Ep. 1452 - Matt Walsh Sits Down With "Hate Crime Hoax" Author
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All right, we're joined by Wilford Riley. He's a college professor, author of the book Hate Crime Hoax, How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War. But if you've seen the new film, Am I Racist?, playing now in theaters, get tickets at amiracist.com, then you also know him as one of the only voices of sanity in the movie. In fact, of the, I guess we'd say, expert class, the academics and so on that we talked to, the only voice of sanity in that group.

And the two of us went head-to-head in an intellectual bout in that film, a bout that I'm sorry to say I probably lost, I can now admit. But he's here now. Wilford, great to see you again. Yeah, great to be on the show, Matt. So I wanted to talk about a lot of several different things, issues that the movie deals with and that you've dealt with a lot in your career, that your book deals with. But before we get into any of that,

This is sort of a unique opportunity to interview someone else about my own movie, which is interesting. Because there are things about the scene that we recorded together, that we filmed together, that I actually don't know from your perspective. Because I wasn't involved in the booking side of things. So here's my question. I know that you knew who I was because we had followed each other on Twitter for probably years before this. But...

That's all I know about your perspective on this. So what was kind of like going through your mind when we were sparring back and forth and I was in my dumb wig? What was that from your perspective? I mean, I assumed that we were doing a sort of Borat style setup. I mean, I think we're both offhand pretty funny. I mean, so it was just being aware of that, but also sincerely answering the questions. I mean, they were good questions, actually. How many hate

crimes are there per year? Is there a wave of interracial or hate crime that's certainly white on black, but even that's black on white? Is that going on? Those are things that are really out there in the discourse. And it was really interesting to respond as kind of the conservative consultant to that. But I mean, when you came in, it's pretty obvious this is Matt Walsh in a wig.

as someone who's in a right-leaning business space. So you kind of know what this is. And that was my assumption. But you just go along with it. The theme was great for the movie. What did you think of the wig? Because Robin DiAngelo says it was ill-fitting. I thought it fit pretty well. I mean, it's an expensive wig. The wig's getting a hard time from the audience. So you didn't buy the wig at all?

Well, I mean, I didn't buy the wig because I knew it was you. I mean, you often can tell. I could have grown my hair out for all you know. Yeah, but it was, it did not look like that was what had happened. It wasn't a bad wig, actually. I mean, I read Robin DiAngelo's response, which is called something like, about that movie. Um.

And I think there's a kind of attempt to downplay how silly she ended up looking in the movie. I mean, as everyone in the audience now knows, she paid reparations to one of the guys just on the Daily Wire staff. I think Ben, I mean, she reaches in her purse to give him $30 or something like that. So when you're exposed like this, she ended up deleting her own Twitter. You're probably going to throw out as many criticisms as possible. I thought the wig was good, but it didn't make me think that you were somebody else. No. Yeah.

All right. I'll take that as a C plus. We'll give it a C plus. C plus wig. Have you gotten, what's the reaction been like in your own life to people that maybe have seen the movie? Have you gotten recognized at all? Anything like that? Yeah, I've been

I've gotten recognized a few times. I live in the Kentucky state Capitol, which is a small city, but where, I mean, the state house is a block down the street. National politicians will often come there to negotiate deals and so on. So like the gym I go to occasionally has this semi famous people wandering around and

And in environments like that, I sometimes get recognized. That's happened more after the movie. But no one's particularly impressed. It's the kind of environment where everyone would pretend not to be, even if they were. So it's just like, oh, you're that guy. The reaction I've gotten on Twitter and Facebook from the audience in general has been very positive, actually, overall.

Because I think the thing with both of your films, both of which I've watched, was that most people in the quote unquote expert class end up looking like idiots, which is obviously one of the points of the movie. I mean, in What is a Woman? There's very famously some kind of academic that compares humans to chickens and says, well, sure, you can sex a chicken. You know, a female has a cloaca, but does a chicken commit suicide? Does a chicken cry? Right.

And there was a lot of that in this movie as well. The Moana scene sticks in mind. So, I mean, most people that saw me were kind of just like, oh, that's that guy on Twitter that, you know, teaches and does consulting and so on down the line. He seems pretty normal, which which was good. I think that would be an advantage you'd have if you were coming from the right, which I think is where the correct position on this dwells in in a piece like that. So the reaction has been good.

