Thank everyone for coming, my name is parker van houten, fifthyear senior at the university of kentucky, i start study Performance Arts administration and im happy to be here on this blustery ca morning. So our first presenter today is an associate professor of Political Science at kentucky state university. Author of the books taboo 10 fax you cant talk about. And the 50 million question, please welcome wilfred riley. And our next speaker is the author of 11 books including thought criminal, beyond woke, google archipelago, and the simulation of freedom to name a few. Please welcome michael rectenwald. And finally these gentlemen are joined by kylie carlino, senior media strategist at Regnery Publishing who will moderatethe panel. Thank you for coming to this. Im excited about this conversation. Were going to be talking about the state of speech and Book Publishing specifically. The dystopian idea of book banning is becoming a trend among american publishers. Regnery publishing where i work as a conservative policy Company Based in washington dc and over 75 years weve gained a rsreputation for publishing books that new york publishers wont touch, one being mister rileys book taboo. Book banning is a reality we will be discussing today. It happens along officers before a book makes it to the public eye. It whappens among distributors have apologized for shipping taboo kstopic books that disagree with the mainstream sentiments and among booksellers like amazon have refused to carry books for the same reason. So will, if you could just briefly introduce yourself. Talkabout your book a little bit , why you talk about the book in taboo and why is it important to todays discussion . Taboo is a book subtitled the 10 fax you cant talk about. And what i do is look at 10 of the more prominent kind of public narratives in society and see what the facts underlying them if any happen to be. So i look at the black lives matter narrative for example which is that theres an epidemic number of africanamerican unarmed men being killed by police. I look at the broader narrative that theres a massive amount of interracial crime and conflict in the country and go across the spectrum. I look at systemic racism, are there Hidden Forces in america that make it hard for people of color to succeed and in the final chapter i look at the things the altar right says. The idea for example that diverse societies just dont work and what i find is that a lot of these narratives are, the word i usually use is bullshit although although ill avoid that in a polite audience like this one but i find theres that all factual basis for a lot of the things that mass media promotes in modern society soin terms of the black lives matter argument for example , the total number of unarmed africanamerican men that were killed by police last ou year turned out to be 17 and you can go into this data at some length. The total number of people overall shot and killed by the police last year and asin almost every year was under thousand. Of those, about 250 were black or africanamerican. The majority of peopleturned out to be attacking the police with guns, knives, in one case a cadillac escalade. So the core of this argument that were constantly confronted with is unreal. Its fictional. And there seems to be a problem not so much of people understanding this reality but with people expressing it. And that turned out to be true for most of the other things as well. Interracial crime based in the traditional sense kind of violent incidents involving either a black at all what victim or a white or black victim was about three percent of crime. Most recent year on record which is what i use in the book, there were 600,000 of these cases and there were about 20 million total crimes. Of the interracial crimes that did occur about 90 percent of them, 89 percent were actually black on white. This is not an epidemic in any direction. The person most likely to kill you in the usa is your exwife at least four males but i mean, that is a bit of an indication of whats going on. How real a lot of what you hear is s this is just true on down the line. In terms of the idea of systemic bias claim there is really what doctor Ibrahim Kennedy says if youre familiar withthat gentleman. But that any large gaps in performance between groups has to be due to some kind of subtle racism unless you want to propose that its due to genetic inferiority. In fact what i found is adjusting for basic things like age, the most common age for a black man and the usa is 27. For a white man is 58. Just on down the line. The major online right claims, diverse societies dont function were no more likely to be accurate. Large countries have been diverse since ancient rome. If you own a lot of land generally there are a lot of different kinds of people that live on it. So the point of the book i think is that many things that almost everyone seems to believe ecreally arent accurate and we believe these things because we are being told them by people. So i look at that. I examine why apparently this is a controversial thing to do and this came on top of the previous book a crime hopes which makes the point a lot of the very high profile on the racial incidents weve seen in recent years , Covington Catholic inkentucky. Jesse small it obviously mocked by Dave Chapelle as a mad frenchman. Turned out simply not to be true. Dso the topic of both these books i think which we will get into is that a lot of things that were all expected to believe are real. So the question is why were expected to believe them and there are many people that object to this sort of line of inquiry i think. So thats it for me. I am an associate professor at kentucky stateuniversity in frankfurt. A quick drive over from lexington, glad to be here. And michael, can you briefly tell us about your book for criminal and how its relevant to this discussion. Im Michael Brecht and walt and thought criminal is my 11th book. I was a professor, full professor at nyu in global liberal studies