Why Words Are Cheap: How Congress Avoids Ownership While The Executive Makes Policy

Accountability costs more than a press conference, and that’s exactly why our politics keeps choosing words over work. We open with the Caribbean boat strikes and map the legal gray zone where overlapping agencies, temporary guidance, and classified memos substitute for clear law. When Congress refuses to define roles and rules of engagement, the executive fills the vacuum, and the public gets euphemisms instead of answers. Action would assign ownership; chatter only spreads the blame.

From there, we unpack Amnesty International’s harrowing report on detention sites branded with cutesy nicknames that dull the edge of cruelty. Rationed water, perpetual lighting, invasive cameras, solitary confinement, and a two-foot outdoor “box” paint a picture of punishment—not processing. This is how authoritarian systems grow: through emergency measures, no-bid contracts, and a culture that treats rights as perimeter-sensitive. If we normalize this for the powerless, it will not stay at the margins.

We then draw a line to the business of conspiracy. Doubt has become identity, fear a product, and insinuation a growth hack. Whether it’s panic at scale, tragedy sold as authenticity, or plausible deniability framed as curiosity, the market for suspicion thrives when institutions speak morally but act selectively. People notice when leaders find money for munitions but not insulin, when civilian deaths are “regrettable” abroad and oversight is optional at home. Consistency is the currency of credibility—and we’re running a deficit.

To anchor the stakes, we revisit James Baldwin’s clash with Paul Weiss, where history, power, and personal agency collide. Institutions are evidence, Baldwin reminds us; ideals mean little without structures that honor them. Our case is simple: define maritime authorities in law, end euphemisms that hide state violence, restore constitutional standards in detention, and hold media voices to the risks of being wrong. Coherence, transparency, and courage won’t fix everything, but they will close the gap that cynicism floods.

If this resonates, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review with the one reform you think would build the most trust. Your ideas shape what we tackle next.

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Congress Prefers Talk Over Action
• 2:46 The Legal Gray Zone Of Boat Strikes
• 5:46 Accountability Vacuum And Blame Avoidance
• 9:16 Oversight Would Reveal Hard Truths
• 13:16 Action Means Owning Tragedies
• 14:36 Amnesty Report: “Alligator Alcatraz”
• 19:48 Euphemisms And The Normalization Of Cruelty
• 24:18 From Camps To Authoritarian Creep
• 28:48 Minimum Demands For Rule Of Law
• 32:48 Conspiracy Culture As A Revenue Stream
• 36:18 Alex Jones And Manufactured Fear
• 39:18 Kanye, Pain, And Performance
• 42:18 Candace Owens And Weaponized Insinuation
• 44:48 Tucker Carlson’s Plausible Deniability
• 47:48 Belonging, Tribe, And Cynicism
• 51:48 Moral Language Without Consistency

