Transcription
I refuse to use the term homeless because that was the biggest marketing coup on the [music] part of advocates was to brand them homeless. I spent a lot of time on Skid Row in Los Angeles talking to people. They are entitled. They are not gentle lambs who are out there, you know, braving the elements because they have nowhere to go. To be very blunt, Andrew, they are obnoxious. >> [music] [music] [music] >>
Everybody, it's Andrew Klavan with this week's interview with Heather Mac Donald, one of my favorite guests, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of best sellers like the war on cops, the diversity delusion, and recently when race trumps merit. She She's I I love having her on cuz she's one of the best reporters in the country. Uh just a handful of reporters who are anywhere in her league. Uh always the person who gets the story that nobody else will tell. You know how good she is because you never see her on the mainstream media. That's how you know how good [laughter] she is. Heather, it's wonderful to see you. How are you doing? >>
I'm great, Andrew. Thank you so much for having me on. >>
It is It is an absolute pleasure. Every time I read your pieces, I'm I I can't [laughter] I hope I hope you don't mind my saying this, but it always strikes me you're kind of a a small girl person, but you write like one of these big tough guy reporters from the 1930s movies. Uh and say things that nobody I mean, does anybody ever You've won all kinds of awards from the right, but you've never won the like the Pulitzer, which you've deserved You've As far as I I've lost count, but at least three times. What Does anybody talk to you on the on the other side? >>
No, in fact, I'm writing an article right now on drones in law enforcement, and I reached out to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a far left libertarian organization that is against uh law enforcement generally but anything that smacks of surveillance. And you'd think they'd want to get their message out. I just, you know, very in an anodyne fashion said, "I'd just like to get your perspective on where this drone is coming." They said, "We cannot make anybody available to you." And you figure, what's, you know, you exist in order to get your message out. So, there does seem to be a rather sort of a cordon sanitaire around the purity of the mainstream media. >>
Yeah, you you strike terror into the hearts of your opponents. >> [laughter] >>
I you know, I actually want to talk to you about that a little bit. First, I want to talk to you about this new piece you have at City Journal, which is a remarkable piece called The Scourge of Teen Takeovers, Why Youths Are Rampaging in Cities Across America and How to Stop It. You can get it on the City Journal website. It was also on Real Clear Politics. Uh you know, this is this is this kind of thing that I've been seeing stories out of the corner of my eye, but it really has not gotten any real press even though they're talking about curfew There were curfews for a while in D.C. The new mayor says she's going to get rid of them. Before Before we talk about the teen takeovers directly, the state of the union in terms of crime is is pretty good right now. Is that fair to say? >>
Well, it's certainly gone down from the post George Floyd the race riot high where you had the largest increase in one year in homicide nearly 30% in in American history. And it's come back down. A lot of that, I think, is just reverting to the mean. It simply couldn't stay at that very, very elevated rate, which of course was made up mostly, overwhelmingly, by additional black victims who'd been killed by black perpetrators. Uh but there has been generally uh baby steps on the part of some law enforcement agencies to engage in the essential proactive policing again uh that, you know, says to officers, we want you not just to react to crime after the hap- after it happens, which is a little late, but to actually use your powers of observation on the street. If you see suspicious behavior, ask a few questions. You know, you're constitutionally allowed to do that. So, that's helping. On the other hand, Andrew, that is the it is the case that if you ask the public, is crime down? They will say, "No, it's not." They still feel vulnerable, and for very good reason. The The mainstream media sneers at that reaction, but it's because low-level disorder in many, many American cities, above all those that are democratically led, is out of control. It is beyond anything that Americans have seen before, even in the worst periods of extreme violent crime in New York City, where I spend half the year, every single week there is somebody assaulted by a clearly mentally ill, chemically addicted vagrant who you can spot from blocks away that this guy is a walking time bomb, who should be either in jail because he has a for a long time, because his criminal record is 20 times arrested and and occasionally prosecuted, or he should be involuntarily committed because he looks like he's just escaped from Bedlam, and these these assaults keep on happening. People are pushed into subway tracks, they're pushed into subway cars, their heads are slammed. We've had these awful events with a woman set on fire in Chicago, with a uh, the Ukrainian immigrant stabbed to death, uh, on a subway car in in the South. And so, that is as important. Government has as much of an obligation to keep the streets free of threat and and disorder and and uh the the inevitability that somebody is going to be attacked by these people who should be off the streets. That is as important and governments are failing all over the country to control that. >>
