[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everyone, and welcome to the 187th episode of the Atlas Society asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. My friends call me Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. We are a leading nonprofit introducing young people to the ideas of Einran, specifically leveraging art that Einrand called the Indus sensible medium for the communication of a moral ideal through music, through graphic novels, through animated videos, even AI animated videos. Today we are joined by Andy Bernstein. Before I even begin to introduce our guest, I want to remind all of you who are watching us on Zoom, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube. Go ahead and use the comment sections to type in your questions. We will get to as many of them as we can. So our guest, Andrew Bernstein, is a lifelong objectivist who taught philosophy for many years at Morrist College. He previously joined us on the Atlas Society, asks to talk about his book, why Johnny still can't read or write or understand math and what we can do about it. He returns to talk about, really a continuation of the conversation we've been having with many of our guests, talking about this current surge of antisemitism on college campuses and elsewhere, with a perspective informed by his two latest books, his novel reckoning and his racism.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: It's upside down.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: I always do that.
It's decline, it's bailful resurgence and our looming race war. Andy, thank you for joining us and for your forbearance, as always, with me.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Well, it's good to be here, Jack, thanks for having me on.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: As I like to say at the Outlaw Society, we take ideas seriously. We don't take ourselves seriously, but we should know how to hold our guests books properly. So I was really honored that you asked me to read an advanced copy of reckoning and was thrilled to provide a testimonial for that. It was published late last summer. It's a fast paced, multi layered, dystopian thriller, in a way, about these simmering tensions between blacks and Jews in Brooklyn bubbling over into a race force. So given the response to the terrorist attacks on Israel and the jew hatred that's been unleashed, particularly among the BLM crowd and supposed champions of people of color, the novel seems eerily prophetic. Tell us a bit about the novel, its inspiration, and what it has to tell us about what we are living through right now.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, Jake, that's a good question, and I made a mistake here. Also, I should have a copy of the book here to hold up for the camera. Can I be excused for a couple of seconds to go get a copy?
I'll be right.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: No, that's all right. We're live. So we have a screenshot of it. So we'll show that. Okay. Yeah. So tell us about.
I know you have these fiction and nonfiction projects planned well in advance, so there we go.
That's american racism. We want the other one.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Do you have a screenshot of reckoning? Because I have a copy just 10ft away.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Oh, that's okay. Here we go.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: There we go. The reckoning. Race war comes to America. The artwork done by my good buddy Bosch, Boston.
Yes, that's my new novel. Came out in the summer. And to answer your question, Jack, several things. First of all, they know from the time I was a little kid, I want to be a writer and to write fiction and write novels. And they say the writer's question is, what if?
What if? Such and such? And then you go from there. And a question that occurred to me years ago, this goes back to 2006, because I was already afraid that the left was pushing us heavily into racism and towards race war even before Obama was elected president. And the question was, what if a nazi war criminal converted to Judaism, became a rabbi and hid in that know, hid as a rabbi, ministering to the jewish community somewhere, and we're better than in Brooklyn, New York. So that was the question that triggered this book that I worked on for at least ten years.
Yeah, I did many iterations of this and the background to this. That's the ominous rise of racism in the country, because we were making progress on racism. I think the anti black racism amongst the white community was, and still is, relatively low. White supremacism is still around, but it's been dying for years since the civil rights movement, which should properly be called the individual rights movement for black Americans. But as postmodernism became dominant in the american universities where I teach that postmodernism, I'm talking about people like Michel Foucault, Jacques de Radar, Richard Rowdy, people like that. They are, as I think of them, Marxists on know. Marx, divided, didn't see human society in terms of individuals. He saw human society in terms of groups, the oppressor and the oppressed. He defined that narrowly in economic terms. The rich oppressed the poor. But the postmodernists.
Stephen Hicks has explained this very nicely in his book, explaining postmodernism. The postmodernists, it's not just the rich oppressing the poor. It's whites oppressing non whites, males oppressing females, straights oppressing gays. And they've taken over the humanities divisions of our universities for like 20 years now, pushing this anti white, this hatred of white people, and it's terrifying. And so it struck me that I know your questions. We'll get into this a little bit later, pushing us towards real racism and the possibility of race force. I wanted to show what that looks like in action. And the main character here pushing racism is a black nationalist in reckoning. Amiri Bantu Baiko, who's this brilliant guy? Jack? I think of Biko as like, he's a Francisco danconia of mean. He's just brilliant at everything. He exceeds everybody.
He's basically a Nazi. He's got the favored and disfavored races.