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 1:32

Welcome to the Darrow McLean Show. I'm your host, Darrow McLean. Independent media that won't reinforce tribalism. We have one planet, nobody is leaving. So let us reason it together. We're gonna start the show off today, like we started it off on the last episode with a show question. So, much controversy about the boat strike in the Caribbean. Why the constant chatter, but no action taken by Congress. Thank you for the question, and let us get into the episode. So let me break it down like this. Congress loves chatter because chatter is safe and action actually has consequences. So when I talk about the martial strikes, the migrant boats, the interdictions, or the shoot-don't shoot protocols costs zero political capital taking action, that means owning the outcomes, and Congress actually hates ownership like a cat hates bath water. If they strengthen authorities, they get blamed for the deaths. If they restrict authorities, they get blamed for letting people in. If they demand oversight, they get accused of undermining national security. If they ask for transparency, someone screams classified. So they argue, posture, grandstand, and circular issues like vultures around a campfire. But the one thing that I have learned that Congress is afraid of doing is actually legislating. So we get to the executive branch and the Congress, we have to deal with the fact that the executive branch is making a de facto policy, and Congress is very comfortable letting it have to. The boat strikes in the Caribbean happen in a legal gray zone where multiple agencies happen to overlap. The Coast Guard, uh Southcom, uh Department of Homeland Security, CPB, Air and Marine, Navy, sometimes, State Department, and local Caribbean governments. Congress would actually need to uh clarify roles, authorities, and the rules of engagement. They haven't. Why? Because the minute you define responsibility, you actually define the blame. So the executive fills the void with temporary guidance, classified memos, and improvisations on the water. And that's why nobody can tell the public what's authorized, who authorized what, under what legal standard, based on what intelligence significance, and with what accountability. Congress has been asleep at the wheel, or worse, awake, but pretending to be asleep. So the Caribbean migrant crisis is actually very politically radioactive because nobody wants their fingerprints on it. Republicans want to look tough on borders without being seen as killing desperate migrants. Democrats want to look humane without appearing weak or permissive, so both sides retreat into symbolism and statements instead of statutes. You get hearings, leaked memories, angry press conferences, but no binding legislation. There is no undefined narrative. There is no unified narrative, and Congress won't actually move without one. Is this a humanitarian crisis? Is this a border enforcement issue? Is this a military operation problem? Is this a diplomatic failure? Is this a drug trafficking epidemic? Is this a unconstitutional overreach by the executive? It actually depends on who you ask, and when Congress can't agree on the diagnosis, their sure as hell won't write a prescription. Oversight is actually the enemy because oversight would expose things neither party wants to explain. So let's be straight here. If Congress held full public hearings, we would learn one what the rules of engagement have been stretched to the breaking point. We would learn, two, the intel used to justify interdictions is often fragmentary. Three, we would learn anxiously bumping into each other like blindfolded linebackers. We would also learn four some accidental strikes aren't as accidental as they are PR teams' claims. Five, we would learn to founding shortfalls create unsafe and rush engagement. And we would learn that funding also has a lot to do with that. And the last but not least, we would learn that coordinating with the Caribbean nations is a patchwork at best. And no politician wants to be responsible for telling the American people, yes, these deaths were abordable. We just didn't fix our broken system. So Congress talks, but it doesn't want to touch. The bottom line, to be blunt and honest about this, Congress isn't acting because action means accountability. Action means drawing lines. Action means owning tragedies. Chatter conversations, committees, chatter costs nothing. And in a town addicted to re-election, nothing is cheaper than words. And that's the bottom line because Darrell McLean said so, and thank you for the question.

