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April 13, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:07:44
Fred on Everything
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Radio Renaissance.
I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance, and with me is my indispensable co-host, Paul Kersey.
We also have a special guest, who I will introduce to you in just a few moments.
Today is April 13th, Year of Our Lord 2022, and as is our custom, which we would not wish to violate, we will begin with a few comments from listeners.
Mr. Kersey will recall that last time we talked about Tyler Perry's films.
We did.
Of which I have never seen one, but one day I hope to feast my eyes upon one of his creations.
And one of our listeners says, your mention of Tyler Perry's films in your latest podcast elicited a laugh for me.
If you ever run out of ideas, it would be very humorous if you gathered the AmRam staff one evening to stream your commentary while appreciating his directorial talents.
Another commenter says, I'm an avid listener all the way from the land of the Vikings, Norway, and I'm trying to get more Scandinavians to listen to your fireside chats.
I didn't know they were farsight chats, but that sounds good to me.
As an American-born transplant to Norway, I find it very odd how, from the largest cities to the smallest podunk villages here in Norway, we find more Muslims and Africans as Ramadan begins European fetishization of this cult and their beliefs continues and I'm tired of all the red carpet treatment these Muslims get from people who forget that 700 years ago they were pillaging and enslaving the world.
Organizations here in Norway like SIAN, that stands for Stop the Islamization of Norway, are getting more traction just last week at the start of Ramadan, that is the Well, I certainly agree with that.
And our final comment.
Sian Lars Torsen commemorated the kickoff by proudly burning several ornate Korans in
Oslo in front of a crowd of almost 400 people.
That's a large number to gather in Norway.
He goes on to say, we need to promote race realism and I strongly believe we need to
talk more about IQ and race.
Well, I certainly agree with that.
And our final comment, this one was a rather erudite one.
And I'm sure Mr. Kurz, you remember we talked about the Chicago Protestant Church that was
loudly signaling its virtuous fast from whiteness.
Of course.
The fast for whiteness was going to take the form of an abstinence from any kind of musical composition by white composers during Lent.
Isn't that charming?
It seems the people behind this stunt failed to fully think through its implications.
First is the fact that the Lenten fast is always a choice to do without a thing of intrinsic goodness, such as meat, dairy products, olive oil, etc.
These are gifts from God which naturally bring pleasure and happiness.
Doing without is a penitential sacrifice to God.
Therefore, in their fast from whiteness, this Paris is implicitly admitting that whiteness
is God-given, intrinsically good, beneficial, brings pleasure and happiness.
Certainly great pleasure comes from hearing Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and other European composers.
Furthermore, in choosing to use only BIPOC composed music this Lent, the Church is implying that listening to such compositions is a penitential act, effectively equating this with subjecting themselves to sackcloth and ashes.
He concludes by saying, Secondly, there's the fact that a fast necessarily implies a following feast.
Just as a Lenten fast of meat, dairy, oils, and other good food is always followed by a festive indulgence on Easter, so should the virtue-signaling Chicago church logically follow its own sacrificial deprivation with a joyous feasting on whiteness this Easter.
Perhaps Bach's St.
John Passion, followed by Handel's Messiah, accompanied by a slideshow of the works of Michelangelo and Caravaggio.
That would go a long way towards lifting my spirits after 40 grueling days in the desert of BIPOC spirituals.
So there you go.
Thank you, listener.
That was one of the best comments we've had in some time.
Would you not agree?
I was going to actually go on a limb and say that might be my favorite comment we've ever received.
We get a lot of them.
We get a lot of good ones, but that was certainly one of the best.
Now, I cannot go further forward without at least taking a detour through Brooklyn, and I would like to read the opening sentences from a New York Times article that I saw just yesterday, or maybe it was the day before.
A man in a worker's vest put on a gas mask, opened a canister that filled a subway car with smoke, and then opened fire, the police said.
Surveillance cameras that could have captured the shooting were not working, according to Mayor Eric Adams.
To me, that just sort of captures today's New York City.
Oh, without a doubt.
That just about does it.
That's a perfect vignette.
And of course, at least 16 people injured, 10 of them by gunfire, This has gotten so much coverage that we really don't need to go into the details, I suspect, but I was amused that New York Times was so coy and shy about identifying the person.
A lot of people saw him.
A lot of people saw him well enough to notice that he put on a gas mask, he's gutted, jammed, but he was a heavyset man wearing a green construction vest and a gray sweatshirt.
That they got.
They got that all figured out.
Well, the Daily Mail figured out that he was one of our dusky brethren.
But the New York Times was still failing to report this.
And I would point out that I have a mention from yet another listener.
He was listening to 1010 Winds Radio.
That's a local New York City news all-talk radio station.
And this was yesterday morning, he said, referring to the description of the suspect.
Some person from representing the police department said something along the lines of, the effects of misinformation in regard to the suspect would be a greater tragedy than what happened inside the station.
In other words, if we got it wrong, if we set out the word that this gentleman was one of our African-American fellow citizens, that could be even worse than the shootings.
And of course, this reminds me This reminds me of what happened in 2009.
Nadeel Nidal Malik Hassan at the Fort Hood shooting.
Remember that 2009?
Of course, of course I do.
Killed 13 servicemen, wounded more than 30 at General George Casey.
He said that as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse.
Read back that quote from the radio station that the listener heard.
The effects of misinformation in regards to the sub-suspect would be a greater tragedy than what happened inside the station.
Okay.
That's right, if we get the word out.
So, now, I'm sure all of our listeners are tenterhooks.
With whom are we speaking today?
Our guest is none other than Fred Reed.
Those of you who read American Renaissance and other dissident corners of the web know what an excellent commentator he is on all things that he sets his mind to.
So, Mr. Reid, we are delighted to have you and we're looking forward to a conversation which from henceforth on will be mostly about you and your observations and your experiences.
Now, as I recall, one of your first career moves was to join the Marine Corps.
