Critical Race Theory Makes Perpetual Victims | Leonydus Johnson on The Babylon Bee
Leonydus Johnson is at The Babylon Bee to talk about how Critical Race Theory has already infected all our schools to raise an entire generation of victims and also how reparations won't solve anything. He is an expert on being told he doesn't know what it's like to be black in America. Kyle finds out that he can't pronounce 'Pernicious'. Leonydus' book is out now, Raising Victims: The Pernicious Rise of Critical Race Theory: https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Victims-Pernicious-Critical-Theory/dp/1684513774 Become a premium subscriber: https://babylonbee.com/plans?utm_source=PYT&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=description
Isn't saying you're advocating for colorblindness racist?
Yeah, you'll be told that, and I'm told that all the time.
You're such a racist.
Yeah, how dare you?
You don't want to judge people by their skin color?
That is oppressive, my friend.
I don't trust people with blue eyes, personally.
Yeah, I call them bright eyes.
I also don't trust bald people.
Wait.
And now it's time for another interview on the Babylon B podcast.
There's a secret military base under Denver.
Did you hear about this?
Secret military base.
Like they look at the Denver airport and they talk.
This is part of the interview.
So the Denver airport, if you look at the layout of it and how much money was spent to build it, there's all these conspiracy theories about it.
Oh.
Like it's a very weird.
And there's like weird sculptures there and stuff.
So there's like secret stuff underneath.
There used to be when I was, I grew up in Colorado.
And every time they extended the finish date like three times, four times.
So I mean, I could see that really being the case, like, because they kept pushing that date back.
And they kept saying it was like this newfangled system where they were moving all the luggage around.
Like, that's what they kept saying.
It's like underground, right?
Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's the underground luggage system that we're trying to.
Pay no attention to the man behind the.
Well, thanks for coming out, man.
Ohio, out here to Southern California.
So it's a little chilly out here right now, but you're managing.
Compared to Ohio, this is summer weather.
We're cold.
We are cold.
Look at you.
You guys are wearing a jacket?
No, I wear a jacket in the summertime.
Do you really?
Yeah.
All the time.
I get really cold out here in California.
I'm pretty sure it was in teens this morning in Ohio.
So there you go.
Sounds awful.
Oh, that's great.
Well, Babylon B headline, Ohio Man Writes Book.
It's a really good headline.
Somebody write that down.
We'll publish it.
It's good.
I like it.
So talk about it.
So we got Raising Victims, the pernicious, is that how you say that?
Pernicious.
Copernicus.
Pernicus.
Yeah.
Pernicuous rise of critical race theory.
Tell us how this came about, man.
Yeah, well, I mean, you look around what's happening in society, the infusion of critical race theory and race-centric policies that are happening everywhere, particularly in public schools.
And what happens when you push back on that kind of stuff?
You say, like, I don't really want my kids being taught to deconstruct their whiteness.
I don't want my kids being taught that they're victims.
And people say, well, you don't know what you're talking about.
And critical race theory is not being taught in schools.
And you need to just shut up and pay attention.
Just let us do our jobs.
You have no, yeah.
It's a legal theory.
Yeah, it's just, it's taught in laws.
It's taught in law school.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Right.
So you push back on that stuff and you basically get dismissed.
So the book came from a place where, you know, just wanting to describe what critical race theory actually is, how it's being infused in our society in public schools, in corporations, pretty much everywhere.
And what to do about it.
Breaking apart the arguments, the diversity, equity, inclusion, how it's hiding itself in like anti-racism and Black Lives Matter and all these different things.
And then what can we do to push back and fight back against it?
And then pushing the idea for colorblindness in a post-racial society, which is one of my biggest passions as far as political aspirations go.
Initiating a paradigm shift in our society where we move toward a place where skin color just doesn't matter.
I can look at you and say, yeah, okay, you have a different skin color, so what?
It's basically like your hair color and eye color.