That's it's amazing. You know, I I haven't heard anybody say that because everybody I talk to says crime is bad except the people who have the statistics and we all know that statistics are very close to lies. It's just it is remarkable the sense I'm in New York all the time and the sense of chaos it it's it's creeping chaos. It's not like it's not like it was back in the '70s when you felt like you were going to be shot just for getting a pack of cigarettes, but it's still this kind of weird dystopian kind of feeling and I >>
Well, yeah, it's it's because of the vagrancy and we have we have sanctified these vagrants and government views its primary obligation at this point as protecting the dysfunctional and the antisocial. Government views law-abiding citizens as merely ATMs to get money out of to pour into these feckless outreach programs, social service programs. And so, even in the '70s, which was really the the crime high uh for for shootings and homicides in this country, you did not have this phenomenon of these crazy people and they are drug addicted and the combination of mental illness and and drug addiction, it's it's called Mike the Mike a population, the mentally ill chemical abusers, is absolutely lethal. This is something new and we have this entire advocacy class who is dedicated to keeping vagrants on the street. I refuse to use the term homeless because that was the biggest marketing coup on the part of advocates was to brand them homeless when the problem has nothing to do with housing. It has everything to do with mental illness, chemical abuse, and and social disaffiliation because these people frankly, I've spent a lot of time on Skid Row in Los Angeles, and Santa Ana in in the vagrant territories around City Hall talking to people. They are entitled. They are not gentle lambs who are out there, you know, braving the elements because they have nowhere to go. To be very blunt, Andrew, they are obnoxious. >>
Yeah. >>
They have a sense of you I I remember talking to some gutter punks as they're called in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, these youth that ride the rails up and down the West Coast to to panhandle. And one guy who was just so offensive, he said I said, "Well, well, why should I give you money?" He said, "Because you have a dollar and I don't, you know, so therefore I'm entitled to your dollar dollar." These these people should not be there, but again, they have been glamorized and and and and sanctified by the advocates who hate capitalism. They want them there as visible symbols of the social injustice in the in the US because we're too capitalist a society. >>
You know, it's it's interesting the people who actually work with the homeless, like the charity people, they they would say every word that you just said they would agree with. And when I when I have called them up just to research it and to talk about it, they're always so shocked that anybody called to talk to them. They're like, you know, you know, and and the fact that since most of them are some kind of liberal, they're always shocked that it's a conservative calling them up. But they'll say they'll tell you that the conservatives are the only people who ever call them to ask them their opinion. So I you know, it is interesting there's this there's this group standing between the public and the people who actually help these people uh ostensibly advocating for them. >>
I would disagree with you a little bit there because I think there's a lot of the uh outreach groups who won't be honest about that, but famously in Los Angeles there is the Union Mission run by Andy Bales, and he is one of the most honest of the uh vagrant advocates and wants to have work requirements. He wants the police to clear up the drug dealing. I mean, Skid Row again is just one big drug bizarre. People come from the country over to party cuz they know they can be in their tents, engage in sexual assault among, you know, their their their fellow campers, and and have very easy access to drugs. I would I would so I would say it's not typical for the act advocates certainly, but even for some of the people doing the outreach to acknowledge that these people are 100% shelter resistant. You can build all the wonderful private housing, you know, at $80,000 a shot in San Francisco and offer it to people, and they'll just say, "Sorry, no, not taking your offer. I'd rather be here where again I can my my drug dealers are here, and I have advocates delivering pizza to my box at night." >>
