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April 23, 2024 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor

01:22:04

20240423_Tue

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	Everyone welcome to view from the right.
	I am Gregory Hood.
	I'm here as always with Paul Kersey today We're going to be talking about one of the more influential movies in our sphere Something that was created as basically a deliberate attempt to pathologize this entire realm of thought and that of course was American History X and it brings up a bigger issue about what the purpose of media is a lot of times a On the populist right, you'll hear this idea of predictive programming, and usually it's in the context of conspiracy theories, where they say, well, you know, the elites are doing this because they're going to do some sort of an attack or false flag six months later.
	But because of ritual purposes, they have to tell you in advance.
	I actually think it's both more nefarious and simpler than that.
	They do these things to condition people's responses.
	They do these things to manage people's attitudes.
	And like I've always said over and over again, public opinion in a democracy is dictated, because at the end, democracy is ruled by media.
	And probably the most significant part of media, even more than the actual news media itself, is the entertainment industry, and specifically movies.
	So Paul, I mean, you've seen the memes about this and everything else, but in terms of what this movie was actually trying to tell people, it's almost unbelievable how cynical it is.
	Yeah, you know, going back real quick, we have to talk about when this movie came out, it was the end of 1998.
	And in a lot of ways, I reason why we're doing this movie, this discussion is because it's the 25th anniversary of 1999, when a lot of very important movies came out, obviously, The Matrix, everyone talks about the red pill, blue pill.
	I remember we were at Blockbuster, some of my friends and I, and, you know, this is a lot of some of our younger listeners might not ever know, they'll never know the glory of this, but you would go To a blockbuster on a Friday night, probably after hitting up your local pizza place and you'd go check out a DVD or VHS and we picked up The Matrix and American History X and I remember we put it in and it was the most mesmerizing couple hours just watching this movie and the emotions you feel as you're going through it and
	Yeah, I mean, this this this is the movie that put Ed Norton on the map as one of the big actors.
	And it's also a movie that you have to sit back and kind of go back on because I believe there was just a story, Mr. Hood, that it turns out that the guy that this movie was based on, they did a they did a DNA check on him.
	It was based on neo-Nazi, whatever.
	And it turns out the guy was Jewish.
	Have you seen this story?
	No, but that's not surprising.
	And of course, they always do these kinds of things.
	I mean, if you want, it's I think it was Frank Holland, one of the guys who ended up taking over the American Nazi Party after George Lincoln Rockwell was killed, was like a Jewish guy.
	And there's always been this kind of, when you have organizations where it's sort of like an entertainment show for the media, you always get a number of characters who are in it because they enjoy being a spectacle.
	There's always like some sort of weird personal things going on with a lot of these cases But I think what's interesting about this film is that it wasn't so much about that what they were trying to do was basically Take certain opinions that were not just mainstream, but were the majority opinions at that time and associating it with certain optics and certain ideologies and certain Ideas and basically the point of the movie if there really was one was basically not that this is wrong But if you do these things it will destroy your life basically if you even take one step down this road we're gonna make trouble for you and The reason for this is because it's a very strange film because just to go through it real quick obviously the the main thrust of the movie is Ed Norton is the skinhead guy and
	It's like a neo-nazi skinhead gang.
	If I could, Mr. Red, let's go back here.
	He was not.
	He was from a middle class family at first, whose father was a firefighter.
	Well, yeah, that's how he gets into it.
	But that's that's my point, is that they set it up as basically he's a well-educated middle class guy who falls into this thing.
	And the arguments that he's making in the movie Most often, they come off like Republican arguments at the time.
	I mean, a lot of it sounds a lot like the anti-immigration stuff that was coming out of the California Republican Party at the time.
	And I think this is obviously deliberate.
	What they were trying to do was say, if you make certain arguments against, say, affirmative action, if you make arguments against, say, mass immigration, actually, you're just like this guy.
	I mean, there's that one famous scene where after his father Is killed by blacks and again.
	Well, there's another scene.
	I want to get into with that real quick, but there's a scene where I believe the the person who's dating his mom is Jewish right and is agreeing with some of the stuff that he's saying at the dinner table, but then later he you know, he does you see what this means.
	He's got the swastika.
	It means not welcome.
	And basically the idea is basically if you say any of these sorts of things, We're going to tar you with this most extreme thing possible.
	And so actually, if you hear anybody saying these kinds of arguments that were perfectly mainstream at the time, you should automatically disregard them.
	Because really, they're this.
	They're this cartoon that we're creating.
	And everybody else in this film is essentially the cartoon.
	You have, you know, the fat guy who played the, until he lost a ton of weight, and I think his career dropped off after that, who always played the fat, unattractive guy in just about every film.
	Yeah.
	Um, he was driving around saying racial slurs and everything else.
	You know, it's funny, Mr. Hood, in, uh, in a movie that was made a couple of years later, remember the Titans, he actually calls himself white trash.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, that was kind of his whole bit.
	Yeah.
	You have the leader of this thing who actually doesn't care about any of the people who are underneath him.
	The people who end up betraying the Ed Norton character, of course, is the fellow members of the gang who I think rape him in prison and are doing drug deals with non-white groups.
	And so that's like the big disillusioning thing.
	His kid brother ends up getting killed.
	We can talk about the alternate ending in a little while, but That's the big thing that is supposed to tell us how evil it is for people to get involved in this stuff, that if you get involved in any of these kinds of groups, you're going to be killed, you're going to go to jail.
	He develops a friendship with another prisoner, a black prisoner.
	Of course, I'm not sure you could even have that friendship thing now because the initial bond that the two men share is making jokes about women, which by itself could be considered politically incorrect today.
	But what's striking about the whole thing, and I think that's why this movie particularly has stuck with me all this time, is I don't see it so much as an attack on the quote-unquote far right.
	I don't even see it as an attack on neo-Nazis.
	I don't see it as an attack on national socialism or any of this kind of stuff.
	I see it really as an attack on the conservatives at the time.
	Because the arguments and the speeches that he make are not the kind of speeches Yeah, I think probably the most controversial speech that he gives is when the Edward Norton character gives a speech as they are about to go raid a Korean grocery store.
	That's right.
	that the most qualified guy is in getting hired.
	Yeah, I think probably the most controversial speech that he gives is when the Edward Norton
	character gives a speech as they are about to go raid a Korean grocery store, where it
	used to be a great grocery store and then all these people came across, Edward McGrenson,
	and he kind of goes.
	a point by point case, it's almost as if the Center for Immigration Studies wrote the speech,
	at least applying it.
	Yeah, it's not a very radical speech.
	No, it's basically saying, here's the situation.
	This is why Prop 187 went through.
	This is why they wanted to deny illegal immigrants benefits, because they took away from the
	native population.
	You're listening to this, you're like, this doesn't strike me as something that would
	be said by these individuals as they're listening to.
	No, no.
	And I remember some of the particular lines is he actually right before they're all leading this raid into a business to smash it up to destroy property to assault the workers, all of which, by the way, would be perfectly permissible in California today.
	Yeah.
	If a group of blacks went in and smashed up an Asian store, it wouldn't even make the news.
	Nobody would be arrested.
	As long as you don't steal more than $1,000 worth of merchandise, you can walk out free every day.
	That's exactly right.
	I mean, that's one of the little ironies of this is that you're supposed to be horrified at the kind of violence and destruction that takes place immediately afterward, but that's what happens every day.
	Largely because the sorts of people who thought this was a really great moral lesson for everyone, they won and they got their way.
	And so that's, and ironically, the biggest victims are probably the kinds of Asians who run these stores in these certain neighborhoods.
	But in this case, I remember the Ed Norton character, he's making a speech and he's saying, these people are crossing our border.
	They're laughing at us.
	They're laughing at our laws.
	How remarkable that right before a gang attack on a business, what he's talking about is law and order, and the sanctity of the rule of law, and how sad it is that the government has betrayed its duty to the people.
	I don't think that's an accident.
	And I think this, the reason why it's important to get into this is not because of what you think about this movie that came out 25 years ago, but this is the kind of mindset you have to be using when you see any piece of media.
