Why Critical Race Theory Is Doomed, Writing & Law | Kurt Schlichter | One American Podcast #10
Chase Geiser is joined by Kurt Schlichter.
Kurt Schlichter is a successful trial lawyer based in the Los Angeles area representing companies and individuals in matters ranging from routine business cases to confidential Hollywood and entertainment industry disputes and transactions. A member of the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, which recognizes attorneys who have won trial verdicts in excess of $1 million, his litigation strategy and legal analysis articles have run in such legal publications such as the Los Angeles Daily Journal and California Lawyer.
Kurt is a 1994 graduate of Loyola Law School, where he was a law review editor. He majored in Communications and Political Science as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, where he also edited the student paper California Review while writing a regular column in the student humor paper the Koala.
After college, Kurt enlisted in the United States Army and received his commission as a second lieutenant through the Army Officer Candidate School. While stationed in West Germany, Kurt was deployed to Operation Desert Storm when he served in the conflict as a platoon leader. After leaving active duty, he joined the California Army National Guard and served in a variety of command and staff positions for over two decades.
Colonel Schlichter wears the silver “jump wings” of a qualified paratrooper and commanded the elite 1st Squadron, 18th Cavalry Regiment. A veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom (Kosovo), as well as the Los Angeles riots, the Northridge earthquake and the 2007 San Diego fires mobilizations, he is a graduate of the Army’s Combined Arms Staff Service School and the Command and General Staff College. He earned a master of Strategic Studies degree from the United States Army War College.
His freelance writing been published in major papers like the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Times, the Army Times, and the San Francisco Examiner. Kurt also wrote for Breitbart.com’s Big Hollywood, Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Peace sites and is a weekly columnist for Townhall.com.
As a stand-up comic for several years, he has gathered a large and devoted following in the world of social media for his amusing and often biting conservative commentary. He is an active user of Twitter (@KurtSchlichter) with over 37,000 followers, which led to his four #1 selling Amazon “Political Humor” ebooks “I Am a Conservative,” “I Am a Liberal,” “Fetch My Latte,” and “Fifty Shades of Liberal.”
Kurt is often on the air as a news source, an on-screen commentator, and as a guest on nationally syndicated radio programs discussing political, military and legal issues, including Fox News, the Hugh Hewitt Show, the Dennis Miller Show, Geraldo, the Greg Garrison Show, the WMAL Morning Show with Larry O’Connor, the Larry Elder Show, and KABC’s John Phillips Show, among others.
Kurt is married to Irina and has two children. He lives in the South Bay area of Los Angeles.
EPISODE LINKS:
Kurt's Twitter: https://twitter.com/KurtSchlichter
Chase's Twitter: https://twitter.com/realchasegeiser
Kurt's Website: http://kurtschlichter.com/
Kurt's Books: https://www.amazon.com/Kurt-Schlichte...
PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://www.patreon.com/IAmOneAmerican
To be honest with you, I didn't know much about you before this weekend.
And it's excusable.
Yeah, it sounds like you've had quite an eclectic life experience from communications and political science as an undergrad to the military to writing novels to stand-up comedy to trial law.
It's wild, all the different things you've been involved with.
And so, you know, a blank page doesn't worry me just like a crowd doesn't worry me.
I find it bizarre that there are people out there who are afraid to speak in public, for instance.
To me, I always just assumed everybody absolutely wanted to hear what I had to say.
I mean, it never occurred to me that they didn't.
Why wouldn't they?
But the same with writing.
Actually, talking about this weekend, I just, you know, I always knew I wanted to write books.
So I just did and, you know, sold it.
I did, I've done three traditional, five non-traditional, the last of which was Crisis, and that got to 29 on all of Amazon.
Now I have another one coming.
Thank you.
I'll have another one coming out next month.
Interesting about writing.
I'll get to that in a sec, but I just decided I wanted to do it.
I mean, the first novel that I published, I just decided I want to do it.
So I did it.
And it's very interesting.
The writing world has changed because I don't have to ask anybody's permission to do it.
I do traditional books and they happen differently.
There's a longer process.
There's a more formal editorial process.
The timing's different.
The way you get paid is different.
I do like the control that the self-publishing tools give you because it's essentially transparent.
I was talking to somebody today who's publishing a novel this month and a good one.
And he's like, oh man, I got a format.
I'm like, it takes me like two hours.
That's the easiest part.
It's so easy to get out there.
The barriers are so low to selling your work that it really becomes a situation where you're standing on your own, as opposed to, you know, in the past, the publishing industry is terrible.
Much of it is devoted to people going to lunch with each other.
It is inefficient.
It is archaic.
They have no idea what's going on.
They don't know what's going to sell.
I mean, they have no better idea than you or I about what a good idea is going to be.
And it's really kind of bizarre.
And now they have like much less power because the people who are doing really well, many of them started doing non-traditional, like the guy who wrote The Martian.
Now he writes regular books, but if he got pissed off, he'd go, well, screw you.
I'll just go on Amazon and publish it.
And I'll keep 70% of the money as opposed to like 25%.