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It's also refreshing because by the time that you appear in the film, we've heard so much nonsense. And then to get just like someone saying things that are obviously true, I think it's very refreshing. You can kind of feel that in the theater. It's almost like a breath of fresh air to just have someone have a little glimmer of light in the midst of all that. I think that's also happening there.

Well, I think we all feel that way sometimes just as middle class or upper middle class citizens. Like I even I sometimes as someone who's in this field wonder, like, could I be wrong about these obvious things? There seems to be such a mass of people that are saying absolutely crazy stuff like men can be women.

I think that's the obvious one. But just going on beyond that, I mean, during COVID, not learning, and you see a little bit of this on the right, too, but not learning and not studying doesn't affect your performance on IQ tests. Just things that seem objectively insane. America is one of the most racially fraught countries on earth, and you go to a high school football game. So there's this presentation that almost everyone seems to be nodding along to that's obviously

obviously not real. And that creates a real dichotomy in the minds of many people. I mean, the equivalent would be hundreds of years ago being taught a false version of religion or some bizarre heresy by the government and being forced to go along with this. I think that's a very close parallel. And then I suppose most people did as well. You wouldn't want the punishments that came along with rejecting it. But I mean, I think that there's

and this is, I guess, a message almost for the audience, like there's a facility of logic that human beings have. It's one of the first classes you take at any decent college, including my own. And,

And it's this ability to logically analyze that makes it possible to serve on juries and question professional prosecutors, to write op-eds that go to a major local paper that 100,000 people read, to submit to what we call interdisciplinary journals. As an academic who's fairly good, I can write in any field if I'm willing to take criticism. That comes from an inherent ability humans have. So when you see people saying things that are nonsense—

And you yourself are not an idiot. You're a country lawyer, a housewife with six kids, or someone else who has responsibility in your life. The question isn't, am I going crazy? It's, why is this person saying something that's objectively not real? And that's a fascinating question. And it's a very tough question to answer. But I think that when someone says, and we've probably both been in this role, but when someone says, look, what you're saying just isn't true, how do you know that

People are male or female. I mean, the comedic analysis is what we use for horses in Kentucky. Like when someone says something like that, I do think that people often sort of gasp and say, yes, thank God that's true. And then you return to the question of why are people saying the thing that's false, which is interesting to me. Yeah, I think that segues into my question as we move away from the movie itself and some of the issues that it addresses. Why do you think

People like Robin DiAngelo and her ilk, what I would call the race hustlers, how do they get to a point of such cultural power in your view, given that when you actually sit down and talk to Robin DiAngelo, as I obviously have, or you read her book, as unfortunately I did, it's so vapid. It's so ridiculous. I actually picked up her book and I read it

Almost hoping for my own sake, because I have to read this whole damn thing, hoping that maybe I'd find a couple of interesting insights in there. Maybe there'd be a few moments where I could say, okay, well, that was an interesting point, or she has a point there. And what I found is, honest to God, that didn't happen a single time. It was just utter drivel. And yet she, and this is changing now for her for a couple of different reasons, but she got to a point of great cultural influence and power there.

And people like her, Ibram X. Kendi being another one before his downfall. So how does that happen? How do they get to this point? It's a fascinating question. I mean, that might be the topic of my next book, depending on what the publisher's offers look like. It's going to be either that or a book called Panda Bears about why young people can't seem to mate and marry. But I mean, your show actually played a role in inspiring that title. It's great. They're both great. Yeah.

Yeah, the panda bears one would be funny. I mean, and that actually is one where I would go do interviews and things like that. I mean, I read recently that, don't overstate this, but 47% of young men, this is true across Republicans, Democrats, Christians, other faiths, whatever, have never asked a woman on a date. Young men goes up to 25. So there's a lot of criticism of feminism and the like, and some of that's legitimate, but there's also, you're failing in the most basic kind of male role in that situation, which Fox has managed to figure out.

