Welcome to the Tucker Carlson show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content@tuckercarlson.com. here's the episode. So I gotta say it, it's a little weird to be sitting across from you in my barn. You're, I was thinking this morning, you're, you're almost like Matt Drudge used to be. You know, everyone read the Drudge report starting in the nineties, but no one wanted to admit it in the news business. But everybody read it. But Drudge himself was this mysterious figure, actually knew him, sort of. I've never met you. Everybody I know on both sides has read you for years. You're not crazy, you're not a bigot. But somehow you became a sort of mysterious outlaw figure that no one was allowed to meet or talk to. Is it weird to be out in public?

Yeah, it actually is. For ten years, from 2013 into 2023, you basically couldn't go see Steve Saylor give a speech anywhere. I was being signed up for conferences. The last speech I gave in 2000, 920 13, was an analysis of the Obama versus Romney exit polls. Didn't seem all that controversial to me. But for the next decade, every time I'd be invited to a conference and about six weeks later I'd get an email going, well, it turned out the SPLC or media matters went to the hotel and said that this is just deplorable. And you might find also that the local antifa, the black block guys, were thinking about protesting and, you know, how that can turn into violence and so forth. So they canceled their contract. So, you know, the, I just kept writing, but all, suddenly ice started to break up maybe last year. And this year I've been doing, traveling around the country and meeting people who've been reading me for years or just started reading me. It's a lot of fun. I appreciate it.

It's just funny, though, because in a world where there are some wackos and there are people who advocate violence, you would seem to be maybe the last person who would scare people. I mean, you're effectively an informal academic or social scientist. You're a numbers guy.

Yeah, I'm kind of like Bill James, the baseball statistics analyst for the social sciences in the US. For three years now, I've been raising a stink about, all right, what was the impact of black lives Matter on Black Lives. And as far as I can tell, it's got Black Lives Matter during the two eras of triumph after Ferguson in 2015 to 16, and then the big one during the Floyd effect, the racial reckoning of the 20 twenty's. They've got an incremental 15 to 20,000 extra black lives murdered through incremental homicides versus the baseline, or just splattered on the pavement through increased traffic fatalities.

But so all killed by white cops.

No, the vast majority of black shooting deaths is at the hands of other blacks. There was a, for example, in 2020, there was just an enormous explosion in mass shootings with at least four dead or wounded at black social events. This is, you know, we talk about mass shootings a lot. But as the New York Times did a big study in 2016 and concluded that almost 75% of the mass shootings with at least four victims wounded or killed take place in black on black events, typically Saturday night at the club or a funeral. Some of them are organized crime, very strategic, like in the tv show the Wire. But a lot is just one guy disses another guy and people pull out guns and start shooting. And yet that's of very little interest to the democratic establishment. The need for what I call point of use gun control. The Democrats tend to obsess over the need for point of sale gun control to keep rednecks out in the country from buying rifles, legally buying rifles at Walmart. And in truth, what we've seen, like in the 1990s, into the 2010s in New York City, where people like Giuliani, Bloomberg, and Braddon did a great job of bringing down the murder rate.

What really works is point of use gun control. You discourage lowlifes from packing their illegal handguns when they go out because they're more worried about the cops and getting caught carrying an illegal piece. So they leave it up in their grandmother's attic, stuffed away. And the fewer people who are carrying guns on the streets in New York City, less often, they pull them out and start shooting. And you get this virtuous cycle, but nobody understands that. So during the great awokening the last decade, and especially during what used to be called the racial reckoning before, the whole George Floyd thing has pretty much gotten memory hold lately. Just huge increases in black deaths by murder and by car crash.

Okay, so can we back up? You said a bunch of different things I want to follow up with, but let's just start at the very beginning. You said the George Floyd thing has been effectively memory hold.

Yeah.

What was the you know, it's been almost exactly four years since that happened.

Yeah.

Memorial Day 2020. With that, the benefit of, you know, some time to think about it. What was that?

What was it? To a large extent, it didn't happen. Or the follow on events, such as a huge increase in the murder rate, especially among blacks. The murder rate was 44% more blacks were killed by homicide in 2021 and 2019 the year before, and 39% more blacks died in car crashes in 2021 than in 2021. Car crashes. Yeah. It all ties together, because when the establishment, as they did after George Floyd's death, said, okay, here's the biggest problem in America, even bigger than Covid for the moment, is that we impose too much law and order on African Americans. We are pulling them over for tiki tack. Things like speeding and not having registration on their car and just driving badly. And then we're checking for outstanding criminal warrants and maybe searching for illegal handguns. This is all incredibly discriminatory. So the cops went, oh, okay, you don't want us to do that. All right, we'll be in the donut shop. And so the number of traffic stops dropped way down. So people started driving worse. They drove faster, and they started carrying illegal handguns more. And then the number of shootings, the number of homicides just went through the roof just immediately.

I can show week by week data from the center for Disease Control. That's pretty astonishing.

Beginning with George Floyd's death in the.

Riots, the all time most murderous day in the storied history of Chicago's murder narrative. Going back, blowing away the St. Valentine's Day massacre by Al Capone. And all that was May 31, 2026, days after George Floyd's death, when 18 Chicagoans were murdered that day. Why? Pretty much because the cops went down to the magnificent mile to keep it from being torched and looted. And the word quickly got around that you can do anything you want in the neighborhood, and nobody's gonna. Gonna notice. And so all sorts of vengeance was just taken on random people out there for, you know, for personal reasons. And then it just went on and on for several more years. Fortunately, last year or so, the murder rate started finally to come.

You don't think there's any. And you have the numbers, right?

Yeah.

Can we see them?

Yeah.

You don't think there's any question that this was related to the Floyd story, to the Floyd events?

Let's take a look. Let's take a look at the CDC's data weekly. All right. This is the center for Disease Control collects data weekly on all the deaths in the United States, you can ask for any one particular thing. So this is weeks from 2018 into 2023. The blue line indicates the beginning of COVID lockdowns. The black line is George Floyd's death. All right? The red line is the number of African Americans who died by homicide that week. So it's bouncing around. It has some seasonality. In 2018, 2019, George Floyd dies, and suddenly, boom, it goes to the enormous peak and then just slowly fades over the next four years into 2000.

But it's immediate. The second George Floyd od's, people start shooting each other.

Yeah, about. Probably. Probably by the Friday after he died, on Memorial Day, on Monday, it just, you know, there was just a giant cultural revolution, and basically people lost fear of the cops because everybody, the establishment, the media, the politicians, were telling America that we have too much policing and too much law and order, and so we got a lot more murder. It's kind of ironic because the name of the movement was Black Lives Matter, and it wound up getting an enormous number of black lives murdered. Incremental versus what you see in 2000.

That'S not even a close call. I mean, that is absolutely, yeah.

This is one of the biggest findings in the american social sciences, probably since Angus Deden, and cases finding in 2015 of deaths of despair and how the white working class's life expectancy was dropping in the early 21st century. The other. But the big part of it is that, oh, it also applies to motor vehicle accident deaths. So you could see this pretty consistent level. African Americans had traditionally been not bad drivers. They don't have the kind of problem with driving traditionally the way they had with homicide. But boom, a new plateau that's endured ever since. And to put this in a longer term historical perspective, let me find graphs of the CDC data monthly going back to 1999 through 2021. These are homicide deaths as opposed to murders perpetrated. So these are the races of victims and blacks, Hispanics, whites and blue. That is quite. You can see 911 there. That's what it is. 3000 Americans die by homicide at the hands of al Qaeda. Okay. And then most years, you've got. Yeah, you've got more people get murdered in summer than in winter. They're out partying and so forth. But it's pretty consistent. You can see an increase over here in the Ferguson effect after the Black Lives Matter emerges in 2014, which was a pretty decent year, and then all of a sudden, murders go up dramatically in 20, 1516.

