The Megyn Kelly Show - Shelby and Eli Steele on Ferguson, Overcoming Obstacles and America | Ep. 30

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Megyn Kelly is joined by author Dr. Shelby Steele and filmmaker Eli Steele, the father and son behind the new film, "What Killed Michael Brown?" to talk about what really happened in Ferguson, the power of overcoming obstacles, victimhood in America, Black Lives Matter, Hollywood and the media and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. I'm Megyn Kelly. Today on the show, Shelby Steele and his son, Eli Steele. But first, I want to talk to you about Norton 360 with LifeLock. No one wants to deal with cyber threats or find out that their personal information has been compromised online, especially during the holidays when you're online all the time. But with all that holiday gift shopping and browsing online, you could be one bad click away from a cyber threat headache. Get Norton 360 with LifeLock to alleviate that burden and help protect your identity and your devices against

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He's a celebrated author. He's written White Guilt. He's written The Content of Our Character. He's won the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he happens to be the writer and narrator of the new movie, you can get it on Amazon now after some hullabaloo, called What Killed Michael Brown? His son Eli is an award-winning filmmaker and director, and they worked in tandem on this project, which has not been without controversy or without a profound message. And I think if you followed the BLM movement at all, what happened in Ferguson, Missouri five years ago with Michael Brown,

you're going to find their messaging and their hard look at what really was behind Michael Brown's circumstances as he had that fatal confrontation with the officer that day. Really fascinating. It's raw, it's honest, it's provocative, and it's really telling. Without further ado, Eli and Shelby Steele. Thank you both so much for being here. So Shelby, this movie was so interesting to me because I covered this case wall to wall when I was on the air in the prime time at Fox News. And if you looked at it from a lawyer's perspective, it had obvious problems right from the beginning. And the hands up, don't shoot narrative was falling apart before our very eyes. But so many in the media refused to acknowledge it until ultimately the lie was put to that story by none other than Eric Holder's Department of Justice that came out and said it was a lie. Michael Brown didn't have his hands up.

He wasn't saying don't shoot when he was shot by the police officer in that case. And so I looked at this movie that you guys made, you and your son Eli, and thought, why now? Why five years later go back to this? Well, I think, you know, time offered some perspective so that we could, we were interested in the isolated story of what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, but we were also interested in what it signified in terms of race relations in America on a broader level. And so the five years intervening between when it actually happened and when we made the film was comfortable. People had digested things by this time and um and had had deeper thoughts than they might have had if uh if we had started when the actual event took place so it gave us a perspective people were so willing to believe that story they They wanted to believe the

story that here is this 18 year old man begging the police officer for his life and the white cop shot him down repeatedly and over his desperate pleas. I'll never forget the shot on CNN with Sonny Hostin and Sally Cohn and a couple of others holding up signs that read, hands up, don't shoot to show their disgust. And if this had been an adjudication by a jury at that point, you could understand it. But the case was very much in dispute. And so that gesture was really inappropriate. But it was it indicated what much of the media was doing then and much of Ferguson was doing

at the time, which was believing without evidence. You talk in the movie about how there's a desire to believe because they're pursuing not actual truth, but poetic truth. What does that mean? Well, what it means is that in this instance, they're pursuing power. What does that mean? This false narrative, this poetic truth, a truth manipulated to serve one's political, ideological goals. And so that truth focuses on victimization of blacks. And if you can somehow establish that blacks were victims of white racism, then power redounds to you. And in American culture, the political left, the ideological left, is based almost entirely on the idea of black victimization.

Now, the environment also now is becoming a source of the same sort of thing. But for the most part, black victimization is really pregnant with power. And so this, Ferguson, the shooting of one kid in Ferguson, Missouri causes sort of worldwide ripples. That same year in Chicago, 3,000 boys were shot. 700 were killed. There was very little response at all. There was no power there. there had to be a white finger, a trigger finger, shooting and killing a black kid, usually a male, almost always a male. Then we're duplicating all of American history.

We're able then to say that, you see, systemic racism is still with us. This poor boy lost his life as a result of it. And so people seize that and exploit that and make it, turn it into really enormous power, much bigger than I think we realize sometimes. Political correctness, the influence of the left in universities, now in corporations, the corporate world. This is now a power that simply has to be contended, dealt with. So there was a lot at stake in Ferguson and more than met the eye at the very beginning. The film takes a hard look at Ferguson, which is an area right outside of St. Louis, looks at its history, looks at, because the question is that the movie is in search of

an answer to the question, what killed Michael Brown? And you make the assertion in the film that it's a film about a racist murder that was neither racist nor a murder. So what did kill Michael Brown? And I thought it was interesting how you spent so much time on this public housing that was brought into the area in sort of what you call the post-1960s liberalism phase of our country's history, Pruitt-Igoe. And I wanted to ask you, Eli, as the filmmaker, why that was important, how you thought the public housing history in the area figured in to how Michael Brown died, why he died, since it obviously happened years and years before he was born. And also to tell the audience, just so they understand that you are hearing impaired. So we have a setup where you can hear me,

and hopefully the audience will be able to understand you even though we don't have a video. So what are your thoughts on that Pruitt-Igoe and how that factors in? When you look back at history, you start to see that Black people, when they came up during the Great Migration beginning in 1900 were very aspirational. I mean, you have to be very aspirational to leave a land you've known your whole life for the challenge of movies in a northern city. And these people really succeeded.