So why? And I wanna sit down with a panel of guys and a panel of women,

And possibly even have my fiance host that one and just go and ask them. And I'm genuinely curious. But to answer your question, which is why is nonsense prevalent? First of all, I think it's important to realize that the default for humans isn't sharp wit in a capitalist liberal democracy. This, I think, is one of the points that Tom Sowell made over the years that was so important. That the default for humanity in Europe and West Africa and China everywhere was grinding poverty under a cane.

You know, and part of that generally was believing nonsense. I don't mean to single out any one religion, but I mean, I don't believe that traditional Hindu theology happens to be accurate. I mean, I would assume that in thousands of traditional schools across the great nation of India, people are taught this. It's assumed that there is an instrumental social value to them learning it and people believe it.

The idea that people believe things that may or may not be true, the traditional hierarchy of the races when that was perhaps necessary to justify conquest, so on down the line, that's nothing new. That's a constant. Why do people believe that? Because there's a tendency on the part of people, and I don't even know if believe is the word, but to obey the things that are told to them by reasonably competent leaders in order to get along in society.

The deeper question, though, is why this particular mythology took off. The anti-racist and queer theory, all of the... I'm kind of stumbling here, but all the stuff that we see now, I think that there are a number of reasons why.

declining belief in anything traditional is one of them. But a big one simply is that this stuff to me, all the downroad Marxist stuff is an endemic disease of capitalist competitive society.

When you see what's a pretty fair system, like American SAT testing, produce wildly disparate results. Or last year, Native Americans brought up the rear, got a 9-12. Asians were ahead of everyone, including whites, with a 12-50. When you see a gap like that, it's very tempting to think that the fair system is, in fact, unfair and start coming up with explanations as to why.

So Candy and D'Angelo actually have a very simple kind of bear trap mythology that they've made up that's incredibly tempting to midwits.

And the idea is basically there are two possible explanations for large group differences in performance. One is genetic inferiority, which nobody really wants to believe in. People might accept that there are 2% differences in mathematical ability or foot speed or something. But no one wants to believe that causes the 300-point gap, and it almost certainly doesn't. But the other alternative, according to them, is racism.

So Kendi will just ask during his presentation, which do you believe? Do you believe there's something wrong with black people and no hands go up? Do you believe that it has to be systems that every hand goes up? The reality, of course, is that there are dozens of things in between like culture. But I think in our society, we're a diverse society that produces strengths and weaknesses.

We're looking at these very large gaps. And this crap provided an instrumental explanation for these gaps that wasn't as awkward as single mothers are likely to produce failures as sons or study time is critical for performance on tests. You could simply say this, and this became very popular. And because it involved kind of uplifting people, it became a quasi-religion for a lot of Americans. I think that's kind of the three-part process there.

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Switching easy. Essentially, all wireless companies should be like Pure Talk, but unfortunately they're not. So you should switch right now. And if you do at puretalk.com slash Walsh, you can also get one year free of Daily Wire Plus, where you can stream What Is A Woman for free and watch me debunk yet another myth.

Support Pure Talk, a wireless company who wants to be a wireless company and nothing more. And here's the kicker. They also support the same values you do. And remember, it takes courage to stand for your values and takes even more to stand against those who try to silence you. PureTalk.com slash Walsh. That's PureTalk.com slash Walsh. And also, I wonder if this is part of it. The going with the racism explanation also means that you don't have to actually do anything about it.

Because ultimately it's a non-fixable situation. I mean, they say America's inherently racist. I asked Robin DiAngelo in the movie, is it even possible to be not racist? She says, well, in any given moment, you can be less racist or more racist, talking about white people, of course.

But you can never be not racist. And even her, as you say, mythology, which is the way of putting it, it's like in any given moment, your racism fluctuates wildly, which is if you believe that is quite hopeless. So I wonder if part of it also is if you chalk it up to even though they have their ideas for policies and laws and all that kind of stuff. But really, if you chalk it up to racism, then you don't actually have to do anything about it. And certainly on the individual level.

There's not anything any individual person really needs to do because you're just kind of waiting around for the system to fix it, which it never will.

Well, first of all, I think that last point is extremely important. When you get into left-wing ideas or contemporary left-wing ideas, this is a fair way to put it, about racism, even about environmentalism, what they're doing is changing the definition of the thing so that you can't improve yourself and fix 90% of the thing. So, I mean, you know, I pick up my trash, you know, I go camping, I fish, I hate people that throw junk on the ground. That to me is what environmental concern is.

