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March 9, 2015 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor

26:52

Ferguson: The Big Picture

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	Today we have a special and very exciting guest, namely Paul Kersey.
	Paul Kersey is the presiding genius of the very popular website Stuff Black People Don't Like.
	You can get to that by SBPDL.com.
	He is also the author of a number of excellent books such as Paul Kersey on Detroit, Bell Curve City, Whitey on the Moon, The City That Bleeds, Escape from Detroit, and a number of others.
	He's also written for VDare.com and other Well-regarded websites and he is consented to speak to us today about the events of Ferguson.
	So welcome, Paul Kersey.
	Thank you for joining us. Jared, it's an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity to talk with you today.
	Great. Could you begin by just giving us a little bit of the background.
	What has happened over the last say 25 or 30 years in Ferguson, Missouri that has led up to these famous incidents?
	It's interesting.
	Ferguson is just like any other suburb of a major United States city.
	Back in 1970, you look at the population breakdown, 21,000 people.
	It's roughly stayed that since 1970.
	Jared, it was 99% white in 1970.
	Now we're talking about a city that is, by all indicators, about 25% white and 70% black, and then there's 5% other.
	But you're talking about just a substantial freefall of the white population between 1970 and 2010.
	Back in 1990, about the same time AR was founded, Jared, the city was 74% white, 25% black.
	So... Well, and this change has led to quite a difference in the tone, the nature, the poverty levels, and that kind of thing of the city as well, has it not?
	It has, and I'd like to actually share with you a story that I think is so important to understand the type of life that Ferguson wants offered to its citizens.
	A city's health is nothing more than a look at the individuals who live there and that collectively create social capital or destroy the social capital that makes living in a city where you have neighbors and you have...
	You have businesses that want to flock there and invest there.
	Worthwhile. And there's a story about a football coach from East St.
	Louis High School. They actually wrote a book about him, Jared, back in the 1990s.
	It's called The Right Kind of Heroes.
	Coach Bob Shannon and the East St.
	Louis Flyers. You, of course, your readers...
	I need no introduction to East St.
	Louis. It's a 99% black city.
	75% of the people who live there receive public assistance.
	Well, this book was about how Bob Shannon coached this Illinois high school team to the state championship year after year as he tried to impart positive virtues on them.
	Jared, guess where he lived? I can't guess.
	He lived in Ferguson at a time when it was 85% white and 14% black.
	And in the book, he's actually taken to task by the city leaders of East St.
	Louis, sir, because they don't understand why he doesn't live in East St.
	Louis. And he says, and I quote, they tell me I'm selfish for criticizing the city when I don't live here.
	I figure it this way.
	You only have one life to live and I say you ought to live it as comfortably as you can.
	Hey, I come from poverty.
	I want to live in a place where they pick up the trash, where they call the police.
	You can be sure they're going to come.
	I don't think it's selfish to want to go home and be secure, end quote.
	He was talking about Ferguson, St.
	Louis, sir. Well, I imagine he is one of the many whites who has cleared out.
	No, sir. Actually, he was a black gentleman.
	Oh, I beg your pardon.
	That's why the story is so much more powerful.
	He was a black head coach.
	I should have prefaced that.
	And he chose to relocate his family from East St.
	Louis to Ferguson because, as he says, It was a safe city.
	And that was in the 1980s and 90s.
	Well, he may have cleared out anyway.
	But given the kind of white flight that's been happening there, how would you describe the white people who are remaining in the city?
	What sort of people would you expect them to be like?
	Well, Jared, that's a great question.
	That's one of the sad things about a lot of the cities throughout the country, not just Ferguson, that undergo these dramatic racial shifts so quickly.
	Whereas the people who stay, they've been there for decades.
	They're more advanced in their years.
	They're elderly whites who might not have the means to leave.
	Their wealth is all tied up into the equity of their home.
	And as the property values began to realign with the new majority population, they basically were underwater with their mortgages and they couldn't leave.
	They were stuck. Right, right.
	Well, could you just recap very briefly?
	I suspect all our readers know what happened in Ferguson with the Michael Brown-Darren Wilson incident.
	But just recap basically what happened and the scandals that erupted as a consequence.
	Wow, that's such an interesting question because so much has happened since August 9, 2014.
