This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," June 14, 2020. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
MARK LEVIN, FOX NEWS HOST: Hello, America. I'm Mark Levin. This is LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN. We have two wonderful guests tonight on part two of the Insurrection.
Our first guest is Dr. Carol Swain. Dr. Swain taught at Princeton where she was tenured. She was a tenured Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. She has a BA in Criminal Justice, a Masters in Law, a PhD in Political Science. Really, a remarkable woman.
She's also part of the 1776 Unite Group that Bob Woodson has organized and is a part of the Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board member and I could go on and on.
Dr. Swain, you're very, very impressive. For people who don't know, give us a little bit of your background.
DR. CAROL SWAIN, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY: Well, I'm an American success story. I was one of 12 children born and raised in the rural south. We all dropped out of school after completing the eighth grade.
I married at 16 and had my first child by 17. By the time I was 20, I had three small children. And the boys went to a community college and got the first of five degrees and I eventually became a successful University Professor, earned an early tenure at Princeton. I've won national prizes. I've been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. And I love America. And if you haven't noticed, I'm black.
LEVIN: Well, let me ask you some questions and that is a fantastic background. You see what's been going on in this country. You've seen the, the voices on television and heard them. Athletes, the Commissioner of NFL, Hollywood, the Democratic Party on the left, Pelosi and Schumer.
First of all, I want to ask you a question. Is this a Civil Rights Movement like the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s that had a specific agenda on equality, voting access, due process, whereas this seems to be, as I say, an insurrection that has as its purpose, the overthrow of the original principles of our government and the overthrow of our economic system? What do you make of this?
SWAIN: I think of it -- it's part of the cultural Marxist agenda against America and many of the protesters that are out there, the corporations that are given money, I believe that they are sincere, that they believe that racism in America isn't tolerable, that it hasn't improved, and that black people live their lives in fear. That's a false narrative.
And I think it's being push this year because of the election, and I think that the situation with George Floyd that the media, the Democratic Party, Antifa, Black Lives Matter -- all of those groups had an incentive to push and fan the flames so that they -- so that they ended up with what we are experiencing right now.
So, we are all suffering as a result of their political agenda, and it will not bring us closer together.
LEVIN: You know, Dr. Swain, I look at this, and I have to say you look at these cities, they've been run by one party with an iron fist. Mayor, City Councils, Aldermen for half a century at least. They're in charge of the money that comes into these communities. They're in charge of how it is distributed.
That money is laundered through their bureaucracy, their nepotism, their political cronyism. They take no responsibility for what's going on in their cities. They blame other people. They blame systemic racism.
Same with these one state, excuse me, one party states -- these Democratic states. And it is amazing to me because you have Nancy Pelosi this week who announced that she wants to remove 11 Confederate statues from Congress and I'm thinking to myself, Dr. Swain, hadn't she been there like 30 years?
She's been Speaker twice. She was there when the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, and Barack Obama was President and only now she decides to remove 11 Confederate statues.
Number one, what is that going to do for the people in these communities? And number two, isn't it for her purely opportunism because she had every opportunity to remove those statues years ago?
SWAIN: Well first of all, I'd like for your viewers to know that I was a Democrat up until 2009, but I always had a different perspective on the world. I've always been able to see through things. And so I've known that the Democratic Party was problematic, but I was there, and I've been able to watch them over the years.
And it's clear that this whole movement to tear down monuments, I believe it's really focused on dividing the country even further, because the monuments are part of our history. If we can't learn from my history, then we're in trouble.
And the whole situation is problematic because with the monuments, this is something that -- there are monuments on all sides. If we start tearing down the monuments, what happens tomorrow when the leaders that we are celebrating today, when those people fall out of favor, it's the wrong path for our nation. It's divisive. It's opportunism. And it's just meant to stir up people that are traditionalist, people that love America, people that are patriotic.
LEVIN: I think you're right. The notion that we're going to now tear down all of the Confederate statues because Americans worship these generals. Americans don't worship these generals, Americans mostly despise these generals. They don't even know who the hell they are.
And the fact is, you're going to start pulling down monuments. What comes next? Any of the Founding Fathers who owned slaves and released slaves? What comes next? Books? We already know movies are being affected. Television shows are being pulled off the air.