That's very touching. I don't want to leave my drug dealer. Um, so, the scourge of teen takeovers. Now, this talk about something that contributes to the sense of chaos. Can you describe what exactly this is? A teen takeover? It sounds that sounds kind of like a pizza party, but it's not, right? >> [snorts] >>
Well, they often originate and perhaps always originate on social media where uh somebody sets out a notice that there's going to be a takeover. Uh they initially try to be as um bland and and non explicit non non descriptive as possible in order to fend off any police oversight as long as possible. And these notices, you know, let's take over sometimes they're accompanied by gang uh memorabilia or black power signs can draw thousands, tens of thousands of teens uh to a thoroughfare, to a beach, to a shopping mall. And I'm just going to I'm going to violate the taboo early on, Andrew, because uh I'm going to The fact is is this is a racial issue. And that's what you're never going to learn in the press except for those few moments when the press is quoting left-wing academics saying, "Well, you know, white people are just just in a moral panic about black teens." So, at that point they will admit this is overwhelmingly uh the blacks who are congregating at these moments. But otherwise, you get very antiseptic language just about talking about youth. Uh and so sometime occasionally they remain uh over largely non-violent, but very, very often they result in shootings, in killings, in looting, uh people that are these participants that are running down streets, uh walking on top of cars, twerking on top of police cars, uh assaulting passersby, just random sucker punching people as they as they as they walk by them. Uh they they can be extremely threatening. Some of them in in Washington, D.C., in the Navy Yard area have resulted in again shootings, businesses closed down. There were a ton of these over 4th of July and businesses had to shut down because the chaos outside was so bad and they the business owners worry about their employees, they worry about the customers and of course are losing money uh because the police have been so demoralized, they've been so emasculated from enforcing the law on racial grounds. Again, sadly this is all about race uh that they're unable to provide protection to the to the law-abiding residents of an area and and to business owners and and business workers and customers. >>
Do they cover it on the news? Do they cover it on on TV news? It look even locally? >>
Yeah, if there's been if there's a viral video uh it will get covered. There was one uh incident this 4th of July um in North Charleston where a female officer was attacked by a group of largely female uh takeovers and she was down on the ground. They were punching her in the head, stomping on her just because she had had the temerity to try and uh restore some order and that video uh did circulate wide widely. Uh others are and you know, this is not just started by social media but once these takeovers are underway a a goal of a lot of the participants is to shoot video of violence of brawls, of shootings in the hope that those their own videos will go viral and they can claim, you know, a social media success. So, you get a sort of a performative quality to a lot of this violence where it's it's almost being staged for maximum circulation. >>
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Is Are these happening in certain cities or uh all over the place? >>
I I think they're happening all over. They're happening in the south. You know, Florida has been its its um governor and some of its sheriffs, Mike Chitwood in Volusia County, which is where Daytona Beach is located. They had some very unruly, dangerous stampedes there. Uh they've announced, you know, we're not putting up with this. We're going to declare like immediate emergency zones where the police can immediately impound cars. Uh but it's they still break out even in Florida, but Chicago is very very ripe target, and that's been going on for decades, which gives the lie to uh the explanations that the media and the advocates have come up for these things are just hilarious. Um, and the one of the central ones is that oh, it's all because of COVID. And as a result of COVID, these teens, again, we're talking about black teens are suffering from a crisis of loneliness, and they're just longing for connection, [laughter] uh which is ludicrous on a on a number of grounds, uh but one of them one of those grounds is that these mass disorder crime events have been going on long before COVID, long before COVID. Especially in Chicago, you know, you've had the rampaging on the Michigan Avenue, the Magnificent Mile, uh at at Hyde Park, on the on the beaches there, where the teens are again going going through the streets, looting, punching passersby. Um, and and as far as the COVID explanation, if that were the case that COVID had simply [clears throat] driven teens into a state of such emotional crisis and neediness that they had to go out and