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We're back with another edition of the
Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Joshenski,

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culture editor here at the Federalist.
As always, you can email the show

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at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,

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make sure to subscribe wherever you download
your podcasts, and of course to

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the premium version of our website as
well. So excited to be joined by

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Coleman Hughes today. He's the author
of the new book The End of Race

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Politics, Arguments for a Color Blind
America. That book is out on February

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sixth. He's also the host of
the popular podcast Conversations with Coleman, and

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he writes over at Substack at Coleman
Hughes dot substack dot com. You're busy

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man, Coleman, thanks for coming
on Federalist Radio Hour. Very happy to

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be here. Thanks for having me. Of course, I follow your work

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really closely. I'm so much I'm
such a fan of so much of what

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you write, and I was hoping
maybe we could start just with some of

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the personal stuff that you write about
in the End of Race Politics, sort

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of about your experience at Columbia University
in the Ivy league picking up on some

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pessimism that was surprising, and maybe
it wasn't surprising to you, but maybe

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seemed out of touch or just you
know, kind of unexpected. Can you

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talk to us a little bit about
that experience. Absolutely so. I enrolled

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at Columbia University in twenty sixteen,
and anyone who is familiar with the culture

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of IVY Leagues, certainly in the
past ten years at least, if not

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longer, will know that these are
some of the least racist places on planet

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Earth. In other words, if
I were to assess my likelihood of,

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say, being called the N word, in a million different locations on planet,

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just sampling the level of racism around
the world, I would find Columbia's

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campus, Harvard's campus, Princeton's campus
to rank at the absolute lowest level of

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that kind of old school racism.
So it was a surprise when I got

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to school, and this is even
coming from growing up in a liberal location.

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It was a surprise to see that
almost every other day in the campus

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newspaper, other black kids on campus
were claiming to experience white supremacy every single

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day on campus. This was shocking
to me because it seemed to me that

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This was one of the least racist
zip codes one could possibly be. It,

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So I became curious, why is
it that in one of the least

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racist places you could be a hyper
progressive university campus where a white person is

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more likely to be almost sheepish and
apologetic deferent to you as a black person

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than to be racist to you.
Why is it that in such a place

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I heard the greatest pessimism that I've
ever heard about racism and why supremacy,

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Almost more pessimistic than my own grandparents, who were born and lived in segregation.

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Yeah, it's so interesting and one
of the big questions I have for

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you. Because so I was born
in nineteen eighty three, and I remember

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when I was in college, this
is when the Trayvon Martin killing happened,

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and I just, for whatever reason, I always look back on this,

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I had a pit in my stomach. And throughout the news coverage, you

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know, this went on for ever
and then kind of bled into the Ferguson

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protests and everything since then, it
just felt really scary. On some sort

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of intangible level, it just felt
like something had changed just in the media.

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Watching the media coverage happen, I
wanted to ask you, Coleman,

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if there's a time that you pinpoint
this change, this shift from what used

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to be a mainstream kind of color
blind approach that you argue we should get

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back to to the mainstream suddenly pushing
almost this cultural Marxist approach to race.

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Was there a time that we can
pinpoint that shift, or is there maybe

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no way to actually say it started
right now or it started at this point

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ab or C. Well, I
think you actually nailed the point in time

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that it switched, namely the death
of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George

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Zimmerman, the acquittal of George Zimmerman
the next year in twenty thirteen, which

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launched the Black Lives Matter movement,
though that movement remained kind of small and

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marginal until Michael Brown was killed in
Ferguson in twenty fourteen, at which point

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it became a national news story,
and it kind of incubated and grew slowly

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until it exploded in twenty twenty with
the death of George Floyd. So basically

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the question is what happened around twenty
thirteen that race and racism and all the

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associated issues with the police went from
pretty marginal in the American news cycle and

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American consciousness to central My thesis in
the book is that what happened is essentially

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technology changed. If you and I
are old enough to remember a time before,

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really before smartphones and before social media, when the way that you would

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get your news was basically the six
o'clock news if you watched it, or

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the newspaper once a day. And
at that time, if there was an

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altercation between a police a cop and
a citizen that went south in any number

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of ways, probably it wasn't filmed. Remember the huge thing about Rodney King

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was that it was filmed as a
fluke freak accident. Some guy happened to

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have a video camera and saw it
out his window. But what happens now

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is now everyone has a camera,
Everyone has a high depth camera that they

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can turn on within five seconds.
Everyone can now post that to social media

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and it can be algorithmically boosted so
that it's seen by millions in a single

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day. That's a fundamental seed change
in the way information spreads. And right

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around twenty thirteen is the time when
a critical mass of people had that technology,

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that is to say, smartphones plus
social media. So it's not that

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there was some spike in racism.
In fact, every indicator of racism had

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been going down since the nineties,
including police caners. So it's not that

