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July 17, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
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How Much Does a ‘CDO’ Make?
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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Radio Renaissance, or Renaissance Radio, as you prefer.
We are many things to many people.
I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, and today is July 17, 2020.
On these weekly podcasts, I find myself thinking that my job seems to be to just chronicle the madness, the insanity that is sweeping both the United States and other parts of the white world.
It's a sad and sorry state of affairs, but those of us who have not lost our minds must stick together, and I am quite convinced that sanity will someday return.
Part of my optimism is the pleasure I confess I take in seeing some of the lefties eating each other up.
Any lefty, it seems, can always find an even more hopped up and crazed vicious lefty than he.
And the hopped up and vicious crazed lefties will turn on the less hopped up, less vicious, and less crazed lefties and accuse them of white supremacy.
Maybe on another podcast I will gather together some of these heartwarming incidents.
But today I've got a number of different forms of insanity to talk about.
And one has to do with Stephen Douglas.
You will recall he was known as the Little Giant.
He was a senator from Illinois.
He was only 5'4", but he had a huge political influence.
He played a major role in the lead-up to the Civil War.
And one historian by the name of Graham Peck describes him as probably the most important senator in the history of the country.
Well, his fellow Illinoisians, if that's how the name is pronounced, have honored him after his death with a statue that sits atop a 96-foot tall granite structure.
This was completed in 1881, and it includes a large and impressive obelisk, and at the base is a mausoleum where the little giant's body is entombed.
Well, The little giant has stood at the top of this tower, 96 feet tall, for over, well over 100 years.
And the black folks who represent that part of Chicago, I should have said this is in Chicago, by the way, the black folks who represent that part of Chicago in the statehouse, have decided that this is no good.
State Reps Cam Buckner, Curtis J. Tarver, and Lamont Robinson.
They wrote a letter to Governor J.B.
Pritzker of Illinois claiming that this nine-foot tall bronze statue of Stephen Douglas should be removed because, as they say, there is an edifice dedicated to allowing a bigot.
That's Stephen Douglas, of course.
Even in his grave to look down upon the black community.
This is indefensible.
Now, when the statue was put up, it was not exactly the black community.
But now it has become, well, it's not entirely black by any means either.
But the fact that it is looking down on a single black person, of course, is probably a crime against humanity.
The letter from these three state reps comes less than a week after the House Speaker Mike Madigan called for all statues and a portrait of Stephen Douglas to be removed from the state capitol in Springfield.
He referred to Stephen Douglas' disturbing past, which he said he learned about just a few months ago.
Seems a little odd to me that the Speaker of the House know nothing or so little about the person who was probably one of the most influential people from that state, aside from Abraham Lincoln, and whom a historian calls the most important senator in history of the country, but there again he was ignorant.
Now, why are these people so angry?
That a statue, it's a nine foot tall statue made of bronze.
Why are they so angry that you'd be staring down on Chicago?
Well, he did hold a number of views that were fashionable at the time, perfectly accepted at the time, but are now considered reprehensible and disqualify one from an effigy in bronze or paint on canvas.
I suppose one of the most telling things that he's recorded as having said is, and I quote Stephen Douglas, I hold that a Negro is not and never ought to be a citizen of the United States.
I hold that this government was made on the white basis, made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men and none others.
Well, yeah, that's pretty risque by today's standards, but it was not at all unusual at the time, and Abraham Lincoln would have agreed essentially with everything therein.
So, I do continue to predict that as Lincoln's sentiments become more and more available to the public at large, and it doesn't take too much digging to discover them, Lincoln will get the same treatment.
The call is on.
Tear this down.
Now, the fact that he's buried beneath it, that would give me pause, it seems to me.
This is really a grave site.
So, we're going to tear down grave sites as well?
We shall see.
Now, of course, given the activities by the Speaker of the House in expressing his undying shame about Stephen Douglas, my suspicion is that the statue will likewise come down.
But I will not hold my breath waiting to see what will happen.
Another spot of madness, this has to do with Brooklyn College.
Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson.
She recently announced the school has raised funds to address the problem of professors who commit two crimes.
One is that they give a large quantities of D's and F's.
Can't have that.
Apparently Brooklyn College students never deserve D's or F's.
Almost never.
And if you give more than you should, you're clearly a bad person.
But the worst part is those who have racial disparities in outcomes.
That seems to be much the greater crime because the message announcing this raised funds and this problem was called enacting an anti-racist agenda at Brooklyn College.
The faculty is under orders.
They quote, must identify and address the structural obstacles that black students and students of color more generally face.
And so if they're getting lower grades, That is a structural problem.
It's not a problem of these students.
And it is the teachers who have to solve the problem.
They are supposed to, quote, identify racial disparities and develop plans to eliminate them.
It's up to them to eliminate them.
Professors and instructors who have signed too many low grades to too many people of color will be offered, quote, professional development to correct the problem.
One Brooklyn College professor has called the scheme, Grade Affirmative Action.
And it seems to me that he's simply more outspoken than most.
This, frankly, is the sort of thing that people who are in academia tell me has been going on for years.
You simply cannot grade, especially black students, the same way you grade white students because they will get D's and F's.