That helps get Trump elected. You might remember how Black Lives Matter terrorists were assassinating cops in Dallas and Baton Rouge and so forth, although that's really been memory hold. Anyway, Jeff Sessions came in, kind of told the police departments, no, you know, we're not going to persecute you for doing your jobs. All right. Then Trump got rid of sessions. Maybe murder started going up a little more, and then comes 2020 and the, and the George Floyd racial reckoning, it's just enormous increase compared to anything else in the 21st century. Now, one reason we don't hear about this is because these graphs are kind of embarrassing, because the black line of homicide death rate is so much higher than the light brown hispanic line there. Hispanics, actually, in the 21st century have done a pretty good job of lowering their rate of being murdered. And finally, though, when the racial reckoning came along, it got worse again. So we're losing a bunch of that progress. The blue line is the white line down there. It's an order of magnitude below the black line, and it's considered really bad taste to notice differences in the homicide rate.

The other thing but I point out is motor vehicle deaths. Motor vehicle deaths per capita. This isn't per mile driven weren't too bad. They didn't have big racial differences in the past. The whites in the blue line often had the worst. Blacks weren't bad, Hispanics weren't good. But then, after 2008, Hispanics actually got better. And the brown hispanic line is doing pretty good until the racial reckoning. But you can see the black line just went through the roof again compared to the rest of the 21st century. So what's happened is during the great awokening during the era of Black Lives Matter, what we see is that deaths, two different kinds of deaths, homicides and car crashes, what I call deaths of exuberance, in contrast to case and Deaton's deaths of despair, seem to have gotten highly correlated. When black lives Matter is winning, people, especially black Americans, die more deaths of exuberance until black lives Matter goes out of fashion again and the cops are allowed to, like, pull over bad drivers and check for illegal handguns. So does anybody know that? No, it's. It's hardly caught on at all. I mean, part of the problem is because I discovered in 2021, then, if you're a social scientist, you want to write a paper for an academic journal.

It's kind of like either, well, either I cite Steve Saylor, but I might get canceled for citing this horrible crime thinker, or I don't cite him, and then his followers on Twitter all get real mad at me for not citing him. Here's my view. Just go ahead. Don't cite me. Just get the word out there. It's more important that America know about how badly it screwed up, how many tens of thousands of incremental americans have died because America, America's elites get infatuated with black lives matter now and then than it is for me to get publicity about it.

Why?

Think about it. I'll prepare to you for the unexpected. Emergencies strike without warning and we all know something big will be thrown at us soon. Being prepared makes all the difference. This means having a reliable food supply stored to use during tougher times. That's why at my patriot supply we sell thousands of our four week emergency food kits every week. Each kit is packed with delicious, easy to prepare meals that provide over 2000 calories per day. These kits are designed to stand by for up to 25 years, ready to use when you need the most. This week, save $50 on every four week emergency food kit you need. Simply go to mypatriotsupply.com and secure one for each family member. That's dollar 50 off every four week emergency food kit. Order by 03:00 p.m. and your kits shipped that same day. It's better to have emergency food than to need it and not have it. Shop mypatriotsupply.com mypatriotsupply.com the bad people have.

So much power because the bad people have all the money. Where'd they get all the money? You gave it to them by using their businesses. Businesses that undermine this country and empower countries that that don't seek the best for your family. Trust us. But there is an alternative. It's called Public Square. Public Square is a network of over 75,000 independent businesses, small businesses in this country from which you can buy guns and ammo, fresh food, household goods, things you need to live. And when you buy them, you can feel certain that you are not doing a bad deed. You are doing a good deed that will make this a better and more independent country and make your kids future brighter. Publicsquare.com we are honored. We are proud to have them as a sponsor of this show.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host.

Of America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

A podcast for the first podcast network. Look, there are a lot of shows.

Out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the hill, to this, to that.

There are no other shows that are.

Cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented law fair, debilitating.

And affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all that every single day, right here on America on trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcast. It's America on trial with Josh Hammer. These numbers are pretty striking when you graphed out like this.

Yeah.

But they comport with what you notice.

Yeah.

Already. I mean, you sort of knew that, you know, when you have riots, people die, and a lot of people who died were black. Not all, however. But it was pretty obvious from day one that Black Lives Matter wasn't helping anybody, including and maybe especially black people. So, like, what would be the motive?

What's the motive? There were a lot of motives for Black Lives Matter. One was that America had gotten better after the 1990s, after the crack wars at policing, that the drugs that were driving crime were not particularly marketed to inner city blacks. The opioids, the oxycodone and so forth. Even when the mexican cartels started selling black tar heroin, they also focused, like, the Sackler family on, like, you know, who are a bunch of people. If they drop dead, nobody's going to care. And that's like, white people in small towns in Kentucky, that kind of stuff. So you had these had this big rise in deaths of despair.

Wait, so you're saying you think that was the sacklers in the mexican. Mexican drug cartels, morally equivalent, I would say, or close targeted rural whites, appalachian whites, for example, on purpose, because they knew that nobody would care when they died.

I mean, it's the theory of a good reporter named Sam Quinones, who's written a couple books on the evolution of the drug trade in this century, that the mexican cartels had a strategy that, no, we don't want to sell to particularly shooty people near media capitals. We'll sell to people who will overdose and quiet in just kind of take small towns in the Ohio river valley that nobody's going to care much about. And so, I mean, nobody paid any attention to this increase in the white working class death rate until just fortuitously, in 2015, Angus Deden was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. And a couple weeks later, he and his wife published this important paper saying, you know, if you look at the CDC data, life expectancy for white working class people without, you know, without college degrees has been dropping in the 21st century, and it's not supposed to happen. And it seems to be overdoses on painkillers. It seems to be suicide, it seems to be alcoholism. Just deaths of despair.

Seven years into Obama.

Yeah, yeah. 15 years into the. Into when it started around 2000 when the Sackler families, Purdue, pharmaceuticals, started their big push for opioid prescriptions.

But how would no one notice this, I wonder?

You know, there's no organizations dedicated to the welfare of white working class people. So the fact that they're dying in great numbers of novel causes, it basically relied on two academics and who said, wow, this is interesting. And one of them happened to win the Nobel Prize just before their paper came out. So people paid attention to their paper because. Oh, yeah, I heard about Angus Deaton and the Nobel Prize last month.

Well, that's kind of, if I can ask you to. I think you're right, but it's sort of interesting if you think about it. There are no organizations dedicated to the welfare of rural whites, but there are a lot of organizations dedicated to the welfare of a million other groups that are much smaller in number.

Yeah.

So why aren't there any organizations dedicated to that?

You know, a few people have tried to set up organizations that speak for white people the way that al Sharpton speaks for black people and countless other organizations speak for jewish people or Latinos and so forth and are highly respectable and are constantly quoted in the newspaper. A bright, very gentlemanly fellow named Jared Taylor tried to do this for the last 30 years, and he's still banned on Twitter at this point. America has a phobia about anybody speaking up for the emerging white minority. Everybody. You know, the conventional wisdom is that whites are rapidly being turned into a minority, and that's a good thing. And, but we're not going to treat, ever treat whites like the minority that they're becoming in multiple states across the country. We're going to treat them as the all powerful omnipotent legacy majority who can be blamed for everything from now on.

But that's, I certainly see that. Well, I think it's absolutely right. But if their life expectancy is declining faster than anyone else's and they are dying, then, I mean, it does seem a little odd to lie about that. I mean, what's the intent there?

It's, nobody lied so much as they just wonder, why are you interested in this? What kind of sinister reason do you have for worrying about the hundred million working class white people in the country who are generating these new problems and dropping dead from them? And, you know, putting out the alarm about it is just considered some sort of white supremacist, white nationalist dog whistle that will lead to slavery and the holocaust and all sorts of imaginings. And the other half of the white population wasn't suffering. They weren't the kind of people who don't have a bad back because they don't lift heavy things on the job, not hooked on oxycodone or when prescriptions got tightened up, they didn't go over to mexican heroin and then to fentanyl and so forth. So, you know, who cares? We're just talking about deplorables here.