They were building up equity. They were building new lives. And we took all that away from them and moved them into housing projects. When you take away equity from people, when you take away their responsibility, their freedom, and move them into housing projects, you rob people of so much.

And then, I'm giving the very very short version, in the house you brought you, some work. You tear them down, you blow them up. Well, what do you do with that population afterwards? Michael Brown, all of these people, they have no idea why they are in the world that they are in. And so that's why the story of Pooitt-Igoe is so important, because it's a lost history. Pruitt-Igoe played a huge role in the film really created the ghettoization. This is what you say in the film of black families creating, as you say, Eli, the creation of a permanent black underclass that, that could never quite get out of, if not the actual buildings of the public housing, the, the belief that they were incapable of lifting themselves up. And I wonder, you know, as I'm watching the film, how much of this do you think still goes on today

and influences cases like we saw over the summer, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and so on, because this is a problem that exists beyond Ferguson, Missouri, Shelby. Yes, it sure is. It's a pattern that we fell into back in the mid-60s when all the civil rights legislation was passed. And in effect, Blacks became absolutely free at that point. Obviously, there was racism that continued, but we were really granted freedom at that point. A big event happened then that we have not dealt with yet in America. And we have not, I don't think, fully understood. When a country confesses to having oppressed a people for four centuries in the most brutal instance of oppression in all of history.

And then finally, in 1964, you pass a civil rights bill. You say, oh, we were wrong. We're sorry. That confession, and that's what I call it, the sort of great confession, put white America in a position where after you confess to a sin, you have to then redeem yourself on that sin. And so white America was put in a position where race was concerned, it had to redeem itself. And we have been in that redemptive phase of race relations since the mid-60s, where the real focus, we say, as we did in Pruitt-Igoe, we're going to save the lives of all these black people. But we don't really look at them. We don't really see them as human beings. We're just going to save their lives because we want to be able to say we are redeemed of our collusion with racism. It redeems white America.

It redeems the legitimacy of the democracy, of our government, to then begin to give things to blacks, all sorts of programs, Great Society, War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, public housing, school busing, advanced welfare payments, so forth and so on. Just give, give, give, not because we want to help black people, but because we want to redeem white people. And so all of these policies then, in effect, exploited black people all over again. Now we're using black people as evidence of white innocence of racism. And so what President Johnson, who came up with a bunch of these programs, he was concerned really about preserving the moral legitimacy of the American democracy. So he said, we've confessed. Now what we have to do is redeem ourselves in order to be legitimate. We have to

help these people that we oppressed for so long. And to this day, that's the psychology that pretty much controls race relations, relations between blacks and whites. And so blacks now say, oh, you know what? Our big thing, our source of power is the fact that we were victimized. That's what gets us attention in the larger society. That's what gets us social programs and racial preferences and universities and so forth, diversity. But that's what gets us that is our victimization. And so what do we end up doing? That becomes an incentive in black America for us to think of ourselves as victims. And so we now, black America after the 60s, has what I call a victim-focused identity. If you want to make most blacks angry,

tell them that they're not really victims. They'll go up for a lot of things but that's where that's where the foot goes down and and the battle and the battle begins you can't tell blacks that that's our identity that's our power in the world you you take that away you say we're not really a victim that america's changed that there's opportunity that there's freedom everywhere. So you say that and you're going to make a lot of people outraged. More with Shelby and Eli Steele in just a moment. But first, blinds galore could be a savior to you. If you are worried about feeling like you're sitting on the sun when you're in your living room, or if you are worried about privacy, think about Blinds Galore. They're having a huge, huge Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale. And they're going on right now.

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that you've always wanted in your home at Blinds Galore. Visit blindsgalore.com today and let them know I sent you by choosing the Megyn Kelly show at checkout. Then take 50% off during friday and cyber monday this can make such a nice difference in a room you got to do it that's blinds galore.com there was this the controversy from the smithsonian sending out notification that words like self-reliance are racist that that blacks can identify with that. And

for you to assume they can, it means you are racist. You say in the film that government and its policies have been an impediment to black progression because they've disbelieved in our agency. I love the way you phrase that, that these programs disbelieve in black agency. I know people who defend the programs would say, no, they were simply trying to remove impediments that made black agency not enough, right? that they couldn't get over some of these historical historical barriers to entry in areas like mortgages or banking or universities or some corporate jobs without something to help even what had been an uneven playing field. Right. That was the presumption. Yes. So how do you factor that in? The folks who would be offended by what you said, saying,, 50 years of hindsight, but what I would say is here's what's wrong with that. You figured out that maybe they needed to be helped and have some barriers removed and so forth. And certainly, let's actually stop discrimination stop redlining stop all of that

certainly must be done where the the failure was to actually see black people as human beings not as black people but as human beings because you can't give human beings things like this without actually asking something of those human beings. So the corruption of most of the racial reform that came out of the 60s was that it asked absolutely nothing of the people, by way of development, of the people it claimed to help. It therefore ended up oppressing them all over again. And to this very day, we talk now at universities where political correctness and diversity, they're just consumed with this. My response always is to students,

what is your grade point average? Are you taking advantage of the racial preference you got? Are you developing? And one of the reasons these programs have all failed is because, again, they don't ask for anything in return. They don't say, we will help you, but you have the agency over your own life. Your fate is in your hands, and if you don't do it, it won't happen, no matter how we try to support you, no matter how many barriers we remove. Nothing will happen until you take responsibility for it. And that was the evil of oppression for four centuries. We didn't let you have agency over your own life. The challenge now is we're giving it to you. Make something of yourself. Make something. Join the modern world.