We have this kind of bizarre purging going on. This cleaning up of history going on, when in fact, we actually need to know all of these things as we go into the future. Correct?
SWAIN: It's far more important to look at the full picture and not to judge the past by the political correct lens that we use today.
LEVIN: Yes, because if we judge the past by the political lens of today, as you point out, then we have a lot of questions asked of the left and the Democratic Party, don't we?
For instance --
SWAIN: Yes.
LEVIN: How could you have voted for Robert Byrd to be the Democratic Party Majority Leader in the United States Senate when he had been an avowed Klansmen several decades before? That seems to me to be a rational question. Or how could Joe Biden have worked with out of the closet segregationists in the 1970s on various Crime Bills and other issues if we're supposed to cleanse history?
Are we supposed to ignore that too? Or may I say this to your, Professor. The Democratic Party, if we're going to purge society of all vestiges of slavery and segregation and racism, was it not the Democratic Party that led the Confederacy? Was not the Democratic Party that gave birth to the Klan? Was it not the Democratic Party that throughout a hundred years after the Civil War, led the effort on segregation and Jim Crow and poll taxes and literacy tests?
I understand the Democratic Party has done some good things. But if it's in our DNA, and we are systemically racist, and we're pulling down statues, and we're burning books, and we're removing TV shows, why don't we purge the Democratic Party? Just a rhetorical point to you, Professor.
SWAIN: I agree and the Democratic Party also fought against the anti- lynching laws, and if you look at the 1960s, the Democrats have been manipulating black people for a long time, and they pay off the leaders.
They pick certain ones in the black community, they pay them off and nothing good trickles down to the masses.
The Democratic Party has stood in the way black progress. It is standing in the way right now. And they are using black people to advance a radical agenda that I believe will be destructive to our nation, that it will hurt all of us and it's hurting us right now.
LEVIN: And you know, when I look at relatively recent history, I look at 1964, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was actually quite crucial. You look at the breakdown of the votes in the House of Representatives, 61 percent of Democrats voted for it, 80 percent of Republicans voted for it. In the Senate, which was filibustered, the Democrats 69 percent of Democrats wound up voting for it, 82 percent of Republicans wound up voting for it.
And yet, the Democratic Party today claims to take the lead in dealing with what it calls systemic racism -- systemic racism in society, systemic racism in police departments. That the Democrat Party is going to advance equality.
You have iconic figures in our culture: Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James. You have the Commissioner of the NFL, pretty much, these are all Democrats all promoting the Democratic Party.
Let me circle back. So, is this in many respects, about power and not so much about Civil Rights?
SWAIN: It's absolutely about power, and if you go to the Black Lives Matter website, and you click on the link to donate, that money is going to Democratic candidates. It's not really advancing the cause of black people.
And I think that it's very problematic that the true statement, the slogan that Black Lives Matter, in the same way that all lives matter, that because the slogan, Black Lives Matter is a true statement, people that want to help blacks and they are white, they're being shamed. They feel like the only way they can show support is to donate money or to acquiesce or get down on their knees before black people, and that's not going to benefit the black community.
And this whole move to defund the police, I mean that's ludicrous. That will hurt black people more than any other group.
LEVIN: All right, thank you. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. Dr. Carol Swain, I want to ask you a few questions. You're very experienced. You've lived what people like to theorize about. You are an example of the American dream.
When you hear of people who haven't lived the way you have lived in the media, sportscaster, sports, Hollywood talk about a systemically racist society, and so many of them do not live in these communities. Maybe some of them came from these communities. They're in the top one-one hundredth percent of the income group.
They live in these communities that are quote-unquote "systemically racist." They send their kids to schools in these communities that are quote-unquote "systemically racist."
I'm talking about media figures, sports figures, and so forth. Does that kind of hypocrisy -- again, somebody like you who's come out of an inner city environment -- does that kind of hypocrisy frustrate you?
SWAIN: Well, the poverty that I came out of was a rural poverty. And what I've noticed, you know, as a student and as a faculty member, is that a lot of people who have been privileged, whether they're white, black, or Hispanic, the more privileged they are, the more they feel the need, you know, to use that language of systemic racism and I think it's being driven by guilt.
