And we are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt
Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist and your experience shirpa on today's quest
for Knowledge. As always, you can email the show at radio at the
Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fvr LST, make sure to
subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of course to the premium version of
our website as well. I'm joined today by Wilfred Riley, political science professor
at Kentucky State University, an author of the new book Lies my liberal teacher
told me, debunking the false narratives defining America's school curriculum. It is a
topic, of course, that is ripe with all kinds of very important material.
Thank you for joining us, Wilford. I appreciate your time. Thank
you for having me on the show. This is a very interesting book.
Like I said, there's so much here to break down. But doesn't this
really come out of that nineteen ninety five book about the lies my teacher told
me, kind of a left wing look at the things omitted in, you
know, in our lessons in school over the years. Certainly some truth to
that, but you have, as you note, have have seen over the
last generation plus how much the left has infused itself in the lying in our
curricula. Yeah, so, I mean I think that the short answer is
yes, it's to some extent a response to that text. But over the
last really sixty years, I mean, the trend in higher education is cut
in the other direction. And this is one of those books that sounds sort
of dry, but I think will be actually really engaging to read, just
as a reminder of how fascinating American history is, what the real stories of
the country are. I even get into some discussions about whether, for example,
ultimate morality is real and if so, what it entails. But I
mean, so for in the past forty to fifty years, there's been a
huge block of books that have come out that have focused on the idea that
one, Western civilization is arguably one of the worst human cultures in history,
and two that you are being lied to about this by the white man would
be only a somewhat glip way of putting it. So, I mean,
you have lies. My teacher told me you mentioned that one correctly, but
you also have you know, sixteen nineteen, a Black history of the United
States. If I have that title correct, that book came out about a
year ago. You have Bury My Hearted, Wounded Knee, A Native History
of the United States, probably the the og in this field that old communist
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. And what all of these
I think heaven common is something that we both already sort of summarized. But
point one the idea that there are massive, unique flaws in the Western project,
and point two the idea that no one is telling you this, and
you're gaining a sort of arcane knowledge by learning about it, usually from the
rids or the feminists or whatever. And by the way, they're also feminist
versions of this ons I'll do as the bridges my back and so on.
And what I'm saying in this book is no, that's simply not realistic.
The problem in higher education and secondary education is not that mainstream academics love the
country too much and are coming too hard from the right. So I point
out that in reality, first of all, the flaws of Western culture exist
in almost every human civilization. So I open the book by going through this
lengthy discussion of slavery. It is somewhat heavily reliant on Thomas Soul, but
really just digging into the actual academic research on the concept. Going back to
Babylon and Rome, I talk about the Native Americans, and chapters two and
three I explained that these basic ideas, the oppression of women to some extent,
vascilage for men, the abuse of battle captives, these are pretty much
universal. One two. What distinguishes the West, if anything, is the
uniqueness of the glories of our civilization emancipation. For example, the idea that
people who aren't themselves slaves should object to slavery is a uniquely Western idea.
Slaves, who historically have generally been defeated warriors, have obviously always objected to
slavery, but free men have not. In Britain, in France, in
America, Whites, free blacks, other people who were ordinary silversmiths and such
decided that slavery was inherently immoral and launched a campaign against slavery. And if
you're an adherent of contemporary moral ethos, this means that the West, for
most of it's much of its history was simply better than the societies against which
we were competing. So there's point one point Two, we did the same
things that everyone did, some of which I don't even viewer with, particularly
wicked of fighting declared wars and then taking booty from the people that were defeated.
