Calgary Audio. Ladies and gentlemen, it is June and twenty two. I am at Bolinsky. This is your weekly dose substanity, the prevailing narrative, and so the issue that I think needs some sanity brought to it, the conversation around gun control, gun violence and mass shootings. Recent horrifying incidents in Valida, Texas, Buffalo, New York really tugged at the nation's heart strings and brought this conversation front and center. And regardless of what anyone may think in response to some tragic incidents, that hey, these things happen, but of course this is going to spark a national conversation and and bring this situation to a head over one how do these things happen? Into what can be done to address them? I have shied away from addressing these topics so far in this podcast, at least in detail, because I want to have the right conversation. There's a gentleman that I'll be interviewing on this episode. His name is Wilfred Riley. He is a professor at Kentucky State University. Is a public intellectual. It's written or such publications as Newsweek, tablet, magazine, commentary, a bunch of others City Journal. It's done amazing work. I found him to be a really interesting commentator on a host of issues, but also, did you know, really interesting work and not necessarily work that I agree with a on the gun issue, in the gun control issue, and this was someone that I felt was looking at the situation from a number of different angles and looking at it in his his most empiric sense possible. And that's why I really liked having this conversation Will with Wilford. And you know, he's looking at it from the perspective of okay, in determining the extent of our gun violence problem, are we using the right comps? Are are the way that the politicians and the media and those discussing gun control talking about the various firearms? Is that realistic? Because in this day and age, a lot of times, uh, the way that public commentators or the public conversation gets swamped with pure I hate to use the term misinformation, but Falsehood's right that people throw around lingo and and kind of focus in one respect on an issue in a way that may make people feel good or may make people feel like they are being productive on the issue, but really do not accurately reflect what's going on, and I think he's able to kind of sift through that and really synthesize things from a pretty broad perspective. And as you'll hear, you know, he's generally a you know, pro gun advocate, somewhat skeptical of gun control, but certainly not dogmatic about it. You know, there was the only major federal policy advancement here was a gun bill put forth by some Senate Democrats, which seems to be getting some support right now, and Wilfred and I both agree, you know, we both are generally in support of that legislation and the principles espoused in that policy. So um a conversation that kind of acknowledges the many different sides of this debate UM, and certainly is not dismissive of guns nor dismissive of gun control. That's the conversation that I've been wanting to have, and I think that we have it with Wilford uh this week, and that is coming up in just a bit. But also, you know, we need beyond the specific and the more empirical conversation about gun control and gun violence. There's always this line, Hey, it's not a gun problem to mental health problem, or people retorting that this is just all a matter of America's unique gun culture, and how do we have so many more guns on the streets in circulation than anywhere else, And that's also a consideration, But I think that's a false dichotomy, because when we're thinking about this issue of mass shooters, this is a very unique American phenomenon. And when gun gun advocates or those defender defenders of the Second Amendment do mention that, hey, we've always had a lot of guns, we've only had mass shootings recently, they're not wrong about that, right When they use that to completely dismiss the role of guns in these mass shootings, I think that's also not I think that's a bit of a cheap, manipulative rhetorical trick. So we need we can't we can't be dismissive of when we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater. But it does beg the question why do we have so many people who are desirous, who have the desire and intent to indiscriminately murder innocent individuals. Right to the fact that someone could even want to go into an elementary school and start murdering children. While the guns do provide some of the means for that result, they don't provide the intent. This how us to start with a person who is so dark, who is so lost, who's turned to nihilism, who wants to go ahead and and has the intent to go and inflict that harm on society and innocent individuals in the Vall Day, Texas UH case, on innocent children. And that's something that we need to be be looking at as well. And there was one piece that I thought was particularly good. It's actually been getting a lot of love and a lot of traction on Twitter. There's a writer named Catherine d. I think she's on Twitter under the handle default friend, and she's an interesting cultural commentator, and she wrote a piece called mass shootings in the World liberalism made the debate over more or less gun control completely misses the horrifying heart of the matter. The modern world breeds the nihilism behind mass shootings. And so when she's saying liberalism, she doesn't mean political liberalism and blaming quote unquote the libs. Right, She's saying that liberalism over you know, the liberalization of modern society and enhancement of individual let's called I don't want to say individual freedom, but individual independence and us really siloing into our own worlds that she believes has created a lot of people thrive in that environment. A lot of people also slip through the cracks and turn to nihilism. And so how does Catherine describe nihilism? Seems to describe it as a stripping way of all meaning and all belief that these killers, they believe society and modernity and the life that they're in, the world that they're encounter has no meaning and thus can be stripped away. And this life becomes meaning because society has no meaning, life becomes meaningless. Thus there's no there's no consequence, and there's nothing wrong with going and ending life. And that's what that is, both a cause and effect of these people turning to nihilism and murder. So how does she describe the problem. Generally, the explanations offered by journalists and politicians are always the same. Online radicalization, video games, white supremacy, loneliness, fatherlessness, lack of community. The left demand stricter gun control and red flag laws. The right, fearful the left may prevail, insists that the real issue is our mental health epidemic, the result we hear of all those antidepressants and antipsychotics being prescribed to fatherless young men, and that the solution is to arm school teachers and hire more on campus cops. And I think, as you'll see, you know, the way that she's framing that is that dichotomy that is once again a false dichotomy that each side is trying to essentially, uh deflect blame for anything that they their political faction might have to do with the problem, and everybody seems to be missing the point. As she goes on. Influencers on both sides of the divide greatly exacerbate things by hammering every calamity into the preferred tool of choice, which boils down to fewer guns or more guns. Right. So it's like everyone says, okay, the problem. We either need more guns so the good you know, the good guys with the guns can stop bad guys with guns, or we need less guns because oh my god, America has ten times as many guns as anywhere else on earth. We have so much gun violence and we live in this crazy outlaw society, right, But neither of those are It's not It's not that simple. In either direction, she goes on, But you know what's more outrageous than failing to implement mandatory gun buybacks or school shooters not being stopped in their tracks by social studies, by social studies, teachers packing heat the coin insistent by public figures and talking heads on fitting these incidents into self serving click generating narratives. Right, So everybody's trying to stick the problem into their own super simplistic headline. Right, But that looks forgets that if you go look in to the individuals who turn out to be mass shooters, there's kind of an eerie consistency that a lot of these people seem to have fairly well developed philosophies on why they're killers, on why they're justifiable, Like these are not. You know, the Uvalde, Texas killer, he seemed to be just kind of a societal reject, right he was holding up you know, dead pictures of cats on the Internet and things of that nature. But for instance, Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, he had entire YouTube channel essentially explaining his philosophy, right, he had content out there talking about his existential angst. And it is simply not necessarily in a whiny matter his philosophy on why society was meaningless, and thus, you know, you needed to inflict some harm upon society in that matter, on how the system needed to be torn down, on how there is no meaning. Right. So Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, was heavily influenced by Nietzsche. So you see how a person is not really handling modern society very well, but they have a certain level of intelligence, and they turned to these philosophies to kind of explain their not their depression, right, they explain their meaningless to themselves, and thus they use that to justify herrick horrific acts. James Holmes, the shooter in Aurora, Colorado, who went into the movie theater that was playing Batman, I guess and murdered twelve people. I mean he had a neuroscience degree. You keep on looking back through these incidents, the unit bomber was a super human genius. I mean, you graduated from Harvard like sixteen, and you see that these people, I mean to a certain extent, someone could look at it and say, well, a certain level of intelligence, it can almost drive a person crazy. So apparently there was a blogger who went through every video on Adam Lanza's YouTube channel and kind of analyzed his message and his philosophy to really start to search for what was the colonel, what really sparked this nihilistic uh, this nihilistic outlook that led to Adam Lanza to go and shoot a bunch of kids. So when an essay Blithering Genius describes Lanzs philosophy as the rejection of culture, Lanza he writes thought of culture as a delusion, as a disease. He hypothesized that lands of targeted schools because that is where in his thinking, at least our culture, our values is transmitted. More to the point, he killed children because they represent the propagation of life. He couldn't have viewed murder as harmful, at least not philosophically. Blithering Genius rights, this is very much evidence of a nihilistic philosophy, right, People who believe the world life has absolutely no meaning, and they they act on their worst impulses and they want to take their hate and their pain out on others. Okay, So this is something that seems to be happening more in America than in other places. So even places that have a lot of gun violence, a lot of handgun violence. Um as we'll get into Wilford. You know, that makes it the majority of violence in America as well. However, these kind of crazy psycho killer mass murder incidents do seem to be happening at a higher rate in the United States, and because we keep on producing a lot more nihilism for some reason. And Catherine DSPs. She seems to believe that this is to a certain extent a bit of an outgrowth or an extension of, you know, of non psychotic society right of the world that the rest of us inhabit, and that some of the characteristics of modern life are breeding this type of thing. As she writes, we imagine that these killers have nothing to do with everyone else, that they're like a leper colony apart from the rest of us, and every so often one escapes and spreads his disease. We want to believe that because it makes us feel good, but the reality is the smudge of nihilism's fingerprints stains all things everywhere. She frames it in terms of a numbing out of people in constant states of numbing and distraction, that that the killers aren't able to dive into that a lot of people are trying to numb their worst instincts, and these killers they simply don't have the capability to do that, and that's why they lash out. It's the commingling of our leisure and our anesthesia. We drink to escape, we exercise until we can't feel anything. We propel ourselves into fantasy lives with fandom. It's even paradoxically in our insistence on living in the moment. Nothing matters, so we might as well be happy where we are. Is that it is that that people because they can't see anything broader than themselves. The darker side of YOLO is how it forecloses on the possibility that our lives matter in any grander sense, that we can be part of a tradition that started long before we were born, and we'll extend for ages after we die. So the at this point actually resonates quite a bit. Uh, is that people in losing a sense of community and losing a sense of tradition and history and really, you know, living so much for the here and now and for themselves, have lost any attachment to any you know, I don't want to put this into religious terms, but any attachment to a higher vision and a higher power, and when that goes wrong, it goes really wrong. And so I see her point and that some of the vestiges of modern society that for many of us, may you know, may they may lead to the increase in depression, the increase in opioids, the increase in using psychoactive medication, things of that nature. To this that a lot of people they can kind of wad through this haze and and their living life at less than their full optimization, but they don't turn to murder. Yet the same dynamics that are leading them to leave less than fulfilling lives are kind of living life through some kind of mild despair. They're leading some people to turn to real dark places, and that's what's leading to the atom lands is of the world, the Uvoli day killers, and things of that nature. Catherine's peci also frames us in terms of narcissism, that self obsession, that the quest for self actualization that our society seems to be constantly on at all times is really driving a lot of people insane. Right, It's why people kind of have this this lib self deprecating humor about how nothing matters anymore. So, Okay, it