	Every piece of media has an objective.
	Yeah.
	And the key is that If the wrong message is coming from a piece of media, that piece of media will not get a platform.
	It will not get funding.
	It will not get distribution.
	It doesn't matter how well it's going to do.
	It doesn't matter how much money it's going to make.
	I mean, one of the examples that was striking, and again, this is a bit dated, but I just say this in passing.
	I don't want to get into a big thing on it.
	But Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ, I mean, certainly anybody could tell you that that movie was going to be a huge success and make a huge amount of money.
	But he had a heck of a time getting that thing made and just about everybody associated with it.
	That's like all they're ever going to be known for.
	Jim Caviezel, certainly.
	I mean, his his career has been kind of pigeonholed after that.
	And the reason is because the main objective of the culture industry is not so much to make money.
	It's to change opinion, and it's to manage opinion.
	Well, and to dictate opinion.
	You're right.
	You know, Caviezel was a guy whose career was, I mean, originally he was cast in 20th Century Fox's X-Men, one of the first come up movies.
	He was going to be Cyclops.
	He pulled out, I want to say, to make Frequency with Randy Quaid, and then he went on to star in a great movie with Guy Pearce.
	The Count of Monte Cristo, which is an underrated film.
	And like you said, he was cast as Jesus Christ, and of course he's going to reprise that role in 2025, because Mel Gibson is making the Resurrection film, which is going to also start another... Yeah, there's going to be a whole big thing about that.
	That's going to be very wearisome.
	It'll be fascinating to watch.
	And, you know, we're talking about this because I swear, I'm not making this up, but there's this really interesting book by a guy named John Ronson called Them, Adventures of a Dreamer.
	That's an interesting book, too, because it talks a lot about Alex Jones before he became a household name.
	No, it talks about Alex Jones when he went and broke into Bohemian Grove.
	This guy actually broke into it with him.
	This is one of the more fascinating books written because it was done, like, right, it was being written at the time that, right before 9-11, so it's such a weird dichotomy in the country because you have the world before and then after, and the situation where American pride, you know, think about this, you and I both remember when George W. Bush throughout the first pitch at the World
	Series and through that perfect strike. I'm from North Jersey. I remember it very well.
	Yeah. You know, probably a 95% approval rating. He gave that great speech, you know, the people who
	knocked these towers down. Oh, yeah.
	And at the same time, all this weird stuff is happening.
	And John Ronson wrote this fascinating book about he was given access to a lot of these
	interesting people from Alex Jones to he's talking to Noam Chomsky.
	He's talking to, he's talking to like clan members.
	It was, uh, there were some other, he, I think it was, uh, Randy Weaver's daughter.
	Um, yeah.
	Well then he goes and he talks to the director of American history X. Yeah.
	They basically talk about what the whole purpose of making the movie was, was to insert.
	It was completely crazy.
	Yeah.
	He's the craziest guy in the whole book.
	A hundred percent.
	Yeah.
	The whole, the whole point of the movie was that it was this, this spiritual exercise that they were using to try to recondition the minds of the American people.
	And they had this ecumenical thing going on where they were bringing, I mean, it sounds like the beginning of a bar joke or something.
	They had like a priest, a rabbi, and a mom, like walking around, going to meetings and stuff, trying to do this like spiritual enlightening thing.
	The ambitions for the film were completely out of control.
	I mean, it sounds like something you would get from a PSA or something.
	And, but I think that that's why it's significant is because this is one of the, the cruder examples of something, but it also, a lot of people did see it and it did have a big impact and it did have a lot of exposure, but it's worth asking what was the objective?
	And I don't think the objective was to smear The the far right the the true far right you know whatever the stereotypical thing that you have in your head about that because to some extent that had already been done and to some extent that's not really what they portray in the film if you really think about it because the main leader that we see the Ed Norton character is not Derek Vineyard is not particularly he's not poorly spoken he's not poorly educated he's not
	Stupid.
	He's not impulsive.
	He's not, I mean, even the, the crime that he commits is after, you know, his house is basically attacked and menaced and he's portrayed as somebody who, who is actually seeing real plot problems and responding to something.
	And you ask yourself why, and the arguments that he's making are not really out of place from anything you would have seen on talk shows at that time.
	Again, there was a much freer public debate.
	So why make the film and the film exists to pathologize that type of thing.
	The other thing I think is that there's a sort of related argument to the way they go after conservatives or the right today, particularly online, which wasn't the thing then, but you see the same motif.
	The idea that the only people involved in this movement are doing it to, like, make money or to cynically use people.
	And this, of course, is portrayed by the leader of the neo-Nazi gang who's putting on the concerts and feeding young people to do his dirty work while he sits back and doesn't do anything.
	But, of course, you don't really see how he benefits much other than just sort of, you know, some petty sense of power.
	But it's not like he's a real mover or shaker or anything like that.
	And then at the end of the film, black guy kills the white younger brother.
	And then the film just kind of ends with this movie, with this quote from Abraham Lincoln about the better angels of our nature.
	And isn't it a shame that we can't all get along, which of course feeds into what we talked about with OJ Simpson and feeds into the 1990s colorblind ideal that by itself is completely out of place.
	When we talk about today's rhetoric around rice, because nobody Nobody who matters.
	Nobody in the universities, nobody in the media, nobody in politics who actually matters is going to say something like what we need to do is to get past race.
	What we need to do is think of ourselves as all Americans.
	What we need to do is actually get along because actually the educated opinion on race now is we need to talk about it endlessly.
	We just need to constantly be bashing white people as a unique problem.
	Yeah, it's a 24.
	It is a weird time capsule.
	Some elements of it are timeless, but other elements Age extremely poorly to the point that it, it looks like it's from another planet.
	Well, what's fascinating about the film is the casting that was done where you and I are 90 or children of the nineties, I would say.
	And the father from Boy Meets World is the dad is the firefighter and the flashback scenes, which are all in black and white, mind you.
	And the mother, the mother is the, uh, the beautiful mom from the Chevy Chase, uh, National Lampoon vacation series.
	Right.
	None of these things are accidents.
	Yeah, they've got this great family, you know, this idyllic mom and dad, and there's a scene where they're sitting around the dinner table.
	You know, again, the film is set, is it set in one of the white, kind of changing, demographically changing suburbs?
	Yeah, it's California, isn't it?
	Yeah, it's California.
	I believe it's set in L.A., and they're having a conversation about- Which was once the middle class paradise of the United States.
	Yeah, in the 19- I mean, that's what L.A.
	was, and this is something that You don't really I mean there's a whole series of books on on what happened to California, which I wrote a thing on American Renaissance for I'll see if I can post it in the description here, but.
	Los Angeles was unique in that it was the place for people to go after World War Two because it was the best city for middle class white guys to start a family.
	Yeah, it was overwhelmingly white.
	I mean it was the American dream personified and.
	The speed with which mass immigration totally transformed it and really changed the whole idea of what California was because it went from this is the best place to be a middle-class American to this isn't even really part of America anymore and you're absolutely crazy if you think you're gonna raise a family here.
	I mean that happened in the span of like what 15 years?
	If that yeah it was described at one point in the 1950s I believe as Iowa with a beach.
	Because just a bunch of like you said.
	And it was the birthplace of the conservative movement.
	It was, yeah.
	Orange County, certainly.
	Yeah, Orange County.
	I mean, that's not a lie, but you know, that general Southern California area.
	Yeah, I know Orange County very well.
	Laguna Niguel, Dana Beach, Huntington, uh, Dana Point, Huntington Beach.
	No, it is, it's Richard Nixon in a lot of ways.
	That's where a lot of this was.
	Nixon and Reagan, both from California.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it's weird to grow up in that post California era where California was this beacon where it was it was like it was like this signal.
	Hey, just come here leave where you're from leave your roots put in roots here and come to the Pacific.
	Everything will work out.
	Everything worked out.
	But the thing is it did.
	I'm sorry.
	It did.
	I mean the people did vote to save themselves in the 90s.
	And yeah, you think about that's one of the more nefarious things about this film is that it's not targeting The far right.