	It's almost a different country in a lot of ways.
	But basically, as we all know...
	Michael Brown was with his friend.
	I can't remember the guy's name.
	Maybe we can add this in post-production.
	I wouldn't say it was Darius, but they were at that store, and as Witness 120 told the Department of Justice, they were getting cigarellos for smoking marijuana.
	And that great Department of Justice report that exonerated Darren Wilson, Witness 120 admitted that they were getting cigarellos to To be able to smoke marijuana.
	So they're at that store.
	Michael Brown, of course, engages in the strong arming of the Asian shopkeeper.
	They leave the store and then they proceed to walk down Canfield Drive in the middle of the street.
	I want to say it was 1.30 to 2 p.m.
	in the middle of the day. Excuse me.
	And Officer Darren Wilson approaches in his cruiser and he basically says, hey guys, you want to get to the sidewalk?
	I'm still confused and I'm not sure if it's really been established if he was going to stop them because he got the call.
	Is that being confirmed?
	No, they refused to do that and refused to go to the sidewalk.
	Then he drove on away and then he heard the call that there had been a robbery.
	And I think he remembered saying that there were cigarillos in Michael Brown's hands and he backed up and came back.
	And that's when the struggle began.
	Exactly. And as Darren Wilson testified, he said that, I believe Michael Brown said something to the facts of, and I will make sure to censor the flowerly language, What the F are you going to do about it?
	As he tried to get him to go to the sidewalk, that's when he bum-rushed the car.
	I want to say, I can't remember the word Darren Wilson used, I think Hulk Hogan shrink or something, and attacked the car, and he was going for Darren Wilson's firearm.
	That's right. And there was an initial incident in the car.
	I believe there was a couple shots fired.
	Yes. And that's when he then proceeded away from the vehicle.
	And then he charged again.
	That's right. As you so astutely pointed out, Jared, in your article, there was no hands up, don't shoot.
	Of course, the Department of Justice says that's a lie.
	He wasn't executed pleading for his life.
	He wasn't shot in the back. Those were all...
	Just vile lies told by so-called witnesses who were completely discredited in the DOJ report.
	Darren Wilson did his job that day.
	And, Jared, what's so fascinating that people forget, Michael Brown's body was...
	In the middle of Canfield Drive for a number of hours as that huge crowd started to gather and that's when all these rumors started to fly around that two black males were shot on Twitter.
	I'm sure you might not recall this but the rumors were that in St.
	Louis there were two black males killed by an officer that day at first and so this huge crowd begins to gather around the dead body of Michael Brown and Chief Chief Jackson of the Ferguson Police Department, he urged the crime scene detectives to hurry up their work.
	They've got to expedite what's going on because there were more shootings going off.
	They heard gunshots going off and there were people screaming, let's kill the police.
	People were throwing water bottles and yelling at individuals.
	In fact, the guy who was going to pick up the body, they actually were told by the police
	to stay in the car because they couldn't guarantee their safety.
	They weren't wearing bulletproof vests and they had to get this, quote, the best thing
	for you to do is to get down.
	And the guy who was coming to pick up the bodies, his name was Calvin Whitaker.
	He and his wife reclined in their seats and hunkered down for a number of hours as police dogs arrived.
	And officers tried to push the crowd back.
	It was just a chaotic scene.
	Well, that's right. In effect, it was impossible to collect the body because there was this hostile crowd around.
	But now that's one of the great complaints about Ferguson is they let the body lie for hours.
	Yeah. So... It was just an unsafe situation for the officers and for the individuals dispatched to pick up the body.
	So from the beginning, you had what Whitaker, the guy who was going to get the body, he said, it's the worst situation I've ever been in and decades of service to the city of St.
	Louis and St. Louis County for retrieving bodies.
	And so from the get-go, Jared, it was a fiasco that Tom Wolfe himself couldn't pin.
	That's right. And then, of course, the press picked up with this nonsense view of Michael Brown being shot in the back or shot in cold blood and it became this terrible racist incident and caused demonstrations and riots.
	That, I think, has been well covered by the media.
	And then finally, what has been the denouement recently in terms of the DOJ's investigations of this event and of the police department itself?
	Yeah, well, you have the two reports.