But, okay, I mean, I get. Everyone has preferences, and a lot of people in Washington, New York, and la don't like the voting patterns of the population you're describing, but they are human beings and Americans. And if they're going extinct or they're dying in huge numbers, in any case, to ignore that or downplay it is evil, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, they. To my view, they are our fellow american citizens, as are African Americans. And so the fact that black lives matter in this ironic, complete self destructiveness brought about just historic changes in the number of black lives dying in kind of the opposite of the working white, working class deaths of exuberance, that you could see it in the Ferguson effect in 2015 to 16, and now in the huge Floyd effect of the mean, we're talking something like an incremental 15 to 20,000 more blacks have died in car crashes and murders than if the baseline of a few years ago had been maintained. And that's just enormous. That's easily the black death rate, death total in Vietnam, maybe Vietnam and Korea put together. And people should be talking about that, too, because African Americans are our fellow american citizens, and we ought to be, like, keeping an eye on them and not refraining from noticing. Just because it's embarrassing. Just because.

Who's it embarrassing, too?

Elites. The propounders of the conventional wisdom, the respectable prestige press, academia, the Democratic Party, and so forth, that they. They promoted all of this stuff. They took black lives matter at face value and did very little investigation. I mean, basically, you weren't any more allowed to ask the question like, okay, blacksmith men tend to get shot by the police about two to three times as often as white men per capita. That's a big difference. But it's nowhere near as big a difference as blacks tend to get shot by each other about ten times as much as whites get shot by each other. Probably blacks get shot by non police whites dozens of times less often than they're shot by other blacks. Young black men in this country have an enormous homicide problem, a gun homicide problem. I looked up for males aged 15 to 34, their death by gun homicide in 2022. And young black men died about 50, not 15, but 50 times more per capita by gunfire than young asian men, 24 times more than young white men, and six times more than Hispanics. Hispanics are fairly comparable in poverty rate and education and so forth, but they don't have anywhere near the kind of gun problem that African Americans have developed.

And I think. But is anybody out there asking young African Americans and telling them, you know, if you guys could not get your homicide rate down to the hispanic level, if you could get it down halfway from where it is now to this hispanic level, this country would be so much better off, and race relations would be so much better. But, you know, you're not supposed to put crime statistics like that in the newspaper. It's just considered, you know, racist to mention.

So these governments, it's obviously not, you know, reality is not racist, you know, by definition.

I hope not.

Right. But again, sorry to keep asking variations of the same question, but what would be the motive in trying to hide something like that?

All right, my theory is that it goes back to the grand strategy of the Democratic Party, which is enthusiastically assisted by other forms of the establishment, such as the prestige press, academia, much of the corporate world as well. The Democrats have realized over the last few decades that they could be. That America is becoming more diverse. Immigration is driving diversity, patterns of interracial marriage. More people who are. Have some claim to be non white. Also, there's the constant generation of new identities, such as, in the last decade, transgenderism. So as America becomes more diverse, the democratic party can profit by being the party of diversity, the party of the diverse, the party of people from the fringes of american society, the party of people that the Democrats would call the marginalized from the margins of american society. So you're talking about immigrants. You're talking about black church ladies, transgenders, Jews, Muslims, etcetera, etcetera. Now, the one problem with all this is that while it works pretty well on paper, and the Democrats have managed to win the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, the problem is keeping this coalition of the fringes, of the marginalized from turning on each other, from becoming a circular firing.

Squad, because a lot of the components have very little in common.

Yeah. Seeing with Jews and Muslims right now, it's, you know, these people do not like each other. Do the black church ladies who were the steadfast Democrats, do they. Do they really get along that well with the gays, much less with the transgenders? Nah. Do the asian immigrants have much in common with. With hispanic immigrants? Nah, not really. It can go on and on. It's inherent in the Democrats grand strategy to be the party of diversity, the party of the fringes of american society. So how can they unite their coalition of the margins? And one strategy the Democrats have come up with is basically to foster racist animus against core Americans, people who basically are demographically somewhat like George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, that are white, that are men, that are straight. Maybe they own homes, maybe they're married, they have kids. So the, and to make them the bad guys in the american narrative. And that's the only thing the Democrats and their colleagues in academia, etcetera, can think of to hold together this diverse coalition. So we've seen this enormous increase in just racist bigotry being expressed in, you know, the pages of the New York Times in this century, things that in the past would have been considered rather in poor taste and extremist.

So the New York Times will, you know, has put in a lot of effort in recent years explaining the racist, sexist slur of Karen as this anti white woman racist slur to their millions of subscribers so that they know just the right time to use it and they make sure not to use it on any non white Karens and so forth. You recently had on.

Can I assess that? My impression is that most of the readership of the New York Times is Karen's.

Yeah, I would think what I mean.

By that is like screechy, fragile, barren, NPR listing, middle aged lawyers.

Yeah, that's, yeah. I mean, in my mind, in the modal subscriber, perhaps. And yeah, the, you know, the New York Times is not the failing New York Times anymore. It's, they've done a very good job of identifying people who will pay to subscribe, to have their worldview vindicated over and over again and kind of for the times to bury inconvenient facts that don't support their view of the world in the 27th paragraph or something like that. So, yeah, you recently had on Jeremy Karl. He's got a new book, the Unprotected Class, that documents a great length, just this trend toward evermore anti white racism in the respectable press and in media and the democratic speeches and so forth. And, you know, it's finally starting to backfire on democrats. People are starting to notice just how much awful stuff is said about kind of the core Americans that tend to vote republican. So I don't know. I mean, have you been seeing this just over the last ten years? Just huge increases and putting down white people?

Have I noticed it?

Yeah.

It's one of the defining facts of american society. And it's always perpetrated by people who are simultaneously in the same sentence. Giving you a lecture about racism.

Yes.

Shut up, white man. You're evil for being white and racist. Huh. There's so many, like, the contradictions in that sentence are so inherent that it's hard to believe anyone could utter it. But no, of course I noticed that. And I guess what I'm really struck by, and I don't know the answer is why people put up with it. So at that point, it's like, well, you know, like, if you're attacking my children for their skin color, then I get my gun, right? But nobody does get his gun. They just sort of sit there and, okay, yeah, I can't say anything. Like, why? I don't. Why would anyone ever put up with that?

I mean. I mean, white Americans go out of their way not to just go, oh, yes, I hear what you're saying about how the evils of whiteness and, and my children are children of whiteness and they have oppressed the world. And I've actually thought about that. And while that may sound like just lowbrow racist bigotry on your part, it actually has a really impressive intellectual heritage going back to the Frankfurt school and Gramsci and updated by, you know, in the critical race theory by Marcuse. And people will go on and on about, you know, what you're saying isn't as moronic as it sounds and hate filled bigotry. It's actually, you're getting this. And it all goes back to Marxism or Foucault or something like that. So, yeah, Republicans, whites have been reluctant to call out just anti white racism for what it is.

But why is that? I mean, clearly something is broken inside, right? I mean, like, why would you put up with an attack that's inherently unreasonable, right? You don't choose your race, therefore you probably shouldn't attack someone on the basis of his race. It's totally anti american as defined by consensus. Over the last 60 years, that's one thing we're not allowed to do. And yet it's done at greater scale now than during the Jim Crow period. So why would you even consider putting up with that? There must be something wrong with you. You hate yourself, obviously.

Yeah, Republicans. Republicans like other races, and good for them. And yeah, they want to blame the tendency that's been growing, especially in the Black Lives Matter era of the last decade, to just say the most bigoted things. They want to blame it on something old like Marxism. This isn't what African Americans want to say. You know, my son's friends on his high school football team, they're not bigoted racists. And the truth is, yeah, a lot of them aren't. I mean, a lot of this stuff is coming out of colleges and so forth. It's kind of soft degree majors and so on. But, you know, taking claims to have some deep intellectual heritage is naive. It's just, it's just people with soft majors who got Dei sinecures and so forth and corporations and colleges, you know, just expressing their basic prejudices, their basic bigotry. And, you know, we should be laughing at it. We shouldn't be taking it that seriously. We should be satirizing it and scorning it and making jokes about it. And that could well get the message across.

You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist, right, left. The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network. And we invite you to subscribe to it. Go to tuckercarlson.com podcast, our entire archive. Is there a lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running tuckercarlson.com podcast? You will not regret it. So can I ask, I think a lot of people assume that when whites who obviously founded the country, become a minority in the country their ancestors founded, that it'll stop.

Whites will be the legacy majority. I mean, I'll give you an example. In 1955, a 14 year old black child named Emmett Till was murdered for making pretty aggressive past toward a white woman in the south. All right.

Married white woman. In a store.

