Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Dec. 2, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

20:21

2854 Stopping America's Suicide by Race

Why I focused on Ferguson and the Michael Brown shooting: the LA riots of 1992 - dozens of people slaughtered, 2,000 people injured, 3,000 fires set, and a billion dollars of property damage - race baiting and rioting feeds the police state, cripples poor neighborhoods, and creates more and more dependence on the state and its power...

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, Stefan Waller from Free Domain Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	So, this is perhaps the rarest category of Free Domain Radio shows, wherein I explain my motives behind particular shows.
	There have been some questions about my coverage of the Ferguson situation, of course, the shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson, soon to be ex-office.
	Apparently he's resigning.
	As the result of threats made against the police force as a whole in St.
	Louis if he remains.
	And although I was correct, I did a video which has been seen I guess close to half a million times, wherein I predicted the outcome, went through the evidence and was largely correct and certainly correct about what the grand jury recently found was that there was no reason to indict Officer Wilson.
	So, some people have been saying, Steph, you're for a stateless society.
	Look.
	Look what's on my coffee cup.
	And so why am I spooning the cats in blue?
	Why am I taking the office aside, so to speak?
	Of course, as a philosopher, as a thinker, my allegiance is to...
	Facts and evidence, not any particular narrative, either the narrative of racist, fascist police force in the United States, nor the narrative of all cops are bad no matter what.
	My allegiance must be, despite my particular opinions or preferences, my allegiance must be to the facts.
	So, of course, there are many facts which I could choose to promote in this show, and I did a I believe that I acted with allegiance to the facts as I knew them at the time and remain in that category.
	The question is why did I focus on this?
	Well, here's where I get to annoy the younger listeners and get to play the age card.
	So if you're young, you probably are too young to remember or to really process The 1992 riots in Los Angeles after the officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.
	This was an unbelievably brutal riot.
	2,000 people injured, more than 50 people killed, more than 1,100 buildings damaged, and 3,000 fires were set, property damaged in the LA area.
	It was set at about a billion dollars.
	And some of it still has not been rebuilt.
	So this was basically a race-baiting airstrike on an already troubled set of neighborhoods, which has actually caused black flight from those neighborhoods since.
	So that was an unbelievable situation.
	As you probably are aware, I did a Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman video that just on videos alone went over a million views, and close to a million at the time, and since it's gone over a million, with podcast downloads and so on, probably about two million people heard the evidence as I had gathered and presented it with regards to the Zimmerman Martin shooting.
	And I think two million is not an insignificant number.
	I think that...
	That may have pushed the needle, moved the needle a little bit and perhaps reduced some capacity for rioting.
	Now, many hundreds of thousands of people have seen and listened to my show, probably over a million all told, on the Michael Brown shooting.
	That may have moved the needle a little bit.
	Getting the facts out is important because the consequences of falsified information Are truly terrible.
	So you probably know that a news station in America edited Zimmerman's call to 911.
	They said, or they presented the information that Zimmerman said, he looks up to no good.
	He looks black.
	In other words, because he's up to no good, he looks black as if it's causal.
	But the real conversation was Zimmerman saying, this guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something.
	It's raining and he's just walking around looking about.
	And the dispatcher said, okay, and this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?
	Did not ask Asian.
	And Zimmerman replied, he looks black.
	So Zimmerman did not say, he looks like, he looks up to no good, he looks black.
	He said, he looks likely no good.
	And then they say, what, is he white, black, or Hispanic?
	He was responding to a question from the dispatcher.
	Very different situation.
	Now, with regards to the Rodney King riots...
	The television station deliberately cut out the first 13 seconds of a video that was shot, and this was only the last 68 seconds of an 81-second tape.
	Well, why was that important?
	So let's just very briefly go through the Rodney King incident which led to these city-shattering riots.
	Rodney King, a black man of course, was a violent ex-con.
	He was on parole.
