Brian Kilmeade Show Special: Thomas Sowell on Social Justice Fallacies

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Go to lifelock.com slash foxpod and save up to 25% your first year. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the latest moments of the Brian Kilmeade Show. The minute I interviewed Thomas Sowell, Allison's great booking, and Pete executed, I said, when we do this, this would be great for a special.

And sure enough, we ended up doing it at a time in which we can record more than just our typical segments. And this is what it's for. It's a special right now just on Thomas Sowell. He's got a brand new book out called Social Justice Fallacies.

Why? Well, as an African-American, he grew up not really in a traditional family. He overcame a lot. He changed political philosophies on the fly through life experience. And he was able to constantly observe and make opinions. And his columns are simply must-read. I mean, he grew up, there's Chicago, a school of black, you know, mostly a black school.

He spent a significant time in Harlem and now spends a significant amount of time on the West Coast. And now he has definite opinions about where we are in race. So I'm going to break up this entire hour with different sections, his importance of his life and his beliefs. Right now, what is this book about?

Why is this the right time to put it forward? What is the message we should be taking from it? Here's a little of my conversation, just the beginning of my conversation with author Thomas Sowell. Professor, welcome back.

Good being back. First off, tell me about, what do you mean by social justice fallacies? There's some truths that aren't truths, I guess. Well, I think I would say most of the truths in that vision are not true. One of them is, for example, that there's something very strange about different groups, whether by race, sex or whatever, have very different representation in different kinds of institutions and activities and that therefore something sinister must be going on. In point of fact, disparities are virtually universal, as I mentioned in the book itself. You can read reams of social justice literature and not encounter a single example of a country where people from different groups are equally represented in different occupations or activities. And that's true if you go back, whether you're looking at countries around the world today or you're looking back through history for over a thousand years. So what people want to do is say, oh, the reason why Hispanics aren't big here or blacks aren't big here or people in the Midwest aren't doing well here is discrimination. They want to say it's racism. When you say there's a logic behind almost all of it and that we can't script outcomes, we can only script opportunities.

That's right. Because the outcomes, among other things, depend upon what the individuals themselves want to do. One of the examples I've often used, imagine if a black baby is born in the middle of the ghetto with muscles identical to those of Rudolph Nureja, the great ballet dancer, the chance of that kid becoming another Rudolph on the radio must be one in the thousands if that's high. Because the whole, he's not going to grow up oriented towards that kind of thing. And one of the things that bothers me when people talk about the days when they had ability grouping in the schools, and it wasn't really ability grouping, it was outcome grouping. Because when you have some students who really don't care about school one way or the other, I don't know how you know what his ability is.

Exactly. How they apply themselves. But yet they look at test scores and they judge what kind of teacher you are, what kind of school system you're in. You also say there's just certain things that are universal and it has to do with the environment.

It doesn't mean that society's unequal or people are trying to hold you down. So for example, you bring up, why aren't more Hispanics in the tech industry? There must be a bias. There must be a reason. There is a reason, but it's not bias, right?

There are more Asians in that area because there's a higher number of Asians with degrees in engineering. That's not an unfair advantage. That's just a fact.

Yes. And the other thing too is that the idea that we should resent people who are doing better than we are. I mean, one of my favorite examples personally is basketball. Now, when I tried to play basketball as a teenager, I was really awful. I mean, I was lucky to hit the backboard, you know, never mind the basket. But if I were into social justice, I would then hate Michael Jordan because he's such a great basketball player.

Actually, I was a big Michael Jordan fan because I realized that he really could do some stuff. But there's an idea that when someone like say Bill Gates comes along and becomes a multi-millionaire, that he's somehow subtracting from the wealth of the rest of the society. But there's no fixed or pre-dested wealth out there. He's probably created trillions of dollars of wealth around the world. And if he becomes a multi-billionaire out of it, so be it. But to all those other people who can do any number of things better with a computer than they can without it, all those people benefit financially and otherwise.

See, and we're talking to Thomas Sowell and that people might be saying, listen, well, that's just conservative thought. That whole, that economic thought is, you know, out of the success, you have other people that work for you. Like I might work for Bill Gates and then I might become a manager there. I might learn, I might split off and get my own company, hire other people because I was able to go be a part of a great organization. And that's the theory.