But you're the one who will have to do that. And we still have not gotten to that point in terms of our racial reform in America. And again, this is what Ferguson, Missouri is all about. Michael Brown's tragic story. The idea of black agency was, a sense killed off by 50 years of this kind of liberalism. So now to demand that blacks do something themselves, boy, you'd be called a racist in a split second. You'd be seen as an enemy when actually that's exactly what blacks need to hear. That's the rules everybody structural barriers working against them. Is that true? Isn't that a horrible thing, a message to send to a young black kid now trying to work his way into college or get ahead in life? And you're going to basically tell him that no matter how

hard he works, it's never going to pay off because he's black. And you think you're a friend of the race because you're talking in this way? You are as bad as any oppressor. The segregationists, I grew up in the segregationist era. They didn't doubt us in this way. They didn't doubt our very spirit, tell us that we had a right to be irresponsible, if Michelle Obama, God bless her, would really stop and think for a minute. That message that you just denunciated is meant for white people. She wants white people to stay on the hook to black people. That's all she cares about. That's the black victim-focused identity. I'm, as a black, I am a victim and you owe me. And that's the, that's the arrangement that Michelle Obama is trying to, is trying to put forward. Are, are we on the hook? Aren't we still on the hook at all for what's happened in our past? That's a very good question, and it needs to be discussed and debated. But my point is that whether whites are on the hook or not on the hook, the challenge for black Americans is development. We're on the hook for development.

We have to become all the great things we said we were going to be if we were just set free. That's our responsibility to history. We have to become something. We have to make something of ourselves. Let's get specific on just one example. Let's take Hollywood, an industry that's just sadly known for excluding Blacks, both in acting roles and certainly in producing and directing roles. And I think folks would say no amount of excellence is going to get any meaningful number of black Americans over those barriers because there is an inherent bias in the industry that doesn't want them there. And without shaming them, calling them out for racism, demanding even quotas on certain roles or production jobs, nothing will change. What do you think of that? I think that that's a unique situation in Hollywood.

I have no doubt that there has been bias. And more importantly, I think it should be fought tooth and nail. Blacks should be absolutely outraged and should do everything in their power, whites as well, to find ways to end that kind of bias so that everybody has a fair chance and so forth. That's one side of it. And I don't have any problem with that. And I frankly don't think probably Hollywood has a problem with that. And I frankly don't think probably Hollywood has a problem with that. I think they're probably at this point in their history open to that kind of thing.

But there's another side to the story. And that is that when you take agency over your own life, when you take responsibility for yourself and you say, I want this no matter what in the world. It's a fair thing and this is something that's important for me and I want to have it. Then it's on you. You make a movie. There'll be people who will be happy to fund and support you. You get really good at filmmaking. You enter the competition. You make movies that everybody wants to see. In other words, you compete. You don't sit on the sidelines and say you guys are racist. You make the best movie of the year. Put all your energy there. Compete. The minute you start to compete and you do well and you make a movie that's a hit,

everybody in Hollywood is going to imitate you. And pretty soon you look up and race won't be relevant. It's not lost on me that when I'm sitting here talking to a black filmmaker, Eli Steele, who just made an amazing movie. Eli, what are your thoughts on this, on barriers to entry that may be racist and overcoming them? There are definitely barriers. I wrote about the first black jockeys

that won the Kentucky Derby in the 1880s. Well, we can't find a black gash here that's small enough. Black movies most sell overseas. No Europeans, most sell overseas. No Europeans will watch Black movies. So you hear this over and over and over.

I also heard this from Black people, too, from Black executives. So it was not just white people. And so you get all of it. But what my father's saying is very true, because it's very difficult to get all these suggestions. He's trying to make a living. You know, I got married. I had kids. And I almost gave up filmmaking.

But, you know, I had too much love for it. I wanted to do it since I was like 13 years old. So I just ran on the outside and carved my own path. And here I am today. So that's sort of what you have to do when the institution basically closes the door in your face. You either quit or you find another way. Do you think you had an advantage in having a father who I presume was raising you with this notion of you're the captain of your ship, you?

Definitely. But, you. Definitely. But, you know, obviously we live in a very political world and I'm in a very liberal world. So people found out who my father was. It was definitely, you know, a barrier in many ways. But there were many, many advantages, you know, you know, his love for me, his inspiration, his guiding, the path that he carved, the path that he built upon, the path that his own father built. Yeah, I am the beneficiary of all of that.

You make the film. Your father, Shelby, your dad was a bus driver. You both make it in this world as men of color. And you make this important film with your perspective on what led to the problems in Ferguson and in particular this case, Michael Brown's death. And Amazon, one of the biggest companies in America, promptly turns around and says, no, we don't want it. Now, I understand they've ultimately reversed it after a lot of public pressure. But their first response was, you don't get to put your film on Amazon because only some black voices matter. And if they happen to be right leaning, they don't matter to us at all. In fact, this is deemed offensive content. We're not going to air it. When you saw that, Shelby, were you surprised?

