TRIGGERnometry - We Are in a Moral Panic: Coleman Hughes

Episode Date: June 14, 2020

Coleman Hughes is a writer, contributing editor at City Journal and host of the podcast Conversations With Coleman. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a contributing editor at City Journal and the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman. Coleman Hughes, we've been looking forward to this for a long time. Welcome to Trigonometry. Glad to be here.

It's so good to have you on, man. For anyone who doesn't know who you are, just give us a little brief overview of who you are. How are you where you are? What is the journey that brings you here talking to us? Well, that's a big question, but yeah, I grew up in New Jersey. Most of, you know, I was always good in school, but mostly into music as a kid. Briefly went to Juilliard out of high school with the intent of becoming a professional jazz musician. But then things changed and priorities changed, and I ended up at Columbia. doing a degree in philosophy, which I finished about a month ago.

And during my time at Columbia started writing for various online outlets on issues of race and racial inequality, politics, and other odd issues here and there, usually in the American context. All right, well, it's brilliant to have you here. Your work and your writing has been quite sensational and exceptional, and I've been following it for some time. We all have, I think. But let me take us back to 2008, because I remember that moment very well.

I remember exactly where I was. You know, it was a Barack Obama gets elected, this brilliant charismatic leader who seems to, you know, assemble a very large coalition. You know, most of the United States, most of the world is celebrating the fact that you have the first black president. And what a president, too, he's articulate, he is intelligent, he's capable, he's inspiring. Don't go calling him articulate. That's a microaggression. Right, right. Good, good point.

Finally, you put him out. Well done. He's a skilled orator in a very non-racial way, right? You know, I remember that moment. I think many people will remember how inspired they felt because what I think a lot of people felt was, here we are. Finally, it does not matter what your skin color is. You do whoever you are, you can rise to the top and you can succeed.

if you've got the talent to do it. This is the end of the racist past that we've had. What happened? Well, even more useful is to roll it back to, say, 2007 and ask virtually any black person in America whether Barack Obama could make it. The answer you would get is almost uniformly, no, we're not ready. And the reason people said that is because they knew if he won,

it would mean that we had made significant deep progress on the issue of racism. And they did not think we had made that progress and therefore believed that Brock couldn't win. Now, a strange thing happened when Barack did win, which is that virtually nobody updated their views of how much progress we've made as a country, which doesn't make very much sense. Usually when you make a prediction based on your model of the world and your prediction gets combined. completely destroyed by reality, you're supposed to update your model of the world to come back in line with what's actually happening. People didn't do that with Barack. They should have. So there was that moment where, obviously, Constantine mentioned where he, Barack Obama got elected, the yes, we can speech, everything like that. Why has it suddenly distorted into where we find ourselves now? Is it, do you think just one reason in particular, or are the myriad of different reasons?

Do you mean the perception of racism? Why has it gotten so much worse in the past 10 years? Yes, absolutely. Well, yeah, I think that social media has a lot to do with it. In 2008, when Barack was elected, not so many people were on Facebook somewhere, but it wasn't what it is now. Obviously, Twitter was barely a thing, Instagram, much less. people didn't you know smartphones were not ubiquitous I still had a flip phone at that time

so what that means is in 2008 when an unarmed American gets shot by the cops which probably happened around 50 or 100 times that year we don't have good data from back then you know many of those would have been white some of those would have been black nobody saw a video of it in their newsfeed. If it happened in Kentucky, it stayed in a local Kentucky newspaper, never made it to the New York Times or the Washington Post of the Wall Street Journal. And what people saw on the news was, you know, a black man getting elected to president. So, you know, that's where people get their perception from by and large. Now, you move to 2012 or 2014.

The biggest shift that has taken place has nothing to do with the presidency. Barack Obama has won his second term handily over a rather strong candidate in Mitt Romney. But what's different now is everyone has an iPhone, or a smartphone, rather. Everyone's on Facebook and Twitter. so that when Michael Brown or Philando Castile or Alton Sterling dies at the hand of the cops unarmed, we are all confronted with this for the first time in a visceral way. You see it.

There's a huge difference between a story staying in local news in Kentucky, which is what happens to 99% of tragedies that occur throughout the nation and being confronted with it no matter where you are in the country on the news cycle 24-7 on your phone in your Facebook feed where all your friends you know people whose approval you care about are commenting on it and now you feel pressure to have an opinion at minimum that creates an entirely different social dynamic and what I want to what is most important to glean here is that all of the actions actual problems, if you're talking about, for example, police killing unarmed Americans in general

or unarmed black Americans in particular, if you're talking about the number of black Americans in prison, all of these issues have been going in completely the right direction for the past 20 years. Most people don't know, for example, that the incarceration rate for black men in their 20s has more than cut in half since 2001. Most people don't know that just in the past five years that we've been measuring police killings of unarmed Americans, it's gone down from almost 100 to just over 50. And the data is not good here, but NYPD has kept great data since the 70s, and they killed like 93 people unarmed, or perhaps not unarmed, but in total in 1971, and they had it down to five by last year. So, you know, every one of these questions has gone in the right direction, sometimes quickly and drastically. But the perception is that it's gone in the opposite direction, that things have gotten worse.