	It's targeting the people who are being dispossessed.
	Yes.
	It's the way the speeches, the way the conflicts are set up in the movie is here are these white Americans who are seeing their way of life being taken away.
	They're being victims of crime.
	I mean, two members of the family are killed by blacks in the film, his father, father and the younger brother.
	And yet, What is the point of the film?
	You are worthy of death if you even think these things, if you even complain about these things, you have everything coming to you.
	And if you take one step down this, you're going to get in trouble.
	You're going to be surrounded by these bad people who are going to do bad things to you.
	Why they do these things.
	If they're if they're so evil and motivated by racism, why they apparently aren't racist enough not to like deal drugs with non-whites.
	And why they like rape their own guys just for the heck of it.
	None of these things are ever explained.
	Yeah, it's just simply the message is essentially.
	You need to not only put up with what's being done to you, but you need to control your very thoughts, lest you risk disaster.
	And I think what people really need to take away from that is that this message worked.
	Because that is what most white Americans did do in the years ahead.
	And that's why when California did vote to save itself, to stop mass immigration, and a court contemptuously tossed it out just for fun, and the Democratic governor refused to appeal it, it got recalled, but it didn't matter.
	Gray Davis, yeah.
	They elected a Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who people forget this now, but he ran as an immigration restrictionist.
	Talking about how we're going to make sure illegals don't get driver's licenses and things like that.
	Nothing happened.
	The Democratic process failed entirely.
	And yet, at the end of the day, people just kind of accepted it because what else are you supposed to do?
	At that point, the system, everything within the system has failed and everything outside the system basically leads you down the path of what it talked about in the movie.
	And so you can't do that because you're going to get in trouble.
	So You just lose your way of life.
	You lose your community altogether and you just leave and that seems to be what the film is telling people to do.
	Well, that that that'd be quiet.
	I mean the scene that I still remember so vividly is around the dinner table and it's this bucolic family the younger daughter.
	They have three kids.
	They've got a an older.
	They've got a they've got a daughter the oldest the son.
	Oh, they have four kids.
	I'm sorry.
	They've got two daughters and two sons.
	So two middle sons the older daughter who's going to go to college and the dad everybody everybody reveres the father.
	He's the moral center of the family and he starts to ask the Ed Norton character.
	Hey, what are you written in that in that class and he starts talking.
	I want to say things fall apart.
	Or was it The Invisible Man?
	It's some author by a black author.
	Right.
	And then the father kind of dismissively, he puts his fork down.
	He's like, Oh God, you know, if you're going to add, if you're going to add... I had to read both of them in school for what it's worth.
	Yeah.
	Chinua Achebe and Ralph Ellison.
	Yeah.
	My daughter was my college professor.
	Really?
	So you're sitting there and you're watching this and he's just like, listen, If you're going to include a black author, that means that you remove a white author from the curriculum, from the, you know, from, from what you're reading.
	And I think he says the word affirmative black-tion.
	And I remember I'm sitting there like, wow, this, this actually resonates with me.
	This makes sense.
	It's supposed to.
	I mean, that's kind of the trap.
	Exactly.
	And then, and then he says, just, just keep your mouth shut, pass the class.
	And move on because the teacher is a, is a black pedagogue who ends up being actually an important moral center of the, of the movie.
	Yeah.
	That's another one of the great themes is shut up and listen to the experts.
	Exactly.
	And then subsequently we get that black and white flashback scene where all the scenes set in the past are all black and white.
	And of course, Derek's, uh, Ed Norton's character's father is a firefighter who's gunned down going to, um, I don't know whether it's a drug house or something, but he's shot by, like you said, by blacks, nefarious blacks, and they interview Derek, and one of the things that has become sort of a running meme, I haven't really had a chance to read into it yet, by the way, is
	That apparently the Department of Justice sends out first responders to talk to the family about how they're gonna react to this is yes there's an article that was in human events by the Pseudo-anonymous author who goes under the name raw egg nationalist.
	He wrote an article about this that the DOJ there is something called like a community relations task force or something that the DOJ has and Its objective is basically to make sure that the different warring communities that make up our gorgeous cultural mosaic don't go to war with each other every time you get one of these types of crimes.
	And while a white-on-non-white crime or even a non-white-on-non-white crime turns into a major crusade and the media covers it and, you know, you'll get lawsuits and statues and holidays and whatever else, If there is a white person killed by a non-white, basically the the allegation is that the DOJ sends people to tell them to shut up.
	And this is why whenever you get one of these kinds of things after a day or two, you usually get the white family members trotted out to recite a few lines about how this had nothing to do with race.
	How the most important thing is that we should all get along, how we don't want to use our loved one's death for politics, and we should just remember, you know, how he did whatever he did, and then they're just sort of contemptuously ignored.
	Maybe the criminal will get convicted, maybe not.
	More likely, they'll get some reduced sentence because, you know, they're not smart enough to actually be put on trial or something, and then you just never hear about it ever again.
	And that's just how justice works in the United States of America.
	One of the interesting things about this film, of course, is that, and this is the thing that becomes kind of a meme, is, I'm not gonna use the obscenity here, but after his father is killed, the reporter is there and he says, what the obscenity is the matter with these people?
	After they shot his dad.
	And what's interesting, of course, is that even though that's in the film, and of course the mother is like horrified that he says this, Oh, yeah, reporter.
	The reporter is stunned.
	The reporter in the film is far more horrified than that, than by the fact that this kid's dad was just executed.
	What's funny about this?
	We're not funny, but certainly.
	And it tells us a lot about the way this society actually works.
	You never really see that, do you?
	You've never actually seen.
	A press conference by the white relatives of A crime victim saying, you know what?
	This happened.
	This happened because they're taught to hate white people.
	It happens over and over again, and I'm sick of it.
	You never hear that.
	The closest I can think of is in 2020 when that black guy executed the five-year-old, I believe his name was Cannon Hinnant, and his mother said that she would do whatever it took To make sure the criminal would get the harshest possible punishment.
	But of course, then you never heard anything about the case ever again.
	And there was another case where.
	The there was somebody nobody died, but somebody fired a gun and I think the father ended up basically taking a wound and I don't think it was a very serious wound, but he was wounded, essentially protecting his daughters from black shooting a gun.
	And I think it was the Justice Report went down and sent somebody and they said, hey, this is the father said something along the lines of like, yeah, this was motivated by race.
	But, you know, it wasn't a mainstream media organization that bothered to do any reporting on this.
	It's just kind of not even like the New York Post or or Daily Caller or any of the kinds of things that sort of race bait and get their their hits that way.
	Nobody actually does the follow up on this.
	And This is one of the things that, because it's in the media, you sort of assume that this is something that happens.
	You sort of assume that this is something you've seen before, but you never actually have, because if it ever actually did happen, we would all know about it, and we would all talk about it, and may have actually led to something.
	Instead, what we have is essentially the almost celebration When somebody's loved one is killed and then the family members come out and use it as a, as an opportunity to surely forgive the killer or something.
	And the killer usually never bothered to ask for it and doesn't even know what's going on.
	Well, and not only surrender, I would even say capitulation.
	I can't tell you how many times over the years that I would do the whole meme,
	the whole thing from the Fight Club film.
	His name is Robert Paulson.
	Oh, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Looked that on and I started doing his name is, her name is, because I had a friend
	who was murdered in 2011.
	Which Chuck Pahalnik even referenced.
	Chuck Pahalnik in Fight Club?
	Yeah, the author of Fight Club, yeah.
	I remember when a friend said, have you seen this at the foreword?
	Like the spirit of, the spirit of Tyler Durden lives on in Paul Kersey when he says his name or her name is when interracial murders happen.
	I was like, wow, that was the, that was the glory of Google when actual Google didn't.
	When you could actually use it to find things.
	Exactly.
	But I can't tell you, Mr. Hood, how many times I would get emails from family members who were like, Hey, why are you, why are you even bringing this up?