Like we have different skin colors and hair colors, eye colors, and it's not consequential to who we are.
So the book comes from that place where we're trying to attack critical race theory for what it is and expose how it's infiltrating our society and then giving a remedy for it.
I don't trust people with blue eyes, personally.
Yeah, I call them bright eyes.
Listen here, bright eyes.
Isn't though, isn't saying you're advocating for colorblindness racist?
You'll be told that.
Yeah, you'll be told that.
And I'm told that all the time that you're such a racist.
How dare you?
You don't want to judge people by their skin color?
That is oppressive, my friend.
You have internalized racism.
Yeah, I've been told that as well.
I mean, it seems like a joke, but that's a real argument.
It's a real attack.
Oh, you have internalized white supremacy.
You know, the thing that happened in Memphis with the five black police officers, they hadn't internalized white supremacy.
You hear that argument.
It's like, oh, it's five black police officers and a supposedly black victim.
And somehow that has to do with white supremacy.
Because that's the nature of the argument.
But yeah, I mean, Dr. King's whole idea of pushing for, well, the I Have a Dream speech and pushing for that idea of colorblindness where people are judged for the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
People say that that's oppressive.
They say, no, no, no, no, you misunderstand what he was saying.
Like he wasn't actually saying that we shouldn't see skin color.
He was saying that, you know, like we need to embrace critical race theory or something like that.
Don't both sides embrace, like they claim Martin Luther King Jr. now?
Kind of both sides do, right?
All the time.
Or do you think that they pick and choose?
They pick and choose certain speeches and certain sayings because he did.
There were certain aspects where he picked certain socialist principles and he pushed for things like UBI and things like that.
And people will hold on to those sort of things and they'll say like, oh, see?
What is UBI?
Universal basic income.
Oh, yeah.
It's an infection that you get kind of.
It's in the belly button, actually.
Yeah, but I mean, like, there are those aspects where they try to paint Martin Luther King as a radical extremist.
Like he was like a Black Panther or something.
And then, but you hit, again, you have the I Have Dream speech, which is completely the opposite of that.
And that's just dismissed as, no, no, we're not going to pay attention to that.
But yeah, you get that a lot.
Like, oh, you're internalized white supremacy.
You don't even know you're oppressed, man.
Like, I get told that all the time.
Like, oh, you're just oppressed and you just don't even know it.
You poor soul, especially by white progressives.
You poor soul.
I'll help you.
You come here, Mitchell.
The white saviors.
They don't even know they're sinners.
They internalize sin.
Internalized sin.
Sinners.
I like that.
That should be a book.
Yeah.
I'm going to write it right now.
I also don't trust bald people.
Wait.
That was racist.
This is awkward now.
So going back to this discussion of CRT, you know, you said that some people will say that CRT is not taught in schools.
What are some examples you've seen where this is being taught?
Or what did you find as your research in the book?
What they'll do is they'll disguise it in sanitized names like diversity, equity, and inclusion, anti-racism.
They'll push concepts of Black Lives Matter in the classroom.
any kind of race-centric curriculums or race-centric lesson plans are rooted in critical race theory.
And what people need to understand, I think, is that when these teachers are in universities, they're studying critical race theory.
They're studying the edicts of CRT.
And that's where the academic portion comes from.
And what also needs to be understood is that there's a activist. portion of CRT.
And the founders will tell you that explicitly, that it has the academic portion and the activist portion.
So they're training activists in these universities.
And it's not just in law school.
They say explicitly it's spread out to other academic disciplines, including education.
And so these teachers are being trained in the edicts of CRT.
So are we supposed to expect that they're not going to take it to the K through 12 classrooms after they graduate?
Clearly they are.
Clearly this is happening.
And so they get into the classrooms and when they say they're not teaching CRT, they're technically correct.
They're not.
They're applying it.
It's application.
It's critical race praxis.
So the lesson plans are filtered through a lens of critical race theory.
