This conversation. During this hour will have a lively discussion that two of the most dynamic observers and analysts ofamerican culture today. Author of a plot to change America Mike Gonzalez and Michael Knowles. Following the conversation between mike and michael we built a q a session which i will moderate so at any point during the program if you think of something youd like to ask you both of them pleasesubmit question in the question box. Be sure to tell us your name and where your tuning in. Will answer as many questions we can in the time we have but before we get the discussion between Mike Gonzalez and Michael Knowles i want to introduce a special guest. Guest is Heritage Foundation president kay coles james. The floor is yours. That morning. I am so excited to welcome you to the Heritage Foundation and to our virtual book launch of the to change america. I want to thank you all especially i want Michael Knowles for joining us today. Were so glad to have you with us. We are so proud of Mike Gonzalez and the time and research that hes put into this tremendous book. My isnt afraid to point out whats happening to our beloved country and hes not afraid to call out those who buy into the destructive rules of identity politics. Mike is often at the tip of the seer at heritage comes to these issues. He doesnt, he does it because hes a true patriot, because he doesnt want to see our beloved country any further down this treacherous road. Asian gentleman was only in the 1960s when we were struggling to the segregationist country courageous whites and blacks were working to bring races together and to ensure america lives up to promise liberty and justice and equal treatment are all people. Today, most americans live in racial harmony. We had our first black president , weve had women and people of all colors backgrounds in the highest ranks of american businessand government. And yet , and yet our young people are coming out of our colleges and universities believing that grievance politics, identity politics is the road to justice and equality. When in fact 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 disruptions of statues and monuments and the rewriting of American History in the classroom. The American People need to wake up to the insidious miss of identity politics. They need to understand what this has already cost our society and they need to understand how it will poison our children and our grandchildren if we just stand by and allow it to continue. We cant let that happen and we wont let that happen. Mike, thank you for writing this important book and thank you for being here, to talk to us about that. We are all looking forward to the conversation. Is an honor to be here at the Heritage Foundation albeit virtually not in the building these days. Its such a pleasure to be joined by mike dollars talk about this book, plot to change america. I dont want to accuse you of anything but when i look around today and i see roving bands of anarchists tearing down statues of the founding fathers, all 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 as though were seeing that thesis played out horrifyingly in realtime all around us. Thank you very much for that introduction and thank you very much for being here. Im happy that my book is selling well and that my ideas are getting out but im not happy at all for the reasons why. I did not hire these people but everything youre seeing today, just put your finger on it. Everything youre seeing from anarchy in portland to the 1619 project to the robin dangelos socalled antiracism Training Sessions, all of this at the heart of what ive written my book. Little did i know as 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 really a consequence of the thingswe have done to ourselves. Its funny because you trace the origin of this identity politics back to the 60s when you might see the summer of love and i think people were skeptical of that designation but now i think your description is at. Seeing the fruits of those ideologies and its led to the summer of hate. Theres one moment early on in the book that was a little surprising to me but i think youre absolutely right it is that when people think of identity politics and all of the affiliated mythology, political correctness, intersection reality, use whatever term you like. Consider that to be just a sort of eccentricity. A side issue in american politics but we really need to get down to talking about the budget or Foreign Policy but identity politics, thats over on the side of what you say is much more specific and probably more damning. You say identity politics has become our national pardon, what do you mean by . Its the software of our culture. Its everywhere around us. Weve become divided into groups based on race, and the city, sexual orientation. Gender, even disability status and anything that confers a degree of victimhood which can then be used to claim respect or attention or rewards for compensatory justice, it is from the moment you enter school when your daughters principle is saying youre threatening to high school when our kids are made to read howards in which does a wonderful job not telling history because its bad history of instilling grievances. The installation of grievances is at the heart of this and it needs to work that way and then obviously the University Campuses have been taken over by this but its going over to the workforce. Hr is telling people to but aside on their desks that say im an ally. An ally, are we in a time of war . So it really has, i have come to believe it is the jugular issue of our times. Not