They feel guilty because they're prospering. And it's very problematic to me that the people who make public policy, a lot of them have degrees from Ivy League schools, they went to Ivy League schools and prep schools. They know nothing about the topics they're trying to solve.
So, they -- maybe they did research. They were in a PhD program. They wrote a dissertation. That's the extent of their knowledge and they're going to make public policy for the nation? That's one of the reasons that we are in trouble. And all of these theories that they put forth, the critical theory, critical feminist theory, critical race theory -- all of that is rooted in Marxism and it's a false narrative, and it has no relationship to truth or reality.
LEVIN: And this word Marxism, the fact is the Antifa group, which has done enormous damage to inner city communities over the last couple of weeks is a Marxist anarchist group. The media pretends that they don't exist or they downplay the role.
Black Lives Matter in many respects is a very violent group and an anti- Semitic group, at least during its founding, it is part of the BDS Movement. That's never mentioned. People say they stand with Black Lives Matter.
We stand for the lives of black people and all people. We do not necessarily -- the world -- certainly not I -- stand with this organization per se.
Let me ask you this. School choice. Education is key. Education has been key throughout your life. You're a highly educated woman. In our inner cities, the kind of choice that we have in the rest of the country does not exist.
We have an all-powerful labor union, a public sector union called the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. They are tied at the hip with the Democratic Party. They are huge donors to the Democratic Party, nearly exclusively and they work hand in glove.
Barack Obama was one of the most outspoken and ardent opponents of school choice, which would allow for America -- the parents of poor kids, especially in violent communities or in communities with bad schools and minority communities to choose working quality schools to send their kids rather than the school down the street if it's not functioning properly, and allows competition -- parochial schools, private schools, charter schools and so forth. Well, the money follows the student just as the money follows the students in college.
This to me is a huge Human and Civil Rights issue -- basic education. The NBA is not behind it. The NFL is not behind it. The media are not behind it. Hollywood's not behind it. The Democratic Party like so often in our history is obstructing it.
And they talk about the cops unions. What about the teachers unions? What's your take on this?
SWAIN: Well, I can tell you that they public opinion polls that I've seen majorities of blacks and Hispanics want school choice and it makes a lot of sense because the people who are making decisions for them, they have school choice.
And in those inner city schools, they are crime ridden. Students are afraid to go to school because of the, quote, "restorative justice" rooted in Marxism, and it is making it almost impossible for students to be suspended.
And in cities that are run by Democrats, they have not gotten rid of that. And so there's lawlessness within the schoolhouse. The teachers are afraid to teach. There's chaos in school, just like it is on the streets.
And I think that that's very problematic, and we need school choice, and we need to hold public schools accountable, and whenever Democratic cities want money, they say we have to pay our teachers more. They use the teachers but a lot of that money never reaches the teachers. It's used for administrative purposes.
LEVIN: The problem is in these Democratic cities, they have an economic model that is more socialist than capitalist.
SWAIN: Yes.
LEVIN: They have an all-powerful bureaucracy and they do not allow these kids to get a proper education. The money keeps flowing through the same routes and it does not work. You want true revolutionary change, true drastic reform. You've got to remove these barriers.
The one party rule of the public sector teachers union, and bring in more liberty and opportunity and prosperity and education and choice in the communities that haven't seen it in half a century.
Doctor, I want to thank you very, very much for being on the program and God bless you.
SWAIN: Thank you.
LEVIN: We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ASHLEY STROHMIER, FOX NEWS CHANNEL CORRESPONDENT: This is a Fox News Alert. I'm Ashley Strohmier from New York.
The Fulton County Medical Examiner releasing Rayshard Brooks autopsy report listing the cause of death as homicide. According to the report, Brooks died from two gunshot wounds to the back creating organ failure due to blood loss.
Protesters flooding the streets of Atlanta last night, this, following the death of Rayshard Brooks at the hands of police. Brooks had fallen asleep in the drive thru-lane of a Wendy's and failed a field sobriety test. He resisted arrest and took one of the officer's tasers.