It's treated with the presupposition that systemic racism is actually pushing oppression on black people and black students and it's causing the disparities in classrooms.
And then it's treating that as a foregone conclusion.
It's not something even to debate.
It's just all the lesson plans are filtered through that.
Is that what critical race theory is?
Is that assumption?
Or do you define that?
So critical race.
Is it the legal component?
Is it the moving target?
So critical race theory is hard to define because it's that constantly shifting definition.
Because when you define it, they'll say, no, no, that's not what critical race theory is.
But the presuppositions of critical race theory is that racism is endemic in society and that it's all around us at all times.
It's the very foundation of our country.
And so it's Antonio Gramsci's idea of cultural hegemony, where the elites in society create this entire system and status quo where the oppressed don't even realize that they're oppressed.
They just think it's the normal operation of things.
So us sitting here talking on the Babylon B podcast, it can be viewed through the lens of white supremacy because everything is founded in white supremacy.
Do it.
Yeah, I know.
Because we justified it.
We outnumber him too.
Clearly.
Exactly.
And the other person of color.
And I, yeah, exactly.
He's not even allowed to speak.
He doesn't have a voice.
That's Bucky or Mascot.
Yeah, I feel upstage by Bucky.
Never work with animals or small children.
They'll always upstage.
That's right.
But yeah, I mean, but that's the basic essence of critical race theory, that racism is endemic in our society and that it's everywhere at all times and it drives racial disparities.
And like I said, it has the academic portion that exists in universities where they train the activists.
And then it has the activist portion where the activists are sent out to, the way they put it, is to affect social change.
And what it really is, is to institute a cultural revolution in our society.
And that's basically what's happening.
Which is how it's a critical theory.
It's Marxism, essentially.
It's Marxism at its core.
It absolutely is.
And, you know, I was on the Will Kane podcast a couple days ago, and we talked about this.
It seems like a conspiracy theory when you say that.
Because Marxism is kind of overplayed a little bit.
And people kind of turn off when you say that.
It's like, oh, Marxism.
Okay.
Yeah, whatever, dude.
Like, get out of here, QAnon, or whatever.
It's like, but like, if you go back and you look at the origins of critical race theory and where it actually comes from, it is Marxist in its foundation.
It's Marxist in its origins.
And the founders of Critical Race Theory said themselves at the event where critical race theory was coined, where the term was coined by Kimberly Crenshaw, they said that they were a room full of self-professed Marxists.
They were all Marxists in that room.
So the idea that it doesn't come from Marxism or that it has no association with Marxism is nonsense because it absolutely does.
It absolutely has that foundation to it.
Why do you think Marxism is so attractive to academics?
And why do you think so?
Because it seems like it keeps coming up over the years.
You know, they kind of change the names around and put different, you know, make someone the bourgeois and other people like the oppressed groups.
Like, why do you think it's attractive?
It's the beard.
Is it mostly the beard?
He's got a really nice.
And his lack of showering.
Yeah.
And his satanic plays that he wrote.
That's exactly it.
Yeah.
Marx, which is all of his satanic plays.
Where are the satanic plays?
He totally wrote satanic plays.
Karl Marx.
Yes.
Carl.
He wrote plays from the perspective of Lucifer.
Oh, okay.
Where Lucifer was the hero.
And you should read this book called The Devil and Karl Marx.
Okay.
Oh, it's good.
I actually didn't know about the plays.
That's a good idea.
Yeah, he wrote devil plays and also devil poems.
That's what they call them officially.
That's what it is then.
Yeah.
That's no wonder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was fascinated by the devil.
You were asking him a question.
I'm sorry.
He never got a job his whole life.
You asked him why he never worked.
I know.
I'm just talking about Marx now.
Why is Marxism?
Because he was not an attractive guy.
He's stunk.
Yeah.
He wrote devil plays.
He's ugly.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, well, I think it comes down to emotional reasoning as a serious answer.