And that is entirely the result of social media. I think some people are tempted to blame it on Obama. I think people are too hard on Obama. Yeah, sometimes he played a bit of identity politics, but in truth, you know, I don't think he had, he could. couldn't have predicted the effect that Twitter and Facebook and the rest were going to have on the country and on the perception of racism. Well, I think that was actually one of the things that inspired someone like me about his campaign at the time is that there was no sense at all that he was using his identity as a weapon. Certainly, he wasn't pretending he wasn't black, but he wasn't using that as a way to claim additional credit or whatever. He was just a guy who was very inspiring to a lot of people. And, you know, his politics aside,

It's a slightly different issue. As a personality, I think he was very persuasive in that way. But if you, I mean, you say that all of these, we've made moves in the right direction and all these issues, but is there not an argument there to say that, okay, well, maybe it's 50 people who die unarmed at the hands of the police now, but that's still way too many. And what we've seen is the proliferation of the camera phone. It has shown a light on, you know, genuine police brutality that should not be happening at all.

And, you know, the outrage we see now is justified as a response to us becoming aware of genuine injustice. I mean, you know, the George Floyd example, which I'm sure we'll get onto, being a perfect example of just an open and shut case of police brutality. So here we have to be very careful about what we're talking about. If we're talking about George Floyd and an officer putting his knee on the neck of a suspect for nine minutes while he begs for his life, begs for his mother, That is something I think we can completely get rid of. You know, I think it has to be possible to enforce some kind of policy that permanently prevents things like that from happening. Or if they do happen, they happen, you know, once every 10 years and it's a scandal and that cop gets fired immediately. And it's, you know, it's one of those freak news stories.

The same thing happened to a white man named Tony Timpa in 2016. Very few people paid attention. It was caught on video, almost an identical incident. He was killed, suffocated with a knee on his upper back begging for his life. So that's the kind of thing I think, I hope it's possible to completely eradicate. But if we want to talk about the wider phenomenon of a cop killing a person, while unarmed, there are a lot of reality checks that we have to keep in mind before we jump to the idea that the number ought to be zero. Okay, like, I would love for the number

to be zero. I think everyone would. I would also love for the number of murders in general to be zero. It's never happened in any society ever. And America is a particularly unique case for a couple of reasons. One, we're a huge country. We're 10 times the size of Canada population-wise, which means that extremely low probability events happen 10 times as often here as they do in somewhere like Canada,

if Canada were identical to the U.S. So it can seem like something, you know, lightning will, people will die from lightning strikes more often here. Secondly, and more importantly, we are a gun country. We are a huge gun country. We have, you know, a rate of gun ownership that's more than 20 times the rate in the UK. And what that means is when the cops in America pull someone over, they have every reason to suspect and be prepared for the fact that they have a pistol hidden in the glove compartment.

And that's just not true in other countries. In the UK, when you pull someone over, you have almost no reason to suspect that they might have a gun because so few people. do have guns. A cop gets shot roughly every single day in America. And what that means is in America, the cops are always going to be more likely to mistake a wallet for a gun when an unarmed person reaches in their waistband for something. And this happens to white people as well all the time. It's just, you know, they never get elevated to national news. there are probably over a dozen cases like this every year. And I don't see realistically how any amount of training or, you know, any amount of reform is going to get rid of the problem that police are aware that a cop get shot every day in this country, unlike in other countries, and that in the heat of the moment, you often actually cannot tell whether something is a smartphone or a wallet.

So what I'm saying is, yes, I think we can probably get the number from what it was last year, which is about 56. We could probably reduce that. But we absolutely cannot reduce it to zero. And that's very important because if the future of race relations or the future of civilian cop trust depends on that number being zero, then we are absolutely doomed as a country. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being,

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And Coleman, we've been talking about hysteria on social media, how it gets whipped up, how then it distorts reality. What responsibility does Trump have to take? Because there have been certain tweets that he's done, which have been, to put it, quite frankly, inflammatory and not going to help the situation. Absolutely, yeah. Trump, he's seen, it almost seems as if he's trying to say the thing that is going to piss the left off as much as possible

or piss black people off as much as possible. I mean, he could do slightly worse, but he couldn't do that much worse, realistically. I think there's no doubt that he has added some fuel to the fire of the protests and the riots. And in many ways, he thrives in this condition because every far-left access, when people on the left say they're going to get rid of dismantle

or defund the police, Trump comes to look actually sane by comparison. When he makes people go insane, become as insane as him, it gives people the impression that, well, yeah, Trump is insane, but the far left is insane too, and maybe Trump's are only bet. So he really thrives in this circumstance. He certainly has added fuel to the fire. What you would want right now is a president who can be a unifying force, and Trump is constitutionally incapable of that. at the same time, the riots and the underlying distress that we're feeling as a country is not caused by Trump.