Well, yes and no. You know, you you I certainly on one level was not surprised. I mean, I know the the fascination with censorship that the big tech world has these days. But just to be rejected, the the tone of the rejection email was really hateful. I mean, it was like, don't think you can resubmit this. Don't change the title and try to resubmit it. Don't call us up and ask what you can do to fix it. Don't do this.

Don't do that. Just evaporate, disappear. There was hate in that. Coming from a company the size of Amazon to one little guy out here trying to make a film, he and his son, seemed to me a bit ridiculous. The story got picked up by the Wall Street Journal, did an editorial on it and so forth. And so then out of the blue, we get a call from Amazon saying that they somehow had made a mistake, whatever that means, and that they would be happy to start streaming our film.

And so there we are. They have done that. And I'm grateful that they changed their mind. They have a tremendous, huge platform for films. It would have injured our film profoundly if they hadn't done that. And so I'm grateful for the way things turned out, but it is obviously evidence of a deep, deep problem that is now sort of in the news almost every day, congressional hearings and so forth. But we're happy to have slipped out of the noose at least for a minute. It's crazy how they're cracking down on anything that isn't orthodox. You know, we've seen this with Abigail Schreier's book that touches on what she says is a contagion

amongst some teenage girls when it comes to becoming trans. And her book is getting not reviewed, pulled off of shelves. She had a problem with Amazon as well. The censorship that is being laid down against people who have unorthodox views is scary to me. It's very contrary to sort of fundamental principles we have in this country of speaking more, not less, when you're on controversial subjects. How much blowback have you gotten, Shelby, in being, you know, a heterodox black man for not sort of towing the party line?

Because you don't you don't sound like Ta-Nehisi Coates. You do not sound at all like Ibram X. Kendi. And I imagine that's posed some problems for you. Well, I can I'm used to it. It's been a while. Uh, I, I, um, no longer surprised by it or, or, uh, um, I'm kind of a known entity at this point. And, uh, so how many, how many names can you call me? Um, it was difficult when my kids when they were younger, and they paid a little price in college and so forth for being my children. So I've seen this for a long time, but it's only made me maybe more fervent in the work I'm doing. It's pushed me

further than I thought I would be pushed. I accept my fate. As I sort of preach, it's in my hands. It's up to me to make something of it. There's some good parts to it as well as a bunch of flack that one has to take.

It's crazy that you get bullied for having views that don't line up with a very large mass of people on the other side who are very well represented. Their point of view, they don't need one additional guy. But they're insecure. They're insecure, I think, on a deep level. And the anger, you know, is the object of their anger. I obviously must really make them nervous. They must know that something I'm saying has an element of truth in it. And they're afraid of that truth. They're afraid at some point they'll be made accountable for that truth. It'll catch up to them. And so, you know, their energy goes into sort of punishing people like me.

Well, you know, that voice won't be still. It'll always be here. Uh, and, uh, uh, I'm, I feel very comfortable, um, where I'm in the position that I'm in. For me, you know, this is an example of, you know, I come from, you know, Jewish people and, you know, black people and, you know, the power to be always like a shunning. They always say, you're the good Negro or you're the bad Negro. Well, in today's time, we are the bad Negroes.

We're not the good ones. Amazon was the good one. So that's where the racism really comes from. It coming from the liberals. It coming more from white liberals. They're picking and choosing which Negroes they want. And that's why it's so dangerous in this world, because why do they have the power to decide who is part of the amplified Black voices platform? And who are

the good ones to get in? And who are the ones to that excluded. And the bigger question is, why are they excluding us? Probably the easiest answer is because we point the finger right at them. Coming up in just one moment, an incredible exchange between Eli, Shelby, and yours truly. This unfolded completely spontaneously and it was a beautiful and moving moment. You got to stay tuned. It has to do with Eli's hearing issue and some assumptions I made and others made. And even Eli may have made about this process and how it might go. And trust me, you're going to love it. Okay. I promise you that you will love it. Trust me on that and stay tuned. Before I get to that,

though, let's talk about Pure Talk. Who's your wireless provider? Is it AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile maybe? Well, what if I told you you could be saving over 400 bucks a year without having to sacrifice your service or any of your coverage. Pure Talk is on the exact same network as one of those big carriers, and it gives you the same bars, the same service, but for half the price. Why wouldn't you do this? How do they do it? Well, they don't play the same games as the big carriers who sell you unlimited data when you don't need that much. Pure Talk will give you unlimited talk, text, and two gigs of data all for just $20 a month. 20.