Yeah, in a store. And then that was a big story at the time and helped lead to the civil rights era of the 1960s. And then it sort of faded from the newspapers. The New York Times mentioned Emmett Till's name twice in 1980. In 2000, they were up to mentioning him four times. By, I think, 2018, they were mentioning him something like one and a half times a week, about as often as Chief Justice John Roberts, really, in the New York Times. It just became this huge breaking news story. And I joke that they had a, you know, had a jet at LaGuardia fueled up, always ready to fly to anywhere to report on the latest Emmett Till news. All right, this kind of antiquarianism is increasing because, I mean, the truth for liberals is the liberals have been pretty much in charge of most things involving race for, since the 1960s, and they haven't really accomplished that much. So they kind of want to hide their record and focus people on pre civil rights antiquities such as Emmett Till or you constantly hear these days about FDR's redlining of FHA loans in 1938 as the reason that black neighborhoods tend to have lower property values than white neighborhoods or latino or asian neighborhoods.

And, you know, it couldn't have anything to do with current crime rates. It couldn't have anything to do with, with discipline in the local schools. It's got to do with the nefarious plot of FDR, you know, almost 90 years ago.

And why does no one so often, you know, all these southern cities are famous in american culture for their association. You know, the Edmund Pettisbridge, Selma, Alabama, the trial in Wilmington. You know, there's like these moments in the civil rights era that people are still, as you pointed out, talking about Philadelphia, Mississippi. Why does no one ever go back to those places, those physical places, and find out how they're doing?

Yeah. Birmingham, not doing that well. Selma, not doing that well. Yeah, it's. Yeah. What then ends up is you then have you end up getting a long lecture about how the construction of a freeway in 1958 destroyed. Destroyed the booming black Wall street of Birmingham or whatever, and all sorts of things like that. There's a large number of pre canned excuses.

But is there any effort to actually improve the lives of black people that you're aware of?

I mean, what does improve the lives of black people? Basically having some law and order, keeping people from carrying guns on the street, that's probably done quite a bit of good. Basically, the parts of the country that are run by republicans tend to have somewhat better performing blacks, students in schools and so forth. For example, Frisco, Texas, a fast growing exurb of Dallas, has the smallest test score gap of any school district in the country. That has the highest. It's about 11% black and 20% hispanic. And it has the highest black and hispanic test scores in the United States.

Really?

And the smallest white black gap in the country and other places. The great liberal cities like San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, tend to have bigger gaps, not just because they have a lot of smart white people living there, but they do a lousier job in San Francisco of educating blacks because it's such a liberal, progressive environment. They do a poor job of doing things like having well disciplined schools and focusing on basics and so forth. So, yeah, there's a general, I mean, there's been a general trend toward blacks who have some, have some choices in life who are looking to get ahead, looking to do good things for their, their kids to be moving to the south, to Texas, to red states and so forth, where, you know, they can, and away from the highly liberal parts of the country. It's not a panacea, but, yeah, it does some good at the margin.

Where are we on the continuum? In other words, if the graphs that you showed the four years after the Floyd verdict or Floyd death, if you extended those, if you doubled them, what would they look like? Where are we now?

We're hopefully past the worst of the racial reckoning. What I've noticed in the newspapers was that the front section, around a few months before the 2022 election, seemed to get the word from maybe the Biden White House that, like, you know, this whole George Floyd racial reckoning thing, that's not going to be a big vote winner in the 2022 midterms, especially in the New York City area. So let's go easy on it. Let's not talk about it all the time. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea. And then it just sort of disappeared from the serious news part of the paper and the cultural section in the back. You know, they never got the memo. So there's constantly discussions about how, okay, in a great leap forward for equity at the Art Institute of Chicago, they fired all the nice white lady docents who work for free giving tours of the great artwork so they can hire people of color to pay them to work there and stuff like that. And you kept hearing all those kind of stories going on much longer about the wonders of the racial reckoning because they hadn't gotten the message.

But, yeah, probably the Biden administration engaging in benign neglect about, like, yeah, let's not persecute police departments quite as hard as we were, has probably done some good about getting the cops out of the donut shop and actually pulling over, you know, people driving 100 miles an hour. And so, yeah, that's. That's made some progress, but it took the, it took the Hispanics a while longer to get the. Get the word that the cops weren't being proactive. And so their car crash and murder rates have gone way up. And, you know, even if things are getting better now, they're going to take a number of years to get back to where we were in 2019, much less where we were before Ferguson in 2014. The death rate is still up, like, in these deaths of exuberance, like, 30% to 40% over 2014 and way up.

Over the non black average. So the obvious question is, like, why? And it's been going on a long time. Has there ever been a serious effort made in good faith to figure out why rates of violence among. In black areas are so much higher, which they are and have always been, but why?

Yeah, people have been studying it for the longest time. Time magazine ran an article in the late fifties about the biggest worry of big city mayors is the growing problem of black crime. At this point. Cities have done, we went through a bunch of phases. We liberalized the country in the sixties, in the Warren court years. We cut the imprisonment times and so forth, and that wound up doubling the per capita murder rate in the sixties and seventies.

It doubled.

Yeah, it was. By 1980, it was twice what it was in 1961, per capita.

That's a lot of dead people.

Yeah, that's a lot of dead people. And did horrors to american urban life. People fled to the suburbs. They're all now denounced as these villains who engaged in white flight. But, you know, like, my. My wife's family lived in the. In the Austin neighborhood in the west side of Chicago, and they. When it started to integrate, they joined a liberal catholic group and said, okay, we're all going to stick it out and make integration work, and we're not going to fleet of the suburbs. And my in laws stuck. Stuck it out three years longer than the rest of the members of the club did. But at that point, the number of felonies against their children was piling up. And so they finally sold out at a loss of, like, half of what they could have gotten for their house if they'd sold it three years before. Tens of millions.

Did that change their views? What a tragedy for them.

Yeah, my late father in law was the tuba player for the Chicago Lyric opera, so he ended up buying a farm 63 miles out of town and then commuting to work to play the tuba in the opera house downtown. Yeah, it was kind of a disaster for them. And there's tens of millions of Americans who are still alive who can tell these stories, stories of what actually happened, and the media is not that interested in hearing them. You know, the media wants to portray these people as the bad guys who, because of their bigotry and not because of all the felonies against their children, you know, moved out to the suburbs. Interestingly, right across the street from where my in laws lived is the municipality of Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb that Ernest Hemingway supposedly said was the land of broad lawns and narrow mines. But it's really nice, has all this great Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. They actually did something really intelligent and really illegal in the 1970s, which was they put a racial quota on real estate agents. It was called the black a block club and said, no, you can't make a huge fast windfall by terrifying everybody into selling right now because the whole block is going to tip black.

We're going to do this in an orderly fashion and we're going to use a racial quota. And it worked. It kept Oak park from going all black the way the Austin neighborhood next door has gone. And Austin just is bleak. It's kind of post apocalyptic looking now. And Oak park looks kind of like this gay utopia for older gay couples who like fixing up beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright houses. So, you know, liberals did some things to protect themselves, but they just didn't tell anybody about it.

So was anyone ever held responsible for any of this?

You know, if you, if you read the press, yeah, there's been huge condemnation for all the, all the white families that fled crime as that they're engaging in white flight. And if their grandchildren move back to the city because the crime has come down a little, then they're engaging in the great crime of gentrification. It's kind of can't win either way. You lose. There's all sorts of talk. You know, Mayor Pete and the transportation department's always denouncing racist roads, that building highways was destroying black neighborhoods and so forth. You know, we've rewritten the past over and over again, so we don't learn anything from it because we just, we just specify a few important, a few things that fit this narrative that everybody has now. So, you know, we'll see. I mean, the obvious goal is what they call equity, and the term equity is one of those words. It's not a secret what the DEI people want when they specify equity, what they're talking about, when they're talking about equity and generational wealth and so forth is they want your equity in your home and they want to tax it away and take it for as reparations and spend it on themselves.

And that's kind of the bottom line. Whether that'll get carried out, I don't know. We've seen reparation programs start to put out checks and super liberal places like Evanston, Illinois, even in California, the idea of handing out huge checks to black people for the horrors of living in California didn't go that well.

We have too large a hispanic population.