start uh mini riots, and in some cases full-blown riots, you would expect this to be across the board, but this is again overwhelmingly black. White teens were probably nailed down by their parents much more strictly from what we know about parenting habits across different groups. We saw early on in COVID that the media was had was very unhappy to acknowledge that there were these large house parties happening in the Hollywood Hills for black rappers and whatnot in contravention to the lockdown rules and you don't see them happening you don't see teen takeovers happening in Europe or the rest of the modern world which was again Europe was even more draconian in its COVID lockdowns. It is just this one group that is engaged in this and the answer is not COVID. It's not loneliness. It's not here's some of the other great ones poverty, capitalism, hunger, too much law enforcement. The answer is a culture that has legitimated black violence for decades now and grown to a fever pitch of legitimation in the aftermath of the George Floyd death and that has told blacks that they are basically entitled to commit crime because they live in this system of of racial oppression and we all need to understand it excuse it and certainly not punish it. >>
So you think that these gatherings are in effect a sort of you know giving the bird to white culture. I mean is that is that a way to put it? >>
I think that's a a large part of it. Now some of them do happen in black neighborhoods but overwhelmingly they are happening in wealthier white neighborhoods and I think there is definitely an element of wanting to diss whitey. I quote in the piece Martin Luther King himself in '67 gave an address to the American Psychological Association uh black looting and riots and he said back then uh it's a desire to offend white norms and because whites are so uptight about property rights, uh this is a way to really stick it to them and I think that oppositional culture has certainly not gone away and if anything it's grown since the '60s. >>
What about that you know every weekend in Chicago like 30, 40 people get shot? I mean it's some these are happening in black neighborhoods or there is there no one left there [laughter] who wants that to stop? I mean why do they keep electing the same people to run cities that are essentially you know shooting galleries? >>
It's it's the big mystery. I mean why did why did Los Angeles not vote for Spencer Pratt? On the on the disorder more generally um, you know, why does San Francisco why does Los Angeles why does New York, Chicago put up with the vagrancy, with the squalor? They just tragic tragic discussion you know you the destruction of of of Los Angeles you you know used to live here and understandably moved Andrew but this was such a beautiful city uh and my explanation for that is that conservatives view that disorder as a policy choice. We have the tools we could get rid of these vagrant colonies, the encampments overnight. If we gave officers the power that they have had for decades before we got into the '80s, uh which is to move vagrants along and not allow colonization of street which so so this is all choose a chosen the the choice not to incarcerate criminals because that would have a disparate impact on blacks, uh progressive prosecutors that you know are refusing to prosecute shoplifting and looting and resisting arrest. These are all choices. Liberals, however, look at this disorder, and they don't see it as a policy choice. They see it as a naturally occurring phenomenon that is the result of capitalism and poverty and income inequality. And so, they don't blame the government. They blame, "Oh, well, these these greedy taxpayers are simply not paying enough money for affordable housing." And so, why should we hold uh Karen Bass responsible in Los Angeles or Brandon Johnson in Chicago? As far as sort of more specific levels of crime in in in Chicago, I mean, it it is a mystery. Um Actually, you know, there's a narrative among conservatives that, "Well, the real support for these crazy left-wingers is white progressive, you know, the Karens, the female graduates of >>
Yeah. >>
of Bennington and and, you know, Harvard University." But, that's not always the case, you know, uh the challenger to Brandon Johnson in the last election, Paul Vallas, got the white vote. It was South Side of Chicago, the West Side of Chicago, that voted Brandon Johnson in. He's a complete fool. He's absolutely toxic to Chicago. Uh but, there's a certain degree of, I think, uh tribal voting there that goes on. And maybe just a sense of of apathy that there's a sense of the there's nothing we can do about it, a lack of efficacy. I don't know, but it it's it's very curious, and one keeps on waiting for some tipping point, which obviously New York did reach uh in 1993 when it elected Rudolph Giuliani to be mayor after the feckless David Dinkins. And that was a a milestone in urban history. It it ushered in the greatest revolution in urban policy making in American history. >>
