Feb 19 2023 Ep03 Reparations: From whom - to whom?!

0:00:08

G

Hello, this is George Caylor and this is Tea With George. And today we’re going to discuss reparations. What does that mean? Today I have with me professor Steve Putney and Attorney Diane Gruber, my regular co-hosts on tea time. And before we begin, Diane, you have your own webpage and podcast, tell us about what you do and how to find you.

0:00:36

D

Thank you, George. I don’t have my own podcast. But I’m on Substack. And I call my newsletter “America First – Reignited” and I started it in July because I was so overwhelmed and disgusted by the lies and the false narratives being put out there by both the media and of course the democrats I mean it was just like, it was driving me crazy. And even our local newspaper here in this little beach town in Washington state, was promulgating all the poppycock and wouldn’t allow any other ideas in other than the democrat narrative. I had written for some blogs several years ago, so my brother-in-law said, “Well, you should check out Substack.” So, I am now on Substack and you can find me under my name, which is Diane L. Gruber, G, R, U, B, E, R, or “America First – Reignited.” And basically what… I’m just one person. And when something strikes me, that’s going on out there, I research it and if I think it’s something that the American people need to know about, then I write about it. And, of course I add my opinion and I’m just trying to get facts out there, because there’s so many facts that are being hidden and stomped down by the big media. And we just need one more voice, so I’m just one more voice.

0:02:24

G

You know, I also read your missile every time you write one, and it’s so spot on. It’s just fabulous. You have a lot of insight and wisdom, and I hope everybody goes to reignite America on Substack and I hope they subscribe. I get mine by subscription, it comes in every time you write one and I always read it. It’s great. And Steve Putney, Professor Steve Putney. I attend you history class every Monday night, and it’s very popular. Why do you take time to teach us history? I mean, mainly adults, mainly older people, there you are teaching us history. Why do you do that?

0:03:13

S

Well, I teach to the group that is meeting now because older people who have a better understanding of history have a better appreciation of it. So many young people think “ughhhh, I never like history. It’s so boring. It doesn’t affect my life.” For them, time began when they developed consciousness. But we old Geezers have been conscious for a long time and we realize that there was time before our time. And so, we’re interested in knowing what happened before we came on the scene. As my mentor used to say. We must know what we believe and why, as well as what we don’t believe and why. Or we will be led by those that do know what they believe and why. And I don’t want to be led, and I don’t think those in my class want to be led around by the nose as slaves by those that want to take us in the direction that’s contrary to what the founding of this nation was all about.

0:04:15

G

You and Diane have so much in common and I just love you both. Well, today we’re going to discuss reparations. I saw a Disney cartoon that was pretty much propaganda. You know propaganda is such a dangerous thing. When I, when I ran AIG in Germany in the 80’s, I became an acquaintance of the son of the producer of a movie called The Eternal Jew. And it was a movie that dehumanized the Jewish people. And it was in anticipation of the Holocaust, preparing the German people to accept the Holocaust. The Eternal Jew, I think you can probably find it somewhere, and it’s just the most evil thing. And Disney did this cartoon showing the wonderfulness of reparations. We should be making reparations to the descendants of American slaves. Now, that’s problematic in so many ways. And I think I’ll start with you, Steve. Tell us what you think of reparations and the problem thereof and just talk to us about that.

0:05:36

S

Alright, thank you George. I would argue personally that reparations, and I call it racial reparations has little to do with race. It has more to do with greed, coupled with a Marxist economic redistributionist program.

0:05:52

G

Well, it’s only, I saw the amount, we’re supposed to give each black person in America one million dollars as recompense.

0:06:01

D

No, five million, George.

0:06:02

G

Five million, five million? Not one million?

0:06:05

D

Five million, in California.

0:06:06

G

Oh, okay, well I guess one million’s a bargain then.

0:06:08

D

Well, that’s in California, not nationwide.

0:06:10

G

Five million, no wonder I didn’t get it. It’s too unbelievable. Well, go on Steve.