Is that not correct?
That is correct.
And where did you serve?
Da Nang.
Da Nang.
So you were in that generation.
Indeed so.
As was I. I was not sent.
I did not sign up.
And I remember years later talking to a veteran, and I says, oh, you weren't in Vietnam?
I said, no.
He says, boy, it was the big event of our generation, and you missed it.
Now, I don't know if that's the way you feel about it, Mr. Reid.
I wish I had missed it.
Yes, I think a lot do.
But then, you were injured and you left the Corps because of an injury.
Is that correct?
True.
Yes.
And then, what sort of turn did your career take after that?
I spent several years wandering around the country as a sort of non-political hippie doing things that were chemical in nature and would not be approved of now and eventually a friend of mine when I was 27 committed suicide and I decided that I should do something respectable and I thought that journalism was.
Remember I was very young and naive?
Yes, that was an illusion.
Yes, yes it was.
So I went to the editor of my hometown paper in Fredericksburg, Virginia and told him I want to be a war correspondent.
This is a damn fool thing to do.
It's not how you get into journalism.
But he was sufficiently surprised that he let me go to the Israeli War of 73 and said that if he liked my stuff he'd publish it.
Did Fredericksburg even have any foreign correspondents?
Oh, good Lord, no.
It had a circulation of 23,000.
And you volunteered to be their war correspondent?
Yes, I was a local boy, and they fell for it.
Well done, well done.
And they shipped you off to Israel?
Yes.
Wow, great.
And then I understand later on you joined Army Times?
Yes, after that.
Well, tell me some of your adventures, either at the Frederickburg Paper or Army Times.
Well, at Army Times, I persuaded them that they needed me as a foreign correspondent in Saigon.
So I went off there for a year, split between Saigon and Phnom Penh.
This reinforced my view that the United States should stay out of other people's countries.
We didn't get that message.
I mean, we got the message, but that's the last thing we've done, is stay out of people's countries.
That's a fact.
But sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
Well, it was interesting.
I was in Phnom Penh when it fell, and I was evacuated in an Air America, which is a CIA caribou, along with several Vietnamese officers and several, about 15 buffies, which are big, ugly, this is a family show, friendly elephants.
Elephants?
Well, they were called Big Ugly Fucking Elephants.
Oh, oh, oh.
Ceramic things like this.
That was the local term for them.
And when I got to Saigon, it proceeded to fall, too.
So we were... So these elephants were decorative?
They're objects of art?
Yes.
Ceramic.
I see.
Okay.
All right.
Not everybody thought they were decorative, which is why the big ugly, but anyway,
then I was left Saigon in the evacuation there, landed in San Francisco and was expecting it to
be evacuated. I was becoming a habit. It should have been.
It hasn't been yet.
Well, yes, the civilization will take down the flag pretty soon, I suspect, but not quite yet.
Wow, well that sounds like quite an adventure.
Then, wow, so now your dispatches from these places were army time?
Yes.
Wow, I suppose are they online now?
This was pre-internet, yes.
I have to go back and ask a question about the Fredericksburg paper.
What were some of your initial dispatches that you filed?
How were they received by the editor of the Fredericksburg paper?
They liked them and published them.
And these are reports on 73 War?
Yes.
The Israelis at that time were quite friendly to journalists.
I looked so completely unprofessional that they called the newspaper to check.
But when the paper said that, yes, they had credited me, the Israelis were quite good.
And I went out into various war zones and so on and so forth.
Wow.
Wow.
Great.
And then from Army Times, where did fate take you?
Uh, after a while I ended up going out to the Stafford Soldier Fortune Magazine.
Soldier of Fortune.
You know, I still have an old copy of Soldier of Fortune.
Yes, Mr. Kersey, do you know about Soldier of Fortune?
I do.
I read it a couple of times back in, I would say, 2000, 2002, probably right to the lead up of the initial invasion of Iraq, 2002, 2003.
It must have been sort of fading out by then, is my guess.
How long did it last?
About that long, I think.
It was directed mostly at Vietnam vets who had come back, and they started to get married, grow responsibilities, have children, and no longer wanted to fantasize about being mercenaries.
What happened to you?
I got hired away by the Washingtonian in Washington, but Soldier of Fortune was great fun.
In most places you have a fire box and you open it and there's an ax inside.
At Soldier of Fortune there were 12, 12 cages loaded.
In the firebox.
In the firebox.
And the students at CU were threatened, this was in Boulder, Colorado, were threatened to attack this evil den of mercenaries.
And if they had, it would have been the worst mistake anybody ever made.
Wow, well that's not, I guess you put out a special kind of a fire with 12 gauges.
Yes, you do.
What was the firearm you had on you?
Did you have a revolver or a semi-automatic pistol?
Oh, those were all over the place.
They were quite common.
Well, what were some of the articles you did for Social Fortune?
I went to Angola and spent a couple of weeks with Savimbi and Juanita and his boys.
Is that right?
Yes.
That was quite a trip.
Whatever happened to Jonas Savimbi, anyway?
He was, I guess, the NPLA eventually took him over, or the Pulitzer.
I forget now, but he was not on the winning side at the end, was he?
No, the story I heard, which may even be true, was that his politics and those of the US diverged, and so the CIA extinguished him.
But that may be nonsense, but it's the story that went around.
Wow, they sent you to Angola.
Boy, so you've seen quite a few battlefields.
Sufficiently, yes.
Hmm, enough for a lifetime.
Wow.
Were you with Soldier of Fortune in 92 when the LA riots happened, or were you already employed by... No, not then.
And so, yeah, Soldier of Fortune was in Gosh, and what else after that?
After Soldier of Fortune?
I eventually ended up at the Washington Times as a police reporter after spending some years as a...
That's quite a tame change.
But yes, sorry.
I always believe don't ask what you can do for journalism, ask what journalism can do for you.
And as a military reporter, it's a wonderful gig.