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the actual problem got worse, it's
that our ability to see these viral incidents,

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some of which really were murders and
horrible acts, and others of which

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were totally justified police shootings, our
ability to see them suddenly changed in a

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way that we weren't prepared for.
So really it's the technology that caused the

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b l M movement, and then
because of the because of the b LM

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movement and the enormous emotions that that
unleashed on both sides of the political aisle,

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that's what really touched off the the
trend of you know, DEI in

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in corporate in corporate America having to
sign DEI loyalty pledges to get hired as

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a professor at certain schools, and
all of these other you know, the

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controversy over teaching quote unquote crt n
K through twelve as all of these other

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things were downstream consequences of the emotions
that the BLM movement unleashed, which was

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it self caused by technology. Okay, so I'm so glad you brought that

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up, because it was what I
was very eager to ask you about from

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the book. I mean, one
of the lenses where I think on this

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podcast we're very clearly the most important
lens to look at American politics and culture

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and internationally too, of course,
is technology. It is the lens that

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you need to apply in order to
understand this. And Jonathan Hite, Gene

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Twenji, a lot of them will
say right on twenty twelve, twenty thirteen,

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as you pointed out, is that's
the time of critical mass. So

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colemin I wanted to ask also the
means of communication are changing, the vehicles

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are changing, and also it's doing
something to us. It's almost gamifying politics.

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It's almost gamifying race in a new
way. You know Twitter at the

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time, it's very different than what
X is now, but it was still

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You're doing this with Facebook and Instagram, likes, tweets, and the incentives

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just changed completely in the way that
we're communicating. Is that for younger generations,

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is that also that has to be
part of what's made them look at

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race relations in a country that historically
has more people of different races, ethnicities

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and backgrounds living together more peacefully than
ever before in human history within geographic areas.

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That has to be part of why
that pessimism started to surge too.

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I would argue it's more than part
of why my senses, it's almost all

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of why. If you look at
the gallop and the pew poles from twenty

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twelve and twenty thirteen, you see
actually a majority of white and black Americans

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saying that race relations are good.
Right around twenty thirteen, that begins to

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take a nose divee And there's no
other explanation than the you know, the

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BLM movement and the essentially the series
of martyrs that were presented as a part

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of that movement that we all saw
on Facebook and via our phones. There's

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no other explanation actually makes sense.
Right. It wasn't Barack Obama's fault.

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He had already presided over four years
of quite good race relations. Actually,

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it wasn't Trump's fault because the trend
started before Trump, and it certainly wasn't

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a reflection of an actual increase in
white racism or in police killings. Both

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of those are empirical questions, both
aren't true when you look at the data.

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The only actual theory that makes sense
of it is that suddenly we had

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phones in our hands, we had
cameras, we had social media, and

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this changed the kind of information that
reached our eyeballs. It promoted deferentially information

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and videos that were divisive that tapped
into our kind of deep tribal circuitry around

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historical grievances, racism, and so
forth. And it let that information in

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those videos spread very quickly without any
fact checking or ability to place context around

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them. And that's really what happened. I don't want to put words in

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Rufo's mouth, because I'm sure he
agrees with a lot of what you said,

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but I'm curious also for your take
on the theory. And I know

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you write about this in the book
that essentially radicals had been installed in academia,

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and increasingly, as we sent more
people through academia, we were filtering

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through these radical worldviews. It was
kind of happening under our noses. They

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went out into the working world with
these radical, post color blind, anti

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color blind takes on race relations that
were often rooted and outright Marxism and communism,

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and we woke up one day in
twenty twenty, looked around and saw

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that there had been this institutional takeover. But that's sort of different also than

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social media blurring the empirical facts.
There's something about the ground kind of being

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seated by these radical ideologies in a
way that people, you know, when

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they were shown blurred versions of the
truth, Maybe it flips a light switch

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on. I don't know. I'm
curious Coleman for what you think the interaction

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between those two theories is. Yeah, I think you're exactly right that it's

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seated the ground. The ideas of
the ideology of critical race theory, which

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has been around since the nineteen seventies, the ideology of intersectionality, which hasn't

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been around since the late eighties early
nineties, Kimberly Crenshaw being in some way

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the mother of both of those ideologies. Those have been around for decades,

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and they've percolated and incubated mostly in
higher education, in turned PhD programs,

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corners of law schools, and so
forth. They've been around for decades,

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but they've been marginal for decades,
so they created a kind of backdrop,

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but they still needed a spark,
and the spark that really drove the decline

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in race relations since twenty twelve,
twenty thirteen. The spark was the technology

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and the videos. That's really what
it was. Yeah, that makes a

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lot of sense. And then on
another point you made, I'm also curious

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what you think about whether this legitimate
anti black and anti white racism. In

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the year since twenty twelve twenty thirteen, do you think in the last decade

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those sentiments, that there actually has
been an increase in legitimate anti black,

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anti anti white racism. I mean, I think pretty clearly anti white racism

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has surged, and if you look
at Robin d. Angelo and Ibernix Kenny

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being massive best selling authors and getting
their works kind of installed in school districts

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around the country. But is that
Are we seeing a rise in real racism

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or is it sort of rhetoric from
the elites. Has it trickled into legitimate

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sentiments among average Americans. It's a
good question, very hard thing to measure.

