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Them Before Us Podcast
Them Before Us #061 | Pro-Child Politics Author Delano Squires | The Lies About "Race" Hurting Kids
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- [00:00]
Delano Squires
Foreign.
- [00:07]
Jen Friedman
Welcome to the Them Before Us podcast. I'm your host, Jen Friedman. And today we're continuing our Pro Child Politics author series with Delano Squires. Delano is a research fellow in the center for Life, Religion and Family at the Heritage Foundation. Delano's articles and essays on marriage, family, fatherhood, race and culture have been published by the website Black and Married With Kids, the Root, the Griot, Newsweek, the American Conservative, the Federalist, Blaze Media, and the Institute for Family Studies. Delano earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and a graduate degree in public policy from the George Washington University. He resides in Maryland with his wife and four young children. Delano, thanks so much for being here.
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Delano Squires
Thank you for having me.
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Jen Friedman
You're actually one of our first repeat guests, so I'll link everyone to episode 38. You came on to talk about how to save the black family in America. You talked about four houses to get in order. And I think at the time you were working on a book. Can you just give us an update on where you're at with that?
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Delano Squires
So I am about 10 days away from submitting my final manuscript. So I'm excited about that, finishing the last few chapters. You know, I go over. So the book is on marriage and the black family, specifically the forces that eroded the black family and destroyed in many respects, and then how we build it back. So I'm in the process of finishing that and I'm very, very much excited about that project.
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Jen Friedman
Awesome. I don't remember if you had nailed down a title at the time. Do you have one now?
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Delano Squires
The last. I don't have one that's finalized. The last version I sent to my editor was the title is who Destroyed the Black Family? And then the subtitle is Reviving Marriage after Decades of Progressive Deception.
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Jen Friedman
Ooh, it's gonna be good. Spicy. Awesome. Well, we will definitely be looking for that. That'll be exciting. All right. You wrote the chapter on race for pro child politics, which was great. You start your chapter with a child story like Katie has asked everyone to do. You talk about Jasmine, a seven year old black girl who was shot in Houston. And you talk about the initial response because the suspect at first was a, I think you said 40 year old white man. And of course there was a lot of media attention, celebrities, maybe protests, things like that. And then you say that it turned out that it was two black men that got arrested. And we can imagine from there, the news probably went pretty silent. Everyone disappeared. You said no one updated. You know, that no one came back and said, oops, we were wrong. Actually, it was about this. It kind of just disappeared. And you have a background in the tech space, but then you worked in local government in dc. We talked about this on our previous episode for over a decade. So you got to help people face to face. And I imagine in dc, very kind of diverse, all different kinds of people, probably different socioeconomic status, ethnicities. And I was wondering if you had a distinct moment. Well, I'd love to know, when you interact with all these different kinds of people, does race in America seem as bad as it does when we just go off of the news and when we get into this cycle? That was kind of the first question. What was your experience with working with all different kinds of people? And the second was, when did you become really aware of sort of how hypocritical culture and politics are when it comes to race relations in America?