These are perennial issues. We had riots in the late 60s, riots in the 70s, not so many in the 80s, but huge riots in 1992. Riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, 2014 and 2015 under Obama. And Obama would have been ostensibly the perfect president to stop it. But the truth is the issues are much deeper than any particular president. That's interesting. And Coleman, let me ask you this, because you've several times now, you've talked about the white suspect who died in similar circumstances to George Floyd.

And see, even though you said his name and I'm familiar with it, I can't remember it now, which is kind of a... You're a racist, mate. Yeah, racist against white people, obviously. But this kind of makes your point, which is, you know, you. you know, we don't treat these instances in the same way. Why is that? Well, that's a very deep question. I think deep in the American subconscious,

many of us have seen the videos of police putting the hoses and the dogs on perfectly peaceful civil rights protesters in the 1960s who are simply asking for the right to vote, the right to go to a restaurant. And we've seared those images into our subconscious, and they form part of how we make sense of morality and right and wrong. And when an American, and probably true of many Europeans as well, sees a white cop doing something to a black suspect, they feel differently and they feel angrier than if a white cop had done it to a white suspect, or frankly, if a black cop had done it to a black suspect. It hits harder.

It tugs at one's heartstrings a little bit more. In fact, a lot more. Even if it's the identical crime. And this is a deep, it's a deep kind of moral confusion that we have, but it's extremely hard to root out. Because ultimately, a life is a life. If that's not true, nothing is true. But we're just hardwired to feel, well, I shouldn't say hardwired,

where our software, our cultural software as Americans, makes us feel that a racist crime, there's a particular edge that that has in our feelings that intra-racial violence doesn't have. So that's why you see, you know, the fact that there are dozens of, there are videos of white people getting killed by the cops with their hands up, begging for their lives, every bit as brutal and terrifying and awful as the videos we've seen. You know, there's this whole, at all the Black Lives Matter protest, there's this thing, you know, they always say say their name.

You say the name, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, etc. There are so many white names. There are, in fact, in absolute terms, there are more white names and there are black names. I've spent some time looking at them, and they're identical. The cases, for every black person killed by the police, there are usually two or three white people that died exactly the same way.

Nobody says their names and nobody cares. That seems to people like the correct moral, bias because we're imprinted with the symbolism of the civil rights movement, but we have to outgrow this if we're going to be a cohesive country going into the 21st century, which is, you know, a very different reality than where we're coming from. The interesting thing about this movement, in particular the murder of George Floyd, was it doesn't, obviously it hasn't affected America. It's turned into this global movement. Why do you think that is common? Why do you think that

people in the UK, in Australia, in Brazil, where they're having huge BLM rallies. Why is it that people have really connected with this particular crime? That is a fascinating question. I've already given my rant on social media. And, you know, I think no doubt that has something to do with it. I love how you describe it as a rind. You're so mild-mannered and calm, that your calm and gentle description of your concerns about social media becomes a I love it. But, you know, I think probably coronavirus has something to do with it. I have to imagine people around the world are working much less than usual in their

house much more than usual. On Facebook, Twitter and watching the news much more than usual are more restless and bored than usual. All of those things conspire, I think, to make people more likely to go out and protest. And do you think, I mean, this is. my theory of it because I've got a lot of friends like in the UK who are black and they're talking about their experiences and from growing up and they're in their 30s and they're talking about what it's like to be a black man in South London in the 90s when the police were really

racist. Do you think part of this is just unearthing some deep trauma within people from years in years back? Like my mom came to this country from Venezuela. She's a brown woman and very conservative, very, very right wing, but she doesn't like police. And I didn't expect that response from her. She was saying police are racist. So do you think it's just this trauma that a lot of people are covering and all of a sudden they get a chance to expunge it almost? Absolutely. I think there are decades and decades. We can talk about to what extent the cops are racist today in 2020, but there's no doubt that for, you know, I know less about London's history, but I definitely take your mother's experience as probably true of a lot of people. There's no doubt that

there's just decades and decades of accumulated bad faith between the police and in particular the black community for disproportionately stopping black and Hispanic people, men, especially, you know, planting drugs on suspects, all kinds of corruption and lying and brutality. There's just just decades of accumulated experience with that. And all of that gets symbolically discharged when an event like this happens. It's not just about George Floyd for people.