SPEAKER_00: 7:19

Alligator Alcatraz, how tyranny starts with those people. Amnesty International's new report on the U.S. detention sites, Alligator Alcatraz, and Chrome is a warning flair for every American who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law, and the basic dignity of human beings. We've seen governmental cruelty before in our history, but these facilities mark a new level of calculated dehumanization on U.S. soil. And Amnesty is calling it what it is: torture, enforced disappearance, and a deliberate system designed to break people. What makes this report so chilling isn't just the details, although they're horrifying enough. It's that the government has begun giving these places cute theme park style nicknames like alligator Alcatraz and Cornhusk or Clink as if they're attractions instead of concentration camp-style black sites. Authoritarian regimes always begin by softening the language, making the abuses sound like logistics, law enforcement, or processing rather than cruelty. If you want to condition the public to accept state violence, you start with euphemisms. Investigators found people packed into filthy tents and trailers where toilets overflowed onto the floors and into sleeping areas. Water was sometimes rationed. Food quality was lousy, insects swarmed at all hours, lights were left on day and night. Cameras reportedly pointed at showers and toilets in clear violation of privacy and human dignity. This wasn't an accident. These were choices. The so-called box at the Florida concentration camp may be the most grotesque example. It's a two-foot by two-foot outdoor metal cage where detainees, shackled and already vulnerable, were left in blistering Florida heat, exposed to mosquitoes and biting flies, denied water, and forced to endure punishment sessions lasting up to 24 hours. These are exactly the kinds of stress-position torture techniques our nation once condemned when used by dictatorships abroad. Today they're being used in our name by our government on our soil. The Chrome amnesty documented prolonged solitary confinement, routine shackling even during medical transport, denial of legal access, and a pervasive system of intimidation and retaliation. Medical care was often delayed or unavailable. People needing lawyers were blocked from communicating with them. This is not a processing system. It's a punishment regime. It's brutality done with your and my tax dollars and in our names. The report makes clear that these are not isolated violations. They're the design. This administration has woven cruelty into policy, permitting state-run detention networks to operate as if constitutional rights simply evaporate when you cross a razor wire perimeter. The crisis for American democracy isn't just that the camps exist, it's that they're being normalized, bureaucratized, branded, and replicated. Amnesty warns that DHS is already planning more such sites using so-called emergency authorities and no-bid contracts to create an extrajudicial detention network beyond the reach of meaningful oversight. This is exactly how authoritarian systems evolve. They never begin with political opponents. Instead, they begin with people the majority already sees as powerless. Immigrants, refugees, the poor, non-citizens, those without family or money or social standing. When the public tolerates a government treating one group of human beings as disposable, that system is inevitably expanded to inflict that same treatment on others, dissidents, politicians, people like you and me, whenever it becomes politically useful. We've seen this in nation after nation that slid from democracy into authoritarianism. The first victims are always those considered outsiders or threats to the order the regime promised to maintain. Once the public is desensitized to cages, beatings, disappearance at secret courts, it becomes frighteningly easy to redirect these same tactics for dissidents, journalists, labor leaders, activists, and political opponents. This Amnesty International Report isn't just a humanitarian alarm bell, it's a constitutional one. When due process is suspended for one class of people, it's suspended in principle for all. When the government can hide detainees in swamp camps legal without with no legal representation, it's already established the machinery necessary to detain anyone it wants to silence. When the public is conditioned to see cages in brutality and think, eh, this is fine, the moral system of a nation starts to collapse. We forget that the Constitution doesn't protect itself. It's protected by norms, culture, public outrage, legal oversight, and a shared belief that the state doesn't get to brutalize human beings no matter who they are. When these norms erode, when brutality becomes invisible but known or acceptable, authoritarianism doesn't arrive with a drumbeat. It arrives quietly, it arrives bureaucratically, it arrives through temporary measures and emergency facilities and processing centers set up for those people over there. Amnesty is demanding the immediate closure of allocator allocates and any similar state-run life sites. They call for an end to emergency authorized detention, a prohibition on outdoor punitive confinement, the restoration of access to legal counsel, real medical care, due process, judicial oversight, and a halt to no-bit construction of new camps. These aren't radical demands. They're the bare minimum for a nation that claims to believe in the rule of law. Because if we let our government create a network of secretive, cruel extrajudicial detention facilities for one set of powerless people today, tomorrow it will inevitably turn those same systems against anyone who challenges their power. This is how authoritarian this this is how every authoritarian regime in history has done it. And unless we stop it now, it's how this one will too.

SPEAKER_04: 12:25

Like a rose at the show, like a post combusting up where the family's gold there ain't noise of one hands and the last one turn up. They just did through scale colour from the system. Bring back the law with the law, and then comes a nation with a flag in flag real quiet.

SPEAKER_05: 19:39

While we look away.