	Like my, my husband or my brother or my, my father or my, or my cousin or my sibling.
	they didn't have these thoughts and they would be ashamed if their death was used to advance
	ideas that they were that were antithetical to what they believed in life and it's like well
	does that really matter you're they're dead because of the exact opposite of what they believed and
	in fact i got a cease and desist letter one time remember ron ron is like what do we do about this
	And I'm like, what do you want to do?
	He goes, I don't really care about it.
	They can keep sending it.
	We don't need to address it.
	It was a guy who was killed in Memphis, a white guy who was like a contractor, a very prominent guy.
	And, um, and his family kept sending stuff and we just never addressed it.
	And then do you remember, you know, Memphis is in the news right now because there was just, uh, some, yeah, there was just another one of these things, but you know, this is, this is sort of the point is that this kind of reaction only happens in fiction.
	And what happens in the real world is these sorts of incidents, they're regarded, Larry Oster used to write about this, how the media always calls them random.
	Yeah.
	That it's like, it's like bad weather or it's like an industrial accident.
	Well, an industrial accident might actually lead to some sort of a change.
	And even the weather is supposedly something that we're expected to control now with climate change.
	But with these types of things, it's, It's something that just sort of happens, sort of the same way they talk about immigration.
	It just happens.
	It has nothing to do with policy.
	It has nothing to do with decisions that are made.
	It's just something that is inevitable.
	And if it does happen, you are supposed to grin and bear it.
	And more than that, you are supposed to almost It's a kind of test of faith.
	It's a test of faith that you really can't afford to fail because if you doubt in the glory of the diversity and multicultural project, that's a kind of secular damnation.
	And so you're actually supposed to just sort of not just accept it, but actually reaffirm your faith and the ideas that just killed your loved one.
	And of course, on a broader scale, Particularly in a community if I can use that word very very loosely like Memphis These sorts of things just kind of happen over and over and over again But the bigger problem is to talk about them, and I think the larger The larger Sort of conflict that this movie depends on the premise I guess is what the word I'm looking for is that a
	Real social evil can only come from collective white reaction.
	There's never a point where it doesn't matter how many people are killed by blacks.
	It doesn't matter how much black-on-black crime there is certainly doesn't even matter how much black-on-white crime there is.
	Because we all just kind of take it for granted that there's going to be non-white anger against whites and it's just something we have to put up with partially because we supposedly deserve it.
	But partially I also think the premise here is that everybody sort of understands that there's not really much they can do.
	It's sort of, they're just kind of like striking out randomly and that it is sort of bad luck if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, to use the phrase they always use.
	But it's never anything done with intent.
	Even when it is something that's done with intent on a small scale, like the Mau Mau killings or something like that, or the zebra killings or any of these sorts of horror stories you would hear from like the seventies or something.
	It's never that many people and it usually falls apart pretty quickly because there's just not that much they can do.
	Certainly when you see mass shootings, they usually end up wounding far more people than they kill.
	But when white people do something collective, that's real, immediate, and serious.
	And this is the sort of implicit white supremacism you always see within liberalism where They sort of know that if collectively whites ever decided to start doing something, either violently or more likely non-violently, but through political action, the effects would be real and immediate.
	Like we could solve the immigration thing tomorrow.
	Yeah.
	If we felt like it.
	And we know this because it was already done by a president who everybody talks about as a great moderate, and in many ways was a moderate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, where he just said, you know what, we're just not going to do this anymore.
	And it was that simple.
	And certainly when it comes to solving the problem of crime, when it comes to solving the problem of quote unquote communities like Memphis or Jackson or any or East St.
	Louis or any of these disasters or Baltimore for that matter, we could do it tomorrow.
	But it's because we could do it that in some sense we're not allowed to do it.
	And it's because black violence is so haphazard and Even when it's horrific, it still comes off as like sort of pitiable and incompetent and sad that we have to just put up with it.
	And if it happens to cost the lives of somebody you care about, well, that's sad for you.
	And the media is not exactly going to celebrate it, but you're still not allowed to take personal offense.
	It's just sort of part of the deal.
	It's almost like this weird sense of, uh, Oh, I don't even know.
	It's sort of like, The responsibility that an aristocrat has to feel for the peasants.
	It's just something that you have to accept as part of having a higher station.
	Yeah.
	I mean, again, people have, have seen this movie and you don't, you can't go back to that, that visceral feeling you, uh, you encounter when first viewing something.
	And I, I remember exactly where I was when I saw this movie for the first time.
	Yeah, that's one of the most absurd things I've ever seen in my life.
	incongruent scenes.
	There's a famous basketball scene where they play a bunch of.
	Yeah, that's one of the most absurd things I've ever seen in my life.
	No, it's.
	What a strange way to set up a conflict like, hey, we're the white racial gang
	and we're gonna play the black racial gang in basketball and whoever loses has to leave the court.
	What?
	This is the most, like, civilized racial conflict in history.
	And then afterward, we're all just going to abide by this gentleman's agreement?
	What is going on?
	It's like this game was played, you know, under the queen's rules and king's rules.
	It's very strange.
	It ends with a dunk.
	Hey man, you fouled me.
	Like, oh, I'm so sorry.
	Hey, no blood, no foul, right?
	But you're watching this movie, and you're right.
	I mean, it's such a moment in time because, again, it comes out the same year that... I mean, let's just put things into perspective for some of our listeners around the world in the United States, all that was happening in 99.
	Fascinating cultural year.
	You had the... I guess it's been 25 years now since Columbine happened.
	Wasn't that four nights before?
	Yeah, before Columbine, and you had the... That was really the beginning.
	That was not the first school shooting.
	There were certainly were a couple before that which I remember it was the first one that really got media attention and there's a number of Looking back type articles floating around now usually tied with demands for gun control when it comes to Columbine Yeah, and that was sort of tied in because that was on 420 and that was sort of tied in with Hitlerism and and this kind of stuff even though it seemed to be more of a Just sort of a sociopathic We're just gonna kill people type thing.
	I don't want to talk about who the shooters were or allegedly and all that stuff.
	No, but I'm just saying like they tried to tie it to certain, the media tried to tie it to certain things.
	Oh yeah, Dylan Klebold and Eric, whatever, I can't believe I remember.
	It doesn't matter, who cares.
	But anyways, the point is, that shooting caused the basketball diaries with... That's right, DiCaprio.
	That was then shelved because they were wearing trench coats and it was the trench coat mafia and another film that has actually in a lot of ways had more of a cultural impact on the country and on people because there are some interesting aspects of it and that's the Boondock Saints which did not get a theatrical release.
	That's another one that uh and that was probably one of the more reactionary movies that's ever slipped the leash.
	I mean there's that famous uh deleted scene where they The owner of some factory talks about affirmative action and why he's hiring lesbians or something to get around some sort of government quota.
	And then it leads to this, this fight and everything else.
	And of course, the point of the movie is executing criminals.
	Of course, in this case, the criminals are all mafia as if the mafia is a big presence in American life now.
	And Italian gangsters are the reason that San Francisco is such a dump or Chicago for that matter, but maybe in the twenties or thirties, but.
	One of the interesting things that you bring up, especially vis-a-vis Columbine, is that at that time, that was one of the, I think that was a case where the media began to develop a certain self-awareness about its cultural power.
	Because to some extent, I mean, you can argue about why people do stuff, but to some extent, obviously, you sort of internalize what you pick up from the culture.
	You could certainly say that That killing and other things that happened.
	Obviously, there were certain movies and media images that may have played a part in it.
	Would they would have done it anyway?
	Who knows?
	But the idea that well, the way people behave is simply a consequence of the sort of programming we put out there.
	Therefore, if we put the programming in a certain way, we can control behavior.
	And there were a lot at the time.
	A lot of the debates were coming from you would call the political right.
	And it's crazy to remember this, but it was Tipper Gore of Al Gore's wife,
	the Democrat, who was the big push trying to control music, trying to make sure that and she was right.
	Well, yeah, I mean, that's the the amusing thing about all of this,
	trying to make sure that there weren't vulgar words or certain themes
	in popular music.
	You had a lot of times on the right people trying to control video games
	And at the time it was the left that was wrapping itself in the mantle of free speech.