It's about the whole history of brutal policing going back many decades. And ultimately, the history of white supremacy going back to slavery. I do think there's a danger in making an issue symbolic like that because then you kind of decide what you think about the George Floyd incident before you've actually looked. To you, if it's really about whether the police in Brooklyn or South Central L.A. were racist in 1990, which I have no doubt that they were, if that's what decides your opinion on George Floyd, Floyd in 2020 and Black Lives Matter and the degree to which the cops are racist now, then we're just having two separate conversations. And it becomes very difficult, you know, then facts cease to matter in the now. But I can totally understand why someone, you know, we all bring all of our whole life history

with us and the police have a horrible history. they made a lot of progress and but you know another way to frame that is that they used they used to be far far worse and a lot of people who remember it and they resent it and you talked about the different ways we treat these instances when depending on what race of victim is involved do you think there is an element where there are assumptions that are made if the if the suspect who dies is black which aren't necessarily I mean they may be accurate but they may not like is there any evidence at the moment that George Floyd was his murder is racially motivated do we know that uh the the short answer is no um it's one of those things that I want to be clear about what I'm

saying we don't have reason to believe that it was racist right it could have been racist that's exactly what I'm saying it may well be deeply racist but we don't know that but I think the assumption we just don't know either way. Yes, and the reason they make that assessment is because the vast majority of people, they haven't seen all the videos of white people being killed in this way. They haven't seen the Tony Timper video where the same thing happened to a white guy a few years ago. And so they assume because this kind of thing overwhelmingly or only happens to black people, that therefore it's racist.

Still, I'm sure even if you showed them all the videos of having to white people, a certain kind of person will say, no, I just know it in my bones. I know it. I know that he wouldn't have done that to a white boy. And you can't argue with that because it's faith at that point. And let's move on to the organization of Black Lives Matter. Now, I think we, everybody agrees that, of course, black lives do matter. Of course they do.

And it's important that we end police brutality. Of course it is. Or essentially, you know, try and minimize it, like you said, as much as possible. But why is it that we have this organization? I've read through what they want to achieve, the abolition of the nuclear family, defunding the police, and lots of other things,

and it makes you deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Well, it does for me because of my background as a Venezuelan. Why is it that you can't criticize Black Lives Matter the organization? Well, what they've done, which is, you know, what all successful propagandists do, is to have a very, a very, indisputable, you know, facial argument, by which I mean, who wouldn't agree that Black Lives Matter?

Like if you actually disagree with that, taken literally, you're a monster, right? So on the one hand, they could say, oh, we're just, all we're saying is that Black Lives Matter. And then when you say, but wait a minute, what about that abolishing the nuclear? family thing. They can always retreat to say, listen, we're about Black Lives Mattering. You're either with that or you're not. And then they hide all of these other much more radical, much more controversial,

much less defensible claims. But, you know, it's also worth stating that Black Lives Matter is not like the Civil Rights Movement. It's the Civil Rights Movement was pretty coherent. They had a set of, you know, goals that there was a top-down. structure to the organization that made it made it you know it made it you know it made sense to talk about it as one body but black lives matter they have chapters all all over the nation the people protesting with that slogan many of them don't believe this stuff that you find on on the you know the national website about abolishing the nuclear family you know a lot of that is coming from the higher

up that always have an incentive to go for the more and more radical thing. Whereas I think I've been to a couple of these protests and yeah, I think there are some folks who really go all the way with it and but there are others that are just there because you know they saw the video they were moved by it and they think something has to be done about police brutality. So I'm always wary of painting with too broad a brush. But yeah, that would be my answer to that. So what is your assessment of the impact of the of the Black Lives Matter as an organization or as a movement? Do you see it as a force for good? In part, I think, you know,

I'm not, if not for Black Lives Matter, I'm not sure how much we'd be talking about police reform right now. Would we be talking about ending the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which which makes it tough to bring civil rights lawsuits against police officers? Probably not. Would we be talking about universal body cams, you know, not funding the use of military-grade weapons to go to police departments. All of these strike me as probably good ideas, and I'm not sure we'd be talking about them. Frankly, I'm not even sure we would have a national database on police shootings, which we didn't actually have until 2015, and we still don't have an official government-run database. So all of that is to the good and I think Black Lives Matter deserves credit for.

At the same time, the central premise of their movement is not true. The idea that we have a problem with racist cops killing unarmed black people. And it's a dangerous myth because it's a kind of myth that if you believe it, it makes sense to go out and riot. and destroy businesses and loot and set things on fire. If it's really true that the state is uniquely coming after your people and shooting them dead, that's the kind of thing that leads people to riot. And that's the narrative we've been sold for the past roughly seven years, let's say. And then the nation started burning.