SPEAKER_01: 20:10

America does not have a conspiracy theory problem. America has a meaning problem. We have always had conspiracies. That's not new. From uh Salem to the Red Scare to JFK, Americans have never trusted power easily, and frankly, sometimes we're right not to. But what is new is this conspiracy is no longer a question. It's a brand. It's not rebellion anymore. It's actually a way to make money. It's a revenue stream. Conspiracies used to be a uh a thing that kind of lived on the margins of society. Now it has lighting, it has producers, it has merchandise, it has podcasts, it has Patreons, and a rotating cast of very confident people telling you with annoying smile that everyone else, except them of course, is lying to you. And that's where I want to do the second segment today. Because when skepticism turns into theater, when doubt becomes identity, when just asking questions becomes a shield against responsibility, that's when society starts losing its grip on the truth. Not because truth disappeared, but because discipline disappeared. So look at this cast of characters we are dealing with right now. Alex Jones, Connie West, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson. Very different, very different people, very different tones, but they all share one dangerous habit. They say enormous things, erroneous things, while refusing the burden of being wrong. They don't argue against reality, they raise an eyebrow in it. They wink, and the wink tells it all. So let's first talk about Alex Jones. Alex Jones is not misunderstood. He is exactly what he presents himself to be. A man who discovered that fear sells better than facts. He doesn't analyze power, he mythologizes it. Everything is always on the brink of collapse. The elites are always moments away from total control. And yet somehow these shadowy elites can't quite stop him from broadcasting their secrets every single day for years at full volume. Jones doesn't persuade you, he exhausts you, keeps you in a permanent state of panic, where discernment feels free, and it feels almost like a luxury. And calm, relaxation feels like a sort of betrayal. Fear becomes a point, and once fear takes over, the truth becomes optional. Fear in the hands of Jones isn't a warning, it's actually a product. Now, Kanye West is something a bit different. Kanye West is a tragedy, not necessarily a villain. And we need to be honest about that. Kanye represents what happens when a genius a genuine brilliance collides with untreated mental illness, unlimited access, and a culture that rewards collapse as authentic uh you know, be being authentic. Um America has had a has always had a bad habit of confusing suffering with prophecy. We see pain, and instead of responding with care, we hand it a microphone. So Kanye's unraveling wasn't met with an intervention, it was met with applause, and confidence got mistaken for coherence. So let me say this very plainly because it needs to be said the mental illness does not make you a truth teller. Mental illness does not make you prophetic. Mental illness does not make you a prophet. And suffering does not grant historical accuracy. A broken compass does not point north just because it spins dramatically. Kanye didn't expose hidden systems of power, but Kanye actually exposed what happens when. Genius loses its anger, and when a culture would rather be entertained than be responsible. Now I have to go to Candace Owens, because Candace is not loud. She doesn't rant. She doesn't sweat. She doesn't spiral. She smiles. And that smile that she does is doing a lot of work. Her power isn't in the conclusions, it's in the insinuations. She rarely says the thing outright. She implies she suggests. She asks questions that never get answers and raises doubts that never get examined. And when the audience walks away, they're not informed, but they're flattered, convinced they are part of a smarter, braver minority who just happen to see through it all. Now, this is contrarianism without a risk. It is rebellion without the sacrifice. Skepticism becomes a posture instead of a discipline. And the point is no longer truth, it's identity. You're not right because the evidence holds. You're right because you're not like them. And then there is Tucker Carlson. Tucker Carlson is the most polished of them all. Now he doesn't rage, he chuckles. He doesn't accuse, he wonders aloud. He perfects plausible deniability like it's an art form. Tucker understands something critical about the modern media. If you ask the same question enough times, people stop hearing it as a question. They hear it as a fact that hasn't been officially acknowledged yet. And when the damage is done, he can say truthfully, I actually never said that. Now, this is skepticism minus courage. This is curiosity without responsibility. Now, here's the thread of tying all these people together. None of these figures consistently ask the hardest questions the power demands. What happens if I am wrong? They flirt with dangerous ideas and then retreat behind irony, humor, mental health, or the magic phrase we're just asking questions. Truth becomes flexible, harm becomes incidental, and accountability becomes optional. And here's the deeper issue. Conspiracy culture today isn't about facts. It's about tribe. It's about belonging. To believe a conspiracy theory is to be awake, smarter than the sheep, morally superior, part of a remnant who sees through it all. In a lonely, fractured society, conspiracy theories replace community, it replaces churches, it replaces unions, it replaces civic groups, it replaces a shared civic trust with algorithms, enemies, and endless suspicion. Different figures often have different flavors of belonging. Alex Jones offers a permanent siege. Connie offered revelation through rupture. Candace offers elite contrarianism status. Tucker offers a disbelief with manners. Different mask, but same game. Same playbook. And here's the uncomfortable truth America doesn't want to face. It tears down society without building anything to replace it. It questions without responsibility. It leaves people cynical but not free. The real scandal isn't that these people exist. Every age produces entertainers shaped by its anxieties. The scandal is that we confuse provocation with philosophy and suspicion with serious. We mistake cynicism for intelligence. We mistake irony for bravery. We mistake volume for truthfulness. Conspiracy culture isn't radical. It's conservatism