I mean, when you look at Marxism on paper, it's emotionally satisfying for people who want to help out the oppressed or what they would view as the oppressed and the little guy.
So if you have that predisposition already and you're presented with this theory, it's like, oh, capitalism is evil.
Capitalism can be blamed for all the ills in our society.
Or in this case, racism can be blamed for all the ills in our society.
Everything that's wrong in our society can be blamed on white supremacy.
And if you're predisposed to emotional reasoning, you're going to say, oh, yeah, yeah, now I'm angry.
Now I need to do something about that.
And now we need to have some activism.
So I think that's why people who aren't familiar with the history of Marxism and the absolute catastrophes that have followed from its attempted implementations everywhere it's been tried, I think that's why they're so attracted to it.
And as far as academics go, it's just, you know, they think that they've discovered something new.
Like the Frankfurt School where critical theory was developed, those guys, they actually realized that Marxism didn't work.
They were like, Marxism's, it's not working at all.
So we need to come together and we need to add Freud to this and we need to figure out how to, you know, create something that will work.
And so they were, that's where the neo-Marxist idea came from.
So it was Marxism, but they were reframing it to try to, you know, apply it to philosophy and culture.
But then critical legal theory comes along later on and it's same thing.
These people think that they're discovering something new.
Like, Eureka, I know the other stuff didn't work, but now I've discovered this new aspect and it will work this time, guys.
They just didn't do it right before, but we have the answer now.
Eureka.
Yeah.
Eureka.
Exclamation point.
Exclamation.
Two exclamation points, actually, I think.
Eureka!
I like those people.
So if CRT is in part, at least the assumption that racism is baked into everything, then going back to the shooting death of Tyre Nichols, this is an article the Babylon B published.
New Netflix series on Tyre Nichols beating will feature white officers.
I'll have that on the screen there.
They're going to recast it.
Here is a tweet from Tim Wise.
I love that.
Tim Wise, it kind of sums up what a lot of people.
Yeah, he's.
I had an interaction with him not too long ago.
And he says, anyone who says the killing of Tyre Nichols can't be about racism because the cops were also black really doesn't understand how white supremacy or anti-blackness work.
So is that the connection?
Is that they think the assumption is already racism.
So no matter what the facts are, it has to be blamed on racism.
It's funny.
I had an interaction with Tim Wise not that long ago, and he proceeded to explain to me why I didn't understand what it was like to be black in America.
And he didn't.
I can't see it.
He does very well.
He does that well, but I don't think.
Pretty sure he's white.
I don't want to make any assumptions, but.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, it depends on how he identifies too.
Sure, sure.
That's important to take that into account.
But he was explaining to me that I had, like, if I didn't agree with him on how endemic racism was in our society, then I had internalized white supremacy.
So it goes back to that.
And that's a pretty common tactic.
But yeah, I mean, it's this idea that racism is the foundation of everything that happens.
So no matter what, I mean, it could just be, I mean, remember those events with the black guys that were beating up Asian Americans out here in California or attacking Jewish Americans in New York.
And what happened?
They blamed it on white supremacy.
It's like it had nothing to do with white supremacy, but somehow they managed to draw these lines from whatever happens in society to white supremacy based on this idea that everything is founded through it.
And that's critical race theory.
It's critical race theory as root.
So yeah, you can't, it's unfalsifiable.
It's invisible.
So you have to have a secret spy decoder ring in order to see it.
You can't see it because you have to rely on people with PhDs to come tell you when something is racist or how something is racist.
And so that's what Tim Wise is doing.
He's saying that, like, listen, like, you don't have the credentials to be able to see racism like I do.
So you just need to shut up and listen and pay attention to what I'm saying.
Trust the experts.
It's coming back to us.
Go sit in this room for four days, listen to me talk to you.
But that's, yeah, that's the ideology.
And that's how it works.
It reminds me of the dorky kid that's never had a girlfriend in his entire life.
And like, he comes up to you.