doesn't matter that that their life is spiraling downwards. You see this a lot in some of the meme accounts, and you know, for better for worse, a lot of the female meme accounts that are about you know, look at how much of a hot mess I am. Oh, my god, my life. I'm always hanging on by a thread. I don't have everything together. But that's what that's why my life is such a wild ride. And ha ha, isn't it funny that you know that my life is so chaotic and messy at all times? Maybe you know, maybe that is derived from narcissism. Uh, and maybe that's not the healthiest thing. And of course we're not trying to equate that with people who going indiscriminately murder uh, innocent strangers. Right, But there does once again, there does seem to be some overlap about the general meaningless and on we that a lot of people and stagnation that a lot of people are finding in modern life. Um. The way she closes it, the debate over guns are fewer guns completely misses the horrifying heart of the matter, the world built by modern liberalism, which took for its tell us the maximization of individual autonomy. In this guaranteed total alienation breeds the nihilism behind these shootings. So in the maximization of individual autonomy is leading to alienation. People are not connected, they're not connected to their communities, they're not connected to others and what Like I said, there's a lot of people who can be functional in that manner. But when when you come across a person who is smart, motivated and not functional in that environment, we're popping out too many of these people. And that's what's really scary. It's a concept, and once again going back back to the false dichotomy of who do we have a gun problem or a mental health and a mental health and let's call it a happiness and despair problem. Right, it's not a one or the other. Um, if you come with a a concept called coupling, where one phenomenon or another phenomenon wall separate, are feasible, right there, not that problematic. But when you match the two phenomenon together at the same time, when they're both present at the same time, that's when things become really problematic and leads to some harmful results. Right. So in this case, if we just had a lot of guns as we used to It might not be such a problem if we just had a lot of unhappy people who are getting lost in this kind of ex sesse of alienated narcissism and and you know, uh, letting the devil creep into their soul um, that might not be such a problem either. But when you have so many people who have, you know, let's call it nihilistic narcissistic leanings, and so many guns in circulation, and such easy access to gun when you put those two together, it's a lot of trouble. And I think that's what we're seeing in American society right now. So Catherine's piece, it's phenomenal. Go check it out. Coming up in just a moment. You know, this was a little more of a philosophical look at the gun the gun issue, So this segment was a little bit more of a philosophical, holistic look at the mass shooting phenomenon. In the issue, we get into a little bit more of an objective, empirical look at the gun control problem and a host of other topics with Wilfred Riley coming up in just a minute. I think you guys are gonna really enjoy it. Please stick around, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Matt Blinsky. This is the Prevailing Narrative, and one of the objectives of this podcast it's to bring you some of the smartest, most insightful public intellectuals and commentators, and I'm here today with one of them named Wilfred. Riley found him on Twitter and he's always got a very poignant point of view on any number of topics. One that has definitely been on people's minds recently our mass shootings and gun control. And you know, it's been a couple of weeks since the UV Aliday shootings and the Buffalo shootings, and you know, Wilford and I have been trying to have this discussion for a moment or a minute or two. But one piece that he released right after the You've all this shooting I found particularly interesting, and then the meta commentary around it. It was in Newsweek, uh and titled We're not an outlier. Targeted solutions will make America safer than gun control. So definitely want to dig into that piece with you. But first off, Wilford, thanks you, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, glad, you're glad to be on so UM you know your perspective here. I guess there's two parts and you elaborate on it in the piece. But one, America is not an outlier in terms of gun violence, and then targeted solutions. So I'd like to attack that first piece initially. Um, the claim that No, America, despite you know, generally high rate, very high rate of gun ownership and seemingly high rate of gun violence, is not necessarily an outlier in that regard. Yeah, I mean a lot of the things that I say are just sort of empirical facts. I mean, me bringing some of this stuff from the political science world into that high end public intellectual space. Um, the USA is definitely not an outlier when it comes to violence or gun violence. I mean, there's a site, the Global Economy dot com that you can go to to look at the rankings of different countries and they've got all kind of things health spending and outcomes, COVID child mortality. But in the North American zone, there's a graphic homicide rate in North America that I'm looking at right now. There are eighteen countries and the USA ranked seventeen, so second best in terms of murder. I mean, these are pretty civilized countries. I mean, you've got the Island Paradise is like Jamaica. Um, You've got Mexico, You've got Puerto Rico, one of our own territories, Costa Rica, You've got Canada, Bermuda. So all of those countries except for Canada last year have higher murder rates than the USA. I mean, and to put our murder rate, we've got a five murders per one thousand people per year. To put that in context, Jamaica it is a very pleasant, civilized country. As about sixty, they've got a fifty seven. So what you often see with the USA and no excuses for kind of like hood and holler crime in the USA. But what you often see with America when this kind of analysis takes place in the totally mainstream media is that will be compared to a set of maybe seven very small, exclusively white, exclusively upper middle income o e c D countries like Norway, and people will say things like, the USA obviously is the outlier on this graphic, so it'll be the seven like Norway murders per one thousand one, and then there's US at the bottom, and that that looks wildly uncivilized. But the response is just if you throw any size peer of ours except maybe China and they're lying on that graph of Russia Brazil, you're gonna see dramatic differences. And this this has very little to do with race. For example, some of the things we obsess about Russia's virtually all Caucasian believe the Caucasus Mountains are in Russia actually are one of the nearby countries. But I mean, They're murder rate is ten per one thousands. So if you actually take that map of countries globally and break us out, let's see where we fall. Actually, I don't want to walk out too much on this, so let's just look at all world. Hope, feel free to walk out as much as possible. And I'm pulling up World right now. Homicides, So we are thirty second, And again a lot of these countries aren't really reporting data. I mean, so when you go down here and you see that, like you know, for example, Bosnia says they have one homicide per one hundred thousand people, so does Guinea Bissu and Africa, like I'm not I'm not too sure about that. I mean, among those countries that are accurately reporting data, we're doing pretty well. And again number one in the world is l Salvador That sixty one eight murders per one thousand. Yeah, I mean, so the argument that we're number one in the world or number one in our weight class or something that that's just not true. You can still say we have too much crime, but then you're getting into an empirical argument, like no one denies the crime is bad. So like here a couple of people out there that seems and maybe not outright denied, but seems to at least minimize it quite a bit these days. But that's uh, part of part of our conversation. But and fair point in terms of you know, they kind of flaw uh the kind of flawed reasoning or just the outright you know, inaccuracy of claiming us to be an outlier. But okay, and and how you know, kind of carving out a certain uh irrelevant sample size to as point of comparison. But okay, some people do look at us and say, despite a seventy decrease in the homicide rate since the early nineties, we're still at three or four times most of those Western European countries. Um, obviously they shouldn't necessarily be the only point of comparison, But what what can we trace? What what are the distinguishing factors? Why are murder rate is so much higher than those countries. I mean, it's important to just be honest about this. I mean, so first of all, like the northern white murder rate in the USA is on par with most of Europe. I mean, so the reason why the USA has a crime rate is that we're a very We're a gigantic, continental, very diverse country. So we have large racial minorities that got nearly to the point of war ethnic conflict with the majority in the past, where in the black community there wasn't much policing, so you had to develop an alternative set of legal norms. I mean, you have that in the USA. You don't have that in Norway. I mean you have a two thousand mile border with a second World country. Yeah, I mean, if if you want to talk about where a fair chunk of crime on the drug side is coming from, so on down the line. So again I think something like Sweden or Norway or Switzerland is an idiotic comparison for the USA. And just getting back to that first point, like the white northern crime rate in the USA is on par with Sweden or Switzerland. So when someone says, well, you have a higher crime rate than Swedes in Sweden, the question would be, to some extent, well, what's the crime rate for Swedes in America? I mean it makes no sense to not quote unquote rittennecks or young black men or the massive young working class immigrant population that we had have off of our stat or yeah, it makes no sense to keep them on our stats and then compare our full complex population to the population of Scandinavia. The black the black homicide rate, and again I mean they're very high crime rates in regions of Appalachia, I mean Latino community. So I don't like the ana of blaming one group here, but the black homicide rate is sixteen per one thousand. The white rates about two. And that's what southerns and so on included in the mix. So when you ask, well, why is the murder rate elevated relative to Europe, I mean more than half of it just traces to that that there's a very large minority group here that clashed for hundreds of years with the majority group and has a very high crime rate. There's no equivalent there in many of these tiny European countries, and there's no equivalent in any kind of upper middle income one race state. By the way, I mean the homicide rate in Ghana, which has gotten to the point where they're reporting pretty accurate data is super So to take either Norway or Gona, population whatever, population Texas and actually substantially less in the Norwegian case and compare that to us, that that's an invalid comparative metric. And it feels like the America is tough to compare and and this is why a lot of these comparisons fall so flat. It feels like America is tough to compare to any you know, we have such a unique experience in a unique population composition, and it's hard to in particularly in terms of demographics and a legacy um and heritage of gun ownership and guns in the culture. It's it's tough to really compare out You're you're going apple stor oranges any almost anywhere. But one factor that some people did speculate that was kind of relevant to what you just mentioned is homogeney verse heterogeny, and then more complex heterogeneous society might be more prone to gun violence. But then you go try to drag that out, you know, across different reasons, and some people look at homogeneous society in Japan and it's very low murder rate. But then the Central and South American countries that you know, kind of fall higher on the list, and you know, put us down the list in the northern in the Western hemisphere at least, um, they're all seemingly homogeneous as well. Is there anything you know, to what extent is that a causal factor or not. Yeah, so that's actually a complex and interesting question. It depends to some extent on what you mean by homogeneity. I mean, so Japan is a homogeneous society. I mean virtually everyone there is, as I understand there in the long term sense, kind of racial descendants of the Han, the people in China. The Japanese people entered those islands hundreds if not thousands of years ago, displaced the you know, the i AU, the native population, and then have just sort of been there. So I don't think anyone disputes that. I would overall agree that racial diversity, as opposed to class or kind of language diversity, like how many tribes there are in a country, isn't actually a huge predictor of conflict. Um. I think this is one of the things that quote unquote alt right gets badly on. Most large countries are by definition going to be fairly diverse. Even Canada is simply because they cover a great deal of land and there are a lot of different types of people's that happened happened to live in that area. And yeah, so I mean the most violent countries Somalia, l Salvador, so on, aren't what you would think of as incredibly racially mixed. I will say there is some ethnic conflict in those countries though, between people that see themselves as Indo or Mestizo like Indian and essence and descent, and people that see themselves as descended to the Spaniards. And there's a lot of income inequality or class conflict which also ties into violence. Um. But in reality, I don't so I'll say something kind of controversial but fairly obvious here. I don't think that when you adjust for the diversity variables and so on, guns have much of anything to do with our level of violence. And I'm sure some social scientists watching this or grad student will correct that and say, well, American whites are still thirty percent more violent than European whites. Everything in the model and something like this, But the the heaviest gun ownership states are almost invariably places like Montana and South