The Eric Metaxas Show - Shelby Steele

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

The incomparable Shelby Steele joins the program and brings news of his "What Killed Michael Brown?" film project; plus, Shelby offers sober thoughts on race, Black Lives Matter, and the upcoming election.

Welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show. It's the show about everything. And we do mean everything. Yes, even that. Yep, and that too. Oh, you bet. Definitely that. Now here's everything you want to know, host, Eric Mataxis.

Hey there, folks. Welcome to the show. It's the Eric Mataxis show. I'm playing the role of Eric Metaxis. We have a really exciting day today. In a couple of seconds, we're going to be talking to a legend, Dr. Shelby Steele. There's certain people I say, if you don't know who, that is, first you should be ashamed because he's a big deal. But then forget all about that,

because in a couple of minutes, you'll know who he is, and you'll be able to make your friends feel ashamed that they don't know who he is. He is a legend. He's an African-American, black American intellectual who has written a ton of books, most famously a book called White Guilt. We're going to talk to him for the rest of this hour. And hour two, we're going to, we're going to break down the whole Biden corruption monstrosity. This This is very big. It's getting bigger, not smaller. I think he's in big trouble.

But first things first, okay? Before we get to the, we've got a couple of fun things we want to share with you in about two minutes. But I first want to say we're in trouble, as far as I'm concerned, with our Alliance Defending Freedom campaign. We have like two days left and we have not hit our goal, which is really important that we do by to do right. by the lines defending freedom, you know, trusting us to raise this, this money. I heard a clip from our Salem colleague Hugh Hewitt.

Now, you know Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Larry Elder. We are all on the Salem team trying to raise money. And every one of us, Sebastian Gorka, we've, Mike Gallagher, we've all been having a hard time because of the time of year that it is, because the election. So I wanted to play what Hugh Hewitt had to say, and then I'll come back from this, but he's going to give you a phone number to call. Don't call that number. We'll give you our number. But here's what Hugh Hewitt had to say, please listen carefully. We're in some trouble here. We really do need help. This is serious.

I want to talk to you about Alliance Defending Freedom. I'm down to two days, two days left for you to help Alliance Defending Freedom. Their website is over at Hugh Hewitt.com. I need to raise about five grand today to do right by ADF. Larry Elder, my colleague, got a note from Dana. Hi, Larry, I have a message for the parents of college students. I'm the mother of three college students of another applying now for next fall. As you can imagine, our coffers are a bit low, with all the tuition going out of all the house, but we just gave to ADF. My sons and daughters have shared the real-life drama of being on campus as a conservative, and I can see how easily. Any of our conservative kids could have become targets of the left and end up in a court case.

I just want to encourage all parents of college students to give to ADF now, please. We need to have each other's backs. College is expensive enough, but can you imagine paying for a defense lawyer against the university? We really can't afford not to help ADF defend the Constitution and perhaps even our own children. Thank you for highlighting the work ADF is doing for us. Dana, Southwest Washington State. Well, thank you, Dana. because ADF is there for everyone.

They represent their clients for free, and we need them. They've won 11 cases in the Supreme Court since 2010. Alliance Defending Freedom represents people for free because of donors like you. Can you please call right now 866359-9644 and give your best gift? Like I say, I'd like to raise 5,000, maybe even 50,000 a day. Maybe someone out there knows what ADF does. they've been meaning for years to step up. You know, if big tech would do one thing,

simply support both left and right if they gave, you know, stroke those big checks, Michael Bloomberg, not just to the gun grabbers, but to the Alliance Defending Freedom, people would just say, okay, they're supporting free speech, but they don't. We need little people like you to make the best gift you can

at Alliance Defending Freedom at Hugh Hewitt.com. Well, there you have it, folks. That's Hugh Hewitt. But we, if you're watching on YouTube, I put up the phone number. Our phone number is 855-5-4-7-53-8-55-5-4-7-53. But it's easier just to go to Metaxistalk.com. But this is so important. I don't know how else to say it.

Some of you have been very generous. I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you because ADF helps people who can't afford these court costs. And this is coming at us, you know, from everywhere. We're living at a time right now. I'm sorry to say when religious liberty is under attack. So I do hope you can help. Now, if you go to Metaxistock.com, Albin, do we say what we give people there?