He's like, yeah, man, I have this new hot girlfriend, and we have to do all this stuff now because of her.
And you're like, what are you talking about?
Like, who is she?
It's like, I don't know.
You don't know her.
She goes to another school.
She's in Canada.
She's in Canada, man.
She's in Canada.
Never heard of it.
You don't have to worry about it.
I'm just saying.
Canada doesn't exist.
My uncle works for Nintendo.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah, he can get us cool early games and stuff.
My uncle works for Amazon.
Really?
Yeah.
He's a driver.
He's a driver.
He drives.
Oh, man.
That's so cool.
So we've been talking recently here in California about paying reparations to black folks, F-O-L-X, in San Francisco.
And I heard some numbers like going up to $5 million or per person.
Per person, maybe it's household or person.
I don't know what it was.
That's a lot.
So your thoughts?
Pro or con?
It's like, actually, that sounds pretty good.
Move to San Francisco, maybe.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, I haven't seen the details of the plans.
I heard they were trying to do that.
But it's like, how do you even begin to have that conversation?
Like, are we going to go back to the one drop rule?
Like, who qualifies for reparations at this point?
It's like, like, I'm black.
Look, does Rachel Dalazile?
Does she, does it, can she qualify?
Is she going to get reparation?
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, how do you, like, how do you determine who's going to get reparation?
Like, you have to go into people's genetic ancestries and look and see.
And what if they're descended from slave owners?
Do they have to pay reparations?
Like, you know, so it's just nonsensical.
If you're trying to, if you're trying to make recompense for something that happened in the past where, you know, the people involved are already gone, like, how do you even begin to do that?
Like, you're, you're trying to punish people collectively.
And this is actually critical race theory at large, honestly.
You're punishing people collectively based on their skin color.
And then basically saying that this other group over here are victims and they need to have some sort of recompense based on their skin color.
So you're bringing everything back to skin color and making judgments based on skin color that have no real attachment to the real world.
Like LeBron James, is he getting this $5 million?
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, it makes no sense to try to delineate and try to distribute reparations based on solely on skin color when there's no real attachment.
But I mean, that's my basic thoughts on reparations.
But the whole thing with California in general is, I mean, they're not going to be focused on any kind of logical solutions.
It's all about what, again, back to the emotional reasoning.
It's all about whatever makes people feel good.
And that's where it comes down to.
So, hey, reparations makes us feel good.
But let's do that.
$5 million would make it good.
$5 million makes us feel good.
But here's the thing.
I was going to say one more thing about it.
What people need to understand about critical race theory and the essence of it is that they believe that the entire system is corrupt.
The entire system is imbibed with racism and white supremacy.
So because of that, there is no solution other than tearing down the system.
The system has to be destroyed.
It has to be completely upended.
So if you give out reparations, it's not going to matter because they're eventually going to say that they're still oppressed.
They're going to say they're oppressed by the reparations.
The reparations are oppressing me now because everything's oppressive.
My thing is, what do you think black people will buy with the $5 million in San Francisco?
I watched that Chappelle skip.
I know.
I already know.
You don't have to answer that.
What was I going to say?
I can't remember.
I know, because when one system is built, then it has to be torn down again.
And then you have another system that's built and it has to be torn down.
So how do you, I mean, like, if it were, you know, switched around, isn't critical theory just like the continuation of conflict for the rest of eternity?
There's no solution, right?
Well, I mean, yeah, it's perpetual.
Like, because you think about the French Revolution, you know, the idea was to tear down the monarchy and then replace it with the people, the put the people in charge.
But then when the people got in charge, awful things happened.
So it's like it created new problems.
Same thing happened in Russia when they upended the monarchy there.
So yeah, you have these perpetual sort of issues, but the critical theories in their essence will never be satisfied.
They'll continually, until everything is ash and everything is gone, they'll never be never be happy because there's always going to be justification for some form of oppression.