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Get unlimited talk, text, plus two gigs of data, all for just 20 bucks a month. From your cell phone, dial pound 250 and say, Megan Kelly, and you will save an additional 50% off your first month. Aren't we all looking to save money this holiday season? That's pound 250. Say, Megan Kelly. Pure talk. Simply smarter wireless and now before we get back to shelby and eli i want to tell you what is a feature we call real talk where we talk about

something something going on in the news or in this case it's going to be in my life so thanksgiving is upon us uh as you know the holiday season is officially here and i want to tell you about a tradition we do in my family that i love maybe Maybe you guys know about this, maybe not, but if, if not listen up. So it's always hard to get your kids talking right around the table. And when it's Thanksgiving, you're with extended family and they want to hear about your life and they want to hear about your kids' lives. And of course, you're all six feet away and, you know, wearing your masks in between bites and doing all this stuff. Um, but we play Rosebud Thorn and I highly recommend this. But we play rose bud thorn, and I highly recommend this. We do it on birthdays and we do it on Thanksgiving usually, where you go around

the table and everybody offers their rose, their bud, and their thorn. And the way it works is you look back at the past 12 months or whatever months, and you give your rose, which is the best thing that's happened to you. And then you give your thorn, which is the best thing that's happened to you. And then you give your thorn, which is the worst thing that's happened to you. You know, the thorn of your year that you wish had not occurred. And then you give your bud for the upcoming year ahead. You know, the thing you feel most hopeful about. And my kids love playing it. And it's been funny to listen to their rose and buds and thorns evolve over the years, especially my little guy, Thatcher.

But they'll talk. It'll get them chatting about what's important to them. And then the rest of the family can weigh in. It's a great conversation starter. And I highly recommend it. It's one of our family traditions, that and I never cook. Those are our two traditions. And I really highly recommend them. And don't think it's because

I now have dough because I've never cooked. Even when I had no dough, I would scrimp together enough that I could just at least buy it at the grocery store. So all I'd have to do is reheat it. One time I cooked years ago. It's actually a funny story. I'll tell it to you quickly. But Doug and I were hosting John O'Hurley and Lisa O'Hurley, you know, John O'Hurley from Seinfeld, Elaine, Mr. Peterman. He came and she came and their son and we tried to cook Doug and I and long story short, we started a big fire and the turkey like container that the tray it opened up, it leaked, the grease went all over the oven, a fire started. We managed to put out the fire. The turkey was extremely dry. We were taking it out of the oven. There's still

some like juice in the tray. And it got on my dog, who thankfully was a Shih Tzu. So he's covered in hair. He didn't feel anything. But then the other Shih Tzu was just licking that Shih Tzu all day long because he was covered in turkey grease. Then we realized halfway through the dinner on Thanksgiving day that we had left two of the bags at the grocery store when we bought the Thanksgiving fixings. We took two and we left two. So we didn't have anything. Really, all we had was the turkey. We had some stuffing and that was pretty much it. We'd have green beans, mashed potato. We had nothing and we didn't have gravy. So now I've got a very dry turkey and no gravy people. So what am I going to do? And I'm not exactly like, let me fix it myself. I'll just whip something up kind of person. So Doug went out to the Duane Reed,

which is the grocery or the drugstore here in New York. He gets one of those little packs. There's only one left. It's like the dry crystals of gravy. He brings it back home. I follow the directions. Exactly, people. Exactly. I start stirring. It's like this huge bowl of soup when I started that looked brown. I just keep stirring, keep stirring as it tells me to. And it's getting smaller and smaller. Now it is getting thicker. That's good. Starting to resemble gravy. Tiny. And I was like, well, I don't need to have gravy as it gets smaller. I'm like, well, Doug doesn't need to have gravy. A smaller. And I'm like, well, Lisa's probably not going to have gravy. Tiny. And finally, I'm like, okay, John,

here's your thimble full of gravy for your burnt, extremely dry turkey. I remember when the smoke started billowing out of the kitchen at one point, John yelled, we've got Jean Jour, Jean Speed done, which is this fancy restaurant here in New York. I'm like, I've got this. I've got this. But they were dear friends. They never complained. We've had many other Thanksgivings with them after that.

To their credit, they gave us another choice, but it was pre-agreed that I would order the food, which I do. So those are my recommendations. Order, outsource if you're not really a chef like me, and Rosebudthorn. Okay, without further ado, back to Shelby and Eli. Enjoy this. You point out in the film that blacks were doing OK when it comes to finding housing and independence between the 40s and the 60s, that their numbers were moving up and in the right direction. And then came the Great Society and then came the housing projects and then came the no man in the house rule that related to welfare. And things really started to shift another way. And there's really not been a lot of responsibility taken for that.

It's I know it's considered verboten to even talk about in some circles. But your whole point is that white guilt has led to some really bad decision making that is, in essence, dehumanizing of blacks and their agency that only sees skin color and is paternalistic, that paternalistic attitude. That's the number one thing I feel when I see the messages coming in the schools these days in corporate America, which is basically, you know, the white man needs to help the black man. The white man's the oppressor of the black man. And somehow the black man is powerless. It's all up to the white man to either shut up, get out of the way, pave the way, apologize for having been in the way. And to me, it just feels insulting. I'm

insulted on behalf of my black friends that I'm supposed to look at them like this. And I supposedly have all the power, Shelby. Exactly. Yeah. It's horrible because it basically says white supremacy is good because these are all white supremacists who believe in the agency of white people and disbelieve in the agency of black people. And so they're basically saying, we're the superior race. And gosh, we abused you for so long. And now we're going to, we want to, we don't want to abuse you anymore. So we're going to give you this and push you into that program and push you down this street and up that one. And we're going to agent you out of your despair, your despondency, your weakness. We're going to get you over the problem of your

inferiority because we are superior. We see things you don't see. We know the world better than you know it. And we're going to, therefore, we're going to agent you into a better world. So is that ugly? And we've had 50, 60 years of this now. When I was growing up in the era of actual segregation, there was no black underclass. Didn't exist. We were all poor. We were discriminated against in every single area of life, day in and day out.