Know the blacks are the favored race and the whites are the disfavored race. But he holds the impelling principle of national socialism, and that is that race war is the driving force of social history, as distinct from the Marxists, who think class war, and not without reason. You look at history, not just the brutal treatment of blacks in America or apartheid in South Africa, but the Holocaust and the armenian genocide and the rwandan genocide, the bengali genocide in 1971, when the pakistani regime murdered millions of Bengalis, mostly Hindus. It just goes on and on and on and on. And you can see where Biko is coming from. And so for him, the only way the black man can rise, have his rights protected, is to overthrow the white race in one of its homelands, the United States, and establish a black state. So he's a powerful leader of black nationalism. In the novel, Marco Winehouse, who's a jewish rabbi, violent, based on real life Rabbi Maya Kahani, who founded the Jewish Defense League in real life in Brooklyn back in 1980s. I think he's got a violent cadre of jewish thugs, they call themselves the Maccabees, who fight against the black nationalists. And then he rupts into race war in Brooklyn. And in the midst of all this, what I think is really interesting is Winehouse. This violent jewish rabbi is suspect that the Mossad gets a whiff, gets a hint from some people in Brooklyn who know Winehouse, that Winehouse may actually be Heinrich Stoutner, a wanted nazi war criminal, the menace of Medichewsky. And so the Masad dispatches its leading nazi hunter, Mick Davidson, who's from Brooklyn originally but has emigrated Israel. He's an IDF war hero. He's a brilliant guy, tough guy. Your Maasad field agent. To track down Winehouse in Brooklyn, find out is Heinrich Stouton. So in the midst of this race war going on amidst of all this, McDavidson's hunting your nazi war criminal. Rabbi Jacob Parris is a Holocaust survivor. He's Winehouse's opposite number, trying to bring peace amongst warring tribes. Davidson and his daughter Giselle, who's a tough girl crab maga instructor. Sparks fly here in different ways. So, yeah, I got a romance brewing here, but really explores the theme of colorblind individualism versus racism in any of its forms. And it's brutal. Everybody out there. It's not to everybody's taste. If you don't like violence, this is not book for you.
[00:09:56] Speaker A: But the book definitely does not pull any punches. But this beautiful light motif throughout repeated that every individual is unique and not replaceable, not repeatable.
But, yeah, it's edgy, folks. It's definitely edgy.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: It's not for everybody, but for the people who can handle the violence. And, doc, because it's about race war. But I will say if I could pat myself on the shoulder for a second, it's very well plotted. It's a hell of a plot, and it carries the important theme.
It dramatizes this theme of colorblind individualism versus racism in any form.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: So you talked about, as you demonstrate catalog in this book, the decline of anti black racism over the decades. And that's an achievement.
What does not seem to have declined, and in fact, seems to have risen is anti jew hatred.
So if you could bring your perspective on that. You talked about postmodernism, identity politics, that has kind of taken hold of the perspective of young people. And in that matrix of oppression, somehow jews who have been victims of extermination attempts throughout history, somehow, I guess, come out on the top of that. Is this identity politics? Is this anti capitalism, as our scholars have argued? What are some of the currents that are at play here, from your perspective?
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Jew hatred is the racism, the form of racism that never dies. It changes its forms, it metastasizes, but it never dies. And I think here's a clue here, jag. You look at american culture, right? Because I'm an american most aware of what goes on in America and most concerned about what goes on in America. It's the country I love.
Where is jew hatred the most virulent?
On college and university campuses. Right? Was that an accident? No, that's a big clue. What's the dominant philosophy on university campuses? Marxism.
Marxism and its modern form of postmodernism.
Marxism, of course, preaches inveterate class warfare, right?
The rich get rich by exploiting the poor. It's an article of faith in Marxism. The poor must rise up and if necessary, annihilate the oni class in order to bring social justice.
And so Marxism is, I think, a good way to put it. Marxism is a philosophy of foreign by envy riddled, psychopathological, wannabe mass murderers.
And I'll repeat that, I think Marxism is a philosophy of foreign by envy riddled, psychopathological, wannabe mass murderers. They want to kill the owning class. They want to eat the rich. Right? They want to kill the rich. The most successful. And under capitalism, in fact, success, people become successful by hard work and honest effort. They want to kill Andrew Carnegie's. And, you know, people like that, the Hank Reardon's in the Dagny Taggarts and Ayn Rand's novel. And so if you're a member of the Oni class, if you're successful, are you affluent, are you rich, are you well educated? Are you doing well? That makes you an oppressor, that makes you evil. And the Jews in America are by far, I think, historically, I think I could say by far the most educated, most affluent, most successful Jews of history. And so from this pile of steaming marxist, postmodernist philosophy, they're the oppressors. And it's the same in Israel. Israel is a flourishing, prosperous state. The Palestinians are poor. Most people in the arab islamic world are poor. From a marxist standpoint, that necessarily makes the Jews and the Israelis eagle. Plus the know today, the postmodernist version of Marxism has introduced a nazi element into their class war ideology, because Marxists traditionally were not fighting race war as a Nazis. But now the whites oppress the non whites. That's a part of now it's the rich whites oppressing the poor non whites. And so? Well, the Jews are white european colonizers. They're evil. And you see the examples of the evil white man.
