Dr. Wilfred Reilly on the hype around fake, racial stories and the value of fathers in homes

Dr. Wilfred Reilly, a political scientist, author, and social commentator, discussed his talk at the Louisville Forum, the lack of contemporary racism in the middle class and the fake stories that abound, the need to focus on today's real issues, and the value of having fathers in homes...

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I was a moderator at an interestingevent earlier this week. Ricky Jones was
one of the speakers, and theother is the guy who's getting ready to
join me now. Doctor Wilford Rileyis a political scientists, author, cultural
commentator, and has more of aright lean in the things he says about

(00:23):
American culture. So it was aninteresting exchange of idea as a concept.
It's got a lot of great feedbackon So I wanted to welcome doctor Riley
to the show. Welcome Wilford.Yeah, great, great to be on
the show. It's fun. Youlive in Frankfort, is that where?
Or Lexington? Well, I livein Frankfort, live in downtown Frankfort,
Frankfort, Kentucky. All right,let's go. And yeah, I live

(00:46):
across the street from the Capitol.Well that's got to be very exciting for
you all the time. So you'rea professor, but you're originally from Chicago.
Is that what you're telling me theother day? Yeah, I was
born on the South side of Chicago. I still have a still have a
property there right now. Actually,so I kind of go back and forth
between Kentucky and Illinois. All right, very good, And is it White
Sox or Cubbies for you from thesouth side of the White Sox. They're

(01:08):
they're the people's team. In Chicago, the Cubs are. Yeah, they're
they're a great team you cheer fromagainst the Yankees. But the joke in
Chicago that that's the team supported bylike drunk pediatrists from you know, the
suburbs and so on. Some ofyour books are titled this way, hate
crime, hoax, how the leftis selling a fake race war. Another

(01:30):
is lies. My liberal teacher toldme, So, this gives you a
sense of the nature of commentary.And you are not shy. You came
the other day to this event,the Louisville Forum event, bearing receipts,
as the youngsters say, and itwas just fascinating. I think the crowd
was transfixed by what they were hearing. Yeah, I mean, I've I've

(01:53):
talked I've talked to doctor Jones,I believe once or twice before online I
looked up his contacts after this thoughtthat was a good a good friendly debate.
But yeah, the topic was sortof what is wokeness? And I
find often I'm kind of on thecenter right politically and in academia. Obviously,
that's a very liberal environment. AndI think when I talk to people
about these topics, very often Ifind that the things are conventionally supposed to

(02:15):
say, like, oh, well, that that doesn't exist, there's no
movement to the political left or kindof broader themes like the civil rights movement
didn't accomplish a whole lot. Theystrike me as almost nonsensical. So when
I got through that first stage tenureor a couple of years back, I'm
a quantitative methodologist myself, so Istarted looking empirically at a lot of this

(02:39):
stuff, and my obvious impression wasthat clearly, you know, race relations
have improved very, very dramatically overthe past eighty years, or that programs
like affirmative action have to have hadan effect. A lot of the things
that Black Lives Matter was saying struckme as just being fartially untrue. And

(03:00):
what I found was that very oftenkind of that common sense impression was pretty
accurate. Like you know, thefirst book, Hate Crime Hoax actually just
looks at a lot of those veryhigh profile racial incidents that were in the
public eye for the past couple ofyears, like Jesse Smollett, Covington Catholic
here in Kentucky, you know theKaren Cases, Duke Lacrosse, we might

(03:23):
remember the University of Missouri in theSEC now. And I found that most
of them, about eighty five percentof them, are just fakes. So
I look at look at why thishappened, like why people and this is
true on the white alt right aswell, but why people were just making
up these stories attention? And Igo from there into my other books.
Yeah, but it's a lot ofus for online cloud. It's for attention,
and there's money to be made aswell. Yeah, that's correct.

(03:45):
So what I find today is thatthey're really so obviously, like this is
Kentucky where you have both black andAppalachian populations that really have been abused in
the past, certainly by you know, Southside Chicago, stay where you had
black Irish Italian kids all just competingtogether ninety years ago. And you can't
minimize that. People are paid inscript all that, So I take that

(04:09):
as a given. But today therereally is not much contemporary racism or magnic
conflict bloody in the US middle class. There there just isn't. There aren't
a lot of racially motivated beatings orsomething like that that you're going to experience
in day to day life. Sowhen you hear about a story that,

(04:30):
like clans you put up a nooseon a campus, the reality is that
that is and the hate crime hoaxreally really likely to be fake. Like
your instinct as a normal homemaker orlocal lawyer that that is fake. That
is not incorrect. You're not afool obviously, So I mean the question
is why do people do that?And I think you summed it up there.