To pull that off.

Can I ask how exactly would the DEI community steal the equity out of your home?

Well, I mean, one start has been to reopen ancient history. What do you call it when the government condemns your property and sells and buys it for what it thinks it's worth? We've seen cases.

Eminent domain.

Yeah, eminent domain cases from a century ago. We saw. So if you're black and you happen to have a family legend that we used to own this really nice piece of property, but then it got eminently domained to make into a park that that was racist, and we should get that property back. So the descendants of a black family in Manhattan beach recently, who Manhattan beach had had condemned their property and a few other and some white neighbors of theirs to build a park, and they recently got the city council to declare that that was racist in 1928, and that if it wasn't for this, they no doubt would have held on to the property through the depression, through everything that's happened ever since. They would. They would have scrimped and saved to hold on to that land next to the beach, which is now worth $20 million. So they got a check for $20 million for that. You'll see this is a general trend that's speeding up as plaintiff's attorneys are looking for these old cases, and it's not like they can relitigate the case, because there's nobody alive that remembers that can testify or anything like that.

So there'll be lots of attempts like that to basically hand out large amounts of money. And maybe it won't be called reparations, but you'll see this, and it's definitely been increasing in the 2020s.

But doesn't demographic change through be driven by immigration scramble the formula a little bit. So I'm 55, you're older than I am by a bit. But we both grew up in a country where it was white majority, black minority, and with some. We're from California, both of us. So there was always a hispanic component, but I think most Americans sort of thought of it as a white country with a black minority, a mistreated black minority. In some cases, that was true. True. But that's not the country that we're in right now, and it definitely is not the country we're going to be in in ten years, which is going to have a hispanic majority, a white minority, and then a much, much, much smaller black minority. So I just wonder if the hispanic majority is going to be that interested in Emmett till.

Yeah, I mean, that's. Yeah, that's definitely a possibility. And the establishment is working hard on that, to inculcate in the public schools that Emmett Till is the most important figure of the 20th century. They're working very hard to keep together the democratic coalition of the fringes by pointing at these horrible white men who were the enemy and who also have all the generational wealth. And keep your eye on the prize. Eyes on the prize, which is other people's money. Yeah, other people's money. It's white people's home equity, basically in stocks. Baby boomers are dying. They're leaving. They want to leave their property to their kids. This is a vast turnover of wealth. We need to get our hands on some of this. Another question might be, how big is the african immigration going to be? If you look at the border, there's all sorts of people showing up from Mauritania, from all sorts of places. In recent years, all over the world, fertility rates are plummeting, except they're still way above reproduction rate in most of Africa. And people know how to get out of Africa now, you get a smartphone, it gives you all the instructions and so forth.

So, you know, why not move somewhere nicer and, you know, so the. So the country could well be, you know, I mean, Europe's getting much more african and probably, and America is, too. At this point, the descendants of american slaves are losing out on their affirmative action and so forth. I mean, 20 years ago, two Harvard african american studies professors pointed out that a huge fraction of the affirmative action spots at Harvard seem to be reserved either for foreign elites whose parents are foreign minister of Ghana or something like that, or have one white parent, or like, in the case of the Obama family, it's now a three generation Harvard family, both privileges. And, you know, not many positions at Harvard go to descendants of american slaves the way, you know, Michelle Obama is clearly a, you know, highly legitimate descendant of american slaves. And Barack. Yeah, not at all. But, yeah, that's. We're gonna see. We'll see that. I mean, american corporations, they want, if they have to meet dei quotas, they tend to prefer immigrants for the jobs or people maybe, who are raised by their white mothers or something like that. So we'll see where this all leads to.

Where does it all go politically? Well, actually, let me just take a step back. You became famous to the extent that you were famous in sort of a Samus dot kind of way, 2016, for calling that election with some. With some accuracy, based on looking at the demographics. Tell us about your predictions.

Yeah, that's a kind overstatement, but it's more like, in 2000, I became the most outspoken critic of the new GOP orthodoxy, as promulgated by Carl Rove, George W. Bush's Svengali. And Rove's theory was that what we need, what the Republicans need, is to push through amnesty and much easier immigration. And that's what the latino voters, or future latino voters, will love us for. That, for bringing in fellow Latinos. And then they'll all switch to voting republican, especially for the Bush family, which, you know, Jeb's son, George P. Bush, is half mexican. And so there's a future. As the United States and Mexico demographically merge, the Bush dynasty of wasps and Mexicans will carry on as the natural ruling class of increasingly mestizo North America. And that's too implausible. But I kept asking questions like, do Latinos really care and that much about immigration policy? Are you sure they really want all their cousins from back home to be moving in with them? The one close latino state is Florida. And do the Cubans in Florida really care about Mexicans, illegal alien Mexicans? I haven't noticed that. And I kept saying, you know, an awful lot of Latinos are in California, and that's never going to go republic again.

And the others are in Texas in large numbers. And if that goes, if that's up for play, then the republican party's in really big trouble. So wouldn't it make more sense, looking at the electoral college map to go, well, look, there's all these great lake states, the Rust Belt, and one of the things you see there is that the white working class isn't anywhere near as republican as they are in the south, and they're actually really close in the electoral college. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. So why not do things for the white working class in the north, such as limiting immigration so that they can continue to be paid pretty well and focus on them? And the republican establishment kept going on with the hispanic plan. That was the big 2013 audit that convinced Marco Rubio that we need amnesty and so forth. But I kept saying, yeah, you know, the way you win in the electoral college is these. Is these Rust belt states around the great.

Did Rove not see that.

He. I mean, for his loyalty to the Bush dynasty, I really think George P. Bush played a huge role in the Bush family's thinking that because Jeb had married into a mexican family, that this gave the Bushes, out of all the Wasp dynasties in the United States, the greatest chance to exploit the immigration wave from Latin America and be the natural rulers of. Of a mexicanized population. I mean, George hw Bush had ten year old George P. Bush read the Declaration of Independence at the 1988 republican convention, which was a big deal because the democratic candidate had been unenthusiastic about the pledge of allegiance and so forth. So, you know, George Hw was putting his, what he called his little brown one up there on national television to the LBO. Yeah. To get that started. So. So, yeah, it made sense to Rove. You know, you got the sense that.

The more you listen to Rove, that maybe he wasn't the genius we were told he was.

Yeah. You know. Yeah, he won an election. He won, yeah, he got. He won a couple of elections for George W. Bush. Um, but, yeah. Is he this genius? Nah, but, you know, the Republicans weren't. Didn't, you know, didn't have a whole lot of people who crunched numbers and spreadsheets. So in the first decade of this century, I spent a lot of time analyzing spreadsheets and so forth of election totals and going, you know, it looks like there's a different path here. And it really runs through the north central region where white working class people vote about 50 50 Republican and Democrat. And you can get that up to 55, 60%. You can win a lot of electoral votes. So did Trump read my 2000 article? Nah. But what else was he going to do? That was the one path to the presidency. You know, it almost worked again in 2020 under pretty adverse circumstances.

So will it work this time?

I don't know. I've given up making predictions. I mean, people. People came along like Nate Silver, who just were so much more interested in predicting elections and worked so much harder at it. That was like, I don't have that gambling instinct that Nate does. And, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna retire from making predictions. I don't see myself as a great forecaster of the future. What I try to be is a historian of the present and notice things that are happening right now. So what has happened with hispanic voters in Texas? In Texas, it definitely seemed like the racial reckoning of 2020, when the Democrats went basically nuts over blacks, alienated quite a few Texas Latino Democrats. In California, less clear.

Does it even matter? I mean, California's not much of a democracy at this point.

Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's helpful in Texas in that the republican Republicans will basically lose the White House forever when Texas flips blue. The good news in Texas is that basically they have a pretty. They have a pretty strong, loyal, steadfast republican white population. A lot of the advantages of Texas are that they're not tied into guilt over the south. They were a confederate state, but they don't care about that. They care about the Alamo. They've got this whole national narrative, and it helps keep them together, and they provide strong leadership for Hispanics. And Hispanics are less, you know, domineering than people were talking about in the past. They kind of look around at their upper middle class neighbors and go, oh, okay, what do you do? Oh, you're a Republican. Okay, that sounds pretty cool. I might be a Republican, too. California, you know, the upper middle class is democratic, so the Hispanics follow that lead. So I can't tell exactly where it'll go.