If you go out in the woods, you take a shovel, you clean your stuff up. That's not what environmental activism means if you've ever read anything current from Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. They start by talking about large systems led by the USA in the West and China in the East that rely on models of late capitalism.

Environmentalism becomes sort of a vague concern about the world that you can displace your empathy onto. It's the same thing with racism. Racism is individual dislike of other races in the quantitative social sciences where we actually have to conclude things or get fired. That's what it means. You can measure it quite easily on a one to 10 scale. How warm do you feel toward interracial marriage?

I'd say about a seven. I don't really care what people do. I may have a very slight preference for my own group, but you can measure that. Most people have taken tests of this kind. But that's not what Ibram Kendi means by racism. What he means by racism, as closely as I can parse out, is any system that produces disparate results between any groups, most of which results can never be fixed because, in fact, the cause isn't racism. So you're right about that. So racism becomes sin would be a good way to think about it.

Like if you're born into certain groups, you're capable of racism. And if you're born into other groups, although you can be equally prejudiced, you're not. So your job is not just being less racist, hiring 10% black guys on the job site. It is recognizing the sin within yourself, apologizing, shaming yourself in public meetings. And it's easy to see why this appeals to a certain kind of masochistic, perhaps especially female upper middle class person.

In my opinion. Yeah, you said something there. You answered a question I was going to ask a few questions down the line, which is, what is racism? And you gave a definition there that I also... That's the definition I would give because it's pretty simple and straightforward. It seems intuitively correct. I think it's how everybody would have defined racism up until very recently. But...

That's one of the interesting things in making the movie, Am I Racist?, is that we could have actually called the movie What Is Racism? There's a whole other movie we could have made where I'm only going around and asking that question to these race activists. They're anti-racist. They define themselves as anti-racist. Well, what even is racism? And that is a question that I did ask in the course of many of these interviews, and we

And it was a very what is a woman like experience where they didn't want to answer it. And I was a little surprised by that. I thought that I knew they wouldn't give the answer to racism that you just gave. I knew they'd have a different definition, but I thought they'd have a definition ready to go. But they didn't. They really didn't want to be nailed down to have to give any kind of discernible definition for what racism is. I mean, what do you make of that?

Well, what I make of that is that a lot of these people are grifters that want to call everything racist. I mean, so when you see so again, just common sense for the audience, when you see someone engaging in behavior that looks kind of grifty, that doesn't seem to make a lot of coherent sense, there are essentially two possibilities. One is that you've encountered a genius that is substantially smarter than your own 115 or whatever IQ, and you just can't understand this genius.

brilliant, venerable, bead-level individual. And the other thing is that you're being BS'd and it's exactly what you think it might be that happens to be going on. Very frequently, I don't want to give an R-rated example here, but I was reading...

The joke here would be, you know, every day I read 20 pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, the Holy Quran or Karl Marx, know your enemy. But I actually did glance at an issue of Cosmo that people were debating online. And one of the articles a couple of months ago was titled, men are making women orgasm as much as vice versa now. Here's why that's bad.

And the subtitle was, so your husband really cares about pleasing you. Of course he does. It's all about him. And this feminist author went on to explain about how men are competitive, aggressive creatures and we're still brutes and so on. And I mean, I was reading this and laughing, but I could easily imagine multiple ex-partners from that Chicago legal and sales floor world actually taking this quite seriously. So the framework there, of course, would be

If you don't care about your wife's emotional and physical satisfaction, you're a brutal savage. If you do care about your wife's emotional and physical satisfaction, you're a brutal savage wearing a jacket. The framework of fourth wave feminism is you're always a brutal savage and we should kill all the men. I mean, at a certain level, past a certain point.

It's the same thing with racism. If you flee a black neighborhood, you are engaging in white flight. If you enter a black neighborhood, you're engaging in gentrification. So yeah, getting to the point, I think that asking the question, what actually is racism, would have gotten you the what is a woman result, where people dance and stammer and they're avoiding an easily available explanation. So what a woman is to trans advocates is anyone who portrays sex stereotypes.