You get to go to all sorts of countries, fly in B-52s and fighter planes.
It's a racket.
Wow.
Well, I had some odd fantasies about doing something similar myself, but I never really qualified.
But no, it sounds like great fun as long as you don't stop A rapidly moving piece of metal of some kind.
I think this is the anniversary of the war between England and the Falcons.
Were you down there?
No, I had nothing to do with that.
They managed to fight that without you.
Yes.
Well, boy.
So you wrote a military column for the Washington Times and it was syndicated, was it not?
Universal Press Syndicate.
An interesting point about that was, I was with the Washington Times, which at that time was a very low-caste publication, the Moonies and so on and so forth, but then a guy named Reagan got elected, which we may remember, and what did Reagan, what was his politics?
He was conservative, so he read the Washington Times.
What was he interested in?
The military.
Who had the only military column in the country, probably, but certainly there.
So I ended up in the Daily Clips, and all of a sudden, if I wanted to go fly on a fighter plane, the Pentagon would say, yes sir, Mr. Reid, we'll land it on the sidewalk in front of your place.
What kind of salad dressing do you want?
Wow!
So, what fighter planes did you drive in?
Well, riding the F-15, the F-16, the B-52 is not a fighter plane, but did low-level bonding practice in all the world's helicopters.
Well, well, you know, there's another journalist who took rides in fighter planes, and that is James Fallows.
He writes for The Atlantic, and he was a great critic, I believe, of the F-15.
Sixteen.
That story with the sixteen.
Okay.
He's a critic of the sixteen.
And they decided, well, we'll take you up.
And we'll just show you what fun this thing is.
And they deliberately put him through sufficient G's for him to lose his lunch.
That's easy to do.
So I understand.
You have to be pretty fit to fly around in those things.
One time in the F-15, we were doing a sight over Holloman Air Force Base out west, and we were flying against A-7s, which are an attack plane, and they should not have had a chance against the F-15, but these were Cajun pilots out of Vietnam, and they actually shot us down.
I mean, this is simulated, of course, but It was really humiliating because at one point we went into a 5G turn, which means that if your head weighs 15 pounds, usually now it's 75.
And I was bending over into my nausea bag, throwing up as we went through this dramatic dog fight.
I didn't see any of it.
Then when we landed up, a colonel came up and took away my bag full of vomit.
How do the pilots train themselves for that kind of experience?
They're used to it.
You get used to it with a while.
But the guy in back, even if it's a pilot, so I was told, is in danger of losing his lunch.
Huh.
So it's the guy in front who's looking out the windscreen straight ahead.
He's the guy who is least likely to lose his lunch, right?
Yes.
And with experienced pilots, it just doesn't happen, but I wasn't one.
Well, same thing happened to James Fallows.
I guess, I don't know how much it took.
I doubt it took 5 G's.
That's a pretty stiff turn, isn't it?
It's pretty stiff.
Well, I used to enjoy roller coasters, but that's a completely different story, isn't it?
Now, as I recall, we're going back in time a bit, but you diverged from your usual subject matter and wrote an article that got an editor for Harper's Magazine fired.
Yes.
Tell us about that.
Okay, it's called The Color of Education, and it's online somewhere.
He did a piece on the black schools, black Catholic schools in Washington.
What had happened was that, like most cities, there were Catholic schools dealing with the white Catholic kids.
The Catholic families made money and went to the suburbs, so the schools had to decide, are we going to chase them into the suburbs, or are we going to stay in Washington and teach the black kids, who need it more than the white kids do, in the suburbs?
So they stayed.
So I went to a group of these schools, some of them being 93% black, and I found them to be completely civilized.
The kids were learning.
If my own kids had gone there, I wouldn't have worried about them.
And how did they do this, I ask?
Well, excuse me.
One way was that if you came to school with a knife or a weapon, you were gone.
Period.
No appeal.
Gone.
If you insulted teachers, gone.
They just didn't put up with that.
And 90% of the kids, not being stupid, saw that if A, then B. I don't like B, so I don't do A.
And so they behaved, and I don't know how well they would have done on a national test of success and scholarship, but they could certainly read, and they were certainly nice kids.
And what period was this?
I think it was 85, I'm not entirely sure.
Boy, that just seems a lifetime ago.
Yes.
So these were Catholic schools in Washington, D.C.? ?
Do they still exist, you know?
I assume so.
I have no idea why they wouldn't.
But they really did manage to teach these children to behave and to read and write and maybe even cipher.
Yeah, it's a fact.
I actually saw it.
It can be done, yes.
Now, why... and you wrote this for Harper's Magazine?
Yes.
And why did this result in unhappiness?
I would have thought the liberals would have been overjoyed.
You said, it can be done!
It can be done.
Look at these wonderful black children.
That's what I expected, but the thing is that by admiring the Catholics for doing things successfully, it pointed out that the school system in general didn't do them at all.
And so this was taken as a great denunciation of the National Education Association, the entire scholarly apparatus, and it was one.
And that tended to be more important than that these black kids were learning stuff.
That's surprising to me.
I guess the Teachers Union and the NEA and those folks, their feelings were more important than demonstrating the successes that young black children can achieve.
That's what happened.
Wow.
So this poor guy, the editor used to be Louis Lapham.
It was.
He was fired.
Michael Kinsley took over.
So that's what got him fired.
That's what Lou told me.
And then Lou came back.
Oh, he's came back.
I see he was reinstated.
Yeah, incredible.
What year was this again?
I think it was 1985, but I could be wrong.
Yeah, that's quite a story.
Well, you have caused all sorts of waves, haven't you?
Well, getting back to your more warlike adventures, tell us more.
Tell us other places you went, tell us experiences you had.
These are things that little boys fantasize about.
Most of us never get to go into the bush with Jonas Savimbi, for heaven's sake.