So Bill Gates becomes richer and I have an opportunity to do the same thing because the Microsoft exists. Oh, absolutely. And as far as conservative thought, I have no objection to people having whatever kinds of opinions they do have. What troubles me a lot is that we have notions that catch on in some intellectual elites and these notions are treated as if these were demonstrated facts. In many cases, when you look at the data, you find that the exact opposite happens compared to what they had promised. For example, putting sex education into the school, which is not a new thing, by the way. What was new is the parents found out about it because of COVID had led to a lot of homeschooling. But sex education came in on a mass scale in the 1960s. It came in with the promise that it was going to reduce to a teenage pregnancy and teenage venereal diseases. And if you go look at the facts, the fact is the teenage pregnancies and teenage venereal diseases were going down in the 1950s. As of 1960, the infection rate for syphilis was among teenagers. With half of what it had been in 1950s, pregnancy rates were going down.

You brought in sex education. All of those things all of those things immediately reversed and shut up. And they've not come down since then. Similarly with crime, especially homicide. Homicide rates for black males in the United States went down by 18% in the 1940s. Went down by another 22% in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the federal courts, the Supreme Court especially, created all sorts of new rights for criminals, changed the whole nature of criminal law. And instantly, the murder rate doubled from 1963 to 1973.

So you could run through a whole list of things like that where you're supposed to produce a good result from this wonderful new bright idea. And in fact, the fact that the data all shows that things got worse. So Thomas Sowell, I know that you tell the story about growing up and that you grew up in Harlem and that you said you never even heard a gunshot in Harlem. But yet we always had the Second Amendment.

Oh my gosh, yes. You know, out here in California, there's a place, East Palo Alto, which a few decades ago had the highest murder rate in the country. The next year, the murder rate was way down. And so the question is, did they discover the root causes of crime? Did they get rid of all injustices? No, they put more cops in there and the homicide rate drops. And a number of places, people have pointed out things like this said, oh, it was amazing. There's even some great coincidence that when you send in a lot of cops, fewer people get killed. Yeah.

And that was so weird to describe this. I almost think you're talking about today. We think the problem was there's too many people in jail and that it's not fair to poor people that they can't afford bail. So now we have zero cash bail. And unless you're a violent criminal, you get to stay out of the court.

You get to stay out and be free until your day in court and you see the results. And now instead of backing off on this, Illinois just started it. California is reaffirming it and New York is trying to get out of it.

Well, at least in New York they have looked at the data. But politics is a strange institution. Politics is an institution where you can end your whole career just by admitting the truth, that you made a mistake. And in the economy, for example, you know, when Coca-Cola tried to change the flavor and they thought that was a bright idea. When people started, rather stopped buying Coca-Cola, suddenly the choice between the people who ran the company was, are we going to pretend that we were right or are we going to stay here and go bankrupt?

They decided they'd admit being right and go back to the old color flavor. All right, coming up right after the break, high taxes. Having people run for the hills in New York, what it means for high income earners and what it means for race in America. We'll discuss it. Coming to you on a need to know basis, because man do you need to know. It's Brian Kilmeade. I'm Dana Perino. Join me for my brand new podcast, Perino on Politics.

As we analyze the 2024 election cycle, make sure you subscribe to this series on Fox News podcast dot com or wherever you download podcasts and leave me a rating and review. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more connecting online and more personal information potentially being exposed to identity thieves. But with a lifelock US based restoration specialist, you don't have to face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or other financial losses from identity theft all alone. If your identity is stolen, they'll work to fix it back by the lifelock million dollar protection package. Spend more time on more holiday fun, not identity worries.

Go to lifelock.com Fox Pod to save up to 25 percent your first year. Welcome back to a Brian Kilmeade show special presentation. Thomas Sowell, Social Justice Fallacies. We're talking to Thomas Sowell here.