	One, that the Department of Justice came out and they basically discredited the hands up, don't shoot.
	They showed that...
	I'm getting these two great men confused.
	They showed that Officer Darren Wilson did everything by the book.
	In fact, I guarantee you that academies across the country will one day...
	Use this story as a case study and what to do as an officer in a shooting such as this.
	And you'd have to go back to that tremendous interview that he did with George Stephanopoulos on ABC where he just matter-of-factly said, everything I did was what I was trained to do and I have a clear conscience over it.
	And as the DOJ report shows, Jared, that's true.
	But of course, we have to go to...
	The other report that the Civil Rights Division came out with, which Eric Holder, if you've not seen the video of Eric Holder's speech, this is the most important thing to watch Eric Holder's ever done.
	He said, the searing, and yes, it was searing, report by the Civil Rights Division on the Ferguson Police Department shows a pattern of discrimination.
	And as you wrote, sir, the evidence they have is...
	I don't think it's sufficient enough to try and show that Bull Connor's ghost has somehow been resurrected and presiding over the Ferguson Police Department.
	In a lot of ways, it's just like, this is it?
	Well, what struck me reading the report was that so much of it is clearly stories that have been told by people in the community.
	The report brags about how many interviews they conducted, how many activist groups they contacted,
	how many community groups they contacted.
	And let us not forget, the people that they're talking to are precisely the kind of people
	who circulated this crazy story about hands up, don't shoot.
	And so for them to be passing this stuff off as gospel truth, and what's worse,
	for the media to be then writing about it as if there is absolutely no doubt about these things.
	I think that's really just, it's just contemptible the way the media has been handling this.
	What's been your view of how, start to finish, the media, their responsibility in what's happened here?
	This is a completely media-driven event, Jared.
	you know it's funny we're talking about how a number of ferguson police uh...
	police officers and i lost their job over the so-called uh...
	racist emails where they told a couple jokes
	and yet not one media member uh... has
	has been has been forced to confront the lies that they help spread in fact i would say
	that uh... if we want to try and use some sort of
	uh... jingoism here you know the media lied and zimmer bedrick died i'd be looking at
	this way the hands up don't shoot why
	was told in classrooms it was told and uh... church black churches
	it was told all over the black media not just the uh... not just the so-called mainstream
	corporate media but the black media
	i'm talking about the route I'm talking about Salon.
	I'm talking about Slate. I'm talking about these websites that cater and they promote these black authors like Brittany Cooper.
	I think she's a professor at Rutgers who are just telling these just horrible lies based on, like you said, these false witness testimonies.
	And a guy like Zimmer Bejek, he's a Bosnian immigrant who's a Muslim from the Muslim community there in St.
	Louis. He's killed all because of this climate that was created by the media and, Jared, we can't forget it was exacerbated by the Obama administration and Eric Holder.
	Yes, there's absolutely no question about that.
	One aspect of the report That intrigues me.
	The one by the DOJ about the Ferguson PD. We have been told over and over again that of the 54 sworn officers in the department, only four are black.
	And yet, I was very surprised to find that not a single black policeman is quoted in the DOJ report.
	Well, what do you make of that?
	What would you conclude from that fact?
	You know, it's funny. There was a St.
	Louis Post-Dispatch article written right around August 20th.
	I'm going to try and find it real quick, so maybe we can edit this so we can talk about it.
	But there was a black officer who said that he was called an Uncle Tom by the black community.
	His wife said that he was safer She felt that he was safer, Jared, in his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan than he was in Ferguson.
	My take on the officers in Ferguson is what happened in September when images began to proliferate of officers with I am Darren Wilson bracelets.
	And the Department of Justice said, you need to take these off.
	You're antagonizing the community.
	Your job is to create positive relationships.
	You can't wear these bracelets.
	But to return to these black officers, if you were working for the Department of Justice and you were on the sniff for racism within the PD, wouldn't you go straight to these four guys and grill them for hours on end?
	And it seems to me the fact that they don't quote them at all Surely what that means is that these black officers did not confirm their suspicions.
	I'm guessing the black officers said, look, this is the way that we operate.
	There's no racial bias.
	That's what I'm guessing, but that's speculation.
	No, it's not speculation, Jared.