All right, at that time I was an ardent scuba diver and so my wife and I of the time on our honeymoon went to Panama to Cologne where Special Forces, what is Group 7 I think, is headquartered and we went there and we were going to cover what they were doing and The Special Forces always want to give manhood tests.
It happens every time.
And for us, they said, oh, well, you want to go diving with our dive team?
Well, sure.
I said, well, we dive at night.
Oh, OK.
And well, we don't use lights.
OK.
So, we went, and my wife, who is a conservatory-trained harp-supportist, is not exactly who you would expect to find diving with the Special Forces scuba team, but anyway, we went at it.
And we're diving, and you go down deep, and this sounds impossible, but it's true.
With pie plates, you can reflect enough light coming through from the moon that you can sort of see where you're going.
We did that.
With pie plates?
Pie plates.
You lied to me.
Exactly.
Fascinating.
So we did that and the scuba team leader Keith Huber got lost and so we had to come back over a reef and this reef was in about two feet of water and three feet of sea urchin spines So to go across you had to take your fins off, put one in front of you, kneel on it, move the other one out, kneel on it, and go across that way so as not to get stabbed.
We did that and it was funny because you can tell whether somebody has been scared diving by seeing how much air he or she had used.
So they checked my wife's air.
She hadn't used any!
It didn't bother her at all.
So at that point, we were accepted by the Special Forces.
How about your tank?
Same.
Good.
But I've had a lot of experience.
I was going to ask that with my follow-up question.
Yeah, exactly.
Wow.
So in other words, if you're terrified, you're going to be hyperventilating and using up all your air.
Yeah.
And it shows on the gauge.
My goodness.
There's another fantasy of mine.
I've always wanted to dive wrecks.
Have you ever dived, and there's some great wrecks, Pacific War wrecks, Iron Bottom Sound, I think that's Savo Island.
That was one of the terrible defeats of the U.S.
Navy when the IJN, the Imperial Japanese Navy, was just slaughtering us at every encounter, and apparently there are wonderful, wonderful wrecks down there.
A truck lagoon is supposed to be full of great Japanese wrecks.
Yeah, never did that, but off Sneed's Ferry in North Carolina on the Continental Shelf, which is shallow.
It's no more than 125 feet deep.
There's, I forget whether it's the U-352 or U-354, but it's a German U-boat that in the early stages of the war made the mistake of getting caught on the surface by the Coast Guard Cutter Icarus and it lost.
And so, we would go down and we'd sit on the conning tower of this thing and watch amberjacks, which are big fish circling around wondering who we were.
My goodness, no, I would think swimming around wrecks.
Apparently in Truck Lagoon there's a Japanese transport.
You can go down into the hold and actually sit in the cockpit of one of the Zeros that are still in the hold.
Yes.
As I say, gosh, you've done all the things I fantasized about doing, Mr. Reid.
Gosh, this is, I'm getting increasingly envious as we go along.
Well, I gotta go back to your time with Washington Times.
Did you get the opportunity to go to the White House and meet President Reagan?
No, I never did.
Interesting.
But the fact that he liked your columns meant that when you called up the Pentagon, they said, yes sir, Mr. Reid, right away, Mr. Reid.
Yes, as far as I know, only two people, reporters, have ever gotten out on a boomer, a nuclear missile sub.
One was George Will, conservatism's milkmaid, and a good friend of Reagan.
I wrote a column saying that somebody in the military criticized me for not having something right about submarines.
I said, how can I write about it if I can't get near them?
And the Navy had to call up and invite me to go out Oh, but boomers are out for a long time.
No, this was a shakedown cruise after repairs, so it was 20 hours.
I see.
How claustrophobic did you get?
Not at all.
These things are like five-star hotels.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
What, 560 feet long, 42 feet beam?
No, they're comfortable.
Yes, that's what I understand.
I don't think I'd feel claustrophobic.
I guess people have different reactions to these things.
The only times I've been through submarines, they're ones that have been docked or museum ships.
Some of the, you know, I've been in a U-Boat.
There's one in the Chicago Field Museum.
The U, which is five something or other.
And it looks pretty tight, but I don't think I'd get all antsy.
charges on you, that'd be a different story. But well, well.
So, well, what, what, aside from it being a five-star hotel, what, what were your, what was
your sense of being on a boomer?
That they are exceedingly well engineered. At one point, they had to do a full speed test
as part of the checkout. And the way you can tell when a boomer is going flat out is to ask somebody
in the crew, because it doesn't make any noise, it doesn't vibrate, you're just hovering there
as far as you know. And And I had to sign in blood that I wouldn't say anything about the gauges on depth and speed, but they're impressive boats.
So, you're going absolutely full speed, but so far as you can tell, you could be standing still in 100 feet of water.
Yeah, yeah.
My goodness, for heaven's sake, no vibration in the craft?
It's quiet?
None whatever.
Well, they're all designed that way to be indetectable.
Sure.
Well, well.
You know, this reminds me of a story.
Apparently, they sometimes have to do a panic... Did they do one of those panic surfacings where you come shooting out of the water and fly into the air and come bouncing down?
No.
Apparently, in one of those demonstrations, they had some guy they wanted to impress.
Apparently, it's like a whale breaching.
And they came flying up and they smashed into a Japanese fishing vessel and sank it.
Very embarrassing, very embarrassing.
That cost us a lot of money, but wow.
Okay, well then, how about one more war story and then we can talk about maybe your crime reporting or whichever you prefer.
A war story.
Well, not too happy one.
When I was in Cambodia, staying in 98 Jawaharlal Street on the rooftop apartment with Steve Heder, who was a stringer, I think, at the time.
His wife, Davie, who was a Khmer, had two sisters, twin sisters, they were 16, lovely girls, and at the time, they went to the Alliance Francaise and spoke French, and I spoke French that would have gotten me shot in Paris, but anyway, they understood.
In Phnom Penh, it could get you a bowl of rice.
Yeah, and they were sweet kids, they were really nice.
