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--:-- John Bickley: A shocking mob attack in downtown Cincinnati has led to a string of charges against several suspects and a federal investigation. The footage of the shocking event renewed the national debate over racially motivated crimes and prompted the DOJ to look into potential hate crime charges. In this episode, we sit down with bestselling author Heather McDonald to discuss what crime data reveals about racially charged crimes in the U.S. and the media's role in inflaming racial tensions.
--:-- John Bickley: I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, August 2nd, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. You know that nagging feeling about the doctor's appointment you've been putting off forever? Maybe it's that dentist cleaning you're now six months overdue for. Whatever it is, today might actually be the day to stop procrastinating. With ZocDoc, you can find and book the right doctor entirely online, and honestly, you'll probably have an appointment booked before the end of this ad.
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--:-- John Bickley: Joining us now to discuss the racially charged debate raging around the recent mob attacks in Cincinnati is Heather MacDonald, a Manhattan Institute fellow, a contributing editor at City Journal, and author of Win Race Trump's Merit, which is a Daily Wire published book, I should know.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: Thanks so much for having me on.
--:-- John Bickley: So this week we saw a video go completely viral on the Cincinnati attack. It's really disturbing. I actually had a hard time getting over watching it. Fifteen people or so surrounding this man. Eventually a woman getting just pummeled. The woman is knocked out. Her head hits the concrete. It's alarming. It's disturbing. First of all, why do you think this has gone so viral?
--:-- Heather MacDonald: Well, I think people realize that they've been fed a pack of lies when they have been told by President Obama, by President Biden, that whites are the biggest threat to blacks. The two presidents used to routinely intone that black parents were right to fear that their children will be killed every time they step outside, meaning by a white person or by a police officer. The data is precisely the opposite. The rates of interracial crime are way, way on the side of blacks beating up whites. And people experience this; they see it, but they're not allowed to talk about it. And this is just proof that you can really suppress the truth.
--:-- John Bickley: This video really spread like wildfire before anyone really knew much about what led to the violence. But there's no doubt about what we see in it, which is a bunch of people either just standing around watching somebody get their head literally stomped on, on the concrete. This is with the male. And then the female being punched right in the face by a full-grown male, her head hitting the concrete, like I said. She's knocked out for several seconds, yet through all of this, almost no one acts to help either of them.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: Well, it's certainly a group of people that have not been socialized, that have been taught to give in to their worst impulses. And, I'm not I don't want to really invoke social media here, but but whether there's this is all sort of performative, I don't know. But this is not again, the data show that this is not an aberration.
--:-- John Bickley: In 2023, the National Academy of Sciences, which is about as establishment and liberal as you can get, came out with a report on crime edited by the left-wing criminologist at Columbia, Bruce Western, that said that white-on-black homicides are virtually nonexistent. Whites are virtually never killing blacks, whereas blacks commit violent crime against whites at 35 times the rate at which whites commit violent crime against blacks. That is the reality. Hate crimes are just as disparate if you want to look at who's committing hate crimes against gays, against Asians, uh, against Jews. It's overwhelmingly blacks, not whites. And yet we're told just the opposite.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: And the narrative that is embraced by the media, which is that whites are constantly oppressing blacks, that they are the source of the astronomical black death by homicide rate, cannot help but create in some people a sense of entitlement to strike back at their alleged oppressor. Whites are effectively dehumanized by the media when it comes to race relations.
--:-- John Bickley: I wanted to ask you about that factor. For at least the first 24 hours, we didn't see any major outlets covering this at all, at least not what I saw. When they did cover it, it was in a pretty subdued way with vanilla headlines where they've just buried the stories. You're saying the media is not just complicit. They're actually making things worse here in their coverage.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: Absolutely. Black-on-black homicides get no coverage. Black-on-white attacks get no coverage. The only coverage, you know, the media is racist. The only black lives they care about are those extremely rare instances where a white police officer has taken the life of a black person. And those become international global sensations overnight. They get nonstop media coverage creating a completely phony impression of what the real source is of threat to black people and, frankly, to white people.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, we'll always hear from the media that most crime is intraracial. That's true. But the rates of intraracial crime are very different. And the rates of inter black-on-white versus white-on-black crime is very different. But so people have been living in a tissue of media lies that at some point it's just not going to work any longer. And we're seeing this, I think, with the Trump administration that is no longer putting out these phony narratives about white supremacy that is no longer accepting anti-white anti-Asian racism on the part of institutions.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: And it may be that with a leader that's willing to say you can't scare me any longer by calling me a racist, I don't care that more and more people are also not going to accept the race hustle and the race grift.