As he was running away, Brooks turned back with the taser in hand, an officer shot and killed him. Protesters then set fire to the Wendy's where Brooks had been killed.
In the aftermath, the Atlanta Police Chief has resigned. One officer has been fired and the other placed on administrative duty.
I'm Ashley Strohmier. Now back to LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.
LEVIN: Welcome back. Our next guest, Dr. Wilfred Riley, Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University. He's written a fantastic book, among others, "Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is selling a Fake Race War."
Well, Professor, you see what's going on around you. You've been commenting on this. So, let me get right to the crux of the matter.
Is there systemic racism in our police departments in the aggregate?
DR. WILFRED RILEY, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, KENTUCKY STATE UNIVERSITY: Well, systemic or institutional racism as an academic is a phrase that I'm always a bit skeptical of.
Now, obviously, if we want to be honest about some of this country's history, there have been systems like criminal sentencing in the past, where until quite recently, you did see discrimination at kind of a broad group targeted level.
But very often, this phrase simply means there's a difference in performance between two groups, and we're going to attribute that to racism.
And to give an example of why that doesn't necessarily work. I mean, my favorite sports league, the NBA, the National Basketball Association is more than 65 percent black. And I don't think any serious person would believe that that's because white jocks just don't get a fair shake in American society.
The reason is that there's what you might call a cultural variable. African-Americans play basketball more and so on average, at the median, with all due respect to the hit from French Lick, we're better at it. White guys play more baseball, and if you look at MLB that is a very heavily Caucasian and Hispanic athletically.
And you see this same thing in more what you might call serious situations all the time.
So in 1995, the government economist June O'Neill, who is a liberal as I understand, and the conservative researcher, Dinesh D'Souza, who was fairly nonpartisan at the time, looked at the troubling fact that there was a gap between black and white incomes.
As I recall, African-Americans made 82 percent of what Caucasians did. And this was just universally attributed to racism. And what they found out was that that wasn't the case. There were a lot of quote-unquote, variables involved.
African-Americans are a younger population. The most common age for a black man is 27. The most common age for a white man is 58. Obviously, people earn more later in life when they've had the chance to move into executive roles. African-Americans are much more concentrated in the south where wages are lower for everyone.
If you adjust for these factors and just a couple of others, I mean years not even quality of schooling, just staying in school. Average performance on a test like the SAT, the gap almost disappeared.
And you could argue that some of those things are tied into class and whatnot. But there's no pattern of businesses paying an absolutely equally qualified black guy and an absolutely equally qualified white guy different amounts in general.
And I think that's a valuable lesson to take into life. So, when people argue that policing is institutionally racist, almost always what they are saying is, African-Americans are arrested at a higher rate or they encounter police at a higher rate than the black percentage of society would predict.
But the obvious intermediary variable there is crime rate. If you look at the Bureau of Justice Statistics crime report, the African-American crime rate for violent crimes where you encounter the police, whites dominate corporate crime is 2.4 times the white rate.
So, you would expect there unfortunately, to be more encounters between African-Americans and the police. And when you look at this narrative about black people and the police being in constant conflict, not only does a lot of the structural element -- perhaps not all of it, but a great deal -- disappear if you adjust for crime rate.
The figures themselves that are often used strike me as very, very inflated in terms of police violence. So there's a comprehensive database of police shootings and police killings maintained by "The Washington Post" newspaper.
There's another one that's kept online and live at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.killedbypolice.net&d=DwICAg&c=cnx1hdOQtepEQkpermZGwQ&r=tgDLkJy54PfJyWJwul3dKe54qGxqO7b7d5vjo7RcZds&m=4F-S_-1PlnteXeB2D7EabvoXExN6ADkRjgGdobPawxE&s=X3oKXzMCTXBTXlVrvKD9yAHblRaQvKEa71V2tJSrIzM&e= . And if you look at that "Washington Post" database, for some reason, the figures change from time to time.
But until about a week ago, the total number of unarmed men killed by police in the USA last year was listed as nine, unarmed black individuals.
Total number of unarmed people, all races, all sexes, was only 56. There were only about a thousand people of all backgrounds armed or unarmed killed by police, and only 229 of those were African-American.
