Jason Riley

Absolutely.

As I say, your Jacksons and Sharptons led the charge here, and it's been very lucrative.

I think that's one of the reasons it's been sustained for so long.

You can make a very good living in this country if you are a black person who goes around blaming all problems in the black community,

on white people.

Black politicians use this to get people to the polls.

You know, Jim Crow 2.0, voter ID laws, it's all the same, nothing's changed.

That's been the message coming out of the black left for a long, long time.

I'm more optimistic that it's starting to work less and less, Ben.

I don't think that it has the resonance than it once did.

Even organizations like Black Lives Matter, I think, have lost a lot of credibility with the general public by playing from the songbook that was written largely by the Jesse Jacksons out there.

So I'm optimistic that it isn't working as well.

You're right, it is divisive.

And also, it doesn't help Black people broadly.

I mean, what what the civil rights leadership needed to focus on after those tremendous gains, the Civil Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights Act of 65 were preparing the black underclass in particular to take advantage of these opportunities.

That means, you know, developing attitudes that are

conducive to upward mobility in terms of attitudes towards school, attitudes towards the rule of law and crime, attitudes towards marriage and raising children and so forth.

These are sort of cultural transformations that had to take place.

And instead,

I think the black community and the black leadership, I should say, in particular, took their eye off the ball and started pulling all of their eggs in this basket of seeking more political power, per se, as the answer to these problems.