The Eric Metaxas Show - Horace Cooper

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

Horace Cooper of Project 21 and author of "How Trump Is Making Black America Great Again," considers Obama's election and the opportunity for advancement with race relations that was lost during his years in office.

show. It's the show that answers the questions. Could you milk a cockroach? By the way, cockroach milk is really yummy. Some would even say numby. This announcement has been brought to you by the cockroach dairy council. And now the man who once wrangled cockroaches for a living in Kansas City, Eric Mataxis. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Just the other night, I was watching Tucker Carlson. He has been doing some genuinely heroic things lately. if there's anything that you don't want to miss, it's probably his program. And he head on someone I've seen before, Horace Cooper. Horace Cooper has a new book out called How Trump is Making Black America Great Again.

Horace Cooper is with Project 21. Horace Cooper is, was legal counsel to Congressman Dick Army? And he's my guest right now. Horace, welcome. Hey, it's great to be on the program. Well, what you said the other night on Fox News struck me as important. We're living in outrageous times. Anybody with any sense of history understands that the division and the cynicism on the hard left right now, the nihilism,

trying to piggyback on racial grievances. It is so ugly that we have to speak loudly and clearly and help people understand what is happening, because obviously the mainstream media has died. So I was so grateful for you. I want to hear your version of where we are now. You, it seems to me, you've been a black man most of your life. Is that right? Conception, I think.

You know, that's fascinating. So you speak from a different point of view, one from which I certainly cannot speak. you know that what is happening right now when it comes to Black Lives Matter, okay? I've said this over and over again, and I want to get this out over and over and over. So let me start here. I think anyone with a conscience, certainly anybody with any faith understands that Black Lives Matter, but the movement Black Lives Matter, the organization Black Lives Matter does not help blacks.

It harms everyone. It is an anarchist, radical leftist organization that does not speak for blacks in America. And we need to be very clear that if you actually care about black lives, you have an obligation to distance yourself from Black Lives Matter the organization, the hashtag movement, whatever it is. I want to get that out up front. But Horace, how have you been processing this? So, Dick 21 was actually formed in the wake of the Rodney King riots. And several of us, I'm a founding member of the organization, but several of us were watching CNN and hearing this idea that it is the normal and legitimate way that black Americans express their

frustrations with civic life, that they run into the nearest Best Buy, and grab as many DVD players as they can. And we knew. I knew this, my associates that I grew up with, and it turned out people from all walks of life knew that this is so far from reality. And we decided to form an organization that would say, we're black Americans, and we want people to understand that this universal vision or perspective,

that's being put forward on the mainstream media about who black Americans are, doesn't represent or reflect the reality. And we are going to start having people that will appear on the news, appear in print, appear on the radio waves, saying, hey, wait a second, when Martin Luther King said that people would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, we were astonished to hear that what people were saying is okay to say. You just look at that person's skin color and you know their political affiliation,

you know their views on taxation, their views on free enterprise, all manner of issues. That's the very opposite. And so we've been around and that's been our purpose. Watching what's going on now has been almost. like a wholesale rejection of this idea. Americans in all walks of life come to Washington, they come to their state capitals, and they're able, in a representative system of government, come up with conclusions and policies.

You don't actually have to be wheelchair-bound to have a position on the Americans with Disabilities Act. You don't actually have to be Latino to have a position on immigration or you don't have to be black to have a perspective on what kinds of policies would be useful and constructive. And we have watched. But where does that come from? In other words, that's classic identity politics. It's new in America. It didn't exist 50 years ago. Where did this idea come from?

Is it a cultural Marxist thing that, you know, unless I'm black, I can. I can't talk about race unless I'm in a wheelchair. I can't talk about disabilities. Where do we get that idea intellectually? It's clearly a Marxist concept, and it rejects the notion that we can have elected representative government that is morally capable of making judgments and decisions that are good for all walks of life, and it doesn't require you to come. come from a specific perspective.