There's a lot that goes on with anti semitism, especially historically, there's a lot of religious elements to the jew hatred. But today, I think, in the mono western world, the jew hatred is driven by marxist post modernist philosophy that dominates the intellectual culture as not an accident, that's most virulent on college and university campuses.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: So last week, as part of this series, I interviewed Liael Lieboitz, editor at large of tablet magazine, who's written and edited various books on Zionism and anti Semitism. And he had a take that I'd like to get your reaction to. He said, quote, antisemitism has nothing to do with the Jews.
It's a mind virus and a brain rot that affects people completely independently from the presence of and actions of any real jewish people. And he goes on to give examples of places where there's very high anti Semitism, like in Greece or other countries where the Dru's have been completely driven out. And he makes this connection between anti semitism to a kind of paganism throughout the ages, living in an uncertain world, which leads to a heightened tribalism and a need to identify an outside enemy. What do you make of that? Take?
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Well, tribalism for sure, but I don't think the pagan worldview was all that influential in the west anymore.
But I think the tribalism. He's right about the tribalism, definitely. But that groupthink is a product primarily of german philosophy. That's Kant, Hegel, and know the human race creates its own reality, in effect, and we all do it the same. Well, Hegel said, oh, no. Yeah, we create their own reality, but every culture, every nationality creates it differently. And Marx says, oh, well, even within a society, even within a culture, different economic classes create their own reality. And there's no dictionary translation. Marx weaponizes that there's endless warfare amongst these different groups, these different economic classes that create their own reality differently and can't communicate. Polylogism. There's different logics. We can't communicate and opposed modernists.
Each gender, every race, tribe, nationality, creates its own reality. Seething struggle. There's no dictionary translation. The strong win, the weak loses forces. The final arbiter of human affairs, going back to the sophist and ancient Greece on this. So tribalism for sure, even more than the pagans. I don't know pagan culture that well.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: I don't think he was meaning like paganism, literally polytheism. Yeah. Or that it was a belief in supernatural beings or a worship of idols. That he was more saying that when people live in an uncertain world, and certainly to the extent that you embrace postmodernism and you reject the idea of objective truth, you're cast adrift in an uncertain world where definitions are always shifting and people are very suspect. So I think that he was saying that throughout history, when things have seemed more uncertain and when there has been a search either for people to latch onto, whether it's strong man or looking for people on the outside to demonize. So I think that's kind of where he was looking at it, especially in finding that there are these pockets of anti semitism in countries where there aren't any Jews, although in these modern days we're all connected. And so you don't necessarily have to have a thriving community of Jews in order to believe in this conspiracy of international conniving jewelry.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: Pulling the screen right, and you hit it right. There's no objective truth on this marxist postmodernist view. There's only subjective truth. There's group truth. The groups are necessarily warring with each other. There's the oppressor and the oppressed. And so it makes sense that people would want to sign up with their ethnic group or with their gender or with their nationality to protect themselves against the oppressor. And on this view, the Jews are viewed as their success and their affluence and their educational levels makes them a prime member of the oppressor. And so, yeah, I think the tribalism. I think he's right about the tribalism and the group thing being a big part of this.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: So I want to turn to your book in a moment, and we also have some audience questions to get to. But just before we leave this topic, how do you respond to people who say they don't hate Jews, they just reject Zionism? For my part, I'm pretty persuaded by Barry Weiss's argument in her book how to fight anti Semitism, that if you reject the idea that Jews have a right to remain in and return to Israel, particularly in light of history, with repeated examples of attempts to outright exterminate the jewish people, then if you're not outright anti semitic, you're at least sort of anti semitic adjacent, to borrow the argo of intersectionality.
What is your take? Or do you feel like that that is a legitimate distinction to know. I'm not anti semitic. I just don't think Israel should exist.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: First of all, I want to say I have a lot of respect for, you know, who stands up for freedom of speech and left her position, New York Times to do so. So I just wanted to say that I certainly support Israel.
I'm not sure if she's know the Zionist.
There's different reasons that are advanced for supporting Israel. Some good, some not so good. The zionist movement was that Zion means the traditional jewish homeland, which is based now. The Jews lived there for a long time in the ancient world. When Alexander conquers the persian empire, I mean, the Jews are living there, and that's in the Judea, and that's in the fourth century BC, and they were living there before that. But the idea that God gave this land to us, that's a faith based belief. That's not an argument that I support. But Israel definitely has a moral right to exist because it's generally a rights respecting nation.
It's a civilized rights respecting nations. You know the joke on this? It's not funny. Name the one middle eastern country where Muslims have rights. And the answer is Israel. Because the Israeli Arabs, the muslim population, were living in peace with Israel, living as israeli citizens, they have the same rights as the jewish Israelis. Israel is a civilized, rights respecting nation in a sea of arab islamic theocracies, dictatorships, brutally murderous, that basically want to wipe out most arab islamic nations and organizations are dedicated to destroying Israel and killing all the Jews. This idea that the Palestinians want land or their own state, there's a technical word for that belief in philosophy, Jag. It's called bullshit. The Israelis are completely willing to trade land for peace having a palestinian state if the Palestinians and their government respected Israel's right to exist and willing to live in peace with Israel. But no, they are not like most arab islamic nations. And I'm going to say this flat out an organization. I'm going to say this flat out. If I get in trouble for it, so be it. Islam is evil. Flat out. Islam is know I have all kinds of problems with Judaism and Christianity, but Islam is know it claims it's the one true faith. Got a war on the infidels. Islam. Sharia law states, once a land belongs to Islam, it belongs to Islam forever. Muslim warriors conquered the Middle east roughly 700 ad.