How does Trump change that? I mean, it feels anecdotally like a lot of latin american immigrants like Trump.

Yeah. I mean, what Trump has done is he's taken the appeal of the Republican Party, uh, downscale compared to, say, Mitt Romney. Uh, Mitt did a pretty good job of holding on to suburban, upper middle class, the frequent flyer population, uh, corporate executives and things like that. They feel at one with him. Uh, you know, Trump is picking up working class people of all races. Uh, that's good. But, you know, it also is kind of taking the Republican Party downscale intellectually. You know, you're getting more dumb conspiracy theories out of Republicans, etcetera. You know, it's, if can the Republicans keep some competent, higher brow people around? You know, that's another question. What do you think? I mean, a big, big question is, how much is this totally Trump's personality? I mean, 2024, it looked like Ron DeSantis had, like, studied Trump and said, okay, Trump's got some interesting new ideas, some post Romney ideas, and I'm the competent, well educated guy who reads all the fine print, and I can implement some of these. And that doesn't seem like a bad pitch, but just didn't go over at all. As soon as the Democrats started arresting Trump for all sorts of charges, then that helps solve the democratic nightmare that the Republicans were going to nominate a competent 40 something to run against their octogenarian incumbent.

And so now we're stuck with a rerun of.

So you think that's what it was? It was the legal persecution of Trump.

It seemed like that blunted DeSantis, and basically Republicans went back to Trump and went like, well, if the Democrats are going to do that, then we're going to stand by Trump. And, you know, if the, you know, arresting a major candidate is un american, it's. It's totally shameful in the United States history. And the Democrats didn't get in the way and go like, oh, let's, let's not do that. They let local politicians, you know, kind of run amok, like this New York case. And, and so they got the, they got the nominee. They wanted Donald Trump, but now they're, now they're real worried that they're going to get the president. They don't want Donald Trump. So we shall see.

So you're the reason that you've emerged from your cave in Tora Bora. Sorry. Is because you've got a book. It's a beautiful looking book, and it's collected journalism, 1973 to 2023. You don't look that old, but it's called noticing. What does that mean?

Yeah, I'll hold it up here. I mean, it's a slogan that I took from George Orwell, who said that to see what's in front of one's nose takes a constant effort. And I'm trying to make it easier for people to notice the realities that they see around them and to, to understand that what they see with their own lying eyes in their daily life is also actually validated by the best of the social sciences, and that there aren't these two different realms of existence. This kind of tawdry, sublunary one where we make decisions about what neighborhoods our family should live in and what are good schools for the kids, and then this higher, more realm of the science.

The world of data.

Yeah, the world of data that proves that all those things you notice in your daily life can't possibly be true, because then that would be a stereotype. And my view is not all connected. There's just one reality out there. It goes from your personal anecdotes to what people might dismiss as anecdata, to the data, and it all tells pretty much the same story, so.

But why is it. I mean, we don't even need to get into Covid, but I just noticed from the very beginning, I never knew anyone. I know people died of COVID I never knew anyone who died of COVID I did know someone who died from the facts and a number of other people who are injured pretty conclusively by the vax. That doesn't mean that more people were injured by the vax than died of COVID I'm not saying that. But then I started to ask around, you know, do you know anyone who died of COVID Do you know anyone? Like, actually, no one. Have you had dinner with anyone who later died of COVID Do you know anyone who was injured by the vax. And I don't think I've ever met a single person who didn't have the same answer I did. Whether that's reality or not, I still don't know. But I do know there's been such an effort to tell me that I'm crazy for noticing that.

Yeah. One thing I used to do was go through the list of on Wikipedia, prominent people who have died of COVID And the thing I noticed about it was that they were almost all people who were no longer in their primes. That, oh, like, I saw, like, oh, baseball pitcher hall of Famer Tom Seaver has died at age 74 of COVID And then I looked up a little more about him and like, well, you know, he probably would have had another good couple decades going to old timers games and stuff like that. But then it turned out that he dropped out of public life the year before because he had dementia and Parkinson's. Just general. He didn't have a good life ahead of him. And so I think that's one of the things that was going on, was that Covid was really taking a toll among people who had passed their primes and were toward the last decade of their lives and weren't no longer in the public eye. And so that's, that sort of helps explain the thesis that, yeah, there was a lot of COVID deaths. The antithesis that, like, you know, it's not like anybody I was, like, met and I knew at work dropped dead of COVID And then you get the synthesis of, like, oh, yeah, it's.

It mostly killed off people who were, who were probably close to retirement, retired in ill health from other things and so on.

So I think what's interesting is the point of social science to point was to bring the principles of science, of the scientific method, to bear on the world just right around us and to make it clear what we were actually seeing, I think.

Yeah.

But it seems like its use, at least over the past several years, has been to do the opposite, which is to obscure what we're actually seeing, living, experiencing, and tell us a story that's not true.

Yeah.

Is that my imagination?

No, it's. I mean, the issue is that so much data has piled up that we can now answer quite a few questions that were beyond our capability beforehand. I mean, and the answers we keep getting are the generally politically incorrect ones that were anticipated by the bad people, the Charles Murrays and James Q. Wilsons in the 20th century. So, for example, we have an enormous amount of data from DNA that tells us about our racial ancestors. And what have we discovered in that in this century? Did the conventional wisdom that race does not biologically exist be proven? No, of course not. You can call up ancestry.com or 23 andme, and they'll tell you your race to three digits. You know, they'll tell you if you're jewish, they'll tell you you're 49.8% Ashkenazi. Other data is piling up. There's a Harvard economist named Raj Chetty who's done phenomenal work talking government bureaucracies into letting him work with totally confidential data, like the tax returns of everybody in the country. And so he can do studies that nobody ever had the chutzpah to dream before, that they didn't get their hands on the data. So, for example, he tracked 21 million Americans across 30 years of their lives.

He looked at how much money their parents made in the 1990s, and then he looked at things like, were they in jail on Census day, April 1, 2010, when they were about 30 years old? And so then he could plot out, what are the odds of a man being in jail based on how poor rich's parents were? And not surprisingly, poor guys who grew up poor go to jail a lot more. He could also answer, using data from the census Bureau, what the race was of all 21 million of his people. And he discovered, yeah, in general, blacks who had the exact same income as whites growing up as kids in the nineties in 2010, were in jail three to ten times more often than whites, who were their exact peers in terms of family income. And this is like, wow, I never expected somebody to be able to come up with that. And it goes, yeah. So when people wonder, why are blacks in jail more often? Is it. Is it poverty? And poverty plays a role, but even without poverty, you take it all away. At the highest level, blacks. At the highest percentile, blacks go to jail about ten times as often as the richest whites.

So we're able to answer all sorts of social science questions these days, but nobody likes the answers they're getting.

Well, it did seem like when we finally unraveled the human genome, which was right around the time the bell curve came out, ish. Yeah, that's when the whole conversation got shut down.

Yeah.

Maybe we had too much information.

Yeah. What happened at a ceremony that Bill Clinton put on in the presidential Rose Garden in 2000 for the human Genome project? They just sort of made progress decoding a single genome, which was mostly that of entrepreneur Craig Venter, who'd helped out enormously and Craig got up and made a speech that was exactly what the zeitgeist wanted to hear. He said, we've looked at the human genome, or his human genome, and we discovered the one thing you can't see in it is race. There's no difference whatsoever genetically between different genomes in terms of racial ancestry. Well, then within three, four, five years, the evidence was piling up. It was like, no, actually, you can tell exactly what the ancestry of people is. Became a sizable business very quickly. But as far as I can tell, a huge fraction of the population remembers hearing that the science has proven that race doesn't exist genetically, and they've never rethought it since that 2000 speech by Venter standing next to Bill Clinton. So people want to believe some things. They want to believe that the science has proven all of this anti racist dogmas that they get told, and they just sort of ignore that.

Now it's actually moving the other direction. And it's time that we. It's time that we think realistically about, you know, what the data is telling us. And personally, I don't think it's the end of the world by any means. And I think we can all get along pretty well knowing the realities, but a lot of people are just terrified of them and basically want to lie about it.