And I don't know who else to blame, but the people who spread this myth. And where do you stand? I know I can guess what the answer is going to be. So, for instance, I talk to some of my friends who are more on towards the left, the progressive left, and I say, look, you know, I think it's important that we have these discussions, of course. I disagree with writing and burning down businesses. And I got described as using the language of an Israeli or an Occupy, which was delightful. But there we go. Lovely way to spend a Tuesday afternoon, Coleman.

Where do you stand on this? And people who say the only way that we can achieve something is by rioting and looting. Historically illiterate. I think some people will think that that's naive, but there's a little something called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I don't remember a violent, a single violent thing that protesters did to achieve that. The riots we had in the 60s didn't really start in earnest until 1967. That was after the great civil rights legislative reforms. Martin Luther King's movement was a peaceful movement on purpose.

The police were violent, but the whole point was that no matter how violent the police got, the protesters would never get violent. And they would win over the hearts and minds of America by showing them how peaceful they were, how committed to their principles they were. what did the what did the violent protests of the late 60s achieve certainly nothing on par with the voting rights act and the civil rights act um as i as i said you know progress progress usually doesn't come in the form of some sexy legislation that that happens after you burn half of your country down actually usually progress happens a little bit every day and after at the end of the 20 at the end of 20 years you say holy shit there are half as many black people in prison as they were in 2001 or young young black men in this case um but of course no one pays attention to that so they get the impression that nothing has changed they're just watching the news every day they're not looking at numbers because nobody does and and then they get this false impression that that uh that uh violence is the only way you can make progress.

I'll give another example. The First Step Act, it's a little piece of legislation that nobody paid attention to, frankly, because it felt, well, here's what happened. You know, Trump ran a campaign saying he was going to build a wall, and, you know, a lot of people were afraid he was going to put Muslims on a kind of registry or something. And frankly, we didn't really know whether he was going to be a Hitler or, you know, just like a kind of petty

authoritarian want to be authoritarian frankly I didn't know because I didn't know how much of it was talk and how much of it was for real and I voted against him largely worried about the small chance that he would end up

being a kind of a true Hitler figure then he got to power in 2018 he you know he passes you know a bipartisan bill that includes every progressive criminal justice reform that people on the far left have been calling for since 2007,

called the First Step Act. He releases a couple thousand inmates from federal prison, reduces sentences for a couple thousand more. The majority of these people are black. It shifts the focus from punishment to rehabilitation. It's just everything that, you wouldn't expect a sort of law and order politician like Trump to do. And of course, he got no credit for it because it was too awkward and surprising to sort of

admit that he did something like that. But that was exactly the kind of progress that if it had come after a riot, people would have seen it as proof that riots work, you know? But because it just came sort of out of the blue in the middle of, in the middle of, in the middle of Trump's first term, people just didn't even pay attention to it. My point here being that progress is happening all the time, it's not that it needs riots to happen. It's that all the people justifying the riots, they're not paying attention when the progress is happening. Hey man, the riots have achieved something. We're tearing down statues in this country over

something that happened in your country. So they're making progress in one way or another. But let's talk about, I mean, look, as you say, there are some legitimate complaints, and of course there's some legitimate positive outcomes out of what Black Lives Matter are doing. And I suppose the central complaint, you bring up the white victims versus black victims. The central complaint would be that black people are disproportionately imprisoned. Black people are disproportionately stopped. Black people are disproportionately searched. black people are disproportionately, the victims of police brutality, et cetera.

And as far as I know, all those things are true, if you just look at the raw statistics, black people, about 13% of the population, but much more representative than that and all those other categories. So are those not legitimate claims? Well, no, because, you know, as any intro stat student will tell you, you've got a control for the confounding variables. You know, men make up more than not. 90% of victims in all these cases, whether you're talking about brutality, prison, shot by the cops or otherwise, men are, of course, only 50% of the population. Just viewing that fact doesn't tell you anything about anti-male bias per se.

You have to think about, you know, and it's impossible not to talk about the underlying facts of racially disparate crime. 13% of the population commits and suffers 52% of the murders. And, you know, that's probably the largest disparity, but if you're talking about robberies, aggravated assaults, you know, all of the, virtually all of the disparities except, you know, drunk driving and a few others show black people showing up black men, young black men in particular, showing up. showing up heavily disproportionate rates, and that's a first-order problem. The police are coming into contact with young black men far more often as a result. Even if they didn't pay attention to skin color at all, and I'm not saying there's no racial bias in the police, I think there is. I think some of that is just, some of it's just good old-fashioned racism. Some of it is the fact that, you know, if I were a cop in the way.