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What I can say is, certainly, I don't think there's any way

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that you decrease racism by making people
think about race far more often. I

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think this is one of the big
misconceptions among progressive anti racists. They all

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say that we never talk about race, and we need to talk about race

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much much more. We need to
view everything in our lives through the lens

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of race. You need to be
examining the racial makeup of your friend group.

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You need to be assessing people's opinions. Oh, okay, he's a

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white guy that said that, and
that's why he said it. Is a

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black guy that said that, et
cetera. Encouraging people and even children to

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think this way. I don't see
how it could possibly reduce the sum total

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of racism in society. And if
it does anything, it probably amplifies it.

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Now of course, that you can't
measure people's thoughts directly. What you

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can look at our policies, and
if you're if we're going to look at

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anti white policies, they have certainly
become more numerous and more mainstream in the

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past ten years. I mean,
if we could take a time machine back

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to ten years ago and tell you
know, Barack Obama or anyone or any

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default Democrat that in the year twenty
twenty, there's going to be a global

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pandemic of the kind we haven't seen
since the Spanish flu. And rather than

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hand out aid to failing restaurants on
the basis of need, or financial aid,

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financial need rather will hand it out
on the basis of race, and

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that there will be serious proposals in
some places implemented to hand out vaccines and

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covid anti virals preferentially on the basis
of race. People would have told you

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there's no way such a thing could
never happen in America, and yet it

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did. That's a really chilling hypothetic
one. It just kind of underscores how

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sad all of this is. And
that kind of brings me to another thing

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that I wanted to ask you about, Coleman. Are there things the right

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as it's pivoting to address some of
what happened, and, by the way,

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some of what happened under the watch
of Republican leadership or bi parties in

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leadership for decades, as the right
just kind of pivots to address some of

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this more and more through the Republican
Party, the conservative movement, conservative media.

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Are there things that stand out in
your mind that the right is getting

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wrong, that the right could maybe
do better, or that maybe are endemic

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to the right's approach to combating the
leftist sort of anti color blind ideology.

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Well, this is an evolving story, but just today I saw Charlie kirk

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is preparing some kind of takedown of
Martin Luther King. Yeah, so the

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behind the curtain here, we're pre
taping this on MLK day. So that's

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in Coleman you have in the book
you addressed this, but yeah, this

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is a great example. Yeah.
So just to set this up, there's

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been this trend on the left for
you know, certainly the past ten years,

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maybe longer, where every Martin Luther
King Day there's a series of articles

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that are practically copy pasted from one
another that all make the same argument that

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Martin Luther King was really a rat. They say he was really radical,

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and conservatives and moderates like to pretend
that he wasn't a radical. They like

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to sanitize and co op and whitewash
his legacy in order to sort of claim

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his mantle. And the implied argument
here is that if MLK were alive today,

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he would support people like Ibram Kendy
and Tanahase Coates and Robin DiAngelo and

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he would and BLM and he would, he would really he'd really identify with

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that approach to talking and thinking about
race rather than say to someone like me

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or to people that strive for a
colorblind society. This argument is totally specious

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and relies on a bait and switch
because the areas in which MLK was a

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quote radical were not about race.
He was radical in his day on the

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Vietnam War and on socioeconomic issues.
For example, he was pro universal healthcare,

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guaranteed federal employment, guaranteed full employment
rather soort Bernie Sanders type policies.

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And he was against the Vietnam War
before that was mainstream. So I can

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just see now even Ibram x Kenny
has posted today on Twitter talking about Mlka's

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position on the war. The reason
this is abate and switch is because those

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topics, whatever you think of them, have nothing to do with the idea

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of race, of common humanity,
and of striving for a colorblind society.

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And on those issues which are the
ones he's alleged to be a radical about,

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he actually never wavered on those and
inter Section Olivia Coleman, Yeah,

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exactly, and he never wavered on
preferring class based policy to race based policy.