I hope so. Albin, you're on mute, and it's a radio program. We do have the list up. Is this a radio program? Okay. No, listen, if you go to our website, there's a place you can click. you can see the list of gifts. And by the way, my beard hair, you have to specifically request it for $500.

You get my beard hair and you get the complete set, the Box of Mysteries, Hamster Homes. Okay, but the beard hair, I'll send it to you from this lunchbox. What about if somebody wants mustache hair? Well, I got to tell you, the mustache hair, it went away. There was so little of it that it actually blew away once I shaved it off. So I'm sorry. That's like blowing money into the wind. I can't believe.

you did that. But you could get the beard. Well, your beard hair is valuable. It's historic. And I think that anybody with a conscience would know that it would be wrong to let that beard hair go unclaimed. So if that's what it needs, if that's what needs to happen to entice you to give to the lines defending freedom. Again, you got to go to metaxis talk.com. I'll have to glue it back on if you don't take it. You know what? I didn't think of that. And I will say, I've received some assurance for my Chinese scientist friends that the beard hair does include enough DNA to successfully clone albin, so you're good on that front. Holy cow, you can have your own albin.

I already have a twin brother, an identical twin brother. So you've already got your own albin, but other people would like their own albin. Okay, well, the thing is, you know, beard hair has been in the news lately when Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, testified. He was wearing such a nasty-looking freakish beard. This is when he went before Congress. I would say he was in contempt of Congress by showing up with that beard.

And I racked my brain. Why does he have that beard? And I came up with what is the only obvious answer to why he has that beard. he plays in a jug band. And if there's any other reason that any human being would have a beard like that, besides playing in a jug band for the life of me, I can't think what it might be.

It has to be that. Or he might be one of those cough drop brothers or ZZ Top. No, no, no. They had different beards. They had kind of respectable, you know, duck commander kind of beards. His is just kind of like a sad, freakish jug band beard. And so I'm just assuming that the man to give him, you know, to feed his soul, since he's doing the soulless work of a tech dictator, he has to kind of feed his soul by playing in a jug band.

That's all I can say. Okay, we've got to, in a couple of seconds, we're talking to Shelby Steele. I cannot believe we have this legend on this program. Lord, make me worthy of this conversation. And also in hour two, we're talking to Jenna Ellis about what's going on in the country. Really, really dark stuff. What happened, what's going on with Joe Biden. We'll talk about it an hour or two.

But it is huge. I don't think it's going away. I think as a result of this, Trump definitely is going to win. And then the question is what happens after that? So I just want to be really clear that we're going to be talking about that in hour two. we are at a tipping point in history. So, folks, I hope you will take this seriously. I also hope, if you buy anything from Mypillow.com,

there's a guy named Mike Lindell, and I have a reasonable facsimile of him in bobblehead form. If you watch us on YouTube, you can see. He's here to tell you that you've got to use the code Eric, otherwise you don't get the big savings. And I want to say when you go to Mypillow.com, If you click on my store.com, you can now again get my Donald the Caveman books for 1099 each. Do you understand?

I'm losing money on that deal. But now you have to use the code. Eric, don't forget it. When we come back, the great Shelby Steel Hour to, Jenna Ellis. Folks, welcome the Eric McIntaxis show. Promises made, promises kept. I said to you that one day in the future, I would try to get Shelby Steele on this program.

Now, if you already know who he is, you're jumping up and down. Relax. He's here. If you don't know who he is, listen the more carefully, because this is someone whose work is very important, has been important for a long time. But whose work right now is that much more important. He is the author of many books, most known. notably a book called White Guilt, How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights era. Shelby Steele, welcome to this program.

Good to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, we're really honored. I've wanted to talk to you for a long time. And I want to talk to you about a number of things. Of course, our time is limited. So where shall we start? Why don't we start if you don't mind with the movie, Who Killed Michael Brown?