- [03:29]
Delano Squires
So on the first question to your point, I worked basically 15 years in local government in DC, so I ran a program that provided technology resources to low income families in the city. And just given DC's demographics, I mean, overwhelmingly the families I was working with were African American families in the city's typically poorest parts of the city. So now I did have. We did have programs, you know, we had one called All Hands On Tech, where we would invite people from a given neighborhood to bring their devices in, and the techs who work for DC would fix them for free on the weekend. So there was some exposure there. And then my last year, I worked in the Office of Gun Violence Prevention as a resident liaison. And I talked to residents, some black, some white, who were frustrated by the epidemic of gun violence in the city and the issues of, the racial issues that come up in national media, from my experience, were completely disconnected from the way people talk about issues in their own lives, in their own neighborhoods, even things like violence. So I was in Office of Gun Violence Prevention. This would have been 2021, 2022. This was around the time that there were some people on the left calling to defund the police. The very last meeting I had with residents in my capacity with the government was with a group of homeowners, largely black in the city, who were frustrated by shootings that were going on sort of right outside of their gate, you know, or the fence that separates their community from like a multi dwelling unit. Almost all the people involved with that on both sides, the frustrated homeowners and the shooters and the victims were all black. Right. I had never heard a single person Dealing with the fallout of gun violence in their community, say that fewer police were the answer. The only people who I ever heard say that were activists. Now, some of them lived in the city, but very few own property. Almost none have families because this is not the way parents tend to think about these things. And it was evident to me that these way these issues are talked about in the media are entirely framed by. Defined by sort of elite ideological interests. And that to your point, to your other question, seeing how that process took place, 2020 was a big eye opener. I mean, I was already moving in that direction, understanding that. So the ways we talk about race are completely divorced from reality. I remember on one mile marker on my sort of path to race radicalism, if you could say that was seeing. And I'm from New York, I grew up in New York seeing an elected official, the second highest ranking elected official in New York City. I think he's called the something advocate, citizens advocate, something. It was some type of position. His name is Jumani Williams. He was calling for defunding the police in 2020. And shortly after he did that, he moved from his home in Brooklyn to an army base in Brooklyn, Fort Hamilton. So the person who complained about militarized policing and the militarized policing, particularly in black neighborhoods, chose to spend his entire day surrounded by soldiers and police officers. That's the type of thing that were frustrated. That frustrated me, has been frustrating me as it relates to these issues around race.
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Jen Friedman
Well, in a place you can't even get onto without id, significant vetting to get even into the space. Right? Yeah. Very ironic.
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Delano Squires
Right?
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Jen Friedman
Yeah.
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Delano Squires
Right.
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Jen Friedman
The first two lies you identify in the chapter are that race exists at all. And the other one is that race is essential. So can you unpack those? They feel a little bit tied to me.
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Delano Squires
Sure. So the first one, I'm thinking about race as a classification tool. Right. So people can observe differences in skin color and hair texture in terms of certain features between people from different ethnic backgrounds. That's. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is race as a classification tool. And specifically a classification tool that ascribes certain types of certain. Describes a particular value to different groups of people based on where they are classified. That is, that moves beyond simple observations into ranking people in terms of their worth as human beings based on which group they are part of. And I think that that, that is a lie that needs to be countered. That's a lie that leads to bad public policy, leads to, you know, cultural norms. Social norms that strip people of their human dignity. And I think it's a lie that leads directly into the second one, which is race ess, Right. Which is this notion that you can tell who a person is and the things that they value based on their skin color. And one of the things I like to say is that humanity does not have a skin problem. We have a sin problem. And throughout our history, even in the United States, there have been times where people have attributed certain characteristics to others based on skin color. So for I mentioned in the book a physician named Samuel Cartwright, who in the 1800s came up with the diagnosis of drapetomania, which was a condition he used to describe the tendency for slaves to want to escape slavery. There have been, after that, subsequent to that, there were stereotypes about blacks as being lazy and over sexualized and, you know, prone to rage and all types of negative stereotypes that people ascribe to race. Now you fast forward, you know, almost 100 years, a couple hundred years, and you have someone like Robin D'Angelo who hits the scene in 2020 at the height of, you know, all the things, the racial reckoning, George Floyd, who says, who attributes to white people a sense of fragility. Because certain white people say, no, I don't want to be blamed, not even for the sins of my ancestors, but I don't want to be blamed for the sins of people who, I don't know, have never met, not related to me. They just happen to share my skin color. And Robin Diangelo's response is to say, no, these people are fragile, as opposed. As if the notion that an individual would not want to be blamed for the things that someone else who they don't know, so for someone else's actions is somehow a sign of moral deficiency. So this sense that race is essential in telling us who we are as individuals is a very pernicious lie and one that has found its way both into our cultural norms and also our public policy.