every group gets to claim identity politics grievance status is even though as you can see on the camera i have swore the skin from my sicilian heritage it seems like i would not qualify. Many other people in this country do not qualify so how does one get to claim this privilege of being considered oppressed . We decided in the 60s to siphon off a group of people and call them minorities. We had done this before. We had done this in the 1920s when we had a huge number of armenians, syrians or lebanese or sicilians in your case or jewish people from eastern europe. People were seen as, could be identified and we could have siphoned them off as minorities. We chose not to reedit chose to say lets have all of these servants coming in join the melting pot. And become americans through assimilation. In the 1940s you have social scientists who believe to be associate the sense of victimhood, of collective discrimination with the term minority and then the term minority as we know it today comes into its first defined in websters 1961 in a definition that we know today that has an association with victimhood. This, so we divide and all these people into minority groups and they have this sense of grievance, of victimhood and it is that which they then use to say well, the country is systemically racist. Country is institutionally and structurally racist so we must change all the institutions and all the structures and the system itself. You mention the social scientists. You mention the institutions. I think in the popular imagination identity politics is something that was developed from the grassroots. People spontaneously taking to the streets and coming towards a kind of righteousness as a group of people and demanding their rights in the face of oppression. Thats the official leftwing narrative at least by the people pushing identity politics. You say the origins are a little bit different. You say the origins are much more pacific, involve small group of people and it was highly intentional. So which is it and whos behind . It is not at all a grassroots effort. In fact it was written by elite activists and ideologues, different groups of people who formed a bureaucracy to create these groups but then still who had been promoted at universities. In the 1960s, 600,000 or so to ucla researchers to go into the southwest and commune with africanamericans and they came back with horrible news for the activists, mexicanamericans did not feel they were minorities. Did not feel they were a victim group. They didnt know they were facing discrimination which they did but they thought they could solve their own problems at an individual level. They could use their own individual agency to overcome their problems. This was very bad news for the ucla researchers and for the Poor Foundation which overtook a process to instill and to create identities. The foundation was already getting money already in the late 60s to instill identities into groups and the foundation that creates la raza and the Court Foundation to really support all of this Group Creation behind all this is the thinking of postmodernists in the Frankfurt School that wanted to replace the metanarrative in terms of the postmodernists or the hegemonic narrative to use the words of a communist leader in the 20s to replace what he means that the American Dream which is obviously were not a perfect country but we can be improved by sticking to our ideals. It is these theories that you see themselves play over again and again among the people who create the groups, who create the ethnic groups and who create identities. You mentioned antonio gromshi and is perhaps one of the most important communist follow philosophers ever sowe have a marxist for building some of these ideas. Going out into critical. In the modern university. You today have people claiming the mantle of identity politics are openly describing themselves as trained marxists, this simply the leaders of the blm organization. I see this Common Thread and the thread teams to be karl marx, the Common Thread teams to be people who are avowedly communist yet when you raise that specter in the United States people say that the crazy conspiracy. Reedit your seeing communist everywhere, thats a red square scare area is this a Conspiracy Theory or is it a conspiracy . Gromshi who you mention is the one who first comes up with the idea. Weve seen this example from the apostle st. Paul, able do a lot of good thinking in present and a lot of good writing so he begins to think in the late 20s and 30s why havent revolutions happened like marx and engels promised us . Its only succeeded in one place, a backward part of europe and russia in 1817 but all the revelations have failed since 1848. There is no italian soviets, the german revolutionfailed. And he begins to say well, the reason is that the worker has become his own oppressor. The worker has accepted all the cultural gets of the oppressor class. Family, religion, the Economic System and all the institutions. So antonio gromshi focuses his theory that we need to destroy this hegemonic narrative and replace it with a counter narrative. This is what were seeing today. Your seeing the creator of the 1619 project said this is about replacingthe narrative of america. Its sort of the refinement comes from the Franklin School which the second president max four, writes a book in 1937 which pronounces , first comes up with the idea of critical theory and thats an unremitting attack on all the norms of the west. Martin j who wrote the book on the Franklin School notes that they almost completely ignored