And this is intolerable and so there has been grade affirmative action all along.
Now it's going to be official, at least at Brooklyn College.
But I'm glad to see that it's out in the open like that.
It seems to me that really the only solution is as soon as a black child is born, just grant that child a diploma right at birth.
Just staple it to the birth certificate so they don't have to go through all this humiliation.
Or, you know, one idea would be to make a university diploma kind of like a prize in a cereal box.
You know, you buy enough boxes of Cheerios or Corn Flakes and once you've collected them all, you get a diploma.
In any case, that's the direction certainly in which we are moving.
Now, I have a little international story for you.
And when you think about the current trauma in the United States in which we have discovered just how horrible a country we are, how miserably we treat non-whites, it's remarkable that we should have engaged in this.
But there was a very interesting article in New York Times dated July 14th.
And it was called A Racial Awakening in France, where race is a taboo topic.
And it brags about the extent to which blacks living in France have been, I would say, infected, perhaps the Times would say instructed, by the black experience in the United States.
Let me read a few passages from this article, which as I say was on July 14th, Bastille Day, commemorating the French Revolution, but this was their salvo against the French.
The killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis has underscored the emergence of a new way of thinking about race in the public discourse in France.
A nation where discussion of race and religion has traditionally been muted.
In favor of elevating a colorblind ideal that all people share the same universal rights.
That really has been the French approach.
And it remains illegal to collect national data on race for the census.
And for any other official purpose, practically.
So, there are only estimates as to the number of Muslims, number of blacks in jail, who are poor, who are criminals, etc, etc.
Although the people who are interested can generally get to the bottom of this stuff.
But the idea is race simply doesn't matter.
Now, that was more or less accepted in France.
I lived in France back in the 1970s.
This was the theory, and people tried to make it work.
But as the times goes on, this thinking has been challenged perhaps most vociferously by the many black French who've gone through a racial awakening in the recent decades, helped by the pop culture of the United States.
Pop culture?
I should think they're more helped by university, more lefty thinking.
By American thinkers and even American Paris-based diplomats who spotted and encouraged young black French leaders a decade ago.
So see what's happening here.
Blacks living in France who have been taught to think, well, race really doesn't matter, we can all be Frenchmen.
They have been instructed by forces from the United States, including American diplomats based in Paris, saying, no, no, no, no, you've got a black identity.
You have got to be black and proud and all of that stuff.
You can't just be French.
You've got to be black first and then maybe French.
Now, let us quote someone by the name of Suomiharo, who is originally from Ivory Coast.
She says, when I consider both countries, she's lived in both the United States and in France, when I consider both countries, I'm not saying that one country is better than the other.
For me, they are two racist societies that manage racism in their own way.
So you see, the French idea of not trying to pay any attention to race, not even gathering racial statistics, that's managing racism in their own way.
Most of France's new thinkers on race are the children of immigrants from former colonial empire.
That's right.
They show up in France.
They grew up in households with a strong sense of their separate ethnic identities, and they gradually began to develop a shared sense of racial consciousness.
So they weren't just Fulani or Bambara.
They discovered that, hmm, yes, we're black.
Now here's one fellow by the name of Pap Ndiaye, a historian who led efforts to establish black studies as an academic discipline in France.
You see, they learn the best from America's things like black studies.
He says this, It's an experience that all black French go through when they go to the United States.
It's the experience of a country where skin color is reflected upon and where it is not hidden behind a colorblind discourse.
You see, oh, those poor benighted French.
They're really trying to make everyone French and ignore the question of skin color.
The United States doesn't do that, so when these black French come to the United States, ooh, they get this wonderful awakening.
And Gérard Araud, France's former ambassador to the United States, who, as far as I can tell, is a white man, he says this about colorblindness.
Quote, faced with Islam on one side and black Africans on the other, this model has evidently reached its limits.
And so the debate is that on one side is this universalism, which is beautiful, but on the other is how to say at the same time that, well, it's not working.
Well, I wonder why it's not working.
Why has it reached its limits, as he says?
All these Muslims coming into the country, all these blacks coming into the country, and somehow it becomes more difficult to persuade that color and religion have nothing to do with being French.
This is something that I've been talking about for years.
Once the newcomers arrive at a certain critical mass, Their loyalty to their religion or to their race or their group overwhelms any larger loyalty to the country, especially if, in fact, they are black and have all the problems that black people almost invariably do, fitting into any Western society.
Here's another fellow.
Roque Diallo.
He's one of several high-profile individuals who was fingered by an American program and he was approached by the U.S.
Embassy in Paris.
They started doing this shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and they would send them to the United States.
They'd send to the U.S.
and teach them all about affirmative action, black racial consciousness.
Well, as you can imagine, the French who were aware of this were not so keen on it.
This contributed to fears among what the New York Times called French conservatives of an Americanization of French society.
Well, yes, it's deliberately injecting this virus of racial dissent.
It would have happened all on its own, I'm quite convinced.
But the United States has, in its wisdom and its bliss, said to the blacks, no, no, you can't just try to be French.
You not only have to be black, you have to look for special privileges, affirmative action,
et cetera, et cetera.
And so the embassy, they would organize these educational programs, both in France and the United
States, on things like black pride and racial preferences.