- [10:33]
Jen Friedman
Well, and we see how nonsensical it all becomes when. So, for example, in the conversations about reparations, some of the folks pushing back have said, now take individuals. More and more people are maybe mixed ethnically with, you know, my mom is black, my dad is white or Korean, American mom, white dad, whatever. What box do you check? You know, are you getting reparations or paying reparations if you're half black and half white? And so the people who really put so much value and saying, you know, basically what you look like or the amount of blood that you have of a certain thing is going to determine what we do to you. They're finding this very hard to try and craft actual public policy around in a way that doesn't sound overtly racist, I think. And it kind of comes back to it is overtly racist. And so that has been a problem when people push back. For sure.
- [11:26]
Delano Squires
Yeah. And. And I think one of the things in particular in this election season that I find ironic is that there are people who consistently asking, okay, well, what is this particular candidate going to do for my group? This often happens with Democrats and the black community. And you'll see a candidate say, these are my policies targeted at this particular black men or black women. My response is, I would be careful with that. Because the thing, when you, when I hear targeted policy, I'm not sure whether to give that a positive or a negative connotation. The things that some politician will do to you for you that you think are positive, when you open that door, you don't know when they're going to say, well, now some time to do something to you that is negative. So I'm a type of person that believes that we should embrace a colorblind constitution in that the constitution and our laws should not have different applications based on which group you belong to. Now, we can acknowledge that that has been the case in our past. But the remedy for that is not to say, well, we'll do the same thing, just point the gun at somebody else. The remedy for that is just to lay down our arms altogether.
- [12:44]
Jen Friedman
Right. It's interesting because it seems like the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth to whether it's political party or not. But culturally, you know, there's a history of actual slavery based on what someone looked like or discrimination based on, like you said in the book, if you had this much blood and you could be considered black American, you know, they'd put it on your ID card or something, and then you could be discriminated against. And then. But conservatives maybe sometimes want to swing to the other side and saying, colorblind, not in the sense of policy or constitution, but colorblind. Like, let's just not ever talk about that. There might be some different cultural or ethnic beautiful, interesting things. And instead I feel like sometimes conservatives are, well, let's not talk about it. And I don't want you to bring that up because I don't want to be woke or I don't want to swing this way. So how do we balance observing different things, hearing from people who had. You've had a much different experience than me. In part because of your skin color, of course, in part because you're a man. But also, I grew up on the east coast or the West Coast. You grew up on the east coast. You've worked in D.C. i've worked in Seattle. Whoever was in your family, how you were up, how you were raised, your churches, there's many things that make us similar and different. And sometimes maybe on the conservative side we want to say, well, don't bring it up at all, because that's going to bring us down this progressive road. Do you have any good advice on how we can balance these things? Well, and I guess I mean more interpersonally because maybe that's not an answer for, for law or public policy.
- [14:21]
Delano Squires
Well, I think you bring up a fascinating topic. I've heard conservatives tout the virtue of colorblindness for years. There was a time where I took the people who said it, generally speaking that there were, but particularly with the advent of social media, when you follow accounts that only post certain types of crime videos, fight videos, it is clear that many of these conservatives are not colorblind at all, right? Like local crime is like Visine for the colorblind conservative because then they can see color very, very clearly. And in fact, one of the things that I argue, and I started the book with this, is that progressives and conservatives are color conscious and colorblind are both color conscious and colorblind, but in different ways. So the progressive will say we should have color conscious policy when it comes to benefits. But when it comes to placing responsibility, then all lives matter, right? So when it comes to certain types of policies, then it's like, okay, no, we see color. When we want to fix policing issues, then this is a race issue. But when we're talking about the disparities in violent crime in New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore, then it's no, this is a human issue, we shouldn't racialize it. Conservatives have the opposite issue, which is conservatives often, many want to be race specific when it comes to the problems. Now this is a problem of the black family and this is a problem of black crime. But then when it comes to the solutions, then they want to be more general in nature. So if I say this was one of the title ideas I have for the book, Black Wives Matter, someone is going to predictably say, no, all wives matter. Now the same person will say, well, the issues in the black community are caused by the destruction of the black family. And we can attribute that to the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson, so on and so on and so forth. So both sides pick and choose when they want to be color conscious and when they