Popular podcast in america, Michael Knowles. Following the conversation between Mike Gonzalez and Michael Knowles we have conversations, if you think of something you would like to ask either or both of them please submit that question in the questions box. Join us with what you are tuning in for him. I want to introduce a special guest, Heritage Foundation president , mister kay coles james. Welcome to the Heritage Foundation and our virtual book launch of the plot to change america how identity politics is dividing the land of the free. I want to thank you all but especially Michael Knowles for joining us today. We are honored to have you with us. We are so proud with Mike Gonzalez and the time and research he put into this tremendous book. Mike isnt afraid to talk about what is happening to our beloved country and call out those who buy into the destructive identity politics. Mike is often at the tip of the spear at heritage when it comes to these issues. It isnt because hes a true patriot because he doesnt want to see our beloved country go any further down this treacherous road. It was only in the 1960s when we were struggling to desegregate this country, courageous whites and blacks were working to bring racists together and ensure that america lived up to its promise of liberty and justice and equal treatment for all people. We had our first black, our colors and black ground and highest ranks of American Business and government. And yet our young people are coming out of colleges and universities be leaving grievance politics, identity politics, the road to justice and equality when instead it will bring us right to a place where this nation is looking at a time in our history when we have never been more disrupted. This book couldnt be any more timely with the riots and distraction of statues and monuments and the rewriting of American History in the classroom. The American People need to wake up to the insidious notice of identity politics. They need to understand what this costs our society and they need to understand what it instills in our children and grandchildren if we stand by and allow it to continue. We cant let that happen and we wont let that happen so thank you for writing the support book and thank you for being here, Michael Knowles, to talk to us about that. An honor to be here at the Heritage Foundation. It is a pleasure to be joined, to talk about this book the plot to change america how identity politics is dividing the land of the free. I dont want to accuse you of anything. When i see roving bands of anarchists tearing down stages of the Founding Fathers of this country using the rhetoric of identity politics some of whom are selfproclaimed marxists i cannot help but wonder if you hired this group of people as a Marketing Tool to promote the thesis in this book because it seems this is playing out in realtime all around us. Thank you for being here. I am happy my book, my ideas are getting out. I did not hire these people but everything you see today you put your finger on it. Everything we see today from the anarchy in portland to the project, the blm organizations who robin dangelos socalled antiracism Training Sessions, all of this is at the heart of why i wrote my book. Little did i know when i was writing a year ago that we were going to have the summer of 2020 what im beginning to call the summer of hate is a consequence of the things weve done to ourselves. Host you trace identity politics to the 60s, the summer of love. A lot of people were skeptical of that designation at the time but your description is apt, the fruit of those ideologies led to the summer of hate. There is one moment early on in the book that was a little surprising to me but i think you are absolutely right. When people think of identity politics and all the affiliated pathologic, political correctness, intersection now any, use whatever term you like, when we think of it a lot of people consider that to be a sort of eccentricity in american politics, that we need to talk about the budget or foreignpolicy. You say is much more specific and more damning. You say identity politics has become our national hardware. What do you mean . Guest it is the software of our culture everywhere around us. We have become divided into groups based on race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender, even disability status. Anything that composes a degree of victimhood that can be used to claim respects or attentional rewards or justice, from the moment you enter school, your daughters, principally saying the rest of you to high school when our kids are made to read howard then which does a wonderful job not of telling history because it is bad history but instilling grievances, installation of grievances is at the heart of this, needs to work that way. The University Campuses have been taken over by this but it leans over to the workforce. Hr telling people to put a sign on their desks that say i am an outright, are we in a time of war . We are basing it as i say, it is i have come to believe it is the gender issue of our times. Host not every group gets to claim identity politics grievance status. Even though is you see on the camera i have relatively swarthy skin from my sicilian heritage it seems i would not qualify. Many other people in this country do not qualify so what is it . How does one get to claim this privilege of being considered oppressed . Guest we decided in the 60s to siphon off a group of people and call them minorities. We havent done this before. We had never done this before. We could have done this in the 1920s when we had a huge number of syrians were lebanese or sicilians in your case or jewish people from eastern europe, who could