(04:51):
There's kind of an incentive structure there. Like I'm just thinking of this
off the top of the head.We didn't go into kind of a motivational
model in the book really, butyeah, there's the demand for bigots kind
of exceeds the supply right now.So if you're making a point we need
a Black student center or something likethat that's justified primarily by the existence of

(05:13):
massive racial conflict, and you're makingthis at a major integrated university in urban
Kentucky or something like that, theonly way you can provide evidence might well
be too invented. And I guessthe point that I was trying to make
with the book is that instead ofus going along with that and allowing people
to invent the evidence. We mightwant to say, well, it looks

(05:35):
like things are a lot better,why don't we celebrate that, and what
are the real problems of the future, like social class competition with China?
Instead of chasing ghosts, why don'twe actually look at what today's issues are
opiate suicide. So I think there'sa point to the book, But another
point was that a lot of theissues that we are obsessing about aren't real

(05:57):
at all, and we're still seeingthe cases today. The claim a couple
of weeks ago is that a pregnantnurse attacked five young black men installed their
bicycles. So stuff like that Itend to be very skeptical about, and
there's a broader narrative underlying it that'salso mostly just bs. Media loves selling
that stuff too. However, likewe can look at the University of Kentucky.

(06:17):
We saw that white girl abusing thatblack student who was working I guess
as the night desk clerk at thedormitory, and so that then pulls everybody
right back down the hills as,oh my god, we're back at square
one. Oh, but the thingis we're not black at square one.
I mean, the question is whatthat actually means. So, I mean,

(06:39):
like, I looked at social mediaones and I found that a clip
was about five hundred times more likelyto go viral if it showed a white
guy in a black guy fighting.Like I mean, it's just I don't
think that's surprised as anyone. Butit's like white cop, black guy,
or even just two guys in afist fire, or like two black kids
beating up a white guy in school, Like any of those three clips is
going to go massively viral. Peoplelike picking racial sides and commenting and judging

(07:02):
the skill the two guys are tradingblows with and that probably says something dark
about human instinct. You cheer foryour team, and that's true for a
lot of things well beyond race.Like I mentioned being from Chicago, if
you walk through a working class Chicagoneighborhood in a coat that says Green Bay
Packers on it, you would getin a fight. There's just there's a

(07:23):
human instinct around that that we needto recognize, that we need to understand,
but we also need to be awarebecause of that that these individual incidents
don't really mean much of anything.So like broadly, there's an annual crime
report. It's called the Baru ofJustice Statistics National Crime Victimization Report, the
BJS n CBS. If you lookat violent crime annually, only about three

(07:46):
percent of it is which you thinkof his old school interracial crime. It's
like violent crime involving a black guyand a white guy, and of that
about eighty percent is actually black onwhite. There are more whites and they
have more money. So the argumentthat, look, we have a video
of a white guy being racist,that means nothing's changed since nineteen fifty four,
that's often just grifting. The realityis that almost everything's changed since nineteen

(08:09):
fifty four. This is a tinychunk of crime. The person most likely
to kill you is your husband oryour wife. And if we have to
talk about this marginal thing right now, it's mostly minority on Caucasian right.
And if someone like me, I'ma white male, starts talking about them
on the air, people who wantto take that side and just say,
oh, you're a racist for bringingit up. So that's why I want

(08:31):
to have you on again today too. It's Father's Day weekend. Let's talk
about the value of fathers and homes. If I say that, people then
put me in a box as somebodywho can't see beyond such and such.
And aren't these single moms so braveand powerful and one They're all great and
wonderful. But what is the contributionof a male, regardless of color in

(08:54):
a home, doctor Riley? Yeah, well, I'm glad you said regardless
of color. But I mean,obviously contribution of a mayo at a home
is massive. I mean, twois twice the number that one is.
And I mean men make slightly more, quite a bit more money than women.
I'm I'm sure sex doesn't play somerole here. But we also work
longer hours, we work different jobs. So the argument that cutting the family

(09:15):
size and half in America over thepast forty years had no impact is another
one. This is another one ofthose things that clearly doesn't make sense.
Like the stuff we hear so oftenin the arena of race relations, this
stuff we heard so often in thearena of COVID, I mean, the
stuff we hear so often in thepolitical arena that's just obvious nonsense, but
that you're supposed to kind of notalong to. And I mean, I

(09:37):
guess my personal brand to some extentyours as well is not doing that.
So yeah, that's clearly false.Over the past, I mean, what
would just say, sixty years inthe USA, we've actually seen this incredible
revolution in terms of family structure.So I mean, in the nineteen sixties,
there was what we call the MoynihanReport. One of the US senators