And yet we somehow came. We were still the agents of our fate. My father couldn't stand the idea of public housing. They bought these ramshackle houses. My mother and father rebuilt them. They had a little equity, bought another house, did the same thing. Everybody in my neighborhood lived that way. Then, of course, here comes public housing.

Here comes welfare. Here comes this. And the oppression of white supremacy continues under the flag now of white innocence. We're going to oppress you now in the name of our innocence. And my anger with blacks is like, hello, how long are we going to take this? We need to say, don't you dare give us reparations. Don't you dare think you can buy our dignity with a few bucks. Don't you dare think you can come up with another gimcrack program and that that's going to somehow make you not racist and you're innocent? And Blacks will get ahead when we take that attitude. We take our fate back out of other people's hands.

How did things get to the point of being anti-American in their messaging? You know, you point out in the film that Martin Luther King Jr. had a very different message that the civil rights movement wanted into America. This is how you put it in the film.

And the BLM protests want to dismantle America as it stands now. And you have a soundbite in there from somebody saying, it is time to end the American experience. So how did we cross over from, you know, black protesters willing to- Because we keep paying that. We keep paying off for that. They say these outrageous things. They hate America. America's got to, we've got to break it down and rebuild it. And they keep getting, they get money in universities, they get tenured positions, they get jobs in HR departments and corporations. Millions of people are now financially supported by this argument that America is evil.

So there's money in it. There's profit in it. If you say that America is not evil, that this country has made more moral progress in the last 50 years than any country in human history. If you say that, then you're a racist.

You're a bigot. Well, it's, you know, what's the way out of this double bind? The way out of it is that people are going to have to find some courage to stand up to this. And it's going to be a fight because the other side is entrenched at this point.

And the truth is isolated and seen as dangerous and so forth. So it's going to take a lot of courage, but there's no other way. I think the anti-racism movement of today is a big part of the anti-American labor in the air today, because when you reduce people's ways to skin color, you're going against the American principle, which segregationists did, which slave owners did.

You kind of continue with that plan. Now everybody kind of thinks that anti-racism is new today. No, it's not. We did this back in the 70s with affirmative action. If you remember, affirmative action's original purpose was to go into impoverished, into the black underclass, basically. Better schools, better teachers. Lift these people up after segregation, after centuries of oppression. Lift them up. believe in these people,

these people can do it. Well, what happened was, we were not populating college campuses with black people fast enough. So we turned from that original purpose of affirmative action to racial preconditions. We started to racially engineer people into college campuses.

That is anti-racism. We've already been doing this for years, for decades. And you should see it has not produced the level of equity that these people on the left want. And the question is why? You can't racially engineer people. And when you turn people into skin color and racially engineer them, you can't turn around and say, okay, now believe in America.

You've been putting the wrong values on them. And that's the biggest mistake that we've made. Anti-racism really, really separates us from America. You know, you mentioned Eric Holder earlier, and he's somebody who continues to see disparities almost solely through the eyes of race. We saw that during Obama's presidency. He was sent to Ferguson. The Department of Justice looked into Michael Brown's shooting. Even Eric Holder's Justice Department had to conclude, based on the eyewitness testimony from the witnesses there, who the vast majority of whom were black, that the hands up, don't shoot narrative was a lie and that Officer Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown, who had attacked him once and appeared to be trying to attack him a second time.

However, he he was sure to condemn the Ferguson Police Department as a group in his report. And one of the things he touched on that you mentioned in the movie is, for example, traffic stops saying 67% of the population of Ferguson is black. 85% of the traffic stops are of blacks saying there is no other explanation for this disparity than implicit racial bias. That is what we hear today. We hear it about corporate America. We still hear it about universities. We hear it about, of course, police and blacks when it comes to traffic stops, pullovers, stops, and certainly shootings that have been in the news. So was Eric Holder onto something, Shelby? Did he have a point at all about the traffic stops? No, not really. He had 95% of the people who live in and around Ferguson are black.

So if you had, you know, 87 percent that you were ticketed, 87 percent blacks, then it's a black world there. As one person, woman we interviewed who's married to a policeman, they rank the policeman, how many tickets they give. The guy who wins in the Ferguson, the police department is giving out the most tickets is black. It's a way of life there and that there is some racial animus behind it. Holder doesn't offers no support for that whatsoever. If you're going to give out tickets, and of course what happened is because of Holder's report, Ferguson stopped giving out tickets for a while. Of course, speeding went up, crime has gone up tripled in many cases in Ferguson.