You're famous as an intellectual and a public intellectual, but you've participated recently in making a film. I talked to Bob Woodson about that, I guess it was yesterday. And tell us about that if you would. Yes, it's what killed Michael Brown. And we became interested, obviously, the Michael Brown incident in St. Louis, in St. Louis, just outside of St. Louis, became a big national sort of event. And it occurred to me that these events,

like the shooting and the killing of Michael Brown, and ironically, we had one last night in Philadelphia or the night before, I think it was, now with two days of riots and so forth, the George Floyd situation in Minneapolis. These events, somehow make us accountable to our long history of slavery and racism and segregation and so forth. And so we sort of use them in the 21st century here to re-evaluate ourselves.

But I think most importantly, we use them, we comb them over, we squeeze, exploit them for power. they have enormous power. I think the power in the left, the post-60s liberalism, is at its very core a power that comes out of America's victimization of blacks. And so anytime I as a black can establish that an incident may have had something to do with racism, I take on a great power. And again, the left has used that, political correctness. But much more than that, the education system in America has been pretty much taken over by a point of view that sees America as ugly and irretrievable because of racism.

And racism generally is a weapon now in American life. and events like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, we thought illustrated that very well. So we wanted to do a film that started from there. Well, the film, What Killed Michael Brown, the first I heard of it, was that it had been banished, kept out of Amazon Prime.

They somehow deemed it unworthy, of their platform, which, oddly enough, deems worthy a lot of trash. We don't have a lot of times, so I'll just use the word trash. How is it that a film like what killed Michael Brown put together by someone as distinguished, as civil as you have been in your discourse over the years, that they would say that that is not worthy of their platform? Is that pure fear on their part that if they give a platform to something that that speaks from a different point of view, uh, from the people that run their company or, or whatever it is, how is it possible, uh, that something as anodyne, if you don't mind my saying so, because I don't see it as being,

uh, incendiary, that it would be treated this way. Uh, yes, we were, we were, uh, absolutely shocked. I certainly heard and knew about there is this sort of new focus on the American left that's emerging now and this I think is a part of it. This idea of cancellation where you

presume that your moral high ground is such that the important thing is not to argue with your opponent but to cancel your opponent altogether. You serve the good in that way. It's a good positive act

in the world to cancel voices that dissent. And that has crept into, again, the culture of the big tech, Silicon Valley, so forth. So they would think a film like

ours needed literally with none of the usual things, usually you've got nudity or terrible language and so forth, then you're going to run into trouble. We don't have any of that. I think I stand by. I think it was a thoughtful, incisive film.

And I think probably that's what heard it. It made a good argument for against the position of the left, which in racial matters is at this moment pretty much controlled by the ideology of Black Lives Matters, matter. Well, we challenged that directly and I think I think powerfully. And I think that caused us to be canceled. We got a rejection letter. And now to finish the story, Wall Street Journal then did a couple pieces on us being canceled. And so now suddenly Amazon was embarrassed.

and out of their embarrassment, they suddenly realized that they had made a mistake. And so they communicated with us and saying that they were sorry, they made a mistake, they didn't need to cancel us. And so they put us back on. So we are now on what killed Michael Brown is now on Amazon.

But we had to go through, we're not for the Wall Street Journal and the publicity that follow. from that. We would not be allowed to be on the Amazon platform. Well, you know, our friend Larry Elder went through the same thing with his film Uncle Tom. It's to me so scandalous that these corporations have the power that they do, number one, which I don't think the founders could have foreseen quite, but that they would use it this nakedly. It really is a little frightening to me that they don't appreciate what it means to a culture like ours, a free culture,

when someone with power exercises it that way. And I guess it's a combination of ignorance and ideology, but they clearly seem to think that it's okay, that Jack Dorsey at Twitter seems to think it's okay to de-platform The New York Post, not just a couple of articles, but the entire New York Post. it goes on and on. How do you see us finding our way out of this monopolization of power in the hands of a few people who have an ideology that I would say is fundamentally anti-American?

I think one thing interesting to me about it, power can produce. If you have power and it's uncontested, you can become smug. it. And I think big tech today suffers from just simple, old-fashioned smugness. They have this power. They can, if they decide that they want to use it, they can use it. And they in a sense know or believe in their smugness that they're not going to really, that they're going to get away with it, that they're big enough and powerful enough and important enough. there's a lot of self-aggrandizement that goes along with having that kind of power. You begin to sort of become a ruler of the world, as it were. And that's where I think they're at right now. What do we do about it?