None of this stuff had been accepted here before in France.
The idea was, no, no, no, no, you don't turn around and give
people special privileges because of race.
We're all Frenchmen, and race doesn't matter.
Now, but Mr. Kanute, he is a black man, age 40s, whose parents came from Mali.
He says, here in France, they want us to melt into a single body and put aside our cultural diversity.
He says, with us, that's not possible.
We're French, but we don't forget what makes us whole.
And what makes us whole, of course, is being African.
Being vividly, self-consciously African, and this is something the United States has spent tax dollars, your hard-earned tax dollars, trying to make black people feel less French in France and more African.
You know, this is such a hilarious state of affairs.
American liberals, maybe a decade or two ago, Certainly under the age of Obama.
And when Obama was elected, they were talking about how we had entered this harmonious post-racial future.
We were all going to solve the problems of biology, solve the problems of racial and cultural difference, and live happily ever after.
Well now, it seems like every single one of them has decided that no, no, we have become even more oppressive.
We have become even more white supremacist.
And our entire population, especially white people, I guess exclusively white people, really.
We have to be re-educated and our entire historical legitimacy is to be questioned.
And these are the same people who are trying to foist the same kind of conscience, the same kind of hatred of their own country, hatred of their own society, inject this virus into France.
Doesn't that make you feel proud?
Needless to say, the New York Times writes this up with a certain sense of satisfaction, yes.
We're raising the consciousness of these French Africans and France will be a better place for it.
Well, yes.
Aren't we a great example of the wonderful multiracial society that we propose and propagate all around the world?
Well, moving on from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal.
Just this last week, the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article on chief diversity officers.
As it turns out, Roughly half of S&P 500 companies have a chief diversity officer.
It makes you wonder, gosh, the other half are really lagging.
The pressure's on, I'm sure, to hire, to appoint a chief diversity officer.
As it turns out, this is apparently a more recent thing than I thought.
I thought chief diversity officers were just proliferating like mad and had been for some time, but 63% of these CDOs, as they're called, that's the newfangled hip expression for diversity officers.
You address it, you call it by its initials, CDO.
63% of these CDOs and S&P 500s have been appointed or promoted to their roles within just the past three years.
Now, of course, they have all had these affirmative action plans, they've had people and personnel hooping up diversity, but this position of CDO, that is a relatively new thing apparently.
Now, guess what the median base salary of a CDO is in a big U.S.
company like an S&P 500?
Guess.
Think for a moment.
The median base salary is $350,000.
So these are well-paid little niches.
That's the median.
So half of them earn more than that.
Then the median total compensation, which includes bonuses and long-term incentives, is, hold your breath, $600,000.
Yes, you can do well by doing good if you are spreading the joys of diversity throughout a large corporation.
The Wall Street Journal has looked into how CDOs operate.
And apparently some report to the general counsel, some are in the marketing department, but some report directly to the CEO.
And what they found is if the CDO reports to the general counsel, the role is often focused on compliance issues, making sure you're not sued.
And those who report to personnel may pay more attention to recruiting And while diversity executives who work in marketing are more attuned to protecting a company's image.
They make sure that nobody does anything insensitive, that everything fits with the proper mythology.
However, if you report, if the CDO reports directly to the top person in the company, then apparently you can affect all aspects.
Now, Facebook has a CDO by the name of Maxine Williams, melanin enhanced, and also of the female sex, which makes her even more impressive for this purpose.
Maxine reports directly to Sheryl Sandberg, who is the numero uno at Facebook.
And she outlined an ambitious goal in 2019 so that women, black and Latinos and other underrepresented groups, I don't know who they would be.
I suppose that would be American Indians and Eskimos and Bhutanese and maybe Turks.
In any case, blacks, Latinos and other underrepresented groups would make up 50% of the workforce within five years.
Now, how are they going to get there?
Of course, the only way to do that is to discriminate against other people.
Of course.
Now, she says that COVID means there's not so much hiring going on, and so she might not achieve this goal of a 50% super-duper, underrepresented, black, Latino, etc., LGBTQ workforce within five years, but that is her goal.
That is her goal, so watch out, white people.
You think you're going to work there?
Probably not a good idea.
Now, you wonder, are there any Black-oriented companies that have a CDO, Chief Diversity Officer.
Does BET have one?
I somehow doubt it.
How about the NAACP?
Yeah, they've got a good-sized company.
They have a CDO.
And I wonder, is there even a single Chief Diversity Officer on the entire continent of Africa?
Or Asia?
Or Latin America?
I would guess by now there are a few of these in Europe, but it's only, only in majority white countries, the dwindling majority white countries, where one would even conceive of having a CDO because of course we're the only people who require diversity in order to be fully functioning human beings.
Now, on the subject of diversity, let us find another story that has to do with racism in Hollywood.
Racism.
You know, it's a bad problem there.
This is an article in the Daily Mail called Hollywood's Identity Crisis.
And let me read a few passages from it.
Because, boy, have they gotten into diversity in a big way.
A revolution is underway.
White actors are being fired.
Edicts from studio bosses make it clear that only minorities, racial and sexual, can be given jobs.