Consequently, this is muslim land.
There's no way these jihadists supporting Muslims will ever accept a non muslim nation on islamic land, what they consider islamic land. And they're dedicated not to bringing peace with Israel or living in peace with Israel or having a palestinian state. They don't care about that. You can't have a non muslim nation on Islam, on land that belongs to Islam. Israel must be destroyed, the Jews must be killed.
That's the bottom line for this.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: I don't know if I am entirely in agreement with you, and I know you are writing a book on evil, and so you're going to break it down in terms of the objectivist idea of irrationality and its ultimate impotence. But if you look at all of the major religions, maybe not all, but certainly in their most fundamentalist forms and their most archaic forms, that they have justified all kinds of atrocities and been to a greater or lesser extent rational or irrational or treating people differently.
But I do think that Judaism has had this process, particularly this talmudic process, over the millennia of arguing about applications and trying to seek the most just interpretation of ancient scriptures. And Christianity has also come a long way in terms of the crusades. And we must go out and convert people. And I do think that there are people that are trying to have a similar modernizing project for Islam and to try to animate a kind of reform movement just like you've had within Judaism. You have different branches and also as an open objectivist and maybe it's just the way that we talk about things and how we try to bring people along.
You and I share similar views on objectivity and on mysticism and on religion. But I kind of try to lead at least with a little bit of honey because.
[00:26:22] Speaker B: No, I understand.
First of all, there's 1.5 billion Muslims in the world.
There's a lot of honest people amongst that 1.5 billion Muslim who are not supporting jihad and a lot of them.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: Are supporting and enjoying our content.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: Good. There's a lot of honest people in the Islamic who don't want to kill the infidels and so on and so forth. But my point is not about Muslims being evil. My point is that the philosophy of Islam is an important point, important distinction between Islam and its great historical rival, not his Christianity. There's a difference here that greatly favors Christianity, and that is Christianity is found according to the gospels. Was a man of peace. He didn't practice war. He didn't preach war. He practiced peace. He preached peace. So when Christians perpetrate all kinds of violent crimes and atrocities, as they most certainly have, as you pointed out, it's in contradiction to the basic principles of its founder. Now Islam on the other hand, Muhammad was a man of war. He preached war, he practiced war, he was a warlord. The Quran preaches warfare. It's holy text. And the hadith, the compendium of sayings and actions ascribed to Muhammad, show that he was a warlord practicing holy war. So when muslim warriors commit all kinds of crimes or atrocities in the name of their religion, it's not in contradiction to the teachings of its founder, it's in accord with the teachings of its founder. And so pacifying Islam is going to be a much more intractable problem than pacifying Christianity doesn't mean it's impossible. And I hope you're right. But it means that Islam right now is a dangerous philosophy. And I understand why good people living in the arab islamic world either keep their mouths shut because they can get killed by the jihadists, or they want to get out. They want to know. And that includes all the israeli Arabs, all the Muslims who prefer to live in Israel because their rights are, especially the women, because their rights are respected as israeli citizens where they wouldn't be in Saudi Arabia. Iran, Afghanistan.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: And so also, I think that there is a moderating force and a positive force that comes with increased trade and whatever else one thinks of the Trump administration. The fact that we have these Abraham accords and that that has noticeably led to more deals, more investment, more tourism going back and forth. And I've talked to people that are donors, and they're dealing with what it means for Israel or for themselves as Jews to have the fallout of these terrorist attacks. But they also want to get back to business. They also need to get to Qatar. They need to get to Abu Dhabi.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: I understand. I was just say this. So I was raised in a jewish family, but I completely ignored the Bible and jewish teachings because it's faith based beliefs, and I don't regard it know it's true. And similarly, there are a lot of people raised in islamic families who disregard the Quran and the hadith. They want to live in peace, and it's just much more dangerous to do that in Saudi Arabia, to reject islamic teaching in Saudi Arabia or Iran, than it is to reject jewish or christian teaching in America. But I hope that there could be some kind of philosophical moral revolution in the arab islamic world. We see bits and pieces of it in.
And, and I know you have content. The Atlascity has contents that's know people throughout the world, you know, in Arabic. So, I mean, that's very encouraging. You can't eviscerate the Quran or the deed. It says what it says, although Thomas Jefferson went through his personal copy of the Bible and deleted all the mystical references. But you can encourage people to ignore the Quran and the deities. Then they'd be nominal Muslims, the way you and I are nominal Jews and many Americans nominal Christians.