We just hammer away at. Fight back. Continue to hold them accountable to the First Amendment. Continue to call out what they're doing. They are a profound danger to our democracy. And we have to make them accountable in every way possible. Well, the only question, of course, is whether they're having done this over the course of years now would tip this election toward the party that, has been unable to summon the courage to stand against the cultural Marxists in Antifa and BLM.

When we come back, we'll talk about that and other things with Shelby Steel. Folks, don't go away. Investors seeking steady cash flow, ready to diversify. NRIA has grown to be one of the nation's leading specialists and offers 10% annualized monthly payouts with bonuses targeted at 18 to 21. That's right. You could receive steady 10% return monthly payments with bonuses. As their slogan says, they specialize in realty investing done right. You can even use your 401k or IRA to invest. NRA's 15-year track record and $1.2 billion in new construction development backs you. Learn how you can invest in this hard asset real estate cash flow fund today and receive 10% annualized monthly payouts with bonuses. This is something savvy. investors should research and consider. Call now 800, 700, 700, 5483. That's 800, 700, 5483 or visit nria.net. An offer to buy or sell any security is only made by our private

placement memorandum. Read it first. See us at nria.net. Patriots, I want to make sure you're prepared to vote on November 3rd. The radical Democrats are doing everything in their power to stop Republicans from winning. And we want to make sure patriots like you are heard. This is the election of our lifetime. Make sure your vote is counted. Text metaxus, M-E-T-A-X-A-S-2 to 880-2 to find your polling location. Folks, I got some embarrassing news to share with you, but you know what? This is just the kind of a show where I don't care. I'm willing to lay my heart, you know, on the line. Here's the issue. Mike Lindell with my pillow. You may, you may notice that I have a bobble hell of him near me. He's here to remind all of us that when you go to mypillow.com, you get whopping discounts if you use the code Eric. Okay. Now,

there are a lot of people who haven't done that and we have your names here. And Chris Heim's Anne Albin pointed out to me that there's like three pages of you whose first name is Eric. You, you're so, I mean, that's humiliating for me that even though your name is Eric, you're still not willing to use the code Eric. I mean, if you don't want to use it because it's my name, use it because it's your name. The point is that, that I see who you are. And I just, I just feel humiliated by this. Please go to go to mypillar.com. It's okay, Mike. It's going to be okay. Go to go to mypillow.com. Use the code Eric. You're going to get whopping savings and really high quality products. Did I, did I mention that? Thank you.

Welcome back. I'm talking to Shelby Steele, the author of many, many books, including white guilt, which in some ways sums up a bit of what we're talking about today, doesn't it? Dr. Steele, I guess when you talk about white guilt, you as a black American speak about white guilt from a different point of view. Tell us a little bit about that, because I think that, as you said earlier, it is a, it's, a very powerful intoxicating, it's an intoxicating temptation for people who want to shut someone up to use what we call white guilt, and it's an intoxicating temptation for white people to buy into it. That's the easy path. Yes, yes, it is.

Quick recap. When it began, I think, in the 1960s, when the civil rights victories, occurred. We passed civil rights bill, housing, so forth. That constituted what I call a great confession. America confessed to its long history of racism. Wow. And to, in other words, it's collusion with an evil. When a society does something like that and no other society ever has, it is a mark of our greatness, singular greatness, that we did that. We made that we confessed. Yes, we did it. And we will be accountable. Wow. Never had happened before. Well, when you confess that the other side of that is, of course, that you take on this burden. Other people now have this over your

head. They can bring it out. They can use it. They can point to it. You know you with the slavery, you know, so forth, segregation, you know, and so it put white Americans in a position where they were at a deficit of moral authority. Their moral authority was wounded profoundly by the great act they themselves had stood up to, the confession they had made. And that's the circumstance of being white in America today, is having living with that sort of injury to self-involve to the whole idea of one's power in the world. So white guilt is, and one of the problems with it, is that it's always self-referential.

White say, well, we'll deal with our guilt. We'll heal what we did. Back in the 60s, London Johnson came out with a war on poverty, the great society. school busing, public housing, extended welfare payments, on and on and on, to buy back the moral authority that America had lost in confessing. The problem was all of this, all these programs, all these gestures of healing the past were really designed much more to give whites moral authority than to help blacks develop after four centuries of oppression. And so we are less developed.