New York, where roughly 97% of the shootings every year, 97% are committed and suffered by blacks and Hispanics. That means you could forget the white part of that and almost not even make a dent in the total number of shootings. Is it possible that I would develop a kernel of racial bias, which is to say, when I see a black or Hispanic suspect, I suspect him more than I would a white person. I would love to say that I'm such an amazing human being that I wouldn't develop that, but I'm also not naive, and I don't want to be such a self-flattering backseat driver to the cops whose job it is to actually keep everyone safe, including black and Hispanic people, the vast majority of whom do not commit crime, even in the most criminal neighborhoods.

So you have to look at, you know, virtually every study I've looked at, that controls for all of these variables finds no anti-black bias in deadly shootings. Sometimes they find anti-black biases in a cop's likelihood to put his hands on and rough up a suspect. And that's a very real problem. But there's simply, there's really no disparity to be found when it comes to a cop's decision to pull the trigger. All right, but what about this idea that this is still all down to racism? Because it's a result of the fact that black people tend to be poorer, and they're poorer because of the history and the legacy of Jim Crow.

It's a legacy of slavery because a lot of black people are the descendants of slaves. They don't have the same economic base. Therefore, they live in poorer neighborhoods. Therefore, they're still being punished for essentially being brought to America as slaves. I think it's a very superficial analysis of what causes people to commit crime. I suppose it's a very long conversation. You know, if I talk to someone who, well, let me put it this way, if you look at the history of the, you know, American crime rate over the past hundred years, and your theory is that poverty causes crime, you're going to run into a lot of awkward facts. Like, you know, when the economy is booming, crime doesn't always go down. Sometimes it goes up, you know, during the recession, 2008, crime went down. Why is that? On a theory that says poverty,

causes crime that there should have been a huge uptick. I think the truth is much more complicated. I think this gets into your picture of human nature and why someone would commit crime to begin with. And there begins to be such a huge gap in worldview that it's sort of hard to settle in the course of a single conversation. But suffice it to say, I don't really look for reasons why someone commits a crime. To me, what we call a quote unquote criminal behavior for much of our species' existence

would have just been behavior. Like, yeah, you kill someone from the other tribe. He's in the other gang. Fuck him. It's not that much more complicated than that. It doesn't have to be because you grew up poor. Rich people commit crimes too. All the people on Wall Street,

money laundering and defrauding investors, why did they do it? Is it because their childhood? I don't know, maybe it's because they wanted to get some. You know, like, I don't, I, some people would say that's extremely naive. To me, it accords with virtually everything I know about human beings and how, how they behave. But that doesn't explain the disparity between different groups, which is what we're really talking about. Sure.

I mean, listen, the causal, the causal chain can just as easily own the opposite direction. Crime causes poverty. Last time I checked, if you live in a criminal, in a neighborhood with a high crime rate, good luck getting a loan for your small business. Good luck getting anyone to invest. Good luck getting people to want to move to the area and therefore raising property values and making everyone richer. What we call gentrification is really just a synonym for the crime rate in a formerly high crime neighborhood going down.

so the neighborhood becoming more desirable and property values rising. Colman, what I'm trying to, sorry to drive, all I'm trying to dig into is why is it that crime in those communities is so much higher than in others? If it's not the history of racism, what is it? So, I mean, I'm objecting to the question a little bit

because in what two groups is the crime rate ever equal? Why do white people commit so much more crime than Asians? Because white men are evil, we know that. This is what I'm saying. People have this expectation that every group should have like identical statistics. And then when they see a disparity, they go, oh my God, why is there such a large disparity? And me looking at the data, all I see is disparity. If I look at that if I compare Jews to Protestants, you're damn sure I'm finding a wealth disparity there.

I'm sorry, that's just the truth. but I'm not asking why, why, why, as if every deviation from equality has some nefarious explanation. It's because we're lizards made. That's why Jews do better, but that's just, you know, that's a David Dyke theory.

Anyway, Francis, go ahead, mate. So, Coleman, what I've really enjoyed about this interview is that we're talking and that you're bringing nuance to the conversation. Why is it that we can't have these conversations anymore in the mainstream media? If we try and do this,

in the UK mainstream media or America, wherever it may be, it would degenerate into finger-pointing, talking over one another. Why have we lost that ability? Frankly, I'm not so sure we ever had it. I don't know if we ever had it in my lifetime, but yeah, I don't know.

The short answer is I don't know. You know, mainstream media outlets, select for people who make points that feel good, that that that preach to the choir, that are that don't involve any statistics because people don't want to hear numbers ever. They want to hear short sound bites and maybe at most a story. And anyone who wants to get more complex than that is going to find him or herself relegated to non-mainstreamed like this podcast like this is where you end up, mate. Yeah.

