these television companies supports c-span2 as a public service. >> thank you everyone for coming. i'm a fifth-year seniorr at the university of a kentucky. i studied performance arts of the university and i'm happy to

be here on this brisk morning. our first presenter today is an associate professor of political science at kentucky statee university, the author of the books taboo ten facts you can't talk about high crime hoax and the 50 million-dollar question. please welcome wilford riley. [applause] the next speaker the author of 11 books including fault criminal, c beyond woke, google, the digital gulags and a simulation of freedom just to name a few.el please welcome michael. [applause] and kylie the senior media relations strategist at regnery publishing who will moderate the panel. [applause] hi, everyone. thank you for coming. a really excited about this conversation. we will be talking about the state of speech and book publishing specifically. the dystopian idea is becoming a

trend among american publishers. regnery publishing where i work as a conservative publishing company in washington, d.c. and over 75 years of history we've gained a reputation for publishing books that publishers want to touch one of them being mr. riley's book, taboo.is book banning is a reality wee will be discussing today. it happens among publishers before a book makes it to the public eye. s it happens among distributors bowho apologized for shipping taboo books that would disagree with the mainstream sentiment and booksellers like amazon who refused to carry books for the same reason. so if you could briefly introduce yourself, talk about your book a little bit, why you talk about what you talk about in taboo and why is it important in today's conversation. >> it's subtitled the ten facts you can't talk about and what i

do is look at ten of the more prominent kind of public narratives in society and see what the facts underlining them if any happened to be so i look at the black lives matter narrative that there is anpo epidemic number of unarmed men being killed by police. i look at the sort of broad narrative that bears a massive amount of interracial crime and conflict in the country and i go across the spectrum and look at the idea of systemic racism, or their head influences in america that make it difficult for people of color to succeed. and to switch it up in the final chapter i lookt- at things the d wright says. thest idea that for example diverse societies just don't work and what i find is that a lot of these narratives are, i will avoid the word in front of an audience like this one but

there's very little factual basis for a lot of the things mass media kind of promotes. soiv in terms of the black lives matter argument, for example, the total number of unarmed african-american men killed by policean turned out to be 17 and you can really go into this data at some length it was under a thousand and of those about 250 were african-american. the majority turned out to be attacking with guns, knives and the cap black escalade. the core of the argument we are currently confronted with i is unreal. it's fictional and there seems to be a problem not so much of people understanding the reality, but people expressing it. interracial crime in the

traditionalng sense with a black perp and white victim or white purple and black victim is about 3%3% of crime. the most recent view 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 person most likely to kill you in the usa is your ex-wife at least for males but that is a bit of an indication of what is going on and how real it is. the claim is what doctor kennedy says if you're b familiar with a lot of gentle man that any large gap in performance between groups have to do with some kind of hidden subtle racism.

adjusting for basic things like age, the most common age for black man in the usa is 27. for the white man it's 58. it closed almost all the gaps and so on down the line.er the major old wright claims diverseti societies don't functn for example, women no more likely to be accurate. largenc countries our diversityn ancient rome if o you own a lotf land p generally there's a lot f different kinds of people that live on it. many things that almost anyone seems to believe really aren'tng accurate and we believe these because we are being told by people. this is a very controversial thing to do and this came on top of a previous book.

mocked by dave chapelle's and t turned out not to be true so the topic of both these books is that a lot of things that are expected to believe aren't real i am an associate professor here in frankfurt, quick drive over from lexington i was a professor, full professor at nyu and global liberal studies and was basically a leftist, a

marxist and in the university it started to alarm me and i saw the totalitarian character of what they represented and started to speak out against it two days after the interview appeared iur was pressured into, forced into a leave of absence and driven off campus and by the diversity equity and inclusion group. effectively, my academic career was ruined. so, since then, i've been writing.i i have written springtime for snowflakes, which is a memoir that treats my journey from the academic left and back out.