His book is now out. It's called Social Justice Fallacies. And believe me, these are conversations that people have and they give their opinion. But what would you have done, Professor Sowell, is you looked back at the stats and you look at the results through time in our favor in this country. And hopefully we'll learn from it because you have no agenda. You just want to get to the bottom line and see if we could change education the way people are viewed and stop blaming everything on prejudice, racism and sexism.

And this week I'm reading the paper today, getting ready for this interview, and I see this story. In New York, they're looking to raise taxes on high income earners. They think they deserve another five percent income tax on what they make over $250,000, another 7.5 percent of people make over $323,000.

Now the result has been what? People who make a lot of money, 26 to 45 especially, are leaving this state of New York because they're being taxed too high. What is wrong with the thought of taxing the rich because other people need more money?

Oh my goodness. You know, one of the most successful attempts to actually, one of the most successful programs to get money from high income people was done in the 1920s. After the Woodrow Wilson administration, the top tax rate was 73 percent. It was pure Republicans in the 1920s.

And back in those days, Republicans had some kind of principles. But they came in and they reduced the top tax rate to 25 percent. Great outcry that this was tax cuts for the rich. In point of fact, the federal government collected more revenue at 25 percent than they ever collected at 73 percent. Because at 73 percent, people put their money into tax exempt securities and it wasn't taxed at all. And so one figure that I remember is at the beginning, people who made a million dollars a year paid five percent of all the income tax revenue. After they cut the tax rate to 25 percent, people who were making a million dollars a year paid more than 15 percent of all the tax revenue. And then for the simple reason that 25 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing.

Understood. And the other thing that you always talk about is people think you're going to just take their money and they're not going to do anything. Like, of course, if you're going to take 75 percent of my money, I'm going to put it someplace else where you can't get it. I know how hard it took to earn it. And what we always hear from this president in particular is, I'm not for you being wealthy. I don't care if you're going to be wealthy. You can do that, but just pay your fair share.

That bothers you a lot. What is fair share? Well, they will never define it because it has no meaning. Someone once asked Samuel Godfrey, the great labor leader, what does labor want? He said more. And that's true of politicians.

They want more so that they can never tell you what the fair share is or on what basis you would figure it if you could. Quite aside from whether you ever collected. So Thomas, the other thing you talk about, too, is civil rights legislation and what it meant. Was there a need?

Absolutely. You know, in 1865, we ended the Civil War. Reconstruction kicks in. We have the Compromise of 1877. We take a huge step backwards with the end of Reconstruction, essentially, separate but equal. The Jim Crow laws come into effect. But the one thing that was happening, as evil as it was, the black family was intact.

And as much as no one will ever make excuses for back of the bus, separate water fountains, no one will ever say that that'll ever be okay. The one thing about the black family, can't even say African-American, could be Caribbean-American, doesn't matter, is that the family was intact. How important was that family unit in retrospect? Oh, it was huge.

It was huge. And you can tell that by what happened when when the family disintegrated. There's a monumental study called the Black Family and Slavery and Freedom by Herbert Gutman.

Anyone who wants to get some facts as distinguished from rhetoric should read that. There were heart-rending stories after the end of slavery where many people began looking for their relatives who had been sold somewhere else and being illiterate. They would have someone write a letter for them. They would send them to some local church where they thought maybe a son, a brother, or a cousin was.

And these would then be read out to the church. And so the enormous struggles to reconstitute families that had been split by slavery itself going on for decades after the Civil War. And today we have places where, you know, there are women on welfare who've had children by a number of men, none of whom take any interest in them even though the kid is right down the block. And that is not peculiar to blacks, by the way. The very same pattern exists in England and to the very same degree. And yet there the underclass is predominantly white. So they have no racism to face. They have no legacy of slavery. And they have the exact same phenomena you have in schools as well as in the families. And so the seizing upon this historical tragedy to explain everything leaves out the fact that the Black family in 1940, more than four-fifths of all black children were raised in two-parent families. Before that century was over, it was down, you know, to less than a third. So this happened after the welfare state came in. So coming up next, I think you're going to love it. It's our look and our conversation about the 1960s Lawrence Baines Johnson idea of a great society.

We're going to equal things out, make it better for all Americans of all races, creeds, and genders. Didn't really work. Why didn't it work? Was the intention pure? Perhaps.

