About this episode
Part 1It’s time for a difficult conversation about race in America. We used to hear this a lotIt was a buzzphrase of the late Obama era, and of the early trump years. Y’all ain’t ready for that conversation. You remember thisI think this conversation has come and gone. I think we had it at gunpoint, in 2020, in the summer of GeorgeBut that never was a conversation, was it? It was only ever a lecture, a kind of nagging, a kind of scolding, based on no reality at all, only on hysterical — and predominantly female — delusions. The other side of the conversation, our side, the white man’s side, that side never gets published or broadcast anywhere in so called “respectable” outletsTruth is, that half of the conversation is illegal. That conversation will get you fired. We live in country which is systematically racist against black people but also black people have a sacred name that if any white person says it even once, he gets fired and black people have a license to beat him.That’s not written into the law, it’s not de jure, but it is de facto lèse-majesté, a rule against insulting the king.And this is one of the many pitfalls of the conversation about race. And I think there is no value in trying to have this conversation with your friends or your coworkers or even your family, unless you know they are already sympathetic.The way we win isn’t by some grassroots evangelical mission to the man on the street. We accomplish nothing by sending racist witnesses door to door with a copy of the bell curve. The way we win this argument is by broadcasting these truths, with authority and power, from the biggest megaphones we can get hold of. That’s the only way people recognize truth in the mass media regime.And the truth is, the first time they hear it, they will resist. Or get angry. Or deny it. But then one day they see something in their own lives that they can’t make sense of any other way.So that’s when they find themselves — and honestly it’s a very painful moment, for most people — because they think it’s evil to be racially aware, so we have to be sensitive to the intellectual — and spiritual — journey that each individual person takes when they come to us.Debating is fruitless. No one is ever convinced by watching debates. When you watch a debate between two people, you always walk away convinced that your champion won, and the other team lost. It galvanizes your enemies against you, it doesn’t win people over.You’re not going to have some Ben Shapiro moment where you destroy the libs with FACTS and LAWGIC. That’s not the goal.The goal is a kind of seduction, it’s to tell a story, a story that most people won’t want to hear, but which is darkly appealing, and then let them come to youNPC Linear DialogAnd the beautiful thing about this process of seduction is that it’s not a secret. In f