then another book which treats the same sort of ideology as it permeates big tech with a leftist authoritarian outfit. i treat all of these subjects from big tech dealing with of te social justice ideology and all of it permutations and then finally that novel is based on the premise of a neuroscientist who's come up with a theory about a virus and he thinks that the virus is being perpetrated by the state and that it has a

function to connect the neo cortex of the database. he believes the vaccine is doing something other than they say. in fact it turns out to be true the vaccine serves in fact to make the virus more effective and more permanent so that almost all the thinking is supplied and replaces one's own thinking by this body called collective mind which is a vast database process system. so he's a soft criminal because he's trying to maintain his own individual autonomy and thinking process at the risk of being infected with the virus which

will then eradicate his personality and he's among the group called the network of thought deviation nests and that derives from basically i take that language from the soviet union in which basically dissidents were considered from the party line. so this is about totalitarianism and how it eradicates individual thought and attempts to replace it with party line of thinking. >> you've published against the mainstream media messaging topics. you've published some controversial stuff among publishers over the past year

we've seen books signed and canceled or just authors that were not signed on at all for example simon and schuster. mike pence was signed to publish a memoir but then cancel culture got in and a bunch of employees made a petition to cancel the memoir because the policies were racist and sexist. the ceo was asked to commit to a broad range of views so they committed to that but earlier in 21 they had canceled josh holly. i don't know if you've heard of him. he was canceled by simon and schuster because he objected to the presidential election's for the same reasons he was political, his political stance. so i wanted to hear from you guys have you had any difficulty with publishers not wanting to publish your books because they

didn't want to promote your message? >> yes, i did. when i wrote springtime for snowflakes i examined the transgender ideology and i'm not talking about -- i'm talking about the ideology and the cultural a trend and agenda. i analyzed what was going on with transgender ideology and decided it had to do with postmodernism which is a school of philosophical thought so to speak that basically suggests reality as determined by language so that is a constructt that's made by language itself. everything is produced by the subject. it's a very subjective and an

idealistic but you are who you say you are so it all comes down to words and the language determines reality. we were through the whole revision process may be seven times. he tried to get the book through but the transgender thing tripped it up. he had a certain imprint called all points book and they tripped over the transgender issue so i had to move to a different publisher which i'm perfectly happy about because i can say exactly what i wanted to say without any apologies or

whatever. >> do you feel your choice of edgy topics have gotten you in trouble with publishing? >> i have a great relationship but there's a reason this came out. in all honesty i think there's a great deal of resistance to a whole range of topics in modern publishing i don't think it's much of a secret for this audience. i haveor a background in sales. how i got my first book published, i identified the e-mails and phone numbers for the publishing companies and i just made a pitch call. i'm a professor at a local university. setting up 20 minutes talking about a book idea. everyone accepted it was an enjoyable, great fun. but a lot of them said very openly when i mentioned the premise of the book there's no

way we can publish it. one of them called me kid. it's interesting you don't understand how our business works. there's no way we can get this out. he's an extremism researcher in kansas that tries 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 before publication when they had a cover this is something we are simply not going to be able t' release. they said you seem like a nice guy. and i somehow feel that would have been a little bit of a different situation if i'd written a book called antiracist bottler. so there are prejudices in every field like the u.s. military.

in the publishing it crosses the arts in academia you're going to run into a lot of people that leaned toward the political left and that's going to affect the topic. i avoided the issue in taboo because the book is already based around ten or 11 major taboos, so i didn't want to have to fight about this one. it's obvious men aren't women if you want to put it this way but to take that on. that may be the next book although i think my co-author g and a number of people covered that pretty well. there is a form of censorship that makes the situation that's something people can notice and react to. >> does censorship in the publishing world resemble any historical precedents that you've done on your research?

