Professor Wilfred Reilly author of taboo. Good morning, and thank everyone for coming. My name is parker van houten. I am a fifth year senior at the university of kentucky. I study vocal performance and Arts Administration at the university and im very happy to be here on this brisk and blustery morning. So our first presenter today is an associate professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University the author of the books taboo 10 facts you can talk about hate crime hoax and the 50 Million Dollar question. Please welcome Wilfred Reilly. And our next speaker is the author of 11 books including thought criminal beyond woke google archipelago the digital gulag and the simulation of freedom just to name a few. Please welcome michael rectenwald. And finally these gentlemen are joined by carly kylie carlino the senior Media Relation strategist at ragnary publishing who will moderate the panel. Hi everyone. Thank you for coming to this. Im really excited about this conversation where we talking about the state of speech in Book Publishing specifically. The dystopian idea of book banning is becoming a trend among american publishers regular publishing where i work is a conservative Book PublishingCompany Based in washington, dc and over 75 year history. We have gained a reputation for publishing books that new york publishers wont touch one of them being mr. Rileys book, taboo. I book banning is a reality. We will be discussing today. It happens among publishers before a book even makes it to the public eye. It happens among distributors who have apologized for shipping taboo. Topic books that disagree with the mainstream sentiment and among booksellers like amazon who have even refused to carry books for the same reason. So well if you could just briefly introduce yourself talk about your book a little bit. You talk about the brilliant. What do you talk about in taboo . And why is it important to todays discussion . Yeah, so taboo is a book. Its subtitled the 10 facts 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 happened 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 sort of the broader narrative that theres a massive amount of interracial crime and conflict in the country. And i really go across the spectrum. I look at the idea of systemic racism are there Hidden Forces in america that make it very difficult for people of color to succeed. And to sort of switch it up in the final chapter. I look at the things the altright says the idea for example that diverse societys just dont work. And what i find, is that a lot of these narratives are the word i usually use as. Although ill avoid this in front of a polite audience like this one, but i find that theres very little factual basis for a lot of the things that mass media kind of promotes in modern society. So in terms of the black lives matter argument, for example, the total number of unarmed africanamerican men that were killed by police last year turns out to be 17. And you can really go into this data at some length. I mean the total number of people overall that were shot and killed by the police last year and as in almost every year was under a thousand. Of those about 250 were black where africanamerican the majorities people turned out to be attacking the police with guns knives in knives in one case a cadillac escalade. So the the core of this argument that were constantly confronted with is unreal. Its fictional and there seems to be a problem not so much with 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 at least in the traditional sense kind of a violent incident involving either a black perp and a white victim or a white perp and a black victim was about three percent of crime. The 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 of them 89 were actually black on white now again, this is not an epidemic in any direction the person most likely to kill you in the usa is your exwife at least for males, but i mean that that is a bit of an indication of whats actually going on. How real a lot of what you hear is and this is this is just true on and on down the line. I mean in terms of the idea of systemic hidden bias the claim there is really what dr. Abram kindy says if youre familiar with that gentleman but that any large gap in performance between groups has to be due to some kind of hidden subtle racism unless you want to propose that its due to genetic inferiority. In fact what i found is that adjusting for really basic things like age the most common age for a black man in the usa is 27 for a white man. Its 58 closed almost all of the gaps. Just so on down the line. I mean the major alt right claims diverse societies dont function for example, where no more likely to be accurate. I mean 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 point of the book i think is that many things that almost everyone seems to believe really arent accurate and we believe these things because were being told them by people. So i look at that i examine why and apparently this is a very controversial thing to do and this came on top of a previous book hate crime hoax which makes the point that a lot of the very high profile kind of racial incidents that weve seen in recent years Covington Catholic here in kentucky. Jussie smollett, obviously mocked by Dave Chappelle is the mad frenchman juicy smilier. So on turned out simply not to be true. So the topic of both these books i think which well get into is that a lot of things that were all expected to believe arent real. And so the question is why were expected to believe them and there are there are many people that object to this sort of line of inquiry taking place. I think. So that thats it for me. Oh, im i am an associate professor at Kentucky State University here in frankfort quick drive over from lexington glad to be here. Thank you will and michael. Can you briefly tell us about your book thought criminal and how its prepared for you to talk about this discussion. Sure. Yes. Im michael rutkin walton and criminal is my 11th book. I was a professor full professor at nyu in global liberal studies and um, i was basically a leftist a marxist and then the social justice excesses in the university started to alarm me and i saw the sort of totalitarian of what they represented. And i started to speak out against it on twitter first, and then i was interviewed by the Student Newspaper there. And two days after the interview appeared i was pressured into a force a forced into a leave of absence and driven off campus. Condemned by a committee called the diversity equity and inclusion group. And effectively my academic career was ruined. 