be identified, could have siphoned them off as minorities but chose not to. We chose to say lets have all the immigrants coming in join the melting pot and become americans through assimilation. In the 1940s social scientists were believed to associate in the essential victimhood have collective discrimination with a minority and the term minority as we know it today is first defined in websters 1961 in the definition we know of today that has an association with victimhood. We divide these people into minority groups, they have a sense of grievances of victimhood and that is what we use to say the country is systemically racist, institutionally racist so we must change the institutions and structures in the system itself. Host you mention the social scientist, the institution. In the popular imagination identity politics is something that was developed from the grassroots. People spontaneously taking to the streets and coming toward a kind of consciousness is a group of people and demanding their rights in the face of oppression. That is the official leftwing narrative by the people pushing identity politics. You say the origins are different. You say the origins are more specific, involves a small group of people, and it was highly intentional. Which is it at who is behind it . Guest it is not a grassroots effort, it was driven by elite activists, different groups of people who formed a bureaucracy to create these groups who promoted this at universities. In the 1960s the Ford Foundation gave a great deal of money to the researchers to go in, mexicanamericans, thinking back, horrible news to the activists, mexicanamericans did not feel they were minorities or victim group, they didnt know they were facing discrimination. At the individual level at this agency, this is bad news for ucla researchers which undertook a process to instill, the Ford Foundation in the late 60s, the Ford Foundation, the Mexican Health fund, they support this group creation, behind this, the thinking of the Frankfurt School to replace the metanarrative, the hegemonic narrative. The American Dream obviously we are not a perfect country by any means which can be perfectible to be improved. What we see them play over again on people who create ethnic groups who create identities. Host you mentioned antonio gramsci, the most significant philosopher, including karl marx himself. We had a marxist at the beginning. Into critical theory and modern university. Today you have people claiming identity politics describing themselves as trained marxists, leaders of the blm organization. The Common Thread seems to be karl marx, people who are avowedly common list communist. But that is a crazy Conspiracy Theory, you are seeing communists everywhere. The red scare. Is this a Conspiracy Theory . Guest Antonio Graham ski is the one who comes up with the idea, the fascists send you to prison to stop his brain working, bad idea. A lot of thinking in prison, he begins to think in the late 20s and 30s why havent revolutions happened . On leave they have succeeded, backwater of europe in 1719 but all the revolutions have failed since 1848, there is no italian soviet, in italy, and and and the are all the institutions. We need to destroy the hegemonic narrative. What we are seeing, the creator of the 1619 project, this is about repressing the narrative of americans. The refinement comes from the Frankfurt School, writes a book in 1937, critical theory is an unremitting attack north to west. Martin j who really good book on Frankfurt School notes almost ignored, completely ignored the soviet union, even at the height of the famine and all the massacres but an unremitting attack on western norms and american norms and you have critical theory, has infiltrated every faculty. You have to study critical legal theory, all of the study started in the 60s. About replacing the narrative. Angela davis, the black panther member of the communist party, at brandeis, she says ethnic studies are the intellectual arm of the revolution. She knows what you are saying. We should take it seriously when we see what is happening, echoing the same phrases these neomarxists and cultural marxists in the 50s and 60s. Host you outlined greater detail in the book you can trace this intellectual evolution that overflows into crazy politics, you did not dedicate a chapter to black identity because of the unique role of black people in the United States, legal slavery, tim crow and everything, what you point out is identity politics attempts to conflate other minority groups as they continue to be created day by day with the black experience in america. As a matter of chronology how do these minority groups develop . We could begin with hispanic or latino or the new term, latin x, they dont and how to pronounce that, i wont even try. Your last name is gonzalez. What is the hispanic identity . People did not buy into it when it came out, why does it stop . Guest this analogizing of the black experience, they did it on purpose. The National Organization for women and other feminists in terms of jane crow at the time, making a clear association, thurgood marshall, in this decision, our experience is unique, i say in my book the plot to change america how identity politics is dividing the land of the free am i going to have a chapter on African Americans because of the unique experience. I dont think it is healthy to fill their hearts and minds with that but i do think slavery happened, jim crow happened, segregation happens, i fight so hard because i dont going back to the era of plessy versus ferguson, separate but equal, not even slowly but rapidly going back with identity politics. The hispanic model is a clear one, in the late 40s with Los