And that's not so bad. I mean, listen, in a free market, there's, you know, everyone can find their niche. But, yeah, it just means that, you know, the most mainstream outlets sort of have to cater to the common denominator. And I think we kind of get the media we deserve. So how do we move on, Coleman? Because, I mean, look, as you say, half your country is burning. We're not quite there. And hopefully we won't get there.

but a lot of people are starting to feel like the veneo of civilization is fraying at the edges. How do we move past these issues? Well, I would say, first of all, you know, always take note that things are not as bad as they seem. You know, the riots in Minneapolis were horrible, especially in a few other cities. And a lot of damage was done, but... Civilization, I don't think, is yet fraying at the edges. I think we have to guard against the very bad ideas, like dismantling the police. And I think we will.

I don't think people will stand for it. I think we have to push for the reasonable reforms of the police that we ought to have done a while ago. And above all, we have to make sure that, you know, we are educated ourselves. Make sure you know what's going on. don't just listen, don't just, you know, listen to everything that you hear, you know, pick your battles, but stand up for yourself when it matters. And, you know, I'm not sure I have much more advice to give than that. I like the points you make, Coleman.

There's a part of me and bear in mind, I'm a rabid pessimist, so take this on board. But I just see a lot of people being really scared to voice their opinion in case they say the wrong thing, in case they express an opinion clumsily, which can then be twisting and distorted and interpreted as racism and all the rest of it. Do you think that we are going to come to a point where debate is simply going to shut down because people are too scared to speak? I mean, I think we're kind of already at that point. Yeah, I think there are... have to be tens of thousands of people just in the US that are horrified to say what they really think. Even if they only have tentative opinions, if they only half think something, they're terrified to say, to say what they think.

It's a lot more than a few tens of thousands. It's going to be in the millions, I would suggest. Yeah, probably. Yeah, probably. Yeah, listen, they're afraid to to lose their jobs, they're afraid to lose their friends, they're afraid to lose their relationships, they're afraid to lose everything. And there's very, you know, it only really goes one way. If you say defund the police right now, post that on your Facebook, despite how insanely radical that idea is, you're not really going to lose very much because of it. Your company's not going to fire you.

know, maybe if you live in a really red conservative bubble, which many people do, yeah, maybe you'll face some consequences. But if you live in a city, if you live, you know, anywhere close to blue America, you know, you'll face no consequences for that. But you'll, you might lose everything if you say the opposite. If you so much has expressed a skeptical word about Black Lives Matter. So yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, um, it's extremely tough. We're living in, we're living through a moral panic, one of the great moral panics of American history about racism and white supremacy.

And do you think, sorry, carry on, Coleman. No, no, go ahead. And do you think it's almost in the sense of like McCarthyism in that, you know, people are just getting outed, left, right and center as being racist? You know, you, you, I mean, white privilege. You can agree, you can disagree, whatever it may be. But if you openly criticize white privilege, we've seen incidences in the UK of, you know,

newscast is getting yanked and then having to give groveling public apologies and all the rest of it. No, I mean, yeah, McCarthyism is one of the nicest analogies for what's happening right now. We look back on the McCarthyist era and we say, how could they have been so out of their minds with regard to this communist threat? You know, anytime someone was accused of being a communist,

and a friend came to his defense and said, wait a minute, guys, look at the details here, okay? He was a little bit of a socialist, but if you actually look at what he wrote, he condemned Stalin and yada, yada, yada, people wouldn't hear it. They would just ask which side are you on, as if that's the only question that matters.

And that's what you're seeing right now. Carmen, I was going to wrap up here, but actually, I want to ask you about this defund the police thing. and the slogan because I've been in arguments with people over this where like you, I've said, look, this is a crazy idea. One of the things, if you get rid of the police, one of the things that will happen is there'll be more crime

in those communities and more black people will die. So if you believe that as I do, that the lives of black people matter, this is gonna achieve the opposite of that, right? And the argument that people make to me, well, defund the police doesn't mean abolish the police. It just means, you know, get rid of the militarized weaponry that you talked about or whatever.

Like, is that true? People mean it in different ways, yes. Some people just mean get rid of militarized weapons, you know, which is a very misleading, it's a very misleading banner to put on that idea. But wouldn't you say reform the police if that's what you meant? Right. You would. I mean, again, defund the police is a slogan and people are, as they often do,

They're saying it before they know what it means. They're saying it because it sounds radical and cool and it makes them seem really radical to their friends. So whatever, I don't know, they can get laid more often or whatever. And then, you know, does it work? Look at him. He's excited, man. If it didn't work, people wouldn't do it.

Okay, cool. Nice one, Coleman. Thanks, man. But they're coming out with what it means, you know, slowly and after the fact. So some people, yeah, some people do want. to abolish the police. That's ridiculous. Some people want to replace the police with community police. So get rid of all the cops with badges and we're going to build an institution ourselves. We're going to train them better so that these kinds of incidents never happen.