But yeah, to your point, like Mao in China, during the Cultural Revolution, said specifically that in order to build a new site on the side of the old or a new culture, new society on the side of the old, the old site has to be swept clean.
And that's what we're seeing.
That's exactly what's happening, that this idea that everything is oppressive, everything is imbibed with racism, and therefore it has to be eliminated.
It's interwoven into the very fabric of our society.
So the only solution is to tear down society and build up our new communist utopia from the ashes.
And doesn't it justify racism, like Kendi said on page like eight, I think, of his book, How to Be an Anti-Racist?
In the very beginning of the book, he says, the only way to stop racism.
Chapter three, verse six.
It's Kendi.
The book of Kendi.
The book of Kendi.
So how do you remember what?
We will be reading from Tisbee today.
Tisbee and then Kendi.
All stand.
All stand looking at us, Kendi.
Take off our hats, put our hands on our hearts.
Anyway, yeah, so I do think he does say that because the only way to solve racism is to create racism, essentially.
It's like be racist.
Yeah, he doesn't say that specifically, but that's essentially what he was saying.
He used the word discrimination.
Yeah, that's right.
Discrimination.
In order to remedy past discrimination, you have to have present discrimination.
In order to remedy present discrimination, you have to have future discrimination.
It's like, dude, but yeah, like they are absolutely advocating for, I don't even want to use the term reverse racism because it's just race.
It's just straight up racism.
It's just straight up racism.
But they're advocating for it because, so it tells you that they believe that racism has utility just in certain situations.
And as long as they have the power.
Yeah, as long as they have the power.
It's just a power differential.
That's it.
They're trying to upend the perceived hierarchy.
So they can talk about equality of outcomes all they want, but they actually want to be in charge and they want to be running things.
And Kendi, again, he's a good example of that because he's advocated for, I don't remember what he called it, but it was essentially like a government system that everything, all bills and legislation had to go through and be approved by this unelected anti-racist people who would approve everything and decide what gets passed in the law.
Isn't that functionally what's happening in businesses, though?
Functionally.
Right now?
Yeah.
And in USAID, you have like the IPI, DI people that decide who gets hired and what gets into the curriculums.
Yeah, so yeah, so put that into the government.
I'm sure everything will work out fine.
It's going to be great.
Yeah.
Well, you look at these reparations we were talking about.
You know, it strikes me that it's based on this assumption, like we were talking about equality of outcomes, that unequal outcomes are because of racism.
And I think that's part of the belief of CRT.
Like any unequal outcome.
Yeah, primary issue.
And it ignores any kind of cultural differences and it ignores any kind of personal choices that were made that were different.
I'm sure that's a racist dog whistle to talk about personal choices.
Yeah, absolutely.
But it's yeah, it just strikes me that it is, it does stem from this CRT belief that you look at something, you say, oh, you know, these people are not as well off today, therefore it must be traced to racism from, you know, wherever you can find it, if it's 200 years ago or whatever.
No, it absolutely is.
It's this idea that, and again, back to Kendi, like it's the idea that anywhere, any system that produces unequal outcomes along racial lines is inherently a racist system.
No further analysis is necessary.
We don't need to look at any of the other variables.
All we need to know is that race is there's disparities along racial lines, and that's all that matters.
So, yeah, that's the primary driver of critical race theory because a critical legal theory was developed because there were racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
And they decided that those were due to racism without looking at any other variables or any other factors.
What would you suggest are the other variables that you're talking about?
Well, I mean, look at variables in between individuals and what causes differences in between individuals, behaviors, choices, attitudes, values, beliefs.
And then when you get broader, culture, cultural differences, general cultural differences, general environmental differences.
Thomas Soule says, you know, the same man isn't even equal to himself on different days.
So it's very difficult to read.
Facts.
All standards.
Facts.
They will now be reading facts.
That's great.
But yeah, I mean, the idea of egalitarianism and equality as far as outcomes go is just a fallacy in and of itself.