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In fact, in his final book, which is his so called radical

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phase, he devotes an entire chapter
to critiquing the black power movement, which

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was like the BLM of his day, and he in fact, he criticizes

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them for focusing on race instead of
class, and he even suggests that they

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change their name from Black Power to
Power for Poor People. So that's the

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way the left gets this wrong.
The right wing response, it seems,

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and like I said, this is
an evolving story, but from someone like

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Charlie Kirk is essentially to agree with
the left wing analysis of King and then

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reject King as a result. This
is equally wrongheaded. I think Martin Luther

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King was one of the wisest and
deepest moral thinkers and leaders that the country

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has ever seen, and his example
in philosophy certainly still provides the path forward

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whether you're on the right or the
left. It seems to me it's so

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easy even for people with good intentions
to fall into this trap that I think

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has defined dorm room leftism liberty and
for a really long time, which is

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that if you learn an inconvenient fact. So for example, in this case,

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Charlie Kirk has talked about the tapes
that exist. Jay Edgar Hoover had

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wire tapped Martin Luther King for a
long time to discover and blackmail him over

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adultery, clearly what looks like alcoholism, all of that. People learn about

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his plagiarism, his flirtation with Marxism
and all those things, and reflexively then

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say the entire narrative is wrong.
And the reason I'm asking this, Coleman,

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is because I think this is also
where social media and technology in general

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is gamifying the discourse and is making
almost impossible for us to have common heroes

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like a Martin Luther King anymore.
It's almost like, you learn these inconvenient

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facts, then every single thing I
know about Martin Luther King is wrong.

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He's a bad guy start to finish. It's just like what they do with

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Thomas Jefferson. Oh, you learned
Thomas Jefferson had six hundred slaves, and

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everything Thomas Jefferson did is now poisoned
because it's true. There's a really inconvenient

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fact that exists out there. It's
just it's facile, and it seems like

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it's making this impossible to share things
as a country anymore. Yeah. I

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think I'm always one that can separate
the art from the artist, and certainly

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separate the message from the messenger.
And when it comes to doctor King or

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Jefferson or you know any literal founding
father or you know analogous leader. I

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think it's important to understand that these
were flawed people, and that doesn't necessarily

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invalidate their message. I'm curious if
if people on the right who want to

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do that to King would would hold
their own heroes to the same standards.

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Right, Yes, And the answer
obviously is no. In most cases,

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well no, And I think it's
because, again, social media is so

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reflexive that you are the incentives to
rack up likes and retweets for a really

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hard and non nuanced stance. And
this is another question I was going to

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ask you, Coleman, just like
on this broader debate that a lot of

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people are having about whether the tide
is turning. You know, lots of

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eulogies have been written for Cancel Cancel
culture, and people really feel feel like

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things are changing. And you exist
in the space on substack and with a

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popular podcast where people are really embracing
nuance and rejecting that reflexive sort of tip

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for tat that's incentivized on social media. Just in your own experiences as somebody

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who works in this space, do
you feel like the tide is turning.

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Do you feel like these new sort
of alternative platforms that have popped up,

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you know, whether it's substack or
podcasting platforms, are like really really really

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helping us get out of this era, or are we maybe hopelessly divided.

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I think cancel culture and wokeness peaked
probably in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one.

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But to say that it's declined from
a peak is not quite as hopeful

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sentiment as it might sound, because
really it was increasing steadily since twenty thirteen

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and then had a massive spike around
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. So

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they say that it's a little bit
under its massive spike, it's high point

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that doesn't necessarily make me sleep great
at night, So that's how I would

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view it. I think we're still
in this situation where the goal of color

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blindness is frowned upon by progressives and
still the people on the right and among

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Republicans and moderates who do claim color
blindness as a goal. We have failed

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to persuade a crucial contingent on this
left and center left. So this is

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still a rather big problem for the
country going forward, and it's one that

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is vulnerable to a huge flare up
at any time. Yeah, that's another

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thing I'm curious for your take on, is we were talking about seeding the

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ground. At the same time,
we've seen black support for Donald Trump,

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for example, jump more than we
really have seen black support for any Republican

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candidate, and that also has coincided
with a decline in support for Joe Biden

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at almost historic levels, at least
in recent history. At the same time,

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though, to the point you just
made, there has been the seating

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of the ground. There has been
a generation now that's exposure to racial politics

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is on social media and completely distorted
with completely distorted narratives. Is it all

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just kind of a big puzzle at
this point? You know, we don't.

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There's these unknowable segments of the public
that are just in different camps,

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like what is the future and as
we know it now, as we can

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see it now, of where things
are maybe shifting, just with Black Americans

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as they consider some of these hugely
important questions. One thing to say is

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that you know, there's been a
massive seed change in the way people consume

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information from say the nineteen nineties to
today. Back then, a lot of

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people still watched the same channels,
and there were fewer channels and fewer ways

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to get information, So it was, you know, it was easier if

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you just met a random person on
street. The likelihood that you two are

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absorbing the same information was much higher. Nowadays, with Instagram, TikTok,

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YouTube shorts, everyone having a personalized
algorithm, it becomes very difficult to find

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common ground with a typical stranger.
Everyone kind of has their own unique diet

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of information, and people are siloed, and there are just many more silos,

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so it is difficult to kind of
see outside your bubble in a way