Our system actually doesn't want a parochial mindset. We don't only want Latinos to be part of the conversation about immigration. And we shouldn't say that we should primarily be asking black Americans with regard to policies that are either going to have some impact on blacks or that blacks may be having some desire to pursue. All Americans ought to be encouraged to weigh in. And so anytime I hear someone say, well, I defer to you because of your particular perspective or background, I'm reminded that's actually not what Martin Luther King talked about. He presumed, and I think that that was a vision that actually America is premised on, citizens are able to make decisions, and we're all. all going to be as citizens equal before the law. When America was founded, that concept was

radical and alien. Everywhere else you have to go back to Greece, ancient Greece, before you find this idea of the citizen being empowered to make decisions and having equality before the law. I'm watching Black Lives Matters, and that movement is. is now asking us, and I'm seeing it in the New York Times, mainstream media, is asking us, reject the idea of equality before the law, reject the idea that all the citizens are equal, and let's start picking lifelong women and losers primarily based on race or some unique aspect about a person. Well, it's interesting because I wrote a book called If You Can Keep It, because I myself understood that if America is an idea, in other words, it's not about your race,

it's not about your ethnicity, it's not about anything except you buy into a set of ideas about how we can govern ourselves and what we need to do. And my parents, you know, who have accents and come from another part of the world, they are as American today as George Washington. But the problem is if you don't understand those ideas, then you can't really be fully American. You can't really govern yourself. And for 50 years, we've not been teaching those ideas in schools, certainly not in the universities who have been teaching against those ideas. The pop culture has stopped celebrating patriotism and celebrating the ideals of this country.

And so it's only because we have a population today, a citizenry, that is largely ignorant of these foundational things to which you have just alluded and some of which you stated explicitly. it's only because of that that people like the Black Lives Matter movement and other cynical people can come in and confuse and bamboozle and bully because people don't know what to say they're caught flat-footed. We're going to go to a break. Folks, we're going to have Horace Cooper for the hour. Do not go away. This is the Eric Metaxe show. Very important stuff. Hey, folks, this is the Eric Mattaxas show. I am talking to Horace's show. I am talking to Horace's. Cooper, he's with the National Center for Public Policy Research, and also with Project 21. Horace, what's the difference between Project 21 and the National Center for Public Policy Research? Is one a part of the other? Yes, so we are one of the initiatives of the National Center for Public Policy Research.

What we do at Project 21 in particular is make sure that people remember that you can be black and support less taxation. You can be black in support the idea that societies work better when families are strong and we set up policies that encourage family formation. That life actually works when people are expected to take responsibility, act with agency. And that government, as the Toadville discovered in the late 19th century when he came to America, that government that governs least is the government that expects more of its people because it places in their hands. Now, the National Center does a number of issues dealing with deregulation, dealing with what we have an initiative called the Free Enterprise Project,

where we actually expect corporate America to remember how the free enterprise system operates and that it's their responsibility to live up to the privileges that we've allowed in the name of creating this organizational structure called the corporation. And we go to their shareholder meetings. We assist in representing the interests of shareholders in seeing to it that shareholders are primary in the actions of the corporation and not some secondary action. We work on environmental issues. Any number, we had a COVID-19 blueprint with some third.

ideas about how to deal with a pandemic if one were to occur again and also how we can rapidly move to economic growth and reopening from the situation that we're in right now. Folks need to know if they want more on all of this stuff, then go to national center.org, national center.org. I want to talk to you about a couple of things. First of all, you have a book out called How Trump is making Black America great again, which is a number. new book. And also, the other day when you were on with Tucker Carlson, you were talking about how President Obama failed Black America. And I want my audience to hear that because it was it was really eye-opening and fascinating. So our community would have us believe that the best