And I've heard, and I don't know if this has been your experience, but I have friends who are authors.
And I've heard that even if you get a publishing deal, the advance may be nice, but if you don't sell your own book, they're not going to sell it for you.
You know, it's not my mom was a judge and a lawyer when I was growing up.
So there is no romance to being a lawyer.
I'm distinctly unimpressed by it.
It's just a job.
I mean, there are some skills and sometimes it's fun.
And sometimes you, you know, I'm working on a project right now where I'm out thinking the other side before he even knows I'm going to attack.
I prefer to win my cases before they even know I'm fighting.
I think that's kind of a military side thing.
But, you know, I mean, being a lawyer does give you experience, you know, forming arguments, picking holes in other arguments.
I don't think it's necessary.
I mean, I don't think it's not useful.
Some people are impressed by it.
It's kind of, you know, I think I get away with being a lot more obnoxious than I would otherwise if I couldn't say, yeah, I was a colonel and a lawyer.
I think everybody should have a, I'm not going to call it a shitty job, though I thought it was shitty at the time.
I think everybody should have a tough job that doesn't give you false ego, you know, working on something where you're dealing with human beings, which is always a challenge, and where, you know, it's just not pleasant.
There's so many people who, you know, I came to law school after being in the Gulf War.
So I was like, I had been a platoon leader in a war and I get there and most of these kids were right out of college.
I went to Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, which is a small private school, Christian school.
And I, when I went there, all of them had virtually, virtually all of them either been homeschooled or gone to a private school.
And I noticed that, and this is just, this is just anecdotal stereotype.
Okay.
So I noticed that the private school kids had like no sense of hustle and like, you know, sort of like resourcefulness, right?
Because resources were never, had never been an issue.
And I'm torn like as a new dad, thinking about what I want to do with my daughter in terms of private versus public school, because obviously, you know, you were likely to get a better education at private school, but isn't there value in going to public school because it sucks?
I think there's some sort of like what I like to refer to as generational envy in that.
And I experience it too.
When I go, if I watch, for example, Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, the TV series on HBO, there's a part of me, and it's probably out of some sort of immaturity, but there's a part of me that's like, man, I wish that I would have been able to have fought in like, you know, this so clearly good versus evil thing.
And I think the civil rights movement, right?
It was wish that they could have fought in the civil rights movement.
I don't know if it's a highlight of my life, but it was, I would not, I would not miss that experience for a world.
I wouldn't miss my experience in basic training, my experience in Oscar Canada at school, even though that sucked and probably the worst 14 weeks of my life.
But, you know, I think those are, I think shitty experiences are important too.
Well, I think there could be a component of it too, where people are really yearning for something to live or die for that's noble and heroic.
And I think that somehow in America, we're moving away from people finding out for themselves what's going to fulfill them versus just sort of doing what's expected of them and expecting that to fulfill them.
Right.
So like you always knew you were going to write and 99% of people will say, oh, you don't want to be a writer.
They don't make any money, but you didn't give a shit.
I think there's going to be a backlash to this critical race theory idiocy.
My friends who are very deep into polling and politics, you know, the mechanics of politics, the actual science as opposed to the art, tell me that critical race theory is polling right there with herpes in popularity.
Their kids come home and go, hi, mom, we're all racist.
Did you know that?
And it's like, okay.
And even a liberal woman's going, no, that's most of them.
No, that's, that's a lie.
That's simply not true.
Why am I, why is the school I'm paying for, whether privately or publicly, why making you lie?
And they don't like it.
Now, I mean, there are some people who really like it.
They are never the ones who are expected to pay the costs of it.
You know, It's always somebody else who's privileged, you know, who's, you know, poorer and objectively less privileged in every way, who's really the privileged one.
When you see a billionaire hand over all his billions to a bunch of people based on where their great-great-grandfather came from, let me know because it ain't ever going to happen.
But if it did, I'd be very interested in hearing about it.
Yeah, it's, you know, again, it's everything.
The thing about America is it was built by hard men who did tough things, and they created a place so safe and secure and prosperous that we can tolerate frivolous nitwits.
You know, there was this, I saw on Twitter today, National Geographic, how far it's fallen, had a picture of this, you know, human walrus.
I mean, she obviously had not missed a meal, shaved half her head, you know, pierced.
I mean, she looks exactly like what you'd expect to waddle out of a gender studies program at Gumbo State.
And she says, I, you know, I'm ashamed of, I'm ashamed of my the race of my ancestors.
And it's like, holy shit.
How wonderful a society do we have when someone feels not only safe enough, but secure enough to, you know, economically and socially to spew that kind of idiocy with the expectation not only that people aren't going to point at punch her or point and laugh at her, but some will celebrate her.
I know a little about Balkanizations because I lived in the Balkans.
And my job was to keep group A from committing genocide on group B, which they would do in a heartbeat.
So when people start, you know, when people, people start separating by race, you know, I've been at the bottom of the slippery slope and it looks like a, it looks like ruins.
Okay.
It looks like smoldering burnt villages.