and i was basically leftist, a marxist and then the social justice excesses in the university started to alarm me. And i saw this sort of totalitarian character of what they represented and i started to speak out against it on twitter first. He and then i was interviewed by the Student Newspaper there. And two days after the interview appeared, i was pressured into, forced into a leave of absence and driven offcampus condemned by a Committee Call for diversity equity and inclusion broke and effectively my academic career was over. So since then ive been writing. I have written springtime for snowflakes which is a memoir that treats my journey through the academic left and back out and then another book called google archipelago which treats the same sort of ideology as it permeates big tech and how big tech and why big tech is a leftist authoritarian outfit. A cartel, really is what it is. And the next book was beyond where i treat all these subjects from tech dealing with the social justice ideology and all of its permutations. Then finally thought criminal is a novel. That novel treats. Its based on the premise of neuroscientist who has come up with a theory about the virus and he thinks that the is actually being perpetrated by the state and that it has a function which is to connect the neurons of the neocortex of the various subjects through this massive database of Processing System called collective mind. And theres a Vaccine Program and he believes that the vaccine is actually doing something other than what they say. In fact it turns out to be true that the vaccine serves in fact to make the virus more effective and to make it more permanent so that almost all of the thinking is ngto apply and replaces ones own thinking. Its all supplied by this body called collective mind which is this vast database process system. So hes a thought criminal because hes trying to main maintain his own individual autonomy and thinking process at the risk of being infected with the virus which will then eradicate his personality and effect. And he is amongst the group calledthe network of thought deviations. And that derives from basically i take that language from the soviet union in which basically dissidents were considered deviation is from the party line. So this is about totalitarianism and how it eradicates individual thought and attempts to replace it with partyline thinking. So you guys have published some pretty against the Mainstream Media messaging. Youve published some controversial stuff that has gotten peoples higher up in a lot of ways. Among publishers over the past year we have seen books signed and then canceled or just authors who are not signed on at all by for example simon and schuster. Mike pence was signed by simon and schuster pto publish a memoir but then canceled culture got in their two and a bunch of employees made a petition demanding they cancel his memoir because his policies were quick, racist and sexist. The ceo son Jonathan Carter which commits publishing of fraud ranging views so they ended up committing to publish that earlier in 2021 they canceled a man named josh hawley, i dont know if youve heard of him and he was canceled by simon and schuster because he objected to certifying the 20 20 president ial election so you was for the same reason political. His political stands. Thats why he was canceled by a Publishing Company so i wanted to hear from you guys , michael, have you be with publishers not wanting to publish your book because they didnt want to promote your message. I did. When i wrote springtime for snowflakes one of the things i examined was transgender ideology and im not talking about transgender here, im talking about the ideology and the cultural trend and agenda so i analyzed what was going on with transgender ideology and i decided that it had to do with postmodernism which is a school of philosophical thought so to speak if you can call it thought. That basically suggests that reality is determined by language. So that reality is really a social construct thats made by language itself and theres no there out there. Really everything is produced by the subject and its very subjectivist thing and its very, its actually nihilist in terms of its epistemology but what i was getting at here is talk about how transgender resume depends on naming in effect you are who you sayyou are so it all comes down to words. The language determines reality. So anyway, i had a publisher Saint Martins press. We were all through the whole errevision process, maybe seven times. Thats how they were. Adam bello was the editor and hes a conservative actually of a certain bill. And he tried to get the book kthrough but the transgender thing tripped it up. St. Martins press isactually an Academic Press but he had a certain inference call all opoints books. And they drifted up over the transgender issue so i had to move it to a different publisher. Which im perfectly happy about because i could say exactly what i want to say without any apologies for whatever. We are discussing the book business, do you feel your choice of any topics have gotten you in troublewith publishing . Yes. I have a great relationship with you guys but theres a reason thiscame up with regnery. In all honesty i think theres a great deal of resistance to a whole range of topics in modern academia and in modern publishing. I dont think its much of a secret for this audience but i have a background in sales. I was a sales director for marcus in chicago. And how i got my first book published was i just identified the email and phone numbers for the executives. It wasnt hardto do, theyre on the website uand i made a pitch call. Im a serious guy, im a professor at a local university. I would be interested in setting up 20 minutes talking about a book idea and everyone accepted. It was enjoyable. Great fun is a phrase that comes to mind. But a lot of them said very openly when i mentioned the premise of the book a crime, theres no way we can publish it. One of them called