test of the positive moral nature of a society is its ability to break itself out into separate groups and give sort of some rotating power to those organizations. You know, my realist and I know this, but the European Union has a rotating presidency, and each member of the European Union will eventually get a chance to have some representative of their country act as the president. Well, that same concept is applied often to America, and it is the fact that we don't operate that way, and that largely we operate as a meritocracy that we're often criticizing, but America is based on this idea that we're going to let the best. Now, that's a long way

of saying, I'm very, very critical of Barack Obama as president that even though what he exemplified was the idea that in America, not in France, not in the United Kingdom, not in Italy in Spain that any person, regardless of their background, regardless of their lineage, can actually ultimately become the president of the United States, the most powerful person on the planet. That's our American system, and it's amazing. The problem I had was that instead of embodying that idea, he actively, Barack Obama, actively worked to undermine. There was a country Western song called My Lying Eyes, which are you going to believe? Your lying eyes are what I'm telling you.

And in the case of Barack Obama, he often said, America's not there. America's not going to give you a shot. America's not going to let you, if you, sacrifice and struggle, achieve. And yet, there he was. An example of the proof of what America is. and so many minorities, so many struggling poor people of all colors, really believed the message more than what they could see with their own eyes. And I think that has been extremely hurtful that he refused to at least inspire by example. Then he added on a host of terrible, odious economic policies that were awful and destructive.

Is that all? Let me just say there's so much here, but it strikes me that, you know, you said earlier that this idea, which is really it is an identity politics, cultural Marxist idea that, you know, unless you're black, you can't have anything about black issues. And what it does, first of all, is it kicks logic and truth to the curb. And it says it's all about feelings and experiences and we don't care about statistics. And others, if I'm black and I feel that blacks are discriminated against, if the statistics show that cops don't discriminate against blacks, if the statistics show that police brutality does not disproportionately affect blacks, I, as a black man, can say, I don't care what your statistics show. I feel this. I feel that. And so it's a shifting away from the basis of our government, which is to say that we base everything on truth and on a free people who can look at the truth and try to decide what's going on. And it becomes about feelings. And once you make it about feelings, there is no truth. But what I find even more interesting is that let's say, we say, okay, we understand if a black American has had a certain experience, you're right that that does come.

into the equation. And so it is good to hear from black Americans about their perception. That's a good thing. It becomes ironic for me is that voices like yours, you obviously are black, voices like Candace Owens, you know, Shelby Steele, Bob Woodson, who's been on this program, so many who come out of the black experience, who have a completely different view from the radical leftist view we're getting from Black Lives Matter Another, they are shut out of the conversation. They are not invited to speak. And the cherry picking that is done by the mainstream media, which is

increasingly in activist media, they are actually ironically shutting out the black voices that they don't like. And Clarence Thomas is at the top of the list. And it goes on and on. That to me is the deeper injustice. Oh, absolutely. And I just want to make sure that everyone understands. It is very tempting to cede the moral authority to the person who's had the experience. Look, I'm going to use a very dramatic analogy. We normally don't turn to the serial killer to help us inform policies with regard to treating serial killers. What we understand is that we can comprehend, we can accept, and we can use logic and reason to deal with it without actually having to be serial killers. It's the opposite mindset that I think has proven very, very dangerous. And a lot of Americans are yielding to this idea, oh, well, I wasn't born black. Maybe I guess I don't have anything to say.

Here's a truth. In America, black Americans are the least oppressed that they have ever been throughout the existence of America. Moreover, to live in America as a black person is better than to live in any other country on the planet. There is more wealth among blacks in America than in any concentration of blacks in. anywhere else. Even in countries that are run and are overwhelmingly black, do not have the access to housing, do not have the access to education, do not have the access to health. That is by looking at people with black and brown all coming together and promoting our free enterprise system. That has led to, I think it's been ignored. Let's pause there. It has been ignored, and

And that's why you are on this program today because we need not to ignore it. We'll be right back, folks. There's talk on the street. It sounds so familiar. Hey, folks, President Trump's birthday is coming up June 14th. It comes up every year on June 14th, Flag Day. And there's no better way to express your gratitude for him and the work he's done for our country than by taking a moment to wish him a happy birthday. All you have to do is text the word cupcakes to 88022 to wish the president a happy birthday.