If you have a couple of beers with one, that's what they'll get down to. I always loved pink. I like kissing boys, that sort of thing. Similarly to Ibram Kendi or someone like that, racism is any system that produces any differences between any groups because if it weren't for oppression, all

people and probably all groups would be exactly identical. That's pure blank slate-ism that goes back to Rich Delgado, that goes back in terms of actual scientist Afran Boaz. This is a thing that was said through the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. Now that we can scan someone's brain, this is what Musk does with mirror link, we know that's nonsense. Some brains are twice as big as others, but many people believe it and that's the root cause of this.

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Yeah, and you mentioned Ebernex Kendi, and now I'm just remembering that he actually, there's a famous video of him being asked what is racism from several years ago, and he kind of infamously gives this winding, tortured answer, but basically his answer is racism is racism. It was something like racism is any system that produces racist results or something like that, which is, again, not... Go ahead. Sorry, but it...

These questions are funny because they sound like people answering the most complex, stoic or Christian theological paradigms, like what's the difference between God and the Holy Ghost or Father and Holy Ghost, something like that. But it's being done in the context of what are the easiest to answer questions that have ever been designed by man. That's why it's entertaining. So racism, again, is measurable dislike for members of other races. If I wanted to off

the top of the head come up with a better definition right now, it would be believing inaccurately and to an immoral degree in the genetic inferiority of one human population to another.

And each component of that would be important. It has to be to a serious level where it's interfering in business or similar relationships. It has to be inaccurate. If I believe that pygmies are small and weak by adult white or black male standards, that's not racist. Samoans tend to be larger guys. That's not racist. You know, and so on down the line. It has to be genetic. So I think that's what people mean by racism. Kendi can't answer that because obviously the majority of gaps in modern life aren't explained by that.

So when Kendi says something like the SAT is racist against minorities or even I understand why whites would think the college admissions process is racist. I'm surprised to see him admit what he means by racist is this thing that we clearly just defined. But he's not going to admit he's not going to say any system that treats anyone differently is racist because he sounds like a nutcase. Yeah. So.

Here's a simple question, and maybe it's not so simple. Maybe there's not an answer for it that you can give. But with all this stuff factored in and these race hustlers doing what they do, do you think race relations, and I guess it depends on how you define that, but do you think race relations in this country are getting better or worse, unchanged? I mean, how do you assess that, broadly speaking?

One of the things about quantitative social science, and I'm hardly here as a defender of the current academy, but in terms of quantitative political science or psychology or something like that, most people don't need to access these paradigms. Most people don't need a professional shrink. But a lot of the stuff we do actually is pretty empirical, pretty verifiable. So race relations are getting a lot worse. How do we know that? Because Pew, about 30 years ago, started doing a process where they asked people how they feel about race relations.

I think it's on the census now. So every couple of years, we ask millions of people these questions. And I mean, what we actually found is that I might get a couple of the years wrong by 1% here, but going back to 1990, going back to that kind of Jordan v. Byrd era,

your race relations were very good and that's what you'd expect about 70 percent of whites 65 percent of blacks rated them as very good and the that tiny gap there probably does indicate there's a little bit of racism still going on you're not surprised to see the minority group be four or five points below but i mean this wasn't exactly the era of slavery even the deep south desegregated in 1954 or at least began that process so by the 1990s

Most people felt that this was kind of done. This is as far away in time as warfare against Hitler. I mean, we started, we pulled troops out of Germany as the Marshall Plan began in 1951. We kept them in the West. I mean, so that wasn't a concern of most people I grew up with in Chicago, whether they're Irish, Italian, Black, Hispanic. 70-65%.

Now, today, after years of this crap, you've seen a steady trend line down. And the last I looked after the full BLM era and now the somewhat justified, but the Caucasian online response, mobs of black guys beating up white guys. After all this has been visible to everyone, I think we're at 33 white and 30 black. So race relations have been halved.