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that it didn't used to be.
And so yeah, it's sort of difficult

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to understand a trend like why is
why is? Why is Trump getting so

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much support relative to most Republicans among
black men in particular, of black people

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in general. I remember when the
first indictments started coming out on Trump,

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especially the multiple indictments, I had
a kind of I wouldn't call it a

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prediction that would be giving myself to
credit, but a suspicion that the fact

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he was under so many indictments would
make him seem like more sympathetic, more

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of a martyr and that might increase
his support in the black community, which

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I think naturally roots for the perceived
underdog. In many ways, I think

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Trump has been billed as the picture
of a white supremacist power structure, the

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kind of the white man keeping us
down, and that image is hard to

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sustain when he's under several federal and
state indictments. It's like, if he's

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in charge, why can't he even
seem to keep himself out of the courtroom.

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So when that image gets punctured,
I think it might be the case

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that some black people are more able
to sort of look at Trump charitably and

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lend support to him. That that's
my only theory. My only other theory

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00:29:03,359 --> 00:29:08,920
is that when Trump shuts up and
doesn't talk very much, he becomes more

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likable, because yeah, and Trump
has just been much quieter over the past

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00:29:17,160 --> 00:29:22,359
three years. So in a way, people I think a lot of people

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are seeing Biden Biden's obvious problems with
age, and they're not hearing as much

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from Trump, which means they're not
hearing as much upsetting and you know,

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idiotic and mean stuff from Trump,
and he becomes more attractive by default.

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That's the sort of flip side of
the social media coin. And we were

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just talking about this a little bit, that the gatekeepers are still very powerful,

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and yet they have never had less
power than they do right now.

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And I'm talking to media and academia
that you know, if you're a kid

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who's learning about let's say you got
the sixty to nineteen project curriculum in your

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school district, you also have YouTube, Wikipedia, the entire Internet at your

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disposal to sort of blow up those
narratives and to either look for more information

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that supports it or the information that
rebuts it. And you know, someone

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00:30:15,880 --> 00:30:21,519
like you, you're able to publish
your podcasts, your sub stack and to

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00:30:21,759 --> 00:30:25,200
sort of question the official narrative.
And I guess call me My question for

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00:30:25,240 --> 00:30:27,960
you is does that make you optimistic? Does that make you? You know?

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For example, when the Jacob Blake
thing happened in Kenosha and the riots,

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you know, the mainstream position on
that was absolutely wrong. There was

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00:30:38,000 --> 00:30:42,960
false information being spread about that,
A distorted picture, literally a distorted picture

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of that was mega viral, was
treated as gospel by the corporate press and

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sort of the mainstream popular culture.
But people had evidence or had access to

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the full video, they just sort
of needed to be prompted to look for

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it, and they need to be
prompted to follow voices like your own.

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So does that make you hopeful ultimately
that because you know, the flip side

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of the coin is really powerful too, the truth wins out. I don't

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00:31:11,759 --> 00:31:15,240
know if it makes me hopeful.
I'm certainly grateful to live in a free

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society with a free press and basically
no top down censorship except of sort of

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state secrets that are often understandably kept
secret. But the truth is that the

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00:31:33,039 --> 00:31:37,680
the legacy media, especially on the
issue of race, possibly more than any

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00:31:37,720 --> 00:31:45,559
other, has been totally derelict in
its duty to inform the public about the

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00:31:45,559 --> 00:31:49,599
facts as they stand. And you
could you can look at Jacob Blake,

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you could look at George Floyd as
another example. You could look at Michael

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00:31:55,640 --> 00:32:00,759
Brown. You can even look at
certain aspects of Trayvon Mare in his death.

355
00:32:00,559 --> 00:32:04,960
Every single one of these down the
line, you find a narrative that

356
00:32:05,079 --> 00:32:13,039
was very quickly seized upon biased against
the police, that when further facts emerged,

357
00:32:13,240 --> 00:32:19,319
those facts just were not very well
publicized or they were spun. And

358
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so really what happened is that most
journalists and anchors and people in the media

359
00:32:29,759 --> 00:32:36,440
were either supporters of BDLM and so
biased in their coverage, or they wanted

360
00:32:36,480 --> 00:32:42,440
to report it objectively, but they
existed in an environment where a single misstep

361
00:32:42,920 --> 00:32:49,599
or a single even correct take can
get you called a racist, so many

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00:32:49,680 --> 00:32:55,079
of them just kind of kept their
mouth shut about certain facts and lived to

363
00:32:55,119 --> 00:33:00,440
write another day. I mean,
how many people still don't know that the

364
00:33:00,319 --> 00:33:05,240
knee on the neck hold or the
knee on the shoulder blade hold that Derek

365
00:33:05,359 --> 00:33:10,119
Chauvin had George Floyden was not his
signature move or not some unique sign of

366
00:33:10,119 --> 00:33:15,640
his cruelty, but was literally the
trained hold called the maximum restraint technique that

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00:33:15,839 --> 00:33:23,160
every single Minneapolis cop was trained to
do when a subject was resisting and in

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00:33:23,279 --> 00:33:30,759
need of EMS. Many people don't
know that. Whose fault is that it's

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not really censored in the sense that
it would be censored in China or Russia.