And then when we went out with the evacuation, I know they died in the walkout under Paul Pott.
Oh gosh.
Because anybody with soft hands, as they said, did.
And for that reason, I have ever since wanted to shoot everybody in the American government.
But I suppose you can't do that because of some stuffy law.
You mean because we abandoned them to Paul Pott?
Yes.
Yes.
What was it?
As Caligula said, I wish every Roman had but one neck so that I could kill them all with a single blow.
That's the way I sometimes feel about the feds myself.
Yes, yes.
Golly, now that must be a sobering, awful thing.
Especially when it happens to people, young ladies in particular.
There's something about us men we feel particularly awful when terrible things happen to young ladies.
Well, tell us about being a crime reporter.
Oh, that's interesting.
Everybody thinks he knows all about the place, and I'm always being told how the place really are, and they really have no idea.
Out there in the bad parts of the cities at 3 a.m., it's a different world, and you see things that are just crazy.
Some of them are almost funny.
We had a call once for ADW Weed Whacker, Assault with a Deadly Weapon Weed Whacker.
Somebody was attacking.
But...
The things you see don't fit what they're supposed to.
Quick story, one night near Shaw in Washington, D.C., I was walking a foot beat with a cop, and we found a woman.
She looked maybe 35, a blonde.
She was crawling on the street, obviously having wetter pants, holding a half-empty bottle of whiskey of some sort in one hand.
Horrible thing to see.
You say, what should the cops do?
Put her in jail?
On Saturday night, there's no room in the jail.
If you put her there, the judge would put her on the street the next day with a summons to come back and she wouldn't.
This is a woman who wasn't going to live.
She's going to die from that kind of booze and crawling around on a city street.
So the cop left her with her booze and we went away.
Geez.
What should we have done?
Golly!
Did you end up writing about this or was this just an observation?
Oh yes, this was the kind of thing that I wrote all the time.
Another story I found amusing in South Chicago, the Austin District, I was riding with a white cop and there was a car in front of us weaving back and forth.
He pulled the car over and of course it was black guys, nobody else in that part of town.
They were maybe in their 60s and he said, can I see your license?
Well, no, they didn't have that.
Can I see this?
No, they didn't have that either, etc, etc.
Well, again, there's no point in arresting them because the judge would have let them out on recog and then everyone would have shut up.
But the cop knew that, it was somebody else's car, by the way, but the cop knew that 60-year-old guys don't steal cars.
So what he did was take their keys, open the trunk, put the keys in, close the trunk so they couldn't get at them, and we went away.
Well, that would keep them from driving drunk for a little while, and what else could he have done?
Hmm.
So, you're describing strange dilemmas that we cities would never imagine.
Mm-hmm.
So you were a crime reporter in Chicago as well?
No, but I knew cops there.
An old friend of mine was a DEA guy.
Wow.
So, yeah.
Were you ever with an officer who was required to even unholster his weapon, much less use it?
I was with one who did, but I think he was showing off.
But no, cops very seldom use their guns, and most of them aren't very good at it.
Well, but this was in what period?
This would have been the 1990s?
I think so, yeah, roughly.
And mostly in Washington, D.C.?
Mostly.
Then I suppose the most of the experience you accumulated was with blacks.
Yeah, there's no reason for a reporter to write in a white region because the worst you get is, my daughter's run away, she's been kidnapped, and of course she's in her adolescent rebellion stage and is watching TV with a friend somewhere and refused to call her mother.
That's about as bad as it gets.
What was the 90s like in D.C.?
I mean, obviously, you've seen, if you were in Fredericksburg, you probably spent time in the 70s in D.C., in the 80s, obviously, but in the 90s, what was the worst era, the worst period that you were in D.C.
and just saw?
Wanton violence during the cocaine epic.
Okay, crack cocaine.
Yeah.
So for some of our younger listeners or people across the across the world, they might not know this is a 92 94.
I think so.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, that was that's those were still crime records that are unequaled today.
Murder rates, violent crime rates, we're certainly heading back that way.
But I think 1994 was perhaps the peak in murders and violent crime, and then it came drifting down pretty remarkably.
And then somehow, something happened in 2020, and they're back up again.
Can't blame the crack.
Did you ever get a chance to interview like Marion Barry during that time period?
No.
That would have been a pity.
He was quite a character.
So, but I'm a little surprised.
As a crime reporter, you would ride with officers.
Oh yes, always.
But what if nothing worth writing happened about it?
Was this just to acquaint you with how it all worked?
Usually something happened.
And if not, I could write something philosophical about life and the meaning of art or whatever.
I just don't think of car reporters doing that.
I think of it more showing up when there's a big crime, an important crime.
That's the usual approach but that's also not very interesting and I did this.
I guess that way everybody gets the same story basically.
All the folks who are covering this Brooklyn shooting, they're all basically getting the same story.
Lots of curious things happen that you don't associate with cops.
One time we found an Asian guy, probably 60, 70, somewhere in there, driving around, obviously lost.
We stopped and talked to him.
He didn't know where he lived.
He had a nice car.
He wasn't a criminal, but he was a dementia case, I guess.
So you have to figure out who he is and call his wife and say, come get him.
And cops do a fair amount of that kind of thing that's actually helping people.
I think they do help people.
I mean, they got to call the bad guys, but I've almost never had an unpleasant encounter with a police officer.
I know a lot of people claim that they get pushed around or shouted at and I certainly don't like being pulled over when I'm speeding, but if I'm speeding and they pull me over, that's their job and there's no reason to get angry at them.
I think American police officers, certainly the ones that have to work in a big city with lots of black criminals, they have one of the hardest jobs in the world.
But at that time, there really wasn't this notion of all cops are bastards, or was there?
No, that's fairly recent.
Yeah, that really must have been a different time in that respect.
Well, yeah, the N.W.A.
came out, the F the Police song, that was in the early 90s.
Was that early 90s?