	In fact, I encourage all your listeners to type in This, in Google, Black and Blue, a Ferguson police sergeant reflects on a tough time.
	It's an article from August 3rd, the St.
	Louis Post-Dispatch, and it tells the story of Sergeant Harry Dilworth, a black officer.
	I believe he was the highest-rated officer in the Ferguson PD. And basically, he said that he's seen fellow black officers endure racial slurs shouted by members of his own race.
	It caused his wife to say, you're safer in Iraq than you are in Ferguson.
	And so it's just a tremendous article because it confirms what you just said.
	This guy, these officers are tasked with doing their job.
	In fact, in the article, he points out, this officer, Sergeant Dilworth, asks, Why don't they care about all of the black-on-black violence?
	He says, and I quote, we are not killing you.
	You are killing yourselves.
	This is a systematic problem that's going on for years.
	Why can't you guys understand that cop shootings are very, very rare?
	You know, they are very rare, but the level of black-on-black violence, whether it's a fatal or a non-fatal shooting, well, that's just almost axiomatic that's going to happen once or twice a day in a city like St.
	Louis. Right. Well, tell me, now that this, what strikes me as an extremely tendentious and inaccurate report about the police department has been issued by the Department of Justice, what is your sense of how the city and the police department are going to react?
	Well, I read an article that Mayor Knowles, the white Republican mayor of Ferguson, who's been a lifelong resident, has said, you know, we don't agree with this.
	And I think they are going to contest.
	And I think you'll see individuals like this officer, Sergeant Dilworth, I think they'll come out and they'll say things.
	I mean, again, this is a community that...
	This is a community in Ferguson.
	It's very close to the St.
	Louis airport. It's still got nice housing.
	I mean, it's got a great infrastructure.
	It's a great city.
	It truly is. And there's a reason why it attracted so many black members of the middle class from the city of St.
	Louis, because they wanted to raise their family and a nice community.
	It's just that those community standards weren't maintained as the racial demographic shifted.
	So your impression is that the city is going to fight this and defend its good name because I've seen speculation that some people think the police department would simply fold and that Ferguson will then be subject to St.
	Louis County Police Department rather than having its own department.
	I think that if they were going to do that, the police chief would have resigned when CNN reported that he was going to resign back in, I think, December.
	And they've been...
	Mayor Knowles has, since the beginning, said they're going to do all sorts of minority police training to try and get more black officers.
	But the fact of the matter is...
	You know, the Bob McCullough, the St.
	Louis County prosecutor, has been resolute in saying, hey, this Department of Justice report, the one that exonerates Darren Wilson, this is exactly what we said.
	And now the Civil Rights Division report lambasting the Ferguson Police Department for, in a lot of ways, just a strange racist word they just threw out there because, you know, as you know, Jared, once you're called racist, the burden of proof then, it doesn't exist.
	You're a racist. Right. That's right.
	And most of their charge of racist policing resides in statistics, the over-representation of blacks in police activity.
	But as the police department is quoted as saying, the reason blacks are over-represented is because of reasons of personal irresponsibility.
	That's just another way of saying That they're more likely to commit crimes.
	And that is an absolute fact that the American media refused to accept.
	What strikes me about the way the media have handled this second report is that despite having provoked all of this chaos and rioting and hands up, don't shoot by passing along the initial lies about the event, now they are passing along This utterly one-sided, tendentious report, as if it were true.
	They're repeating the same error over again, do you not think?
	To them, it's the gospel truth.
	The St. Louis Post-Dispatch did an editorial where it says the hammer of justice falls on Ferguson.
	And in that very just...
	You know, sappy editorial, they again pointed out Michael Brown was unarmed, as if that matters.
	Have they not read the report?
	He was going for Officer Wilson's gun, and had he procured it, Jared, he would have been armed, and Darren Wilson would be dead.
	And you have to ask yourself, would Michael Brown be an even bigger hero to the black community than he is dead?
	Well, just to wrap up here, Paul Kersey, could you tell me what your sense is of, in the larger picture, what do these events mean for the United States and what do they mean for white people in general, an ordinarily white person looking at these things?
	What's the reaction going to be?
	Well, you know, I think that most...