But every day that Giuliani was mayor, every single day he was called a racist in the New York Times and and a fascist and anything that happened between a cop and a suspect was his fault and it was it was amazing. It was amazing and and I was living overseas and I came back to New York having lived in New York at its worst possible moment, having a job where I had to go to work at 3:00 in the morning and had to run to stand with the prostitutes so that nobody would would interrupt business by killing me. And and when I came back it was like it was like Dorothy stepping out of the house in The Wizard of Oz. It had been utterly transformed and I'm you know sitting overseas reading about what a Nazi Giuliani was. He was the greatest mayor maybe the country ever had let alone New York. >>
So I agree. >>
So does does the lack of um a mental health system have anything to do with this? I mean does it have you know all the closing of the asylums? We always hear about that because Reagan had some hand in that even though it was really on both sides. Is does that have anything to do with this or am I grasping at straws? I mean is this really just a black culture problem? >>
Well, are you talking about the street vagrancy or the >>
vagrancy. Yeah. >>
team takeovers? I would say the street vagrancy is absolutely about the closing of mental institutions and the rise of Thomas Szasz, the libertarian theorist of of sort of mental history, mental illness, who claimed that well, mental illness was just a social construct that the uptight bourgeoisie imposed on the nonconformists among us. >>
Yeah. >>
Um, so that that discredited mental illness and then the received wisdom is well, it was also Ronald Reagan who wanted to save money and shut down the mental institutions and I'm agnostic on that. I I haven't really confirmed it. It's repeated so often that preposterously maybe I'm I'm inclined to accept that as a default explanation absent reputation. Um, but we now make it very, very impossible to commit anybody long-term based on this uh excessive idea of individual autonomy. And so, the typical pattern is maybe if somebody gets picked up and put into uh a mental ward of the hospital on an emergency basis, if they stabilize through medication, they'll be let out again even though they've done this 20 times and we know the pattern will reassert itself. They'll go untreated, they'll be taking drugs, uh and they will again become a total threat. It is expensive uh to run mental institutions. And it was also the case that some were poorly run and there were all sorts of exposés of a big mental hospital in in Massachusetts. Um, so the solution to that is not to get rid of them. The solution is to run them well, build more. We need more capacity. We also need more capacity in our prisons and jails. >>
Yeah. >>
Uh part of the reason why prosecutors do triage everybody out and you know, give everybody plea bargains rather than actually imposing real consequences is a perceived lack of of of prison space. And California, of course, is closing them down. Um, Mayor Momdani is acting on a long-standing promise to shut Rikers down. Uh we it costs a lot less to maintain prisons and they should be clean, orderly, and safe. A lot of American prisons are frankly, they are a scandal. It is on government to make sure that they are safe for their inmates and the quality of the prison core guards can be pretty damn abysmal. So that has to be improved. And it is expensive to keep somebody in institutionalized for a long time. It is much less expensive to do those things than to allow people to live in fear and cities to be completely prevented from reaching their full potential. So you have people moving away, you have businesses moving away, tax base goes down, you know, white flight from cities. That is a much greater cost to society than building institutions and putting people in who clearly need to be there whether it's because they're just outright you know, cold-hearted gangbangers or because they are schizophrenic and and need treatment and should not be allowed to wander on the streets. And they halfway house solution, you know, well we'll treat them in the community. Nice sounding phrases, it doesn't work. >>
So I I'm running out of time but I have to ask you this. I mean one of the things that makes your work so riveting is the honesty with which you approach the the racial problem. You know, I mean I think people get crucified for saying the things that you're saying and what they since they can't they can't stop you, they just ignore you. They just don't bring you on the mainstream. But but what is there a solution to that? I mean look, this this is a community as far as I'm concerned the Democrats are like a cancer on the li- lives of black people. They have degraded their community, they've just destroyed the sort of moral sense that most neighborhoods have. Is Is there a a back? I mean is you are you do you have any kind of optimism about this at all? >>
Well, first of all, um, you know, when I talk about crime statistics, I'm always talking about averages. There are there are millions of hardworking, law-abiding blacks >>