	Now that's changed where it's the left that says we actually need to control these ideas very aggressively and we need to make sure the wrong people aren't saying these sorts of things particularly on social media now that ordinary people can have a megaphone however small it may be.
	But more than that The idea that we can use media and we can that media works as a kind of magic spell that if we just say the ideas that we want or we describe the cultural reality that we want, we will actually shape the real world culture into what we want it to be.
	And this even works with history.
	There was a British media Executive.
	I'm not sure if they even quoted his name.
	He may have spoken on background.
	But somebody asked the very obvious question that with these British period dramas, why is it that you see something about Elizabethan England or, or Restoration England even, and they'll start talking about how the aristocracy is filled with all these black people, or when they had the Winter King, which was a TV series about King Arthur and things like that.
	Merlin is black, half the people running around England are black, which of course is amazing because the whole point of the show is about the fight of these Celts to restore the British gods and the old British identity in the face of these invading Saxons, the guys who actually make England England.
	And yet, for some reason, like the indigenous thing that they're all fighting for is multiracial and diverse.
	And the explanation given was that we understand that we're lying, but it's a noble lie.
	And by redefining our history, we're creating a better present, and hopefully we'll be able to build that That multi-racial and multicultural future that we want so badly.
	Now why they want it so badly and whether people truly want it or whether they feel like they should want it or are being intimidated into wanting it or whether certain people want it and other people don't want it and are just going along with it.
	These are all big discussions and these this can wait for another day.
	But the point is that they see media as the critical thing to bring this into From an abstraction into concrete reality, and they truly believe that just putting images and using certain words changes reality tangibly the same way as a magic spell.
	And if I was, you know, some YouTube based centrist creator about against wokeness, I would make fun of them for this.
	But unfortunately, I'm too honest.
	And my fear is not that they're wrong.
	My fear is that they're right.
	My fear is that what is communicated through popular media actually has a greater impact on the way people view the world and the way they interact with other people in their everyday life than what they actually see in the real world, in the so-called real world.
	And that the relationships they have with fictional characters and fictional settings are actually more important and more meaningful to them.
	Then the interactions they have with real people.
	Certainly to go back to the example of what we talked about with Derek talking about his his father being slain by by blacks and complaining on the media to the shock of everybody.
	I'm sure that most people think they've seen something like that a million times, even though it's my and I if I'm wrong, I'd love to see somebody say it in the comments.
	I don't think that's ever actually happened.
	I don't think I think of because I used to catalog all these and I just can't do it anymore because it's just so gruesome and so just It's so repetitive, and in a lot of ways, it's ruinous to the soul to think about.
	And there is an argument, and I want to address what some people have said about the way I post on X sometime, as James Kirkpatrick there, and of course, even as what some people might say about American Renaissance and things like that, where you're bringing up double standards, you're bringing up black and white attacks, you're bringing up the fact that all these things are happening, and they say, well, this is basically defeatism.
	That this is a demoralization op or even a humiliation ritual.
	Now I would respond that you may be familiar with a lot of these things, but most people are not.
	As a matter of fact, there was just a GSS survey that came out a little while ago that showed fewer people than ever believe in hereditarianism as an important influence on human behavior.
	So while it's taken for granted in our circles and on X that These sorts of things are more popular than ever.
	This is something we talked about a couple weeks ago.
	We we can say we've made great strides certainly and as far as waking up some people at the university level.
	Even if people may know about it there.
	They certainly don't feel like they can talk about it and they certainly don't feel like they can talk about it even anonymously when it comes to a survey.
	So I mean that's why you still have to talk about these things.
	But I do see the point.
	I mean when you are just Kind of rubbing in the people's face in the in misery and defeat in violence and also the the masochism and of of whites who seem to to feel like their suffering is deserved and that they aren't even allowed to be angry about it.
	And I think that this film is really important because it was probably one of the most direct statements of this in an almost explicit way to a mass audience that We admit that you were facing these problems.
	Yeah.
	We admit that these problems are real.
	We admit that the consequences are horrific in terms of the actual deaths of family members.
	We're not going to change the race.
	We're not going to pretend these things aren't happening.
	We're actually going to tell you that these things are happening, but you just need to shut up and take it.
	And if you don't do that, you're a bad person and you have it coming.
	Yeah, capitulate.
	That's the message of the film.
	And I think back to, we're talking about Memphis again, and one of the more horrific stories that came out over the past three or four years.
	was Eliza Fletcher.
	She was 30.
	She was jogging.
	A white female.
	She had two young kids.
	Very, very wealthy family.
	I know Memphis very well.
	I know that area.
	I know a lot of people who live in one of the former great white enclaves.
	Germantown, which of course is the black undertow, has consumed and it has remained on its own.
	Memphis should be one of America's great cities.
	It's on the Mississippi.
	Used to be a great statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest there.
	It was removed in the dark of the night, but the point is Eliza Fletcher was jogging at like 4 a.m.
	in the morning.
	And she was abducted and immediately a lot of people tried to claim, Oh, it must be her husband because she's an heiress.
	And, you know, he, he was in on it.
	He paid, he paid for this to happen.
	All these, all these true crime fans.
	And it just turns out it was this, this, uh, black dude with a lengthy juvenile record, including rape and kidnapping who, who murdered her.
	And, uh, it's, it's, it's just like the Davey, oh my God, Davey Blackburn.
	And I remember what they, the way they framed it was that it was an attack on female athletes.
	That's the problem.
	That's right.
	And then you go back to the one that you and I remember so well, the Christian, uh, pastor Davey Blackburn in Indianapolis.
	Oh man.
	Yeah.
	That was a tough, that was for those of you out there.
	You didn't want to admit that you were like, oh, it has to be him.
	I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.
	Yeah, and I wrote that thing way back when, you know?
	And she was carrying their child and she fought for her life.
	And- Yeah, and I wrote that thing way back when, you know.
	Wrote that and that was also- That was for Radix, I think, way back a long time ago.
	I wrote something about that case.
	And I mean, again, you don't want to like dunk on these people or criticize them in any way because what they are going through is truly unimaginable.
	And I pray to God that, uh, I never have to go through something like that, but there's, I don't want to give the names for that reason.
	So if you know it, don't give it, but the, I remember just the, the feeling of physical nausea.
	When then the pastor starts giving the little speech about how this is actually a good, or like, not that this is a good thing, but this could lead to a good thing because now the criminal might come to know Jesus and how we're gonna forgive and how this isn't a, you know, we have to be focused on the next world.
	And there was just a kind of, it is a sickness.
	Like, I'm just not going to genuflect before this sort of a belief because there's a point where it's not stoicism and it's not faith to almost welcome the unchosen.
	This isn't martyrdom.
	This isn't something that they chose to win the crown of martyrdom before the Romans or something.
	This is something that somebody spent their last moments desperately trying to avoid.
	And this is something that destroyed the lives of your family forever.
	And it was done as a result of specific policy choices that were opposed by people that you have been told were evil, but actually accurately perceived everything that was going to happen.
	That the people you have been told were the bad guys were right all along.
	And you're living in the world that the bad guys made.
	And then to, to duck away from this, And to say that, whether it's a religious explanation, or what I think is even worse, I mean, because at least a religious explanation, and I think I wrote about this in the column too, at least if you have a religious explanation, at least it's internally consistent, right?
	I mean, like, even if you don't buy that, at least it makes sense.
	I mean, if he's right, what he's saying is actually true.
	But if you don't even believe in God, to then say, well actually this is still good because we need to forgive and this is good for multiculturalism or multiracialism or something.
	What are you talking about?
	These are just words.
	There's no justice at the end of this.
	There's no divine retribution.
	There's nothing that, there's no Divine judge with a sword who makes everything okay at the end of all this.
	Everything just goes downhill, and there's suffering without any purpose to it.
	Easily avoidable suffering.
	And to excuse this kind of thing is to welcome it, I think.
	Yeah, and that's the horror of the way American history accents, because you think that this character has had this profound transformation, of course, referring to Ed Norton's character who goes to jail for Murdering a black guy who, as you noted, was trying to break in and probably commit triple homicide in the house.