Yeah, the West Coast rap scene was discussing what would morph into the A.C.A.B.
There is a real tradition of certainly blacks and then a certain lefty Really hard left, white view, off the pigs, you know, in other words, kill police officers.
That was a Weatherman chant or a Weatherman slogan.
Yeah.
But that, I think that was considered really marginal and stupid and very, nobody would have thought about defunding the police in those days, but we really have advanced into a state of just extraordinary insanity as far as the police are concerned.
Well, And then once your career as a police reporter came to an end, then what happened, Mr. Reed?
I went to Mexico.
Went to Mexico.
Well, why not?
Yes.
Not enough crime here in the U.S.
I gather where you are is pretty peaceful.
No Sinaloa guys swaggering around with black rifles.
No, the narcos are out of control.
They have been for 20 years, but they have very little influence over most people.
If you don't get into the drug business, you're pretty much going to be left alone.
If you do, make out a life insurance policy and put me as the beneficiary.
What compelled you to go to Mexico and leave the U.S.? ?
I was bored and I've always wanted to know something about Mexico, so I went to Manzanillo, which is Mexico's second port on the Pacific coast, spent a summer there, decided that was good.
Somebody said go to Guadalajara and Ajijic, which is on Lake Chapala, and see what you think of that.
I did, and I never got out.
That's the largest lake in Mexico, is it not?
Yes.
Wow, so you ended up at this in Ajijic and decided this is okay and decided to stay.
Yes.
And how long has it been now?
20 years.
20 years in Ajijic?
Yeah, I wanted to learn Spanish so I went to a local school and talked to the principal and she told me, here's a number for somebody who teaches Spanish.
And so I went and we have been married for 18 years.
I tell everybody I married her to get free lessons, but it didn't work out that way.
No?
No, she charges you still?
No, it's never free.
No, nothing's free.
Ah, well, well, that's quite a story.
But you ended up, you went to Mexico and were determined to live there before you even had learned Spanish.
True.
Wow, that's sort of love at first something, I guess.
Bullheaded, maybe, but anyway.
Wow.
So, that is, well, 20 years.
That's pretty long haul.
I guess that's home now.
That's where you... Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, as you probably know, Mr. Reid, our listeners, some of them have a dim view of Mexicans, certainly those who come to the United States.
Are there any words of wisdom for Americans, for a man who has lived there as long as you have and is married to a Mexican?
What mistaken views are the listeners of the Radio Renaissance podcast likely to have about Mexicans?
If we're talking Mexicans in Mexico, I hear that they are breeding on flies, high birth rate, The fact is, if you check the CIA World Factbook, which is online, it will tell you that the number of total births per woman in Mexico is 2.17, which is 0.07 above replacement.
Literacy, according to the World Factbook, is 95%.
To the OECD, they're saying 96%, which is well above literacy rates in America.
They are not primitive.
Landlines work, cell phones work, Wi-Fi works.
I read last week that in a population of 131 million, there are 92 million active users
of the internet and 88 million mobile users, meaning having cell phones.
92 million out of 135?
131.
131.
Active users of the internet.
Yes.
I would be surprised.
Yes.
I wonder if that's higher.
That's men, women, and children.
It may include dogs, but these are from tech sites.
And the idea that Mexicans are hostile to Americans, it simply isn't true.
In 20 years, I've had only one disagreeable experience.
I was sitting in a bar and a guy, 22, 24, something like that, started giving me a hard time and he was using... About being an American.
Yes.
He kept saying, I want to see your Mexican passport, which I didn't have.
Pretty obviously from his language, he had been deported and was not happy about it.
Oh, he'd been deported from the United States.
Yeah.
Well, there must be quite a large number of those people floating around.
Probably, but I don't run into them.
Or if they do, they don't hold a grudge, I guess.
I guess.
Another thing people think that isn't true is that all Mexicans want to live in the United States.
For one thing, as their economy has improved, which it has been doing fairly well, they don't have much interest.
American culture and Mexicans don't mix particularly well.
They're just not really interested.
They used to go for the money, and if they don't need the money, they tend not to go.
Which is why today most of the immigrants are from Central America where they don't have money and have other problems too.
Well, that seems to be generally the mentality for an awful lot of people.
People come from the Middle East, people come from parts of Asia.
They don't come because they love Thomas Jefferson, the U.S.
Constitution, and separation of powers.
They just want to make a buck.
And often, their obvious first loyalty is back where they came from.
And, not surprising, religious widgets chump to let so many in who operate on that basis.
But, well, after having sung the praises of Mexico, what would you consider to be, from an American point of view, any drawbacks to living there?
Aside from the fact that you have to speak Spanish, and if you don't, you're in trouble.
From a Mexican point of view.
Well, a great many, most Americans do not learn Spanish, but they live in concentrations of Americans and the Mexicans learn easily enough English that they can get along.
Typically people, Americans show up and they say, oh, I'm going to learn Spanish.
I want to know the culture.
I just love the people.
Some people just can't handle culture shock.
It's a different place.
at Immersion's and Tom's Bar, or else they take lessons for six weeks, find out that it's work,
oh my god, what's the subjunctive, I'm not going to do this stuff, and they don't. But the drawbacks,
some people just can't handle culture shock, it's a different place.
Other than that, I can't think of any system-wide problems.
You've got all the shopping and stuff.
Medical care is good in Guadalajara.
I've had eye surgery twice with good results.
Gee, what?
Well, that sounds great.
I don't argue that it's absolutely wonderful.
I'm just saying that I can't think of any particular system-wide objection.
I know that you have written a number of books now, collections of essays, and you continue to be a regular columnist.
Where does your work appear, and what are the subjects that you like to cover?
Well, at this point, mostly I have an e-letter form, a newsletter form, And what do I cover?
Anything that comes to mind?
My column is called Fred on Everything, so as not to restrict my scope too much.
Well, and what are some of the everythings that show up?