	That's such a difficult question to answer because we know that the Obama administration is pushing for this new police task force, which is basically going to federalize the police force, have them answerable not to local citizens and local sheriffs, but to federal employees, probably within the Department of Homeland Security.
	But I think that the scariest aspect of Ferguson is that There are thousands of potential Fergusons out there, Mr.
	Taylor. As the Brookings Institute noted in an article back on August 15th, Ferguson, Missouri is emblematic of growing suburban poverty.
	In that article, there's a fact that is frightening when you think about what it means for the future of the country.
	That is that Ferguson is really the story of Section 8 vouchers and what the redistribution of poverty from inner city areas to outlying suburbs as a policy by the House of Urban Development and by this federal government to try and Well, because it's not evil on their intent.
	It's what they believe is the best way, as opposed to concentrating poverty in places like the now-demolished Pruitt-Igoe housing complex.
	they believe that by osmosis if you put these poverty-stricken, primarily black people in
	areas with white people, they're going to magically close the racial gap in everything.
	I believe in one of your articles that you have pointed out the expanding number of Section
	8 households in Ferguson over the last several decades, which has contributed to this growing
	black underclass in that time that makes everything so much more difficult.
	not only from a policing point of view, but from a tax-based point of view.
	Precisely, and the stat I'll just give you, I know we're closing on time here, this is the most important statistic to understand about Ferguson, and this is even more important than the racial demographic changes.
	It is the fact that the number of households using federal housing choice vouchers climbed from roughly 302,000 That was when the city, by the way, Jared, was about 50-50 white-black to more than 800 by the end of the decade of 2010.
	And at that point, the city was about 28-67 white-black.
	Jared, that's just households with vouchers.
	We don't know the number of individuals in those households.
	And I think it's fair to say that an average of four per household.
	So you're going from 1,200 people In Ferguson because of housing choice vouchers in 2000 to potentially more than 3,200 people on housing vouchers.
	That's one-seventh of the city's population.
	Right, right. Well, I understand that it has a poverty rate of 25% throughout.
	One of the housing tracts has a poverty rate of over 35% and ordinarily Once the poverty rate gets to about 20%, that's when a neighborhood or a city or any kind of jurisdiction begins to show all these terrible cumulative effects of the ghettoization and the development of the underclass.
	But my hope is that certainly the Darren Wilson aspect of this, the fact that what he said was true all along, the fact that he has been justified despite all of this nonsense and posturing, That is something that's going to wake up a lot of white people.
	What will ultimately happen on the question of what the Ferguson PD ends up doing, it seems to me that we are at a very important time in terms of the understanding of white people of all these things, and what will happen will depend enormously on the extent to which Ferguson resists this report, fights this report, tries to get the truth out, or the extent that it rolls over.
	I'm just hoping that they will be tough, that they will defend themselves, but we'll have to keep our fingers crossed on that.
	Well, in closing, I'd like to say this, Jared.
	The city leaders of Ferguson, which, you know, they've been white ever since Ferguson was founded, was incorporated.
	Yes. An article on October 19th for the St.
	Louis Post-Dispatch, it's the title, this, and I think this is leaving your listeners in closing with this article will show you that whites do fight back when they can, and I think that the citizens of The incorporated cities of St.
	Louis County are going to understand they have to if they want to protect the equity in their homes and their livelihood in a lot of ways.
	But the article is, as low-income housing boomed, Ferguson pushed back.
	Now, they did try and fight it.
	and jared you're seeing you're seeing white people try and fight the evil of
	section eight vouchers in cities like indianapolis where they're trying to
	pass uh... past rules making all land lords uh...
	have to accept housing vouchers you're seeing this in cities across the country
	and it's just this uh... it's it's it's it's a form of it's a form of economic warfare and a
	lot of ways a section eight voucher and you're seeing that in ferguson i
	agree with you wholeheartedly
	if the ferguson police department and if the city leaders of ferguson do fight
	back this could be an opportunity for that
	real dialogue on race that or elites don't want to have because the facts are on our
	side Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Paul Kersey, and for our listeners, let me remind you that he is a man who runs Stuff Black People Don't Like, and you can get to it, and it's fascinating articles at sbpdl.com.
	Well, thank you so much, Mr.
	Kersey. No, thank you, Jared.

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