And I've been there.
And, you know, I mean, how ridiculous.
What a ridiculous person.
All of society should laugh at this woman and hurt her feelings.
So maybe she'll learn.
But it's so, and the thing is, she's absolutely, she's not only safe in certain quarters, she's going to be celebrated.
And for what?
Saying exactly what everybody, all her friends want to hear?
Well, what's crazy to me is how hated I think MLK would be by the left today, because his whole I Have a Dream speech is literally judge on the content of character, not the color of skin.
And so this idea that your immutable quality of your race makes you inherently racist or is suffering some sort of white fragility or whatever is just totally antithetical to the whole civil rights movement, in my opinion.
It's about short-term power for people who are unaccomplished and can't do it in any other way.
I mean, look at what's his name?
Abdul Kendi, what's Ibrahim Kendi, Ibram Kendi, whatever the hell his name is.
Okay, he's a fucking clown.
All right.
He's a joke.
He is a human punchline.
His ideas are stupid.
They're expressed poorly.
He's ridiculous.
How else is he going to become successful?
I mean, really, I mean, what are his options?
That he's found dumb people who are willing to pay him for his idiotic harangues is the greatest thing that could have happened to him.
I understand why people are milking it.
It's immoral.
I'd never do anything like that.
But I have self-respect.
I also have competence.
So it's not like I have to grift the rubes of Manhattan and Santa Monica to make a living.
But he does.
These are unaccomplished people.
There are no one associated with critical race theory has any kind of accomplishment other than in rare cases, election to political office to the extent that's an accomplishment.
That's it.
I mean, you look at these people.
What have they ever done?
Well, they've explored deeply the transsexual influences on 15th century Bolivian poetry.
Okay, doesn't count as an achievement, not achievement, not even interesting.
It god, somebody, somebody wise guy once said, you know, feminism exists, so ugly girls have something to do while the pretty ones are dating.
Yeah, but uh, uh, I think for a lot of people, these you know, ideas like basic fairness, like uh uh Martin Luther King expounded on, are accepted by most normal, all normal people.
Okay, there are not a lot of people out there who uh at least, at least on the uh, the towards minority side, are anything like a white supremacist.
I think most people, I mean, I don't when's the last time you met somebody going, you know, you know what, other races are worse than my race.
And it's just you know, it's just it's just not part of our experience, it's very passe.
Well, it's just tacky and socially at the threshold level, it's tacky, it's un-American, it's unchristian, whatever.
Uh, it's just not done, and you know, I mean, I hang around with a lot of hardcore conservatives who are supposed to be deeply racist.
And the thing that if you want to delight conservatives, show them someone who's a minority who agrees with them about freedom and about family and about values.
Uh, you know, I mean, they absolutely adore it.
Uh, then you get on the other side where you get essentially rich white liberals who are playing at guilt for something they didn't do for people who weren't wronged, and you know, stupid college students and the politicians who love them.
So, it's just the general fairness where you shouldn't be treated differently, you shouldn't be treated badly because of your immutable characteristics, right?
Is well established, but that's of course not what CRT is about.
CRT is about leveraging uh bullshit racist and real racist notions in order to get short-term power.
Of course, in the long term, that's a bad idea.
The the you know, one thing I have thought for a long time is one of America's greatest achievements is its majority race never really thought of itself as a race, and that gets critiqued.
Oh, you know, everybody assumes whiteness.
Well, no, they didn't, they just sort of assumed something, and most of those people, because they're most Americans, were white.
I've been in a place where everyone thinks first, here's my ethnicity, right?
America was not like that, at least for the vast majority of people.
And I think a vast majority of people, most races.
Uh, why would anyone be insane enough to try and make that a reality?
Why would they try and change that?
This is a great gift in America in the last hundred years, right?
And they just want to throw it away because, you know, hey, I think I can get, you know, hey, I'm Professor Kendi and I can get a slight edge.
And then things don't remain static.
The last, uh, gosh, so the last thing you want is some sort of horrible, horrible, uh, true balkanization.
Think there's going to be a, I think there's a growing response against it because it's wrong.
And people sense that when you know, you go to a normal person and you go, Hey, that person over there, you know, his grandfather came from Norway, so we should treat him worse.
And normal people are like, no, that doesn't make any sense to me.
Well, then you're bad too.
And they're like, no, I'm not bad.
Americans are very polite.
You know, and there was a time that if you went up to somebody and go, I really think you're racist.
A person go, oh, shit.
Oh, man, I better take a personal inventory.
Am I doing?
Because no one would ever say that unless they really thought I better, you know, I better check myself and make sure I'm not doing something wrong.
And now it's like, fuck you.
Because it's become, you know, you can only cry wolf so many times before people stop taking you seriously.
And that's that's not the situation we want.
I would like a country where people took it seriously.
I would like a country where people, you know, but then again, that also means it's a country where you wouldn't really have to take it seriously because you'd be so such a fringe minor thing that statistically it's just not going to come up.
But now you've got a bunch of people making it come up everywhere and all the time.