(10:01):
wrote this document saying that he waspanicked about the breakdown of the black family
because the illegitimacy or if you preferthe otta wedlock birth rate had reached I
believe seventeen percent. It might havebeen as high as twenty three percent.
And his comment was, you justcan't have stable neighborhoods if one in four
families doesn't have a father there.They don't have that second income, they

(10:22):
don't have that strong man to providediscipline. The crazy thing about that is
that today every ethnic group in thecountry except I think Chinese Americans, is
way way over that. So forWhites, for Caucasians, the illegitimacy rate
right now is thirty five percent.For Southern Lights, for poor whites,
by the way, it's about fiftypercent. It's close to that. Blacks,

(10:43):
we're about seventy Hispanics maybe sixty Ihaven't broken out all the groups for
a while. Native Americans sixty sixpercent. I mean they're up there at
the black rate. So I mean, when you look at a lot of
these social pathalities, when you askwhy is crime rising or why can't Johnny
Reid, I mean, again,we can play these games and talk about,
well, there's still some level ofracism. Maybe things won't get better

(11:05):
until we get rid of every lastelement of that or you know, I
mentioned foreign conflict earlier, but there'sagain that sort of giant beam and Vin
and I right, like, thebiggest problem is that we've completely rearranged our
families over the past couple of generations. So, I mean it's again just
obvious that if we were, ifwe were somehow to restore those stable families,

(11:28):
especially in black communities, but alsoin working class white communities and Hispanic
communities, it's hard to imagine thatyou wouldn't see a whole bunch of metrics
crime until on get better. It'simpossible to imagine that. Yeah, it
just seems like they're you know,there are so many kids that are out
at one o'clock in the morning andyou're thinking why are they out? You
know, a fourteen year olds involvedin a crime. It's like, how

(11:52):
is that even possible? And youknow, people give me three hundred answers
to that, But the basic thingis family structure says get your ass in
his house by ten o'clock. Yeah, yeah, it's it's usually dad.
Who if you have a wild youngson who's playing some football, he's fifteen,
he ways one hundred and seventy pounds, who's gonna, you know,
half jokingly put that kid in awrestling move and say be home by ten

(12:13):
thirty to treat her well. It'snormally going to be the father. And
again we're supposed to say, andthis is often true these rope lines and
single moms hustle hard, that's true. But dad's who are iron workers,
hustle hard to like it helps tohave both, you know. There there
are multiple studies done of men inprison, specifically men. I don't know

(12:33):
about women. A mom might bemore important there, but they ask guys,
you know, how many of youwere raised in a single mother father
absent household among inmates, and it'sit's invariably like eighty to ninety five.
So yeah, the basic role ofdad saying, you know, come home
or you know they're gonna be someconsequences that that's incredibly important in Chicago,

(12:56):
which has an even higher crime ratethan Louilale elect and I think it's globally
known that's the case the police departmentrecently, you know, under a strong
African American chief who's very active,and you know the fathers and Fathers Rights
movement, by the way, ButI mean, we once looked at what
the average age of a shooter wasand it was almost unbelievable. It was
like sixteen through eighteen. Every yearwe looked at that. You know,

(13:22):
you can't unsealed juvenile records, butyou could break down what the ages were
of the people in the car whengang violence occurred. So you're not really
talking about thirty year old men ridingaround getting into brawls or shooting at each
other. You're talking about kids doingit. And there's something going on with
the family that makes it possible forkids to do that. And right now

(13:43):
that problem exists, if we're beinghonest, mostly in the black family,
but in the past it was theIrish American family, the Italian American family.
But the variable is the same thatif you have maybe low income plays
a role, but if you don'thave that male presence there, and you
don't have that sense of order there, you live in the neighborhood where are
lots of other wild kids with nodad's present, you're going to have a

(14:03):
high rate of crime. So veryoften, this isn't magic, this isn't
wizardry figuring this out. It's justhaving common sense, seeing what the problem
is, and then being bold enoughto talk about it. Yeah, that
last phrase is the key one,being bold enough to talk about it without
being bullied into silence, which somany people are. They just go with
the narrative of oh, we haveto do better and let's talk about eighteen

(14:26):
sixty five. Is like, well, okay, we're here now, so
hey, we're out of time.I would love to get you back on
again sometime soon, though, professor, appreciate your contributions. Yeah, glad,
glad to come on pretty frequently.Thanks for having me on today.
Okay, Wilfrid, we'll talk againsoon. Have a good That is Professor
Wilfred Riley. He's a Kentucky StateUniversity obviously political scientist and the author of

(14:48):
many books, including hate crime hoax. How the left is selling a fake race war