0:06:16

S

Well, Since you’ve raised that issue, that stimulates my thinking in terms of asking the question, who were slaves, only those that have black skin? How black do they have to be, to be considered black. You know there was a supreme court case in the 19th century called Plessy v. Ferguson and Louisiana had passed segregation… Well, let me just back up a moment. Following reconstruction, which ends in about 1876, you have what’s called redemption, where the southern whites come back to power and they begin putting restrictions on the freedmen. And by the 1890s they’ve consolidated their power once again. So, they start passing what we now know as Jim Crow, or segregation laws. And in Louisiana, you had, if you were black, you had to ride in a certain railroad car. If you were white, you rode in another railroad car. Fast forward that, think about busses in the 1950s in the south and the Rosa Parks issue. Well, Homer Plessy sat in the white car. And the conductor and some passengers drug him out. So, he files suit because he was only 1/8th black. He wasn’t 100 percent black. He didn’t have a black mother and a white father. He wasn’t a quarter black. He was 12 and a half percent! He looked like a white person. I mean where are we going to draw the line here, okay? So, reparations, racial reparations is based on skin color. But what if a person is white but looks black. You see, what we’re talking about her is entering into the realm of the absurd. If we’re talking about paying people money out of the state treasury, by state I mean government, because of their skin color. Blacks weren’t the first slaves in the United States or in America to begin with, if I can bring that forward a moment, George. The Irish, between 1600 and 1699 there were more Irish sold as slaves than there were Africans sold as slaves. See, you talked about dehumanizing the Jews, the English had dehumanized the Irish. And they didn’t mind killing them or selling them off. In the 1620s there were a half a million Irish killed by the English and 300,000 Irish were sold. So, slavery is not defined by time or skin color, but by the condition and experience of its subjects. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the name of Lerone Bennet Jr., the late Lerone Bennet Jr., who was an African American social historian and here’s a quote. “When someone removes the cataracts of whiteness from our eyes,” (He’s speaking to a black audience.) “And when we look with unclouded vision on the bloody shadows of the American past, we will recognize for the first time that the African American who was so often second in freedom, was also second in slavery.”

0:10:23

G

Yeah, that’s pretty good, Steve. I appreciate that. You know, Diane, you’re way there on the west coast and not you, but generally the west coast, or we call them the left coasters are on a different plane of thinking. Give us your take on reparations and what might be the problems thereof.

0:10:43

D

Well, here’s my take, I’m going to apply for reparations. You and your listeners will be the first to hear of this, my great, great grandfather was injured at the battle of the Murphy, let’s see, Murfreesboro in Tennessee in December 31st, 1862. He was injured trying to free the slaves. The very next day, President Lincoln, the first republican president, that’s when the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect and freed the slaves. So, because my great, great grandfather suffered, he suffered form that injury the rest of his life, I’m entitled to reparations and so are my sisters and cousins. And I expect 5 million dollars, so I will be applying, ‘course I don’t live in California is coming from. But if it ever comes to my jurisdiction, I will be applying.

0:11:49

G

Wow, that’s some history there Diane. I think before we go on, we need to…

0:11:58

D

And you what, oh come on! We need to, I mean we need to get real here. The white people freed the slaves in the civil war. It was the bloodiest slaughter. I think I heard somewhere; we lost 20 percent of our population. I mean, it was bloody. I was just a slaughter of people on both sides, and that freed the slaves. So that’s one thought. Steve, you mentioned 1/8th, in Plessy v. Ferguson about 1/8th black blood, that made the man a black man. Okay, well that’s the standard that, beginning in the Clinton administration 1/8th non-white blood, and that could be, you know, any type other than white, you’ve got a little smack of something in you, in your bloodline that is not white, that’s how they, they started a new program where they were hiring and promoting people based on if you could prove you had 1/8th non-white blood. This is getting ridiculous. So, we have to fork over our DNA in order to get a job, or to get special benefits. And talk about slavery, what about the tax slaves. If they give 5 million dollars to every so-called black person in California, what does that make the rest of the Californians? It makes them slaves. They have to work to pay somebody else to sit on their tush. Their money’s been confiscated for something that happened for something that happened 200 years ago that they had nothing to do with. I mean it just boggles the mind. It’s hard to wrap your head around it.

0:13:50

S

Well, I have a question, how about the free blacks that were never slaves? Do they get a million or 5 million.

0:14:01

D

Well, aren’t freed blacks originally slaves at one point earlier on. Like, before the Civil War came along… Well, no, no I understand. But at some point, there’s slave blood in a freedman’s bloodline. Do, you understand what I’m saying?

0:14:22

G

What about the white slaves, the indentured servants? You know, my ancestors, some of them were Hessians sold by German nobility to the English to fight the Americans in the revolution. And the one evening, Christmas Eve, George Washington and some people crossed the Delaware river and took the Hessian fort. And George Washington spoke fluent German, as did most people at that, in our frontier. And he said to the Germans that he had just conquered, “You can stay here or you can go back to the Germany that you knew. But if you stay here you can’t fight with us anymore. What do you want to do?” And I can just hear my ancestors all yelling We’re here, bleiben, we’re staying here. We have to have a word from our sponsor here.