But we did those things, some of them were bad. Two we
improved at a faster rate, if anything. And three, And I think
this is really the key point, because these sort of conversations about the morality
of war have been had thousands of times. The Catholic Church of published books
and discussions about this. Three. The sort of center left, hippie influenced
ethos that's often presented edgy and radical in the USA isn't edgy and radical at
all. It's stale and boring. It's actually the mainstream ethos that you get
in high school textbooks, which I quote extensively throughout the book. And I
think that's something that's not noted as often. That sort of a warmed over
Marxist feminism is entirely ordinary today. It's what you're expected to say about gender
ideology and American history and a dozen other things. Pride parades are sponsored by
Halliburton. So even if you want to be an authentic, youthful rebel,
you should find something else you should for young marriage, or something that would
genuinely shock someone. So those, I guess would be the three points of
the book. It's interesting you note that, you know, if you really
want to be a rebel today, it is truly going against the whole Marxist
notion that you find that has led to well, for instance, what we've
seen on our college campuses over the last several months, and probably what we'll
see at our DNC RNC conventions coming up in a couple of months. So
then let me ask you this, Why is the Western, particularly the American
system, that has achieved so much, that has been so truly progressive in
the real sense of the word. Why is it deemed so awful by all
of these organizations? Now? I think, and this is a kind of
cynical view from a businessman, but I think the uniquely positive Western moral code
has been taken too seriously by a lot of Westerners. I mean, that
might be one way to put it. So Western morality, and Nietzsche and
a number of other people pointed this out. But Western morality became the first
moral system to value empathy in and of itself to an extraordinarily high level,
and traditionally, that has not been the case across human ethical MODI. I
mean, so let's see what the nine noble virtues of the warrior are.
Nine Nordic virtues. Okay, so the nine noble virtues. We associate these
with the Vikings, but the Roman Stoics, the Iroquois so on, followed
almost an identical code. Courage, fidelity, self reliance, truth, discipline,
industriousness, honor, hospitality, perseverance. You know, I suppose that's
pretty much the moral code I would attempt to pursue today. Obviously, Christianity
added a few other things into that mix that we that have been called the
virtues of Mary in the past, if I recall correctly, empathy and tolerance.
And I think that as the West has moved beyond Christianity into a sort
of woke paganism. And again I'm kind of making up my theology on the
fly here, but a lot of people seem to have settled on empathy and
tolerance as the only virtues worth having or worth practicing. So in a situation
where a lot of Westerners don't know too much about other societies, what you
see is an insane over analysis of our own history. In the context only
of these specific virtues of empathy and tolerance, and that leads to the idea
that people like the conquistadors are the pioneers, who obviously were brave, forthright,
truthful, inspiring and so on, were evil because they were not empathic,
or they committed acts of violence and so on down the line. And
I think there are two points of review here. One using any other ethical
standard, those people are extremely impressive, and two using the ethical standard that
quote unquote woke people use every other society and history was worse. But I
think what you have is basically the application of this neo morality only to our
society. And the final point that I would make is that this is to
to some extent, guided by smart, cynical people that know what they're doing.
I mean, I would assume that this movement is to some extent influenced
and funded by actors from foreign powers, by people who would like to see
Western society collapse from within and rebuild along another model. I mean, American
communists have generally encouraged some collapse within our society so on. But it's a
good question why why Westerners seem to dislike our society so much more than other
people in other societies dislike their society. I think it's because the focus on
empathy is inherently virtuous, created a potential weakness that, in the absence of
actual religion or countervailing virtues, becomes very, very dangerous. Also, in
the absence of knowledge about other societies, there seems to be a self loathing
component to that, and we have certainly seen that, of course, most
recently when we take a look at, for instance, some of the far
left Jews who have supported in essence Hamas in the guys of course of supporting
the Palestinian movement, so to speak. We have seen this definitely pushed by
an opportunistic left and a democratic party in this country. You mentioned a number
of things that have been taught in schools over the last generation, couple of
generations, really, you know, that simply don't stand up to history,
that don't stand up to reality. You mentioned the Red Scare was a moral
panic that caught no Kamis. That's the kind of you know, that's the
kind of stuff that's been taught in our school that's patently not true. The
other that I think is interesting Native Americans were peaceful people who spent all day
dancing. That's the kind of concept we have, especially at our university that
have now made their students their staff, their faculty. You know, recite
a pledge that says we stole this land from the natives. They were genuinely
good, peaceful people and this was horrible. There is definitely truth to that,
but it's not the whole truth. And that's the problem, and that's
I think what your book tries to dispel. Yeah, well, I think
that's a very important point, and I thank you for bringing it up.
Yeah. So, in many of these cases, the mainstream, kind of
center left narrative isn't disputable or debatable. It's just wrong, which makes it
so remarkable that it is universally accepted that you often almost have to pledge adherence
to it. So, I mean, the obvious example of this, and
I'm not going to take this far off the rails here, but is gender
ideology where I mean, if you've taken college level biology. I mean,
in Kentucky we learn how to sex a racehorse. And I don't mean to
be crue, but the joke is the males, the one with the testicles.