	And he goes to jail.
	He's raped by a white supremacist.
	Well, he's raped because he's actually too racist.
	He's mad about them doing drugs.
	Why are you dealing with the Hispanic gang, you clown?
	He's too much of a right winger to, like, To get along with the Nazi prison gags, and I guess this is sort of the... Hey, Mr. Hood, I remember when I saw that movie, I was like, God, I don't like anything about this movie because again, here's a guy who actually believes in this idea that is pretty much anathema.
	to everything we're supposed to believe, and yet he believes it to such a degree that he turns his
	back and then loses his protection. And then he ends up befriending, as you said, at the end.
	They bond over sexist jokes.
	They bond over sexist jokes, then the black English teacher from high school shows back up
	and starts to reconnect. And then he says, you have a chance to save your brother.
	Uh, he's going the wrong way.
	He just wrote a book report on, I think mind comp.
	I believe that's because that's realistic.
	Kids do that all the time.
	They just turn in book reports about Adolf Hitler.
	I will say, I mean, this is, this is also the ridiculous thing is they, and this is part of the dishonesty of it, the mixing and matching of fairly moderate rhetoric with the Hollywood over the top.
	Naziism that nobody acts this way, you know?
	Nobody gets up and says, I'm opposed to affirmative action because I want the most qualified person to be hired and then turns in a book report on Mein Kampf to their teacher.
	Nobody does this.
	Nobody has ever done this.
	Real quick, in AP English, I remember I was sitting there talking to my teacher and I was like- Hershey's like, I did that.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	I actually said something different.
	I said, Don't you think that blacks should be offended by the whole concept of affirmative action?
	Well, yeah.
	That's the point.
	Yeah.
	A lot of people will say things like that.
	Yeah.
	Because we were, because I was reading, we had to pick up books and, and, uh, I think I was reading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.
	And it's just, again, that's a great, great book.
	Great book.
	But I remember we're sitting there talking and, and somebody else read, uh, God, I want to say we, we had to read, what's the book about New Orleans that the guy who killed himself wrote and posthumously became a, A big hero.
	Oh, well, Confederacy of Dunces.
	Confederacy of Dunces.
	We read a lot of great books, but then we started having conversations about race and it felt very stilted.
	And at the end of it, I made some comments that I'm sure a lot of people, that pissed a lot of people off.
	And at the end of the class, I walked up to the teacher and I said, you know, sir, like, you know, you're an educated guy.
	Don't you think you'd be embarrassed if you only got ahead because we lowered standards?
	Like wouldn't, if you had, A modicum of sense, and you understood, like, your place.
	Like, wouldn't you say, wow, that's offensive to me, that you have to... Yeah, right.
	And that was always my take in high school, because I remember one time, I had a liberal phase for like a day.
	I was at a Methodist church, pretty prominent church where I grew up, and it was this kind of... Every high school has cliques, and the high school that I went to had this very elitist clique, where all the guys would go to this...
	this Methodist youth group, young group, Young Life I think it was called.
	Yeah, Young Life was like the young Christian group.
	Yeah, exactly. We're all sitting around talking and everyone's like,
	hey, we know you grew up in this nice suburb of Atlanta before you moved here,
	tell us about what it was like. And they were talking about black and white interactions.
	I was like, yeah, we're Well, you know, one of my, one of my buddies, he got pulled over for being black and he may have been driving fast.
	I don't know, but God, it made me so mad.
	And I was totally lying.
	It didn't make me mad at all.
	I was just trying to, I was trying to ingratiate myself because I thought that's what they needed to hear.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	I remember I'm driving home, um, getting ready for school the next day.
	I'm like, wow, what did I just say?
	And I'm like, I don't feel good about that.
	And yet at the same time, I was thinking, I bet you, conversely, there are people who do feel good for voicing this, this, this, this idea.
	There is, there is something that, uh, we, we need to kind of bring this to a close, but I think we should, we need to really wrap our minds around the idea of, of narrative and purpose and meaning because With the collapse of organized religion in the United States, and it's a whole big debate, you could argue about white advocacy and Christianity or religion or things like this.
	But the fact is, and certainly when you're in our sphere, you always hear things, correlation does not apply causation.
	But the fact is, with the decline of Christian religiosity, you also have the decline of white racial identity.
	These two things went in common.
	It's also true that the more often people go to church, the more often, at least among whites, that they have some sort of belief in religious organizations, that they tend to have more conservative attitudes about these sorts of things.
	So whether that's because of the way the churches used to be as opposed to now, whether that was because the churches were wrong, whether However that is, it's simply reality that this is how it developed.
	I think what really is happening is that people are being born into a world now where a lot of them don't even really have families.
	You certainly don't have the kind of extended kinship networks that many took for granted, because it wasn't just the nuclear family.
	I mean, ideally, you should have like cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and other people around you.
	So it's not just mom and dad trying to raise kids.
	And these days, if you got a mom and dad, you're lucky.
	And you don't have any sense of who you are, where you come from, either ethnically or in a religious sense, like you don't have a sense of yourself as What it is to be moral, where you're going after you die, if you die, if anywhere, like what, what you're actually here for.
	And so you think to yourself, well, what is, what is the mythology?
	Where do people get meaning from?
	And sadly, and I mean this totally straightforwardly, it's basically from movies and pop culture.
	I mean, not a few people have said, I think David French even said this, and he said, this is a good thing that America's Iliad was like the Avengers.
	And there's probably something to that, that for most people, the only thing people really have in common, the only archetypes people have, it's not really religious figures, but it's pop culture heroes.
	And if you take a step back from that, because, you know, you can get people to basically say, well, you know, because everybody has a certain Assign cynicism toward the authorities of the past you can it's it's very easy to get somebody especially a Gen Xer Like us or older millennial to say something like well Religious leaders of the past it was just about power man You know they wrote these books or did whatever to try to uphold the patriarchy or something like that But if you tell them that well Wouldn't it be true that the people who put out media products may also have an agenda?
	Wouldn't it be true that they are also trying to communicate certain explicit or implicit messages to make you try to behave a certain way?
	Wouldn't they want to do things that make you behave so those people have an advantage?
	All of a sudden, people recoil.
	But what's interesting about American History X, and especially as chronicled in that Them book, we more or less get that explicitly.
	I mean, the guy basically says, like, yeah, this is what we're trying to do.
	And the film is actually It's interesting because it's so clumsy.
	It's because it's so over the top with what it's trying to tell you.
	Like, we're gonna mix and match neo-nazism, like really cartoonish neo-nazism, with basic bitch conservative talking points and we're gonna meld them all together and say it's the same thing.
	We're gonna make the neo-nazis smart and cynical and Super effective, but also stupid and brutish and traitors to their own cause somehow and for some reason.
	And then we're also going to say that it's perfectly normal to have interracial friendships and bond over certain common human experiences.
	And if we all work together, everything's going to go away.
	But then at the end, we're going to have the black guy kill the younger brother, which kind of torpedoes the whole point of what we're trying to say.
	And this, of course, leads us to The last thing I want to bring up, which is the alternate ending.
	And you're familiar with this, I'm sure, right?
	I am.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, for the audience, if you aren't familiar with this, the alternate ending of the film was the younger brother being killed by the black kid and Ed Norton's character looking in the mirror, shaving his head again.
	Basically admitting that the guys he was running around with at the beginning of the film were right about everything.
	Now, What the obvious point was, again, in light of the better angels of our nature quote from Lincoln that the movie kind of ends with is, Oh, conflict is bad.
	Can't we all just get along as Rodney King said, and all this sorts of thing, which is a pretty dumb message that may pass for profound in Hollywood, but that doesn't really provide many answers to the issues we face today.
	And today it wouldn't even be considered as moral.
	It would actually be considered as.
	Almost white supremacist and reactionary because if you say we should all just get along and we should all just be Americans or even just we should all be humans you're not allowed to say that anymore.
	No.
	You know at the time when we were brought up I mean again we're dating ourselves here but when we were brought up that's what it means to be anti-racist.