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It's out there. It's just that
journalists don't want to report that.

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So this is basically what's happened.
That does not give me hope, because

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00:33:46,720 --> 00:33:52,039
it's hard to see how that changes
without a big sea change among elite the

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culture of elite media. But yes, I'm quite happy I live in a

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free and open society in general,
and that I you know, you can't

375
00:34:00,759 --> 00:34:05,480
be in prison for your views.
Yeah. No, I share your broad

376
00:34:05,519 --> 00:34:10,960
pessimism ultimately on these questions. But
you know, this is as we're sort

377
00:34:10,960 --> 00:34:15,119
of rounding out the conversation when you're
writing about your experience at Columbia, there's

378
00:34:15,199 --> 00:34:23,000
such a heavy looming sense of class
and this entire conversation basically when we're talking

379
00:34:23,039 --> 00:34:28,800
about academia, elite media. You
know, it makes me think of when

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00:34:29,440 --> 00:34:35,440
white evangelicals, for example, have
representation in corporate media. It's David French,

381
00:34:35,519 --> 00:34:37,039
like, he lives in Tennessee,
but in like one of the wealthiest

382
00:34:37,159 --> 00:34:43,480
pockets outside of Nashville in the entire
country, And so you get, even

383
00:34:43,519 --> 00:34:49,159
when representation is allowed in the media, you get someone who's still really following

384
00:34:49,320 --> 00:34:52,800
the elite line in terms of their
argumentation. And I know that that's a

385
00:34:52,840 --> 00:34:58,239
problem in the black community. I
just want to talk about your experience as

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00:34:58,239 --> 00:35:05,159
somebody who is is successful but heterotox
and I imagine Coleman, you get smeared

387
00:35:05,320 --> 00:35:08,719
all of the time, and I
wonder to what extent you think class plays

388
00:35:08,719 --> 00:35:14,719
a role in that disconnect between the
narrative and the truth. Yeah, class

389
00:35:14,719 --> 00:35:17,960
plays a huge role in it.
I'm, you know, as elite as

390
00:35:19,039 --> 00:35:22,760
any of the elites that I may
want to criticize. But I try to

391
00:35:23,000 --> 00:35:30,360
do well. I try. I
try to understand that on me and almost

392
00:35:30,440 --> 00:35:37,039
and most people I know are elites, and the bubble of elite thinking is

393
00:35:37,079 --> 00:35:43,079
not the same as as the country
at large. And you can just see

394
00:35:43,119 --> 00:35:49,280
so many egregious examples of this.
So I'll give two examples. I'm half

395
00:35:49,400 --> 00:35:54,440
Hispanic, half Black. When I
got to Columbia and I started noticing people

396
00:35:54,519 --> 00:36:00,760
use this term latin X. Now, I spent quite bit of time with

397
00:36:00,880 --> 00:36:07,119
my Puerto Rican family growing up.
I spoke quite a bit of Spanish as

398
00:36:07,159 --> 00:36:12,400
a kid, a lot of family
members that only speak Spanish, and so

399
00:36:12,559 --> 00:36:19,840
I had an intuitive sense of just
the hilariousness of this term. It's terrible,

400
00:36:20,239 --> 00:36:23,719
It makes no sense given the phonetics
of the Spanish language, and no

401
00:36:23,920 --> 00:36:30,760
actual Hispanic person would want to use
it. And yet I was being told

402
00:36:30,840 --> 00:36:37,719
on Columbia's campus that this term is
somehow the one that the Hispanic community is

403
00:36:37,800 --> 00:36:42,920
asking to be called. So I
knew that was ridiculous. I had no

404
00:36:43,000 --> 00:36:46,039
data to back it up at the
time, I only had experiences. And

405
00:36:46,079 --> 00:36:52,360
then Pew did a poll finding that
I think four percent of the Spanish community

406
00:36:52,400 --> 00:36:55,639
in America liked that term. The
other ninety six percent either did not like

407
00:36:55,679 --> 00:37:00,440
it or had never heard of it. That's the bubble. And yet this

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00:37:00,480 --> 00:37:05,000
is a word that came out of
Elizabeth Warren's mouth, who was running for

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00:37:05,079 --> 00:37:10,280
presidents of the entire country, not
a four percent of it. Another example,

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00:37:12,039 --> 00:37:15,599
at the height of twenty twenty,
the defund the Police Movement and the