We are farther behind whites today than we were in 1955 before any of this happened. So that's my beef with white guilt, is that it has become the new oppression of black Americans. We're oppressed by it. It steals our moral thunder. steals our soul so that we're not responsible for our fate anymore. Whites out. And we have to continue to appeal to them and badger them to give us things or we'll never make it.

Well, when a people begin to think that way, all hope is lost. And we're, Black America is now at this moment in serious, profound danger of, of, of, We've already given into this this trap. And we're, we have to find some way out. Well, for me, you know, speaking as a Christian, I always say that when you confess a sin, when you deal with it, you know, when 6,000 white boys die in a war to end slavery. And guess what? We end slavery. Wow.

A price was paid. Slavery was ended. in 1965, we deal with this stuff. We end Jim Crow. We do all that. And so when you confess these things, as you said, it gives people a cudgel and to say, aha, you admit it. You were wrong.

But speaking as a Christian, I say, that's the voice of the devil. Because you say, yes, of course I was wrong. That's the point. I confessed it. You know, as a Christian, you can use whatever lingo you want. I nailed it to the cross. it's over. I was forgiven. And now I celebrate that I have repented and I'm moving in the right direction. But people don't understand that. And they buy in voluntarily to the idea that I will

never live it down. I will never really be free of it. I can never be forgiven. And that's, that's a dark worldview. It's as I say, without apologizing, that's the voice of the devil that says you will never be better. I don't care what good thing you ever do. You are branded. You are wrong. You will always be wrong. You will always hang your head in shame. That is not the voice that allows everyone to move forward into the light. Well, you're absolutely right. That is not the voice. But here's the problem. White America has lost its moral confidence. So when blacks come forward and try to use that confession against white America, they fold. Hold on.

This is a key point. We're going to go to a break. This is radio. We'll be right back with Dr. Shelby Steele. Continuing the conversation with Dr. Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt and recently involved in making a new film, which is called What Killed Michael Brown. Dr. Steele, you were just making such a key point.

Please restate that and finish your point. Well, this is sort of my beef with white guilt is that, again, it's always self-referential. It's from the point of view of whites. I understandably so because, again, now there is people you have given the other side. of a cajol, you've given them power over your, over the entire society, over the curriculum of universities, over the way we do business, the corporate world in America, now is subject to to having to find some way to prove its innocence or demonstrate its innocence of that evil past. of racism. So racism becomes, which today I think is the most powerful word in American lexicon, because it is, it has this power to just stop people cold, even though everybody knows they're not really racist and so forth. Racism brings all that up. And the problem is

white guilt then encourages. And the word is, I pick it, carefully, it enables weakness in the black world. It enables us to come back and rely on our ability to sort of badger white people to give us things. And so we just become kind of pathetic badgerers who we've got enough power to really to sort of make whites lose confidence, but we don't have enough power to transform ourselves

into a fully modern people. Well, and because, of course, you can never get it that way. You know, it just doesn't work. I mean, what you're really talking about, how I see it, is that this perpetual victim ideology is itself racism. Whether it's whites or blacks, they seem to be saying the same paternalistic things that actually racist whites always said toward blacks that, you know, they're so sad. They can never help themselves. we need to do all these things to help them. We cannot treat them as though there are our equals and let them make their own way.

My goodness, that'll never work. That's genuine racism. And that seems to me to be the view of the left today. I guess I have to ask you just, do you believe that many black Americans are waking up to some of these things? I have a view that finally, after 50-something years of democratically controlled,

controlled cities in America, the evidence is there for many people to see they have failed us. Yes, I think that the essence of this liberalism is a faithlessness, a lack of faith in the full humanity of black Americans to control their own fate. And white liberals, the whole white guilt syndrome is to sort of overlook blacks as human beings. And as you point out correctly, precisely the same way that segregationists did, that slave owners did. They too disregarded the humanity of blacks in order to benefit from it. White liberalism today, based on white guilt, that overlooks the humanity, the full humanity of blacks. If you, for example, believe in the full humanity of blacks, you would be adamantly against affirmative action, any sort of a racial preference, because you would take it as an insult.