Dakota, and they have very low rates of violence. I mean, those are pretty homogeneous areas. Those are areas with a long term hunting culture and so on. Again, the northern white homicide rate in the U s A. Just is what it is. So the simple reality, I mean, at some level, the cause of the very high murder rate in the USA is that among all of the formerly marginal populations I described, and especially Black Americans, there's a higher murder rate like last year, especially following the quote unquote racial reckoning that came after the killing of George Floyd, which is a disaster for black communities. Um, we're in a position where something like six of all murder victims are black. So if you just removed that from the mix, I don't think you'd be looking at the USA as even being in the position that we're in, which is not in the top thirty in the world in terms of homicides. So we have a lot of ethnic diversity, we have a lot of income inequality, we have a very high homicide rate, specifically among black people, and that is that's the cause to some extent of the murder rate that we have. There's a very low correlation between something like gunt legal gun ownership and homicide rates in a state, especially if you remove the big cities in that state. The correlation is there, but it's not big. And I would assume that might be domestic violence killings or something like that, but that's not the majority of our murders. I mean the majority eighty percent of gun debts or gang related they involve young men of all colors. And again half of that pool is specifically African American and real quick or what your ethnicity, Um, I'm black. Sorry, I was in the gym playing basketball a little bit before there. Um I'm Black, Irish American and a little bit Native American India. So very interesting and so to that point in terms of the levels of gun and ownership not necessarily being correlated with gun violence, but still acknowledging that there's some tail risk to a high proliferation of guns that the Uvalde shooters of the world more easily, Um, get access to a gun legally, but you know your your approach in the Newsweek piece was that gun control is probably not going to be very impactful. Um, and that there are targeted solutions that address other issues relevant to why such a person would want to step into a school or a buffalo shoot, would want to step into a a a grocery store and gun down innocent people. Um, maybe you could tell talk a little bit about those targeted solutions and why you think they would work. Yeah, So they're almost two questions there. The first or two comments there that I that I would unpack a little bit. The first is that what the media has kind of trained seal US trained trained us to think of as gun violence in the USA as a really small chunk of gun violence. So when whenever we have the gun conversation, one of the first things people bring up is quote unquote assault rifles or assault weapons, which I, like almost everyone on the right I think is a pretty meaningless term, but that that's the centerpiece of the conversation. People will say something like, right wing not do you think that someone should be able to buy a weapon of war and walk into a bakery and open fire. The the answer is, well, no one thinks that part two should be possible and murder is illegal. But yeah, I support the sale of most rifles to adult taxpayers. But rifles make up an infinitesimal chunk of the gun deaths in the USA. I mean, if you google something like homicide deaths by type, you find that in a typical year, um, I mean, they're about two hundred to five hundred people killed by by rifles by the entire category of firearm. They're usually slightly more people killed by knives. They're usually slightly more people killed by sort of a catch all category that include things like bats and just fists and feet. Um. You know, most most deaths in the USA that are murders involves sort of cheap regular handguns, basic semi automatics. So the gun control conversation I don't think centers on something that's especially useful in the sense that if we got rid of all of the high velocity rifles in the country, we'd be saving about four lives a year. And if you look at the demographic profile for kind of the purchaser of a fresh new a R fifteen, I mean that's generally going to be someone who has some disposable income who obeys the law. If you look at what you need to buy a gun, much much less that variety of God, it's gonna be someone with little or no criminal record, So I'm not sure that in the end you'd save lives at all. I mean, those people are mostly gonna be home defenders, and they're between what is at point seven and four million crimes a year that are stopped by just sort of a solid dad or mom with a gun. So I saw I saw that claiming your newsweek piece. I'm wondering, what is the basis for that claim? And once this is a claim that legal gun ownership can be we can attribute saving essentially four million lives a year to legal gun ownership, what is the basis for that? What's four million crimes prevented? I mean, there's a great deal of research on this. I'd recommend just looking up John Lots more guns, less crime and then looking at the response papers dealing with that like some pro some con but I mean there's a there's a pretty convincing to me body of research that indicates that areas where there is substantial legal civilian gun ownership have lower rates of crime on average, and to some extent that's not even surprising I mean I live in Frankfort, the Kentucky capital, and I mean I've heard people joke that there are parts of town, like our classically quote unquote redneck neighborhood, where you'd have to be insane to try to rob a house. I mean, almost everyone in the home would have a gun, and they would all come out of their room with those weapons. So I mean a lot did a series of pretty sophisticated quantitative models looking at this around two thousand. He's redone it a couple of times and found exactly this effect that where you have people that are able to defend themselves, you have less crime. And the point seven to four million figure comes out of the debate that followed that book in some similar books, I don't I don't have you know, exact citation on the desk in front of me, And that's crimes prevented. By the way, It's not live saved. So I'm I'm pro gun, but nobody, nobody says that they're four million good guys with guns every year. The idea is that if you if you take the burglary rate in neighborhood A and then the burglary rate incomparable neighborhood be just using a two or three variable model, and the burglary rate in B is thirty lower, you can assume that X number of crimes and y number of violent crimes were prevented. And again there's quite a lot of solid real research around this, so I mean, I guess my point there though, is whether or not you ended up saving a few lives on the one hand, or costing a few on the other. Taking the long barrel, high velocity rifles away from people that are usually ex military, often involved at the police, just hunters, people that know what they're doing, it wouldn't do much for gun violence in the USA. I mean, they're they're almost twenty thousand homicides a year, and those are mostly kind of young guys bucking away at each other with the pistols you can buy at a paunch shop with very limited vetting for a hundred fifty dollars. So there are there are ways you could crack down on that, but the focus the language often leads people on the center right like myself, to suspect that the overall goal is banning all guns, becur making civilian gun ownership very limited ala Trudeaus Canada, because anyone that's familiar with this issue can't possibly believe that getting rid of rifles would significantly impact the murder numbers. I think the next step would be or getting rid of semi automatic rifles. I think the next step would be arguing that, you know, handguns are the real tool of mass destruction and something like that. And that's kind of true, but I don't see it as realistic to take the four million guns in circulation away from legitimate users and we'll have more of the prevailing narrative after the break now. And that's a fair point that the the language and the response each time one of these incidents occurs seems to direct all the attention away from handguns, which are responsible for the majority of homicides, and towards um, you know, high capacity rifles and things of that nature. But then that does beg the question that, Okay, is there a true and demonstrable increase in lethality from certain UH from certain firearms semi automatic rifles that may carry UH larger capacity magazines shoot larger bullets, and that the amount of damage that can be done. I mean, this is a point that you know, we would get to McConaughey in a second. But McConaughey's speech at the White House point made was that the damage done by these guns um is more significant each each uh, each shot is going to be more damaging than would otherwise be resultant from a handgun, and that there is an interest in preventing that even in the small number of cases where someone does go on a map UH there there is a mass killing incident, and that to the extent that we can put some guardrails in place that may make it a little more difficult to access such a firearm is worth say, the reduction in lethality from even the very random light strikes mass murder incident. Is there any validity to that argument? Well, I personal, So first of all, I mean, I don't want to go deep into morality and ethics here, but I'm not. I don't think there's much ultimate right or wrong at all. I mean, if you sit down with an anthropologist or even a priest, they'll tell you they're about ten or twelve human universals. Don't funk your mom, excuse the language, and don't rape tribes women, don't omit cannibalism. There aren't that many things that human beings seemed to be hardwired to see as bad. So in most cases, what we're having, and it's important to remember this when you're on Twitter or Facebook, what's happening are good faith debates between two people that both think they're right. And I think this is a classic example of this. But so that this is all just to lead into what I was gonna say, I actually totally disagree with them. Um, I don't think we should, in general get rid of freedom to secure safety. This is a very old debate. Franklin and Jefferson talked about this with one another, right, Um, and I think the argument that massively limiting a right to save just one life is a morally good thing could be used to limit virtually every right to a massive, you know, nearly maximal extent. So, I mean that's so, just to give some examples, we heard this under COVID. I mean, even once it was it was widely understood that the lethality rate for the virus was about point four percent and the average victim was eighty one. There was an incredible amount of pressure on people to stay home most of the day because you could theoretically hurt a senior that wasn't taking care of their own health precautions or something like that. And I found that really unconvinced. Like I was more careful around old people. But I don't think I have a duty to abandon my freedom of movement because you could theoretically unintentionally hurt someone else. You And you saw this argument being made, and you saw good faith people disagreeing about it, and you saw it being fairly effective with a lot of people. But you could make the same argument with guns. You could make the same argument with cars. You can make the same argument with porn, which certainly has inspired a whole lot of sex and for example, high school, that one party might not be all that comfortable. If you can make the same argument of liquor, you can make the same argument with a board. Yeah, but here's the thing, there are there there are restrictions out there, right, you know. Yeah, but but child porn is illegal, right, Um, you cannot and there's a certain that we have we have, uh, we have enumerated a threshold above which you should not drive intoxicated. You you can go have a half a glass of wine and we've determined that, you know, that will probably fall under the legal limit, uh or the illegal limit, and we we we have tried, society has tried to synthesize where a certain freedom should be impinged on UM in order to say, you know, increased safety to negative externalities and safety. But that is part of the discussion my point here, of course. Yeah, and I don't think you should be able to buy well, actually I personally I don't know, but I mean I think most people don't think you should be able to buy warships or cannons or Apache helicopters or something like that. If we're talking about arms. Certain yes, of course there are some limits on right, So I should probably clarify a little bit from the baseline of what I think of as hyper sensitivity that we are at today, I do not think and I'm not talking only about guns here, but I do not think we need to move further in the direction of limiting freedom to achieve more safety. I mean weaning from the basis that which we are at right, from the baselines now, and I'll talk more specifically about guns in a second. I think there are a couple of things we can do. And I actually just wrote a whole article segments, so I'm not some inflexible nut on this, But I mean, like, we literally just shut down the whole damn country for about six months to protect against a disease with the lethality rate I just gave. I think we're nervous enough, So in general, I think we need to move back toward freedom. Um. I mean I got a new vehicle the other day, and you can't not wear a seat belt. There's a kind of piercing shriek that starts if you leave the seat belt unbuckled for fifteen second. That that's where we are right now. I mean they're automatic car seat lock ins in the back in case you feel and obviously supposed to not use them, but just in case you feel tempted to let your eight year old ride in the front seat. We are a very safety conscious society right now, and I see some problems that in terms of human development. I mean, as a kid, you can be on your parents health insurance until you're twenty seven, no, no doubt. In terms of you know, we are a society blanketed with safetyism and bureaucracy, and as a general matter, uh, walking that back would would probably be healthy. Um. Conversely, I mean it seems like every situation you know, does have it on its own set of unique facts and circumstances, and particularly ones that do carry, um, you know, the the potential of lethal