[00:30:51] Speaker A: Right. Cultural, cultural, cultural Muslims. Cultural Jews. Okay, everyone, I see your questions. I'm not ignoring you. But in fairness, while I wanted to have Andy on the show, and I did want to get his perspective on anti semitism, I also want to give due to his book by holding it up correctly. And I read it twice, as evidenced by all of these margin notes. So let me get to a few questions with Andy about this book, and then I am going to dip into the questions. So you spend a good part of the book acknowledging the evil realities of past white supremacy in the US. You catalog the significant progress of black Americans over the past century, but then you go on to talk about the greatest danger to black lives, as you put it, being violence against by the hands of black murderers. You cite that 94% of black homicide victims are murdered by black criminals. And that blacks, who make up roughly 13% of the american population account for nearly 50% of homicide victims and more than 50% of homicide offenders. Now we hear all kinds of justification. It's internalized white supremacy, yada, yada. But what do you see as the root causes of this terrible phenomenon?
[00:32:31] Speaker B: Well, I think it's leftist principles and policies. First of all, you're right. Year after year after year after year for decades now, five, six, 7000 or so, 8000 black Americans are murdered every year. 90% on average. Year after year, 90% are murdered by black criminals. Not by the police, not by white supremacists. Although there are instances of police brutality and there are still white supremacists around. But by the gang bangers, by the little gunbusters, as they're known in the projects now, the homicide rate in black urban neighborhoods has risen astronomically since roughly 1970. It wasn't like that before. And so what's happened?
What's the cause of this? And it doesn't make sense that it's white supremacy internalized or any other form. Because by any metric, white supremacy has declined significantly in the United States over the last hundred years. If it was white supremacy, the murder rates in black neighborhoods should have been off the charts 100 years ago when white supremacy really was a prevalent philosophy. And a clan, for example, had millions of members, at least according to the antidefamation League. No, that's from the Atlantic, I think. But the Klan most likely had millions of members 100 years ago when the white population was only like, 95 million. No. What's changed since then is, first of all, the welfare state. And this is true not just of black Americans. This is true of white people in England and the United States who've accepted the. Excuse me, I have a cold. Accepted the same premises. And that is you pay women to have children.
Women who have children, as long as they're not married, they get money from husband government. As one white leftist intellectual put it.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: Fatherlessness. Right. So fatherlessness, fathers from the home. And that. That is a cause of violence. Huge boys seeking family by joining again.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Exactly. That's a huge problem. Because, you see, if you're not married to the kid's mother, you might still have a relationship with the child. But it makes it much easier to be a deadbeat dad because, one, you're not married to the mother. Two, you're not financially responsible for your child because she's getting the checks from husband government. And it makes it easy for dad to just walk. And many do. And you have a lot of kids being raised not just in single parent home, but dad's in prison, or dad's just not a member of the family, your dad's just not around. You read the true crime literature and you see that a lot of the kids who join the gangs really do come from families without a father in their life.
[00:35:32] Speaker A: In your book, you also talk about the role of education and also the drug war.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: Well, the minimum wage wars.
The education system is a disaster. We discussed this last year about my book. Yeah. A lot of people say, I think accurately, that it's worse in the black urban neighborhoods. And you get these kids who go through high school, and some of them are reading first or second grade, second grade level, so they're semi illiterate. And then the minimum wage laws discriminate against low skilled, low skilled people because if they have to pay you $10 an hour, but your skills are so low that your work is worth only six or $8 per hour, you're not going to get hired. And so you have thousands and thousands and thousands of kids, boys with no fathers, little, no education, and no prospect of employment.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, before he was ever us senator back in 1965, wrote about, wrote about this when he's talking in his book. I forget the title, but the terminology of the day about the Negro family. And he predicted this kind of terrible social unrest. And of course, leftists criticized him as being a racist. But if we ended the war on drugs, that would be one step forward for many reasons, because that eliminates or reduces the financial incentive to join a gang. But you read the true crime literature, you realize eleven year old kids join a gang not just to get money, but they have no father in their life. You have 16 or 17 or 18 year old kids who lead the gang. Life expectancy doesn't reach 21. So you get 17 or 18 year old kids leading the gang and they get a family structure. The older kids are like a father figure to the younger kids, and the gang really will fight to the death for you. It's like having a family.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: So those are some of the causes. What are some of the solutions? How do we turn this around?
[00:37:32] Speaker B: Yeah, first of all, we need to phase out the welfare state.
Paying, what did Thomas Sowell, the great Thomas soul, who's a national treasure. Thomas Soul, put it very nicely, if you pay people not to get married, fewer people will get married.
Or you pay people to have children out of wedlock, fewer people will get married. And by the way, Thomas soul and the late, great Walter Williams two brilliant economists pointed out, for years and years and years now, the poverty rate amongst married black americans has been below 10%. More than 90% of married black americans are living in the middle class. Ohio, the welfare state is responsible for the 70% illegitimacy rate. So one thing is to gradually phase out the welfare state. Another thing is, I think we need a movement. Black lives matter is a wrong movement. I mean, if it was honest. Yeah, of course black lives matter. All human lives matter. But that's just a marxist organization fomenting anti capitalism and race war and so on, so forth. The movement we need, or one movement we need, is fathers matter.