Was the results great? We're still living with the problems. Don't move. Our special conversation, Thanksgiving special conversation with Thomas Sowell right after this. More holiday shopping, travel, and connecting online can expose more personal information. With lifelock identity theft protection, you won't face drained accounts or fraudulent loans alone.

Go to lifelock.com slash Fox pod and save up to 25% your first year. You're listening to a Brian Kilmeade show special presentation, Thomas Sowell, social justice fallacies. Welcome back everybody. So think about the 1960s. We're talking about the Vietnam war. And as it begins to go south and when more and more troops are exposed there, LBJ pivoted, pivoted to the great society.

And that's what he really wanted to talk about. How to make things great in America for all races, a hundred years after slavery, the problems with the reset in the 1877 and the compromise that didn't work coming out of segregation. How do we make it better for African-Americans in America? Well, with his plan, the great society plan, what went wrong? Here's what Thomas Sowell says.

And man, what he says works. Black families survive slavery. We survive poll taxes and literacy tests. We survive discrimination. What was hard to survive was Johnson's great society, where they decided to put money, where they decided to take the black father out of the household to get a check in the mail. And you can now measure that and unemployment and crime and devastation. So people, Democrats got offended that he took on the great society. Where do you stand, Thomas Sowell?

Everywhere he said it was absolutely correct. The Democrats should stop being offended and start facing facts. On the other hand, Republicans are not always facing facts either. So in the great society, it might've been well intended, but the result was the essential incentivization of getting welfare checks. And if you have at one point a single parent family, you'd get more money.

Absolutely. And the data in my book shows that black married couple families have had poverty rates under 10% for more than a quarter of a century, every year for more than a quarter of a century, starting in 1994. And so the differences between races are not necessarily racial differences, either in the sense of genetics or in the sense of discrimination, where there are behavioral differences from different cultures, which there always are. Those who have a certain behavior pattern do not have the same consequences. By contrast, white female-headed families have had much higher poverty rates than black married couple families. It's not the race as such.

It's the behavior patterns. And you think one of the great things that happened to you is you did have a two-parent family. You were adopted. You were living in New York City and you asked your family, when did I start walking?

He goes, we don't know because your feet never hit the floor. You were being held so much. And that really laid the foundation to be this great person you ended up becoming. Well, I know that it was really more like a four-parent family in the sense that I was the only child in a family of four adults. And so I had a lot of people there to, in the early years especially, when everything is so crucial. And Thomas, also you bring up the fact that there's reasons why certain people are successful. For example, the oldest child in a family tends to be more successful because at a time they were the only child.

And you said there's no coincidence, it's not a coincidence that most astronauts were the oldest in their family. How does that figure into what you become? Well, the question about it, because they saw things, even though they had little education, they were thinking ahead about my future. And of course, when I was a kid, I wasn't thinking about the future.

To me, the future was two weeks from now. But they met some kid who was very bright and very intellectually oriented. And they immediately, the light bulb went on that he should take me in hand.

He's a year older than me. And it was through him that I went into a public library for the first time, having no idea what a public library was. Little things can change lives. As you look at, as you look at your life now and look at what we've experienced as a country, you remember the segregated south.

That's not strange to you. You don't have to read that in the book, you lived it. But as we look now, we seem to be more racially aware now than ever before. But in essence, is America more equal than it ever was?

Oh no, I know. The painful irony is that as the library rates of intermarriage have risen to levels far beyond what they were in the past, everybody is now more intensely into a racial identity. And that's not peculiar to the United States. The same thing you see in New Zealand where the Maoris are constantly talking about their identity.

I don't know if there are any, how many pure-blooded Maoris there are in New Zealand as compared to those who are Maori and white. And what are you going to do if you're going to have reparations, for example? How are you going to unscramble all these people when an absolute majority of black Americans have Caucasian genes? So do you look at America? I mean, if, would you see progress in, in race relations today? I see progress where people have been left alone to work things out themselves. I see a lot of pretrogression where there are presumptuous people among intellectuals and among opportunistic politicians who have, who are playing up racial differences in order to win votes. And today when you saw the George Floyd riots and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and then you mentioned reparations, especially in the West Coast, the brainchild of your genius governor, are those things, do you think progress, show progress? Are they disturbing to you? No, no, no.