consequences. And I mean you know said, you've also acknowledged and you mentioned it on Twitter that we can debate the boundary of red flag laws, legality of involuntary commitment, etcetera. But come on, there are a fair number of leaders on this page. There has to be a way to stop the guy holding up a bag of dead cats on social media from buying a gun. So in focusing on that where there are some telltale signs of threatening or dangerous behavior and thus free, we can justify limiting freedom in that regard. You know, what, what do we looking for? How do we how do we codify that into policy, and what principles should be informing it? Okay, So a couple of different points here at first. I mean, you know, a good technical correction is never unwelcome. So yeah, in general, I prefer freedom to safety ism. Am I the full on privatized the fire department sort of libertarian bro? No? Not really, So I recognize, of course, you shouldn't be able to make child pornography and sell it at Walgreens or make it at all. Indeed, I mean sowing down the line of course you should be able to drive well. Again, I don't really have an objection to this, but we have a loss saying you can't drive your card a hundred miles an hour. I support drunk driving lost going down the line. Point two that relates to that, though, is I think we've gone a long way down the safetiest path and we don't need to go further down it in most cases. So now we get specifically two guns. And the starting point of my article ties into my broad preference for freedom over safety is m I make the point that there's no chance of us getting rid of guns without prompting something close to a civil war. I mean, there are five hundred undred, five hundred million legally civili and owned firearms in the United States, and almost all of them fall into the categories that people I think of secretly is not secretly, but it's gun grabbers occasionally talk about limited like as I'm sure you know, a semi automatic rifle or handgun is just a gun that fires once when you pull back with force on the trigger. That's almost every gun. Like I mean, my girlfriend, my fiance now has one of those SMW shields, very effective, sort of the classic business woman's handgun. It's like six inches long. That would be banned under many sort of gun restriction proposals because it is a semi automatic weapon that can take a clip containing more than nine bullets. That's every gun, and I think people that are proposing these things kind of want to sneak that by. It sounds good to say we want to ban semi automatic weapons of war with a magazine capacity above ten, and you just never mentioned, well, that's your girlfriend's pistol. It's like saying don't you favor comprehensive healthcare for lgbt Q youth without ever mentioning, well, that means castration in some cases once you past the age of sixteen. So we're not We're not going to get rid of all the guns. Most of the guns are semi automatic. Fifty million of the guns are rifles. That's that's the starting point. We're not going to do that. It would require a massive national registry as a starting point. It would require spending billions on a buy back as a starting point. We've wasted enough money on dumb ship recently, we don't need to give you know, every good old boy with a couple of a Rs. Five thousand dollars a piece or some of the plans I'm hearing. I think there are very specific things that could stop, specifically mass shootings. UM one of those and I get a lot of pushback for this on the right, but one of those is an effective red flag law. And I mean, I like it that you pulled up my tweet read it to me. If you're active on social media, you've probably seen a picture of this guy literally holding a bag of butcher cats like you take a hatchet. He apparently killed two cats, the crazy son of a bit, and he was it was not popular. I don't know if that's the word, but he was on these social media apps like yebo or whatever it's called. He was one of those channer guys. I mean, there were there were hundreds of people that must have been aware of his cat killing proclivities. This has been reported as I understand the educational authorities. But he was still able to walk into a gun store and buy two very nice guns and then four hundred rounds of ammunition. So if a guy who's known in town as the local amateur butcher, you know, comes in to L's Sporting Goods and says, I want to buy two of the closest too illegal that you have, and then four hundred rounds, Like there's gotta be a process first of all. If I was the store on her, let's say no. I mean, like there there are individuals are often responsible for the progression of evil. I mean, the guy who was like okay, um, you don't want to blame him as a businessman, but it seems like that decision could have been made differently. The cops who are outside the room for an hour, twelve minutes, that decision could have been made differently. So at any rate, this could have been prevented as it is, but some kind of effective red flag or something like an educational professional who's the school psychologist can report the cat incident. And if you're under say if you're under twenty five and you can't run a are in that age range. If you're under twenty five, stuff like that is added to your data file when you try to make a buy. I mean, virtually every one of these mass shooters is a disturbed young man, fatherless, under twenty seven of whatever race on psyche meds. We know the profile, and I don't think it would be very difficult to stop mass shootings at all with some basic techniques like that UM and again, there are just sort of common sense behaviors that you can engage in that I think would would remove most of the rest of that subset. There are so few mass shootings, even though we've been trained not to think this, that everyone is an outlier event requiring multiple failures, multiple point failure sources, I guess I would say professionally. So, I mean, in this case, the guy was able to get into a grade school, which you're never supposed to be able to do because one of the teachers left the back door open. They were out there doing whatever, maybe having a smoke or they heard about him and they went to go out and look and see if you know, there was a madman outside. I'm not sure exactly how you wind up with that wide open, but he just walked then. I mean that again, simple training would prevent that the police were there. They were called within minutes. They simply didn't intervene. You can't allow that anything from one armed guard in the schools to just making this point over and over two police departments would cut down on the rate of these But yeah, red flags those two suggestions. The final thing that I brought up, by the way, I you noticed neither one of us is named the shooter. One of the points I made was that the news networks need to stop giving these clowns what I would call negative respect as a teacher or coach, where every time one of these shootings happens, there's the guys full picture on television. They're discussing his history. I mean, that's that's how I've seen the cat image. They're discussing how he committed his crime, making him seem like some kind of strategic genius. You know, he noticed the agate door, he entered from the side. I mean, I've seen graphics depicting this on both Fox and MSNBC. Just don't do that. Mentioned that there's been a shooting, focus on the names of the victims, move on, never named the guy again, and I think that would be in our in our kind of broad and fragmented media lance up in communication landscape. Do you think it's necessarily realistic to keep the killer's name out of circulation. I understand that to refrain from some things that might be seen as glorifying it. But I mean, can you not necessarily say that simply reporting on a tragic incident is inherently it's going to glorify things for crazy people? Right, if you're a crazy person, if you're a violent, nihilistic person, you might look at at any of these situations and, oh, Jeffrey Dahmer, like, how glamorous it is that he's now you know the most the the name is synonymous with evil? Right, Um, so is there do you think it's realistic too? While you can kind of veer away from highlighting the person's identity, that the names is always going to get circulated, there's always going to be some attention drawn and some mythology around these people. Well, I think you can minimize it as much as possible. I mean, I think that's the answer. So, first of all, I would like to see the media report more on actual patterns on society and focus less on kind of sensationalistic, provocative stories in the first place. So, I mean the pattern that I'm describing here is something that you see with a lot of other things. I mean something that I dropped into probably every second or third article the Skeptic Research Center good heterodox think tank about a year back, now asked a group of mostly urban men, as I recall but diverse population, basically, how many unarmed black men they thought were killed in a typical year by the police, and among the standard very liberal category, not even leftist. Just you break it into four bars, and this is the left. Most of them, um, thirty four to thirty five percent thought that the number of unarmed brothers that were killed by cops and a typically year was about a thousand. Another fourteen to sixteen percent thought that the number of unarmed black men that were killed by police was about ten thousand quote, and eight percent thought it was more than that. Now, again, to put this in context, there only twenty thousand murders in a typical bad year until very recently less than half have involved blacks. So the the assumption among the average left leaning guy pool of people is that there are as many black men massacred by police in a typical year as there, in fact are murders of black men, if not men. Um. And this is a result of sensationalism. I think in a large part they I think they do this in the paper but I don't want to exaggerate. I have to check it out, but you could very easily correlate this to mass media exposure. And I have no doubt that the more you've seen of kind of George Floyd, the horrible video we all saw Jacob Blake, very different from the George Floyd case, by the way, but him TV editing the knife out of his hand and him getting shot. I mean, like, the more you see of these kind of images, I said one exactly, I don't if the knife was in his hand, and iife might have been in his car. But at any rate, the more you see of this type of imagery, the more likely you are to believe in the ten thousand person figure. And this exists throughout society. So I'd like to see less of this if you want to cover George Floyd. There really is a story about police being abusive to young males of all races. There really is a story about like Derek Shelvin had four complaints in his past. He shot a guy once, so you can actually ask why is that guy out on the street. This isn't even necessarily racial. I mean, these complaints covered the gamut. As I understand but what's up with these rogue officers. There are many real stories, but one of those stories is not. These massacres happen hundreds of times. There's so much of a focus on the individual image that draws the clicks that we see these unhealthy patterns that exist in society. It would be it would be easy to give mass shooters one of the facial coverage that they get. And I think that would be a good idea. Yeah, it's a fair point, um, And you actually mentioned this in your piece assault the assault on empiricism that are remarkable aspect of today's cultural war debates is that many massively popular positions bear no resemblance to measurable truth, and that one of them that what you just mentioned is the volume and number of unarmed African American men shot by the police each year. Um, what what else do you think is driving this? Right? Why have we become so detached from empiricism? Is this a deliberate assault from those who are imbued with the responsibility to be truth tellers and to funnel us the news? Is there something larger at play? Um? You know, what do you think is driving this? Well? I think when it comes to the media. There two things, um one is an understanding of market metrics, and the other is political bias. So I mean, simply put one of the things we forget about the media. I mean, I've met Tucker Carlson, you know, I used to like Don Lemon years before CNN took its turn. They're both intelligent guys, and when you watch them reading through kind of a pre prepared script talking about a real problem in society, you're you're tempted to think, well, this is an intellectual process to some extent, isn't it. The reality is that news media is not that intellectual process that news. News media is an ad sales vehicle to some extent, I mean, in a typical one, to a very large extent. In a typical one hour broadcast, I mean twenty one minutes will be ads for cars, penis pills, and so on down the line. And the goal of the anchor, that erudite guy in front of the camera, be that handed to your met out, is to draw you into you buy the penis pills and the vehicle. So we've realized, unfortunately, and this is even more true on social media, that what draws people in is kind of the scent of blood, competitive things, what's the other party doing, what's the other race doing, what's the most graphic or the most sexual image possible. Um. The New York Post on social media, I will say, has really mastered the art of doing this. Um. They keep posting these headlines. One of them the other day was something like after a good date, I smell like fish from this woman. And all these women were like, hey, me too, if it goes well, ha ha ha. And it turned out to be an article about a woman that had some terrible autoimmune disease that caused its body owner. But I mean I clicked on it as well and expected to make a jump and was like, oh, this is terrible. But whoever their social media guy is is very very good with this. So I think that there are almost certainly social scientists, at least at my level as methodologists, that are running the trends to see what draws people in. And that's why there's so much interracial prime stuff, so much sex scandal stuff so on down the line. I mean, yeah, it almost seems like a function of volume, you know, in terms of cable news. Maybe we don't need twenty four hours. Maybe the incentives when you have to fill up twenty four hours and you need to keep keep ratings high and attention uh and keep an audience engaged in order to justify the