultaneously, Ronald Reagan, who was former governor, not quite yet running for president in 1980,

had these wonderful radio broadcasts he did every morning, five days a week, where he would come in on the radio and talk about inflation, about the Soviet threat, about the Soviet mistreatment of Jews, communist expansion in Central America, excess government spending, why taxes need to be cut and so on. And I listen to this every morning and had the contrast between Jimmy Carter's failures and the incredible hope and promise that Ronald Reagan offered. And I thought, I like what I hear. I think this man ought to be president.

And I started volunteering for the Reagan campaign in October 19, 1979 when I was in the ninth grade, and I've been involved in the conservative movement and the free market movement ever since. Wow, that is cool. As someone who loves Reagan, I just think that's amazing. I love his speeches, especially just listening, given to any speech. It's just really incredible. They're still magic.

I mean, they hold up so well over time, the style, the delivery, but much more so than all of those things is the substance. The truths he revealed, the truths he highlighted are still completely valid today. Totally. I have to ask, since you may. mention this. Do you remember any specific things out in the campaign or things that you did or stuff that has stuck with you when you were volunteering on his campaign? Interesting. I don't know if any one single story jumps out at me. I just remember

how exciting it was to be in junior high school, then into high school and being involved in all of this. I'd say really, if there's any really big highlight, it probably would be going to the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit and being there when Reagan was nominated. And doing that as a, let's see, I would have been, I think, an incoming 10th grader, if I'm not mistaken. And that was extremely exciting. That whole week we're there. I was there with a bunch of other kids from California. It was the first time I spent any time with kids from the East Coast.

It was very interesting to spend time with them. Most of the California kids were in bed and sleeping by about 11 o'clock. The East Coast kids were wide awake until 3, 4 in the morning. I'm a night owl. And so I had a lot of time hanging out with a bunch of New Yorkers and Massachusetts people who had the sort of late-night tendencies that I do. That's awesome. So, DeRoy, how did you get your start? conservative media and journalism?

I was the editor-in-chief of my junior high school paper, the town crier, which at Paul Revere Junior High School. And I started writing op-ed pieces in fall of 1978. And I wrote op-eds. A lot of people eventually get to writing op-eds after they write news or sports or whatever. I started expressing my opinions straight away. I started doing that immediately. And wrote op-eds on all the current events of the time, as I mentioned, the energy crisis,

Jimmy Carter's failures, things Reagan was talking about Proposition 13 in California, all this sort of stuff. And I just continued with it. I wrote at the Tideline at Palisades High School, my high school. I was on the paper 10th and 11th grade, I believe. And let's see, what else did I do? Then I was at Georgetown University. I was not on the staff of the Hoyer, but I wrote for the Hoyer. And I think right about 1985 or so, when I was a junior, I believe going to senior year,

I met a very wonderful man who was at the Washington Times. He was the new incoming opinion page editor, or newly installed opinion page editor. And he was very nice to me, and I started sending him at CPAC as a matter of fact, at a reception. And I sent him my op-ed pieces. A man named Bill Sheshire was his name.

And he, this is the time he had to type things up, Xerox, and put in an envelope, and then drop in the mail. And then he would get it a day or two later, and if you liked it, have his secretary type it up and so on. So that's how we just do things back then. And he liked the first piece I sent him, which he ran. I sent him another piece. He ran that.

And he continued to run pretty much every couple weeks or so, op-ed pieces that I would write. And I continued from there. I kept writing through college. I wrote a bit during business school at New York University. It spent a couple years in advertising. We didn't write very much. And then in 1991, we had the Read My Lips recession

when George Herbert Walker Bush raised taxes even though he said he wouldn't do so. The economy tanked, and I lost my job at Ogilvy and made their advertising, there's so many people were laid off. And I thought, what can I do to make money? And so I thought, well, I know how to write op-ed pieces. So I went back to the op-ed work and have continued with that. And I have pretty much written ever since June 13, 1991,

which is when I was laid off. Started doing TV probably somewhere in the mid-90s just as a guest, as well as radio. And then since January 2012, I've been a Fox News contributor. and very happy to be on staff with them and go on the air usually a couple times a week to talk about events of the day and express my views with the national and international audience. Well, thanks for sharing that with us. So you're a founding member of the Project 21 Black Leadership Network. Can you first off tell us what a Project 21 does and then just talk a little bit about what you've been doing since its inception? Project 21 is a project of the National Center for Public Policy Research, which was founded in the mid-19.