	Apparently he was a very nice guy when he wasn't drinking, but he had been drinking a lot the night of March 2nd, 1991.
	When he thought, hey, you know what's great if you're drunk and violent ex-con on parole?
	I'm going to go for a drive with two friends.
	And even five hours after his arrest, his blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit.
	Now, there was a husband and wife cop team of the California Highway Patrol and they spotted King's Hyundai rocketing down the 210 freeway.
	And, you know, put the sirens on, tried to pull them over.
	For nearly seven miles, Rodney King led the husband and wife cop team on a high-speed chase at speeds clocked at up to 115 miles per hour, and even as he drove through residential neighborhoods at 85 miles an hour.
	When he was asked later, why on earth would you run at such high speeds?
	He said, well, he was on parole.
	He said, I was scared of going back to prison, and I just kind of thought the problem would just go away.
	So the chase ended.
	King barreled through a red light, almost caused an accident, and then came to a stop.
	So the husband, Tim, of the husband and wife team, approached the car and said, get out of the vehicle and lie on the ground.
	Now, there were two passengers in Rodney King's car.
	They were black.
	They got out, and they obeyed the cops.
	They lay on the ground, and they went home without any injuries, without any bruises, without even a scratch on their head.
	So while Tim Singer frisked the passengers, his wife approached the car, told King to get out.
	And King did slowly, but instead of lying on the ground, he danced around, he babbled to himself, he waved to the police helicopter overhead that I guess had been following the chase on the highway, and then wandered about, was crouching, was kneeling, getting on all fours at one point, laughing and smiling, and in other ways indicating that he may not be in his right mind.
	And then...
	The woman, Melanie, she saw that King was reaching behind him and she drew her gun and said, keep your hands away from your butt.
	And then Rodney King grabbed his ass and waved it at her and wiggled at her.
	He also made a clicking sound, which is generally a prison...
	Gesture or signal of disrespect.
	So in this way, the officers were fairly sure that King had been in prison, and seeing his entirely erratic behavior, they were concerned that he was on Angel Dust or PCP. Even one of the passengers of King's ride-around later told the jury he was acting strange.
	So then they followed the book.
	The officers followed the book and attempted to subdue him.
	They rushed him, but he just threw them off as if they were the proverbial rag dolls.
	And then they were fairly scared that he was on angel dust.
	Then they shot Rodney King with a taser dart, which made him howl, but didn't do much else.
	And then they shot Rodney King with a second taser dart.
	And this seemed to work, but not...
	So, at this point, Citizen began filming the interaction from somewhere else.
	So, this is where the video started.
	So, after a second taser dart, Rodney King leapt up.
	Now, this guy is six foot four.
	He's a big guy.
	And if he's, you know, high on PCP, then he's got superhuman strength.
	He's immune to pain, immune to fear or caution.
	King leapt up and he lurched towards the officer, one of the officers.
	And then he got hit with a metal baton.
	The public never saw that.
	This was edited out of the tape that was shown to the public.
	So...
	The LAPD policy is you can't use chokeholds, because chokeholds, of course, can be quite dangerous.
	And you're also not supposed to get into a physical struggle with people who you suspect might be on PCP. Now, they didn't know for sure, but this is what they suspected.
	And so the only thing that you have left, the taser wasn't working, physical restraint wasn't working, they can't use chokeholds, and now they're really concerned that he's on PCP, so the only thing that they're allowed to do at this point is to use their batons.
	So a number of officers began hitting King with their metal batons, and if he moved, then they whacked him.
	And it was only this part of the...
	The confrontation that the TV put on the air, and this was basically just put in an endless loop on all channels.
	So they hit him about 50 times or more with their batons, and then finally they double handcuffed him, which was standard procedure for suspects that are suspected of being on PCP. They put him in an ambulance to the hospital in King, and all the officers were alive.
	when one of the policemen, I think the guy in charge, heard that the arrest had been captured on videotape, he said, quote, this is great, they got it on tape.