Yeah. >>
that are desperate for more police protection. I talk to them a lot. I go to police community meetings. I see these fabulous elderly black ladies in these wonderful hats who stand up and say, "We love the police. The only time I feel safe about going to my building lobby to pick up my mail is because the police officers there, otherwise it's colonized by youth that are trespassing, selling drugs, and smoking weed. Please send us more officers." So, those people are shut out from the mainstream media, but they exist and they deserve protection. And that's who the police work for. The police know these people. Their hearts are broken by their vulnerability, and they're trying to help them. Um, so, you know, I I have a a nuanced view of the black population. Uh and and you know, the criminal pop element is a subset of that. Nevertheless, it is the case that the black criminal offending rate is magnitudes magnitudes higher. Um, so, you know, I get this question a lot. What can we do? And I'm going to be honest again, Andrew. I'm I'm starting to think that there's not a heck of a lot that the so-called um mythical we can do at this point. Everything has been tried. Of course, obviously, philanthropists want to keep on trying and good for them, you know, with the after-school programs that the charter, the chess programs, trying to keep uh charter schools that trying to keep their spines strengthened because a lot of them that were part of this no excuses movement, like the KIPP Academies, that were very good uh, efforts to make up for the lack of socialization in the home by imposing rules in class, having very strict routines of how you study, how you walk in the school, respect for your teacher. They've all gone to the left as well, and not all of them, but many of them have that well, it's racist to say to black kids that you're going to obey the rules or else you're out of here. Um, so we should continue doing that and we should continue holding out those opportunities, which God knows we are, but I I am thinking that frankly the change has to come from within that community. Uh, the out-of-wedlock birth rate, I mean this is a a chestnut of conservative uh, received wisdom, but it's true. Uh, it gets sort of boring to repeat it, but but when you have out-of-wedlock birth rates, illegitimacy rates of up to 70% um, with 70% of black children being born out of wedlock, by comparison about 16%, 1.6% of Asian kids are born out of wedlock, which is higher than I'm frankly really willing to believe, and maybe about 26% for whites. Hispanics, you know, contrary to the Hispanic family values, uh, chestnut that the conservatives love, Hispanics have about a 53% illegitimacy rate. In any case, that has to change, but very difficult to do so. A relationship between males and females is breaking down across the country, but it's particularly toxic uh, between black men and black women. A lot of mistrust, a lot of suspicion, and there has to be a determination to give up on the race card. No longer play that race hustle. No longer blame everybody else for your problems. No longer blame whitey. Say, "We have efficacy. We're going to take control of our homes, of our kids. We're not going to let them roam at 2:00 a.m. on a school night. Uh in my piece, I quote this great a member of the uh oversight board of the Detroit Police Commission who points out that nobody in Detroit shows up for parent-teacher association meetings. They're absolutely vacant. Whereas the line for a new beauty supply store in Detroit was like three times around the block. And he said if if parents, you know, spend as much time or was as interested in in their children's education as they are about getting the latest hair products, things would change. And and parents should not allow their kids out on a on a school night. Those voices need to be amplified and encouraged uh because again, there's only so much that people outside can do. And but one of the things they should do is for sure enforce the law. Get the gangbangers off the streets so that the kids who are determined to study, who want to be able to go to school, the elderly who want to be able to go to the post office to pick up their their social security checks can do so without fear. That is the bare minimum that government owes blacks. >>
Heather Mac Donald, always great to see you. Uh the article is in City Journal, The Scourge of Teen Takeovers, why youths are rampaging in cities across America and how to stop it. Your writing is always terrific and it's always a wonderful talking to you. I hope you'll come back soon. >>
I'd love to, Andrew. Thank you so much. >>
It is always just so bracing to talk to Heather. You know, just somebody who is that blunt and that straightforward and has the facts and the courage to walk into neighborhoods uh where, you know, uh wise men do not go. Uh Heather Mac Donald, great to great to see you as always. Come on over to the Andrew Klavan Show on Friday. It'll be great to see you as well. >> [music] >>
I'm a fool. I'm a fool. >> [music] >>