Let's say, like it's pretty obvious that there are males and females.
There's a very small intercepts subcomponent of humans or not clownfish. But I mean
the idea that this is complicated difficult. You can't on a third date or
during a varsity tryout figure out what sex people are. That's just clearly wrong.
So to some extent, the question that comes to front of mind as
a psychological question, why are we being asked to pretend this isn't So it's
almost at that level when we get into some of the racial stuff. So
Nicole Hanna Jones sixteen nineteen project makes a series of claims about slavery that are
astonishingly sweeping. One of them, for example, is that slavery is a
or the thing that enriched the United States, brought us essentially to where we
are today. Another is that virtually everything that's unique about the United States of
America came out of historical blacks slavery. We are a slaveocracy. Another one
is that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery. And you could just
go on and on with this. Racism is in our country's DNA, and
just I mean going backwards through those DNA is unchangeable. Whereas we passed the
Civil Rights Act in nineteen sixty four and made racism illegal, the Revolutionary War
was not fought to preserve slavery. Britain didn't free the slaves in her out
of country overseas colonies until eighteen thirty three, if I recall correctly, Yes,
indeed, I mean yeah, if you want to talk about everything unique
about America, that would include Irish pubs, Indian immigration, the tech sector,
and most of that has nothing to do with black people whatsoever, although
we've made great contributions, and the percentage of American wealth attributable to slavery has
been variously pegged between three percent twenty percent before eighteen sixty five, after which
there was no slavery. We've seen an eleven six hundred percent increase in national
GDP. Of course, since eighteen sixty five, since the end of the
Civil War, mister Lincoln's and Men's Patient Proclamation, the final breaking of the
Confederacy Met's Patient Proclamation, of course has a bit earlier. But I mean,
so the points are just factually invalid. You're just supposed to kind of
reiterate them. So you have a situation where a lot of people believe things
that are empirically not true, and if you make a quantitative center right point
in response, you're in a weird situation where you're saying something that's absolutely,
verifiably accurate, and you're being treated like a loon. So my book is
intended to some extent to provide ammunition at the level of the smart college senior,
the intelligent layman in some of these conversations. Final point, your point
on the Red Scare, that's actually chapter two of the book. I mean,
I say one of the lies is the Red Scare was just sort of
an incoherent social panic. It didn't catch any communists. That's absolute nonsense.
As a political scientist, you're often expected to be at least familiar in passing
with what are called the Venona cables. And the Venona cables were the declassifications
of the Russian communiques with intelligence agents in the USA, which we I believe
completed in the nineteen nineties when we were fairly friendly with Plutin and the Russians.
So we know who most of the Russian agents who were in the USA
during the Cold War era were, And I think it's fair to say that
virtually every sort of caused celeb individual who was accused of spying for the Ruskies
and who was defended by the American left, I mean Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,
Alger Hisss, so one down the line actually was at least an asset
of not an agent. Most of them were spying for the Ruskies during the
Cold War. So the whole idea that this never happened, no one was
doing this. That's a fiction that's been created over decades of effort, and
the question is why create it? Who created it? And those are real
questions we're looking at. This is Pastor Matthew Harrison, President of the Lutheran
Church Missouri Syentate. The LCMS operates the second largest parochial school system in the
United States. What can you expect from a Lutheran Church Missouri Centate school.
There's one race, the human race, and Jesus died for the sins of
every man, woman and child from every land and every nation. Life begins
a conception. All life is precious, from womb to tomb, and every
student, parent, and teacher is created in the very image of God.
There's right and wrong, and we know which is which. From the Ten
Commandments. There are only two sexes, male and female. He created them.
Marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman. There's such
a thing as objective, absolute truth, and it's found in the person and
work of Jesus Christ and his word. To find a Lutheran church Missouri sentis
school near you, visit LCMS dot org slash schools. Your last point really
drives home. I think what is the meat of the matter today, and
that is we have our educational systems now pre kindergarten through high school, into
our institutions of higher education. And I guess what is most important to me,
and I think what is important to many of our listeners is how much
of this is based on just leftist zeal how much of this is based on
changing the power dynamic over the last couple few generations in America. You mean
the content of the curriculum itself. I mean the curriculum and the mission.