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. Cartel really is what it is and then the next book was beyond woke and which i treat. All of these subjects from big tech through im dealing with the social justice ideology and all of its permutations and then finally thought criminal is a novel and that novel treats . Uh, its based the premise of neuroscientist who has come up with a theory about a virus. And he thinks that the virus 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 to this massive database and 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 make the virus more effective and to make it more permanent, so that almost all of the thinking is supplied. And replaces ones own thinking its all supplied by this body called collective mind, which is this vast database Processing System. So hes a thought criminal because hes trying to maintain his own individual autonomy and thinking process at the risk of being. Of being infected with the virus, which will then eradicate his personality in effect. And he is a amongst a group called the network of thought deviationists and that derives from basically i take that language from the soviet union. In which basically dissidents were considered deviationists from the party line. So this is about totalitarianism. And how it eradicates individual thought and attempts to replace it with party line thinking. All right. Thank you. Yeah, so you guys have published some pretty against the against the Mainstream Media messaging. Topics youve published some controversial stuff that have really gotten peoples eye up and a lot of ways among publishers over the past year. We have seen books signed and then canceled and or just authors refuse to be signed were not signed on an all by for example, simon and schuster mike pence was signed by simon and schuster to publish a memoir, but then cancel called culture got in there too and a bunch of employees made a petition demanding the cancel mike pences memoir because his policies were quote racist and sexist the ceo. Jonathan karp said Simon Schuster would commit to publishing a broad range of views. And so they ended up committing to publish that but earlier in 21, they had canceled a mans book named josh hawley. I dont know if youve heard of him. And he was canceled by Simon Schuster because he objected to certifying the 2020 president ial election. So he was for the same reasons political his political stance. Thats why he was canceled by a publishing company. And so i wanted to hear from you. Is michael . Have you had any difficulty with publishers not wanting to publish your books because they didnt want to promote your message. Yes, i did. When i wrote spring time for snowflakes one of the things i examined was transgender ideology. And im going to talk about trans. Transgender here. Im talking about the ideology and the cultural. Trend and agenda and so i i analyzed what was going on with transgender ideology, and i 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 is determined by language. So that reality is really a social and linguistic construct thats made by language itself. And that is not you know, theres no out there out there really everything is produced by the subject. Its very subjectivistic and its very its very its actually nihilistic in terms of epistemology. But what i was getting at here is i talked about how transgenderism depends on naming and effect. You are who you say you are so it all comes down to words and language determines reality. So anyway, i had a publisher Saint Martins press we were all through the whole revision process. Maybe seven times. Thats how they were adam. Bella was the editor and hes a conservative actually of a certain ilk and he tried to get the book through but the transgender thing tripped it up Saint Martins press is actually an Academic Press but he had he had a certain imprint called all points books and they tripped it 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 wanted to say without any apologies or whatever. Yeah, how about you will were discussing the book business. Do you feel your choice of very edgy topics has gotten you in trouble with publishing. Uh, yeah, i think i mean i have a great relationship with you guys, but theres a reason that this came out with regnery. Um in all honesty, i think that theres a great deal of resistance to a whole range of topics in modern academia and modern publishing. I dont think thats much of a secret for this audience, but ill tell you i have a background in sales. I was a sales director for marcus Evans International in chicago for a couple years and how i got my first book published was that i just identified the emails and the phone numbers for the executives that Publishing Companies which isnt hard to do theyre on the websites and i just made a pitch call like im a pretty serious guy. Im a professor at a local university. I have this background. Id be interested in setting up 20 minutes talking about a book idea and everyone accepted it was it was enjoyable a great funds the phrase that comes to mind talking all these guys in a new field but a lot of them said very openly when i mentioned the premise of the book hate crime hoax theres no way we can publish this. One of them actually called me kid. The guy was about 70. I think a little past that point, but its just sort of interesting like you dont understand how our business works. Theres no way we can get this out. Ill tell you theres a book. You should check out called crying wolf by a guy named laird wilcox, which is the first version of hate crime hoax and this guy laird wilcox is an extreme as a researcher conservative guy down to kansas tried 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 a cover. This is something post. For example, Tawana Brawley that were simply not going to be able to release so that obviously exists. I mean, i openly talked to people who said you seem like a nice guy, this topics not one were gonna go with and i somehow feel that that would have been a little bit of a different situation if id written a book called, you know antiracist toddler. So there are definitely our prejudices in every field. I mean their fields like the us military obviously that lean wright but in publishing i think across the arts in general and academia in the ngo sector youre gonna run into a lot of people that lean toward the political left and thats thats going to affect the topics. You can quote unquote get away with i actually avoided the trans issue in taboo, because the books already based around 10 or 11 major taboos, so i didnt want to have to fight about this one. I mean, i think its obvious that men arent women if you want to put it that way but chose not to really take that on, you know full frontally that may be my next book, although i think mr. Rechtenwald my coauthor and a number of people have already covered that ground pretty well. But yeah, the there really is a form of censorship it comes mostly from the left today that makes the situation such that saying men arent women would be a wildly controversial statement. And yeah, thats something people can notice and people can react to but yes that obviously has affected me. Yeah, and michael does censorship in the publishing world and in the media at large day resemble any historical precedence that you your research . Well, yeah, i mean i mean i mean, its its very reminiscent of stalinism frankly and the cultural revolution in china. Where in china for example, they . Effectively ran on a rampage destroying the four olds customs habits idea. I dont know all the four olds, but you can look it up on wikipedia where theyll tell you lies about mostly everything. But anyway, before the four olds and basically they destroyed all remnants of traditional culture and routed out what they thought of as bourgeois ideology or bourgeois ideas and in the same thing happened in soviet union, except they didnt have a cultural revolution. It just was a basically routing out all the scent and in dissonance and putting them in gulags, i mean, so we dont have were having a soft. Cultural socialist revolution in the United States. I mean this this should not be a surprise to anyone to realize that we are undergoing that. And as such it is permeated all of these Culture Industries the publishing houses. I think were actually late in coming to this but almost every Cultural Institution in the United States and around the world, but you know, this seems to be the 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 eastern bloc. Where these dissidents would 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 publishi