>> it's very reminiscent of stalin and the cultural revolution in china where for example they effectively ran on a rampage destroying the customs habits where they will tell you lies about mostly everything but anyway, basically they destroyed all remnants of traditional culture.ie the same thing happened in thelt soviet union except they didn't have a cultural revolution. itti just was basically routing out all dissent and dissidents and putting them in gulags. we have a socialist revolution

in the united states. this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone to realize we are undergoing that and as such it's permeated the w publishing houss i think we are actually late in coming to this but every institution this seems to be the belly of the beast in terms of where this is coming from so it resembles the eastern bloc where the dissidents would have to create and publish. basically they call them parallel structures and they try to develop the parallel cultural institutions and various types of other mechanisms by which to survive to keep their sanity.

and third of all, to try to flourish creatively and otherwise. so, yes it very much to me we are undergoing something that i think is very serious. it isn't simply a joke. brokenness isn't funny although there is a funny book about it right now. it is a very dangerous ideological means by which to exclude and destroy people and it's not a joke so this is a very serious situation thatn resembles the soviet union and in fact i read an article before this called the soviet united states which talks about from a russian dissident who fled to the soviet union and said what's

happening here is making its hair stand on end and i've heard frome other people that came hee and they are saying the same thing. this reminds them of the chinese cultural revolution. publishing is definitely one of the elements, but it's very widespread. >> we are already seeing the development of the parallel institutions where you are seseeing almost separate right-wing if you well and then mainstream centerleft media. lsyou're seeing alternative academic institutions. hillsdale college is one we were talking about but this is a major problem because we are creating two bases, which is something george bush and even barack obama fairly partisan spoke out against quite recently. but the audience base for fox news was about 91% conservatives

and fox identifies itself as somewhat ideologically conservative but you see the same thing in reverse, the base for "the new york times" and "washington post" 80 to 90% more last i looked at any real data for msnbc so not to drop a bunch of figures but we are moving towards the sort of two camps that disagree on everything. a good pull from this research itcenter found the average libel american thinks it is 10,000. this isn't me exaggerating. a p bunch of people that were vy liberal, how many people felt thoughtthis was and it's more t. 15% i thought it was about 10010% felt it was more than

that. the constant panic on one side of the aisle like the covid vaccine and extremism knowledge and thought and information that is problematic.it >> i agree with that and i think there is a split at least there's two americas but i would like to add one of them has the cultural power. they control for the most part academia and a few schools like hillsdale and a few others. they are controlling most of the publishing world and most of the media. fox notwithstanding. it's getting tremendous pressure from the left to get people canceled. there've been numerous campaigns for the tucker carlson campaign

for examples of this is ongoing. luckily he's got quite a spine so i admire him for that. but this is not, and this is true but i would say in this sense there is a parallel structure that just has to be subversive. one final comment the body is that you see in the media and academia, again it's about 93% less, the famous study by pugh in 2004 the national media journalists that are if i recall correctly leftist liberals were left leaning moderates with the same in my field of political science we have about 20ts democrats and republicans. when murdoch, founded fox news e was asked to do you think the audience will be for the

conservative tv station he said 51% of america because he looked at the demographics and had seen all of the pre-existing media was on this one side of the fence. the people that are coming out of field like the studies are saying things i don't want to focus on this one topic but they are rejected by the massive majority of americans. it's utterly mainstream and what the experts say. as an intelligent taxpaying citizen one thing i would encourage you to remember is an expert scientist is another upper middle-class citizen with a degree in a specific arena like education. it matters of 25% of these human people are in one of the political camps. there needs to be more build up

buildupand i think your seeing . they are hiring people actual mainstream figures. will that be enough? i don't know but it makes it more difficulted to just lie. every major story is usually wrong that's going to have a massive breaking affect. obviously swinging back to the thirds of the panel the entire thing turned out to be a set of lies. you had some great things to say and i liked your phrase of the messaging with the purpose of excluding and destroying things we don't want, that people don't want to hear. this happened in the past year

with the american booksellers association. they sent out an official apology. values and everything we believe and support it is inexcusable.ab i wanted to ask what do you think about this language that's being used there's this term

that came out of academia. again it stems out of postmodern ideas the language in and of itself in the form of action languages violins or your speech is violence this is a standard

that we are under. i think that it is prophetic on the part of this to cave to these mobs especially ifso it is one person, even if it is a twitter mob. they have a lexicon of woke ideology. a plug and t play rhetoric and then they spit them out and they may as well be computers. they have as much predictability as a computer application. they are so boring and the sameness and the work that they use it almost identical.