but in the worst possible form of it. It preserves grievances, it rewards confusion, and it fears, I would dare say, even hate, clarity. And I'll leave you with this because it matters. To lose faith in institutions may be understandable, but to replace them with influencers is careless. That is not freedom. That's decay with a microphone. And that is my thought, at least on today's second segment on the Darrell McLean show. If you've been listening carefully to the news this week, uh even this year, this decade, you've noticed something uh very strange probably. Now what's being said is uh not necessarily new, but what you've noticed, especially uh pre-COVID or post-COVID, I should say, is what's not being said, but what is it being said. We hear a lot of moral language in American politics, a lot of talk about values, a lot of talk about defending democracy, a lot of talk about human rights, and a lot of talk about a rules-based international order. But we rarely get consistency. And consistency is the currency of credibility. And here's the connection to health care I want people to hear this clearly. When Americans are told that there's no money for insulin caps, no urgency for mental health care, no political will to keep hospitals open, yet somehow there's always money for weapons, there's always legal gymnastics for foreign conflicts. That disconnect doesn't stay overseas. It eventually comes back to the United States of America. So of course, this week once again we saw civilian harm abroad described with the softest possible language, regrettable, unintended, accident, under review. We watched officials argue about what happened, about if the right words were used to describe it, etc. And this is where trust breaks, because the public isn't stupid. People actually notice when more outrage depends on who's holding the weapon. When war crimes is a phrase used selectively, carefully rationed like a medicine we claim that we can't afford. America hasn't abandoned morality. It outsourced it to press releases and political talking points. And here's the dangerous part of it. When moral language becomes conditional, people stop believing any of it. You can't tell a parent struggling to afford chemotherapy that the budget is tight, and then explain without irony that billions more must move overseas immediately to help some foreign country when no questions asked. Even if the policy argument is complex, the moral optics are very simple. This is how cynicism grows its roots. And cynicism doesn't just sit quietly, it mutates. It turns into distrust of the media, it turns into distrust of institutions, distrust of the experts, and eventually, yes, into conspiratorial thinking. When people sense hypocrisy but aren't given honest explanations, they don't become scholars. They become skeptics without guardrails. Now let me be clear because nuance matters, at least it does to me. This is not an argument for isolationism. This is not a call to abandon our allies, and it's certainly not a defense of atrocities by anyone. This is an argument about moral coherence. We cannot claim to be the global referee while we're writing the rule book depending on who's on the team at the time. You cannot build legitimacy abroad while hemorrhaging it back home. And this selective outreach doesn't just weaken our foreign policy, it corrodes domestic trust. It teaches people that justice is negotiable, that ethics are flexible, and that truth is actually just political. That's when people stop listening. That's when they stop listening to institutions and start listening to personalities. That's when an influencer with a microphone sounds more honest than a government with a briefing room. And then leaders will inevitably ask, why don't people trust us anymore? Well, because trust is built on patterns, not on authority, and not on slogan. Now here's the bottom line, and this connects directly back to the healthcare segment I started off with. Media and everything else that we have talked about today. A country that cannot explain its moral priorities will clearly eventually lose the light and the right to lecture anyone, its citizens specifically. You don't fix distrust by demanding faith. You fix it with consistency. You fix it with transparency, you fix it with the humility to say, here's what we're doing, here's why, and here's what it will cause. Now until then, outrage will remain selective, language will remain slippery, and the public will keep filling the silence with skepticism, anger, and suspicion. And when that happens, we should pretend to be surprised by the consequences. We're gonna do a blast from the intellectual past, and we'll see you on the next episode. So on today's Blast from the Intellectual Pass, we're gonna go all the way back. We're gonna travel back to the Dick Cavit show, and we're gonna travel back to a show that aired on May 16th, 1969. And this is with the late James Baldwin talking to the late uh Paul Wise. Now Dickovett had been nominated for an Emmy Award in the most recent 20 uh 12 HBO special Mill Books at Dick Event Together Again and won three. The show spanned five decades, and his television career has defined excellence in interview format. He started at ABC in actually 1968 and enjoyed success on PBS USA and CNBC. And now his most recent television successes were September 2014 PBS Special Dick Covet's Watergate, followed by April 2015 Dick Cavetz Vietnam. He appeared in movies, TV specials, TV commercials, and several Broadway plays. He starred in an off-Broadway production of Hellman vs. McCarthy in 2014 and reprised a role at a theater 40 in LA in February 2015. Cavat published four books, being Um The Civette 1979, The Eye on Cavet 1983, Quad of Christopher Portfield, his two recent books, uh Talk Show Confirmations Pointed Uh Commentary Off-Screen Secrets, 2010, A Brief Encounter, Conversations, Magic Moments, and Assorted Hijacks in October 2014, are collections of his online P and column written for the New York Times since 2007. Additionally, he was written for the New Yorker, the TV guide, and Vanity Fair and elsewhere. So this is uh really good debate. I actually look at it sometimes back and forth. It's for the writer James Baldwin and Yale Professor Paul Wise, and they get into a heated debate on discrimination in the United States of America. It's very telling, and I think we should uh review these things and decide which one we agree with. Again, this aired way back on May 16th, 1969.

