All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 8, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
08:49
Social Trust in a Crisis
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
These videos aren't being suggested in the usual way, so I'd be grateful if you suggest them to your friends.
You know what social trust is.
It's about how the people in a community or a nation feel about each other.
And that level of trust makes a huge difference.
For example, at some American schools, you have to go through a metal detector to get to class.
This is Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Missouri.
And there are also schools where there isn't an armed guard in sight.
In some stores, you can check out your own groceries because management trusts you.
In other stores, the cashier is behind bulletproof glass.
In some neighborhoods, there are fences and bars on the windows.
And in some places, people still leave their doors unlocked.
It's all a question of who's living there, isn't it?
There are group differences and national differences in levels of social trust.
I once had a conversation with a Brazilian who was visiting the United States.
He was astonished by those newspaper vending machines, the kind where you put in your coins, open the machine, and you take a paper.
He said you could take as many papers as you like.
That's true, I said, but we take only one.
He told me in Brazil people would clean out the machine and give papers to all their friends.
Well, this virus pandemic has highlighted national and group differences in social trust.
I'm sure you've heard about locked-down Italians getting together and singing off their balconies and out their windows.
Well, this is what happened when someone tried the same thing in New York City.
Shut the f**k up!
Whoever took the video thought that was hilarious.
Social trust requires shared expectations and a shared culture.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently admitted that New York City got a huge dose of the virus because we welcome people from across the globe.
Well, where's the shared culture when you have immigrants, natives, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Christians, Jews, Muslims?
Is there even one song that all New Yorkers know how to sing?
Maybe happy birthday?
Someone tries to cheer up the community by singing and is cursed and laughed at.
No social trust.
Here's another sign of social trust, or lack of it.
All across America, retail stores are boarding up their windows while they wait out to quarantine.
They don't trust their neighbors.
And you know what?
They're right not to.
In New York City, with all those people from everywhere, burglaries of bodegas and supermarkets are up 400% compared to last year.
Overall, commercial burglaries are up 75%.
They didn't board up stores in Wuhan.
They're not boarding them up in Tokyo or Seoul, but they are in London.
And the percentage of non-whites in that city went from 29% in 2001 to nearly 50% today.
Now, I don't know why those numbers just occurred to me.
In a crisis, it's important to be able to trust government.
But here's a graph of the number of Americans who trust the federal government to do the right thing either always or most of the time.
Back in the 1960s, that figure was 75%.
It dropped to just 19% under President Obama, and it's still in the low 20s.
Over that period, the United States became much more diverse, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
In a crisis, you'd like to trust the media.
That trend is also down.
In the 1970s, more than 70% of Americans trusted the media.
Now, we're lucky to get about 40%.
And wouldn't it be great if the media trusted the government?
Well, big media have so little trust in Donald Trump, they don't even want you to watch his press briefings on the virus.
Vox says cable news should cancel the Trump show.
The New York Times says drop the curtain on the Trump follies.
I'm sure part of it's because he's upstaging their guy, Joe Biden, who's stuck in his basement making amateurish videos.
But it's also because the media hate Mr. Trump.
They claimed he was so stupid that he said the coronavirus was no worse than the flu.
But did you ever see this collage of big media headlines that said exactly the same thing?
Here's a sample headline.
Relax. Coronavirus is less dangerous than the flu, says epidemic expert.
All 26 of these articles are genuine.
To repeat.
In a crisis, wouldn't it be nice to pull together to have a government and media we could trust and that trusted each other?
Here's an example of what we don't have.
Japan just declared a coronavirus emergency and wants everybody to stay home.
But it's not issuing orders.
It's just making a request.
Japanese trust each other to do the right thing.
We don't.
In most states, breaking coronavirus quarantine could mean serious legal consequences.
And certain people seem to be cooperating more than others.
Now, police got a call about a party in the Noble Square neighborhood last night.
Officers showed up around midnight and found dozens of people inside this home near Greenview Avenue and Black Hawk Street.
Here's another fellow practicing social distancing.
"We spread that shit, the coronavirus.
We spread that shit.
My mama, big ass coronavirus."
I don't think the Japanese have this problem.
Nor do the European countries like Hungary, Czech Republic, Lithuania, that are still homogeneous.
And here's another headline for you.
Texas teenager who threatened to spread COVID-19 arrested.
Lorraine... Mara Diaga of Carrollton, Texas, posted a video of herself saying she was at a Walmart and was going to infect everyone with the virus.
Social trust means thinking we're all in this together.
And now we're supposed to be wearing masks to stop spreading the virus.
But some people say they won't do that.
Here's a headline for you.
I'm a black man in America.
Entering a shop with a face mask might get me killed.
This black guy actually thinks that if he walks around with his face covered, people will think he's a bandito and will shoot him on sight.
That's crazy, of course, but I'd call that a very severe case of social distrust.
And we have a lot of it.
In America, there are people who think that anyone who cooperates with the police to get criminals locked up is a traitor who deserves to be sliced up.
Remember, snitches get stitches?
That's the opposite of social trust.
This guy is a walking billboard for low social trust.
You wouldn't know it from the way we are always being told to celebrate diversity, but scholars recognize that diversity destroys social trust.
Robert Putnam of Harvard is the best-known researcher in this field.
As he wrote in 2007, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life.
To distrust their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin.
To withdraw even from close friends.
To expect the worst from their community and its leaders.
To volunteer less.
Give less to charity and work on community projects less often.
To register to vote less.
To agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference.
And to huddle unhappily in front of the television.
And that's what diversity does to us in ordinary circumstances.
It's worse in a crisis.
And what we're going through now is mild.
You've still got electricity.
There's food in the stores, gas at the pump.
What if the lights went out and the stores were empty?
Would you be counting the blessings of diversity?
Or would you be wishing you were somewhere else?
It's worth thinking about, isn't it?
▲
Export Selection