I mean, instead of emphasizing the positive, instead of, you know, the old white guy and a black guy in astronaut suits standing in front of a flag. Is it entirely real? No, but it's what countries do. Instead of doing that, this sort of endless whining and minging about the Aztecs were introduced to war for the first time ever by the savage incomers. This is massively, massively detracted from politics.

the attitudes that people in general have toward the country and toward other groups within the country. I think that's a fair way to put it. Well, here's my, because I would answer basically the same about race relations. As you say, it's pretty empirical. So, and race relations, I guess, are one of those things that if everybody thinks they're bad, then sort of by definition, they are. My theory about where that all began is, it's certainly not just my theory, is you kind of look

to me, in the middle part of the first decade of the 2000s is when things started. Things started being an issue that didn't seem to be an issue before, at least from my perspective. And that's interesting because that is right around the time when we had the first black president, which you would think would be, if you didn't know any better, naively, and I think people did think it would be kind of the

the final nail in the coffin of any semblance of poor race relations, that this is sort of the end of that and now we're into a post-racial future or whatever. It didn't work out that way, obviously. And my theory about why that happened is that when you have a black man at the top of the system, running the system, well, that's pretty good evidence that

systemic racism is not much of an issue anymore because this guy's running the system. But all that meant is that the race hustlers, the Robin DeAngelos of the world, even if she wasn't a factor back then, but people like that,

Now they had to kind of work overtime to convince people that they are racist. They had to go looking for problems. And that's why we, that's when you first start hearing about things like microaggressions that no one ever talked about before. But now you start hearing those things because now they got to, now they got to, they don't want you to sit there and say, okay, we have a black president. I think things are fine. Now they want to go find the problem. And, and maybe that is what started the snowball effect. What do you?

What do you think about that? I think there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, I voted for Obama in 2008, certainly. I forget about 12. But I mean, I leaned to the right even at that point. I mean, I was at that point was in central Chicago working those sort of post-college jobs. I wasn't a big fan of Democratic tax policies, but I thought it'd be cool to see the first black president. I think a lot of people did. There was a massive rally in the downtown of Chicago with about a million people present.

My take on Barack Obama, however, is that he's someone who really missed his chance, kind of missed his Nixon and China moment. Because what Obama could have done, and I think what most people expected him to do is what you basically just said, where he would stand up and say, look, we haven't wrinkled out every last bit of bias in the

the Appalachian high hills. There's still for that matter, an intolerable level of black crime in Detroit and Atlanta, but we're all getting along pretty well. Look at the army. I'm the president enough with this. Let's move on to newer issues.

rights for a campaign to actually benefit poor heartland Americans who come in all colors is something that's decades behind in terms of the launch. I think that's what a lot of people expected. This one's over, fight's over, we started in 1954, it's done. Obama almost did the reverse of that. He had some good domestic policy, actually, but his issues on race, I mean, the classic example most people cite is my son would look just like Trayvon,

And the thing that's notable about that is that it's so obviously false. There's a 0% chance of the son of Barack Obama who went to Harvard, who's not an Ados black American, by the way, who's half white, uh,

a half noble lineage Kenyan, but there's a 0% chance of this kid wandering around in shoddy housing development at 1:00 AM getting in a fist fight with the head of the local neighborhood watch that escalates to the point of guns being drawn hoodie on. I mean, that's just obviously not true, but

The decision to say that didn't occur in isolation. I mean, it was part of Obama's, a lot's been written about this in my field, but it was part of Obama's attempt to put together his coalition of the fringes for 2012 and so on and on. But yeah, Barack Obama definitely didn't help race relations.

My opinion is that his presidency was part of a gradual decline, though. I mean, you saw kind of an era, and I actually don't really have much of a theory about this, but you saw an era of kind of open, free speech where Charles Murray's The Bell Curve came out on the right, and then Tom Sowell wrote a book responding to that, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, plus some other things. I mean...

People on the left, who's it, Nisbet wrote a book where he said both of them were wrong. And this is a coherent liberal idea about how you can gain intelligence and learn civilized culture. So we really just let people talk for quite a period. It was maybe 89 to 2005. And then it stopped.

To me, I think maybe the onset of social media played a big role because Facebook came out in 2006, something like that. So as you allowed these censorious people to concentrate in groups, that had a real chilling effect. I think that played a huge role. I have no documentary proof of that.