A new wave of what has been termed by some as anti-white prejudice is causing writers, directors, and producers to fear they will never work again.
One described the current atmosphere as, quote, more toxic than Chernobyl.
That's a good line.
Leading actors are afraid to speak out amid concerns that they will be labeled racist.
Well, of course they will!
One of the most powerful black directors in Hollywood, Oscar-winning Jordan Peele, I'm sorry to say, being the cultural ignoramus I am, I don't know who Jordan Peele is, but he is a powerful black director and he won an Oscar.
The man behind box office hits such as Get Out, And us, again, sorry to hear, sorry to say, I don't know much about that, stated in public that he would not hire a leading man who was white.
That's okay.
Don't get in trouble for that.
But dozens of producers, writers, and actors spoke to the Daily Mail, this British newspaper, by the way, you wouldn't find this in American paper, I suppose, but spoke to the Daily Mail on conditions of anonymity.
One executive confirmed that the climate is now toxic for white middle-aged men in show business.
He says their careers are pretty much over.
They quote another one.
We are hiring only people of color, women, or LGBT to write, star, produce, operate the cameras, work in craft services.
So the whole thing.
It's not just on on-air talent.
Everybody.
This person goes on to say, if you're white, you can't speak out because you will instantly be branded racist or condemned for a white privilege.
That's right.
That's right.
White privilege.
We've all got white privilege.
So we have to be just oppressed and fired and insulted.
And there are lots of hushed conversations going on, but publicly, everyone is desperate to be seen.
You're promoting diversity.
Too terrified to speak out.
The latest buzzword in Hollywood is BIPOC.
I talked about BIPOC last week.
That's an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
And there's another new term in Hollywood.
This is one that I had not heard before, which is MENEMY.
That's a combination of men and enemy.
That means the white male enemy of the diversity movement.
Even heads of studios reportedly realize their jobs are on the line.
White, middle-aged men are collateral damage in this campaign to diversify.
They are the men-enemy.
I suppose it should be women-enemy, white men-enemy, but no, men-enemy is what they're called.
And let's see.
Actor in his 50s says, we're walking on eggshells during every Zoom meeting.
It's got to the point where if there's a person of color in the meeting, we can't hang up before they do for fear of being considered offensive.
Reminds me, of course, of the way the Politburo used to react when Joseph Stalin would speak.
You better not be the first guy to stop applauding.
So the applause would go on and on and on and on and on and on.
We know who holds the power.
And a fellow who actually did permit himself to be named, Nathan Lee Bush, used to shoot commercials for companies like Budweiser and Nike, criticized a post on a private Facebook group.
Somebody said, I need an editor looking for black union editors.
He says, well, come on, you know, does that mean no white men?
Oh, sin, sin, sin.
One of Mr. Bush's main clients, the U.S.
restaurant chain Panera Bread, vowed never to work with him again.
And he's been forced to apologize.
He should never have complained about the fact that somebody's looking only for a black editor.
There you go.
And a lot of people who are not remotely well-known, they are writing and complaining to the Daily Mail every way to say they fear for their livelihoods, they're keeping their heads down, fearing what will happen if they dare to speak out.
And then there was something that just happened last week which was all a tempest in your teapot as far as I'm concerned because I don't know who these people are, but an actress named Jodie Comer, who apparently gained a certain amount of fame in a movie called Killing Eve, The move is on.
The move is on absolutely to have her rushed out of Hollywood, never work again.
What was her crime?
Well, online trolls were furious to discover who she's dating.
This culprit is an American lacrosse player named James Burke.
Well, apparently James Burke is rumored to be a registered Republican and a Donald Trump supporter.
So that's enough to get this baying mob on the trail of this actress Jodi Comer and try to ensure that she never works again.
So there you go.
This apparently is the, in other words, they don't even need chief diversity officers in Hollywood, it seems to me.
It's all happening all by itself.
It's like censorship in the United States, you know.
I used to say, unlike the censorship in Eastern Europe and behind the Iron Curtain, where you had a commissar in a hat with a little red star right on the crown of it, sitting offstage or sitting at the elbow of the editor to make sure that nothing bad was said in the United States.
Every man's his own commissar.
You don't need the government to do it.
And that makes it even more insidious.
So in Hollywood, you don't even need a chief diversity officer.
They're all doing as they're told without orders from on high.
Now here's yet another outfit that does not need a Chief Diversity Officer, and that's the University of Connecticut Student Government.
UConn, the UConn Huskies as they are known, the President and the Vice President of UConn's Undergraduate Student Governor resigned just last week, starting with Vice President Alex Ooze.
Now, why did she resign?
I think you know the trend in which we are moving here.
She, and she issued a public statement of the fact, she cited the climate and incidence of racial injustice across the country and at the university.
She wasn't specific about this.
I'd like to know just what sort of racial injustice is raging through the University of Connecticut, but she resigned in order to make space for BIPOC.
Here, once again, BIPOC.
You know, all the hip people.
Used to be POC, person of color, now it's BIPOC.
To make space for BIPOC voices.
Now, Ms.
Ose, who is clearly white, according to her photograph, she's pressuring everybody else in the student government who's white.
They've got to resign too.