	Now we'll have a live in-the-field film to show police recruits.
	It can be a real-life example of how to use escalating force properly.
	Now, at the trial of the officers, there was an expert witness...
	Who watched the videotape and analyzed the baton strikes blow-by-blah saying each one was appropriate.
	But of course, you wouldn't have to watch and be outraged by the video.
	You'd actually have to sit through the legal evidence and know something about the law.
	Now, just about everyone who saw the full tape rather than the edited tape said that it completely changed their perception of violence.
	The incident.
	240 pounds, 6 foot 4, Rodney King, rising up and charging at the officer.
	Well, that did...
	And the fact that they didn't know that they'd already tried to subdue him physically and that there was no harm had come to his fellow black passengers and so on.
	One of my favorite economists, Walter Williams, who happens to be black, watched a two-hour summary of the trial on video and denounced, quote, the news media's dereliction and deception, unquote, in its presentation of the tape.
	Now, just as happened with Ferguson, the president weighed in and the mayor of Los Angeles said that the officers were guilty of a crime.
	And after the first verdict where they were not found guilty, he said, quote, the jury told the world that what we all saw with our own eyes was not a crime.
	And after a few days into the L.A. riots, George Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office and said, quote, it was hard to understand how the verdict could possibly square with the video.
	Those civil rights leaders with whom I met were stunned, and so was I, and so was Barbara, and so were my kids.
	Rodney King, at the time, did not feel, did not believe or think that his race was in any way a factor in the beatdown.
	In the second trial, he suddenly recalled hearing the officers call him a nigger, and so both the juries, at the first trial, both juries, the police and Rodney King said it had nothing to do with race.
	Of course, King, just like Michael Brown, was called a gentle giant on his way to college.
	King was called a black motorist, not a drunk, violent ex-con leading police on a dangerous high-speed chase.
	To be clear, Michael Brown was not an ex-con or anything like that.
	So I'll just give you one example of what happened in the Los Angeles riots after the acquittal.
	A white truck driver, Reginald Denny, was cruising through in his 18-wheeler and he just went into the middle of the mayhem.
	He didn't really know what was going on.
	He wasn't listening to the news, but to country music.
	And rioters smashed his passenger window with a rock, dragged him from the car, and beat him to a pulp.
	One guy stood on Denny's neck.
	The other thugs kicked and stomped him.
	They smashed his head in with a claw hammer and they threw a five-pound oxygenator at his head.
	One man picked up a slab of concrete and heaved it directly on Denny's head, knocking him unconscious for five minutes and fracturing his skull in 91 places.
	The man then did a victory dance around the body.
	Pointed at the body and flashed gang signs to a hovering news chopper.
	You can find this footage online, I'm sure.
	Other rioters took photos of the smashed up body of Denny, spat on him and stole his wallet.
	One black guy stopped on his motorcycle, fired a shotgun at the gas tank on Denny's truck.
	Did not hit.
	A very brave man named Bobby Green, who was also a black truck driver who lived in the neighborhood.
	He saw the beating on TV, of course recognized that it was right outside, and rushed out in the street to rescue him.
	With the help of three other blacks running interference in their cars, Green drove Denny's truck with Denny in it to a hospital.
	They got there just in time.
	He went into a seizure as soon as they arrived.
	Now this is what is called an injury of the thousands of injuries that occurred.
	And there were some very brave black men.
	One black minister threw himself on a man's body that was being desecrated and told the crowd, kill him and you'll have to kill me too.
	So, the rioters even attacked a carload of nuns.
	54, 55, 56, nobody can count, people were injured in the riots.
	And this race-baiting narrative is unbelievably dangerous.
	Entire neighborhoods can be destroyed.
	Economic futures can be wrecked.
	People can be slaughtered, maimed, mutilated, brutalized.
	And it is an incredibly dangerous thing.
	If you are against the growth of the power of the state, as I am, then race-baiting, fomenting riots, is a fantastic way to expand the power of the state.