SPEAKER_02: 39:46

Professor Paul Weiss, the Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale. And I guess I don't have a copy of a book that he recently wrote with his son. It's the one you may have read about in Time magazine called Right and Wrong. It's a dialogue between father and son. Your son is here and will be up later. He's a lawyer. And um Mr. Weiss is did I mention the Sterling professor of philosophy at the Yale? You've seen him on the show possibly before. He's most interesting teacher, and because he was um he didn't class was full of these um answers questions as if somebody came to me. Is there anything that you disagree with?

SPEAKER_03: 40:52

I uh one of us to walk into this. And of course, there's a good deal I agree with. But I think uh he's overlooking one very important matter of I think. Each one of us, I think, is terribly alone. He lives his own individual life. He has all kinds of obstacles in the way of religion or color or size or shape or lack of ability, and the problem is to become a man. For each one of us, I think we always talk about poverty, race, uh prejudice. It's important, vital, but it's not really at the center. It deals only with the means and the way or the obstacles in the way of becoming something much more serious and important. That is to be someone in yourself. To become a man is a difficult job that takes a lifetime. I don't disagree with that at all. I didn't think you would, but um I take that for granted. I really do. Uh that you see, but by taking it for granted, you emphasize always the obstacles in the way, and that perhaps you have it in mind, but I think your hearers very often forget that you have another objective in view, the one we have both agreed upon. When he asked you, aren't you being more extreme? Isn't there some other end? Is it all hopeless? In one sense, it is not hopeless, in another sense it is. It's hopeless in the sense that nobody ever changed the state of being a full man. But it's not hopeless in the sense that every one of us has a problem which he can resolve more or less within itself. These obstacles are terrible, I agree with you, but they are not insuperable if you know what you're looking for.

SPEAKER_05: 42:35

I was discussing death problems. Really, I was discussing the difficulty, the obstacles, the very real danger of death by the society when a legal, when a black man attempts to become a man.

SPEAKER_03: 43:11

And you have more in common with a white author than you have with someone who's against all literature. So why must we always concentrate on color or religion or this? There are all other ways of connecting men.

SPEAKER_05: 43:22

I'm not talking about that. Understand that. As we sit here in the house, by the will of the people, a man named Ronald Reagan governs California. And the terms I'm using, you must understand. A lot of the terms I myself might choose. I'm not interested in one oppression's white people or black people. I'm talking about the force of the state which at this moment is oppressing black people among this nation. The force of the state which is oppressing every black state. It is um the first difficulty is to you will say this truth, everybody. I like you, all right? In the first place, I have to deal with the fact that my history, my history is inaccessible to me. That my history in this country begins with the bill of sale.

SPEAKER_03: 44:50

You want your individual history? My name is old English. My name is White, it's been derived from somebody else. Maybe my great, great, great, great ancestor was White Indian or whatever. I don't have them. I don't think I've met them in ten years. It doesn't matter. That doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_05: 45:11

No, it doesn't. One's got to face this. Fact. Let us say we're both black, right? We both get here the same time, right? You come from one tribe, I come from another. You speak one language, I speak another. We cannot talk to each other. We don't know what is happening to us. We are confronting a white man with a Bible and a gun and a cross. And what you have to do, if you're going to live, is accept this stranger, this book you cannot get read, under the gun. Wait a moment, wait a moment. You ask me a question, I'll do my best to answer it. Yes, but you must give me a chance to say something different.

SPEAKER_02: 45:49

I'm not trying to I'm not trying to uh can I do something even more unforgivable because of do the mechanics? If we don't pause now, we may not be back for a while. So we will, and then we'll be back. Stay away. Gentlemen, where were we? I was in the middle of the sounds of David.