I know we republish some of your very trenchant writing on race relations in the United States, and they're some of the most popular things we publish.
I wish you wrote more But other than that, what have you been writing about?
I take a dim view of the theory of evolution and write about that.
This current war in Ukraine, just another of America's wars, I write about that some.
I'll write about my wife when she puts out sugar water, excuse me, to attract hummingbirds.
And then we find ourselves with 35 or 40 bats at night flying around because they also like sugar water.
We didn't think of that.
Is that right?
Yeah, this is not going to change the path of existence, but...
Well, bats are good to have.
They eat mosquitoes.
I don't know, maybe mosquitoes aren't a problem in Mexico.
But they eat mosquitoes, and bat guano is supposed to be about the best fertilizer around.
Yeah, when it's on your patio floor, it's not as attractive as it might be on your garden.
No, but it's got to be collected someplace.
I, at one time, was thinking of putting a bat house on the side of my own house just to attract bats.
Never got around to it.
I kind of like the way they flutter around, but I gather that your wife isn't keen on 40, 50 bats.
No, she thought they were wonderful.
We'd go out and watch them, yeah.
Going quickly back to Ukraine, this is obviously such a what's happening in Ukraine proxy situation, the global American empire.
You know, trying to position themselves with what's happening with Russia.
What are your observations?
You said earlier, you know, we shouldn't get involved with anything.
Obviously, we are doing stuff over there right now.
We're seeing the British, we're seeing the Poles.
This is shaping up to be a pretty horrific situation.
Well, that's a long story, but I think what we did, the State Department and so on, did was deliberately put Putin in a position in which he either had to let NATO into Ukraine, which would have been a great victory for the Pentagon, or else he had to fight.
And this war is giving Washington everything it wants.
It has blocked Nord Stream 2.
It is cutting off the gas pipeline into Germany.
It's forcing them, Europe, to buy liquefied natural gas at a high price from the States.
It's got Germany buying a bunch of F-35s.
It's crippling Russia's economy, or at least that's the idea.
And what is really going on, this is too much to talk about now, but as China is growing and integrating all of Asia into one united block commercially, the U.S.
had to keep Russia from being part of that because it would dwarf the U.S.
and may do it anyway.
But this is not just Putin's meanie guiders.
It's not just Putin is a mean guy we have to talk bad about him.
There's method in this madness.
Well, as we've said, I do believe that our foreign policy and this utterly aggressive
expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union, really drove
the Russians into a corner, into a terrible corner.
Exactly.
At the same time, to me, I am grieved that two white countries could not work something out without sending their boys in to slaughter each other.
This war probably bothers me at a visceral and emotional level as much as anything that's
happened in the last several years.
It's just a terrible, terrible black eye to everything I believe in and hold dear.
We'll talk about NATO expansion.
We saw, I believe, the past couple of days, Sweden now is going to join NATO.
Oh, is that for sure?
They put out an application?
Yeah, I mean, this is just shaping up again to reiterate what Mr. Taylor said with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact.
What was the purpose of NATO?
Except just to have commercial markets for Boeing and Lockheed.
Well, and all of these weapons that we're going to be giving them, all of our defense contractors are just going to be making money hand over fist, the whole thing.
And all of the nationalistic and traditionalist stances that Russia has taken over the years that have been kind of a beacon for many of us, in the eyes of a lot of the very people that we need to persuade, all of those positions are taking a black eye on account of this.
But I'm very pleased that Viktor Orban, he came through as well as he did in the elections in Hungary.
And despite the close ties that Marine Le Pen has had with the Russians, at least she's still paying back debts from Russian bank on her last campaign.
2018.
27.
2017, that's right, five years, that's right.
She seems to be doing well.
So it hasn't caused a complete collapse of European nationalism, but at its worst, I could see it coming that way.
Although, people are now praising Ukrainian nationalism, and they're praising the idea of guns in civilians' hands.
Once the war is over, they're going to have to do a little acrobatic job to persuade, oh, no, no, no, nationalism's not so good after all, and we sure don't want guns in the hands of civilians.
No, it's really a wretched thing.
You've been away from America for 20 years.
I mean, what are your observations?
We saw the horrible Bush years.
We then saw this post-racial presidency of Obama.
We then saw the reaction to Obama with Trump.
And now all that whatever happened in 2020 with, you know, Electoral shenanigans, big tech basically censoring things.
What are you?
Are you bullish?
Are you bearish on America?
I think it's hopeless.
I don't think there's any way the U.S.
can recover.
For example, what's happening in the schools is incredible.
Look at all of the high-end schools, both universities, Caltech, MIT, and the high-end high schools, and they're all 70% East Asian.
And this is not some plot.
They take the test, they do best on the test and they get in.
And I have seen people I know in universities saying that the teachers now are overwhelmingly East Asian and Indian.
A friend of mine's daughter taught petroleum geology at Rice, I think it was, and she said that the Nigerian students are better prepared mathematically than the Americans.
Yes!
And you've seen these foolish stories about how math is racist and it doesn't matter whether you get the right answer.
That's going to frighten Beijing really, really bad.
No, we often joke about how the Chinese are just quaking in their boots, watching us tear ourselves to bits.
But boy, our Marines and our sailors and our soldiers are sure going to know about critical race theory.
Well, not just that.
I mean, it's not exactly on topic, but following what's happening now with the whole transgender stuff.
I mean, what, down in Mexico, I mean, is this... What are the schools?
What do they... I mean, this is so weird to even have this conversation of this.
I mean, what's taught in schools in Mexico?
Reading, writing, and arithmetic.
What an idea!
They're not taught to hate their history?
They're not taught to hate... Oh no, the Mexicans do not hate Mexico.
They do not hate Mexicans.
And I have been to some of the universities, of which there are a great many, by the way.
And the kids, they look like ours did in 1950-something.
They dress casually, but cleanly.