There's you know, that's I guess that's what I'm asking. Is this more
than just saying, hey, the America is systemically racist, take a look
at slavery, blah blah blah the rest of it. Is this just a
matter of the miseducation of Americans for some liberal point or is there a power
dynamic? Is there the reason behind all of this to recreate, reconfigure the
foundation of the United States of America. No, no, yeah, I
think that's a good question. I think it's instrumental in the sense that you're
describing. So I don't think that the ordinary teacher and I don't mean to
have fun with the education majors here, but on average, and I actually
think this is a problem for the country. Education as a major boasts the
lowest or the second lowest board scores of any major in college, so I
mean usually a little over one thousand math and verbal combined. So I don't
think the average perky incoming teacher really necessarily has And I mean, you know,
in business and political science, we're not we're not smashing that by four
hundred points, you know. But I don't think the average incoming teacher really
has wildly sophisticated views about global communism or something like that. But I think
at the level of the people that are writing the materials for these programs.
And James Lindsay's pretty good on this, I mean he'll he'll go back and
forth and scream on Twitter. But I mean in terms of books like The
Querying of the America entertainingly, but in terms of books like The Queering of
the American Child, I mean he's broken down the sources of these curricula.
I mean the number of times the Brazilian Marxist Apollo Ferrere is cited in the
ed schools and so on. The people that are putting together the curricular packages,
I think are very aware of what they want for society, and I
think that at that level, the goal is very much getting these out,
these ideas out into society. Instrumentally and obviously to some extent, what people
are taught and also what people are allowed to do by other sectors, like
the medical sector, does have an impact for society. I mean, you
see massive shifts in society caused by everything from education to medical technology all the
time. I mean, one of the most basic going on right now is
just that humans aren't reproducing anymore. A combination of everything from anti natalist education,
easily available birth control, the no fault divorce has not the fertility rate
per couple in the American upper middle class down to one point one kids per
two people. So that's a problem. I mean, that's actually a survival
level problem for humans at least of that nation and that position in the social
order. So clearly, what you're told, what you learn does have consequences.
And I think that a very specific goal of a lot of the people
pitching these ideas that very often again aren't accurate, is having certain things happen.
So if you read even the sixteen to nineteen project is pop culture to
some extent in terms of where it was originally published, but is a good
example of this. Every one of the essays has an instrumental component. So
a core goal of the project is linking almost everything imaginable to the worst kind
of historical slavery and then proposing some kind of solution to the problem that was
just invented. So why do Americans eat so much sugar because blacks used to
grow sugar cane in the South, And now what do we need to do?
You know, why is there a traffic problem in the cities of the
South and Midwest because slavery led to segregation, and now what do we need
to do? So I very definitely think that the argument that the USA is
a horrible country that was founded on the conquest of natives, that was founded
on the oppression of black people, founded on the oppression of women, so
on down the line is usually used as a prerequisite for a whole bunch of
proposed social chain. Is like, and that's why we need land acknowledgements,
that's why we need reparation, that's why we need a female dominant society today,
et cetera, et cetera. At Center, I think at least some
of these people do very much know what they're doing. With that in mind,
how can a nation that has existed for two hundred and fifty years as
a republic, as Benjamin Franklin said, if you can keep it? And
that's I think that's the crossroads point that we're at now. How can a
republic survive with the constant teaching that the republic is innately bad? How can
the republic that was founded nearly two hundred and fifty years ago still be that
republic if all of our many of our institutions, particularly our institutions of education,
continuously are breaking that republic down, Well, it probably can't. I
mean, I think that we need to stop doing that a certain level.