SPEAKER_05: 46:05

Yes, I think it could be up somehow. I was trying to make a point. The point is this simply. That one began here was a history of uh an identity, not only inaccessible, but also systematically and deliberately denied and destroyed. When the Moynihan Report talks about the breakup of the Negro family, and it occurs to me as a you know a very bitter kind of comment on people who did their best to break up that family. Now to blame the family for being broken up. And to suggest Why aren't you doing that by report I read? Well, they're looking at there look there are no male father images for child. Big news. What are you talking about? In the first place, in the first place, that's not as true as Moynah would like to think. Otherwise, there would be none of us here at all. The point is that, then, you know, come back to where I was, one has to really excavate out of the absence of a history, and then and then out on the presence of a history, which is absolutely indescribable. You must remember that I was taught, and children, black children until the day are being taught, that no black people ever contributed anything to history, that I was not much better than an eight. And I was lucky to be discovered in Africa by white people.

SPEAKER_03: 47:14

Mr. Baldwin, but if you if your case were carried out all the way through the way you're putting it, it'd be hard to understand how you ever wrote a word. After all, you're a distinguished novelist. You must have had time of freedom, somebody must have paid attention to it. You must have been reviewed objectively as an author, not as a Nick Rome. Nobody gave a damn whether your great ancestor had the bought or soul, but they treated your literature or your work in its own terms. That's the way you wanted it, that's where you had it, that's the way you're having it now. What are you criticizing? What are you objecting to? That there are terrible injustices everyone admits. But you're generalizing and you're rigidifying, you're solidifying it in such a way as if nobody, there's no way out. You're an exhibition of the fact there's a way out, am I? Yes. You yourself admitted. You're you're not you're not just the incarnation of blackness, you're an author. That's the way I think of you.

SPEAKER_05: 48:07

I beg your pardon. I'm also the oldest of nine children. All of whom are black. I'm one of the few survivors in my generation, all of whom the people I'm speaking of are black. Very Jimmy Bowman or Sammy Davis or Harry Bella Fontier, Sidney Poisier. There are a whole lot of people you've never heard of. At least equally talented, perhaps more talented, who do not manage. I'll tell you how one makes in this country if you're black. You know, you have to decide somehow that you are not going to be controlled by what white people think of you.

SPEAKER_03: 48:47

What anybody thinks of you, ultimately you have to think of yourself, and they put you.

SPEAKER_05: 48:51

I don't care what Senator Eastland thinks about me. Okay. Or Ronald Regan thinks about me, but they have the power to destroy my life and the life of my children, and this is given them by the will of the state. I'm not talking about myself as a writer. Of course I'm a writer. I know that. I know it produced me, too. And it was not simply Charles Dickens or any of your colleges. It was also Bessie Smith and Ray Charles and my father, who was a preacher, and my mother who learned how to sing. That's cool. What I am trying to say is that the gap, the distance placed between myself and my own assessment, my own experience, was much greater than it would be for any white person in this country. I don't believe it. I know you don't believe it. I'm not complaining. I'm not copying a plea. It's not a special plea. I'm trying to make you see something.

SPEAKER_03: 49:38

I'll start from scratch. They are helped in various exterior ways in order to be able to find themselves. But the finding of themselves goes within. To become a writer is something that you have to struggle with by yourself, in yourself. And all these other things are conditions and problems, and I grant you had more than other people had. I didn't even say that.

SPEAKER_05: 49:58

I said they were different. I'll tell you this. When I left this country in 1948, I left this country for one reason only. One reason. I didn't care where I went. I might have gone to Hong Kong, I might have gone to Timbok, too, I ended up in Paris on the streets of Paris, with$40 in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than it already happened to me here. You talk about making it as a writer by yourself, you have to be able then to turn up all the antenna with which you live, because once you turn your back on this society, you may die. You may die. And it's very hard to live a typewriter and concentrate on that if you're afraid of the world around you. The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me. They released me from that particular social terror, which is not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody.

SPEAKER_03: 50:55

Everybody, no matter who, no matter what is attitude, is bigoted. I did not say that. Well, it has an attitude. It's on the space, is in the way of every force.

SPEAKER_05: 51:05

You're asking me to do something impossible. You're asking me to take the will for the deed. I don't know what most white people in this country feel, but I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don't know that white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know that we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know as Malcolm X once put it, it's the most segregated hour in American life. It's high noon on Sunday. That's a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can't afford to trust most white Christians and certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn't matter, but I know I'm not in their unions. I don't know if the real estate lobbyists anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobbies keep me in the ghetto. I don't know if the Board of Education hates black people, but I know the textbooks that give my children to read, and the schools that we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my assistant, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.

SPEAKER_02: 52:19

Oh, all right. Uh we will be back after this message.