high rates for those those advertisements. Twenty four hours too much news, and then you dreat you multiply that out amongst three or four twenty four hour news channels. And this is what you get similarly with online published news, in that when there was a daily um uh, when there was a hard copy of a newspaper, there's only so much you could print. You had a limitation on how many stories you could print. Now, if someone can think it, and someone can type it and press and press send, uh, you can get out there into the universe. And now you just have all this endless amount of nonsense. And it almost feels like some news source should say, hey, we're putting a cap on stories per day. We will we will release no more than ten stories per day, and we will require that that will uh enforce, that will enforce some level of quality control, and hopefully that comes to you know, clean, a cleaner kind of a cleaner body of stories that they put out. I mean, I actoually like to see someone even try that I actually think that's a great business idea. I mean there are some sites like just the New that they don't have to pay you and they don't even have pay Meny it's out there now, it's it's on the internet unless you cut this out of the video. But no, I think that would be a pretty good model for a news network, like the ten stories per day. Um, I might actually, unless you object, suggests that on Twitter, Academia, that EU or something and see if someone wants likes the idea. I mean we're doing I'm giving away all the good ideas on this show right now. My god, someone's gonna take this one and run with it. But yeah, I think that's that is the anti buzz feed. Okay, to reverse uh the reverse the corrosion that the descent from the buzz peutification of news in the early and mid two thousand tens of you know, just sticking all these freaking uh listicals and and you know, making everything a litany. Okay, we have inherent scarcity, were bitcoin the only or only are gonna you know, there's only gonna be twenty one million a million bitcoin rolling in a print ten stories a day. We will enforce quality via scarcity. I think that would be an interest. Actually, I actually think that's a great idea. That that is how the bitcoin blockchain works obviously what I mean, yeah, but yeah, they some site should do that, and we're just kind of like, good job, bro, you know, I'm like, I'm gonna move on from this second. But yeah, any any site that ran with ten full length word articles a day by people kind of spanning that spectrum from Matty Iglesias through like Cathy Young over to soha mom, so rob a mare or something like that, I mean like you would get a massive, massive volume of followers. I mean, you can argue that's just sub stack, but I mean it's not the same thing prying of hard copy magazine. You don't just publish on the prestigious Internet anyway. I think that that that's a great idea, but right now, unfortunately, we don't have that. Have you ever seen the movie Anchorman too? I've yet say I'm running through my sequels of movies I loved. I made It's a train Spotting two last week. Have not made it to Anchorman two yet? Who's still alive for Trainspotting two? I ever, apparently all of them they even they somehow all survived, you know, a little nineties smack addiction didn't really take them out, so you pick up the story twenty years later. It was okay, I didn't love it. I didn't hate it. A bunch of our most characters with no teeth, I mean, but like such a moving movie because they were destroying themselves. So it's it would be really weird to see the guys from Train Spotting fifteen years on, like, oh, it made him an insurance agent now twelve that that was kind of it. They kind of they make Rent in the uh he's he's kind of you know, they try to spice the character up a little bit that he settled in Amsterdam. That okay, but Wenten became a professional and chose life. But oh he did in Amsterdam because he's edgy and a former heroin addict and he's not gonna choose Switzerland, right, Um, And so you know, they didn't. They definitely made the characters too stable, um, you know, And and it didn't kind of have that the grittiness of the first movie, although Danny Boyle is pretty good. They had a couple interesting bits kind of you know, commentary on modern culture. In the UK, so I won't be too hard on the movie, but yeah, it was a little a little tough to translate Trainspotting, you know, in the Trainspotting characters into responsible adulthood. Yeah, I mean so Bill Spotting. I mean, that's just easy to make fun of. But it's nonetheless, I'm sure than interesting club but no Anchorman to actually just a dumb, funny movie. Give it a B plus, but makes this point, like the characters from the News Network whatever it is, like Z B. C Um get in some kind of trouble unbelievably and they wind up working for this the first cable network. It's a puff of TNT. But the traditionally that they had been the news team that did an hour broadcast today and for all their bullshit, took it pretty seriously. Like the sports guy would read all the papers and clip all the scores and he condense that to fifteen minutes, not to be American sports. And now they and people under them have to manage twenty four hours worth the news every day. So the plot of the movie is them inventing bullshit, Like at first they just try to fill the news time with lesser bits of real news and they're being beating beaten in the ratings by like the Horse Channel. I mean, this is this is the kind of movie it is, you know, but I mean then they start like one of them accidentally stumbled. It's not as I recall the movie, and they put the car chase on the air for two hours and people start watching, cheering for either the police or the criminal. And this is of course based on real content. It's based on the O. J Chase so on, And they then move into other things like Funniest Animals of the Day is a show that's hosted by the guy who loves lamp if I recall, I mean like it's you know anyway, this is this is is what goes on, and you see them inventing the news as we see it today. And again I've met him, like many of these people. But if you watch the afternoon or evening especially news shows on Fox or CNN, you see this. You see like the five or tan witty people sitting around a table talking about like the best raccoons day and so on. And that's how you fail the twenty four hours. Stationalism, race war, raw Sexton offices, gun violence that sells even more than the best raccoon of the day. So that's that's why you get so much of it, um, you know, scarcity. Wilfred Riley and I with a little help from Ancrement, who are going to solve exactly clean up American journalism single handedly. But to to that point and in terms of UH, this is something that's that has been in the back of my mind for a while now. For about five six years, we couldn't go more than a month or maybe two months without a heart wrenching, very incendiary, controversial video of an unarmed African American person being shot by the police. Right, These kept on coming for about five six years. Then obviously George Floyd, Jacob Blake and all you know where narrative seemed to have run wild there. Then the Macayah Bryant incident occurs, where it finally seems like it's undeniable that they jumped the shark, that the way that it was portrayed, that they portrayed an officer shooting that clearly was justified and in fact saved the life of a person who was about to be at the other end of a switchblade. Uh. And they tried off the bat to run it through the same cycle and make it this another another instance of of an unarmed black person, you know who murdered by an oppressive and uncaring society and uh and poorly trained and racist policeman, etcetera, etcetera. But then every society kind of said, oh, I don't know about that this one, that that was not what this is, and everyone agreed on it. Since then, since McKay bryant have can you recall one one shooting, one story of an unarmed African American being murdered by the by the police that made national news that was a national news story. I can't think of one. No, But he also have to remember that Joe Biden is president, I mean, and until pretty recently he was a popular Democrat. And I'm not just being cynical here, like you really can see trajectories and stories, story trajectories and story trends. I guess that is how I'd write this in a paper on either the mainstream media on the one hand, or Fox in O A. N on the other hand, depending on who's in office. And this dates back at least to Ronald Reagan, where for eight years there were constant hammer blows about the homeless. It's this cruel Republican president that's responsible for people sleeping outside and tough co refrigerator boxes and so on. And when Reagan left office, he was replaced by Bush, who was geocopy universally thought to be competent, and then started the empathic Bill. Clinton, we saw a decline. I think it was something like that. I didn't write the article, but in stories about the homeless, the problem was that the homeless population didn't decline. The homeless population correct me if I'm wrong, audience, but has been on the upsurge for quite a while. I mean, we have an over the top problem with homelessness right now following COVID, and we have open hoover bills in the middle of most cities. So this ties into a very critical point. Well to critical points. One, what's covered in the media doesn't have anything to do with what's going on in society. This is something that's so shocking that when I say it in a forum and say politics and media, this is the one thing nothing racial sexual song that students will immediately latch onto and say, doc that that can't possibly be true, But but it is. I mean, the decisions of individual ranking producers and so on, plus the advertisers behind the scenes determine what you see on the air and whether those patterns match patterns in society. Seems to occur at about the rate of random luck. So I mean, like, if we want to talk about policing, one of the things nobody disputes in that space is that sevent of the people shot by cops are Caucasian. They're Anglo whites, Caucasian, Hispanics, so on down the line. I mean, nobody disputes that. Nobody informed disputes that. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. I mean, sure, if you just hold your black buddy that at a barbershop or something, I mean, it might be an argument buddies here in l A. Yeah, No, I'm not. I'm not saying the white guy or the black guys dumber in the situation. I'm just saying, like, sure, something at a bar might dispute that. There's not one academic It's like saying that their test score gaps between ethnic groups between the North and the South. Like it's awkward to talk about, but nobody disputes it at all. So seventy of the victims of police shootings are Caucasians, they're white guys are Hispanic guys. They seem to get, depending on the year, between five and twenty percent of the coverage of police shooting. So when you see a police shooting or a police killing and it's a black guy, every time, your immediate response is going to be, well, CNN X, fox X, NBC wouldn't lie to me, this must be a problem that's targeting black men. The reality is that behind the scenes, the USA is only six white, and a nearly proportional number of whites are killed by the police. You're just not being shown this information. In fact, when people like Roland Fryer have really unpacked this. I mean, if you between the lines of his paper about Dallas, the people most likely to be shot by the police team to be poor whites and recent Latino immigrants, right, I mean, because there's not really a lobby for either of those groups. I mean, if you shoot a tough white or Hispanic criminal, there aren't gonna be people marching around outside your office with a fake coffin. So the presentation in the media of the issue has nothing to do with the way the issue actually looks on the ground. And that's very, very common. I mean, so, just to make this point quickly, there hasn't been a decline in homelessness since Reagan left office. I would assume the homeless population is probably tripled through the COVID, through Bill Clinton and into the COVID era. Um, there hasn't there hasn't been a decline in black people getting shot by the cops. I mean, if anything, what's striking about that is it's utter consistency, Like every single year. If you open up the Washington Posts, great the counted database. I don't like the newspaper that much. I do love their data. Yeah, Washington Post is the only one that has a good data set on that that specific issue. It's excellent. Well, I mean killed by police used to over there a couple but I mean like it's yeah, great database. But every year it's about a thousand guys that are killed by police and two hundred three hundred of them are black. There's been no change. There's been no change in the numbers, the black numbers or the unarmed numbers through this entire movement, and everyone just sort of ignores that. And now with a Democrat who began is fairly popular in office, you're seeing less coverage even of the potentially unjustified shootings. So it's again one of those things like don't let him gas like you, what you're saying is absolutely correct. You're not imagining it. No, I mean, it is what it is totally. I guess what I'm looking at is the trajectory of that coverage and why it ebbs and flows when it ebbs and flows, Because I see your point about, Okay, we're done with Trump and Biden's in office. However, a lot of phenomenon that people attribute strictly to the Trump era and including you know, a lot of just woke idiocy and specifically the police brutality issue started during the late Obama era. It was Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Um. A lot of these that kind of first wave of BLM kind of caused leb incidents happened before Trump. So how do we how how do we account for that in looking at this trajectory where this thing became a big issue from two thousand fourteen to two thousand twenty one. Then we have this one incident where like essentially everybody, even lebron James uh stepped right into a rake and kind of you know, uh criticizing the cops on social media, and it was even willing to take it down, and that's something that wouldn't have happened. And in regards to these other issues that might have been more edge cases, everyone said, Okay, you know something the media machine that's highlighting, that's using these videos to portray a certain, uh societal reality that cops are indiscriminately