And sure enough, President the President, so the top two figures, President Joshua Crowe, Also, he tendered his resignation just two days later.
So there's room at the top, folks.
There's room at the top.
But, you know, maybe they should just all commit suicide.
Wouldn't that really give BIPOC room to move?
So there you go.
This is the kind of sentiment that's sweeping American college campuses.
As I say, this is just a chronicle of insanity.
And we sit back and we have to laugh to keep from crying.
Now, something else happened interesting this week.
On Monday, the Washington Redskins dropped its name.
It's had the name Redskins for 87 years.
As you know, there's been this big move on to say, no, you can't have the name of Redskins.
That's insulting to Indians.
Indians are increasingly wonderful people.
They have been oppressed and they were exterminated, you know.
Surprisingly, so many left.
They're victims of genocide, but we still have quite a few of them left in the country.
What caused this after the owner of the team had said for years he would never, never, never, never, never, double never, change the name?
Well, supporters, well it's not so much supporters, corporate sponsors really put the screws on them.
FedEx Corporation, the team's most prominent sponsor, who has the name FedEx Field where the Washington Redskins play, they told the team to change its name.
And Fred Smith, who runs FedEx, he's also a minority owner of the team.
So I suppose his words count for a lot.
Furthermore, Nike Incorporated, which is the NFL's apparel partner, as it's called.
They manufacture all this merch that people wear.
They stopped selling Redskins gear in its online shop.
Now that's a financial hit too.
Then Bank of America, another team sponsor, said in a statement, as a partner and sponsor, we have encouraged the team to change the name.
Boy, I bet they really encouraged the team.
And PepsiCo, likewise.
It's time for a change.
So all these people are saying change, and so Mr. Snyder decided, after all, that he was going to eat his words and change the name.
Now, they haven't decided what it's going to be.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe the pandering white skins, or who knows.
In any case, they're going to ponder this, and by the time it sees open, they're going to have a brand new name, apparently.
But, You know, there's been bad history for the Washington Redskins apparently under owner George Preston Marshall.
He was the last of the teams to integrate.
He didn't sign a black player until 1962.
I don't know enough football to know just how delinquent that would make him, but he was the last team to sign a black player.
And they signed someone named Bobby Mitchell.
Again, I'm not enough of a football fan to know whether Bobby Mitchell was particularly good But more about Bobby Mitchell.
Because you see, two weeks ago, the Washington Convention and Sports Authority removed a statue of Marshall from outside the stadium because he was a racist.
And the same day, the team stripped Marshall's name, George Preston Marshall, white racist, from the name of the lower bowl of its Maryland stadium and replaced it with guess whose name?
Mitchell's name.
The first black player signed.
Now maybe he was a super-duper player, but I suspect the point really was every time, of course, you replace a bad racist white man, you have to racist with a wonderful BIPOC, preferably a B as in BIPOC.
And you know, there was a suit against the Washington Redskins led by American Indians.
They claimed that they should lose the trademark of their logo and their name because it was insulting.
And it made little Indian children become alcoholics and do badly in school and all of those things.
And as a matter of fact, it took the U.S.
Court of Appeals in the Fourth Circuit To vacate a decision that had cancelled the Washington NFL team's trademark.
And that finally ended a legal fight that had gone on for 25 years.
And so, of course, as a result, Indians just suffered grievously in account of the fact they could continue to use this horrible racist logo.
Now, in this context, I think it's worth asking, what do Indians themselves think about this logo?
You know, all these hopped up white people, all of these companies, all of these virtue signaling executives saying it's horrible, horrible, horrible.
What do the Indians think?
Well, in 2016, four years ago, there was an article in the Washington Post.
And I'm quite astonished that they even published this and that it's still on the internet.
But nine in ten Native Indians, as they call them, say they're not offended by the Redskin name.
And their response to the poll was unambiguous.
Very few objected to the name and some liked it.
Barbara Bruce, a Chippewa who's lived on a North Dakota reservation most of her life, said, I'm proud of being Native American and of the Redskins.
I'm not ashamed of that at all.
I like that name.
Yeah, they actually quote her.
And it was across every demographic group.
The vast majority of them say the team's name is just fine, including 80% who identify as politically liberal.
85% of college graduates, 90% of those enrolled at a time, and 90% of non-football fans, and 91% of those between the ages of 18 and 39.
It's really across the board.
Even 9 in 10 of those who had heard a great deal about the controversy said, they're not bothered by the name.
So, honkeys can hoop all they like about this.
They're not bothered.
Here, Gabriel Nez, a 29-year-old Navajo, he's quoted as saying, I don't mind it, I like it.
We call other natives skins, too.
Yes, they're skins.
And here's a guy, Randy Whitworth, 58, who lives on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana.
He says, let's start taking care of our people and quit worrying about names like Washington Redskins.
Yes, they've got other, more important, tastier, fatter fish to fry.
Now, according to the Post, the opinions that were recorded in 2016 were no different, essentially, from a 2004 poll 12 years earlier by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
Now, activists, there are Indians, of course, who are really insulted.
Oh, they are just grievously, grievously smitten and horrified by this name.
They warned that the owners must act even if only a small minority of Indians are insulted by the term.