They just basically gave the town over to the criminals. Well, the whole idea of disparity, if there's a disparity, then we say it must be because of racism. And that's proof that there's racism. Well, the big obvious elephant in the room there is you're talking about a people that were oppressed for four centuries. Suddenly, they get at least a gesture toward freedom in the 60s. Four centuries of oppression is going to cause a deep problem of underdevelopment. These people are not going to have the same levels of development as other people. There's going to be disparities all over the place. It's going to take generations for that disparity to disappear also blacks have to now

figure out this we have a huge problem in underdevelopment it intimidates us so much it scares us so much that we keep running back to racism and saying, oh, that's our problem. If we can just get rid of racism, then, oh, we'll be equal. There'll

be no disparities anymore. We'll all be the same. Well, that's ridiculous. If your child is going to preschool or kindergarten and doesn't know their letters and doesn't know their alphabet and you've never read stories to them, you've done nothing to them, then right away you're perpetuating a problem of underdevelopment. We know that with kids by the fourth grade, if they can't read at that point, then the life ahead does not bode well for their future. Because that group does not appreciate yet the extraordinary importance of intellectual academic development in young people. And groups that do thrive in America just absolutely thrive. Groups that don't, whether it's people in Appalachia or people in Harlem, they suffer. Well, that's exactly right. Lower socioeconomic status and poor academic performance are

obviously intimately linked. But on the first part of the argument, I think some folks will be asking, right. So given that disparity, given that 400 year history, why not create racial preferences at the university level? I realize that it could create some problems for black students who otherwise wouldn't be admitted to an institution, but it helps them create connections that will help them for life. When you do that, you create an incentive to those students by saying, your race is what got you here. Not you. Not your hard work, your talent, your development, but your race. But if history makes them start- You're then back in the same old swamp. But wait, but- Where were we? But if you are then back in the same old swamp. But wait, but if history is this is the come up.

This is the Kamala Harris argument that she put out in that little cartoon before the election, that if the black person is starting 50 yards behind the white person at the beginning of the race, shouldn't society do something to help the black person get a little closer to the starting line when, you know, the race is begun? That's the argument behind racial preferences and so on. They should cheer them on and say, you know, you're going to have to work a little harder to get up to become competitive. The reality is that you're not. We're profoundly sorry for that. But right now, what you need is development. You need to make sure your children, when they go to school, are really, really ready to learn, that you're pressuring those schools to really demand something from them, that you are putting yourself not at the mercy of white people, but into competition with the white people.

As my father used to say to me back in the, in the sixties, don't go into a class the first day of class and say, well, I want to do as well as the, the, the, any of the other black in the class, there'll be one or two go in there and say, well, I want to do as well as the other black in the class, there'll be one or two, go in there and say you want to beat the number one guy or gal, whoever it is. Go for the whole, well, that's what we need. We don't need any more paternalism.

And remember, I say in that film, race is always a means to power it's always a corruption affirmative action has ruined two or three generations of blacks invested them in the idea that their race their victimization is their power not their talent america has just simply got to stop doing that stop rewarding this victim-focused identity Where no matter how high I climb in society I'm Michelle Obama I cry the blues Why not?

You got to be the first lady of the United States Why not celebrate that? Why not show us all the turns in your life where you did well and you advanced and you moved ahead because you were in charge of your own fate? Become a positive example. She's basically cheerleading, asking blacks to cry the blues and beg from whites. It's a tragedy, this symbiosis between black and white America, where white America wants so much to be innocent of racism, is so plagued with the charge, the accusation of racism, that it just doesn't, white America is in a kind of racial anguish. But they keep making the same mistake.

They keep thinking about their anguish rather than the problems of a group of people who've been held down for four centuries. It's a lot easier to work to actually say to blacks, reality. Reality is you are literally underdeveloped. That is a profound, that's horrible. Now you must be developed. We will be on the sidelines cheering you on. But we will never lower the standards to let you in

because the minute we do that, we give you an investment. Your power is more your color than your character. It's a corruption. It'll bring you down. You beat the best on their own terms. You become America.

You don't put America down. You become America. You join rather than alienate yourself. Can I ask Eli to weigh in? No, I want to get Eli in on this because I'm thinking about you and being a man of color, being a man who's hearing impaired. Obviously, you've had a fair amount to deal with in your own life. You don't

seem to come from somebody who believes in seeing oneself as a victim. So how did you get here? How important was attitude and state of mind to your success? It was basically either you think or you swim. I grew up in a time, I was born in a time where technology was improving. However, technology may give you more hearing, it may give you more of um that but it does not erase the barriers so in every situation i walk into you know i'm only i'm the only deaf person in the room i'm the um i'm always behind the starting line i'm always having issues like even on the phone calls i'm saying well if they give me video on this and then okay there's no video. Okay, so I have to listen the whole time. So the burden

always can be on me. And I don't mind that because if the burden is on me and I make it happen, then that's the most empowering thing that we can do. The fact that I can sit here and listen for

one hour without any video, without any lip reading, it's a big achievement for me. It may not be for other people, but it is for me. It gives me power. It gives me belief in myself. Nobody else can give that to me. And that's a very simple lesson that we're staying here. The government can't give you that. Technology can't give you that. You, you're individual. By taking on the challenges of life, why is it up?

And taking them on and succeeding. Making a film. I had somebody ask me the other day, you're deaf. How can you make a film? You've never been around deaf people or anything like that. And I was just kind of like, oh, I just made a film. Like, it's just part of who I am.

And so that's where the real power comes from. Is it fair? If you wish it, you could have it easy. Of course. It's not going to be fair. I'm going to be wiped out after the conversation, because I have to pay so much attention, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

And so that's what's so important is that we need to really understand that even somebody who is in the Black underclass or somebody who is profoundly deaf, born deaf like me, has enormous power. And it is that power that we need to nurture. We need to cheer on, as my dad said. And America would be a much better country for that. Eli. You're going to make me emotional here.