	I mean I still on an individual basis when I meet someone I try to treat them more or less the same regardless of who they are but you know some would leap And say, like, that's proof that I've always been a white nationalist, no matter what, because if you're treating people as individuals, that's proof that you're bad.
	That's how much.
	The the narrative has changed over time, but I think even at that time, even if we accept that standard.
	I think that American History X is so compelling precisely because it's so incoherent.
	Because it's so contradictory because it's ideology makes no sense and yet it is also effective because what it told white people to do was surrender and white people did like they got what they wanted that whites basically behave the way people they want people to behave the way that the film told them behave that yeah these problems are real and you're gonna suffer and you may even die but That's what it is to be a heckin decent human being.
	So put up with it.
	Yeah, your civilization.
	I mean, it goes down to the it goes down to the just the base level of the nuclear family has to be destroyed.
	Community and of course, even that school destroyed.
	Yeah, his school's destroyed.
	His neighborhood is completely remade.
	The local economy is destroyed.
	He looks at his mom and says, I'm so sorry you have to live here.
	It's going downhill.
	It's degrading.
	It's degenerating into just this hellhole.
	We have to put bars in our windows.
	It's not like it used to be just five years ago when dad was here before he was murdered.
	He goes on that monologue about what happened to the state of California, and then the nation as a whole, just the whole concept of American History X. And I think that 25 years after this movie came out, I think this is the movie that in a lot of ways is more important than anything else that came out in 1999, which was, there's been a couple of books actually written about how important that year was for film.
	Yeah.
	Because again, you had a number of movies come out, but this is- Yeah, this is kind of the sleeper though.
	Yeah, this is the one that came out at the end of 1998.
	So a lot of people never saw it in theaters, so they correlate it with watching it because they rented it from Blockbuster or Hollywood Video in 1999, which is what I did.
	And just that feeling, you're just like, oh, and I actually, I would like to correct one thing because only I know this, but I did not see the Matrix back to back.
	I saw Fight Club and American History X back.
	Oh man, that's it.
	I mean, I don't want to, I don't want this to turn.
	If we wanted to do, I'd like to hear some feedback from everyone.
	My email is hood at nc-f.org.
	Paul, do you want to give your email for people to contact you?
	Yeah, it's because we live here at protonmail.com.
	Once again, really easy because we live here at protonmail.com.
	We do want to hear from you.
	And if people, if there was sufficient interest, I wouldn't mind having just a separate Pop culture, media analysis, uh, podcast, just because I do think, I mean, I've said over and over and over again, the media is a regime.
	I'm not being clever.
	I'm not trying to be like cute or whatever.
	Like, no, it's media.
	Media is more important than politics.
	Media is more important than the military.
	It all comes down to will and what defines will is media.
	That's more important than who's preaching in your church.
	That's more because I mean, who do you think?
	The pastors and priests and in most religious organizations are afraid of.
	The religious superiors or local reporters?
	Like I promise you it's the latter.
	That's who they're worried about getting criticism from.
	So media analysis is really important.
	It is important to talk about these kinds of things.
	Not to do this navel-gazing like, oh look, we're doing a close reading of whatever.
	Isn't this fun?
	No, it's not fun.
	It's a kind of psychological war and you have to approach these things with What is it that this, this film is trying to tell us?
	And I think American History X is really important because it's, it's one of the, it's kind of a skeleton key in that it's one of the ones where it's so easy and it's so on the nose that it sort of unveils what so many other ones are trying to do, because rarely are they this clumsy.
	And if you read that book, Them, I mean, the reason that it's clumsy is because everybody involved in the production seemed to be completely insane.
	Well, I think Ed Norton was actually, was it this one where he was kind of annoyed how it, uh, I think there was some controversy even how it came out, correct?
	Well, he stepped in and actually tried to re-edit the whole thing.
	That's right.
	And the director got really mad and he tried to piece together a more coherent narrative.
	But I want to end with one thing.
	Think about this.
	It's been 25 years, 2024.
	That's the year we're in, the current year.
	So if you go back from when this movie came out, uh, in 1999, 25 years prior, that's what, 1974.
	Think about the movies that really were important in 1974, and I can think of two off the top of my head.
	It would be Death Wish, and it would be Dirty Harry.
	Think about what a different country we were.
	You basically have another film, Dirty Harry, where it's basically, it's basically a film, forgive me, I can't remember what murderer it was kind of based on.
	You're talking about in San Francisco, the Zebra Killings?
	No, not the Zebra Killings, the other one.
	that the Jake Gyllenhaal movie where it was this these weird hot stalker probably the Night Stalker
	I don't know if we're getting that right but these were the two huge films in the zeitgeist
	and Death Wish was a movie that basically was a it was a Brian Garfield novel uh the same name
	Jewish guy fights back and then in this movie course was an allusion to Bernie Getz was also a Jewish guy
	who shot the criminals on the suburb.
	That happened that happened far after the well, yeah, but I'm just saying, yeah, exactly. You're right. You're right,
	Bernie, but it was taken. The point is, we're looking at 50 years in our country's history. Now you and I were born
	within that in the in the mid 80s. But you think about how weird
	it is when you look at a film, and you think about its cultural
	impact when it came out, and then 25 years into the future, and
	then you just take a look back, well, let's take a look, what
	was the films that were really pushing the envelope, and causing
	controversy and and feedback and and for people to really criticize what was
	happening with the culture and where we were. And and that's, you know, that was when john millius that was when Steven
	Spielberg that was when George Lucas were getting ready to come
	out of UC USC film school. But you had these movies that in a
	lot of ways, I think one of the most important scenes is to think about
	Bye.
	Dirty Harry, and that's a movie about San Francisco and where it was all about law and order.
	And then what we're talking about is the complete destruction of law and order
	in San Francisco to a point where they're trying, the state, the city is trying to keep grocery stores
	from closing immediately when they have too much theft.
	They're trying to find them from leaving.
	And we've seen all of the stores, all of the stores that have shut down
	because of the lawlessness.
	And yet Dirty Harry, a film that came out roughly 50 years ago, was a movie that glorified a lawman
	who would take things into his own hand to try and make a city safer
	for the law-abiding citizens.
	Damn, what an embarrassment.
	Both of these were highly controversial among critics and intellectuals.
	I think the difference though is that this is also comes from the increasing number of peoples who go to college and essentially are stamped with a certain ideology and it is mass-produced.
	I mean, once you make, once everybody goes to college, all that happens is college just becomes dumber.
	But one of the keys to all of this is that Well, let's take, I mean, this is much later and we're getting a, let's go a bit longer.
	I mean, I think this is, this is important.
	Take Bernie Getz.
	I mean, this is much later than the films you're describing.
	This is Jewish guy in New York City.
	This is a guy who shot these people who were accosting him.
	And if you look at the exact circumstances of the shooting, it was not really an open and shut self-defense case.
	I think one of them was even, like, as the guy was going away, wasn't, am I right about that?
	I mean, it was not, it was not something where, like, if he didn't unload on these guys, he was going to die, at least not with every single shot fired.
	And yet, the public reaction was overwhelmingly positive.
	It was sort of taken for granted that crime and disorder is a bad thing.
	And if we have to do things to stop this, it may upset some people in the universities or something, but these guys are out of touch.
	They don't understand what's happening to people on the ground.
	And even in Death Wish or something, and you see this certainly in the later ones, I mean, I know in the first Death Wish, there's that one comment where he says something along the lines of, oh, well, you know, if blacks are committing most of the crime and you want it to be equal, should whites commit more crime?
	Something along those lines.
	But in the Death Wish movies, you know, even the urban, he gets like black sidekicks and even the blacks are cheering him when he fights the, the multiracial eighties gangs that show up.
	I mean, it's taken for granted that everybody of every race should actually be mad about crime.
	Now we don't even have that.
	Now it's, it's sort of taken for granted that actually if there was crime, Even if the victims are mostly non-white, that's a sacrifice they should be willing to make because it's a way of inflicting harm on whites.
	And if whites are the victims of crime, individually, that's just, you're just going to have to take one for the team because frankly, You're still privileged because of the legacy of colonialism, whatever, and you probably had it coming.