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00:37:15,639 --> 00:37:22,360
BLM movement when BLM had the most
support it ever has had as a result

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00:37:22,360 --> 00:37:30,239
of the death of George Floyd Gallup. I believe did a poll asking Black

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00:37:30,280 --> 00:37:36,119
Americans a simple question, do you
want more police in your neighborhood the same

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00:37:36,159 --> 00:37:42,800
amount or less? Eighty one percent
answered that they either wanted the same amount

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00:37:43,159 --> 00:37:49,079
or more, and that broke down
as I believe sixty percent wanting the same

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00:37:49,159 --> 00:37:53,719
presence and about twenty percent wanting more. That left only twenty percent of Black

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00:37:53,760 --> 00:38:00,960
Americans, only one in five sharing
the position of Black Lives Matter that police

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00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:07,079
presence should be diminished. If you
were someone in the elite journalism world,

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00:38:07,480 --> 00:38:13,119
paying attention to the elite conversation,
that fact would have been flabbergasting, completely

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00:38:13,159 --> 00:38:17,760
shocking to you that only one in
five Americans, Black Americans shared BLM's position

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00:38:17,920 --> 00:38:24,400
on police presence, because far more
than one in five elite black Americans,

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00:38:24,559 --> 00:38:30,039
the ones you see on TV,
the ones in my world, far more

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00:38:30,079 --> 00:38:35,239
than one in five of those,
practically all of those shared BLM's position.

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00:38:37,719 --> 00:38:44,840
Yeah, the disconnect is incredible.
Those numbers are still incredible to think about.

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00:38:45,599 --> 00:38:47,360
And my last question Coleman, is
I know that you've been talking a

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00:38:47,400 --> 00:38:52,920
lot in this book tour I imagine
is going to be you know, there's

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00:38:52,960 --> 00:38:58,360
going to feature a lot of questions
about Claudine Gay and the entire sort of

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00:38:58,679 --> 00:39:04,320
question of press or oppressed dichotomy,
the oppressor oppressed dichotomy on Israel and Palestine.

429
00:39:04,440 --> 00:39:08,079
And you have written about how it's
sort of the struggle for black equality

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00:39:08,079 --> 00:39:15,039
in the United States has been appropriated
or it has been then used in South

431
00:39:15,400 --> 00:39:17,360
taking South Africa as well as an
example, and then sort of grafted onto

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00:39:17,480 --> 00:39:21,800
what happens in Israel and Palestine.
Could you talk a little bit about how

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00:39:21,840 --> 00:39:29,079
the left, and especially the elite
left, abuses that example or abuses what

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00:39:29,079 --> 00:39:34,519
happened in the United States to sort
of make the let's say, simplify what's

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00:39:34,519 --> 00:39:37,119
happening in Israel Palestine. Yeah,
I think a lot of people in the

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00:39:37,159 --> 00:39:43,039
West, in America in particular,
also in Europe, they want to see

437
00:39:43,079 --> 00:39:49,440
the issue of Israel and Palestine as
the same as the issue of Western Europeans

438
00:39:50,000 --> 00:39:54,400
and Africans essentially, whether that be
colonialism in the case of Europeans in Africa,

439
00:39:54,960 --> 00:40:00,760
or whether that be slavery and Jim
Crow when it comes to to America.

440
00:40:00,360 --> 00:40:05,079
Now, there are a lot of
very important differences here. One is

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00:40:05,119 --> 00:40:10,960
that the goal of Palestinian the Palestinian
national movement, is not the same as

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00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:15,840
the goal of the civil rights movement
in America. It was not even the

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00:40:15,840 --> 00:40:22,320
same as the goal of the black
radicals in America. Malcolm X never claimed

444
00:40:22,639 --> 00:40:27,800
that he wanted to take over all
of America and rule it as essentially a

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00:40:27,840 --> 00:40:31,320
black state. The most he ever
claimed in the early sixties was that he

446
00:40:31,440 --> 00:40:36,920
wanted a separate black state, maybe
somewhere in the US South or somewhere else

447
00:40:37,320 --> 00:40:43,239
altogether, like Liberia. In other
words, his most radical claim is that

448
00:40:43,280 --> 00:40:47,239
there should be a white state and
a Black state. Martin Luther King,

449
00:40:47,239 --> 00:40:53,880
of course, wanted to peacefully integrate
the company, Sorry, the country.