I mean, the way that previous civilizations held together in the face of knowledge of genetic and racial differences, which are obviously real, but they weren't always at war with themselves. And one of the ways they did that was by believing in a religious doctrine that said God created everybody. Therefore, despite whatever differences we have, we are all of equal value without that overlay, which we no longer have. How do you keep a society together in the face of these realities?

Yeah, I mean, the Democrats have been moving toward the. Toward a sort of nazi type solution of having a scapegoat who unites everybody else by being the locus of evil, namely whites. Or, you know, the way the democratic works, it's all sorts of circles within circles. So you get more pokemon points for being non white, you get diversity points for being a woman, you get more diversity points if you were born a man, etcetera, etcetera. But, yeah, unifying around a certain scapegoat population that does not have a good track record.

What happens in the end?

What happens in the end? We don't know. Does it get worse? Or one of the things we see maybe over the last year is people just objecting to it and pushing back and laughing at the conventional wisdom and scoffing at it and saying, you know, you guys are just making this up. It's not true. You're just saying it so you can get Dei money and easy sinecure jobs. And, you know, we don't believe this.

One thing ambitious people are doing and you've written about this is just denying being white.

Yeah.

And the flight from white, what is that?

Flight from white has a lot of different dimensions. It's people. It's kids applying to college and remembering their grandmother was, their irish grandmother was born in Buenos Aires before she went back to Ireland, and in Argentina, the.

Whitest country in the world.

Yeah, it's so stupid. But it's also happening at the government level, the census and so forth. So the Biden administration just recently announced that there allowing Middle Easterners and North Africans to have their own racial category, Mena, so that they don't have the unprofitable, ignominious fate of having to check white or caucasian. And this has a long tradition in the United States. If you go back to in the 1970s, South Asians were classified as white, but that really annoyed the south asian businessmen because east asian businessmen were getting all sorts of low interest loans from the SBA. As a minority, they were getting contracting preferences on government deals. And the South Asians said, well, hey, we just got off the airplane. We should be getting those deals too. And so the south asian organizations got themselves declared to be asian and grouped in with the Orientals and formed the new asian group so they could get these good deals from the government that white people are not entitled to. And so that was an early example of flight from white. You see it with the Hispanics increasingly. Originally, when the hispanic category was created, it was set up so Hispanics could get good deals from the government and get good affirmative action benefits, but without actually declaring themselves to be racially white.

Because a lot of them were kind of took pride in their kind of, they took racist pride in their blue blooded spanish heritage and so forth.

Well, there's an awful lot of that in Latin America.

So they increased so they could set up a separate ethnicity for Hispanics so you could get all the affirmative action benefits without actually admitting your shame of being white. But enough time has gone by that only yourself Fuentes types anymore are like, really publicly white racist from Latin America. And now it's more prestigious to declare yourself racially. I'm hispanic. Even though nobody's exactly sure what that means.

What does it mean? I'm confused too, because would that include Brazil, which is, of course, a different language it's not right. And a different colonial power. But, of course, it's a multiracial country, heavily black country, as is Cuba, which is spanish speaking. I mean, it's like. I don't understand. What does the word mean?

Yes. Are Brazilians and Portuguese included in Hispanics, or are they Lusitanics? And according to a book I read by David Bernstein, categorized, I believe it's called law professor. He said that most of the federal government will not give you a break on federal contracting if you put down your brazilian, except the Department of Transportation. They'll give you racial preferences for bidding on a highway, overpay caste or something like that. If you're brazilian, they'll include them in the Hispanics. So it's. I mean, we live. We live in a society that's increasingly mixed in terms of ancestry. So we have more and more people coming out who are a quarter this and a quarter that, and there's lots of money on the table. And as long as you're not. As long as you don't declare yourself white, you've got. Got all sorts of opportunities to get free beats.

I wonder how long this can go on, though, before it just blows up the country. I mean, is there any chance of getting back to a race blind posture, officially by the federal government? I mean, you can have whatever opinions you want on race, but the government, which represents everybody, has to treat american citizens equally as citizens. Is there any hope for that?

I mean, the Supreme Court nominally outlawed affirmative action in colleges, like, because Harvard was clearly, clearly discriminating against Asians. On the other hand, they left huge loopholes, like, oh, well, yeah, you can write about your race in your essay, and, you know, the admissions department can then go, oh, this kid is, you know, black. So we'll give him, you know, 50 extra Pokemon points on his application. I mean, the one issue is that asian students are pulling away so fast from everybody else in terms of things like SAT scores, that the asian black gaps are opening up so widely that if you go to total color blind college admissions at the high end, you end up with a campus with very, very few blacks qualifying to get in. And a huge number of Asians and places like Harvard really worry about whether they might turn out like Yogi Berra's former favorite restaurant that got so popular that nobody goes there anymore. So if Harvard becomes 56% asian, are Asians going to consider Harvard Cool? Or do Asians want to go to places that there's a lot of white people there? Nobody really knows what I don't know is whether the asian rise, the rise in asian SATS scores is completely legitimate and they just really have been getting so much smarter than everybody else in the 21st century that asian test scores are pulling away from the field like secretariat in the 1973 Belmont.

Or, you know, could there be other reasons? Yeah, could it be? I mean, we know there's a lot of cheating in Asia itself on the satisfactory.

I don't think people bring their bad habits when they come here, do you?

Yeah. I mean, nobody can possibly communicate across the Pacific Ocean. It's thousands of miles wide. How could anybody text message what was on the test? Or just the enormous amount of tiger mother prep that Asians brought with them from their 2000 year old tradition of taking tests to become mandarins and doing enormous amounts of test prep for years? Or is it. Or there's possible technical reasons that the people making the SAT have been criticized for one thing or another for discriminating against blacks and Latinos, so they keep doing things like, let's get rid of analogies and that'll be fairer. But it winds up just benefiting the Asians most of all.

Why?

Oh, it was more of a. When they had analogies, it was harder to memorize, apparently, and test prep didn't work as well. It took a certain amount of creativity and kind of insight in the brain and. But the university of California demanded getting rid of analogies about 20 years ago. So the college board said, yeah, sure, you're our biggest customer, we'll do what you want. And things just sort of got worse after that.

But there has been a noticeable rise, relative rise, in asian SATS scores.

Yes, huge. Huge since the year 2000. And I think basically we should have blue ribbon commission to look into, like, what's going on exactly with the SAT? I mean, that's one reason that Covid came.

I'm sorry, just before you say that, but does it still matter? I mean, is that the trend of schools getting rid of the SAT requirement, is that real or.

They definitely all happen during COVID and the racial reckoning at once, all the colleges went, well, they had to cancel some SAT tests because they had to be 6ft apart and they couldn't fit in the classroom, etcetera. And then they all decided, due to the racial reckoning, that they weren't going to take sats and in fact, they were going to make it go totally test optional. And the University of California went further. They ban the applicants from submitting any kind of test score. And then what happened was that the colleges started noticing like, wow, these kids who are showing up that we let in, they're not very bright. They are not going to become computer science graduates of MIT. So MIT was the first one that went, ah, this was stupid. We're going back to demanding standardized tests. And now Harvard's jumped on board. Everybody except the University of California at the elite level is moving in that direction because it was.

So it is a measure of aptitude, actually.

Yeah. And it. Yeah, it's a very good measure of aptitude. It tells, you know, GPA. High school GPA is a great measure, but it's hard to compare schools. Some schools are hard in grades, some are easy. Having a test and having high school grades, you can put them together and they work pretty well. But because of the racial gaps that have been around forever and these things, it was decided during the racial reckoning that absolutely proves, as Ibram X Kendi has demonstrated by scientific logic, that the only reason some races might be doing better than other races is because of the evil whiteness. But of course, what it turns out is the Asians are doing much, much.

Better because of the evil of whiteness.

Because nobody really knows, because nobody's that interested in studying it, because it sounds like the kind of thing you could get canceled for finding out. And just in general, we have a lot of problems that have been swept under the rug in recent years because they don't fit within the ideologies, the woke ideologies. And just to think about them is kind of dangerous sounding when the planes start crashing. Yeah.

Will people start thinking about him?