And they seem to make an association between learning engineering, medicine, and law, and making a living, which is a novel idea in the States.
No, probably no feminist studies.
No black liberation studies.
They don't believe in that stuff, I imagine.
Haven't heard of it.
Queer studies.
What is Mexicans' general perception of blacks?
I really don't know.
Some of them that I've talked to seem to buy the line that they hear that blacks are being terribly oppressed.
Okay, discriminated, yeah.
And others seem to know that they're associated with high crime, but it's not a topic of much interest.
The thing is that there are so few blacks in Mexico anyway, right?
Yeah.
It's just not something that they would be inclined to think about.
Sure.
On two occasions, and I remember thinking from time to time how strange to be in this country in which we hear about people rolling severed heads like bowling balls through nightclubs and hanging beheaded bodies from bridges.
That's all up near the U.S.
border because it's all associated with the drug trafficking.
You don't have the slightest sense of even being in that same country.
No, there's no relation between the press version and the one I live in.
Maybe I'm wrong and the press is right.
Well, and also, I don't get the impression that they dislike white people at all.
No, not a trace of that.
They don't like the United States frequently because of historical and political reasons, which may or may not be right, but that doesn't make them dislike us as people.
Yeah, I mean, I've spent a total of maybe four weeks in Mexico and I never ever had an unpleasant encounter, but that's such a short amount of time.
But your experience of 20 years and one bad apple, I guess that says a lot.
But you're such a lovable guy, Mr. Reid.
Oh, I always did.
I probably have had, you know, 20 different guys come up and insult me if I've been there for 20 years.
So, going back to real quick what you said, you said it's hopeless.
So, what does that mean?
Does that mean that we're going to see a Soviet-style breakup?
I see no possible solution for the racial problem vis-a-vis blacks.
This is very different from Mexicans.
I don't see how that's going to change.
Recently, you maybe saw the story that in Baltimore, which has many, many schools, half a dozen, when they're all black, had no students proficient in reading, and another half dozen had five or six.
Every year we are graduating between, in quotes, millions of black kids who are never going to be able to be employable.
They can't read.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, all the signs certainly point towards disaster.
I would certainly agree.
And for somebody who would like to think that Social Security will still continue to pay me in the years to come, and for you, Mr. Kersey, you've yet to start cashing in.
It is disturbing to really look at the long-term trends in this country.
The only legitimate excuse for the existence of the U.S.
government is to pay VA disability payments to people who were wounded in Vietnam.
Other than that, there's no reason for its existence.
It does have another existence now for those who paid in the Social Security all their life.
Oh, okay.
So, yes, now it has two reasons to exist.
Of course, to do that, it's got to have revenue.
That's the problem.
As Mr. Kennedy said, ask not what...
You know, I often think about that.
John F. Kennedy, in his inauguration in 1961, he says, ask not what your country can do
for you, but ask what you can do for your country.
Can you imagine even a rock-ribbed, super-conservative Republican saying such a thing, much less a Democrat?
I mean, you'd just be laughed off the podium if a President of the United States said such a thing.
Anyway, well there are things that government can do for me, you're right about that, and for you as well.
What was it like to be down in Mexico during the whole George Floyd fiasco and watching the ensuing complete degradation of law and order as our government just failed to do its basic duty in city after city?
Judging by the fairly small number of Mexicans I've talked to about that, they think America's crazy.
Well, they're right.
What was your observations?
America's crazy!
But I guess, you know, there were, to my surprise, BLM movements in Korea, for heaven's sake, and a few Japanese got hopped up and roared around, and French.
Was there any of that at all in Mexico, as far as you know?
Not that I know of.
There have been a couple of statues of Columbus pulled down by, I guess, student radicals, but nothing even faintly resembling... Well, was that a 2020 phenomenon?
Is that when that got going, or has that been happening?
I think so.
I think so.
Now, that's interesting.
Statues of Columbus were pulled down.
Well, I know of one.
There may have been others.
Well, in California, we're seeing not just that, but we're seeing the Spanish history of the Catholic history.
They're pulling down statues, renaming names.
Yeah, Junipero Serra, a bona fide Catholic saint, they're pulling down his statues.
I think what's going on is that there's a whole lot of anxiety and unhappiness in the United States, and this is a convenient target.
Well, the white man is the most available and most yielding and most full of money and will sprinkle it on you kind of target there is.
That's the most disgusting thing about it.
But, well, our time is coming to an end.
And we've actually gone over our time.
We're usually pretty strict about sticking to one hour.
But you've been well worth Thanks.
But do you have any other messages in particular for American Renaissance Radio, Renaissance listeners?
I must say, it's been a pleasure to have you on and listen to you.
Totally agree.
I've been reading your poems for years.
Just real quick, give a couple of the titles.
Are they still available on Amazon, some of your books?
Oh, they are.
Oh, good.
And what are the titles?
Well, one I like is Curmudging Through Paradise.
That's right, Curmudging Through Paradise, yes.
Another one is Tracing Through Wonderland, which is a collection of a whole lot of columns for my kids, really, but people seem to like them.
I did a couple of hardboiled cop novels based on being a police reporter.
What's a title?
What's one of your hard-boiled cop titles?
One is Killer Kink and the other is Triple Tap.
Triple Tap.
All right.
Killer Kink and Triple Tap.
Triple Tap.
Yeah.
Bam, bam, bam.
Exactly.
Well, very good.
And if someone wants to subscribe to your newsletter, your columns regularly, what's the best way to reach you?
To write me, email me at JetPossum, that's J-E-T-P-O-S-S-U-M, as in Jet Propelled Possum, at gmail.com.
Next one.
Jet Possum.
J-E-T-P-O-S-S-U-M.
All right.
Well, great.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, you now know how to reach the great Fred Reed.
And it has been a pleasure and honor for us to spend this hour, not only with Mr. Reed, but our listeners all around the world.
And on behalf of Mr. Kersey, thank you very much.
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