450
00:40:54,599 --> 00:41:02,039
Palestinians nationalists have claimed since the nineteen
thirties they've rejected every single partition that would

451
00:41:02,239 --> 00:41:06,840
allow for a Jewish state and an
Arab state to live side by side,

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00:41:07,400 --> 00:41:12,039
and they've insisted on the idea of
from the river to the sea, Palestine

453
00:41:12,079 --> 00:41:15,719
shall be free. That is that
the entire land of Israel would be a

454
00:41:15,719 --> 00:41:23,719
Palestinian Arab state, and in that
situation, the Jews would probably have to

455
00:41:23,800 --> 00:41:30,480
pack up and leave or be slaughtered. That is not anywhere analogous to the

456
00:41:30,519 --> 00:41:36,400
goals of the civil rights movement or
even the black radicals in America. Now

457
00:41:36,559 --> 00:41:40,800
that's goals. If you talk about
tactics, there's nothing in the history of

458
00:41:42,320 --> 00:41:49,360
the Black American struggle for freedom and
equality that is akin to the tactics Palestinian

459
00:41:49,360 --> 00:41:54,760
militants use, in particular hamas but
also Fatah back when they were more into

460
00:41:54,880 --> 00:42:01,119
terrorism. You can know, someone
like normal Finkelstein likes to cite the not

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00:42:01,280 --> 00:42:07,639
Turner slave revolt as an example.
Nat Turner did some horrible things kind of

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00:42:07,840 --> 00:42:17,079
hamas like in its barbarism towards civilians. The truth is that not Turner was

463
00:42:17,079 --> 00:42:23,360
an absolute footnote in the history of
Black Americans achieving freedom. Had not Turner

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00:42:23,400 --> 00:42:27,440
died in his crib, the Civil
War would have happened just like it did.

465
00:42:27,960 --> 00:42:31,679
The fight against Jim Crow would have
happened just like it did. And

466
00:42:31,760 --> 00:42:38,079
sohing there's nothing now in the mainstream
history of Black American activism, the mainstream

467
00:42:38,159 --> 00:42:45,039
history that is analogous to Hamas's use
of human shields its own people as human

468
00:42:45,039 --> 00:42:51,599
shields, to its indiscriminate targeting of
Israeli civilians, any of these things.

469
00:42:52,159 --> 00:42:55,920
So to compare the two things is
just ludicrous, both in terms of the

470
00:42:55,960 --> 00:43:00,920
goals and the tactics. And then
finally, this idea that is an apartheid

471
00:43:00,000 --> 00:43:05,960
state, I mean, this is
you know, I would argue it's refuted

472
00:43:05,960 --> 00:43:10,639
by the fact that twenty percent of
Israeli citizens are themselves Arabs. You could

473
00:43:10,639 --> 00:43:14,559
call them Palestinians or Israeli Arabs,
whatever you want to call them. They

474
00:43:14,559 --> 00:43:20,639
have the right to vote, they
have all the rights that Israeli citizens have,

475
00:43:20,719 --> 00:43:22,320
and actually not all of the obligations. They don't have to serve in

476
00:43:22,360 --> 00:43:27,880
the army. I'm not saying that
there's no racism towards them, there's no

477
00:43:27,960 --> 00:43:34,559
bigotry. There's bigotry as a constant
all over the world. But Israel is

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00:43:34,639 --> 00:43:37,960
not in the partheid state the way
that South Africa was. It has an

479
00:43:37,960 --> 00:43:44,960
occupation in the West Bank and Gaza
that it has offered to end in the

480
00:43:45,000 --> 00:43:50,239
past in exchange for a peaceful two
state solution. The problem is that the

481
00:43:50,239 --> 00:43:57,960
core of Palestinian thought still rejects that
and is deeply attached to the idea of

482
00:43:58,000 --> 00:44:04,519
from the River to the Sea.
Yeah, it's amazing how the mainstream has

483
00:44:04,719 --> 00:44:08,360
completely running with that narrative. To
Coleman, thank you so much. It's

484
00:44:08,400 --> 00:44:10,760
just been an absolute pleasure to talk
through some of this with you, and

485
00:44:10,840 --> 00:44:14,760
I really recommend your book again.
It's called The End of Race Politics,

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00:44:14,960 --> 00:44:19,920
Arguments for a Collar Blind America.
It's out on February sixth. Conversations with

487
00:44:19,960 --> 00:44:22,159
Coleman is a podcast that you can
get wherever you download your podcasts, and

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00:44:22,239 --> 00:44:27,679
you can follow Coleman's work at Coleman
Hughes dot substack dot com. Thanks so

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00:44:27,760 --> 00:44:30,920
much Coleman for coming on the show. Thanks very much for having me.

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00:44:30,440 --> 00:44:34,840
Well, you've been listening to another
edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm

491
00:44:34,840 --> 00:44:37,199
Emilgershinski, culture editor here at the
Federalist. As always, you can email

492
00:44:37,199 --> 00:44:40,320
the show at radio at the Federalist
dot com, follow us on Twitter at

493
00:44:40,400 --> 00:44:45,320
fdr LST. Make sure to subscribe
wherever you download your podcasts. We'll be

494
00:44:45,400 --> 00:44:49,400
back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for

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00:44:49,440 --> 00:45:00,639
the fray. Right, well,
you know a three