gunning down black people. We went too far on this one, and since then you never hear about this anymore. Well, I imagining this, No, you're not imagining it. But I mean, I think one of my big invocations to young scholars and journalists is be multi bariat. It's never just one thing. So I mean, like the frenzy around Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown wasn't on part with the frenzy around George Floyd. So parts of the media coverage, no doubt had to do with the racist, white supremacist, hetero sexist, sist, sexist, sexist, post colonialist monster Donald Trump being in office. So now that that's going you would, I would assume you would see a tune down from at least those sources on the left. It does no good to point out that the police are using their guns more often under president by I mean because that really that really, I mean, that's like five times more. You know, we we've just agreed the data the same every year, But I mean that that note five times in the sense of five more instances. The police are not five more likely to shoot. We we both just agree this is the same data almost every year. But no, I mean that that really if you say that the rate of police violence is the same under democratic and Republican presidents and for that matter, of governors, Because the actual source of the police encounter problem is young male and especially black crime and blue cities, that's not really gonna do your case all that much good if you're arguing from the political left. So I do think that you probably, as with the homelessness thing, see a tune down when the parties changed. But yeah, another thing, what I mean, you are and a bunch of other people should probably take a bit of the credit here. I mean, part of this was just that every case kept being exposed as bullshit. Like I've had reporters tell me that after I wrote hate crime hopes, they were less likely to run panicked page one stories about hate crime allegations because their assumption was, if this is this high profile, there may be a chance this just isn't real. And I don't want to be the guy who's getting roasted on, you know, p J Media and all these other million hit conservative sites for for calling out the story. And I think that's basically good. I mean, it's not like police aren't interviewing the victim. If it's real, then the story can run. But these racial hysterias were kind of knocked down a bit by the writing. I mean, I did there, but Heather McDonald did, Roland Friar did. I mean a lot of people came out and said, look a lot of this stuff just isn't true. Barry Weiss n kind of that center in that center, right, Um, it's not just mcaya Bryant. I mean, I think you pointed out the most obvious case for those who aren't aware of the mccaya bryant situation, was a case where a young black woman was running toward another woman wielding one of those like flip out Butcher's not it's nice, like nine inches long. They've been fighting, you know, honors about evenly Bryant got tired of it decided to kill somebody, um, and a cop shoots are after a fair warning, saves a black woman's life. I think everyone involved was black, by the way. Um, and this was originally presented as just another police murder of an innocent college bound black future nurse. This kind of stuff, and people looking at this seeing this and I don't mean to be cooler, but morbidly obese, adult sized woman with this deadly weapon. I mean you you'd give up your money if this was pointed you and you didn't have your gun out. People just said enough of this, like, we're tired of this, this sort of childlike pretense. Black people aren't little kids. You have to obey the law to some extent. This is this is a bridge too far. But part of what contributed to that was all the other cases falling apart, right, I mean, like Jacob Blake, Jacob Blake quite notoriously. Yeah, I mean that that's a good example. I was thinking of a couple others, but Jacob Blake, I mean was what was probably probably it's probably the second craziest of these. I mean, this was what's because I guess it's because of the reaction, right, look at the reaction the reaction to Jacob Blake. There were riots. Everyone forgets the Kyle Rittenhouse incident because Wisconsin was burning down in regards to the supposed injustice of the Jacob Blake shooting, and it turns out that it was completely justified. I mean, I guess that's what I was looking at in terms of maybe it wasn't the most egregiously misframed by the media. Others have as well, but Jesus Christ, society, the the activist movement treated it like George Floyd. Yeah, Jacob Blake, I think you're right. I've been convinced, Jacob Blake. The thing with the Jacob Blake case is that this was originally presented as a real travesty of justice, like this black man was at a party hosted by a couple of beautiful black sisters. He was trying to blake up a fight. The police showed up, and the original street report was just for no reason, shot him. You read through black media what actually happens that Jacob Blake was a guilty rapist. I mean, he'd been accused of at least digital rape. I haven't read through the entire like rape case template, but he sexual abuse let's say by his ex girlfriend. He'd showed up at her house. He had apparently had very fingered her. He'd said, this is mine, I don't want you around any other men, pushed her violently, like abused her like she was crying and called the police and they came. I mean, Jacob Blake, as I understand it, outstanding warrant for rape. Like he left that day, and he showed up again at his victim's house um on the day when unfortunately, when he was shot, got into an argument with the victim and apparently said that he was taking her car with the kids in it, like there were a number of young children in this situation. Police are called. Of course, they show up. They try to talk him down, he refuses. They physically fight with him. He beats up a cop, he shrugs off a taser. He starts running towards this vehicle. Now he's got against something like a ten inch hunting knife in this vehicle, knows how to use it as he's reaching for it. The last possible moment, the cops yelling he gets shot. I mean, that's it. Like the the rapist who went back to the victim's house at least if you believe the legal testimony, got shot after a three minute physical battle with the police, and this was again presented as just another innocent, just another good brother, let's get those graduation pictures ready, and that that Again a lot of people, especially women, just started looking at this disgustedly, like are we expected to play along with this bullshit? You know? That's that? That is another good example, but all of them, like the Brianna Taylor case, like I think she shouldn't have been God, I don't. I'm not a no knock warrants guy. But it was not necessarily that. You cannot draw direct causality back to police misconduct her shooting. She was shot because her boyfriend shot at the cops and almost crippled the cop. Like people forget this. The Brianna Taylor, Brianna Taylor's name what appeared accurately on a warrant because she'd been heavily involved in her brother's drug her ex boyfriend's drug business. This, as far as I can tell from kind of street talk, is universally known in Louisville. It's also been reported in I live in Kentucky. It's also been reported in the Courier Journal, the major newspaper. So a number of people were named in this warrant investigating her ex boyfriend's drug business. And he was apparently a pretty sizeable drug dealer and he was nicknamed El Chopo in the city chopped. So they subtle and keep it low key, like I went to Tony Yo back in the day. Um, anyway, my good buddy Joey crystal meth. But so basically, the police show up the apartment where Taylor was where she's sort of laying up resting with her new boyfriend who's not involved in the drug game. But they hear this pounding on the door, and I don't know, they think from some things I've heard that it was her ex boyfriend's men at the door. Again, I mean, this guy wasn't in the best field of business. So the new guy takes out his gun as I understands the legal firearm, and he starts bucking away at the police. He's shooting pretty well too, I mean, he hit one of them in a leg. That guy was hospitalized for a long period of time, you know. And the police start responding after a couple verbal statements because someone shooting at them, so they shoot back and whatever happened. I mean, some people speculated this guy was holding tailor up as a kind of shield. I personally haven't seen any evidence of that. Despicable of cell though, But I mean, she gets shot because there's a gunfight going on that the guy on her side started. So again, the idea of the cops came for no reason. That's false. She was named on the warrant as a participant in chops and business. Um the police fired unprovokedly, No they didn't. Somebody shot one of them. They sent the guy to the hospital. So none of these cases ever panned out is what they were originally supposed to be. I mean, and I think a lot of people became very aware of that, Like normal white guys, middle class Black guys behind the scenes were like, I don't know about this, and so interesting. I like, because I think a lot of people these conversations do seem remain siloed within different ethnic groups. I think there's probably an assumption from a lot of Caucasians that you know that the entirety of that that your average black male was supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement. But then I see a lot of conversations you know, on social media within the black community, and it seems to be a lot of skepticism of the movement, particularly from younger black males um and to a certain extent that that some of it seemed to be coated around the kind of you know, gender composition of the leadership of Black Lives Matter was Within the African American community, they're more kind of diversity of opinion on BLM than than a lot of white people from outside looking in might think. Well, I think that one of the important things here is that the craziest woke people aren't black. I mean black Black people started from a lower base than whites in the USA and large part because of past oppression and ethnic conflict racial competition. But I mean when you look at where the average Black American is from, I mean that's kind of that Christian patriotic Deep South. We have a high I rate a military service many group some I think Native American Indians and other Yeah, black people are of the military. So I mean that kind of like ex athlete, maybe you're a tough guy. Ethos can go one of two ways, and they can take you out into the streets, but can also make you a coach. I mean like there's there's black over representation, a lot of very successful fields and academics or athletics, athletic coaching, some of the softer sciences teaching, especially for boys, military, policing, security. But anyway, my point here isn't like the big up the black communities, you know, resume across a range of fields. It's just although the guys that are athletic coaches and security guards aren't buying a lot of what Patrice Color's is saying. And this is even more true for members of other minority groups that didn't have that initial financial hobble on right, so Asians, Black Caribbeans, and we're not seeing about forty percent of Mexicans voting GEOP. A big mistake of both the left and the alt right was assuming this frankly stupid demography equals destiny argument um, where the assumption was that there there's enough racism in the USA, and there's probably always is going to be that as minorities come into this country, the power of the left coalition is going to keep growing. So if you're on the right, you want to keep minorities out, and if you're on the left, you want to bring minorities down, and I think we all know behind the scenes that's a reason for these figures you sometimes see, like fifty Democratic support for illegal immigration. The problem with this argument is that it's a mistaken I mean, even if if you want to get into that sort of culture cult crip harred debate on i Q, I mean, if you want to dig deep into this stuff, I mean, Hispanics are Caucasian, Like, there's no particular reason to assume when when you say that, what could you elaborate on that? When you say that these Hispanics are Caucasian, sixty six percent of Hispanics identify as white and white alone, and census terms and DNA data indicates that's roughly accurate. I mean roughly that percentage or sevent or more of Castilla and or Spanish whatever it would be descent. I mean two thirds of Hispanics are white. No, I mean you can speculate as to we can discuss what white means in the twenty three and me era if we really want to talk to genomics, is that a use will term at all? But I mean we can certainly say that a Caucasian Latino is as white for good or ill essay an Italian or it certainly a Sicilian. So I mean I think the idea that and again another like I don't I would test I would be black forty percent Celtic and planes Indian and genetic terms, So I I in some ways lean toward the idea of racelessness when it comes to a lot of saying, A lot of the stuff just bullshit, and you get into these questions like are Jews white? So on. But if you want to have this conversation, and if you want to apply practical population genetics to metrics like athletics or i Q, it is relevant to note that a large number of current immigrants are members of the same race as the majority population group. So a lot of these assumptions, like minorities want to assimilate, a lot of members of minority groups probably won't be considered minorities in fifty years. Other minorities like Korean Americans or Nigerian's outperform both white sand blacks and tend to lean pretty far to the right politically, although that's not always reflected voting patterns. Maybe I should say socially instead. Anyway, I think that the future of politics is going to be pretty interesting. But demographics certainly do not equal destiny. And if you were to ask the ordinary working class black guy or upper middle class Asian guy how they feel about the civil rights left, I think you'd hear some interesting, spicy things. There is one group in the USA that consistently supports the civil rights left, and that is upper middle class, college educated white women, especially if they're failures. I mean, well, seriously, if you have that profile and you have an income of like thirty thou dollars a year and you're doing some kind of semi volunteer