Angeles City council, organized mexicanamericans, fred ross, did not think they were organized enough into a voting block, the kind of movement that comes in, the leaves this is considered race, mexican as a nationality, there are many mexicans of european origin, mixes thereof, so they have the association and begin to realize we want to expand this coast to coast, bring cubans, Puerto Ricans in the northeast and that is when they come up with the idea of hispanics which the activists begin almost to intimidate the bureaucracy into creating the bureaucracy throws in the towel in 1877, the office of management and budget comes up with policy directive, the hispanic identity introduced into the census of 1980, the first census that has hispanic identity and Asian Americans which is another huge benefit, americans of different origins, and and and and people listening to this will be surprised, concocted by the bureaucracy, Christina Moore wrote, wrote about this. And expect this identity of having existed always, to create another Identity Group and a group of americans, the development of nina which im pleased to say we have collective amnesia about nina because it was a new Identity Group the left tried to foist on us during the Obama Administration that never took off. A win for the good guys, that there is not one more grievance group. As you point out in the book for the vast majority of our history arabs were considered white. You name a number of wellknown arabs including mitch daniels, former governor of indiana or people of middle eastern origins, steve jobs, not particularly oppressed on the basis of his race. That raises this question of White Privilege which we hear about today. Bestselling books are written about, you cant take a job or go to a School Without attending a Training Session where you are castigated for White Privilege but raises the question, if one receives a special privilege by virtue of being white, why are activists clamoring to remove their designation as white and create the new identity politics . There seems to be a problem. Gives lie to this idea of White Privilege. Jd vance wrote a very good book four or five years ago, describing scotch irish, when he got to yale he was unaware what was expected culturally and what he tends to use or anything like that. I quote the activists at the Census Bureau including a radical palestinian activist, the idea of the Census Bureau brought them to the office in 2015 to advise on the creation of mina, everything you want to know about this, an agency captured by the left. They were very clear about when they were discussing what to do, to model it on hispanics. Not asking for the mina category but a professor of ethnic studies said once they understand there will be benefits in terms of racial preference or hiring practices, should right away how this is, using these racial purposes as a gateway drug to identity politics. It shows also you could derive benefit from proving you are not white. Host you might call it oppression privilege. It has become inverted. Linda began to wherever he job which she now wears in public appearances because without it she was just another white woman and that was not advantageous politically. The woman question comes up as well. In addition to racial categories there are sexual categories for identity politics. What struck me as strange, women make up the majority of the population, women make up in America Today the majority of College Students. How is it the majority could become an aggrieved minority . Guest as i said in the 60s with the second wave feminism they identified women, analogize the situation of black americans is unique for black women it used the jane crow analogy, a new iteration of this, they are being moved to the oppressor class, theres this new term karen that comes in, people are marking women as karens which is really bizarre phenomenon to be happening and i havent read her book, robin dangelos book, chapter called white womens fears. So i think there was women are classified now, i believe that this could be happening, being moved into the category of white women that is. Host i have not mastered sufficient masochism to read the white fragility book which is popular as is this term karen. The term karen though it is in common use is a racial slur referring specifically to white women, it is a socially acceptable racial term. You see this evolution, this change in what racial categories are protected, what sexual categories are protected. There is a disagreement between the new feminists and the old feminists. The second wave very much believed in biological sex, in i woman hear me roar, now the category of sex has been completely obliterated with major news agency the referrer the other day to individuals with a service, you might say i women hear me or has individual with a cervix, hear me roar which would seem to create a contradiction, problem within that particular identity category. I am searching for any hope that we can recover from this identity politics nightmare. Is there a chance because of this contradiction, identity politics will collapse in on itself or will it require a greater effort to rid ourselves of that problem . Guest i am hopeful. The reason i wrote my book the plot to change america how identity politics is dividing the land of the free is to shed light on what has happened. Americans need to be aware what happened, how they did it, why they did it before we can think of ways of reversing what has happened. At the end of the day, these are at heart marxist ideas, the conflict is a purely marxist concept of life being conflict between groups and power dynamics, but at the end of the day marxists set out to do the