Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor - Social Trust in a Crisis
Aired: 2021-01-08
Duration: 08:49


=== Understanding Social Trust (08:26) ===

[00:00:04]  Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
[00:00:07]  These videos aren't being suggested in the usual way, so I'd be grateful if you suggest them to your friends.
[00:00:14]  You know what social trust is.
[00:00:16]  It's about how the people in a community or a nation feel about each other.
[00:00:21]  And that level of trust makes a huge difference.
[00:00:24]  For example, at some American schools, you have to go through a metal detector to get to class.
[00:00:30]  This is Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Missouri.
[00:00:33]  And there are also schools where there isn't an armed guard in sight.
[00:00:38]  In some stores, you can check out your own groceries because management trusts you.
[00:00:43]  In other stores, the cashier is behind bulletproof glass.
[00:00:47]  In some neighborhoods, there are fences and bars on the windows.
[00:00:51]  And in some places, people still leave their doors unlocked.
[00:00:54]  It's all a question of who's living there, isn't it?
[00:00:58]  There are group differences and national differences in levels of social trust.
[00:01:03]  I once had a conversation with a Brazilian who was visiting the United States.
[00:01:07]  He was astonished by those newspaper vending machines, the kind where you put in your coins, open the machine, and you take a paper.
[00:01:15]  He said you could take as many papers as you like.
[00:01:18]  That's true, I said, but we take only one.
[00:01:21]  He told me in Brazil people would clean out the machine and give papers to all their friends.
[00:01:27]  Well, this virus pandemic has highlighted national and group differences in social trust.
[00:01:33]  I'm sure you've heard about locked-down Italians getting together and singing off their balconies and out their windows.
[00:01:44]  Well, this is what happened when someone tried the same thing in New York City.
[00:01:48]  Shut the f**k up!
[00:01:56]  Whoever took the video thought that was hilarious.
[00:02:00]  Social trust requires shared expectations and a shared culture.
[00:02:05]  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.
[00:02:14]  Well, where's the shared culture when you have immigrants, natives, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Christians, Jews, Muslims?
[00:02:21]  Is there even one song that all New Yorkers know how to sing?
[00:02:27]  Maybe happy birthday?
[00:02:29]  Someone tries to cheer up the community by singing and is cursed and laughed at.
[00:02:35]  No social trust.
[00:02:37]  Here's another sign of social trust, or lack of it.
[00:02:40]  All across America, retail stores are boarding up their windows while they wait out to quarantine.
[00:02:46]  They don't trust their neighbors.
[00:02:48]  And you know what?
[00:02:49]  They're right not to.
[00:02:51]  In New York City, with all those people from everywhere, burglaries of bodegas and supermarkets are up 400% compared to last year.
[00:03:00]  Overall, commercial burglaries are up 75%.
[00:03:03]  They didn't board up stores in Wuhan.
[00:03:07]  They're not boarding them up in Tokyo or Seoul, but they are in London.
[00:03:13]  And the percentage of non-whites in that city went from 29% in 2001 to nearly 50% today.
[00:03:20]  Now, I don't know why those numbers just occurred to me.
[00:03:24]  In a crisis, it's important to be able to trust government.
[00:03:29]  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.
[00:03:36]  Back in the 1960s, that figure was 75%.
[00:03:40]  It dropped to just 19% under President Obama, and it's still in the low 20s.
[00:03:47]  Over that period, the United States became much more diverse, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
[00:03:54]  In a crisis, you'd like to trust the media.
[00:03:57]  That trend is also down.
[00:04:00]  In the 1970s, more than 70% of Americans trusted the media.
[00:04:05]  Now, we're lucky to get about 40%.
[00:04:09]  And wouldn't it be great if the media trusted the government?
[00:04:12]  Well, big media have so little trust in Donald Trump, they don't even want you to watch his press briefings on the virus.
