Coleman Hughes

"Many black progressives use the myth of collective, intergenerational transfers of suffering to exempt themselves from the rules of civil discourse."

"Almost all successful examples of reparations [...] have been to the specific individuals who were harmed, not to their grand-grandchildren. My ancestors were on Thomas Jeffersons plantation; we can prove it; we have the documentation. The question from a policy perspective is, in a condition with limited resources where we are trying to fix the broken public education system, where we have health care costs that are so far gone compared to our peer countries, [...] that we can either allocate limited resources based on who needs it the most, or you can give it to someone like me because my grandparents were on Monticello. The second thing doesnt make sense, and doesnt make sense to most Americans, and it shouldnt make sense."

"Progressives ought not dodge the question: Why are blacks the only ethnic group routinely and openly encouraged to nurse stale grievances back to life?"

"[About black people being over-represented in criminal statistics:] As any intro stat student will tell you, youve got to control for the confounding variables. Men make up more than 90 % of victims in all these cases whether youre talking about brutality, prison, shot by the cops, or otherwise. Men are of course only 50 % of the population. Just viewing that fact doesnt tell you anyting about anti-male bias per se. Its impossible to not to talk about the underlying facts of racially disparate crime: 13 % of the population commits, and suffers, 52 % of the murders. [...] Virtually all of the disparities [...], show [young black men] in particular, showing up at heavily disproportionate rates and thats a first order problem. The police are coming into contact with young black men far more often as a result. [...] Im not saying theres no racial bias in police; I think there is. [...] But I dont want to be such a self-flattering backseat driver to the cops whose job it is to actually keep everyone safe, including black and hispanic people, the vast majority of whom do not commit crime even in the most criminal neighborhoods. Virtually every study Ive looked at that controls for all of these variables finds no anti-black bias in deadly shootings. Sometimes they find anti-black biases in cops likelyhood to put his hands on and rough up a suspect and thats very real problem, but theres really no disparity to be found when it comes to a cops decision to pull the trigger."

"[About defunding the police and replacing it with community created police:] A lot of the problems are inherent in the job itself, no matter who you get to be the police."

"Were living through a moral panic, one of the great moral panics of American history, about racism and white supremacy."

"People have long defended affirmative action by saying Its really just a thumb on the scale. Its used only as a tie-breaker between otherwise identical candidates. Ive always known that thats just a lie or just uninformed by the people who say it. But it does betray a sense that even defenders of the policy are a little bit unconfortable defending the reality of it; they would wish it to be more of a thumb-on-the-scale thing but its not. And weve had research thats shown that for several decades actually. Thomas Espenshade found it was the equivalent of 450 SAT points for an Asian student relative to a black student, everything else held equal."

"[About Donald Trump:] Trump ended up governing very differently than he talked and maybe that was obvious to some people that got Trump, but it was not obvious to me who didnt get Trump in 2016. And so Im certainly much less afraid of a Trump presidency than I was in 2016, because I understand the vast gulf between what he says and what he does. He talks in a stream of consciousness way and entertains ideas far crazier than what he would actually do. And it may be true that because he talks so crazy, I think the immune system of America reacts to him in a way that we react to no other president."

"[About Black Lives Matter:] If not for Black Lives Matter, Im not sure how much wed be talking about [police reform, qualified immunity, universal body cams, military grade weapons in the police]. All these strike me as good ideas [...] and I think Black Lives Matter deserves credit for [them]. At the same time, the central premise of their movement is not true: The idea that we have a problem with racist cops killing unarmed black people. And its a dangerous myth because its the kind of myth that if you believe it, it makes sense to go out and riot and destroy businesses and loot and set things on fire. [...] And thats the narrative weve been sold for the past roughly seven years, lets say, and then the nation started burning. And I dont know who else to blame than the people who spread this myth."

"I was one of the many people shocked to the point of humor when Black Lives Matter had, as a part of its platform, the end of the nuclear family, criticizing this as a heteronormative, patriarchal system. That you can run an organization meant to solve problems for black America, look out on black America, and say "I know what the problem is: Too much marriage. Thats really the problem." That you can even really entertain that thought says something about the lack of logic youre operating with."

"There are videos of white people, getting killed by the cops, with their hands up begging for their lives every bit as brutal and terrifying and awful as the videos weve seen. At all the Black Lives Matter protests theres this thing, they always say Say their name! [...] There are so many white names. There are in fact, in absolute terms, there are more white names than there are black names. And Ive spent some time looking at them and theyre identical. The case is for every black person killed by the police there are usually two or three white people that died exactly the same way. Nobody says their names and nobody cares. That seems to people like the correct moral bias because were imprinted with the symbolism of the civil rights movement, but we have to outgrow this if were going to be a cohesive country going into the 21st century which is a very different reality than where were coming from."

"Mainstream media outlets selects for people who make points that feel good, that preach to the choir, that dont involve any statistics because people dont what to hear numbers. Ever. They want to hear short soundbites and maybe, at most, a story. And anyone who wants to get more complex than that is going to find [themselves] relegated to non-mainstream."