Kids need fathers. The girls need fathers, and the boys. For the boys, it's life and death. We need a movement of fathers matter. Remember the million man march? We need the million fathers march, marching through all cities, but especially through the black urban neighbors. Fathers matter. We need to teach kids this in the elementary schools and the middle schools. You need both parties to discuss the importance of actually being.
If your girlfriend's pregnant or your wife is pregnant and the baby is born, to actually, if you don't want to be with the mother, that's your choice. But to be your presence in your child, in your child's life.
[00:39:19] Speaker A: I love that. A million fathers march. That's definitely.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: Yeah, we need the movement. Fathers matter. We need it all over the Internet, in the school system, on billboards, on tv and radio ads.
And we need men's fathers standing up and speaking out about not just the responsibility. I'm not the best father in the world. I don't claim that I am. But fathers who are really good fathers, standing up and speaking out about not just the responsibilities of fatherhood, but the joys of it, of having a relationship with your own child.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Yeah. So now you argue in the final chapter of the book that the left, or more literally, american collectivists, socialists, are pushing the country toward a race war. That is a pretty strong position, so help us understand that.
How are they doing this? Is this wittingly? Is it unwittingly? And what is the end game?
[00:40:22] Speaker B: What's the purpose of all this virulent anti white hatred that's spewed out every. Know that Rutgers University professor a few years ago said, we got to take white people out. It was that New York City psychiatrist speaking at Yale. She said, I fantasize about shooting white people in the.
This. The left spews this kind of stuff out every day. We got to be less white. Wasn't that a training mantra? At Coke, we got to be less white, so on and so forth. Was the purpose of this. Now, I think they were tote the relatively innocuous purpose is to breed white privilege and so on and so forth, is to breed a sense of shame in the young white Americans who are growing up, which will make them much more amenable.
Don't forget this anti white racism comes from marxist. They'll make them much more amenable to a massive redistribution of income from the white middle class to the members of the non white poverty class, including the insanity of slavery, reparations.
Now, this is a massive grift.
As evil as that is, it's a knock you as compared to the deeper issue. Because for years I've been thinking about this, discussing it with my objectivist friends and everything, and thinking at one point I thought, wait, a Marxist left is going to be surprised because, well, let's say anti white racism, yeah, it's going to make some people ashamed and open to the redistribution of income, but it's going to make a lot of other people angry. You got to constantly drilled into you that you're evil. White people are evil. Some people are going to be angry. And they may join Richard Spencer and the, you know, and the Marxists may well, they say, be careful what you wish for or you may increase the numbers of these white supremacists. Right now there are very few. Remember the march in Charlotesville, Virginia in August 2017? There are a few country that most white supremacists had like thousands of counter protesters. The USA Today photographs confirmed that. I think they may get something that they're not bargaining for. And then it occurred to me, no, they know that. The Marxist left knows that. They know you're going to anger a lot of white Americans. It's in their self interest to do it. To see the alt right, the so called alt right, these neo Nazis, to see these white supremacist movement grow. Why? Because if you want to impose a communist dictatorship as the Marxists do, not even socialism anymore from the left. Notice how they want to shut down freedom of speech. Now it's communist totalitarianism they're pushing. What do you need to do? Two things. One, you need your philosophy to completely dominate the intellectual culture. And they have that. They control the universities, the school system, Hollywood, the media, the Democratic Party. They control the intellectual culture. Then two, how did Mussolini come to power in the 1920s? How did Hitler come to power in the 1930s? Part of it was massive street violence, Mussolini's black shirts, Hitler's brown shirts fighting with union organizers and Marxists, and endless street violence, riots, burning, looting, street violence could go on for day after day after day. So honest people can't get to work, and you see peace and stability collapsing in society. That gives the Marxists the chance to say, what does Wesley Mouse say in that short? I need more powers. I need wider powers. We need wider powers. To the alt right, the Nazis, the white supremacists, they're already screaming about that. They're priming the pump with this screaming about whites. Biden says it all the time about white supremacy. We need more power to suppress the white supremacist threat. So, yeah, it's in their self interest to rile up enough white people to join the so called alt right, or the Nazi left, as I like to think of it. So, yeah, I think race war, they don't have any fears of losing it, Jack, because one, they control the intellectual culture, and two, because they do, they've churned out millions and millions and millions of little indoctrinated Marxists. They have millions of Marxists and a few thousand Nazis. We know who's going to win this struggle. And they could use the nazi boogeyman, the white supremacist boogeyman, to frighten the nation into communism. So, yeah, I do think that's part of their agenda.
[00:44:50] Speaker A: All right, going to jump into some of our audience questions. You guys have been very patient. I appreciate it. Of course, as always. Our friend, my modern Gault, is joining us on instagram, and he asks, focusing on the US, what do you think are the strongest examples of racism being on the rise? So when you talk about the bailful resurgence of american racism, what specifically are some examples of that?