You would say it presumes our inferiority. It builds the system that accommodates us as inferiors. and then ask us to somehow function as equals. You couldn't come up with a worst program if you were the two clubs' clan. I mean that even it's worse than that. I grew up in segregation. I know segregationists. They hated you and so forth,

but they let you, you or you in charge of your own life. Today's liberal wants your very soul. He wants to be in charge. of your life to socially engineer you ahead and then take credit for it to prove his innocence and his legitimacy and so forth. So it's a it's a very sad symbiotic bond that that we're stuck in it, seems to me at this point. Well, there's no question about that. I want to ask you since we have an election coming up. I think you may be aware of it.

What is your sense of where we are going and what will happen next week? Well, I think it's just, boy, one of the most important elections, certainly that I've ever seen come along. I think it's between, because its implications are much more profound culturally than they are,

politically. If the left were to win, Biden were to win the election, you would have this, what would happen is sort of loosey-goosey, socialistic Marxian drift would be given momentum in American life. what I love about Trump is not Trump, but what he does, as a president, his focus really on mundane things, on, you know, how to make the bureaucracy leaner and more efficient, on immigration. What he did there was so, such a marvelous yet simple, obvious solution. Build a wall. Be humane about it. But in other words, stop being a guilty white society that shows nothing but that tries to win back its innocence by showing deference to everything. You can't do.

And that's what I love about his presidency. He does not suffer from white guilt. And that is his biggest problem in American politics today. He has no way to defer to his enemy. He just stands for what he stands for. It's, it is extraordinary. We're going to be right back. Folks, I'm talking to Dr. Shelby Steele, author of many books,

white, guilt, prominent among them. We'll be right back. The Georgie girl swinging down the street so fancy free. Hey there, folks. It's the Eric Metaxus show. Where else would you go to hear? hear a conversation with Dr. Shelby Steele. Dr. Steele, I have to ask you. I actually think one of the biggest problems in America today has to do with the media. We don't seem to have talk shows where I

can flip around and say, oh, who's that guy, who's Shelby Steele? Let me listen for a second and hear from you. We don't seem to have those kinds of media platforms at this point. We have some conservative of media, but I don't see them sitting down for a 60 or 90-minute conversation with someone like you or with a number of people that I can think of who might have some similar things to say. That's what I worry about in America. Well, I think that's a valid worry. It is very hard. I'm not sure altogether whose fault that is, but the media tends to go to the sensational. It doesn't seem to like the reflective very much. That's a, and that's a problem because it means that it's harder for the public to hear different voices and make

sounder decisions about things. It hurts us. I mean, you know, it's literally why I do this show, I suppose, modeled in some ways on, you know, Dick Cabot. We have to have long. conversations. But in this culture, we just don't get that opportunity. You know, we get the six-minute segment with somebody making a couple of points, and then we're done, which I think is a pity. So that's why I'm so grateful for your time. I hope we can continue this conversation beyond today. I guess I want to ask you, do you see figures in the black community who are helping us to make progress along these lines. I've been encouraged, I guess, in the last couple of years in a way that I hadn't been. Well, same here. I've been encouraged, too. It's remarkable to me. I think there is

the beginnings of a renaissance in Black America where you have just a bevy of very powerful personalities emerging, beginning to express this different sort of point of view. And a point of view that is much more in terms of the black community, much more focused on the power, the power in our own personal responsibility, the transformative power that we ourselves possess, possess. I think it's just, it's just marvel. everywhere I look, I see people emerging in this new point of view. I also see on the other side from the American left, the black voices, there's a staleness, a sort of meanness of spirit that is unappealing, I think, to the majority of black Americans. And I think it will catch up to them.

whereas I think people on the other side are more appealing and are more open to us as human beings. What black people want and what they've always want is to be treated as full and equal human beings, not as blacks, but as human beings.

That's the name of the game. That's such an extraordinary statement when you think about it, my goodness. Well, if you're able, we'd love to drag you into our second hour for a little bit. So, folks, if you can hang on, I'll continue the conversation with Dr. Shelby Steel. Remember, the film is What Killed Michael Brown, highly recommended. And in hour or two, we'll also be speaking to Jenna Ellis about the election, about some of the developments with Joe Biden and his son really.

grievous things to contemplate but important. So don't go away.