80s. And what Project 21 does is try to bring conservative ideas into the black community and also have people who have to be black appear on television on the radio and in prints, etc., talking about why free market ideas, limited government, free enterprise, the rule of law, peace through strength, why these ideas are good for the country and also good for black Americans in particular. And so as a consequence, the Project 21 folks are very good about getting me primarily on radio stations to talk about this sort of thing. And they've done so for probably the last 20 years or so. And I'm very happy to work with them.

And I think we are both getting the message into the black community and also showing the overall American population that there are black folks who are not left-wingers screaming for more and more government. There are people who are black who are on the right. And in fact, you saw in the last election that President Donald J. Trump got 12% of the black. vote. That's 50% more than he had in 2016. And it is, I believe, three times, if I'm not wrong. No, it's about double. It's double what Mitt Romney got in 2012. So there is an appetite for these ideas among black Americans. And we're going to continue to make that case and make

those arguments and hopefully persuade those people that conservatism and free markets are very good things and very helpful things among black Americans. Well, on that note, just given your work in the Project 21 Black Leadership Network, how do you think conservatives, just in generally, can do better to reach the black community more? I think the primary thing that conservatives need to do to reach Black Americans is make the effort. I think that there is a certain hesitancy to do so. I don't think it's malicious. I just think there's a sense, particularly among white conservatives,

well, we know what to say to them, and we don't know quite the language, and maybe they'll be upset and all the – the best thing to do is knock on the doors, go to the black churches, go to the black businesses, go to the black schools, whatever it is, and talk about these ideas and why they're good for America and why they're good for black Americans. I think a lot of folks, even if they don't necessarily agree with everything they hear, at least will appreciate the polite effort to come talk. And they'll say, all right, maybe I don't agree with all of that, but I appreciate you coming to talk to us. I think that's part of the reason that President Trump did as well as he did, is he's really the first Republican presidential nominee who's made a concerted effort to reach out for the black vote, as well as his policy such as supporting historical. black colleges and universities, first step back criminal justice reform, reauthorizing and funding

the D.C. Boucher program. These are all sorts of things that I think a lot of black voters appreciate and as a consequence he did, well, much better the polls than most Republicans do. So I follow that model, go out and make the case, be direct about it, be bold about it, don't be bashful about it. And if the Democrats, the left, let them scream, let them scream. They're going to scream anyway. So at least let them scream about something in response, something positive that's going on as opposed to just screaming racist, racist, racist, which is what they do seven days a week, 24, 24-7, 365. Well, something that's really entered the national conversation more

is this whole aspect of cancel culture. We see it happening right and left with different conservative organizations on Twitter, people being banned with really no rhyme or reason, and it just happening out in the community as well, too. So what's your perspective of this, and how do you think conservatives can combat it? I think what's amazing to watch about this cancel culture is essentially it's censorship.

But unlike most censorship that you see around the world, which is conducted by governments, where the Ministry of the Interior will come down and shut down your newspaper, close your TV station, whatever it might be, it's privatized. The left usually is against privatization, but what they've done is they've privatized censorship.

So rather than have the FBI or the Department of Justice come in and shut down your website or your TV channel or your conservative T-shirt shop or whatever. This is being done by Google. This is being done by Amazon. This is being done by Twitter, by Facebook. And the henchmen, if you will, are not people in long black trench coats operating out of Washington, D.C. They're people in t-shirts and flip-flops working in San Jose and Palo Alto and Seattle and places like this. So there's something really unusual and new and insidious about this. It makes it much harder to fight because if the, you know, if the FBI came in and

said, okay, we're shutting down parlor, parlor could go to court and get that overturned, probably overnight. But because it's done by private organization and private companies do have the right to say we do or don't want to do business with these people, but given that they are basically operating as monopolies, and they're also protected by certain government privileges, namely section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that gives them protection from liability, from lawsuits. And so what they're trying to do is say, well, we're private. We can do what we want. But at the same time, they're hiding behind Uncle Sam's coattails, if you will.

They really need to make a choice one way the other. If they want the government protection, great. They can be protected from lawsuits, but then they have to be able to. Parlor's got to be able to appear on Amazon in the Apple Store, what have you. People like Dennis Prager and Prager University ought to be able to appear on YouTube without getting knocked out. And conversely, if YouTube and, you know, Amazon and Twitter don't like conservatives, that's great. Go ahead and hate us.

Don't do business with us. But then you're not going to get the government protection. And if something goes wrong, people can take you to court. They're having the best of both worlds, and they really have to pick one world or the other. Well, DeRoy, thank you so much for joining us on the Daily Signal podcast. It's been great having you. Rachel, great to be with you and enjoy the rest of the CPAC. And that'll do it for today's episode.

Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast. on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave a series of you and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. And as always, please encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all on Monday. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound design by Lauren

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