vista work in the hood, the odds of you being off the charts as a leftist are But in that category overall, that that's where you see things like support for politically correct restraint of speech that literally no other group supports. I mean, that is the group that still backs Joe Biden. And we'll have more of the prevailing narrative after the break. And so you make a point as to the the kind of downward pressure on income in that profile. Yet this is now the prevailing ethos of just about all of corporate America and every institution that does require some sort of achievement how has this ethos penetrated those institutions in your opinion, Well, I think that this is an interesting question. I mean, sure it's a good rebuttal. I mean, if you say, well, look, people are just a bunch of pop smoking college failures, how does how come every corporation has the department of diversity? I mean, I would speculate that two things can be true at once. I mean, many members of what Will Chamberlain would call the awful demographic um potentially affluent white female liberal art in fact, they end up on the affluent side. Um My. My comment was just that there seems to be even more in focus on this weird brand of politics if they don't make it. But so let me let me try to tie these two things together. Obviously, I think that people who fit this demo are even more likely to be radical if they're not very successful. But this does seem to be the one demographic that's most linked into wokenness. I think that's almost different from the question that you're asking, though, which is how is this stuff getting into mainstream society? And I think that the term I jokingly use in business sessions and so on for this is kind of the woke to bullshit pipeline. So for have you ever read the book Bullshit Jobs? No bullshit Jobs argues I forget the author, but it's a funny, witty book, and it argues that probably about half of all jobs don't contribute anything to the baseline of the employer of the person with the job, like many jobs are just completely useless. Say there's an accreditation protocol for your college, and so you need to fill out US. You need someone to fill out paperwork indicating that your campus owns a certain number of thoroughbred horses. I'm just completely making this up to to meet this accreditation protocol. That is a bullshit job. The person with the job every year does the work needed to meet the accreditation protocol, which is also useless. If you were to get rid of the accreditation protocol, you get rid of two bull ship jobs. You get rid actually probably rid of a hundred bullshit jobs. But you'd get rid of the job of the person who red used the paperwork and make sure this college has an appropriate number of horses, and you'd get rid of the individual at every college whose job it is to turn in this paperwork once a year. And this is not a hypothetical job, by the way, in reality the person would be sending in diversity information or something like this, or Greek life information. But most colleges employed dozens of people to do basically this anyway, the whole thing with the bullshit jobs. Though for a long time, people in the business world, which is where I resided until going back to academia, in thought of wokeness, by which I mean a sort of dumbed down, lower i Q version of Marxism that's focused on race and gender. I see you replace the rich man as the big bad in your schema, would say the white man or the man overall. Um society isn't set up to benefit the rich in a corrupt fashion. It's set up to benefit why sent a corrupt fashion by oppressing minorities. And you can spend this into virtually any arena. I mean, queer theory is a version where straights filled the oppressor rolso and down the line. But wokeness was long considered to be just a weird quirk on the campus. I mean people would openly say things like, I'm not that worried about these kids. You know, you can't get into college under legacy or affirmative action, standards of admission and major and something like fat studies and then come out and get a significant job. Um, I mean you're gonna have to do something like work in an open hiring space like a sales floor and ads or something like that for a couple of years, learned what the real world is like, get a real degree or certificate, and by that point this this will be shaken out of you. And that turned out not to be the case at all, brutally incorrect. Yes, that it was entirely wrong. What actually happened was that the people who got degrees in sociology, the studies feel so on, began creating consultancies one two, pressuring corporations to create departments that were focused on the things they'd study, like D E I the whole alphabet suit D E I, E, S G, S E, L hr all. The stuff that's now growing in the corporate world comes out of this sector. So, in fact, if you major in black studies and you graduate from a decent school a lower IVY, this would certainly be true for sociology, psyches so on, just the bachelor's. You don't in fact go work at a Starbucks for a while and then decide on graduate school or another career. You can go work in d E, I, HR, whatever down the line for a fortune coporation. So I mean, I think I haven't exactly given a mechanism, but that's that's what happened. For whatever reason, I think the advice of legal which initially assumed this would be pretty harmless. But for whatever reason, this stuff became very entrenched in corporate America. So you now have a pipeline four woke college kids into the business world in to woke fields, and these have become incredibly controlling in the biggest companies. And that's how you have senior management, and you have an older generation that has ascended was already in power before the stuff came along. That's completely buckling to it. Which is the most fascinating thing from my perspective. Well, it's I think it's because they don't know that it's bullshit. I don't know, you don't think of sixty three year old CEO knows that putting your fucking pronouns and your bio is bullshit. Every you have to see Wilford. I get emails from the stuffiest law firms on earth. They got pronouns in their bio. This stuff is everywhere. Yeah, No, it's I think that what am I trying to say here? I think that there is an element of people actually taking this more seriously than it deserves because of the traditional American respect for experts. So this is actually one of the things that you constantly here when you engage with woke wannots. If you say something like biological sex is extraordinarily simple to define by Brad Pitt Bulls as a young manner teddy air hamsters. Both these things are true for my group of friends. Uh, it's it's very obvious what this is. What you're saying is just idiotic. I've seen it empirically demonstrated to be wrong hundreds of times. Um, the response will invariably be, why are you saying something that all of the experts are lined up against? Do you think that you know more about the nature of sex and gender than the American Association of Pediatrics And it Actually it requires a lot of understanding. This is one of the focuses of my next book. Actually, it requires a lot of understanding of the modern scene of the kind that the CEO of say, a dental services company might not have to understand why this is bullshit, like to understand that this is just bullshit. I'm like, let's talk about one of the milder things, like diversity training. Diversity training, which in practice consists mostly of teaching your executives about the stereotypical attributes of different groups. Um, is completely useless. There's a famous article in Harvard Business Review. I've shot a emails um to the guy who wrote it. I have to look and see whether there's a response. But I mean, they looked at all these diversity training programs and they found that none of them added anything the bottom line at all, none of them had any positive effect. People are just just the the trope that diversity is our strength or that we we will do better with diversity. I mean, is such like in you know, you want to talk about multivariant versus univariant. I mean sometimes, but how on earth could you make could you drag that out to assume that it is true in all cases? Yeah? I mean and also just the the the uh, the juvenile sheen that this puts on everything that you need some sort of bureaucratic chaining process for people to know to you know, to not try not to have a blind spot as to the diversity of the background or the demography of the people involved in the company. Just sucking nuts. Yeah no, I mean, but I think we we agree. So the article found that diversity training didn't accomplish anything. And I mean if if you read the article and read the response papers and certainly read between the lines, I mean, you you realize why, like any idiot could hire eleven percent blacks who are reasonably well qualified into a company. That's all you need to do to get diversity. So like fire the whole department, you know, have have a junior vice president, do that once a year. I mean, so first, that's the most basic point, and then tell people not to be racist. Everything on top of that is just useless. So a seminar that explains the traditional stereotypical idea of black learning style is only going to be valuable one if there is a black learning style, which they're not. There's not. I mean what that means to me is that we're still seven percent or whatever behind on the tests. I mean, it just seems to be like it takes longer to process information. If you read what this is supposed to be, you know, more circular process of thinking. Those aren't strengths. So first you have to assume this is a real thing instead of just we need to spend more time hitting the books. And second, for the seminar the training to be useful, you would have to assume that every non black executive should be willing to change what they do to accommodate this, which is again crazy. So there's an obvious read than why this doesn't work. But anyway, the point of the article is just that it doesn't work. My point, though, is something more background. If you're a CEO looking at some of this, looking at what are now considered entire fields like HR or d E, I, I don't think you're going to be immediately aware that it's mostly just crap, that concepts like stereotype threat or microaggression aren't supported by any good research. Like you might think it, you might think it in the back of your mind, like and it's just a bullshit, but it's it's gonna be fairly difficult for you to say that. And again, part of what I'm trying to do in my next book is explain the process, Like the process that created this bullshit field is that in the sixties and seventies, a specific thing happened. I mean, you saw the combination of traditional legacy programs which had long been letting in idiots, with affirmative action programs, female focused programs, so on, bringing in still more students that were not at already for the campus, especially blacks at the time, Black Americans. And you saw the creation of these fields, the different studies so on, designed to house these under prepared students. And a great many of the concepts we're talking today about, D E, I and so on came out of this period in the set of ideas. So when you hear quote unquote experts in this field, you have to realize these fields, you have to realize that almost everyone has an extraordinarily strong political bias towards the left side. I mean, something like eight of social science professors right now openly identify as communist or Marxists. It's something like five percent of Republicans. Um, So you have to question how intelligent are the people that were getting these fields. And when you go through all of this, you realize, yes, my initial common sense impulse was probably correct, But unless you're prepared to do that, it can be kind of intimidating to have a department that was created by your predecessors saying well, we want to apply the best science. Who are you to oppose that? Yeah? But do people even micro aggressions? I think is a good playing field for this, because I'm just not seeing anyone of any sentience who heard microaggressions the first time it left the campus, you know, in two thousand and twelve, two thousand and fourteen, sometime around there. And that wait a second, who are these children who are whinting? This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard microaggressions. You don't get to feel good about everything all the time. Something might make you feel less than great about it. And in the words of Bill Maher, if it's a micro aggression, aggression, doesn't it make you micro pissed? So and and I think the point that you harp on is that it's that they don't. It's a it's a it's a reputational risk, and it's a public relations risk in that it's become an athema or it's become taboo or risky to oppose these things. Whereby in two thousand seven, if someone in HR employee kind of mentioned an issue around microaggressions, you'd laugh them out of the room, if not fire them. But you can't do that any longer. That's not that's no longer how it works. Not that we're gonna be able to solve why that is on this chat right now. But I'm sure that's one that you know, the type of question that you and I are trying to get to the bottom of constantly. But yeah, I just I'm still shocked that these people hitting you know, many of them were already in their fifties, whether the gen X or baby late baby boomers, were in the c suites of these of these corporations and did not summarily reject this, even if they were somewhat intimidated reputationally. But I guess we'll have to see where that where, you know, where that trajectory takes us in terms of trajectory. Also, you know one topic that you tweeted out about UM a couple of weeks. You know, I think it is actually a few days ago, UM that I found interesting in trying to think that is there any self corrective mechanism in in society for some of this stuff? UM? Someone else tweeted out about a childhood gender transition, and that mentioned that eight years from now, sixty minutes will be doing pieces on the transition craze of the twenties, and this will be looked upon in retrospect as in horror. Um, you responded, guarantee this and have no problem saying it in public, and you believe that this is going that that there is gonna be self correcting action in society, that people will realize that this is all insane and and veer away from it and and look back on it in shame and horror. Um, how secure are you that that's