[00:04:20]  Vox says cable news should cancel the Trump show.
[00:04:25]  The New York Times says drop the curtain on the Trump follies.
[00:04:30]  I'm sure part of it's because he's upstaging their guy, Joe Biden, who's stuck in his basement making amateurish videos.
[00:04:39]  But it's also because the media hate Mr. Trump.
[00:04:42]  They claimed he was so stupid that he said the coronavirus was no worse than the flu.
[00:04:48]  But did you ever see this collage of big media headlines that said exactly the same thing?
[00:04:54]  Here's a sample headline.
[00:04:56]  Relax. Coronavirus is less dangerous than the flu, says epidemic expert.
[00:05:02]  All 26 of these articles are genuine.
[00:05:06]  To repeat.
[00:05:08]  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?
[00:05:16]  Here's an example of what we don't have.
[00:05:19]  Japan just declared a coronavirus emergency and wants everybody to stay home.
[00:05:24]  But it's not issuing orders.
[00:05:26]  It's just making a request.
[00:05:29]  Japanese trust each other to do the right thing.
[00:05:32]  We don't.
[00:05:33]  In most states, breaking coronavirus quarantine could mean serious legal consequences.
[00:05:39]  And certain people seem to be cooperating more than others.
[00:05:44]  Now, police got a call about a party in the Noble Square neighborhood last night.
[00:05:48]  Officers showed up around midnight and found dozens of people inside this home near Greenview Avenue and Black Hawk Street.
[00:05:55]  Here's another fellow practicing social distancing.
[00:05:58]  "We spread that shit, the coronavirus.
[00:06:03]  We spread that shit.
[00:06:05]  My mama, big ass coronavirus."
[00:06:07]  I don't think the Japanese have this problem.
[00:06:11]  Nor do the European countries like Hungary, Czech Republic, Lithuania, that are still homogeneous.
[00:06:19]  And here's another headline for you.
[00:06:21]  Texas teenager who threatened to spread COVID-19 arrested.
[00:06:26]  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.
[00:06:36]  Social trust means thinking we're all in this together.
[00:06:40]  And now we're supposed to be wearing masks to stop spreading the virus.
[00:06:45]  But some people say they won't do that.
[00:06:48]  Here's a headline for you.
[00:06:50]  I'm a black man in America.
[00:06:52]  Entering a shop with a face mask might get me killed.
[00:06:57]  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.
[00:07:04]  That's crazy, of course, but I'd call that a very severe case of social distrust.
[00:07:11]  And we have a lot of it.
[00:07:13]  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.
[00:07:21]  Remember, snitches get stitches?
[00:07:24]  That's the opposite of social trust.
[00:07:27]  This guy is a walking billboard for low social trust.
[00:07:31]  You wouldn't know it from the way we are always being told to celebrate diversity, but scholars recognize that diversity destroys social trust.
[00:07:41]  Robert Putnam of Harvard is the best-known researcher in this field.
[00:07:46]  As he wrote in 2007, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life.
[00:07:54]  To distrust their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin.
[00:07:58]  To withdraw even from close friends.
[00:08:01]  To expect the worst from their community and its leaders.
[00:08:05]  To volunteer less.
[00:08:07]  Give less to charity and work on community projects less often.
[00:08:11]  To register to vote less.
[00:08:13]  To agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference.

=== Empty Stores, Full Thoughts (00:34) ===

[00:08:19]  And to huddle unhappily in front of the television.
[00:08:23]  And that's what diversity does to us in ordinary circumstances.
[00:08:28]  It's worse in a crisis.
[00:08:30]  And what we're going through now is mild.
[00:08:33]  You've still got electricity.
[00:08:35]  There's food in the stores, gas at the pump.
[00:08:37]  What if the lights went out and the stores were empty?
[00:08:41]  Would you be counting the blessings of diversity?
[00:08:43]  Or would you be wishing you were somewhere else?
[00:08:47]  It's worth thinking about, isn't it?