Right? To hear you say that is so uplifting. I want to make a confession to you in response to your honesty, which is when we were talking about booking you and your dad, we discussed the fact that you're hearing impaired. And we can't put words up for them to follow if they can't understand. And I said, are we putting him in an uncomfortable position because he can't see me either? And in the end, we said, let's let him decide. He'll tell us if he's not comfortable with this and we'll go from there. And so to hear you say it is a challenge, you willingly met it, knowing it might be hard, and that now having accomplished it, you feel better about yourself. You feel stronger.

You feel more confident. It's just a microcosm of what else is possible for anyone feeling disadvantaged, right? It's like you've inspired me. You've inspired me not to be paternalistic, not to assume someone else can't and that I have to be the savior. I love what you said. Thank you.

And I really do appreciate the fact that you gave me the chance. I think this, since we've been doing the publicity for the film, I've had about four people pull out because I was deaf. So I really appreciate you giving me that sand. And that's just the way it is. So give me the sand.

Give everybody the sand. Let them stink or fly. And that's all we can do. Oh, my God. Now I got tears in my eyes, Shelby. Yeah, you got me. Because I'm well you know what can i say uh i'm so proud um but it's important this young man uh he well i'll just say he he had the worst uh and um what's the test that they measure your hearing?

In Santa Clara County, a huge county, which is now Silicon Valley, he had the worst audiogram of any kid in the history of that county. You could shoot a gun off and he couldn't hear it. So we're not talking about somebody who's just a little bit deaf. There's nobody else in America that I'm aware of with the degree of hearing loss that he has who functions like he does. And he's never given himself an excuse. He puts himself in every situation and faces it down. He's a very rare young man.

I'm very proud of him. Wow. Can I ask you, because I didn't actually ask this question, Eli, how are you hearing me? How can you hear me? In 2000, I got recorded cochlear implant.

It's basically an electrode that they put into the cochlea of your ear. And before that, I had hearing aids. And the hearing aid gave me about 15% of what you may hear.

So I think that's a testament to my parents, because it took about I was diagnosed with death when I was about one, from one until about four. Despite school therapy and this therapy, I never said a word. People called my parents abusive for not putting me into sign language. They kept the faith and eventually I said my first word. And from then on, I was on my way. And in 2000, I got the Cochlear implant, which gave me about 80% of what you hear.

It amazed me. I mean, amazed me, the fact that I could do this phone call. I could have not done in 1999. So I am very blessed to live in a world where technology, all of that stuff, makes things possible. It's miraculous. It makes me want to circle back to something you said earlier, Shelby, which is the willingness to fight, you know, to fight for yourself, to fight for what you know you believe in, what you can do. And I think, gosh, this is a situation for so many Americans right now who are not swallowing this divisive rhetoric or being fed by BLM and Robin DiAngelo and corporate America that's making us all believe we all come down to our pigmentation. And yet people are afraid.

They are afraid to speak up. So what do they do? That's the power. Well, again, my parents were met and married in the civil rights movement. I grew up in the civil rights movement. Uh, you know, King was a kind of new count Johnny come lately in my family. Um, and so one of the things that I learned in blacks were very reluctant in the fifties to go with, in the civil rights, my father would have to really knock on people's doors to get them to

come out and demonstrate. And they would tell him he was just a troublemaker and so forth. What I learned in the civil rights movement is that the only thing that ever really brings change for the better is when people find their courage to say and be accountable for what they truly believe. And the civil rights movement was a high moment in human affairs. The American people came to a point where they they said okay segregation is wrong period uh whatever that consequence that brings it just brings but we're no longer going to deny it we're going to have the courage to stand because before that if you protested you were an outsider a radical a troublemaker and forth. But people found the courage. White America today has pretty much lost its moral courage, its moral authority.

And it gives over to these complaints of victimization way too easily and never asked anything in return. Well, there's going to come a point where I think the masses of people of Americans, black, white, and otherwise, are going to become tired of this and find the courage to say so and act on it. I don't think we're going to keep getting away with this. Things that people are bound to, as time moves on, to find their confidence and hold America accountable. If you find yourself in a situation where you are in any way playing around with lowering a standard to accommodate some demand from a minority group that's claiming victimization and you give into that, then you can't complain. That's weakness. People have got to stand up

and say, I love you. I wish you the very best. We're all Americans. We're all in it together. We all live by the same standards. If I lowered the standards, I'd be saying you're not a real American. I'd be humiliating you. Then I'd be a racist. But I'm not a racist. I know you can compete in the same level everybody else competes. When people finally have the courage to enforce that, we'll all be better off. Shelby and Eli Steele, thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you so much for having us. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much for having us. We really enjoyed it.

Today's episode was brought to you in part by Blinds Galore. Get the custom blinds and shades you've always wanted visit blinds galore.com today and choose the megan kelly show at checkout to learn more go ahead and subscribe to the show right now if you haven't please uh on on apple or wherever you're getting our podcast from subscribe download rate and review five stars por favor a written review is always appreciated. Still reading them, still loving them. But I want to tell you, you're not going to want to miss Monday's show

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