actually gonna happen, That this is now not now so entrenched, and that the the moral calculus is so now in favor of people um indulging this, in supporting this, and that that that the ease with which you can paint someone as a bigot or reactionary or fascist for opposing it, That those incentives are now so powerful that society is not going to be able to come back from this, and this is just gonna keep on marching forward. Um. I don't think the d transitioners, and like the gender the g C, the gender critical feminists are gonna let that happen. I mean, so like you're seeing a weird alliance against this kind of stuff where you've got guys like Matt Walsh on the one side, like bearded lumberjack looking conservative dudes, and then you have people like Happy Little Turf on Twitter that are like feminist ex party girls that are like opposing this full on riot girl style Eva Carlova and someone down the line. I mean, uh, I think to a certain extent, so when we were talking about how corporations could possibly fall for this stuff, um, I think it got through the door pretty incrementally. It seemed reasonable to have one person that would focus on diversity hiring, and then like topsy, it just grew. But I mean, how can it stay? How can can I ask you one question here in terms of that. But if you're saying it's incremental, look at the trajectory of it, let's call it how much it grew from let's even call it two thousand five to two thousand twelve verse two thousand twelve to two thousand nineteen one phase. I mean, it's just fractional minuscule the march and progression of this um from let's call it the two thousands to the pretty great Awokening era to the Great Awokening ear. I see this more as just a tidal wave that washed over society beginning in about two thirteen. Well, I think a simple way of looking at this would be that you're seeing exponential annual growth. I mean, like if you if you yeah, but if you invest in the market, like you know what that is. I mean, so two times two is only four, and four times four is only sixteen. But when you get into sixteen times sixteen, then you're getting into massive increases in the amount of something that you see. And so the originally invisible thing, the four staffers at a fortune five becomes very visible because you have two hundred forty four staffers or whatever the figure would be. I mean, I think that's probably something close to what happened. Zach Goldberg, who's done a lot of good writing about this, uh ties the greater Wokening, as he calls it, to the racial reckoning. He may have coined both terms, actually, but I mean that's when you saw Trayvon Martin. So the entire Black Lives Matter thing, like even with a black president, we see this genocide against black people was certainly one of the big levers that was seized on to make this this false argument like we haven't made substantial progress in the sixties and we need to bring in more people into this business that can work on handling different aspects of this. So I mean, if you have a d I focused HR office, I mean you might have someone focused on Title nine issues. You might have someone focused on relationships with legal which is a big issue with this stuff. You might have some many people focused on diversity, hiring, minority outreach, different types of marketing, so on down the line. I don't know if I would say this is one of the biggest problems in society, but it's definitely a damn real issue if you're involved in business, and it's become more and more noticeable each of these years. But that's just because of the pace of increase um and I think but in terms of what I was saying, I think that there are two techniques that are really used by people in these roles. The first is to argue that they come from legitimate scientific disciplines, and what they're saying is science that CEOs from the older generation wouldn't understand. This is used in the gender space. All of the time, So it's like microaggressions. There are a couple of papers that purport to show that asking someone about background or home country, for example, upsets them and can can slow down work product in a business. Now, there are dozens of other responses that show that's probably not true. I posted one to Twitter today. But if you are someone making this argument, you would say, well, do you come out of the field of d E I focused hr, Like I do? Are you questioning my very serious degree? Now? Again, I personally think that almost anyone could do a lot of these jobs, Like I think there are a lot of predictors of how well you do in the workplace. One of them is i Q, one of them is aggression, and way down the road you get too credential, Like it sounds absurd to me that the skills that I learned as a college professor, as a coach, so on down the line wouldn't be effective as an executive and a whole range of businesses. So I mean, I don't think this is true, but it's pretty effective, Like are you questioning my science? These are two microaggressive of papers. The second technique that's used is working with legal where people will say you know, yeah, people maybe a little over sensitive, but there really are issues of genocide in our society or whatever, anti trans discrimination in our society, and if we shy away from this as a company, we're gonna get picketed, We're gonna get sued. So we are saving your us. We are preventing you from having these terrible things happen. So generally, the the vice president of d E I will talk, for example, with the the corporate council. That would probably also be a c suite title, and something would be worked out in terms of what the firm is gonna do as h it's approached a Pride month or whatever. And that's how you see just like crazy ship like Haliburton and the U S. Marines doing pride ads. Every one of these bullets that hits you will be a different color. I actually made fun of this on Twitter, where I said that it was just creepy to see the C I A and the N S A doing pride ads, like you can't imagine our diversity. How about the Marines? Their pride ad was kind of a take on Full Met The Full Metal Jacket fan cover art, the poster art for the movie Full Metal jacket, except with the rainbow of the bullets rampifi bullets. This is insanity. Yeah, I mean, and again like the I once when I was in high school, excuse the language, but I mean, I asked one of my good buddies what he thought about gamers. But no, but he was like, you know, you like to suck cox and ain't my problem. And that's that's always been kind of my attitude, Like I don't care at all about people's sexuality. I support gay marriage. I mean, so I think when you look at some of this stuff, like, yeah, it's a little ridiculous, but as at a baseline it wouldn't be an issue. The problem is that everyone's doing it. They're not doing it voluntarily, and they're doing it because of the invasive presence of this negative Marxist ideology, and that really is a problem, correct, Yeah, I mean, like if you just like to sleep with dudes, okay, more women for me, Like, who cares? It's it seems like when it when it seems to be cycled through every corporate marketing program in America, it seems like there's something else going on, and that's what's what's turning a lot of people off. It's also so blatantly a moral Like I mean, I'm, you know, like a competitive guy, come from the business world myself, Like I don't, I'm not the most poster boy for ethics. But I mean, like when you see this stuff where it's like BMW Europe, everything's rainbow, pretty gade up, then it's like BMW USA. They even in flicted this on the poor Africans. Now that Africa stabilizing BMW Nigeria, and they see like bf W Saudi Arabia and they're none of those games at all, not by right by a lot of those cars over there, it's just like straight up like the American and Saudi flag or whatever in like a nice car. So, I mean it's you understand that to a certain extent, this is being done only because people are tolerating it, only where people are tolerating it, and it's being done as a money seeking lawsuit avoiding virtue signal. And that's that's what's irritating. Yeah, And I just the way I put it. You know, I don't know if you're familiar with the company fashion company Revolve, but Revolve is known for, you know, having this marketing machine around fashion you know, Instagram models and fashion influencers, and they run this machine, this marketing machine, you know, this Revolve marketing machine. It's like, okay, we're inserting society, you know, serious societal issues through the Revolve marketing machine. That's pretty much what we're doing. It's just very just eerie. UM. So circling all the way back to the gun issue that we started this conversation on, um to finish up with. So, the only ledgislation, or at least only federal legislation that has come out of the recent UH conversation in response to the two big shootings was a Senate bill that had that does include some of the stuff we touched on in terms of red flag laws. UM, and you know, some at least limitations age based on access to high capacity firearms things of that nature. UM. What do you think of the bill? Um? Is it too you know, is it just another unnecessary step towards in the direction of safety. Is m bureaucracy that's really not going to solve any problems or you know, even just the the overtures towards red flag laws. Could it fill the space or at least address the issue that I think we we found some common ground on in terms of identifying people who truly do pose a threat and putting some specific restrictions on their access to firearms. And I think this is pretty good to build. It's at the left of me and won't do much of anything. I mean, yeah, I like, I think that you have to do something as a leader. You know, the red the red flags for these troubled young men under twenty one or twenty five or whatever they settle on. That's a good idea. The question is because I mean, like when you say, isn't that a risk to my guns? I mean, I don't want to be glib, but I'm almost forty. Like, if you're buying an a R at twenty one, I don't necessarily mind that there is a process that's enhanced enough that they look at your juvie record. I mean that just makes common sense. You only had two years to rack up an adult record. So I think that one might prevent some mash shootings. One thing they're doing in there is closing the quote unquote boyfriend loophole, where if you actually get a felony above the lowest level DV charge, meaning you beat the crap out of a woman. In most cases, generally, if you were a husband and you did that, you wouldn't be able to own guns for at least a period of time. But if you weren't married and you did that to your baby mama, like Jacob Blake, would have been able to buy a gun. UM. So I don't have a problem with that. I think that those two things, and some of the other things like mental health spending targeted at men, we'll probably have some positive impact the reality those that we need to be honest about this topic. Again, the eighty percent majority of gun violence is gang violence, involving young men white, Black, and Hispanic shooting each other with two guns. Um. And more than half of those men are just black, not discounting the violence from the Caucasian in Chicago's traditionally Hirish and Italian, the Hispanic bugs. But I mean, again, fifty murders last you were black guys. So there's a very specific demo here, like it's poor fatherless men under twenty five half black. Bone just described it. So when you talk about we're not supposed to profile, we're not supposed to analyze who does certain things. I just in a sentence describe who does this. Now, what can we do to move handguns away from those guys? And that's gonna be tough. And by the way, the interesting thing is if you actually did that, because again probably what sixty six percent of the people in the group I just mentioned, we'd be black or Hispanic. If you actually try to do this, you'd be accused of racism just off bat. I mean, any policy that would really move the gun stores out of those areas and whatever was done, I mean you would see an immediate backlash, like they're trying to disarm our small businessman. The white man's coming for our weapons. So when you say diversity can be a strength or a weakness here, it's a weakness because policies that would be non controversial in many countries, just as voter ideas, become very controversial in the USA because of our history of large races and classes and even regions the North and the South killing each other. So it's the the issue is not doesn't make sense to use an idea, it's will Hispanics be disenfranchised by the use of idea or something? And the same problem America America is kind of one of one are our unique history and heritage make you know, some solutions that make sense for some other countries just impractical or a little more difficult to implement out here. Um, Wilfred, this was fantastic. Lutely appreciate you coming on today. There's so many topics that you know, you uh much like myself and and I think probably the people that we like to interact with and seek out. You know, no, we don't mind spraying a little machine gun fire and hitting all the targets and just there's so much, there's so much to synthesize in you know, in society these days, um, politically, policy wise, sociologically, and you do a great job at all of it. Um, so appreciate you coming on today. And why don't you tell everybody where they can find you on the internet. Yeah, I'm pretty easy to find. I mean, my usual recommendation of just google Wilfred Riley. That's w I L F R E D R E I L L Y. You'll find my Twitter, website, Facebook books. I mean both books were international bestseller, so they are pretty easy to find on Amazon and so on. But check if you're interested, check me out. I'm at the point where I'll still engage with you online all that kind of things. They're get in touch. I love it and also will be six thirty on Twitter on Twitter w I L Underscore d A underscore Beast six thirty does great work there, Um Wilford, thank you once again. This is the Prevailing Narrative. I am at Bolinski once again. You can listen and subscribe to the Prevailing Narrative on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you're listening right now. Make sure to follow me on my socials at Matt Bolinsky m A T T B I L I N s k Y. The Prevailing Narrative is a Cavalry Audio production and association with I Heart Radio produced by Brandon Morrigan, Executive produced by Dana Burnetti and Kegan Rosenberger for Calvary Audio. I'm at Bolinsky