Now, here says Oneida Nation representative Ray Halberder.
And along with the National Congress of American Indians Executive Director, Jacqueline Pata.
These are people who, although they don't speak for the majority, they say Native Americans are resilient and have not allowed the NFL's decades-long denigration of us to define our own self-image.
A fancy way of saying, well, you know, they're too stupid to realize they're being insulted by this.
They have no right not to be insulted, but there you go.
And, you know, there's been this whole string of editorials.
President Obama said the name had to be changed.
50 Democratic U.S.
senators, dozens of sports broadcasters and economists, several newspapers and editorial boards, and there are, in fact, National Public Radio, for example, refuses to use the word redskins.
It's such a horrifying, such an insulting, such a taboo word.
No, no, they don't even use it on the broadcast.
They refer to some other word.
They've always got some other way.
To talk about the team name, so as not to offend the poor delicate ears of those who might be listening.
But yeah, so what's it gonna be?
What's it gonna be?
Uh, maybe the Washington gutless pandering snowflakes, uh, or I don't know, the Washington pig skins.
Uh, that way they could still have skins and, uh, they could talk about footballs instead of, uh, instead of, uh, um, warriors.
Uh, they're going to, but they say, oh, and the, uh, all the Indian activists say they better not have any kind of Indian imagery at all.
It can't be warriors.
It can't be braves.
No, no, no.
All of that's deeply insulting.
So as soon as that name changes, man, life's going to improve on the reservations all across the country.
And so let us swoop all the way across the country to Portland, Portland, Oregon.
As you may know, in honor of George Floyd, there have been demonstrations and frequently riots and bonfires and sackings of stores every night.
Every night since all of this began.
Things have calmed down in most other cities, but not in Portland.
And this has given the city a bit of a problem because it prides itself on being super lefty, super progressive, and giving marginalized voices an opportunity to speak.
Well, those marginalized voices have been speaking And a few people are getting a little bit tired of these marginalized voices and the manner in which they speak.
As you may know, Portland is a famous stomping ground for Antifa.
And they have seized these opportunities to demonstrate for all the sorts of wild and crazy things that they are crazy about.
And lost in the debate, and this is something that the AP itself has noticed with a certain amount of tut-tutting, Lost in debate are the downtown businesses that are racking up millions of dollars in property damage and lost sales, as well as the voices of hundreds of thousands of Portland residents who are staying off the streets and don't at all like what they see.
David Margulis.
He owns a jewelry store downtown, and he has seen, since these riotings began, he has seen his sales drop by 50%.
He is quoted in this AP story as saying, I talked to people on the phone to tell me I don't know if I'll ever come downtown again.
Now, it is, of course, still unfashionable to blame the protesters if you have any kind of public position.
You have to be just an ordinary, normal port lender, or you have to be someone who actually owns a store down there to realize what the problem is.
Those who are in public positions and are Democrats, for example, Governor Kate Brown and the Speaker of the Oregon House, they think the problem is the police.
The police have been too aggressive.
Of course, as you can imagine, in a place like Portland, the police have been pretty much constrained to within an inch of their lives.
This is not the kind of place where the police are given full reign to do the needful.
But now, the idea is, if there's a problem, if there are riots, if there are bonfires, if there are swords looted, the problem is the police.
The AP quotes a certain Gregory McKelvey.
He is an activist and, of course, a critic of the police.
And he says, each night's protest is now turning into a protest of the night before's police activity.
So they get out and they're frisky and they light fires and they throw things to police.
The police respond in the way the police necessarily must do and this is considered police brutality, wickedness of the kind that BLM has always been about opposing and so they have to be out the next night to protest the same thing and this just goes on and on and on while the police rack up more overtime.
Now Portland.
Let me ask my listeners, what percentage do you think of the Portland population is black?
I'll give you two self-imposed guesses, and then I will give you a heartbeat to think about this, and I will tell you.
The black percentage of Portland is six percent.
Six percent.
So we can be assured that the vast majority of these people who are out having a frolic sometime every night are white people.
This just goes to show you the extent to which black lives matter in Portland.
One of the few black people who live in the city is Joanne Hardesty.
She is the first black woman to have been elected to the Portland City Council and She wisely points out that protesters don't need to destroy property to affect change, but she believes the violence is a reaction to a newfound understanding, particularly among white people, about, to use her words, how abusive the police can be.
And so that's what they're protesting now.
Not black lives anymore.
Of course, I suspect what's going on is Antifa types.
They just love mixing it up with the police.
They love the excitement of being tear gassed.
And they love the attention.
And they're just anarchists and crazy folks right down the line.
But they live in a city that coddles them, that panders to them, and that will not just simply lock them all up.
How hard can that be?
There are ways to dissuade people from doing this kind of thing, but not in the city of Portland.
So, let us swoop back across the country to New York City.
Now, for the last few weeks, I have been having kind of a regular feature here of increases in gun crime.
This is almost becoming like a broken record, and maybe I should stop and do this, but the numbers still are impressive.
So, I may do it for a while.
We'll see what the data tell us.
But over the year to date, in New York City, murders are up 27% in the first half of 2019.
27%!
That's particularly significant because violent crime had been trending down for the last 15-20 years or so.