And it becomes even more of a fallacy when you're talking about disparate groups of people who have disparate beliefs and value systems in different cultures.
And that's not saying that when you generalize and say that like all black people have a different culture and all white people have a different culture, but within the groups, so like use police shootings, for example.
Like within the black population, there is a very small percentage of black people who commit a large, the majority of the violent crime.
And because of that, they distort the statistics and make it seem like black people are responsible.
So like say murders, black people are responsible for over 50% of the murders.
It's not really black people.
It's that small percentage of people that adhere to that degenerate and violent culture that are responsible for 50% of the murders.
Right.
So those people drive the disparities.
And then you look at specifically gang culture.
Gang culture.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Which is part of the broader part, what I would call hood culture.
It's all hip-hop already.
I'm calling hood culture.
If you've ever recorded a hip-hop album, you're part of the problem.
Oh, no.
I've recorded hip-hop.
I know.
That's why I said that.
Wait a minute.
Joel told me he had recorded a few hip-hop CDs.
CDs?
Do you have any CDs with you?
I do not.
That's a past lifetime.
Okay, should we scrub that?
Look it up.
Are you proud of your hip-hop?
I mean, it was fun while I was fun.
Yeah, I did like positive Christian hip-hop and all that.
Yeah.
This was back in the day.
So not responsible for violence.
Okay.
Yeah, I was the anti-anti-violent stuff.
But that was back in like 2005, 2006.
That was a long time ago.
Was it under your current name or was it a.
What was your name?
You're going to make me tell it.
They're going to go look it up.
They're going to go look it up.
Go to the subscriber portion now.
Subscriber exclusive if you want to find out what you really want to know.
No, it's on my biographies and stuff.
It was under the moniker of gifted, G-Y-F-T-E-D.
That's not how you spell gifted.
I like it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A little swag to it, right?
Oh, that's good.
That's good.
Sorry.
I totally interrupted the point.
Oh, I like it.
Sorry.
I don't remember what we were talking about.
You were talking about how a small percentage of the black people commit all hip-hop culture and crime.
Hip-hop culture.
Hood.
Hood culture.
Hood culture.
Let's say that.
There's some overlap there.
There's some overlap.
Not all hip-hop culture is hood culture, but there's some overlap.
Particularly when you see all these rappers that end up getting shot, which is something you don't see in country music at all.
You don't forget me.
Like a hunting accident.
You see the country artists shooting people, but mostly like intruders in their homes and that kind of thing.
Or deer.
Deer.
Yeah.
People that named like people named Bam.
Self-defense.
Yeah.
But yeah.
No, but and what do you think?
So is gang culture a lot because of fatherlessness too?
And then that systemic, like, where does that, where does that come from?
It's, it's, it's a lot of that.
Yeah.
I mean, you pretty much everything that happens in these communities.
Well, I mean, I don't want to just hone in on these communities.
I mean, society at large, you can trace just about every socioeconomic problem back to the home.
And you look in these communities, and fatherlessness is a huge issue.
I mean, you're talking about 77% of black children being born out of wedlock.
That's going to have some effects on the upbringing and what's going on.
And that's not a knock on single mothers at all, but the statistics bear it out that kids do better, generally do better in two-parent households when the father is present in the home.
So when the father's not present, the cards are stacked against them.
And that's just a fact of life.
It's not a why is that a cultural phenomenon in those communities, by the way?
Well, I mean, it's hard to say specifically without psychologizing and knowing, you know, mind reading and knowing exactly what's happening in people's minds.
But the culture just does not emphasize personal responsibility and it doesn't emphasize family values.
So you have a baby mama culture.
And everybody's heard that term before.
And so when you have the, when you're glorifying this sort of promiscuity and lack of personal responsibility and baby mama culture, where you know guys are having kids with you know six seven, eight different women uh yeah, sometimes more.
If you're Nick Cannon and yeah, repopulating the audience or the Nilon MUSK, they call them cannonites.