Again, that's cupcakes to 88022, to wish President Trump a happy birthday to join him in the fight to keep America great for four more years. Hi, folks, trying times. Just know they won't last. Trying times can be hard on our digestive track. So why not try life change tea at get the tea.com? Life change tea is an herbal blend of tea that helps the digestive track and the colon cleanse from intruders. For years, people have experienced the benefits from life change tea. And so can you.

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It's the Eric McAxas show. I'm talking to the author of how Trump is making black America great again. Horace Cooper, you're the author of that book, How Trump is making black America great again. You were just talking about how people buy into a set of values and how as Americans it's incumbent upon us. If we really don't want to be racist, we can't treat blacks like they are somehow lesser.

They don't understand logic. We just need to appeal to emotion. You're saying, you know, as a black man, let's look at the facts. Where's the clarity? And where I want to start in this segment is to say, for 50 years, Democrats and many black Democrats have had political control. and power and tons of taxpayer money to do whatever they liked. Their policies have failed so dramatically that we are where we are now.

And they are trying, as Bob Woodson said, to say, oh, no, no, don't look at our failure. Don't look at the failure of our policies. It's the white man's fault. It's systemic racism. Look anywhere except at what we have done. done with the trillions of dollars, don't look at us. And I would say, time is up. It's been 50 years. You have failed. And it's time for other people to try something else. And I think most of black Americans would see that. They say, we are not doing well under the Democrats. They have crushed us.

The absolute fact. The original march on Washington in 1963 was a jobs march. And that the issues associated with civil rights were tied to the idea that it would require America to intervene so that people remember the Civil Rights Act's primary purpose was to say you can no longer discriminate in the hiring and firing of people on the basis of their race.

Now it included things like access to hotels and other parts of the civil society saying you can't separate schools, have a black school or a white school. But its primary impetus was to encourage and make it lawful for people to be able to present their skills into the public sphere and be able to prosper as a result of it. Most of the $22 trillion that has been spent as part of the great society has been an absolute rejection of the idea that the best way for black America to succeed is the same as the best way for white America and brown America, and that is that free people making choices and decisions for themselves are best able to do that.

The $22 trillion has been predicated on an alien concept. You hire strangers. You pay them handsomely. Their job is to look after you and care for you and educate you and love you in a way that you never are capable of and no one in your family is ever capable of. This concept will never work anywhere. It's been tried. And that's, of course, the definition of racism. It is, was it George W. Bush, who used the phrase the soft bigotry of low expectations? I mean, the idea that you look at a group of people and you say, You know, they're never going to be able to lift themselves up.

So we're going to do it for them. We're going to take care of them, which, you know, that was the patronizing attitude of former slave owners back when. And I think that that's something it hasn't been spoken of very much. Oh, no, you're exactly right. But I also want to mention that there is a sector of our society that has wildly benefited from being on the receiving. of the 22 trillion. It turns out that if you spend a dollar of public money assisting someone, that 90 cents of it is not actually going to the person.

90 cents of it is actually going to the person responsible or persons who are helping to carry it out. And so you've created a huge number of people whose ability to go to the Aspen ski trip or their ability to get their new Volvo. I have nothing against Aspen ski trips, and I've got nothing against volvos. But those individuals' livelihoods are entirely situated with perpetuating and continuing the service provisioning that they do. If people stood up and were independent and no longer in need of their services, the need to pay them would also go away. They have a stake.