And over the last four weeks, More than 300 people have been shot in New York.
That's up from 100 during the same period last year.
So, the figures are triple.
A lot of people are stopping bullets.
And just last week, shootings were up 277 percent, that is to say 49 compared to 13 in 2019.
The number of victims is 60 compared to 17 in 2019.
These are pretty significant rises.
The chief of the police department, Terrence Monaghan, he talks about a combination of things.
Bail reform, that's right, you can get out without paying bail.
The COVID jailbreak.
In other words, you've got to let the darlings out of prison because they might give each other diseases if they're in a slammer.
Which means that Rikers Island, the famous New York City prison, has only half as many occupants as it had.
Also, their courts shut down.
And because of the pandemic, over 1,800 people arrested on illegal gun charges have been released.
They're not walking around.
Now whether or not they still have their illegal guns, I don't know.
But they are still on the prowl.
As you no doubt know, prosecutors in New York City have embraced this new national fashion of declining to indict suspects who are arrested for what are considered relatively minor crimes, misdemeanors first of all, and minor felonies.
And as a result, arrests are way down.
For the first three months of 2020, this year, police arrested 9,300 people.
In the first three months of 2019, last year, they arrested 17,400.
Let's look at those numbers again.
9,300 as opposed to 17,400.
Let's look at those numbers again.
9,300 as opposed to 17,400.
During this period, crime is not surprisingly up.
Thousands of criminals are going about their business, reveling in the fact that they don't
have to pay bail, there's a revolving door, they can be arrested and re-arrested and re-re-re-re-arrested
for the same crime, and out they go.
Essentially, the criminal justice system is on its ear.
Now, has the mayor proposed any new solutions to this rise in gunplay in his beloved city?
No.
Do you know what he thinks is working?
Bill de Blasio praised the Cure Violence movement.
What does that do?
It is involved in violence interruption.
What that means is, and I will quote from a description of how the program works, community people, reaching young people in particular, mediating, stopping violence before it happens.
He thinks that's going great.
How can he possibly think that?
When all of these shootings are going up.
This is nuts.
The guy needs to open his eyes.
But the person who takes the biscuit for the stupidest explanation of all is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She says all the shootings are up because of the economic deprivation of the virus.
And let me quote her.
They are put in a position where they feel they either need to shot lift some bread or go hungry.
And that's causing the crime.
Now, if they're shoplifting bread so they won't have to go hungry, it's not as though they're shooting each other.
This is really the most idiotic explanation for the rise in crime I think one could possibly imagine.
I haven't heard a single case Of someone who has been arrested for shoplifting in New York because otherwise he thought he would starve.
I'm sorry.
I just haven't heard of one.
And as a matter of fact, according to the crime statistics, petty larceny such as shoplifting groceries is well down for this year so far compared to 2019.
Probably because people aren't out and about as much.
Grand larceny is down except for auto theft.
Auto theft has been up because of fewer people on the streets.
The car thieves feel as though they can get out and do their business without being detected.
So, yes, once again Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets the gold medal for stupidity, either willful or not.
Fortunately, a few blacks actually see the light.
There are two members, prominent members of the black community, who have called on the NYPD to bring back the anti-crime unit that had been disbanded.
Its job with several hundred plain-clothes men was to get guns off the street, but this unit was recently disbanded because they targeted the people with the guns, and the people with the guns turned out to be BIPOCs.
Well, at least black and brown people.
So they had to go.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former cop, says this is terrible.
They've got to get the guns back off the street.
Get the anti-crime unit back in action.
And community activist Tony Herbert says the same thing.
He says the guns keep going off.
And there is blood on the hands of the mayor and the state legislature.
Good for him.
Yes, they're right.
It's nuts.
It's nuts.
And at least a few people recognize that it's nuts.
Moving from New York to Chicago, in this roll call, this panoply of statistics, at least over the last weekend, at least 60 people were shot.
I love the way the news accounts say, at least, because you never know, another body might crop up, another 10 bodies might crop up any time.
At least 60 people were shot, 13 fatally, over last weekend.
That means Chicago shootings were up 76% as opposed to the same time period last year.
NBC News reported, Nearly all the bloodshed was concentrated in the city's
predominantly black and brown communities on the south and west sides.
The bloodshed.
They make it sound like it's a hurricane.
Or, yes, a twister touched down.
There was no human intervention at all.
The bloodshed was concentrated.
It just happened that way.
We can't imagine why.
But, oh, those poor black and brown people, they really do have the worst possible luck, don't they?
This twister, this hurricane of bloodshed, just touched down in their neighborhood.
At least last weekend was not quite as bad as the 4th of July weekend when not just 60 people but 70 people were shot.
14 fatally.
So, black lives certainly do matter and we're glad to see all the efforts being taken to honor those people and to make sure that they are never going to suffer from that kind of thing again.
Now, let us move from the United States to Great Britain, to Bristol.
Bristol, England.
Those of you who have been paying attention know that a statue of Edward Colston was torn down in June.
This statue had stood there for 125 years.
It had been erected in 1895 and Edward Colston was a wonderful benefactor of the city.