want to be colorblind. My advice is for people one, to treat others as individuals, right? To not presume or assume we know what a person likes or dislikes or what they think about certain issues based on their immutable characteristics. I have no problem with using, being specific in terms of who is affected by certain issues in public policy. But, but I'm, I'm consistent. I think the biggest problem with the racial equity industry is that it is inequitable in the application of its tools of analysis and remedy. So this the. I'll give you an example of how this. I've seen this work. I've seen sort of, you know, the titans of the grievous industrial complex look at again, police shootings, fatal police shootings, where blacks make up about 25%, whites about 45%, and say, well, no, this is a black issue because, you know, black people are disproportionately impacted. Then when somebody turns the conversation to, let's say, who benefits from social welfare programs, tanf, you know, snap, all those, those types of programs, then it's no, but more, more white people are on welfare than black people. So there's not the consistency in saying, well, this happens disproportionately with this group and this happens disproportionately with that group. It's always whatever weight and scale gives me. The outcome that I desire is the one that I'm willing to use. And I think whatever. However people want to address issues of race, all that I ask personally, this is for me personally, this is not public policy. I just want people to use a single weight and a single measure because I believe that that is a biblical principle, to use honest weights and honest and just measures because that is how God judges. Right? No respect of persons judgment should be equitable, actual equity, consistent application of a particular standard and not have our outrage or our policy or our cultural norms or our rhetoric determined by the skin color of the person speaking and the skin color of the person hearing.
- [18:54]
Jen Friedman
Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. And even thinking we can be general in our public policy prescriptions for different things, like you're saying, but having even weights and measures, but then be individual in how we interact with different people around us. And I think to your point too, I've spent a lot of my career working with people with special needs. And in getting to know people with special needs, you then learn more about them. You don't learn about all special needs. Generally you learn about an individual person that has some different things they're good at, things they need help with. But by becoming a friend now, I know how to interact with that person. And. But I think to America's credit, I think the majority of us are kind of doing that. It's just when we see Twitter and online and the fighting, you start thinking, wait, does really everybody hate me because my skin color or because I live here in this part of the country or that part of the country? And I think there's talked about this on another podcast with one of our cover artists. Actually, I was wondering what your cover is going to look like, your book cover. But he was just talking about how there's lots of things that work, trying to get people to be arguing in comments all the time, engaging with each other and just be perpetually outraged with your neighbor instead of just going and being with your neighbor and realizing, oh, okay, they're actually not that bad of a person.
- [20:12]
Delano Squires
Right. Yeah, exactly. I think relationships help break down some of these barriers. And I will say this, and I do think this is important for conservatives to get right, because what I'm starting to see mainly in social media is an embrace of a certain type of white grievance politics on the right. I see it as a natural sort of corrective, over corrective to sort of the Robin D'Angelos of the world. And I've, I mean, Stevie Wonder could have seen this coming, right? If you sold Robin D'Angelo for long enough, you, at some point you're going to reap Richard Spencer and David Duke. You're going to read people who say, I'm tired of being told that I'm America's problem. Everything in our culture says white man, bad white. The ultimate boogeyman is the straight white Christian male. Everybody's sort of framework of diversity is to lower their influence, impact and numbers in society. And that's seen as a positive good. So I can understand why some number of those people say, no, no, we are not going to continue to be bullied. We're going to embrace something that makes us feel proud and makes us feel relevant. I understand that because I think it's human nature. Again, that's not a skin problem to me. This is an issue of human nature. And I think generally speaking, the rejection of moderation almost always leads to radicalism. And again, let's, let's jump back to history for a second. I can imagine being a 17 year old growing up in the deep south in 1956. And seeing my parents, dignified Christian people, always dressed to the nines, my dad always wearing a hat, my mom always wearing a dress, and, you know, walk into church on a Sunday morning and they say, we're going to participate in a civil rights march. And they are met with fire hoses and dogs and treated reprehensibly by the people that my parents elected if they were able to vote, let's say, in a local election. And I could see a young me having my parents say, well, you need to join this movement. And then me looking to my friends who said, no, look, there's some more. They're guys who are much more radical. They don't allow themselves to be beat up or they want to take up arms. They want to defend themselves and their communities. And I can understand exactly why the Black Panther movement, the Black nationalist movement, the Black power movement, came right after the civil rights movement.