They have a stake in maintaining this social order where we work with a failed idea that, again, you can pay people to do what mom and dad do, what brothers and sisters do, what concerned neighbors do, that you can pay them from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. It has never worked anywhere this has been tried, and it has been primarily. done with black America, but the bad news is that we've expanded that so that more and more Americans, even non-Blacks, they think that this is the way the world works, that you get help from Washington, D.C. Black Americans have suffered the most of this, but America continues to suffer from it, and the Black Lives Matters movement perpetuates it. And I want to say it's not only that they are not helping. They're harming. If somebody says, listen, don't walk, don't walk, let me carry you. Eventually, your legs will atrophy and you will never be able to walk again. That is what has happened

under the Democratic policies. We need to be honest about this, folks. We need to be honest. It's not about parties. It's about reality. We'll be right back. it does, it will even up the school. Hey folks, I'm talking to Horace Cooper. He's with Project 21, and he is the author of how Trump is making black America great again. A very provocative title, Horace. I want to just say that, you know, I'm white, you're black, but we value clear thinking and logic and facts. And the idea that is foisted on us over and over and over again is that if somebody like me, as a white person, has something to say about race relations or about how we distribute wealth in America or anything, that I should shut up because I'm white, which is a kind of racism itself, of course.

But I just want to ask you, you know, when we talk about the failure of democratic policies, I say this as a Christian, as an outspoken Christian. that if I really care about underprivileged kids in black communities, in urban communities, I have an obligation before God to speak the truth about how I think they can be helped. And that is why I have folks like you on this program because I say, it's not okay just to have a few woke people say, hey, Eric's, Eric cares about black people. I have to look to God. And to be honest about, am I actually? helping people who are struggling? Am I helping them? And when some Christians have said,

you know, we can't ally ourselves too much with a political party, well, I get that. I don't make an idol of politics. But the point is, if I see one party enacting policies that are harming people, I have a solemn obligation before God to call it out and to tell everyone I know that is harming people. And if you do not try to see that and do something about that, you're part of the problem. And that's where we are. That is exactly where we are. You know, in the late 1940s, the early 1950s, there were academics who were projecting, what I call this, social services, provisions,

provisioning by bureaucracy theory. It hadn't been tried. It hadn't been tested. and so you might see why people might be tempted to implement this. You now had 50 years of the failure of this. And now I'm no longer willing to say, oh, well, they mean well. In the late, excuse me, the early 18th century, I'll get it right, the late 18th century, early 19th century, we used to bleed people.

doctors would literally go to sick people and say to them, hey, hey, hey, I see what your problem is. I'm going to take a couple of pints of blood away, and that's going to make you feel better. The doctor meant well. He was good intentioned. He wasn't a serial killer. He just had, and it was looking at that abysmal failure rate that led us away from doing in the name of social service provisioning. is bleeding the ability of people to stand on their own, to strive on their own, to succeed on their own.

And yet, if you say bleeding people will kill them, bleeding people will take away their ability, they call you a racist and claim you couldn't actually care. Well, I don't any longer care whether the doctor met well. Well, I've got to tell you, it's well at night. The reason we're going through all this, and I can say this as a white man, is because of white guilt. There are a lot of whites in America who, when a black person starts speaking about something or someone starts speaking on behalf of blacks, they feel like, oh, I have nothing to say because I've been part of this system and I have this guilt. And I have said, again, as a Christian, that's not the way it works. my attitude is if I'm guilty of something, I take my sin to God and I repent and he forgives me and that's the end of it.

Nobody brings it up again except the devil. And right now, I think we have an entire, you know, chattering class, the cultural elites. They are just crippled under this burden of white guilt. And it's being used very cynically by ultra-leftists to put forward ideas. that again, ironically, are harming blacks. But the only people who've spoken about this issue of white guilt are people like Shelby Steele, who wrote a book about it, and Bob Woodson. You don't hear a lot of people addressing that as a problem. Well, you don't, and it's precisely because it can be a challenge. You know, I went on Tucker, I go on Warren Ingram, I'm on your program

and others like them. People track me down and try to tell me why. I need to keep my mouth shut, that I shouldn't participate in the conversation. It's not without irony that they don't appreciate that, even if they disagreed with me, they should be welcoming my participation in the conversation. In fact, mirrored on the Christian concept, and that is that it's God so loved the world, not he loved tall ones, not he loved the dark ones, not he love the rich ones. He absolutely loves. Our American system was founded on this idea that the citizen was going to be equal with every other citizen.