[00:45:21] Speaker B: Well, I think the main example is the hatred of white people that's spewed out all the mean. The New York Times hired that writer, sarah what's her name? Sarah Jiang, who's all over the Internet. White people smell awful, and white people are irrational. White people are evil. And New York Times hired, hired her anyway. And there's just endless examples of this. The marxist left has now integrated a nazi element into its class war philosophy. It's not just the rich oppressing the poor, it's the rich white people oppressing the poor non whites. So the hatred of white people that's been spewed out over the last 20 years as the postmodernists became dominant in our humanities divisions, that's the main example. And that's what terrified me when I realized what was happening, what motivated me to write reckoning, my novel on this. So that's one example. And then in the last few months, we've seen the Jew haters come crawling out of their, shouldn't even put it that way. They control the universities. I mean, Harvard University, Penn, these major universities are rife with jew hatred amongst the administration, the faculty, the students.
So those are two examples. And like I said, we really haven't seen a blowback yet in the rise of the white supremacists. There's still good news here. They're still tiny and marginalized, like maybe a few thousand of them amongst 234,000,000 white Americans. But you continue with this anti white hatred endlessly. You're going to see the alt right, Richard Spencer, and those guys attract more recruits. Like your friend said before about tribalists, the people are going to need to migrate to their tribe out of protection from their enemies. We haven't seen it yet, but I do think white supremacism will rise. And having been deliberately fanned by the marxist.
[00:47:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there comes a point where you call people who generally aren't racist, but you repeatedly call them racist and accuse them of racism. And at some point they're like, okay, well, yeah, call me that, but I think that's also why it's important.
[00:47:45] Speaker B: You don't want fantasize about shooting white people in the head. This is a New York City psychiatrist saying, where was the blowback? He said this at Yale. There's not enough pushback by serious thinkers in the culture against this virulent anti white racism. It's social dynamite.
[00:48:01] Speaker A: All right, on x, Sterling, with his wonderful dollar sign there, asks, don't you think there's a distinction to be made between people being critical of Israel versus sweeping everything under the banner of jew hatred? Sterling, I'll take that, because actually, Michael Kaufman, who's been on this show, he's with his family. He lives in Tel Aviv. He also gave a keynote speech at our Gulch summit in Washington, DC. He's been extremely critical of Israel, and he attributes part of this fiasco and this failing on the part of Israel to have had better intelligence and better deployment against the terrorist attacks, to all of the shenanigans that Netanyahu has been doing and trying to change the court and making these deals with, as he calls them, the mystics and the muscle in Israel in order to kind of stay ahead of these allegations. So I definitely do think that there needs to be a distinction made.
There's a lot to criticize the United States for and a lot to criticize Israel for as well.
[00:49:26] Speaker B: Rock criticizes Israel for all kinds of things, the welfare state and sometimes a very mushy, I think, and weak foreign policy against its enemies, where I would have adopted a much sterner attitude towards her enemies. But having criticized Israel, I will always point out that it's basically a civilized, rights respecting nation in the midst of arab islamic brutality and consequently, anybody who supports individual rights in this struggle yet criticize Israel all your rights, especially if you live in Israel. You have the right to do so where you don't in the arab islamic world. Criticize Israel all you want, but applaud it and praise it as the only civilized, rights respecting nation in that region of the world.
[00:50:15] Speaker A: Kyle Moore, also on Instagram, has a question.
Do you disagree that Arabs have also been targeted and been subjected to mass killings? It appears that this isn't just exclusive to any one race, and I wanted to get that question to you because, Andy, you have a whole section in your book on these various racist genocides from ancient history going up to today. And so obviously, there was a lot of massacres of Hindis. Right? In India.
[00:50:55] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:50:55] Speaker A: By Muslims. There probably were some massacres of Muslims by Hindus. But what was your kind of take on whether or not there have been efforts to have genocide against Arabs or Muslims?
[00:51:15] Speaker B: Well, a friend of mine's from Pakistan, and he's speaking of a nominal Muslim. And he asked me, he's not religious. He's very secular.
And he asked me once a few years ago, he said, andy, he said, which ethnic group do you think is responsible for the murder of more Muslims than any other ethnic group in history? And being fascinated by history and studying it, I said to him, it would have to be other Muslims, right? And he said, bingo. Absolutely right.
If you study the history of the otoman empire, for example, Sunni Muslims, there were different sultans who every year had the standing pronouncement that within the Otoman Empire, the Sunni Muslims had to kill at least 100,000 Shiites in that year. In that calendar, there was so many Shiites killed over the centuries, it's amazing that there are any more of them left.
The sunni shiite warfare within Islam almost makes the protestant catholic wars of the 16th and 17th century look secondary by comparison.