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Jen Friedman
Yeah.
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Delano Squires
Because if, if King is too radical for you, well, then there'll be somebody around the corner who's far more radical. And in the same respect, if Mitt Romney is a racist, if, if Paul Ryan is, you know, a white supremacist, then eventually you're going to have people who say, no, if you think that's white supremacy, I'll show you. I'll show you the real thing. And I think it's important for all groups to reject the siren song of victimization and grievance, because that never. That doesn't even end well for the people it's supposed to benefit.
- [23:10]
Jen Friedman
Yeah, well, that's really well said. Yeah, for sure. It leads well into your third and fourth lies. One of those lies is that different outcomes are always caused by racism, and then the fourth lie kind of ties to that. Therefore, we need good discrimination to basically fix everything. We talked about it a little bit, but can you explain why aren't different outcomes. Let's say it's between a black man and a white man, and the white man is doing better. How is that not racism? Not always racism.
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Delano Squires
Right. I don't, honestly, I don't even understand how this became accepted. This, this is a sort of key tenet in Ibram Kendi's. Kendi's theology of racism and anti racism. Right. That group outcomes are always driven by racist policy. Now, again, he doesn't use this definition equitably because if he did, he would look at, let's say, the National Basketball association, the NBA, and say, hey, black men make up, I don't know, 13% of the male population. How is it that they make up 70 plus percent of the NBA. Oh, there must be racism against, you know, white people. Now someone would say, oh, that's ridiculous. You know, people have different interests and everybody's not 6 foot 5. Okay, that's fine. Even in the NFL, people talk about the plight of the black quarterback. We've had black quarterbacks who've gone. I mean, I think in last year's draft, the first three quarterbacks drafted all black quarterback.
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Jen Friedman
Oh, wow.
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Delano Squires
What we have, what we have not had in a long time prior to, I think last year is a starting white cornerback, a defender prior to last year or this, this draft, I think the last starting white cornerback, I think retired maybe in 2005. So no. 1, Ibram Kennedy. I only bring that up to say neither Ibram Kendi nor his disciples would look at that and accuse the NFL of engaging in racism. But for some reason, only when the disparities go from white people on top and black and brown people on bottom, does he say this is caused by racism. And the remedy from his perspective for that is what he calls, quote, unquote, good. You know, he doesn't call it good discrimination. I think that's the way I phrase it. But he says the only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination, and the only remedy for present discrimination is future discrimination. And my argument is that all that does is bombard the host, the body politics with the same disease that's been making us ill for generations. So that's not a worldview that I accept, and it's certainly not a policy prescription that I would promote.
- [25:46]
Jen Friedman
Well, and it's exactly what you're saying. When you look at Indian Americans, those who've immigrated, whether it's first generation, second generation from India, I think they're the most financially successful people group in the United States right now. And then Harvard, so many Asians were applying and getting into Harvard. They had, they started capping and not allowing them in, but then they'll redefine. Well, they're white adjacent, so then it's okay to discriminate. They're too successful, even though, well, they weren't white. They're too successful. Now we're going to reorient how they're defined.
- [26:22]
Delano Squires
Yeah, and, and I'm glad you, you brought up those examples because one of the, the reasons that I think our, our conversations on race are so ridiculous is because they, they use a 1940s sort of racial narrative and superstructure. Because when you look at almost all the social outcomes today, median household income, education attainment, SAT scores, Asians are doing better than whites. And in fact, the pattern, the racial pattern of Asian, white, Hispanic, black polls for more social outcomes than I can sort of take off the top of my head, including the ones that I mentioned. But that's also the pattern, interestingly enough, of marriage rates for adults. It's Asian, white, Hispanic, black, and the percentage of homes in each of those communities that are married to parent homes. So I think there's something much greater at play there than just sort of the strict binary notions of, of either racist or anti racist that Ibram Kendi puts forward.