And again I talk about this when I engage morality in the book. But
even if it were true that the founding of the USA were extraordinarily brutal in
a time when extraordinary brutality were common, if we came to the logical conclusion
that the USA today was a good thing for the world, I'm not necessarily
sure we should lie to kids, although I'd consider it in a leadership role,
but it would probably be a good idea not to constantly emphasize American brutality
and failure in a way that would lead to the collapse of the United States
and worsen the world. So there, when you're involved in a leadership role,
as both you and I, as I understand, have been, there's
an element of core practicality. What should your immigration policy be. It should
be the policy that is most likely to benefit the country that is letting in
the immigrants. That is the answer. There's plenty of room for interesting theoretical
debates when you go to church on Sunday, but that is the actual answer
as read how immigrants should be handled. So similarly here, I mean,
I think even in a scenario where the USA was a much worse country than
we are, there are many practical ways to handle education. I mean,
the Germans might provide some lessons from their Holocaust educational curriculum or something like that.
The basic idea that you spend twelve years teaching people that the country is
horrific is not a good not a logical one. But as it happens,
we're actually a pretty good country, certainly in comparison. So doing this,
allowing a small fringe of the political population that dislikes the country to dominate media,
secondary education, higher education, so on, in this sort of a
lenski I fashion, is a really stupid thing to do. Now, when
you ask how can we survive, I mean, the answer, of course,
is that past a certain point we can't. If most people come to
believe negative things about the nation, and most people are normally moral when it
comes to individual action, I mean, that would require at some level most
people to radically change the nation. The one possible intervening variable there is that
there aren't that many far leftists, so as people leave those few structures where
people of the kind that I'm describing have influence. I mean, what we
used to say on the right, in the center right was well they'll go
out into business, they'll get married, they'll participate in normal institutions, the
church, and most of this stuff will just sort of be washed out of
them. I mean, they'll see why the rules regulating sexual behavior exists.
They'll see why capitalism and advocacy for lower taxes exist. They'll see why support
for closed borders exists. And very often that's been the case. And that's
one of the reasons we're kind of stumbling along quite well even today. The
problem with that going forward is that a lot of these ideas have been migrating.
Basically, so the concepts like CRT, fourth wave feminism, et cetera,
that were considered radical even in the Academy twenty years ago during the Black
Lives Matter era, during what's been called the Great Awokening, which seems to
have begun after the rise of social media after about twenty twelve, have been
reaching into the corporate sector. So you now have I mean new HR is
a commonly used buzzword, DEI CRT. You now see all this in the
real world, and I if that becomes something that endures for several decades,
that's going to have very major civilization damaging impacts. I don't know if it
will, though, I think people are getting very tired of it right now.
Indeed, I certainly am. I can't speak for the rest of my
fellowship sins all of them, but I think I think you're absolutely right.
I think there are a lot of people who are indeed getting tired of it.
You said something interesting a moment ago that I wanted to pick up on,
and you're absolutely right. It just again, it feels differently, and
that's the left. It's feel versus fact a lot of times. But I
want to pick up on their point. I guess you said there aren't that
many far leftists. And when we say far leftist, of course we mean,
you know, the extremes of what you just mentioned, the different sorts
of ideologies that have come to play, particularly in the advent of social media
social networks. But there are a lot of people who have been The word
is perhaps overused, but it is right indoctrinated through this educational system for the
last fifty years in this country, particularly over the last thirty years. And
one of the phrases that I hear repeatedly that they make the left, the
far left makes this constant argument is about there is no absolute truth. There
is their truth, Your truth. This groups truth, the particularly groups that
have been you know, impacted negatively by the American system, you know,
the systemic racism or whatever that's going on. How do you go up against
that notion that there is no such thing as absolute truth because I think that
permeates our educational system today more than ever. Well, it depends what you
mean. I mean so traditionally, and we talked about this in the book
as well. The book does get a bit philosophical from time to time.
There's been a distinction that people have drawn between facts and morals. So you
can argue that there is no objective morality. I mean, it's one of
the greatest human debates essentially to some extent, that gets down to is their
or God? So I mean, if I kill, is that objectively absolutely
wrong? That can depend on a number of circumstances. Are you an enemy
and so on. At a deeper level, it probably does depend on whether
there's some kind of judge that exists outside the realm of man that can analyze
whether my behavior is good or bad. It gets some absolute objective standard.