Robert Spencer, not Richard Spencer, the white supremacist, but Robert Spencer, the Muhammad and Islam scholar, publish his website. Was it Jihad watch? Every week this past week, there's 17 examples of suicide bombings in 13 countries, 180 people killed, mostly Muslims killed by jihadists. So, yeah, absolutely. But this kind of irrationality and sectarian fighting amongst different members of the same religion, whether it was your Catholics and the Protestants or the Sunnis and the Shiites, but just endless racism.
The bengali massacre that you mentioned before, that was 1971. Some people can remember the concert for Bangladesh, right? It was at George Harrison and I think was involved in that. 1971, the pakistani regime murdered, nobody knows, 1.5 million to 3 million Bengalis, mostly Hindus. This stuff just goes on and on and on. I mean, the rape of Nan King, where the japanese soldiers raped and murdered hundreds of thousands of chinese civilians. They'd been taught from the time they were children in the japanese school system that the Chinese were no better than pigs and the Japanese were superior race because they worshiped their emperor. And this kind of racist stuff, history is just filled with it. And that's why Baiko, my main enemy in reckoning, and Jacob Harris, even points this out publicly. The rabbi, Holocaust survivor fighting for peace. Biko's racist nazi beliefs, he has evidence to support it. The endless race war that goes on all over the world. So, yeah, it's endless. And there's no one racial group that's more guilty than others.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: Title. All right, well, as always happens, Andy, when I have you on in this space, the hour just flies by, and we only have a couple minutes left.
So let's talk about the solutions. What's the rational alternative?
How do we avoid attempts to manipulate us into acting out and fulfilling the stereotypes that people are trying to foist upon whites? What is the rational antidote, as you put it, to this destructive dialectic?
[00:55:10] Speaker B: Well, here's a lot of good news, Jack. Read ein Rant, first of all, which should be a pleasurable experience, because the fountainhead and outlet shrugged. I mean, they're just magnificent novels. They're great stories. And you realize individualism is the proper philosophy here, that a human being, male, female, black, white, asian, latino, biracial, whatever, a human being is first, foremost, and always an individual, not a member of some ethnic group or tribe or gender. And consequently, who and what we are is based on the moral choices we know. Martin Luther King understood this. Moral character matters. The moral character of an individual human being based on the moral choices that he or she makes, not the gender he or she's born into or the ethnic group that he or she's born into. The choices that the moral choices people make. So colorblind individualism here is the panacea for racism in any of its forms. It should be simple. We want people in our lives who are morally upright. It doesn't matter what race, what tribe they are. We want people who are morally upright.
And that's the cure. Notice, by the way, the left who's always talking about black lives matter and everything, individual rights is the solution. Colorblind. Individualism, they reject it. It's a microaggression. The leftists call it a microaggression. That's why I think it should be obvious to point out the left doesn't care about black lives or women's rights or gays or transgenders or anything. If they did, they would embrace the principle of individual rights because that's the only protection any of us have, especially members of persecuted groups or minorities. But they don't. They reject it. Microaggression. But anyway, that's the principle. Individualism, individual rights, colorblindness. This is the way to fight racism. And every one of us can do it in our own souls.
[00:57:13] Speaker A: Do it in our own souls. We can do it in our own spheres of influence. I think a greatly underestimated antidote is the power of example. So whether you want to be an example of what it means to live your life benevolently, rationally and productively as an objectivist, you can spend all of your time out there preaching the ideas and marketing the books and living it.
[00:57:50] Speaker B: Like you said, living it in your own life.
[00:57:53] Speaker A: Yes. And that goes as well for being an individualist. It's not about being an antiracist or a racist, but it's about being an individualist and choosing your friends selfishly and being a good friend in return. And so, Andy, thank you for being a good friend to me and to the Atlas Society in so many ways, all of the little projects that we have going on. I really appreciate you. And once again, magnificent job, both on your novel reckoning and your latest. And good luck with your next book, which is going to be very interesting.
[00:58:36] Speaker B: Thank you. My next book, I'm going to write on the nature of evil. Write a book on the nature of evil. It's surprising how little has been written on that in the history of moral philosophy. And so my book on evil is going to obviously come from a distinctively objectivist perspective. So that's what I'm starting to work on right now. That's the project for 2024.
[00:58:56] Speaker A: When do you hope to have you given yourself a deadline?
[00:59:01] Speaker B: Deadlines you try, but sometimes you recognize they're often futile.
[00:59:06] Speaker A: A goal.
[00:59:07] Speaker B: But I'm hoping for this year to have the finished product at the end of the year 2020, we'll have to.
[00:59:13] Speaker A: Have you back to talk about that. So there's an extra incentive.
Thank you. Thanks, Andy. Thanks all of you for joining us today. If you enjoyed this video or any of the content that we create at the Atlas Society, please consider supporting us with a tax deductible
[email protected]. And hope you will come and join us again next week for a change of years. Paulina Pompliano is going to join us on the Atlas Society, asks to discuss her book, hidden Genius, the secret ways of thinking that power the world's most successful people. So I'll see you then. Thanks.