My gosh. It makes me wonder if we're not buying problems much bigger than any human being can solve. The George Floyd riots were especially painful to me because when you think about it, what were the people protesting? They say, well, they protested what the policeman did. It was an evil thing that the policeman did. Everybody I know, one of the most conservative radio broadcasters went ballistic denouncing the policeman.

I can't think of any incident in American history where there was more, at the very least 99 percent agreement. The cops shouldn't have done it. He should be fired. He should be indicted. He should be tried, convicted, and sentenced.

All of that happened. So what was the, you know, if you're going to riot with his unanimity, what are you going to do when there are differences of opinion? So that was Thomas Sowell speaking out about things that he's been researching his entire life, name of the book, Social Justice Fallacies.

And if you want to arm yourself with the next great statement on your, whether it's your backyard barbecue or a tailgate, with facts about America, do that. When we come back, Booker T. Washington, his message in the early 20th century and how some are running from it today and they shouldn't. Brian Kilmeade Show. It's Brian Kilmeade. Welcome back to a Brian Kilmeade Show special presentation. Thomas Sowell, Social Justice Fallacies.

Welcome back. Education in America. It really resonates with me because I spent the last two, three years looking at Booker T. Washington, his thirst for an education, how he got his education, and then how he tried to educate the masses and was successful with the Rosenwald School, of course, combining with Julius Rosenwald, but most importantly Tuskegee University, Tuskegee College, normal college back then.

Education in America today. What did Booker T. thinks? What does Thomas Sowell think about the impact of Booker T.?

And why is he not embraced as somebody who's pulling you up from the bootstraps, take responsibility for your life, be a self-made person? Why is that not resonating with black America today in some sectors? We discuss it with Thomas Sowell right here, right now. Just looking back at race relations, I wrote the President Freedom Fighter. You studied Frederick Douglass and where he came from, slavery, how the meager means in which Abraham Lincoln came back from, and then picking up where he left off, Booker T. Washington, who overlapped with Frederick Douglass, was able to put together educational institutions in the segregated South. Yet today, Booker T. Washington is not necessarily embraced by the black community.

Do you understand why? His program was different from theirs. He was trying to make sure that the blacks acquired skills at Tustee Institute, which he founded. And one of the skills they taught was building skills. And so many of those buildings were built by the students themselves on the basis of what they had been taught. And they were making their own bricks. And even in the segregated South, whites would come over to Tustee Institute to buy bricks because they could get a better deal there. And then in the end, it was all about raising intellects and academics, but also learning a trade. Because at that time, the white community wasn't looking necessarily to hire blacks. So make yourself invaluable.

For yourself, for others, start your own business. Yes, there was segregated South and there was racism. Overcome it was his attitude. Does Thomas Sowell have that same attitude?

Yes, I think that we get so much attention to racists. When I look at groups around the world, and I spent a lot of time studying that over the years, the groups that rise from poverty to prosperity almost never have any charismatic leaders who lead them protesting against other groups, no matter how justified the protesting would be. They invest their time and energies into acquiring skills that have value in the marketplace. And that's how they arose. In the United States, for example, there was a time 100 years or so ago when the people of Japanese and Chinese immigrants could not legally own property in California. They didn't spend their time worrying about that.

They got built up their own skills and went on. But now, I don't believe racists today can do half as much damage to the younger generation of blacks as the teachers unions are doing every day. And because the way they, the low expectations, the lack of quality care, it's not a lack of money, lack of funding. You see the staggering results on academic standards when it comes to the cities. Most of them run by African-American mayors, run by school, most of them are filled with minority students. But it's not because minorities aren't capable of everything others are capable of. It's all about the situation which they're born into, and the classroom, as well as the curriculum. Yeah, well, I did a book on charter school a few years ago in which I compared schools in New York City where the black and Hispanic kids were in charter schools, were located in the very same building with black and Hispanic kids from traditional public schools. In fact, I myself went to one of those schools when I was a teenager. In those schools, the ones, the black and Hispanic kids who are in the traditional public schools reached the required level of math 7% of the time.