0:15:20

AD

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0:16:05

G

Now Steve, you’re a historian, a constitutional expert. Is there anything in the constitution that would authorize payments to people who aren’t slaves from people who never owned a slave?

0:16:25

S

No, the only reference in the constitution about slavery was that the slave trade would be outlawed 20 years hence. In 1808, it was illegal after that to import slaves into the United States. Slavery was a state issue, not a national issue prior to 1861. Really, you could say prior to 1863, because, Diane if I can say this,  the war didn’t commence over the issue of slavery. The war began over the issue of taxes. The republicans were really the grandchildren of the Whig party. And Henry Clay was the father of the Whig party and his American system had three major components to it, what he wanted. He wanted internal improvements, a central bank, and high protective tariffs. Now, in shall we say the antebellum period up to this terrible war, which I never call a civil war. I always call it the war between the states. Or to the right audience I call it Mr. Lincoln’s war. 67 percent of the import duties were paid by southerners and they clearly knew that that money, raised by the national government, we now call it the federal government, the Washington D.C. government, that that money would be spent in northern states. Cause that’s where the population was, and who bites the hand that feeds them. What do republicans do? Do you follow where I’m going? And Lincoln, Lincoln he could not live without the revenue coming from the southern states. That’s why he wouldn’t give up he wouldn’t give up Fort Sumpter in Charleston Harbor, cause they needed that revenue. He needed that revenue. Well, what happened was England and France, and France was following England’s lead, was sympathetic towards the south and had either or both of those two countries gave recognition to the confederacy, it might have doomed the union. And so, Lincoln had changed the nature of the war. Because look what had happened with slavery with respect in the British empire. Those that have ever read or know the name William Wilberforce…

0:19:12

G

Oh, he’s one of my heroes.

0:19:13

S

I wrote a paper in graduate school titled William Wilberforce titled “The Man, the Message and the Mission.” I mean he was a marvelous, marvelous Christian. He was ill most of his adult life.

0:19:26

G

He had Crohn’s, I think.

0:19:28

S

Yes. Anyway he labored, in fact, when he became a Christian, he thought he should leave parliament and get out of dirty politics so to speak. But… Oh the name slips my mind George, who wrote Amazing Grace?

0:19:50

G

John Newton.

0:19:52

S

Advised him to stay where he was, God could use him right where he was as an MP. And so he did, and he dedicated his life, he and a group of others, toward abolishing slavery. He didn’t finish it all the way through, because he became ill in health. But his followers did. A man named Braxton; I’ve forgotten his first name. But he lived long enough to see it, in the 1830s. And how did the British empire end slavery? They didn’t fight a war over it. No, they manumitted the slaves by paying slave owners half of the market value at that time and they were to work out for seven more years the other half. And that was the end of slavery. They didn’t stay on the plantations. Many of them left. Nonetheless, it was a bloodless ending of a terrible institution. By, by changing the nature of the war from a taxing issue, a taxing dispute, to a moral dispute over slavery, England then backed off and didn’t recognize the south.

0:21:03

G

You know I was raised on a family farm and the mechanized machinery for farming really came of age in the 1870s, 1880s. Slavery would have been too expensive. It just, it would have, slavery would have ended economically.

0:21:27

S

That’s right, it would have. By 1900, it would have been over.

0:21:29

G

It would have been over long before then. But it seems that England forced the issue economically to end slavery. Diane, you’ve heard Steve and me pontificate on this a little bit. I want the west coast here. Your take on, where are you with this now?