the soviet union. There were no attacks on stalin even at the height of the trials and all the massacres. Its really an unremitting attack on the western norms andamerican norms. And what do you have today on campus . Critical theory is something that has infiltrated every faculty. If youre in law school you have to study critical legal. And if youre in other places you have to study Critical Race Theory and all the ethical study departments started in the 60s, in the 70s actually by these activists are about replacing the narrative. Angela davis, the former black panther, member of the communist party usa who was taught directly by Herbert Mantooth in the 60s. That these neomarxist, cultural marxists used in the 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s. You can trace as you just did as outlined at uganda greater detail in the book you can trace this evolution, it overflows into this crazy politics where seeing around us. One interesting point i noted in the book is you did not dedicate a chapter to black identity because of the unique role of black people in history of the United States. Legal slavery, then jim crow and then everything that accompanied those institutions. What you point out is identity politics attempts to conflate the experience of other minority groups as they continue to be created day by day with a black experience in america. Just as a matter of chronology how do these minority groups develop . Perhaps we could begin with hispanic or latino or the new term that that didnt politics people want to see is latinx. I noticed your last name is gonzalez, so what is the hispanic identity and discerning people dont come did not buy into it when it came out, why has it stuck . It is this analogizing of the unique black experience that is i think specious. They did it on purpose, but National Organization for women and of the feminists were talking in terms of jane crow at the time to make a Clear Association with jim crow. Thurgood marshall said i think, i think it was he said no, our experience is unique. I sit in my book the plot to change america i will not have chapter of africanamericans because they are unique experience. I dont think it is healthy to fill the hearts and minds of africanamericans with hatred but i do think slavery happened, jim crow happen, segregation happen. Fact i fight song because it would go back to the era of plessy v. Ferguson in separate but equal in where slowly, not even sold, very rapidly going back in plessy v. Ferguson with identity politics. The hispanic model is very clear one with they first tried organize in the 40s, late 40s with election of a Los Angeles City councilman organize mexicanamericans who worked did not think were organized enough into a voting bloc. And then the Chicano Movement comes in and the believe mexicans should be considered a raise. Mexicans is a nationality, the remaining mexicans who are european origin, mexicans for indigenous origin, mixes of their outcome even mexican african mexicans. They do have this association of mexicans and race than the begin to realize we want to expand his coasttocoast. We need we need to bring in humans, cuban immigrants in florida, Puerto Ricans in the northeast and thats when they start to come up with the idea of hispanic which the activists will begin to almost intimidate but work urography into creating the bureaucracy finally throws in the towel in 1977, the office of management and budget comes out with policy directive number 15 which as the hispanic identity and it is in three years later it gets introduced into the census of 1980, the first census that has this hispanic identity and also asianamericans which is another huge Umbrella Group that brings together americans of many different origins, people from india or pakistan or china, korea, the philippines. So americans with very different groups come very different cultural indicators brought in under this umbrella of asianamericans. Its the same thing as hispanic americans. Many people listen to this would be surprised to hear that hispanics were concocted by the bureaucracy and they will think this is been around forever, in fact, its a writer, a professor at the university of california system who wrote about this and said it would be collective amnesia. People will forget that this is new and will begin to accept this identity is having existed always. This is what they also want to do with me in middle north africa, create a different group. The development which im pleased that i where collective amnesia because that was a new Identity Group that the left tried to foist on the Obama Administration and just never took off. I guess when one for the good guys that theres not one more Grievance Group has been concocted here because as you point out in the book for the vast majority of our history, arabs were considered white. You name a a number of very wellknown era, including for instance, mitch daniels, former governor of indiana are other people of middle eastern origin. For steve jobs. That raises this question of White Privilege with we hear about today to bestselling books are written on the subject. You cant take a job or go to a School Without attending a Training Session where your castigated for your White Privilege. It raises a question. If one receives a special privilege by virtue of being white, then why are activists clamoring to remove the designation as white and create a new identity Politics Group . There seems to be a problem there. Yeah right. It gives the why to this idea of White Privilege. It can be as j. D. Vance would a very good book hillbilly