If not, it's probably not ultimately wrong. But none of that changes the
fact that you are dead. If I stab you. So the idea that
facts can't be ultimate is just stupid. I don't know what to say,
Like I've always found postmodernism to just be dumb. I mean, I don't
really have a deep comment here. If I had to think, just sort
of off the top of the head, as somebody's taken the grn L said
and done quite well. There seem to be at least three obvious kinds of
truth. There's demonstrable truth. Two plus two is four. I can pick
up two rocks, throw them in a bin, two rocks, throw them
at a bin. I have four rocks. There's necessary truth. If all
snarks or snooks, and all snooks or snacks, then all snarks are acts.
What I do methodological empirical research. There's also what you call statistically significant
truth. So, for example, and I don't mean to be crude or
disingenuous with this example, but if I'm testing the thesis people dislike being raped
and beaten, I mean you're going to find that there are a few massachists
that do not dislike being raped and beaten, but ninety nine point ninety nine
percent of people do. What we call the P value would be point zero
zero zero zero one. If you're tracking the chance of something being seen as
a negative experience, so we would classify that as true. That's actually something
people have looked at when it comes to how people report criminal experiences. That's
why that was used as an example. So the comment that there are no
shared human realities or no shared truth is just hidiotic. In fact, there's
a whole literature that looks at this in psychology, like can you look at
the facial expressions of people who have different racial backgrounds from you, or who
are from different societies and tell whether they're pleased, you know, disgusted,
that kind of thing, and it's you can do it almost perfectly. Humans
can read the facial expressions of chimps and other great apes. It turns out
we can do it with dogs, like any animals we're close to. So
the whole my truth thing seems to just be a way to allow people to
take unjustifiable personal opinions and claim that they are as valid as anything else.
And in fact, this is a lot of what social science has been slanting
torn over the past thirty or forty years, And to me, it's a
it's a form of mental affirmative action, and I'm just I'm just sort of
talking off the head here. But the idea of a lot of this stuff,
like only black people can be racist, is that it compensates for the
reality of unequal performance that we in fact find so occasionally, in fact,
that's the sideline that occasionally we've gone into eras like the period when the bell
curves and where there's been kind of an open window where you can discuss certain
topics, and there's been a great deal of discussion that the window closes in
Overton window, if you will. Anyway, leaving that aside, whenever we
have done research on touchy issues, what we found is that the results of
their research are not necessarily what would be good for quote unquote woke people.
So, for example, all human beings tend to be about equally racist in
the same country and across large groups. If anything, minorities in the USA
are more racist than whites. So there's a lot of research on this.
Zak Goldberg has done studies where he asks basic questions about in group affiliation to
members of different racial populations. The standard result is that people like all their
neighbors find in a fairly well run multi racial country, like this one,
but they value their own group by say, ten plus points more than other
groups. So for blacks it was plus fifteen plus fourteen, Asians plus fifteen
or whatever, white conservatives plus twelve. The one exception was white liberals,
by the way, who hate white people. Found that really interesting. I
don't think it's surprises anyone, but I found it really interesting. But the
reaction to that, when this work is performed, and this type of experiment
has been done since the nineteen sixties, the reaction to this of leftists is
simply to say, well, black people can't be racist. And what they're
doing is not denying that black people actually score as the second most racist of
all American groups. What they're doing is a verbal redefinition, wherein they say
that racism requires not merely intensive prejudice, but also power. It's just sort
of playing a word game. Similarly, if you're engaging one of these people
and you say, well, using the typical standard of demonstrable or necessary statistically
significant truth, what you're saying is just bullshit. What they'll say is,
well, but I'm using my truth as a minoritized person, and you can't
criticize me, And it's become more and more popular in the journals to allow
in this kind of nonsense, to create sort of the facade of an argument.
I guess to me, if you can read between the lines, it's
very clear that kind of the old modernists, you could call it before postmodern.
But the old modernist arguments, which were made awkwardly, often by like
IQ, white guys who leaned a little to the right, are mostly correct,
and that has a lot of implications. The Democrats are counting on your
economic ignorance so they can get re elected. The Washed ont on Wall Street
podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and
the economy and how it affects your wallet. The left wants you to think
that oil companies and grocery stores are ripping American off. Meanwhile, they just
want to get back into office to keep printing trillions of more dollars. Whether
it's happening in DC or down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Be informed. Check out the Watchdot on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski on
Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think that that's
a very interesting point because you're talking about what is happening in our schools.