0:21:49

D

Well, one of the things that caught my ear when they were talking about the California reparations is, identify. If you can prove that you have identified as black for at least ten years, you get the 5 million dollars that they are talking about. Identify as black. Kind of like Elizabeth Warren identifies as a Native American, okay? Well, I’m here to tell you, I don’t know what there doing down in California, but I’m here to tell you the university system in the sate of Oregon allows people to fill out their paperwork when they are enrolling as a student, they allow you to check the box that you’re black and they never question you on that. And a whole lot of kids, and this has been going on 15-20 years to my knowledge, there’s a whole lot of people that have been quote on quote identifying as black at least in Oregon because they got all these benefits in the education system. They didn’t have any pride. They didn’t mind people knowing that they were lying. Because, you know, they’re sitting there pasty white and yet they’re claiming to be African American. So, this identify as black is really, I kind of wonder if there isn’t going to be a battle over that when they get right down to wrapping up an finishing the law, making the decision on who is going to get money and who isn’t and stuff. This identify as black, I kind of wonder how many people in California have been identifying as black for at least ten years. So, and then I could see the real blacks, the real black people being a little upset by that if the whole idea is to pay them back for slavery. And that’s another thing, if somebody can prove that they have a 50 percent slave blood, do they get more money than somebody that has, oh, let’s say eight percent slave blood? I mean I’m just throwing out that as a question. There is nobody in America today, I’d like to have somebody come froward and prove to me that they are 100 percent descended from slave blood, 100 percent. You won’t find that person, I’d almost guarantee you won’t find that person. So, how are they going to divvy up? Do you have more slave blood, you get more money, you have less slave blood, you have, you know? There’s that question too, you know, are they going to check your DNA? what are they going to do? I mean it just opens up a big can of worms.

0:24:35

S

It is a can of worms!

0:24:37

G

Steve just said it, it’s getting absurd. I mean men are identifying as women so they can compete against women. For instance, I’m thinking of entering an 80s-and-up women’s weightlifting contest. And, oh I’ll beat those women every day. And uh, but would it be fair? IU mean men have upper body strength that women don’t have. They’re not equipped for it. So, Steve you were going to say something on Diane’s comment?

0:25:05

S

I’ve forgot now what I was going to say.

0:25:09

G

I think these kids should also identify as age 65 so they can get social security right now. You know, it’s how far can we go with this identification.

0:25:19

S

Well,

0:25:21

G

Steve is lost for words right now because of what Diane just said.

0:25:24

S

It is not going to go anyplace. It really isn’t. If you think back when the radical republicans controlled congress in the reconstruction period, and the word among southern freedmen was that they were all going to receive 40 acres and a mule, 40 acres and a mule. Did that happen? No. And there’s no way reparations are going to happen today. I think it is race hustlers that want to be out in front, want to raise money, want to satisfy their narcissistic lust for notoriety influence and power that are trying to gen up racial hatred and for compensation, they want green money.

0:26:18

G

Diane, we’re nearing the end right here and I’m going to leave the rest up to you. What are your parting comments on reparations?

0:26:31

D

Well, if you want to further divide the country, and you want more Americans hating other Americans, then yeah let’s do this reparations. Let’s do it nationwide as though we are not divided enough already. Let’s divvy us up in more ways. And let’s find more so-called victims to give money to, to take money… excuses to take money away from people who work and earn it and give it to people who don’t work and earn it. Let’s find more excuses for that. You know, how far does this go? We’re already at each other’s throats here. I mean, quite literally, I don’t know what it is like in Lynchburg, you try living in the Portland area, try living in the Seattle area. They’re dominated by liberal democrats. There is so much liberal hatred there that you are afraid to talk to your neighbor. Literally, people you’ve known for decades, you are afraid to say anything because you don’t know when they are going to be screaming at you because you said something that they thought was incorrect. That’s not part of the narrative. You’re not allowed to say that. I mean we’re just at each other’s throats. So, yeah let’s go ahead, let’s divide the country more. Let’s do reparations nationwide. Let’s charge me an extra, oh let’s say 50,000 dollars on my, on my income tax this year. Make me pay an extra 50,000 so it can go somebody that supposedly has a different bloodline than I do. Let’s do that. That’s perfect.

028:08

S

But what if they are making more money now than you are, if we’re basing this all on bloodline?

0:28:13

D

Well, exactly, bingo!

0:28:16

S

Here’s the point, you can’t do the wrong thing the right way. You can’t. And racial reparations is clearly wrong. We all acknowledge was and still is wrong. So, can we agree that two wrongs don’t make a right?

0:28:34

G

Let’s end with that.

0:28:37

D

And you know what else Steve?

0:28:38

G

We have to come to an end here. By the way, our listening audience can tell. This show is completely unscripted. It’s just three old people who want to save America.

0:28:51

D

Speak for yourself.

0:28:54

G

Talking about what’s going on. And we hope that you’ll spread the word. Tea With George is something you need to toon into. We got to get a greater listening audience and get this thing going. And once again, go to survivinggeorgie.com for one of the greatest, funniest books in America. Get your copy today. And Steve, Diane, once again thank you so much for being my guest today.

0:29:21

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