I hope so. I mean, my father worked for Lockheed from the late thirties to the 1980s, and when one of his planes crashed, he'd spent two months on the site, because when a plane hits the ground, it spreads out over a mile or so, picking up all the pieces of the plane so they could reassemble it. And there's a jigsaw puzzle and figure out why it crashed and also picking up pieces of the pilot and the passengers and so forth. And over, you know, the last hundred years, people who were picked because they were smart and hard working have done a whole lot of good at getting airplanes, so they don't crash very much anymore. Now, Boeing may be working on reversing a lot of that history, but, yeah, you know, we got a lot better at things by having systems to find people who were competent and work hard. And now the zeitgeist in the 21st century has been moving away from that. Will we see a lot of planes crashing? God, I hope not. But, you know, we need to make a 180 degree u turn in terms of what we value, whether it's competence or diversity.

And lately diversity has been winning and that's going to get people killed.

Is there a point, I mean, I'm asking these questions because South Africa tried this and the country is just continuously degraded for, well, 30 years this year, to the point where there's no electricity in parts at times and the murder rate is among the highest in the world and the rape rate is the highest in the world. But there's no deceleration that I can tell from afar, thousands of miles away. But I'm watching and it's like, no, there's no second guessing. It's just like going to ride it right back to the Stone Age, pretend it was never an advanced society in our country, which is different from South Africa in a lot of ways. Will there be a point like when the planes do crash and the air traffic controllers are just high or too dumb or distracted, don't care to keep the planes from crashing? Will there be a public demand, like, no, no, no, let's just hire viability from now on?

Well, what we've seen is what we saw with what we talked about earlier, homicides and car crashes, huge increases, and we've seen some pushback against that. But, you know, the establishment doesn't really want to talk about why that happened because it's embarrassing for them. On the other hand, the airplanes, you know, important people fly a lot more than unimportant people do. And that's one reason we have, like, pretty strict rules about who can be a pilot. There was a plane crash in 2009. Congressmen take a lot of flights to get back to their home district.

The one in Buffalo.

Yeah. So they immediately passed some laws that made it. Made it harder to become a pilot. And there hasn't been a fatal plane crash of american airliner since then. And, you know, some of it is we just, we got really good pilots these days, in part because congressmen worry about stuff like that now, are we? You know, but on the other hand, the Obama administration came along and basically sabotaged the system for hiring air traffic controllers. And Congress had set up a pretty good system for finding good people in the nineties. But, yeah, it turned out that white men really like air traffic. They really like airplanes. It's like, you know, what is, what is a, what have white men ever done with airplanes since the Wright brothers? So there, there were too many whites. So the Obama administration came up with a totally absurd, corrupt test to hire more black guys. And so what happens is then you get fewer people, still make it through the training. So the training has been kept pretty legitimate. So you flunk out more people, which then means that you're under the number of air traffic controllers you expected.

So you're making the, them work really long hours and they're getting more and more tired on the job and they're making mistakes and stuff like that. And it tracks back to the Obama administration's DEI program for air traffic controllers. Can we avoid that? Yeah, we can. We just got to talk about it. And we just can't just shut down discussion by saying, are you saying that, you know, a stereotype that on average, blacks wouldn't make as good air traffic controllers as whites? And the answer is, yeah. Yeah, I'm saying that. So you expect to have a fewer percentage passing the test. And we can live with it. We live with it every day in sports that there are racial differences in performance on average, and nobody cares that much. And, you know, God bless them. We love sports. So, yeah, there is hope for the country that we can go back and have a philosophy for, you know, for things like jet travel that, where we consider it as important as the NFL, and therefore, we can't have, you know, racial quotas getting in the way. That doesn't seem out of outlandish.

No, it doesn't. So last question, and I sort of began with this, but maybe you've, I just want to push a little more. Why do you think that you're able to have these conversations and when you travel the country talking about your book, you're not attacked? And, you know, speaking of good signs, do you take that as a good sign that the country's becoming more open?

Well, yeah, somebody suggested to me, it's like, well, Steve, you're in, you're in the best possible position. It's the fourth year of a democratic president. Everybody's sick of Biden. But if Trump gets elected, then there will be an enormous effort on the part of the establishment to crack down on, you know, honest, dissident voices that lead to horrible outcomes like Trump getting reelected. And if, if Biden wins, then they'll go, oh, we've got four more years and we really got to change things. So we never let Trump win. Trump's type people win again. So it could be a short term thaw or it could be that enough people have noticed and have been empowered by changes like Elon Musk opening up Twitter so that, you know, I can have 125,000 followers just, you know, the accumulation of little changes like that, that these ideas that I've been propounding for 30 years and have people out there going, yeah, that sailor's ideas, they make sense. He's like the most reasonable guy in America. Maybe we've gone through a watershed and we're beyond the mania of the racial reckoning and the great awokening, knock on wood. I hope so.

Or this period, ten years from now is described as the dark ages, where Steve Saylor was actually in public.

Yeah.

I mean, face uncovered.

I mean, what do you think I mean? All right, let me ask you why. Why me in particular? That I, I became sort of the Lord Voldemort, whose name cannot be, cannot be mentioned when I'm just, you know, this kind of, to my mind, this very kind of public spirited, benevolent guy who can see both sides of various problems.

Well, I've always thought that. I've always thought that you were particularly threatening because you're so obviously moderate by temperament. You're just clearly not a hater. You can smell that on people instantly. You're very reasonable, and you use the language that the left would like to keep for itself, like of science, of reason, of data, and you actually argue from that basis, and they'd like a monopoly on that. And so there's something really threatening about a guy who's like, no, actually, no, hear the numbers and doesn't raise his voice. That's way more threatening than some guy who's jumping up and down on cable news or, you know, sending crazed tweets all day long. That person is, you know, his potential audience is much smaller than yours. Your potential audience is like, you know, sort of any open minded person who'd like to solve a problem. That's always been my thought.

Yeah. Yeah, I hope so. But, yeah, it's, it's, it's been, you know, a long, strange trip.

But did it bother you when they called you a nazi or white supremacist or when they threw these slurs at you for so long?

I mean, I didn't, it seemed ridiculous, but it did also didn't seem like, it also seemed like what they want to do is get you into a position where it's like, oh, I'm not one of those horrible people. Here's, these six guys are the really horrible people, and get me to condemn people who get to drive them out of publicity. It's kind of the way you hear liberals talk about, well, the great thing about William F. Buckley was he cracked down on Pat Buchanan. All right, and I never met Mister Buckley. You know, I worked for National Review, wrote for National Review in the nineties, but I did. I did meet Mister Buchanan. And, you know, Pat was a great guy. I mean, I mean, one of my last memories of my father before he died at 95 was Pat sent me one of his new books, and he'd gone through and put post it notes on every page where he quoted me or made reference to some concept of mine. So I showed it to my dad and he read it. He looked through at all the things that Pat had with his own hand, had said all the nice things he'd said about me and was like, wow, this is great.

And that was like the last thing or last interaction before he died. I thank Pat Buchanan for it. And a lot of people have good stories about Pat Buchanan.

What a, what a nice man.

Yes, absolutely.

You know, so, I mean, I guess it could kind of go either way. It depends on who's writing the history. I mean, I bet, I'd bet money that, you know, Pat Buchanan is described in 50 years when there's not a single living person who actually knew him, you know, some sort of monster hater or something like that, wouldn't you think?

Yeah, I mean, I mean, they say history is written by the winners. My impression is more history is written by historians who got paid by one side or the other, not necessarily the winners, to write the history. So, you know, for a hundred years after the civil war in the United States, the south, which was mostly pretty broke, but they could still scrape together enough money to pay historians to write the story of the lost cause. And so most of our history books were kind of biased in favor of the south, you know, what's, how we're going to remember, you know, our time. I don't know, but, you know, it could go, it could change very much. And, you know, maybe, maybe we'll have different heroes all of a sudden. You know, that's, that's, maybe you and you and me will come out looking pretty good.

Well, I have trouble believing that, but I admire you.

Well, me, too.

But Steve, so thank you very much.

All right. Thank you, Tucker. Thanks.

Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to TuckerCarlson to see everything that we have made the complete library tuckercarlson.com.