The cannonites I like that, but I mean like when you're, when you're emphasizing those kind of values in and in the culture, then it's not going to be a surprise that you have those kind of outcomes.
And then the other, the other end of that is when you have uh, you have kids raising kids.
You know you have uh 16 15, 16 year olds um well, actually the grandmothers and grandparents end up raising the kids.
But you know, kids raising kids and these kids don't grow up, you know, in in solid, stable environments, and so it perpetuates right, the cycle perpetuates.
And then you know you have the crime element where uh, you know these kids get involved in street stuff and they end up, end up in prison and again perpetuates.
But this wasn't always the case in the black community right, like this wasn't, I mean, there were a lot of stable marriages back in the day.
There was a lot going on that was good in the black community.
And then it all changed.
You know, like what was, when did it, when did it change?
Well, yeah, I mean, you're kind of hinting at the Thomas Sowell stuff again.
Yeah, I wonder.
But yeah, he talks about that at length, that the real turning point was in the 60s, the Lyndon B. Johnson welfare push.
And that's when you really started to see things start to change in culture where people were incentivized to not have fathers and women were incentivized to not have fathers in the home.
And so, yeah, I mean, again, like all these different, if you incentivize people to have certain behaviors, the culture incentivizes them to have certain behaviors, then it's not going to be a surprise when those behaviors surface.
Like, oh, where did these come from?
Like, well, like you're giving them high fives and financial incentives to behave this way.
And then there's no condemnation for the negative stuff.
And that's the other thing, too, is that our society kind of brushes it off.
You know, it's like, oh, like, it's not really their fault.
Like, we don't want to hold them responsible for acting that way.
It's like, yeah, like, well, those five guys beat that one guy to death, but it's not really their fault.
It's white supremacy.
So like, it's like all this stuff.
There's all these excuses for why these behaviors, like, I mean, I'll give you an example.
In Baltimore, which is, there's a black mayor in Baltimore.
There's a black police chief, a black superintendent.
Most of the school board is black.
Most of the city council is black.
Many of the teachers are black.
Most of the student bodies.
I mean, like, it's mostly black people in the system.
And yet you look at the schools in Baltimore and the outcomes are abysmal.
I mean, we're talking like 12% proficient in reading and language arts and like 10% proficient in math in some places.
In some schools, less than 1% in both.
And so when you bring that up and you say, okay, something is going on in this culture here that needs to be changed, people say, no, it's white supremacy.
It's systemic racism that's causing these problems.
So there's no accountability.
There's no sense of personal responsibility.
There's no sense of looking and trying to change things on the ground.
It's just like we're just going to make excuses and blame racism and then continuing to protect this culture.
So that culture should have died out a long time ago, but it continues to be protected and continues to be perpetuated.
The book is Raising Victims, the Rise of Critical Racism by Salem Books.
And this is out now?
February 7th.
February 7th.
So probably out by the time this comes out.
So everybody, go check it out.
Go check it out.
How to raise victims.
Perniciously.
Perniciously.
Perniculous, pernicious.
Perniculous victims.
Perniculous victims.
Are there any other projects that you've worked on that you want people to know about?
I have a podcast.
Yeah.
I have a podcast, Informed Dissent, which you can find anywhere, anywhere you have podcasts.
Of course, the book.
And then I have a substack where I write occasionally, which is just leonitis.substack.
So you check that out as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Try a few different spellings of Leonidas until you figure it out.
Perniculous Leonidas.
Principalous Leonidas.
Check it out.
We'll have links to all of his social media and everything that you can go follow him.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
Yeah, there's an almost Christian stoicism there or something that looks out at stuff and says, I can't control that thing that just happened, but I can't control how I respond to it.
Yeah, that's a very Christian idea, I think, in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I like that.
Do you do martial arts?
I don't, actually.
You look like you can.
You should.
Do you work out?
Do you work out?
I work out.
Yeah.
I work out.
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