--:-- John Bickley: To your point, Vice President J.D. Vance publicly weighed in on this. He called for the arrest of all the thugs involved in this, putting a lot of pressure on local officials. What I saw is a mob of lawless thugs beating up on an innocent person, and it's disgusting. And I hope every single one of those people who engage in violence is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: And they will be. They will be so long as law enforcement in the state of Ohio takes their job seriously.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, we did see local officials finally start to really get their act together on this. The police union's been very great on this. The mayor finally weighed in. Some other people have condemned the attacks. So can this kind of pressure from the White House have an effect? Do we see trends of local officials responding to that kind of pressure?
--:-- Heather MacDonald: Well, I don't know. We're certainly not seeing that when it comes to immigration enforcement. I'm here in Los Angeles, Southern California, and the police departments here are just as adamant about not cooperating with ICE. So that's a demographic reality. They're obviously catering to the fact that Southern California is now massively Hispanic. And when it comes to black issues, race issues, white, white, black issues, I'm not sure. We'll see.
--:-- John Bickley: I hope that the Trump administration is going to encourage more departments to publish their racial crime data. Very few do at this point. It becomes harder and harder to get. But I think that the Trump administration has, as usual, the power of the purse. I actually don't believe in federal spending in local crime matters. I think that it's a shell game. I don't I don't believe in federal grants, basically, because it's just local taxpayer dollars that gets sent to Washington and then funneled back. And we're all supposed to be so grateful that we've got our local tax dollars back.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: Nevertheless, given the fact that the feds do send local taxpayers back to local jurisdictions for for police spending and whatnot, they should be very explicit and demanding about expecting local police chiefs to publish their crime data. Don't don't cover this up. And police chiefs, when they are giving public presentations, should start educating the public about the reality of crime. Because, again, we live like one phony narrative after another.
--:-- John Bickley: If you may recall, John, there was the spa shootings in 21 by a white guy that went to three Asian massage parlors and shot them up because he was wracked by by religious guilt over his sexual taste. This became the standard story that whites were going around beating up and killing Asians when, in fact, we saw occasionally we got the videos where the elderly Asians were being routinely set upon by blacks in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Before that in the 2000s, 1990s, we used to hear about the knockout game all the time where young blacks go around and club elderly people from behind. This is the reality, but the narrative is just the opposite.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: Now, you've been personally hit with a lot of accusations in the past for bringing up this data, that it's racist to even cite statistics like this, that like you said, are coming from very authoritative sources, a lot of left-wing sources. Why is it so important to actually look at the data in an unflinching way? Why is this so vital?
--:-- Heather MacDonald: Well, if you care about black lives, you should look at where black lives are being taken, and that is inner-city neighborhoods by kids that don't have fathers, that have never been socialized, that are engaged in these absolutely mindless, barbaric drive-by shootings that are taking the lives of young black children. If we go around pretending that the problem is whites and we need more anti-racism training, that's not going to help these kids survive childhood and not get shot while they're playing on trampolines or in their bed at home or at birthday parties or in a park at a barbecue. That's how black kids are getting gunned down. And we turn our eyes away from that reality because it's so depressing. And squalid. But that's where our focus should be, not on fighting phantom racism.
--:-- John Bickley: Plus, I just believe in the truth. I do not believe that human beings should be forced to live with lies, whether it's with regards to the optional nature of biological sex, or what the source is of violence in this country.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: Well, a hard conversation that's raging again across the country. Meanwhile, charges have been filed in Cincinnati. So we're seeing the beginnings, at least, of justice there.
--:-- John Bickley: Heather, thank you so much for coming on.
--:-- Heather MacDonald: My pleasure, John. Thank you.
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--:-- John Bickley: That was Heather MacDonald, author of Win Race, Trump's Merit. And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