Your book is all about that, what's happened in our schools over the last
many, many years in this country. And the problem is context. This
wouldn't be an issue when we were talking before about can America survive? Well,
in many ways it hasn't survived and its foundational values because of what you
just mentioned. If you go against their truths, the lefts truths that you
know, these ideas that are patently falls you are, you know, some
sort of a racist, you are some you're silenced. Ultimately, is the
alt your point of not just your point of view, but the facts are
silence. So you already have the erosion of the First Amendment and many other
of course inherent God given rights of course in this country. But that said,
it would be one thing if the leftist were teaching this in our school.
It's another thing, though, to have that alongside the facts, if
you will, alongside the other side of this argument, so to speak.
But that's not happening in America, and it is becoming rare and rare in
our institutions of higher education where we are seeing the other side of the argument.
How problematic is that it's extremely problematic. So I mean I just mentioned
that there was a period of kind of detent around racial topics when the Bell
Curve is written. I mean, I don't even agree with a lot of
the Bell Curve. The point is just that you should be able to discuss
these issues. I mean, that's also when Thomas soul was writing a little
to the left, Wilson, That's when Murray, That's when Willam Julius Wilson
was writing on the left. So yeah, the ideal point would be people
writing on the left, right and center and discussing tough topics. I mean,
when it comes to race and IQ, as you know, there's an
entire paradigm or entire debate the crit cult red conversation where some people argue national
which are much larger than racial, but national and racial gaps and test scoring
are genetics. Some people argue their cultural, which where I fall. Some
people argue they're doing entirely to racial bigotry, which is sort of the thing
you're supposed to say right now, But that's ebra Kenny and all that.
I personally think all three groups can argue and can find it out in the
journals, and can debate each other. But right now, yeah, that
does not seem to be the currently accepted position. I actually have a pretty
short answer to this one. I mean, yeah, I think that shutting
down speech as prejudiced is problematic. The only real question is whether anyone actually
believes that all their opponents are bigots, or they just think they can't let
them talk. I've wondered about this, like I've debated Ebram Candy online.
Not nothing formal, but I mean, like he His position, as far
as I can tell, is that any gap in performance between any two large
groups has to be due to either like straight up genetic inferiority or racism.
And it's difficult for me to imagine that any intelligent person can believe that.
I mean, I like, I don't you know, I tease Kenny about
his set scores from time to time, But this guy's got a PhD.
I mean, he's not not a dumb guy. Like, that's not true.
There are just to pick one obvious example. You don't need to hear
my dinner speech, but there are. The modal average black man is twenty
seven. The modal average white man is fifty eight. If you're looking at
crime stats, on the right or wealth stats on the left. It's just
asinine not to take that into account and to say, well, the resulting
difference is due to either racism or genes, you know, And it's this
sort of thing happens all the time. Like Hispanics recently have been scoring about
par with Blecks on the SAT. Natives, which now includes more Meso American
Indians have been scoring behind African Americans. The latest Native score so I was
nine to twelve. Why are we seeing these very poor Latin American scores because
a lot of Hispanics don't speak English. I mean, it's just bizarre not
to adjust for something like this. So it's in reality, they're just these
dozens of variables that come into play when you're looking at root performance. And
I think that anyone who's denying that from the leftist or for that matter,
from the old right side, my personal take is that they can't actually believe
that the idea. The ideas are totally instrumental. And by instrumental, I
mean you're saying this because you want something from it. At the most basic
level, you might just want money from Whitey, but at a deeper level,
you might you do want massive social change. You probably think you're owed
massive social change if you're a feminist, radical woman who's also a minority and
so on, And this is thevehicle that you're going to ride to massive social
change. So the last thing you want is me and you two KACKI guys
who often wear jackets, you know, throwing a bunch of numbers on a
table and saying no, that's not true. It's like saying God's not real
to a preacher. It's just impolite. That I think is how they feel
about it. Interesting. One final question for you, I think I think
I can see the connection certainly, But how much did your work on your
other books, Hate Crime, Hoax, how the Left is selling a fake
race war, and taboo ten facts you can't talk about? How much did
that inform this latest book. Well, the underlying question is very similar,
and it's just sort of how much of what's being said is actually true?