In the charter school, in the very same building, serving the very same community, 100% of the students met the standards. Now, you know, you can't explain that by race. You can't explain it by race and you can't explain it by test bias. So, and the thing is, Dr. Sol, for the most part, teachers in the public school are even getting paid more, and their days are shorter. So you can't say, well, you get what you pay for.

Not really. If you look at what they're producing in these charter schools, you're getting a longer day, more demands, usually a uniform, and you seem to, and the demands result in better results. Worse than that, people don't understand that charter schools were set up with the idea that you have an experimental kind of school, and if some things work there, you could transfer that to the larger, regular public schools.

Fine. What happened is that the charter schools have so outperformed the traditional public schools that the traditional public schools know they're never going to be able to do what the charter schools are doing. And so there are laws, including in California, that are forcing the charter schools to do the counterproductive things that the public schools are doing in order to save the jobs of the unionized teachers and in order to continue for the unions to take in billions of dollars a union does every year. And you would think, okay, well, I love what that charter school's doing. Let's learn from that.

Instead, they look at them as the enemy. And I don't know if you've been involved, but I watch what's happening on in New York all the time, and they're trying to keep down the charter schools. There was supposed to be dozens more, but they're just leaving them empty, and they're not staffing them up and putting kids in there because it would hurt the amount of people in the public schools. But if you really cared about minorities like you claim to, you'd want to fill up those charter schools because you want the results, better educated, highly motivated students.

Yeah. The last time I checked, there were 50,000 students in New York City trying to get into charter schools and not able to do so. In California, it's even worse. In 2019, a law was passed saying that disruptive students cannot be expelled from charter schools. Now, you know, in other words, the charter schools had behavioral standards. And so instead of raising the behavioral standards in the public schools, they would rather deliberately handicap the charter school.

It is quite cynical. I just like to go back in history, by the way, we're talking Thomas Sowell's new book that you need to read is Social Justice Fallacies. He goes out and gets the facts about institutions and the families and races and lets everybody know that we aren't necessarily in a, we're not in a racist society. There were societal reasons why certain things happen. And one of the things we could all do is you could, if you want to raise somebody, you raise them in a stable family.

That's probably the best thing you could do if you want your kid to be successful. But just looking back in history, it's just amazing how the smartest people, if you look back in time, had opinions because that's how they were brought up. I know Benjamin Franklin was brought up and he was a guy who had slaves and he just thought, well, whites are smarter than blacks and that's just the way it is. And then later on, he would find out and see black kids in school and see the results and start noticing there is no difference. He became the ultimate abolitionist in his lifetime. And then other people like Booker T. Washington would notice that people were brought up in environments where they were always told from the time they were kids that whites were smarter than blacks or blacks weren't smart.

And that would gradually change with time. And then you see people like Andrew Carnegie and the rich and famous who stand up and speak out and support people like Booker T. Washington and do the best they can white to help the African American cause because things change. People are born with perceptions and they're wrong, but it doesn't mean they're necessarily evil.

It means they need to be better educated and exposed to the realities, which your book does with exposing the fallacies. But if you look back in time and you say, well, Benjamin Franklin had slaves, we got to hate him. Well, George Washington had slaves, we got to hate him. I think that's a very dangerous thing to do, don't you?

Yes. What our, what our schools are doing is teaching kids to hate strangers who have done nothing to them. Now that is not, not, not a, that's not a good future either for that kid, those kids or for this whole society. Because once, once you start tolerating that from one side, you'll, you'll start seeing the same thing happening other side. And at that point there'll be such outrage that the actual substantive issues won't matter anymore.

There'll be people out for revenge and counter revenge on and on. So that's a special look at Thomas Sowell. We had a chance to talk to him for quite a long time and it still wasn't long enough. He's in his nineties now and he acts like maybe in his sixties, social justice fallacies. Arm yourself with doctrines like these. So when people start talking about how America is endemically racist, let him talk about personal responsibility and inequality in America and the danger of equity in America.