they all sound alike. they are like agent smith in the matrix. they are identical and repeat the same thing. >> there's actually a term for that and the idea that if you are arguing with someone online, they are going to repeat that rhetoric without really coming up with any new argumentsts or innovations. so i think that there are two things that come into play. one of them is the definition of language by sort of the postmodern left and go beyond what we talk about here. certainly my arena you support any system in the usa that produces different outcomes for people in different races, so the argument is that the sat, for example, is racist because whites out square blocks and blocks obscure latinos and the

only reason this could occur, the only way this could occur is some sortrs of hidden prejudice society. this doesn't answer the question why asians outscore everybody. but that is the argument. the word racism has been redefined s to mean any system that is seen as advantaging white people. coming from a military family the idea that it's a violin to speak freely as opposed to beat someone up strikes me as utterly ridiculous. but someone said this in an academic paper. a big problem i think quite seriously as the other side has most of the english teacher so we have to -- i don't mean that as a joke. every system in the usa is

antiracism becauseod all the systems produce slightly different outcomes for blacks and whites and asians and latinos but antiracism you have to redefine that and say that isfineo- racism for something le that. so is social media. i don't want to ramble on about this but the idea that the people on social media are representative of the country is sksimply false. you show of hands how many people have a twitter account? we have two in the room. solid group of taxpayers. that's about a typical, that's what i see when i give speeches. they arell young upper class mostly college kids. ever look at the demographic. saying something doesn't play on twitter, like mike pence is unpopular whichhe may be one of the silliest single analyses i've ever heard.wo so we have to claim the

definitions and don't focus too much on the artificial world,ta social media, twitter, instagram and a whole world beyond that. focused on going out and talking to people and seenk what americs think. i know it's real and academia and in publishing. utbut it's mostly fake. last line ihe was on twitter the other day and i have about 50,000 twitter followers. arguing with a person who was a roman statue i logged out. no point in engaging in that conversation. i think the statute probably has a better point but these are not real people, they are cartoon characters created. so actually, focus on your fellow citizens, that is a good idea for everyone.re >> excellent, excellent point. and i wantedne to make a correction. the one person who complained

that was in relation to target taking the book off the website recently. we have about ten minutes left and i would like to open up to questions for either will or michael or both of them. we have a microphone here if you raiseju your hand. >> i want to add a point about the redefinition of words because this is exactly what orwell talks about in 1984 end of this is what happened in the soviet union where language changes meaning and this is a way of supporting reality of people can't trust their own senses and have no idea of the

total disorientation and this makes them very easy to control. >> one quick sentence political correctness. >> it came from lenin. >> the idea was something can bs wrong but you still have to say it. something can be wrong but someone still has to say it because it is governmentally correct under the law. and we are now seeing this i think withey trans racialism. the idea of naming on campuses that you have to identify students if they are multiethnic for example the race they identify with, the gender of course. this is going to continue. we now recognize the director saidrd yesterday that wearing ordinary masks reduces your

chance by 80%. that is just not true but it remains up on the account. we seem to be seeing an increasing wave of people saying things that are not fact and i don't think this is entirely a left-wing but people say thingsm that absolutely are not true and then command you to agree with of the thing that is not true. >> are there any questions?s what is the name of this topic, this panel again? >> save the speech. it may not be safe speech, but i

think that the woke social justice business has basically armorphed into and made possible the covid narrative in the way people arest being canceled like they were for incorrect political speech now it's for incorrect science. there are medical doctors and scientists who are totally abject with the mainstream narrative of what's going on and ai think what i am seeing going on is the totalitarianism developing and i'm not going to sugarcoat this. i think it is very scary. that's where i will leave it. >> i think a lot of this will be regional and local. s one of the issues with of the american elite and when we talk about weakness in academic writing i would call it the fact

that 93 to 95% of academics and mass media journalists are on the far left. that's a reality but the problem with the elite is most of the people in the country don't respect it at all. i mean,, thomas soul who all of you should read as much of as possible while we are at a bookstore, thomas sold decades ago called this of the vision of the anointed. they said there's a specific group of mostly white although that doesn't matter now they arv diversifying, urban, lower middle-class ivy league may be big ten overeducated people that run these specific sectors of the country like academia. one of the points is that they have a limited reach of power because many of the states are full of people that view them as idiots that come from the other large conferences or where the leaders come from the military.n the union a sector and other things. so when we talk about covid, one of the things we've noticed they