	The state uses the riots to increase police militarization, and at a more subtle level, this race-baiting, this racial discrimination narrative, Which falls flat in the face of the fact that Asians tend to do better than whites in a white racist society.
	In 92, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston produced a now famous study which said, Aha!
	Blacks are being discriminated against in mortgage lending.
	The study was completely ridiculous, full of massive errors.
	And once these errors and math errors and...
	I mean, they said that some loans require the banks to pay interest to the borrowers.
	That's how bad it was.
	Once all these errors were removed and corrected, there was no evidence of discrimination against blacks.
	But, of course, because the narrative clicked right into the America is a racist, fascist state, the Federal Reserve went and imposed unbelievably suicidal mortgage lending policies on banks.
	I mean, just the new guidelines said that banks have got to stop requiring borrowers to have a credit history.
	That banks have to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as down payments.
	In other words, you want to buy a house, the only down payment you have is your unemployment benefits.
	So, go ahead.
	Now, the government is forcing banks to lend to people to correct this supposed racism in mortgage lending.
	And this, of course, I mean, a lot of blacks want to get out of bad neighborhoods, partly because they want to get their kids to better schools.
	It's a whole other issue.
	But this is one of the reasons why the housing crisis triggered the financial crisis, which has triggered a 40 percent destruction of America's wealth and a massive undercut of the middle class.
	So if the race baiting narrative is also responsible for the financial crash in the United States that has caused so much unbelievable suffering, then we really do have to oppose the race baiting narrative with facts.
	With facts!
	In the Los Angeles area, even 20 years, almost 20 years after the riots, unemployment for Latinos and blacks was worse than it was in 1992.
	The big box stores generally moved out, generally don't go back.
	The stores that are destroyed generally don't get insurance, because insurance doesn't cover insurrection, riots, act of war, and so on, right?
	So...
	When riots kill jobs, when riots kill investment into poorer communities, more people end up dependent on the state, which grows the power of the state.
	They tend to vote for more benefits from the state.
	And of course, since the government can't possibly continue in its current path of massive amounts of welfare lending, it can't last.
	And therefore, the more people who are dependent on the state, the worse it's going to be when the state runs out of money.
	I mean, we've got food stamps, free school breakfasts, the government schools themselves, lunch programs, special supplemental nutrition programs for women, infants and children, free and subsidized and rent-controlled housing for the poor, free medical care for the poor, direct cash payments for the poor, hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
	To the point now where the biggest problem among poor people is obesity.
	I mean, one of the biggest problems.
	This can't last.
	And when the money runs out, the more people who are dependent upon the state, the worse the transition is going to be.
	So I think it's important to point out the facts.
	I have an allegiance to the facts.
	I also have an allegiance to supplying whatever alternative media muscle I can to pushing back, to pushing back against the race-baiting narrative that is incredibly harmful to blacks, is incredibly harmful to the poor, and is incredibly beneficial to those and is incredibly beneficial to those who wish to grow state power.
	So I am opposing the state when I am opposing the race-baiting narrative because setting us all at odds against each other is something that our political masters fundamentally have a strong incentive to do.
	Because when we're focusing on race-baiting narratives and getting all outraged and talking about it, we're not talking about other things that are fundamentally significant about how the society works.
	As the old saying goes, if you can get people to ask the wrong questions, nobody cares.
	The people in power don't care about the answers.
	So yes, I'm going to supply whatever muscle I can to push back against this narrative.
	I am not pro-cop.
	I am pro-facts.
	And I am anti-state.
	I would like there to be no government.
	Let me be very clear about this.
	Over the next few generations, I would like to work peacefully towards a stateless society.
	That is my goal.
	That is my plan.
	Denying the facts, encouraging race-baiting is the exact opposite direction of that, which is why I spend time focusing on these issues.
	I hope that that makes some sense.
	Please, of course, feel free to give me your comments below.

▲