I think that's extremely naive. You know, the medical profession kills hundreds of thousands of people every year with medical errors, but no one is suggesting we dismantle or get of doctors and surgeons and like replace them with our own system. It's kind of ridiculous because a lot of the problems are inherent in the job itself. No matter who you get to be the police, when you come across a suspect of a violent crime, a lot of times they're going to resist arrest. Sometimes they're going to pull a gun on you. It doesn't matter who you are. Doesn't matter if you have a badge or if you're the new Black Lives Matter community policeman. So we might as well work with the system we have now and reform it.

no absolutely and it also doesn't take into account like the human element of it like whatever like i was a former teacher whatever industry or profession there is you're going to get good people and you're going to get people who are not good and going to it for the wrong reasons like every teacher knows one teacher who was a bully and used to bully the children and it's awful but that's how it is and i imagine if you're somebody who likes to feel power likes to bully others and a police officer is a pretty good job to have francis let's not talk about your career mate. But do you think that's a point as well, Coleman, in that can we ever truly eradicate these things because they're ingrained in our nature? Yeah, I mean, this comes back to having,

you know, fundamentally different views of, of, you know, man as a creature. Some people think that all of our foribles and flaws are a consequence of bad ideas and bad policies. that if we could only get the right set of policies and, you know, ideas and raise children believing the right things, then there would be no murder, no rape, no war, no anything, that we would truly achieve a utopia. And so they measure our society currently against the imagined utopia that they have in their minds, and they always find our society to be lacking. Other people like myself are more persuaded by the idea that human nature is a mixed bag. Like other animals, we come with a built-in set of tendencies. Some of those tendencies are good. We love our families.

We love our friends. We have empathy. We can see someone else's suffering and feel it as our own. But we also have greed and the capacity for cruelty and the desire to climb the ladder at other people's expense, the desire to be mean for no reason. If you've never felt these feelings in yourself, then I either become more self-aware or think your lucky stars that you're like, you know, one of the few humans that was just born innately perfect. Thank you. I am. But listen, you look at every society in history. It's had, it's had, you know,

there have been many have been worse than others, but there have been, there have been, none that were perfect. I'm sorry. There's been none with no racism. As long as there was ethnic difference, there was bigotry, ethnic bigotry. As long as there were men and women, there was sexism, almost always directed at women. There was violence in every society we've ever seen. So I think that's a coincidence and humans have just been getting the wrong answer to the question of what ideas to raise our children with every single time. Or there's something baked into us by evolution that includes both good qualities and bad qualities. And the institutions that allow us to make moral progress are the ones that recognize human

nature as fixed and try to allow us to make progress without having to be saints. because we're never going to be saints. That's a really brilliant point on which to wrap up the interview, Coleman. You're a voice that needs to be heard more of in this conversation, and people like you, I think, are actually the kind of people that can take our society forward rather than the people who are burning down buildings and tearing things down. So thank you for coming on the show.

We've got one more question for you. And it's a question. We always end the show, Coleman, which is, what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I suppose the answer is, in America, the answer is homicide and violent crime. At a time like this, it is more important than ever,

even though it will seem completely tone deaf to people to remind the American population that homicide is the number one cause of death for black men in their 20s. that is not true of any other race. That it's a first order problem, not just in terms of the lives lost, but in terms of the cycle of poverty and unemployment that plagues high crime communities, the fact that stores have to charge higher prices to defray security costs,

the fact that it's very hard to attract investment. Property values are low because no one wants to be in a place that's unsafe. Every problem that a person of goodwill would want to see solved is made worse by the reality of violent crime in pockets of U.S. cities and suburbs. The police are one of the best tools we have, one of the primary tools we have to lower crime rate. They're not the only ones. Social programs matter too. but we have to keep that in view as a central problem. And that can't be lost.

It's much easier to focus on the police as villains. It's easy. They're wearing badges. I mean, in every Hollywood movie, the guy with the badge comes and stomps on someone and you feel reflexive sympathy as you should for the person being stomped on. But, you know,

society is not always a Hollywood movie. Sometimes the main villains are a small subset of criminals in a population that are wreaking havoc for everybody else. So that's what I would say. Brilliant stuff. Thank you.

Thank you very much for coming on. Just tell everybody about your podcast and where they can follow your writing as well. My podcast is Conversations with Coleman. and listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts and you can follow me on twitter at cold x-man perfect and we'll make sure we'll put all those links uh in the video and in the audio description colman thank you so much for coming on once again and uh thanks everybody for watching and listening we'll see you again very very soon with another interview or a live stream take care and see you soon