And there's a lot of serious research that looks at types of violence other than just shooting, other than killing.
So, Roland Fryer, who is one of the youngest individuals ever to gain tenure at Harvard, and like me, as a black man took a comprehensive look at every type of police violence in a paper that came out in, I believe 2016.
And what he found is that there were some small gaps. African-Americans were a bit more likely to be, for example, cursed at or lightly shoved. But when it came to extreme beatings or police shootings, African-Americans, in the case of shootings, were actually 24.2 less likely with everything along with race adjusted for, to be shot by the police than whites were.
So, I don't think you see a pattern of broad systemic targeting specifically, of black people by the police today. That doesn't mean there aren't individual bad officers. I mean, we saw the horrifying George Floyd tape. I mean, my position is that charges should be filed against every one of the officers involved in that situation.
But even there, the facts are a little more complex than they originally seemed to be. Two of the officers on the scene as it turns out, Thao and Kueng, if I have the names correct, are not Caucasian men. Floyd and Chauvin, the officer primarily responsible for the killing had previously known one another from a nightlife security position.
So, I don't think we can just look at interactions between African- Americans and the police and say, what we have here is an epidemic pattern of racism, a genocide as Attorney Crump called it in the recent book.
LEVIN: All right. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. Professor Reilly, well based on what you're saying, based on what I'm reading, based on the data, really, police brutality is not the issue that is holding back people in these various communities. What is holding back people in these various communities? And why is the narrative so heavily focused on police brutality?
REILLY: Well, I think that's a very complex question that gets into a lot of things like the difference between historic and contemporary racism.
So first of all, one thing that I would say is that minority communities in the United States have gone through and come through a lot. The black community endured slavery, at least in the south, endured Jim Crow. The crack era and so on down the line.
And you've actually seen some pretty steady closures of gaps between blacks and whites. Just looking at this casually doing some research the other day, I mean, the black SAT rose from about 1,800 as I recall in the 1970s to 950 looking at College Board data just a couple of years ago. So, the black story in America is not a story of tragedy.
But when you look at things that are genuinely problematic in a large scale in the black community, I think you're seeing legacies of racism in the past. You're looking at poverty housing and so on down the line, and even more to the point to me, you're seeing legacies of the 1960s welfare state.
Fatherlessness, for example, is the biggest problem. I'm just going to blame black people here -- the biggest problem among all groups in America.
The great economist Walter Williams in 1938 looked at rates of fatherlessness for whites as I recall, that was under four percent, for African-Americans, it was 11 percent. Those same rates today are 35.4 percent for Caucasians, including Caucasian-Hispanics, over 50 percent, close to 60 percent for Hispanics and Native Americans, 72 percent for African-Americans.
And obviously the presence of a father in particularly a young man's life is one of the biggest predictors of how well he is going to do in High School, how likely he is to go to jail. Things like suicide. That's especially true by the way for lower income Caucasian Americans.
So, I think there are very broad systemic problems in the black community and in many American communities, I would say the collapse of the family and the things associated with this small business community social sector, probably the biggest one.
Why is it so tempting to blame the ghosts of the past? I think, to some extent, two reasons. One, we're used to doing so. And two, there is broad social approval.
So I mean, celebrities, LeBron James, for example, know that if they say the cause of every one of these problems, such as fatherlessness, or the test score gap is racism. One, that is going to be greeted very approvingly by a network of natural allies throughout society. And two, it will sound like something that most people are used to hearing.
But dealing with the actual problems in African-American communities and other communities is going to take more than the eradication of racism. And it's worth noting, by the way that the large majority of people, black and white are not racist in any conventional sense today.
We might look at the results on some complex implicit bias test and be a little worried for a bit, but if you look at actual classic questions, would you vote for a qualified member of the other race for President if they ran with your political party?
The figure for that is 92 percent for African-Americans and for whites. Well over 80 percent of people support interracial dating, marriage love.
So, I don't think we can simply look at an issue like violence in cities and say, well, that's due to racism. One thing you have to point out is that many of the large cities in the United States of America have been controlled by Democratic, often minority led administrations for decades.
So, if there is a problem with the schools in Detroit or with gun violence in the streets, you can't necessarily just say, well, that's the white man.