	And so you're allowed to be sad, but that's about it.
	You're certainly not allowed to be angry.
	And if people like us come along and say, hey, actually, there are reasons that these things are happening.
	You need to condemn those guys.
	You can't be mad at the guys who killed your loved ones, but you should be mad at these evil white nationalists.
	American History X is kind of a mile marker about all of this because it really spells out Where we're going at a time just after you had this sort of interregnum between the end of the Cold War and 9-11 and the emergence of the security state and then later of course Obama and where anti-racism became like the new defining purpose of the United States as opposed to like what anti-communism once was.
	This was a time, as we talked about before, in the 90s where you had a bit more discussion about race.
	You had a lot more discussion about immigration, certainly.
	You had a real fight within the conservative movement about what the American right was going to be about.
	And unfortunately, the good guys lost.
	And all the things that they warned about came to fruition.
	But you can still find what they said.
	And it still matters because Those issues have only become more important in the years since.
	We're sort of going through another one of these battles now.
	No, I think we are, and I think it's very fortuitous.
	Quote Ronald Reagan, a time for choosing.
	No, well, I'm going to quote someone else, because I think that it's fortuitous that I just kind of thought about the whole 25 years back and forward of where American History X came out and what came out in 1974, and that is Death Wish.
	And I think the most profound scene in Death Wish is when Charles Bronson's character, Paul Kersey,
	is talking to his son-in-law.
	Now in the film, his wife and his daughter were viciously raped by a white gang in New York.
	His wife is murdered, his daughter becomes catatomic, and the Charles Bronson, Paul Kersey character says,
	nothing to do but cut and run, huh?
	What else?
	What about the old American social custom of self-defense?
	If the police don't defend us, maybe we ought to do it ourselves.
	His son-in-law says, we're not pioneers anymore, Dad.
	He replies, what are we, Jack?
	The son-in-law says, what do you mean?
	Paul Kersey says, I mean, if we're not pioneers, what have we become?
	What do you call people who, when they're faced with a condition of fear, do nothing about it?
	They just run and hide.
	The son-in-law says, civilized?
	Question mark.
	Paul Kersey says no.
	I think that that's the scene that of any movie that's always struck me because it's like what what are you if you allow fear and you allow just the subjugation of everything you believe to become commonplace to dictate.
	It's more than that in a way because it's you one of the things that really It's always fascinating when you see human beings in extreme circumstances.
	And one of the horrifying things, and I hate to admit it, but I think we would all kind of be like this in an extreme circumstance, is when you see people, let's say someone with a gun is killing people, and if they all rush them at once, they would probably get them.
	But they don't.
	And so they all kind of get cut down one by one.
	And you say, well, why aren't you rushing them?
	And it's like, well, because...
	If you rush them and you're the first one to go, the odds are like 100% that you're going to get got.
	And a lot of times in, yeah.
	And if you have like a, if you have a disaster or something, a lot of times people will just kind of sit there and wait for the end to come.
	They'll kind of, because in their head, they've sort of convinced themselves That this isn't actually going to happen, right?
	That it's not actually going to happen to me.
	And there's always kind of, you see this, I remember talking to a friend who died pretty young, but you know, he said something that always struck with me was that, you know, intellectually, you understand that someday you're going to die.
	And intellectually, you understand, you've seen people die, you know, death comes for all of us.
	But the fact is, every single morning, you wake up.
	And so every experience that you've ever had in your entire life tells you, well, it's not actually going to happen to me, right?
	And there's kind of this, this refusal to accept that, like, no, actually it is going to happen to you.
	I can understand that kind of fear.
	I can understand that kind of inaction, even though I hope that if I was tested, I wouldn't react in that way.
	What I can't understand is when there's no actual danger.
	And it's not even the danger of social disapproval, but the idea of taking upon yourself moral guilt when you are actually a victim, when you are actually the victim of violence, of discrimination, of persecution, or a family member is killed, and to still say, no, the way to be the bigger person here is to actually cloak myself in shame and disgrace And to say that I had this coming, and what's truly remarkable to me in these cases is so many of these people don't even believe in God.
	I can understand the pastor who tried to cope with his wife's death by saying that there may have been some greater divine purpose to this.
	I may disagree with it, but at least it makes sense if you accept his premise, right?
	I don't accept his premise, but if you do, it follows.
	If you don't believe in a God, what, what exactly are you saying this stuff for?
	What moral good are you actually putting up here?
	And I can't see this as anything other than pure degeneration and almost like a sickly, like a true death wish, like a desire almost to have never have existed.
	And I think that at root, this is something that it's not.
	It may emerge once in a while, you certainly see this in some religions and stuff, but I think in most cases it's something that is taught.
	And I think the real black pill and something we really need to cope with is that this idea among our enemies that they can sort of speak the world they want into existence has a certain amount of truth.
	They can't make blacks perform equally on standardized tests, for example.
	They can't make crime go away.
	They can't make racial differences go away.
	But they can make people believe that they don't exist.
	And they can make people believe that acting on those differences is the worst thing you can possibly do.
	Even worse than direct violence against an innocent person.
	Because far more people are bothered by quote-unquote racism than are bothered by violence.
	You actually can manipulate the masses of people that directly.
	And that's something we have to cope with and to bring it around.
	I think that's why American History X is one of the the clumsiest and yet oddly one of the most compelling examples is so important of this true version of predictive programming.
	Yeah, I think and just end just with one thought.
	I think people whenever they see it, there's something they see in the film that they don't want to admit is real.
	Yeah, it's just simple little moments where they've had conversations with the family member or they've had to Think about, wow, what if my father, what if my mother was murdered?
	How would I react to that?
	Like, am I allowed to even think about this?
	Yeah, there's definitely, it's definitely teaching you Crimestop out of 1984.
	Like, if your, if your thoughts start going down a certain path, you better put a stop to that fast, otherwise...
	You get raped in prison or something.
	Yeah.
	It's about being on the right side of history.
	The right side of history.
	Yeah.
	And again, the thing is, I think the whole point of America's Shreks, the way that I view it, is there's never a right side.
	There's never a side.
	It's just history.
	There's only victors and vanquished.
	Exactly.
	I agree 100%.
	And I think right now, the America that I love is celebrated in Madison Grant, and again, I would like to end on a very white pill note.
	Every one of our listeners should go out of their way to pick up a copy of Madison Grant's The Conquest of a Continent.
	Hands down the most important racial book ever written.
	There's not even a question.
	It's not even debatable.
	The ADL went to war with this book after the popularity of The Past and the Great Race that he wrote in 1917.
	and what he was able to do to get the 1924 Immigration Act.
	He then went even further with the conquest of the continent because he basically, Mr.
	Hood, lamented the fact that the American colonization society had failed and he wanted to
	he wanted to resurrect that. And he said that, you know, we've got to deal with the Negro
	problem to forever free the American people of a burden that never had to be a problem.
	No, it didn't have to be a problem.
	And that's the thing.
	It's not about, it's never about... Lincoln himself talked about sending him to Liberia on more than one occasion.
	One of the things Jared, Mr. Taylor, has converted me on, because I didn't believe it, but he's shown me quite a, even after the war ended, Lincoln was still pushing for colonization, for sending him to Africa.
	If Lincoln had lived, I mean, you kind of wonder.
	There's debate about what was said about giving certain blacks... We should do another episode just on this.
	I'll tell you what, we can go there because we can talk about the Order of the Golden Circle, which I think you tweeted about earlier.
	The Knights of the Golden Circle, yeah.
	We will definitely return to that topic.
	I think we should wrap this up for now.
	So I'm going to thank everybody for listening to this.
	We truly appreciate it.
	We do want to hear from you.
	Heck, maybe if enough people are interested, we'll restart the American Colonization Society along with another podcast.
	But check out Madison Grant.
	Definitely think carefully about some of the things we've talked about today, because it is ultimately a psychological war, because the critical factor in all warfare is about the willingness to fight.
	And for better or worse, the number one tool for that, it's not violence, it's not direct political repression, it's media and the conditioning of someone's consciousness.
	So, I'm Gregory Hood.

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