We didn't get it exactly at the beginning, but we were so radical beyond what was going on with the rest of the world, that it is my hope that this concept, this experiment is able to continue. Radicals, they reject that idea, and they want us to go back to, well, there's rich people or there's black people or whatever the elite group of privileges and the everyone else is they can, you know, the system, and the folks who are challenging us really, really are jeopardizing the American system. Well, and that's why I say to people, if you really believe Black Lives Matter, you need to reject the movement and the organization Black Lives Matter because they are tremendously pernicious to blacks and to everyone in America. They want to destroy the very hope that we have, all of us, of lifting ourselves up in any way. And I think people have a moral obligation at this point to vote against the Democratic Party. Until the Democratic party is willing to own up to its own failures, okay? And forget about white guilt. There's Democrat guilt. Unless they're willing to own up to it and repent, they can't be forgiven. And we need

to call them out. We're going to be right back talking to Horace Cooper. Hey, folks, I'm talking to Horace Cooper. He's the author of how Trump is making black America great again. Got to ask you about the book Horace. What do you say in this book? So I talk about the economics that demonstrate that black Americans have been amazingly and remarkably benefited by free market policies, that even though the policies of this president have been colorblind, black Americans have done better than every other ethnic group.

And that's a good sign because it's the leftist socialist schemes that. It simply harm the rest of us. I talk about immigration and how Latino immigrants from other countries are now favored party, a favored interest group among the left and Democrats. I talk about abortion and how so much of the population decline in America and its political strength has been attenuated by the millions of lives lost. In California, blacks aren't just the second largest minority, they're not even the third largest minority. They're the fourth largest, and we're rapidly falling in every state. That actually means when you ask yourself this question, will there be another black president? Eventually, you're going to be of such low power and low influence.

You're not even going to see that again. But it's the policies of the left that are leading us to that. And the book helps people see the exact progress that has been made in black America over the last three years, the first three years of the Trump administration. And it compares it to the progress that was being made in the roaring 20s. And if you look at that comparison, what you'll see is colorblind policies are working. They lead to progress. They lead to prosperity. And it's color-specific policies that do exactly.

the opposite. Well, it's so fascinating. I think way back to that principled liberal Democrat, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in the mid-60s, came up with, you know, wrote this paper that it is the decline of black families that's going to destroy black America. He was told to shut up then, and people with that point of view have been told to shut up for 55 years. And the fact of the matter is the Democrats have been all in on this. And I really do believe that we've kindly gotten to a point, Finally, where many blacks in America, they may not be saying it very vocally, but they see what is going on. They see that the Democrats have taken them for granted, have not helped them at all over 50 years, and that they are either not going to vote for the Democratic candidate or they're going to vote for Donald Trump. And I think that that scares the Democrats to death.

And it's why we're seeing this kind of scorched earth policy in the way that they're fighting just more viciously than anything we've ever seen. Every American black, white or brown, looked primarily at the economic benefit of any policy, and they make that the measure. Having more pickup trucks in your driveway, having more opportunities to have a new, more opportunities to go on vacation. Under the first three years of the Trump administration, record after record after record was set for black America while also setting records for the country as a whole. The contrast is striking because under Barack Obama, four of the records of the lowest employment rates for blacks were set, while under President Trump, six of the record employment levels were set. It is such a contrast. Last thing I want to say is this.

There was a time in America from the 1920s when black men were the most likely to be employed in the country. that when black families, there was a time in the 1920s when black families were the most likely to be two-parent stable families. There was a time when black men were the least likely characteristic of a federal... It had been forgotten, and it is presumed that today's state of play is a consequence of the evil of slavery, notwithstanding how much progress was made just within 75 years of that. We're at a time. Thank you for being my guest. Thank you, folks.