It was torn down by BLM people And one of the people who was making the largest stink was a BLM protester, a black lady with frizzy hair by the name of Jen Reed.
Well, ever since the thing came down in June, the plinth on which it stood, it's quite a nice, oh maybe eight foot tall plinth, has been vacant except until Wednesday night.
Well, I should say Wednesday morning.
Early Wednesday morning, a new statue went up.
It is, in fact, a statue of this self-same frizzy-haired black lady, Jen Reed.
It's a life-size statue.
She's holding her fist above her head in triumph, and this was the pose she struck when Eric Colston came down.
This was a secret operation by Jen Reed as well as a white artist by the name of Mark Quinn.
It does take an occasional whitey, you see, to put this sort of thing together.
It appears to have been some kind of 3D printing thing with resin rather than bronze.
So there it is.
It's up there now.
And the Bristol City Council has decided, it has got to make up its mind whether or not to keep it there or make a bronze substitute, make it permanent.
We'll see.
My guess is that they will not dare take it down.
Once a black person goes up, it'd be racist to take it down.
Now, it is interesting that the entire city of Bristol has turned its back in the most desperate way on its benefactor, Edward Colston.
The famous Bristol Concert Venue, known as Colston Hall, it will change its name.
A window in Bristol Cathedral was dedicated to Colston's memory.
The cathedral announced in June, about the time the statue came down, that they will remove the window.
Maybe they'll put one in for Jen Reed, frizzy-haired black lady.
Colston Primary School renamed itself Cotham Gardens Primary School.
And in February of 2019, this is well before the current insanity, St.
Mary Redcliffe and Temple School announced it would rename its Colston Schoolhouse after guess who?
Katherine Johnson.
Now those of you who've been paying a lot of attention know that Katherine Johnson was the black lady mathematician who worked for Nassau.
She did calculations for the space program and was immortalized in the movie Hidden Figures.
President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I suspect she's the only rank-and-file worker at NASA who ever got the highest civilian order.
But there you go.
This school in Bristol, England, after having ditched the name of its benefactor, chose a black person, a black woman, who lived thousands of miles away in the United States.
That's the way these things work.
Well...
Let's look into Edward Coles.
Why did he have to go?
He was born in November of 1636 in Bristol.
The Colston family had lived in the city since the late 13th century.
They're longtime Colstonites.
He was a merchant, initially trading in wine, fruit, and textiles, mainly in Spain, Portugal, and other European cities.
In 1618, at the age of 44, he became a member of the Royal African Company.
The Royal African Company had the monopoly in England on trading along the west coast of Africa in gold, silver, ivory, and Uh-oh, this is all that matters!
All that matters!
They also Trafficked in slaves.
Well, he was deputy governor of the company from 1689 to 1690, and his association with the company ended in 1692.
So, for out of his total of 84 years on earth, he was involved with the Royal African Company for a total of 12 years.
Now, was he cracking the whip?
Was he putting the manacles on the slaves?
Was he driving them before his wrath and racist anger?
No, of course not.
He was working in London.
He was an administrator of this company that did these things, but that's all that matters.
That's all that matters.
Edward Colston is a thoroughly bad guy.
Got to go.
Now, why was he there in the first place?
Why was he there to be removed today?
It's because he loved Bristol, he loved his country, and after he'd made a considerable fortune, he spent a great deal of it on less fortunate people in Bristol.
He supported and endowed schools, almshouses, that is to say, houses for the poor, hospitals and churches, mainly in Bristol, but also in London.
David Hewson, a historian, writing in 1808, described Colson as, quote, the great benefactor of the city of Bristol, who in his lifetime expended more than 70,000 pounds in charitable institutions.
Now, I don't know how far 70,000 pounds went in the 17th century, but I imagine it went quite a ways.
But for the fact that for those 12 years, he was an administrator in a company that, uh-oh, traded in slaves.
He's got to go.
Now, we've got time for maybe one last story here.
The National Museum of African American History.
That is on the Mall.
It's part of the Smithsonian.
It has got a great big new website up about white culture and white privilege.
And it says that the normalization of white racial identity throughout America's history has created a culture where non-white persons are seen as inferior.
We're abnormal.
Well, the people who know, who run the National Museum of African American History sure ought to know everything there is to know about white people, right?
And they say that because white people hold power in the United States, all whites are privileged.
They go on to say, for many white people, this can be hard to bear, understand, or accept, but it is true.
Full stop.
They go on to say, if you are white in America, you have benefited from the color of your skin.
Full stop.
Then they go on to say that if white people are told about this, they will suffer from white fragility.
Full stop.
So, I'm sure you are delighted to know, as was I, to learn that your tax dollars are working very, very hard on them all, telling people that white folks are a terrible problem.
And as usual, everything that's gone wrong for black people is our fault.
They are utterly incapable of helping themselves, clearly, so we have to do it for them.
We must transform ourselves, turn ourselves inside out for the benefit of black people.
So I hope that you will dedicate the next at least 25 seconds to musing on your white fragility, your white privilege, and fighting white supremacy.
I'll be doing the same, and I look forward to speaking with you next week.
Thank you very much for your attention on this occasion, and it will be my pleasure to keep you company again as we survey the passing insanity of our time.
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