- [27:36]
Jen Friedman
Your truths, two of your truths all tie together that there's only one race, the human race. We touched on that a little bit with the lie. And then the second truth is that every human being is created in the image of God and our lives have inherent, not conditional, value. I was wondering what you think. If someone's not a Christian can or not religious at all, can they believe these things are true? Because I was trying to process this when I was reading through the chapter. From maybe a purely evolutionary perspective of the world, it makes sense that we would only care about in group, out group, whether it's skin color or not. It's the people I care about and the people who are not in my family, in my home, in my town. So I'm, I'm curious what you think about, and this is sort of not directly related to the chapter, but can secular people still get on board with humans having inherent value across race, ethnicity and things like that, do you think?
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Delano Squires
Well, I, I think you're bringing up two related, related, but somewhat distinct issues. Right. So the notion that I care more about my in group than an out group, I don't think is. I certainly don't think it's racist. I think it's very much a human notion. It's the reason that for lack of better term, every parent cares more about their children and the children outside of their home. That doesn't mean they don't care about other kids. That doesn't mean that a dad who sees a lost kid in Costco or Whole Foods or wherever won't say, hey, hey little buddy, where are your parents? And if he says, well, I'm not sure that the dad won't walk that child along with his own children up to the front and say, hey, this kid is lost, that shows that he cares. But if he has buildings burning down and he has to choose between grabbing his kids, right, his two kids, or grabbing the other two kids, he's going to choose his own Two children. That doesn't make him a bad person at all. So I think you can. You can be a person who prioritize you prioritizes your in group. And when I say in group, I'm thinking about rightly ordered loves as they work themselves out from the household. Right. And still be a kind and compassionate caring person. Now, once that gets into sort of ethnic group or racial group, so to speak, then I think it can, you know, there's some other variables that are. That are impacted. So. But my contention is that the people who say that they care about race, and particularly the ones who may look like, look like me, they don't even care about race. So I hold them. I would charge them as being guilty of a certain sense of racial fraudulence because if they did, they would talk more about the black family. They would frame issues of education disparities in terms of the things that are either happening or not happening in the home and in the school. When they talk about public safety and criminal justice, they would focus more on the victims of crime as opposed to perpetrators. They would promote school choice instead of demanding that Harvard practice affirmative action for their kids, the kids that summer, Martha's Vineyard, by closing off education opportunities to poor inner city kids in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Atlanta, wherever. They would address the violent and degrading lyrics in hip hop and many of its subgenres that have been sort of infecting the cultural airways and waterways for the better part of close to almost 40 years. If they really cared about the in group, then they would address those things. They don't care about the in group. They care about the people they see as the white perpetrators of these injustices. So to them, it's not that black lives matter. It's that white perpetrators matter. And many of our problems around race I characterize as a symbiotic relationship between white liberals seeking absolution for sins that they did not commit and black liberals seeking empathy and compensation for injustices that they did not endure. And those two groups have a parasitic relationship with everybody else because they draw resources, they draw attention, they draw policy, they draw media coverage away from the things, as I said, that really matter onto these elite types of concerns. So I hope that answers your question.
- [31:57]
Jen Friedman
Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah, I love it. And it has me thinking too, about things you've said previously, other articles and. And interviews I've seen you write in. The idea of you don't care about black lives. Black lives don't matter if you don't care about black Marriages, black families. And to your point about the ethnic groups of like Asians generally performing at the top and then it kind of goes down from there. And I think Brad Wilcox talks about that in his book Get Married, the groups that stay married. It would be interesting for us to relate and you know, if marriages are not as healthy within then that white people, that group, that next town group. Okay, well why aren't we looking then to see why are so many Asian families staying married performing well in school? Okay, what are they doing that we should be trying to emulate instead of kind of trying to cut down? If there's a group doing better than me, I'm going to try and cut them down and make sure they can't go to school instead of observing. I think you're doing that. Seems like a lot of what your work is and your advocacy is really trying to share with black Americans, with conservatives, trying to help bridge those gaps of here's the ways we can be restoring the black family and therefore helping all the other issues, the violence, the gun violence, the lack of education, the lack of opportunity, et cetera.