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I wanted to ask you another thing that I've been wondering about a lot, especially after making the film. I guess you get your take on it. We have the grifters, and we kind of know what motivates them. That's not all that interesting. They get paid. They have a lot of influence and power and all that kind of stuff. What interests me more are the people who...

go to these grifters in the movie Race to Dinner, you know, the white ladies who sit around the table at Race to Dinner and get berated. The people that go to these seminars that you see in the film, that I'm there as a joke, but they're there in real life because they really want to be there. And it's a really, as I can say, as someone who's been there, it's a very unpleasant experience. It's the opposite of inspirational. It's the opposite of anything that I would ever choose to be around unless I was making a movie about it.

And yet these people choose to go there and kind of be berated and degraded and demeaned, white people in particular, because they're the ones who are in line for that kind of treatment. What do you think, this is more of a psychological question, but what do you think motivates that? What do they get out of that?

that experience? Well, it's three levels. So first, just a personal opinion. I'd like to see people and in particular white people stop doing this. Like we can debate all day whether morality is ultimate. And if so, what morals are ultimate? Is it simply the short list given at the start of each of the great religions, blah, blah, blah. But I think at a basic predatory level, human beings who are hunters since before fire feel contempt for people that embarrass and debase themselves.

And white liberals don't seem to understand this. The idea is that outreach to Asian-Americans or black business people or something involves this shameful kowtowing and so on. And no, like the black and Polynesian guys, your kids played football with you that just like your kids would. It's bizarre.

Some people might accept the offer and exploit those people. Most people like me view it as sort of ignoble to do that, but you don't want to associate with them either. So stop doing that. That's extremely bizarre. A second level of analysis, someone I knew casually in graduate school was a dominatrix, a part-time source of income.

And she told me that people who tended toward masochism, not sadism, which is unfortunately brought among males, probably comes out of 10,000 years of rating. But people who tended toward masochism were almost invariably upper middle class, over-spoiled, mostly female liberals who felt that they needed someone to dominate them.

And it's hard not to notice, I'm sure this will be clipped out of context if anyone bothers, but it's hard not to notice that that's the exact demographic for Race for Dinner. There's a whole lot of anger at my father, someone needs to be the powerful lord and shut me up kind of stuff about a lot of this. The

What is it, Femin, the group that tears their tops off and throws red paint on things and screams at cops like, are you mad enough to arrest me? Psychologically, there's a lot you can say there. Why do you have a zip-down Handmaid's Tale outfit in your closet? Is that something you bought specifically for this protest? One might wonder. I mean, so that's a second level of just personal analysis as an adult, as it happens in adult male. Yeah.

Third level, I think, though, beyond the people that might be legitimately crazy and almost quote unquote getting off on this, beyond the people that are making money hustling, there is a third category of person who legitimately has come to believe this stuff. And I think it's important to realize this about the prevalent philosophy in society. We saw this even in communist countries. 30, 40 percent of the population come to think it's true.

We've seen repeatedly, including under COVID-19, that people are willing to quote unquote snitch on their neighbors if those in positions of leadership tell them to. So I think a lot of these people are at these dinners because they feel that the only cause of gaps in performance is oppression, that their group is responsible for the oppression, and that

they want to learn how to stop the oppression. Now, watching the full scene at that dinner where the woman said to Rao at one point, you know, I talked to my white friends the same way. I don't feel like this is useful. I think a lot of them began to realize as it went on that they weren't going to get anything out of this. But there's a

deeper message there. The reason that being taught about your oppressive nature is not going to fix problems in the black community or on India reservations, or for poor whites for that matter, is that those things are not caused by oppression. One of the groups I just mentioned is white. They're caused by a combination of failed culture and structural issues like our elite outsourcing our jobs. So all of this is just a kabuki sideshow that makes a few hustlers some money. That's it.

Yep, fascinating. A lot more we could talk about, obviously, but I know you got to go. You have a real job as a college professor. If I call you again to be in another movie in a crazy wig, are you game or no?

Yeah, I've just released a new book, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me. And so I've gotten some requests to talk in serious documentaries and such. And I think yours is the highest grossing in that form right now for a while. So yeah, if you want me to come back, I'd certainly be willing to do it. I might wear something myself, a disguise. I don't know. We'll see. Wear your own wig. See what's out there. Awesome. Appreciate it. Wilford Riley, thanks for talking to us. Thank you. The stage is set. The stakes are sky high.

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