I mean, I don't think I'm actually I do think I'm a unique and
interesting right, otherwise it wouldn't write. But I don't think I'm some kind
of one off genius that's discussed this topic. I'm in the Great tom Souls
discussed it extensively. Barry glassner Man of the Left wrote The Culture of discussed
it extensively. But one of my interest is excuse the language. Both like
the extent to which members of the educated, intelligent, upper middle class are
often driven to the point of frenzy by things that are not real. And
if you look across media and social media, you see this all the time.
I mean, like right now on Twitter, both black and white guys
seem to be absolutely convinced that members of the other race are constantly ganging up
in groups and beating them up. And I mean, like I isolated the
total number of videos where this had happened that I had seen, like just
different distinct videos, and I was like thirty black on white and like twelve
white on black. I mean, it's too many of them, and there
are more black guys, but like this is over the course of about a
year, looking at the timestamps, like this is not a thing that's probably
going to kill you. And there's a whole genre of things like this,
from pit bull attacks to plane crashes COVID nineteen if you're under forty, I
mean, just it goes on and on and on, and I'm always very
curious about what the level of actual risk is versus perceived risk is in life,
what the actual numbers are that underlie public phenomena. So in hate crime
hoax, I mean, pitch the book for thirty seconds. I noticed that
a very large number of these high profile racial incidents that were paralyzing the country
Jusse Smollett, Covington, Catholic Yasminn Suite, Duke Lacrosse, Gaucher College,
Air Force Academy. It has never happened. And this was mostly a phenomenon
on the left. I've both sides of it a little bit recently. This
is mostly a left wing thing, and I asked, why or why are
we giving this value to victimization? Why are we making people think this way?
Is there a way to punish people that are doing this? I mean
some of like a fake rape accusation is very serious. The penalty for that
should be somewhat similar to the penalty for the crime itself. So I put
the book out there, and right now I have a data set that is
at almost a thousand of these bizarre hate hoaxes, and it's just you can
critique my methodology for the book, but the data set itself is is hard
to disagree with. I mean, it's just hundreds of these cases over about
five years of people publicly falsifying these high visibility incidents. Taboo was pretty similar.
I took a look at ten of the most high profile stories that were
being discussed in the news at that time. So the claims of black lives
matter every day and unarmed African American is murdered, and I went beyond that
to interracial crime claims from both whites and minorities. I went beyond that into
the whole idea of cultural appropriation, white privileged systemic racism, and I looked
at the realities underlying this, and I asked whether these are plausible ideas,
and I found that most of them were stupid nonsense. I mean, in
the Black Lives Matter claims were untrue to a degree that's rarely seen, something
I find fairly often with a black activist movement. Specifically, I mean the
total number of unarmed black men killed by the police in twenty twenty two,
which is the last year I looked Washington Post database at the time, I
looked twelve. So I mean, the average person on the left thinks it's
something like a thousand. So this is something that really got out there in
the zeitgeist, that really became very prevalent that it almost never happens at all.
I mean, if you add all males together, it's under one hundred.
That's with poor White's, Hispanics, everybody thrown in Natives and Indian reservations.
So I mean that was notable. That's something they got the book noticed.
But similarly, if you adjust for things like test score, the region
you live in, there was no evidence for systemic racism. Really, incomes
tend to equalize across racial groups if you do that. So that was the
second book, and again you find that these things that are claimed very publicly
are not real. So in this third book, I started looking at the
educational curriculum and the question was what about this, Like were we the only
country to have slaves and abused them? And the results were the same as
they always are. No, it is amazing to me. I mean,
as a journalist, the most intriguing question over my career has always been the
why I know that there is We talk about many wars, and the left
likes to talk about wars on this and war on that, but we do
see and have seen a war on reality in this country that I think is
at the core of your book, and I'm glad we had a chance to
talk about that today. Wilfred Riley, political science professor at Kentucky State University,
author of the new book Lies my liberal teacher told me debunking the false
narratives defining America's school curricula. You can find that book wherever good books are
sold, particularly on Amazon. Thank you so much, sir, for joining
us today, Thanks for having me. Absolutely you will enjoy this book,
I think immensely if you are here because you're here because you are a thinker
and you enjoy being challenged, and that is what this book will, indeed.
Do you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm
Matt Kittle, senior correspondent at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more.
Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the Fray.