- [33:19]
Delano Squires
And you really hit on one of my central criticisms of the equity movement, which is to say the only way to get every tree in the forest to be the same height is to cut off the tops of some. So when people talk about equity in this way, they never address the inputs. They only want to deal with the outcomes. What you end up doing is killing the motivation for people to want to work harder, to strive to improve themselves, to maximize their God given ability because they know who. Well, if we don't get the outcomes we're looking for, we can always, you know, tinker around with the things on, on the back end. But yeah, I've never heard a Kendi acolyte say, well, we believe that there's anti white discrimination because white people. Because the difference between median household income between Asians and whites is the same as the difference between whites and blacks. Ooh, only one of those things. Yes.
- [34:16]
Jen Friedman
Wow.
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Delano Squires
I didn't know that only, only one of those things would ever be attributed to, to racism and discrimination. And in fact there was at one point over the last couple years, Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps stats on, on earnings and at one point Asian women were out earning white men. Now a lot of factors go into that, right. But this is such a two dimensional, flattened way of looking at the world and my contention is that it's just not helpful. And as I said, these, these groups don't really care about the people they claim they care about. I'll give you a story. And I remember this around the time of jasmine barnes in 2020. I'm sure you remember the, the incident involving Jacob Blake, right? In Kenosha, Wisconsin.
- [35:00]
Jen Friedman
Yeah.
- [35:02]
Delano Squires
Washington Nationals. So the baseball team that plays 15 minutes from where I am right now, they sent out a statement on Twitter saying that they're canceling the game. They just want to stand in solidarity with might have been NBA and other professional leagues and teams because of what they saw happen to Jake Jacob Blake. Okay. I think Shortly after that, 20 people were shot at a block party in D.C. 10 minutes from that stadium. Not a single Twitter post. No acknowledgement, no mention. And one of my frustrations with the entire BLM crowd, in addition to it being a Trojan horse, which is a, you know, BLM is really an LGBT organization that used the high profile deaths of a few black men to advance their real agenda. That mindset, the BLM mindset, the one that focuses all of its attention and makes all of its moral appeals exit the community, is the type of mindset that will step over the bodies of young people or adults, innocent bystanders in their own neighborhoods to go and talk about a police shooting or a vigilante incident in some town halfway across the country that they've never heard of. So, no, I don't believe that these people actually care about the communities they come from. I think they're just using certain types of issues to advance a much more sort of nefarious and radical agenda.
- [36:35]
Jen Friedman
That's why we're so thankful for the pro child politics books and all of you experts that contributed, because you're helping give people a well rounded sense on, on a number of these different topics. So hopefully the next time that news story hits, they'll remember some of these things and be able to look at it a little more critically and also be caring more about the 20 kids that just got killed. Let's be proactive and be working in that direction instead of only caring once every how many months that, that the media decides it's important to care about kind of thing.
- [37:06]
Delano Squires
Right, Right.
- [37:08]
Jen Friedman
Thanks so much for your time, Delano. Thank you for your chapter. Where can people find you?
- [37:13]
Delano Squires
So I try to stay out of trouble on X Twitter, as I still call it at Delano. D E L A N O Squires S Q U I R E S All one, all one phrase. And then I write once a week. I have a weekly column at the Blaze and they can also find some of my writings at the Heritage Foundation. Those are the places where you can find me.
- [37:34]
Jen Friedman
Awesome. All right. Thank you so much for your time and your contribution and your thoughts. I appreciate you for listening.