LEVIN: And also on this interracial issue you raised, I looked at statistics based on a few years back, and it indicated that new marriages, 17 percent or almost one in five are interracial. Now, how can you have systemic racism, when one out of every five marriage is interracial -- and the other statistics you provided?
See, I could be wrong about this. And I'd like to pose this to you for the next segment. This notion of systemic racism means everything and means nothing.
It's an excuse for not addressing the real issues that exist in these communities and other communities. You pointed out one party rule, one party ideology, one party economic ideology. So, there's a battle. There are obstacles to things like school choice that exist in other parts of the country, but not in the inner cities.
You have the Democratic Party that oppose this and as I said earlier in the show, Barack Obama led the battle against the school choice in many of these communities.
And so, if you're going to have truly revolutionary and radical ideas, you have to have competition politically, competition in schools and opportunities. I'd like your thought on that when we return. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Professor Reilley, how about a liberty agenda? A competition agenda? The sort of environment that exists in so many other parts of the country. It's never discussed. You never hear it discussed by people in the media or in Hollywood, and so forth. How about a real liberty agenda?
REILLY: If you're talking about for the black community, I would fully support that. One thing I will say is that I think that more competition economically and politically would be an excellent thing for the African- American community.
I would love to see the black community split our vote 50/50 because that would imply that both political parties might actually do something for us.
What you see right now is that every four years, with a few exceptions, there are a few long term serving black civil servants, but Democratic politicians come out of the woodwork during election years and make impassioned, racialized pitches to the black community, and this is true no matter who the G.O.P. candidate is.
I mean, when Mitt Romney who is a centrist anti-racist Republican was running for President, Joe Biden's comment about him was he is going to put you all back in chains.
Mitt Romney is not going to bring back slavery, no matter which political party you vote for. He's just not going to. And this year, the exact same line has been used against Donald Trump.
In Political Science, by the way, we find that the mainstream media covered most G.O.P. Presidents as they've covered Donald Trump. The reaction to him isn't a result of his sometimes over the top offensive language, it is also how Romney was discussed, it is how Bush was discussed.
But in regard to Trump, Joe Biden said, "You ain't black" to the radio host Charlemagne tha God if you would consider voting for Donald while he's in office. So, I don't think that sort of virtue signaling every four years does much.
Again, obviously racism is real, but today, simply put, the biggest predictor of how successful you become in this country is not residual prejudice around you.
The most successful groups in the country have a competition or a liberty agenda. Nigerian-Americans, Japanese-Americans, East Indian-Americans, Lebanese-Americans, these, not white or black Americans are the wealthiest Americans.
And I would definitely like to see a lot of that agenda transitioned into deprived communities, whether poor white communities or African-American communities, although clearly my focus is on African-American communities.
I'd like to see enterprise zones. I'd like to see charter schools as an option for striving minority parents. HBCUs, a good number of which are private -- I'm proud to teach at one -- do a fair amount of good in this arena, but that's after high school.
But yes, I would like to see as many chances to competitively perform in the hood as there are to competitively perform in the suburbs, and that would do much, much more good for poor people, especially poor black people than the endless ghost hunting for new, more refined forms of racism.
LEVIN: But you do understand what that means. That means trying to figure out how to defeat one party rule in these cities and how to defeat the teachers unions in these cities, and a whole bureaucracy and a whole a group of surrogates that have grown out of these -- these one party rule cities. That that's going to be very difficult.
REILLY: Yes, just very quickly. Public sector unions in general, to me, as a businessman and an academic are problematic. Private sector unions are great.
With public sector unions, you don't really have two parties coming to the table. You have the union made up of middle class employees and executives in the public sector and then you have the politicians to whom these unions give sizable donations. Those are the two parties negotiating and those are not two distinct parties.
By the way, in terms of real solutions to the issues of policing, a lot of those would involve tackling police unions. You sometimes hear that Camden got rid of the police. No, they didn't. What they did was break the police union, give cops some basic training in related fields like social work and change their name, but they have 70 percent more boots on the ground in terms of what in practice police officers than they used to.