me kid. Le the guy was about 70. But its interesting. You dont understand how our business works. Theres no way we can get this out. Theres a book you should check out all crying wolf by a guy named Leonard Wilcox. This guy Leonard Wilcox is an extremist researcher, conservative guy in kansas. Try to publish this book for Something Like four years. He finally got a deal with one publisher. I forget the name of the business but was told just before publication when they had acover , this is something that were simply not going to be to release so that obviously exists. I openly talk to people who said you seem like a nice guy. This topic is not one were going to go with and i somehow feel that would have been a little bit of a different situation if id written a book called antiracist. So there are definitely our prejudices in every field. Feels like the us military obviously that lean right but in publishing and i think across the arts in general and academia, in the ngo sector youre going to irun into a lot of people with the political left and thats going to affect the topic. I actually avoided the transition in taboo because the book is already based around 10 or 11 major taboos. Thats something people can notice and people can react to but it has an effect. Yes. And michael, the censorship and the public in world and the media large resemble in historical precedents that you didnt research . Yeah. I mean, its very reminiscent of stalinism frankly, at the cultural revolution in china. Where in china, for example, they effectively ran on a rampage destroying the customs, habits. You can look it up on wikipedia where they will tell you lies about mostly everything. But anyway, basically they destroyed all remnants of traditional culture and routed out what they thought of as bourgeois ideas and same thing happened in thehe soviet union except they didnt have cultural revolution. It just was basically routing out all dissent and dissidents and putting them in gulags. We dont have, were having a soft cultural socialist revolution in the united states. I mean, this should not be a surprise to anyone to realize that we are undergoing fat, and as such it is permeated all of these cultural industries, the publishing houses i think were actually late in coming to this, but almost every Cultural Institution in the united states, and around thehe world, but this seems to be a hotbed or the belly of the beast in terms of where this is actually coming from. So it seems that it really resembles the soviet union. It resembles the easternes bloc. D have to create what they called sams about books and publish. Basically, they called him parallel structures. They tried to develop parallel Cultural Institutions and various types of other mechanisms by which to survive first of all to keep their sanity second of all and third of all to try to flourish creatively and otherwise so yeah it very much is to me. Were undergoing something that i think is very serious. It is not. Simply a joke wokeness isnt just funny. Although theres a funny book about it right here. Wokeness is actually a very dangerous ideological means by which to exclude and destroy people and its not its not a joke. So yeah, i think this is a very serious situation that very much resembles. The soviet union and in fact, i just read an article before this talk called the soviet is a sovietization of the united states. Which talks about all then this is from a russian dissident who who fled the soviet union he defected and he said whats happening here . Has had was was its its making its hair stand on end. And also ive heard from other people from the cold from china that came over the that came here and theyre saying the same thing this minds them of the chinese cultural revolution. So publishing is definitely one of the elements but its very widespread. No. No, i would make about my coauthors comment there. Were already seeing the development of quote unquote parallel institutions in the usa. Where youre seeing almost separate rightwing if you will and then sort of Mainstream Center left medias. I mean youre seeing alternative academic institutions. A Hillsdale College is one were just talking about but this is actually a major problem for my field of Political Science because youre creating two bases. Youre creating two americas, which is something that even george bush even barack obama fairly partisan fellows spoke out against quite recently, but the audience base for fox news. Last i looked was about 91 conservative and fox at least identifies itself as somewhat ideologically conservative, but you see the same thing in reverse the base for the New York Times the washington post. So on down the line leans 80 90 percent or more to the left. Its over 95 last i looked at any real data for msnbc. So not to just drop a bunch of figures on you guys, but we are moving toward this sort of two camps that disagree on everything but because theyre receiving different information. For example, i mentioned last line, but i mentioned the total number of in black men shot by the cops in a typical year. Its about 10, maybe 20. Um a good well done recent poll from the Skeptic Research center found that the average liberal american thinks its 10,000. This isnt me exaggerating. They asked a bunch of people identified as leftist or very liberals how many people they thought this was and it was more than 35 thought. It was about 10,000 if i recall court now 35 thought it was about a thousand. I dont want to exaggerate 15 thought it was about 10,000 and about 10 thought it was more than that. So the constant panic on one side of the aisle and the reaction to that Something Like the Covid Vaccine sometimes extremism on the right reflects entirely different bases of knowledge and thought and even information which is very problematic. Thats a good point. Yeah, i agree with connect. And just that something i agree with that. And i think there is a split theres theres two at least two americas, but i would like that though that on