are not doing what they are being told to, so i think that woke ms. will continue to a breaking point in academia. first of all we have a pretty heavy investor. i see that breaking in about 25 years when this gets into the hard sciences and we start really losing to china. the moment we fall behind a power like that you, there's going to be the same sort of revisionism we saw s when we started losing the space race to russia. that's neither here nor there but in the meantime i think kentucky for example there's going to be a significant backlash if you look at the school board moms and so on against a lot of the stuff so i think on the east coast -- where i'm from in chicago it will be unbearable for about two decades. other places iic think it will depend on who the people are, and this is what the people do. >> i will chime in on that. i agree there is a regionalism and that makes things different and that gives a lot of space for people. and i must admit i do have a

sort of -- i'm involved in the east coast. i've been in urbanites lived in new york for 11 years and now i live in pittsburgh so i am talking about i do agree that my experience has been influenced by those regional variations. but the vaccine rollout is not dependent upon regions and the facts are not dependent upon regions and the people working arfor these companies are across all these regions. the people that are going to get fired already have been fired because they work for the company that requires them to have the vaccine if they have more than 100 employees that isn't regional. there's many things that are across the whole country and across the whole world. china is light years ahead of us

in the industrial revolution technologies that is ai, machine learning robotics and effectively light years ahead of us. of these technologies combined with particular ideologies which is what i argue these technologies combined with an authoritarian ideology is a very frightening prospect because this can be enforced by virtual technological and position. >> the truth may well be somewhere in the middle i agree with that. i do think that in terms of some of the states like florida as i understand addressed some of it like the simple rule i suppose would be something like in this state you can block an inspectod inspected at the door or not reveal a component of your

healthcare policy so no one would know or be able to ask him to see how many people to find whatever absurd amount, $114,000 per violation. they increased it under the new mandate. i think what you're going to see us some of the red states taking that idea to court. theim mandate is not implemented for 120 days as i can understand which is an odd thing considering the argument that we are on the edge of the precipice and all going to die. but first we are going to wait over 100 days to let the legal experts take a look at this and so on. but i do think most of this will vary to an extraordinary degree, the policies of the state level. the china thing is problematic. we are not alone in the world. so a couple of weeks ago, two things happened. china launched the first intercontinental. non-ballistic missile that could fly around the world and we announced to the army and federal government there is a horrible gender

policy. so, i mean, we announced there will be certain things we do to make soldiers feel more welcome and we are g looking for moremm diversity and we will have more accommodations for pregnant soldiers and so on. maybe that's an exaggeration. so, that's not a good thing. the reality though i think is after we lose a couple big skirmishes with of the chinese, even nationally america is a tough competitor. people will start saying enough of this nonsense. we don't want a proportionate number of people flying planes necessarily. we want the best pilots. we might have to go to war with the chinese government. the pressure of reality exerts a strong downward progress.al that's why people stop becomingn mentally. i suppose that happens to societies as well. we've had it too good for too long but that's about to change. ..

>> the reality pushes back against the nonsense ideas eventually. >> some very quick final comments. first of all i actually once had a feminist girlfriend tell me that buildings were phallic symbols. and that they all go up none of them are internal or in caved so she would be looking at skylights to be quite critical of them there are

major terminals articles feminine articles about this. >> how long did you date her quick. >> we went on three dates. [laughter] currently in a relationship with someone else who is my fiancég because the buildings are always he racked. >> again they can't be written around thes core so i do think that we are seeing some of s this already. you cannot this out. that there was a specific branch by an all female very sexually diverse group of engineers that was hailed in the building trades about one year ago. but is the primary first goal is this type of diversity of

how many bisexual greek women? you will see the result we have to compete in consensus realities of people will use lip service. microsoft that minute long land w acknowledgment yesterday that our client campus was the former home of the tribe and then they went on to be one of the leading computer powers of the world they will not give the campus land that. >> thank you both for being here for this a great conversation thank you for coming and they will be here for purchase as well. thank you