So, the more you can take on these public sector unions to achieve things like actual body cameras in every department, a discussion about no knock raids, removing these various complex forms of immunity from contracts, perhaps I'd like to hear officers reactions to that, the better you'll see -- the better a relationship between police and the communities they serve, you will see.
LEVIN: All right, Professor. I want to thank you very, very much. You've been extremely edifying. And God bless you.
REILLY: You as well.
LEVIN: We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. You know, America is a great country with great people. Massive diversity, where the vast majority of us get along, but there are forces in this country, political, and others that seek the divide us. This idea that America is systemically racist is a big lie.
The purpose of the flag and the National Anthem is to unite the country. The people who attack it, don't seek to unite the country.
Let's go through history very quickly in the minutes that I have left.
We had a Civil War that began in 1861. Over 800,000 casualties. That would be the equivalent today of over eight million casualties. And over half of those were soldiers and others fighting for the North, to keep the union together and to end slavery. No nation on the face of the Earth has ever undertaken such an effort.
In 1863, we have the Emancipation Proclamation. President Lincoln freeing the slaves throughout the country, particularly the south. We had 1865, the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. The states ratified the 13th Amendment.
We had the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and 1871. The Enforcement Act of 1870. The Force Act of 1871 -- all intended to advance the cause of integration. With the KKK Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
In 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified by the states. It abolishes, not only did it abolish slavery, it guarantees due process and equal protection of all citizens, especially freed African slaves. In 1870, the 15th Amendment guarantees the right to vote for all citizens.
Now, the implementation of this became problematic because of the Democratic Party and racist elements, not just in the south and in the north that didn't believe in reconstruction after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and after Ulysses S. Grant left office, and so there have been many efforts since then, including by our courts, our national legislatures and our state legislature.
You have in 1954, the Brown versus Board of Education decision, nine to zero, reversing parts of Plessy versus Ferguson. It ended legal racial segregation in schools. In 1962, Bailey versus Patterson ends desegregation and transportation.
In the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed by the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House and the Senate and majorities of the Democrats in both prohibits discrimination in voting, public accommodations, public facilities, public education, Federal assistance programs and employment and established the EEOC or the 1965 Voting Rights Act that prohibited denial or restriction of the right to vote. It forbids discriminatory voting practices nationwide.
In 1967, you had the Loving versus Virginia Act declaring state laws prohibiting interracial marriage to be unconstitutional.
Going back, in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower instituted rules that eliminated discrimination in government contracting. He desegregated Federal government in the nation's capital. In 1957, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, it created the Civil Rights Commission. It created the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
In 1957 and 1959, Eisenhower ordered desegregation of the Washington, D.C. public schools.
We have the Insurrection Act that was amended in 1871 to allow the use of military to enforce among other things, Civil Rights and desegregation. In 1871, Ulysses S. Grant sent a thousand soldiers to hunt down Klansmen in South Carolina and they captured 600 of them.
In 1957, Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect nine black students entering Little Rock Central High School against the order of the Governor at the time, Orville Faubus, one of Bill Clinton's mentors, by the way.
In 1962, John Kennedy federalized the National Guard to allow a black student to enroll in classes at the University of Mississippi-Oxford.
In 1965, LBJ federalized the National Guard to protect Civil Rights marches headed for Selma to Montgomery.
This -- I'm just touching the tip of the iceberg.
The number of economic programs, the trillions of dollars and so forth, don't tell me this country is systemically racist. If this country were systemically racist, none of this would have taken place. None of this would be taking place.
We, Americans are good people, regardless of our race, regardless of our religion, regardless of our sex, regardless of the politicians who try to divide us, the media who try to divide us, these so-called cultural icons who try to divide us.
We're an imperfect people in an imperfect country, but it is the greatest country in the face of the Earth. Just ask most of those who are on TV who are in sports or in Hollywood, who trash it day in and day out.
If you want real revolutionary, dramatic reforms, including in our inner cities, then abandon the old economic practices, allow choice, allow liberty to take place in these communities.
They're ruled by one party -- iron fisted control. And the politicians that run these towns, as far as I'm concerned are corrupt right up to here.
Anyway, thank you for joining me tonight on LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN and I'll see you next time.
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